Glory of the Hero & Ulduar Achievements

At long last! My bf surprised me with this when I logged on. I was only missing 20 min Occulus. He's so sweet *sparkles in eyes*

I love that it is red, I can finally put away my green proto drake =)

So far, the new 10 man guild has been doing well though we still need to recruit more people for a more stable roster. Easier said than done, of course.

However, we have cleared 10 man Ulduar (except for Algalon) and done a bunch of hard modes. Our newest Achievement was I Choose You, Steelbreaker and I got the quest item! I can't wait to work towards unlocking Algalon =D

Till next time!

Leaving My 25 man Raiding Guild

I was reading random blog entries about guilds such as giving negative or positive feedback and it made me feel quite off put about my guild. I was relatively happy when I first got invited into guild because it was an actual raiding guild rather than the previous dictatorship ruled guild that I had come from. We downed stuff in Naxx, Malygos and Sartharion with relatively few hiccuups (though some such as failed 25 man 3D) along the way. It is when Ulduar came out that our weaknesses as a guild became glaringly apparent.

Now, I understand that everyone plays this game to have fun.

But.

When you are in a guild that raids, it is important to remember that you are part of a team. Being part of a team means you need to carry your weight. Even if you cannot, the point is to try.

Don't wipe the raid. Don't stand in crap. Stand in stuff. Don't pull aggro, do have enough threat. Don't have connection issues. Don't run OOR of healers. Don't stack up, do stack up. Follow instructions and play your role.

Your reward is the loot that the entire raid earned together. Teamwork, it's a beautiful thing - a symphony of harmony at its apex.

Update: Hiatus Lifting Soon

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, my dear readers =)

I've recently left my 25 man raiding guild to form a 10 man raiding guild. I've always found 10 man raids more fun, more intimate than 25 man raids. My old guild did some things I disagreed with and an incident happened that was the breaking point, basically.

I was a part of a group of raiders that were mostly core raiders and our exodus from the guild basically forced their break up. We were definitely painted as the villains but honestly, if people are unhappy raiding, why should anyone stay?

Anyway, some real posts incoming!

Algalon Quest Event

The top Hordeside guild on my server was able to grab the server first for 10 man Algalon, thereby completing the quest. They announced it in trade that they were going to start the event soon and everyone clustered around the sculpture near the Alliance bank (South).

I liked the event but it seemed people felt gypped as we got a scripted speech from Rhonin, de facto leader of Dalaran. I just thought it was cool how night turned into day from the blazing light arising from the sculpture. The speech also reminded me of the Independence Day speech made by the President, "We will not go quietly in to the night!"

I think even after patch 3.2 comes out, I will always want to kill 10 man Algalon. Heroic Algalon is a near impossibility for me right now =T

Anyway, I hope some of you experience this event. Till next time!

Happy 4th of July!

The Unspoken Rules of DI

Most raiders know of Divine Intervention, the paladin only spell that kills the user and places a bubble of immunity on the target. The target is immune to all damage but cannot move or cast anything until the buff wears off after 3 min or until they click it off themselves.

I actually leveled all the way to level 70 in TBC and as a fresh 70, I was talking to a fellow holy paladin about DI and how useless a spell it seemed to be. I remarked that what was the point of a spell that killed yourself and thought it was a very quirky spell.

I later discovered I was a noob.

My mistake in my first experience using DI was that I had targeted no one and therefore, I only killed myself with no discernible advantage. The whole point of DI is that it is a wipe saving mechanism. With that said, there is actually a whole art to using the spell.

PTR 3.2 - More adventures on the PTR

So I can see that my adventures on the PTR got quite a lot of attention and thank you all for commenting. =)

Now, it was my objective to really put myself in healing intense situations when I next logged on the PTR. It was then I discovered something about the PTR servers. Pugging is damn hard even with a much larger pool of puggers with higher gear level (via premades like mine). It doesn't stop people from dying to stupid stuff like void zones or flame walls. -.- It was one of the most difficult Sartharion 1D fights I ever had to heal through.

As you can see, I got more used to the changes but the entire raid took a crap ton of damage. I also think some of the healers weren't that good as some of them consistently ate flame walls. It seemed some of the puggers had no clue about the new T9 gear that they could buy so some of them were handicapped in comparison to me. (Note: I didn't bother censoring as I usually do because this is the PTR, not like it is live servers. If you were one of these puggers and want me to censor, I will gladly do so)

I'm just glad that I restructured my gear and I was almost full T9 or I wouldn't have been able to support my healing done. In general, I felt that haste was much more important than crit so I balanced my gear appropriately (I wasn't even close to 676 soft haste cap). In my opinion, paladins will have to settle for lower crit so they have more haste, spell power and mp5 as well as continuing to gem for maximum intellect. Mana regen is even more important than ever as spell power is easily gotten from the new gear.

PTR 3.2 - Initial Impression for Holy Paladins

I've never been on the PTR before but with the severe mana regen nerfs incoming to holy paladins, I knew that I wanted to experience for myself how bad the nerfs really were before passing judgement.

I wasn't able to copy over my main in time but a premade paladin character was successfully copied over. The paladin got a lot of sweet gear for all 3 specs for PVE with full sets of T8.5 and complete Deadly gear for PVP, pretty nice hook ups.

I wasn't completely happy with how the holy set for the premade paladin turned out but I got to see the Mimiron 25 trinket, score! With that said, the enchants for all the gear was pretty funny such as PVP res enchants for shoulders/head for PVE gear and really weird enchants for the tank set.

Screenshot Update

I've realized that many of my recent posts are long wordy blocks of text so I thought I would give my readers a bit of a break and post screenshots instead.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, no? I have to say I just have never been in the habit of taking screenshots though I should as they are the best way to document and relive moments past. Screenshots are the photograph of WoW and we should all be photographers =)

I've said before that my guild hasn't been doing so great in 25 mans due to the summer as we can barely get 2 raid days going let alone the 3 raid days that is our aim. Even so, we made significant progression in 10 man Ulduar. Though it may be because of some nerfs that we made headway, it is still a great feeling to progress.

Like an idiot, I didn't ss our Mimiron down but somehow I remembered to ss the cool gate we saw before we reached General. Oops =X

Paladins in the next patch

I know that there may be a little or a lot in store for us holy paladins in the next patch but we will see then how the upcoming changes to holy will really affect us. I just want to point out one little thing.

A new line of dailies and rewards for players who have earned the title of Crusader will be available with two random seal-awarding dailies.

• New Heirlooms
• New Argent Crusade Banner
• New Argent Crusade Tabard: Ports you directly to the Tournament grounds.
• An Upgraded Squire: As any good squire should, this upgraded squire now has a mount.
• New Mount: A new Argent Crusade paladin-only charger will be available.

Muhahaha, did you see it? I'll show you it again.

New Mount: A new Argent Crusade paladin-only charger will be available.

So do your Argent Tournament dailies and save your Champion Seals! I love being a paladin so much sometimes =D

P.S. I just realized something, paladins really did get the pony they wanted, didn't they? =X

Random Macros

There are many ways to heal, tank or DPS and it's up to the individual gamer to decide what kind of style of play they wish to utilize. One tool that helps players out are macros.

For me, I don't use many macros at all and prefer to manually click things or just press keyboard keys/key binds. The few macros I have are based off of basically 2 macro commands. I shall now teach this to you =)

/cast [insert spell name here]

/castsequence [spell 1, spell 2]

So simple, yeah? So for the /cast command, I use that when I want to combine using a spell/ability with a simple /say or /party or /raid or /rw or one or more of the above to announce its usage. If it is a spell that is cast on someone, I use %t in my announcement message so that whoever I am targetting at the time I use the macro will be announced as the target. Then the macro becomes:

/cast [spell]
/say [spell] used on %t


In addition, if you don't want to pick a completely new icon for the macro for your action bar when you first create the macro, just pick the question mark as the icon. This way it automatically makes the macro pick the normal icon of the spell that you use. If you want to mouseover your macro button and see the tool tip, which will help you see the CD too, insert this snippet above the beginning of the macro in the macro input box, like so: