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.