Addons!

I came late to the concept of addons. My first addon - I believe it was MapCoords - was installed when my first character was late 60s. When I made my Paladin, I levelled to 80 simply using that one addon; when I hit 80, I deleted it.

I tanked Naxx clears and other 3.0 raid content for a number of weeks without any addons, then finally installed Deadly Boss Mods. I tanked Naxx clears for several more weeks with just DBM before deciding to completely rebuild my User Interface. A customised UI, depending on just what you want to do with it, can require a large number of addons.

Here is a list of all the addons I have installed:
All Stats
Atlasloot Enhanced
Auctionator
Bartender 4
BlizzMove
Deadly Boss Mods
eCastingBar
Grid
LunarSphere
Message Redirect
MikScrollingBattleText
Omen Threat Meter
PallyPower
Pitbull Unit Frames 3.0
Power Auras Classic
Prat 3.0
Recount
SatrinaBuffFrame
SexyMap
SmartRes
SmoothDurability
Taunt Tattle

The ones in bold are the most important ones.

And, if you're interested, here's what my UI looks like currently:

Click it!

There are some things that it's difficult to get a screenshot of, and some things that simply aren't shown because they weren't relevant at the time I took the screenshot. The most important aspects of my UI are visible though.

Alterac Valley

Alterac Valley was the last battleground I needed marks of honor from to buy myself a PvP mount. Knowing that there is a certain PvE element involved, I stayed in Protection spec for the seven battlegrounds necessary to get the marks required.

For those who don't know, Alterac Valley has the distinction of being the only battleground with a highest bracket of 71-80. What this means is that in addition to fighting level 80 opponents, there are also opponents below level 80 to fight. And, with the addition of XP gains in battlegrounds, there seemed to be a LOT of under-80 characters on both sides.

As a Paladin tank with 35k health self-buffed, fighting against under-80 opponents is not fun. At least not when they're alone. They do minimal damage, and I crit with Judgement for about 1.5k, crit with Hammer of the Righteous for just over 4k, crit with Shield of Righteousness for just over 6k, and mid-70 opponents don't have all that much health.

However, fighting teams of under-80 opponents is ridiculous amounts of fun. While one person stands no chance of killing me before I kill them, a group of three, four or five of them do. And, in the midst of a swarm of mid-70 Horde trying to kill me, there was the occasional surprise of a level 80 opponent as well.

I was hacking and slashing with my axe, slamming with my shield, and throwing out holy judgement in all directions. But I wasn't dying until I ended up against a mid-70 mage, rogue, death knight and an 80 Warlock without a healer present (I had killed this same group earlier when I had a 73 druid healing me).

I am Ironman

I've spent the last few days doing PvP when I haven't been raiding or doing Tournament dailies, generally focusing on the three vanilla battlegrounds to get the necessary emblems for a PvP mount - I had a black war horse on my first character, a 70 Warrior (pre-Wrath) which I PvPed with exclusively, and decided I wanted one on my Paladin too.

I'd been getting close to Ironman for a while, generally managing to capture two flags without dying. My best attempt was two flags without dying, and no opposition from the Horde to speak of (I assume they were busy being graveyard camped by the rest of my team), but a rogue on the Alliance side decided to be a prick and capture the third flag himself. Admittedly I didn't tell him that I was going for Ironman, and he may not have realised I'd already done two of the flags, but still.

If there is one thing I've learnt from my Ironman attempts, it's that holy shit I can take a beating. Between Lay on Hands healing me back to full, Ardent Defender putting me back on 30% health when I should have died, and the 35k health I have self-buffed, there have been times where I have had two DKs and a rogue trying to kill me, and been able to survive with almost no heals from the Horde base to the bottom of the tunnel in the Alliance base.

I just hit autorun, spam cleanse to get rid of as many DoTs as possible, use Hand of Freedom whenever possible and necessary, and watch my health go down gradually, with the occasional spike upwards when I do have somebody heal me.

So I have 27 Warsong Gulch Marks of Honor, and only need three more. I step into Warsong Gulch in Protection spec, and run for the flag. I grab it, I start running down the long tunnel, and get attacked by a rogue. I kill the rogue, carry on running. I get met at the end of the tunnel by a druid healer, and start making my way across the field to the Alliance base. I get attacked nearing our base by two mages, but they die quickly to a gathering group of Alliance. One capture.

I repeat the process twice, each time getting close to dying but not actually dying. I have no idea how many DoTs I cleansed from myself or how much damage I took, but I finally captured that third flag. I am Ironman.

And, by the way, I wrote this entire post while listening to Ironman. It just seemed appropriate.

Argent Tournament

I neglected the Argent Tournament in 3.1 - I did the quests for a few days, then got bored of the same thing over and over again. I wasn't very good at jousting (I am now awesome, obviously) and didn't find it that interesting.

With the addition of the Argent Charger - I WANT WANT WANT this mount - in patch 3.2, I've been doing the Tournament dailies every day. I have five days of Gnomeregan Valiant quests left (including today, haven't logged onto WoW yet) before I'm a Crusader, and should be Exalted with the Silver Covenant sometime in the next couple of days.

I'm still not convinced that these quests are fun, but they aren't as awful as my first impression suggested they were, and they do at least contribute heavily to my income of gold. Plus it will all be worth it when I have myself an Argent Charger.

Yogg-Saron

This week, after some excellent progress in our first night in Ulduar (eight bosses down), we were in a good position to finally see the last two bosses of the instance. We only had Freya left to quickly down on Sunday night, then we were on to General Vezax.

Who went down in three tries. First attempt got him to 34%. Second attempt wasn't quite as good - a cast wasn't interrupted which took out the healer on me, and I died shortly after. At this point, our Paladin healer had realised he could solo heal me without any mana issues, so we downed General Vezax on the third try with one tank, two healers and seven DPS (four of which were melee).

We went on to Yogg-Saron, which was a disaster. We wiped twice in about ten minutes because people couldn't handle not standing in the clouds (what the fuck? It's not difficult to avoid them), then people said we should call it because people were getting unfocused. I have a different word for it, but whatever. We still had two days before the reset, which meant Yogg-Saron was (in my mind) going down this week.

Last night we went back to Ulduar, and had some more attempts on Yogg-Saron. Phase one generally went smoothly, with only the very occasional additional add spawn (which we could handle). The first few attempts on the second phase were ugly, with the group ending up spread out, DPS not knowing what they should be targetting, and people running in the opposite direction when they got brain linked.

We finally made some progress, getting Yogg-Saron to 49% before wiping. I was confident that, with a few more attempts, we could reach phase three. The next attempt was awful, with the melee DPS only getting 300k damage done on the brain in 12 minutes of the 15 minute enrage timer. Healer had to leave, we called it less than two hours after the first pull of the evening.

This is where I got annoyed. People having to go and calling a raid due to a lack of replacements I can understand. However, people seem generally unwilling to dedicate any more time to working on Yogg-Saron this week, which I don't understand and find frustrating. Apparently spending two nights wiping on a boss is enough. What the hell? We've spent less than one full night's worth of raiding wiping on the boss, it was just spread out across two evenings.

The raid content is only going to get harder - if they're unwilling to dedicate more than a few hours a week to learning difficult content, we're going to make incredibly slow progress and there's no point in me being here.

I can sort of understand wanting to do ToC for the emblems and loot, but they've already downed the Northrend Beasts this week, and Lord Jaraxxus won't (shouldn't) take an entire raid session to kill. Two attempts at most, otherwise something is wrong. Will we then go back to Ulduar and spend more time on Yogg-Saron, or just do nothing?

Trial of the Crusader

I've downed the first two bosses from the new 10 man normal raid, Trial of the Crusader. The Northrend Beasts and Lord Jaraxxus, and neither seemed like a particularly difficult fight. We wiped some on both bosses before downing them, but that's to be expected when learning new content.

The only hard part of the Northrend Beasts is the start of the second phase, where both of the Jormungar are alive. There seemed to be some confusion as to how exactly the debuffs worked, especially as different people are affected depending on whether or not they're static or mobile. After a few attempts we managed to sort these issues, and downed the boss (the third phase is awesome amounts of fun, by the way).

We downed Lord Jaraxxus in four tries. The first attempt we had no idea what to expect - for some reason people decided to start the fight without taking a break to look up anything about the fight - and wiped fast. The second attempt went better. The third attempt should have had the boss down; we had one person up when the boss was on about 10-15k health - a Paladin tank (not me). He died when the boss was on 1k. The next attempt Jaraxxus went down, and I bought myself a new Libram (the +200 strength one).

Downfall of the Spellweaver

Malygos went down about a week ago. Finally. It's been the only kill I've needed for the Champion of the Frozen Wastes achievement for quite a few months but I've never been particularly proactive in searching for groups to attempt it. I'd had one or two failed attempts, then the group would fall apart; typical pug mentality.

We put a group together from the guild, pugged a few DPS, and gave it a try. We wiped on the first phase due to a lack of healing, and decided to grab a third healer when one of the DPS quit a few tries later. With three healers we got to the third phase, but didn't manage to down him before the enrage.

A few tries later, I'd finally discovered the secret to DPSing on the drakes. I had always been aware that the rotation was 1... 1... 2 but had never managed to find a speed that didn't leave me out of energy pretty quickly. The secret, I found, was to wait for your Engulf in Flames debuff to tick down to ~5 seconds, then do the rotation again - no energy problems, and eventually a stack that was doing 24k damage a tick (before I died).

I still haven't figured out a way to stay alive on phase three yet (I never seem to get any healing?), but that's ok. I have the achievement and probably won't be doing Malygos again.

Updates upon updates

I just realised I haven't updated for close to three weeks. I've been busy with raiding and other things, and haven't thought about posting about all the stuff I've been doing. I'll be putting up some posts about some of the things I've been doing, as well as going back and finally adding tags (Blogger calls them labels) to my old posts.

More First Impressions of 3.2

The Paladin changes are overall pretty fantastic.

The change to Exorcism has taken away one ranged pick up ability, and some of the damage/threat output, but from the instances I've tanked so far - several heroics and Naxx 10 - it won't be a big issue. I'm surprised at how quickly I've gotten out of the habit of hitting the key for Exorcism (I replaced it on my action bar with Sacred Shield) when trying to grab adds.

The change to Blessing of Sanctuary is fantastic, but also bugged. No longer having to choose between the additional health of Kings and the mana return/damage reduction of Sanctuary is great in 5 or 10 man groups where I'm the only Paladin.

Between the changes to Shield of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance, I think Prot Paladin single target DPS is about the same as it was before - possibly a bit higher, I haven't really looked at numbers. I'll have to look at the damage I get tanking Emalon adds to have more of an idea how much difference it has made.

The removal of the duration on Righteous Fury is fantastic, though I noticed that the mana cost hasn't been removed. I was hoping for a 0 mana, toggleable ability similar to auras. Righteous Fury contributes a large chunk of my buffing mana consumption, which becomes a serious problem when being combat ressed during boss encounters (I have just over 5.5k mana, buffing costs me a large percentage of that).

The Ardent Defender change is fantastic. It saved my ass on the Kel'Thuzad fight when we were finishing off Naxx 10 (I swear I was out of that void zone), and seems like it will help a lot on fights like Mimiron and General Vezax where there's the potential to take a large amount of damage quickly that healers may not be prepared for.

The only new content I've seen so far is the 5 man, Trial of the Champion. I ran it on both heroic and normal (losing a roll on the new tank trinket), and was overall very disappointed with it.

Having to use mounts and joust for the first boss(es) is a neat idea, except that I HATE the jousting on WoW with a passion. It seems clumsy and awkward, but that might just be because I'm no good at it, I don't know.

After that it was just general tank and spank trash, no seemingly great challenge. We wiped once on the first boss (on the jousting part), but after that we only had a couple of deaths from people pulling additional groups before the second boss fight. Maybe I'm just too used to Ulduar at this point, though.

I might see if I can DPS some heroics later today to see what the changes are like from the Retribution point of view, then possibly try out the new battleground. Holy Paladins are, from what I saw in Naxx last night, now insane. I think the Paladin we had (who isn't even geared well enough for Ulduar) could have solo healed a large amount of it.

First Impressions of 3.2

Because everyone else is doing it.

It took me ~35 minutes to download the patch, only to have problems with installation because "WoW.exe couldn't be found." I had the bright idea of moving the downloader file for the patch over to my World of Warcraft folder (where the WoW.exe file is located - makes sense, right?) and running it - only to find I had to download the patch again. ~60% later I finally remembered I'd already downloaded the patch into another folder, cancelled the download and copied the files over. Same error.

The fix? Right-click, "Run as Administrator" on WoW.exe then run the patch install again. Fuck you, Vista.

The patch is now installed and I've spent half an hour trying to log into a server that went up nearly an hour late (thanks Blizzard). I'm getting as far as "Retrieving character list" before finally being disconnected.

At this point I haven't even seen 3.2 in action and I hate it already. Will update when I can actually login.