My WoW History

Since we are coming up to the five year anniversary of WoW, I decided to recap my own history in the game.

I entered the World of Warcraft about a month after its release. My first character was a dwarf paladin named Thorwald. I was attracted to the idea of a holy warrior that was wearing heavy armor, a two-handed weapon, and used a combination of magic and brute force to kill monsters. Thorwald was deleted when he reached mid-30s, since I got bored with the combat system (buff yourself, autoattack, and watch mobs die at random speed). I then tried out an undead rogue for 35ish levels, and then a human mage. That mage eventually became my second character to reach 70, and is now, at level 71, working as my bank character / enchanter.

I have played every class in the game to at least level 55. The only classes that never made it to 70 were warrior, druid, and priest.

I didn't start raiding until I was 70. My first raid instance ever was Karazhan, and my first raiding character was a holy paladin named Isolde. Isolde had been around for a long time by then. After deleting my dwarf paladin, I realized that I still wanted one of those holy warriors, so I created a human paladin and levelled her as a holy/ret hybrid. She was my first character to reach both 60 and 70. These days she is stuck at 71, still dressed in her BT/MH epics, sitting at the inn in Valiance Keep.

I raided SSC, TK, MH, and BT on my holy paladin until I got bored with the paladin healing style. I then switched my main raiding character to my elemental shaman and spent some time spamming lightning bolts at stuff in raids.

At this time, I felt the guild needed another tank, and thus Arnax was born. I levelled him as protection from day 1. I still remember the mid-30s when I finally got Reckoning, which made AoE grinding alot faster. "Need to kill X boars? Sure, just round them up and hack away!". Switching between Seal of light and Seal of wisdom to keep them bars topped off while being attacked by a plethora of mobs was fun.

I tanked my way through all the TBC raids up until Council in BT when The Patch was released, which made it easier for everyone to finish off those pesky final bosses. Thus I never tanked Illidan before 3.0, and I always brought my shaman to Archimonde for an extra tremor totem until 3.0 hit us.

Arnax is now my main, and is the character I bring to progression raids. I have a rogue alt who I bring to our second raid group (Ulduar and Coliseum) and a death knight alt who I help out in Naxx with. My shaman has raided Naxx and Ulduar, but is now in the ice box.

I have deleted all my other alts, mostly to remove the temptation to level them as well. But I have found that the experience of having played almost all of the classes up to 70 has served me well. I know what to expect from other classes, and I know their strengths and weaknesses. Actually, the only specs I have absolutely no clue about are balance druids and shadow priests.

The only class that I have stuck by with through all these years is the paladin. My current main paladin was not my first, but my third paladin created. It just took some time for me to figure out which spec I enjoyed the most (I play a horde retribution paladin as well).

It's been a fun five years. The last three years my wife has played the game as well, which has made it even more fun. The time I have spent with the guild Guardians of Destiny has been great, and I thank them for letting me raid with them, and letting me switch roles from healer to dps to tank in our progression raids.

With Icecrown Citadel at the horizon, and Cataclysm later on, the future of WoW looks promising. I hope to enjoy it as long as it lasts.

Twin Val'kyr

The fourth boss encounter in Trial of the Crusader is the Twin Val'kyr (a.k.a. The Twin Loot Piñatas). Even though the strategy for this fight seems very complicated, the execution is simple, and the encounter itself turned out to be the easiest so far.

Is it just me, or isn't a raid instance tuned badly when every new encounter is one- or two-shotted? Aren't we supposed to be wiping for hours to learn a new boss and than feel the rush of adrenaline and satisfaction when it's downed? Coliseum is nowhere near that. People can slack on learning tactics, slack on execution, do stupid mistakes, and we STILL down the bosses.

The Faction Champions were tough the first week, until people managed to change their mindset from PvE to PvP. This week it was a two-shot, and on the second attempt we barely had any deaths at all.

Anyway, let's return the focus to the Twin Val'kyr. As I mentioned above, the tactics seem a lot more complicated than they are.

There are two mobs: Edyis Darkbane and Fjola Lightbane. They share a health pool, so it doesn't really matter how you split your dps, but to split it about half on each is best, due to the nature of the encounter.

There are four portals in the room, two black and two white. When you click on them, you get a black or white buff. When you have the white buff, you take less "white" damage, and you do more damage to the black val'kyr. When you have the black buff, you take less "black" damage, and you do more damage to the white val'kyr. Split the raid, so that half gets the white buff and the other half gets the black buff. Target the corresponding mob and start the fight.

(Note: Darkbane is doing shadow damage, while Lightbane is doing fire damage. Fire resistance aura and Shadow protection are good buffs.)

Things to look out for:

• Black and white orbs spawn in the room. People having the white buff will get an extra stacking damage buff if they absorb a white orb, and take some minor damage if they absorb a black orb, and vice versa. If the orbs reach the boss, they will also get the stacking damage buff, so that should be avoided if possible.
• Light/Dark Vortex is a nasty AoE damage ability that does significant "white"/"black" damage to the entire raid if people are not having the right buff up. To avoid damage, everybody must make sure to have the right buff (i.e. the white buff if it is a Light Vortex). The spell has an 8 second cast time, so you have plenty of time to get to the nearest portal and get the correct buff in time.
• Twin's Pact is a powerful heal that needs to be interrupted. The val'kyr that is casting this heal is shielded by a 250k shield. The cast time for the heal is 15 seconds, so that's how much time you have to burn through the shield and interrupt the heal. To be able to burn trough the shield in time, everybody has to switch buff to the opposite of the target (i.e. switch to the white buff forEdyis Darkbane). After the heal is interrupted, everybody should return to their assigned buff and target.

A random Vortex or Twin's Pact spell is cast every 45 seconds and is announced well in advance.

We tanked the two val'kyrs close to eachother between two portals. That way the melee didn't have to move so much when switching targets during Twin's Pacts and everybody was in range of healers at all times. Everybody is also close enough to both types of portals so that they quickly can switch buff before a Light or Dark Vortex.

As a tank, this fight is a faceroll. Get the right buff, and your threat will be insane if you get some stacks of the damage buff (by absorbing orbs). Switch to the safe buff before a Vortex, and then switch back to the assigned one as soon as possible afterwards. Damage is negligible. The val'kyrs have special attacks that are supposed to hurt the tank, but I didn't even notice them.

We wiped once due to the raid leader announcing the wrong thing to do before a vortex, which caused confusion and resulted in half the raid dying. The second attempt was a clean kill without any deaths.

It will be very interesting to see how Blizzard tunes the heroic version of this raid instance. The normal mode is just too easy.

Faction Champions

Did you enjoy the Priestess Delrissa encounter in Magister's Terrace? Then you will absolutely love Faction Champions in the Coliseum.

The encounter is set up as a PvP-like fight against ten random mobs, all having about the same abilities as you might be used to facing in PvP.

There is not much tactics to talk about in this fight. It's more about fast reactions and controlling the mobs as much as possible. Crowd control can be used for some time, but the diminishing returns are ridiculous and the mobs will be immune quite fast (of course their crowd controls have no diminishing returns at all....). Basic advice is to control the melee, interrupt the casters, cleanse/dispel/purge, and burn down the healers as fast as possible.

This is by far the hardest fight so far in the Coliseum. We actually spent an hour wiping before we got the hang of the fight. Our kill order was holy priest, shammy, resto druid, mage, shadow priest, warrior, hunter, death knight, ret paladin, and rogue. We had a death knight kiting the rogue the entire fight, which helped a lot. Our druids were entangling the melee as much as possible, our priests were dispelling shields, our interrupters were interrupting heals, our hunters slowed mobs with traps and killed off totems as soon as possible, and so on. Everybody in the raid has an important task, and it was most likely not the task they usually perform in a raid encounter.

As a tank, I initially felt like a fish out of water. I tried the first couple of attempts as retribution, but realized I did little use actually dpsing. I spent most of my time cleansing and stunning. So I respecced back to protection and figured out my role in the fight:

• Cleanse. There are massive debuffs being thrown around in this fight. Cleansing all kinds of crowd control on my fellow raid members and the worst of the DoTs is very important for survival.
• Interrupt/stun/silence. With a 40 second cooldown on my Hammer of Justice, I couldn't interrupt as well as other classes, but the stun effect (until immune) was very useful. The silence effect on Avenger's Shield also turned out to be very useful.
• Blessing of Protection. Clothies love me.
  
• Taunt. Even though there is no "real" aggro table, it is possible to taunt the melee classes. This saved our clothies more than once. When I saw one of the melee go for the healers or casters, I taunted the mob and got his attention for a few seconds, thus saving the cloth-wearing target from certain death.
  

I performed all of these tasks better as protection. I could keep my mana up longer with Divine Plea plus autottack on random target, I could survive a melee class hitting on me after a taunt. I had a shorter duration on my HoJ. I had my frisbee. And I had twice as much health.

The PvPers in the raid loved the encounter. Some of the non-PvPers were complaining a bit about Blizzard putting a PvP fight in a PvE raid. It was noticable that it took some time for people to get used to the fight. It is not a fight you can plan in advance and execute according to that plan. This fight requires fast reactions, ability to improvise and adapt, and for each player to know how to best use his class in a PvP-like encounter.

After the kill we went to Ulduar, where Flame Leviathan finally, after 17 kills, dropped Titanguard for the first time.

Patch 3.2.2 Changes

Yet again, I'm getting the news late. Taking the weekend off made me miss the announced changes in patch 3.2.2. Anyway, here they are:

• Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%. [Straight-forward nerf to tankadin threat. Maybe we should have seen this coming, with the recent buffs and all. Even though I don't enjoy being forced to pump out less threat, I think this is a good change in the long run. Blizzard has had problems with scaling tankadin dps since our threat modifier was so big. I'd prefer to get threat from pure dps than from a modifier that won't help me actually kill stuff.]

• Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds. [PvE nerf due to PvP. Ever heard that one before? Apparently, a stun on a 20 second cooldown was too good to be true in PvP, even though it was barely useful as an interrupt in PvE. For me, this is the final nail in the coffin for Hammer of Justice as a tankadin ability. I didn't put points into the Improved Hammer of Justice talent since I believed the cooldown was still too long, and now Blizzard has made it even worse. Just face it: They don't want us to be able to interrupt.]

• Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina. [Another PvP nerf. Protection specced healing paladins decked out in spell power plate in Arena was the latest Flavor of the Month, and Blizzard decided to crush that spec hard and fast. With the nerf to Judgement of the Just AND Touched by the Light, that spec is now dead. For the normal tankadin, it is a small threat nerf, since we still have more than twice as much stamina than strength. But the change still makes sense. Stamina shouldn't be a threat stat, and Strength now got even better as a threat stat. In the long run, I think this also is a good change.]

• Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack. [Seal of Cleave! Yes, sounds good! Since Seal of Vengeance sucks rhino balls on trash, this will make up for it. However, Seal switching is quite expensive these days. Having to switch seals between trash, bosses, and AoE packs will drain one's mana. Just imagine the Onyxia fight, when switching between the Broodmother and her whelps. That would require a seal switch every time.]

Patch 3.2.2 is already up on the PTR, so adjustments to these changes will surely pop up during the coming weeks. Even though the changes so far are nerfs to tankadins, I don't cry myself to sleep at night.

Lord Jaraxxus

Lord Jaraxxus is the second boss in Trial of the Crusader. We found him to be easier than the first, three-phased boss encounter; Northrend Beasts.

There is a lot of damage going around in the raid, especially if the raid members don't move out of the fires, if the adds are not killed fast, and the boss's abilities are not interrupted, dispelled, or spell stolen. But seriously, all those tricks are Raiding 101 anyways.

We used two tanks: one tanking Jaraxxus in the center of the room, and one (yours truly) taking care of the adds that spawned.

• The raid should be spread out in a circle around him, since he casts a chain lightning-like spell called Fel lightning which will chain to up to five targets.
• Spreading out also helps against the Legion flames, a debuff that makes the target burn and leave a trail of flames behind when moving. If you move, make sure to move straight away from the boss, so that as few people as possible are affected by the fire trail.
• Incinerate Flesh is another thing to look out for. Its target will have to be healed for 70,000 within 15 seconds, or he will explode.
• Jaraxxus casts a Fel fireball on the tank, which needs to be interrupted since it deals a silly amount of damage. Make sure to have assigned interrupters!
• Nether Power is a buff that Jaraxxus gains which increases spell damage dealt by 20%. This buff should of course be spell stolen by mages, since it stacks up to 10 times. If you have no mages around, make your priests dispel it at least.
  

The add tanks job is to pick up the adds that spawns. There are two different types of adds:

• The Mistress of Pain spawns from a portal and should be nuked down as fast as possible by ALL dps, except those on interrupt duty. The Mistress hits quite hard and will also attack a random target with Spinning Pain Spike that deals 10-15k damage.
• Infernals spawns from volcanos. A volcano spawns 3-4 infernals at the same time, so the adds tank needs to be quick and mobile to pick them up. They do nasty AoE damage and needs to be tanked away from the raid. It's not very easy to make them move with you, since they randomly target other players before returning to the tank. All ranged dps need to burn down these adds as soon as possible to avoid unecessary raid damage.

As the adds tank, I had my work cut out for me. It was alot of running, taunting, frisbee-throwing, stunning, and then some more taunting. I did miss instant Exorcism in this fight!

Our first try on this boss was a wipe since we lost too many melee to fires (standing in fire = bad). The second attempt went so well that our raid leader (who was relaxing while tanking Jaraxxus) yelled out that we should do an achievement by keeping two Mistresses of Pain up when the boss died. This of course meant more work for the poor adds tank, who now needed to tank two demons as well as three infernals at the same time. But I'm a paladin, and we all know paladins rock, right?

Overall, it's an easy fight, as long as your raid knows how to interrupt, position, dispel, and heal. Having an imba adds tanks helps too :)

Northrend Beasts (and a bugged XT)

The first fight in the new raid instance is a three phase fight, where you encounter three different beasts.

First off is Gormok the Impaler. He's your ordinary neighbourhood magnataur. And he impales people. But overall, he's not a scary guy. There are basically three things to look out for:

• Staggering Stomp does some AoE damage, so make sure to have ranged people at max range.
• Impale puts a nasty bleed debuff on the tank. It stacks, so at 3 or so stacks, you should switch tanks until the debuff falls off.
• Snobold Vassal is some annoying mob that sit on people's shoulders and stops them from doing anything useful. They need to be killed immediately.

As soon as Gormok goes down, the next phase starts and two big worms enter the arena: Acidmaw and Dreadscale. Acidmaw is greenish and has poison attacks, and Dreadscale is redish and has fire attacks. One of the worms are stationary while the other roams around. Every now and then, they switch places, so that the roaming one is stationary while the other starts moving.
There are two things to look out for:

• They both do a frontal cone attack (fire or poison) so the tank needs to tank them facing away from the raid.
• Acidmaw applies a Paralytic Toxin which makes the target immobile after some time. Only way to get rid of this is to get close to someone who has the fire debuff from the other worm.
  

I was tanking Acidmaw. When he was stationary, it's just full nukage since we wanted to kill him off first (due to the Paralytic Toxin, which we wouldn't be able to get rid of if we killed the other worm first). When he was moving, I kited him around the room, since he leaves behind a Grobbulus-like poison cloud.

Whenever I got the Paralytic Toxin, the two tanks moved closer to eachother, so that the toxin would be neutralized by the fire debuff from the other tank. If I had my bubble off cooldown, I just used that to get rid of the toxin. I love being a paladin :)

And remember that the worms do an aggro reset when they switch. We had some dpsers who learned that the hard way...

When the two worms bite the dust, the third and final phase starts as Icehowl enters the arena. He is a big, hairy, and angry wendigo. There are a couple of things to look out for:

• Ferocious Butt is a hard hit which also stuns for 3 seconds.
• Arctic Breath is a frontal cone attack that freezes the targets and deals damage over time.
• Whirl is an AoE attack with a knockback effect.
• Massive Crash is where the fun starts. He jumps into the air, lands in the middle of the room and, knocks everybody back and stuns them. Then he glares at a raid member and then charges him. The target needs to move out FAST. If Icehowl misses his target he crashes into the wall and is stunned for some time. However, if Icehowl hits his target, that person dies and Icehowl gains the effect next on the list:
  
• Frothing Rage is a damage and attack speed increase of 50%.

We had some trouble with people not moving out of his way when he charged them, which lead to an even angrier wendigo which then slaughtered the poor tank.

Other than that, this fight is not hard. I tanked him with my back against a wall so that his frontal cone attack and knockbacks had little effect. Since there is an early warning on who he will charge, there should be no problem in moving out. Blizzard has even given the target a temporary movement speed buff which makes it even easier.

Northrend Beasts is an easy encounter, at least on 25 man normal mode.

The loot gods where good to me, and I got myself the Chestplate of the Towering Monstrosity and a Tier 9 token (Trophy of the Crusade). Now I just have to figure out how to use it...

When we were finished at the Coliseum, we went to Ulduar, where we got a nasty surprise.

XT is bugged to oblivion. There are MILLIONS of adds coming, and light bombs and gravity bombs being applied even during the Tantrums. A fight that usually takes about three minutes took us close to nine minutes. Since there were so many adds, the dps on XT himself was low, and I noticed on Omen that I had a 60% threat lead on the closest dps. This fight needs to be hotfixed ASAP.

We cleared all the way to Freya before calling it a night.

New specs for 3.2

Patch 3.2 brings some minor changes to my specs (I'm dual-speccing prot/ret).

Let's start with my primary spec:

Protection

The most important change here is that I want two points in Vindication. To be able to get that, I need to steal two points from Conviction. There are no real alternatives here, since Crusade is more threat than Conviction, and I just cannot give up Pursuit of Justice.

The other change is a minor one. I decided to give up on Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. Divine Sacrifice has been nerfed since I picked it (it's capping at 150% of the paladin's health), and with the changes to Sacred Shield (only one shield per player) I find the improved duration of Sacred Shield in the Divine Guardian talent to be less useful. I usually kept Sacred Shield up on myself, and then the improved duration (and absorption) was useful. Now, since I can only have one Sacred Shield up, I will let the holy paladin handle this.

The three points from Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian were tough to find a new home to.
The alternatives were Divinity, Improved Hammer of Justice, and Reckoning.
I don't see Divinity as useful, since 3% extra healing won't change a thing. It will only give more overhealing done on me.
Improved Hammer of Justice was tempting, but the cooldown would still be too long to be really useful.
So the three points went into Reckoning for some extra threat.


My secondary spec is dps:

Retribution

In my earlier retribution spec I had Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian for some raid utility. These two talents I have now scrapped, since I needed five points in Holy.

Seals of the Pure is now mandatory in the Holy tree.
The new Vindication talent is sexy enough to warrant two points.

I also picked up Seal of Command again. I've been running as ret without Seal of Command for a while, since I only ever used Seal of the Martyr. I believe we will have some use for Seal of Command in fights where there is no time to ramp up the stacks of Holy Vengeance on the mobs to make Seal of Vengeance do enough damage. It will also be a better alternative in PvP.

That left four points without a home. I dumped them in Divinity, with the justification that it could be useful to get some extra heals from an Art of War proc Flash of Light.

I'm leaving my glyphs as they were before the patch. I'm going to revisit them later, when I've got the time. For now, the old ones have to do :)