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