Through life’s trials, I wield no sword, I carry no shield. To conquer these demons, and release my burdens, I solely possess this Fury Untold.

For those interested, I am having a blast with the guild. Recruitment is creeping along and things are shaping up.

I’ve still got several aspects to iron out as far as detailed guild policies (refer back to my Guild Structure post). However, we hit OS and Naxx last night (with a few pugs) and did fairly well. Now if people could just learn the Heigan dance. :D

I’ve been lucky on my recruitment, I’ve gotten mostly good players, that are looking for what I’m trying to offer. Hopefully in the coming weeks we can get further in (and hopefully clear) Naxx and we can move on to Malygos. Only time will tell.

PS - Watch for a follow up post to my “Tanks: Egos and Epeens” post.

Blizz has states they don’t want any mandatory classes in a raid. They have supported this with overlapping buffs from different classes as well as reworks of a few mechanics.

Tanking was the “sort of” focal point of the mechanics changes in WotLK. Crushing blows were removed, Deathknights were added, (protection) Paladins were completely reworked, among other things. Any time there are drastic changes, habits and patterns often get opened up to change. However, peoples choices are not always 100% pure and unbiased. Many people still hold what was true in The Burning Crusade, and even back to Original content as true today. Paladins and Druids have gained huge buffs since those days, and some people are beginning to accept some of what new information is out there, while others cling to old concepts and refuse to open an eye to see what’s out there.

In Wrath of the Lich King there are four tanking classes, Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Deathknights. Now that crushing blows have been removed, the line between the classes has been blurred to a certain degree. Paladins and Warriors can use shields, while the other two tanks cannot. In WotLK Block Value has shot through the roof. At the peak of my (boss) gear, I might have been a bit over 300 BV in TBC. Now in Wrath I am just shy of 1,000 BV completely unbuffed, and in a raid setting I can reach up to 2,000 BV. Additionally, WotLK did not bring with it a “huge” stamina jump like we saw in The Burning Crusade. Therefore boss damage numbers haven’t scaled quite as fast, and blocking a hit can significantly up your overall damage mitigation.

Druids compensate for this with very large health pools, and larger than normal armor ratings. Bringing their mitigation almost up to a Warrior or Paladin. However their high HP pool is there simply because they take much less consistent damage. They have dodge, miss, or full-hit on their incoming combat table. Deathknights have a similar situation, however they add parry to the list.

Paladins and Warriors can shave off another 1-2.5k from those hits. Warriors can also get a “critical block” for two times their block value (albeit not very frequently). Paladis are the only class that can (with a little raid gear) consistently block every I coming hit (that isn’t avoided). This brings their (physical) mitigation to the smoothest of all tanks.

People that raided pre-BC still have it stuck in their minds that Warriors are the end-all tank. However I feel the playing field is much more even, if not slightly leaning towards paladin MT’ing. I’ve gotten into several raids and been designated to OT duty (damn pugs), until the warrior (who has less health and avoidance) gets smashed by the boss.

Wrapping up, anybody reading this, please try to educate people that the scene has changed and sometimes there is a better choice than what worked in the past.

PS - maybe “Bring the player, not the class” is true, and I am just that leet. LOL!

Insomnia is a horrible thing.

I don’t normally ask for comments to my posts, but this one is different. As I mentioned in a previous post, I have transferred my paladin back to Sen’jin and started a guild <Fury Untold>. The guild is still very new, and I am still finalizing many guild policies.

When I was still on Kael’thas and still in , I knew I wasn’t happy. For many reasons that I do t really care to go into. I have my two original 70’s on Sen’jin and I wanted to get everybody back together (well almost everyone).

During the time between me realizing that Entourage wasn’t working out and me purchasing my guild charter for Fury Untold, I did a lot of research. I have been a GM twice before, and was an officer and raid leader in other guilds. I took what experiences I had, and re knowledge I had gained since my last bout as a GM, and decided to try and make a place called my own on my home server.

I had it all planned out. Looting rules, officer structures, guild policies, the works. It boiled over in my head for weeks before I even left Kael’thas, not to mention when I was actually turning in the guild charter.

I hope that people in Fury Untold read this. I know the blog itself is new, just a month or two older than the guild. My original intent was a democratic guild with a board or officers that were appointed by me. Delegation was going to be a major part of my leadership style. I wanted to have my officers doing their specific jobs, so they would feel a bit of connection and involvement with the direction of the guild.

I wanted to have an even looting system, however I think I’ve decided against my original idea, as I want something more transparent as not I cause issues or confrontations directly at whoever is leading the raid.

I’d like to take a poll, specifically of any Fury Untold members that may read this, however I would love to hear from anyone. I have opened comments to unregistered users, so anybody can respond. Just make up a name and a email and give me your opinions. How do you like a guild run? Do you want a dictator making executive decisions? Or a comitee of officers that have meetings and take votes to decide what direction to move things? What about looting policies? We are going to remain a fairly casual guild for now, raiding 2-3 times a week once I can get the numbers met. So use that as your guideline for comments.

As I promised, I’m following up my previous post with a bit of rambling about DKs.

So far I’ve grouped with 6 death knights, two of which were on my paladin. One was played my an acquaintence of mine, second was a random pug. The other 4 were in a 5 DK group I ran on my DK Deathridden. For this post I’ll stick to the experiences from my paladin (the others were a group of power-leveling raiders that rerolled).

I understand that the Death Knight is a new class, deemed a “hero class” by Blizzard. This combined with several other factors have absolutely ruined the DK class for me. My conclusion of the issues:

• Previously mentioned, Hero class
• They wear plate armor
• Stated to be able to tank utilizing any talent tree
• The class is only a few weeks old

So Blizz has said DKs can tank as any spec. This doesn’t mean that every tree is a tank tree. It means every tree has tank talents. 9/10 people take the dps talents because they are much more fun than the mitigation/utility talents. Additionally people seem to think they are gods because they are THE hero class. I have run into an abundance of problems grouping with Death Knights and I’ve really only run with two “average players”.

Just because these stars have seemingly aligned does now make you the gods of WoW. You’re just another dos in my group that will kill the boss while he pays attention to me. I don’t want you to dps frost presence, out of marked order, claiming you’re offtanking. I don’t want you to Death and Decay in FP either. It’s your job to kill things, not make our healer freak out because they don’t know who’s going to get the next big hit.

So now I’m done with my rambling. Maybe I’ll go play my DK to try and put one more good player closer to the level cap.

To continue my last post, I have been pugging a lot.

Having moved my paladin back to my old home server, his friends list isn’t the largest, and the guild is still small. I fond myself pugging, for multiple reasons. First is obvious, just trying to get the group going, but secondly a good instance run is a great way to impress people and hopefully get some new recruits.

Up until now, I have been pretty east going about who I pug with. I’ve got a few exceptions, that I’ll probably cover in a post immediately following this one. Generally I just slap a group together and hit some instance, but after reading a few threads on maintankadin I have been thinking about changing my game plan.

In a recent run there was an arms warrior that was rolling against me on tank gear. Now I know it’s just blue loot, nothing to get that upset about, however I would have rolled on the dps plate that dropped, however I had a retribution guild mate of mine in the group, and I didn’t want to piss on his chances. During my reading tonight, one line caught my eye, “if you want to roll on tank gear, go tank for your own group”. That just makes so much sense to me. I’m here trying to gear up my main set for progression and you’re stealing my upgrades so you can never use them.

So, in conclusion, I think I’ll probably keep my groups open, however I’m probably going to be much more of an asshole when inviting other plate classes.

I dinged 80 last weekend, I apologize for the lack of updates, I’ve been busy gearing and questing.

I’ve run a few heroics, none are two hard, although there are a few gear checks. The main one I ran into was a DPS gear check in Halls of Stone (heroic). The Brann Bronzebeard event is tough if your DPS can’t keep up. The waves spawn much much faster on heroic.

As far as raid content goes, I’ve only run one, Archavon in Wintergrasp. It was a fun fight, especially when the boss picked me up and hit my offtank with me. Speaking of OT’s, our DK was suprisingly squishy to the melée damage. I know Blizzard doesn’t want DK’s to HAVE to use their mitigation cooldowns (Icebound Fortitude and similar) just to stay on equal terms with other tanks, but I feel that may be the case.

I added gravatar support to the comments section as well as opened up unregistered comments. If the email you supply when you post your comment is associated with a Gravatar profile, it will be displayed.

I busted my ass this week and went from 70-78 playing Monday to Thursday. I took the weekend off, as my eyes were about to explode.

Additionally, I set up a guild on the Sen’jin realm, Fury Untold is the name. We’re gonna stay in 10 man content initially with a 2 night a week raid schedule. This being the 3rd guild I’ve started in my ~3.5 year WoW career, I can definately say, recruiting your initial player base sucks. Once you get enough people to get a group together (with enough room for an unguilded pug or two) it’s not too bad, but damn.

While the list is still short, I’m going to give a run down of my favorite blogs. As you can see I’ve currently got 4 blogs listed in my sidebar World of Matticus, Blessing of Kings, Eye for an Eye, and Lore LOL.

First, World of Matticus. This is the new guy on the list. I stumbled onto his blog from a link on Maintankadin regarding the difficulty of 10 man raiding. I checked out the post, and stumbled into a few more articles. The first post that caught my eye was his Build Your Own Guild series.  His subject matter covers everything from a serious raiding perspective.

Next in line is the first wow blog I started reading, Blessing of Kings, authored by Rohan. He’s a fairly well rounded paladin, and while I don’t always agree with his views 100% he’s generally got a pretty good grasp on the class a whole and keeps a pretty active blog.

Eye for an Eye was a blog I started reading several months ago. Josh raids as ret, but has a history as prot, and he’s got some good views (particularly from the DPS POV). He’s very well educated on PvE ret and has a few good posts on PvP. He’s a good learning experience for anybody trying to catch up on the “smash with a big hammer” side of paladin’ing.

Last is Lore. Good ‘Ol Lazy Lore. He hardly ever posts, and half the time, they aren’t even real post, just him blabbing on about randomness. However, he’s a big shot at tankspot, and does a lot of theorycrafting and articles over there, additionally he is also one of the head moderators at Maintankadin. So he’s got his hands full, but he’s a really funny guy that has maintanked almost (if not all) 100% of the content in the game.

Well, there is my overview. Hopefully one day, I’ll add some more!

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.