2009 WoW Year in Review

Many WoW bloggers are putting their reviews up for 2009.  So, I thought I'd add my comments to Honorshammer's review points for 2009.

1.  What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you'd never done before?

This would probably be main tanking.  My first two max-level toons ever were both DPS (mage, then hunter).  Next was my shaman, and Kickingbird was primarily heals until recently.  Bastien, being my current main was leveled to 70 immediately prior to the release of Lich King, and was my first level 80 character.  I had leveled this toon with the intent of tanking, but found myself in a guild with a long history and way too many tanks, so I was relegated to the healer corps.  This lasted until about May of 2009 after I had joined Fallout and stated my intent to tank.  Working with the guild leadership, there were some convenient MIA's which allowed me to step into my desired role as a main tank for 25-man content.  (Obviously I had been working on my tank set through badges, heroics, offspec bids, etc., so I wasn't completely inept).

I've never enjoyed the game more.  One, I love the versatility of paladins, as well as what they stand for from the lore perspective.  Two, there's something indescribably gratifying about being able to hold/control a boss or group of mobs, while the rest of your raid is raining destruction on said mobs and/or trying to keep you alive.  Philosophically, I think Paladins are the perfect tanks.  It's very much in line with the concept of "take me not them".

2.  What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Ulduar.  Icecrown Citadel looks to be very promising, but it's not complete, so we haven't seen the whole thing yet.  And the first leg of ICC doesn't really excite me that much.  Ulduar introduced hard-modes, had beautiful graphics, and interesting fights.  I'd never been to Naxxramas in Vanilla-WoW, so it was cool to see the bosses there.  But, I ran it so much it just became tedious.  The rooms weren't that pretty either.

3.  What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

A proto-drake.....ANY proto-drake.  LOL  I only lack Yogg+1 for the Rusted Proto Drake.  And I still have a few heroic achievements for that one.  But, it's the one thing I really wanted and never got in 2009.

I'll have to finish this up later.  Work.  Bleh.

Be smart....even if you're not.

Recently, I was selected and promoted to the rank of Officer in my guild. One of my duties is to review incoming applications to the guild, especially if they are a class/role I'm familiar with.

As many of us have, I've been with many guilds throughout my WoW career and each have had very different application processes. Just by my personal nature, I have always tried to fill out the application to the best of my ability and to answer all of the questions as completely as possible.

Having reviewed many an application, both as a one-time Guild Master, and now again as an Officer, I have seen some very impressive applications, and some very, VERY poor ones. Some key things I usually look for are:

• Knowledge of class
• Overall completeness and attitude
• Guild history
• General and Raid availability

Class Knowledge

The most telling "tool" in this department is your character's Armory profile. There are many other sites which extend the functionality offered here, but they all run using Blizzard's base data. The best thing to do here, if you're considering applying for a new guild is get on the web and learn about your class (if you don't already practice this).

There are obvious faux pas, such as a rogue in spellpower gear (lolPoisonSpec??), or a mage in attack power gear (lolWandSpec?!?!). However, there are more subtle things to look for as well, like proper gemming and enchants for your class and role. Intellect is better than raw spellpower for Holy Paladins, Spirit is useless for Shaman, etc. If you're always learning about your character, you would know these things, and you Armory profile will reflect this.

Overall Completeness and Attitude

Depending on your target guild's application process, one thing you can do to make your application stand out is use a spell checker. Sometimes this might mean copy/pasting the application into a program like Word or another word processor. Some guild sites may even have a spell check built in.

Another thing is type coherently.

hello i'm a healing pally and i like to raid i like raidin because of all the phat lootz. i like getting bosses down and hanging out with friends and i like spamming trade channel with "anal " most of the time i like hangin out in lowbie zones and ganking people of the opposite trying to level. pick me pick ME!

This will probably NOT get you a spot in a successful raiding guild. Also, poignantly "sparse" answers won't get you very far either. Answering "I heal ppl" to the question "Explain your role in a raid, and what your class brings to the raid that is unique and beneficial", most of the time won't cut it.

Guild History

If you've been in 9 different guilds in the last 3 months, you're probably not someone we want in ours. Yes people change guilds, and sometimes with a fair amount of frequency. And yes, things do happen. If you feel this applies to you, explain what happened regarding your guild history in your application.

General and Raid Availability

If you're looking to join a raiding guild: hard core, casual or in-between, it's pretty important that you're going to be available for the raids. Some guilds also like you see you online helping out your other guildies with 5-man or 10-man content (depending on how those things are handled with your target guild) and/or offering your master crafting services or just plain bettering your character through achievements, reputation grinds, etc.

We all have real lives, and some of us do more with them than others outside of our WoW bubble. Indicating your availability gives the GM/Officers of the target guild the opportunity to know just how much you'll be around to participate in guild activities.

Nerf? Maybe not so much.

• Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.

This is a concern (obviously).  Maybe paladins a currently a little overpowered in the threat department.  But 10%?  

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

This is an obvious PvP nerf.  While is makes Hammer of Justice a little less useful, I have to admit that (currently) almost everytime I want to use it, it's up.  Chances are that this won't bother me too much when live.  We were never interrupt tanks anyway.

• Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.

This is the "Proly" fix.  What's sort of ironic about this is how the math works based on my current gear.  In my "general tanking" set, I have 2587 stamina and 1376 strength.  The current Touched by the Light (TbtL) gives me 776.1 spellpower.  After 3.2.2, I'll have 825.6 spellpower.  From what I've been reading on Maintankadin, most paladins will be losing spellpower (and thus threat).  Fortunately, I'm not one of those.  Will it be enough to make up the 10% lost on Righteous Fury?  I am by no means Theck, but I don't think it will.

• Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack.

I expect this to get nerfed.  Used while tanking, you would be hitting up to 9 (12 if glyphed) mobs with Hammer of the Righteous.  Hellloooooo Thorim arena tanking!  The same applies to Ret's melee attacks, and I just don't see that kind of AoE damage sticking around for long.

And the nerf bat swings around....

We knew it was going to come, we just thought it was going to be the Ardent Defender getting nerfed.  This is Ghostcrawler's response to a borderline troll post:

We don't think "high threat tanks" is a fun niche for the game. We don't mind some variation depending on the specific situation, but paladin OTs were accidentally pulling off of MTs an awful lot. That isn't a L2P issue. That's just the numbers being off and frustrating everyone. 

We didn't want to nerf threat until community perception had turned around that paladins could survive while tanking hard modes. 

Try out the hard Coliseum fights (once available) or the tougher ones in Ulduar and let us know how it feels.

First off, I think the first statement of the first paragraph is plain wrong.  Maybe it's subjective.  I like the fact that I can out-threat my DK MT, if I want to.  I like the fact that my DPS'ers aren't threat capped on Hodir, in fact it's probably how we get hard mode in 10-man every week.

Admittedly, I've pulled off the MT accidently.  He'll say he's grabbing a mob back from me over Vent implying that I taunted, when in fact I hadn't.  But, I think that's my own fault for not paying attention, and it doesn't happen often.  The only time I can see this maybe being a problem is in a fight like Thorim.  When the tanks are trading back and forth after each Unbalacing Strike, if the one with the debuff doesn't watch his threat and let other tank hold Thorim while it wears off, it will basically mean a dead tank.  Thorim just hits hard, and his buff/your debuff is basically a sunder on steroids.  But this is an edge case.  I can't think of any other fights where more threat is a bad thing.  If you're functioning as the offtank, it's a matter of finesse and control to make sure that the MT maintains control of the boss or mob he's tanking.

Hot-headed rant out of the way, I can see Blizzard's point of view, in that they want to make sure that the knuckle-draggers can play too, without screwing up the raid for the other 9 or 24 people.  More on this to come.  I need to look deeper at the details (not that I'm a hardened theorycrafter), but ultimately, once the change is implemented, it may not be that big of a nerf.  We will have to see. 

Onyxia returns!

According to this thread, Onyxia will be making a return.

I have mixed feelings in general about bringing back old content.  On the one hand, it's cool to see the raid content from Classic WoW.  I didn't start playing the game until just before the release of The Burning Crusade, so there was a lot of the experience that I missed.  On the other hand, it seems that Blizzard would be better off spending their time and resources on a) developing new content relevant to today's lore and theme and b) fixing issues like the current instance limit problem.

In this case, I have to side with Blizzard, since the reasoning they are giving for bringing Onyxia back is in celebration of WoW's 5 year anniversary.  An opportunity (albeit miniscule) for an Onyxia-like mount, as well as a companion pet just for logging in on or around the 5-year mark itself are nice bonuses for WoW's "Wooden Anniversary".

Oops, I'm supposed to be writing here....

Blog Noob

OK, so I'm new to this whole blogging thing and I need to learn to be more disciplined about it.  I'll get there.  'Nuff said.

Instance Limit Rant

With the advent of the Achievement system, people have been running back and farming old instances and raids.  The consequent after-effect of this is that the limit of available instances is reached much more quickly (who knew there was a limit before 3.0?).  On my server (Thunderhorn/US) this has been creeping up especially since 3.1 (Seige of Ulduar).  With 3.2 out, you simply can't enter an instance without banging your toon against the skull-portal a few times.  During peak hours, you can literally wait 30 minutes or longer.  On a couple of these particularly long waits, I've chosen to pass the time by putting in a petition.  Hoping beyond hope, that Blizzard actually tracks the number of complaints they get about certain things adds them to a "fix list".  I could quote it here, but suffice it to say I get the typical Customer Service type response that doesn't lead me to believe they plan on doing anything about it.

What I don't get is how could they not anticipate an increase in the number of active instance with the release fo the 3.2 patch?!?  I mean, with the change to the Emblem system, wouldn't Blizzard expect, even desire, more people running instances to get Emblems of Conquest??  WELFARE EPICS!!! HELLOOOO!!!  Given that, wouldn't any self-respecting company want to ensure that their consumers are happy, and, in this case, maybe expand the environment appropriately to allow a higher instance limit in anticipation of and prior to the changes?!

Fail, Blizz, fail.  And yet we suckers continue to pump our $15 bucks a month for our serving of WoW-crack.

/sigh

Ardent Defender Blue Posts on 3.2 PTR

This came from a slew of updates on the PTR.

Protection

• Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin's defense rating (example: a paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent, while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount).
• Guarded by the Light: This talent will no longer cause Divine Plea's duration to be refreshed by using Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Justice, or Judgement of Light.

So, it looks like they are still dialing in the Ardent Defender talent. Looks like you will still need some "OH!SHIT!" healing if your health gets to that point. As long as Divine Plea is still refreshed with melee hits, I don't see the Guarded by the Light change being significant.