Editor’s Warning: This post is long. If you don’t like em long you can skip straight to the good stuff here.

I’ve been the acting guild and raid leader for <Specced for Awesome> since the mid-TBC era. We started out as an extremely casual guild and delved headfirst into Karazhan with our motley crew of 10 or so raiders. Most of us had never raided before (that one time where I lolcleansed a ZG pug in vanilla doesn’t count). We dabbled in 5-mans here and there but Kara was that first hit of the hard stuff. We were hooked.

Months later we were clearing the entirety of Kara in one night. So what next? We naturally attempted to jump right in to Zul’Aman where the Amani trolls proceeded to have their way with us. ZA was challenging to say the least. Kara was (and still is) a great instance but it wasn’t really giving us the fix we needed. We really had no choice but to head into Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s Keep if we wanted to progress. There was just one problem: we were a 10-man guild and these raids required 25.

So we did what we had to, we upped our recruitment efforts. We recruited pugs from heroics and Kara runs, we advertised in trade, solicited the unguilded and even braved the dreaded realm forums. It took a guild merger/acquisition but we finally got the numbers we needed.

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Dear Blizzard Dev Team,

I’d like to present to you a wish-list of things that I’d like to see in the upcoming expansion:

Race Switch – It seems far fetched but with you already announcing plans to allow faction traversal at some point in the future I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility. You can already change servers, rename your character, change its appearance and even its gender.

The only non-cosmetic difference between the races right now are a handful of racial abilities that continue to be nerfed and homogenized. I could see the human’s diplomacy being an attraction for rep grinding but you could deter opportunists with a super long race-change cooldown. I’d also recommend that they continue to enforce the class restrictions* (ie: you could switch to a Draenei but not a Human if you were currently a Night Elf Hunter).

I really don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t allow this. Plus I secretly wish my pally was a dwarf.

Class Restrictions Begone – I changed my mind. Class restrictions at this point are silly. Lore be damned. There’s no reason why a Tauren dedicated to embracing the darkness shouldn’t be allowed to be a warlock. A human hunter perhaps? Hell, if you’re going to let Blood Elves be paladins, you could let the trolls and the night elves devote themselves to the Light as well.

This is another silly restriction that does nothing to enhance the game at this point. I understand that it might take some extra effort to see this one implemented, such as adding class specific starter quests to other zones (although they did put a shaman trainer outside of Stormwind).

You also made sure every piece of gear works for every class already.

Worgen and Goblin Races – by no means an original concept, but with all the attention to the “leaked” mask situation I really feel like this would be an awesome direction for Bizzard to go in. Entirely feasible and I’d almost be willing to bet gold on it (if it wasn’t against the EULA).

Worgen would naturally make a great Alliance race as we’re really lacking in the beastial department. Horde could also use a smaller race to round out their lineup. As far as classes go, I’m sure we’ll see some typical combos like warrior and rogue on both sides. Not sure about the caster classes for Goblin but at least warlocks seem fitting for the Worgen. Although you could just use my previous suggestion and let us choose any class we want. Worgenadin ftw.

Increased Max on Characters per Realm – I’m sure that quite a few of you have already hit the 10-character max on a realm or two. If Blizzard does end up adding additional races then some of us are going to be making some hard decisions about who gets to stick around when its time to make a wolfman err wolfwoman.

Sortable Character Screen (and more) - I just want to change the order of my characters on the login screen damnit. Who else hates having their bank alt higher on the list than their main? While you’re at it, overhaul the character screen completely. Show me my current talentspec(s), hearth cooldown, rested xp percentage, gold on-hand, unread mail, total time played and time since last logoff. On second thought, forget about those last two.

More multi-passenger mounts – my favorite part of my chopper (and that of many a guildmate) is definitely the sidecar. Two-person flying mounts (rolfcopter 2.0) or even a 5-man siege tank would be awesome. Underwater mounts? How about a multi-person submersible (a la The Life Aquatic)? Talk about a money sink eh? Bah dum tsss!

More Ulduar – Ulduar is a great instance. Sexy aesthetics aside, I love the difficulity. I love the layout. I love the teleporting between sections. I love the perfect amount of trash mobs. Ulduar has eeked out Karazhan as my favorite instance and I hope that there are more Ulduaresque raids to come.

Less mail drops though plx.

Lumberjacking Profession – I’m actually surprised that this isn’t in the game already. Collecting wood is such a staple of Warcraft that it boggles the mind that we haven’t seen this implemented yet. I know I’m not the only one that thinks this would be an awesome idea. Naturally we’d need a woodcrafter profession to go along with it. Staves anyone?

Guild Housing Ships - as cool as a guild hall would be where you could fly your own colors, hire vendors and show off your spoils of war in a trophy case, a freakin pirate ship with the aforementioned would be infinitely cooler. If we are indeed heading out to sea to visit the Maelstrom then this would be a perfect fit.

You probably wouldn’t want everyone and their 3 person guild piloting a massive frigate, but you could setup ship tiers that you could upgrade to. Start out with a dinghy and work your way up to a steam-powered icebreaker. Better yet, let us upgrade to dirigibles with the highest tier being your very own gunship. /drool

A guild ship would definitely be a significant investment. Plus it would give those lumberjacks something to do. Of course I’d have to name ours the Belafonte.

Heroic Old-World Instances - you can’t deny it, the old world instances are dead. Deadmines (no pun intended), still one of the best 5-man dungeons in the game, gets unfortunately passed over by most fledgeling Alliance these days. I’m sure the early Horde instances suffer a similar fate.

The not-so simple solution: set the instance to heroic and bam, your level and gear scale down to meet the dungeon’s intended range. Or put in dungeon-wide aura that removes a percentage of your stats, much like ressurection sickness. Now you can run dungeons with your lowbie friends or their alts and it won’t be a complete joke.

But what’s in it for the senior that’s bringing themselves down to nubville? Besides the experience of revisiting some of the games awesome dungeon content of course? Well, why don’t we let them use tabards to build faction rep? How about letting them gain some sort of mentor rep that can be applied for separate rewards. Orrr, maybe the bosses drop emblems of heirloomism (yeah, I’ made that up) for BtA gear?

You kow you could just throw some mentor achievements in there and go home early.

So Blizzard, I hope that you’ll take some of my ideas into consideration. Please feel free to implement all of the awesome recommendations stated above without any fear of recourse regarding your originality.

Regards,

Jon Roach

Oh yeah, one more thing…

15-man Raids – I’m actually working on an entire separate post letter as to the reason why I think this would be one of the best changes to the game since the addition of dualspec. Keep an eye out for this controversial submission.

Incoming nerfs to ret will actually punish prot and holy deeps as well. /facepalm

Rohan covers the details here.

I like to dabble in PVP here and there but lately it seems that Blizzard is having a much more difficult time balancing for both aspects of the game. What makes a class or spec viable in PVE makes them overpowered in PVP.

Ret mana regen is a good example of this: in an arena fight, their unending supply of mana definitely gives them the leg-up on the competition. So let’s take that away from them so they don’t seem quite so invincible. But now the poor raiding retadins (yes they do exist) lose their ability to output sustained amounts of high dps without OOMing.

I’m hoping that Ferraro is right and this latest change to JotW is revoked as sort of a “we’re giving you something by not taking it away”-move by Blizzard. I usually have a lot of faith in Blizzard’s dev team, they obviously have copious amounts of talent at their disposal, but I just can’t help but feel like we’ve been here before. Why is Blizzard so afraid to make such an iconic class powerful and fun to play–and leave it that way?

Well Ret had it’s fun for about a day. We’ve already been hotfixed.

-Judgment of light and seal of light reduced by around 50%
-Judgment of command dmg reduced by around 25%
-Divine storm does 100% physical dmg instead of 100% holy dmg

I agree that we might have been a bit overpowered in PVP but this nerf seems like a knee-jerk reaction to forum QQers who now have a formidable foe where there once stood just a minor annoyance. The problem is that this clearly affects PVE DPS and raid viability. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is nothing new for the Holy Knight.

Update: Official Word from Ghostcrawler regarding the recent hotfix and ret’s future.

When you fight, you fight from behind.

The following applies to anyone who is doing melee damage on a mob or raid boss: unless you are the tank, you want to be behind the mob when you attack.

Why? Because a mob cannot parry (or block) your attacks when you hit it from behind.

That’s awesome right?

Yes it is and here’s why: besides the obvious benefit of increasing your personal DPS because your attacks are actually connecting, a parried attack will reduce the mob’s swing timer (effectively increasing its attack speed).

An easier way to think of it is that a parry on a mob will result in a counterattack. This counterattack is directed at the mob’s target (which should be the tank in most situations). Now the tank has his own parries to worry about and probably doesn’t want someone else buffing the boss.

An unlucky string of parries from the mob, whether caused by the tank or from other melee DPS, can result in some nasty damage spikes, putting unnecessary stress on your healers and increasing the risk of your tank biting the dust.

But wait there’s more. There are plenty of raid bosses out there that have a cleave attack that hits everyone in their frontal arc. You don’t want to be affected by this but it’s easy to avoid: just hit it from behind*.

*Behind means behind. Make sure you’re not on top of the boss as your attacks can technically pass through the mob and be counted as frontal hits.

The only exception to this method is when fighting dragons (tails hurt, attack the hind legs) or mobs with a knock-back that require special positioning.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
While I draw breath, they shall not perish.
So long as they live, our enemies will fall.
I am defender, protector, guardian.
I am a Paladin.

Yes there are some caveats, soloing is one of them. My lousy dps and extended downtime make solo grinding unbearable. Unless of course I’m doing this:

A few days ago I switched my Paladin from Ret to Prot, as 66 seemed to be the level of choice to do so. Now I’m happily tanking. I’ve noticed that sometimes I have to drop defense gear so that I take enough damage, and in one fight I considered getting my 2h sword out again, just so that the hits would hurt more.

These were 60-62 instances – so is that pretty normal if you’re doing a lower instance. eg. At 70 will I be doing the same in the 68-69 Instances?

As I was writing my response in the comments I figured I’d go ahead and make it a full-fledged post.

Paladins are a unique breed in that our rage bar just happens to be blue. We use our mana to generate threat and provide other utility like our taunt and the occasional hammer-stun. When we tank, we rely on our healers to provide a healthy stream of mana by way of our passive Spiritual Attunement.

For every heal that we successfully receive, SA rewards us with 10% (at level 66) of the healed amount in mana with one very important caveat: if we’re at full health, we get no mana. This can be extremely problematic as in Nathan’s situation where one isn’t actually losing enough health to keep their mana levels up.

I often joke about taking my gear off as we run through 5-man trash as I burn through mana at an extremely fast pace but stay relatively topped off in the health department due to my superior defense. What you will find as you progress through content as a tanking pally is that you will need to acquire (and keep with you at all times) at least 2 (if not more) sets of gear.

The first set is probably closest to what you’ve acquired thus far if you’re new to the prot scene and that is high spell dmg, high int, mp5 gear. These pieces will come in handy when burning through instance trash, and even on some boss battles that favor staying power over damage reduction. If you’re still not taking enough damage, feel free to slip into some caster cloth or pull out the ole’ zweihander.

The second set is what you will be working on for raid content with a focus on tanking stats. Get yourself to 490 defense to become virtually uncrittable and work on 102.4% for uncrushability. With these goals in mind, you will still probably want to hang on to most any tanking piece you come across as different stats will be better suited for different scenarios. Some gear will have have a focus on mitigation (reducing the damage taken) while other items will provide more stamina (allowing you to take more damage) or avoidance (not taking any damage at all). Which stat to build over the other is still a topic of huge debate among players. My preferred solution is to have them all and switch them out as needed.

So to answer your question Andrew, yes, it is entirely normal and you will still be tweaking your equipment on the fly throughout runs at 70 in not only the dungeons but I can only assume well into the raid progression as well. With so many different encounter types, increasing the ability to excel at your role by adjusting your stats through gear is crucial to the success of any player, especially the tank.

Other “raid-spec” classes have it even worse. A resto druid in our guild is rendered useless when tasked with solo questing. I’m sure other healers have it bad too, not to mention the prot warriors. Gear switching can alleviate some of the drudgery but the real issue here is that to succeed in one area of the game (namely raiding/grouping) we have to gimp ourselves in another (solo & pvp).

Blizzard’s current answer to this is the respec system. They allow you to change your character’s talents for a significant amount of gold. Ok fair enough, you don’t want people “abusing” the spec-switch right? Well let’s think about this. What good does it do to require a player to head to a capital city and drop approximately 50g for the chance to “forget” what they’ve specialized in, only to instantly specify a different set of talents and pay to relearn a repertoire of spells that they have most likely known and subsequently forgotten numerous times already? It seems like a lot of work just to shift to another style of play.

It’s really just a money-sink and an annoyance. Ultimately it’s a deterrent to respeccing on a whim. So why do it? The same tanks that are paying outrageous repair bills have an arguably harder time grinding cash to enable them to continue. Our poor healers are required to tag along with others just to finish daily quests.

“Oh, you wanna try out the arena?”

“Too bad, you’re worthless with that talent setup. l2play nub.”

“If you want to experience multiple game-play elements with one character, well there’s a tax.”

My suggestion is this: At the very least, let a character keep all spells that they have already paid once to learn, but make them dormant when they aren’t “talented enough” to use them. Switch back to your regular tanking/healing build and there’s no need to relearn what you already once knew.

There’s always the option of doing away with the respec cost all-together, but I don’t see that happening. Blizzard needs our hard-earned gold to pay all of their NPCs. =P

A third and final option would be to let a character effectively have two specs with the ability to switch between them on the fly (I think EQ2 actually has something like this). The mechanism for switching could be an item or trinket that worked much like a hearthstone with an extended casting time and a significant cooldown. You could have the best of both worlds without the prohibitive recurring cost and annoyance factor. Blizzard could even make said item require a significant time investment to obtain with a chain of quests that require both soloing and grouping and the extensive use of a class’ entire repertoire of skills (think rogue poison quest). Lore-enforcers and RPers could be appeased by making the switch-item a journal or tome of sorts.

I’ve only ran a couple of instances as the frontman.. err frontlady. Mana tombs at level 70 was relatively easy, but Shattered Halls in Hellfire Citadel gave us a decent challenge. We made the huge mistake of attempting the heroic version of SH prior to our regular run… we couldn’t make it past the first pull. A definite reality(gear)-check. We made it through the normal Shattered Halls without too much trouble. Learned a few valuable lessons, laughed, cried, killed and plundered.

The actual tanking play-style requires a high degree of micromanagement. I rarely find myself spamming a single spell over and over *cough*healading*cough* but rather I’m constantly trying to manage my timing, cooldowns, and buff/debuff durations to maximize both my threat and my survivability. The key is being able to not just have a tried and true cycle of skills but being able to adjust them based on the circumstances. In one scenario, i might not be taking enough damage to require consistent healspamming, which ultimately affects my mana pool as I won’t be getting much of a bonus from spiritual attunement, so i’ll bust out my seal/judgement of wisdom. On the other hand, a hardhitting boss or an unfortunately large trash pull will result in seal of light to help ease the job of the healer. There’s also times where i’ll need to throw on my wings or pop a spell-damage trinket to keep up with the threat from a hard-dotting lock or a crithappy boomkin.

So with my newfound role comes a desire to master it. I’ve found the Maintankadin Forum to be an invaluable resource for a newb prot pally such as myself. The other part of the equation of course is gear. Much like a warrior, paladins have to maximize mitigation and staying power through typical stats like defense, dodge, parry and block but there’s also a need to maintain a certain level of spelldamage as that’s where the majority of our threat comes from. This stat juggling turns gearing up a paladin into a fine science.

This science is made infinitely more convenient with addons like Rating Buster and TankPoints as well as awesome theorycrafting tools like warcrafter.net. Warcrafter allows you to import your character from the Armory (or start from scratch with a blank template), and switch out any piece of gear imaginable to see its effect on your overall stats. It also includes the ability to add various enchants and gems and calculates for further fine-tuning. I highly recommend checking it out. I’ve saved my current gear wish-list at http://www.warcrafter.net/sandbox/16972. It’s probably not the most efficient or definitely not the best gear arrangement possible, but it does offer a good mix of what I would consider obtainable items over the next month or so and gets me over 490 defense (uncrittable by bosses) and close to 102.4% total avoidance (uncrushable) with holy shield up.

Time to go tank another instance. =)

In WoW news, Kaelwryn and Aereyan both hit 70 within minutes of each other. These are our first level 70 characters so we are quite stoked to have finally crossed over into the casual-elusive “endgame”. We had both reached 60 in vanilla but it wasn’t long before TBC dropped and set forth another epic 10 levels to grind.

I borrowed a couple hundred gold from a guildmate and went straight to Ilsa Blusterbrew, the Flying Riding Trainer in Shadowmoon Valley while Shelbi got right to work on creating her Frozen Shadoweave Set. I also had some honor saved up from days of yore so after a handful of organized EotS runs (We went undefeated on Shadowburn for almost 20 games, an impressive feat for the Alliance) I splurged on Gladiator’s Salvation. It’s probably not the most effective tankadin weapon but I figured I would find myself in a healing role often enough to justify the selection. I guess we’ll see.

Unfortunately our rep with the Winter Solstice gods wasn’t high enough to avoid being stricken with a respiratory malady for the latter half of our vacation. We have both been coughing up lungs and other assorted organs for the past few days and needless to say it hasn’t been pleasant. Fortunately our children survived relatively unscathed.

As the new year rolls in, we look forward to getting back on schedule with regular updates. Thanks to all of our readers (fellow gamers, bloggers, guildmates, friends and family) out there who make this blog well worth the effort.