Retribution

Moved to Self Hosting!

2009-08-27T11:44:00.003+01:00

Righty!

Its not quite finished, but I'm eager to start writting again so head on over to :

http://retribution-paladin.co.uk

Update your links :)

See you all there!

Blog Move incoming..

2009-08-27T07:43:00.001+01:00

Hey peeps!

Just wanted to let you know that I'm moving from blogger at the moment to Wordpress and Self Hosted!!

New address will be posted in the next couple days!!

Prepare to update your blogger links! :)

Epic Fail = Me!!

2009-08-24T20:11:00.004+01:00

Well I'm such a slacker! I've been so busy lately What with raiding and new content and Blizzcon '09 (well watching it anyway) I've forgotten that I was supposed to be blogging!!

Anyway - no empty threats for posting this time! I'll post if i can!

So lets round up the past couple months.

1 - Ulduar 25 Progression - We've had lots of problems with getting enough people together to do 25-mans therefore we're still stuck on Yogg-Saron. Really annoying - we've gotten into phase where you go into the memories rooms.

2 - Trail of the Crusader - I've really enjoyed this new content so far - all the fights are really cool and I like the way you've gotta work for the top end gear! I means Ensida etc have to wait for loot like the rest of us!! ^_^

3 - Argent Tournament - New dailys are awesome, new quests - new items - lots of cool stuff. I got my Argent Charger!

Gotten some interesting acheivements as well!!

Got my 100th Mount!!

And got my 2nd Turtle Mount!!

I'm enjoying the game again - and thing are only looking forward!!

I spent almost all weekend watching Blizzcon as well! (cant wait for my new murloc pet!! haha!)

I cant wait for the Cataclysm! :)

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder...

2009-07-16T09:53:00.005+01:00

Wow its been almost a month since my last blog post - so I guess I better explain myself!!

Well its been a bit of a stressful time for me in RL - my G/F and I are in the middle of buying a house together - and its all completed this week so Grats Anna and I! Just gotta wait for them to finish building it!

So as I've had a lot on my plate in RL, I've not done much in WoW. In fact i didn't even log into WoW for 8 days! Somewhat of a record for me!

I took this time to chill out, play Ghostbusters on my PS3 (which is just awesome btw!!) and look back at the last 3 years of WoW that I've been playing.

I was pretty close to quitting actually - the reason for this was i was feeling sad cos I missed all my friends from the guild!!

Last night with all the raid instances reset we started at Vault of Archavon and I got my T8 legs.........Damn...

Yep...that's right - Men look stupid in dresses!!!

So its sex-change time again I'm afraid!! I just don't see why the t8 legs had to look like that - its like they got the shaman and paladin loot mixed up.....nabs....

There! That's much better!!

So as i was saying - I got the Teir 8 legs and we moved onto Ulduar where I had a good night loot wise!!

I got Worldcarver to replace my Rune Edge - Nice to have all that extra Attack Power from the strength.
Also managed to snag myself some new bracers.

So a welcome return to WoW for me.

Before my brief break we managed to down General Vezax, and have a few tries on Yoggy. They managed to get to him as well, but it wasn't a good try from what I heard. We should get to him again this week! I cant wait to get him down! Long time coming!

Did you guys notice today the downloader is going for 3.2?

Bring it on! Been playing a bit on the PTR - changes seem good! Cant wait for that!

Hope everyones ok - and Sorry for the lack of updates lately - more will be coming I promise!!

Alex

Upcoming 3.2 Retribution Changes..

2009-06-19T16:50:00.003+01:00

Ok...so the dust has settled a bit, and I've calmed down a little from reading the initial stuff.

So I'm not going to go over everything again - most of the big hitters have already nit picked everything to the nth degree.

Anyway I wanna make a few comments on a few of the things coming in 3.2

So Seal of the Martyr/Blood has passed to the great pile of discarded abilities in the sky, and I'm thankful for this. Its been a liability since the day it was created. This change should have happened when Blizzard gave the Alliance the seal. Instead all it did was make Seal of Command worthless other than a leveling dps talent.

The new Seal of Command seems to be interesting - "This seal now deals 36% weapon damage on every swing" Interesting indeed. "All melee attacks deal additional Holy damage." So Command will do damage on every single melee attack: Crusader Strike, Divine Storm and White Damage. Guaranteed! I imagine this'll get nerfed eventually.

To be honest considering Blizzard said they were going to be revamping Retribution, I didn't think sorting out Seal of Command would be the answer. I guess we all had delusions of greater and grander things.

One question about Exorcism. They've put back the cast time on this, and given Art of War the ability to make it instant again. Pointless. This just gives Mages another spell to counter. Making us even more useless in PvP. The only way this would be a good change is to remove the cool down on the spell.

I just wanna get into the PTR. Like NOW.

Mimiron & General Vezax

2009-06-17T06:41:00.003+01:00

Hey guys, sorry for the semi lack of posts, but I took a week and a bit off raiding as I had a week off work to chill out and relax - You know - Made some time to do Man things like working on my car and playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Anyway Rage managed to slip past the elusive Hodir and Thorim and also Mimiron.
Thankfully on Monday night I was back just in time to see Mimiron downed on the 2nd try.

Now I'd heard Mimiron was a bit of a pain, but while the fight is reasonably complicated, it didn't seem very hard compared to other fights we've had in Ulduar thus far.

Mimirons 4 phase are a real blast! If you've not seen the fight be prepared for some fun and I imagine frustration!

So on Monday night and again last night we had various tries on the big man:

General Vezax

This is a fairly straight forward fight from a melee point of view thankfully unless you happen to be a death knight - in which case you're likely to be on deathgrip duty helping the ranged classes with the green mana goo!

Our best try thus far was to get him to 44% Its a long fight and you really need your healers to be top of their game.

Tonight I'm raid leading our clearance night in Ulduar! Wish me luck!! *gulp* This is my first time raid leading a 25-man, thankfully we wont be doing anything new here (well I hope not!) and it will be a nice experience! Even if the other officers were laughing! Bring it on!

Figure Print Arrives!

2009-06-06T07:56:00.004+01:00

Hey guys! Just wanted to let you all know of a couple of really cool things that I've gotten!

Yesterday, after almost a month of waiting, my Figureprint arrived!

Its way more awesome than I had ever imagined it would be - Check it out:

Awesome isn't it! I went for my Tier 6 gear with a bit of my Ulduar gear thrown in for good measure! That sword is just massive!!

Also I blew all my money and bought myself a Chopper!!

Vroom Vroom!!! Loving the Chopper! And I only had to spend 12,500 on the official mats from Storm Peaks. Big Thanks to Umari from the Guild for stumping up 11 Titansteel Bars!!

Thanks Dude!! <3

Thorim Down!

2009-06-03T12:59:00.002+01:00

Hey peeps! Wow! Isn't the weather just lovely? Shame I'm cooped up at work all day!

Finally Rage managed to down Thorim last night after a couple of hours of tries.

We went into Ulduar last night with Freya in our sights first. It was a messy start to the raid with a couple of wipes on trash, nerves were frayed, but we pulled together and took her down after 3/4 tries.

After joking about going to Mimiron next (which was hilarious as almost the entire raid bombarded our GM with "NOOESS!! We cant go Mimiron they're nerfing him tomorrowz!!!" much to his annoyance) we move to Thorim.

We did 5 tries where I was out in the main trash room. After the 2 tries I asked to be made raid assist and was then marking the healer types with a raid mark - to assist the dps. This made a huge difference in nuking down the evokers. I really recommend if you're having problems with this to get someone competent to do this. It really helps when all you can see is a mash of players and NPC's and AOE affects going off all around you.

After the first batch of tries I was asked to move into the gauntlet. 3 tries later Thorim was down.

Lets break down the fight:

Phase 1 - the raid run into the room and clear the combatants and the giant worm. As soon as the last mob is down the lever to the left of the room will be activated leading to...

Phase 2 - gather 2 healers 1 tank, 2 CC'ers and 2 more dps.

Our Gauntlet group consisted of;

Resto shaman - Healer/CC
Resto Druid - Healer
2x Ret Paladins - DPS
1x Prot Warrior - Tank
1x Mage - DPS/CC

This was what we found to be optimal for us - this may not be the case, but should be a good guide of what to do.

People on the gauntlet have to run down the corridor and fight there way to Thorim. They will face;

Pull 1 - 1 Healer, and 3 DPS NPC's - CC 2 of the DPS NPC's and nuke the healer, then kill adds.

Pull 2 - -1 Healer and 3 DPS NPC's - CC 2 of the DPS NPC's and nuke the healer, then kill adds.

Pull 3 - Giant War Golem - This guy will be firing fireballs(ish) at the party right up to the point you engage him - AVOID THESE AT ALL COSTS.

Pull 4 - 2 Healer NPC's and 2 DPS and 1 Stone Iron Giant. This can be really tricky to pull off - we CC'd the healer types - cleared the smaller NPC's then the Giant, then returned to kill the last 2 CC'd Mobs.

Then the group runs to Thorim and jumps down to join the rest of the raid.

While the gauntlet group is doing its thing (the faster the better) the rest of the raid will be dealing with wave after wave of dwarves. With each wave there will be a Dark Run Evoker - this guy is a seriously good healer and needs to be nuked down as a priority. Assign a group of people specifically for this task (and if possible get one of them to mark the mob) It really helps if you have a target macro to help you find him.

There are some larger mobs that have to be tanked away from the raid due to AOE whirlwind he does that can kill a clothie pretty quick. Melee should stay away from these.

Phase 3 starts when Thorim jumps down once the gauntlet team have cleared the gauntlet. This phase is pretty much a tank and spank with 1 exception. Thorim will occasionally turn and run a small electrical charge to a ranged member of the raid - shortly there after he does a Cone-Effect Chain Lightning with roughly a 60 degree radius.
This starts off not doing very much damage, but as the fight progresses gets higher and higher. (I was hit once by a 26k charge, one of our rogues was hit for 54k the same fight later on) Don't let yourself get caught in the chain lightning. Its a real pain and will wipe the raid.

So there you go - once you've gotten into the rhythm its easy as pie - but there are lots of things that can generally cause a wipe. If anyone is killed during phase 2 - especially if its one of the tanks - its a wipe. If either the tank or one of the healers is killed in the gauntlet team its a wipe.

So be safe, work hard and you got him!

Good luck!

Thorim has Rage on Farm

2009-05-29T15:24:00.002+01:00

Hey peeps!

As Doxa was kind enough to enquire as to our guilds progress on Thorim I thought I'd make a quick post to answer him!

Well as the title suggests we're having a few problems on getting that dude down! Quite literally.

Getting him down off that pedestal is a real job! Either the guys going through the gauntlet wipe or the group outside cant keep up with the number of mobs spawning and wipe just as the last mob is pulled by the gauntlet.

We've tried lots of different combo's here - from putting more people in the gauntlet to putting more people outside.

I've been in both sides of the tries - starting with staying in the main room and fighting off the hordes of iron dwarves that come - it can be very overwhelming at times - and woweee the chaos that can ensue as people are just running around like blue-ass-flies trying to stay in control.... and its not much more fun in the Gauntlet room. Pull aggro off the tanks and you're dead! Thankfully hand of Salvation is a real godsend here! The gauntlet itself is not terribly difficult to start off with but when you get to those stairs...oh my god...you really need to be with a fearless tank who is able to take more than his fair share of punishment.

I've never been more scared to use Divine Storm in all my life!

Its just a frustrating thing - I guess many people will say we clearly don't have the DPS required yet to get past him. I guess there is always going to be a gear check with some bosses.

Good news though is all other bosses are on farm mode more or less aside from Hodir and Thorim (we've not tried Mimiron on 25-man yet but I heard he's a nightmare!!)

This weekend I'm going to try get me that Red Proto-Drake! I've wanted that bad boy for a while now and only need 7/8 more achievements to get it! 5 more Mounts left then all I need is the Tournament mounts to get my Mountain of Mounts reward of a very sexy Blue Dragonhawk!

So sadly Doxa we too are also headbutting the same wall as you!

Freya Down.

2009-05-22T12:18:00.003+01:00

Hey peeps! I'm trying to post some more - need to get back into the swing of things after having nothing really to write about for ages.

So Wednesday Rage started again and cleared 6 bosses in Ulduar Heroic in 1 night (unfortunately I was not present as I was at the cinema seeing Star Trek for the 2nd time!!)

Last night we went and had tries on Freya, and at 11:30 Server time she finally went down.

The first half of the night I was on DPS, and we had problems with the 4 medium sized mobs that spawned being tanked, so I switched my gear out and activated my tank spec (go go gadget tank!) I was tasked with helping out with the tanking on those adds.

It was interesting for me, I had lots of fun doing that, and it was great finally getting her down. That fight is seriously harder on 25 man compared to 10 man.

Monday night we'll probably try Thorim and Hodir again. (first time on Thorim) Wish us luck!

Ulduar Progression

2009-05-20T12:21:00.003+01:00

Hey guys! Hope all are well and still rocking the new content!

Rage's progression is as always slow and steady compared to some of you guys out there, but we're doing our best in the face of adversity.

Last night we cleared Auriaya and had a few good tries on Hodir in 25-man.

Auriaya is a bit of a nightmare and its all about the raid being able to keep mobile if the void zones spawn in rubbish places. This fight reminds me a bit of Prince in Karazhan with the infernals spawning all over the place.

Hodir on the other hand is best described in 1 word: Chaos.

Everyone has to keep moving all the time or they take frost damage, added to the fact you have to keep out of the runes on the floor in case you get knocked back by cave-ins. Its a real intensive fight and people have to be on the ball or its FAIL time. Also he's got 32 million Hit Points.....that's just unreasonable!! Damn you Blizzard!

So that's all the news from a raiding point of view. I've slowly been continuing my rep grind for the Insane title, but nothing massive to report there, other than hitting honored with Darkmoon Faire. I've started the Argent Tournament on my Druid - which is fun, and adds a nice source of income as well.

I'm planning on leveling another toon to 80 just so I can do these quests again maybe - it depends on what happens when 3.2 comes out.

I also managed to get my 75th non-combat pet in game and got my Fawn pet in the post, which was cool! Also last night in VoA Emalon was kind enough to drop the Grand Black War Mammoth!! Somehow I managed to win the roll as well!! /grin

That's my 85th mount in game - 15 to go for the Dragonhawk mount you get at 100.

Good Times!

Have any of you guys completed any WoW milestones with regards to content or achievements?

Ulduar Progression and Guild Changes.

2009-05-13T13:03:00.003+01:00

Hey peeps! Been a while since I did a big update on here about raiding, but with going to Star Trek and being ill (no not swine flu!) I've not had much spare time.

Anyway Rage have been progressing quite nicely, not as fast as some people in the guild would like, but slow and steady always wins the race as they say.

In 10 man Ulduar we've cleared 9 bosses: Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale, XT-002, Iron Council, The big dude with the arms, Auraiya, Hodir, and Fraiya.

In 25 man Ulduar we're not so far, but getting there all the above aside from Auraiya, Hodir and Fraiya.

So far its been fun! I've loved all the fights - even given some of the wipe nights we've had.

I've been lucky here and there and managed to get some nice upgrades so far, the latest being this baby!!!!

Rune Edge
Two Hand Sword
632-949 Dmg Speed 3.40
(232.5 damage per second)
+121 Agility
+120 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 86.
Equip: Increases your attack power by 160.
Equip: Increases your armor penetration rating by 70.

Lovely upgrade for my Betrayer, and finally nice to have a sword again. I hate having axe's. It always seems like such a waste of my nice expertise Bonus.

The Plate chest dropped too "Steelbreaker's Embrace" but I let that go to the other ret-paladin that joined us recently as i would loose a LOT of hit rating swapping out that. I'm saving my dkp for the tier 8.5 Chest. That way I'm not loosing too much Hit Rating.

The Iron Council is an annoying fight to be sure - the tanks take a lot of damage. Us paladins had to work out a rotation for Hand of Sacrifice if ever a tank wound up getting the boss in the rune that increases damage by 50%. We had almost 2 nights of wipes there - very frustrating stuff.

In other news I'm now the Paladin Class Leader in Rage! Our last one has quit his paladin so concentrate on his Horde Hunter. Good luck to him! Cheers Rovell! So this is lots of veteran meetings and sorting out who's doing what and helping make guild decisions! Interesting to see the behind the scenes stuff in a Raid guild.

Other projects I'm working on at the moment, in case any of you have been nosing around on my Armory page are as follows:

I finished the Argent Tournament on Monday!! Crusader Firelight was my 27th Title!

I'm also working on "the Insane" title. Here's where I am with that:

Bloodsail Buccaneers -11999/12000 Honored - Completed
Ravenholdt - Currently Revered - Incomplete.
Shen'dralar - Currently Friendly - Incomplete.
Darkmoon Fair - Currently Friendly - Incomplete.
Steamwheedle Cartel - Currently 8000/36000 Hated with most - Very Incomplete!!

This is taking me a long time!! I've killed literally thousands of Syndicate mobs, Southsea Pirates and Wastewander Pirates, and I've got thousands more to kill!

I've been slowly buying all the Rogue/Swords/Mages decks from the Auction house and getting my darkmoon rep up that way but this is also very slow. Also been gathering items for libram hand ins for Shen'dralar rep. Its going to be expensive, and its going to take ages, but I want this title!! Wish me luck!

PS - I'll hit the exalted title in 2 rep factions time as well! (40 factions to exalted)

New Star Trek Movie

2009-05-08T11:14:00.002+01:00

Hey guys, just wanted to make a quick post about the new Star Trek Movie!

Don't worry - no spoilers here!

Some friends and I drove to London last night to an IMAX Theatre to see the film.

My god.....this is without a doubt one of the best, if not THE best, film I've seen in years!

Seriously - even if you're not a Star Trek fan, go see this! Its just brilliant!

Worth Every Penny!

That's all!! More Warcraft next time!

Ulduar - XT-002 Deconstructor DOWN and explained!

2009-04-29T12:03:00.004+01:00

Hey guys'n'gals! Hope all of you have managed to get your Noblegarden acheivements done in quite time as we all know childrens week starts on Friday!

Anyways on Rage's 2nd night of tries we managed to clear the Deconstructor - and pretty early on last night it has to be said! We almost had him the night before but had a few people DC in Greece - on of their ISP's dropped out for 20 minutes which pretty much ended the raid as it was late anyway.

Its quite a fun fight, and Deconstructor's voice is pretty funny, with 2 phases:

Phase 1 - The tank positions the boss with his back to the raid right infront of the stairs and after a few seconds to allow him time to get sufficient aggro the DPS set off and we're full swing into the fight. During the fight random people will be afflicted with either;

- Gravity Bomb - This nasty debuff doesnt have a DOT effect, but if you get it - move away from the raid as after a few seconds it pulls everyone within 10/15 feet of you to where you are - just intime for you to explode causing a lot of damage to you and them.

- Light Bomb - This even more nasty debuff does i think about 3.5k damage per tick to you and anyone within range of you. MOVE FAST---->

Phase 2 - Deconstructor decides to have a sleep and his heart pops out of his chest. His heart has 10 million HP and your damage is increased by 100% against the heart. Whatever health you take off the heart is removed directly from Deconstructor, so this is a really good time to pop all trinkets/cool downs and heroism etc. During this phase various robots come to attack the raid and have to be tanked - or they move to the boss and if they get to range they heal him for 60,000 HP. There are also Bomb Bots - ranged dps need to deal with these and stay at max range as they explode causing 16-20k damage on plate. Phase 1 then starts again.

We got deconstructor down with 3 phase 2's last night - obviously as our gear increases it will get quicker and quicker. We were popping heroism on the 3rd phase 2.

Something interesting happened as well - have any of you noticed how much Judgement of Light is healing for? On the try when we downed deconstructor I was 3rd dps overall and 1st on the healing meters!!! WTF? I guess blizzard got something right! (ok most of it was over healing, but hey its better than nothing) my Judgement was ticking for 850-1000 on everyone in the raid when they hit the boss! Crazy!

So as a reward the boss was kind enough to drop these for me:

Clockwork Legplates
Binds when picked up
Legs Plate
2054 Armor
+106 Strength
+169 Stamina
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Strength
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves hit rating by 57.
Equip: Increases your armor penetration rating by 76.

So that's a nice bonus for me! Cost me though! 550 DKP! Damn those Death Knights!!

So far I've really enjoyed 3.1 - the Tournament is fun and I cant wait for the next phase to start, although from what I've read it wont be starting till the next major content patch. Ulduar is new and fresh, and feels way more of a challenge.

For me this is the first time we've had to work hard on downing any bosses since the pre-wrath patch came out and nerfed all the tier 6 raid content.

Firelight the Noble

2009-04-26T15:10:00.003+01:00

Hey guys! You're all loving the Noblegarden today!! Isn't it cool!!

LOL!

Here's a couple of pics of me on my epic journey across Tanaris and Un'goro!

It only took me a few hours to get the meta achievement done - I'm glad it was pretty easy I was sweating quite a lot that I wouldn't get the Love is Around meta due to terrible RNG achievements. The only thing plaguing me this time around is the tuxedo pants! I'm sure they'll come!

Are all of you peeps having fun? What really gets my goat is people are supposed run around looking but instead they seem set on just camping spawn spots. Boring! I've been keeping with the run around as a rabbit nabbing eggs from the campers wherever possible!

Ok about the last post I made - I guess my idea of what they should have done with Death Knights was a bit more or less what people expected. That's how I wish they'd done it! Like it or loath it - it was just a bit of fun!

The Argent Tournament presses on also! I'm now championed with Stormwind and Exodar! Darnassus next.

So bring on Children's Week!!

Happy Egg Hunting!

Next Hero Class: Unholy Paladins.

2009-04-22T12:30:00.002+01:00

Hey guys - Just been reading all the blog posts about the nerf we've received to Exorcism as of 3.1.1 that went live yesterday/today (US/EU)

Now in the week since 3.1 came out I've not done any pvp. Not a sausage! (not including jousting!!) But we all knew this was going to come - a day or so after looking at my exorcism damage i said to one of our prot-a-dins "Watch them nerf it next week..."

Low and behold its done. Thankfully not in PvE phew!

Anyway I read a comment on Tim's latest post over at Suicidal Zebra from Dallana:

"Ever consider that it's more often than not, Holy's fault that Ret gets
hurt?"

Well that got me thinking to the future...something that blizzard could offer us Ret Paladins...

No-one wants to switch mains - not really - you loose all that hard work you put in to get your achievement's done, and all that awesome collectible loot and fun stuff.

So I came up with an alternative. This will stop all the game breaking nerf's and bring something new to the game that people will love:

Unholy Paladins.

An optional quest chain would be opened up by paladins wishing to turn their backs on the light and move away from that which was held so dear for so long.

This quest line would take you on a journey of discovery....from one end of Azeroth to another - bringing you back to your ultimate decision to become a paladin. This is a far throw from what happened to Death Knights...this is something different.

Quest by quest each of your main abilities would be corrupted from what we know it as now to their new versions - the dark twisting magic that begins to envelop you the deeper you go on your journey slowly changing the very way you perceive the world - things appear darker, more uninviting.

Your veins begin to pulsate with the hatred for all things holy - the mana burns from your body and a new power system call Unholy Power starts to take over...

The culmination of this quest line is an epic battle between you and your Unholy brothers in arms and the Priests and Paladins that are fighting to battle the corruption from within their very souls.

There would only be 1 talent tree - this is a pure DPS class with raid utilities similar to regular paladins, but wholly different at the same time.

Lets look at some of our new/changed abilities:

Curse of Blood. This 1 hour buff grants you with something similar to combining Seal of
the Martyr and Blessing of Might and Kings - All stats are increased by 15% and all direct melee attacks have a chance to do damage based on a percentage of attack power multiplied by weapon dps.

Damned Crusader Strike. Our old Crusader Strike's powers are taken and twisted. An instant attack that causes 115% weapon damage + 33% Attack Power and silences the target for 2 seconds. 6 Second Cool Down.

Unholy Storm. Divine Storm has a new ability - As well as hitting 4 targets around the Unholy Paladin for 110% weapon damage it also does this as unholy damage and is not resistible. 10 Second Cool Down.

The old seals and judgement system is gone. Curse of Blood above folds our only useful seal into its blessing and no long does any damage to the user.

Unholy Damnation. This is an instant cast ability that hits the target for 200% weapon damage. This ability also heals you for 10% of the damage dealt - 8 second Cool Down.

Desecration. Like Consecration, but better - this ability does not stay where you pop it - instead it follows the Unholy Paladin - 8 second duration/cooldown.

Our heals have changed as well - Flash of Light becomes Flash of Darkness and Holy Light becomes Unholy Darkness. Core abilities stay the same, but add a HoT affect upon critical which heals for 33% of the amount healed over 5 seconds.

As mentioned earlier the mana bar is gone - its been replaced with an Unholy Power bar. (sounds like some sort of chocolate snack!) This starts empty like a rage/runic power bar and increases depending on how many abilities are used in a certain period of time. Once at 100% your damage is increased for 15 seconds by 30% at the end of this time your bar returns to 0 and you have to work your spells again. Filling your bar to 100% should take about 2 minutes creating a kind of auto avenging wrath every 2 minutes but is controlable by not doing certain abilities that grant Unholy Power.

It just an idea, a fantasy I've had - something I'd love to see implemented as a viable option for Paladins who truly want to dish out some retribution.

It kinda all sounds a bit Death Knightish, but with a twist - there's not tanking nonsense here - its pure dps with some raid utility added in to make us useful in raids.

Can you think of any more interesting new spells to add or change?

Dual Spec'd Up & Argent Tournament

2009-04-21T12:16:00.002+01:00

Hey Guys'n'Gals (are there really any girls reading this?)

So just wanted to touch base with a few things I've been doing in-game recently.

So I've been beavering away at the Argent Tournament and this morning I made it to Champion of Stormwind and I'm now "Firelight of Stormwind" Another title to add to the long list of titles in my repartee! (over 20 now I think!)

I'm now going to have to start the arduous task of saving up tokens for the mounts/pets. I think I need to save up 140 per faction and 250 for the flyer.

I think I'm going to switch factions and champion each of them as it only seems to take 8 days to do that and you get a bonus 10 tokens - unless its more profitable to do the dailys (5 tokens per day?)

I only just managed to get the champion beaten before I had to leave for work, so I've not had a proper chance to weigh up the options and make a proper decision. I'll have a play tonight and see whats what!

Also over the weekend I finally got round to picking up the dual spec and last night I got my chance to put it to practise!

I've gone protection for my alternate spec. I've got mostly all 25-man tanking gear so I'm over the defense cap.

So late last night one of the guildies is "Looking for a tank for heroic" I whisper him that I'll come - I need the practise!

Thinking it was going to be Halls of Stone - somewhere nice and relatively easy we ended up going to Ahn'Kahet: The Old Kingdom. One of the harder instances.
Bearing in mind I've not properly tanked an instance since I was level 70 and even then I was only tanking 5-mans and not heroics, I did well. (so i was told anyway!)

There were some difficult pulls in there - and my rotation seems to wipe my mana pool pretty darn quickly - need to talk to the other pally tanks in there to see whats what with regards to that - cos I was blowing mana pots like there was no tomorrow, but we didn't wipe and only once or twice did a couple of the dps get killed (although not my fault thankfully!!)

I tell you what - doing that insanity bit in there as a protection paladin was really painful.

I was able to stay alive for each of the splits but it was impossible for me to kill anyone due to the 2 priests that were constantly healing each other and the rest of the team. Thankfully the rest of the team came to my aid when they'd cleared their mobs.

I was glad of the practise to be honest because I've kinda put my name down as a possible tank for tonight's 25-man raid in Ulduar (razorscale) to our GM, Kuta. He said it would be good due to the lack of tanks we have signed. The Pressure is ON!

Ulduar First Impressions

2009-04-16T12:51:00.007+01:00

Hey peeps - wow did I have a fantastic night last night!

So around about 5pm I logged onto WoW and spent a little while setting up my talent build for raiding, and so far it seems to be holding up. I went for a pve/pvp build - taking a few things from the ret tree that are considered pvp talents. I cant remember the exact build I'll post it later maybe!

Anyway then I got my addons sorted - WoWmatrix is gone - long live Curse Client. If you've not read about wowmatrix then i suggest you go find the article thats floating about.

Anyway I shed a couple of addons that weren't up to date, and logged in - all seemed OK - I didn't have any problems at all really. Of the ones that weren't updated they all still worked OK.

So I went up to the Argent Tournament and started the quests up there, managed to get all that finished including all the dailys and all of the first part of the black knight quest line - not sure when I get to pick that up again - time will tell.

Our Guild Master had postponed the raid to 9pm server time - giving me plenty of time to prep - get some pots made up etc and get everything ready for Ulduar.

I also popped down to booty bay to pick up my sandbox tiger!! Cute!

Anyway I flew up to Storm Peaks and entered the instance.

When the loading screen disappeared I was at the graveyard outside Scarlett Monastery??

Double You Tee Eff!!?!??!?

Grrr - good thing the hearthstone is only 30 minutes now!

Hearthed back - only to be faced with "World Server is Down!" Oh here we go!! We're all ready to go into Ulduar and we cant!!! /cry

OK 5 mins later the server was back up - and we entered. 30/40 mins later and after the Raid leaders decided who is going to be in what vehicles we started the event.

1 word for you...

AWESOME!

I was driving one of these bad boys:

I love it!! I cant wait to have a go on the other vehicles next week! The motorbike looks fun!

Oh and button 6 is hilarious! When you get that warning up on the screen saying "Ambister had moved to the catapult" hilarity ensues!!!

After we wiped the 2nd time the raid leaders were changing tactics again and the Death Knight Class Leader came to me and said;

"Fire, launch me!!!"

"Woot??? Where?"

"At the boss!!!"

" LOOOOOOOOOOL!!! OK!

So I positioned myself in the middle of the group so no-one would see and Patoooeeee!!! Archael gets fired at the boss!! I'm already turned around and running away as fast as my chariot can take me! Me and Arch (dave) were in stitches!!

So on the 4th try we got Flame Leviathan down - I don't think any of us wanted to get him down we were having so much fun in there! What a wicked cool fight!

Can you tell I was excited about it?

After we downed him it was Raid Over. We noticed we had Wintergrasp and decided to run down and have a look at the new boss in there, but we only had 20 people willing to come. We managed to take down Archavon, and all I'm willing to say about our 3 attempts at the new guys is OUCH! 26k chain lightning? Trash mobs that wiped 1 third of the raid?

To quote my hero Strongbad: "Holy Crap!"

So tonight we press forward in Ulduar - I'm just wishing the day away!! Bring on Home Time!!

Ulduar Awaits....

2009-04-14T13:43:00.003+01:00

So you lucky beggars in the US already have Ulduar and I Imagine we'll see world firsts later tonight.

I've just seen the intro to Ulduar and WoW! I cannot wait. I got that shiver down my spine again as the piece came to the end. You know the one? The one you got when you watched the Wrathgate video, or the one you got when they released the WotLK trailer.

I hope the patch meets up to my expectations and is as the thing I need to get me interested in the game again. I think a lot of people are feeling similar things to me with regards to the current content (3.0.X)

I'm not going to go over what 100 other blogs have gone over the patch notes with a fine tooth comb.

So fingers crossed peeps!

I will post a more comprehensive blog-post later in the week once I've had a chance to play the patch a bit more and give you some news on my current Rep-Grind Project.

See you at the Argent Tournament!!

Guild Drama Part 2 - The Aftermath

2009-04-07T13:05:00.003+01:00

Firstly let me say thanks to all who commented on my last post - its good to know that there are a few people out there with something to add to this dilemma.

I'm going to start by answering a few people now;

@ Peregrine - Thanks for the support buddy - I'm sure things will be OK once 3.1 comes next week(maybe)

@ Ithilien - You of course were right - Just stopping wasn't the right thing to do, more on that later. Lots of guilds in game seem to be having this problem - Blizzard made the game too easy on one hand then ridiculously stupid-hard on the other. But nothing that a little focus can overcome. I didn't stop raiding - I just started using my Druid to raid instead just to make the experience feel fresher - Ignoring the plate items and getting some nice t7.5 upgrade for my Boomkin.

@ Barrista - Like you I've been to pretty much every raid from day one - There were not many of us that did that 10-man content but I was there a few weeks after Wrath came out gearing up further. It can be difficult carrying people through the raid content now, but it feels good none the less knowing that most of those people will stay with us. (And there will be some scumbags that just use the guild as a stepping stone to gear up then leave to go elsewhere....I hate those people....)

@ Tay - I feel your pain friend - Making the decision to drop out of the raid cos so many people are cheesing you off is hard, but sometimes its all you can do to stop you from tearing your hair out.

@ Darrtanus - I've not been into Oculus for at least 2 months...everyone hates it! You know why? Cos its one of the only 5-mans in Wrath that requires a lot of skill from everyone in the group. I would never PuG Oculus. I desperately want to go in there though to get my heroic achievements done.

So thanks to you peeps - love you long time!

Anyway lets fill you in on whats been happening. Rage lost a few key members from all of this drama, including our Raid Leader Carinthalas. He wanted to be in a progression guild...and apparently Sarth +3D is what he wanted to complete - personally while I do want that title and the mount I cannot see the point really - there's no more loot, but you get to say "Look! Our guild are leet enough to do Sarth+3D!" and that can mean a lot to people.

But lets not forget that we are a progression guild - we've had problems with bosses in the past, but nothing a little work cant pull us through.

We also lost a couple of member who just seemed to be in the guild to leech loot and not add anything to our group. This burns me off so much. So farewell to you.

We've started recruiting again and have gotten in some really good people it seems and our GM is in talks with another raid guild that seem to be in a similar place to us, about a possible merger - Rage soaking up their best members and ditching the rubbish. I wont mention the guild name on here in case anyone is reading.

We'll see how that pans out - We're all wary of guild mergers - but given the losses we've had lately from people leaving or quitting WoW it seems necessary if we are to progress in Ulduar.

Well Ulduar is a week away it seems so we shall see what happens.

Good Luck To Us All....

Edit: Does anyone know or have you heard anything about the new dances we were promised?

Guild Drama..

2009-04-01T22:32:00.003+01:00

Hey Guys! Hope all are well and getting excited about Ulduar coming soon.

So I guess by the title of the post you've guessed what I'm going to be writing about tonight.

I'm sure we've all been through Guild Drama at one time or another during the course of playing WoW and tonight was the first time I've had to deal with it for a long time.

The guild has been having a few issues lately getting enough people to form 25-man raids. People seem to be burning out a little on the current content being to easy or something.

We've had a few core veterans leave due to real life issues as well and that hasn't helped either.

So tonight's raid formed up and we were 5 men down for Naxx. So we pulled together what we had and said we'd do the Achievement for doing Naxx with less than 21. All was going fine, we cleared the Spider wing with no problems one shotting all 3 bosses and then we moved to Patchwerk. Now the last few weeks we've had issues with the melee group getting Hateful Strikes and nearly always this would lead to a wipe. It was so bad one time I resigned myself to ret-healing - standing at the back and helping spam Flash of Light one of the tanks.

The biggest problem we seem to have is Chain Heal from our Resto Shamans. This and the extra things resto Shamans have that cause instant crit heals on raid members in range.

As a melee dps its really frustrating. No-one like wiping - especially if we cant even get him down in under 3 minutes for the achievement.

So tonight this was the straw that broke the horses back for me and after the 4th wipe on patchwerk I left the raid and logged off.

I gave myself sometime to cool off and popped over to my hordie and had a chat with Tim over at Suicidal Zebra. Some minutes later I logged back onto my banker toon and whispered one of my guildies who was leading the raid tonight. He had told our resto shaman and the rest of the melee to cool off or he'd kick people from the guild and then disbanded the raid.

I logged onto Firelight, said that I wont be threatened into shutting up when I knew what was wrong and what had to be done to stop the melee from being killed and /gquit.

I then had the majority of guild members whispering and our GM and I had a long chat on ventrillo. A few minutes later I was back in the guild, but he said something interesting;

"Its no one persons fault that all of this is happening, its Blizzards fault for causing people to get burnt out so quickly"

This made sense to me - I mean why would someone leave the guild (our main raid leader) stating that due to our lack of ability to gather 25 people together and not being able to kill Sartharion with 3 Drakes up.

After all of this I've decided to take a raiding break with my Paladin till 3.1 is out. I'm going to log on and play still, but I'm going to level up some alts and try some other things - probably end up doing some 10-mans with my Boomkin.

As I said before we've all been affected one way or another by guild drama, all we can do is try to pull ourselves through it, learn from it, and move on.

Newsworthy?

2009-03-31T12:48:00.003+01:00

Hey guys.

Not much to report of late from in-game Retribution related stuff that hasn't already been covered elsewhere.

I moved my Death Knight who's now 70 to Silvermoon-EU - He's now called...oh...err...I forgot what I called him!! I'll check tonight and update this!

The Reason? Well my mum's new Boyfriend has 2 level 80 characters on here, and my sister wanted us to play together! Sounds wierd I know, so I created a paladin and started leveling him up before realising he was seriously lacking gear and money! So off my DK went - with his 750g on him from questing.

Rage have changed their rules regarding raiding and dkp and attendance. A lot of people have not been raiding much, due to RL issues I imagine. This includes myself. But they have also opened up Naxxramas to alts - so I hope to get my Druid in there for some Boomkin love!

I ran some more tests on the PTR - checking out the new changes to SotM and I'm impressed.
At a test dummy I managed a sustained 3.3k DPS with just self buffs (BoM, 180AP Flask, +40Str Food) and was still able to not run out of mana too fast - with raid mana-regen we should be ok I think.

Also has anyone noticed they've added a nice Yellow Lightning effect to Divine Storm? It only happens sometimes, but I think it looks really nice. Subtle.

I'll grab a screenie later and post it.

I've just completed my Protection set - made up of mostly 25-man naxx items - which is really nice! I finished enchanting it and gemming the gear up and in Ret spec i'm running at 27k health with Kings. Very Nice! Now when 3.1 comes out I can try some tanking! I'm a bit out of practise so will need to do some normal runs before I jump into heroics!

Practise Makes Perfect!

Mana Regen In 3.1 PTR

2009-03-25T06:43:00.002Z

Hey guys.

Just wanted to pop a quick post on here to tell you all about an experiment I ran last night on the PTR.

So armed with the new changes, but no dps meter, I ran myself to the glyph vendor in dalaran and picked up the new Exorcism Glyph and the Seal of the Martyr/Blood Glyph.

I only applied the Exorcism Glyph.

Off I ran to Stormwind and to the test dummies, buffed up and started plugging away at the helpless wooden object.

For 5-10 minutes I stood there - spamming everything that wasnt on Cool Down, including concecrate and didnt really run out of mana. If I got to 50% of mana left I popped Divine Plea and I was back up to 90-100% mana again.

Its good to remember that the new Judgements of the Wise returns 25% of base mana now. Which unless you have a lot of Int gear is pretty much 25% of our entire mana bar. Judgements are now almost back to how they were when 3.0 first came out (33% returned back then IIRC)

So I think with the added re-gen from buffs like improoved Blessing of Wisdom and other sources we shouldn't have any problems with mana regen.

Which is good news!

The only thing we have to work out now is our rotation. It seems that we can still spam consecrate but is it worth it now we have Exorcism?

I'm guessing our priority should remain roughly the same, but I was getting almost 5k Crits with exorcism in there.

Judgement > Crusader Strike > Exorcism > Divine Storm > Consecrate.

Does that look OK? Or is the Judgement going to off Cool down before DS or Cons? Its not really a big deal - just remember to punch Judgement over anything else!

PS - In naxx on Monday night i managed to get a 484k Judgement of the Martyr Crit on the adds after Razz died! LOL! I literally Crit myself to death!! Next time I'm gonna go in guns blazing full on! (read my Avenging wrath was on cool down!)

PTR Changes - Build 9722 - Ret Changes..

2009-03-23T23:25:00.006Z

OK so Blizzard have started to talk about our up-coming changes...

Divine Storm now causes 110% of weapon damage to up to 4 enemies within 8 yards.

Is this a nerf or a buff? The tool tip in game doesn't give a percentage figure for the damage.

Righteous Vengeance now also affects Crusader Strike.

This is a nice buff. Straight up.

Crusader Strike is now An instant strike that causes 110% weapon damage. In addition, if you strike a player while they are casting, their magical damage and healing will be reduced by 50% for 6 sec.

Crusader Strike has been nerfed by 11% to make way for this extra PvP ability. Not sure I'm completely happy about that - Unless we think it'll work in PvE? (Just checked the talent tree's on the Blizzard page - it says it should be 110%....so why does my in game one say 121%? Am I being thick?) ......Wait a minute...is that a mortal strike effect? /facepalm

Judgements of the Wise now immediately grant you 25% of your base mana. (Up from 15%)

There's our mana return increased. Will this be enough? As soon as the EU PTR is up I'll take a look.

Right so the first phase of the Ret-tree fixing has started - all in all it seems positive - some extra pvp abilities and more mana back and a seemingly nice buff as well.

Edit: They've added a Glyph change as well!

Glyph of Seal of Blood -- When your Seal of Blood, Seal of the Martyr, Judgement of Blood, or Judgement of the Martyr deals damage to you, you gain 11% of the damage done as mana.

More Mana! Very nice - So Martyr is no longer less appealing. 11% seems a bit much given the increase on Judgements of the Wise.

Edit 2: The Crusader Strike Debuff isnt coming to the game in 3.1 - Ghostcrawler
Thanks to Tim @ Suicidal Zebra for letting us know.

Ghostcrawler Brings the Love....Maybe....

2009-03-18T07:00:00.002Z

Morning people! So Ghostcrawler decided to answer some questions last night...Check it out!

Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)

“I know Ret pallies have made many posts outlining their potential or realized problems. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to answer those. We can only answer a very few a day.

“But here is what I can tell you:

“There is a bug in Righteous Vengeance that caused its damage to be too low (even accounting for the reduction in ranks). That bug has now been fixed. Note that even though the dot is Holy damage (which is normally not-resistable) mobs that are higher level than you can still resist some of the damage. This was not the actual bug, though some players made that assumption since they noticed RV had dropped (again even accounting for the rank reduction).

“Spiritual Attunement could provide as much or more mana as Judgements of the Wise on fights with a lot of raid damage. To account for this, we are likely to buff the instant mana from Judgements of the Wise.

“The glyph of Seal of Blood is reasonably nonsensical now, so we will probably change it to something similar but actually useful (e.g. you get mana back as if you still had SA for purposes of Blood).

“When all that is said and done, Ret’s PvE damage is still probably a little low. Buffing Divine Storm or allowing RV to benefit from Crusader Strike are two possible places to add more damage.

“Note that I made no promises. These are all just things we are discussing. The eventual solutions could end up different. ”

So interesting stuff eh...

Righteous Vengeance is bugged and is gonna get buffed and fixed at the same time - will this bring us inline with pure dps classes in 3.1? Time will tell.

It'll be interesting to see - maybe I'll resurrect my PTR session and go have a looksee when its all said and done.

It does sound interesting though - but I bet we still have mana issues while solo'ing. Seal of Wisdom FTW I suppose...

At least Blizzard have given us a glimmer of hope - a chance that we wont be broken again.

Solidarity Brothers and Sisters...the Light will Deliver us from Evil....

Ding! 2nd 80 - Time to level up the 3rd!

2009-03-17T09:52:00.002Z

Hey guys!

Spent the weekend focused on getting Gwindle to level 80. Somehow even though I wanted to level my mage up first, I was always going to level her up before any of the others.

So I have to decide what to go for next - aside from getting into heroics and naxx-10 with Gwindle - Who do I level next?

The Mage, The Warlock, or burn through the TBC content again with my 65 Death Knight.

Its a fairly steady income for my raiding from selling all the greens/greys and AH'ing all non soulbound items.

In Achievement news - Firelight is up to 81 out of 100 Mounts for the Mountain of Mounts Achievement - which is pretty mental when I think about it!!

Rage continues to work hard on Sartharion with 3 Drakes up. With 2 we clear it first time. But with the 3rd we're having problems when the 3rd drake lands - key members of the raid are getting killed fast and its kinda frustrating.

I'm not sure where things are going wrong here but considering how simple Sarth +2D is why is +3D such a big step up? I'm guessing its cos of the debuffs, but we can usually take Tenebron down really fast so he's either dead or almost dead when the 2nd Drake joins the fray.

We'll be going there again tonight to give it a try if we have the raid members present.

This week I've also been playing a bit of Warhammer. Created a Warrior Priest (of course!) called Firelight and I'm currently level 5. Will be doing a bit of a report on it later maybe. First impressions are OK, its very much a WoW Clone, with a few things different here and there.

Ok so that didnt work...

2009-03-14T11:04:00.002Z

So I posted my idea on the WoW Forums this morning and it wont work. So my 11/5/55 is out the window. (but it appears it will be nice for a ret-pvp utility spec)

So I'm left with 11 points left to spend.

Now unless Blizzard add some stuff into the Ret-tree I really dont know where to put those 11 points for a pure PvE build.

With the dual spec thing coming in I really don't see a need for a pve/pvp joint spec.

So what are my options?

Any thoughts/help on this will be really grateful cos right now I have no idea what to do...

My 3.1 Talent Build Idea...

2009-03-13T06:18:00.002Z

Hey peeps. So as we all know 3.1 is just a few weeks away (probably) and as most of us also know that the Ret-tree has had a few tweaks done to it leaving us with a lot of spare points to play with.

To that end I've put together a couple of possible specs and wanted feed back on what people thought.

1 - 11/5/55 - My idea with this one is to spec deep enough into Holy to get Aura Mastery. This will give our retribution aura 100% more effect. Increasing damage done by the aura by another 50%, increasing raid wide damage by another 3% and increasing attack speed and spell casting by another 3%. (That's provided it does in fact increase ***ALL*** effects) This also gives us 15% extra mana to play with - which is always nice.

2 - 0/10/61 - The Ret PvE/PvP Build - Gives us all the nice stat related pvp stuff in Ret and a few prot pvp related talents.

While I'll put my hand up and say I'm no pvp expert, these seem like nice buils to go for in the patch. I'd have put a nice PvP build in there to, but I'll leave Josh @ E4AE to do that. He knows his PvP way better than I.

Obviously people will be playing with talents a lot when 3.1 comes out, due to dual-spec's - personally I'll be going RET/PROT for my dual specs. Been picking up some nice tanking gear from naxx 25 that people don't want - should be nice for heroics.

I'll leave you today by telling you a dream I had last night.....

In an upcoming patch Blizzard will add "Epic Difficulty" to the 5-man Dungeons. This setting will increase the difficulty in 5-man Dungeons only to EPIC! Bosses will drop the Valor Tokens that currently drop in naxx25 and drops will be all epic 226-229 level items.

These instances will be insanely hard - completing all of them will grant, by way of an achievement, a special 310% Puce Armored Proto-Drake. There will be no hard mode achievement's as the dungeons themselves will be hard enough to test even the Leetest among us!

Bring It On!!!!!

Ask Firelight: Peregrine on Ret

2009-03-09T17:47:00.005Z

Hey peeps! I've had another email from Peregrine over at Divine Storm:

Peregrine here (aka Divine Storm). I like to think of myself as an old-school pro, but I recognize a good player when I see one. So let me ask you a few questions that have been nagging at me:

1) Do you use Seal of the Martyr for every fight?

2) What is our hit cap? I hit 8% and I'm still being dodged quite often.

3) What Major Glyphs do you use? I'm personally rolling with Glyph of Judgement/Glyph of Seal of the Martyr/Glyph of Lay on Hands. Basically, it's all for Mana efficiency - I can consecrate every single cooldown and never go below 50% Mana. But is this overkill, and is my DPS suffering for it?

4) How long do you wait to blow Avenging Wrath for the first time? I usually blow it along with Hand of Salvation as soon as I start DPS'ing, I'm pretty sure this is the right way to do it, but is there a better way?

Ok so lets start with this:

/target Peregrine
/blush

Now that's over with lets see if we cant help you by answering some of your questions:

1 - No. In some fights its just not practical (read safe) to use Seal of Blood/Martyr. Fights like Loatheb in Naxx, and as you reported today on your blog Raz in Naxx once he's dead.

You just have to remember that sometimes its a good idea to use Command when the healers are stretched and the last thing you want to do is give them more healing to do! I know usually this will mean running out/low on mana - especially on longer fights, but it really is good to be consider the healers.

2 - Currently I'm sat at 289 Hit Rating - That's 8.81% You have to remember that on some fights you will get misses. Dodges are not affected by Hit Rating. In order to remove dodges you have to stack expertise gear. My Expertise Rating is currently 91 (2.75%) but the cap is 214 Rating. Once I get that up my dps will go up a bit.

3 - I use the following Major Glyphs;

a) Glyph of Spiritual Attunement - Increases the amount of mana gained from your Spiritual Attunement spell by an additional 2%.
b) Glyph of Judgement - Your Judgements deal 10% more damage.
c) Glyph of Avenging Wrath - Reduces the cooldown of your Hammer of Wrath spell by 50% while Avenging Wrath is active.

I will be dropping the first one for Glyph of Exorcism when 3.1 comes out (+20% more damage on Exorcism) for the extra damage buff. As long as your using Seal of Blood/Martyr then you're never going to run out of mana cos of all the extra healing you get that gives you mana from your Spiritual Attunement. (PS get the Spiritual Attuement Glyph - its better than the seal of blood/martyr one you're using)

With my setup I never run out of mana - unless I'm using Seal of Command - and even then I just pop Divine Plea and/or a potion if it gets really low.

But its all down to personal preference. If you are really worried about running out of mana the keep your setup, but ask yourself one thing: Do I really need to keep above 50% mana for 100% of the fight?

4 - I usually have different times when I pop my wings. Most of the time I will use it right at the start of the fight, unless the fight is really really quick - like Patchwerk - then I'll use it when the boss gets to 20% health so I can use my Hammer of Wrath every 3 seconds due to my Glyph - Which is just IMBA.

I never ever blow it right at the start of a fight for 2 very good reasons;

1 - You might draw aggro from the tank - especially if he's positioning the boss.
2 - Your Vengeance wont be at full power, nor will other similar things like trinkets that build up your attack power over a number of swings.

You really should wait for the Raid leader to call for heroism if you have shaman's in your raid to pop it on long fights.

Avenging Wrath is a very situational buff, but needs to be used as much as possible.

I hope that helps!

Ask Firelight: Voldor on Ulduar Changes.

2009-03-06T12:34:00.002Z

Hey guys - Got an interesting email from Voldor @ Emeriss EU today;
Hi Firelight

I was wondering if you could take some time to reflect on the upcomming
changed to the Retribution talent Tree - and if you share my concerns about
Paladin dps in Ulduar?

Well this is a rather interesting question!

Having been playing on the PTR a little I've not had a chance to get into a raid into Ulduar, but There are a few things that are interesting.

1 - The change to exocism. This will increase our dps against non-undead targets a considerable amount. Now I think it might be reasonable to say that this could do with the Cooldown dropping a bit - maybe to 10 seconds? Or maybe the cooldown is just fine? I suppose it doesnt really matter - We all know by now there is no spot on rotation for Ret-Paladins, just so long as you prioritise your cooldowns available. (Judge -> CS -> DS -> Conc) Just gotta figure out where Exorcism would fit in. Also remember that Exorcism is now a guaranteed crit on Undeads.

2 - Glyph of Exorcism: +20% damage increase to Exorcism. This is just plain lovely!

Now Ghostcrawler has said that Ret-DPS as it stands in 3.1 is too low. What does this mean exactly? Yes that's right - we all remember a few months ago those immortal words:

"...TO THE GROUND BABY...."

A sad day indeed it was. So they're going to have to buff us again to get us in line with other DPS classes/specs. I've seen screen shots here and there of Hunters doing over 6k sustained dps in Naxx on the PTR - that's insane!!! Will we come in line with them? Maybe. It'd be nice!

The main thing to remember is we are a hybrid class - if we get buffed too much all the pure dps classes with be QQ'ing like crazy (Mages/Warlocks/Hunters) Even now I'm out DPS'ing the Warlocks in our raids.

So it does make you wonder what sort of things they're going to change/add to Ret to give it that boost.

I'd like to see Divine Storm become holy damage again personally. That was a big nerf.

Another thing maybe could be to increase the damage further of judgements and Crusader Strike.

Can I ask for Titans Grip as well? ( I can dream can't I?)

But seriously - until we see more info from Blizzard with regards to what they plan to do with us all we can do is speculate on things...

Worrying about it now is not going to help things!

Everything Blizzard does on the PTR is as predictable as the weather: - You know roughly whats supposed to be coming but predicting it accurately is impossible.

So to sum up Voldor, from a personal stand point I'm NOT worried at all about our DPS in Ulduar.

Maybe when Blizzard announce the changes for us then I'll think about it some more.

Sartharian + 2 Drakes DOWN!

2009-03-03T20:52:00.004Z

Hey guys! Time for a raiding update! Rage managed to down Sartharian with 2 drakes tonight, and on our 2nd try!

I got the Obsidian Greathelm! The best helm in the game for Rets!

Obsidian Greathelm
Head Plate
1908 Armor
+98 Strength
+145 Stamina
Meta Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +8 Strength
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 76.
Equip: Improves your expertise rating by 59.

Well happy I am!

So we're currently in Naxx clearing the Death Knight wing, and i noticed this:
Yeah thats a 26k Consecration tick on Razz..... W T F!

Anyone care to explain? Also a sustained 4.2k DPS!

My Screenshot Meme!

2009-02-27T22:10:00.004Z

Ok so Tim over at Suicidal Zebra has tagged me! Damn!

Manged to dig out an old hard drive and scraped out my Pre-TBC Screenies from Firelights old MC Raiding as holy!!

First we take a trip to Molten Core, waiting for people to arrive so we can start. (Yes I really did run around dressed like a parrot!!!)

Then we take a trip to Zul'Gurrub - waiting to go into the Panther bosses room.

Then last, but not least, a very rare shot of me in TBC Protection spec before I joined Rage and became the ret-monster I am today!

I'm going to tag Rohan @ Blessing of Kings, Galoheart @ Ardent Defender and Holy Warrior @ The Good, the Bad and the Downright Evil!

Good Luck!

Woot! I love Bre and Fim!! Twisted Nether Blogcast FTW!!

2009-02-25T13:42:00.001Z

Thanks to Bre and Fim for reading out my Email on their latest pod-cast!!

http://www.twistednether.net/2009/02/20/episode-35-the-myze-has-melted/

Darkmoon Card: Greatness - 3.1 Incoming

2009-02-25T12:30:00.004Z

OK so finally I've managed to pluck up the courage and try to get this card.

Its awesome.

I've wanted it since the day I first laid eyes on it!

So I dumped herbalism on my mage and took up Inscription as there was/is no way I was going to spend 15,000 gold on a trinket.

So I got Edam to 400 inscription skill and started creating the cards. Obviously there is a lot of hit and miss with crafting them. But you can almost guarantee without a doubt you can sell all of the cards that you craft that you don't want. And you do pray for Duplicates of Nobles cards as they go for 1-3k on my server each.

In crafting the whole set I spent about 7,000 gold on herbalism mats. Its kinda sucky how expensive stuff still is on this server with regards to herbs.

But I managed it - in a few hours - but as I said it cost me about half of the cost of buying the deck out-right from the AH.

Of course the only problem is I cant get my grubby little hands on the trinket for a week and a half when the Darkmoon Faire comes to Elwynn. Bah!

But I've finally managed to get it, so I can start saving up for other things now.

What am I saving for? Well firstly I've got more than enough gold to buy the dual spec when it comes in 3.1 so I guess its going to be mounts and pets!

Having seen the list on MMO-Champion of the new pets and mounts available in 3.1 I'm going to be having a nose around the PTR later this week to see how much these cost and to make a list of locations of where to buy em. I will be posting on that when I do find out if its obvious.

Speaking of 3.1 I've been looking around and reading everyone's take on the upcoming paladin changes. Somethings are good, some are meh, some are bad.

I guess the 0/10/61 build is out of the window now. So I want to see a working talent calculator to play with to see if its maybe worth picking up some holy or prot talents.

I'm not going to start second guessing myself till I see whats what in the PTR. Obviously all the changes made are standard and can be changed/removed at any time if blizzard see's fit.

One thing I expect to see nerfed is:

Glyph of Exorcism - Increases damage done by Exorcism by 20%. (Old: Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.)

Exorcism as it stands crits for 2.5-3.5k at the moment. adding 20% to 3.5k = 4.2k crits with this.

Add that to a nice bunch of CS, DS, and Judgment crits? You're looking at 6 second rotation that could possibly do like easily 20-25k's damage or more (given 100% lucky crits)

Pop Avenging Wrath
- Judgement: 10k
- Consecrate: ticks for 600-700.
- Crusader Strike: 7k
- Divine Storm: 8k
- Exorcism: 4k

Obviously in PvP thats pretty much never going to happen? So I suppose we could be safe. But on boss fights that's just awesome. Just gotta work out how much mana we'd be burning all the time with that in the rotation. Add into that Hammer of Wrath? Wow...

At the moment I'm loving when bosses get to 20% with my AW glyph giving me HoW every 3 seconds - pew pew pew!! But damn do I run out of mana quick! (usually the time I pop a potion if required - depending on raid setup of course)

I also found these interesting - Guess they're PvP Glyphs?

Glyph of Divine Storm - Your Divine Storm now heals for an additional 15% of the damage it causes.

Glyph of Divine Plea - While Divine Plea is active, you take 3% reduced damage from all sources.

Glyph of Hand of Salvation - When you cast Hand of Salvation on yourself, it also reduces damage taken by 20%.

Its nice of Blizzard to clean up the Retri tree quite a bit - by allowing for a lot of things to be removed and merged into other talents. Am I happy I'm losing 2/3% crit? Not really but I'm sure I'll cope! Running with nearly 50% crit at times in raids can be a bit silly! NO NO! I LOVE IT!!!

What things are you guys looking forward to in 3.1?

2 Words: Aquatic Mounts!

Ask Firelight: Retribution Advice - Metin

2009-02-22T08:06:00.002Z

Well 2 emails in a row! So here goes!

I received an email from Metin from Elune US asking the following:

I need some suggestions on how I may improve my dps with what I have so far.
My current gears can be viewed from wowarmory. Metin, Elune realm.
Last time in 25Naxx I did 3.8k dps. At that time I had Titansteel Destroyer
and Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal. Then I got an up with:

The Jawbone
Binds when picked up
Two-Hand Mace
586 - 880 Damage Speed 3.60
(203.6 damage per second)
(2083 feral attack power)
+101 Strength
+108 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves haste rating by 99 (3.02% @ L80).
Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 59 (7.2 @ L80).

Of course my hit rating went down by 54 from swapping out Titansteel Destroyer.
So now I'm forced to dig out a pair of old boots:
Iron-Spring Jumpers
Binds when equipped Feet Plate
1580 Armor
+76 Strength
+85 Stamina
Durability 75 / 75
Requires Level 80
Equip: Improves hit rating by 73 (2.23% @ L80).
Equip: Increases armor penetration rating by 37 (2.4% @ L80).

But I like Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal because it will give me more damage.
So I was thinking of using Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal when engaging
trash mobs in Naxx since they don't require that much hit. And then
switch back to Iron-Spring Jumpers for bosses.

My dps rotation is judge, CS, consec, DS, exceroism.
With multiple mob pulls, I use judge, consec, DS, CS.
I use seal of martyr.

Question: I noticed some pallies go for that valor armor set.
But that set will drop hit rating. So a lot of hit gems will be
used instead of strength gems. Will that bonus stat 1s judge cooldown
reduction make more dps than having the best of each individual gear
category with hit capped?

The key to getting your hit rating up is the non-set items - Boots/bracers/belts.

In the mean time - change the enchant on your boots to the Icewalker enchant, and start using Hit-Rating food so you're as close to the Hit-Cap as possible during boss fights. Those 2 things will give you 52 hit rating and get you up to 263 Hit Rating - only 2 points off the cap.

In the mean time you have to pray to the WoW gods that you get some/all of the following upgrades!!

Bracers of Unrelenting Attack - +46 Hit Rating.
Crude Discolored Battlegrips - +74 Hit Rating.
Girdle of the Ascended Phamtom - +51 Hit Rating.

These upgrades will allow you to drop your current legs for the Valorous legs and get the rest of the set so you can get your 4-piece bonus.

So keep your new Sudden Reprisal boots on and change the enchant on them, and use hit rating food.

Upgrades are the key here!

Good Luck!

PS - I'm very jealous of your trinket!! Grrrr!! Gief Greatness Trinket!!

Ask Firelight: Retribution Advice

2009-02-18T20:29:00.002Z

I've had an email from Darrtanus from Argent Dawn - US asking the following:

I've been reading you "Retribution" blog for some time now and find it quite useful.I was looking at your armory profile to compare to mine. I saw you have little expertise rating. People have been telling me that I need to get some expertise to help my dps. Is expertise needed? I'm topping out at around 1800 dps.

The only thing not accurate is on my armory is my weapon. For raiding I use the Titansteel Destroyer.

I guess the first question to ask is what Seal are you using? Most ret-paladins I see around on my server are scared to use Seal of Blood/Martyr due to the damage component. After telling them to switch to Martyr they immediately notice a big jump in their DPS.

Secondly Gems I see your over the hit cap of 265 by exactly 16 points - loose that Hit rating gem in your boots. Also your stacking a lot of crit. I would swap out all your crit gems for +16 Strength gems asap. You'll build your crit up with gear upgrades as you progress into 10-man Naxx.

As for expertise It is a nice buff, but given the choice I'd go for the following suggestion from Josh @ E4AE (follow that link for way more quality Ret-Tips)

Strength
Hit (to 8%, or ~262 rating)
Expertise (to 6.5%, or ~214 rating before racials - get to 26 expertise skill)
Crit (or equal amounts of Agility)
Haste
Armor Penetration

Some tips at this point for you are as following;

1 - Hit the Heroics. Get as much gear as you can from heroics. (I've put together a small list of nice upgrades for you lower down)

2 - Get your Sons of Hodir rep up to exalted for the Epic shoulder enchants.

3 - Change your wrist/glove enchants for the good attack power buffs when you get upgrades rather than +Strength and + Hit rating ones you have on there at the moment.

4 - Finish enchanting your gear - your cloak is missing one at the moment.

5 - If you can afford it - drop your mining skill for Blacksmithing for the cool extra sockets in gloves/braces/belt (although the belt one is available to non-blacksmiths)

I think at the moment your main issue is getting more gear. See if you can get yourself into Naxx-10 and get saving Badges of Heroism for the teir 7 chest/gloves.

List of Upgrades:-

Chest - Bonegrinder Breastplate - Heroic: Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom

Gloves - Gauntlets of Capture - Heroic: Violet Hold.

Belt - Flame-Bathed Steel Girdle - Heroic: The Nexus.

Legs - Staggering Legplates - Heroic: Utgarde Keep.

Well I hope that helps out - If anyone of my reader has any more suggestions or dissagree's with anything I've said don't hesitate to shout out!

Firelight, The Love Fool!

2009-02-15T07:54:00.003Z

Finally! After 30 or 40 tries I managed to get 2 bags of candy from the guards in Ironforge.

I didn't realise that the guards also gave Adoration gifts and had only been talking to citizens for them. Silly Me!

Once I realised this I was able to get my 18th title!

Candy Rant....

2009-02-13T09:53:00.002Z

Where's my candy bags huh?

2 days of trying so far an no Candy!!!!

This is getting ridiculous.....

All other achievements done, just need the candy bags!! DOH!

Love Is In The Air.

2009-02-12T13:06:00.002Z

Yep! Its that time of year again. Everything is pink and fluffy and for some reason there are hundreds of people trying to get in the pants of an innocent gnome in Ironforge.

There's something unusual about running around Ironforge, Stormwind and Darnassus professing my love to burly men all over the place. I mean I suppose I could be picky and only give my tokens of love to only members of the opposite sex. But then It'd take me all week to get my achievments done.

So after a night of running around the 3 cities and managed to get the majority of the achievements done for the title.

I just need the following;

Candy achievement - This is proving to be quite hard as I've not gotten any of the candy yet so far.

I also need to run around and /pity the love fools - Only managed to get my love fools this morning so I'll do that tonight.

I need to also get the roses from the dungeon bosses - I did do an Utgarde Keep heroic last night and they dropped, but I didn't win the roll. But I can probably go into UK Normal and get the item with my mage friend quite easily.

I think I need 1 more achievement for the title, but cant remember, which one.

Have any of you been getting into the swing of things and enjoying the holiday? There's not really anything new to it this year, but last year I was so un-interested in it I didn't quite understand what you had to do! Its really over-complicated with getting loads of items that fill up your bags very quickly!

The Sunwell - Retro Raiding

2009-02-11T13:08:00.003Z

Hey people! Hows everyone one on this wonderful Wednesday! Can't wait to go home and see how exciting it is not not bring my seals up every 2 minutes. Its going to take a little while to get used to that!! Took me long enough to get used to not having to do it every 30 seconds!

Anyway I'm not going to spend any time repeating what about 30 other blogs have talked about the 3.0.9 patch that's live today/yesterday.

All 25-man content had been cleared this week to date last night when the raid formed and we had penciled in a run to the Sunwell.

20 of our finest and a couple of trialists descended to Shattrath and then onto the Isle of Quel'danas and rode into the instance. Having not been here for about 4 or 5 months it was with great anticipation and excitement that we re-entered with the plan to blow through the content and get that all important achievement "Outland Raider"

At around 20:00 we started gathering inside, and were chatting on Ventrillo about how we were going to blow through here like a hot knife through butter.

The first patrol mob was one of those sentinel things. I jokingly said "he's only got 350k health!" and was promptly told to go try solo'ing him! Off i went - Seal of Light in hand.
10 seconds later (and I was surprised I lasted that long) SPLAT! Oops!
"I think we may have underestimated this place a little" to which one of our pally tanks stepped up and showed how it was done! Well done Lefty!!

Anyway about 10/15 mins later we started clearing the trash which was fast - I mean really fast. We got to the first boss in a few minutes.

Now this was the blue dragon Kalecgos. It seems that most people had forgotten the tactics and started nuking the dragon down before I remembered we had to kill the demon in the other realm!! in we piled and managed to kill the demon when Kalecgos had only 20k health left! phew! That was close!

Next onto Brutallus - he went down pretty fast on the first go as well. Felmyst was next - she wiped us once or twice due to getting double width breaths that were MC'ing most if not all of the raid.

Back pre-wrath we had never managed to get Felmyst down in Rage so from here on it was all new territory.

We cleared the trash to the Eredar Twins. All I'm going to say is - these 2 should have been the last boss in the place...

OH! MY! GOD!

Thankfully after about the 6th or 7th wipe we had one of our new members get onto vent and explain the fight and after a couple more tries we got them down.

That fight is SO unforgiving. If anyone gets the Conflagrate they really need to move FAST.

So then it was onto Mu'ru where after 1 wipe we got him down - the first attempt was pretty funny, we just attempted to Nuke him, not 100% sure what would happen - our guide who was explaining the fights had forgotten the part where Mu'ru becomes that demon, but we got him in the end.

Then onto the man himself....Kil'Jaeden.

This guy was a joke. With 20 people in the raid we managed to Nuke this guys down so fast he never made it into his scary phase. (apparently!)

The RP event that happened after was pretty cool, and Nice to finally see the end of TBC Raiding.

So it was a rather frustrating night - to the point that a few people gave up during our wipes with the Eredar twins, but was really nice to see the rest of the content.

Here are a few pics!

Fishing For The First Time...

2009-02-06T12:58:00.003Z

Hey guys! Wanted to talk about fishing today. It occurred to me over the weekend that paying gold for food buffs was finally getting silly.

The +40 Strength and Stamina food buff (of which I cant remember the name) was costing me around 50-70g per stack of 20 for just the fish. Even more if I wanted to buy the ready made stuff. So after almost 3 years I decided to start leveling my fishing skill.

Not only to be able to fish for my own food, but also to get some more achievements done!
Over the years when I'd been REALLY bored I'd managed to get myself to 225 Fishing Skill. So having found some good guides on the web I set about fishing.

I started in Ironforge as I wanted to get hold of the rare fish there for the achievement. When i finally fished up this beauty I was about 275 Fishing. I then moved to Theramore and started again. I stayed there till 350 fishing then moved to Northrend to get my 350-450 skill training.

I started in some of the sea's/lakes there until I got to 360 or so then was able to fish in Dragonblight to fish up the Dragonfin Angelfish from the pool surrounded by dead kalu'ak dudes.
So now I'm 390 or so and actually enjoying myself! I've started doing the outland-daily quests and I'm fishing up the coins in Dalaran.

I'm slowly moving through the achievements one-by-one.

I'm a bit obsessed by these achievements really - All of them are in my grasp, so I'm spending more time doing them than actually leveling my alts! HaHa!

Anyway here's me fishing in Dalaran

Also need some quick advise - which of these 2 pairs of boots is better. The gem in the boots with the socket was there to keep my meta-gem working.

(PS - If anyone is interested in the Mini-Map addon I'm using its called "sexymap")

Malygos 25-Man DOWN!!!

2009-01-29T23:26:00.001Z

Well happy! 4 hours of tries and we eventually got him!

Grats Rage!

Mana Issues with Ret?

2009-01-29T12:29:00.002Z

Hey guys! Just wanted to take a few mins to talk about something that seems to be bother a few peeps.

Josh @ Eye for an Eye posted about his mana issues and having to go for Glyph of Consecration to over come this.

Now Glyph of Consecration increases the length and cooldown time of Consecrate by 1 second. Meaning you spam it less often.

Rather than use Glyph of Con. I use Glyph of Seal of the Martyr/Blood. This increases the amount of mana you receive from Spiritual Attunement by 10% while the seal is active.

This little awesome glyph keeps you topped up in fights like Patchwerk where you don't(shouldn't) receive much healing. (don't get me started about random 14k Chain-Heal procs you shamans!!)

Reading the comments about the glyph on wowhead.com it seems no-one agrees and now has me 2nd guessing something that seems to help me keep my mana going.

The only time I ever have to consume a potion is if i'm solo'ing stuff now. In last nights raid for instance we cleared 3 wings of naxx-25 and I didn't take *ANY* potions - not even health pots.
I'm wondering if I should start carrying around DPS potions for the last 20% of boss fights when I pop wings or when Heroism is up.

I'll list what Glyphs I'm using later in case you're interested.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Last night I was invited in the Naxx as someone dropped out at the last minute.

Once again all that dropped was stupid Protector T7.5 items, but I manged to get to 60 something Emblems of Valor so just purchased my shoulders that way instead.

I did however get 1 loot item:

Aged Winter Cloak
Back
154 Armor
+38 Agility
+57 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.
Equip: Increases attack power by 110.
Equip: Increases armor penetration rating by 28.

Which is lovely! I had the emblem cloak before so this was a nice crit upgrade for me.

I also got gems fitted to my t7.5 shoulder and legs, and enchanted my new gloves:

Crude Discolored Battlegrips
Hands Plate
1436 Armor
+75 Strength
+82 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 74.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 43.

This was the last piece i needed to get me over the hit cap again which is now sitting at 294 meaning I can possibly play with some new boots/belt/neck or something in the future.

I also went for the Massacre enchant for my Axe - controversial? +110 AP is pretty nice!

I'm sitting at 35.1% crit now unbuffed and way over 3k Attack Power.
(In raids fully buffed I'm hovering around 5k AP and 40-45% crit depending on Druids!)

Cooking Achievements Completed!

2009-01-28T13:26:00.006Z

Well almost!!

Hey guys! Just wanted to talk about a few things that I've done lately.

I've completed all the cooking achievements - well there's one left - the 100 cooking tokens one.

I managed to scour the face of Azeroth in search of the last 13 recipes I needed for the 160 recipes achievement, and managed to get them all without having to get the chimera chops or the Thistle Tea recipe.

If anyone is interested I could list what recipes I have. Maybe I'll make a post about it!

I've kinda not got the will to level my alts at the moment. Which kinda defeats the object of me being on a raiding break - this has not been helped by having computer problems.

I bought a new case and a new heatsink/fan for the cpu and tidied the cables to promote air flow in the case - just need to buy an additional 120mm case fan and I'm set. Got a lot of things to try out tonight in the hunt to work out what the problem is that's causing the crashing.

I hope I can get it fixed soon - thankfully it only seems to crash the PC when I'm travelling around Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor and not in Northrend at all.

Chef Firelight the Elder

2009-01-26T13:13:00.004Z

Hey guys! I hope you're enjoying the Lunar Festival!

Well as you can probably guess from the title I've managed to get another 2 titles to add to my collection!

Lets start with my thoughts on the Lunar Festival Achievements.

All of them are very easy provided 2 things;

1 - You're level 80

2 - You can get a group to kill 1 boss in a heroic.

The running around seeing all the elders really couldn't be easier - just time consuming.

As for the opposite factions city elders - I'd suggest you either go very early in the morning, or with a large group. Thankfully even though I did mine at like 11am on Saturday we didn't meet any resistance at all and were able to get in and out - no problem.

Other than going to the other factions cities there are no Battleground achievements this holiday(unless you count going to the elder in Wintergrasp)

Most of the instance elders can be solo'd easily by a level 80. I did the majority of the instances with a Mage guildie (Hi Umari!)

So come Saturday afternoon I was Elder Firelight!

So that brings me to the Cooking Title: Chef

Like everyone else who wanted this title we were waiting for the extra recipes to come with the patch.

Then it was just a case of getting the last 8 points to get me to 450. This was expensive - thankfully I was able to get a couple of guildies who had spare fish for me.

All in all a pretty successful weekend when it came down to it.

Aside from my computer problems - I'm really at a loss now - when I run WoW in windowed mode the game will randomly restart my pc in certain places in what appears to be Kalimdor.

I re-installed WoW - that didn't work.

I re-installed Vista - that didn't work.

I updated all my drivers and that seems to work OK but I've been running the game in full screen mode. I wouldn't mind if the PC was old - but the kit is only 2 months - well not even that.

Lets see what happens, but I'm slowly starting to loose my rag!! Gaaahh!!!

Oh and before I forget I listened to the WoW Insider podcast over the weekend live and was in the chat and Mike Schramm gave me a mention on air!!

Big Big Thanks to Xaodaria!

2009-01-23T20:34:00.004Z

Just wanted to make a quick post about something that's just happened in game!

Let me just fill you in on a couple of things. I've been running UBRS on and off the last 2 and a half years trying to get my Lightforge Spaulders.

They dropped once for me and a warrior ninja'd them back when I was level 60. Ever since then I've been running that instance whenever I could get a group together.

Since 3.0.8 I've run UBRS 8 or 9 times and The beast has only dropped some cape and Finkle's Skinner. Every time he went down, those items dropped.

So I thought I'd raise a ticket to the GM's to ask if The Beast's loot table was bugged.
(Don't laugh! It was worth a try!!)

So when the GM finally come to talk to me I'm in UBRS again with a couple of guildies....

"*Jumps out of the bush and screams Buu!* Greetings Firelight, I am Game Master Xaodaria. Do you have a moment to discuss your ticket?"

"Aah!! You scared me! Yes I do"

"What seems to be the problem?"

"In a lot of runs, and i mean a lot, The Beast is dropping the same items over and over"

"Yes the shoulders have a lower drop chance than the other items."

"But after 3 years of coming here they only drop once?"

"Yeah, they are rare."

"Oh I'm killing him now again, fingers crossed!..........

....Wahey!! They dropped!!!!"

"Did they? :) "

"Yeah" I don't believe it! You must be my good luck charm!!"

She then asked me to stand still and she dropped a Chocolate cake into my bags!!

I ate the cake and I was explaining this on vent to my guildies and the rogue in the group asked if I could ask her to make Drakki drop the shadowcraft tunic -which then dropped!

While we were fighting him I noticed that the GM had /cheer 'd at me, and there she was!! Standing there for a few seconds!! The first time I've seen a GM in game!

So she asked if I needed anything else and I said "You couldn't make the legs drop for me too in strat could ya!!" as a joke, and after she had gone I went to Strat and they he dropped the legs!!

That was probably just luck to be honest, but it was a fun few mins that's for sure!

So Happy Birthday Xaodaria I hope you have a great day!!

And here's me in all of my Dungeon 0.5 set!

Edit: Oh and in case you didnt notice I'm back to a man again!!

Loremaster!

2009-01-22T07:46:00.001Z

Logged in yesterday to find that I had the Achievement Loremaster!

One Happy Paladin!

Reputation Update and Leveling Alts in Northrend

2009-01-20T12:10:00.003Z

Hey peeps! So its nice to be just chilling out instead of worrying about if I can afford raiding mats etc.

I've been a bit burned out lately from all the raiding again, but as my gear is almost maxed out to the best it can be right now raiding should be relatively cheaper from here on.

Anyway I wanted to talk about my rep grind to 40 factions exalted today and some alt leveling stuff.

So I finally made it to exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood - which is number 36/40, leaving me with a real hard decision on where to go to next for rep.

I guess the cheapest way would be grind Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch Battlegrounds. I'm currently Honored with AB, and only friendly with WSG. I'm not sure how long/how many BG's I'd have to run in order to make exalted with both of these factions - I imagine it'd be quite some time. Months maybe? Can anyone tell me how long it took them to reach exalted with AB/WSG?

The next factions to look at from the old world are;

1 - Hydraxian Waterlords. I'm fairly confident I can solo most of the trash in Molten Core and will have a go at the weekend if that's possible. Not sure how much rep you get for mobs in there - at least 3.0.8 is hitting tomorrow so I'll get more rep from the mobs.

2 - Magram/Gelkis Clan Centaurs. After tomorrow getting one of these to exalted shouldn't take too much time and will be reasonable good money grinding too as the mobs drop lots of cloth. obviously I can only do 1 of these factions and not both.

3 - Steamwheedle Cartel - again this is kinda hard work but as its going to be virtually impossible for me to get the Bloodsail admiral title I might consider grinding rep for these guys once 3.0.8 hits.

I'm exalted with all Burning Crusade Rep Factions apart from Scryers, and there's no point switching to them as I will loose credit for the Aldor.

So that leaves me with Wrath factions;

1 - Explorers' League - At the moment there is only 1 repeatable quest to get to exalted and I think I read somewhere it would take 156 days to get there from Friendly.

2 - The Frostborn - As above.

3 - The Silver Covenant - No quests at all from these guys in game at the moment - I imagine they'll either be linked to Ulduar or Icecrown Citadel raid instances when 3.1 and 3.2 come out. Actually thinking about it, I imagine the Explorers' League and the Frostborn will be linked to Ulduar.

4 - Frenzyheart Tribe - as with the scryers/aldor you can only have exalted with 1 faction at any one time.

I think I'm going to try for the Hydraxian Waterlords first to see if its attainable solo then one of the centaur rep factions - preferably the Gelkis one as I have to do some quests for the Loremaster achievement in Kalimdor. Unless of course when I log in tomorrow I've already got it! I've been working hard on doing as many quests as possible on Firelight to get as close as possible to the 730 quests required. I think I was up to 680 odd completed.
What was odd though on the PTR was I was much closer to the 700 required in 3.0.8 than I was in Live. Curious...

So last night whilst watching episode 3 and 4 of the new 24 series I picked up my boomkin and started questing again. She dinged 72 just before I logged off for the night. I tell you what Shadow Meld is awesome when you suddenly get ganked by a lot of mobs!

What I'd been doing up till know was switching between my Mage and my druid - questing here and there - but I've decided to level Gwindle up first as she's got 2 very profitable professions on her: Enchanting/herbalism. Then if I make good time my Mage will be next.

Currently I have zero desire to level my warlock. I'm not sure what it is, but I just don't feel like it would be as entertaining leveling a 3rd caster toon. Maybe once I've played with my Death Knight some more. Although I probably will level my locks Alchemy - the price of Mana/health potions at the moment is ridiculous.

Betrayer of Humanity

2009-01-16T13:15:00.003Z

Wohoo!

Got me my new Axe last night from Kel'thuzad!

Betrayer of Humanity
Two Hand Axe
606-910 Dmg Speed 3.40
(222.9 damage per second)
+66 Agility
+121 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 87.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 57.
Equip: Improves attack power by 226.

This is awesome! Shame I cant afford to do anything with it enchant wise just yet.
Might have to plumb for the 110 AP enchant till I can get the mats together for berserker.

I also got the T7.5 leg token which I need to get some gems for and some new gloves (neither which I have equipped so I cant check the stats)

Is anyone else having issues getting hold of Red Wrath Gems? There are never any on the auction house!! I was however lucky enough to get one of our guild Jewelcrafters to pick up the +16 Strength gem pattern for me. So at least that's one thing I don't have to worry about.

So from last night I've taken on board some of the things Stoico had to say on my last post and I've started crafting little things like the belt buckle and putting them on the AH at a reasonable price. but not undercutting. By this morning one had sold already! Now if only I could stop spending it all on Dark Iron Ore and running to BRD and handing them for rep - mind you I'll be done soon!!! 3k rep to go!!

Anyway things are going to slow down a bit here for a couple weeks, I will update where I can about my progress on new stuff I do.

Wipe Nights

2009-01-15T16:40:00.003Z

Hey peeps! Been quiet round here for a few days, just not much going on really - I'm planning a 2-3 week raiding break to cool off and level my alts to make some gold for raiding as it seems I'm pretty broke right now in game!

Anyway I wanted to take a few mins to talk about wipe nights after Rage has had a few problems downing Malygos 25.

So 10 of us had cleared him a week ago after 4 or 5 attempts as I said earlier.

So Monday night we gathered 25 of our finest and headed over to Malygos. Where we spent the whole 3/4 hours wiping. our best try was about 4/5% left.

Everyone seemed to get what was going on, but something was causing chunks of the raid to get killed either in phase 2 or early on in phase 3.

So 4 Hours, 2 flasks, 20 food items later and probably about 150g in repairs we called it a night.

Total cost for the night? At least 250-300g in mats/repairs.

I didn't raid on Tuesday night due to having to grind some girlfriend rep, but the same thing happened - 3/4 hours of wipes on Malygos. That enrage timer is a real pain.

Now I have no problem throwing away that sort of gold on progression raids, but I imagine a lot of other people do.

Not being a great grinder, and having maxed my rep with all the daily quest giver factions I don't see the point in doing dailys other than the cooking quest. (Further more it seems that to get 40 factions to exalted is not retro active. If you're exalted with Aldor, as soon as you drop below exalted, if you had 35 factions to exalted you'd loose 1 and drop to 34. Confirmed by Blizzard)

So this leaves me a little short to say the least. I've tried playing the Auction House, but it seems that in order to get a long in this you have to spend a lot of time in the AH, this just bores me to be honest. I do my daily scans on the AH so maybe one day I'll try it properly.

So what this brings me to is now the fact that I have to take a break from Raiding to level up some alts. I guess the hardest part will be not spending the gold on mounts!!

I have to say that I wasn't expecting to start raiding so soon. I think I had based my expectations on what happened to my raiding group when TBC hit 2 years ago and the fact I didn't start raiding again for 4/5 months after the expansion was released.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation where you have to stop raiding to gain gold, and what did you do about it if anything.

Set Bonuses, Ghost Hit Rating and Librams....

2009-01-09T13:20:00.003Z

Well It seems that Jacob was right in the comments for my last post about Ghost Hit Rating being hotfixed in the server restarts - only the EU servers got them 24 hours later so my tests were still valid at the time.

I've done some more tests with my current gear and I need another 1% Hit Rating to be capped. (Or I put on my old legs for the time being till I get something else with 79 Hit rating on it.
Its only 1% so I'm not so fussed. Didnt seem to affect my DPS too much last night.

We finished off Naxx and moved to Sartharion again last night - the Kel'Thuzad fight was very messy at the start and somehow I managed to get killed very early on by Kel's ice block thing - and not receiving any healing. Kinda annoying but I've not been to Kel for a couple of weeks, so the rest of the team managed with out me it seems as he went down FAST!

So Stoico asked earlier have I tried any other gear that would mean I loose my 4x set bonus. Well to be honest I've not gotten any replacement gear yet to replace any of my t7/t7.5 stuff.

I use maxdps.com for as a guide to what is good or not good for replacement dps items.

As for Librams, I'm using the +damage to crusader strike one from Naxx-25 as according to maxdps.com its a 1dps increase compared to the grizzly hills one (which I had been using till 2 days ago)

Ghost Hit Rating Experiment

2009-01-08T11:24:00.004Z

Hey guys! So we did a 3 wings in Naxx last night and I got some new legs to replace the Staggering Legplates. This meant I was loosing 80 hit rating.

So this meant I was 79 Hit rating off the cap. So it was time to test to see if I had the ghost hit rating.

Off I ran to Ironforge - removed all the gear I had with hit rating on, cleared Re-count and started swinging away.

20 mins later I came back and had a look at the stats:

As you can see I missed 4.6% of the time out of 500 hits. I took this to mean I would need only 5% Hit rating to reach my cap.

So I had limited time, but I threw on all my gear and started plugging away. I was only able to do 100 swings before I had to go to bed, but managed to get the following:

As you can see with 5.73% hit rating out of the 100 hits I had no misses. (I'll run a more comprehensive test(bear in mind I wasn't doing any special attacks - it was just auto swing on both tests)

So did I do something wrong? Does Hit rating affect Dodge as well?

Here's a screenie after the Noth the Plaguebringer fight....4115 DPS! nice!

Malygos 10-Man Explained.

2009-01-07T11:01:00.002Z

Hey peeps!

Last night Rage were supposed to get together and go take down 25-man Malygos.

Sadly we were missing a few people so we did 25-man Arcavon instead then split into 2 groups - 1 moving to naxx and the other moved to the Eye of Eternity.

I was picked for malygos, which was really cool because I'd not witnessed this fight properly before. So I'm going to try to explain as much as I can remember from the fight.

Phase 1.

The tank will grab Malygos - please allow him a few seconds to grab aggro. The rest of the raid should stand in the centre of the area bunched up. As Malygos is being tanked a star will appear and make its way to Malygos - if it gets to him it will give him a 10/15s buff that increases his damage by 50%. This stacks so don't let any get to him or your healers will have a hard time healing the tank. So you have to kill the stars before they get to Malygos. Once destroyed they drop onto the ground a lightning field that if you stand into it you get a 50% damage buff. So what you wanna do is kill them as they come to the raid. That way you get a stacking buff - each of them giving +50% damage - the most we say in 10 man was 3 of them (total 150% damage increase) which was pretty sweet.

Phase 2.

At 50% malygos gets annoyed and summons a load of blood elves of discs that have to be killed before phase 3 starts.
There are 2 types of these blood elves - 3/4 or each type.
The first type that move along the floor and the second that fly in the air.
The ground ones have to go first - once they die they drop the discs they're on and the melee classes can jump on the discs and fly up in the air and kill the flying ones.
While your fighting the ground ones, the flying ones will be firing crap all over the place that hits for 14k damage unless you're hiding inside one of the Arcane bubbles that appear on the platform. These bubbles only last a short while - getting smaller and smaller, but thankfully more appear for you to run into. This phase is really easy - as long as you stick to the bubbles if your on the platform. (people on the discs flying around wont get hit by the 14k arcane bolt things) Once all the adds are dead we move to...

Phase 3.

At this point Malygos is REALLY pissed! and he blows up the platform!

OH MY GOD!! We're falling to our death!!

Thud! Wow I was caught by a dragon! Cool!!!

So Your dragon has 6 abilities.

1 - Fires a fire bolt at Malygos that puts a combo point on him and does fire damage over time(which stacks)
2 - Does a damage to malygos based on the number of combo points you have up on Malygos
3 - Same as 1, but Heals the target and puts a combo point up.
4 - Sets off an AOE heal based on the number of combo points up on the target
5 - Fire shield - This protects you from Malygos for a certain amount of damage based on the number of combo points up on Malygos.
6 - Speed buff.

The entire raid should just do the following (apart from the Main Tank)
Press 1 twice so you get 2 combo points up on malygos, then wait till you have 85 energy and press 2.

Just keep doing that and eventually you can be doing 100k dps due to the number of stacks of the fire damage up on Malygos.
If Malygos ever targets you and you get the warning - press 5 to protect yourself.

The Main tank should mark himself with a raid mark and target one of his/her fellow raiders and start spamming 3 till he has 5 combo points up and then press 4 to do the AOE heal.

While he is doing that he should also be move around Malygos or the Lightning Fields will kill the raid.

Everyone should stick together - then provided you have enough time after phase 1 and 2 then its a cake walk.

So that's the basics of the fight - i suggest you watch the Tank-Spot video on YouTube as this is a really good video tutorial.

Anyway so I got my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title - so I'm happy!

After the raid my 3v3 team did some arena matches and after a few matches things started to gel together quite well. Although our enhancement shaman kept getting ganked quite fast early on in the matches. Eventually after some macro's being written for my hand of protection we started winning some matches. I still deplore rogues in pvp. Yes that means you, you stun locking sunofab****.

Once we've done some more matches I'll report on it more.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-06T12:28:00.004Z

Hey Guys! Hope you all had a good new year and didn't get too inebriated!

I had a quiet night in as my g/f was working till 2am New Years eve sadly, but it was OK, I had some beers and played some WoW, Guitar Hero: World Tour, and Rock Band.

Anyway I wanted to talk about a few things today so here we go!

First - I've not had a chance to do any 3v3 yet with my team so that'll have to wait for another day.

Second - Ghost Hit Rating. Does it exist? Is it Real? Personally I don't know yet - I'm planning on doing a test to see what my current hit rating is with no Hit gear on on a dummy in Ironforge and see what happens. Many blogs have talked about it already so I wont go into too much detail, but it would appear if you had Precision (+3% Hit rating) pre-wrath then you should still have this buff although its not shown anywhere. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it!
If this is the case it means that I can drop almost 100 hit rating from my gear and not worry about it so much - In my case this would be getting the t7 (or 7.5) legs as I'd loose 80 hit rating.

Third - Titles!

Currently I have 13 Titles on Firelight;

Firelight the Merrymaker - Completing Winter Veil Achievements
Firelight the Hallowed - Completing Hallows End Achievements
Master Sergeant Firelight - Old PvP Rank from Vanilla WoW
Firelight, Hand of A'dal - Kill Lady Vashj and Keal'thas Raid Bosses Pre-3.0
Firelight Jenkins - Complete Leeeeeeeeroy Achievement in UBRS.
Firelight, Champion of the Naaru - Complete quest line to kill Magtheridon in TBC.
Ambassador Firelight - gain Exalted with all 5 City Alliance/Horde Factions
Firelight the Diplomat - Exalted with Sporregar, Timbermaw Hold and the Kurenai.
Firelight the Seeker - Complete 3000 Quests.
Firelight the Explorer - Explore Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Outland and Northrend.
Firelight, Guardian of Cenarius - Exalted with Cenarian Expedition and Circle.
Firelight the Argent Champion - Exalted with Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade.
Firelight of the Shattered Sun - Exalted with SSO + 1000g

Ones I'm currently Pursuing:

Champion of the Frozen Wastes (just need Malygos for this one)
Loremaster - Stupid Kalimodor quests....grrrr...

I quite like the title systems, its pretty cool - another way to say "Look what I did" to your friends.

Do any of you have any different Titles? Or are you going for anything special?

Good Times!

2008-12-29T12:38:00.003Z

So I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are looking forward to the New year ahead.

I know I am!

So a week without WoW and Saturday night I'm back with a vengeance! Or so I thought!

Didn't really do anything when I got back, too tired from an 8 hour drive back from Newcastle visiting my g/f's parents.

Sunday however I was back in Zul'Gurub getting rep and clearing some of the bosses in there for gold with a Mage friend of mine. It seems that the trash is fine to solo clear, but some of the bosses are kinda silly - and much harder than Onyxia! Well not much harder, but certainly hard enough to warrant me getting pwned at 10/15%

I mean I cant even pull the bat boss.........*looks annoyed* and I recon I could solo her if I had some mechanic to interrupt her heals.

But I did manage to hit exalted with Zandalar Tribe.

Anyway its much quicker with 2 people there. Still no Raptor mount dropped for my mate, as I already have it. I'm hoping for the Tiger mount - but the only time I've cleared them was with a shaman friend of mine.

Speaking of Shaman' Our 3v3 team has formed - just gotta get invited and we're set to get a good rating!

Team will consist of me, a resto shaman and an Enhancement Shaman. Can't wait to get my teeth stuck in.

Anyway also I managed this morning before work to get exalted with Timbermaw Hold!

That puts me at 34 factions to exalted and only 6 away from the title!

Oracles next for 35, then I have to decide where to go next for rep. I'm tempted to try the Steamwheedle Cartel Bunch of factions - I recon when 3.0.8 comes they'll be reasonably easy to get due to the rep changes Blizzard are introducing that will not reduce rep gained based on level for killing mobs. Better pack lots of tan lotion in the bags for spending hours and hours in the Tanaris deserts!

No raid progression this week as the guild are on a raiding holiday until the 4th jan. Other than doing the Archavon in Wintergrasp - but that's not a real raid boss - he's a free loot bot!

Anyways - watch this space as we return to our usual service...

Upcoming posts will deal with arena at 80, and the mysterious Ghost-Hit-Cap for Ret-Paladins!!

Christmas Break!

2008-12-20T22:14:00.003Z

So its that time of year again!

I'm off to spend Christmas with my Girlfriends Family!

I hope you all have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Naxxramas 25-Man Update

2008-12-19T12:48:00.002Z

Hey guys - Just some quick updates and thoughts on Naxxramas 25.

So with the instances all reset this week Rage entered Naxxramas and cleared 3 of the 4 wings in 4 hours.

Death Knight wing all bosses cleared no wipes.
Plague Wing all bosses cleared no wipes.
Spider Wing all bosses cleared no wipes.

Last night we were 2 men down for the night due to no-shows and cancellations but our raid leader took us to Naxx none the less to see if we could get through it.

Patchwerk is a wall. A big fat wall of PAIN.

I mean don't get me wrong, we've gotten past him already last week, but 2 people missing and its just pain city.

This is NOT a dps for melee and no-matter what we tries it just ended every try with the melee going down hard and fast.

Its so unforgiving. Its a DPS race - but the healers cant heal anyone but the 3 tanks. melee have to keep themselves under 8/9k health or die a horrible insta-gib death.

Anyway so we moved on and took down Sartharion then the raid disbanded.

My first egg from the Oracles hatched today, and I got the White birdy non-combat pet out of it.
Bought another one - and just gotta play the waiting game till I can get the other 2 non-combat pets and eventually I imagine the Mount.

PS - If anyone is after the "Red Winter Hat" the best place to get it is normal Nexus - 2/3 level 80's can skip most of the mobs as long as you've got a ret-paladin/warrior/druid - well any melee class that can take a beating from 3/4 mobs at once. The mage boss in there seems to have a 100% drop rate of the hat. Much easier than years past.

PPS - Has anyone seen a blue "!" running around in Dalaran on the mini-map called "Frostie"?

I saw it twice last night...I cant find any mention of it anywhere on the web and nothing on the WoW forums either.

Please tell me I'm not seeing things!!!

Character Customisation and Kel'Thuzad

2008-12-17T10:12:00.004Z

Hey guys! Pretty happy here today! Hope you're all getting ready for Christmas!

So last night Rage managed to take down Kel'Thuzad in 25-man Naxx!

It was so funny!! Kel had like 60/70k health down and we had about 10/15 people left up and all our tanks died! The adds went after the remaining healers then the remaining dps.

BAM! Kel'Thuzad goes down!

Who's left standing?

Our enhancement Shammy and a hunter!

It was so funny - Vent erupted in the biggest cheer I've heard in a long time! We were all shouting louder and louder as his health went down lower and lower!!

Was awesome! A long night of tries on him but we were successful!!

We popped to Sartharion after and took him down fast - I think we'll try him with 1 or 2 of the other dragons up soon! I cant wait for that challenge!

Anyway as many of you may have noticed the Winter Veil has arrived in Azeroth and I've been spending my time when I'm not raiding getting the achievements done so I can pick up my title "The Merrymaker" I'm only 3/4 achievements away from that. One of which I cant get till the 25th anyway.

Also character customisation has come to the European servers, and being how I like to experience everything the game has to offer, so I paid my £12 and dove in head first!

See if you can notice what I changed on Firelight!

Factions, Factions and More Factions!

2008-12-15T14:10:00.002Z

Hey Dudes! Its been quiet on the WoW front these past few days so just been working on getting rep for that elusive Achievement: 40 Factions to Exalted.

Currently I'm sitting on 31 Factions to Exalted:

Alliance: - Darnassus, Exodar, Gnomeregan Exiles, Ironforge, and Stormwind.

Alliance Forces: - Stormpike Guard (Alterac Valley)

Alliance Vanguard: - Valiance Expedition

Classic: - Argent Dawn, Cenarion Circle and Wintersaber Trainers.

Shattrath City: - Lower City, Sha'tari Skyguard, Shattered Sun Offensive, The Aldor, and The Sha'tar.

The Burning Crusade: - Ashtongue Deathsworn, Cenarion Expedition, Honor Hold, Keepers of Time, Kurenai, Netherwing, Orgri'la, Sporregar, The Consortium, The Scale of the Sands, and The Violet Eye.

Wrath of the Lich King: - Argent Crusade, Kirin Tor, Knights of the Ebon Blade, The Sons of Hodir and The Wyrmrest Accord.

So I got 9 Factions I need to get to exalted.

Factions at Revered:

The Kalu'ak - 20206/21000 - Will get this tomorrow.
The Oracles - 6232/21000 - 8 Days of the 3 dailys left.
Zandalar Tribe - 11429/21000 - I might go see if i can solo the mobs in there for coins/bijou's.
Timbermaw Hold - 1143/21000 - This is Slooooooooww..... Gave up a bit on this at revered.

Factions at Honored:

The League of Arathor - 2253/12000 - The Endless Grind....
Hydraxian Waterlords - 11296/12000 - LFM to MC - Must be over 70.
Steamwheedle Cartel - All 4 Factions Honored.
(Frenzyheart Tribe - Will switch to Frenzyheart once I get the protodrake from the Oracles)

Factions at Friendly:

Silverwing Sentinels - 3281/6000 - Anyone else hate WSG Rep Grind?
Explorers' League - 4689/6000 - How do you get rep with these?
The Frostborn - 553/6000 - And these?
Darkmoon Faire 2115/6000 - Mission Impossible!

Factions at Neutral:

The Silver Covenant - 0/3000 - Not implemented in game yet as I know.
Magram Clan Centaur - 2136/3000 - Zzzzz Kill a zillion centaurs..
Ravenholdt - 5/3000
Shen'dralar - 660/3000
Thorium Brotherhood - 2090/3000

So 4 at Revered, 3(4) at Honored and 4 at Friendly equals 11.

So I guess I have to choose the easiest.

This is the order I plan to do them in:

1 - The Kalu'ak
2 - The Oracles
3 - Zandalar Tribe (if i can down the trash in ZG)
4 - Timbermaw Hold - Groan - can you say slow grind?
5 - Frenzyheart Tribe - Once I get the Green Proto-Drake from the Oracles.
6 - Scryers - I'm exalted Aldor at the moment, and I imagine Scryer Rep Items are really cheap right now, but You have a hard slog to get to exalted due to only being able to do 1 quest for some basilisk eyes.

That's as far as I can predict right now - its a big old task now. Lets see what happens in the future and if any new factions appear sooner or later. I just don't wanna get to 39 factions to exalted with nothing on the horizon!!

Solo'ing Instances.

2008-12-10T13:39:00.006Z

Hey guys! Just wanted to write a blog post about something I've always tried to do to the best of my ability as a way to prove myself as a decent ret-paladin.

So at the weekend I thought to my self "Now I'm 80 and decked out in some nice epics its time to go see Onyxia again. I'd been to see her at level 70 and solo'd her but that was in beta, before all the nerf's.

Would it be possible again?

In short: Yes! As usual the trash leading to Ony herself proved to be more of a pain in the butt than the dragon herself. She had just over 1 million health, and contrary to popular belief you can melee her in phase 2, she went down in just under 20 minutes. Easy as pie. For the most part I played it safe. Using seal of Light and Wisdom when required. I switched out to Seal of Command for a few seconds here and there when she wasn't doing anything particularly nasty.

The whelps went down fast with the new consecrate ticking for 4/500.

So that got me thinking, a few days before I'd gone and cleared out most of Normal Ramparts in Hellfire Peninsula, I wonder if it'd be possible for me to solo a level 70 Heroic?

Obviously I'd only have to do the bosses and given my level I could probably skip the majority of the trash mobs.

Does anyone think this could be possible? I might try tonight if I get time to go have a stab at heroic Ramparts.

Edit - I've re-enabled anonymous comment posting again.

Weekend Updates - Armageddon

2008-12-08T12:07:00.004Z

Hey Peeps! Its been a busy weekend in Azeroth more than usual as I was able to get some good time in playing! Man I hate the cold weather in this country!!

Anyway What did I get up to? Well quite a lot I managed to get done:

Sons of Hodir - Exalted! Now I gotta save up for my Grand Ice Mammoth

Sholozar Basin - all quests cleared and I've started my rep grind with The Oracles.
(leaving me with 10-15 quests left in Icecrown to get the Loremaster of Northrend Achievement)

Finally decided which toon to level to 80 next, the switfly changed my mind;

I got my mage to level 70 (from 68) in Northrend really REALLY fast. Only to then run out of rested bonus. What I've decided to do is level each toon in the same area (Borean Tundra) to start off with till I run out of rested bonus, then switch to the next toon.

This will maximise XP received for killing mobs all the way to 80. Well that's what I think anyway! HA!

Rage started our domination of the 25 man content Yesterday! Starting with Archavon (man that dude is cake!) and we cleared out the Spider Wing and the Death Knight Wing.

The encounters were a little harder, but having more DPS, more Tanks, more Healers meant that we either took the various bosses down first time, or on the 2nd try. The hardest to co-ordinate was Instructor Razuvious. Getting 4 priests to time their Mind Controlling was a real challenge the first time, and even then we got him down to 30/40% before the wipe was called and we got him 2nd time. The night ended on a high for me when the 4 horsemen chest contained:

Armageddon
Two Hand Sword
554-831 Dmg Speed 3.40
(203.7 damage per second)
+101 Strength
+108 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 58.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 100.

Wow! I nearly fell off my chair! I've gone for the Berserker enchant on it (Damn that cost me a lot - those Abyss Crystals cost too much, and I only had to buy 6!!) which has a chance to increase Attack Power by 400 at the cost of 25% of your armour.

I'll get a proper test of that sword tonight in Naxx as we clear our the other 2 wings.
I also got these from A Noob! (Anub'Rekhan)

Sabatons of Sudden Reprisal
Feet Plate
1580 Armor
+67 Strength
+82 Stamina
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Strength
Equip: Improves Critical Strike Rating by 66.
Equip: Improves haste rating by 43.

I've put some random purple gem in there, and Icewalker to keep my Hit rating capped(its dropped to 290 now)

I just need to find a nice new trinket and some rings!

Look at that thing! ITS HUGE!!!!

(its so big, whilst on my back, the tip of it scrapes along the ground!)

Quickie.

2008-12-05T13:31:00.001Z

OK I've updated my gear and picked out all the haste gems and replaced them with Strength Gems.

Cost me a fair bit. The quicker the epic gems come in, the quicker the blue quality gems will drop in price!

Oh I know what i mean to ask - I read somewhere that there was going to be a glyph that converts 10% of the AP bonus from Blessing of Might into Spell Power?

Did I dream that? Cos I cant seem to find it anywhere yet....?

Changes...

2008-12-04T12:14:00.004Z

OK so thanks to all of you that commented on my last post. Great info there and I'm going to make some changes to my gear tonight. Such a shame you cant remove gems and re-use them later.

I was under the impression that haste was the way to go for Ret due to what I'd read about horde Pallies in TBC, but it appears I was slightly wrong about that. (thanks Tim!)

So I'm gonna swap out all the Haste gems for Strength gems or crit gems.

I'm just over my hit cap so I don't have a problem there are the moment. (no hit gems but 1 hit enchant on my boots)

I'm still unsure about a few things:

1 - Should I swap the 2/2 Improved Retribution Aura (increases damage done by my ret-aura by 50%) for 2/2 Vindication (reduces targets attributes by 20% for 15sec)

2 - What weapon enchant should I go for? (Josh says Berserking - and is what I'm going to try - Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes increase your attack power by 400, but at the cost of reduced armor. - 20 Infinite Dust, 15 Greater Cosmic Essence, and 10 Abyss Crystal's DAMN!)

3 - Where have the +Strength Enchants for Bracers and Gloves that I thought we'd see in Wrath? Or am I just stuck with AP enchants now?

4 - Should I pick a slower weapon over a faster one? If either what speed is good?

I'm kinda doing my gord in about this at the moment! Did you guess?

Question That I Have..

2008-12-03T12:38:00.003Z

Just a quick one - 2nd post today - I was talking to a fellow Raiding Ret last night and he asked how my DPS was in raids and to be honest overall its been 2-2.5k. He was shocked about this and said he was putting out 3.2k dps.

I was a little shocked - looking at his gear he has more or less the same as me, and I'd go out on a limb and say I was better geared than him.

Check out his armory link (if its working....) and compare it to mine.

I cant see what I'm doing wrong. I've tried reading what I could get my head around here. (Great site for Ret btw)

Can anyone find a spell rotation for me? something that will get me to improve my dps by 1k? Does that even seem possible?

I still have upgrades to come as well - I'm almost exalted with Sons of Hodir - should have that by next week and I'm saving up mats to get the +115 AP weapon enchant unless you recommend I go for something different? (using +85 AP at the mo)

I'm WAY over my hit cap I think (142 is the cap still?) I'm running with 296 (9.03%) Around 4-5k AP in raids 35% odd crit in raids, with 200 odd Haste Rating. (cant remember off hand)

Into The Obsidian Sanctum...

2008-12-03T07:18:00.004Z

Hey guys! More raid news from a quick raid we had last night.

Our 10-man team formed up and we were told to head to the Chamber of Aspects.

"What?"

"Where's that?"

Were most of the replies - including myself in that! Ha Ha!

The Chamber of Aspects, if you've not discovered it yet, is a large room at the bottom of the dragon tower in Dragonblight. It has 5 "doors" that least to 5 caves for each of the dragonflight factions (Red, Green, Blue, Bronze and Obsidian)

The only one that is open at the moment is The Obsidian Sanctum.

In here lives 4 dragons; Sartharion, and his 3 buddies, Shadron - Tenebron and Vesperon.

Basically you get more loot if you can defeat Sartharion with either 1, 2 or 3 drakes still alive and in the fight.

We just cleared all 3 drakes tonight and the trash then killed Sartharion.

The 3 drakes are basic tank and spank, with a special ability that needs to be followed.

Each of them with spawn a portal that the whole group will need to go into apart from the Main Tank and his Primary healer.

Once inside the portal there will be a mob inside that needs to be killed asap. (Or in one of the portals a bunch of eggs that need to be nuked down or when you pop back to the "real world" each of the eggs will turn into a whelp than needs to be killed before you can start DPS on the mini-boss again.

Sartharion himself is a fairly straight-forward fight - the usual dragon thing - watch the tail and dps don't stand in front of him or be cleaved. Every now-and-again an emote will pop up saying "The lava surrounding Sartharion churns" and some lava waves will spawn from the sides and sweep across the area you're standing. These waves MUST be avoided or upon contact a fire elemental will spawn and you have kill that before returning dps to Sartharion. Elementals also spawn that have to be off tanked.

Our first try on this guy was a success with 2 people dead very early on so he's not difficult really you just need to make sure you stay out of the way of the waves.

Here is a pic of his corpse!

After we went and had 1 shot at Malygos just to see what it was all about and to prepare for the future when we're geared up a bit more. Wow that seemed like a slap in the face! Cant wait to down this dude!

Naxx 10 Man Cleared! Kel'Thuzad Explained.

2008-12-02T13:05:00.006Z

So as the title suggests we cleared Kel'thuzad in Naxx last night in 10 man.

It felt really good to defeat a proper challenge again after the level 70 stuff was nerfed.

I know its not the 25 man content, but its still an achievement in itself for a casual raid guild.

The fight itself is a really interesting one, but very straight forward.

Phase 1 - The group run into the centre of the room and the fight starts. The room itself is a large circular room with seven or eight alcoves dug out into the walls with portals in the ends of them.
In these alcoves undead mobs spawn:
Skeletons - these have really low health and can be one-shotted with any of my abilities
Abominations - these need to be tanked and nuked down.
Soul Reavers - these banshee's move really really slowly towards the raid and do 8k damage to anyone who gets into melee range. These need to be nuked down by that ranged DPS classes.

These mobs will come randomly and attack the group - its not hard - you should not be wiping in phase one!

Phase 2 - After 2/3 mins of the undead mobs attacking Kel'thuzad stops channelling his portals and the undeads stop spawning and he joins the fight.

At this point the raid should spread out - and be more than 10 yards apart if possible. This is a MUST!

Kel'thuzad has 3 abilities during this phase:
1 - single shot shadow bolt - hits 1 random target for a reasonable amount of damage.

2 - Multi shot shadow bolt - his most, if not all, of the raid for a few thousand health.

3 - Iceblock thing - This will wipe the raid if you're not careful and is the single most important reason why the raid need to spread out. The affected target will be encased in a tomb of ice which will do 105% of the players health as damage over 3/4 seconds. It cannot be bubbled out of, or ice-blocked out of. Anyone who is with 10 yards of the affected player will ALSO get this. So its really bad if you have your healers all stood together and all 3 of them are affected - Yep thats a wipe!

Your healers really need to be on-top of their game to keep the affected player alive. As a ret-paladin I was helping out a lot with the healing where i could - if I got an instant cast heal i would top up the health of anyone who had low health - bearing in mind that my Flash of Light can crit for 3/4k while raid buffed. So that's quite a lot of healing for a dps to do. It really helped us out last night.

Phase 3 - at 40% Kel'Thuzad will cry out for help from the Lich King who kindly obliges the lich with 2 big nasty bugs. Each of these should be tanked by the off tank. You cannot kill these dudes as they have the same health as Kel'Thuzad. (2.5 million if I remember correctly)
These guys have a buff that increases there damage by 15% each stack - this can stack 99 times.
Both our tanks last night were Paladins, so when Kel was down to about 5/10% our off tank went down as he just couldn't stand up to the damage those things were putting out.
When phase 3 starts - its a dps race - pure and simple. Kill Kel'thuzad as quick as you can or your tanks are going to get killed by the bugs.

Phase 3 isn't all that difficult - we had more problems getting through phase 2 without loosing a healer from the ice-block.

Prior to the Naxx raid we went and helped out in Wintergrasp so we could do the 10-man boss in there Archavon. Wow is he easy in 10 man. Having seen the 25-man and that being one shotted - its really free epixx!! If you've not been yet i suggest you group up and go there as soon as you can - its really fun.

Anyway here are a couple pics from after we owned Kel'Thuzad!

Latest Achievements.

2008-12-01T13:14:00.003Z

Hey Guys!

Just thought I'd make a post about the latest achievements I'd gotten, or been involved in getting!

Its been a busy weekend - and I had planned on posting about my latest gear upgrades and some other bits, but I don't have any of my pictures here at work so I cant. Maybe tonight or tomorrow!

Anyway I've been involved in some pretty cool stuff over the weekend so lets break it down:

PvP Achievements:

1 - Black War Bear! Yes that's right, I joined a group of 30/35 people and after a bit of waiting for everyone to gather oh a hill just north of Thunderbluff. Its about 12am server time and we're hoping its quiet as the last thing we wanted was Horde interference.

There were about 3/4 hordies in TB who didn't get involved, and one poor soul who just happened to be passing and flagged lol SPLAT!

Cairne Blooodhoof went down in a few mins and with in the glory of our battle we decided to move to Silvermoon to take down Lor'themar Theron. He was cake.
Next we went to Undercity. Travelling via the sewer it seems if you've not completed the quest chain in Dragonblight then you cant enter with your comrades.

Sylvanas has a few interesting abilities including the ability to vanish, ice block everyone then appear ranged and start taking potshots at the group. As we got her down a shaman turned up flagged just as we were running out of the room. Ha Ha! he went down so fast! 33 vs 1 is a bit unfair!

That left Thrall. We quickly over crowded one of the Zeppelins to Ogrimmar and flew across the sea. We re-grouped outside the west entrance to Orgrimmar. Once we were ready and buffed we rode in - killing guards on the way.

Finally we met some resistance, the last 3 bosses had been cake with only 1 or 2 horde turning up.

We were mid fight and suddenly 20/30 horde came in and wiped the raid. But all was not lost. During the scuffle I manged to complete another 2 achievements:

10,000 Honorable Kills.
That Takes Class (got the DK kill I was waiting for!)

After about 10 minutes of waiting as ghost the horde finally cleared off and we got back to work.

What I and a few others were surprised about is that the Troll leader is in Thralls chambers and has to be tanked/defeated as well, and annoyingly there is no achievement for killing him.

Thrall went down eventually, followed by Vul'jin or whatever his name is (Who has an annoying ability that turns everyone into a frog!)

So that snagged me "For The Alliance" and I got my Black War Bear!

I also managed to get 300 Shard things from instance bosses and some pvp in Wintergrasp and snagged myself a Black War Mammoth!

PvE:

I've cleared all the instances in Wrath on heroic now (5-man) and our guild have cleared all 4 wings in Naxx and took down Sathiron in 10 man last night (spell check pls!) although I wasn't present.

I joined a 25-man group for Archivron in Wintergrasp - man is that guy cake! we hit the enrage timer though but still managed to get him down with only 4 people left standing! Cant wait to get him down with the guild so we can get some proper loot from him - was a bit of a farce at the weekend - people needing when they shouldn't have - stupid master looter released during the fight so missed out on the kill. So I got my first Emblem of Valor as well.

I've gotten my t7 gloves from badges, and now I'm saving up for other bits - like neck/rings/trinkets.

I've managed to replace pretty much all my gear now with epics from heroics or naxx. leaving me with just 2 blue quest-trinkets/heroic drops and 2 level 70 rings from Black Temple.

I also leveled my Blacksmithing on Saturday and crafted myself a new epic helm - cost me a small fortune though! 6,000g or there abouts all in to get to 440 B/S and including the mats for the helm.

Crazy business! There goes my plan to get a Grand Mammoth from Sons of Hodir rep.

Anyway that's enough for now!

Edit: Added the pics!

Naxxramas 10 man: First Impressions

2008-11-26T10:54:00.004Z

Hey guys!

So the guild continued in Naxx last night and we had a fun time in there - it was interesting to see some new content at last in the form of a raid as apposed to heroics/5-mans.

The previous nights group had cleared the Spider wing, and a boss in the Plague wing. Leaving us with the Death Knight wing, the last 2 bosses in the Plague Wing and the abomination Wing.

We cleared the Plague wing and all of the DK wing as well.

Some of the bosses were cake, some required a bit more attention or focus. The unwashed fella for instance - that whole run around avoiding the poison things on the floor was kinda irritating.

Anyway we did well - and it'll be nice to see how big a difference it is to do the 25 man version of the instance soon.

I got a new belt and the tier 7 shoulders - so I'm happy.

Thats 2/5 tier 7 for me! and only 10 badges away from the gloves. I'm struggling to find a decent libram. There is one from badge vendors which gives 173 haste, but it procs off judgement of command - which is kinda useless....means I'd have to do some seal twisting....more mana waste.

So I'm going to go for the one from the Grizzly Hills pvp. (cant remember the name off hand)

Quick Update..

2008-11-25T12:52:00.002Z

No Naxx for me last night, I'm going tonight. The Raid leader wanted to get everyone in who was 79/80 before we start it properly tomorrow after the reset.

Then I imagine we'll do naxx 10 for a while and then move onto bigger and better things!

I've hit exalted with my 3rd WotLK faction last night:

Knights of the Ebon Blade
Valiance Expedition
The Wrymrest Accord

If anyone can explain what the Alliance Vanguard is and why it appears as revered on my faction sheet, but is only listed as a group consisting of:

Explorers League, The Frostborn, The Silver Covenant and the Valiance Expedition.

Is there some soft of bonus for getting this?

As I'm exalted with the Valiance Expedition I'm no longer getting rep for them, instead I'm getting rep for the Vanguard instead.

I know there is an achievement for getting the 4 factions to exalted that you champion in instances (Argent Cursade, Kirin Tor, Knights of the Ebon Blade, and The Wrymrest Accord) Could the Alliance Vanguard get something similar?

Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.

Let the Purples Roll In...

2008-11-24T12:03:00.002Z

Hey guys! Its back to normal life today, back to work and boredom again. *sigh*

But what a busy busy few days its been since my last update.

The heroic onslaught continues and I finally got my Tier 7 chest and I'm over half way to getting my gloves.

Looking at the badge vendor I need about 140 badges to get the items I want from the limited choice that there is.

I also hit exalted with The Knights of the Ebon Blade on Friday last week as well so have those awesome boots from them available at exalted.

I'm grinding rep where I can with dailys and doing Heroics where possible. But I wasn't online much over the weekend due to having to do some Christmas shopping and my PC breaking down (possible melt down due to too much wow the last week and a half!!)

The graphics were all screwy and all the tests I was able to do, given that windows wouldn't boot, pointed to a defective Motherboard.

So yesterday I popped down to my local Novatech and purchased the following:

Creative Labs X-Fi Soundcard (Mine died a few months ago and have been using the on board sound)

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H

Processor - Got an AMD X2 Dual Core AM2 Athlon 64 6000 3.0GHz 2x512KB

PSU - My old one was a little long in the tooth so thought I might as well as I was here upgrade this to a newer one as well.

Anyway so I got home - installed all the bits and guess what....the graphics glitch was still there...and to cap it all off the graphics card is in warranty! so £300 wasted? I think not! Nice upgrade from my old system so I'm happy either way. Just gotta go get the card replaced as the on board ATI Radeon 3500 on the new motherboard is nice, but having to play wow on all the lowest settings SUCKS!

Anyway tonight we go to Naxx for our first official raid if only 10-man. Provided of course we have enough people at 80! LOL!

Heroics - GONE MAD!!!!

2008-11-20T12:26:00.004Z

Hey dudes!!

Updated a few pics on the site in keeping with the Wrath feel!

So what have I been doing since i hit 80? Well Heroics!! Lots of them!!

I got 44 Emblams yesterday and some awesome gear!

Check my armory link for more details!!

I'm cleaning up for Heroics today as we speak! Just hit Exalted with the Ebon Blade as well! So got my epic boots from them.

I did 12 Heroics yesterday, and i'm on my 4th today! MORE SHINEYS!!!

56 Emblams so far - 24 to go for my tier 7 chest!

And for those people who were interested and thought it was a mace.... Here's a pic of me and my AXE!!!

DING 80!!!!

2008-11-19T02:41:00.005Z

Well there we go!

70-80 in 6 days! Phew!

Seriously though, I have to put my hands together to Blizzard for making a great game, utterly amazing.

The quests are fun, they're involved, they keep you guessing from minute to minute as to whats going to happen - where the plot is going to go, and to cap it all off they've added loads and loads more FUN!

Here's a run-down of where I quested:

Howling Fjord - 130/130 Quests Completed.
Dragonblight - 115/115 Quests Completed.
Grizzly Hills - 85/85 Quests Completed.
Zul'Drak - 100/100 Quests Completed.
Storm Peaks - 100/100 Quests Completed.
Icecrown - 61/140 Quests Completed.

Leaving me with the last in Icecrown, all of Borean Tundra, and all of Sholazar Basin to complete.

I'll continue for now in Icecrown as I'm loving the lore so far in there.

Once all those area's are clear that leaves me with 90 quests left in Kalimdor somewhere to find!

Anyway Its late! I wanna go to sleep, here are some pics!

Enjoy!

/pat on the back
/sleep

Ding 79! The Home Stretch!

2008-11-18T11:52:00.005Z

Well here we are! Level 79! The final stretch...and what a ride its been!

Cool things that happened between 78-79:

1 - Hit 3000 quests and got my new title: Firelight the Seeker.

2 - Got my Reins of the White Polar Bear from the daily quests in Storm Peaks.

I've got the day off from WoW today other than just quickly hitting 79 this morning. So level 80 tomorrow for me - or maybe tonight if i can wangle it!! No hurry!

We've had a lot of realm firsts in the last couple days including realm first level 80 Death Knight.

THAT is nuts...and people think I'm leveling fast!

Anyway here are some cool pics! Enjoy!

Ding 78!!!

2008-11-17T12:17:00.006Z

Well that went quicker than I had imagined! I've moved up to the Storm Peaks for questing - while the mobs are 2/3 levels higher than me, the amount of XP I'm getting is very nice for the little extra work I have to do.

The Brunnhilder quest line I'm on at the moment is simply Awesome!! Just after I Dinged I went on a quest where you have to ride on a Proto Drake, and fight other people actually sat on the drake the 2 of you fighting - hand-to-hand! Awesome! (well i smashed their faces in with my mace! hahahaha!)

Also as I got my Mount I flew all around the lands having a nose, and got my Explorer achievement including the title and a cool Tabard.

Pics of my conquests/exploration from 77-78 below!

Ding 77!!!!

2008-11-16T19:44:00.006Z

Finally!! Level 77 and able to get my wings and start exploring the wonders of Northrend!

Ding 76!!!!

2008-11-16T11:37:00.006Z

Took a bit of a break last night and stopped just before hitting 76 (3 bars) but I'm there now!

Moved onto Zul'Drak for questing - lots of Trolls 'round here!

As you can see I got a new Axe! Its almost as good as the Torch, but not quite! If it had some haste on it....

Ding 75!!!!

2008-11-15T19:56:00.006Z

Moved onto Grizzly Hills for this level! Lovely place to look at! Lots of really fun and interesting quests to be done!

Check out the screenies below - Also coming soon - my Death Knight Experiance!!

Ding 74!!!!

2008-11-15T00:15:00.004Z

Woohoo!!! DING!!!

On my way to Dalaran as I type!

I've Cleared all the quests in Dragonblight - including the cool Bolvar Fordragon line - which was simply epic!!! Fighting along side the King in Undercity!! Awesome!!

Ding 73!!!

2008-11-14T16:20:00.004Z

Woohoo!! Flying now!!

Here are some more screenies!!

Ding 72!!!!

2008-11-14T00:25:00.003Z

Woohoo!! Just leveled up! Time for bed!!

DING 71!!!!

2008-11-13T13:42:00.004Z

Yay! Level 71 at last!!

Been questing in Howling Fjord and just loving every minute so far!

Here are some pics of my exploits today!

Installing!!!

2008-11-13T00:42:00.003Z

OMG!!! This is taking too long!!!

Got my copy of the Collectors edition 42 mins ago :)

Was the 3rd person in the Shop!

But a lot of people were already in Northrend a few hours before I got mine! NO FAIR!!!

GIEEEEEEEF!!!!!!!!!!!

T-Minus 12 Hours and Counting...

2008-11-12T12:01:00.002Z

OH MY GOD!!!! 12 Hours to go!!! AAAAAHHH!!!!!!!

I'm going to my local Gamestation in Portsmouth tonight at midnight to pickup my copy of the Collectors Edition. I cannot wait to get my grubby little mits on that box and get it installed asap and get my ret-butt into Northrend!

I've decided to start leveling in the Howling Fjord - due to this apparently being a good place to start - I've read that in a few places and BRK mentioned it in his latest podcast. (don't ask why I listen to a hunter podcast, I just find that guy so funny!)

I'm sat here at work - counting down the damn minutes till I can get home and then do a few last things in the old world before I say goodbye to Ouland and jump on the boat.

I will be posting regular updates and screen shots throughout the time I'm leveling to 80 with fun stories and some other cool stuff - and maybe some videos!

Didn't really get up to too much last night - did a couple of heroics - one of which i respec'd prot to tank - first time I've done that for a long time! Was right back to Ret immediately afterwards though! Did some more spring cleaning of crap in my bank - and Prep'd my Banker as well - she's got her own guildbank too - so lots of space to store up drops etc that I decide to keep - if anything - I imagine I'll just be throwing as much cloth as i can onto the AH as its going to be worth a fortune initially. I remember when TBC came out - Netherweave was selling for up to 50g per stack! It was nuts!

So watch this space for regular updates over the coming days!

2 Days To Go....

2008-11-11T12:04:00.003Z

OOOHH!!!! 2 days!!!! GIEF!!!!

Just a quick update!

Last night i grouped up some peeps from Devotion (another raiding guild on our server) who were forming a raid for the bear mount.

We all met up outside Zul'Aman and buffed up. It was cool to see 40 people again in a raid outside of Alterac Valley.

We rode over to Silvermoon in a big pack - kinda like the big pack that opens out from AV and re-grouped on a hill just outside the entrance. After a minute or so - just enough time to let the slow-coaches catch up. Then we rode in!

It was EPIC! This was my first proper raid on a City Boss in the 2 and a half years I've been playing and I just loved it!

We got to the boss quickly and cleared the guards then started on the boss.

Wow...this took a LOT longer than I imagined! He had 5.5 Million Health points and even though we'd all stacked as much hit rating as much as possible I was still only hitting him for 2.5k max on certain abilities i knew would hit for 5/6k in 70 raids.

So slowly level 70 hordies turned up one by one - stupidly attacking or healing the boss and getting killed either by the mass AOE or by people just killing them quick.

After 20 mins or so a LARGE number of horde turned up and wiped us out.

The boss was at 7%

Gutted!

But wow what a blast that was!

Just after the raid disbanded (I was luckily able to res and bubble/hearth) in general city chat it turned out 1 or 2 of the raid guilds had heard about our attack, stopped their raids in BT/MH and turned up right at the end to kill us! Doh!!

But how awesome was it! At level 80 that will be over so much quicker! I cant wait for a re-match!!

In other news I managed to clear out a load more space from my bank - I was ruthless and chucked out anything I didn't need - well i vendored it - I had 4 different tanking gloves for some reason. Infact I'm tempted to chuck out all my tanking gear - maybe I'll keep some of the nicer pieces.

Anyway not long to go and i'm getting more and more excited by the minute!!!

3 Days to go...

2008-11-10T12:20:00.002Z

So we're rapidly approaching the day when all havoc is going to break out and 11 million people will jump onto a small boat and make their way to snowy hills of Northrend.....

....and the days are just dragging along!!

Like quite a few people I imagine, I've taken some time off work to play the game properly without stupid 9 hour gaps that are my job! Crazy? yep!

So I've got 10 days - from the 13th till 23rd to play as much as I want and work my little paladin butt off extra hard to get to 80! Do-able? I don't know - it took me 12 days to get do 60-70 when TBC came out - (not played time) from release date to 70. This time around will it take longer? I doubt it. I've seen the amount of XP they're giving from quests on Wowhead and its starting at like 18-20k per quest up to about 25k. I wonder how much gold I'm going to make from this as well - last time around I was able to make close to 5k gold from vendoring quest rewards and general cash, and from selling all the cloth I got and blues/greens etc.

I'm going to pass all green drops to my druid to DE and pass the mats to my banker to sell.

So that's the plan, but since Raiding has stopped I've just been trying to do as much of my achievements as possible. The one that's really doing my head in at the moment is the Loremaster: Kalimdor one.

I started at patch 3.0.2 with 280/730 quests completed and I'm currently sat on 638/730.

I have a few scrappy quests in my log for instances but nothing more than maybe 10/20 quests tops.

I've gone to all the flight paths in Kalimdor looking for quests, but I must have missed something somewhere? some outpost somewhere i overlooked? The only place I've not really looked at is Azshara, but I hate that place! Maybe they're in there. Gonna keep on plugging away from now until Wednesday night - when I'm going to fill my log with 25 completed Daily quests. (I'm sure I'll get XP instead of cash for those right? Either way the money will be nice!)

I've also started fishing on Firelight. I was sat at about 110 fishing for the best part of 2 years and dusted off my rod and started again - for the achievements obviously. I'm almost 225 now which is pretty cool but its hard work ....no its not hard..its boring! BORING!!! Not sure I'll ever be grand super master fisherman - it just takes too long!

One thing I'm going to have to do is clear out my bank. I've got a lot TBC Crap stored away in there still - gear I'm keeping for prosperity (tier4/5) and some nice weapons etc. But its all useless really. My bags for example - i have 2 bags of raiding mats (reagents, pots, flasks etc) 2 bags of armour and 1 bag free. (4x 20 slot and backpack) What should I do with all this stuff?
I'll be replacing any stuff that i can with stuff from Northrend, But i wont be replacing any of my personal gear till we hit Naxx at 80 aside from maybe some trinkets. Maybe I'll ditch the t4/t5 gear - and all that tanking gear as well, that'll clear up 2 bags in the bank - and i seem to have a bag full of tabards too. I've chucked out all the ones I don't need that i can buy again if i really wanted too, but I wont, I have a lot of special tabards that I cant throw out. But at least I was able to get 25 saved up so I got the tabard reward from the achievement.

I didn't get round to doing any PvP at the weekend, but managed a few heroics in between questing in Kalimdor, and I probably wont do any now until I'm 80.

With regards to Professions? I wont be leveling anyone who is a Miner so that should be interesting as I'm a blacksmith/engineer and the prices for mats are going to be so over the proper market value to start off with - so its going to be save up as much cash as possible and try not to blow it all on a Grand Mammoth!

MUST RESIST BUYING ANY MORE MOUNTS.....52 IS ENOUGH!!
(no its not!! MUST HAVE MORE!!!)

I want more bank space! All my bank slots are populated by 18 slot bags at least.

What are you people doing to prep for the Expansion?

7 Days to go...

2008-11-06T12:21:00.002Z

...till Wrath and this week just couldn't go any slower if it tried. I'm just counting the days now...

I want to get into Northrend and start exploring and leveling up again! I really enjoyed the run from 60-70 as ret and this will be no different. (mainly due to the fact that I' d not leveled as ret before as I leveled Firelight holy from 1-60)

I'm a little disheartened by some of the things they're doing with the professions that I have.

I'm a Macesmith and decided a long time ago to start Mace Smith due to the fact that I thought that Blizzard would follow in their own footsteps again and make another Stormherald or the like.

They're going on about being able to Craft BoE epics - but are they going to be as awesome as the Stormherald? I doubt it. Whats the point of being a specialist in a profession of you're not allowed to craft stuff that is BoP and makes being top in your profession if you get nothing out of it? I mean yeah we'll be able to add gem slots to our gear as a blacksmith, but Its just not the same.

I understand their point of view on this due to the epic tailoring items that were so imba at the time they were released into the game and some people complained about it I guess. (spellfire set i think was the one that caused the most issues)

But we'll see - they might get pressured into releasing something mid expansion.

Anyway Last night Rage did our last run into Black Temple and finally I got my Mace! Yes that's right I've finally got my Torch of the Damned.

Obviously i was very apprehensive about the raid - I was worried about dps etc so I tried a couple of new things.

First I started using Seal of the Martyr instead of Seal of Command. In a full raid experience I was pumping out MORE dps than I was last week!! Yes! MORE! I was a little surprised about this to say the least - I'd tried SotM before now and it'd been worse dps than Command. But now command has been nerfed (to the ground baby) and Martyr was buffed so its the seal of choice now.

I was putting out a sustained 1700 dps all night and was sitting at 3rd-5th dps.

I warned our healing leader that I'll be taking more damage than before but to be honest our main tank last night was a paladin so he was judging Light all night and I never really had a problem - even when I was getting Martyr procs of 5-6k. Wow does that buff give a lot of damage out in packs of mobs. Pew Pew!!

The tool tips were a bit screwed up as well - hammer of wrath said 35% still even though its only available at 20%. I think a few other things might have been out of whack given the maintenance this morning. (Unless Blizzard nerfing us more in some sort of stealth way....)

So I'm happy - Blizzard have managed to keep the PVE DPS awesome. I've not tried pvp other than dueling one of our resto shamans while he was healing himself.

I've just been judging Wisdom and my mana's not really disappearing as some people are saying. I mean i just sat plugging away at him for 4/5 minutes till he ran out of mana. I was getting big procs but nothing like we had before. But i was still able to burn him down when i hit Avenging Wrath and opened up all my abilities.

I'm going to try doing some pvp this weekend and see what the crack is - Since the patch I've been doing pvp in PvE gear just cos it hits so hard regardless to the fact that I go down fast.

But I'm not too worried - I'm not a PvP'er.

Update...

2008-10-31T12:45:00.002Z

Hey guys!

So the hot fix came and to be honest aside from a small change to our mana regen, (although i find if you judge wisdom its not really a problem I think this may be to do with the level of my gear perhaps?) my DPS is only down a little but, but something odd has happened - the other people in the raid seem to have gotten used to their new abilities and started doing more damage.

I've yet to try out things in Battlegrounds or Solo'ing. Although I have been doing a lot of the scourge attack things - killing the ghosts and skellies out and about where I can, and honestly? As long as I open up with judgement of Wisdom I don't need to stop to drink - in fact the only time I ever have water on me is in raids when mages put up food tables.

I guess when 3.0.3 hits we'll really feel it. Just I'm not sure if I should drop Seal of Command all together and stick with Seal of the Martyr.

I got my T6 belt last night from Brutalus (Thanks!) - Illidan didnt drop a t6 chest token, and the bracers went to another paladin.

So Monday/Tuesday will be working on Felmyst i guess and then Wednesday will be our last run into Black Temple before the expansion.

I just want the expansion to be here NOW!

Hot Fix....Live?

2008-10-29T13:51:00.002Z

Hey guys, just a quick post to make a quick post on what was going on last night.

The guild went into Sunwell again and cleared the first 2 bosses and due to lack of healers stopped.

One thing I noticed was that I was running out of mana, but I seem to have worked out a few things so I can keep it topped up when i need to.

So on Brutalus, who we took down on our 3rd/4th try i was tinkering around with stuff as i'd seen i was having to drink again between trash pulls.

So what i'm doing is this: going full out - CS, DS, SoComm, Wings, Judgement of Light, even Consecrating when it was up. Till i got to aout 50% mana the i just stopped consecrating and instead of judging light i judged wisdom.

This returned my mana to about 90/100% so then I popped judgement of light instead and started consecrating again.

Now I'm not 100% sure that the nerfs were live, but I definatly was noticing I was running out of mana, and I wasnt getting as much mana back from judgements as I had been.

After the raid I ran over to the Test Dummies in Ironforge and started plugging away.

Solo i was getting 1450 DPS or there abouts without wings then up to 1650/1700 or so with wings up.

I'm gonna try tonight again and see what the crack is!

Watch this space...

Firelight, Hand of A'dal

2008-10-27T21:30:00.006Z

Hey peeps.

Feeling pretty glum today, know that in less than 36 hours 3.0.3 will go live on the European servers and Retribution Paladins will be stood in a bucket, while the mafia consisting of Rogues, Warlocks, Warrior, and those damned resto druids fill the bucket with quick drying cement and then dumped off the nearest bridge into the canals in Stormwind.

Its been a fun few weeks with all the changes to Achievements and such..and all that lovely dps...

Here's a quick snapshot from Sunday Nights SSC Run to go take down Vashj and Kael'thas to get the achievement and as I'd taken Vashj down prior to the patch I was still running with the old version of the quest, so a few lucky peeps still managed to get the "Hand of A'dal" title.

So if you have the quest items from either Vashj or Kael prior to 3.0.2 then get your toucas into SSC or TK and snag that title before then hot-fix it in 3.0.3 (probably)

Almost 1.6k DPS - and its been higher, that's just the Highest I managed to remember to grab a screenshot of it. (oh and by the way? 3.5k DPS from hunters? Nerf that please blizzard....i mean COME ON!)

I've really been enjoying the pre-wrath event up until I read all the crap Blizzard are doing to the class.

So anyway I've taken some snaps of the carnage for prosperity! Enjoy..

Oh and er....Nerf Tauren Paladins!! ;)

Cya Next Time!

Now where can I get a /hug....
PS - Does anyone know if there's an application I can use to write my blog? This tiny little window they give you to post on is really too small - importing pictures is a nightmare...

Enjoy It While It Lasts...

2008-10-24T12:32:00.003+01:00

So the nerf is coming and there's nothing we can do about it.

So what am I planning on doing about it? I'm going to PvP as much as I can before I loose 45% of my damage. Cos lets face it, thats what we're loosing more or less.

45% of our crit damage...

You know I seem to remember blizzard saying somewhere not long ago that "the whole point of Paladin dps is Big Crits." well not any more! Now we're about sustained damage.

But whats done is done, there's nothing any amount of QQ'ing is going to do about it.

I will be very VERY upset if this affects our perfomance in Raids. Lets see if this bleed effect actually does enough damage (cant see it doing 45% of our crit damage....>_>)

I'm tempted to start stacking agility/crit bonus gear/gems - if I'm not allowed to have 45% of my crit damage - I'll just have to get up to 85% (Joking! But it'd be nice eh?)

Anyway I'll not be crying about it any more - unless its to say "I'm re-rolling to a Death Knight"

******************************************************************

Anyway....Wrath is with is in 3 weeks and the Lich King has starting making his presence know in Azeroth and Outland...(especially in Shattrath actually it seems - the amount of corpses around!)

I was the first in the guild to notice the Argent Healers popping up all over the place.

So its totally cool to become a mindless zombie...brrraaiiinss....especially when you blow yourself up in a bank or Auction House! Ha!

I've not seen any boxes of grain in the major cities as yet but I hear there a a lot in Booty Bay. I wonder if there is going to be any sort of quests like the pre-tbc event.
I imagine the zombie event is just the start!

Gonna keep my ears and eyes open for more though!

One of the cool features is you can talk to people in the other faction while your a zombie! Had a nice conversation with a hordie while we were poisoning people in shatt! (Players cant attack you in shatt so you take it upon yourself to attack them and the NPC's. More Zombies for our army of the undead!)

So enjoy this event and more importantly - Enjoy being A true bringer of Justice and Light. For our time to shine is nearly at an end....

The Sunwell...and Hallows End

2008-10-21T20:47:00.003+01:00

Hey peeps! So the last 2 nights raids have been in Sunwell and didn't we do well in here!

Monday night we cleared Kalecgos and then Brutallus, then had some tries on Felmyst.

We're in the middle of doing Felmyst wipes at the mo - she's tough! just getting the tactics right is difficult. We'll get her eventually.

I got REALLY lucky yesterday with a trash drop and picked up these bad boys!!

I was actually shocked these drop - usually I'm not lucky with drops like this!

In other news - I've managed to complete all of the achievements for Hallows End apart from 1 - I need to get the Squashling pet - but I've never seen it drop.

Kinda sucky - I've read some blue posts about it:

I understand completely that people want to get the achievement, the title, and the mount, and therefore the concept of an achievement that may be intended to be uncommon is not a popular one. I wish everyone the best of luck; while I realize I may have frustrated you today with my answers, but I simply wanted it known that everything brought forth as a concern regarding the Sinister Calling achievement was discussed and the achievement was judged reasonable. We'd read the feedback and we understand where you're coming from but the achievement is still right about where we want it to be in terms of being able to complete it.

That isn't to say we won't make tweaks to the availability of the items in question, but chance will still play a part if we do. We have no intent of making the items use a quest, token, or other guaranteed system to achieve.

Also I've read this and it doesnt look too good...

We don't nerf anyone due to public outcry. If we did, there would probably be 1-2 classes left that were even PvP viable. At most seeing a lot of QQ about one class might get us to look at the numbers to see if there is any truth to the matter. However I will say that in this case there were so many people telling us the same thing that it's hard to come up with an explanation for how they can all be wrong and some of the Ret paladins be right. (I say "some" because several Ret paladins admit they were killing stuff to fast.)

We collect a lot of data from both Beta and the live servers, and Ret paladins were killing people very quickly and often, especially at level 70. Even after the nerfs, they are still very good at 70.

It's never fun to nerf anyone and we know the boards are going to be on fire for several days when we do it. It's our fault that the imbalance existed in the first place and we needed to take steps to correct it. Players are understandably nervous about the new world order with all of the changes we've made to classes and combat. Most of them, I am confident, want to see balance problems fixed quickly.

But we'll just have to wait and see...

1 Year of Blogging!!!

2008-10-20T21:30:00.002+01:00

So its been a year to the day since I wrote my first blog post on here!

My First Blog Entry

I just wanted to say thanks to the 43,000 odd visitors since I started and thanks to all the contributors who have made comments!

Retribution Builds for Level 70 and beyond.

2008-10-19T09:31:00.005+01:00

Hey peeps! So I promised Iandrix that I'd put up what I thought were good builds for level 70 and I thought I'd try to make up something for level 80 as well.

Level 70 Ret Raiding Build
This is the build I'm using Live at the moment for Raiding. As you can see I've only put 2 points in Fanaticism. And so far I've not had a huge issue with threat so far. Hand of Salvation has saved my butt very well so far! But the threat generation warriors have at the moment is awesome.

Here are some more more builds i threw together..I had a real hard time going for anything nice for the 70 pvp build - I really cant decide if its really necessary...but some survivability would be nice...but then I have full pvp gear but rarely use it!!

Level 70 Ret PvP Build

Level 80 Ret Raiding Build

Level 80 Ret PvP Build

If anyone has any suggestions then by all means link different builds!

Edit: I fixed the 80 Ret PvE build!

All together now....NERF!!!

2008-10-16T23:02:00.004+01:00

No...Not Ret....well not yet....but Black Temple has been....HARD!!

Rage went into BT tonight...start to finish 3.5 hours - all cleared!

Illidan Down - Guild First! Hardly surprising though!

But Grats to us!!

We one shot all the bosses in there!

Illidan was down in 9 minutes, Akama was down in 1m 2s.

What an evening!!

2008-10-16T12:54:00.002+01:00

Hey peeps!! Hows everyone today?

I'm fantastic!

Last night after I got in from work, I finished patching my wow client, updated my addons and booted into the game, then I logged off and switched off my addons!

So after a bit of fiddling - relearning some things from my trainer and odds and end here and there the main 25 man raid was cancelled so we decided to head into ZA.

Well that was the plan - it took a little bit of time to implement due to the Eastern Kingdoms mystically disappearing on and off last night from time to time.. I only got caught in one of the crashes thankfully.

Anyway I finally made it up there and while we were waiting a few of the guildies were eager to see what Ret could do...

Well our Rogue Class Leader who has always been a difficult person to duel was ripped to shreds by my new abilities - This he tried 3/4 times and the result was the same each time!

Our Prot warrior on the other hand - well he hurts!! Whatever it is that they can do that returns the damage to the attacker is pretty nasty!!

Anyway we went into Zul'Aman and wow...did we clear the place fast!!!

Start to finish - 57 minutes! What a shame the bear mount is gone!

So at about 12:30am this morning after I'd been running around doing some small achievement things, I logged off...with a big grin on my face...

...Until that is I woke up this morning and came to work and read this post from Blessing of Kings.

Well it seems that Ret-Paladins are just not allowed to have fun ever.

I'll reserve judgement on this till I can try it out. But this is seriously not good....lets hope this is where the nerfing stops.

As almost every other blog site and forum post has stated - Ret will not be OP in Wrath. We will be a viable PVE DPS, and a good PvP class. Which makes a change from not being able to do anything well in TBC.

I mean i did a lot of dueling last night and Ret still suffer the same things as before against classes with Crowd Control - Mages, Warlocks, Resto Druids. Unless we can get within melee range of them. (Basically meaning when Divine Shield isnt on Cool Down) even then they have in game mechanics that can get them away from us...

Why must people just go QQ on forums and moan about Ret when all they need to do is Learn to Play! Work out how to deal with us - the way they had to do in TBC.

I read somewhere a post or thread where someone had said....(not a direct quote)

"Ret Paladins have had to learn how to play very well - to get as much DPS out of a seriously underpowered class in order to be raid viable from a dps point of view, not just from a utility point of view...so now that we finally have been given a nice buff that ability to play well is starting to shine."

Lets hope I don't have to post again about nerfs....hey I can dream can't I?

Quick Update..

2008-10-16T00:32:00.002+01:00

Just updated my pic - to now include all my latest gear and sporting my new doo!!

Will post a bigger post tomorrow!!!

Ready for tomorrow...

2008-10-14T23:11:00.002+01:00

Righto - I'm ready for my mount!!

BRING IT ON!!! I cannot wait for tomorrow!!

Fun In Naxxramas and the PTR!!

2008-10-08T07:16:00.004+01:00

Hey guys'n'gals! its another Wednesday morning and the servers are down, so I thought I'd post something up to keep me busy before work!

Oh and by the way, the blizzard downloader is currently downloading more stuff for the new patch - its up to 1.5gb now. (I had already downloaded the 900 or so mb)

Anyways last nights raid was cancelled so no updates on Illidan but one of our guildies Senias, is a bit of a completest and decided that he wanted to go into Naxx to pick up some patterns he didn't have on his tailor warlock.

Knowing full well that there is going to be a new set of frost-res gear available from someone in Wrath of the Lich King!!

Basically in the Death Knight wing there is a vendor with the patterns who is locked up in a cage at the back of the first main room. Its quite a big room so we had to be fast and safe. Our plan? To run in, bubble then when Sathy was in position cast Divine Intervention onto her so she could safely talk to the NPC and get the patterns.

So it took us a few tries but we got there in the end!

Here's a vid of the event I made! (Right Click, Save Target As... 55mb)

Also I managed to get 50 mounts in the PTR and now have the Albino Drake:

Click images for larger versions!

A Divine Storm is Coming....

2008-10-06T13:12:00.002+01:00

Hey peeps! Hows everyone doing out there in WoW land? Here's to hoping you're all well and raring to go...

So in little over a week the Patch 3.0.2 will be coming and boy is it a long time coming. Having been playing on the PTR for a few weeks now I cannot wait to get my new abilities into live and get some action going!

Ok so Ret is hugely buffed compared to live at the moment and everyone knows it Boy do they know it! There are people all over the shop shouting "NERF RET PALAS" and griping and whining about how they're not able to kill us seemingly. Well having been there a few weeks it seems a lot of classes have worked out how best to deal with us. Well provided of course that Divine Shield is on Cooldown!! ;-)

Mages still own us from what I've seen - I was stood outside IronForge just watching all the rets dueling and it seems that classes with good CC and skill are still able to make short work of Retridins. Frost Mages in particular.

And what a lot of people on there have realised is that all this power we have at level 70 will not stand up at 80 - well i hope that we don't get too much of a loss of power at 80 - It'll be interesting to see. November 13th just cant get here quick enough.

In the mean time Rage is getting closer and closer to getting Illidan down - our best try saw him at 45% and if we don't get him down this week, then I imagine with the nerf they've given bosses/elites in TBC from next week (minus 30% health) then we will eventually.

Either way - he's going down, then maybe we can turn our attention to Kael'thas....there's a lot of completest's in the guild that were never 100% happy about moving from TK/SSC to Black Temple and Mount Hyjall when they removed the attunement. I mean dont get me wrong, who's ever not going to be happy about going somewhere new, but SSC and TK should be more than easy for the guild at the current level we're at. There was a lengthy chat about this in the guild channel over there weekend and I think the GM, Kuta, was a little dejected at having so many people apparently not happy with what we're doing at the moment, and wanting to go back and do obsolete content.

Anyway I'm just counting the days till the patch is released and people can start doing some interesting stuff. I love the idea of the Achievement system, and will spending a lot of my time before the expansion doing stuff in there!

Are any of you having similar issues at the moment regarding raids? Or have you stopped altogether?

Small Update...

2008-09-26T08:10:00.002+01:00

Well it seems that yes we've lost a tiny bit of healing power - but its really not a huge deal.

A prot paladin and I went into Onyxia last night - I just wanted some company - you know someone to talk to aside from the mindless nothingness of solo'ing.

I buffed myself as much as I could, potions, dps food, and finally the sharpening stones are working again. We had Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings and off we went.

Immediately my lack of the ability to control my aggro was very obvious. After about 60 seconds or so I started tanking! Bubble - the protadin started tanking again, 12 seconds later bubble wore off and I was tanking again.

Where's Salvation when I need it most....hang on!! Hand of Salvation! Quickly I buffed myself with this and then the Protadin did after mine wore off. This kept me below his threat, but he wasn't a full tanking capacity - i mean how is it possible for a tankadin to only have 3.5k mana! And i thought my mana pool was small. Anyway it was then I noticed that my Mana/Health Potions were still on Cool down....WTF?!?!

They've made the potions cool down last till the end of fights. While this wasn't a problem for me, I can see it would be a huge problem for healers/casters. Unless they have some sort of massive mana regen mechanic.

Maybe its just a big that its back in the game, and not intentional - I remember all the QQ'ing when it was in the PTR before.

Anyway after about 25 minutes we took Onyxia down which was cool. So it would still be possible - which will be a nice way to make 200g or there abouts every 3 days.