You’ve heard they’re completely changing the shard mechanic for 4.0/Cataclysm, right? Looks like you might have to wait until then for Soul Shatter to be more viable. On the plus side, at least you **have **a threat dump–not every class does. If I’m DPSing and I start crawling up the tank’s ass, my only option is to just stop attacking altogether.
IIRC, Soul Shards will no longer be inventory items, nor generated off of a specific spell. Instead, they’ll appear on your portrait, sort of like DK runes, with a max of something like three available at a time, each on its own CD. You’ll then be able to use these Soul Shards to give some kind of bonus to an attack or ability.
Sounds like you’re halfway there already! If you can get more comfortable with mouse movement, you can probably make things easier for yourself, since your left hand won’t have to be bouncing back and forth between movement keys and ability/attack keys.
I played my paladin for a little while because I want to get her to 40 for the faster horse. I hadn’t played her in a while, and so wasn’t used to the way I have her abilities and spells set up. The lack of a missile weapon caused me some trouble till I remembered. Maybe I should play another class that can use ranged weapons. I started with an undead warrior but gave her up after a couple of levels. Maybe I should start another one.
Keep in mind that a ranged weapon on a Warrior is only going to be used for pulling*–you’ll almost never be able to even get a second hit in before the mob is all up in your face. You might not have a ranged weapon on a Paladin, but you should have some ranged spell/attack that can serve the same purpose for pulling.
*Barring a tiny handful of raid fights where if you’re in a tanking position you’ve got to spend part of the fight twiddling your thumbs out of melee range of the target, like being an add tank on KT in Naxx.
I wouldn’t mind making a Stratholme run either with my 80…never been there.
I was soloing BRD last night, but I began to realize that it’s a long drawn out puzzle, so I bailed. I can’t promise tonight, but I wonder if a 80 ret pally could actually pull off the role of healer in your BRD run, Skammer. Only problem for me is that 6:45 PDT is a little early for me to scratch the WOW itch. My little guy and wife need the attention at that time. Yeti Jr. is usually on but he only has the 80 DK and the 30 Pally.
Other than that, I’ve been BGing honor points to get rid of my blue gear and have been hitting up our alchemists and jewelcrafters (nodding towards Kahmu and Rottingbird) for high grade gems.
Pallies get Hand of Reckoning at level 16 - this is a ranged spell that does minimal damage but will cause the target to aggro you and is useful to pull enemies from a distance. At level 20, Excorcism is better for pulling but has a longer cooldown.
Then at 50, Prot pallies get Avenger’s Shield, which is pure awesome. It pulls up to three targets, doing decent damage and slowing them down for a few seconds (while you fire up Exorcism).
Gratz. The trophy drops off every T-25 boss so they’re pretty easy but in my guild they are expensive (see complaint about DKP system below). I am saving my DKP for slots I cannot fill with triumph badges and filling my t9 slots with the ilevel 232 stuff (I have the 245 gloves from VOA (for some strange reason my guild rolls for loot in VOA)).
Well its not like I think our DKP system is perfect either. When they set DKP prices for loot it is not at all clear that the prices are set very intelligently. I particularly have a problem with the DKP price for the trophy. Noone can explain to me why a trophy that requires 45 or 75 triumph badges to get an ilevel 245 item should cost as much as an ilevel 245 item that doesn’t require triumph badges (and remember you can get an ilevel 245 item with about 50 triumph badges).
Oh, I thought you were saying that its always the tanks fault in the case where everyone is on the same boss.
I agree, if they haven’t made getting conquest badges easy enough for you at this point then you need to scale down your gear expectations.
Start your Hodir faction quests, you’re gonna have to do it anyways unless you are an inscriptionist.
You’re a gurl?
Yeah, its been good and bad. On the one hand we get fewer new guildies but on the other hand we don’t have to carry our new guildies quiter as much (and frankly as a progression guild you can’t really afford to carry anyone for very long).
I think it would make sense to for the keepers in Ulduar to drop Triumph badges and for HTOC and the new instances to drop Triumph badges but unless you just want people to jump from ilevel 200 to ilevel 245 they have to keep the conquest badges around don’t they?
I understand the desire to gear everyone up so that they can all see Arthas (something that didn’t happen in BC (most people never saw the end boss, heck most casual players didn’t see Illidan)).
Yeah, we play to get stuff a few months ahead of everyone else.
As a healer I need to use clique to heal on grid so I can only really use mouse movement on pvp. The same dynamic that makes druid healers so mobile also makes it necessary to use wasd movement.\
Helllllllll no. I’ve been in the position of having stupid DPS pull off me before (e.g., in a moving fight where they massively overgeared me and knew it). I just wanted to acknowledge that there are times when the DPS are pulling off because of something the tank is doing wrong (spec, rotation, stat priority, etc.). There was a DK tank that had problems with this in my previous guild for a while because he was stacking Stam to the exclusion of everything else, including anything that would help him generate more threat, had crappy glyphs, had a weird talent build, etc.
I can’t believe I forgot about Hodir. Definitely do this. It starts with a K2 quest called something like They Took Our Men.
It seems to me that people jumping from iLvl 200 to 232/245 is exactly what they want when 3.3 comes out. Of course, it’s only a few items of 245 (for a hunter it is Head, Shoulder, one Ring, and one not-so-great Trinket) and the rest 232. And no weapons (although the new 5-mans will surely drop iLvl 232 weapons and the other spots you can’t get from EoT).
Considering most raiders will have at least a few more 245 items from 25-man ToC or 10-man ToGC, and will quickly have the 251 (or whatever it will be) stuff from ICC, I don’t really see a problem with this.
Basically the new philosophy seems to be “make it easy, with enough time investment, for a new 80 to get decently geared in the previous patch’s gear”. So, for 3.3 that means Emblems of Triumph dropping like candy.
As I said above this has good and bad aspects, but I think the good outweighs the bad. For example, we had a good ret pally that quit WoW for awhile right as Ulduar hit. He’d be stuck running Ulduar when he could if it weren’t for the new badge system. Instead, a week after he came back he’s contributing well to our ToC runs. This is better, I think.
Yeah we have a player like that in our guild, she understands her class but refuses to use clique or grid and is almost always at the bottom of the heal meter. I don’t think heal meters account for everything but in tank and spank encounters its basically all there is to measure. On the plus side she is pretty good at keeping herself alive because she isn’t furiously clicking on little boxes in grid.
It’s definitely a good thing for me. A month or two ago I was utterly daunted at the thought of having to run a ton of heroics, then Naxx 10, then Naxx 25, then Uld 10…so on and so forth. I want to get into raiding, but that is a ton of time investment and I’d be forever playing catch-up. In 3.3, I can get 200 gear relatively easily, which will let me start picking up 219-245 stuff in the Icecrown 5-mans and TOC, and that will let me get into the ICC raid itself pretty quickly. Except for TOC, it’ll all be new content, so there’ll be plenty of people interested, rather than having to hope we can pull a group together for Naxx when everyone else is sick of it already.
She and aruvqan are my two main “In-Game Gurus”, and if I was to ever be able to give either one a hug?
I’d have to peeled off like velcro!
As I wrote before, you kids have ALL been a great help to this old dude, and I sure DO appreciate it, but my toon Wolkie is now better and longer able to play WoW than before.
Hand of Reckoning is a fantastic little tool. At level 73 in my current gear, my Pally hits with HoR for 960 damage for 90 mana, while Exorcism (glyphed for +20% damage, mind you) only hits for 1320 to 1426 on a non-crit for 243 mana. Since HoR only deals damage when the target isn’t attacking you, I use it exclusively for opening. Since I’m Ret, I have a decent crit percentage and Art of War, so I typically get an instant-cast Exorcism within the first couple seconds of the fight. Exorcism usually winds up being my fight closer rather than opener. If you’re Protection, though, you’ll probably want to open with Exorcism to avoid dealing with the cast time mid-fight.
It’s also not exactly a Hand spell. It’s named such, but it’s not really the same as the other Hands. The other Hands work like the Blessings, except they don’t directly buff stats. You can only have one Hand, one Blessing, and one Aura on another player, but Hand of Reckoning doesn’t conflict since it’s a targeted taunt, not a buff.
ETA: In other news, I can no longer post from work. Disappointing, since chatting here during the day is about as fun as actually playing the game, but it is what it is.
Uh, that brings me to ask a question… assuming I don’t make the guild, or if I do but they want me to gear before hauling my lazy buttocks along, where should I start? Naxx10 (which doesn’t appear to have much goodies).
Disappointing, since chatting here during the day is about as fun as actually playing the game, but it is what it is.