Project Lore

Now that the new patch is alive and kicking, my guild has decided to get back to raiding. Finally! This is great news, but things seem, well, different. I know Blizzard went ahead and reduced mob’s health by 30% for the new patch, and I also know that all of the classes have been buffed a bit with their new abilities. What I wasn’t quite ready for was the net result of all of this. All of the raid content is now ridiculously easy. This has been an extreme nerf, way more so than I had expected. Perhaps it was just the new class abilities are just much more powerful than it seems, or maybe 30% is just way more than I was able to visualize. Either way, wow. In the last two days alone we have had groups go through Kara in half (literally) the time it used to take, we have earned a few guild firsts, and we have taken groups of people who have never raided before into 25-mans with ease. It’s all quite overwhelming. Even heroics have changed significantly. About two pulls into my first heroic since the patch (Ramps), my group quickly went from strategic marking and pulling to just grabbing 14 mobs at a time and AOEing everything down. CC has been rendered completely useless. These made many of us reconsider our activities for the next few weeks. We now have the opportunity to see content that we never thought we would be able to see. Of course we will go down those bosses that always gave us trouble (Vashj I’m looking at you), but after that I think we will be able to press on into content we have never even seen. I even heard about a trade channel PUG that cleared most of Black Temple, surely we can do the same! As fun as this is, I can’t help but think this massively devalues these encounters. Sure we may get guild firsts, but do they count? No way. I no longer get a since of pride from downing a boss, it’s just an achievement/gear run for me now. It’s kind of sad. But then again, I don’t think anyone is really kidding themselves. All in all I think I am just going to take it as it is. I will enjoy the easy achievements, see some new things, gear up my alt, and continue to wait for new (non-nerfed) content in Wrath!

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So as many of you know, the patching process didn't exactly go smoothly for Blizzard. There were delays, installation issues, server issues, add-on issues, and for the fortunate few (like myself) you lost all your vanity pets and mounts. Yes... I know to look in the character screen, those babies are gone. Apparently it's a "display issue" That's not what I want to talk about, however. Once I plowed through all the speed bumps, things were actually pretty fun! I logged on with tons of new stuff to do and things to get excited about. While learning new mechanics has been a bit of a process, man, is it fun to see what my characters can do! My Paladin is pumping out more damage than I ever thought possible, and I have to say Hammer of Righteousness is about the coolest thing I have cast in a long time. Not only is it a great AoE, but I just love that sound it makes! (I know,  but you have to appreciate the small things). There were a few unexpected surprises as well. Once I got all trained up and got my hair cut, I started on a project I hadn't even considered before the patch dropped. I hit the AH and started buying up some glyphs to buff up my spellbook. Once I figured out where the Lexicon of Power was, I had a bunch of little enhancements to play with! Finally, I have to say, I just love the new achievements and titles. Allow myself to introduce you to Bastosa Jenkins (or is it Steve Marcus Bastosa Jenkins now?). On a serious note,  it has been a great excuse to check out some old content, and explore some of the secluded places in Azeroth I have never made it to. While I didn't get credit for everything I have done thus far, I think I am really going to enjoy going back and crossing all those old bosses off the achievement list. If this is a taste of what Wrath is going to be like, I am even more excited. Blizzard has done away with boredom of the downtime, and has given us all something fun to experience. Now if I could only get my epic flyer back...

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Blizzard has made it no secret that there are some big tanking changes on the horizon in Wrath. On the surface this has all seemed really exciting. There are tons of new spells, abilities, and mechanics all around. They have stated they want all of the tanking classes to be viable raid tanks, meaning that the ability for Paladins and Bears to tank single targets will be greatly improved. On the flip side Warriors and bears are getting some great AOE tanking abilities that were the Paladin’s bread and butter. As I first heard about these developments, I got really excited. As a Tankadin, I was getting the equivalent to last stand, shield wall, and shield slam. Mana problems will be a thing of the past, and during raids I won’t have to justify having a warrior main tank a boss instead of me (apologies to TRG’s warrior MT,  Jato). All these new abilities were incredibly exciting. Here’s a quick summary of the exclusive abilities I have noticed that have now crossed over between classes: Consecration – Both Thunder Clap and Swipe now hit unlimited targets, making them better for AOE Righteous Defense – Taunt and growl now work at range as well Holy Shield – Warriors will now also deal damage on blocks with Damage Shield Last Stand – Lay on Hands cool down has been greatly reduced, making it much more useful. Shield Wall – Divine Protection has been reworked to fill this role. Shield Slam – Hammer of the Righteous is a new skill with a similar effect. There are many more, I'm sure. After the initial excitement died down, it occurred to me: are we all going to be the same? Are we losing class distinctions and individuality? It started to not sit right. I love being able to do things that warriors can’t do. I love being the "go to guy" when you want to beat the Shattered Halls timer by 20 minutes. It’s a great feeling to round up a 12 pull without breaking a sweat. And, I’ll admit, I loved being the underdog when it came to being able to tank the big raid bosses (and loved even more proving my guild wrong when I did). It seems like all this will be gone… I will no longer be a Tankadin, I will just be a tank. Perhaps these changes aren’t so good after all? Now take this all with a grain of salt. I have not played the beta, so this may be all in my head, but I fear I may be dead on. Does anyone have any experience to prove me wrong? Are you as concerned as I am? Or is my concern unwarranted? I can’t say I’m completely sure myself.

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The moment of truth is about to arrive. As many of you noticed the second part of the patch has already began hitting our hard drives, and it's widely believed that Tuesday marks the release of 3.0.2. I am incredibly excited, but at the same time I am bracing myself for a bit of an awkward phase, and a somewhat rough transition. Things are about to change, and change a lot. I was not lucky enough to get a beta key, so in order to prepare I have been forced to spend my days reading blogs, websites, and patch notes to figure out what they are doing to my class. It seems like most classes have some pretty major changes coming, but some are bigger than others. Of course where I have been paying the most attention is my Paladin. To state things simply, they changed everything. From what I can tell, they changed the basic mechanics of the way the class operates. Our seal-judge-reseal way of life is gone. Now we have persistent seals and judgments that are not tied to the active seal. Not only that, but we have an entire new list of spells that seem to replace a big part of my tanking threat rotation. Seeing all this will be incredibly fun, but I can't help but feel I will be starting at square one. I will have to relearn how to play my class entirely. I admit that I get in a bit of a rut pulling with avengers shield, doing my standard judgments, and spamming holy shield. Now I have spells like Shield of Righteousness, Seal of the Martyr, and a whole mess of "hand" spells that will all find a good home on my hot bar. It is going to take some time to figure out my new seal and judgment rotation. We no longer have one Judgment, but three. While sealing and judging won't take up as much of my time, I feel it will still be important to manage seals and the debuffs we are placing on mobs very carefully. I imagine my rotation before and after the patch won't look anything alike. It's a bit of a frightening prospect. Luckily we have this 4 week window to romp through old content so we can focus on new abilities, and not have to worry about learning the instances. With any luck I will have all this mastered by the time Wrath drops. How about your class? Is this going to be an easy transition, or are you going back to the drawing board with me?

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In light of all the downtime, alts have been a pretty hot topic lately. Just about everyone I play with is working on one, and now a few people I know are even thinking about switching mains. I know I’ve been working my alts pretty hard recently. I went through a number of different classes before I decided I want to make the rogue my “main alt.” It got me thinking about the role that your main plays in picking your alt.There are a few ways to approach it. At first I decided I wanted to do the complete opposite of my Protection Paladin. After a bit of thought I decided this would probably be the Warlock. Unlike my Pally he’s a DPS class, he’s squishy, he’s ranged, and he has a pet. It seemed difficult to find something much more different. It turns out that this was a little too different. My play style was that of a tank, I would always pull more than I could handle, and it ended up being a fairly unpleasant experience. I was disappointed, but I decided it was time to try something else. I then started my rogue. This was much better. Leather armor meant she could take a little more of a beating, and she was a melee class, so as that was certainly in my comfort zone. Turned out I really enjoyed the class. Play style actually wasn’t far off from my Paladin. Combat was actually more similar than I would have thought, just much faster. Instead of pulling mobs and counting on being the one that dies last, I just had to count on being the one that kills the other one first. Once I got her to 30 I decided to try some other classes on for size. I’ve played shaman, druid, warrior, and priest all past 30. After all that I ended up going back to the rogue. It was simply too much fun. In the end I found picking a class that compliments your play style is a win. My recommendation would be to find that common link between what you enjoy and what other classes have to offer. For me it was getting up in peoples faces with melee classes. Maybe you want to stick with pet classes, or keep it at range, or stick with mana users. Whatever it is, I think common ground is a good thing. What about you, what made you pick your alt? Is it similar or completely different from your main? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to grind out a level and a half to 70!

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Not too long ago I wrote about my experiences in Mount Hyjal and gave everyone the opportunity to share our favorite places to play. I really enjoyed reading through your comments, and you definitely brought back some good memories of leveling in Duskwood and my first steps into Nagrand. Today I want to flip that. I will tell you right now there is an instance I flat out REFUSE to step foot in. Ask anyone in my guild, you can't pay me to go in there. The instance I'm talking about is Slabs (or The Shadow Labyrinth, if you prefer). There are several reasons I hate this place, but you can pretty much chalk it up to two really bad experiences. For quite a while I skated along running it every so often, no major issues to speak of. Then I had the run that will live in infamy. I was just killing some time one random afternoon, so I gathered up a group of friends (including DrDark, who now loves Slabs about as much as I do) and decided to knock out a quick instance run. Things started okay, then it happened. We wiped no less that 15 times on Grandmaster Vorpil. Chalk it up to inexperience, flawed strat, or whatever. The point is it was utterly painful! Four hours later we finally made our way to Murmur.  Another 8-10 wipes and we just called it. This group was fairly skilled, and stubborn as all hell, but we finally just had to cut our losses and move on with our lives. You can finish Kara in less time! I was at a bit of a loss for why the run was so bad, but It was at that moment I swore off Slabs, I felt like I didn't really need to put myself through that again... Alas, probably 4 months later I was starting to get pretty well geared and was working on my TK attunement quests. Guess where it sends me? Heroic Slabs. Oh Joy. I thought about this for a while, Slabs couldn't be near as bad as I remember right? What the hell, lets do this thing! So we did. I was a much better player, and put together a pretty impressive group. So in we go, thinks were going smooth until Blackheart the Inciter. Then all hell breaks loose. 6-7 wipes on Blackheart, at least 10 on Vorpil, and 5 on Murmur. I don't know if we were having an off day, but it was another 4 hour run from hell. It was that point I swore to myself, and meant it, no more Slabs, NEVER AGAIN. This time I've stuck to it, and I never see myself going back. In fact it's become the big joke in the guild whenever Slabs pops up as the heroic daily. "Bast will tank! He loves Slabs!" Har har, my response has become canned "never again." I'm hoping I'm not the only one who has this strong of feelings against an instance. There is no other instance in the game I mind running, and I rarely wipe in heroics at all, but something about Slabs just sends chills down my spine. Do you guys have any hellish experiences to share, or any instances that you flat refuse to run? I completely understand if you do, trust me.

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It seems like the entire world (of Warcraft) has gone into a bit of a holding pattern lately. Many people (myself included) have stopped raiding, we just heard about the arena points reset, so there is not a whole left for anyone to do other than count the days until November 13^th. While I am very much in the same boat, like hell I'm going to stop playing the game! So I have been trying to find a few activities to keeping me going. In the short term, I have been spending my days grinding the Kodo mount for Brewfest. I have over 200 kills and still have yet to see the thing drop, I'm beginning to suspect the cake is a lie. I imagine I will get it eventually, and if not, Brewfest will ultimately come to an end. Soon I will be looking for other alternatives. I have been trying to stay positive and look at this as a good excuse to catch up on those things I have always been meaning to do. I'm talking about all those projects I have always meant to get around to, but never did because I was busy raiding. Here is my list of things I think I will finally be able take a shot at:

Netherwing - I want to finally grind out the Netherwing Dailies, and get my nether drake. Although I must admit, with all the new mounts on the horizon, my desire here is waning a bit.

Fishing / Cooking - I have played around with the idea of leveling my fishing and cooking. It seems like a good way to make some cash and be able to make all that tasty raid food.  Problem is I hate fishing, so I guess this one is just a matter of how bored I get.

Farming Gold - The last thing I could even thing to do on my main is stockpile gold. Certainly not a bad approach, but I question what is going to happen to the WoW economy, and if this will pay off in the long run.

Alts - I have a Rogue that is closing in on 70 fast, and want to make her a priority. I have a few others sitting in 60 range that I may have time to get up there as well.

New Professions - With the prices on the AH falling through the floor (at least on Executus), this isn't a bad time to powerlevel a new profession on one of my alts, and I've always wanted to try Jewelcrafting. For some it may be a good time to push to 375 on your main.

Roll Horde - I've always wondered how the other half lives.

I'm sure there are lots of other worthy projects that would be worth taking on during this time. So tell me, what are you guys doing?  Have you come up with a productive way to spend your WoW time? Please don't tell me you are still raiding... I may become incredibly jealous.

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If you are anything like me, you want to get to level 80 as soon as possible. Sure I understand that some people would like to sit back, smell the roses, and enjoy all that Northrend has to offer. But for me, this game is all about the end game! I'll save the roses for my rogue alt. I want to start raiding as soon as possible, so myself and my fellow guildies have spent some time recently discussing the fastest way possible to get into Naxx. I don't want to do any stupid 48-hour marathon power-leveling or anything, but let's just say I won't be wasting any time. There are a few options, but the one I think we have settled on is pure instance grinding. Being a tank, this would be ideal. First of all, it prevents me from having to respec Ret, which is the last thing I want to do. It will also allow us to learn all the new class skills and abilities in a group setting, which will be valuable down the road.  I'm sure we will poke our heads out of the instance portals from time to time, grab a quest or two, and see what the countryside is about, but I think that the XP from the instances will get us where we want to go fast. Add on the quests that are in the instances themselves and we should be leveling in a hurry. In order to get this dialed in, we are wanting to put together a team of 5 people that will basically level as a unit, make sure we stay close in level, and just hit the 5-mans over and over until the final ding. I imagine it will take more than a couple  runs through each one before we are ready for the next,  but its not like we haven't run every heroic into the ground already. I doubt anyone will mind. I know there are others in the guild with the same plan, so hopefully it will be easy to hook up with one of the groups and go straight into the 10-man scene at 80. Now this is certainly not the only way, just my way. I know people that are going to quest from sun up to sun down. I even know a few that plan on filling their quest logs with 25 completed quests in SMV beforehand and hope to get a level or two off the turn ins when Wrath goes live. In the end I think it comes down to doing what you enjoy. I enjoy group play, so that is my route, what is yours?

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This may seem obvious to many of you, but I thought I would share a bit of insight that I learned the hard way. No matter how much you want to free up that extra bag slot, you should always think twice (or maybe 3 times) about destroying your hard earned pieces of loot. I know it is hard to see a use for those boots you got in Kara when you have a shiny new piece of tier 5 sitting in your bags, but chances are you will need it again. I learned this lesson the hard way when it came time for our guild to take on Hydross in SSC. This fight requires that the main tanks deck themselves out in full resist gear, while still remaining uncritable. I, of course, was elected to be the guilds frost tank, meaning I needed to have both 365 frost resist, and 490 defense. This is not an easy task, and I found myself having to get creative to keep my defense up. This meant regemming many of my lower level Kara items and blues to maximize defense. As I began this long process I came to realize that there were a few items that I had long ago disenchanted that would be perfect for this! There was the trinket from Shadow Labs, that belt from Moroes, and those boots from Chess that would have put me right where I needed to be with minimal effort. Of course I had stupidly decided that I would rather have a void crystal to sell than a “useless” piece of gear, so I went ahead and did what any good enchanter would do and sharded it all. Next thing I know, I need this gear again and I'm back in Kara rolling on loot! While getting this stuff is fun and exciting the first time around, the second time it turns into a real grind. There is nothing like keeping your fingers crossed that some loot will drop that you already won months ago! Lucky for me I have a great guild, that was very understanding in the matter, but still there was a lesson to be learned here. I think this may be a timely reminder with WotLK breathing down our necks. As we all hop on the first boats out to Northrend, I'm sure we will be seeing all sorts of new gear finding its way onto our toons. There is no doubt that we will eventually replace all we have, but take a second look before you get rid of anything for good. I know there are still vanilla WoW trinkets that are used in TBC end game, and I have no doubt there is a piece or two we have now that will have its situational use for a long time to come. Think twice about getting rid of your gear, particularly If you are a tank, but I imagine the same goes for others as well. You never know when the next fight, the next unexpected gear drop, or a creative application of an ability can change your whole set of priorities when it comes to important stats!

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Ever feel like you found a dungeon, zone, or raid that was just made for you? Depending on your class, spec, and general play style some places just click with the way you play. As a protection paladin I've been close to experiencing this a few times. The Plaguelands were full of undead and great paladin lore. It was definitely one of the first places my tankadin felt at home. Further down the road there was Kara. A masterfully designed instance, and again crawling with undead. This had to be it right? Not quite. After all this time playing my Pally, I am proud to announce I have found my place. My "Zen" instance. The raid to end all raids for the protection paladin: Mount Hyjal. I zoned in there for the first time ever a few weeks ago, and it all just feels right. Waves of mobs just charging into my consecrate, piles of undead that I can blast with my Holy Wrath, and pulling stray mobs off an over zealous DPS is just an exorcism away. Even the bosses are all demons, sending our threat through the roof. I know we are designed for AOE tanking, and this instance seems to be designed for us. For those that have never seen the raid, Hyjal is set up much different than others. It is similar to the 5-man instance The Black Morass. You must survive waves of undead that descend upon various towns you must protect. Instead of pulling the instance, the mobs come to you. After you have downed 8 waves you get greeted by a boss. It can be rather hectic, but with all these mobs charging into your raid the Prot Paladin is invaluable for keeping everything under control. I have never had more fun in a raid than I did my first night in Hyjal. Not only did I get to tank in a way I never have before, I even showed up in the top 10 of the DPS chart! I think I am in love. We still have a ways to go, and I know there is an obstacle or two in our way, but I am thoroughly looking forward to working through this instance. I've heard from many people that this instance gets repetitive and tiresome after a while, but I have a feeling I will be enjoying it much longer than others. What about you guys? What zones seem designed for your class? Where are you in your element? Surely there are other zones that seem to be such a good fit for various classes and specs. So what are yours? If there isn't one, what would it take to make one? I'd be curious to know.

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