The Light and How to Swing it: The Life of a Ret Pally

Finally!

2010-03-28T11:24:00.000-06:00

I was able to log into Castassia, finally, after many failed attempts. I was taking a huge risk because when I got DC'd I had just teleported to WG in the fortress next to our guards. If the horde had it, I would be dead in a number of seconds while everything loaded. But luckily, we had WG!

Anyway, I wanted to get my black war mammoth and decided to take a picture of that as well as my pink/purple proto-drake.

Update

2010-03-26T22:35:00.003-06:00

Things have been rather busy around here. School has been kicking my butt, and I'm getting more hours at work here and there, and taking on a little more.

In Azeroth, Castassia hasn't been out to play too much. Being a dps is hard enough, but on my realm, there are still enough other ret pallies as competition, so getting into raids can be difficult. And with the 20 or more minute wait to get into randoms for emblems, it has put Castassia on the back burner while I play my healer. I get into randoms fast and have been through the first five bosses in ICC10 with my healer, so at least I'm still playing and learning. I'm just sad that my favorite toon, and main, now has cobwebs on her because of the lesser need for her on my realm than my healer. Someone from an old guild put it quite well: "dps toons are like STDs; they're everywhere."

However, yesterday I brushed off some of those cobwebs and joined a WG battle. Apparently the Alliance had the zone for most of the day, because we lost it in less than 10 min. and the Horde had vehicles coming at us left and right. With all those vehicles and people coming at us like that, the lag was absolutely awful. And my system is not bottom of the line. But on the bright side, I managed to gain 20 more stone keeper shards and when I get a chance to get back on, maybe tomorrow, and we have WG again, I'll get that Mammoth. I've been working on the 100 mounts on Castassia for some time. This will bring it up to 56 or 57, I can't remember off the top of my head. I got the purple/pink proto-drake from the world event achievements in February. I'd love to have the one for the 25 man Ulduar hard modes.

I'm thinking of doing the loremaster achievements with her as well. She has become the toon I'm doing the most achievements on, so might as well. Plus, it's a great way to beat my husband in our little competition on achievement points. Anyway, to make the loremaster stuff easier, I found out about this armory addon that you use with wowhead.com, and it shows you a list of all the quests possible. I filtered the list to get only Alliance quests and the ones I have done have a check mark next to them. This should help in the loremaster endeavor a ton.

As for the latest patch, aside from the constant log on issues that plague everyone after a new patch, it seems pretty good. Being able to use frozen orbs again is great! The changes to the PvP system is completely awesome. Now I don't have to play Warsong Gulch to get those other black war mounts. Horde owned that battleground every time I went in there. The extra honor from honor kills will also be nice. I'm sure there are some pretty happy tailors out there, with that new flying carpet mount. The paladin didn't receive any real changes to the class; only tooltips updated and such. Since my healer is a Shaman, not much was changed with them, except the way flame shock works a little, and that will be useful in PvP for her and the times when I'm bored and dps/healing. All in all, this was a pretty decent patch. Now if only they could fix the issues caused by the hot fixes to issues caused by the patch, like usual.

On a side note, I'm excited to see the Ruby Sanctum. Can't wait for that.

New patch coming up

2009-10-28T11:18:00.002-06:00

I was reading a blog this morning and someone posted about the 3.3 patch coming up. I'm not on PTR or anything so I have to hear about these things second or third hand

Anyway, to the meat of it....It looks like they are nerfing paladins again. Lay on Hands will no longer be usable on yourself. This frustrates me a bit. I like the fact that if the healer is busy healing the tank on something hard, I can pop LoH and not worry about my health for a bit or the time it took to cast it.

EDIT: It looks like they may have retracted the LoH nerf. But Ghost Crawler says he isn't promising anything. I just hope they leave this one alone.

Also, they are nerfing sacred shield. The amount of damage it reduces is being nerfed because of the times changing. What I mean is that right now it the absorption is triggered every 5 seconds. With the patch it will be triggered every 30 seconds. Do to this, it's almost not worth the mana to cast it on myself.

It can be very frustrating to be a paladin sometimes....

Hallow's end

2009-10-20T22:58:00.003-06:00

I got the holiday achievement on Castassia last year. It's one of the easier one's to obtain, relatively. So I've been working on the Headless Horseman to try to get that darn mount. So far, in the groups I've been in, I haven't even seen it drop. While a real life friend of mine already got it this year. He said first drop on the first night. I so hate him! ( not really)

And just like last year, the stupid rings are everywhere. It would be nice if you could sell them or DE them or even if they were bind to account so all my toons could have one. But they are a pure waste time. The least blizzard could have done was create a semi useful piece of trash. Instead, there are just a ton of unlooted bodies.

On a side note, I'm spending the rest of the time getting free xp on some of my level 70ish toons. The candy in the inns got my shaman up to level 73 now. And I can do homework while flying all over azeroth for that.

Fun in Durotar

2009-10-16T14:20:00.002-06:00

I've been working on achievements lately and decided to go for the world explorer. So I explored a lot of zones lately and was working on the Barrens and then Durotar. When I hit the Barrens, I got a tell asking if I was raiding Org. I just ignored the person since I really don't care. I continued on into Durotar and finished exploring that zone. I went afk quick and came back to a level six troll rogue wanting to duel me. I'm so sick of people asking to duel me, and especially when I'm a level 80 and they are less than 70. So I decided to leave my ret aura on and just stand there. I accepted the duel, and the troll tried to stun-lock me. As soon as he hit me, he went down. My ret aura smashed him. And the troll ran off with his tail between his legs. I hope he learned his lesson........

Odd achievements

2009-10-13T00:00:00.004-06:00

I decided to go try and get a couple of achievements knocked out of the way, like finally finishing all the heroic dungeons in Northrend.

One of the odd ones I did though was to get 10 critters in less than 3 minutes. I like having lots of friends :)

Onyxia

2009-10-11T14:35:00.002-06:00

Last night my guild tried to do Onyxia 10 and 25. We failed on both. I'm not sure what was wrong, other than maybe we need more ranged dps than we had. We were getting to the third phase but people were just petering out slowly until there weren't enough in the third phase.

I'd much prefer trying ulduar since H ToC gives us gear that is closer to that. Some better gear won't hurt us, either.

Brewfest

2009-09-29T20:57:00.002-06:00

I've been killing Direbrew every night. After I couldn't get any more trinkets on Castassia, not any that were useful really, I started bringing my alt in. My shaman isn't 80 yet, but 71. So two of the trinkets would be nice for when she hits 80. She is elemental/restoration and anything I can get for her now is welcomed. It took me two or three nights of bringing her in to get the two trinkets. Those stupid tanking trinkets were pretty much all that dropped.

After I got the two on Selacia, I started bringing Castassia again.

Tonight, I got the Ram. I'm so happy. Maybe I should bring in Yssrill, my warrior tank since the tank trinkets drop almost every time....

Patch 3.2.2

2009-09-25T22:56:00.002-06:00

With the new patch came a few changes. Onyxia is bigger and badder than ever. Basic flight training got cheaper and the faction discount now comes from SW/Org, rather than Honor Hold or Thralmar.

For paladins, we got a buff to seal of Command. It is now basically a cleave attack that comes off when we use our single attacks like Crusader's Strike. Our aoes don't proc it, but that's ok. It now does better damage overall and maybe Seal of Righteousness will fall behind for ret pallies. The down side is it acts like an aoe and will pull mobs out of CC. But then, so will Divine Storm, so I'm not sure that it's that big of a deal

On a side note, the 5 man ToC has been fixed now. After jousting the three faction heroes, they now despawn and/or run to the door they come in at. This makes the instance so much easier. The tank no longer has to grab agro from the three of them, who are normally quite scattered around that big room.

Overall, I think Blizzard did a good job of fixing some very irritating issues.

Addons

2009-09-16T21:37:00.002-06:00

For many players, addons are a great resource for healing and buffing, as well as changing out the music in game so you can listen to your own music.

I thought it might be nice to highlight the ones that I use.

First and foremost for an paladin is PallyPower. It lets me buff the whole raid party in less than a minute. No hunting and pecking, checking to see if each person has the buff. It tells you right there if someone is in range and if they are in range, whether they are buffed. It will tell you how long the buff will remain, as well. And by either right clicking or left clicking, you can change between single player buffs to class buffs.

A very important raiding one is DeadlyBossMod. This just lets you know when things are happening, and shows you the cooldowns for the bosses attacks.

Headcount is quite useful for the people who would like to keep track of who attended your raid. We use this to put the raid info into our guild website.

Next is titan panel. This I like simply because I don't have to keep my bag open to see how much gold I have. It's also useful because it tells me if I need to repair, and an estimate of how much that will cost. And for those lower level toons, it will give you an estimate of how soon you will level.

Auctioneer is nice just to keep me updated on the economy. I can still pick the amount I want to put an item in for, but I know not to put it in for too high an amount or it won't sell.

One of my favorites right now is Bartender4. I condensed all my action bars and am now using most of the space on the bottom. It's cleaner and you can have more than the three or four bars that WOW has. You can change the scale of them, so the buttons are larger or smaller, so I shrunk them in order to make my screen neater.

Finally, my absolute favorite is SexyMap. It is purely aesthetics but I love it because of the border and the coloring. It is nice to clean up all the buttons around the map. You can turn them off, have them shown all the time, or you can set them to only show up when you hover over the map.

I'm continually looking through things at Curse.com to see what else is out there. My shaman hit level 70 and I've been having fun healing. So I might check into grid instead of pulling groups out of the raid window. Though I need to research healbot as well. I'd like to find something where I can click on the persons name and I can heal them with my hotkeys. This just requires more research.

Experimenting

2009-09-13T20:08:00.002-06:00

The other day I tried something new. I've been frustrated lately with my dps output since the last nerf. So I thought I'd try switching out some gems. Well, instead of the straight strength ones, I substituted straight expertise. It was probably 3 gems total, and it didn't really change my dps. So I have less attack power, by about 120. But my expertise is up to 12 out of 26. So I guess the expertise helps, because the bosses can't dodge as much, and if I can get some better gear, maybe my dps output will be better.

I know, I know. I've been told time and time again to not gem for expertise because my gear should give it to me. Well, so far it hasn't so I figured I might as well experiment with it. I do want to see how things work with my expertise capped. So I need to get more gear with expertise or swap out more gems.

Feel free to comment with advice. My armory is here.

New Libram

2009-09-06T09:32:00.004-06:00

My husband found a new Libram for Ret. Pallies. It is the Deadly Gladiator's Libram of Fortitude

While the website says you need arena rating, I bought it from a vendor in Dalaran for a little over 15000 honor points. I've never done arena. Only the battlegrounds because for a while, it was the only way to get any purple gear. Raiding Naxx constantly with nothing dropping was becoming tedious. And after all those battlegrounds I had some honor points left over. That may have been due to me wanting that pretty black kitty that you can get by turning in different tokens from the different BGs.

Anyhow, I hope this helps some of you out there, and I'm hoping it helps me out in the raiding department.

10 man TOC

2009-08-21T22:23:00.001-06:00

We tried running this tonight and only managed to kill the first boss. The worms are killer. We think we have a strat for them, but need to test it out. This week seems to have been long for everyone and so we ended a little earlier than normal. Let's hope tomorrow goes better.

Finally downed all of NAXX!

2009-08-18T22:36:00.011-06:00

I know that we are behind the times a bit, but we are a fairly casual raiding guild. We usually would get three plus quarters down in a week, but the instance would reset and we would lose it all. And it wasn't like we were wasting time in there. We could do each quarter in a couple of hours, with few wipes, just people going afk for personal reasons like pets and kids and dinner and such.

So I'm very pleased to have achieved this!

Bouncing off the instance doors

2009-08-13T16:32:00.002-06:00

Yes this will sound like rant, because it is one. Honestly, it gets tiring bouncing off the door for a half an hour or more. I really wish Blizzard would come up with something better. Maybe add some more servers. A lot of people are really getting fed up with it. I understand the need to limit the number of people so that we don't get stuck in an instance, but honestly, they should do a little more so we can all go have fun in these shiny new instances that they created for this recent patch.

3.2

2009-08-12T15:15:00.001-06:00

I know everyone else has been posting about the new patch, but that's because it's on everyone's minds.

I kept up on all the reports that came from PTR and really worried about Castassia's DPS after the patch. Making exorcism have a cast time unless we pick the right talent in the Ret tree and taking away Seal of Martyr/Blood. Then there were the changes to Seal of Vengeance and more changes. Initially the thought of having to use only auto-attacks was really quite terrifying when my weapon speed is over 3 sec. Then they changed it so it does a partial amount of holy damage, which I thought might just be enough to work.

Well, 3.2 went live and a group of us from our guild decided to go try the 5 man reg. and heroic. We figured the reg. would be nice because it would give us an idea of what the heroic would give us, just tougher. Also, the reg. you can reset and go at it a few times.

I'd read about the changing of seals with trash vs. bosses, and I tried Command on trash and Vengeance on bosses. My DPS sucked. Normally in a 5 man I'll pull 1900 or a little over 2000 DPS. Of course it depends on the buffs and the mobs and bosses, but it sucked. I was at 1600 or less the whole time. So I tried not changing out of Command, and it didn't do any better. I tried running completely with Vengeance and it still sucked.

Finally I went looking at my other seals and pulled one out that I hadn't used in a long time: Seal of Righteousness. I started pulling 2500 and even 3000 on the Black Knight (thanks to crits from exorcism I bet). So I found the new seal that I use all the time, and my DPS is back where it was, if not better. Also, there is a glyph called "Glyph of Seal of Righteousness" that does 10 percent more damage with this seal up.

All in all, I think that Seal of Command should just be trashed unless they do something spiffy to it and seal of Vengeance should be more of a tanking seal since tanks tend to stay on one target longer than most DPS do.

Making the jump

2009-08-10T23:13:00.000-06:00

I've tried my hand at blogging a few things and wondered what I'd really keep up with. Since I spend a lot of time in a week playing WoW and reading about WoW, I thought I'd make the jump and start blogging about it too.

I play a paladin as my main, though my shaman is quickly gaining levels and she will be my favorite alt, I think. My warrior is not that much fun for me, but useful in her jewel crafting skill, as well as the occasional OT. I have a few other alts but with RL and all, it's hard to get to them. So I figure I can post her about my paladin as well as my alts when something interesting pops up.