Nobody Reads This

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Complete the title quote in the comments

I play too much WoW. Fact. Recently I’ve been setting myself little mini-tasks but generally doing very little to get my Healadin deeper into content … Until yesterday that is.

Recently I’ve been playing in the relative safety net that it the world of Heroics and 10 Mans PUGing OS10, Naxx10, VoA10 and any Heroic that Rob won’t go to and I’ve enjoyed it with the exception of EoE10 which Paladins just don’t seem designed to do.

Last night I decided that needed to change and I went to VoA25, Naxx 25 and OS25 and whilst Naxx 25 was a disaster it had nothing to do with me. I can comfortably heal in these settings and will out-strip most other Healadins only really finding contention amongst the Druids and Priests (Motherfucking Circle of Healing…).

Of course I got no loot, but a few Valor Badges won’t go amiss! I’m considering what to do at the moment about Guilds. I was expecting that the five of us with 80s in DoA would really come together to farm the shit out of heroics so that Mark would be ready to MT or OT at the least an OS10 PUG with us as a basis but that just hasn’t happened. At best I get 3 Heroics with 3 of us and at the worst I’m pugging every heroic on my own.

Ultimately though I don’t need anymore badges, my Paladin is PvE Holy and PvP ret so unless I want to collect a Ret DPS Set (I really don’t) or a Prot set (I’m happy to do so with scraps I get from OS rolls) the only thing left to spent tokens on is Heirlooms or the mount.

The point of getting fired up for heroics was to help drive Mark through the tough instances in a setting where he wouldn’t feel pressured and where someone won’t just whine-quit after the first wipe on Skaddi in UP but since that hasn’t happened we’re stuck with pugging people like the Hunter who pulled 750 DPS (less than Mark while tanking) and didn’t know what AoE was.

It’s really quite frustrating and at this rate it’ll be a long time before Mark has all the items he needs to be confident in Tanking (Even just Off-tanking) an OS10.

Who knows, I’ve got my 50 mount achievement now and I don’t really feel like grinding dailies at the moment (I will, but not many) so I’ll probably spend an increasing amount of my time trying to level my mage alt. Until the others are ready to actually put some effort in that is.

Regards,
JamesR.

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Oh cruel fate! I bequeth unto you a humble request; don’t nerf illumination and hand over a token buff! For although Sacred Shield applying a HOT equal to the healing done by Flash of light is certainly nice it is nothing but a shadowy figment set before my eyes to distract from the banditry at hand!

So yesterday a friend finally kicked my back-side and convinced me to check up on the 3.2 patch notes, in response to me asking if there were substantial paladin changes he ominously replied “Ohhh yes”.

It has come to Blizzard’s attention that Paladins are over-performing on the mana effeciency front with many high end players completing Ulduar encounters with intact mana supplies. Blizzard has sought to resolve this by reducing our overall mana-pool with 5% off the top of of Divine Intellect and halving the mana return of Illumination (Down to 30% from 60% of Base spell cost).

As hard as two pretty nasty changes are to swallow they do not come without good reason. Paladins have always been the heinously effecient healing class but we paid for that in a relatively poor array of healing tools. We have no castable HOT’s and one insant cast heal which is on a 6 second cooldown. In return for this reduction in effeciency it was off set by providing us with a new take of Sacred Shield and an arguably fixed version of Beacon of Light.

Sacred shield will now apply a HOT for the total amount healed by the flash of light that procs it which means a sizable increase in healing done especially on those bosses where managing to even cast the heal is the hardest part, i’m looking at you Heigan the Unclean! The Beacon of Light buff now means it heals on potential healing done and for up to 60 yards in range, a very nice adjustment to an already powerful spell and arguably further encourages Raid Leaders to utilize us for Raid healing but at the same time further establishes us as the tank-healer of choice.

Whilst nobody likes the nerf-bat it becomes especially hard to swallow when Blizzard clearly does not realise where Paladins are actually underperforming. Any situational fight that contains either elements of movement or cast-time delays hampers us more than any other class. We are left casting 1 instant every 6 seconds, 1 sacred shield and if we are lucky a flash of light. During a Malygos throw the equates to as much as 20k healing split 10k over at most 4 targets but realistically 3 in a scenario where the whole raid takes as much as 20,000 a head.

Druids, Priests and to a much lesser extent Shaman are all better suited for difficult situations and yet Paladins remain as useless in the Malygos fight as ever before. Here’s to hoping that changes in the not to distant future but for now I’ll enjoy healing both tanks in the Razuvious fight and hitting 7.5k Hp/s.

Remember; never drink and heal,
JamesR.

Liadrin the Noble of Turalyon

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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Wow, it’s hard to believe quite so much time has elapsed since I last visited the left a note for the … 8 … people who still look at this on a regular cycle. Sorry about that. Things are a little hectic not least because University stuff literally appeared from nowhere and kicked me in the nuts but also because I made the fatal mistake of getting back into WoW when I’m at my busiest. Yay for that.

Two things today, I wanted to reflect on my recent WoW activity with a brief commentary on what I’ve been doing and how I feel about a few things including the levelling->Raiding transition and the other is a story over on the BBC about a poll they did on Radio 1 to discover the best game. Please do feel free to go read the top 10 so you are suitably horrified for the rest of this blog.

I’m going to assume you’ve read the results of the Radio 1 Games Poll and now know that Call of Duty 4 is the best game ever, a title coveted by many and seemingly reawarded every time a fad comes along.  I’m going to pass over the games I’m relatively happy with and just make a few comments regarding the fucked up entries:

• Grand Thef Auto IV (10): Are you fucking serious? This game was praised for it’s pretty nice engine but lambasted for it’s terrible gameplay, hateable characters and soul destroyingly dull plot. Are you actually serious? -_-
• Football Manager (2): Yes that’s right, FM is SECOND. The bricklayers and builders clearely voted en masse for this one. Sigh. I like sims! And I like football! And even I think FM is a bag of shite.
• Fifa 2009 (9): Yep, it’s Fifa. It’s like Fifa 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001 … but with exactly 1 more disappointment.
• Halo 3 (8): How did I know the OXM readership would listen to Radio 1?

Out of curiosity here are a few of the good games and where they placed:

• World of Warcraft – 4th
• Half Life 2 – 12th
• Deus Ex – 16th (Noticeably under Fallout 3)
• Pokemon Red/Blue – 18th
• Half Life 1 – 21st
• Command and Conquer

As you can see many of the truly good games ranked, probably appropriately considering that the Radio 1 listenership is quite young but at the same time: Who listens to the radio at the weekend? Predominantly people who are working one might assume. All those white-collar nerds (Like mahself) were probably raiding or trying to alt-boot DOS so they could check out a Microprose classic and did not even find out about the survey until they returned to work on Monday. Quite.

On the topic of raiding (See what I did there) my WoW activity has spiked now that I’ve dinged 80 on my Paladin. Around the 76 Mark I was loaned 500g by Rob to pick up my dual-spec and at the time I was levelling Prot and took off-spec Holy. Tbh, end game protadin is STRESSFUL. Although I generally know all the tacs wherever I’m going I frankly do not have the patience to deal with R-tards. When you’re tanking, it’s all a mile-a-minute and the shit can hit the fan quicker than you can reach for Holy Shield.

Holy is relatively tranquil. Amongst the peaceful sounds of Mik’s Scrolling Combat Text and the soothing glimmer effect that comes with flash of light it’s easy to forget you were fighting a reborn skeletal dragon. Although there is still an element of responsibility – After all I am responsible for whether you live or die – But it’s very much more of a supporting role calling any bonus tacs and pointing out any mistakes for people to improve on.

The Tank is the quarter-back and I’m the half-back. Obscure-American-Football-Reference.

Not long after I dinged 80 I was lucky enough to find myself in a heroic group with an extremely overgeared Prot Pally and a few of his Guild mates. That night we must’ve done 5 or 6 heroics in a row – Enough to come away with a new Epic shield. I accepted their invitation to join their guild and have been running heroics and raids with them ever since.

So far I’ve done OS10, Naxx 10 (All except Kel, they’ve downed him but people are making silly mistakes every time and I don’t join for the rerun) and heroics for most of the other instances. I’ve dinged Exhalted with the Argent Crusade (and got mahself a hat) and now over half my gear is epic 200 Item quality. No set pieces yet though, I passed on my only one since it was a fellow Holy paladin who was running in blues with me in my new Epic Spaulders that only dropped two bosses prior.

Since I dinged 80 and got some of my nice gear we’ve also been running old instances for giggles including Molten Core (2 resets in a row :>) and Onyxia. We also gave BWL a shot but I think some people are too undergeared for it, there were 6 of us which currently makes up: 80 Holy Pally, 80 Enh Shaman, 79 Feral Druid (tank), 72 DK,  72 Shaman, 66~ Mage.

My recommendation: Don’t go until you’ve got at least 3 overgeared top level people. i.e. If the druid could look after himself vs most of the mobs (and cover the Orb Nominee) and one person could be relied on to keep the adds off the boss then I think we’d be ok.

As is, both our attempts have killed the boss before the eggs could go down, and subsequent attempts included botched controls which lead to mass-conflag and a wipe. Going to let the Feral tank ding and get some nice heroic gear – After which I think we’ll be good to give it another shot. The DK is likely to be the next person to ding after which I think Mark will be trying to level his warrior (He’s in outland now, doing fucking well tbh) and Leslie has renewed her levelling effort and only has one or two levels to go until Northrend.

Fun Fun right? Anyway, I look forward to doing some heroics in the not to distant future that are entirely friend driven! We’ve already got 3 80s (assuming Jim dings today :>) which include a Tank and a Healer so we should be ok. Jim may need to invest some cash in premature enchants and gems to get his stats up though but for now we can certainly run some of the easy stuff.

Random tail-end update and gratz for getting this far: I’m coming down to Gosport next week but I will be busy for most of it. I can probably hang out once or twice but I’ve got important University stuff that I need to do. We shall have to meet up and spend hours in Burger King again Also WoW will be on the back burner this week as I prepare all my materials for coming to Gosport.

Enjoy yourself, and GL with levelling Mark.

Gamer, Blogger, Student

James Reynolds

jamesr87[.at.]gmail.com

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And so it has begun, I got off the levelling train at the terminus Ding-city yesterday evening and officially celebrated with a tour-de-force around the Eastern Kingdoms. (For clickthrough links, click to enlarge) 

• First we travelled to Orgrimmar and released fireworks and much cake was had by all. 
   
• Next we took different routes and travelled to Stormwind – I not sucking at WoW was first there
   
• We headed for Stockades – For some of us it was a gruelling task. I got there with only one death
   
• After waiting for Mark for 20 minutes and killing nubs stupid enough to attach us, we obliterated Stockades.
   
• Next we headed for the Deeprun tram and travelled to ironforge.
   
• We got mugged more than once, but I set myself the goal of completing 1 lap around Ironforge.
   
• I discovered Improved Aura affects Crusader Aura
   
• Rob and I headed back into the Deeprun tram
   
• We evaded an angry level 80 Rogue
   
• We ran through Stormwind
   
• Down through the docks (Which are pretty awesome)
   
• Around the coast of Westfall
   
• Into Deadmines – Which we emptied out in about 3 Minutes
   
• Then Rob and I parted ways, I went to Silvermoon.
   
• Travelled back to the Belf starter zone and up to the Monument on the western cliff.
   
• I ate the last slice of my cake, where the game began for Liadrin

 

And that my friends, is how you should celebrate your ding

Regards,
James.