Personally, I’ve been taking my time leveling my paladin. I didn’t pick Wrath up for a few days after launch, and have been working my way across my 3 70’s as well as my upcoming (63 atm) shadow priest, and my Deathknight (currently 61).

I’ve only knocked out a few quest hubs in Howling Fjord so far, but I’m liking the layout and style I’ve seen so far. I worked my way through the Utgarde Keep quest line as fast as possible and ran it. I have been ret since I headed up here and tanked UK just fine. Although my TPS was horrible due to Divine Storm and Crusader Strike being nerfed to physical damage (was holy).

Now that I’ve gotten the feel for the Deathknight class, I can return my focus back to my paladin, and hopefully ding 80 in the near future.

You may notice that it looks sort of similar to the old theme, same color scheme, layout, and all that. But hey, the reason I picked it in the first place was because it was close to what I wanted. If anybody has any suggestions or comments, please let me know, either email me admin |at| whatisboom.com (avoiding spider spam bots), or leave a comment.

Additionally, this theme is optimized for Firefox, but should work fine in Safari and IE. Let me know of any major issues.

One more thing, I’ll soon be adding a header image, so wait for it!

I would just like it noted that any browser (all of them really) that doesn’t support CSS in its purest, most true form can die in a car fire.

On a related note, I’m working on a custom theme for the site, not entirely sure what color scheme or what i’m going for yet, but it’ll get there. If you get lucky, you may just see it active on the site while i’m working on it, please be gentle. Hopefully one day I’ll leave it up.

This may seem redundant, but in the world of MMO’s you have to play with other people. Sure, you can level solo, but that only gets you to max level, and then what do you do? From PvP to heroics to 25 man raids you are going to have to interact with other people.

In the World of Warcraft, there are varying degrees of players. The variables are many and not really of our concern, but you will come in to groups with people that are better than you, and worse than you. Again obvious, but people pay to play. This makes them feel entitled to play the game the way they want to play. So when you get in a group people are expecting you to play the same way they are, so that they can accomplish their goals. However, as I stated, players don’t always play at the same performance level.

This is a major issue in progression content (large raid PvE). I will touch on this in my next post!

One of the original posts I wanted to write for this blog was a discussion about the different kinds of people that make up particular classes.

I think the two most prevalent cases are tanks and dps. In general, dps accepts damage meters such as recount, are the end all of who’s doing the best, but tanks are a little harder to sort out. This leads to tanks boasting about gear, stats, avoidances, and all other things they might be able to bring to the table.

In a world that is as unquantified as tanking, its often very difficult to match up exact tanks against other tanks, especially when the 3 (soon to be 4) classes have varying degrees of differences. Additionally, most of the fights that blizzard designs, have 1 target to tank, and if there are more, they are often clearly designated as “off tank” style mobs. Trash usually requires more than one tank, but when you get to the boss (read: important) fight the other tanks are sidelined. This causes a bit of an inferiority complex in the additional tanks.

This will be alleviated a bit when Blizzard implements the “dual-spec” system, as dps/tanks will be able to switch back and forth, and the tanks won’t feel like such a lame duck when they are attempting to dps for boss fights.

I’ve been putting this off for a while now. A few weeks ago, I got turned onto a mount/vanity pet management addon called LiveStock. With the addition of the achievement system in 3.0, and many people collecting mounts and pets for various achievements, this addon will help anybody out there looking to change things up a bit.

Some of the main features that sparked my interest for this addon include:

• Random Usage of your entire mount and pet collection
• The ability to blacklist certain mounts (for those just going for the X number of mount/pet achievements)
• The ability to blacklist non-epic mounts entirely
• A “smart mount” macro that will choose a flying mount if you can fly, or a ground mount if not

Its nice because I never remembered to have a vanity pet out, but now it will do it upon login, as well as zone changes (summons, instances). It gives you a bit of variety, and  you dont even have to think about it.

Rohan (BoK) and Cathmor (E4aE) have both commented on the incoming nerfs to paladin seals and retribution talents.

First and foremost I will say that retribution in it’s current state is fucking OP. While ret was in dire need of some nerfs, these nerfs were a little uncalled for. The stem of the problem is that ret has a few high burst instant attacks, and every other talent just increased their dps.

I know Blizzard’s “vision” for the paladin is very bursty, but their actual implementation fails.

TBC ret dps was sub-par. Fact. Post 3.0 the tables have turned. Sustained PvE dps is a little higher than most classes, but the issue is that in PvP they can dump all their normal dps abilities in a matter of seconds, all while keeping the opponent stunned. Now that would lead us to believe that whatever changes they made in 3.0 were the culprits.

However, they instead nerf class-wide abilities, our seal and judgements. They were hit hard in the most recent beta push, which will likely go live in a week or two. This hurts everybody, holy can’t solo as effectively, and it’s a protection DPS (and therefore TPS) hit.

In my opinion, the major culprit in this problem is Sheath of Light. It increases spell power by 30% of their attack power, and crit heals place a HoT on their target for 60% of the crit. The intent behind this is to make non-holy paladin (prot has something very similar), more capable healers in a pinch. However, it’s +straight spell power. This, along with all paladin spells having AP and SP coefficients, makes them extremely powerful. If Sheath was changed to only boost healing spell power, that would fix most of retribution’s scaling problems.

There are many different reasons people tank. Any group is going to have some form of a tank, so obviously necessity is one, but as a prelude to my upcoming analysis of tank-behavior, I’ll go over the other reasons people tank.

In my WoW career, I’ve played every class and every role, some more than others. With two out of three of my level-capped characters being hybrids this isn’t a big surprise. My shaman was leveled mostly out of necessity for healers. I’ve played caster dps, melee dps, healing, and tanking, but in the end, tanking fits me the best.

I enjoy tanking for many reasons. When you are the tank you have a very heavy responsibility on your shoulders. From a five man group to a 25 man raid, the entire group looks to you for many things. You control the flow of the instance, the mood of the group, and many other aspects of the experience. In the five person dungeon scenario, the tank is generally the designated “group leader” meaning he is in charge of setting up the marks for kill order, croud control, and anything else that needs to be done.

Another aspect of the necessity side, is just that. You are always needed. Tanks are generally in short supply, particularly good tanks. How many timeshave you seen in trade chat “LF1M tank”. You can very quickly build a name for yourself by pugging a few runs in heroics or kara. As long as you perform well, aren’t too hard to heal, and aren’t an asshole, most people will remember you and probably put you on their friends list.

Now to shift the discussion more to what separates the good tanks from the bad. As with any statistic or assumption, there is always a degree of error, and in the end this is my opinion so think what you may.

You may say that “every group also needs a healer”, and while that is true, tanking obviously has a much different feel to it. While both equally important, tanking is much more involving and exciting. You have a much more active role in the encounter, between threat generation, boss positioning, mitigation management, among others.

For most of TBC raiding, skill > gear, and sadly enough 9/10 skill = “don’t stand in the fire”. But for tanks you have to have the gear and the skills to utilize your entire toolset to be a great tank. Sure anybody in plate can strap on a shield and put themselves in front of an enemy, and count on the healer to keep then alive, or the dps to CC the mob they didn’t pay attention to. However a good tank is going to know how much he can handle, and more importantly, what his healer can handle, as well as the competency of his dps/cc (if needed). Just because you came in here with a BT geared healer and AoE tanked the room before doesn’t mean that you can do the same with every other group. Maybe the healer and dps were just so strong that your group could muscle their way through, or maybe you have decent gear and the healer was able to keep up. A good tank will be able to know the difference.

After a week or so to really play with the achievement system, I firgure it’s time I go ahead and give it a run down.

The thing that really sparked my interest to write about this was the comments made by Rohan, about the difference between the WoW achiement system, and the similar concept in Warhammer online.

He does go over them pretty well, the WoW achievement system (shortened to AS in this post) is pretty transparent. All of the achievment point rewarding goals are listed before you. You can see your targets and work towards those goals. However, in the Warhammer equivalent, all achievements are “hidden” in the fact that you can’t see what they are, or what it takes to accomplish them.

Now while I do like the idea of being surprised by a unexpected/random achievemet, if it were not for the visibility of the goals, lots of the developers efforts would have gone in noticed.

Now, like I mentioned all of WoW’s AP awarding achievements are listed, but there is an additional category that has no reward at all, the “Feats of Strength”. These achievements are hidden to the user, in that they cannot see them before they have accomplished them. They are a little different from the normal goals in the AS, and I’ve only gotten about 3-4 of them (most retroactive from past accomplishments).

I like the direction Blizzard has taken with the AS, it’s definately brought a new aspect to the game, as well as given us high level characters something to do until WotLK drops and we get to level our many alts again.

Apparently if you still have your Vials of Eternity quest from pre-3.0 you can still complete it and receive your Hand of A’dal title. I am not sure if this includes the quest obtained after killing FLK (last chain of BT attunement) or just the vials line for hyjal.

*prays*