Project Lore

Blizzard is 100% serious about making us think before we chose to replace our items. While I still have not replaced much of my S2/T4 gear, I am finally at the level which this should start happening. At the moment I have only easily replaced four items, both of my craptacular trinkets from The Burning Crusade days and the rings to boot. The odd thing is, I have replaced my old pair of trinkets nearly three times over. That is right, I have a total of five trinkets that are an obvious improvement.

Of course, this is where the difficult choices Ghostcrawler discussed come in to play:

• First Mate's Pocketwatch
• Fury of the Crimson Drake
• Talon of Hatred
• Fury of the Encroaching Storm
• Death Knight's Anguish

Unfortunately, the WoWHead item comparison isn't of much help because of the trinkets possessing “Use” or “Chance on hit” buffs. Initially, I went back to min-maxing, a practice that I became to loathe so much from vanilla days. Rather than performing the calculations of average gains over time and all that crap, I just guestimated what was best, taking into account the vendor potential. And no, I didn't even bother checking shared cooldowns for swapping potential. I did check for this post though, the Pocketwatch is the only “Use” trinket not shared with the others' cooldown.

My thought process went something like this. Fury of the Crimson Drake is easily vendored once I look at that Pocketwatch, which beats it in every category. Due to my fast weapons, Death Knight's Anguish pops to its full extent (+150 crit) nearly every fight, adding a solid amount of +crit. To top it off it gives you two separate buffs, making me look more beefcake to the opposing faction and generally badass.

The second trinket seems like it will be a more difficult decision, Fury, Talon or Pocketwatch? Fury and Talon offer the same benefits, static +Haste with AP on use. Naturally the numbers are ever so slightly different, Talon with more haste but less AP. However, Fury is only on a one minute cooldown, meaning I can pop it twice as often. Seems like a good enough reason to beat out the Pocketwatch as well.

Pop in a simple macro and finito:

/use Fury of the Encroaching Storm

/cast Slice and Dice

Now that you are out of my head, you can see that I have finally recovered from obsessing over a small increase in DPS. The case can be made for using the later two “Use” trinkets, Fury and Pocketwatch, since they are on separate timers. The added haste over crit would probably increase DPS due to energy generation off of Focused Attacks, though, and again proving Ghostcrawler's point, I would be losing a chunk of +crit to get the haste. I am just gonna stop now...It'll all get replaced soon.

How do you guys go about these hard decisions? I have a few friends who just go for “whatever is cool,” rather than racking their or someone else's brain over the numbers. This goes for everything, armor, tabards, weapons, trinkets. If the gear is comparable the only stat they analyze is coolness. How I envy them.

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Yesterday I mentioned that most of my Thanksgiving was spent trying to convince people to join me in Azeroth, rather than playing myself. It isn't that I didn't want to play, I did my best to find the time, but living far away from my family forces me to obligate the little time I have with them to them. I blame society and quality parenting (don't ever tell my parents I said that).

While I was busy chastising my brother for his disinterest in Wrath and cursing my cousin's friends for ruining a raiding buddy, Ghostcrawler was busy on the official forums discussing the intricacies of World of Warcraft. Seeing as we have extended maintenance this fine Tuesday, I thought we could dive into his numerous posts and do some light theory discussing today.

The first meaty post I noticed from Mr. Crabbie was a discussion on the upcoming dual spec feature. Healers and tanks have been looking forward to this feature more than anyone, as it will allow them to tank or heal when needed, and revert to a better talent build for solo leveling. Sadly, if the feature doesn't make it into the game soon then most of us will be level 80, and it will lose he majority of its impact. Blizzard realizes this, and even though they won't put an ETA on it, they are trying to get the feature in for patch 3.1.

After reading that over, I noticed another post of interest to PvEers. I have been following the discussion of Wrath's difficulty ever since Ensidia (then TwentyFifthNovember) crushed the end game content. GC mentions that Blizzard is happy with the way PvE is going. Specifically, the developers want players to run the lower level dungeons at the appropriate levels, and make sure they do not “hit the introductory raid content like a brick wall.”

One of the most interesting posts to players of all flavors will be the discussion on itemization. Greg Street gives some background into how Blizzard wants you to feel when you have to decide between items. Back in the day, and after The Burning Crusade's launch, it was pretty obvious that one piece was vastly superior to another. Blizzard is now creating gear that doesn't lend itself to clearcut answers.

Shall I take a bit of haste or a large amount of attack power? These are the kind of questions Blizzard wants you to ask when looking at your gear options. I guess that explains why I have five trinkets that are almost equal. I went with the one with the lowest cooldown and best static stat.

Last but not least, Ghostcrawler spread tanking posts all over the holiday period. The pre-Thanksgiving post is the most interesting (and possess the least QQing by the OP) as it discusses core mechanics behind tanking. The OP asks what the point of the defense mechanism is, to which Street replies to, some 20 posts later. The interesting part is that the tanking mechanics that have been a staple in World of Warcraft since the days of Onyxia, may have just been added to the crustacean's whiteboard. The pincher possessor is not happy with the fact that the mechanic pulls “double duty.” In the future we may see the stat split up into multiple pieces, as the current incarnation “might eventually be a problem.” Topics such as easy tanking and tanking scalability – needing two or three tanks for 10- and 25-man raids – were also brought up.

The decapods dedication to World of Warcraft, the world he has helped to create, is astounding. Being in California one would assume that he celebrated Thanksgiving, yet he managed to post a horde of responses on that day alone. Seems that he took off Wednesday and Friday for travel days thought. The sheer volume of informative posts from Saturday makes me feel inadequate.

Here's to hoping that dual spec is implemented before I turn my focus back on my priest.

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So I’m sure many of you have heard, the Paladin heyday is over. We are getting hit with the Nerf Bat… and HARD. Being the token Project Lore Paladin, I thought I should weigh in on this. First of all I should clarify this nerf is aimed mostly at Retribution. Ret was buffed beyond belief in 3.0.2, and I will admit, probably to a fault. The most obvious overbalance being in PVP. I have heard tales of retadins taking out 4-5 opposing players at a time, bubbling, taking out a few more, laying on hands, and going back again. They have been accused of being unkillable and dealing way too much damage. I’m not going to argue that things are right, in fact I’ll agree that they are very wrong. I must say this whole ordeal as been hard to take as a Paladin. In WoW you grow a certain attachment to the class you play, it becomes part of your identity, and I can’t help but take a lot of the recent criticism a bit personally. There has been massive QQ over what pallies can do. It has gotten to a point that other players are getting angry over it. People are accusing us of being “cheap” or being “cheaters.” This is way out of bounds for me. We are playing our class! We didn’t hack the game to get over powered, it just happened! Sure, I know lots of us have been making the most of it, but I don’t think we are doing anything wrong. Regardless it seems that the chaos is coming to an end. Looking over the list that our good friend Ghostcrawler posted, there are quite a few changes coming down the pipeline. Some of which have already been hotfixed into the game, and a few more that are going to hit in upcoming patches. While I understand this is all part of the class balancing act, I do have a concern, namely the 20% damage nerf to seals and judgments. Consider me a bit selfish, but I can't help but worry that the nerfs to ret are spilling over into the other trees. The Judgment/seal nerf will affect my threat as a tank, no doubt about it. Given, Blizzard acknowledges it, but I think they need to find a way to prevent it, not say they will look into if there is a big problem. They have stated they are very happy with the way Prot has shaped up, so why mess with the formula to teach another spec a lesson? In the end reading over patch notes gives us a very poor idea of how the game play will actually shape up. We are just going to have to wait until we can play these changes to know if they have done too much, not enough, or got it right. All I know is that I will be paying very close attention.

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