Paladin Talent Trees - The Beta Version

I was perusing the Paladin talent trees courtesy of MMO Champion, and here are a few quick thoughts from the Ret and Holy Trees:

• The boost to INT and STR are gone.  I wonder how that's going to work out.
• Eye for an Eye indicates a chance at an automatic Judgement if someone attacks you.  I wonder if that is independent of your current CD or not.  Additionally, that means that if you have aggro and all you want is auto attack (like, say, for the Zombiefest achievement) there's a good chance that you're going to be hitting a lot harder than you intend.
• Judgements of the Wise seems to have been boosted to 1-3% of base mana.  Nice increase.
• Repentance will take longer to gain access (20 points in Ret talents = 40 levels, up from 30 points = 30 levels currently).
• Righteous Vengeance is now way early in the Ret talent tree.
• Aura Mastery is now waaaay down in the Holy Spec (20 points = 40 levels, up from 10 points = 10 levels).
• Judgements of the Pure is far up in the Holy Spec, essentially swapping places with Aura Mastery.
• Beacon of Light is also way up in the Holy Spec (only 10 points = 20 levels!), so you can fling that bacon around a lot earlier, and only taking a 6% bite out of your mana pool (as opposed to 35%).  Having it earlier in the game means that the Pally had better concentrate on INT even more heavily than before.
• There's a new healing talent, Inspired Judgement, which extends the healing of Beacon of Light from a Judgement you bring to bear to the Beacon's target. (!)  I wonder if that includes Judgements from an Eye for an Eye as well.
• Enlightened Judgements are now farther away (30 points = 60 levels as opposed to 45 points = 45 levels currently).  For those tanks who love to push the boundaries of where a Holy Spec Pally can heal, take note that the Healadin might be within range of those blasted silence spells.
• Improved Concentration Aura is now way down in the tree, reflecting when most people pick the darn thing up, I suppose.

All in all, interesting stuff.

Miscellaneous Musings

As I close in on Loremaster, I've come to the conclusion that I hate Kalimdor.

Eastern Kingdoms was a cakewalk compared to this.

True, you can use more aggressive quest assist add-ons than QuestHelper, but if the add-on is doing everything except moving your toon, then why bother?  That said, I've been tempted by the lure of easy questing.  Oh, I've been tempted.

Consider where I've been the past week or two for Kalimdor quests only:  Silithus, Moonglade, Feralas/Dire Maul, Tanaris, Dustwallow Marsh, Desolace, Felwood, Winterspring, Mulgore, Durotar/Orgrimmar, Thousand Needles, Eastern Plaguelands, Alterac, Stranglethorn, Swamp of Sorrows, and Hinterlands.  And that's for just two or three quest chains.  I know I've got The Barrens, the Blackrock instances, and various and sundry places in my future as well.

My frequent windrider miles are sure stacking up.

***

Maybe it's the state of the game right now, but I don't see that many people out questing when I'm putzing around, doing my thing.  Yes, I'm aware that a lot of people don't get up at 5 AM to get their WoW fix in, but I have been getting online in the late afternoon as well and there have been very few people out and about.  I'm starting to wonder if the LFD tool is finally pulling enough people into leveling that way rather than being out and seeing Azeroth.  I know from the standpoint of an ex-PvP server user, it's infinitely safer than being ganked in Tarren Mill.

Who knows what's going on?  Maybe the lure of that Worgen or Goblin character has some questers on the fence right now until Cataclysm drops.

***

There are times when I wish I could clone Quint and send him off to another realm and/or faction.  Yeah, I know, you miss out on the playing, yadda yadda yadda.  Seriously, though, it would be nice to be able to clone a character or be able to get people to join up for a party across servers.  With RealID, Blizz has taken the chat feature and made it non-realm specific (for better or worse), so why not do that for the LFD tool or party creation?  Of course, that makes the cash cow of switching servers go away, but still....

***

I was in an Old Kingdom run today when I was presented with a dilemma.  The tank had pulled a trash mob, but the situation was such that he couldn't pull the mob that far back without causing another group behind us to aggro.  (The position of the mobs in some of those weird angular openings in the Old Kingdom do that.)  However, if Quintalan took up his usual position opposite the tank there was a good chance that I might get a separate trash mob to aggro on me instead.  That would mean I'd have to take up position to one side of the tank, all but guaranteeing that I'd pull aggro unless I reduced myself to auto attack.  The Frostbringers and Eyes of Taladram were bringing it hard, and our caster DPS wasn't that great.

Which was the lesser evil:  take up my normal position and run the risk of having another trash mob aggro on us; stay to the side and auto-attack, hoping that the healer could handle the drawn out fight; or stay to the side and amp up the attacks, risking aggro but figuring that better I get aggro from the mob we have rather than an extra one?

(For the record, I chose the last option, and yes, I did pull aggro, but Hand of Salvation was off cooldown so I was ready.)

***

One last thought:  with Arthas now dead in Cataclysm's timeline, how is Blizz going to reconcile the Northrend questlines with the new reality?

Well hello there Arthas

Big news to share...

My guild has asked me to become an Officer, which is exciting to me for a few reasons.  I am looking forward to the challenges of raid leading and helping to deal with guild decisions.  It's nice to know your opinions will be heard and respected.  Plus, it's also great that I can now tell people to quiet down on vent with some authority (aside from the inherent cranky tank authority).

Also, we had an absolutely amazing raid night last night.  We downed the 10 man versions of Blood Princes after 3 attempts and got the Blood Queen after only two (both of which are new encounters for us).  Which means...  Lich King time!!!!

Zomg excitement.  I cannot tell you how excited I was to be experiencing the final fight in ICC.  I was beginning to fear I wouldn't see it before Cataclysm hits.  We've gotten him to about 64% ish after our fourth attempt and had to stop there for the night.

As a side note, my curiosity got the better of me, and was wondering out loud if you could just waltz up to the LK before the event started and say hello much closer.  So in charges one of our Shaman healers.  Turns out, yep.  You sure can!  It made for an awesome guild screen shot.

Boy Arthas, are you just happy to see us, or are there a pair of Death Knights in your lap? (I was told I looked like a piece of the LK's armor so I stripped nekkid in the next shot.  Luckily for you all I did not grab a pic - Oh and BTW, apparently my DK needs to get more sunlight.)

...and the theory crafters go bonkers

I'm having a grand time giggling over the fact the the theory crafters have to be going a little crazy over the news about the talent trees.

For those of you who missed it

Talent trees will have around 20 unique talents instead of today's (roughly) 30 talents, and aesthetically will look a bit more like the original World of Warcraft talent trees. The 31-point talents will generally be the same as the 51-point talents we already had planned for Cataclysm. A lot of the boring or extremely specialized talents have been removed, but we don't want to remove anything that's going to affect spell/ability rotations. We want to keep overall damage, healing, and survivability roughly the same while providing a lot of the passive bonuses for free based on your specialization choice. While leveling, you will get 1 talent point about every 2 levels (41 points total at level 85). Our goal is to alternate between gaining a new class spell or ability and gaining a talent point with each level. As another significant change, you will not be able to put points into a different talent tree until you have dedicated 31 talent points to your primary specialization. While leveling, this will be possible at 70. Picking a talent specialization should feel important. To that end, we want to make sure new players understand the significance of reaching the bottom of their specialization tree before gaining the option of spending points in the other trees. We intend to make sure dual-specialization and re-talenting function exactly as they do today so players do not feel locked into their specialization choice.

Haha, take that you number crunching basement virgins!

Of course, this just means we'll have a full analysis and a new min/max spec to take to make your character the "best" it can be.

Molten Giants

Ok, I haven't posted in a while, but I've been active in game gearing up my warrior to tank our guild's ICC 10 alt runs - which I successfully did last week. (yay! - 5% on Professor Putricide is not too shabby for our first real alt run)

So, now that I've got 3 of the 4 tanking classes at level 80 and have experience Wrath end game content on each one, I feel I have a real good handle of how each of the 3 classes work. Up until recently I had been working my warrior as a DPS, and swapped back to tank because few things irritate me more than not being in control of how the group moves and how quickly the pace goes (Sounds a bit control freakish I realize... but my sanity cannot take it when a tank will pull two mobs at a time).

As such, I would like to give the general populace a few tips:

1) If your tank is a Paladin, ignore the rest of these tips. Paladins are so facerollingly easy to tank with most people will have no trouble holding aggro, even the bad players will excell.

2) If your tank is a DeathKnight, be cautious of the first few pulls, if the DK is any good, you will see things like NOT using death and decay on every pull, you will see pestilence spread diseases, you will even see him / her use cooldowns on trash pulls. If the above statements are true, you can usually cruise through an instance with little to no excitement.

3) If your tank is a Warrior, be very cautious of the first few pulls. Warrior tanking takes a lot more finesse than the other two I have mentioned. Good warriors will be constantly swapping targets to maintain threat levels on the mobs, and try to adjust his / her positioning to hit most (if not all) of the mobs with a thunderclap and maybe a shockwave. DO NOT GO CRAZY WITH DPS until you feel the tank has a decent threshold on aggro.

4) If you are a DPS with some sort of threat transferring ability, USE IT, ya tard!  Look, I'm more than happy to keep mister bad guy focused on me, but keep it up and I WILL let you die.  And then laugh.

Why are these tips necessary?

Setting: VOA 10
Tanks: Warrior & DK
Trash pulls - I charge in and in the middle of the charge get a heroic throw off and maybe an auto attack which is quickly followed up by the mob turning around and beating the snot out of a hunter. So I got a good chuckle out of it, but the hunter more or less acused me in raid chat of losing aggro. Well.. Guilty as charged buddy. Hope you learned your lesson.

Gee, you mean to tell me a 5800 GS hunter can't just unload against a mob while a 5000 GS tank is trying to establish aggro? Who'd a thunk it.

That was not the only excitement on the run however. The off tank (who was lesser geared than I) had the joy of dropping dead while it was his turn to tank the boss (when he remembered to taunt - I knew I was in trouble when before we get started I receive a whisper from him saying "Remin me how many taunt.") The amazing thing, however, is that ALL of his cooldowns remained unused. DKs are great in this fight. Ice bound fortiude can reduce your incoming damage and Anti magic shell is great to pop right when you see some of those frost swirly things (What.. I'm a tank, it's a frost swirly thing to me; I got bigger problems to deal with).

He receives a battle rez and miraculously got back in the fight to taunt off and relieve some of the pressure cause by the 8 debuffs now stacked on me. DK gets his 3 debuffs and a quick taunt swaps Toravon back to me and I sit there tanking watching my debuff stack up... 7....8....9 "Hey, you feel like taunting any time soon?" 10...*splat* "Guess not") which the boss died seconds after.

I still remember the days when our guild was first venturing into Molten Core and the very first pull featured two molten giants whith a very very touchy aggro table right at the start. The guild was commanded DO NOT ATTACK UNTIL YOU SEE THREE SUNDERS ON THE TARGET.

In fact, I remember a 40 person guild run wiping because a hunter pet wolf growled (which it just does automatically by entering combat) before the tank had even hit Vael in BWL.   Which, by the way, was quite amusing.  Fight starts *growl* dragon immediately turns and does a fire breath followed by the quick deaths of 14 raid members.  Heh...

Raiding required discipline... It's not like that currently.

Here's hoping Cataclysm brings at least a little of that back.  I would love to see an adaptation of the Dire Maul Tribute run.

Failpugs and You - How You Can Cope

I was a bad boy last night.

I'd logged in to take care of some odds and ends, and queued up for the daily random 5-man.  The destination?  Azjol-Nerub.

The tank started on it as soon as we ported in.  "All noobs leave now!" he said, heading down the path.

You have got to be kidding me, I thought.  This is freaking A-N, for pete's sake, and he was going to be an ass over this?

Nobody responded to his comment, but naturally he'd already run ahead before the rest of us could buff him.  He'd already engaged the first bit of trash, but he oriented himself in such a way that it was hard to get behind him so I wouldn't pull aggro.  It didn't matter anyway, since he had difficulty holding aggro with the casters nearby.  Trash disposed of, he turned to me.  "Surprised you haven't left yet," he said.

An evil thought entered my head as I stared at the screen.  Oh, he wants to play, does he?  Then let's play.

"Gee," I replied as he pulled the first Watcher to him, "and I was just about to ask if you wanted to do Watch Him Die."

"Yeah yeah!" said the healer.  "Let's do the achieve!  gogogogo!"

I looked at the health bar of the first Watcher.  "Too late," I said, dangling the lure over the edge.  If I played this right, "No-Noob" would take the bait and do something stupid rather than actually think through the suggestion.

My prayers were rewarded by the WoW gods.  The tank whirled and headed for the first boss.  "No it isn't!" he declared.

I began to follow but got caught in a web, requiring the mage to zap me free.  Two fewer DPS in the fight was even better than I hoped for.  By the time I arrived and took my position on the last boss, the tank and one of the DPS had already wiped.

Almost immediately, the tank dropped.

Scratch one obnoxious, overbearing tank before he caused even more trouble.  I hope he liked the debuff, too.

The reason why I related that story is because the level of asshatery in random 5-mans seems to be rising lately.  I don't even need to bring it up in guild chat; others have noticed it too.  One guildee has gotten so disgusted with it that he refuses to run pugs at all, and several others will only go with fellow guildees; no random characters, period.  Speculation has wandered from the end of the school year to the Cataclysm blues to the BP oil spill (okay, I made that last one up).  Whatever the source of the recent spate of pugfail, I've begun picking and choosing some passive-aggressive resistance.  If I can get away with it --and it won't harm the rest of the group too much-- I wait for an opening and use a bit of reverse psychology on the offending party. 

Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes completely over their heads.  I'd rather not say something like "Hey Jerk, why don't you leave before we kick you out?" but instead manipulate the person into bad decisions.  It's much more fun that way.

Just like Home Alone, but with Zombies!

The suggestion was innocent enough.

“Anyone up for Glory of the Hero?” one of my guild members asked. 

I had a few parts of that achievement to fill, so I said “Sure.” Others chimed in, and we quickly assembled a group.  Paladin as the tank, Shaman, Druid, and Quint as DPS, and Shaman as healer.

“A-N is out,” I said, “I just did that for my Daily.”

“How about CoT?” the tank suggested.

“Zombiefest? I’m game for that.”

We queued up while the healer read up on how to do the achievement. She relayed all of the information to us while we were handling the first few trash mobs. The goal is simple: kill 100 zombies in one minute. To execute the achievement, you have to first kite Salaam the Fleshcrafter (the caster boss) all the way into the Stratholme Town Hall, then you take your old sweet time beating him down. Once that’s done, you clear out the Town Hall portion of the instance. Then, send a player back through the front entrance to collect all of the respawned Risen Zombies and pull them back through the Town Hall and out the secret exit. Once that’s done, kill all of those kited zombies and the ones out front.

“This is going to make Zombieland look like a Disney movie!” she said.

Salaam was in rare form, constantly talking about needing samples, while the tank kited him into the Town Hall. “Just use Auto Attack,” he said.

I felt like a bot, watching Quint swing every couple of seconds. All for the cause, I suppose.

We dispatched Salaam, had dragonkin burgers for a light snack, and our DPS Druid went back through the front door to go get a few zombies.

Did I say a few?

When he came back, there was a huge stream of them following behind, like a John Carpenter version of The Pied Piper.

“Time to kick some zombie butt!”

Salaam wanted a sample? How about these samples!  That zombie splat sound was awfully sweet when you multiply it by, oh, say, a hundred or so.

Achievement gotten, we rushed on to take care of the last Infinite Dragonflight boss. We had just reached the gate when someone asked, “Hey, did we get Arthas?”

“Oh crap, we forgot him!” the tank cried.

“Well,” I said, “Arthas is eminently forgettable.”

Our Shaman DPS peeled off to go trigger our not-quite-worthy charge while the rest of us took out the boss with only seconds to spare. (I still think that we should let Arthas die, but that’s just me.)

“Crap!” the Shaman said. “They all respawned!”

“Hang on!” the tank replied. “We’ll get there.”

Too late. The Shaman and Arthas bit it before we could get through the gate.

“This has got to be the stupidest CoT run I’ve ever been in,” the DPS Druid said. “We get the achievement but forget Arthas.”

“This is just like Home Alone,” I said, “but with zombies.”

Because Arthas died, we had to go back through all the respawned trash, rez our Shaman, retrigger Arthas, and then fight the exact same trash again.

Samples, anyone?