Of Blood and Honor

I  haven’t played WoW for quite awhile. Not because I don’t like it anymore, but because I have become heavily involved in politics this year. I couldn’t help but feel the need to get more involved and now I work constantly for the Obama campaign.

Anyway, I was snooping around my guilds website and saw the announcement for the expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. It looks good and I went to the world of warcraft website and started playing with the talent calculator. The game changes to the talents are great and it is clear that Blizzard is really trying to make retribution paladins worthwhile in a raid. After seeing some of the talents I was pretty excited to get in and play again. I mean, talents that regenerate mana for everyone around me (up to like 5 or 10, I forget) is pretty sweet. Granted it’s not a lot of mana, but it’s mana and I think it was off of every critical hit or something.

They FINALLY are giving us a spell dmg to attack power bonus, which is kick arse. They moved blessing of King’s so I will finally have it, as well as improved blessing of king’s, which will make it a ton better, PLUS they moved the divine strength talent so I can get that still as well. Smart move, Blizzard, I give you kudos.

I had heard retribution Paladins were too powerful in the expansion, but oh well. We’ll see how true that is by the time it is released. They should  be pretty damn bad ass, though, considering we’re fighting undead…

I am excited to get back to playing now that I saw what’s coming up. It looks like it is going to be really fun. I hope it is!

I’ve been busy … leveling my warlock. I just hit level 70 and I enjoy hitting things with my evil bolts of darkness. I still hate cloth wearers though. I just die too easy. It’s really annoying. I suppose it’s my own fault though, being a paladin for the past 2 years has spoiled me in survivability.

I like the warlock A LOT more than my shadow priest, however. In turn, I may just retire the priest entirely, or maybe go healing spec’ or something. I am not sure yet. I just know i get bored on the toon very, very, fast.

Babooom, shadow bolt spam, ftw.

So I formed a new 5 versus 5 team for arenas tonight. It’s 2 retribution paladins, a boomkin, a rogue, and a resto shaman. It’s the most fricking fun I’ve ever had in an arena. We do all the crazy smacking around like you would expect from two ret pallies with windfury, the boomkin can cyclone, drop some heavy spell dmg and root, the rogue smacks stuff too, stuns, stab, stab. It was chaotic, yet we destroyed our opponents. Hopefully that will continue as we get higher into the ratings… it sure was fun as hell though, lol.

Went back to dueling last night and today and I am fighting the same people as before.  I have won almost all of them now though. I respec’d my toon to be a little more pvp friendly and apparently it helps, go figure.  I’ve had to resort to using my bubble (Which I absolutely hate doing in a duel…) but I won nonetheless. I don’t feel bad for using it since they used all their cool downs too. Some of them I won without using it. For instance, when I fought the frost mage with 430+ resilience and I 1 hit his pet, I won that fight without bubbling.  That mage has beat me like 15 times the last week or so and now i have won 3 in a row. It pays to spec for what you’re doing I guess.  I could actually add a few more points to make me even more effective in PvP, but as I like to raid too, I saved a few points in more pve friendly talents.

Anyway, I have now killed every class, except the priest, that killed me before. Hooray. I’m much happier with that…I was pretty peeved at how much I was losing before. lol.

PALLY POWER!

We did Gruul again the other day and it was the first time I really got to use my new shiney, Stormherald. It worked out all right, although I honestly don’t notice many hits higher than what I was used to. Here and there my crusader strike hits for 4300 or more, which is definitely higher, but other than that, I don’t see a huge difference. By the end of Gruul though, I was number 3 in dmg (I came from behind from some deaths ) so I guess it is doing pretty well.

It is really annoying that next patch you can buy nether vortex from badges though. (Of course, before I had stormherald I complained about how you couldn’t. lol) Go figure.  Go Go Pally power!

I was dueling the other day and it was extremely annoying. The only thing I seem to have a real fight against is warriors. Maybe hunters too, but I doubt it now that they can dispel my blessing of freedom. This really pissed me off. I used to do pretty damn well against any class, but now it seems like they can all dispel, spell steal, or purge pretty much everything I can do, which obviously makes it pretty damn hard to kill anything.

Fighting a frost mage…they spell steal blessing of freedom, I trinket out of frost nova then they shoot me and I get in another frost nova, try to cleanse,  frost nova, frost nova, wtf…..then he shoots me for 4,000 or more with a frost bolt. Well hell that’s almost half my health.

Rogues…are very tricky now with that shadow step crap. I still almost kill them, but man, it is annoying. If they aren’t shadow stepping they are mace spec, so they just keep me stunned until I die. Go figure.
Priests…I just simply hate them. They are the bane of all paladins. I actually prefer to fight a shadow priest though, over a holy or discipline priest, just cause they don’t heal as well. Unfortunately, the smart ones just spam dispel me and remove vengeance so it cant stack, remove my buffs so I dont hit as hard, and if I decide to use avenging wrath to try to take them down..guess what? Yes…they dispel that too. Of course, now the healing classes have like 700 or more spell damage too. That’s awesome…………

Resto druids…well I almost killed him too, so if I wasn’t playing sloppy it might have happened. It is still damn annoying he can just putz around moonfiring and insect swarming me until I die while he hots himself up over and over and over. Cyclone is annoying too.

I did all right against shamans. Well, elemental shamans are a bit ridiculous if you let them start casting. Enhancement can be nasty, but they are not too bad for me. Resto shamans… haha, yeah they own me. Kinda funny how the healing specs are the hardest to kill, lol.
Then of course, there are warlocks…fear, dot, dot, dot, fear, drain health if you get them down any signifcant amount. Maybe a shadow bolt here and there, meanwhile they have 15,000 health and 30% dmg reduction, plus 1000+ spell damage. What a crock. Oh, plus they can silence, dispel, or mana drain me too. Woooo.

Now, keep in mind, in every case, (except 1 warlock =/) all of these people had about 440 resilienc or highere, season 3 weapons and crap, which I do not. I have like 320 resilience and .. well mostly season 3 gear, but my weapon is stormherald which is quite a bit weaker.

So I came to the conclusion, it’s a bitch to duel now as a ret paladin, but I can still kick some arse in pvp and even in arenas. (Though I think I personally suck for 2’s, but 3’s and 5’s I do well in.) It just seems that paladins have a weakness to pretty much every class, except for warrior, which I won most of the duels against. Hmmm…

So we did a full clear of karazhan tonight and then got bored. We usually just disband after a raid, but we decided to throw some of our best together into a group to see if we could go kill the eagle boss in Zul’aman (ZA) in less than 20 minutes.

Well, we got there no problem at all, clearing the way with no issues. Once we started the fight we screwed up though and no one called the storm and people were to spread out so we …. died.  We had 7 minutes left when we managed to get back together. We got there. 1 minute left… and…. he died. You got it. Though I guess the title of this post probably gave that away.

I got to test out my new Stormherald and it’s doing pretty well.

Finally, after about a year I have managed to get the crafted weapon, Stormherald. It is a beautiful mace, prepared to wreck havoc upon unsuspecting foes. I put executioner on it, but honestly, I am not sure if I like it or not. It is great when the ability procs off of an attack, of course. The problem is, my weapon speed is 3.8 and that means it doesn’t proc very often. With them all combined I managed to hit a mob in heroic ramparts for 4,333. Not too shabby, considering. That was with avenging wrath popped though, but still, that’s pretty good damage. I wonder what it would be if I had full raid buffs, hmmm.

We did manage to kill Void Reaver too, but I didn’t have stormherald yet.  Afterwards, we went to fight the High Astromancer or something, whom is a much different fight, but I think we’ll kill her soon also. We managed to get her to 57% our first night fighting her, which was like 3 attempts total.

We’ll be going back soon enough. She’ll die soon too. Hooray.

We went and did the eye a few times last week and did all right, I guess. We got the hang of the trash at least, which is good. We went to void reaver and got a chance to fight him a few times. Unfortunately, the lowest we got him to was 27% or so before our raid wiped. We’re damn close to having him down though. We would have killed him, I am pretty much positive, but we had some strange things happen where he would just run across the room at someone who wasn’t very high on threat according to omen, but for whatever reason he would just take off and go attack them for like 3 seconds and then return to the tanks. Meanwhile, while he’s running across the room…he’s shooting orbs (which silent) in spots he isn’t supposed to, which obviously makes things complicated.

On a good, good note, I got two nether vortex. That means I only need 3 more to finally, after like a year of waiting, get my Stormherald. Just in time to get something better too. How awesome is that? Haha.

We go to Gruul again tonight, should be another nice and clean sweep with him.

I’m interested to see what they will do for Retribution Paladins in patch 2.4, coming up soon.

So, my guild finally decided to take a vote to see if we wanted to progress a little more seriously through 25 man raid content. The vote was everyone said Yes. So, we finally get together to do Gruul, the first time in forever, we have… 40 people online to go. yikes. lol.

Anyway, we managed to get the group put together. Thankfully we have sign-ups, so it goes in that order. I was able to go, Hooray for the only retribution paladin in the guild.  We go in, pull the ogres, slaughter them, and I notice I am whacking the holy hell out of them. A few seconds later one of the rogues messages me and says, wtf are you doing? You’ve done 100k dmg already. (We had only killed the first 2 ogres???) Apparently I was doing 1,210 dps on those mobs. Up to High King Maulgor we go. 1 shot him, no death. BAM. What a chump. (This wasn’t our first time here, however, it had been months since we attempted this place, and we never killed him that easy before.)

So, we continue on towards the big meanie, Gruul. Killing those trash mobs on the way to him I had my very first WHITE DAMAGE hit for over 4,000. I have no idea how I did it, but I did, and I was surprised, considering all I use at the moment is deep thunder.

Anyway, so we get to Gruul, fight him, get him down to like 30% or something first shot.  We come back, Try again, I die in about 30 seconds like a moron, so I watch the fight as a corpse and they wipe. We come back, crappy pull and we die. So, we come back again, everyone is actually paying attention this time, and we kill him. (I died again though, damn bastard kept turning to smack me or something.) Anyway, he wasn’t too hard either. I like his instance because it is short and sweet too.

Now.. on to the EYE!  We started that the next day, and go back tonight. It’s much…more interesting. (And annoying, so far.)