Honor's Code

I'm going to go off on a tangent and talk about 1 handed physical DPS weapons. Tanks use one handed weapons, but those are specialized with Defense. Casters have the option of using a one hander and an offhand, or a staff. I have no idea what the preference is. Let's look at the drops for one handed weapons in Ice Crown. 4 daggers (2 spell power, 2 physical) 2 Fists (2 physical) 2 Axes (2 physical) 3 maces (1 tank, 1 physical, 1 spell power) 3 swords (1 tank, 1 physical, 1 spell power) There are 2 tanking one handers, and 4 spell power one handers. But there are 8 physical one handers that can drop. I think that's a bit excessive. Who uses physical one handers? Rogues, Enhancement Shamans, and possibly DPS Frost DKs (do those exist?). That doesn't seem to justify dropping four times as many one handers as tanking weapons, or twice as many as spell power weapons. The Developers constantly tell us they are worried about cluttering up loot tables, yet here we s...

We burned through the Lower Spire bosses pretty quickly last night and ported up to the Upper Spire. The first trash pull of the Val'ykr was where the fun began. Epic Trash Boston (Blood DK) pulled and I hung back to gather the 'copies' the Val'kyr made. The person who gets copied is random, but they seem to have a normal aggro table. While I'm fighting one of the copies, I hear Boston say "Uh-oh" on vent. This is generally not something you want to here out of your Raid Leader. What had happened was that the second Val'kyr had pulled with the first. We know had both Val'kyr and they opened up a FedEX/Kinkos on us. Suddenly, copies were everywhere. I learned a couple of things in the epic struggle that ensued. When a character gets copied, it looks like it ignores spec. These are 0/0/0 copies. So our Boomkin's copy went Feral and my copy started pushing out Flash of Lights. Hunter copies have Disengage and use it pretty much on cooldown. ...

I've got a new article on Paladin Schmaladin today on Protection Paladin's choice for a Weapon Enchant . It goes over some of the new theorycraft from the nerf to Proc based Weapon Enchants (Blade Ward, Mongoose) for Protection Paladins and Unholy Death Knights. Bottom line it for me (TLDR) • For threat, go with Accuracy. • Blade Ward is a bad enchant for us. Don’t get it. • ‘Goose is the only enchant that provides traditional EH (through a very small amount of armor) • Blood Draining is solid but has stacking considerations.

Our intrepid band ventured back into the Plagueworks. Our first disappointment was how little trash had despawned from killing Festergut. Usually when you kill a boss, part of the reward is the removal of the trash associated with that boss. It looks like the only trash mob associated with Festergut is Stinky. All the other trash remained. Well it's more rep! Let's get clearing! We cleared the trash, and still mispulled the first two abominations and got the room behind them. This time we were more ready and got it down without wiping. In short order, we were face to face to Rotface. Rotface had not changed from our initial foray on Thursday, but we had a much better idea of what to expect. This is part of the excitement of the being on the cutting edge of content, sometimes you get some surprises. We had been following the thread on Tankspot where user Kinch of Uldum posted his findings on the Mutated Injection timer. He had parsed several logs and disco...

As an avid reader of blogs, I've seen many stories about issues people have run into with other players in their random dungeon. I try to look at my play and make sure I'm not being 'that guy'. Both my Hunter and Druid are skinners. I haven't had a skinner at max level before. I took skinning on both as a way to make money as I leveled them up. You kill a ton of beasts and it made sense to gather up some skins from them. My Skinning was maxxed very quickly on both toons. In fact, the Druid hit 450 skinning somewhere around Level 73 or 74. Skinning can also take the sting out of someone killing mobs you need for a quest. Case in point, I was leveling on the Druid in Shaloazar Basin doing the 'Mastery' quest line. If you haven't done the quests, you have to kill 15 of certain types of mobs. When I got to the questing spot, I found these two Warriors working in tandem and clearing out the place. They were alternating Bladestorm cooldowns, with one...

In my last blog entry I talked about the change made to Rotface. I wanted to make my response to the change made its own blog entry, rather than bury it at the end of the long blog I had just made on our first night in the Plagueworks. Let me reprint the change again here. The changes made to Rotface were an effort to fix a bug that fell through the cracks in development and testing. The previous iteration of Rotface in 10 player difficulty used (and still uses) the same timer as the 25 player difficulty version when dispersing its Mutated Infection ability. What this means, plainly, is that a disproportionate number of people were being put out of the fight near the 30% mark in 10 player (by a large percentage) versus 25 player, making the entire fight much more difficult than intended. Obviously if you severely outgeared the fight, none of this mattered to you. The HP change will have no effect on your 10 player clears. You will, in fact, still kill Rotface. ...

(I apologize for the lack of screenshots. For some reason Blogger isn't cooperating today. If I can get it fixed, I'll add them to the post later.) Our group made its first foray into the new wing last night. We cleared the first four bosses with little trouble. I picked up a Ghoul Commander's Cuirass off Deathwhisper and Bracers of Pale Illumination from Gunship for my Holy set. The other casters in the raid are getting a little annoyed with the drops. We are getting a ton of spell power plate, which I take as the only person who can use it, but very little cloth or leather spell power. I feel sort of bad taking all these drops. All I can say is, guys, it's not my fault. Part of the reason I changed my offspec from Ret to Holy was to keep these drops from being sharded. We have plenty of physical DPS so those drops are always needed. We zoned into the new wing and we were greeted by the Steam Vents which looks like it will Ice Crown's version of Frogger. ...