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Quiet moments and what to do with them

There hasn’t been a lot going on recently in WoW for me. The big news right now is finally downing Jaraxxus and Faction Champs on 10-man hardmode, which is pretty cool – but I can’t really think of anything past that.

For once in my blogging career, I’m actually at a loss for anything to say.

I’ll probably have something interesting posted up here soon, if not my impressions of Champions Online, then at least something. I guess this post is largely just to let you know I’m still alive. =\

My Aion experiences

I recently cancelled my Aion account.

It was a fun game, but I had some problems with it; mainly, it felt way too grindy. I could kill mobs for much better XP/hour than I could get questing, which in my opinion is bad design. In addition, I just wasn’t getting as much enjoyment value out of it as I do with WoW.

There were some serious upsides to Aion, though; the graphics were outstanding, as was the character customization – I could change every aspect of my character’s appearance, which was pretty neat. Although class diversity was limited, the secondary class system combined with chain skills made playing any class unique and fun. Area design was also excellent, with diverse landscapes, each with its own set of mobs and quests. Abyss stuff was really neat, too, but again, it just wasn’t as fun for me as WoW is.

My overall impression of the game was that of a polished work, but not one that could sustain my interest. There were some very well done aspects of the game, and others that were less awesome – it definitely would appeal to some people, but alas, I am not one of them.

I’ve started playing Champions Online now, too – I’ll post my impressions of that game sometime in the near future.

Windows 7 upgrade rant.

I started out building my current computer with pretty up-to-date hardware, and originally ran Vista Business SP1 on it. By the time Windows 7 RC1 came out, I had upgraded to Vista SP2 and was still sick of Vista’s aggravating idiosyncrasies, so I decided to move to the Windows 7 RC, which ended up being a good idea. The upgrade was seamless, and although I was still on a 32-bit OS and therefore couldn’t make full use of my RAM, I was still able to run Vent, a media player, over 30 webpage tabs in Google Chrome, and WoW all at the same time with no performance loss in-game (always 60+ FPS, even in places like Dalaran). I was really happy with my OS, and was looking forward to the October 22nd official release. Everything was going great.

October 22nd rolled around, and I had already preordered my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Downloaded it, everything went great – until when I tried to upgrade, I was told “Windows 7 does not support an upgrade from your current OS”. That’s right – I could not upgrade the RELEASE CANDIDATE of their operating system to the official release version. I ended up having to blow another $300 on a full copy of Windows 7, and am not particularly enamoured with the handling of this upgrade process. One would think Microsoft would want to make things easier for RC1 users as they helped with pre-release bug testing and so forth, but no – instead, I was stuck buying the entire full version because I was never told to keep a partition with Vista around so I could upgrade to the release Win 7.

Oh well, I guess – I shouldn’t have expected any more from Microsoft. Getting screwed to the tune of $300 isn’t my idea of fun. That aside, Win 7 is indeed a great OS, even better on release. Very impressed with how well it runs everything – even better than RC1 did, which is saying something.

Mage speculation in 3.3

I noticed a few changes to Frost in 3.3, mainly the glyph that allows your Water Elemental to become permanent. I’m *hoping* this means Frost will be viable in 3.3, but we’ll see. It seems like it could be a lot of fun to try, but it doesn’t solve the problem of a very monotonous spell rotation. If they can fix that, I have a feeling that Frost could be a lot of fun in future raiding, especially since there’s that 1% of health every so often taken as damage debuff in Icecrown, at least on the PTR.

Another cool change that I noticed was the Ferocious Inspiration being spread out to Arcane mages – this gives mages another reason to go Arcane, in that it gives the raid a nice 3% damage buff. I foresee this being a pretty big deal in T10 content, especially since it looks like Beast Mastery hunters still aren’t gonna be really great DPS.

Lastly, the long-awaited Scorch change – finally, fire mages can do the same thing that locks can do, and apply their entire Scorch stack in one cast, unglyphed – meaning that any mages that still were using Scorch glyph for the raid can reglyph to something with a true DPS boost. What with Arcane’s 3% raid damage, Fire’s crit buff, and Frost’s replenishment, we may be seeing multiple specs of mages being useful in raids in 3.3, which would be very, very cool.

Friends online and off – why they’re less different than people think

I must admit, this post was kind of off-the-cuff for me; the idea popped into my head and I happened to be working on some other site-related stuff at the time.

I met the best friend that I will ever have about 12 years ago, back in first grade. He and I have stuck it out through thick and thin, and have pretty much always been there for each other for advice, support, anything really. For all the years we lived in the same city, we pretty much did stuff together all the time, worked at the same location for a good while, hung out very often, just in general were together a lot of the time – and even now that we’re in totally different states, we’re keeping in touch through phone calls, texts, pretty much everything – and already planning stuff for when we’re both back in our hometown this winter. We never get in any major disagreements despite being almost character foils for one another, and we’ve experienced a lot of major stuff in our lives together. I honestly think we’ll always keep in touch right up to our deathbeds; we’re literally that good of friends.

To contrast, I’ve met a lot of really cool people through WoW. My friends list has to be cycled through 3 different characters because I’ve met so many people that I genuinely like. A few of them, I was fortunate enough to meet up with at BlizzCon. Many people that I know, I talk to regularly via whispers, Ventrilo, even Facebook in some cases, many different media really. We do stuff together – raids, instances, or sometimes just chatting or leveling alts – and we have a lot of fun doing it. Even just yesterday, a bunch of us did some Outland instances on alts, just going through them and tearing it up. Good times. A lot of these people I’ve known for only about a year, some maybe as far back as a year and a half or two years (gaah, can’t even remember anymore – I’ll have to check blog archives sometime) – and we’re genuinely friends. It’s amazing, really.

Think about the two examples above. Even though I haven’t met a lot of my WoW friends face-to-face, we still do stuff together on a semi-daily basis, and even though people move on or stop playing, we still keep in touch. I’m still good friends with a lot of people from my old guild as well as with some people who used to be in Cloudy Day that have quit or moved on to another game. Now, I’m not saying that I’m ever going to be as good friends with the people that I’ve met over WoW as I am with my best friend (don’t think anyone will ever come close to that), but it’s possible to draw some serious lines of similarity here. Even when WoW dies, I hope to be able to keep in touch with a lot of the people I’ve met – and to that end, I’ll probably maintain the current guild Ventrilo for quite some time after WoW finishes up, or even past the next MMO, if we decide to move to another one. Maybe it’s just that I’m much more of an extrovert over the Internet, but I’ve formed genuine bonds with these people, and I’d hate to see them broken.

It’s a bit late for me here, so I’m going to cut this post a bit short – hopefully I’m not tired to the point where this entire post made no sense. I really didn’t intend for it to prove anything, more just as food for thought. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s still easy to form real friendships over WoW, maybe not to the extent/depth of those you can find in real life, but enough to a point where they’re easily recognized as true friendships.

More alts!

I’ve been very productive with my two major characters recently; my paladin continues to do extremely well tanking, and I’ve also been playing my mage a bit as well. I finally finished my “Classic Raider” achievement when I got into an AQ40 run for the last 3 bosses; that put me up to 6035 achievement points on that character. That aside, I’ve been spending time leveling up some alts as well; my DK’s still at 72, but I’ve gotten my hunter up to 60, and hoping to get up to 70 by next month. Honestly, leveling a hunter is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done; it makes me wonder why I hadn’t done it before.

In other news, Spice and Wolf’s first season comes out on DVD in US region this December! I’m pretty excited about getting that; it’s a great anime. Definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet; Season 2 just finished, so now’s as good a time as any to start watching it.

What I’ve been doing

…and why there have been very few posts recently…

Well, first off, as some of you may be aware, I’m back in college, so that’s cut back significantly on my free time. That said, I’ve still found time for gaming; Cloudy Day killed Anub’arak 25, and we’re making progress on Yogg 25 now too. Hardmode 10 Ulduar hasn’t gone as well as I would like, though, largely due to not being able to find healers. Oh well.

I’m still playing a lot on my paladin, enjoying that immensely – although I did hop on my mage last week and pull 6k dps on Koralon. Always fun to still be able to top charts on an undergeared character. The 4-piece set bonus for T9 Prot Paladins is awesome – 30 seconds off Shield Wall cooldown really helps on some fights.

I’ve been trying out some other games, too – most notably Aion and Champions Online. Aion, to me, feels a lot like a very graphically pretty WoW clone, and in addition feels a bit too grindy for my tastes. (Killing mobs at or around my level yields more experience per hour than questing – no motivation to give myself a sense of direction in the game). I know it was touted by many as the next “WoW killer”, but aside from a WoW killer being impossible to make, Aion really kind of disappointed me. I’ll play until I can get to Abyss on my own character, but I doubt I’ll renew that subscription. Champions Online, on the other hand, is a BLAST. Absolutely love that game. It’s an MMO, but abilities have no cooldowns, so it kind of feels like an action game too. Really well-done game, I’m enjoying it immensely.

Remember my BlizzCon “Part 1″? Well, the reason Part 2 never came out is that I lost my notebook that had all my BlizzCon stuff in it. I’ve found it again so I’ll be posting a horribly late “BlizzCon Part 2″ sometime.

Mmm, delicious progression – and a confession.

A couple nights ago, Cloudy Day finally got through the roadblock that was Faction Champions – plus we got Twin Val’kyr down! The only stuff we’ve got left in current content is Anub 25 and Yoggie 25, since we got Onyxia down on Tuesday. (Fun fight, btw; I really enjoyed tanking that one. Got a couple of the achievements from the 10-man.)

I’ve been enjoying tanking so much recently that I’ve actually officially switched my main over to my paladin as far as guild raiding goes. I kind of feel bad about this due to this having been a mage blog for so long, but fear not! I’m still keeping up with mage theorycraft (check my big theorycraft post; it’s been updated for 3.2.2), and I intend to keep the theorycraft focus in this thread on mages.

That said, I was a little sad to read about the changes to Prot paladins; it really seems that most of those changes were made due to hybrid Prot/Holy builds in arena, but in the process Blizzard managed to nerf our interrupts (kind of important) as well as making a few more changes that really hurt Prot in a PvE environment. I understand the Righteous Fury nerf as we were a little overpowered on threat (and I still do a pretty good job of threat generation even after the nerf – fairly sure I can hit 5.5k or 6k TPS in a 25-man raid environment). The other nerfs, though, seem specifically balanced around Arena, and in my opinion, the changes were short-sighted, as they made Paladins’ interrupt ability even worse.

That said, the Mage changes were beautiful. Combustion’s finally a real talent, and Arcane is pretty awesome now. I’ve always liked the Arcane playstyle, and now that the tree’s viable for raiding again I have respecced my mage back to Arcane. That said, if there’s any AoE component to a boss fight (say, Freya, perhaps), I’ll be going back to Fire because Living Bomb is just so wonderful.

Hardmodes, GO!

I hopped on my tank last night and headed into Ulduar 10-man; after downing Flame Leviathan +4 the night before, I was confident that we could manage XT and Council hardmodes at least that night. I was happily mistaken, as we one-shot XT Hardmode for our guild-first down, then moved to Council and 4-shot that, after which we one-shot Kologarn and Auriaya before moving to Hodir and 4-shotting the hard mode (3 intentional wipes).

Not a bad night at all!

Heroic ToC…

That place is scary. We’ve been putting in attempts over the last couple nights on Northrend Beasts, as we have cleared regular ToC twice now – finally, on our third night of attempts this week, we broke through our DPS barrier and brought down the first boss. I was tanking it, and I won’t lie, I was a bit scared of it after wiping pretty badly the previous two nights. Fortunately, we got them tonight, along with finally getting Freya in 25-Uld, as well as downing Vezax shortly after – so all we’ve got left in there is Yoggie now! I’m really excited to do the fight in 25-man now that I’ve seen it in 10-man.

The long-awaited Paladin Theorycraft blog!

And by “long-awaited” I mean that I mentioned writing something dealing with Paladins waaaayyyy back when I first started blogging, but never got around to doing it. Of course at the time it was going to be about level 30 healing – but never mind that! Tanking’s more fun anyway.

I’m sure a lot of people have heard of the Paladin “96969″ tanking rotation, but I find that a lot of players don’t quite know what that means. To clarify:

Protection paladins have 5 abilities that they use in rotation to build threat. 3 of them are on 9-second cooldowns (Judgement, Holy Shield, Consecration) and 2 are on 6-second cooldowns (Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous). The “96969″ rotation is built around alternating using a 9-second cooldown, followed by a 6-second cooldown, and so forth. Therefore, a typical Paladin rotation might look like:

• Judgement of Wisdom
• Shield of Righteousness
• Holy Shield
• Hammer of the Righteous
• Consecration
• Shield of Righteousness
• Judgement of Wisdom
• Hammer of the Righteous
• Holy Shield
• Shield of Righteousness
• Consecration
• Hammer of the Righteous
• (repeat)

The cool thing about this is that you can adjust your cooldown order on any specific fight as needed. The reason I use Judgement first is to proc my Libram of Obstruction, which gives extra block value on using Judgement. Since Shield of Righteousness is affected by block value, it hits harder when I Judge before using it. After that, I throw up Holy Shield to help mitigation, and from there I finally start using my AoE threat abilities. Granted, this could be changed based on what libram you have, or whether you value instant mitigation (Holy Shield first) or slightly more early AoE threat (start with Consecrate, Hammer of the Righteous) – although the highest single-target threat is the listed rotation, as far as I’m aware.

I actually use macros to set my rotation up; if you macro your 9-second cooldowns in a /castsequence macro to one button, and your 6-second cooldowns to another button, you can alternate the two buttons and do your rotation that way.

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=9 Judgement of Wisdom, Holy Shield, Consecration

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous

Works out pretty nicely.

Some final notes: As far as speccing, there are a few things you can do. Taking the 5 points early in the Holy tree for Seals of the Pure is a viable option due to how good Seal of Corruption is right now, but I personally prefer taking Crusade (in Ret) instead, giving me a 0/53/18 spec. Make sure you glyph Divine Plea as it’s another 3% damage reduction (stacking with Blessing of Sanctuary), and keep that up as close to 100% uptime as you can. (e.g. always be hitting things).

I hope this mini-guide to Paladin tanking has helped you out! If I left out some stuff, please let me know. =)

Mage Theorycraft post updated

Just letting you know that I’ve updated my mage theorycraft/DPS post to reflect upcoming changes in 3.2.2. Feel free to leave me a comment if I’ve made any glaring errors.

YOGGIE!

I’ve been raiding a lot on my paladin recently – the last 4 days, we’ve been killing stuff in 10-Ulduar in a guild run I’ve been (mostly) leading, with various people each night. Last night, we got Freya and Thorim down with two alt healers and an offspec healer, so I had confidence that we could get Mimiron and Vezax down, and start attempts on Yogg-Saron (whom we had only ever gotten to phase 2 before – my guild doesn’t do much in teh way of 10-mans). We one-shot Mimiron and two-shot Vezax, which was awesome. It was really fun tanking Vezax, too – that was a pretty difficult encounter last time I was there (on my mage), but tanking it was a bit better for me and we got it pretty easily on the second attempt.  I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get Yogg down after only one day working on him, but after 8 wipes in various phases of the encounter – two in phase 3 – we finally brought down the Old God in Ulduar.

As a side note, I recently picked up two new addons – oRA3 and Elkano BuffBars – and I’m loving both of them. Totally worth the downloads, imo – oRA3 is especially nice for raid management.

Here are a few pictures of the awesome that is Yogg dead – below the break.

ZOMG!

I did it on my alt. Sigh.

We didn’t have enough people tonight to run a 25-man, so we put together a 10-man OS+3. We had some issues at the beginning as we were short on true tanks, but I eventually hopped on my paladin and we started working on a one-tank one-healer strategy – except we had two healers in the riad for a while. Once we figured that out and got everything rolling (and after a few DPS swapping around), we got Sarth consistently to 15% or below for 6 or 7 straight attempts. Trash respawned, so we recleared – and after 3 more attempts and a change in Bloodlust timing, we finally burned through the last few percent and got OF THE NIGHTFALL.

Pretty exciting business. The only regret I have is that I don’t have the title on my main. Oh well, there’s always next time, right? =)

More news for my paladin!

Sorry about the delay on getting BlizzCon info and impressions out. I’ve been packing for college – I leave tomorrow.

Just some quick notes on the paladin before I head to bed – I did a timed Oculus today, we finished with 3 minutes to spare despite only having 3 drakes, so I got the speed achievement as well as my Red Proto-Drake in the mail. Of course, I’m nowhere close to having enough gold to use it. =)

I also tanked a few bosses in 10-Ulduar tonight – we did Flame Leviathan, XT (I main tanked), Kolo (main tanked again), and Auriaya (who I also main tanked). Auriaya dropped a shield for me too, so I was able to upgrade my old Titansteel Shield wall which I had had since shortly after I hit 80.

This also put my paladin very close gear-wise to where my mage is – basically the next upgrade I get for the paladin will make her have better gear than my poor mage. As sad as that sounds, I do really enjoy tanking, and am looking forward to continuing to tank in Ulduar and also more raids past that.