Honor's Code

Since we run a quasi loot council / random roll for loot, I decided to look over the loot tables and figure out what my upgrades in Ulduar would be. I’m disregarding 25 man loot as well as Emblems of Conquest because I don’t see my guild running that content. I’m perfectly okay with that as the 10 man environment is providing both the challenge and comradely I enjoy. I’m currently sporting the Heroes Redemption Faceguard . There are two helms out of Ulduar I could use. Ironbark Faceguard drops off of Freya and my Tier 8 Valorous Aegis Faceguard drops off of Mimiron. The two Helms are nearly identical. The T8 has a bit more strength, and a little less defense. The major difference is the Ironbark Faceguard has Expertise whereas the T8 has Block Rating. As I’m fairly sure I’m Block Capped, the Block Rating wouldn’t do anything for me, but as a Paladin Expertise is pretty low on the helpful stats list as well. I’m going to pass the first Ironbark we get to my Death Knight co-Tank. Exper...

How much Block Rating is useful on gear? That’s a question a reader asked me as he began to look at the new gear from Ulduar and from the new Emblems of Conquest vendor much of which is loaded with Block Rating. Block Rating is the easiest and most efficient way to get to what is called the Block Cap, or what used to be called Uncrushable at Level 70 before Crushing Blows were changed The Block Cap is a combined Miss, Parry, Dodge, and Block Rating of 102.5%. Once you reach that point, any additional Block Rating is not helping you. Oh, it’s still calculated into your Block percentage, but because of the way the attack table works, once you have more than 100% of combined Miss, Parry, Dodge and Block Rating, the game engine (which is what decides what happens in WoW) will not count it. . If you need a refresher on the Attack Table and how it works, I recommend Winchester’s Maintankadin 101 guide . “Picture it like a table, and there is only room for 100 plates on the table. 1...

We had to cancel our raid on Monday due to scheduling conflicts. That gave me some time to finish up the last couple of achievements I need for Noblegarden. I also got the opportunity to tank for one of our newly leveled Priests. He told us he hadn't done much healing. We got 3 of our best DPSers and yours truly as a Tank and got him some gear upgrades in Violet Hold and Utgarde Pinnacle. Check tomorrow for a blog post on Block Rating and it's value to a Tankadin.

This weekend, I spent most of my time running around leveling up my Mining skill. I'm into Mithril now and will soon be whacking at Thorium. I'm making some decent coin from the ore, stone and gems that I'm getting. I ran a Heroic Culling of Stratholme last night as Retribution. I did alright, posting about 2.1k for the instance. The 1-shot zombies kind of skew the meters a bit in the instance. I was well behind a Rogue, who is one of the better geared DPS in the guild. I was neck and neck with a Mage. He managed to pass me when I got slept on the final boss. We did manage to get the optional boss down before the timer expired, but we had only seconds to spare. There were only two of us going for the mount, and let's just say Honorshammer finally has a sweet ride to replace his Roflcopter. I did promise to run it again to get the Mage I beat out on the roll the Drake. Other than that I was working hard on my Noblegarden achievements. I banged out the two dailies. One of...

We were feeling really good after downing Hodir, so we marched on over to Thorim. It was really cool that he tried to remember you from the quest chain in Storm Peaks. Then Sif showed up and ruined the show. Thing is, I thought Sif was dead? The fight starts with Thorim above you. You clear the first room with a Jormungar and some Hordies, then half your raid heads to the hallway to fight their way to Thorim while the rest of your raid stays in the Arena. I was the Tank in the Arena. Mobs constantly come out of the stands and engage you. Some are elites, some are non-elites. At first, I had everyone stack up on me and laid out a Consecrate. I don’t know what’s happened by Consecrate isn’t the threat magnet it used to be. We discovered one of the mobs Whirlwinded. That made stacking up sort of a bad idea. We went with me in the center and the others spread out around me. The first couple of elites that spawned, I’d handle okay, and they would go down quick. Then all these non-el...

With the Antechamber cleared, we moved onto the Watchers and started clearing towards Hodir. If you haven’t explored the hallway to Hodir, let me give you a heads up. There are these little snow mounds dotted all along the path. If you get too close to one, it starts spawning about a dozen Jormungar Worms. These aren’t a problem in and of themselves, although new ones do tend to aggro to your healers. But say you discover these little mounds while you are fighting the Frost Giant and it can make it a little more difficult. We made our way through the trash and met up with Hodir. My Raid Leader and I had gone back and forth in a private discussion about using Frost Resist gear for Hodir. He gains a buff called Frozen Blows where he does very little physical damage but a whole lot of Frost damage. My thought had been having one of us in Frost Resist gear and the other in ‘normal’ tank gear and switch for Frozen Blows. He felt like our Death Knight Tank (who also happens to BE our Ra...

Only Auriaya remained the only undefeated boss in the Antechamber of Ulduar. We ported to the Shattered Walkway and walked down to where she was patting around with her two Sanctum Sentries. My Raid Leader has taken to calling her Cat Woman. The first thing we had to figure out was her trash. You get these two large Watcher looking guys. One of them will spawn a ball of pure energy, which will slowly move towards the other. If it isn’t destroyed before it gets there, the mob it touches gets a huge buff and will start one-shoting even geared tanks. What we learned quickly was that when one dies the other gets the buff. After mine went down, our Death Knight tank was destroyed. I ran over and taunted, blew my trinkets, Bubble Wall aka Divine Protection, pots, and Lay On Hands. Somehow we managed to kill it before I too was destroyed. When the next pack like this slapped us around and took our lunch money and made us thank them for it, we decided a new approach was needed. That’s...