Helm enchant? Sort of.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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 Arena:

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?

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

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!