I added a Solid Sky Sapphire gem and a Solid Dragon’s Eye gem to it and with the stam bonus, received an extra 137 stam from that trinket alone! Right now, I have 24,544 health. These numbers are based on the rules of 3.0.3.

Health Pool

Since 3.0.8 was [finally] released today, I get a few buffs to my gear. For my tanking helm, I currently have the Tempered Titansteel Helm.

3.0.3 helm stats

In this patch, this helm gets a new blue gem slot AND a meta gem slot. The blue gem will be filled with a Solid Sky Sapphire gem and the meta gem will be filled with a Austere Earthsiege Diamond. These two gems will give me 56 more stamina, for an additional 560 health.

3.0.8 helm stats

Also in 3.0.8 is a new bracer enchant that gives 40 stamina. So now I’m up to 96 more stamina or 960 health.

3.0.8 bracer stam enchant

Yet another change for prot pally tanks is that the prot talent Sacred Duty now gives 8% stamina (up from 6%). I don’t know the exact number that works out to in my current gear but I’m sure it will be enough to give me over 100 extra stamina (or 1,000 extra health).

All of these stamina increases will put me over 25.5k health, unbuffed! Whatever problems I had with my health pool are now over. I feel very good with the amount of health I have for tanking heroics.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.8, enchants, gear, gems, heroics, jewelcrafting, pally, prot, stamina, Tanking, tempered titansteel helm

Naxx

I raided Naxx with my guild on Friday and Saturday nights. On Friday, we did the Arachnid (achievement) and Plague (achievement) quarters. On Saturday, we did the Military (achievement) quarter and attempted the Construct quarter. On the Construct quarter, we downed Patchwerk and attempted Grobbulus a couple of times. We couldn’t get Grobbulus down since over 1/2 of the raid was lagging including our MT (who d/c’d on 2 of the attempts). We called the raid after the last wipe.

I walked out of Naxx with four drops, three of which are holy! The fourth drop was a cloak (that I will link when I am able to log into WoW) that is not any better than my current cloak. The holy pieces were Helm of the Corrupted Mind and two others that I’ll name and link when can log in to WoW.

Tanking

We were going to try and finish Naxx on Sunday night but couldn’t since one of our healers was having internet issues and couldn’t log in. We decided to split up into groups and do some heroics instead. Our MT has been wanting to respec ret and knows that I’ve been wanting to try my hand at tanking so we switched specs. I went with the most popular prot pally build (5/60/6) according to talentchic.com.

We attempted the first boss (Slad’ran) of Heroic Gundrak three times before skipping him in hopes of getting some emblems from two other bosses and then returning to him.

We downed the other bosses in the instance without a problem and went back to Slad’ran. We wiped on him once more before the freshly minted (read: very low dps) lock logged out and into his much better geared mage. After that switch was made, that boss was very trivial. Once attempt, one downing, altar switched and then it was onto the last boss, Gal’darah. The last boss was just as trivial as the others.

I got the achievement for completing Gundrak on Heroic. After reviewing the dps of my group (to myself), I commented that I should get the achievement for tanking my first heroic. Then I looted the boss and saw my achievement waiting: the Horn-Tipped Gauntlets! Those dropping was the icing on the cake for me.

The dps for the group was pretty low considering it was a heroic run. The top dps-er averaged ~1400 dps while the second was 1100ish. The fresh 80 lock averaged just over me, with 900ish dps. I rounded out the bottom with 823 dps (which I feel is extremely low for a WotLK tank).

I had a lot fun tanking that instance, despite the low dps of the group and the many wipes we faced. Tanking is a lot more hectic than dps but I’m ready to tank some more.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: epic, gear, gundrak, heroic, holy, naxx, naxxramas, raiding, ret, tank

This happened to me again last night! I ran two heroics and got some new gear, so the draft post I had needs to be modified, yet again!

This is a filler post basically saying that I plan to recreate my gear wishlist with heroic gear as well as showcase what I’ve gotten and how I have gemmed and enchanted it!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2009. | Permalink
Post tags: attack power, enchants, gear, gems, heroic, Paladin Blogs, ret

I did a little searching online and found a very helpful post over at tankspot.com titled “Uncrittable from crafting and rep only“. Following that guide to fill out the pieces I needed, I got to 535 defense easily.

I was looking up the new titansteel stuff on wowhead.com and noticed that the mats for the Titansteel Shield Wall were relatively cheap. I had that crafted by a guildy and that pushed my defense to 541.

My only issue now is my health. Currently, my health sits at 18,400. I could gain a lot of health by enchanting my gear so that will be my next goal for my prot gear.

The Titansteel Shield Wall was my first WotLK epic.

I was only able to do one instance run as prot since our server seems to be suffering from a major lack of healers, which is why I’ll sadly be dropping my new prot spec (and all my new awesome gear) and eventually going holy.

I’ll go back to ret and try to get into heroic or regular instance groups as dps. When dual specs are implemented, I’ll go ret and holy so that I can solo and still fill out an instance group, when needed.

With the new glyphs on the PTR (patch 3.0.8), healing as holy should get a bit easier. The Glyph of Holy Light will now heal everybody by 10% within 20 yards (up from 5 yards). The new Glyph of Flash of Light now increases the crit chance of the Flash of Light by 5% (changed from “Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its initial effect over 12 sec”).

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.8, dual spec, holy, pally, prot, respec, ret, titansteel, uncrittable

In other news, I’m going to transfer back to Ner’zhul (where I first started 2 years ago) to join a guild so that I can start seeing some raid content. I probably won’t be in the guild’s cutting edge raid group, but I’ll be able to see some 10-mans and a LOT of heroics with my pally. I’ll most likely be able to start them as ret and if need be, respec holy for runs.

The guild I’m in now only has 4 other 80s and the rest are only around level 75ish. I’d like to experience more of the heroics and raids than I did in BC.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: jewelcrafting, transfer

I logged out as a ghost. I logged back in as a ghost and since I didn’t want to spirit rez, I ran around looking for the entrance to the instance. I couldn’t find it but I did see a well with an instance portal down it! So I thought I would be smart and jump in.

Dumb idea! Now I’m stuck in the well and the auto-unstuck isn’t doing anything useful. I can’t hearth because I’m dead. There is no response time on my GM ticket. /sigh…

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: dalaran, stuck, violet hold, well

That was a great idea if I have to say so myself! Last night, I dinged 75 and I still have not finished Borean Tundra. Technically, I’m still in the starting zones!

Leveling was definitely not this easy in the Burning Crusade! I’m sure it’s helped that I’ve done a LOT of the new instances as well. I’ve completed Utgarde Keep four times, three of which I tanked, the Nexus about five times, all as ret and Azjol-Nerub twice, as ret.

Azjol-Nerub is insanely short and very easy. I believe there are only 9 pulls in the whole instance and 3 bosses. I received various gear upgrades for all of my gear sets – dps, tanking and healing.

I’ve been leveling mostly as ret. I did respec for a short time in Howling Fjord so that I could tank Utgarde Keep for the group I was in. I was going to go back to ret immediately after that group but I decided I’d try leveling as prot. It wasn’t bad at all! With Hammer of the Righteous, prot leveling has never been easier. I did go back to ret after gaining 75% of a level as prot, but now that I have Shield of Righteousness, I’m very intrigued and might just go back to prot to level, since I’d be able to tank any instance I wanted to step foot in and tanks are somewhat difficult to find while leveling.

The next zone is Dragonblight. I hope some of the quests turn out to be a little more difficult than the two starting zones.

I’ve got to point out that the amount of healing gear that I’ve accumulated is somewhat maddening! If a quest reward didn’t upgrade my dps or my tanking sets, then I took whatever piece of armor had the most intellect or spellpower, with an emphasis on intellect.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: azjol-nerub, borean tundra, dragonblight, howling fjord, leveling, nexus, prot, ret, tank, utgarde keep, wotlk

So instead of getting back approximatly 900 mana per judement, I’m getting back approximately 400 mana! After reading the forums this morning, I noticed that people are saying that ALL of the proposed nerfs were hotfixed last night yet none of the buffs were implemented!

To be honest, I didn’t mind the nerfs. So what I actually went out of mana once – I’m supposed to! Every other class does. Mana is not infinite in this game. My experience with this nerf is only based on doing dailies and not instances or arena. From what I’ve read, being a paladin in arena now is just about impossible due to going out of mana so quickly. I’ll try out the instancing part next so I can make my own decision.

So far, I’m still using my paladin as my main and the game is still fun. Maybe that will change if I get booted from an instance group as ret.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, arena, hotfix, nerf, pally, patch, ret

The servers were all supposed to be up at 5pm EST yesterday but there were lots of issues from what I’ve read. I had family stuff to do so I didn’t notice any problems until I started trying to log in around 8pm. The servers were up and down last night for about an 80 minutes. They finally stabilized at around 9:20PM. I spent all of the time last night trying to update my add-ons and find replacements for the ones that are no longer supported.

I had to replace Bartender3 with Bartender4 since the former is not being supported any more. I was never able to get a usable bar mod working since I couldn’t figure out how to move the damn toolbars in Bartender4. I got frustrated and just wanted to play and see how OP my ret pally was now.

I finally gave up and went back to the default UI toolbars but I know that was a waste of time since I would never use them. I was able to get onto the WoW forums this morning and see that I wasn’t the only person unable to figure out how to move those bars. Here is how you do it, in case anybody happens upon this post (source):

Type /bt to bring up the options panel. In the upper left corner, check box to lock/unlock.

Now for the pally changes that I did notice. My spellpower is insanely high! In my ret gear, with only AP and Strength being my stats of choice, I have 470 spellpower. I might have one piece of gear with +spellpower on it and it would be very low. The increase in spellpower is a result of the fact that paladin spellpower now scales with stamina. 30% of a paladin’s stamina is converted into spell power.

My small heal, pre-patch, was healing for 400ish. It now heals for 1100ish! One of my small heals crit for over 1600 last night! Then I started testing my big heals. Pre-patch, they were healing for 1900-2000. It now heals for 3k+ and I had one crit for 4600! There is a new talent for ret paladins called Sheath of Light. Rank 3 of this spell’s tooltip reads as

Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 30% of your attack power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 60% of the healed amount over 12 seconds.

Now that I’ll be rolling with improved blessing of might (with talents),  my attack power is now closer to 1500. Basically, this creates a HoT for paladins for heals that crit! This is awesome for healing as a retribution paladin! I could heal instances as ret now! My healing is awesome now, even better than it was as holy.

Pre-patch, I would roll with Sanctity Aura (which adds 10% holy damage). That aura was removed in this patch. Now that it is gone, I’ll be rolling with retribution aura. Pre-patch, retribution aura hit a mob for 26 holy damage whenever they hit me (melee). There is a talent to increase the damage from retribution aura by 50% for 2 talent points called improved retribution aura. Pre-patch, that was laughable and generally not taken (26 * 1.5 = 39, not a big increase). Retribution aura was buffed greatly and now reflects 62 damage. Talented, it reflects 93 holy damage (62 * 1.5 = 93)! That is a huge increase! I put the 2 talent points in improved retribution aura.

I haven’t been able to test it out yet, but from what I’ve read on the forums, consecrate is ticking for a LOT more now. I read that it was ticking for about 200 (my pre-patch consecrate was ticking for about 69)! I can’t wait to test out all of my offensive capabilities soon!!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, addons, bartender3, bartender4, forums, op, pally, patch, ret

I had to respec to prot last night so that I could tank. I also had to get a 1H sword and a shield. The sword (Blade of Retribution) was a quest reward (from Terokkarantula – which I solo’d as ret) and the shield (Outland Shield of the Beast) was the best one on the AH that I could find. I got a nice set of shoulders out of the run, Truth Bearer Shoulderguards.

I have about 175k experience until I ding 68 and then leveling to 70 will get easier…30% easier! Patch 3.0.2 comes out this Tuesday (10/14/08) and the experience required to level from 60-70 will be decreased by 30%. I’d like to be 68 by then, so that I can advantage of the exp decrease at a fresh level.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: instance, prot, tank, terokkar forest, underbog, zangarmarsh