Incoming + Defense Advice

So it's almost here. Excited folks? I know I am!

For those of you unsure about what to do, Ciderhelm over at Tankspot has made a nice guide for folks. It's slightly Warrior-centric, but most of it applies to Tankadins as well, except for the bit about stacking Shield Block value, which really on applies to Warriors before level 75 when we get Shield of Righteousness. And we probably don't need quite as much food/healing potions.

For me, I'm sticking with Ulu's main tanking gear as shown in the armory for the most part. I'm going to keep a few spare +Defense items on hand for when the increase in the Defense Rating-to-point but I'm not bothered too much if I become slightly crittable in the levelling dungeons. I could create a secondary "DPS" set which focussed on Strength/AP, but that just feels like too much effort for not enough reward.

On the subject of +Defense though, I'd advise each and every one of you to keep your eyes out for items with a high amount of +Defense Rating as you level. Currently to reach uncrittable at level 70 we need 328 Defense Rating (2.34 Defense Rating = 1 Defense Skill). At level 80 that becomes the rather frightening 689! (4.92 rating = 1 skill). Then again, with the removal of Crushing blows from Raid bosses, that 689 is our only hard-and-fast gearing requirement, so get it, and then get other tanking stats as you like.

Dual Talent Specs & the cusp of 3.0

So it was Blizzcon over the weekend and they confirmed that they'd be be doing Dual Talent Specs at some point in Wrath of the Lich King:

The Dual-Talent spec feature will let you switch between your two specs without having to go back to town. You can perfectly do it between fights in a raid, however it won't be possible to switch specs in the middle of an Arena Match. Your keybinds and glyphs will be saved and automatically switched as you change your spec. An itemrack-like mod might also be added to the game to make switching even easier.

This is certainly more than I expected from the idea. I figured they'd put a massive cooldown on it, but they definately seem keen to let folks play with being hybrids. As someone who's focussing on 10-man raiding in Wrath, knowing that spare tanks/healers can switch to full DPS specs on fights where they aren't needed is massively welcome. I really cannot wait until this feature goes live.

In other news, I've slowly been vendoring/destroying unneeded junk/items in my bank in preparation for 3.0/Wrath of the Lich King. I've also altered my gear slightly, swapping Ulu's Illidari Runeshield for his Bulwark of the Amani Empire and his Wristguards of Determination for his Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx. I've also set up an altered outfit for after the patch on Wednesday which switches a few more items around. I'm actually considering using the Shard of Contempt in Ulu's tanking gear.

I really can't wait for this patch!

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.

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!

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.

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.

Beta: It's Mine Time!

Well with the current bugged/broken Judgements making Paladin levelling and tanking about as much fun as trying to tighten a screw with a maggot, I decided to get Ulu's professions in order.

When I first copied Ulu to the test realm, his mining was only at 273, and I needed 375 to begin mining in Northrend.

First stop was the Burning Steppes, where I spent an hour doing circuits and mining all the Thorium and Dark Iron veins I could see to get him close to 300. On the plus side, the zones were practically deserted, so I was free to level at my leisure.

At 299 mining, I got on a bird to the Blasted Lands, figuring I could find the last couple of nodes I needed on the way to the Dark Portal. I was right, and dinged 300 there. For my trouble, Ulu was rewarded with Toughness rank 4.

After that, it was time for the easy part. I did circuits of Hellfire Penninsula and Nagrand on Ulu's epic flier, mining all the Fel Iron and Adamantite nodes I could find. Outland was a little busier than Azeroth with all the levelling Death Knights, but none of them were mining, so Ulu had carte blanche again. It took me maybe an hour and a half from that point to get up to 375 mining and Toughness rank 5, but it was worth it.

I'm quite chuffed with the Toughness buffs. It's nice to have a reason to keep a gathering profession late into the life cycle. The 20 Stamina buff is actually 26 when combined with Ulu's talents and I'm looking forward to getting the level 6 Toughness at 450 Mining...

I went to bed after finishing the grind, but I took a run around this morning and mined my first few Cobalt nodes.

In related news, I've just copied my bank character over to the Beta realm with my stored collection of Ores, stones, gems and Primals. I think tonight I'm going to drop Engineering and powerlevel Blacksmithing.

Beta: Further down the Rabbit Hole...

So this weekend, I knuckled down and got some more Beta going on...

First of all, let me say that Blizzard have truly fucked things up with the latest build. Whatever the plan was to tone down Retribution has resulted in none of our three Judgement spells working. This means that along with not doing damage based on the seal used, Judgement of Wisdom doesn't restore mana, Judgement of Light doesn't restore health and the talented abilities Judgements of the Wise and Judgements of the Just don't work. In fact the only indication I can get that Judgement is being used is Heart of the Crusader proccing.

That said, I gritted my teeth and finished levelling Ulu to 71 as Retribution. At that point, I went back to Stormwind, respecced to Protection and picked up the new Divine Plea spell.

I then went to the Nexus with two of my friends (a Resto Druid and an Enhancement Shaman) for an attempt at the instance. All three of us were in a mixture of T5/T6 and badge gear, so we figured we had a decent shot at a beginner instance.

Wrong.

We managed to kill one boss in there, Grand Magus Talestra who is completely insane, somewhere in between Shade of Aran and the last boss in Arcatraz. We made some attempts at Anomalus as well, but we really needed another DPSer for him. We gave up after the instance server crashed.

Lessons learned:

* The Nexus looks really cool.
* Threat generation's a nightmare with the bugged Judgements.
* Resto Druids are Tiny Gods at group healing now.
* Not even the instance servers in Beta are free from lag and instability.

Apart from that, I've done a bunch of quests over there and I'm starting to get a feel for Prot-based soloing. Divine Plea really helps cut downtime, and when they get Judgements working again, there should be no problem with staying as Protection.

I'm currently considering copying my Bank character over to test so I can level Blacksmithing with the ores I've collected. By the time I've got Ulu into his mid-70s, I'd like to be able to start work on the Tempered Saronite set.

Nailing shut the Engineering coffin...

New Beta build which is currently downloading at home. I haven't had much of chance to Beta recently due to a combination of gathering mining materials, showing up for raids and the occasional social engagement.

They've apparently announced some of the initial Engineering stuff here, and, it's looking more and more likely that I'll be switching to Blacksmithing on Ulu. The only two interesting items are set of blue-quality tanking Goggles which will probably be replaced early in Ulu's raiding career at 80 and a trinket with +81 Stamina which I predict to have a similar shelflife.

But when to switch? That is the question:

I could switch now, use the Crystalforge Faceguard as my sole tanking helm. I'd gain about 0.5% uncrushability, some Block Value and 40-ish spelldamage, but lose 2% Avoidance and 200 hp.

I could hold on and hope that the Hexlord drops the Battleworn Tuskguard. The difference in the two is negligable, although the goggles look cooler.

Or I could hold on even longer and make the switch a week or so before Northrend hits the live servers.

Beta: More on Ulu's journey to the Ret side.

So yea, I ended up speccing back to Ret. I tried with Prot, I spent an hour questing with it last night, but i just couldn't get into the groove. Even with Judgement of Wisdom and alternating between Seal of Righteousness and Seal of Wisdom as my mana pool dictated, it was hella slow and there was downtime every 4-5 packs.

With Ret on the other hand, between Judgement of Light and Judgements of the Wise, I was tearing through mobs at a rare old pace. Yes, the survivabilty is lower than Prot, but with the higher damage output, I can kill 3-4 mobs in a fraction of the time and end the fight with over 80% mana. Then all I need to do is cast a quick Holy Light on myself (4k normal heal, 6-7k crit) and I'm ready to take on the next group.

This Discussion has sparked off one of Galoheart's posts. The issue of making Tanking "more fun" has been stated as one of Blizzard's goals in WotLK. I personally have fun tanking atm, but if they wanted to make questing/grinding as a protection spec more fun, then they could do something about our DPS.

At the moment, Tanks do comparatively low damage, but our threat is boosted by various macguffins (Righteous Fury, Defensive Stance, Dire Bear form). If they lowered our innate threat increases, but boosted our baseline damage then it might make solo questing more fun. I'm not suggesting that Tanks should outDPS primary DPS classes like Rogues, Warlocks, Hunters or Mages, but it'd be nice if, as Lore suggested, we were on a par with "utility DPSers" like Shadow Priests, Enhancement Shamans and the like.

Ultimately, I'm going to stick it out as Ret until I hit 71 and get Divine Plea. Then I'll switch back to Prot and see if that makes any difference to my fun as Prot grinding.

I suspect not.

Beta: Quicker, Easier, More Seductive...

In Beta, I've weakened and gone back to Retribution, I'll go into more depth later on, but I'm just finding Prot soloing more annoying than ever since trying Ret...

Death Knight: The first post.

Well, I said I'd do it, so here goes. Yes, I, like almost everyone else in Beta, have started a Death Knight, and I think I like them.

I named him Graysun (using the name of my original Paladin alt from September 2006) and I decided to make him Human. My original idea was to make a Pink-haired Gnome Deathknight, but I quickly realised that joke would get old all too soon. Humans may be bland, but with +5 Expertise with Maces and Swords and +10% Reputation gained from quests, they seemed like the best choice.

Because the Death Knight is a hero class, you start off at level 55. What worried me going in was "am I going to be overwhelmed with the need to spend 46 Talent points and master a few dozen skills straight away?"

Thankfully the answer is "no". You start play with no talent points and about half-a-dozen skills. You're wearing a suit of matched, green-quality armor with no trinkets, relic or weapon. The first quests you do give you your weapon and teach you about Runeforging, which allow you to enchant your weapon with a variety of special effects.

This is Graysun in his starter armor shortly after acquiring his Runeblade:



(I've hidden his helm in those shots, but it looks like a hood covering the upper part of his face in the same style as the rest of his armor. The death knights themselves look like normal examples of their race, with the addition of glowing blue eyes.)

After you've gotten your blade, you're set loose on the Scarlet Crusade! Most of the quests give blue rewards to replace your starter greens, and they too form a matched set of gear.



Also, most of the quests give you some talent points as additional rewards, allowing you to get used to your character and spend your talent points as you go.

After only a cursory look at the talents, I decided to focus on the Blood tree, which seems to focus on 2-handed DPS and life-draining. There's a few talents that remind me strongly of Retribution paladins, which smacks a little of laziness, but I guess they're aiming both trees for the same role: heavy 2-handed DPS with the ability to convert some of the damage done to healing for the group. The healing component of a Blood-spec seems to be higher than that of a Retadin, but I suspect that's to make up for the Death Knight's lack of direct heals.

The Death Knight seems to be everything I wanted the Dark Templar in Age of Conan to be, a tank that does damage and uses that damage to heal himself. I suspect the healing component may even be enough to make up for not using a shield in certain situations. I genuinely tempted to make one as my DPS toon in Wrath live, since I have very little desire to level Wulf these days.

Beta: Prot to Ret and back again.

So when I finally logged into Beta on Saturday, I naturally went straight for Ulushnar. As a Protadin, my first thoughts were to spec Prot, using a spec based off Lore's musings on the WotLK-era core spec.

I dithered around a bit at first. For some strange reason, they'd given Ulu a different "haircut" (actually a large Klingon-like head protusion with a grey mullet) as opposed to his normal alabaster baldness. I went to the hairdresser in Stormwind and found to my horror that the Bald Draenei model was missing!

Ultimately, out of protest, I picked the "hairstyle" that was obviously supposed to include the baldness, and wandered round as a Draenei with half it's head missing:



I started doing quests as Prot, but I found the old cycles weren't working. Even with the new Hammer of the Righteous and my Spiteblade, mobs were dying too slowly. Of course the sane response would be to round em up and AoE, but since it was a busy Saturday afternoon and I was competing with a whole bunch of DPS specs (including Hunters with their new Devilsaur pets and Warriors dual-weilding 2-handers), I was generally limited to what Exorcism and Avenger's Sheild could gather for me.

I'll say one thing for using a high-DPS one-hander over a caster 1-hander though: it really helps you keep soloing if you're low on Mana. That said, with the new Judgement of Wisdom, and the fact that Seals last two minutes, I found mana to be ok, as long as I didn't Consecrate. The Seal change was the hardest to adjust to, since refreshing a seal after hitting Judgement is hard-wired into my playstyle at this point.

Anyway, after a few quests, the Northrend World Server crashed, I went to start my Death Knight (more on him in another post), and then did some mining on Ulu on Live.

After a break for food, I went back to Ulu, ported him back to Stormwind and visited three places: The hairdresser, the Paladin Trainer and the bank. I got sick of being half-headed, so I gave in and got the Klingon Mullet, although this time I changed his hair color to a reddish-brown which I thought was more asthetically pleasing:



After doing that, I went to the bank, and traded in my Prot gear for my Ret gear. It's a mixture of Heroic, Kara, ZA, T5 and early T6 items. It's not amazing, but it gets the job done. Anyway, I specced Ret (using a Spec suggested by Worldie on the Maintankadin forums)) and ended up with 2.3k Attack Power (with improved BoM) and 23.49% melee crit.

I. Owned.

Using Seal of Command and my unenchanted Hammer of the Naaru meant I was downing most mobs in about three hits. I was taking on 3-4 mobs at a time and killing them all in the same time it took Prot Ulu to kill one, and with less downtime for mana recovery afterwards. As it stands, Retribution's kinda broken, and it's damage is going to be toned down before release. Hopefully they'll keep abilities like Divine Storm and Judgements of the Wise functioning similarly, since they offer nice utility. Similarly, I hope they don't break Ret's damage-dealing capacity whilst they're toning it down. It'd be nice to have them doing competitive damage in raids.

After a couple of hours with Ret, I kinda felt a little guilty. I'm positioning myself to be my group's main tank, and there's no point in me falling in love with toys I can't have. So I specced back to Prot and went to see how I could best make it work.

The golden rules seem to be:

*Use Judgement of Wisdom exclusively.
*Use Seal of Wisdom when you're low on Mana. It'll proc on all three mobs when you use Hammer of the Righteous, and the Hammer + Holy Shield + White Damage should keep your DPS high enough.
*Use Consecrate sparingly. Generally I used it when I made an aoe pull to gather up the mobs.
*No matter what you do, downtime is inevitable. Take it like a man and keep on hoping for level 71 and Divine Plea.

Beta: first thoughts.

So I spent most of Saturday Morning/Afternoon downloading and installing the 2gb WotLK Beta client and about another gig of patches. After that, I had some time running about the new content with Ulushnar as both Protection and Retribution spec. I also started a Death Knight called Graysun, who I levelled to 58 and completed the starting Zone with. My initial findings will be expanded on later, but at the moment:

*Those bastards haven't implemented the "bald Draenei" hairstyle from live, so I had to give Ulu a haircut.
*Northrend looks cool, or at least the Borean Tundra does.
*Protection with the current itemization's ok for soloing, but it's more mana-hungry than ever.
*I haven't tanked any instances yet.
*Retribution is completely OP. Even with mediocre stats (2.3k AP buffed and 23.5% melee crit), I was killing most enemies in 2-3 hits and ending fights with 2-3 enemies at above 80% health and mana.
*Blood-spec Death Knights are similarly OP. I was taking down quests I'd struggled with on Wulf/Ulu without breaking a sweat and similarly ending fights with over 80% health and mana.

I'd have more to report, but the Beta servers are up and down like a yo-yo, and even when they're up, the lag at peak times (froma bout 9 in the morning to 11 at night) makes it nigh-unplayable.

Also, I've been busy on Live as well. Ulu's mining is fast approaching 375 (having a Epic Flying Mount really helped with the last bit!) I've also led an attempt at a ZA Bear run (need to get used to the different route and group set-up), a Kara badge-farming run (for Retribution goodies), and our first successful 25-man in over 2 weeks (a clear of the first three bosses in Moutn Hyjal).