From ignorance of the past comes blissful tolerance of change

People tend to dislike change.  I suspect it is because deep down, we all know that change means entropy and the gradual death of the universe, all life, and all meaning.  But what if we don't realize the change happened?

If we don't realize that anything changed, will we get mad?  I doubt it.

This brings me to my paladin. I know something changed from Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria.  I know this because I logged in the day of the patch and was very confused and a bit annoyed.  Yet now I couldn't quite tell you what changed.  Pressed for details I might cite abilities from Wrath of thew Lich King, thinking that something is similar, though no quite sure what.

In this confusion, in this forgetfulness, I have lost my customary ability to be enraged over what were surely intolerable changes to my chosen class.

Dear fellow protection paladins,

I'm leveling another protection paladin.  Early in the day there seems to be a DPS shortage (or maybe it's something with the healers), so I end up in randoms as DPS rather than as a tank.  As a result, I have found myself in several groups with you tanking.  I have been disappointed.

You keep dropping consecration early.  And in the wrong spot.  This makes no sense.  It's not something which follows you.  Where you put it, it stays.  So put it in a useful place, such as in the middle of a pack, rather than where you were standing when you pulled.

Speaking of pulling, throw avenger's shield at casters.  It silences them and bring them close so all the AoEs can hit them.  That also means that you have aggro on them, so they aren't standing off to the side zapping the healer.

You don't have to always use seal of insight.  Especially when DPS are getting aggro because you're so bad.

As for all you retribution paladins, why?  You're above 30, so you can get two specs.  I understand that healing is terrifying (not sarcasm), but why not tank?  Throw on a shield and you are now geared as a tank, since it's not as if avoidance stats become common until much later, and aren't needed until much later anyway.  You can do it!  I have a friend who just started playing and managed to teach her to tank on a druid.  A druid!  Now there's a tricky tanking class, what with not every single ability being an AoE for massive damage.  If some newb can pick up druid tanking (not an expert, but did get a compliment once) in a few days, surely you can do it too.  Just pretend it's DPS and replace crusader strike with hammer of the righteous and you're about halfway there.  It's like I said, tanks are DPS who gave up on aggro management.  Oh, but please do drop consecrate in the right place.  I'm sick of healers getting pissed on.


Finally, why are you such assholes?  I get that tanks are awesome and all, but seriously?  I'll grant that my sample size is small, but I don't want to deal with the assholes rewuired to get a larger sample size.  So with that in mind, one group has the tank ignoring suggestions and then pulling as awkwardly as possible, complete with random pauses in movement and what appeared to be keyboard turning, and then topping it all off with a boss pull that wiped the group and then blaming the healer.  I decided to save us the trouble and just tank the last boss, since we had to kick him after he logged off without dropping group.  After that we had the healer who forgot water, so then everyone had to make up the 99.9999999% of the time useless habit of not auto-looting, the failure of which resulted in the rogue being called a retard.  I pointed out the absurdity of that being the sole qualification for being a retard, resulting in me being called a noob and claims that I was "carried", whatever the hell that means at level 49.

Tanks, we have a heavy burden.  We are the front of the group, the first thing the enemies see, so let's put on a good face.  Set a good pace.  Set a good mood.  As the sniper says: "Be polite, be efficient, have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

A relaxing day of fighting demons before I went to Outland to fight more demons

Desolace started out great and then went rapidly downhill. Felwood, well it also started out great. It went uphill from there.

The two ends of the zone are unchanged: enter, kill insane furbolgs, and then wander off wondering what was the point of that reputation you kept gaining. They took the old Timbermaw quests and tweaked them a little, made them funner and funnier.

The zone then sent me on a gradual crawl north, during which I would kill demons, and then get sent somewhere else to kill more demons. It had a real demon-killing theme to it. I liked that. It made it seems like there was an actual mission to the zone, rather than just randomly being sent on pointless, tangential tasks. "Kill a rat! Now kill a warlock! Kill a warlock rat! Now go gather some rat feathers!"

This isn't due to a radical remaking of the zone. It originally dealt a lot with the legacy of demonic corruption. But it did it better, with small improvements such as not putting the only FP in the far north, or if you were Horde you had it easy and it was only halfway up the very long, narrow zone. I particularly enjoyed the quests where I was sent to kill a demon hunter, which took an expected turn, which as you probably guessed, was to not kill him, but instead listen to him explain how the druids were being idiots. He had a point. Illidan was also featured, typically arrogant, impulsive, power-hungry, and not all that much of a betrayer.

There were a variety of small, heart-warming quest chains. I got to help a new protector tree grow, worked with a sickeningly sugary dryad, got tricked by some mischievous furbolg youngungs, and in the most heart-warming quest of all, a worgen sent me to kill various goblins.

Along the way I ran Ful'Farrak a bunch of times, not because I like the place all that much, but because I'd gotten one of the swords, and if I got the other I'd have an epic. ZOMG EPIC! Eventually I got it, after convincing the hunter who rolled need on it that he had indeed rolled need on it.

I wasn't quite at level 54 for Silithus, so I helped a dwarf kill more forbolgs and then realized that seeing the new Blasted Lands would probably be more fun than another tour around Silithus. And off I went. It started off strangely, with a few quests to remind me that the Horde is being led by a warmongering jackass, then I killed some worgen ghosts whose ships had crashed. But finally I got to something good: Fighting demons.

At first I was slightly annoyed. It looked as if the quest chain for Rakh'likh (epic quest back in vanilla, perhaps too epic) was just another "let's slightly redo a quest that players did in vanilla, ignoring the fact that players have already dealt with this major threat." But it was a little fuzzy about exactly what was going on and what had happened before. However it made it clear that three of the bad guys I'd killed as part of the chain were still dead. Okay, that was a good start. Reading the wiki, he survived my attack back in vanilla, which given that demons tend to come back anyway, is plausible. The quest chain takes place in the aftermath, with the demon hunter having gone to to the job himself, and getting wrecked in the process. I won't spoil it, but let's just say it made me wonder about the means used to achieve the ends, and the ending was pretty interesting. I'm guessing in another decade when The Bulldozers Move Around the Zones expansion comes, we'll see another followup to it.

Perhaps the best part was that finishing this quest is was put me at level 60. So now I can go fight more demons.

There is other content in the zone, but I didn't feel like sticking around. As a tangent I'd helped the murlocs and that was fun.

I don't think the leveling curve is as screwed up now. I was thrown off it by many runs of Scholomance and Zul'Farrak, as well as multiple full clears of BRD. That last one is probably what threw me off, because I think I got a couple levels in the process. That place is huge...

I am consistent in my values

Some people flip flop and waver. Mr. Colbert said about our greatest president, "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday." Well, today is Wednesday and on the metaphorical Monday I made some statements of value. I don't have them with me because the media likes to suppress anything good, but trust me, they were said and they are exactly what I am saying now.

Appearance matters more than actual functionality.

I've believed this my entire life. I grew up using a Mac. More recently, but not actually recently, once upon a time, warlocks had a choice to make. They could get some robes. They could get a trinket which would, in some situation, prove to be quite useful, possibly saving them from having to utter those words which once would make a raid leader rage and lead to an entire MC raid zoning out to go hunt spiders in the Searing Gorge because someone had not farmed enough souls. Note that the item has been changed. It used to summon a voidwalker without needing a soul shard, so you could use it to summon a voidwalker, then walk far enough away and it would desummon, granting you a soul shard. Note that back then, the range to walk was approximately ten miles, uphill, and if you walked downhill on the way back, you'd lose the shard. That last sentence was a complete lie, which makes it notable for the fact that I actually pointed that out.

Finally there was a weapon. It wasn't a great and powerful weapon. It was okay. You might use it for a little while, but not a very long while. Given that players often went to Sunken Temple fairly late in the game, it could soon be replaced by staves from various other instances, such as Scholomance (not the one I mentioned the other day)and BRD, and wasn't even a huge upgrade from an earlier staff from Zul'Farrak. I suppose these days we'd call it a mediocre upgrade. But it had one very important thing going for it: It's a fucking scythe available to a class that takes souls. How can anyone not see that this is the most appropriate choice?

Sadly, some did not. But me, I took a stand. I didn't just tell people what to do, I did it myself, thereby giving me greater legitimacy when I continued to tell them what to do. History, by which I mean a mix of luck and decisions over which I had absolutely no influence, has backed me up. The trinket was nerfed while the staff, thanks to Cataclysm destroying all that was good in the world, and transmogrification allowing us to pretend it was still around, is now unobtainable precisely when it has the opportunity to shine again.

My values have held, to this very day. Some people might say, "Hey, that's not a paladin weapon! It has agility! It's for hunters!" And I say to you this: "It's a fucking scythe!" I put my money where my values are:
Witch-Hunter's Harvester
Don't I look marvelous?
I like my new dress. But I think the BC recolored Judgement might fit the color of the scythe better.

I like how they need to add the qualifier "raid" to "most prestigious title", because otherwise they'd be all like "the Insane? Bloodsail Admiral? BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!?"

Zul'Gurub is not an abomination

I had low hopes for the remade Zuls. I expected watered-down shadows of the awesome they once were. And certainly they are not the same. But they are similar and a good sort of different.

The plethora of mini-bosses was odd. More like glorified trash mobs. But whatever. These days you gotta have the flare.

Venoxis was nothing like what I remember, but was a fun new fight anyway. At least the theme was somewhat consistent with the venom, though it lacked snakes.

Broodlord was a fun fight, which I think stayed somewhat true to the original, though obviously not exactly the same. I hadn't looked it up before, so when I started seeing people getting one-shot, I was worried. I didn't realize that the fight was designed with the expectation that people would be dying a lot. Thankfully, my habit of attacking the raptor was still correct.

The Edge of Madness was... confusing at first. I didn't know how it started, figuring it would just be a random boss. I didn't want it to just be yet another boss, but I figured that these days, that's how things are. Thankfully, I was wrong. Apparently it requires some moderate level of archaeology to activate, and a lot of rummaging around to find the artifacts to activate. I thought that was cool. The boss we got was a crazy troll rogue, who I found silly in a good way.

Zanzil was sorta neat, but I think the cauldrons are a little too far apart.

Panther boss was strange. Ignore her, kill cats, then kill her? She's already tormented and the first thing we do is kill her cats? Killing a crazy cat caricature's cats is cruel.

Jindo was a pretty awesome fight, once we figured out what we were doing. Well, most of us... A warlock in the group was very skilled at never being anywhere near the chains, so we had four or five failed body slams, dragging on the fight, and then the healer died right before we were able to get the last chain.

I got a big mace. I turned it into Might of Menethil. In the end I walked out with a new healing hat, a new DPS hat, a big mace, a treatise on strategy.

I think I might go again.

Better is Different

Are 3 and 4 different numbers? Yes. But they are still numbers, so we can line them up and say that 4 is bigger than 3 and if we're talking about money 4 is better and if we're talking about debt 3 is better. If your bank account goes from 3 digits to 4, that's better. But what if you're measuring something and it goes from 3 to D? Well sure, D is the 4th letter, so maybe we can say it is higher and depending on the perspective, better, but it is also different.

Better is different, but different is not always better.

What is better for you can be worse for someone else. Or for the same person, some parts are better, some parts are worse. This is what has been happening with WoW.

But let's not get into vague ideas like lobby vs. world. Instead, let's talk paladins.

A long while ago there was no such thing as Forbearance. This meant that a paladin could use divine shield right after blessing of protection. Back then there was no mass dispel, so beside a bug involving lag and shamans, divine shield could not be removed. And it lasted 12 seconds. Take note of that time: even with a GCD that is enough to use a hearthstone. It was pretty sweet.

On top of that, Divine Protection used to be a funny sort of spell. It was basically a bad version of divine shield. Priests had a spell like this as well, one of their heals. And of course paladins had a purify spell which was like cleanse but didn't remove magic. Anyway, Divine Protection made the paladins completely invincible just like Divine Shield, but didn't last as long, and made the paladin unable to attack. Of course they could still heal.

Now imagine, as a melee class, trying to fight someone who can heal himself, wears plate, and has three different ways to become entirely immune to physical damage. Not easy!

Over time their toughness has been nerfed. Heavily. Now the bubbles last less time and can be removed, along with triggering forbearance.

It's not all bad though. It may be better overall. Better, but different. Losing all that durability has gone along with some other changes.

Damage has gone up significantly. Paladin damage is no longer a joke. Oh sure, run your numbers and you might find it is too low (I have no clue where it is these days), but wherever it is, it's definitely higher than it was. Mana regeneration is higher. Control of damage is higher. Just plain hitting things hard is higher. If a paladin wants to DPS, they have some chance at it. This was not always the case. People wrote songs about it.

Despite the durability of a paladin, they were not popular tanks either. With almost no regeneration, since back then it mostly came from spirit and seal/judgement of wisdom, which was nowhere near adequate, especially since using seal of wisdom would mean a huge aggro loss. It didn't help that only warriors had tanking sets. Even in BC paladins were in an awkward spot in gear design, using up stats for intellect before mana generation was sorted out in LK (mostly). On top of mana problems, aggro wasn't so easy either. While righteous fury gave a major boost to holy damage aggro, it was a magic ability and could be removed. This was trouble for some bosses. Again, even in BC there was a boss that would spam dispel magic, which made him very tricky to tank, since righteous fury was expensive.

Despite the durability, a quirk of the spell scaling system meant that using a low rank of flash of light with good gear could result in incomparable efficiency. Even with the crap regen, paladin healers could go for a long time, thanks to getting a good bit of healing out of a very cheap spell. So maybe they were good healers. For one target. Spamming one ability for hours on end. While wearing a dress that was clearly not designed for them, so it was not even remotely flattering. Ugh. Terrible times. These days there is gear designed for it, so the priests don't whine so much. The spells are more interesting. Even I, a person who never quite enjoyed healing, can say that paladin healing has improved.

And yet, and yet...

It was fun to see a rogue kill himself punching my shield while feeding me reckoning charges so I could punch back twice as often. I'm not saying that the same punch was giving both, since obviously if you're blocking you aren't getting crit, so no reckoning, at least until they changed it.

A paladin soloed* a level 60 40-man raid boss. At level 60. Thanks to an old old version of reckoning. Balanced? Perhaps not. Awesome? Yes.

* I suppose you could argue it was a two-person operation, since the rogue did help.

This video is why I made a paladin, made her protection, and an engineer. This shit was the shit. For some perspective, those plans were not easy to get, coming from what was not a particularly hard raid, but it did require 40 people and had a low drop rate. My first shields were made by another engineer, who it turned out was about to drop it (my timing is incredible), because it wasn't good enough. Psh. Who needs stupid stats when they can make mind-control helms and cloaking devices? That running around he did in the place with the skeletons, that was Scholomance, back when it was level 60, and really not a place for someone to be soloing. Of course a mage did it(the entire place) because they wish they were as good as warlocks. Of whom I cannot find a video of one soloing it. I'm sure I saw it... Surely a warlock can do anything a mage can do, but better; that's the whole point of them!

Anyway, balance was a hazy concept back then. Things are better now. Better, but different, and different isn't always better.

WoWing around again: Holy Cow

Yep, a tauren paladin. Or more accurately, a sun druid, but does anyone say that? No! Because people like to use imprecise terms and overgeneralize. This is one cause of racism. My point is that anyone who says tauren paladin is bringing the world one step closer to the Fourth Reich.

The tauren are under attack from highly aggressive quillboar, driven from their dens by the cataclysm, who are, of course, neutral. Blizzard really kept the original vibe of the tauren starting area and did a good job of layering the low-level paladin experience on top of it, creating a top-notch incredibly dull experience.

I turned into an eagle and then got bored and quit.

Coming soon: Forsaken!
Sneak Preview: Lillian Voss is a badass!

Hard heroics are good for my ego

I used to not like doing heroics as DPS. But sometimes I'd end up in a guild group with a tank and so I'd be ret. I hated it. I was just another nobody to be measured by a meter.

But these days, I like ret. The heroics are harder, so we have to actually play our classes more fully. The other day I remarked something like "CC and an interrupt, I feel like a real class!" It wasn't just that ret got an interrupt, but that it became needed. Repentance is used on most of the trash pulls because things just plain hit hard. I'm interrupting bad cast after bad cast. I'm using hammer of justice if things get dicey. I'm using divine protection during bad phases. Even my Holy Radiance can do something helpful.

I'm not looking forward to the day when we overgear everything again and I'm back to trying to spam AoE as best I can just to keep up.

GC hates DPS: True Story

While searching for the meaning of life I stumbled across this.

Dungeon Finder is a great part of the game. But its existence isn't going to cause us to design everything for the lowest common denominator. If you get a bad player in your group, give them some pointers. If they refuse to listen, kick them. If you can't kick them, then bail. You're a tank -- your queue is short. They have a lot more to lose.

Actually it doesn't say at all what my title implies, but I found it interesting anyway.

And yes, I know it's not new. I don't do news. I do recent olds.

Whiny Friday: Paladins are horrible

First off, I've heard bad things about holy. But since healing frightens me, I've not tried it. Moving on.

Holy Power.

Holy. Power.

Extra. Periods. Which. I. Use. To. Emphasize. A. Point. Which. I. May. Or. May. Not. Have.

I want sacred shield back. I liked sacred shield. It was an excellent button to press if I had no other buttons to press. And it turns out it was giving a significant bit of mitigation.

I'm actually enjoying ret. The holy power system adds some variation, some interest to it. It's mechanically fun. But it lost a lot of damage and even more self-healing. With divine storm no longer being spammed constantly thanks to t10 and no more instant flashes of light, my healing has pretty much vanished. Seal of insight helps, but it scales pretty slowly. I can use HP for HP, but that means no HP for DS to give HP and damage, so I'm having all sorts of HP problems with the HP system. Also, acronyms. Still, I like ret so far and I'm confident that some DPS tweaks can put it in a solid raid position. Also sprint judgement is pretty nice, though it could stand to be a little bit faster.

But prot. Prot prot prot. Prot. Prot. It has painfully slow HP generation, with only hammer of the righteous or crusader strike and they share a CD. It ends up feeling slow and clunky. Ret also has one ability to spam for HP, but it also has quite a few 40% procs for additional HP and they're on the common abilities, including the finisher moves. I like some of the ideas of it, such as picking between a damage finisher for aggro and a heal finisher which will bubble if it overheals. I like the reseting avenger's shield for something to change things up. I don't like being unable to get pursuit of justice at this level. I might have to switch my boot enchant to run speed, a clearly abominable act considering they currently have rockets on them. Replacing fine goblin engineering with... magic? Ugh. Even worse, magic done by someone else. How do I know if its unreliable?

What I think could help is adding a HP chance to AS. That would speed up the HP generation and make it so AS fees like more than just a misused interrupt. Also put the damage back on hand of taunt.

4.0 has all sorts of strange flaws which are bugging me. Sound effects randomly drop, while at times I can hear the sound of spellbooks being searched and bars being reshuffled. The new character display is great, but I don't like that it shifts my name over when I open the stats tab. Random gives no indication of how many justice points it gives, which incidentally isn't very many. The very worst thing: NPC names and health bars. Health bar display seems to be entirely random; just toggling it on and off will bring up new and exciting mixes of not all of the information that a player needs. Sometimes NPCs show their names above their heads even when not targeted, with the display option turned off. This creates a horrible appearance of all this smashed text floating over NPCs 50 yards away that cannot even be read. Actually that's one of the things that I loved about WoW compared to other MMOs: it didn't have stupid ugly immersion-breaking crap like that. It just looks awful. I'm sure it's just a bug as they sort out what seems to be a new feature, but it's not making the near post-patch experience much better.

It's not all bad though. I like reforging. I like the new way of organizing portals and teleports. I uh... wow, that was a short list.

P.S. Arcane is OP and frost is taking forever to kill anything.

Ignorance is Bliss

I'm really enjoying not understanding my paladin anymore. My bars needing retuning to fit with the new way to use attacks. It's taking some mental rewiring to imagine that divine storm isn't the core of my rotation, but instead an AoE finishing move. Now exorcism is a major ability, seeming to take the place of DS as my random damage proc. CS spam reminds me a little too much of a rogue with sinister strike, but the rest of it seems different enough, or at least fun.

P.S. Any comments with theorycraft will be deleted.

Major ret DPS loss in 4.0

I have no clue what the theorycrafted numbers are for ret DPS, but I do know one thing: there are going to be a whole lot of paladins with no clue what to do, including me.

Why Hand of Reckoning should still do damage

I've heard the most terrible rumors, that hand of reckoning will no longer have a damage component. This is an outrage.

Let's just go through a few theoretical scenarios.

Scenario 1
A mob is flying and a paladin needs to pull it. A ret paladin. What are they going to do? KICK ITS ASS of course. Except if HoR does no damage, they can't get it to come down to die. Oh sure, they could use their taunt, but that's just weird. Why would a taunt be used by a non-tanking spec to pull?

Scenario 2
Bears.
There you are seeking out a fishing spot and right next to it is a bear. A BEAR. Think about that for a sec. There is a bear at your fishing spot. Normally you could just chop it in half, but you're fishing, you have a fishing pole. So a quick bit of damage from hand of reckoning, a judgement, followed by an exorcism and maybe a whack on the head and there you go. But without hand of reckoning, all you're really doing is taunting a bear while armed with nothing but a fishing pole, and that would be stupid.

Scenario 3
Imagine a rabbit. Imagine the most terrifying rabbit known to man, and imagine that you and only you know it's there. But how best to kill such a rabbit? It is at this point in our scenario that along comes hand of reckoning. It is a spell seemingly without limits, a spell for which the taunt always justifies the damage, and it is this spell which suggests that if the goal is a dead critter, the attack should not be a melee, but rather a spell. Three spells exist for such an attack: judgement, exorcism, and hand of reckoning.

Countless others exist and should be considered, but I leave you with these three. They are more than enough of a case. Though these are trying times, let us not be swayed by madness.

We should go to Ravenholm

I started playing Half Life 2 again recently. I don't know why. During it I've noticed a theme: I really like burning places with zombies. In WoW it's Stratholme. In HL2 it's Ravenholme.

If you're not familiar with HL2, here's the general concept of the zombies: these parasites called head crabs, which are about the size of a very fat cat, latch onto a person's head. They then control them. The person is still alive, and from the sound of it, quite aware of their situation and the pain involved. For the most part they are slow and don't hurt much, but they make the most awful sounds. The worst is the one carrying the poison ones. It sounds so sad, yet relieved when it dies.

Ravenholme is a town that got bombarded with shells filled with headcrabs, resulting in a lot of fire and zombies. And Father Grigori.

I've decided that WoW needs someone like this holy man. He is clearly insane, but clearly a strange sort of genius, and perfectly devout. He remains in the town to save his flock. This means killing zombies. I find him to be an inspiration, the kind of man I'd hope to be when the zombie/alien invasion comes. Oh yes, the Earth of Half Life has been invaded by aliens, alien bugs, and zombies. The hero is a physicist who more than once is sent to stabilize a reactor core (nuclear would be trivial compared to this technology) and whose appearance causes joy among all nearby. He's followed by a hot chick who is good at killing zombies with her bare hands or gun. In other words, it's a nerd's dream.

I created my paladin before I knew about HL2, but somehow I ended up on a similar path. I like to kill zombies, I'm an engineer, and my character is her own hot chick. She is a blood elf after all. But perhaps she could be a bit more like Father Grigori rather than Gordon Freeman. A 'moderate Scarlet', meaning just as fanatical and crazy, but not as prone to murdering innocents. Unless they wander into one of my traps.u

Shuffle shuffle shuffle

"Shuffle? I don't fucking shuffle! I am a rogue. Shuffle is sound. I am silence. Unless I'm yelling. Fucking shut up."

My rogue isn't a very nice person.

"NICE!? I don't need to be nice. I need to pick all these damn boxes for you."

She's been farming Blackrock Spire for heavy junkboxes.

"And, and then you give them away for some shitty throwing weapon. Which vendors for over a gold! And then you destroy it. What's that sound? No not the imaginary shuffling. Yes that's it, money being destroyed. Idiot!"

You see, I've been working on building up my reputation with Ravenholdt, which means giving them a lot of junkboxes.

"Understatement."

She pretends she does all the work.

"PRETENDS!?"

She forgets that I was the one running around killing literally thousands of Syndicate.

"Oh the terrible sacrifice of doing your usual ret faceroll, except with targets that can barely hit back. I used to stab people in the face and poison them and pick through their corpses. Not all this thieving. I'm a rogue, sure, but I'm not a thief for hire!"

She doesn't get paid. I don't even let her use poisons because they take up bag space.

"Meanwhile I'm trying to sneak around the lower spire and you're up at the top hitting dragons in the face with that ugly axe!"

Which ugly axe? I have two, you know.

"The fuck it matters? I'm being quiet and you're up there waking up half the spire! Just the other day I was trying to sneak up to some sleeping orcs to grab a chest and they all jump up and I hear you spinning away and throwing hammers."

Pardon me, but I can be sneaky when I need to.
*triggers gnomish cloaking device*

"How many times have I said I want to switch to engineering? How many times? Do you have any idea how great it would be to have a parachute cloak?"

You have safe fall and don't need to be jumping off cliffs.

"And you do?"

Of course. I'm a paladin; jumping off cliffs with my feet shooting flames is very heroic. As I've always said: "Better smiting through technology."

"You're not a priest, noob. You have what, three other miners? You're a miner! The death knight, and the warrior too! You'd never even go mining on me, you prefer crusader aura."

The death knight has a name, you know.

"I can't pronounce that shit."

I know. You can't even pronounce my name.

"Yea, you're so cool with your fake Russian and fake German and fake whatever the fuck you named the hunter."

Folaksamba is not fake. It's made up. There's a difference.

"Fuck you!"

I'll expect another 60 boxes by the end of the day.
Isn't she nice? Kinda chunky though. I think because she never runs. Lazy.

"I am not fat, you armored bitch!"

Excuse me, why are you still here? My mailbox doesn't appear to have the 60 boxes.

I can play WoW in my sleep

And that's not a good thing. Yet another lesson on why it's bad to play before bed.

6
9
6
9
6
9

WTF stop! You don't need to tank, you're asleep.
No you're not losing aggro. You're not even logged in. The computer is even off.

6
9
6
9
6
9
6
9

*sigh*
Get up, look around, take note of reality. You know, that place where you are not a blood elf paladin. At least not a female one (I have way better hair than the males). And not a paladin!

Oh shit shit shit where are those mobs coming from? Dammit, I just cannot hold aggro. I can't even see what's attacking them. How am I supposed to get aggro on mobs that I can't see?
You're not in a group. Remember, computer is off.
But they're getting their asses kicked! The mobs keep spawning way behind the healer and I can't see very well with all the commotion.
There's no commotion! Go to sleep!
But...
Go to sleep.
Fine.

6
9
6
9
6
9
6
9

FUCK!

At least I stopped PvPing before bed. Dreaming of getting stunlocked is even less fun.

But speaking of 6-9, I sometimes throw myself off if I consciously press my consecrate key, because that's a '9' second cooldown (8, but with a delay) but it's actually the 6 key. I should get around to making a pair of castsequence macros for that.

I like my bubbles

Double, double pull and trouble;
Fire burn, and paladin bubble

Of course I like my immunity bubble.

I also like my 50% less damage bubble.

And the Divine Intervention bubble on other people saves me repairs, so that's nice.

But I also like my figurative bubbles. I like my tanking bubble. It protects me from the elitist, speed-running, wipe-causing, asshole tanks that supposedly are rampant in LFD. I've had one non-me tank since LFD started (outside of raids) and that was a very short HoR run, short due to fail.

Maybe this accounts for my generally positive perspective of LFD. I get near-instant queues (I blame lag) and I get to control the group somewhat.

in unrelated news, last night's ICC went very well. I got a new plate chest (die, leather!) and am now so far over the hit cap it has gone from being non-ideal to noobish to terrible and has now passed back around to being funny, if frustrating. Lady Deathwhisper felt overnerfed. I suppose we have downed her before, but either we played perfectly (which we didn't) or the adds were far too easy and her shield too weak, because it felt effortless. But, it is a game and this is only my perspective. Probably someone out there thinks she is perfectly tuned now.

Does WoW need therapists?

I don't know if my paladin is very happy.

"He doesn't pay attention to me anymore. We sometimes go to Dire Maul, but I feel like we're only together because of the ravasaur hatchling. It's going to be grown up soon and then I feel like he'll just throw me away. What do I do then?"

How does this make you feel?

"Frustrated! I get so angry. Sometimes we go tanking, but it feels like he wants me to be another class. I caught him with a death knight once. His death knight he used to call her. I thought they wee done, that he'd stopped with it. But no, I get summoned into this ToC group and I'm thinking 'Why would he be here? He must have gotten the idea that I want something in here.' I knew it then, he's just been there with his death knight. Tanking! Without me! I bet they got the Black Heart."

Maybe you're just imagining it.

"Imagining? Do you know what if feels like to walk into an instance and know that someone else was there first? And then you say I'm imagining it!?"

I'm suggesting that you not lead yourself to conclusions.

"He gets me gems sometimes. But I know this one was just some reject that his rogue didn't want. Ugh, she gets all the gems and all she does is pawn them."

I heard he recently bought you a new mount.

"Yea, a new mount. How romantic. It has this ugly goblin and troll always in the back. And it smells. He only got it for Dire Maul anyway. I'm so sick of that place, saving that stupid goblin in there. It's so stupid. First we killed them and now he's saving them? What's next, I rescue the Ogre Prince from the Naga? Oh have I mentioned I was made queen of the ogres? That was such an honor..."

Why did you two start going to Dire Maul?

"It was supposed to be someplace fun. Just the two of us. No crowds or idiot PUGs. But he's just using me. And halfway in he left and started spending all this time with his rogue and druid. Grinding gold. Yea, great euphemism; those whores. And his shaman too! I thought they were over. I thought..."

Go on.

"I remember our first raid. We were in in Karazhan and these tanking bracers dropped. I wanted them so much. The raid leader asked if I was his main. Oh my god I was floored by that. THE QUESTION! Oh my god. He said yes and just like that his shaman was gone and I was his main. And oh my god those bracers. Eventually we had to sell them, but then one day he surprised me and took me back to Karazhan and got a new pair. Sometimes he so sweet like that."

Perhaps these are positive aspects that you can focus on, build on those.

"Yea, sure. Sure. Let me tell you about another 'positive aspect'. Raid performance. Half the time he doesn't even show up. Yea we do some 6-9 tanking sometimes, but almost never. It's always ret and 'first come first serve.' Yea, that's him just dropping all his cooldowns at once and then complaining that sometimes my mana doesn't last the whole raid. Like that's my fault. Ugh. There's no timing to it, no rhythm. It's just all there and when it's ready again he goes and it just feels terrible. He never asks me how my DPS is doing. Can you believe it, no Recount during, not even a glance at WWS afterward. It's like he doesn't care about my performance, or his."

I will refer you to one of my colleagues about that. Can you tell me more about the alts? Those seemed to come up a lot.

"Yea they do. All the time. When we were in Dire Maul he got some felcloth and I got rid of it because, ew? But turns out he had me send it to his priest. Oh yea, she's a tailor, all the styles too. Turns out he took her to a moonwell. Can you believe it? Logs me out in that crummy SEWER bar so he can take her to Ashenvale."

I'm picking up faithfulness as a problem. Perhaps we can work on that next session.

Math says retribution is OP

Iapetes told me that he was doing Wintergrasp and beating people 2v1. You might think this just means he's skilled. Math says that's exactly the point and proves that ret is OP.

Let's run over some facts.
1) He was facing another ret paladin plus another player.
2) Math.

To elaborate on fact 2: If you have two equal infinities and add a finite value to one, then divide them, you'll get 1. This is because next to infinity, everything else is infinitely small and therefore zero, so adding the finite number has no effect on the ratio.

To put this in terms of player skill, let's imagine a power ratio exists between all competing groups. This is the ratio of the composite of player skill and class power. In cases where one group loses, it is clear that one is higher than the other. But how can 2 be greater than 1? Simple: Make 1 in each group infinite. This will cause the power ratio to go to one; at which point luck, which is innately infinite, to be the deciding factor.

In other words: Ret paladins are overpowered and this explains how ret+player can lose to another ret.

Breaking news on GNOME PALADINS

This is official and straight from the Blues.

First off, they're giving in:

"give you gnome paladins just to put a stop to your relentless requests for them."

However they are likely to follow a similar 'evil' path as the Blood Knights, at least initially, as indicated by these straightforward statements:

"Gnomes are evil."

"Cute does not equal good."

And in response to "They are creatures...of destruction" the response was a clear "Exactly."


Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20677232615&sid=1&pageNo=3