Honor's Code

After my night off of WoW, I got going again Thursday night. The evening started with a big all hands Guild meeting. These things generally bode ill for a guild. This particular meeting was centered around your humble author and our recent kill of Azgalor. Apparently, some people were less than completely excited about the fact that I had received the T6 gloves and had expressed their displeasure to the officers. I felt in somewhat of an awkward spot. I'm relatively new to the guild, and I don't have relationships with hardly anyone. They weren't really upset with me, but with the system. I listened as the Guild Leader and the officers explained why they had chosen to distribute the loot the way they had. Dominion uses a "Gear the Tanks/Healers" system that gives priority on Tier tokens to a group of documented Main Tanks and Main Healers. There are 4 Main Tanks and 6 Main Healers. I was chosen as one of the Main Tanks, and thusly received my Tier 6 token from o...

Tuesday was reset day, so we opted to go back to Mount Hyjal. Everything was pretty fresh in our minds from the previous evening. Our target was a progression kill on Azgalor, and the first pieces of Tier 6 for our guild. I'm getting better at handling the trash waves, though I still need to get better on judging when it's safe to call for AoE. Some waves I would wait too long and the Raid Leader would call it for me, and other waves I call to early, and someone (usually a Warlock) would pull off of me. I'm also getting better timing my Holy Wrath so it hits the targets I'm after, though here as well, I could still use some improvement. At least twice, I hit nothing with my Holy Wrath which made the pickups very hectic. We managed to one shot all the farm bosses, and do so much more cleanly than we had Monday night. I know Dominion's former Prot Paladin would rip Rage Winterchill off the tank 'accidentally'. I'm not sure why he was doing ...

Void Reaver With the Holiday weekend coming not much was going on. I was playing on my Warrior when I got a tell from Aga asking me to go to Tempest Keep. At first I thought we were going to do Al'ar, but instead we tried Void Reaver. It didn't takes up long to figure out that our mods were not calling out incoming Arcane Orbs. We wiped on Void Reaver at about 50%. Vlad changed the location of the melee groups healers, and we went at him again. The great thing about Void Reaver is that your TPS determines whose tanking him. He does a periodic knockback on the current tank, reducing his threat by 25%, and then proceeds to the person on his aggro list if that knocked the current tank out of first place. The idea is to have another tank be #2 so he goes from tank to tank. I did very well on generating threat and soon found myself as the center of Void Reaver's attention. I was having to nearly chain chug mana potions as the gear I need to have on to be uncrushable is a li...

I hope everyone is enjoying your Memorial Day!! It's back to the grill for ole Honors.

I don't know how many of you saw this interview with Jeff Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan is the lead game designer for World of Warcraft. You can see the interview in its entirety here: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/18754 Here's a couple of highlights. Jeff Kaplan: In 10 man raiding, we declare and say without a doubt, we expect you to have 1 tank there. 1 tank, and two healers. Some groups might bring 2 tanks and 3 healers, or 1 tank and an offtank. And then in 25, we've pretty much come out and said we expect you to have 3 tanks, and more healers than just two obviously. So you 10 man group in WotLK will be 1 tank, 2 healers and 7 DPS. I'd imagine in 25 mans it will work out to 3 tanks, 6 healers, and 16 DPS. This to me is an acknowledgement by Blizzard of something the players seem to have known for a long time, most people want to play a DPS. As you progress from 5 to 10 to 25 man look at how each role is represented. Tanks Healers DPS 5 Man 1 (20%) 1 (20%) 3 (60%) 10 man...

Wednesday night, Dominion went after Lady Vashj once more. I logged in long enough to get sub credit and decided to go play on my Warrior. I kept listening in on Vent. My plan was to log into Honorshammer as soon as they got her down, so I could celebrate with them. After my misstep after our first night on Vashj, I was trying to be as good a soldier as I possibly could be. As much as possible I want to show my guild that my outburst was a learning experience from which I hoped to rebound with grace. As start time approached, Vlad determined she only had 6 healers in the Raid, and was debating between asking me to come, or asking a Resto Druid to come. She decided she wanted a 3rd Paladin Blessing and a 3rd Blessing of Freedom in case she lost one of the other two Paladins in Phase 1 or Phase 2. Their best attempt Tuesday had been at least in part foiled when the Paladins went down and they didn't have a Blessing of Freedom for Phase 3. She offered to pay for my respec to H...

My guild, Dominion, made some very good progress on Lady Vashj last night. Twice, they got her into Phase 3. The best attempt was a 5% wipe when they lost the Main Tank (Kee), then the offtank (Vlad) got static charged, and rooted at the same time. My night started out kind of rough. We had a hail storm in my city. We hardly ever get weather like that. Our close proximity to the coast usually protects us from tornadic thunderstorms. My daughter was a little freaked out by the hail hitting on our roof, so I sat up with her until the storm passed. Nothing like wrapping your arms around Daddy to make you feel safe. I emailed my RL (from my cell) and let her know I would be late and to please replace me with someone else. It was a courtesy because I had already been told I wouldn't be in for Vashj, but in case she had been counting on me for Lurker, I wanted to let her know I would be delayed. I finally logged in and they were working on Lurker. I respec Honors back to Prot (yeah...