Hardmode Mania!!!! (And 3.3)

And you thought that a Tribute to Insanity was our last stop until ICC? Our 10 man team continues to steamroll the hardest available 10 man content, by one-shotting all the hardmodes in Ulduar 10 man needed for the Proto-Drake, outside of Firefighter and the General/Yogg ones. We also skipped Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare for the time being since it was quite "time consuming" compared to knocking out the other ones.

Also, 3.3 hit live servers today. Nothing much changes in the Ret PvE depot, except for patching issues that are preventing me from even getting to the log-on screen- Looks like another "uninstall/install WoW entirely" night.

~Ron

Preparing for 3.3, Part 2

Well it is evident that 3.3 is due up on servers by December 8th, 2009. In this patch we see only a few Paladin changes:

• Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
  
• Flash of Light: This spell no longer causes a heal-over-time effect unless the player has the Infusion of Light talent.
  
• Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.
  
• Talents
  • Holy
    • Aura Mastery: This effect of this talent has been reduced in duration to 6 seconds.
      
    
    
  • Protection
    • Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.
      
    • Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases. Finally, Damage which reduces the paladin’s health below 20% now cancels the effect early.
    
    
  • Retribution
    • Repentance: This crowd control effect will no longer break early from the damage done by Righteous Vengeance.

The change to RV is nice, since I could actually pick up RV should I ever go back to Ret PvP (since Prot PvP is better nowadays). The big changes, however, are in Divine Sacrifice and Aura Mastery.

Aura Mastery recieved a slight nerf, however I might considering picking it up- The problem is, I am the only one who (besides the Warrior) can toss up Imp Demo shout, and at no cost to boot. The Divine Sacrifice changes would mean that I can could use it every 2 minutes without having to kill myself in the process. However, with the way our Trees are set up, there is no way I can afford to get Divine Guardian without sacrificing personal DPS.

All in all, my spec will probably not chance. Looking at the content for 3.3, I hope to have a Quel’Delar/Shadow's Edge soon. :)

~Ron

Insanely Skilled

With our cleanup from the previous week, we knew that A Tribute to Insanity was just a week away. On November 29, we managed to takes some names and kick ass with our Server's 13th Anub kill with 50 attempts remaining. Although I did not snag any personal loot, it is still a grand achievement to obtain, and shows just what we are capable with when we focus and work coherently.

Now we just need to repeat this so I can snag my cloak :P


~Ron

Preparing for 3.3, Part 1

So we all know that 3.3 is due in either this Tuesday or within the next 21 days. So today, I decided to start preparing for 3.3

First and foremost, Transmute: Titanium is loosing its cooldown. This can mean either:

• A drop in Titanium/Titansteel Bars, in which case I need less money for Titansteel cooldowns and gear for Alts
• A rise in Saronite Ore/Bars, of which I already 200+ of each to re-sell.

Outside of that, the only other preparation I have done besides PTR work is.... well, nothing. :)

I did accomplish somethings, though, including soloing
Thrym, The Hope Ender:



As well as doing over 1,000,000 damage in a battleground:


Until next time!

~Ron

BiS make my Tenticles Wiggle

Had a wonderful loot night from TotC 25! Last Tuesday, I was able to sweep house with my brand new Justicebringer (it took long enough) as well as the Executioner's Malice neckpiece. Finally, in the Onyxia run (which we somehow managed to wipe twice in?) I picked up a Judgement Crown to replace my helm from TotC 10 man.

In addition, I completed the achievements Chef de Cuisine, Mowed Down, and the requirements for the meta Pilgrim. All in all, I am getting closer to the Tabard of Conquest, which I hope to have within my grasp soon.

As always, here is the dataz.


~Ron

Mad Skills, baby!

A Tribute to Mad Skill!
We came, we saw, and we kicked some ass! Out of our 50 attempts, we managed to get to Anub on Heroic TotGC 10 man with ALL of our attempts! We did have a bit of trouble, though, on Anub himself- However, I see that fight as being so needy and tedious that there are many factors that can go wrong.

With downing Anub with 47/50 attempts remaining, I can honestly say that we are setting the bar higher for next week to obtain some new cloaks.


Composition for tonight's raid is as follows:

Tanks:
Eibrocan
Vires

DPS:
Ronark
Remmanak
Minicthur
Jam
Toranch

Healers:
Sondog
Moonsinnah
Chuckmurloc

As always, the data can be found here.


And as a side Victory, I'm past 7000 achievement points (yay)!

Until next time,

~Ron

New week, New loots

Tuesday came and went. Had Justicebringer drop from Faction Champs, but a DK guildie had priority over me. Good news is, that the next weapon that drops I have overall priority over.

Here is the data for the run.

Was also able to get some quick PvP action in and snag both Isle of Conquest All-Star and Demolition Derby (IoC).

Finally, I bought my Pony for my Squire. Hopefully it will make farming things easier in the future.

~Ron

Is it Tuesday yet?

Restarts are tomorrow, so a quick recap of what my guild's been doing:

- Still on NRB for TotGC : /
- Downed TotCG 10 man with 22 attempts remaining
- Still waiting for that sword from Onyxia :P
- Yogg practice on Ulda 25 man. Here is the data.

~Ron

Tier 11 (or 12) ideas.

I got around to drawing up some rough sketches of my vision of future tier gear, as well as 2 weapons that I would like to see in Cataclysm. The link to the post with the pictures can be found below:

Here

I hope to have them modeled in Autodesk Maya soon, but that takes a considerable amount of time to do.

~Ron

Goal: 100k, and some IoC madness

So, as everyone knows, I am an Achievement Point whore- I have the most in my guild currently, at almost 7k. After waiting for a raid to start the other day, I started to add up all the gold items linked to achievements (mounts, etc) and came to a grand total of: 43,000 gold or so, plus or minus a few hundred.

I find the best way to make money (outside of the 200 or so from IC dailies and the Tourny dailies) is playing the Auction House like its my hoe- Most of the time, it is just earning honor and buying/cutting epic gems and posting them. But most of the time, I am able to craft gold- As in, I buy the materials to craft a Nightmare Tear for 115 gold, and then sell the Nightmare Tear for 170. My goal is to make 100k gold by the beginning of Cata- Ideally, 50k gold going into the expansion, and 50k for my mounts/pets/etc.

Also on a side note, I entered Island of Conquest the other day for the first time, and I have to say, it is pretty amusing. So far I have 6 of the 14 possible achievements, and I hope to have that tabard for my Arena set.

~Ron


P.S. Going into 10 man TotC and maybe 10 man TotGC tonight, lets hope for phat loots!

New week, new loots

After the mishap of last night's fail patch data, we were able to go back to TotC and Onyxia 25 and clean house. No loot for me due to our guild's loot system, but it pushes me up in priority for a potential Justicebringer or Death's Verdict drop next week. I was able to pick up a Furious Gladiator's Scaled Shoulders with my EoTs though.



About to do a 10 man Onyxia, hopefully a new Obsidian Edge soon.


Edit:



~Ron

Ending on a Good Note

Just finished our first guild kill for H ToC 10man. Personally, I only filled in for some other DPS from the prior run, so no achievement for myself yet. I did, however, manage to get the achievement Arathi Basin Assassin.



The data from the Heroic ToC 10man can be found here:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-r0cqfvsg27k5td10/

~Ron

10 man ToC

In addition to blog posts, I'm also going to be publishing data from Raids through World of Logs. Here is this week's 10 ToC data, with a random PuG.


http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ari07zwny4984dcm/

~Ron

Why need healers when you have a Ret?

So my group just finished up the daily-duo for Heroic Cull of Strath, and we decided not to go with a healer- Well, at least not a mainstream healer, but rather myself as Ret spec. Surprisingly it went fine, most of the healing was passive through Judgement of Light and some well timed Sacred Shield + AoW procs. There was one or two pulls where the shit did hit the fan, but there were no wipes, and nothing that Hand of Sacrifice couldn't fix.

It just made me think of GC when he stated that we were too "tanky" and too "heal-y". Personally, just because everyone out gears the instance in T9 gear and clears the whole place with 7 minutes left on the extra boss timer doesn't mean that we are unbalanced.

Although it was fun to clear it that quickly :)



~Ron

A Day Off

Taking the day off today to spend the day with my girlfriend since it is her birthday.

Maybe some PvP will occur afterwards later tonight ;)
~Ron

Whats better than Old Posts?

Since this blog's original creation I have been slacking a bit.
A tiny bit.
only a little.
(as in forgetting about it completely)

The truth is, I have been rather busy with my real life that I forgot about the blog (having it bookmark would have helped, too). Since the original creation, a lot has happened:

-Attended Blizzcon via the Internet.
-Updated the FAQ on MMO-Champions a number of times.
-Added a new War-tools tree for 4.0 (Pre-Cataclysm release patch)
-I'm duel spec'd for Prot PvP- While I am still gathering gear, I'm not sure if I will stay as Ret for PvP or use this new Prot setup.
-Race Chance to a Draenei from a Dwarf(Yay!)

I'll plan to make at least 1 post a week- Since I now have permission to gather data for our guild through World of Logs, and since that data will be posted here, it should help me to remember to stop here more often.


~Ron

FAQ up on MMO-Champions

I've been working on a Ret DPS FAQ for quite a while now and just finalized it. It is posted on MMO-Champion.com under the Paladin forums, link is provided below.

Retribution Paladin FAQ

Now excuse me I need to go to sleep.... I know I'm tired when I spell my class as "Paladen".



~Ron

Comcast Fails yet again.

To those of you making the tough decision, of choosing between Comcast or ________ as your ISP, please, for the love of all the small adorable kittens out there, go with ________ instead.

Crapcast was out the whole day today... had to buy a new router even, as they insisted that "the complications are your own". Bullshit.

Ah well. More to come tomorrow hopefully.

~Ron

3.2 Wartools Ideas

With the welcoming out of the way, I can get down to business. Here are my ideas from 3.2, with a revamp of the Paladin trees, along with my "un-official 3.2 patch notes", should these changes take effect.

3.2 Paladin Wartool

Due to significant talent changes, all paladin talents will be reset for players.

Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.

Charger: Can now be learned at level 40.

Conviction (NEW): Learned at level 80, this is a single-target DoT that shares a cooldown with Consecration.

Exorcism: Now has a 1.5 second cast time, but can once again be used on players.

Hand of Reckoning: Redesigned. Now does damage only when target does not currently have the caster targeted, but damage done increased to 50% of attack power, occurring after the taunt effect is applied.

Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker's maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.

Judgements: Some of these attacks were considered ranged and some melee. They are all now considered melee attacks that can't be dodged, parried or blocked.

Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.

Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.

Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.

Seal of Blood: This ability has been removed.

Seal of the Martyr: This ability has been removed.

Seal of Righteousness- The effect from this ability is now considered a melee attack, and has a chance equal to the paladin’s critical strike rating to crit for x1.5 damage.

Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage. In addition, the damage-over-time effect is now considered a melee attack instead of a spell attack.

Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.

Warhorse: Can now be learned at level 20.

Talents:

Holy:

Aura Mastery: Redesigned. The paladin now assumes a Holyform for 15 seconds. During this time, the paladin is immune to Silence and Interrupt effects, and deals an additional 5% holy damage on each attack.

Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.

Blessed Hands: Moved to tier 2 of the Protection tree.

Blessed Life: Now also increases your total stamina by 1/2/3%.

Divine Favor: Now also reduces the mana cost of your next Holy Light, Flash of Light, or Holy Shocks spell by 100% in addition to its current effect.

Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.

Hallowed Attire: New Talent. It increases the paladin’s Spell Power and Attack Power by 1/2/3 for every 720 Armor Value you have.

Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%, and allows for an additional 10/20/30/40/50% of mana regeneration to continue while casting.

Purifying Power: Moved to tier 2, and now reduces the cast time of your Exorcism spell by 16/33% instead of reducing the cast time.

Sacred Rights: New Talent. Increases the amount healed by your Flash of Light healing over time effect when Sacred Shield is active by 25/50% and your Judgement of Light spell by an additional 1/2%.

Sanctified Light: Now also reduces the mana cost of Holy Light and Holy Shock spells by 2/4/6%.

Seals of the Pure: Moved to tier 1 of the Retribution tree.

Unyielding Faith: Moved to tier 3.

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).

Blessing of Sanctuary: This ability has been removed.

Divine Strength: Moved to tier 1 of the Holy tree.

Guarded by the Light: Instead of refreshing Divine Plea’s duration, this talent now increases your maximum mana by 100/200% of your total strength, in addition to its current effects.

Judgements of the Just: The melee attack speed reduction of this talent is no longer removed when another paladin uses the same Judgement ability used to apply this effect.

Sanctified Blessings: New talent. Your Blessing of Kings and Greater Blessing of Kings spells also reduces damage taken from all sources by 3%. In addition, when the target blocks, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 2% of maximum displayed mana.

Touched by the Light: No longer increases the amount healed by your critical heals, but instead the amount healed by your Holy Light and Flash of Light spells by 2/6/10%.

Retribution:

The Art of War: Moved to tier 6. Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant. In addition, this talent now provides notification in the floating combat text when it activates.

Commanding Strike: New talent. A holy strike that deals 35% of weapon damage as Holy damage plus 357 over 12 seconds. It also interrupts spellcasting and prevents any spell in that school from being cast for 2 sec. Using this ability causes a 10 sec. cooldown on Hammer of Justice.

Crusade: Moved to tier 5.

Crusader Strike: Redesigned. Now deals 65% weapon damage and causes the Mark of the Crusader debuff, which increases all holy periodic damage dealt to the target by 2% and reducing all periodic healing done to the target by 10%. This effect stacks up to 3 times.

Crusader's Call: New 2-point talent. Increases your Expertise rating by 3/6. In addition, your Mark of the Crusader effect slows the movement speed of targets affected by your Judgement of Justice spell by 7/15%.

Deflection: Moved to tier 1 of the Protection tree.

Judgements of the Wise: The base mana gained from this effect has been reduced to 20%, down from 25%.

Repentance: Now has a chance to break on damage, rather than breaking on any damaging spell or ability.

Righteous Vengeance: Now also increases all damage caused by the paladin by 2/4/6%.

Seal of Command: This ability has been removed.

Seals of the Wise: New talent. Increases your Intellect by an amount equal to 12/25% of your Strength, and every time one of your Seal spells hits an enemy, you gain an amount equal to 1/2% of your base mana.

Swift Retribution: Moved to tier 7. In addition, this talent will now also reduce the cooldown on your Exorcism and Repentance spells by 11/22/33%

Two-Handed Weapon Specialization: Removed.

Vindication: Redesigned. Now lowers target attack power, is consistent and does not stack with Demoralizing Shout.

Glyphs:

Paladins

Glyph of Righteous Defense: Now also increases the chance for Hand of Reckoning to hit.

Glyph of Seal of Command: This item has been removed.

Glyph of Seal of Blood: Changed to Glyph of Holy Wrath, which reduces its cooldown by 15 seconds.

Glyph of Repentance: Causes your Repentance spell to also remove all of your Damage over Time effects from the target.

Going into detail on the new spell, Conviction.

Conviction:
10% of base mana Melee Range
Instant cast 8 sec cooldown
Condemns the target, dealing [25 * (113 + 0.04 * SPH + 0.04 * AP)] Holy damage over 20 seconds. This damage is dealt slowly at first, and builds up as the spell reaches its full duration. Shares a cooldown with Consecration, and only 1 target can be convicted at a time.


Basically, a slightly stronger Single-target Consecration that functions similarly to Curse of Agony. After the 20 seconds, the total damage done by Conviction will total for 5% more than that of Consecration after 20 seconds for 32% less base mana. The melee range component is to prevent it from being abused by Holy paladins. Glyph of Consecration would have to be modified to increase Conviction's cooldown as well.

~Ron

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! My name is Brian Jeslis a.k.a. Ronark, or just plain Ron. I play a Retribution Paladin on the Doomhammer-US realm.

About Myself:
As I said, I'm Brian from Illinois in the US. After much dancing between different MMOs like EQ2, DAoC, Guild Wars, and CoH, I finally came across WoW in April of the year 2006. I started playing with some friends on Dommhammer on this Paladin, and never deleted him. Of course, this was way before TBC was even a thought, and Paladins were pretty much pigeon-holed late game, but I'll get to that later.

About Ronark:
I began the game not knowing anything about the class- All I knew was that I wanted to be a dwarf, due to the amount of lore usually associated with them, hence why I chose Mining as a profession, and later, Jewelcrafting (when TBC hit, my other main profession, Blacksmithing, was still stuck at about 120). The name "Ronark" actually was born from looking through the Guild Wars game guide looking for interesting character names: I'm the type of person that despises seeing names such as "Xxpayztoplayzxx" as a character name, and wanted something my own.

Playing a Holy Paladin, I (as everyone else did) leveled very slowly, and barely managed to hit 59 when TBC was released- I did not to get experience an End-game content until later when the Achievement system was added, and people were forming up old BWL and MC raids.

Most of my TBC career was as a Holy paladin with the guild Shadow Wolves- the raid team was consisted of multiple guilds in Vanilla, and only one othe during TBC, the Azure Knights. After a lot of wipes, attempts, and cleared content, I found spamming Flash of Light was beginning to get too OCD. I was able, through Healing raids, to aquire enough Melee plate gear to build a decent Ret set, and was able to Offspec during nights when we inducted new members into our Raid team (doing runs like Gruul's).

Eventually I was able to see some BT action as Ret, and was quite proud of the DPS I was able to do doing these and 5-man MgT and heroic MgT runs, staying at least some-what competitive. I'll tell you one thing, though: convincing your Raid leader to let you raid as an Alliance Ret paladin was fucking hard- As if the bad reputation wasn't enough, I lacked Seal of Blood to DPS effectively. But I was able to get passed that barrier, and have ever since the early days of running BT I have remained Ret.

Ever since the anticipated 3.0 patch the Paladin class, and mainly the Ret spec, was "adjusted to fit the casual player"- I say this because I was still able to play viably with the tools given in 2.2, although it required an EXTREME knowledge of the class in order to pull off. Anyways, I was still brought to Raids, and was still able to preform well- sometimes out DPSing many PuG runs due to my previous experience as "lolret". However, somewhere along the line, my Raid team started to lose interest, and eventually, people. I was them recruit by the guild Torment after running 10-man Ulduar with them for a few weeks, which leads us to where I am today.

About the Game:
My main focus on the game is PvE encounters and content. I have preformed all roles in PvE, from FoL spamming, to having Holy Shield up 100% of the time so as not to be crushed. I do do the occasional PvP, but mainly it has been due to acquiring Achievement Points: I STRIVE for earning Achievement points- The Badge System in City of Villians is what kept me entertained for a long time, and once WoW adopted their own system, I found that I always had something to focus on when not Raiding- Thus, I have sat through many Reputation grinds; I have leveled the dreaded Fishing secondary profession to 400 (before it was nerfed); I have also gotten the chance to see content I wasn't able to experience before.

Present Day:
With patch 3.2 on the way, I can not help but wonder what changes are in store for the Ret Paladin. The changes made to Seal of Vengeance are the start of hopefully something great, but until that alone will not be enough to keep the FotM players away. The skill cap needs to be raised significantly- Until then I'll continue to do what I do best, DPS.


~Ron