Blessing of Might

Arena S7 Week 5 - Double DPS from Hell

2009-10-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So my arena partner was sick most of last week, we didn't get any games in until Sunday night. We started the week at 1807 and for a while things were going pretty well. We got up to 1829 before suddenly tanking like crazy. Lose, lose, lose 1789 (grr). We ended it at 1801.

As a little side note, minimum requirements to be in my guild are 1800.... I don't think they're hard core enough to drop you if you fall below 1800 later in the season (permanently) but our GM is a little "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of guy.

So what was the comp of the night? Double DPS.. yeah 2 mages, Ret Pally/Rogue, Ferril Druid/Rogue, Mage/Rogue...a lot of Rogue last night. Some we pulled thru, others we didn't.

The damage of double DPS was just awsome. I'm no slouch rocking 850 resilience and my partner is at 952 but against a double DPS team it felt like ZERO.... Sometimes by the time I got out of a polymorph or cyclone my partner was basically dead.

My advise here is to not be afraid to blow your CD's much sooner then usual. Did the rouge sap you and 2 people are on your partner? TRINKET OUT OF IT, don't wait the 6 seconds because he'll be dead by then. Are you getting focused and are at 30% Don't want until 10% to bubble, you might not get a chance between 10% and 0... a good team will know the bubble is coming and kick the spell, counterspell, etc and you're dead.

Now don't blow things to early. If you trinket out of a sap right away and the rouge isn't on your partner he's just going to go back and sap you again. Good timing and situational awareness is key. If you can survive the initial burst of double DPS you're all set because their big attacks are on cooldown and you've got a healer - they don't.

That's all for now, hopefully we'll get some games in for week 6 tonight or tomorrow.

Arena after the patch - Put your head down and trudge on

2009-09-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

As promised here's a rundown of Week 4... It started out bad, horribly bad. How bad is that you ask? Try 2-8. Yeah 2 wins 8 losses.

Now some of that is me. But it turns out a lot of it was my warrior partner. He had regemmed for STR from Armor Pen. Well folks I can tell you that even after the armor pen nerf your warrior should stick with it. Tuesday night my warrior is crying out in dismay on why he's critting clothies for 1-2k damage. I'm crying out because of a new humongous 21 second CD between stuns....the rating tanks from 1807 to 1778.... I call it after 10 games in disgust and go pick up my Relentless Gladiator Cloak of Dominance before the rating slips under 1750 and I become ineligible.

We hit it again last night playing 22 games. Jeddak has regemmed to Armor Pen and is critting for his more usual 3-5k again. We end up going 11-11 and the rating goes up slightly to 1787. We went up and down quite a bit with a low of 1740 and a high of 1797.

So what does this mean for Prot/Warror 2's?

#1) The warrior needs to stick with arm pen. I dont' have the math or theorycraft but I have a combined 30+ arena matches this week with Jeddak CLEARLY saying arm pen is better. He'll also be picking up a mace next week for an added 15% arm pen on top of that. He's talked to a couple top level warriors on our relm about it and they all agree...even after the nerf if you have the Attack Power already (say 4k) stick with Arm Pen.

#2) I'll be sticking with Protection in 2's. We're more or less maintaining in the high 1700's - low 1800's in 2's. This is much higher then the low 1600's I was doing last season as Holy Spec.

Now, let's break down how the nerfs have affected me:

Ardent Defender (reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.) - Well I'm sure this is affecting me, but at the end of the day it's not feeling like I'm dying to much quicker so I'm calling this a minimal nerf to my play style.

Touched by the Light: ( provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.) - Surprisingly very little noticeable difference here. This change dropped my spellpower by about 400 but between the mace and cloak upgrades I actually only lost 135 spellpower from last week, and with the huge crits provided by Sacred Shield I'm still spamming FOL quite successfully.

Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.

OK THIS IS THE HUGE, UGLY, KEYBOARD BANGING, VENT YELLING, MOUSE THROWING nerf. It's MUCH worse than even I feared. out of the 19 losses this week, I can attribute at least 9 to having my HoJ a few seconds off cooldown giving a healer that one big heal to get back up to 50-75%, effectively resetting the mach. OR not being able to stop a nice long 10-15 second chain CC because I couldn't stun back.

It's so frustrating seeing what would have been a win last week turn into a loss this week, specifically about this nerf. The problem is that with both stuns on the same 30 second CD timer you now have a full 21 seconds of nothing between stuns. This is up almost 100% from the 11 seconds between stuns we had before the patch.

I've even put a post up on the pvp forums requesting the HoJ stun to be reduced to 25 seconds from 30. You can see the article (and my logic) here. Yeah I don't expect much sympathy but this is such a big nerf it's just crazy.

BOTTOM LINE: Prot isn't going anywhere in 2's. The excellent mana regen and heals are still there, the CC is sort of there, and (so far) it seems to still be working.

AWW Crap patch 3.2.2 live today

2009-09-22T08:17:00.001-07:00

I can't stand up right now, because blizzard just shattered my knee caps with their NERF bat.

Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.
Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.
Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now grants 10% strength in addition to its current effects. Also, the strength and stamina bonuses from this blessing will no longer be lost when Blessing of Kings is removed.
Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.

I was hoping for at least one more week, but clearly I'm not going to get it. What does this mean to me, well clearly it's going to be harder to stay at a high ranking. Not only is this set of stuff a huge nerf, most other classes are getting buffed!?!?!

No one's surprised about these nerfs coming, even I know a little something should change. But the loss of roughly 400 spellpower is hard to swallow. However, one can make up some of that with gear. Loosing 10 seconds of cooldown on a stun however, that's just unpleasant.

I'm unclear on how much the Ardent Defender change is going affect me. At the end of the day we'll see how the rating goes. I should be hitting some games tonight so we'll see what happens.

Beating that Warlock/Healer comp

2009-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

As promised I'm going to write about how to beat a comp that was giving us problems these last couple weeks, warlock/healer.

Traditionally in 2's if there's a healer you go straight for them. I interrupt the heals and the warrior beats them into submission! When it's a warlock though, this strategy has been a big FAIL for us. Despite my partner's high DPS the constant fear's the lock puts out doesn't let my warrior partner put out enough sustained damage, giving their healer a much needed break to heal to full.

Our next though was for me to CC the warlock and the warrior continues with the healer. Unless the healer is very squishy, it's a fail again. I have about 9 seconds of CC followed by a 11 second break. Easily enough time for that fear to strike, especially with resilience keeping the healers up longer.

So we moved on to the Warrior beating on the warlock, and me CCing the Healer. WIN ! With me interrupting the first two heals the warlock is usually pretty low on health, forcing the healer to spend precious mana on large inefficient heals and/or blow a trinket to get out of one of the stuns. 11 seconds later I rinse and repeat.

If we're especially lucky the warlock panics a bit and LOSes his healer allowing a quick victory, if not my excellent mana use/regen allows us to win a protracted mana war, since the healer is feeling too pressured to start mana draining or CCing me too much.

Of course I've been seeing a lot of Druids as healers and the good ones will chain Cyclone me. This becomes a question of who can CC the best, me or the Druid. Many times with this comp we need to switch to pressuring different members depending on how low their mana is. If we can force those big, mana ineffienct heals or get the lock to blow most of his mana right away we come out on top....eventually

Arena S7 week 3 - Ding! 1800

2009-09-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

That's right folks, Jeddak and I hit 1807 in 2's last night. I immediately called a stop and let the points roll in on Tuesday. That means on Tuesday I'm going to have a nice shiny Relentless Gladiator's Gavel !!

What a huge update from my current Titansteel Guardian.
49 Int
16 Sta
21 MP5
41 Resilience
164 Spell Power
30.6 DPS
1 Sockets

I owe it all to a decent partner and the Prot/Holy spec 19/52/0. This spec is insane, with two available stuns on short cooldowns and excellent survivability. Considering that our win percentage last night was 75% (15-5) with gear upgrades I'm thinking 2k might even be possible for the first time ever!.... At least until the nerf comes thru.

I'll talk a little bit about some match strategies in a later post, but for now I'll mention the match that put us over the top.... It was a priest/rogue combo. We head out and I put Blessing of Sacrifice on my partner along with Sacred Shield. The rouge does his stun on me and we wait for the priest to show himself....Somethings different about that priest though

He's Shadow! ... Now I haven't seen a shadow Priest in arena since climbing out of the 1500 bracket and I'm not very familiar with their spells. But but I pop Hand of Freedom on Jed yell at Jed to wail on the guy. I use both of my stuns to lock him up and he's almost dead... to easy!

BUT WAIT... he turns into a purple ball and is basically immune to Jed's attacks. So Jed switches to the rogue. Suddenly the priest reverts back to his normal form and we start taking a lot of damage, my stuns aren't up yet - the rouge is back at 100% health and I'm thinking OH NO don't screw this one up!

Jed hops back on the priest and combined with HoF and my 2 back to back stuns we have the priest dead shortly. Wrap up the rogue and it's 1807 team rating!

Next time I'll talk about one of our problem comps (Warlock/Healer) and how to beat them.

Rumors of 2v2 death have been greatly exagerated

2009-09-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

So you may have read that 2v2 is dead. Blizz has mandated that only 3v3 and 5v5 teams will be eligible for a Gladiator title and weapons. They will also not balance around 2's.

This has effectively killed off the 2v2 bracket with everyone rolling 3's teams, right? WRONG! In fact almost nothing has changed.

What do you say Drunkenclod? Have you been hitting the alcohol particularly hard this morning?

No sir.. but as they say in WOW "Screenshot or it didn't happen"... Sure I got your screenshots right here baby! Check out my excellent article from May of this year (aka season 6)
http://blessingofmight.blogspot.com/2009/05/finally-3s-team-but-no-one-to-play.html

In it you'll see roughly 2,200 active 3's teams back in Season 6.... How many are active today? 2,125 !!

SAY WHAT?!? How can this be? Everyone says 2's has died.

Here's why 2's aren't going anywhere

#1) If you play in the under 1500 bracket (and 60%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you
#2) If you play in the under 1800 bracket (and 90%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you
#3) If you play in the under 2000 bracket (and 95%+ of you do) nothing has changed for you

Why is this? All but 2,200 rated gear is available in 2v2 play, points earned are the same and on the blizz forums (unofficially at this point) it seems that titles EXCEPT for gladiator will still be awarded.

So if you were playing arena in S6 at under 2k keep on PWNing and getting PWNed in S7 - Everyone else is!

Easy points Calculator

2009-09-14T09:23:00.001-07:00

Ever get tired of plugging numbers into the amory? I sure do. Here's a little cheat sheet on all brackets from 1500 - 2000. Since now fifteen hundred is the lowest points you'll get as long as you play ten games a week you'll get points as if you rated at fifteen hundred.

I've also done three color codings, green, red, and blue.... This is based on the full 5v5 points given. So you can see that in order to equal the (roughly) same amount of points in 3's team as a bottom rank 5v5 team you'll need 1550 or in 2's team you'll need 1600.

I find that to be beneficial for me for time managment. If I know I'm getting 344 points for 5's this week and there's no way I'll be able to get 1550 in 3's I can skip it since I'm already getting more points- make sense?

	2v2	3v3	5v5
1500	261	303	344
1525	282	327	372
1550	305	353	401
1575	328	380	432

1600	353	409	465
1625	379	439	499
1650	405	470	534
1675	433	501	570

1700	461	534	607
1725	490	576	644
1750	519	601	683
1775	548	635	722

1800	578	669	760
1825	607	703	799
1850	637	737	838
1875	666	771	876

1900	694	804	914
1925	722	836	950
1950	749	868	986
1975	776	898	1021
2000	801	928	1054

Drunkenclod - WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

2009-09-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Right here Baby!

Seriously though, I took a break from the blog because all the nefs to Ret have forced me to abandon RET. Yeah I can't belive it either. If you would have asked me this at level 70 I would have looked at you like an insane person.

At 80 though it's a whole new game. At 80 Blizz has provided NO pvp weapon upgrade path in Season 6 for people under 1800 rating. In Season 7 I (recently) get a very slight bump with 5 man TOC drops but it's not enough.....

Ret has always been extremely gear dependant, and your Weapon has been the single biggest improvment you can get. With me rocking a Titansteel Destroyer all of S6 no half serious team wants me as RET, so I switched to holy. This was a bit more forgiving with titansteel weapons as long as the armor was good.

This Season I've got prot/holy (19/52/0) and so far it's been AWSOME. Incredible survivability, excellent CC and most importantly my partner and I are steadily increasing in ratings.

SO.... I can no longer speak to RET as well, but I'm going to chronicle this season week by week, we'll see if I stay protection after the 3.2.2 nerf.. but for now 19/52/0 is where it's at.

Season 7 starts today - Items/ratings below

2009-09-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

Arena Season 7 has now officially begun, and players can immediately begin competing for the new Relentless Gladiator PvP item sets. We have reset all Arena team ratings, Arena points, and personal ratings though players retain their honor points and matchmaking rating going into the season.
Also, to coincide with the launch of Arena Season 7, players who were on the top teams from each battlegroup at the end of season 6 should be receiving their end-of-season rewards today. These include Arena-specific titles until the end of the new season, and for players that have earned the rank of gladiator, a Furious Gladiator’s Frostwyrm.

Here is a list of some PvP items that will be available in Arena Season 7 and their expected rating requirements:

No Rating Required:
Deadly Bracer
Deadly Belt
Deadly Boots
Deadly Neck
Deadly Ring
Deadly Cape
Deadly Trinket
Furious Bracer
Furious Belt
Furious Boots
Furious Neck
Furious Ring
Furious Cape
Furious Trinket

Rating Required:
700+: Furious Relics
800+: Furious Gloves
900+: Furious Legs
1000+: Furious Chest
1100+: Furious Helm - 12,000h /700 arena
1200+: Relentless Bracer (honor) - 39,400
1250+: Relentless Belt (honor) - 62,000
1300+: Relentless Boots (honor) - 62,000
1350+: Furious Shoulders -9,600h /550 arena
1400+: Relentless Gloves - 1,300 arena
1450+: Relentless Neck (honor) -47,400
1500+: Relentless Ring (honor) - 47,400
1550+: Relentless Legs - 2,150 arena
1600+: Relentless Chest - 2,150 arena
1650+: Relentless Trinket (honor) - 62,000
1700+: Relentless Wands/Relics/etc
1750+: Relentless Cape (honor) - 47,400
1800+: Relentless Weapon - lvl245 35,000h / 1,200 Arena
1900+: Relentless Helm
2000+: Relentless Shoulders
2200+: Relentless Weapon - lvl258
2300+: Relentless Tabard

Wow Armory on iphone

2009-07-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've just installed it and it's absolutely, positivly, insanely FANTASIC. It's what I've been looking for from a warcraft iphone app since i got it and it's FREE.

Here's a video

Ret PvP for 3.2

2009-06-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

So I wanted to take a minute and address some of the PvP changes listed in patch 3.2 Some are pally specific others are general, but surprisingly no one seems to be writing about it. And frankly at least one of the points is huge....

Well I'm not going to dance around the elephant in the room.

The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.

HOLY CHIT SENIOR ~ If you've seen my previous posts you know the current participation for 3's and 5's is at an all time low. So much that 5's is basically a dead bracket on my server and for the majority of players 3's is not much better in terms of it being where you get your rating from.

So come patch 3.2 if you want any Furious gear for the season your 2's rating will not be enough. 3's or 5's will be mandatory. I'm talking everything from the lowly furious bracers at 1400 to that sexy 2h weapon at 1750. If you're like a huge percentage of teams out there without a 3's or 5's you'd better get any gear you qualify for NOW. You've been warned... Sure at the end of the day it should increase participation in these dead brackets which ultimately will be good. But scheduling will be more of an issue, more fights will break out amongst teams and overall I think there will be less gear progression in PvP, that is not a good thing.

Moving on:

Dalaran Sewers

The entire Arena has increased in size by 25%.
Mounts can now be used in this Arena.
The position and collision of the crates on the central platform has been modified.

Ruins of Lordaeron

Alcoves have been removed from the starting chambers.
Two line-of-sight tombstones have been added to the slime pool on the southern side of the map.
The collision around the central tomb has been smoothed out to prevent players from becoming stuck on the terrain as often.

Well, hard to speak too much on the sewers, until I see it in action. as far as the Ruins go, this clearly is a bonus for people that know how to pillar hump, and a nerf to casters. LOS will be that much more important here.

Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant.

Ah, now a lot of Pallys are glossing over the return of Exorcism Not here. There have been PLENTY of matches where a healer is down to almost nothing and i have ZERO spells left. Nothing but auto attack. I'm not saying this will be huge again, but it's 100% better then what we had with the nerf which was unusable in PvP period.

There we go, there's a lot of other stuff, seal changes, wintergrasp changes, battleground changes. They're all being covered nicely at just about every other site. So I'll leave it to them for now. Plus you can be assured about half of it will be tweaked before the patch.

Upcoming Paladin changes for 3.2

2009-06-18T11:23:00.001-07:00

Hey guys, looks like it's been a month since my last post (how time flies).

Seriously, it's not that I'm not updating the blog, it's that there hasn't been much to report. Arena is going slow, no crazy new content...just the occasional pally nerf...and who want to hear me go off about that!

There's a bunch of changes announced today, but I'm going to focus on the Pally changes... the general PvP changes will come later (hey I need something to write a new article about)

Below is the list... it's rather large but overall excellent changes for once. Believe me not everything is a "buff" per se. A lot of things are just swapping A for B if you know what I mean. But some clear buffs including:

BEACON OF LIGHT REWORKED
EXORCISM USABLE AGAIN
SACRED SHIELD BUFFED

I won't go into all the theorycrafting I know a lot of other pally blogs have done the work already.

Paladins

Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
Charger: Can now be learned at level 40.
Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.
Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.
Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker's maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.
Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.
Seal of Blood: This ability has been removed.
Seal of the Martyr: This ability has been removed.
Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage.
Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.
Warhorse: Can now be learned at level 20.
Talents

Holy

Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.

Protection

Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Currently, any damage taken by the paladin while at 35% health or below is reduced. Instead, any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead set the paladin's health to 10/20/30% of maximum.

Retribution

Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant.
Crusader Strike: Damage reduced to 75% weapon damage to match the new 4 second cooldown.
Seal of Command: Redesigned. This seal now deals 36% weapon damage on every swing, and deals substantially less judgement damage.
Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

The end of Ret Blogging? or the end of Ret?

2009-05-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Drunkenclod, have you been drinking again?....

Sure, but not right now, at this moment I'm quite sober and have noticed a sobering trend going on. THE DEATH OF RET.

No, I don't mean Blizz is eliminating the Ret class, nor do I think everyone's going to stop playing as a Ret pally and switch to a DK (or other class) alt. But I've been having this feeling of...well... apathy towards my Ret Pally ever since this latest patch went live; actually it's even more twards WOW in general, but since Ret is my default spec I think it's causing my happy feelings of Ret to vanish. The sense of "Fun" is going away. Turns out it's not just me. Other Rets are feeling the same way (I bet other classes are as well, but I'm sticking to RET for now).

Let's see what's changed in patch 3.1 for me. Perhaps the best thing to do is to compare what I WAS doing in 3.0 and what I AM doing in 3.1

GOLD FARMING / DAILIES - Before 3.1 I was grinding out dailies on a regular basis, and enjoying it. My stash of gold had dwindled to a couple thousand and I needed to get it back up. I also needed Holar Rep for a shoulder enchant, AND farming plenty of ore for AH sales. After 3.1 it seems less important. I'm back in the 6-7k gold range, with nothing realy to buy. Added rep isn't going to get me anything besides an achievement point, and I swear there's only so many times I can joust an opponent in the Argent daily before I just get tired of mashing the same 3 buttons, in the same pattern, against the same opponent, in the same circle... well you get my drift.... Gold Dailies have lost their "luster".

PvE - Before 3.1 I was going raid and heroic content like mad (for me anyway) traditionally I wan't a fan of raiding, but in patch 3.0 the best gear came from 25 man, and excellent gear from 10 man, even a few 5's if I saved the badges. I ran everything from 5 man heroics to 25 man OS and even pugged Naxx a couple times. I looked forward to a nice 25 man OS group each week and VOA. (VOA will be addressed later as part of Wintergrasp)... After 3.1 it didn't make much sense to bother with 5 or (outside of Uldar) 10 mans at all. I mean the gear is so poor compared to Uldar or high level Arena that unless you've just hit 80 your gear is better already. Even old 25 man content gear is "average" for the veteran player but nothing to look forward to.

That leaves me to try and pug Uldar, which I havn't evn tried considering how hard folks say it is, and my PvP guild sure doesn't run it.... Leaving me no real gear upgrade outside of VOA and Arena... so let's look at those.

Wintergrasp/VOA - Before 3.1, ah wintergrasp was excellent. Sometimes laggy but overall playable. Sweet daily honor and enough turnaround to make it interesting. Also it was pretty easy to pick up a pug for 10 and 25 man after victory... And that pug would down the boss 80-90% of the time after the 1st month or so.... After 3.1 Wintergrasp gameplay was similar enough, but VOA bit the big one. Harder to get PUGs together. And when you did a large argument ensued on whether to do both bosses - just 1 - which one to do 1st and of course the people that left in disgust when the 2nd boss didn't go down, leaving you to wait and find replacements. I've HEARD this is somewhat better so after a couple weeks of leaving VOA alone I'm going to give it another shot. Wintergrasp remains one of the last interesting things going on. I hope the former glory days will come again. Not sure if the fact the honor goes back to weekly from daily will cause another round of fail though.....

Arena - Before patch 3.1 the season itself was very frustrating to play, BUT it was easy enough to get more then enough arena points. In fact I could outfit both specs in a couple months and still have left over points. The only problem was that the gear was sub-par. After 3.1 New season, new gear, and it's GOOD gear. But it takes a long time to get the gear. More honor is needed for each piece and (for most people including me) I'm getting around the same number of arena points....... Add to that the problem of any PvPer not having an upgrade path for a weapon... and the fact that you get the same # of points for a team rating of 150 as you do for 1,500 it just doesn't give you as much incentive to do a ton of arena. For the average player 10 games a week is as good as 50, especially in 3's and 5's.

BG's - Before patch 3.1 well overall OK with SOTA replacing AV as the main place to go for honor, a lot of grinding but the gear upgrades were huge. After patch 3.1 BG's the same but better queuing and improved AV again... another uber long grind for gear but this time it's more of an incremental gear upgrade rather then seeing a huge stat boost from crafted blue gear.

Playstyle - Here's the deal, a Ret Pally is all about DPS. In PvE DPS it's fairly similar before an after the patch. Gear and talents provide some improvement but other classes have similar improvements so compared to others our DPS numbers on the raid charts haven't moved much. In PvP we received nerf after nerf.. no exorcism, less burst, bubble dispellable by warriors and priests, and of course (for many) Armor upgrades with no Weapon Upgrade. This means life is harder for RET in PvP... In fact blizz thinks the playstle is so "broken" their giving it a new overhaul once again... we'll see what this does for Ret but I'm not holding my breath; I expect either it's great but they wind up nerfing it so severely it sucks again... or their attempts to make it more "interesting" will realy just make it "harder"

So is it just me? Am I jaded? I don't think so.... look at the blogs I link to. There's 7 Ret Pally Blogs and they used to be updated multiple times per week, some every day. None of them except for Eye for an Eye have been updated recently... and what does E4E post? That he's not doing as much in WOW and is going to stop blogging regularly.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Finally a 3's team - but no one to play against.

2009-05-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So I got what appears to be a solid 3's team going last night. I've played with both people before and we all get along well. The leader of the group is an excellent player; however this is an alt character for him.

I'm thrilled to join what could be a regular 3's team.... The only problem? I think we're going plateau in the 1600s; this is much lower then our team would have peaked in other seasons. What's the problem? No One is Playing 3's.

What do you mean Drunk? Well let's take a look at the armory. We ended the night with a 705 rating. That put our team on page 3 of 11... and 950th place.

Wow 3rd page out of 11, and in the top 1,000 already? Seems kind of high doesn't it. Well it turns out that by the time you get to page 7 all the teams are inactive.

So how many active teams are there in my battlegroup? Well if you count active as more then zero games then roughly 2,200. If you count active teams as more then 10 games we're closer to 1500.

Now I know it's early in the season, but plenty of folks have reached or surpassed the 1500 mark in 2v2.

Teams over 1500 in my battlegroup 2v2 = 1275
Teams over 1500 in my battlegroup 3v3 = 339
Teams over 1500 on my server 3v3 = 13

Now here's where I could start talking about how I'm PRO, my teams LEET and we'll PWN everyone for Gladiator in 3's.... Instead I'll be more realistic and say that if we get past 1500 this week we'll be one of the top 10 threes teams on my server

That my friends is a sad story for arena, and shows that Blizzard needs to encourage more participation in arenas. Do you need more proof? Would you like me to answer what place I would be in with a just over 1500 team in 5v5?

Currently a 1513 rating in 5's will give me:

1st place on my server
22nd in my battlegroup.

Linky linky

40k honor weekend

2009-05-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Actually 42,956....but who's counting :).... Lets face it, with Season 6 there's hours upon hours of grinding honor ahead of us. The Deadly offset runs over 256,000 honor. Heaven help you if you need to gear 2 specs!

So Friday night I log in and no arena partner hounding me to play 2's.. So I get on the honor grind and boy am I in for a pleasant surprise.

First let's get to what's NOT a surprise.... Wingergrasp. If for some strange, freaky, insane, reason you're not running this once per day you're throwing away a solid 5k honor for about 20 minutes of play. If you do no other grinding of honor you should get in a raid, and do the 3 daily quests associated with this battle. BOOM 5k minimum honor,

NOW, let's get to my very pleasant surprise!.............. Alterec Valley! (shh not so loud) After abandoning this BG for months, literally trying it out only a handful of times in WOTLK with absolutely horrid results, I had given this BG up for dead.

I mean truly terrible results, I'm talking 5 alliance to 40 horde at the start. People joking about ever winning again and the horde getting crazy achievements while farming AV for 1200 honor in about 10 minutes, while the poor alliance get killed a dozen times and end with about 50 honor. It was so bad I opened up a ticket with Blizzard asking them to fix the huge start disparity (They assured me there was no problem)

Well this weekend was AV weekend and I thought I'd give it another try. Blizz clearly fixed something in patch 3.1

Que time = Instantaneous, or 1 minute at most, usually within 5 seconds.
Average BG time = 10-12 minutes. Both teams just zerged all day. That's 5-6 battles per hour
Average honor for loss = 1,000
Average honor for win = 1,500
Average win % = 70

This was like a dream come true, sure a few battles were 20-30 minutes but VERY few. and more wins then losses. Here I am raking 6-8k per hour on average. WOW. My only regret is that I couldn't spend more time doing AV. My time these days is limited and I took some of it to arena. I'd say I did about 5 hours of AV total over the 2 days.

So did I get anything nice for myself with all that honor? Sure did. Now that deadly trinkets don't have a rating requirement I scooped up the Battlemaster's Conviction to replace my faithful Battlemaster's Determination. BAM +190 AP (actually +110 over my old one) plus an instant 3,385 heal YES PLEASE

Here's a couple screenshots of my weekend.... as always CLICK for a large view.

#1) I logged inside wintergrasp, horde controlled. Here's me killing the two horde inside and planting my awesome flag of ownership in one of their rotting bodies.

#2) Here's one of the better WG's I out healed everyone by a crazy amount. Just under 2k honor for that win, although it was one of the longer lasting games.

Arena gear - Cost and Time breakdown

2009-05-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

I've been a bit busy at work (you know the thing that keeps a roof over my head until my blog is bought out by Blizz for millions :) But now that the 2nd week of Season 6 and many players are starting to eye their first piece of arena gear.

I've put together a chart showing all of the gear cost, complete with honor points, rating and arena points. Click the chart to see it in full size

Depending on a variety of things last season your gear is probably a mish-mash of Saronite - Deadly gear so I'm not going to go into detail on what to upgrade first, that's going to depend on how good/bad your current gear is and how high you expect your arena rating to hit this season.

I will say this - with deadly offset gear requiring no rating, and Deadly core sets rating ranging from between 1250 - 1500, I wouldn't waste time on hateful gear if at all possible. Go straight to deadly and furious offsets.

Don't know how you're going to do this season? Look at your rating last season and assume you'll be right around the same. That should help you figure out if you're going for the Furious Bracers at 1400 PR, or sticking with Deadly.

What about cost? This is where it gets ugly in my mind, especially if you're gearing for two talent trees (Holy and Ret in my case) With Blizzards new rule that any team rated under 1500 will earn points as if they were at 1500 here's the minim you will earn each week, even if your rating is at 1, or 100, or 1,000

2v2 = 261
3v3 = 303
5v5 = 344

Worst case scenario (and most likely for many people) is that you only have a 2v2 team and it's under 1500. That means you'll be waiting between 2-3 weeks to get enough arena points for the core deadly gear, or about 3 months for the full core set. 6 months to deck out both specs.

Furious is even crazier. Even if you get to the 1700's for some of the main pieces it's about 4 weeks per piece (assuming a 1750 2's rating gives you 519 points, and a core item runs over 2k AP)

So, the lesson here? Don't burn yourself out, you'll be playing the whole season to gear out. No mad rushes for gear like S5. Blizz has slowed the progression of acquiring top level gear both in PvE and PvP. Not a bad thing in my opinion but a change of pace from what we've seen in WOTLK.

Arena report Day 1 - Season 6

2009-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Ok folks, while I (and many others) stand my my big FU to Blizz from yesterday; it's time for a more coherent post. Unfortunately the armory hasn't updated yet so I don't have the match by match stats but after an evening of arena I have stuff to report. Some of it great other stuff not so much.

First of all, I'm pleased to report I did get a CHALLENGER title along with the achievement. It was probably the most frustrating season I've played in and I've played since S2 So congrats to me!

THE OVERVIEW

So log in late last night and immediately whisper my long time arena partner Kyllia. Turns out he's got some RL issues going on and says he's not going to be very available for games for a few weeks. That's not good since all teams now start at a ZERO rating. It take quite a few games to get up there. Fortunately now that I"m in a PvP guild I've met other folks exited to play and got a Death Knight to join me. I wound up playing 28 games last night. 18 of them with the DK, 10 with my Rogue partner.

Ending win/loss = 17 win 11 loss
Ending Rating = 799

THE GOOD

You're starting at a ZERO rating, it's actually awesome. Because the rating is so low, every loss you take is a zero point loss. Every win is a 47 point win.... Let me say that again because it's so important to what's going to make the season feel good to folks. Until you get well past 1k rating there is no penalty for losing you loose nothing. And every win is 47 points. Frankly it made last night probably the funnest to play in a long time. No need for your teammate to get pissed because some bonehead move got you killed. There's just no real pressure for the first 50 games or so. That's a nice change.

I'm not sure how high you need to go before you start loosing points. In two matches my opponents each lost 1 point while we still gained 47. My guild leader ended the night at a 1304 rating and said that he still hadn't seen any point deduction for a loss.

My 800 point rise in rating last night leads me to believe that the overall rating you get in S6 should be at least as high as you got in S5. That means gear will be easier to obtain. All Deadly gear has a maxium PR of 1500 and furious gear starts at 1400 for the off set. Combined with the fact that if you have less then a 1500 rating you will get points as if you had a 1500 rating... it's great news for caual PvPer's as well as moderates. I hope arena participation will improve.

THE BAD

Not all good news. Holy and Ret PvP builds are gimped compared to S5. The DK I was with Out DPS'ed me when I played RET. With exorcism gone I need to re-glyph myself. I swapped to Holy wich worked out much better (9 wins in a row, almost HOT STREAK). But I can tell it's still gimped. I'm running out of mana faster, I have no stun break, it's not great but it does still seem to work.

In other bad news, (for certain classes) I expect the same old combo's to be OP despite any nerfs, so plan on seeing more DK/Holy Pally teams, expect warriors and warlocks to suck, etc, etc.

At this point I'm unclear on what a zero start rating means for switching teams. Will you go back to zero PR every switch? Man that's going to be problematic I think.

Lastly, this isn't new but there is no Deadly gladiator PvP weapon just two tiers of Furious weapons.. minum rating for that is 1850.... Leaving most people to try to PvE for a better weapon.

GOOD LUCK IN SEASON 6 FOLKS!

Exorcism can no longer be used on players

2009-04-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm tired, maybe it's just been a rough week. Whatever the reason I only have one response to Blizz once again nerfing ret at the last second, and specifically for PvP where Ret is not dominant.

(please excuse my french)

FUCK YOU Blizzard, Fuck you.

That is all... for now.
===========
Exorcism can no longer be used on players

We made a change in the 3.1.1 patch to prevent Exorcism from being used on players. We didn’t announce this change ahead of time because we were trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion. We still plan on getting the tooltip updated ASAP. Exorcism’s use in PvE has not changed at this time.

Going with a “not on players” solution is not ideal and we will be re-designing how the ability works in a future patch (the plan is sooner rather than later). We don’t like for PvE and PvP mechanics to work differently when we can avoid it. We also don’t like for a major damaging ability to be excluded from the PvP game. However, we thought this had become a balance issue serious enough to address at this time.

We shifted around paladin damage for 3.1 trying to increase sustained damage while reducing burst damage. Unfortunately, the Exorcism change did the opposite. Instead of stealing a GCD from a paladin, it actually gave them an extra one. A Retribution paladin could use Exorcism to cause damage while closing to melee and then be ready to go with their melee damage attacks. (Exorcism of course is not limited to Ret paladins either.) We changed the way paladins do damage for Lich King, so while it is unfortunate (and we accept full blame), it also isn’t too surprising that it is taking some effort to get their damage in the right place.

In the same patch where we remove the “not on players” limitation for Exorcism, we are going to change the way paladins do damage so that their normal combat moves have more depth to them instead of just using abilities every time they finish their cooldown. This should make causing damage as a paladin more interesting and also less bursty. While we have some ideas on how to accomplish that, if you have suggestions or your own ideas about how this could work, this would be a good time to share them. (As examples of abilities you don’t just use whenever their cooldown has finished, you might look at Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower or Arcane Blast.) We do request that you don’t fill the forums with posts of limited content or insight about how you don’t like to be nerfed. Nobody does.

It is always a judgment call about when a fix (a buff or a nerf) can’t wait. Some things we can’t change easily in hotfixes or small patches, and some things we consider too risky for technical reasons or for their potential effects on the game.

Get your patch 3.1 Ret PvP spec here (maybe)

2009-04-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I was checking out the new wowhead talent calculator and trying to figure out a way to shave enough points out of the Ret Tree to keep a 30 second stun. Well I may have found it.

0/19/52

So let's look at what's missing from my tree.

SOC - Yep, Seal of Command is gone, the word from PTR folks is that because judgments count for a lot less damage, the blowback from Seal of Blood/Martyr is reduced greatly making this better for all around Damage. If there's an instance where you absolutly can't be taking damage, then you can always dust off that old Seal of Command or even go to a holy seal.

2H Weapon Specalization - Well, this was gone a long time ago for me. So not putting it back doesn't hurt.

Improved Blessing of Might - There it is... the two point loss that (if anyone coments) people will be looking at hard. I hate running numbers and I don't even have time for it right now, but my thought is wtih BOK trainable, a ret pally will be OK using BOK instead of BOM on himself. Sure there is less AP, but you get more health, more mana, bigger crit to make up for it. And you suddenly buy youself 2 spare points to get the 30 second CD for Improved Hammer of Justice and keep Divine Guardian which will just be huge.

The excellent blog RET PALLY SMASH has put up a different build 0/20/51 You get basically the same Prot tallents, but the ret tree gives up RV and Fanaticism instead of BOM and 2H weapon damage.

Here's the thing, Ret Pallies are getting their burst reduced already, RV and Fanticism work great together to help keep the burst up. 18% extra chance to crit AND when the crit happens 30% will be a DOT. Is that better then 6% white damage... Yes I think it is. Is it worth not having improved BOM? Only a little real world testing or heavy theorycrafting will tell.

Religulous

2009-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

Yep RELIGULOUS (like the Bill Maher movie)..... if you don't know the movies it's a comedy about the various religions of the world.

Well, the reason I mention it is that I went ahead and swapped to Holy, and it feels a little comedic; especially dueling and anything that needs DPS like daily quests :)....With the assumption that patch 3.1 is coming on the 14th or 21st I'm going to try to stay holy until the patch. My build is 51/5/15 which is PvE and feels just wrong.. no stun removal, no movement increase, no repentance; but excellent healing when not interrupted. Here's what I've healed so far:

10 man VOA - With only 9 people the raid leader wanted me on raid heal, and put a druid on MT/OT heal. We wiped due to people not staying out of the cloud. 2nd time I asked to switch to tank heals and we did just fine.... I have to say though I was feeling a little low on mana by the end of it.

25 man VOA - Raid heal again, but no idiots standing in the cloud it was a cake walk, although again not a ton of mana left at the end of the fight

Heroic VH - Now this was my first real test as far as I was concerned. Being the only healer means everyone's looking at me to keep them alive. It's probably the easiest heroic as a DPS so I figured it was a good place to start.

Well, let me tell you the first boss we get is Zuramat, which is maybe the hardest boss in there and I just about caused a wipe. I'm casting crazy heals and running out of mana, so I go to case Lay on Hands on myself - unfortunately I had a teammate focused, so the LOH landed on them. I ran out of mana and died, everyone else started dropping as well. Fortunately our groups RET pally had the presence of mind to cast LOH on our tank and the tank lasted just long enough to kill him (down to maybe 10% health with everyone else dead). Still we avoided the wipe which is what counts, but no thanks to me.

The rest of the fight is fine, but I constantly found myself having to manage mana. I'm not sure how the other pally healers do in 5's but with very little down time in VH, I found myself constantly trying to keep above 50% of mana

My observations so far:

1) I know I've read posts that say Holy Pally mana pools are just about infinite, and I can see that in in short bursty arena's or large raids where you're getting mana back from other effects. But if you're the ONLY healer, I just don't see healing heroics without the occasional stop to drink.

2) Beacon of light - Well this certainly helps with healing, but 1 minute? Wow that's annoying to reapply all the time AND I have to go select the guy to re-apply, perhaps I should just write a macro - the annoying thing is that I need to put in the persons name every time I'm healing a new group.

3) I need to get a little better poping abilities like HOP, which means I need to be a little more friendly with my F1-F5 keys me thinks.

Feeling a little "meh" before patch 3.1

2009-04-07T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've had this growing feeling of boredom while waiting for patch 3.1 Let's look at the stuff I do in a given week and why it's getting boring.

- PvP
Ah my true love, like a prison inmate waiting for a conjugal visit I yearn for more arena. The problem is that my teams have stopped playing.. Why? Well my 2v2 SHOULD be OK for a challenger title, and with my current 2's partner pulling 12 hour days at work we don't want to jeopardize it with sloppy play so we're just waiting for the season to end...

Also with arena points being reset at the end of S5 there just isn't anything to play for, so my arena partners are focusing on other things untill S6.

There's always BG's and Wintergrasp.... But I've been honor capped for a couple weeks, and nothing new in WG to buy, I'm basically saving WG marks for the next season and playing more WSG and AB just for the marks - which feels like not the best use of time to sit in a half hour AB for 1 loosing mark and no honor.

-Raiding
Yeah, I've been doing a lot more of that. At some point every week I get in 10/25 man VoA and 10/25 man OS. In fact over the weekend I managed to pick up Gauntlets of the Lost Conqueror which I turned in for Valorious Redemption Gloves for my Holy Set....That's all fine and dandy but running all 4 of these takes up maybe 4 hours in a week, with one of them spent sitting around waiting for the group to form. Then it's a 1 week lockout and I"m forced to move onto...

5-man heroics = (Sigh) it's fine, and pugs are a dime a dozen, but I'm way overgeard for anything to drop for me, pretty much relegating me to buying frozen orbs with the emblems that drop. It's also starting to feel pretty grindy, I mean how many times can a guy run heroic VH and come away exited? That just leaves....

Naxx = That would be fine, it's pretty new content for me and has gear upgrades, but unlike just about every other raid instance this one is relatively hard to find pugs for on my server (relative compared to finding pugs for all the other content) AND most importantly requires a solid 2-4 hour commitment which I don't have a lot of.

Dailies - Nothings more grinding then doing the same quests over and over for more gold... I try to slog thru 3 Holdar dailies minimum per day, plus the WG dailies. Sometimes more. At one point I needed the cash, now I"m sitting at over 5k gold so there's no real pressure. I'm sure with new gear enchants and a 1k Dual Spec fee I'll feel poor soon enough for now though I'm just going thru the motions.

So what's left for me to do? - I'm open to ideas. Frankly I think I may respec to Holy for the last week, not only should it give me a little variety but I'll help me get "into shape" for when I'm asked to heal.... Funny enough this weeks 10 man OS only had 9 people and 1 healer. So for boss fights I swapped to my holy set and off healed along with a shadow priest. It went slow, but no wipes :)

It's not a carry.. we're a TEAM

2009-04-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

Ok guys, as you know I joined a PvP Guild a while back. One of the guys in my guild Jeddak is a fury warrior that loves to PvP AND talk smack. I want to start off by saying that he's a nice guy, on my 3's team, I enjoy doing arena and BG's with him and.. I OWN HIM IN DUELS I mean, I really, really, really kick his butt. We've dueled maybe 20 times and my record is 19-1, with my one loss occurring when I decided to duel in my healing gear (keeping the ret spec) and answering a phone call at the same time.

Now normally I would never go humiliating someone online, but good old Jeddak has a habit of Dueling me when we're the only two people of our guild on. THEN the next day when others are on I suddenly see the guild chat flooded with "lol Drunk I OWNED you last night in Duels".... Despite my protests to the contrary with what really happened there's no admission of loss, just more smack talk that he won against me multiplee times with me taking no wins.

To add insult to injury he convinced one of our PRO healers to carry him in 2v2. Their team rating is 1976. So now as we're going back and forth he's reminding folks to look at his arena rating. When I tell him he's lucky to get such a great carry he always replies "No... We're a Team" Hey.. if he ACTUALLY won and wasn't getting an arena carry he could smack talk all he wants, all day, all night. But since he's loosing every match it's just a fun lie at best. I'm not offended or angry I'm sure he's joking... But because it happens with our Guild leaders on and we're a PvP guild... I want to set the record straight.

Last night just after 11pm server time Jeddak invites me for more duels... Knowing he's going to bring it up when I log in tonight with more "lol I owned you like i own my dog" I went ahead and screenshotted our 5 matches... If you click on the pick for full screen, you can clearly see the time stamps and some in game comments.

Match#1 - (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #2 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #3 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #4 (Winner Drunkenclod)

Match #5 (Winner Drunkenclod)

And finally - His "It's not a carry... we're a Team" 2v2 team in detail
(notice he's played 21 of 575 games)

Sorry Jed, you brought this on yourself my friend. Consider it the ultimate smack talk, but with proof.
It's a carry - You're NOT a Team :)

What makes a PRO? - T H I S

2009-03-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

I know, there's no paladin here, but this guy definitely deserves his own spot. In the 3v3 finals a mage is down to 10% health, and little mana... and it's a 2v1 situation; he wins

The video shows the critical part of the match and breaks down how it happens. Sign me up to this guys team!

Did Blizz make a game modification in response to ME?

2009-03-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

We'll never know for sure but here's one of today's blue posts:
Raids & Dungeons
Vault of Archavon

Archavon, Emalon, and their allies will now banish themselves 10 minutes prior to the beginning of a Lake Wintergrasp battle. A warning will be given 15 minutes prior to the start of Wintergrasp. They will not banish themselves if in combat.

So why do I think there's even a remote possibility that I influenced this blue post in the least?... Grab a beer, sit back and listen to my Tuesday evening.

So I log in Tuesday night looking for either a 25 man OS or VOA.... I see a VOA group is up and get the invite. Wintergrasp is starting in about twenty minutes, fortunately this is a quick raid so we should be fine. Here's how the raid went down.

1) Take the usual few minutes for everyone to get there, while we wait the trash is cleared. I show up about half way thru the trash run.

2) Shortly after the 15 minute WG warning we start on Archavon, but my cries of "buffs please" go unheeded and all I've got on is my blessing of might.... It seems that no one took the time to buff the late comers so half our raid was unbuffed.

3) We wipe on Archavon with 70k life left... GRR

4) We all res, and reset with everyone getting buffed now.... And restart Archavon with 4 min 30 seconds left.

5) At about 100k health left we get a warning that "This raid is scheduled to reset in 30 seconds"... We DPS the guy down but I die... I get a rez and quickly loot my two emblems of Valor... and then Archavon DISAPEARS!

Yep, no one got any loot and some people haven't take their emblems of Valor yet. I can painfuly verify that even if you drop the boss before the raid resets he will de-spawn and you will get no loot.... Now there was a nice chestpiece I would have liked to get, and only 2 other paladins in the raid (not sure their spec).

Knowing it's a long shot I opened up a ticket to Blizz explaining what just happened. I expected the typical "Sorry we can't do anything" line, but instead I got this:

=============

Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department.
Your petition has been forwarded to our character specialists for further
investigation and troubleshooting. Please keep in mind that, due to the
nature and complexity of these types of petitions, it may take several
days for us to contact you with the conclusion of our investigation.
Please do not delete, edit, or re-submit your original ticket,
as it contains essential information needed by our character specialists.
We appreciate your patience and understanding during this time.

================


Then I got this:

=================
Thank you for contacting the World of Warcraft Game Master Department
and bringing this matter to our attention with additional information
to assist in our investigation. We will contact the master looter to
decide how the items will be distributed to resolve the loot issue you
have experienced.
=================

So far nothing else in terms of a resolution, but it is interesting that two days after I put a ticket into Blizz about this and they agree to look into it a new blue post is issued that would prevent this from happening again!

Well there you go, my very very very tedious claim to fame :).... and stupidity, because as someone already pointed out, the smart thing to do would have been to leave the group when I saw less then 5 minutes left before the reset... Of course that would have royally pissed off 24 other people that I might meet again in group, but that's a discussion for another time.

65% fewer arena teams in S5 vs S4

2009-03-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

Gameriot.com has a fascinating article that basically shows 65% fewer teams on average this season, with some battlegroups up to 75% fewer teams depending on bracket. It's all layed out very nicely HERE

Frankly I knew it was lower, but I didn't realize that much lower. In my opinion this is clearly due to the inferior gear PvP gives out this season compared to PvE gear for all but the very best PvP players.

Why grind hours of BG's and do countless arena games if you can't make it into the 1600's at least? And even then, in terms of time spent you're probably better off just running 25 man content gear anyway.

While I still actively do PvP, I have to say that I've run more 5,10, and 25 man content during this arena season then my whole WOW life combined.... Hell I'm doing PvP with a PvE spec for the higher burst damage!?!?!

It's nice to see the new content but it leaves less opportunity for PvP and with my current rating I'm gear capped in PvP, so running 25 man content is my only upgrade path at the moment.

Season 6 looks to change that for a while, but I have a funny feeling I'll be running Uldar a lot more then I think.

Season 5 Talent Calculator is up - ArenaJunkies

2009-03-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

Hey Guys,

In case you don't go there every day, ArenaJunkies.com has their Season 5 talent Calculator up here. The talent calculator isn't 100% accurate so if you're borderline you should try and get a little higher if possible. But it's BY FAR THE BEST tool out there for determining if you're going to qualify for a title.

Let's see what that means for me and my battlegroup:

Bracket	~Glad Cutoff	~Duel Cutoff	~Rival Cutoff	~Chall Cutoff	~Active Teams	Lowest Team
2v2	42	252	841	2945	8417	8417 (49)
3v3	14	86	288	1007	2880	2880 (1053)
5v5	2	14	48	170	486	486 (1054)

So let's head over to the armor and see what this means for me.

2v2 -1598 - 2,785th place = CHALLENGER
3v3 - 1531 - 1655th place = Fail
5v5 - 1500 - 479th place = Inactive Team

Let's look at the minimum ratings to get Challenger this Season on my battlegroup (assuming the calc was 100% accurate and the season ended today.

CHALLENGER
2v2 - 1577
3v3 - 1629
5v5 - 1628

RIVAL
2v2 - 1850
3v3 - 1831
5v5 - 1785

DUELIST
2v2 - 2100
3v3 - 2014
5v5 - 1981

GLADIATOR
2v2 - 2390
3v3 - 2229
5v5 - 2198

So as long as I don't screw up royally I should be able to rock another challenger title in Season 6. I have to say I'd feel a lot better above 1600. I expect we'll be playing regularly so we'll see how it all ends up.

Is 0/20/51 the wrong PvP build?

2009-03-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

Think of all the great inventions that were created by accident.... Plastic, Nike Running Shoes, Post-it notes, corn flakes just to name a few.

Well I've been using a different build then the standard 0/20/51 (or 0/18/53)build for PvP. And I got there by accident. I knew I'd be doing some raids/instances and specc'ed 0/10/61 and it's been going very well.

Let's take a look at this.... you drop 20 (or 18) points in to Prot for the 30 second cooldown on HOJ. In previous season this was just a mandatory talent. You needed as much CC as possible and matches went on for 2-3 minutes. HOWEVER the current season is all about the burn. Double DPS teams will attempt to kill one person in a matter of seconds, often successfully.

So what do I loose by going to 0/10/61? Shorter BOF length, CD on HOJ increased to 1 minute and I don't get the 6% damage reduction with RF.

Here's what I gain.... Full 5/5 points in both Fanaticism and Righteous Fury... so all my judgments now have an extra 25% chance to crit AND When A judgment or DS crits a DOT for 40% of the damage shows up.... I also get to put 2 points in to 2h weapon specialization which will increase white damage by 4%.. this should also up my Divine Storm damage since this is based off white damage.

I still get to keep my 2 stuns and as long as we can burn one guy down within 30 seconds or so we're set. He usually starts on the clothie or healer while I repentance the plate or DPS. While keeping an eye on the repentance I do some damage on my partners target, then make sure to drop HOJ as soon as the repentance is up. I don't even wait to see what happens I just swap to my partners target and burn, burn burn.

Using this spec I've been able to hang right around 1600 in 2's and 1500 in 3's.... Something to think about folks.

Arena Season 5 ending in three weeks - April 6th?

2009-03-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

So Last week a blue post mentioned that Arena Season 6 would start at the same time or right after patch 3.1 went live.... That should be no surprise to anyone as arena gear for all but the best gladiators is already inferior to current raid gear.

Today there was a blue post (see it here) that says the Easter holiday "Noblegarden" may be delayed if PTR testing runs long.

Currently Noblegarden is scheduled to start April 12th according to Blizzard's event calendar. The above blue thread makes it pretty clear that Bliz expects patch 3.1 to be in place in time for this event. Since the 12th is on Sunday, the latest Tuesday patch they can do is April 7th.

So if there are no major delays with testing (yes this is a big IF); we can expect patch 3.1 on April 7th at the latest and the beginning of Arena Season 6 at the same time or shortly after.

You heard it here first, 3 weeks or so left....maybe :)

51/0/20 - I want to use you so bad but I ...keep...getting....stunned

2009-03-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

51/0/20. Favorite of PvE pally's and PvP 5's teams. The major thing here is Beacon of Light for those of you completely oblivious to pally talents. I would love to keep this spec up because it's the default PvE spec, and that means I could run some heroics and even 25 mans as holy. Thus giving me access to some of those sweet tier 7.5 drops. Sadly (because I don't play a 5's team) it's not to be.

The way it works - Same play style as the 49/0/22 build but with the beacon. In 2's place the beacon of light on the player you don't expect to take the brunt of the damage. That's because the beacon will not be healed for overhealing. SO if my rogue was healed for 1k plus 5k overheal I would only receive the 1k in healing as the beacon.

So when I'm playing with my Rogue, Beacon is on me. Whenever I heal up my rogue partner I get the same amount of healing. In 3's it depends on the partner. If it's not a plate wearer I'll put it on them. If they do wear plate and have good resilience I'll put it on myself.

The problem here is that I no longer have Divine Purpose, which means I'm stunned easily. This costs me the game waay to much. A rogue will keep me in stunlock a mage will keep me on ice, etc etc. To me it feels like this build HAS to have a 2nd heal target available because you spend more time catching up in heals thanks to all the stuns; rather then anticipate the heals needed. And forget about any cleansing, when you finally get out of that blind/fear/sap/etc you'll be throwing up an instant holy shock followed by a Holy Light just to keep your partner at 1% health from dying - even as you hear I need a heal NOW! what the hell have you been doing the last 10 seconds?!? thru your vent.

Believe me, letting your partner know how you were locking in a CC chain for half the fight is as frustrating to hear as it is to explain.

This build shines in 5v5 combat where you're effectively healing 2 people at once - it's so hectic none but the best teams will have good CC chains and as a plate wearing healer you're not going to be the first target (usually).

Today the 49/0/22 build

2009-03-06T08:43:00.001-08:00

Before I get into todays build I want to mention that our guild leader was nice enough to team up with me for a couple hours in 2's and later with another guild member. We ended the evening at 1626! I'm off later today to pick up my Hateful Gladiator gloves, both the Scaled for my Ret and Ornamented for holy. I may be able to pick up a deadly pendant if I can farm enough honor but at just under 48k honor I'll only be able to pick it up for 1 spec at most.

What do you guys think, should I pick up the Pendant of Dominance for Holy or Victory for Ret?

49/0/22 - OK on to today's post the tried and true 49/0/22 build. Many people swear by it in both 2's and 3's. You get a faster casting time, higher spell power and a crazy 40 yard ranged judgment AND you get to keep Divine Purpose to break out of stuns. All this for just for loosing Repentance

The Way it Works - It's like that song from the BeeGee's "AH AH AH AH SAYIN' ALIVE" Your partner will have to take on CC and DPS your job is to keep him alive long enough to do it. Use your Divine Purpose to keep your partner mobile or to break you out of that CC so you can Heal some more. In this setup you can spam Holy Light all day, with talents reducing the cast time to between 1.6 - 1.9 seconds a cast there's no reason to use Flash of light unless you find yourself low on mana or have an instant FOL up... And you will have those instants because with a 40 yard Judgment of Justice available to you, I recommend using a GCD to put it on pretty regular. Not only will it help slow down your opponent but can grant you that instead Flash of Light. If your partner is about to die - an instant Holy Shock + Flash of Light + 1.6-1.9 second Holy light will have your teamate going from 100hp to 15,000 hp in under 5 seconds. Leaving your opponents to curse you, your mother, and the entire genetic line that spawned you in frustration

Possible Variants:
Heart of the Crusader vs Improved Judgments - You could spec into Improved Judgments for the 2 second reduction, as a Ret it seems almost a given. But playing Holy remember that your partner(s) will be making use of that extra 3% crit chance on the target. As long as you judge often enough to keep it up most of the fight HOC wins out I think.

Divine Intellect vs Holy Guidance - You're going to have to go 3/5 in one of these talents. I've seen both variants when looking at top holy pallys. I chose Intellect as it affects your mana pool, crit chance AND Mana per Second. My intellect is currently sitting at 660 so the extra 2 points in Holy Guidance give me an extra 49 spell power (because the intellect would lower to 620 if I lost the 2 points in DI). vs about 40 points of intellect boost from DI.... I don't care to do the math, but the extra Intellect seems like an overall good choice. Here's an Elitist Jerks thread that does some calculations for you.

Divine Illumination vs extra Judgments of the Pure - Yep, I skipped out of Divine Illumination for an extra point in JOTP. After about 50 arena matches I found myself hardly ever going out of mana. But if you play 5's or find your matches going long you may want to remove a point in DI for this talent.

That's it for now, Monday is the 51/0/20 build.

A little bit on the 37/0/34 build

2009-03-05T08:41:00.001-08:00

So my last post talked a little bit about the holy builds I've been using in PvP. One of my readers asked me to link the builds I was talking about in my last article, I'm going to do a little better giving the build and a little in depth summary of how it works and the variants you can use. To keep the post from being to long we're going to handle one build per day....

Probably good I do this anyway as I had a bitch of a time finding one site that talked about Holy PvP builds, mostly I had to glean it from about 10 different sources. So here we go:

37/0/34 - This is a shockadin build, or so they say. Frankly I don't find myself doing a ton of damage with this in arena, sure I do better then a few other builds but it's not comparable to any DPS build or class. What I do get here is better CC plus good mana regen.

The Way it Works - Especially useful in 2's you have your teammate focus a target, you take the other guy and Repentance him, then Hammer of Justice. If he's paying attention he's going to eat the full 7 second repentance stun while your opponent is wailing away at his partner. Then once the stun is up wait for that nice big heal to start up (if he's a healer without good instant heals) and then HOJ it. If the guy trinkets out of repentance, immediately follow up with HOJ and switch targets immediately and assist your partner in burning down the other opponent during the 7 seconds it's 2v1. Use your Holy Shock, judgments any anything else you can to help burn the guy down. Once the other opponent is out of stun you revert back to healing.

Possible variants:
Pure of Heart vs Unyielding Faith - I took pure of heart because I find I'm bad at cleansing of DOTs and Healing at the same time. If I'm feared I can usually trinket/bubble or wait it out and throw an instant Holy Shock to keep my partner alive - but with DOTs I'm just healing thru them and leave them on.... With as little as 2-3 hits needed to kill people these days it's hard to waste a global cooldown on cleanse when you can use it for a big heal.

Holy Power vs Divine Intellect - You'll notice I have 4/5 in Holy power. You can take one point out of Divine Intellect instead if you want. In terms of real world returns I'm not sure it's going to be a make or break point. I Chose to gimp Holy Power because the ret tree already gives me a lot of extra crit % chance.

Deflection vs Improved Judgments - You've got 1 point to play with here, not two so we're talking 1% extra parry chance or 1 second of Judgments. Since you're going to spend 90%+ of your time healing in arena you're not going to do a lot of Judging. Of course a 1% chance to parry isn't going to help you much either, choose what you will

Vengeance vs Improved Ret - Frankly vengeance is a filler talent to get to the good stuff, repentance and JOW. For now I'm leaving it in Vengeance because a lot of the top arena teams with this build did so, but once patch 3.1 hits you'll want to spec into Improved Ret because (according to the patch notes) your auras will work for you even if their not active. So you can leave your concentration aura up but still get all the benefits of Improved Ret aura as long as you've specced into it.

That's it for today, next time we go into the more traditional 49/0/22 build.

Starting to feel a little Guild love - and other weekend news

2009-03-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

So the last couple of weeks I've been going Holy from Tuesday - Thursday for my 2's and 3's matches and then swapping back to Ret Friday - Monday for BG's, Heroics, Dailies and Wintergrasp.

Now, before I get into the post I want to mention a little bit about the PvP guild I joined. I wasn't quite sure what to expect after joining But here's how it is: Everyone's busy doing their own thing and most people have their own teams setup already. I do my best to be social when possible, announcing wintergrasp start times, asking people to join up for quick badge runs like heroic VH, 10/25 man VOA etc. Also whenever a premade BG group is running I'm quick to join up.

However our elite players (2k plus arena rating) are already well formed on their 2k teams and not in a rush to carry guild members in the 1500 brackets, not unexpected really, since the way promotion happens in the guild is that the higher your arena rating the higher your member status (officers are 2k + only). Fortunately I've been getting asked in to some skirmish matches and one of the guildies joined my 3's team. He's a pretty solid player raking in the low 1600's for 2s.

S0 last week we ran Rouge/Mage/H Pally in 3's and brought settled in at 1479 after toping out around 1510 or so. That may not sound great, but considering we started at 1385 it was a pretty high bump up.

I was running a 37/0/34 build which I was mainly trying for 2's, but it worked pretty well for 3's as well. This build give me both Repentance and Divine Purpose. The extra Stun is awesome for CC but I do loose out on Unyielding Faith, Holy Guidance and Enlightend Judgments that I would get in a 47/0/24 build. So this week I'll be trying the 47/0/24 build and see how we do.

I can already tell you to stay away from the 51/0/20 build. great for PvE but I've found that I simply have to spec 24 points minimum in Ret to get Divine Purpose, if you can't break the out of those stuns you're dead. And with bust damage as high as it is you can't be out of commission in a stun. One little tidbit for those not paying to much attention to which stun is on you. Divine purpose will break you out of a Hammer of Justice, but NOT a Repentance or Sap so don't go blowing it on those two.

On another pleasant note I got Deadly Gladiator's Scaled Legguards from 25 man VOA this weekend WOOT WOOT! That should still be a sold piece of gear well into arena season 7.

New talent trees up for patch 3.1

2009-02-24T08:10:00.001-08:00

Hey folks,

MMO-Champion has the new talent trees up from the PTR.. these are subject to change but I'm linking the new one below.. followed by the current live one so you can compare the difference.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin=&version=9614
and live
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=s

Now when I made the tree I immediately saw some differences; a few which I had to dig deep to figure out, I'm going to list them here.

Blessing of Kings - Full 10% BOK is now a base spell ability. So any of you keeping points in that can now allocate them elsewhere. Oddly enough it's not going to make a huge difference in my Ret Build as I couldn't afford points for it anyway... But it will be nice to give out to folks.

Improved HOJ - This has been reduced to two levels, BUT now only reduces the cooldown of HOJ by 20 seconds, the old one was 30 seconds for 3 points. Frankly, even though we get one more talent point to spend, this will be a nerf to Ret.

Divine Guardian - New icon, also says "damage reduced by 30% up to 300% of paladins total health". The current version doesn't give a maximum.. i don't know if there was a max before or not but I noticed the tool tip change.

Improved Ret Aura - Is now gone, the talent was folded into sanctified retribution, which makes it a great 1 point talent, plus frees up 2 talent points in the Ret Tree!

Fanaticism - Now only stacks 3 times for a maximum of 18% increased crit. Down from 25% for 5 points. Actually not as bad as it sounds for me, as ret PVP build doesn't really allow 5 points in fanaticism, 3-4 is more common. Technically you'll receive an extra 3% crit if you were speccing 3/5 in your current build.

Righteous Vengeance - Same as above, now stacks only 3 times for a total of 30% as opposed to 5 times for 40%. Buff in terms of damage per talent point, and for me as I had zero in RV before.

Overall? Except for loosing 10 seconds on HOJ (which is a huge PvP downer for me). I'm pretty happy with the rest of the stuff. Again, this was mmo-champoin's pull from the game files and is subject to change. But Now I'll be able to gain a 0/17/54 build (or /19/52) and gain a bit of DPS in the process.

Other classes are getting worked around too.. I'm sure their survivability is up, so doubt this will actually help me beat other classes, (did I mention the HOJ nerf :) but it should be a nice DPS increase.

Back to RET and it feels soooo good.

2009-02-23T10:33:00.001-08:00

Well I respecced back to Ret over the weekend and immediately felt "home" if that's the right word for it. Things were back to the way I knew them.

BUT... with patch 3.1 aka Dual-Spec hitting the PTR tonight (or so people say) I still need to build up my holy gear for my off-set. With that in mind I started doing heroics for badge gear.

I did about 4 different heroics and got a spiffy set of PvE legs from Violet Hold. It was actually my first time ever running not just heroics but 5 mans of any kind for the most part. I find I'm able to easily keep up with most groups DPS, although in a very geared PvE group I'm anywhere from 100-300 dps under the group average. In a typical PUG I keep up the average. Anywhere from 1600-2000 depending on the buffs and type of fight. I was concerned about keeping up since I had never run these dungeons, fortunately a guy named Cityhunder0505 had some excellent video guides that gave me a good idea of what to expect when doing the instances. I'd highly recommend checking out his video guides for any instances you need help with.

Lastly, I've upped my badge count from 8 emblems of heroism to 31. Leaving me 4 short of my protective barricade of the light I'm going for on the holy set.

Crossing over to the LIGHT side?

2009-02-13T08:26:00.000-08:00

Hey folks.

I've always thought of Ret as being a pretty "dark" talent for paladins. I mean your whole purpose is cripple an enemy. Sure you CAN heal others but you usually don't; saving your mana for more damage instead. What's an extra 1,600 health when you can throw down a 4.5k Hammer of Wrath instead.... Frankly aside from the names of the spells I find Death Knights and Ret Pallys very similar. We now roll for the same gear, their runic power is our mana, we both have limited healing abilities and DK's even get a sort of a bubble from anti-magic zone

I made the conscious decision to stay in this dark tree in TBC and refused to respec. Frankly I love BRINGING THE PAIN and killing others. However I see the writing on the wall and I'm starting to build up a set of holy gear....yeah i'm moving to the fluffy light side (at least temporarily) and here's why:

1) Dual spec is coming in the next patch. You're going to be picking up a secondary tree anyway if you can take the time to gear up NOW you'll beat the rampant inflation on your server for items.... I expect all titansteel items to rocket up in price with patch 3.1 These are horribly expensive already don't wait untill they rocket up to begining of WOTLK prices.

2) The top 100 arena teams are stuffed full of holy paladin / DPS combo. (Mostly DK, but others are there too). If you want to PvP and you're already RET - Holy is the way to go.

Now don't misunderstand me, RET is my main spec I'm just setting up holy now as my off-spec for arena. I already tried a few games with crafted blue gear and it went about as well in 2's as RET in my current gear. I can only hope that better gear and more experience will enhance my 2's rating.

In the mean time if anyone has links for good holy pvp guides link them up. I'll let you know how things go next week as I plan to run both my 2's and 3's team as holy plus maybe even a VoA.... boy will I be pissed if a piece of ret gear finally drops and I"m sitting in holy spec.

/ gquit part 2

2009-02-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

So, as you know from my previous post, I quit my guild over the weekend. Specifically to join GOON SQUAD, the predominant alliance PvP guild on the server.

Doing PvP as much as I do I've run across a handful of their members during my time in WoW. Some have helped me with arena, others have done pre-mades with me, etc etc. So I whisper one of them asking if I can join up.... "Sure" I'm told "but only the guild leader can join you, I'll talk to him next time he's on".

Okay, so a day passes and I get a whisper... "I hear you'd like to join Goon Sqad thru xxxx" (name blurred out to protect the innocent lol)

"Yes" I reply and proceed to give him a short history of my pvp experience. I guess I just assumed I'd be let in, my old guild was very relaxed when it came to folks joining and it's not like I was asking to be carried in an arena team just to join the guild.

WELL I WAS WRONG...."Let's get some duels out of the way" says the leader. So I meet him outside the IF (he's a frost mage in mostly Deadly Gladiator Gear). Not a great matchup considering i'm in Savage gear for the most part... but we start the match. It was close, I bubbled at the right time, threw down HOF and instant healed as much as possible. He was dishing some serious damage but I win. I'm thinking "YEAH I ROCK!" but instead I type "CLOSE ONE".

I figure that's showing off my awesomeness enough, NOPE WRONG AGAIN... "Looks like i'll have to use my CD's on you to win, that's good"......WTF? So I barely manage to beat this guy by the skin of my ass popping everything I had and he didn't bother to use any of his large abilities man I'm in trouble.

We duel a couple more times and the closest I get to beating him is him going down to about 30% Most times he just wipes the floor with me as we wern't waiting for CD's to refresh. Once that was done I had to duel another ret pally. I lost, but again was outgeared.

So the guild leader says "I need to see more let's head into a WSG".... Now I don't like running WSG without a premade, but I'm the initiate. So we hop in. I'm not realy sure what he's hoping to see, but I'm not kept guessing long.

We're going to play this with a special set of rules... don't worry about win/loss I want you to get in the top 3 kills at the end of the match. Not just overall kills I'm talking Killing Blows; if alliance suck you just need to be in top 3 for alliance.

Ah, well this is interesting, I don't usually play middle of the field in WSG... normally I assist the flag carrier, dropping HOF, stuns, etc as needed. In fact I've never tried for top kills in WSG.... but this wasn't up for discussion he wanted to see me on the board so it was my job to deliver.

I was nervous, I know my own skillset but I'm not used to having people evaluate me like this. The first few minutes I keep switching to the scoreboard to see where I'm at. After a little bit though I settle down and get to work. Since I knew I was going for top Killing blows I tried my best to be smart about it and time it so my HOJ caused the killing blow.... Problem was there were 4 healers on the team and they liked to stay in a pack. More then once I had to disengage when after 2-3 minutes I realize I was going a ton of damage but two healers combined to out heal me, thus not helping me get those much needed kills.

I pretty much dominated the match top kills, top damage, 2nd healing, and most importantly tied for 1st in Killing Blows. The stats were decisive enough I was given permission to join right after and was able to skip their "trainee" rank and go to regular member.

So there you go, I'm the newest member of GOON SQUAD. We'll see how my new home works out :)

/ gquit

2009-02-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Yep the title says it all. But let me give you the story of how I came to quit my guild this weekend after two years.

I started playing WOW in January of 2007. Being a complete noob with no idea of end game content, talent trees, racial abilities or much of anything else I rolled myself a human paladin. Somewhere in my teen levels I'm running thru westfall and someone asks if I want to join a guild.... "what's a guild for?" I ask. "A group of people to help out with leveling, questions, etc" I hear back.
"OK sounds good" and I'm invited to Legion of Light.

At the time I was about 10-20 levels beneath most of our guild and it seemed like all the core members had a ton of info and were always willing to help out with hard quests and such. It was a very supportive group.

Eventually I reached 60; but by that time The Burning Crusade expansion had come out and most of the guild was well into it, so again I make my way to BC 5-10 levels behind most folks and one day I finally hit 70.... I'm all decked out in greens and I think to myself "yay I finally beat this thing" probably nothing left to do, maybe try a new character.

Man was I wrong lol !

Turns out I really got a kick out of PvP...My guild however was all PvE. This is where the first crack appeared. Folks would ask me to raid with them, I'd rarely go instead focusing on arena matches and battlegrounds. Occasionally I'd get a few guild members together for 5v5 arena but their gear wasn't right and they had no idea of valid combo's classes, strategy etc.

Season 2 came and went, Season 3 was in full swing... I was content to do my pvp thing and my guild was content to not push me into pve. However there was a problem with the guild.... Our leader was getting frustrated with people not showing up to raids, lack of progression etc. After a month or two he left the guild and took some people with him.

More cracks developed. In fact this was the slow spiral of death for the guild. Turns out our leader was the driving force behind putting groups together, keying for instances etc. Without him progression slowed considerably. This pattern continued thru Season 4. More people trickle out. This is where I start giving serious thought to finding a PVP based guild but I had my regular arena partners in place and it was easy enough to find the occasional person to help you get a rating you needed. So I left things alone

WOTLK hits and for a while the guild has more people on then I've seen in months, but this soon dwindles and another large chunk of people leave the guild looking for more active PvE content. During the last couple months I found just 3-5 people on at any given time. A few weeks ago I found myself the only guild member on almost every night. I found out that the majority of active level 80's had transferred to the new Borean Tundra server and merged with a guild there.

Loyalty had kept me with the guild for a long time, longer then it should have probably. But it's one thing to not participate a ton in a group and another for there to basically NOT have a group.

So last week I managed to find 3 long time members online at once and took the time to explain that I would probably be leaving for a pvp oriented guild, and my reasons for it. They understood, and frankly I think they knew the guild was about dead.

So on Saturday I bid a fond farewell to my guild with the little used /gquit command, ending two years with Legion of Light.... What happened after? Am I solo, did I join a new guild? Check back tomorrow to find out.

Huge, Long, complex...but informative blue post for PVP

2009-02-06T10:31:00.001-08:00

Hey guys,

Scratching your head and what's going on for arena ratings and gear, wondering why a 10 man NAXX pug is giving out the equivalent of level 2 hateful gear that you can't even get because season 5 arena is just crazy?

Well, here's Kaglan answering a ton of arena questions, including ratings backed up by actual team's win/loss numbers AND hidden rating numbers....Also included is info on Season 6.

Blue link here

I'm going to list out some of the bigger changes coming up; definitely starting at season 6, but some may be happening before.

1) New teams will NOT start at 1500 - rather some lower number and work their way up to 1500

2) Gear rating requirements change, deadly gear including trinkets will all be accessible at 1500's

3) Win loss #'s are completely different then before, don't go trying to make sense out of it, just accept it. The new matching system is very complex and isn't as easily understood as the old one for the common player.

Now this is just my personal theory here, but it APPEARS that for the casual player in Season 6 everyone's numbers will be 100-200 less then in Season 4. Since the new starting value of teams hasn't been given this is just a guess, but as an example in S4 I was sitting pretty around 1550 - 1650. Now It's consistently 1450-1550. I think the farther you travel away from the median the higher your difference will be.... So a team that could barely make 1400 in S4 will probably drop around 1100-1200 in s6... Teams at 2400 in S4 will probably be closer to 2k.

Hope that makes sense... again not confirmed but I'm reading between the lines as it were....just look at the highest rating requirement in S6 - 2100 (for the shoulders) used to be 2200 in S4

Leading the 25 man VoA Raid

2009-02-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

So Sunday night I'm in wintergrasp looking for a 25 man raid, plenty of people are asking for 25 man, but no one's inviting to a raid. I even see shouts of "create one". Well, I was pretty eager to run 25 man, (for the chance of some sweet deadly drops). So i went ahead and formed one.

I'd like to take a minute to mention that I've never led a 25 man raid. I've never lead a successful 10 man raid, and only a handful of times have I bothered to lead a 5 man dungeon, heroic or otherwise.

Oh sure, I've joined enough in my day that I know what's supposed to be done to get a successful group going. But it turns out leading is a little different.

1) Instead of sitting around contemplating my own navel while the raid filled up, suddenly I was responsible for making sure it filled up AND making sure no one was saved to the instance AND making sure the proper amount of tanks, healers and DPS were present. I had to port to Dalaran TWICE before it was all said and done, to recruit enough players

2) I'm the one initiating ready checks and setting the pace of the raid (and for once people actually listen to what I'm saying)

3) I had to distribute the loot I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS. I had to ask a member of the raid to walk me thru the steps. Turns out it was pretty easy, just select an item, have people /roll for it and then use a drop down menu that appears to manually give it to the person that rolls the highest.

One thing I never did wind up figuring out was how to do one of those yells that shows up in big letters to everyone in the raid... About 4 minutes in i wanted to encourage everyone to pour on the dps I just typed it in like regular.. if anyone knows how to make those raid wide announcements let me know!

Changes made to arena ratings liast night

2009-02-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Here's the blue post... I didn't arena last night so I can't say how big of an effect this will be for folks. I'll have more to report on it as the week goes on.

Quote from: Kalgan (Source)

We made some adjustments to the rating system last night that are now in effect.

1. Personal Ratings will now always trend toward Team Ratings (instead of the internal matchmaking rating). This should eliminate the odd behavior players noticed of seeing their PR change in ways that seemed bizzare. It also eliminates the possibility that you can play every game with your team, yet be ineligible to get items when the team qualifies for them (or ineligible to receive full points).
2. You will now gain or lose around 12 points when winning or losing to teams of roughly equivalent matchmaking rating to your own team (previously this number was 8 ).
3. The rating scale has been extended to a range of 240 to about 2800 to more accurately reflect what was possible under the old system. This means that most players over 1500 will experience some slightly easier than expected rating gain as their team adjusts upward to the new scale.
4. Players with less than 1500 rating will still get the same number of points as players at 1500.

It is now easier to get higher ratings
It is easier to get higher ratings due to the scale adjustment. However, I'd still expect a very small percentage of the population to get the arena master achievement, by no means would I call it trivialized.

Q&A
Is hidden rating wiped on character transfer?
No

What determines hidden rating besides win/loss? Resilience, damage, healing?
Only winning/losing determines the rating

What is the min/max amount of points able to be lost/won now?
24

Is the TR/PR cap still 3000 with these changes?
Yes TR/PR do still have a hard cap at 3k, although we don't expect players to get that high regardless.

Is any of the rating affected by your gear?
None of the rating systems have the slightest clue or are in any way affected by what gear you have.

How can the ratings not get that high if numerous teams get to 2700+? Are there diminishing returns on the amount of rating you can gain off another team despite team ratings being similarly high?
It certainly is possible to get that high legitimately, although it would be unusual. There's about a 2% chance of seeing a 3000 rated team in a population size of 20,000 teams... about a 5% chance of seeing one in a population of 50,000 teams. So, with the number of battlegroups in existence it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility to see a 3k team. Grats to them. =]

S5 - Week 5; the new patch has broken arena ratings

2009-01-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

So this week was another arena improvment for me. My 2's and 3's team went to 1495 and 1510 respecivly and I felt we were making progress. But the major news today is the following blue post

With the release of patch 3.0.8 we have implemented a new matchmaking system for arenas that will improve the overall system and help ensure that players will be matched against others of equal skill. The new matchmaking system uses a rating that you cannot see, and is separate for each of the arena brackets.

The rating changes at the end of each match are affected by this new system, and as it just came out, there may initially be some odd behavior in rating changes, but these will straighten out fairly quickly.

We will monitor this new system and update it as needed to help provide the best experience possible in arena matches.

The forums are lit up like a Christmas tree with people saying their ratings are going all over the place, some are zooming up others zooming down... and I mean WAAY up from 1600 to 2200...or way down from 1500 to 1300 and everything in between.

Also each person a team is affected differently.. in 2's you could go up 20 while your partner goes down 5...it's pandemonium.

I only read about it this morning so I don't know how it'll affect me. there's calls for rollbacks, fixes etc. Bliz has not responded so no one knows if this is a bug or an intended consequence. No one knows how the new "hidden" system works so we can't say for sure.

Here's my recommendation to anyone sitting under less then 1600.... Get out there an try. Worst case scenario you flush your rating to the 1300's; in that case you still don't qualify for better gear and you've lost out on maybe 50 arena points for the week.

HOWEVER if your score goes up you'll suddenly qualify for Hateful or even DEADLY gladiator pieces because your rating has shot up. If they roll back the ratings to 1500 you're not going to qualify again so GET THE GAMES IN NOW and take advantage of the mayhem to get better gear then you were able to get a week ago.

EDIT / UPDATE: Blizzard has annouced that arenas are offline while they look at what's going on. (as of around 1pm pacific time)

S5 - Week 4, you suck I suck we all suck

2009-01-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

Hey guys,

So I've been swapping teams again and wound up in the 1470's on both my 2's and 3's team. I would have been higher on 2's but left my 1524 team to help out a friend who's team was at 1400.
But at this low of a rating who cares.

The sad thing was that I was pretty happy to hit 1473 in 3's....Happy? WTF! I was sitting pretty in 1650-1750 last season and was even pushing the low 1800's after the infamous pre-wrath "patch"... and now I'm happy to be seeing a sub 1500 score?

Yeah, that's bad.... but as it turns out many people must be feeling the same way, no one's posting about it (I think they're embarrassed) but the numbers verify it.

On my battlegroup the 1479 score put me in 1,292nd place out of 2,342 or just under the 50% mark....Out server, i'm on page 3 of 7 telling me I'm actually just over the 50% mark... yeah, receiving a 1479 on the Antonidas server gives me a better score then half of the people playing.

Let me put it another way, Here's the score you would need if arena titles were handed out today:

Gladiator = 1953
Duelist = 1777
Rival = 1645
Challenger = 1505

Atmidedly the numbers are rough, I don't have a good way of removing inactive teams, but they're close.... I mean 1505 for a TITLE OF ANY KIND? WoW (and not the good kind)

S5 - Week 3

2009-01-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

The improvements I've been waiting for.

This week I could tell all the new gear I've been picking up has helped tremendously. I went from the worst rating I've ever seen up to about 1574 before settling in at 1542.... The last few games my partner for the week had a screaming child to deal with and we just wound up calling it a night due to extended "breaks" for the child.

No worries at all, I see the slow progression taking place. In fact I think I'm going to save the arena points this week and just pick up a hateful cloak. If we can cross the 1600's barrier I"m up for a few core hateful gladiator items.

My only concern is that I keep swapping partners, which makes it hard to settle down and get thing synched up.

S5 - Week 2

2008-12-31T12:26:00.001-08:00

Oh the humanity!

Week two ended on Monday night and was very light on arena action. I ran 30 games total 10 with Kyllia, 10 with Clagg and 10 with his Clagg's DK alt. The results were pretty horrible with us slipping well under 1500.... We did not get together for 3's or 5's.

Really more of a let's get minimal points week. We were just focusing on getting all the characters their minum games for the week. I expect bigger and better things this week. Namely I plan to focus with the DK in 2's. I've also switched my main weapon from the Brutal Gladiator sword to the Titansteel Destroyer. The DK also has the Destroyer so we should be good DPS wise this week.

Time to come out swingin' in 2009!

Vault of Archavon and Daily PvP quest

2008-12-29T08:18:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

So last night I managed to get into a PUG group for both the 10 and 25 man Vault of Archavon. Sadly no drops for me which is a horrible, horrible, horrible shame because I really could use a Hateful or Deadly piece of arena gear!

I wanted to share two important things that I found out
while talking to a GM this weekend.

I thought something in my game was bugged, turned out it was not I just didn't know about the following:

#1) The Vault of Archavon resets every Tuesday not on a regular day based timer. So you can run him Monday night and then again Tuesday, or if you already beat him Tuesday you won't be able to run it again untill the following week.

#2) The Victory in Wintergrasp daily PvP quest shares it's slot with the daily "win in a specific BG" quest. Once you accept one of them the other will not be available. So, if you accept and turn in Victory in Wintergrasp, you cannot go up to an NPC and get Victory in Allterec Valley (for example)... and if you turned in Victory in Allterec Valley earlier that day you won't be able to pick up the Victory in Wintergrasp later that evening..... These reset the same as all daily quests so they'll be available again tomorrow but you'll have to pick one or the other, not both.

For those of you not familiar with The VoA read on... those that are turn to page 54 this is the end of the blog post for you! (that's an old choose your adventure series joke)

If your faction controls wintergrasp you have access to this raid instance which consists of 4 guardians and the main boss. Assuming your group doesn't wipe it usually takes longer to form the group then it does to do the instance.

People say this is the easiest raid you're going to encounter for WOTLK, I don't know as i haven't done any other raids but it sure is the fastest. It's pretty much spank and tank but the boss is on a 5 minute timer - if you don't kill him in 5 minutes he goes into berserk mode an one shots everyone.

It's a good idea to try and get a group going as this guy drops DEADLY gladiator gear on 25 man and HATEFUL gladiator gear on 10 man. In the 10 man you'll want 2 healers 1 main tank and one off tank. The rest DPS.

S5 - Week 1

2008-12-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

The first week of season 5 arena has come and gone. Here's how my ratings wound up
2v2 - 1544
3v3 - 1421 (yeah that's not a misprint)
5v5 - N/A

Drunkenclod, what' brought you to this lowly state? Weren't you solidly in the 1600's - 1700's and even hitting the 1800's bracket last season?

Yes, I was and there's 3 main reasons for the lower rating.

1) Gear - My gear is no longer even close to top of the line, in fact all 5 man and 10 man PvE gear is better then what I'm using and a lot of folks are wearing that. I don't normally PvE (more on that in a later article) and my play time is about 2 hours per night; not leaving much time to acquire gear. Lack of resilience is also a huge factor in 3's
1a) Also I've found lack of +HIT on gear to be extremely frustrating. Stuns not landing, judgments missed, GRRR.... All S5 gear is devoid of hit rating, the excption being misc items like neck, cloak, etc. You'll sacrifice +CRIT rating for it, but it is critical that you get back to the 5% hit cap for PvP. This will improve as I'm able to grind more honor for more gear.

2) Research - Every class has new spells, abilities and heck even the new DK class to work with. I have started looking into some of the new abilities for other classes and how to counter them, but research takes time AND then you need to practice it in the arena and BG's

3) We're rusty - Not doing PvP for a month has gotten us off our game. We've just started to mesh again, teaming up on stuns, focusing the correct targets at the correct time and working out new counters to opposing team makeup.

I fully expect this to work itself out in the upcoming weeks, but I will definitely need to start out with Savage Gladiator gear, and work my way up to hateful. It sucks because it's that much more honor and arena points to grind out but I won't be getting 1650-1750 without some better gear!

Strand of the Ancients - Get that Honor

2008-12-15T14:52:00.001-08:00

Hey folks, this weekend I found myself doing a bit of BG... specifically the new Strand of the Ancients. Since I'm alliance no one answered any of my questions and as soon as the team started loosing the insults began flying.

After a few matches I got it figured out, but I figured I'd save some people from contributing to a loss and looking like noobs. So first of all let me give a brief overview of how this works.

There are two rounds, each lasting a maximum of 10 minutes (so the match is a maximum of 20 minutes long). Upon starting you will either find yourself on a boat which means you're attacking or on a platform/hill which means you are on defense. At the end of 10 minutes or the capture of the relic the round is over and you're automatically reset. If you started out on D you are now on O.. if you started on O you're now on D.

The side that captures the orb in the least amount of time wins! Honor is typically around 1,000 for the winning team and 500 for the loosing team. I've seen it as high as 1500/700 and as low as 900/400.... Still that's about 1,500 honor per hour for loosing and 4,000 honor per hour for wining C R A Z Y !

Before I start off on Offense or Defense take a minute to look at the map. (Taken while I was on Offense). Note the multi-colored gates and the horde GY's.... click to zoom in. Take it all in and reference it because it'll make the explanations easier if you know the layout.

OFFENSE (part 1)

So you've just ported in and you find yourself on a ship. You're on offense. You will be in one of two ships. Each will pull up in front of either the blue or green gate. Two siege canons will be waiting in front of your ships and if you're quick enough you can hop in one and control it. If you want to be a team player let the melee classes take the tanks and ranged classes follow.

Drive your tank up towards the gate use the special vehicle abilities to aim the canon and blast down the gate. Canons should focus only on the gate and the ranged people can work on shooting down the offensive turrets....OR once the canon blasts thru the gate ride like mad towards the nearest GY and take it. If you canon is still alive keep going to the next round of gates.

OFFENSE (part 2)

OK, hopefully you've blasted thru the first gate and taken the GY. As soon as a GY is capped the goblin workshops close to the GY will start producing more tanks. At this point anyone that wants to do so should grab a tank and make their way to the next gate... BUT BEFORE YOU HOP IN THE TANK grab a seaforium charge one of these acts the same as a hit from a tank. It's also the only way a person not in a tank can damage the doors....they look like little barrels next to the goblin workshop.

Just run up to the door drop the charge and it will go off in 10 seconds. (the horde can disarm it within those 10 seconds if they have the time to do so).... Keep grabbing tanks and breaking the wall untill you breach it.

OFFENSE (part 3)

Now make your way to the last (yellow) gate. Bring in as many tanks as possible and anyone not in a tank should be carrying a seaforuium charge to help with blasting the gate. Once this gate goes down make your way thru the courtyard and blast the doors of the keep down. Get inside and take the large orb. Once you take the orb the match is over and you're reset to Defense..or if you've already played D the game is over and whichever team grabbed the relic in the least time wins.

Defense (part 1)

So, if you find yourself on a hill you're on Defense. Get yourself to either the green gate or the blue gate. You'll see a set of stairs going up to the top of the gate. Run up and if no one is sitting in a turret (aka gun) you can Mount it. The controls work the same as the siege weapons. Aim and shoot. If both turrets are mounted hop onto the beach and help slow down the horde by killing enemy players or attacking the siege weapons As soon as the enemy leaves the boat start hitting the siege weapons. Kill them before they destroy your gate. If your gate is breached get off the gun and run to the inner wall.

Defense (part 2)

OK your wall has been breached, usually if the enemy tank got thru they're almost dead. Finish off the tank with a hit or two and either rush to your inner gate or to the GY (depending on where the horde is going). If no one is manning the inner gate turrets look for a glowing platform and hop on it.. this will transport you to the top of the wall so you can get in the gun and start wailing away... If the guns are manned stay below and help kill the tanks before they destroy the gate. If your 2nd set of gates are smashed retreat to the Yellow gate and repeat the process.

Defense (part 3)

The stinkin' horde have broken thru the yellow gate and are in the courtyard. Get everyone on your team in the courtyard and mow down the tanks as soon as they show up. DO NOT let them breach the door to the keep. Do whatever you have to do to destroy those tanks. Keep an eye out for the enemy planting the seaforium charges at your door and click to disarm them if they are planted. At this point either time will have run out or they have broken thru and got the relic. The match is over and you're reset to Offense..or if you've already played O the game is over and whichever team grabbed the relic in the least time wins.

!! IMPORTANT TIPS THAT WILL STOP YOU FROM LOOKING LIKE A NOOB !!

Offense

1) It's best to shout out before the match starts and pick a gate. I noticed the Green gate seemed to be the default in my BG's yesterday. If you arrive on the other boat drive your tank to the decided gate. Focusing on one side will help you team win quickly, If you win in under 4 minutes you get an achievement (got mine :).

2) Take a GY as soon as possible, no GY means no tanks, no seaforium charges.

3) If you're in a tank focus on the gates, unless you find yourself getting slaughtered quickly don't waste your time with the guns. Just blast thru the door ASAP.

4) Tanks work best in groups. Two tanks are 4x times as effective as one tank. A lone tank will be focused on by both turrets and any enemies on the ground. Two or three are a LOT harder to kill.

5) If your tank is destroyed you automatically hop out and do not die. You're probably close to the gate anyway take a minute to plant the seaforium charge

6) If a wall has been breached do NOT take precious time out to kill empty or manned turrets just drive on thru.

Defense

1) If both turrets at a gate are not manned, get in there and man it. For inner gates use the defenders portal (the lighted platform underneath a gate) to get in there.

2) Try to hang onto the GY's as long as possible. THIS IS CRITICAL... CRITICAL to wining. Once the opposing team takes the GY they have it for the entire round, you cannot take it back. They will gain control of the goblin workshop and tanks will start appearing. If you can keep the GY's under your teams control you're almost assured to keep your relic and win.

3) If you see the horde skipping your gate and going to the other one (ie you're at green gate and their going to blue) make sure to communicate that so your teammates can move their resources there. If it's clear they are totally skipping your gate get off the turret and help out your other gate.

Winter fashons - Savage Saronite anyone?

2008-12-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

Hey folks,

People hitting arena in a few days will want to pick up the latest gear. Everyone will be starting out on equal footing for the first time since Season 1.... And what will the well dressed palading be wearing? Savage Saronite of course!... Or will they?

This blue set of craftable PvP gear (yes but it at the AH - Between 50-90g per piece on my server) is the new "starter" PvP set for Melee classes. Other classes have similar gear but optimized for their needs. Since this blog is focused on Ret Pally's I'll just be focusing on this set.... Warriors and DK will be sharing the same gear FYI.

So what's the difference... Well a complete set, which includes boots, bracers and belt gives the following advantage over untill now top-of-the-line Brutal Gladiator Gear

+ 157 Stamina
+ 33 Strength
+654 Armor
+129 Resillience
+90 Critical Strike

It's not all good news though, you loose the following:

- 213 Intellect
- 51 Hit Rating
- 10 Available Sockets for Gems

Looking at my gem stats, I gain a total of +50 Strength and +30 Critical strike from gems, so counting this the total difference in stats is:

+ 157 - Stamina (aka extra 1,570 health)
+ 654 - Armor
+ 129 - Resillience (aka extra 1.5% resillence)
+ 60 - Critical Strike (aka extra 1.5% critical strike)
-17 / Strength
- 51 / Hit Rating
- 213 / Intellect (aka minus 3,195 mana)

First a quick word about stats.... at level 80 you seem to need more points for each percent difference in stats. For example at level 70 you only needed 15.8 points per 1% of hit rating. At level 80 you need a whoping 32.8 per 1%... that means that while you only needed 79 points to reach the 5% hit cap at level 70.. at level 80 you'll need 164 to keep that same 5% cap.

Quite a trade off... Sure extra 1.5k health is great but it's coming at the expense of 3k less mana AND more troubling minus 51 off the hit rating. PvP hit rating was never good to begin with, in fact if I loose my current hit rating of 96 down to 45 I go down to about 1.5% hit rating.

The added Resilience and Armor is nice but remember with new stats, 129 resilience is roughly an extra 1.5% not an extra 3.5% if you were level 70.

SO.. with that in mind should we even bother with the blue crafted set? I'd actually like to hear some thoughts on this. Before writing the article I figures sure it's a higher level set go for it, but after running the numbers I'm thinking of holding off for the actual Arena gear.

Comments Please!

Ding - 79 ! - just over a week to S5

2008-12-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

Hey folks, just squeaked in dinging to 79 last night. One more quest filled level to go. I hope to get there by Friday, giving me the weekend to do a little PvP. I will admit due to my minimal playtime I have felt rushed thru getting to 80 and wish I could spend more time savoring the quest and storylines... but hey... that's what Alts are for lol :)

I've also integrated with wowhead, so for my next post, when I talk about the craftable PvP items like Savage Saronite Walkers you should now get a tooltip by hovering over the link... assuming I tame the time out to do the linking properly hahaha.

Two weeks to go - Time to start looking at PvP

2008-12-02T09:29:00.001-08:00

Hey folks,

So I dinged 77 last night and got my cold weather flying. Hopefully I'll be able to fly right thru to 80 (ok a mediocre joke at best). Since I'm approaching 80 I assume many of you are as well, or have reached it already. Time to start looking at Arena Season 5.

This season is full of new stuff and I highly recommend everyone read this article on wowhead that is simply the best Arena prep article I've come across bar none. I'm also going to shamelessly borrow their gear lists because it's a nice format and easier then typing out.

To keep it simple today, I'm just going say that S5 will have 3 tiers of gear. The differences in stats are similar to Season 1 vs Season 2 vs Season 3 gear... but all levels will be available you just need to meet the minimum rating requirements to buy them.

The lowest level is Savage Gladiator - This gear requires no Arena rating and is cheap to get. Starting at just 175 arena points and 3,600 honor even the worst Noobs should have no problems getting one piece per week. The vast majority of casual and new PvPers will keep this gear thru the entire season.

For a Ret Pally set:
* Total Arena Points = 2,225
* Total Honor Points = 38,400

That doesn't include honor for new Rings, Trinkets, Cloak, Labram, etc. Just the core stuff. Since many people will be starting here for their full set, or at least partial set I'd try to make sure you have at least enough honor banked for two pieces of gear before S5 starts. That's 8,400

.
The middle tier is Hateful Gladiator - This is where the vast majority of serious players will end up. Honor requirements are the same, but each item costs more arena points and will require a minimum personal and team rating to buy.

For a Ret Pally set:
* Total Arena Points = 4,450
* Total Honor Points = 38,400

You'll notice the honor requirements are the same, just the arena points go up. Good news since many people will be buying Savage Gladiator first and then needing to grind more honor a few weeks later for the Hateful Gladiator version.

The PRO tier is Deadly Gladiator - Depending on your server, you might not even come across a person with this set. Although most PvE servers will have a handful of people sporting DG. PvP servers or "good" battlegroups may have more.... Pretty much reserved for the top 1-2% of players. You can rest assured anyone sporting this gear is a true PRO and will own you without trying. Notice this set doesn't have any Honor requirements, presumably because if you're good enough to get this set Blizz feels that you shouldn't have to bother grinding honor and can focus on the serious business of arena :)

For a Ret Pally set:
* Total Arena Points = 14,400
* Total Honor Points = 0

.
.
.

So there you go. Upcoming posts will talk about the differences in Gear, what items you should be going for first, where to wait for a higher level of gear, etc.

Ding - 74 ! - I feel like I'm behind

2008-11-24T08:21:00.000-08:00

So I hit level 74 on Sunday. Which is pretty good for playing about 10 hours per week. However I can't help feel like I'm behind the curve. Some of my friends are 77+ with one of them expected to hit 80 today. My arena partners from last season are sitting at 74, 75, 79.... But I simply don't have any extra time to play.

Fortunately at my current rate I should hit 80 in of time for S5... but it sure would be nice to find time to grind some honor before the new season, as it is I already feel rushed. In the mean time, here's some screenshots of my travels.

Post on the upcoming S5 gear sometime after Thanksgiving.

Level 71 and surrounded by assholes?

2008-11-17T07:59:00.001-08:00

Morning folks!

So I dinged 71 on Friday night and I'm about 50% of the way to 72. Looking at the /played option it seems I'm about 5 hours away from 72.

But what I really wanted to talk about today was a disturbing trend on my server. The problem is that it seems every asshole on the server has logged in for the expansion and I'm coming across many of them. So far I've had:

-Repeat ganking of Ore nodes I'm in the middle of mining OR standing on top of and trying to get rid of some mob so I can mine. In fact, I'd say as long as there is a player in the vicinity this happens - we're talking 70% of the time.

Ganking of quest items. For example I needed to free 10 baby mammoths. I'm clearly in the area and someone rides in and takes it - happens all the time
Ganking of NPC's that you need to kill AFTER I put out an announcement asking anyone that needs the guy to group up so we don't have to fight for him.
Any time a person asks for a quest location or a where is xxx on the general chat, there's 2-3 people telling him to shut up and go get quest helper, etc.
Not giving a "ty" when you buff a fellow player and/or not buffing you in return (way more often then in TBC)

I realize everyone is focused on leveling, and places are more crowded then usual but I implore you to be polite to your fellow WOW player, treat others the way you'd like to be treated. I'm sure everyone learned that back in kindergarten but they seem to have forgotten it when getting on WOW.

How about you guys? Are you seeing the same things on your servers, or is it just Antonidas?

Check out the S5 coundown clock

2008-11-13T08:22:00.001-08:00

So I'll be getting my copy of wrath and installing tonight after work. Looks like I'm way behind with Firelight already dinging 71 as I write this (congrats man). BUT as exiting as the expansion is; what I am waiting for is the start of Season 5 !!

So to help motivate myself and every other hard core PvP'er out there I've put a countdown clock at the top of the Blog. If you want to get started on Arena right away you need to ding 80 in 32 days... and counting :)

I'll keep folks updated with my progress; and as we get closer I'll talk about the new BG's, what to do if your arena partner hasn't dinged 80, gear requirements, etc.

WOTLK tomorrow - time to respec (shudder) PvE

2008-11-12T08:11:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks,

I'm just kidding the respec isn't so bad, in fact you could do without it if youSo WOTLK comes out tomorrow. For some people that means they'll be playing from Midnight to dawn. For folks with family and work (like myself). I'll be lucky to have it fully installed and get an hour or two of play time Thursday night.

That means I need to be prepared. I've already cleaned out a lot of bank items. I'll post some additional stuff tonight. I also need to respec myself from a straight PvP build to something a little better suited to grinding. After playing around with the tree I found i didn't have to move that much around... Turns out PvP is a solid grinding spec (we all knew that anyway :)... But For personal preference I've moved the points around a little:

Although I played around with 0/10/51 I stuck with 0/5/56

Here's what I dropped:

Eye for and Eye - No NPC is going to be critting you so no need to keep this one

Crusade - Down from 3/3 to 1/3... I wanted to keep it but no room. Level 71 and 72 will have it full again

Sanctified Wrath - Now with the forbearance change I prefer to have a bubble available most of the time anyway, these points can move somewhere else. I'd like to preface that this is a bit subjective. You may allocate your points differently if you'll be doing a a lot of groups, dungeons, etc.... I expect the majority of my time to be soloing with limited groups.
Divine Purpose - Let's face it, the reason this talent is picked up is for the extra stun resist. With the Human Racial ability changed to a stun resist ability I can let this and my Medallion of the Alliance go.

Here's what I added:

Vindication - This procs a lot, vindication is just about always up within a few seconds of attacking, it should help with almost every mob.

Improved Ret Aura - My "recount" add-in broke down the numbers and it turns out that regular Ret Aura seems to total between 5-6% of my overall damage in PvP getting the improved version should increase my overall damage an extra 2.5-3%, maybe more because I don't always have Ret aura on in PvP (going against a frost mage, shadow priest, etc). I expect to have Ret aura on all the time when grinding.

Full points in RV - I could have left this 1/5 and put some of the extra points in Crusade.... but RV will tick against everyone, Crusade will not work against beasts/animals and it seems there's going to be a fair amount of them in WOTLK. So I'm going with a sure fire proc

Well there you go. I haven't Specced for PvE in months, so any comments/suggestions are welcome.

WOTLK 2 days to go - Arena over for now

2008-11-11T08:46:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks,

OK so Monday night was the last night of level 70 arena. There will be a new Season starting December 16th. Full details on what's happening to Arena and your arena points below.

Since the season is behind us I'll be back to regular posts.

Also, since the season was ending asked our resident Gladiator Mage to dump his team and help me get that S3 weapon with an 1800 rating (I have been hovering in the low/mid 1700's). He said it would be more fun to take the rating to 2050 and get the S4 !! Sure enough within a couple of hours we hit 2050. Since I was maxed out on arena points I was able to pick up both my S4 weapon and S3 shoulders!.... They looks so great I updated my photo!

Of course it won't help me with arena :).... But the increased DPS and armor should be great for leveling. I don't expect to waste money on gear until at least the high 70's and perhaps level 80.

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)
We have created this new thread to reflect some updates we have made to the way in which arena points and seasons will be handled as we transition into Wrath of the Lich King.

We wanted to remind everyone that Arena season 4 is coming to a close. During next Tuesday's maintenance on November 11th, all arena teams, as well as ratings, will be wiped and arena charter NPCs disabled. However, arena points will persist until the beginning of the next arena season, or until a player reaches level 71. Thus, Arena points will be rewarded for rated games played this week and players will be able to purchase Arena items that do not require a team or personal rating. Upon the close of Arena season 4, players at level 70 will continue to be able to play skirmish Arena matches against other level 70 opponents even after Wrath of the Lich King launches.

Arena season 5 is currently scheduled to begin on December 16th, and once that happens players who have reached level 80 will be able to compete in rated arena matches where they can gain arena points which can be used to purchase level 80 arena gear, as well as compete for end-of-season rewards. Players who remain at level 70 after Season 5 begins will only have access to play skirmish arena matches against other level 70 players. However, two new skirmish brackets will be made available (71-75, 76-80) for players who wish to hone their arena skills while leveling in Northrend.

Such huge nerfs coming - Won't post for a bit

2008-10-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

Sadly, such HUGE NERFS are coming to ret pally's that I'm just going to post the link and frankly.. untill this mess gets sorted out I'm not going to bother working on updated builds, talent trees etc. Every week a new round of nerfs comes along that it's just pointless to try and adjust to it... FU_K
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11829377161&sid=1

Patch coming .....get your PvP spec here!

2008-10-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, so patch 3.02 is due out this Tuesday. I've been PvPing like no one's business and I can tell you the best spec for a Ret Pally is 0/8/53. It's enabled me to win over 3 to 1 in 1v1 duels and plenty of skirmishes in arena.

Thanks to the new achievements tab in 3.02 I can tell you that I'm currently at 160 wins and 50 losses for dueling. And now I'll share the spec that let me get there :)

So let's look at the protection tree first.

Divine Strength - 5 points : This increases you STR by 15% and is a must. Stoicism - 3 points : this one reduces stun effects by 30% which is huge considering how many stuns people will put on you. Also decreases the chance your spells get dispelled by 30% which ties in very well to an item in the ret tree.

Now the meat; the Ret tree: I'm not going to go over everything just the must have new stuff that you might be wondering if you should get or not. Something I wouldn't go over is BOM. If you don't know enough to put two points into it (since we're not doing kings) then you need more help then i can cover here :)

Eye for an Eye - This now causes 20% of their damage to go back to your opponent every time they crit. Spell, ranged, melee doesn't matter. Every crit 20% back. And let me tell you crit% is buffed for everyone. Waaay more crits going around. You NEED this.

Sanctified Seals - ONLY PUT 2/3 points here. Combined with stoicism this means you give a person trying to dispel your spells a 96% failure rate. And they will try because 4% means your spells will show up as dispellable. This means the guy will spend his time trying to dispel your stuff instead of hitting you.

Divine Purpose - The big thing here is that you get a 100% chance to remove a stun effect. It's like a free trinket...almost. Doesn't remove some stuff like Freeze trap, etc because that's a spell, not a stun effect according to bliz.. bah. STILL EXCELLENT EXTRA TRINKET AGAINST ROGUES, DRUIDS, ETC

Judgment of the Wise - Absolutely critical if you don't want to run out of mana. And with this talent you almost never run out.

The art of War - Not only do you get a 10% crit increase for two spells that will always be in your rotation, but you get an instant Flash of Light when your divine storm or crusader strike crit. This has saved my bacon on numerous occasions. No more getting out of the fight and stand around for 1.5 seconds hoping you don't get interrupted.... did i mention your FOL will now heal for between 1,200 - 2,400hp?

Sanctified Wrath - J u s t - t a k e - i t

Sheath of Light - this is what is going to enable those huge 2k Flash of Light and 6k holy light heals. You need it, you need it NOW

Righteous Vengeance - I took this over fanaticism because it ups your divine storm crits by 25% as well as judgments. And those two account for the majority of your damage.

Davine Storm - The Creme-de-la-creme.. the new OP spell that will destroy your enemies and heal you at the same time. You're going to love it, you're going to use it, you're going to be the SHIT with this one. Not only will it damage up to 4 targets at once, but 20%% of that damage will be given back to you (or up to 3 raid members) as health.... While it really shines in 5v5 even in 2v2 it's great. It even help dropping down pets, if they're close enough to their master, as pets count as a target if in range.

Good luck, don't forget tonight is the last day of S4 arena.... Get in those games if you're looking for a title.

Fun Soloing instances on the PTR

2008-09-27T23:12:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I spent the day soloing regular instances on the PTR. With the new divine storm spell that damages up to 4 targets AND heals you for 20% of the damage done, many instances are now soloable. Today I've done:

Hellfire Ramparts
Blood Furnace
Underbog
Stockades

Can't do them on heroic, just regular but it's pretty spiffy soloing one of these. Usualy takes under half an hour if you don't stop to loot every corpse. Shame all the blue items are BOP.. otherwise I could give them to my alts :)... I'm including a good shot i got of me tanking about half the mobs in the stockades

A tie

2008-09-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

I "think" I may have seen this once before in a 2's game.. but now I have a screenshot of it. Last night my 3's team was playing and we tied. Kyllia (our rogue) was our last man standing, but had only about 20% health. The opponent's team had a hunter left with around 70% left.

I figured our chances were slim, but we cheered Kyllia on, and he managed to close the gap. I thought he'd die any second but instead the hunter's life kept shrinking. Suddenly the the summary screen comes up and... a TIE!

FYI if you ever receive this. A tie gives no points AND DOES NOT COUNT AS A GAME. We were at 9 games going into this and stayed at 9 games after.

We wound up facing the team again during the next match. Fortunately we beat them :)

I beat a Gladiator on the PTR

2008-09-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

That's right folks. Last night I was outside of the SW gates, which seems to be a gathering place for duels. On of the many duels I fought was a Rogue with a Gladiator title. The match was close, with me down to maybe 10% health but I won!

The Gladiator informed me that he did everything correctly as far as he was concerned (no messing up of keys, popping trinkets at the wrong time, etc) so it was a valid win. That's not to say we're totally OP...... Here's how it's been breaking down for me so far:

vs Rogue - Usually win, down to 20% or less life at the time
vs Druid - If ferrel, I win easily if it's resto I can win but not guaranteed
vs Mage - Can only win if I have my bubble available, and it's not guaranteed
vs Shaman - Same as mage
vs Paladin - 60/40, whoever manages their bubble and cooldowns better wins
vs Warlock - So far it's mostly losses, they have to many fearing abilities and I can't get close enough without the DOTs killing me, bubble or not.
vs Warrior - Not enough matches to test, preliminary results are promising but Titan's grip is broken on the PTR

Glyphs

2008-09-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I started messing around with glyphs on the PTR, I'm not going to go over the various kinds, other blogs I link to do that nicely.. but I did have to look up some questions, including how to equip glyphs... so I'm pasting a Q&A on them below... taken from a wow forum post.

Q. What are glyphs?
A. Glyphs are similar to enchants however they buff your spells/abilities/talents in widely different ways. Everyone has 3 glyph "slots" open to them. These slots are viewable on a separate tab in your spellbook.

Q. How do I equip glyphs?
A. Just right click on the glyph and select a slot to put it in.

Q. It says I need a Lexicon of Power, what is that?
A. Ask a guard in a major city. The Lexicon is a giant floating book which works like a Mana Loom, just stand near it to equip your glyph. Not all glyphs require a Lexicon.

Q. Are glyphs stackable?
A. No, each glyph is unique.

Q. What happens to glyphs I equip?
A. Equipped glyphs are removed from your inventory. You can have a maximum of 3 equipped glyphs. If you already have 3 equipped glyphs, you can overwrite an equipped glyph the same as an enchant or gem. Overwriting destroys the equipped glyph.

Q. What are minor glyphs?
A. Minor glyphs are not currently implemented as of build 8962. Minor glyphs affect spell effects or ability effects. A prime example is the Penguin glyph for mage's polymorph. REPEAT: Minor glyphs are not currently implemented.

Q. How do I train Inscription?
A. Go to any major city beside Shatrath and ask a guard.

Q. How do I skill up from XXX? There are no trainers in the City!
A. Depending on your level, you can train in major cities. For higher recipes, there are additional trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar.
** Edit: Bliz broke trainers in all areas in build 8970. Training above 125 seems to not work.

Q. What is required for Inscription?
A. Herbs. Lots of herbs. All levels, all kinds.

Q. ZOMG, I see you have a skill of 400+, how did that happen?
A. In previous builds, it was possible to craft high end glyphs using very low level herbs. In build 8962, all high end glyphs (above level 350 Inscription) require Northrend herbs.

Q. AWESOMESAUCE! Can I have that glyph?
A. Probably not. Many people are asking for glyphs that are only craftable using Northrend herbs. Any scribe who has a 350+ skill level cannot make high end glyphs.

Q. But I saw Dudeguy over there selling that glyph!
A. They probably made their high end glyphs prior to build 8962 using low level mats. I had a few of those but I gave them away to people without realizing it.

Arena is up on the PTR - Screenshots!

2008-09-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Hey Folks, so I played my first new arena matches on the PTR, "Dalaran Arena" (below) and "Ring of Valor" (the 2nd pic). I also respecced for the shorter stun time. Here's my impressions

DA - You enter in a sewer grate and you need to jump off it to start the match. After a few seconds though, I was somehow shot thru the air across the screen to the grate you see on the right of the photo. I wasn't actually in combat though, just landed in the other grate. At that point I saw my oponents had actually started to the grate left of me. (Our starting areas were on the same side, just one got the left grate, one the right)

The arena is large, with boxes to jump on and a waterfall that spews water at least once per 20 seconds. (I didn't keep count, was busy kicking ass :) I stood next to the waterfall and it knocked me back a little, but no apparent damage. I'm not sure what would happen if I actually stood in the center of the waterfall.

This arena reminded me a little of the ring of trials. It started you underground, and your platform rose up to the center. Wher were were imedialty met by two shamans with full totems. We were maybe 15 yards away from each other at the start, so their totems took full effect. I also noticed that the shamans were able to keep full health with no problems. I havn't looked at the new shaman builds, but it seems that either my random partener realy sucked, or shaman heals have been buffed quite a bit.

Anyway, every so often, flames woudl shoot from the sides of the arena, I hear they will cause damage if you go thru them, so wait for the flames to die out if you want to cross. There are also small pedistals that rise and fall slowly, you can climb up them. Overall this arena is much smaller, and I think will be fast and furious, while the sewers will be good to steath classess

That's it for the moment, I'll try to get more then 2 matches in and give some more descritpions if i can. If you have questions, ask them and I'll try to answer

I"m healing for up to 6k

2008-09-17T11:27:00.001-07:00

Hey folks.

My character copied to the PvP realm this morning and the BG's we working. Sadly I forgot to head to a trainer beforehand and was missing most of my judgment spells, and I was redoing those toolbars again... but here's my top two observations of the morning, before the server went down (again)

#1) ALL classes are doing more damage, I'm taking crits of 2-3k fire damage all the time, and even DOTs are taking 400-500 off per tick. I'm also doing more damage... but the point is everyone's dying faster

#2) My heals are I N S A N E. My Flash of light seems to be a minimum 1,300k heal, with crits aboce 2k. Holy light is going for over 6k!!! Did I mention I'm a friggin ret pally?!? If heling is going to be like this, putting 5 points into spritual focus will make you almost invincible.

Oh, one last thing... I never ran out of mana in my first BG on the PTR.. hell I never got below 50%

More to come.

First thoughts on the PTR

2008-09-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So my character copied over today, but I've been getting disconnected a LOT. The server is slow, and currently outlands are down, BG's are down, Arena is down. So I havn't actually got to do much of anything except get new spells and talents set up. Here's what I think you'll notice right away

PTR SPECIFIC - If you copy a character get ready for a lot of lag, and your talent trees are set to zero so reset them right away. You also cannot load mods into the PTR so you're stuck with the default wow interface. I was also asked to rename my character, after asking most/everyone is asked to do this for the PTR, it doesn't affect your live character.

WOTLK GENERAL - There is a new mount window. If you want to mount up on the PTR, and I think in WOTLK, you need to hit SHIFT+P to access the mount page, then drag a mount icon onto your toolbar, or keep going back to the mount page to click the icon. I was also told that once you drag a mount icon onto the page, you can delete the mount from your bag. Havn't actually tried it yet, but will do so later to double check.

PALADIN SPECIFIC - Sanctity arua is gone. I don't remember reading that before, but there is no sanctity aura for ret pally's. That makes Retribution aura the only offensive aura available. You'll want to put some talent points into it now I think.

My crusader aura seems to be always on, in addition to whatever combat aura I choose.

I have access to the blood elf paladin mount.

I did go after a couple 63 level mobs just outside shat, the damage seemed to only be white, even though it was spell damage, but the average hit was about 1,500k. I don't belive that was a crit.

That's it for now. More later if I can stay on without being disconnected for more then 5 min

WOTLK released Nov 13th - New talents coming sooner

2008-09-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, blizzard has annouced that the new expansion is out on the 13th, that's less then 2 months! Patch 3.02 (that's the one with all the new tallents) is on the PTR right now and should go live sooner, perhaps next month.

There have been plenty of changes to the Ret talents and so far there look to be two viable builds. there are so many new, jucy talents however that it's going to take some time to figure out what works.

I've put in for a character copy and am downloading the client today. I should be up in about 2 days according to the copy que. I'll report back on the new talents at 70 shortly after.

WOTLK talents coming before the expansion

2008-08-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

Blizzard announced that a new 3.02 patch will be happening before the expansion. This patch will include "New class spells and talents" which to me means they'll be giving pally's their new talent tree's ahead of time! THIS IS JUST SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER SUPER news for arena. Oh did I mention it's SUPER!. My old Holy/Ret team may Rise from your grave...da.da.da.da (that's the opening line from Altered Beast for all you 80's arcade fans)

So check you the WOTLK talent calc on the right side of the page and let's go to town. I figure there will be two main options for RET,

0/20/41 - Now looks like this:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sZxGzhRhZxfMtb0uAGobz

The main advantage here is a HUGE 30 second HOJ cooldown reduction, combine that with your Arena gear, you're looking at a 6 second stun with a 20 second cooldown! Take advantage of that before it gets nerfed! Literally you'll have the guy stunned 1/3rd of the time, add Repentance to that and your opponent is basically on lockdown! You'll also get the new Divine Guardian, which at first may not seem like something to carry into arena, especially 2's.... but how many times has your partner been close to death while you're sitting at 90% life? This way you can help him stay alive a little longer.

0/8/53 - Now looks like this:
http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sZxhZxfMtr0hAIoxzqo

This was the old 0/5/56. With so many classes getting better stun abilities, you have got to put the 3 extra points into stoicism. You realy will need that 30% stun reduction. and the 53 points in RET get you the new improved Eye for an Eye (good against all crits, not just casters) Righteous Vengeance and Fanaticism (25% greater chance to crit, and 25% higher crit when it happens) Plus the new Divine Storm which will be awesome in 5's especially and will do a little heal anywhere.

Good time are here my friends.

How to get to 1800

2008-08-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So as you know from my last post I made 1700, now how to get to 1800? Clearly I'll need a PRO to carry me to this high of a rating. At this point I've got to find the best partner for my class and a person with skills enough to get there.

Am I skilled enough? With the right partner it's possible. First of all, I need to get enough arena points. As of tomorrow I should have at least 1349 arena points, leaving me with 2,012 points to go. Now an 1800 rating in 2's will give me 547 points, so I need another 1,465 points untill I can even atempt a serious run. That's at one month before I can attempt a serious run at my S3 weapon and have the points for it.

That also gives me a month to find the right partner. I'll keep you all updated :)

1700 !!

2008-08-15T08:39:00.001-07:00

Hey folks,

I'd played over 500 matches this season and still struggling for 1650. Despite all the (true in my experience) forums telling me I was a gimped class in 2's I kept at it. But after Kelf left, I got a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth.

So I said screw it, and convinced a Rival frost mage to do 2's with me. Turns out this guy doens't play the mage much any more and didn't have any S4 gear. But I got a hell of a lesson in SKILL > GEAR... 21 games and we go to 1700!

Frankly it was like a hot knife cutting thru butter. 17 games won and 4 games lost. Out losses were as follows:

Mage/Rogue - 1st match of the night. Nothing special here but we just needed to synch up a little. I hand't played with a frost mage since the middle of S3.

Shaman/Shaman - They gave the mage the old LOS treatment and purged all our buffs. It also didn't help that we were slow to figure out which shammy to get on.... as my partner doesn't use Proximo!

Druid/Shaman - The match started fine, but about 30 seconds in, the druid switched to tree from. We had to hop off the shammy and we just couldn't out DPS before we died.

Shaman/Rogue - Rogue got a good start on my mage, somehow we got seperated he was down to 40% life before I even knew what was going on, much less could give him BOP.

There were a couple harry games. Once where I was the the last one standing vs a Rogue. Fortunatly with my new 0/20/41 spec my HOJ was up in time to stun the guy and get the kill, despite the fact I was down to 238 life. A couple of times I died, but the mage showed why he got a Rival title and made quick work of the remaining teamember.

Next up, 1800 once I get the arena points!

S4 - Week 8: Bad night Kelf quits!

2008-08-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Our 3's team played last night, we started the week at 1532, which was already down from our previous week. I was ready to get in there and raise us up a ways, but it was not to be.

We played 10 games total, but I need to split it into two seperate events.
5 games - Played against Random opponents
5 games - Played against the same team!?!

That's right, over the course of the night we wound up facing the same team 5 times. 3 in a row, then a break then 2 in a row. I'm not sure what was going on with the system last night but it was a first for me.

The team in question was a Warrior/Shaman/Pally. We head straight for the Shammy who has all his totems out. I take a few seconds to clear them out while Kyllia keeps the Shammy stun-locked. We kill the Shammy and take the match. The next time however, we have a LOS issue, Kelf can't get a heal off on Kyllia and Kyllia dies.

We hop back in a 3'rd time and there's the team again. Similar LOS issues combined with a lack of communication looses us this match as well. We break for a couple minutes and pick up some other teams (more on that shortly) Then a after three more games we come across the same team again!

This time we split a little, Kyllia on the Shammy and myself on the Pally. I manage to kill off the Pally, but shortly after Kyllia goes down. I tell Kelf "it's just like old times, I'm on the Shammy keep me alive" (we played 2's together for months). The shaman gains wolf form before I can SOJ him. He takes off and Kelf tells me to switch to the warrior....

Okay, I start burning the warrior and it's going well but then Kyllia says "uh I think the shaman is ressing the pally" Its true, we have the warrior down to maybe 15%, and the shamman and newly rezzed pally drop down and finish us off..... LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU - IF THERE'S A RESSING CLASS DON'T GIVE IT TIME TO BRING A CHARACTER BACK

One last time we pull the same team. Now I don't have any explanation for this, but we down the Shammy (I'm 99.999% sure of it) and switch over to the pally. A couple seconds later I hear the shammy is back with 41% life? WTF? I start burning him down again but I can't kill him in time, Kyllia drops, then Me, then Kelf. Another loss.... Total against this team 1-4 The other teams we played didn't go much better. Overall for the night was 2-8. We slipped to under 1500, horrible for a team that got to 1611 the first night we played.

*UPDATE* - AFTER POSTING ON SOME FORUMS I FOUND THE GUY USED THIS TRINKET

Right after our 1st match I could tell Kelf was disgusted. He was unaturally silent for the matches, and the multiple losses wern't helping. I asked him about it about 7 games in and he said he was just done with PvP. At the end of our 10 he told us to find another teamate. He said he was tired of his class being shut down so easily, having no CC, only 1 school of magic, etc.

Over the last few weeks I've noticed Kelf being more and more angry about not getting up to 1700. I can't blame him but now we're taking apps for a healer. If you're a Priest/Shaman/Druid... Whisper me in game!

Kylia summed up my feelings on the subject pretty well "You can't play just 10 games per week and pin all your hopes on that, you'll get your highest ratings on a good run, which are harder to get with so few games"

Arena - be smart, come prepared

2008-08-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

I'd like to talk a minute about being prepped for your arena matches. Last night Kyllia and I played 2's. We started the night at 1600 and reached a high of 1624, before dropping down. We could have gone higher, but we didn't... Why you ask?

After dropping down a little we get back into the 1620's and meet up with a druid/warrior team. We manage to get the druid, leaving just the warrior. The problem is that I'm down to about 1k life and completely OOM, Kyllia is down around 30% and the warrior is at 60+%.

The warrior charges me and I die. Now just Kyllia and the Warrior. Kyllia blinds the guy and runs away. "Bandage UP!" I yell out...."I Can't I don't have any bandages" is what comes thru my vent.

O H S H I T !

Kyllia has no choice but to rush the warrior and they go at it. The warrior is down to 1%... Kyllia is down to 3%... the match ends... we lost :( prepared

Now this isn't to rag on Kyllia. We all make mistakes, whether it's leaving an incorrect trinket in a spot, no Star's Tears, missing a stun, etc.... but it really goes to illustrate the need of taking a minute before you start the night to make sure you have everything setup, your gear is correct, and you're ready to go.

Now I'm glossing over the fact that we reached 1624 last night, that was our highest score to-date in S4. It represented hundreds of games of work. But to loose because of a bandage, well that's just hard to swallow... Ended the night at 1575

Am I a PRO Paladin?

2008-08-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

Back in the beginning days of the blog, I wrote an article on "Am I a good Paladin?" which went thru all the minimum requirements to be viable as a ret spec. Today I'll go thru what it takes to be PRO in PvP, both for stats and for play style. Future article will delve deeper into some of these, but here's the overview.

You might be saying to yourself... "Drunk, what the hell do you know about being PRO you can't make 1700!". I need to point out that currently Ret Pally is a gimped class and spec. You can play at a pro level and still not make it. Don't believe me? Let's look at some live stats.

Top 5 builds of 2k and 2.2k teams in 2's 3's and 5's.... #with a Pally of any kind ZERO
All 2,000 rating 2v2 teams with a Paladin (of any spec) 4%... 2% for 2,200 rating
One Ret Pally in the top 10 2's teams
Zero Ret Pally's in the to 10 3's teams
Zero Ret Pally's in the top 10 5's teams

You can customize the reports in even more ways, for example if I pick the top 10 teams with Paladins, 9 out of 10 teams with Pally's have a Holy Pally.. not RET. I refuse to re-roll and try each week to get better, while waiting for the new expansion, which (assuming no major nerfs) should make us much more viable in arena.

First let's look at some basic stats. To be at the top of your game, the stats have to be there. At minimum you should see:

1. Attack Power - 2,000 (buffed)
2. Health - 10,000
3. Resilience - 400
4. Melee Crit - 30%
5. Melee Hit - 81
6. Mana- 7,000

Your stats go up based on gear, and a bare minium you should have all of the current S4 honor gear that does not require a personal rating requirement, along with the S2 sword. Normally I'd say you need even better gear, but PRO players on the forums always say SKILL > GEAR so with that in mind, let's see how to up your skill!

#1) Keybindings - All Gladiator player's agree you cannot be PRO by clicking around. You need to bind your most common spells and play untill it becomes second nature to use keys instead of clicking (look for a more detailed post on this in the future)

#2) Movement - I've also been told you should be moving iwth your mouse, not moving and turning with a keyboard (I havn't been able to do this yet, one of the reason's I'm not a gladiator i guess :)

#3) Play Frequency - Unless your an OP class and spec (cough... Resto Druid...cough) you're never going to get high ratings with just 10 games per week, the best players out there are doing arena the majority of the time they're on.

#4) Communication - Obviously key. Get on Vent or TS, and just leave the mic on voice pickup. Wasting keys on push-to-talk will only hamper you and will result in less communication. Leaving the mic always on you can call out pretty much everything, resulting in better timing of stuns, cleanses, heals, etc.

#5) Pick the right partner - For Ret Pally's a 5's team is best if you can get it, but many people cannot. In 2's partner don't go partnering with the wrong class like a hunter, or with the wrong spec like a ferrel druid. In 3's there are more possible setups, the most cookie cutter being Arms Warrior/Resto Druid/Ret Pally. Others will work if the communication is there.

S4 - Week 7: Ugly. Just ugly

2008-08-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

So Kelf Kyllia and I joined up for 3's last night. I had just managed to get my Libram of Divine Judgment and was feeling pretty good. So we cue up with a starting rating of 1611.

First team seems to be having it's way with us, and Kyllia mentions that they all have titles. "Oh?" yep GLADIATOR - GLADIATOR - DUELIST. We loose 18 points WTF!?!

For those of you not familiar with PvP titles , Here's how they break down:

Gladiator	Top 0.5% of arena teams at the end of the previous season.
Duelist	Top 3.0% of arena teams at the end of the previous season.
Rival	Top 10% of arena teams at the end of the previous season.
Challenger	Top 35% of arena teams at the end of the previous season.

Grimly we wait a minute or two and join up again, I have to say I don't remember too many specific teams, but bad luck followed us the whole night. Kelf disconnected twice during arena matches, and against poor teams which cost us -19 points the first DC and -17 points the 2nd DC. I have to say, this isn't Kelf's or anyone's fault (outside of his ISP) but that's 35 lost points where we should have gained around 20 instead.... in other words a 50 point difference.

We faced this team a 3rd time with all three of us and beat them without too much difficulty, so I can safely say that if we could have taken them the first two times.

On top of that we wound up facing another couple teams with at least one Rival or higher in the team and of course our fair share of folks with S3 weapons.

Addmitedly the Rival and S3 weapons is a little QQ, I'm just saying the night was full of unpleasantness. We also had a little trouble picking the correct target in a few matches... But our first match combined with the two disconnects were realy bad for us. End of the night 9-13 with a rating of 1532.... a drop of 79 points

A little fun for WOTLK

2008-08-05T08:13:00.001-07:00

There's a Blizz developer named Kalgan who plays a warrior and has a history of frowning on Paladins, especially Ret Pallies. I've seen some of his posts myself and he talks about Pally's being overrepresented in arena (sure buddy, overrepresented in the 1400 bracket!)

Rumor is that he's furious at the new changes allowing RET to be a viable option in WOTLK. I found a video that shows his fury at the new changes! Enjoy and pray nothing gets the nerf bat before WOTLK goes live!

A slippery slope but we didn't fall

2008-08-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, so a few interesting items for the week.

While advertising for a heroic somone gave me the ol' "LOLRET" reply. While I don't get it that often it's annoying
Next day while looking to run the same heroic there was a DPS spot, but the leader wouldn't take me because I have no CC, dispite the fact there was a rogue already in the group and I let him know that I'm very well geared, and run heroic SP all the time (the guy was a pally no less)
I had someone in my guild tell me "Being a good Ret Pally is like wining the special olympics - you may be the best out there but you're still a retard"
I ran into a Ret Pally on my server who recognized me and let me know he reads the blog! SWEET, I"M FAMOUS :).... Seriously it was nice to see folks enjoying the blog!

So Kyllia, Kelf and I ran 3's again last night. If you read my previous post, we tore it up last week, but I was unsure if we just got lucky or if this would realy work. We needed to play again to find out. I think the guys were feeling the same way. So... did we tank or own?

So we got together around 10pm. I think we were all a little rusty. Unlike the last two weeks where I had gotten 100+ games in with Kyllia, this week we only played 30 or so, with all of those early in the week. As such we got off to a rock start. The main problem was that Kyllia and I wern't synched up on a target. For example, facing a warlock/druid/warrior team, We'd start on the lock, and then there would be some confusion on whether to swap to the druid, or stay on the lock.

I didn't help things much by going straight to the druid without thinking, leaving Kyllia alone with the lock, but not keeping the druid busy enough to stop him from healing. last night we learned that the key to winning here is for Kyllia and I to be completely in synch with what the other is doing. With Kelf we have to be careful not to LOS him. Which can be problematic at times, because many times it a choice of whether to
a) Finish an opponent and hope I don't die
b) Let Kelf heal us but get off the opponent leaving him to heal up again
It's a little bit of a crapshoot. In general when Kelf starts yelling at us, then I KNOW it's time to stop and let him heal :)

It took us perhaps 5 matches to start synching up again. That left us at about 2-3, then we started coming back. 3-3, then a random DC left kelf disconnected in the middle of a match, and us at 3-4. We bravely kept fighting on untill 11:30. In the starting area of our final match I notice the oposing team has only 2 players... (YES) we run out and it's a shaman and druid, oh how I hate both of those classes!

I had a feeling these OP motherfuckers thought they could do 3's one person short. And once we rushed them I was sure they knew what they were doing. Both behind seperate pillars, the druid right at the 30 yard mark.... But we're no idots either. We start on the Shaman and start working him down. When the druid pops, I briefly throw a stun his way and rush back to the shaman he's slowly going down. Kelf takes up position between the two pillars and keeps the druid stunned while we finish off the shaman. Then we all wail on the druid.

I just had this feeling that it was an OP team and as we're taking down the druid I'm yelling "TAKE THAT YOU OP MOTHERFUCKERS! GIMMEE 25 POINTS!!" Match ends and we get +23 points! We end the night at 1611, ten points above our start.

The three main things I took from last night:
#1) The first week wasn't a fluke, this is a good team with the potential to reach 1700, if we work at it. Communication is key, I won't say no to a litle luck either :)
#2) I noticed a LOT more teams with one or two people with S3 weapons (and probably S4 other gear). We need to gear up as quickly as possible to close the gear gap.
#3) Playing this team is the most fun I've had in a long time. Half because the matches are good, half beause I have hope again of acheving 1700 or better (and a PvP title for next season)

S4 - Week 6: Amazing week, different team (sort of)

2008-07-31T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, Week 6 is here and instead of playing my usual 2's Kelf and I joined up with a rouge I've been playing with a lot during my off days. Kyllia. I wanted to write about my 2's matches with Kyllia, but despite being quite fun, the rating (and dificulty getting there) has been on par with Kelf and I, perhaps a little worse.

SO.. ON TO LAST NIGHT. All 3 of us join Kyllia's abandoned 3's team and que up. The starting rating for the team is 1403, so I expect some easy wins, but with a new team you never know. We started out like this:
1-0
2-0
3-0
4-0
5-0
6-0
7-0
8-0
9-0
10-0
11-0
11-1

It was incredible, win after friggin' win! I had never had so many wins in a row. Of course the first 8 or so were needed just to get us up to 1500, after that I expected stiffer competition and shortly after I got it. 12th Game we met up against Mage/Mage/healer (A priest I think) and were handed our first loss.

We downed the healer but then took to long figuring out which mage to get on, but Kelf went down. I got the 1st mage right after, but then died myself, leaving Kyllia vs the last mage. It was close both were down under 30% but we lost.

Fortunatly the loss was more due to our lack of focus, not because the team was better. We met up with them again that night and beat them :)

We did go up against one team Rogue/Rogue/Priest who beat us twice in a row. This was the only team we faced that night that I felt we were "outclassed" everything else felt very duable. End of the night 20-5, 1601 rating!

Kelf was finally able to pick up his chestpiece and Kyllia got a S4 thrown weapon. Some truely excellent work by everyone that night. There were three things I noticed that I watned to share though.... I'm not sure how this will affect us going forward.

#1) We got a lot of teams multiple times, some as many as 3 or 4. This was great because we could farm them, but in higher rankings I wonder if this could reverse on us. We played late on Wednesday night, so perhaps this was just due to the time slot.

#2) The vast majority of our losses so far seemed either timing issues, or mess ups on our part. This bodes well for us making 1700 or higher, but only more games under our belt will show if this was an especially lucky night or not.

#3) Many teams gave us less then 15 points, meaning that we were paired against lower ranked teams. I'm not going to read into this too much, as a staring rating of 1403 and late time slot made the parings a little odd. But I'm keeping an eye out on how many points we win in the future.

S4 - Week 5: Stagflation

2008-07-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have to pause for a quick sidebar to say I switched 2's teams
last week for a while (more on that in a later post)
and then joined Kelf again last night. Which means
my personal rating reset to 1500, but that doesn't
affect the matchups or overall point allocation as
I was within 150 points of the team rating

Stagflation is where inflation goes up and while your economy stays soft. Kelf and I played last night and it felt similar. We were getting as little as 12 points for a win and as much as -18 for a loss.

The matches started out strong. First two matches were pretty easy wins, a good feeling. But then the 3rd match came up. I didn't see Kelf inside, and I got the "disconnect" tone on Vent. A few seconds later I hear Kelf come back, he got disconnected from the Game. Hoping back in, he didn't see the que and the match was starting 2 vs 1. Kelf and I started talking about what would happen if I quit before the match started, but that converstation happened a little too late and I went in solo. I held my own against a priest/rouge for a couple minutes but there was no doubt the match was theirs. Tally was now 2-1

We take a 2nd loss to a priest/warlock team, then a win, then another loss. Score is now 3-2, but our rating is sitting around 1549?!? WTF? The problem was that we were loosing more points then gaining each match. We keep on trucking and eventually make it up around 1579. Kelf was eager to see 1600 and we keep on going. But a couple back-to-back losses take us back down.

We eventually stopped at 7 - 6, with our score only going up by 9 points. At the time I thought we had actually lost 2 points overal, but looking at last weeks posting I see we gained a little... precious little for 15 matches.

WOTLK Paladin Talent info released

2008-07-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, Blizz has released the talents for the new WOW expansion. A lot of new stuff out there, and with months before the release some changes are gauranteed. Here's a link to the talent tree and what I think will be a viable arena spec.

Hitting my gear limit.

2008-07-17T08:30:00.000-07:00

As you know, if you've been reading my weekly arena posts, I briefly hit 1600 a couple of days ago before dropping back to 1557. I took that shining window of opportunity and bought my chest piece. That leaves me with 4 possible items to buy....in parenthases you'll see the % chance that I think I'll be able to reach that person rating with my current team

S4 Ring - 1,650 rating - (70%)
S4 Boots - 1,700 rating - (25%)
S4 Helm - 1,700 rating - (25%)
S3 Weapon - 1,800 rating - (1%)

As you can see, I'm running out of arena items to buy, and even more to the point I'm hitting a wall, where even if I have the points, I may not have the rating to get the last few items. What am I going to do then? I'm a few weeks away from having to answer that question, so I'll put it on hold for now.

I have been looking at upgrading my last piece of blue gear....That's right, my secret shame, I have one last blue item that I head into battle with every week. My old trusty Libram of Zeal I got this because it was realativly easy to obtain by myself. Most Librams require PvE content runs and I just don't do a lot of that. The 60 badge grind for Dory's embrace took forever.

After a little research, my new Libram will be Libram of Divine Judgement which seems to have around a 40-50% proc rate. This new Libram should help me in two ways:

#1) I should average an extra 80-100 AP over the course of a match. Considering that upgrading EVERYTHING from S3 to S4 gives +43 Strength (minus shoulders and weapon, which upgrade from S1 to S2) This is like doubling the Strength given from a complete season upgrade.

#2) I might hit Seal of Crusader a couple times during an arena match, but Seal of Command is BY FAR my most common seal. So a lot more use out of this.

Of course that means it's back to doing some specific daily quests, and grinding heroic SP. Fortunatly I had a couple badges left from my cloak purchase, combind with the chance for daily's to drop badges I could (theoretically) complete the nessisary badges with 3 heroic daily runs.... Considering how hard it is to find a pug group, I'll shoot for getting this some time in August.

S4 - Week 4: Up the down staircase

2008-07-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

So week 4 is upon us and Kelf and I met up late (even for us) last night. A start time of 10:30pm server time. I was a little concerned that as late as it was, we'd have only better (harder) teams to play against. Now as a reminder we started the week at 1551, which meant we needed a solid 4 wins to get to 1600, the next benchmark for gear.

On the plus side I had warmed up with a couple skirmish matches before we started AND had picked up my new legs right before the match. On the minus side I was going without much sleep and had to brew some 9pm coffee to keep me fresh, if a little tweaky.

So, first match comes up we win pretty easy. Que up again right away, this time we pull a Warrior/Druid combo (our first of many that night). These guys were terribad. Not much resilience and the warrior totally ignored me, leaving me to down the druid pretty quick. we IMMEDIATLY que up again, hoping to pull the same team. We're in luck and 2 minutes later the score is 3-0

I'm starting to think the evening is going pretty well and I take a quick look at the rating. It's higher then I thought 1591.... Now I'm a little nervous. A win would get us over 1,600 a loss and we're back down into the 1,570's.

We pull out of the gate and it's not the same team. Shaman and (if I remember right) a rouge. "Shammy" I say to Kelf and proceed to go at it.... This team wasn't going down without a fight. Quite a bit of Pillar humping, dumping of totems and of course the Shaman running away in wolf form. However after a slighty prolonged game we beat them!! 1,606 BABY / 4-0!! I'm extatic and tell Kelf to go get his gear. I'm picking up mine before we get into another match. I can't believe how well this week is going. Perhaps we need to que up at 10:30pm all the time :)

WHOA COWBOY. Kelf tell me he's short on points, by around 300. If we maintain this rating thru 10 games he can pick up the chest piece next week, but for now he has to pass. "That sucks" I tell him. He say's he'll drool over it another week. I go ahead and pick up my new chest but can't use it just yet.. need to get it gemmed and enchanted first.

The way the night is going, I'm having visions of 1650 but it was not to be. The break in queing was not good for us.

Next team up was a Shadow Priest and Shaman. UGH.... a couple times Kelf managed some last minute heals to keep us alive and managed to get that Priest down to 3%... but couldn't seal the deal. Our first loss of the night 4-1. The next match against another druid/warrior brought us our 2nd loss. Then a series of losses after that. Suddenly our 4-0 turned into a 4-5 and our 1606 rating had slipped to 1542.

I get a (probably well deserved) few words from Kelf about my inability to stay in his healing range. And how my chasing around the opponent left me vounerable AND out of range a handful of times over the last few matches.... Something I need to work on. But that's for another post.

So our last match ques up. Warrior/Druid combo again. These guys are good.... and annoying! The druid is humping that pillar like it was the 1st woman he's seen in 20 years. The warrior starts up on me, but after about 5 minutes of this, he switches over to Kelf, leaving me and the druid to go at it.

I swear this Druid is on auto-pilot. Spamming the same few heals once he gets a little ways aroudn the pillar, and switching to bear form whenever his health gets below 50% (or when he feels the need to hump that pillar again).

I'm doing all the right things, but this druid is as well. And he's regening mana like crazy. Meanwhile Kelf is down to a couple thousand mana as the warrior keeps beating on him, but he's able to do amazing things with little mana and has no problems keeping himself healed. Meanwhile the match is DRAAGING on.

I'd say about 10 minutes into the match, I get the potential for my 1st break. Up to now, I wasn't doing a ton of damage, his resilence combined with bear from was keeping my hits around 600-800 damage. But I had finished drinking up a little while ago and had set myself up.
- 2 Stuns available
- Full mana
- Avenging Wrath ready to pop
- Holy Vengance stacked x5

So, when the druid switched to humanoid form I put repentance on him, then poped my wings, and started wailing away. 2nd stun off and more damage. With the wings on I was getting thru the resilience a bit and getting crits in the 1,000 - 1,500 range. The druid's health slipped to under 20% for the first time ever. Just as importantly his mana was starting to get low.... I figured if I could repeat this cycle every 3 minutes I could eventually wear him down.

A couple repeats later I could see it was taking a toll. The druid was getting eager to run away for a bit and suddenly the guy stops humping the pillar and starts running all around the Arena. We briefly switch to the warrior at one point and get him down to 10%, but the druid runs back in time and heals the guy.

Back to chasing the druid....a few more cycles and finaly I get the druid. With no healer, the warrior goes down shortly after. What a friggin' long match! Seemed like it was for ever, but at least 20 minutes, probably closer to half an hour.

Kelf was done, I was too..... 1557 final score. 5-5 and 6 points higher then we started.

P.S. - I'd like to mention that during this match both Kelf and I had to break away to drink multiple times. I was especially vounerable to this, and probably sat to drink about 5 times during the match. The opponents lack of getting on me when drinking (or in the case of the druid) sitting down to drink himself while I got away was what eventually did the team in.

S4 - Week 3: One step forward, two steps back.

2008-07-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

So we met up on our usual Tuesday night and said 1600 or bust. Guess what? It was a bust. Here's how it went down.

First match against a druid/warrior combo. More often then not, we have this combo down. This time however, they were doing all the right things, warrior was stunning me keeping me from stacking Holy Vengance on they guy (this is the most mana efficent way of getting a druid down.. if you can stack it x5) and also allowing the Seal of Justice to expire once in a while, letting the druid run away.

The match started running long. 5 minutes into it my newborn started crying. 10 minutes into it I had to hold her and play at the same time.... now I'm not saying this caused the loss, but it didn't help. 15 minutes into the match we both went OOM and died.... I took a 10 minute break to put the baby down.

Back we go, and soon it's 0-3, then 1-5 and soon after 2-7. Although the scoreboard doesn't reflect it, most of the matches were very close with two of them leaving only Kelf and 1 opposing teamember to slug it out. But at the end of the day, a loss is a loss. We win the last match and end up around 1513....The night's not over though. We keep slugging along and a few close matches later we're at 3-9.. the rating has tanked to around 1491. OUCH

At this point I'm filled with a grim resolve. I've seen this happen last season but I know we're WAAY better then a sub 1500 team. I start cueing us up and we start hammering away. This next team is Hunter/Hunter, we pick one and down him in a few seconds. Then we tear the other one a new asshole. Que up again and another win, followed by another. We're on a roll but it's late, even for us. Perhaps 11:20pm or so. We wind up going 7-9 and ending at 1551.

I give my "way to get out of the toilet" congratulations and we log for the night.

On one hand, disapointing. We were two wins away from 1600 at the begining of the night, now we're about 4. On the plus side, we were able to salvage the rating somewhat and walk away with some dignity.

Season 4 - Week 2

2008-07-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, technically it's week 3 today , but I'm writing about my matches last night.. we played late as my 2's partner was out of town.

So I got on around 9:40pm... We ended week 1 at 1559 and I told Kelf that we're going 1575 or bust. That's the rating we needed to get our S4 bracers. 16 points doesn't sound hard, but considering loosing the 1st match can put you at -30 or more, it sure can be.

We start out a little rocky... we usualy do, but I hate seeing the rating tank. 3 games into it, we're 1-2 and another loss to a Lock/Rouge combo puts us at 1-3. Now, we saw this combo about 3 more times that night. After the 1st loss due to switching targets from the lock to rouge, we kept solid focus on the Lock and (while the matches wern't easy) didn't loose to that combo again.

9 matches in and we're 4-5..... A hard evening. Last match we win (I think a lock/rouge again) and we're 5-5 with 1563 rating. 4 measily points higher then when we started, but we got our 10.

Of course, I said 1575 or bust, and Kelf was game, so we kept going. Of course we fought a few priest/xxx combo's during these matches and while we no longer fear an automatic loss against a priest on the team, I'd probably bet against myself..... Mana burn is a BITCH when both members are so mana dependent.

So it was with a sinking feeling that at 7-7 and once again at 1563 and we get a shaman/priest combo. This is not a combo we were hoping to go against. If we win this match we get our bracers... loose and we're 30 points away again. We try to keep the shaman busy, but we HAVE to kill the priest first..... The shaman seems to be elemental, so he's thowing a good deal of damage, but Kelf is bravely healing thru it.

The priest isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he knows enough to start thowing in mana burns with increasing frequency. The priest see's that he can outheal my damage and both opponent's start going after Kelf.... "I'm running out of mana" comes they cry from my headphones. Here I make a fateful decision....

I'm taking plenty of DOT (Damage over time) thanks to the priest. My bubble is available, which will dispel everything and leave me alive longer. However so is my Avenging Wrath. Using this would cancel my bubble ability but substantially increase my DPS.

Since my opponents are focused on my partner, and I'm behind the priest, I go ahead an pop Avenging Wrath.. the wings come out and CRIT 2,200, CRIT 2,000... The prest goes well under 20%.... I spam concecration for some periodic damage and finish the priest off before he can heal. We then finish off the Shaman at a more leasurly pace.

+13 points... 1576 rating! WHEW!

We call it a night. That felt good, real good. We earned those bracers last night.

Intentionally loosing a BG

2008-06-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

I started a thread on another forum site and man, did I get people angry! What got folks so rilled up?

I asked why you would continue to try winning a BG match that is basically unwinable?

For example in AB.. the horde control 4 nodes to 1, they have 1700 points to your 300. If you keep fighting you can prolong the match perhaps another 5-10 minutes. If you let them take the last node the fight is over in 1 minute.... Either way you still loose and get your 1 mark of honor.

Another example is WSG... the horde have capped 2 flags, your team has 0 and they've taken the last flag from your flag room. Sure you could fight them every step of the way, staying in the BG for another 5-10 minutes or longer. Or you could just stop and let them take the 3rd one, collect your 1 mark of honor and be cuing again in a minute.

"But Tom", it's just an extra 5-10 minutes, what's the big deal?

Sure, an extra 5 minutes.. but over the last few months I've probably played over 1,000 various BG's. If even 15% were these types of obvious loses that's an extra 12.5 hours of time spent in BG's for nothing.

Some people play for the fun of it, and sure it can be fun when you're winning. But the honor grind gets old. Unfortunately it's necessary to get better gear. So at some point it pays to be efficient with your time and get the most honor per hour.... You'll thank me for showing you how to be efficient oh about 70 hours into your BG grind :)

So, i proudly stop fighting when I see I'm in an unwinable match in both AB and WSG... the honor points are minimal, and if I spam the chat chanel with a request to stop there's usualy enough people that agree that we win sooner.

Dory's Embrace

2008-06-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

So last night I took a quick break from grinding the BG's to do a few quests. I've got to earn that $$$ (What I spend it on is for another post).

Also, as usual whenver I the daily SP heroic is up, I went looking for a group for it. Now I don't normally go looking for Heroic Dungeons, but I'm still in need of an upgrade from my Sargent's Heavy Cloak to Dory's Embrace

The Difference in stats is as follows:

+10 Armor
+7 Stamina
+1 Crit Rating
+1 Resilience Rating
+8 Attack Power
+112 Armour Penetration

Not a huge difference except for the armor Penetration. You can see the increase in damage at this site. There are some other pieces that stack armor penetration, like S3 sword and S4 ring. If you had all these you would get 262 armor penetration, which would be around 2% extra damage for a cloth wearer. 1% for a plate class.

That may not sound like much, but remember you 2% for a passive ability isn't anything to sneeze at. There are certain talents ou there that cost you 1 talent point per 1% dmg increase so yeah not shabby.

Remember, no single item will catepault you to greatness, but each upgraded piece ads that much more to you game.

Anyway, I'm 10 Badges away from being able to get the cloak, that's 2 daily heroics, or 3+ regular runs.....So close yet so far away.

Back from a long hiatus - S4 Here

2008-06-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

I havn't written in a long time, partially to other things going on, partially because I was out of advise to give.

But a new season (S4) is here, and with new minium rating requirements there's a new set of challenges for everone, and of course for me.

So, yesterday I picked up my new S2 weapon, S4 Gloves and S4 Belt, met up with my 2's partner and went to town! At the begining of last season we went 3-7. Of course back then our gear was worse and our play style wasn't as finely tunned as it is today.

So how did our first matches go? 9-6 overall. I clearly saw an iprovment in my DPS and a couple times we went up against teams in S3 weapons. We were able to either beat them or hold our own for a while, something we just couldn't do last season.

At one point we got up to 1550, so my partner went off to get his Arena Legs. I saved my points as I"m hoping someone will be "helping" me to 1700.

Dont' get me wrong, our combo of Holy/Ret is still gimped but with us being able to close the gap with S3 weapon/shoulder teams I'm expecting we'll be able to break 1650 at some point this season.

What does the new S4 mean for you

2008-04-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Hello again folks,

So the last post listed all of the new rating requirements for Season 4. What that means to you will depend a LOT on how high your arena raking will be. Since this page is for Ret Pally's I'm going to assume your not a Resto Druid with a 2200 rating :)

Right now, if you're anything under 1800 in rankings you can get all of the BG gear and all of the arena Gear except S3 shoulders and weapons.... And looking at the servers most Paladins are well under 1800 so at best you've probably got:
- All of the current BG gear
- Most of the S3 gear
- Season 2 (or 1) shoulders
- Season 1 (or 2) Weapon

In order to get the same level of gear in S4 (i.e all s4 bg gear and most S4 arena) you'll need to have an arena team that reaches 1700

Getting less then 1700 in S4 will cost you the battleground boots, getting less then 1650 will also cost you the ring, and under 1575 you'll also loose the bracers and chestpiece...OUCH

So what's a Pally to do?
If your teams are not able to get to 1700 you will need to find a new team. Or branch out and get new teams in the brackets you're not playing.

I've been struggling with this issue, because I've been playing with the same 2v2 partner since Season 2 and we meet like clockwork every week. The problem is that we struggle around 1600. At one point we may have been above 1650 but never 1700.

I'm going to talk a little more about this next time.

New Rating Requirements for S4 - Get good or go home

2008-04-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Hey folks... Blizard has a blue post on new requirements for S4.. this applies to both Battleground gear and Arena gear. I'm just going to post it today and let you digest.

While Season 3 is still going strong, we wanted to announce ahead of time the rating requirements that will be present for arena items once Season 4 begins. We also wanted to give everyone a heads up to some changes that will be in an upcoming patch, altering how points are gained and players are matched in the arena system. The patch with these changes is scheduled to release before the start of Season 4.

First though, the rating requirement changes:

When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:
Shoulders: 1950
Weapon: 1800

The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:
Shoulders: 2200
Weapon: 2050
Head: 1700
Chest: 1600
Legs: 1550
Gloves: none
Off-hand: none

In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:
Boots: 1700
Ring: 1650
Bracers: 1575
Belt: none
Necklace: none
Trinket: none

The Season 2 items, which will move to the honor system when Season 4 begins, will continue to have no rating requirement.

The changes to the rating requirements for these items reflect the nature of the items, their power, and the relative difficulty that should be had when attempting to obtain them. These items are comparable to those found in the newest 25 person raid zone, Sunwell Plateau, and should therefore also feel very challenging to obtain.

To help ensure that the challenge in obtaining these items stays true to those achieving these ratings, we'll also be implementing new rules with an upcoming patch to curb practices that undermine the core concepts of the arena system. These rules are as follows:

If a character’s personal rating is more than 150 points below the team rating, they will earn points based on their personal rating instead of the team rating.

This means that a player cannot join a highly rated team and begin earning points based purely on the pre-established rating of the team before they joined it. They'll need to compete, improve, and gain a personal rating worthy of the points they would receive.

If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating.

This means that players cannot join a highly rated team and immediately face highly rated opponents, easily and quickly bringing their personal rating up. Instead they'll need to again compete, improve, and earn their rating.

We're excited to see these changes implemented, which will continue to emphasize the strong competitive nature of the arenas, and the challenge in obtaining the highest end rewards available for PvP.

Ret gear changing with patch 2.4

2008-02-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

So you've been saving up those honor points for gear and you probably have a few pieces of season 1 or 2 gear. Well patch 2.4 is on the testing server now, when it goes live Blizzard plans on making some tweaks to the gear.

Untill the patch goes live, there are things that can change, but at this point it looks like it's going to be another good patch for Ret Pally's!

New Season 1 gear stats here
New Season 2 gear stats here
No changes to season 3 gear

Not sure what the differences are, dont' worry I've done the heavy lifting....

Season 1 = No more spell damage, instead you now have resilliance around 16 per piece average... Also, increase in strength of about 5 (10 attack power) at the expense of about 5 critical strike

Season 2 = No more spell damage. Added resiliance of about 18 average per piece.... Also increase in strength of about 15 (30 attack power) at the expens of about 7 critical strike

Finally, resilliance has been changed to also reduce the effect of mana drain = great news for us, since we're very suceptable to mana drain. With around 200 resiliance you should see around a 10% reduction in mana drain.

While I'm not thrilled with the loss of Critical Strike stats, I think it is more then made up for in Attack power and Resilliance. And of course, when you move up to season 3 those stats are the same.

There are changes in other classes that (potentially) make them weaker against the retribution pally. For full patch notes and PTR notes check mmo-champion

The golden age of RETRIBUTION is upon us!

1610

2008-02-14T10:03:00.000-08:00

Hello folks,

It's been a while since my last post... probably because I've gotten the basics off my chest. But today I'm celebrating a little milestone, a tale of hope for all you Ret Pally's out there.

This week my 2v2 arena team broke the 1600 barrier and reached 1610 for the week! Yay for me :)

After 200+ games in 2v2 I was getting a little concerned that we'd stay in the 1500's forever. In the last three weeks though, I've been able to increase my (unbuffed) attack power from about 1450 to 1720 and add another 50 resiliance or so. I can tell the difference. Druids, Priest and Warlocks are still hard, but no longer an automatic loss. In fact 3 of my wins this week came from a priest/rouge combo... the extra AP gives me enough DPS to out damage the priest (and most other healers) as long as I play it right.

Healing specs are very mana efficent, but I've found that if I put up:
- Improved Seal of the Crusader
- Stack Seal of Vengence to the maximum 5
- Refresh with Crusader strike

And use my two stuns back-to-back at the right time, then they go down and I still have mana.... When's the right time? It's when the healer is below 40% health, and is gearing up for a big heal.

The difference I'm getting from AP has me looking forward to Arena Season 4 and the new gear it will provide... In fact, my next article will deal with the upcoming patch 2.4 changes and after thta I'll talk a little about the Season 4 rumors.

Guild vs You

2008-02-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

At some point you may be going about your day, blissfully stomping those arena openents and wailing on others in the BG's. Life is great.... until you get that whisper

Hey we'd like you to respec to Holy we need a healer.

WHOA!.... Your guild leader is waiting for a reply and you probably want to avoid pissing off the guy right away with a well timed "FU_K YOU" so what to do? You've got two main choices:

#1) Meekly accept, sacrificing your personal happiness for the needs of the guild. After all, isn't the group need more important then your own?

#2) Screw that, you're a Ret Pally and they'd better accept it... better they get to accepting now!

Either of these choices comes with some potential consiquences. Choice #1 will leave you in the guild and you'll start running more PvE Instances with your friends. Of course you'll be the group healer and your dreams of RET will go bye-bye... and the armor you've acquired for ret will be tossed aside for healing gear.... Worst of all, you won't get much advise from my blog on Holy :)

The consiquences for choice #2 will vary depending on your guild, either they'll say fine and not bring it up again, they'll say fine and stop inviting you to as many guild functions, they'll ask you to leave (or make it uncomfortable enough that you'll leave).

Of course you'll have to decide what's most important to you. But I will give you my opinion on it.

Tell your guild you will NOT respec. Don't bend over for some guy's request! You haven't asked anyone in your guild to respec for you, and you expect the same courtisy from other people! If they need a healer so bad they should get out and recruit one.

Take a sec to think about why they're asking you in the first place.. probably to run instances. If that's for you then great. But if you've embraced PvP then you don't want to waste 5 hours in a big Kara run anyway. You probably also don't want people setting your WOW schedule for you.

If they threaten to toss you out then go ahead and type in "/gquit" and get out of there. I'll let you in on a little secret... There are plenty of guilds out there oriented to PvP. They'll gladly accept a Ret Pally and will help you run BG's get Arena Teams together and will probably be more condusive to your play style.

It's easier to say "go ahead and quit" then actualy do it, especially if you've been with the guild for a long time. Kind of like moving to a new neighborhood, you won't see your old friends any more.... But you'll make new ones, maybe even better ones that understand you and your spec.

Gems, Gems the musical fruit, the more use equip the more you toot

2008-02-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Alright folks,

I meant to get this article out earlier, but hey with a full time job, two blogs and a website plus a lot of hours on WOW sometimes I just run out of time :)

So, you're on your way to getting all the great weapons/armor you need and you're noticing that some of the new stuff has gem socksts. You may be wondering what colors to get, what cuts, etc.

If you've been following my advice and picking up the Gladiator's PvP armor you're going to be seeing mostly yellow and red slots. This is great for you because these colors will help with hit rating, strenght (AP) and critical strike... all of which you're going to want. You'll find a great site here which allows you to search for gems by attribute.

First of all, let's go over a couple basics.

#1) To socket a gem, open up your character screen and "SHIFT+RIGHT CLICK" on the item. This will open up the gem window and you can drag and drop the gems into the sockets

#2) While you can put new gems in your gear down the road, they destroy the old gems (similar to enchanting over an existing enchant)

#3) Mixed colors count a BOTH gems. For example if you have a Red slot, you could put an orange gem or purple gem in and it would work in the red slot.

#4) Make sure you're putting the right gems into the right slot. If you put a yellow gem into a green slot it will allow you to eqip it but you won't get any of the gems bonuses.... If you're not seeing an increase in your stats after socketing a gem, go back and make sure it's in the right socket. (You can't pull it out, but you can put a new gem it it's place... be careful)

There are so many gems out there that I won't go over most of them. But check the link earlier in the article for a filterable list of them. The Gems you choose will depend a bit on your play style and what stats you're short on. But I'll list the 3 that I think will be of most benefit.

Blue Versions

- Bold Living Ruby = +8 Strength
- Inscribed Noble Topazl = +4 Strength +4 Critical Strike
- Rigid Dawnstone = +8 Hit Rating

Green Versions
- Bold Blood Garnet = +6 Strength
- Inscribed Flame Spesserite = +3 Strength +3 Critical Strike
- Rigid Golden Dreanite = +6 Hit Rating

If you don't have the money for Blue gems yet, you can put in the green versions for a lot cheaper (we're talking 3g instead of 30g) but I would recommend getting the better versions when you have the cash. Also there are slight improved purple versions but they're from heroic drops and such... so the blue is probably the best you can reasonably expect to get.

Helm enchant? Sort of.

2008-01-28T11:18:00.000-08:00

So you've picked up a shiny new vengeful gladiator's scaled helm... or you've got something else on you head. But how can you make it better? There are no enchants for helmets.

That is true; but there's Glyphs. These are items that work like enchantments for your helmet and are available from select vendors that you have a high enough reputation with. The best one I've found is the Glyph of Ferocity. It will add the following to your helm:

+34 Attack Power
+16 Hit Rating

If you're already past 81 for your hit rating, you could also try Glyph of the Outcast, which provides:

+17 Strength
+ 16 Intellect

There are others out there, but these two are best for a Ret Pally. Click the links for more info and reputation requirements. Tomorrow I'll go over some of the gems that you'll want to use with your gear.

Arena and You

2008-01-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

A couple nights ago I got on my main arena team Now You Die. It's 2v2 with myself as a Ret Pally and my partner as a Holy Pally. This is not a common pairing but that's a discussion for another time.

We come across a team called LeeT HaxorZ, composed of a Warlock and Paladin. Immediately we have to make a decision on who to take down. Normally we would go for the Paladin since he can heal. HOWEVER the Pally had the same 2H sword I use so we quickly realized he was a Retribution Paladin. As such we went for the warlock.

The fight was very evenly matched but eventually we take down the warlock. However in the next second the other Paladin finishes off my teammate leaving myself and the other Ret pally to fight it out! To make matters worse, while I had more health then my opponent I had much less mana, around 500. As you know a Pally without mana is a dead one.

Fortunately I have two stuns available to me, I start with Repentance and use the seconds to bandage myself for more health. I quickly see that this wasn't the best move as my health is going down pretty quickly and the damage I'm dealing is a bit less then my opponent due to my using auto attack and the occasional crusader strike as not to completely run out of mana. At this point I'm lower on health and mana then my opponent.

I use my hammer of justice to stun my opponent for another 6 seconds. During that time I run out of his line of sight and drink up to regain my mana. I get up to around 1500 mana before my opponent finds me and starts wailing away. We trade blows back and forth but I stop for a minute and Heal myself. (I was concerned I wouldn't get the heal off in time but I had no choice). This is enough to give me slightly more health then my opponent with maybe 1000 mana left.

We're back to trading blows, but I remember to throw down Consecration since we're in close proximity to each other and that's enough to give me the edge. I win the battle, and thus the match with well under 1,000 life... basically one more solid hit and I would have died.

Let's dissect this match and see how my experience can help you.... keep in mind 2v2 is a very unbalanced play style. A lot of who gives you problems depends on your team makeup

Arena is full of choices, starting even before the gates open. Since my team is 2 pally's we plan our Buffs and aura's to complement each other. You'll want to do the same with your teammate. He gives me BoK and give him BoW, I put up the Improved Sanctity Aura for +12% holy damage and he puts up Concentration Aura for an improved chance not to be interrupted for heals. It works for us, but you'll want to tailor your blessings and/or buffs to you and your partner's needs.

The first major choice in the battle comes when you see your opponents. Who should you target first?

Healer/DPS combo - you need to target the healer. Otherwise the healer will just sit back and keep on healing thru your damage. Eventually you'll run out of mana or stuns and then they'll go on the offensive.
Healer/Healer - Ugly, very ugly..... Go with the one that you think is the better healer. For example a shadow preist is not as good at healing as Holy. Alternatively you can try splitting up after the initial burst damage to keep them both occupied. Send your strongest DPS against the main healer, the other guy keep the secondary healer occupied.
Melee/Melee - Usually a warrior and someone else (hunter or rouge). This really depends on the situation, but remember that a warrior gains rage when attacked making him more powerful, either ignore him outright or take him down ASAP.
Mage/DPS - Usually go for the cloth, they die faster and deal more burst damage.

Battle Auras - As a ret pally you should start out with Improve Sanctity Aura, but if you see there's a Warlock around, switch to Shadow resistance. Other classes may or may not need you to switch. Bottom line is you need to adapt to your situation, don't be afraid to change Auras.

Trinkets - You're going to be stunned a lot in arena play. Having a trinket to dispel at least 1 stun is a must. You have two options Insignia of the Alliance and Medallion of the Alliance. The cheaper one only costs 2,805 honor and removes 1 stun effect every 5 minutes. The Medallion 16,983 honor. It removes 1 stun effect every 2 minutes AND gives 20 Resilience. If you're getting a lot of honor per week (15k or more) save your honor and get the Medallion. If you average less then 10k honor per week then go ahead and get the Insignia.

Mana Potions - You cannot use regular mana potions in the arena, but there is a drink you can use called Star's Tears. It restores up to 7,500 mana in the arena, you have to be out of combat to use it. Believe me, after 160+ matches this season I've been using this more then I would have thought. Twards the end of a long fight it's possible no one is doing serious damage due to lack of mana. Have your teammate occupy both guys for a while and drink up for a few seconds, if your teammate uses mana do the same for him. Also, if you've just managed to kill 1 team member but you're both out of mana... again one person keeps the guy busy the other drinks up.

Communication - Last on this list but THE MOST IMPORTANT. If you ever want to get above 1,500 you MUST have a microphone headset and use something to talk to your teammate, whether it's the in-game voice option, ventrillo or teamspeak. You cannot stop fighting to chat with your teammate. Voice is even more important then gear!

Speaking of communication. Don't just jump into your next match. Take a minute to discuss why you won or lost; see where you could improve and think about a strategy if you get the same team again... I often see the same team(s) in a given night.

That's it for now... it's been a long post

Stats

2008-01-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks,

Yesterday I blogged a bit on the stats you should be looking to get as a ret pally. Today I'm going to give an explanation of these stats and why the numbers should be as high as they are. As a recap, below are the minimum "complete" stats you should have. More is better but if you meet the criteria below the WOW community considers you a veteran (non noob) Ret Pally.

1. Attack Power - 1,500
2. Health - 10,000
3. Resilience - 200
4. Melee Crit - 25%
5. Melee Hit - 81
6. Mana- 6,000

Attack power - Your friend and mine AP. This is probably the most often looked at statistic for a melee class. That's because AP translates directly into DPS, and Ret Pally's are made for DPS. More importantly now, other classes have loaded up on Resilience, and that means you're going to find yourself criting a lot less no matter how high your Crit rating is. So the higher your AP the better.

Health - You're not going to be healing yourself unless it's absolutely necessary. That's what the healing classes are for. Plus your heals are not going to be as effective then a full on healer, and taking time on half assed heals when you could be laying on massive damage is usually a waste of time. As such you're going to want a lot of heath; this allows you to take more damage before needing to heal. 10,000 health is more then enough to keep you alive even against some of the bust damage other classes give out.

Resilience - This is a stat that has been sorely needed. It reduces the chance to crit against you and the damage taken during a crit. 200 is not as high as it could be, but you'll really start to notice you're staying alive longer against burst damage when you hit the 200 mark.

Melee Crit - 25% is said to be the minimum amount to keep vengeance up at all times. That will give you a relatively permanent 5% increase to your DPS.

Melee Hit - 81 is considered the amount needed to never miss your target in PvP against a level 70 opponent. That's extremely important - if you're dealing 1,000 damage per hit and you miss a couple times, there's the difference between a win and a loss. There's not a ton of gear that adds to hit rating, but you can get a great yellow gem called a Rigid Dawnstone that adds +8 to your hit rating. A couple of these will get you much closer to 81. On a side note, if you're doing PvE the hit rating goes up to 142. That's because raid bosses are higher then level 70 so you need a higher hit rating. But for all PvP you will get no additional benefit going over 81.

Mana - Last but not least. Sure the other stats are important but with no mana you aren't dealing any damage so it's important not to skimp out on this skill . If you don't believe me wait till a priest or warlock man burns you for the first time and you're stuck doing auto attack. 6,000 mana means you won't run out of mana very often and you don't need to drink up after every fight in PvP or PvE.

I'll admit the post doesn't have as many hard numbers as I like to give, but there's no way I'm going into the math and theory crafting of how each stat is calculated, how much damage each level of armor mitigates, etc. If you're like most people you won't want it either. On the offshot you do, search it out on the wowwiki link on the side.

Come back tomorrow when I talk about my most nail biting arena match ever, and some strategies that can help you!

Am I a good Paladin?

2008-01-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

Hi Folks,

So you've decided to spec Ret, you've read the articles below and are on your way to getting the gear you need. I bet you're asking yourself, OK where should my stats be? How far do I need to go? What's going to make me a truly "viable" Ret Pally?

Very good question. I obviously don't know where you are, but I do know where you need to be. I will list the vital stats below. I list these somewhat in order of importance but many people will debate over this. Just remember As you collect each piece of armor you should go with the armor that gives you the biggest general increases in armor and stats first, rather then look for a piece that shores up a specific weakness.

1. Attack Power - 1,500
2. Health - 10,000
3. Resilience - 200
4. Melee Crit - 25%
5. Melee Hit - 81
6. Mana- 6,000

Don't worry if your stat's don't match this... unless you're better then all season 1 arena gear it's not going to happen. Heck, some of my own stats are a little short. (I still need a few upgrades myself) But this is the minimum you should aim for. Gems and enchants will go a long way towards getting these stats up to where they need to be.

Frankly, the stats above represent what the wow community in general (with a little tweaking) consider "viable". I'm going to post a second set of stats that I'm going to call "starter" stats. If you have the stats below you're well on your way to becoming a great Ret Pally and should be able to hold your own fairly well in the BG's and some arena matches, plus general PvE

1. Attack Power - 1,250
2. Health - 9,000
3. Resilience - 100
4. Melee Crit - 20%
5. Melee Hit - 60
6. Mana - 4,500

Some people may be asking why I talk about Attack Power instead of strength, or Mana instead of Intellect.. Well it's simple, Strength is nothing by itself, it's purpose is to increase your AP, so at the end of the day it's AP you're looking at. Same with Stamina and Intellect. You don't care about stamina per-se; rather you want to see how much health it gives you. That priest isn't going to burn your intellect, he's going to burn your mana. So I'm listing out the end numbers.

Tomorrow I'll go into detail on each of these 6 stats, why they are important and why the numbers should be what I've posted.

The ugly side of Retribution

2008-01-22T08:54:00.000-08:00

I wasn't originally planning to write on this topic, but an incident in AV last night brought it on.

Following my own advice I spent my wow time this weekend on Dailies and AV. It was an AV holiday weekend and I wanted to collect as many points as possible. I didn't have a lot of play time, and this weekend wasn't particularly good with an around 45% win rate.... When people start loosing in battlegrounds they get frustrated and it shows in the chat.

So I'm playing AV and we're loosing. A Holy Pally by the name of Lugz starts making some comments about other classes, including Retribution Pally's and how they are "squishy". I typed in a response indicating that was not the case... very polite and I just forgot about it and continue playing.

A few minutes later I look up at the chat logs and notice that Lugz has been talking again and seems to be ripping on someone. Scrolling up a bit I realize it's me!

Drunkenclod is a noob!... What kind of ret pally wears a felsteel helm?.... His AP is only 1420, his hit rating is less then 8%... his 5v5 arena team is 1400!

Whoa! This guy bothered to look me up in the middle of AV? He's been ripping on me for the last 5 min with no signs of stopping? I tried (politely) to defend myself. I should have stopped there but it escalated a bit with me looking up his profile and pointing out a few things about him.

Lugz had 9 kills and around 34,000 heals in the current AV.. I had 54 kills and 35,000 heal! His 2v2 arena team is 1561... Mine is 1574 this week. He also has no season 3 arena armor or weapons.

Obviously this guy wasn't contributing and just mouthing off. Multiple people called him an asshole on the chat and told him to shut up. He also bragged about getting 33k honor this weekend (although looking at his contributions for kills and damage this guy clearly played AV 24/7 but didn't do much besides clogging the chat logs). He did, however do a very good job of pointing out every shortcoming of my gear at the expense of helping out the team.

This brings me to the two reasons for the article:

#1) As a Retribution Pally you probably will have people harassing you at some point simply because of your spec, and now with the ability to check your stats and gear, if you're not up-to-date in epics you may get crap there too. I'm here to tell you not to worry about it. These people are true assholes and you should do your best to put them on your ignore list; or at least don't let it bother you. It takes time to get gear, time to get good. Heck you should feel sorry for people like the guy above. 33k honor in a weekend? Obviously this guy has no life and no friends outside of WOW. Lugz you need to pry one hand of your dick and the other off your keyboard. Then go out in the sun once in a while. Find someone to hang out with in real life!

#2) GEAR UP! - I can't emphasize this enough. The asshole above decided to mentionevery possible weakness he coudl find and almost all of it was related to just 1 piece of gear.... that felsteel helm.
I'm 2 weeks away from my Vengful Gladiators Scaled Helm in fact it's my last item I need as an epic. So i've been using an old feelsteel helm. the difference in stats will bring my AP past 1500 (the minimum you want to be as a ret pally) it will also bring my hit rating above 81 which is the maximum hit rating you need for level 70 PvP.... and lastly it'll replace a blue item with an epic purple.

In case anyone is wondering about my 5v5 rating... that team is made with guild mates in blues and greens that I'm helping out, I don't use the 5v5 for getting points myself, any team with inexperienced players in non-epics will have a low score... but if you're well geared then take some time out to help your fellow players instead of ragging on them.. I sure do!

Thanks for reading my little rant, I hope it was educational as well. Tomorrow I'll get back on topic with a rundown of the most important stats, and minium stats you should be going for as a Ret Pally.

Getting your Gear - Part III

2008-01-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

Hello again,

For those of you following my blog, you've hopefully realized you need to trade in your blues & greens for some purple epic armor. And you should have a basic understanding of the two paths to do this... Arena and Battlegrounds. You should also know what armor you're looking for and how many points it's going to cost you to get it.

What you may not know is how to play each battleground and how to maximize your points so you can get that armor faster. Let's start out with a little about each of the 4 battlegrounds... Remember all links here can be clicked on for full details courtesy of wowhead or wowwiki.

Arathi Basin (AB for short) - This is the battleground most of you may know. It's been available since level 20 so quite a few folks have at least tried it once. 15 people on each side. There are 5 flags and the goal is to capture and hold as many as possible. Each flag generates resources when controlled.. get 2,000 resources and you win. At level 70 a win gives 125 bonus honor. The game takes about a half hour to play.

Eye of the Storm (EOTS for short) - This battleground is available at level 61. 15 players on each side with 4 towers to control. Each controlled tower generates resources. In addition to the towers there is a flag in the middle that either side can take and run to a controlled tower gaining additional points....get 2,000 resources and you win. At level 70 a win gives 167 bonus honor. The game takes about 15 minutes to play.

Warsong Gulch (WSG for short) - This battleground is available at level ten. 10 players on each side play a "capture the flag" game. Capture the opponent team's flag 3 times and you win. The game continues until one side captures 3 flags. At level 70 win gives 140 honor points. With no fixed end time, these matches can be as short as 10 minutes or well over an hour!

Alterac Valley (AV for short) - The most complicated Battleground by far, please make sure you click the AV link to read all about it since you'll be spending a LOT of time there. 40 people on each side, multiple objectives to take and a convoluted bonus system. In general you can expect between 350-450 for a win, 82-240 for a loss. Each match usually takes between 15-30 minutes to play

ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING: Battleground Holiday Weekends Each week between Friday and Monday there is a different holiday weekend. The battleground is different each week and rotates on a fixed schedule (available in the link above). During the "holiday" every time you enter into the associated battleground your honor points will increase for play. This is very important... below is a breakdown of expected honor points for all battlegrounds during regular vs honor weekends.

---- Win | Loss (reg week) -------- Win | Loss (Honor Week)
--AB 125 | Varies, 0 min. ----------- 200 | Varies, 0 min.
EOTS 167 | Varies, 0 min. -------- 250 | Varies, 20 min.
WSG 140 | Varies, 0 min . -------- 240 | varies, 60 min.
AV ~400| Varies, 0 min . -------- ~500 | Varies, 80 min.

Lastly all battlegrounds offer 3 marks of honor for a win, 1 mark for a loss. Additional honor beyond the bonus is given for active participation, killing enemies, healing teamates, etc. But it's very convoluted to figure out ahead of time and aside from AV it's usually minimal around 10-30 extra honor. Depending on how you compare to your teamates.

On my server alliance wins 60% in AV -- 50% EOTS -- 15% AB -- 5% EOTS.

THE POINT MAXIMIZING STRATEGY

#1) As you can see AV gives the most honor by far. It has the highest wining percentage and the best minimums for a loss. As such you will run AV for the bulk of your honor points. Don't waste you time anywhere else if possible.

#2) You'll have to run the other battlegrounds to get the Marks of Honor. In general you should only run the other battlegrounds during their respective holiday weekends. If it's not a holiday weekend run AV.

#3) Que up for AV and some other battleground! Many servers have a long que time for AV, anywhere from 10-30 minutes! The good news is that you can que up for more then one battleground at a time. So your best bet (especially during the holiday weekend of a different BG) is to que up for a battleground with a short time and also AV.
Once your AV que is ready you'll get a notice in-game that allows you to switch from your current battleground to AV. You won't loose any accumulated honor from your current battleground so there's no penalty aside from not getting a mark of honor at the finish.
When the AV notice comes up take a look at how your battleground is doing. (If it's WSG it's probably sucking hard core) go ahead and switch... HOWEVER if you're pretty confident you'll win just decline the AV and stay in your battleground to collect your full winning honor and 3 Marks of Honor.

That last point was very important folks... go ahead re-read it, I'll wait...........................

Done... OK, here's the thing. AV gives so many honor points that up to 90% of your points will come from the BG, and they'll come fairly easy. The hard part is the marks of honor from other battlegrounds.. especially ones with low win percentages like WSG. There's nothing more frustrating then an hour long WSG match where you get almost no honor an 1 mark out of the 20 you need. Being qued up for AV will give you an "escape hatch" out of those mind numbing games. The other good part is that if your team is winning you can stick around and collect those 3 winning marks!

One final item on this double queing.... About 10% of the time the matches go so well (or bad) that you will end your current battleground even before AV ques up. In that case take your 1 or 3 marks of honor for finishing this and start another BG right away... your que time for AV doesn't change so you'll still get that ability to leave for AV when your que comes up.

Getting your Gear - Part II

2008-01-17T08:58:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

So by now you know the first thing to do once you hit 70 is work on getting some epic gear, and you now know about setting up an arena team and plugging away ASAP for some of the best gear out there.

But there's a much faster way to get gear that (while not the best) is very solid. Welcome to the Battlegrounds!

Let me give you a very brief history..... Originally the Burning Crusade expansion introduced The Area (known as season 1).

Season 1 ended on June 19th 2007, and new gear was released for Season 2. The old season 1 gear became available at a 15% discount.
Season 2 ended on November 27th 2007 and new gear was released for Season 3 (Season three is the current season)
All the Season 1 gear became available via a combination of Honor points and Marks of Honor.

This is great news for everyone, especially Retribution Paladins because the Ret spec really shines in the Battlegrounds. If you play it right you can easily get an armor or weapon item for a weeks worth of play. Maybe even 2 per week if you're lucky or play all day.

As a Ret Pally you're going to want to purchase the Gladiator's Vindication Set. It has all the major slots except Back and Fingers. Items cost between 10,000 and 17,000 honor points.

There is also two excellent 2h weapons, Gladiator's Greatsword or Gladiator's Bonegrinder. Available for 27,000 points and 40 AV marks of honor.

In total for all 8 armor slots plus the 2h weapon you will need to accumulate:

136,744 - Honor Points
50 - WSG Marks of Honor
90 - AB Marks of Honor
90 - AV Marks of Honor
40 - EOTS Marks of Honor

At this point you're probably thinking WHOA DRUNKENCLOD That's a lot! Or if you haven't ever hit the battlegrounds before you may be thinking OK how long is this going to take?

I won't lie to you, this is going to be a lot of PVP. The great news is that as a retribution Paladin PvP is where you will shine! Many of you may have been holy or protection pally's and are switching to ret because you're tired of spam healing or not dealing enough damage. You're going to love respeccing to a retribution build for PvP. Many of you had an idea that when rolling a pally you envisioned the holy warrior standing tall amongst hordes of enemies smiting them left and right whiles occasionally tossing of heal and cures to his friends. Holy spec pally's are just getting tired of being healbots.

As a ret Pally you WILL be on the front lines, standing tall amongst the hordes of enemies. With your Gladiator's Greatsword you cleave thru the horde and many times will jump right into a pack of horde, grabbing their attention with consecration spams, two separate stuns and damage in excess of 2,000 per hit. Then bubble yourself for an extra 6 seconds of life allowing a teamate to reheal, or heal yourself if necessary.

You'll be the one rushing the flag in the AV, and there defending the bases in AB and it's you in the middle of EOTS blocking the horde's access to the narrow pathway to the flag so your teamates can run to safety with it.

If this sounds more exiting then spamming heals all day and having folks yell at you for not keeping them alive... it is!

Remember to follow the links in the article for more info... tomorrow I'll go into the specific battlegrounds, which give the most honor, which ones win the most (or least) and most importantly how to get as much honor as possible in the least amount of time!

Getting your Gear

2008-01-16T09:19:00.000-08:00

So you've read my previous post and are ready to hunt for your new gear, it's your luck day! I'm going to walk you thru the fastest way to get some basic epic gear. How does a Gladiator's Scaled Helm with 1257 armor sound? How about shoulders with 1160 armor? Great huh? Welcome to what some in the warcraft community deem "welfare epics". They're called welfare because as long as you spend the time playing you WILL get these items, there's zero chance for failure. But don't let the term fool you, it takes many hours to get these, but I'll show you how to minimize that time and get geared up ASAP!

Oh.. any time you see a linked word; it goes to either wowhead or wowwiki for full details on that topic. I do this to keep the articles here shorter rather than go into explanations of how to set something up, or where to go, what the stats are, etc.... So see a link, click it for more details.... onto the rest of the article

There are two ways for a PvP pally to get epic armor... Arena and Battlegrounds. Today we'll start with Aren a:

You should get an arena team together as soon as possible. The link above provides all the details, but in A nutshell, arena is fought in teams of 2,3 or 5 (you can be a member of all 3). These matches are called 2v2 3v3 and 5v5. Points are awarded once per week - on Tuesday and the number of points you get depend on your team rating. The more matches you loose, the fewer points, the more you win the more points you get. You'll receive (or loose) about 15 points per match and you need to fight 10 matches per week in order to receive points... Don't worry, the matches go quick and fighting 10 should take an hour or less.

#1) First of all you'll need a team charter. This will cost 40g per person (although as the guy getting a team together you may need to front the majority of the cost if your teammate is poor)....If you're short gold, quest for it or sell stuff on AH. I'll talk about making $$ in a later article.

#2) The easiest group to form is 2v2.. .just you and a buddy. Get someone from your guild, or someone you team with often. If you don't know anyone then post on the #1 channel in any city that you're looking for an arena partner. The most important thing is that you can agree on a common time each week to meet up for an hour. If you don't meet you won't get points.

#3) Play your 10 matches..... Unless you're winning, only do 10.

I'm going to tell you this now; you WILL loose, and you'll probably loose big at first. This is because your gear is not good enough, you haven't developed strategies with your partner, you may not even have a voice server (highly recommended by the way) to talk in battle with your teammate.

So why play? Here's the great thing about Arena. Put in your 10 games and no matter how bad you are you will get epic armor and weapons with enough points. Even if you loose all the matches for the first month you're still (basically) guaranteed at least 200 points per week for playing.... Most of you will probably be around 225 points. 1 piece of armor goes for about 1800 points, so that's 9 weeks of play. That may sound like a long time, but remember it's about an hour per week so that's 9 hours of play.... and that's probably a worst case scenario I expect most people to average 6-7 weeks aka 6-7 hours for the gear.

Sure, it takes a while but it's GUARANTEED. Play your matches you will get the armor and guys let me tell you Arena Season 3 armor; known as Vengeful Gladator armor is the best out there for Ret Pally's. Go ahead and check out the link above, just wipe your drool. An hour per week is very minimal.. but it's important you start NOW... Each week you delay is an extra week you'll have to wait!

Don't want to wait 2 months for Epics? Not to worry, welcome to Season 1 Armor available from the battlegrounds... that article tomorrow!

I've hit 70...is the game over?

2008-01-15T10:43:00.000-08:00

At some point you will (hopefully) level your Pally to 70. The immediate question many folks will have is What Now? / Is this the end?

Yes and no. It's the end of grinding for XP and leveling up. However it's the beginning of "end-game" content. Here's some of the stuff that opens up to you.
- Multiple Dungeons including Kara
- PVP Arena
- Flying Mount / Epic Flying Mount
- Additional Faction rep
- Lvl 70 Epic Armor
- Daily Quests

Eventually you're probably going to find yourself doing mostly PVP or PVE. As a ret pally you may find that you don't get picked for instances/raids very often. This is partially because there's a common misconception that ret pallys aren't very good. Can't heal well enough, can't DPS well enough. That's simply not true. What is true though, is that a Ret Pally is very gear dependent, and decked out in blue's and greens your gear sucks. So priority #1 will be getting better gear.

I'll be posting the best way to get gear tomorrow. In the mean time, make sure you've headed to SW to get your level 70 talents. And pick up your flying mount. If you don't have the money for a flying mount yet, continue doing some quests... While quests no longer give you XP they offer about double the money they did at 69 plus armor and weapons you can sell.

Welcome to Blessing of Might

2008-01-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the new Blessing of Might! I created this blog so I can post things that are of interest to me as a Retribution Paladin in warcraft; I'll also be posting things that I think any Ret Pally will find valuable.

A little Background on me.

I started WOW back in January of 2007 on the Antonidas server. Little did I know it, but on January 7th, for a number of hours, most WoW servers were locked and Antonidas was listed as one of a few both open and 'Recommended'. The server remained 'Recommended' for a number of days afterwards and as such may be behind why Antonidas has a significant ratio of players who were new to WoW when they arrived on the server.

I was one of these noobs and rolled myself a human Paladin. I found the game very exiting and the rest is history! I'm now a level 70 full ret pally that does a ton of PVP. I play a couple hours per day (sometimes more) and don't do many instances/raids because I play in chunks of time to small to devote 5 hours on a Kara run. As such some of my posts will reflect this.

I plan to focus posts on level 70, but if you'd like to see posts for earlier levels then by all means, post a comment and I'd be happy to write about whatever you like!