This Is How I Mog (April, '12 edition)

I played with the idea of making some very specific mog-sets in the past, and have had the luck of getting a few drops that let me finish my sets. These might not look incredibly creative but I like complete sets and I think a good way to set the look of a full-set apart is, as my friend Maara said, to accent it with a couple of off-set items that compliment the themes. It's a very good way to distinguish the uniqueness of your character, I think.

Given that, here are my sets that I'm using now, and will likely use until either I get bored of them (unlikely) or Pandaria (very likely).

ARMOR OF RADIANT GLORY
This to me is the best paladin tanking set in game right now. The white and gray accents are lovely, they match well, the feathered shoulders are delicate but evocative, and with a good tabard, you can hide the hideous plate-belly-shirt. Of course, snagging Holy feet and belt to complete the look is important and you can luckily buy both of them from Valor vendors along with almost all the other pieces. So, if you can win the Shoulders the rest of the set can be purchased with Valor making this an easy 'mog to put together and yet I almost never see people in it.

The accents here are the weapons. The sword is Honor's Call which comes from being Exalted with Honor Hold in Hellfire Penninsula (many thanks to Maara for suggesting the sword.) The shield is the current Season Conquest PvP shield (which I splurged on despite the fact that I don't play Holy-PvP). Here are all the pieces I'm using. Oh, and no helm, no cloak.

Slot	Item
Shoulder	Shoulderguards of Radiant Glory
Chest	Chestguard of Radiant Glory
Tabard	Argent Crusader's Tabard
Hands	Handguards of Radiant Glory
Belt	Dragonfracture Belt
Pants	Legguards of Radiant Glory
Boots	Pillarfoot Greaves
Sword	Honor's Call
Shield	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Redoubt

ARMOR OF VINDICATION

If the objective of PvP armor is to make you feel like a bad-ass while giving your class as aggressive a look a look without descending into farce and brutality, then this set manages the look hands down. Even the helm is awesome! However, the belt is a bit under-whelming so I'm using an off-set belt which matches it quite nicely. Also, I don't have the feet quite yet as I can't splurge on Transmog gear just yet, but I will have the matching feet by the time the set is finished.

However - the sword is what takes this set over the top. Ashkandi has always looked good but it seems to just match this set in a way I can't describe - the colors accent well, the scale and size of it just brilliantly reflects the kind of sheer power and burst Paladins can bring to bear, while being majestic and graceful - it never seems brutal. If it could reflect a subtle, smoking enchantment of some sort, it could be perfect. No cloak, no helm. Pure awesome.

Slot	Item
Shoulder	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Scaled Shoulders
Chest	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Scaled Chestpiece
Hands	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Scaled Gauntlets
Belt	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Girdle of Prowess
Pants	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Scaled Legguards
Boots	Cataclysmic Gladiator's Greaves of Alacrity (Shown: Cataclysmic Gladiator's Warboots of Cruelty)
Sword	Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood

Long Time No See!

It's been a while since I wrote!

There are a couple of themes that are going around the blogs that I read lately that I'd love to respond to  but I don't really know how to. Either I'm not affected by them as strongly as the writers, or I feel like what I have to say is so private that I'd either e-mail the person directly or maybe just silent because I don't know the person well enough.

It's an odd time. Raids are quietly falling silent, people don't log in anymore, guilds are falling out of the game, or scaling back their commitments and I kind of see myself doing the same to some degree, but I still enjoy the game. I'm excited about arenas and pushing my team ranking up. I'm excited for whenever we start doing Heroic raids. I'm excited to farm Madness for more loots as we have a fairly repeatable and reliable strategy for killing him now.

I am absolutely loving being a paladin tank lately. We are the most imbalanced and over powered tank class in the game right now and I love it!

And yet, the game seems distant lately. I don't exactly know why. Some of it is the content being old, some of it is the anticipation I have for MoP, I'd rather play MoP than drag my heels in Cataclysm any longer, honestly, and part of it is wondering if I'm missing something when I read about other people dropping the raiding game or the game completely in some cases.

Why do I keep playing, then? People are leaving, apparently in droves based on forum posts and such, for Star Wars, and while I have some dim interest in the game, it's not enough for me to keep up two subscriptions at the same time. I might wind up playing it to fill in time anyway, but I'm not excited about it.

I tried RIFT and was burned by barely playing the game until I canceled it three months in. LOTRO was the only other game I played consistently but it has changed a lot, and for the worse I think, since it went F2P and the audience it has picked up since then. I miss the quiet, mature audience it had before then even if the game was far more populated after the transition. I don't know how it is now, I haven't played it in a long time. Besides, there was no end-game there to speak of.

Anyway. I keep playing WoW because my friends are playing, because I'm enjoying the game, the raiding is great, the PvP is fun, but I guess I just wish I had something to do with my alts other than the same things I'm doing with my main. I don't know. Maybe I'm just... not burned out, exactly, but bored?  I'm done with the leveling game. I love raiding, I love Arena, but the rest of the time I have to convince myself to log in.

MoP can't get here fast enough, or I'm going to have to play SW just to stay amused. Any SW guilds recruiting? :-P

New Season Shenanigans

I swapped back to Innana to PvP with for this season and it is a massive culture shock.

Warlock PvP is all about control, very strict oversight of the field, making sure at least one of the opponents is being juggled and dotting everything up. While being focused so you're continuously self-healing and kiting as much as you can.

Palading PvP especially in 2's with a Rogue melee-cleave is all about burst. The longest fight we had was maybe 45 seconds last night. The number of stuns and interrupts the rogue has, plus my interrupt and stun, and the amount of burst I can dump within the first 20 or 30 seconds of a fight is just absolutely crushing at very low levels. I'm sure it'll even out very quickly as we get another week or two of gear in, but still, it was very shocking to go from such a nuanced play-style to essentially a burst-fest with occasional Stun/Hammer/Repentance/Blind chains on the healer.

Cleared an 8/0 win streak in less than an hour.

I do still want to PvP on my warlock, but I'll probably do more Battlegrounds and maybe see if I can sneak into a 3's team. Like a dummy I completely failed to realize I could have been gathering Conquest last week so I'm short, essentially, an item. Ah, well. It'll even out in the long run.

I also managed to find someone last week in Trade who had the tanking wrists pattern and had them crafted, and my Warlock bought the boots for Innana, while she picked up the Relic and Cloak as I can't get either of those upgrades from the raid. With the tier legs and shoulders I picked up two weeks ago, my gear is looking pretty good and I'm seriously starting to get into a situation where my gems are starting to slowly shift into the blue spectrum.

I'm considering actually re-gemming for full-out mastery just so I can swap out one of my mastery trinkets for a stamina trinket, but I kind of like having a sort-of DPS trinket on hand to get a bit of extra damage in (and a minute bit of parry as well) on demand. I don't know.

I'm excited for a 3-day raid week. I want a new title already, damn-it.

Changing How I PvP (Warlock Edition)

I threw in the towel.

After two seasons of beating my head against the 1600/1700 rating matches in 2s where I kept meeting up against counter teams, and a 1500 rating wall in 3s where the total lack of sustained offense and nearly complete lack of closers and control blocked me again, I realized Retribution Paladins are just not good in Arenas in the hands of a mediocre player like me.

I do see some Retribution paladins in the top 50/100 rated teams in my Battlegroup, so I'm sure that those guys are taking the class and making it work for them, but for me, I can't seem to able to convert the abilities I have into meaningful kills, and my support is piddling at best, with how quickly I run out of Mana if I try to go that route in 3s.

Retribution Paladins in PvP are designed so defensively that expecting them to work on burst seems to cause a deal of cognitive dissonance. So I sighed, and threw in the towel and gave up all hope of being able to Arenas successfully on my Paladin (I do fantastic in BGs) until such a time as I can get a good and firm understanding of my Holy spec and try Arenas in that venue. With so many instant heals, defensive abilities and support spell, they should be good - I just need a ton more practice in a million BGs first as Holy first. With no Holy gear right now, I'm just going to wait till next season to start gathering it as this late into this season, I'll finish gearing up just as the new stuff is released.

For the time being, I've come to realize how much fun I can have playing my Warlock in PvP.

The two classes are almost completely different in terms of how they play - Retribution Paladin is about lining up cool-downs and abilities to set up a burst kill while catching your enemy in a window with no defensive cool-downs. It's all about the setup.

Affliction Warlocks are all about control of the situation - full-fears, multi-target DoTing, a reliable ranged spell-lock on healers, and super-quick interrupts, escapes and absolutely amazing self-healing.

I've been doing 2s with a rogue, and the two of us are having a blast - we're scratching at about 1500 after a month of matches. We only do a set of 8 wins per week and our win ratio is hovering around the 65% mark which makes me happy. There are teams that are absolutely counters for us - Blood DKs are horrifically broken right now and we have a hard time against them, Warriors with healers can give us a hard time, but overall, we're able to hold our own against most teams.

A personal joy is how I face off against Mages now. On Innana, I used to groan whenever I saw a mage. Now, I just scoff, banish their Elemental, DoT up the Mage, Howl his pets, and Drain Life the hell out of him while big crit numbers pop over his head while they blink here and there fruitlessly, especially if there is no healer and I can sic my puppy on them for locks.

In general, though, if I can get about 5 seconds of free-casting, the amount of damage output Warlocks cash push against an entire team of 2s and even 3s is horrifically frightening. Health Stones, Healing Trinkets, Haunts, and Drain Life (not to mention latent healing returned from DoTs and Fel Armor) all add up to the point where sometimes I out-heal healers. We've even managed to win matches after ten minutes where we were both able to stay alive for extended periods against a healer/DPS comp until we finally converted a kill.

With a pair of Firelands daggers (one of them Heroic), my Rogue buddy is able to gank like nobody's business. I'm looking forward to doing Arenas with her next season when she'll have the legendary daggers.

Anyway. The comp is doing well for us, and I have come to realize that while there is a pang of regret that I'm having to move off my main to do something I enjoy (PvP), the fact that I'm having a ton more fun while doing it on my alt makes up for it.

It might even work for me to keep Merricat as my PvP alt permanently, and Innana as my main in all other ways. It lets me play her on a high-level without having a conflict with my raid group and I do dearly love my Warlock.

For once: Win/Win.

A Summer Of PvP

Man, is it me, or is the blogosphere quiet lately? Most of the blog I read are, anyway. I probably need more blogs to read. I suppose I'm part of the silence lately as well.

Anyway. 4.2 has been out for two weeks now, and I've been enjoying the game quite a bit lately - the dailies and progression along the Molten Front is actually fairly engaging, and I really love the achievements you can get out there. My favorite one so far has been King of the Spider Hill. I died way up high on my first attempt and had to take a spirit rez for the first time in who knows how long.

Last week was also the first time a few guildies and friends pulled together a ten-man and ran a couple of Rated Battlegrounds, and we actually won our third match against a guild from our server. It was fairly hectic but a lot of fun, and my 2v2 partner and I also moved up to a 3v3 team and went 50/50 in our first week with what is, I think, a sub-optimal composition (Retribution/Holy Paladin/Shadow Priest) but I think we'll get better as the season goes on.

We're still getting used to having a third person in our team and figuring out how to incorporate her - I'm thinking Shadow Priests might be in the same role as Affliction warlocks, which is more of a pressure-and-control role and I'm finding that I can bring a lot of burst forward when I put my mind to it. Thanks to our mid-range MMV from last season, we were up against some fairly decent teams, and we saw one very good team three times, winning 1 and loosing 2 against them. They were kind of like our twin - two paladins and a warlock.

I'm finding 3's to be more interesting and dynamic in terms of what's actually going on - there's less of chasing a healer over half of creation just to get them to OOM and more about setting up kills with your team which is far more engaging, and crowd-control is a vital, vital tool and I often have to decide whether I want to eat a CC or break out of it. I also really need to get better at my Repentance usage and being better at off-heals.

After about 15 matches, I think our strength, as it was in 2s, is against any kind of cleave team - we have so much off-healing and survival, that if we play defensively and survive whatever burst they throw at us in the first 30 seconds of a match, we have the game.

Tonight we're going to try a few more rated BGs and see how it goes - hopefully we have enough people and are able to post a guild team. Whenever I start to feel the game getting a bit dull (not that it is, what with all the trash to farm, new bosses to kill, dailies to unlock...), PvP is always there to make things interesting again.

Blogger Boggle & 20 Days Of... (Day 4)

Looks like the Blogger back-end took a crap yesterday and Google had to roll-back all the posts to Wednesday morning, which ate my last entry. I'm sure they'll restore it at some point, but it also ate one of my drafts which I was planning to post today...

This might be the first thing that makes me consider either self hosting or moving to Wordpress. But for now I'll stick with Blogger as I generally enjoy the Google tools quite a bit, and am a huge fan of GMail and Google Documents in particula

Anyway. Next week I'll start posting a few raid-guides I've been working on. For today, let's go continue along with the 20 Days Of... which I haven't updated since March. Oops.

DAY 4: Your Best WoW Memory

Quickly Catching Up & Recruitment

The reason for the lack of posts lately is a minor bout of surgery I had a couple of weeks ago and now I've run out of archived entries to post. I'm in a bit of discomfort, and it's making it hard for me to do much more than sleep, veg in front of the television or WoW, and a day at work is enough to wipe me out. I'm hoping to be back to a regular posting schedule soon, as there's a lot to talk about.

We finished up Cho'gall last week and are going to start hitting Al'Akir this week. 4.1 is coming out, and I am really excited to pick up the Amani War Bear (mount number 97!). I have finally gotten my warlock all ready for raiding and am enjoying the crap out of her. I'm terrified of starting our pulls on Nefarian (hopefully) next week.

On the PvP side of things, my Paladin's 2's Arena team cracked a thousand rating after 2 weeks of matches, and I think I might have a 3's team going soon. A friend is almost done leveling her Shadow Priest and I'll be doing 2's on my Warlock with her. We're even talking about recruiting for a Rated Battleground team.

Speaking of recruitment, we're about to loose two long-term members to real-life attrition and I've been trying to recruit like crazy to no avail. If you have any characters Alliance side on Moon Guard and are looking to raid, please contact me here or in game (on Innana or Merricat) or you can apply directly through our website. We're ideally looking for a (non-druid) healer and a DPS but we're flexible and we'll make room for the right people.

Pee Vee Pee

Back in Season 8 I stepped into Arena for the first time as a Retribution Paladin, with a Restoration Shaman partner who taught me the ins and outs of PvP. She had done Arenas before and in short order had me writing macros for cleanses, casting hands, Focus-crowd control, and especially, focus bursting healers and OOMing them.

It was a lot of fun and we got up to 1500 rating before she left the game and I didn't find another partner before the season ended.

So, Cataclysm comes out, and I keep poking guildies if anyone wanted to Arena with me but nobody really wanted to outside of one or two matches here or there and I was kicking sand with my hands jammed in my pockets, pouting about missing the fun.

Now, recently, my guild leader, Thistle, had swapped her mains from a holy priest to a hunter for raiding and was missing the priest somewhat fierce. I gently suggested Arenas and she cautiously accepted.