Looking to the future.

Well, I've really neglected this thing, haven't I?

In truth, there isn't much to say. There's been nothing much happening in-game over the last week or two. We occasionally get a raid off the ground, but it's not the main thrust of what we're doing atm.

I'm getting bored with WoW because my time on Beta has made me realise the problems with Protection Paladins in their current state. I'm looking forward to the change in stats, I'm particularly looking forward to being able to stack Block Value without worrying about mana, and to wear tanking items without worrying about threat generation or uncrushability. Having seen what we'll become, the Protadin currently feels like a compromised beast. (I know by using the term "Protadin", I have incurred the nerdrage of a thousand Maintankadin posters. You can all kiss the fattest part of my ass!)

Which isn't to say we're perfect right now. In an article over at Tankspot, Lore's listed a few issues still prevailent in our class. For his part, Galoheart's asking "Do You Have Confidence Paladin Class Will Be Fixed?" [sic]

I have to say I do. Even if nothing changes between now and Wrath of the Lich King going live, then we'll still be in a better position than we were going into The Burning Crusade. The differences between us and certain other tanking classes are there, but they're nowhere near as pronounced as they were when the trailblazers like Lore and Invisusira were popularising the idea that we could actually tank 18 months ago.

Whilst we're at a slight disadvantage atm, which the Devs have promised will be looked at, it's a few % at best. That margin is only going to be of interest to the diehard min-maxers and Protadin (there I go again!) haters. If Wrath arrived tomorrow, there's nothing there that would stop me maintanking for Smart Casual all the way through Naxx and beyond.

I'm not worried, and I don't reccomend you should be either.

Adventures in Engineering: The Dimensional Ripper

The Dimensional Ripper - Area 52 is in many ways the pinnacle of Goblin Engineering. It's obnoxious and unreliable.

Oh it'll always get you where you're going, but there can be side effects:



First up, Ulu became a Night Elf...



I didn't like that much, so I made a beeline for the Mechanar and zoned into the instance to find something more asthetically pleasing:



After a while, I went to some other instances to help friends, and Ulu took on another shocking transformation.



However, the last and most truly terrifying transformation had yet to occur:



So remember folks, Engineering isn't all fun and games!

What I did on my weekend by Ulushnar, level 70.

Ok, so I played some of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It's fun, but the boss fights are an annoyance to someone who's used to tanking his way through fights. I'll get back to it at some point.

But if you're reading this, you're probably wanting some Wow-based information, right?

• I've pretty much given up on the Beta server. It's always a bundle of lag and ass at peak times (ie. the times I can reasonably log in). Still I have a semi-decent idea of the starting zones now, which is all I'll really need.
  
• Friday night, I finally maxed-out Ulushnar's Engineering and made his Turbo-Charged Flying Machine Control. I have a chopper now and the lore-freaks can suck it!
  
• On Saturday, I spent most of the day doing old-world content with Ulu. I went to Blackrock Depths and solo'd most of the Onyxia quest chain before patch 3.0 obliterates it. I got all the way up to the part that requires Upper Blackrock Spire.
  
• I then realised I didn't have the Upper Blackrock Spire key, so I went into Lower Blackrock Spire and had Ulushnar solo the bosses there to get it. Given it's a 55-57 level dungeon, it was something less than a problem for Ulushnar.
  
• on Sunday, I also made a Dimensional Ripper - Area 52. Ulushnar now has a Helicopter and a Teleporter.
  
• After that, I spent a fair amount of time helping various guildies kill the Brewfest boss before wrapping up the weekend with a Karazhan clear last night.
  

Speaking of the Guild, things are going ok. We currently have a 14-man membership, and I'm hoping another four people to return from Warhammer before WotLK and join in. There's been a largely positive response from most folks, with the exception of a couple of folks.

Now we just have to spend 7 weeks getting ready for the WotLK release.

The Professions aren't a-changing.

Well according to a post on MMO-Champion, the rather lacklustre Engineering Goggles have had another pass. They're now epic and roughly on a par with the drops from Naxxramas 10-man. They're also available at lvl 72 if you can get the Materials. More to the point, they have the same mote-finding ability as the current Goggles, so it looks like Mote Clouds will be implemented in WotLK.

This makes me somewhat happier about staying with Engineering, so tonight I'm going to use my stockpiled materials to get Ulu up to 375 and make his Turbo-Charged Flying Machine. Just as well really, because getting Blacksmithing to 375 looked like an annoying drag.

In guild news, our numbers seem to be slowly but steadily increasing. Of course it's too early to judge how things will pan out.

A Fresh Start.

Well, with eight weeks until Wrath of the Lich King and raid sign-ups steadily declining, I've been looking more and more to my plans for Wrath of the Lich King.

Chaotic Divinity has been my home in WoW for better or worse for three years, from fresh lvl 60 hunter to lvl 70 tankadin. However, over that time my priorities have shifted. Whilst I'm still interested in a casual approach to raiding, I find the situation as it stands in CD a little too casual. People can sign for every raid or no raids and it doesn't matter. With a membership of over 50, we were routinely struggling to get 25 off the ground. Even when we did, about half the group were generally unfamiliar with the encounter.

We needed a stricter approach to attendance and a tighter group. Sadly I couldn't do either of things whilst keeping the things in CD which were so attractive to some members.

The first ray of hope came at the start of the summer, when it was announced that the WotLK Dungeons would be switchable between 10 and 25-man mode. Suddenly it would be viable to take a tight group of 10 regular raiders all the way through the endgame.

After that, the idea sat at the back of my mind. I'd mention it in passing to folks who reacted postively enough to the idea, but i didn't have an idea about how best to proceed. I thought about setting up an unofficial "group within a group" inside CD, but that would have been unfair. I then considered turning Surprised Survivors into a raidguild. However there's a few people who either wouldn't want to join the group I was thinking of, or who I wouldn't want in that group. Even though I've been GM for most of it's life, I just didn't feel I had the right to kick people out of their home.

So the only option was to make my own Guild. I discussed the matter with a few guildies and we decided to set it up and make the announcement if and when CD finally decided to shut down raiding before Wrath of the Lich King.

As it turns out, that happened tonight. So I've now transferred Ulushnar to his new guild, the Smart Casual Raiding Company, and we've begun the process of recruiting new members.

Pre-TBC we won't get much more than a few ZA/Kara runs and maybe a few Achievement-chasing old-world raid runs after 3.0 hits. The real goal however is to hit the ground running in Wrath with a group that'll be ready to knock on the gates of Naxxramas relatively quickly.

If it all goes to crap now, I've no-one to blame but myself.

Remember, remember the 13th of November...

Well, with the 3.0 Test Realm going up on Saturday night and the rumor* that WotLK is going to be released in a little over 2 months, it looks like Blizzard is pulling all the stops to make sure that their subscribers visits to Warhammer Online will be temporary at best.

Good on them, because it's boring as hell playing on Live atm, and the EU Beta server's been a joke ever since I first logged in.

CD's lost it's raiding spirit. We can maybe scrape together enough people to take a run at the first three bosses in Mount Hyjal, but that's about it. The rest of the time people either play alts, PVP, or plain don't log in.

Warhammer's taken a few of our core players and other folks aren't stepping up to replace them. I don't see how it's worth replacing people for two months of raiding, even if we had the quality of applicants.

I think my raiding career is ending here.

*This was going to be a rant about how until we've heard from Blizzard themselves, it's a rumor, not a confirmed thing, but Blizz have just confirmed as I was typing this. Darn you Blizz, darn you to Heck!

3.0.2 Public Test Realm Open.

Well ok, it's not Beta, but if you want to see how the Paladin changes will affect you, then Patch 3.0.2 has hit the Public Test Realm.

Enjoy.

Beta: Big news.

Ok, so it looks like there was another beta patch last night, two days earlier than normal. And in it, they skinnied down the Protection tree. It's actually possible to spend 51 points in Protection and not feel gimped.

I could list all the changes, but I need another coffee before work, so I'll leave it instead to Lore over at Tankspot.com.

One change he hasn't mentioned though is that Combat Expertise now increases our crit chance by 6%. This plus the unbloating of the tree means we can pick up Heart of the Crusader and Conviction in the Retribution tree more easily. I'm going to have to explore what this means but on the face of it:

1. Having a base crit chance of around 19% will really help our single-target threat.
2. Our off-DPS in Ret gear shouldn't totally suck balls.

It's an interesting change that I'm going to experiment with.

Beta: Size Doesn't Matter..

Well at least as it applies to Mana pools for Tankadins.

I was quite shocked at the outcry from elements of the Tankadin about this weekend's changes to Tankadin itemization. I expected the people moaning about the way we've seemingly been homogenized in with Death Knights and Warriors, but I didn't realise there were so many people who liked +Intellect on their gear.

If I may speak to that section of the Tankadin community for the moment: you're all idiots operating under false assumptions. (Nice save man, you think they noticed?)

Intellect has never really helped our longevity in fights. It's been good for unloading burst threat, but that extra mana will only delay you going out of mana on content you outgear by a few seconds at best. That's why virtually no Tankadin itemization since the T6 set was finalized has included any. It was 15-20 item points out of the budget per peice and it did little good. More to the point, it was 15-20 points per peice that Warriors could have in Stamina, avoidance, threat or mitigation stats, further increasing their slight advantage in progression boss tanking.

WotLK/3.0's solution is far more elegant. It treats a Tankadin's mana pool like the Blue Rage bar we've always joked about it. A finite resource we refresh by doing the things Tanks do: taking damage, hitting stuff and avoiding damage.

Admittedly, the taking damage part of that, Spiritual Attunement is as old as The Burning Crusade/2.0.

We now regain mana by hitting stuff either by casting Judgement of Wisdom on a target, using Seal of Wisdom as our seal of choice, or hell, doing both. Admittedly we've had a version of both JoW and SoW since classic WoW, but these versions both scale, and with Hammer of the Righteous allowing you to proc seals on three targets at once, SoW is massively more effective.

Finally, the biggest and best change is the Blessing of Sanctuary change. We now have an ability that will allow us to regain mana when we successfully avoid or block an attack. This actually scales with both our Avoidance and the number of mobs we're facing.

These abilities mean one thing: Intellect on our gear is irrelevant. And I for one couldn't be happier. I know we've all hit situations where we've found ourselves gasping for mana at some key point in a farm boss fight on Live. We've all found ways around it, from "sit n' crit" to "tanking without pants". I can categorically say that this will almost certainly not happen after 3.0*.

*Unless they really screw the pooch and revert a bunch of the current changes.

Imagine a world without Crushing Blows.

Well when 3.0 comes around and Ulu's free of the yolk that is 102.4%, I'm
looking forward to grabbing some items I'd previously overlooked or benched
because of the need to keep Uncrushability.

Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate: Whilst it's only really a good threat piece on Live, in Beta it's pretty solid, due to it having more +Defense than
the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian and also a good chunk of Hit Rating, which will be useful once we lose Precision.

Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx: At the moment, I need the Wristguards of Determination to hit uncrushability. In 3.0, I'll finally be able to look at these as a viable option, especially with the nice Expertise.

Girdle of the Fearless: Well ok, I don't have this yet, but I have the badges sitting in the bank and with the itemization changes, it's looking like a tasty option.

Bulwark of the Amani Empire: At the moment, I'm using my Illidari Runeshield for better Armor and threat. In 3.0, the only reason for me not to go back to this bad boy will be if Kaz'rogal drops his shield.

Libram of Divine Purpose: This is more about kissing goodbye to
the Libram of Repentance than it is saying hello to the Libram of DP. I don't actually use Seal of Righteousness too much on Beta atm, as I much prefer Seal of Vengeance. Might go with Libram of the Eternal Rest after all.

I honestly wasn't expecting them to reitemize our existing gear, but I'm
really glad they did. Can't wait to try all this out on a real live raid boss
after 3.0. It may be heresy to admit it, but i've always been envious of
Warriors and their ability to go after whatever gear they want without having
to appease some arcane ratio. I'm really looking forward to judging each and
every tanking drop on it's own merits rather than thinking "I can't stay
uncrushable with that" or "that's better for a Warrior".

Beta: The gears(?) they are a-changing!

Ok, I go away for the weekend and the interweb explodes. New Beta patch, and this time the biggest change for Tanks in general, and Paladin tanks in particular is that our gear has been reitemized in line with the changes to our mechanics in WotLK.

I've taken some screenshots to give examples of the itemization changes:









As you can see, the Spelldamage and Intellect is gone, replaced with Strength. Not a bad change, although Ulu's mana pool has dropped from 5.6k to 4.6k, which means his Blessing of Sanctuary and Judgement of Wisdom don't proc for nearly as much. Also, on the tier set items there appears to have been a drop in Stamina values as well. Once again, not drastic, but they seem to be more threat pieces than MT ones.

Now let's look at a couple of generic badge items:




Once again, the strength's been added, but this time, it's at the cost of defense, dodge and expertise. A little more annoying, but the points have to come from somewhere.

Overall, this puts some changes to Ulu's stats:



He now has 1.1k Attack Power, which is nearly three times what he has in live. On top of that, he still has around 400 spellpower thanks to Touched by the Light. He also now blocks for 601, which means I can't wait to get my hands on Shield of Righteousness at level 75.

State of the Protection Tree - The Rambling

Ok, to quickly answer Ghostcrawler's question I'm going to list talents that I consider to be "fun", "not fun", "essential", "not essential". This is from the perspective of someone who MTs 25-mans now and will continue to do so hopefully between 3.0 and Wrath's release.

Fun, Essential

Holy Shield
Anticipation
One Handed Specialization
Blessing of Sanctuary
Hammer of the Righteous
Avenger's Shield
Combat Expertise
Divine Strength
Judgements of the Just (aka, Thunderjudge!)

Fun, Not Essential

Touched by the Light
Improved Holy Shield
Reckoning
Improved Devotion Aura
Blessing of Kings
Redoubt
Shield of the Templar

Not Fun, Essential

Sacred Duty
Toughness
Improved Righteous Fury
Ardent Defender

Not Fun, Not Essential

Shield Specialization
Stoicism
Guardian's Favor
Divine Guardian
Improved Hammer of Justice
Guarded by the Light
Spell Warding


All in all, not a bad ratio, 16 "fun" talents vs 11 "not-fun" ones and more than twice the number of "fun, essential" talents than "not fun, essential" ones. Now some qualifications, be warned folks, this will be a long one.

Two Blessings: Protection is the only tree with talented Blessings and we've got two of the feckers, both of which, thanks to the awesome new Blessing of Sanctuary changes darn-near essential.

Blessing of Kings is one of the best buffs in the game for raiding. A flat 10% boost to all stats that stacks with every other buff in the game. It's also the only buff of it's type in the game.

Blessing of Sanctuary on the other hand is basically the tanking buff that every tank's wanted ever since the first T2-geared Warrior tried to help their mates through Scholo. The 3% mitigation and ability to regain tanking resources on a successful block/parry/dodge is going to be an incredibly desirable ability for almost every fight.

The added wrinkle to this (and I know I'm stepping outside Ghostwalker's brief as I mention this) is that Holydins are less likely to get Kings in the expansion. Most Holydins I speak to are aiming to go 15 points into Retribution for Conviction at least, which will make it unlikely they'll also be willing to go 11 points into Protection.

Therefore, Kings will be only available to Protection Paladins and possibly the occasional Retribution Paladin who specced deeper into Prot for off-tanking. In practical terms, tanks will have to choose between Sanctuary and Kings for most fights. That's one spec with two powerful buffs, only one of which it can do at a time.

My preferred solution would be to make Kings baseline. Or failing that, move it to the Holy Tree, possibly in the place of Aura Mastery (which seems out of place with the new fray-adjacent Holydins). Other people have suggested making Sanctuary a self-buff (or folding it into Improved Righteous Fury), but it's too nice for other tanks imo.

Redoubt/Shield Spec: Redoubt's always been a weird talent. It's reasonably useful in massive AoE situations, and the odd time it allows you to stay uncrushable in between Holy Shield refreshes. That said, if you ask most Tankadins why they take it and the answer's usually "because it's tied to Shield Spec".

Shield Spec itself has taken a hit thusfar. The fact it only works on +block value from items is ignoring the massive swing towards BV from Strength in WotLK itemization. I can imagine that Blizz may be worried about double BV scaling from both Divine Strength and Shield spec, but unless there's a massive amount of +BV itemization in the Wrath endgame, I can't see this talent pulling the weight of the 8 points you need to spend to get it.

The Upper Tiers: Well this is a mixed bag isn't it? On the one hand you have the lovely threat/hybrid talent that is Touched by the Light and "it took you this long to give us it?" awesomeness of Judgements of the Just. All this is capped with the itemization-redefining glee of Hammer of the Righteous.

And then we have two talents that reduce the mana cost of some of our powers... Two. Seperate. Talents.

Ok, so originally Guarded by the Light was the kind of buff that Blessing of Sanctuary eventually became, a talent designed to help us out in overgearing situations without depantsification. And I'll admit that Shield of the Templar also boosts the damage of our shield spells, so it's not as terrible as it first appears.

That said, Guarded by the Light's still underwhelming for a talent this deep in the tree. What I'd like to see, and I'm hopefully not alone in this, is a talent that reduces the duration of silence effects. Currently silences are the major weakness we have compared to other tanks, and it would be nice to see this mitigated.

Well ok, that's my rambling over. If any nice Colonials with access to the Beta forums over there feel like cross-posting this to there, I'll be grateful for like 2, maybe 3 minutes.

State of the Protection Tree: Intro-thingy.

Ok, so there's a topic right now on the US beta forums asking about the current state of the Protection tree:

We are about ready to do our next major pass on the Paladin trees.

We think Prot does have too many mandatory talents, and too many talents that offer passive mitigation without other interesting mechanics or even dps. This thread is a great opportunity to discuss the tree and offer your feedback.

For purposes of this thread, the kinds of feedback that are useful:
-- Which talents are fun vs. which ones aren't
-- Areas in the tree that tie up too many talent points vs. areas that feel barren
-- Talents that feel mandatory vs. talents that feel fun but optional vs. talents you'd never get

For purposes of this thread, we are less interested in:
-- Mitigation and threat capabilities of the paladin vs. other tanks (we'll get to that)
-- Holy and Retribution (we'll get to that)
-- Mana, dps, interrupts or other paladin issues (we'll get to that)
-- Whether it's a good goal for Prot to be viable at healing, dps or PvP. (It's helpful to mention when talents might fit these roles, but let's not use this particular thread for a debate on whether Prot should be at all decent in PvP.)
-- Questions about other topics, pleas to visit other forums or catty arguments

Rest assured this is not our only avenue for collecting feedback. We do talk to experienced and beginner tanks alike as well as drawing on our own internal resources to make decisions.

Ready, Set, Go!

Not having a US Beta account, I'm going to post my thoughts on it here later.

Initial concerns include:

*Two vital blessings in the same tree.
*Redoubt/Shield Specialization crapness.
*the "meh-ness" of the higher-tier talents.

Meanwhile on Live...

We downed Azgalor last night for the first time! Sadly the Paladin t6 token didn't drop, which is fair enough, it gives me more time to store up the bajillion dkp I'll need to get them.

Beta: New Quest Toys

As i mentioned earlier, I picked up quests for two nice blue tanking items this morning.

First up some gloves, which I rate as better than Ulu's T5:


Then some Shoulders, which are slightly worse than his T5 ones, but that I'll grab and bank for when I start to get more +Str gear:


And finally, how the two items look on Ulu:



Hopefully they'll change the look of the shoulders on live. Now all I need to do is grab a PuG to The Nexus some time.

Beta: More on the grind.

Ok, so the last post was me hastily jotting down thoughts whilst finishing my coffee and heading out the door to work.

Last night, Ulu ran around the Howling Fyjord for a while, doing some of the early quests there. It's a pretty huge zone, but the infrastructure between quest hubs feels a little awkward right now. There's a plane you can take from the docks/first quest hub to a second hub, but there's no way for you to return to the first hub easily from there. Thank Blizz for Divine Shield-assisted base-jumping is all I can say!

This morning Ulu left the Howling Fyjord to go back and finish the last few quests in the Borean Tundra, and more specifically, the Coldarra subzone. As I mentioned in passing in the last post, there appears to be an annoying bug present that stops people regenerating mana and health normally. I'm not sure where it comes from because it certainly wasn't present last night.

The new Blessing of Sanctuary and Judgement of Wisdom definately make life easier for soloing, but it all depends on the number of mobs you're fighting. Against one solo mob, it's decidedly inefficent, since you don't dodge, block or parry enough to get a decent mana income relative to your costs. That said, at three or more mobs, I find myself switching to Judgement of Light since I'm getting more than enough mana back.

Casters are still annoying however, but I'm willing to accept that as our Achilles Heel.

There also seems to be new quest rewards added in. Whilst questing in Coldarra, I picked up two quests for The Nexus that included blue-quality tanking options. They don't appear to be on Wowhead, so I'll take screenshots tonight.

It's nice to be level 72, but looking at the new powers available (a new rank of Divine Wrath and Redemption) I won't be making a beeline for the Paladin trainer tonight.

Beta: Three things...

1. Ulu dinged level 72 this morning.
2. There's an annoying bug that's preventing Mana and Health Regenerating via Resting or Eating/Drinking.
3. Don't try and AoE multiple Blue Drakonid Supplicants. The results are embarrassing:

Beta: On Intellect

Galoheart wrote:

Oh yes indeed. Having more Intellect does scale the effect of the procs from Blessing of Sanctuary. Especially given our small mana pool. So stacking it when possible seems at this point a good thing as it adds much to out mana.

I don't think so, really. Whilst we're the only Tanking class who can increase the size of our resource pool via an attribute, I'm not sure if it's worth doing it in anything other than situations that we overgear.

When you're tanking progression content, then you should get a decent-enough mana return from healing, with maybe a JoW/BoS thrown in for good measure.

If we take +intellect items or enchants, it will always be at the detriment to our other stats.

If you had a choice of two items, one with:

+30 Strength
+60 Stamina
+20 Defense Rating

and the other with:

+25 Strength
+51 Stamina
+18 Defense Rating
+20 Intellect

Which one is actually going to make us a better tank? The +Int item will definately help our Soloing, Off-Tanking, and any visits to farm content. That said, the difference in mana return is minimal (the 20 intellect gives +6 mana back per BoS/JoW proc), it'll cost us a fair amount in other stats, which I'm not convinced we can afford to do on progression content. And no other Tanking class will make that sacrifice.

Beta: The Mana Will Roll right In

New Beta build on Friday/Saturday. I started downloading the sucker on Saturday morning before I left for a weekend visiting my friends, so I didn't get to install it until Sunday evening on my return.

There were two major changes for Protadins:

1. Judgements actually work again. They have however removed the Attack Power/Spellpower scaling from the Mana/Health return. Judgement of Wisdom now restores a flat 2% of your maximum mana. In Ulu's T5/Badge gear with 5.6k mana unbuffed, this equated to 112-113 mana per swing. I haven't tested Judgement of Light yet, so I'm unsure how much that scales.

2. Blessing of Sanctuary has had a massive overhaul. The current version is a rather unimpressive flat damage reduction and a small threat boost on block.

"Places a Blessing on the friendly target, reducing damage taken form all sources by 3% for 10 min. In addition, when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 10 rage, 20 runic power, or 2% of maximum mana."

Protection Paladins now have the perfect blessing for Soloing and overgeared content. Yes, I know Blessing of Might scales our damage, but my concern with soloing has always been downtime. I don't mind spending 20 seconds longer killing a group if I can then go straight onto the next group without spending 30 secs eating/drinking. Or worse, having to auto-attack the last 20-30% of a mob because I'm out of mana.

Before work this morning, I left my Blacksmithing levelling and went to the Howling Fyjord to give the new abilities a test. The gate to Valgarde is constantly swarmed with level 67 Vykrul and Worgs, which seemed to be a decent spot to test Ulu's new abilities.



This is him at about a dozen mobs in. Whilst I was moving around and positioning them, the odd attack did get through, and the Worgs have an annoying disease DoT, so Ulu's taken some damage. However, look at the stream of mana gains and more importantly, look at his mana bar at this point:



I think I could get to like this, although if this hits live, I think my pace in instances will cause even more grey hairs on my healer's heads. Of course, I'm going to have to see how this scales with less +Int gear at level 80.