The crit stops here.

My paladin dinged 80 last night. First order of business was to defense cap, and then run Heroic UP for a shot at the sword. Sword didn't drop, but I did a few times. Still, that was in part because my gear was kinda crappy (22k health and 23k armor buffed) and in part because my lovely wife would do silly things like Penance the mobs instead of me.

For those who are unaware, defense is the skill that makes things harder to hit and crit you. You need 140 defense over your level's base defense (which is 400 at 80) to be uncrittable. At level 80, 4.92 defense rating = 1 defense. Thus you need 140 x 4.92 = 688.8 defense rating to become uncrittable. Since defense rating doesn't come in fractions, you need 689 defense rating to truly be uncrittable.

Now, stats like stamina and armor are well and good for tanking, but defense is truly king (note this doesn't apply while you are leveling to 80; those instances are tuned with crittable tanks in mind.) The goal here is to reduce spike damage. You can have all the health and armor in the world, but if you keep taking crits, your healer isn't very likely to be able to keep up. And dead tank = dead group. Remember to gear for survivability first, and threat second. If you aren't uncrittable, no one will take you seriously as a survivable tank.

A quick look at what I did to defense cap:

When I dinged 80, I had ~580 defense rating. The defense rating cap is 689, so this meant that I had to cover an extra 100 or so rating to get myself capped. First stop was enchants. In my case, the guild enchanters had enough dust and shards that I only had to grab nonstandard enchanting mats.

Enchant Cloak - Titanweave - This required two Titanium Bars.
Enchant Chest - Greater Defense - This just required an Eternal Earth.
Enchant Shield - Defense - This was a scroll mailed to me by a guild enchanter who was leveling his enchanting. But if I had to buy the mats, I would have needed six Eternal Earth.
Enchant Bracer - Major Defense - This is a BC enchant, but we still had some mats in the bank for it.

That's about all you can do with enchants to boost your defense. However, that is only 70 defense rating. Where did the remaining defense rating come from?

Daunting Handguards
Daunting Legplates

Those pieces are both chock full of defense rating and are pretty easy to make (so says my Mining/BS friend.) While the gloves were technically a downgrade, becoming uncrittable is THE MOST important thing you can do as a tank. Not everyone has it as easy as Druids do.

While those pieces alone satisfied me, if you just hit 80 and are still strapping for more defense, there are some other easy to make blacksmithing pieces available with high defense. These pieces should be replaced reasonably soon, as they are rather low level, but never go below 689 defense rating.

One final note is gems. I personally prefer to enchant for defense first so that I can gem for stamina, dodge, or whatever else I need. But you can easily close the gap with defense gems. Thick gems offer +12 or +16 defense rating, while Enduring gems offer +6 defense rating/+9 stamina or +8 defense rating/+12 stamina. Additionally, there is a meta gem that provides defense rating, which is an especially good choice for paladins because of the 5% block value, as they pretty much always have a >40% block chance (>70% with Redoubt) and the block value also provides extra threat to Shield of Righteousness, one of the highest threat moves in a paladin's rotation.

Once you have geared yourself to uncrittability, it's time to get out there and tank! Heroics are fair game, though I would probably wait until you've upgraded about half of your gear from heroics before moving on to raiding (Sartharion is probably okay, though.) Good luck and have fun!

There's only one link to click.

So yesterday I talked to the leader of Guild X, the as yet unnamed-on-this-blog guild. He tells me that the person who was spreading the previous information around was acting of his own accord. They aren't looking for a guild to team up with, and almost have 2 Naxx10 teams ready to go. Well, good for them, but what are we to do now? Thankfully, I picked up two recruits. Unfortunately, they are both hunters, and we already have an abundance of those.

I'm trying to work up my Pally tank so that I can actually run two groups of Naxx before we really have four tanks. Right now she's 76, but I hope to hit 80 before the 13th. Something cool may or may not happen on that day, so keep tuned.

One more thing, I noticed the other night that pretty much every class on Savant's webpage had recruitment listed as "closed." This has been rectified, as we are now looking to recruit people of pretty much any class. As always, tanks and healers are of special priority.

I wish Swipe did 4 times the threat and was on a 6 second cooldown

I was sick yesterday. I didn't feel like blogging the rest of the week. I don't blog on weekends anyway, so the sickness didn't really change that. It did make me contemplate not going to work today, in which case this post might not exist.

I believe I already mentioned I hit 80. A day later, I was in a PuG for a heroic. There was a good tank. Unguilded. I let the run carry through, a little bumpy, but not too bad. Certainly not the tank's fault. I topped the DPS charts, though, and as a tank-specced Druid, this concerns me. But nonetheless, I was happy with myself for beating what must have been a retarded hunter (Seriously, my hunter did as much DPS last time she was in an instance, and she was 70 at the time.) Also I think there was a rogue, but rogues are still figuring out how to do good DPS again, it seems (hint: pad your DPS with Fan of Knives on the big pulls.)

Anyway, where was I? Tank. Good. Unguilded. Like any guild leader cat Druid with a shortage of tanks, I waited until the right moment and then I pounced. I bypassed the application process for this one because I had just seen her play, and I was impressed. She knew her stuff. I daresay, she may even be a better tank than I, but only because she knows all the new content.

We almost have a big enough crew to run Naxx, but I've given the guild until the 18th to work on leveling and gear. That's also plenty of time for me to put writeups of the boss strategies on our guild website.

I've leveled Miyra to 71, but I'm not feeling as enthused about her right now. Maybe it's because I feel out of touch with my guild while I'm on her. As sort of a switch up, I got on my pally, respecced her Ret, and sailed off to Northrend, but not after buying Axe skill so that I could use my Arcanite Ripper. So, armed with only a weapon that I barely know how to equip, let alone use, I go into battle with Northrend mobs. And it works! The little Ret Pally quickly jumps from 1 weapon skill, tearing through mobs without much of a problem.

Now, the only thing I need to change is I need to pick up Seal of Command. I've been using Seal of the Martyr, which is a lot more DPS (my glyphs are spent on Protection) but I can't stand the downtime it generates.

I'm looking forward to getting my Pally up to 80. I can't stand how much AoE tanking needs to be done, spending every GCD on swipe instead of something cooler. I miss the brainless exercise that is Pally tanking (at least when compared to Druid tanking.)

I don't even want to hear them try to pronounce "Goethe." Or "Eia" for that matter.

Not much to say on the WoW front, except that we got our first 80 in guild. I kinda thought I would be a little closer, if not there by now, but I haven't been taking the time to play. This has allowed my wife to catch up and even surpass me slightly so we can quest together again.

I've played a little on my hunter, and she's doing alright. Didn't break into 71 yet; she's still just a fun little diversion when I can't play Myze. Such is the life of the hunter, the perennial alt. I guess everyone has one, no?

My paladin, Eia, is currently hanging out in Ironforge, doing AH runs for Myze and just hanging out for whenever I need to meet someone in Azeroth.

I went through the intro questline for my death knight, Goethe. Very fast leveling, especially with all the rested she had built up. One thing I don't like about death knights is that the diversity of the attacks seem artificially forced. I'm also concerned about if you can skip one of the opening quests and be gimped for the remainder of your characters life. But I didn't personally miss anything, so I haven't looked into whether this is actually possible.

I'm currently listening to the Twisted Nether podcast, where I am apparently a winner for guessing that the Nano Rhino is a good reminder to work on NaNoWriMo.

As an aside, I started with the conviction to do NaNo, but gave up pretty much before I started (there were some personal issues involved.) But I'm still on the mailing lists. Now the mascot for the DFW area is NaNo Rhinos. So I sort of cheated, because I knew instantly that it's a bad pun (the best kind.) Incidentally, I pronounce the last part as Re-mo, rather than Wry-mo. So I probably would never have come up with it on my own.

Back to the death knight quest line, I will join those around me that recommend you at least do it. Such wonderful storytelling. As the game has only been out a couple of weeks, I will refrain from spoiling directly here, but my favorite moments were A Special Surprise and Where Kings Walk. Except that I didn't know that king Wrynn had moved back to the Keep from the harbor.

I haven't really talked about the death knight herself, so here goes. I chose Night Elf for Shadowmeld. I figure every class without healing ability should have some kind of way to drop combat. This is probably why my hunter is higher than my rogue (shorter cooldown) and why my warrior is way down the totem pole. I made her look just like Myze, only with the different face that allows for the funky color skin. So she looks very similar to her. Until Blizzard lets me tank in caster form, it will have to suffice.

Vehicles are bugged. I've had more than one instance where the action bar didn't show up when mounted. To dismount, you have to exit the game and come back in. And sometimes when you dismount, your player frame isn't there. Maybe I'm alone in my troubles. But they are fun, so it's not to hard to ignore the glitches, but it is something I've had to deal with. There's a quest in Howling Fjord involving a vehicle that's incredibly buggy, to the point that you probably won't be able to complete it. I wasn't.



Finally got to the end of the podcast...

Gah! They cannot pronounce my name! No one can! I'll add "Myzie" to the list of incorrect pronunciations. Others include "Maze" and "Mizz." When it was spelled "Myse" I've had it pronounced "Mice." I probably have the simplest-yet-hardest to pronounce name in WoW. For the record: "Myze" rhymes with "Eyes." Never forget it. As to the other info, yes, I am a guy, and I have 2 Collector's Editions so I'm glad to be getting a different card.

That's it for now, off to go do some work or lunch or something.

Paladins are simply GUIs for your /castrandom macros

Two days ago, Rohan wrote "[...]it's very annoying to link to someone, and then have them stop posting a little while later."

Fine, fine, I get the picture.

I've had things to say, but I'm still at the point where writing doesn't come naturally to me. I spend a lot time reading blogs, maybe too much, so I figure, maybe I could write this now and THEN start reading for the day. This writing thing just isn't natural for me. This is going to be a random ride.


Does anyone else think of Big Bear Butt when the see the Better Business Bureau logo?
Granted, I don't know what he has to do with a torch. But how many of you are going to think of it now? My place of work is accredited by the Big Bear Butt. Is yours?

My Druid, Myze, has tanked her last instance until Wrath, possibly until 80. She is now specced for Cat (for the most part, it's just the more cat-focused part of my 80 tanking tree.) I was supposed to tank with her in ZA last night, but my baby had other plans. She wasn't feeling well so I took the night off to tend to her. My guild then ran around like a headless chicken, screaming how they didn't want to do ZA without their familiar bear tank. (I should mention at this point that I'm the only person in guild whose main is a tank.) Anyway, they finally manage to get off the ground, for the most part on time. And you know what? They did just as well, if not better than when I went with them the last couple times. Of course I wasn't the only regular who wasn't there, so it's not entirely me holding them back. Actually to be honest, we usually get the first three chests and then go leisurely through the rest of the instance. They actually pushed for Lynx's chest, which I think contributed to them finishing about 15 minutes earlier than expected. Again, they did a good job, and I was proud of them all, and I let them know that.

Miyra, my troll hunter, who has her hunter license suspended by BRK due to a lack of scope on her ranged weapon, is finally doing well. First off, why no scope? Well, it's because I spent the longest time ignoring all enchants and anything else unnecessary for my epic flier. If I needed gems, I'd buy them from the vendor. Her gear languished for quite a while, as I couldn't get her into a guild with a foothold in Kara. Until the invasion event. I managed to get all four of the Blessed pieces for her in one night, basically through my magnificent luck. I also pugged a really unsuccessful Kara that night. We had a good tank up to Curator, but she had to leave, but replaced herself with a tank she "could not vouch for." A tank with 10007 health. He was awful. He actually ditched the run before anyone else.

My hunter's gear is terrible, but still, she lead in DPS that night. And the Heroic MgT I ran the next night. And the Gruul's I ran after the MgT. Over a T5-geared, fully enchanted Rogue. Beast Master Hunters rock, I guess. Actually, she also kept damage over another Beast Master Hunter in Kara last Saturday, who was better geared than I. But it was very slim, a difference of ~50,000 damage for the whole night. The deciding factor? I had a Devilsaur, and he had a Cat. He also probably used Volley too much.

I do want to mention something about heroic Magister's Terrace. I know it doesn't really matter anymore, but on the second boss, Vexallus, pets are REALLY good as soaking pure energy. Just make a macro that says "/petattack [target=Pure Energy]" and spam it the whole fight. Resume normal DPS on Vexallus. WIN!

My Pally, Eia, the third planned 80, is almost fully epicced out, not that it really matters too much. I'm pretty sure I'm going Ret with her to level, in which case, she'll be in greens and blues. I'm still not sure if it's the right way to go, though I know if I stay Prot, Sanctuary is definitely the leveling Blessing due to the mana return on mitigated hits. I would be happy if, on our final trek through Karazhan tomorrow, both Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch and the T4 headpiece dropped. Then I would have 2 characters in all purple. (5 if you count Myze's 4 possible specs and the associated sets I have for them.) Again, though, doesn't really matter as Thursday will start the fast and furious race to 80.

So there you have it. I've been playing, I haven't been in a rut. I'm not about to emo quit the game or anything like that. I'm just lying in wait, and trying to avoid getting in over my head thoerycrafting. There shall be more to come as I level my characters. Maybe I'll have something new to share. Maybe I'll be able to earn my Hunter license, but I doubt it. The only scopes they ever put up on the AH are the Crude and Standard ones. And if I'm already leading in damage in every group I'm in, are those really worth the money and effort? At least I got my quiver.

10 minute blog post

Short post, so let's get to it.

My paladin, Eia, has hit 70. She leveled pretty much all of level 69 in about 3 hours in Netherstorm, first doing Area 52, then doing Kirin'Var. She did this as Ret, with the help of a Rogue guildie who remained out of party to let me get the whole amount of experience.

Within moments of hitting 70, she was respecced Prot and made uncrittable via a combination of Defense and Resilience. I'm trying to take her into Kara this week, so that of course wasn't enough. After a few instances, she now has ~495 defense and the Continuum Blade, which will have to do until I can get the S2 mace. I'm starting to hate AV. Even so, she probably won't be good enough to tank for a little bit, until I can get her avoidance up higher, but golly, I'm gonna try!

Another thing of note is that my horde hunter, Miyra, has made enough gold (with a little help from the other side) to buy her epic flying. This is a character with no professions, and aside from a lucky epic gun drop on the other side (so I lost 15% of the money from it to the neutral AH) she earned her epic flight in ~3 days /played time. No raid gear or anything like that, either. If it weren't for the drop, it would probably be more like 4 days, but still, that's not bad considering there was still instance running time and all that.

Well, that's really all I wanted to say for now.

Been awhile

Wow, this spot has been empty for about a month! Not a good start, but I have to get back into it. I'm letting my 17 subscribers down!

My Paladin is on the cusp of level 70. I took her into Kara anyway, where absolutely no Plate dropped, but I did get a healing Libram off of Opera and my T4 gloves off of Curator. I'm specced Ret right now, to aid in leveling. I expect to be 70 before Saturday night. My wife is leveling her as we speak (She's so nice!) When I hit 70, I will start tanking Karazhan on her, and work on her gear. Fortunately we have a good Pally that can tank the harder fights until I get up there.

I've been on the PTR, just messing around, and I say I approve. Berserk is probably the coolest thing to happen to bear form, being able to spam Mangle on three target is just pure awesome. I haven't really been able to test the DPS of Cat form yet, but it looks promising. For reference, my build on the PTR. I will talk about it in a little bit.

I did happen to spec balance for a little bit, and I'm impressed with how well I've been able to do. It hasn't really gone much beyond the Ogres above Shattrath, but even the elites up there were pushovers. I'm happy that wrath will mean only one set of caster gear, though I doubt I could responsibly reduce my tank and DPS sets to one set. There will be overlap, though. (There kind of is right now, I have the Gauntlets of Malorne in both sets, and two differently gemmed and enchanted Stag-Helms of Malorne. But as far as caster stuff goes, for all I care it's all one set. I'm sure some Boomkins and Treefolk will disagree with me.

My PTR set consisted of a mix between my current healing and balance gear, and I topped out with 980 spellpower, which I don't think is bad at all. Wrath was critting for 2k, but I wasn't really impressed with Starfire cast time/damage ratio compared to Wrath. For reference, I used a balance build similar to the one posted on Gray Matter recently (under the heading My Mock Raid Build.) Basically I took the same balance tree then started going up restoration.

As far as Savant goes, we're chugging along. We had a really good week where we cleared Karazhan, then went on to kill Akil'zon and Nalorakk in ZA. I've finally got off my ass and made a website for Savant, but I'm sure the use of it will be slow for a while. I think it will basically be a forum to discuss happenings and random crap and nothing more. Which is fine by me. I'm using MyGuildHost because they are the same folks that run our vent, UGT Servers. The Vent servers are reliable, and the web hosting is pretty good. If you want to get something usable up right away, it's very easy using their platform. But if you want to customize it, you may be frustrated at your limitations, especially if you do web development for a living. =~_n= All in all, it's good enough that I don't have any major complaints, just some bug reports to file with them (the Guild code that lets a member skip approval doesn't seem to work right now.)

Now, about the Feral build. I may be naive, but I'm hoping for a build that still allows me to be good DPS and good Tanking, with a leaning toward Tanking. To that end, I believe I have the important talents for tanking, or will take them before 80. I also try to maximize DPS per talent point where I can. From my previous build, I'm going to take Omen of Clarity at 71 (for leveling, yeah!) and then Predatory Instincts, Feral Instinct, and King of the Jungle. This is deeper into Feral than I expected to go, but I believe it is best.

The biggest thing I miss out on is Intensity (Master Shapeshifter will always be seen as a 5 point talent to me, and thus not worth the points, since Natural Shapeshifter is all but useless in PvE, especially with the downfall of Powershifting.) To me, Intesity was the only thing that let me heal instances in my Feral Spec. Now, I will have no mana regen, and therefore cannot possibly keep up with my meager mana bar. But that's okay, you don't go Feral to heal. Oh yeah, Enrage won't generate the extra 10 rage, but I don't think that will be an issue.

I don't think there's been anything in that tree that hasn't been touched on by other bloggers, and I don't really have a perspective on it since I'm not in the beta. But if you look to my blogroll, you will see the best of what I read regularly. And there you will find all the theorycraft your heart desires.

Leveling Made Easy

Yesterday, I came home after a busy day of work and grocery shopping and settled down to play with the baby. I watched an episode of NewsRadio on Hulu, and ate a nice dinner. Then I hopped on WoW. I did Arenas with my wife. Second week of doing so, and we went 4-6, not too bad. I helped a friend with a group quest. Then I hopped on my Pally and leveled from 56 to 60.

Wait, what?

No, you aren't misreading that. I had a busy day and still managed to squeeze in four levels. I even managed to get to bed at a decent time. And I will explain how.

You may have heard of a fellow called Athene. Athene is most notable in this discussion as the guy who pushed leveling to a refined art. He had originally posted a 1-70 of 1 day and 19 hours. Then, when an enterprising Druid with a whole guild to support him took 15 hours off the record, Athene went and best that record, very shortly afterward, with only his two friends to help him. Athene has a whole host of videos, but not one says how he did it. He does mention mobtagging, where you attack a mob that is green to a 70, and they kill it for you. And you get the full experience. This requires a mob of level 62 or higher. Bonus points for elites.

If you look around Athene's forums, you may eventually come across this post which details a plan for leveling from 1 to 70 in under 24 hours. Most of it requires a Paladin and a mage, but once you can get to Slave Pens (or a little later for classes without Avenger's Shield) you should head there and level to 70. Here's what I did:

First, I created a macro as follows:

/script LeaveParty()
/cast Avenger's Shield

I would use this macro to pull mobs. I had another Paladin Taunt the mobs off me, and use a macro probably like the following:

/i Eia
/cast Judgement

(/i is the short command for /invite.) I would wait until all the mobs were killed before accepting the invite. Additionally, I would wait for the "teleport box" to disappear before doing another pull. Four pulls were handled with Consecration or Judgement of Righteousness. All in all it was very smooth. We pulled everything up to the bridge and then went out and reset. To watch the idea in action this video shows the process, though not quite how we did it (I think we went a little faster.) It has a couple of superfluous elements that don't matter if you're leveling a Protection Paladin, like Frost Trap. Our setup was me, other Pally, Enhancement Shaman, Feral Druid, and Holy Priest. You gotta have a healer, and you have to have enough DPS to take down a pull in under 40 seconds. That's the only real requirement. The results?

When I started this endeavor last night, I had already spent about half an hour in level 56 doing nothing. I had about 1000 experience in, so I couldn't get a good time for level 56, but I did keep track of the times I dinged 57-60. I don't have the exact figures, but this table illustrates the amount of time taken per level to the minute:

Level	Time
57	20 minutes
58	16 minutes
59	30 minutes

What happened on level 59? We took a break as our Pally was putting his wife to bed. All told, I spent about an hour and a half leveling. Additionally, I got three Spellfire Longswords, one of which will come in handy should I decide to level legitimately at any point past level 62.

The good thing about this method is that it's very efficient. I don't think anyone like finishing in Azeroth, knowing that Outland is right there, and the gear is so much better. And 4 levels in an hour and a half is nothing to sneeze at.

The bad thing about this is that you don't get much other than experience points. If you don't look into your class and research it, you will be at the same disadvantage as an eBayer when you get to 70. Additionally, your friends may resent you for dragging them through the boring task of doing the same thing over and over for hours. Which does bring me to another point.

Leveling like this is pretty damn selfish, as you are asking four other people to basically carry you through 55-70 (or however long you choose to milk it,) without a single tangible benefit to themselves, so you either better be calling in favors owed to you, or you owe your group some heavy favors in return. If you don't have four people who really like to spend time with you, you probably won't be able to pull this off.

If you can, though, I would recommend it on the sole condition that you already have a 70 or two. Additionally, it will probably help if you are leveling a class for which you already know how to perform the role. As for me, I'll probably spend a few levels getting used to BC Pally tanking, and then at least one friend has offered to blitz me to 70 over the weekend. I'll let you know how that goes.

On leveling Paladins

Over the weekend, my Paladin, Eia, recently jumped from ~44 or so to 50. I've been making the push to get my Paladin up both because I want to try Paladin tanking and because one would be very useful to Savant as venture forth into Zul'Aman.

Eia has been Retribution for that time, and while the damage was decent, something just wasn't clicking for me. I think Coriel touched upon it in his article "Revamping Paladins by Upgrading Abilities." Basically, until you hit 50, there's just no action leveling Retribution. Sure you'll occasionally run across an undead or demon that you can Exorcise, but that's kinda rare in the mid 40s, when you're questing in Tanaris, Feralas, and the Hinterlands. Most fights are Auto-attack and Judge every 8 seconds.

I got Crusader strike, and it was pretty nice, but rather underwhelming. Maybe it's that I expected some cool animation and got nothing. Maybe it's that the damage is about 2/3 what I judge for. I understand that it is a solid DPS increase, but somehow just disappointed me. So not more than an hour after talenting into Crusader Strike, I respecced to Protection.

Protection is very interesting, not in how it plays, but rather how it plays in comparison to Retribution. There are more cooldowns to manage, though you could pretty easily boil combat down to Judge and Holy Shield every 10 seconds. However, it feels like with a Protection that you can kill four mobs in the time it takes a Retribution Pally to kill two mobs. Or, as a Protection, you could kill a solo mob in the time in takes a Retribution Pally to kill two mobs. I know that's not really the case, but it's how it feels. You almost want the mobs to be closer together so your mana and your Holy Shield charges are more effectively used.

I also had the opportunity to tank an instance as a Protection Pally. It's pretty easy, though coming from Druid tanking, any other form of tanking is pretty easy. Though I can't form a proper comparison, as Myze was never a tank until Burning Crusade. So I will have to wait until Eia is at least 60. At the rate I'm going, that shouldn't be too far off.