Update your blogroll

In the last week, me and a fellow guild member have launched a project togheter. We both blog he about tanking, me about retribution. And a great deal of other things regarding our beloved class paladins.
The project is a new blog, with me and him as a blogging team. Why you might say. Its done to hightend the quality of my and his blog. To give the visitors more good content. The blog will be with focus on world of warcraft from a paladin perspective. As we play as retribution and protection, that is ofcourse of highest knowledge area. But there will be alot more than that. And who knows maybe there will come a holy paladin into the team as well, and blog about that aspect with indeepth knowledge.

There will also be guides on bosses, as we kill em in ulduar. Im very excited about this project, and it is there I will lay my time. Im not sure yet if im gonna keep this blog running as well or not. Time will tell. My energy in the near future will be on the new blog. I hope you will follow me there, and continue to enjoy what I write about. Ok, enough talk lets get a link. The new blog is named - All Paladin, looking forward to see you on the site.

Impadin

Ulduar Tactics

A bit of progress and tactic news. Taken down 4 bosses in Ulduar 25 man now. Levitant, Razorscale, De-constructor and Kologarn. (Kologarn amazing fight btw.)

Quiet a nice progress for us as a guild, as we are a casual guild, with no hardcore tendencies. So all in all a great first week. Our Razorscale and De-constructor kills, even netted us the following achivements.



As we aint as hardcore as alot of the guilds, which has more or less cleared the place. Or atleast have a player base, which may be abit up the ladder in gear and the like. Our tactics we use, may be a bit different from some of the ones on the net. They are tweaked to fit into our style and gear level.
One of the raid leaders from my guild and a awesome tank and friend, Mordeth. Has put up a blog, where he write the tactics up. Its a great read, I can highly recommend you to tjeck it out.
It will also to be found on the right side of my blog, just under usefull reading.

I will soon start recording our kills in there, hopefully already from next week. And I will add links to the videos on that blog as well. (he just dont know it yet.. :))
They will ofcourse also be found with links from this side.
So you can read and see how we do it.

Good luck in Ulduar all. Let the retribution dps shine in glory.

Belt of Ownage

I always fail to not search the interwebz for upgrades when new instances comes out. There is still alot of loot not seen and discovered in Ulduar. But there is one item which imo, shines through.

Belt of the Titans

How awesome is this, I will name it Red belt of battle version 2. You can use it to cover a meta gem, or you can pump it up with 3x16 STR gems. Yeap, 3 pieces. How awesome is that.
And then its crafted, so you dont have to wait ages to see it drop. And you see the warriors grab in front of your little child fingers.

Ofcourse it aint gonna be cheap.

10x Titansteel bars
8x Eternal shadows
25x Saronite bars
6x Runed orbs

Whats interesting here is the runed orbs. Its a drop in Ulduar from some of the bosses. And better yet, it can be bought from Emblems of Conquest in Dalaran. And they are BoE, so they will to be found on the Ah as well in due time. But prepare to pay alot for em.

The people which like me are surfing the net for gear upgrades, would maybe raise there hand now and say. There is a better one out there.

Belt of Colossal Rage it may be a bit better on paper, stat by stat. But when you think of the changes to get this over Titans, I vote the upper one. And will use my dkp on other upgrades.
Lastly Colossal rage have hit one it. And atm it seems we will fast be way over hit cap with the Ulduar gear. Another thing that in my book brings the Titans over this one.

Do you like the new upgraded Red belt of battle, I sure do... ;)

Retribution Manual

I have started on my personal Retribution Manual. I will add information, when ever I feel I have gathered more info that is needed to play and gear your retribution paladin to max out your dps.

So far it contains stats, build, ability use and glyph choice.

I would love feedback on it so far, and more things you think there is missing in it.

You can find the link to the manual in the right side menu, at all times.
Here is a link as well - Retribution manual.

Impressions on 3.1

In short : They have done it again !!

What have they done ? I have been playing whenever I have had the time to do it the last couple of days, since the patch launched. I have had the change to skim the surface on the Tournament in Icecrown. Which seems new and fresh and im sure that I will dig deep into it all when I have the time for it. The first impression for it all is good, and im sure there is a lot of fun to have there. And no one can say that you don’t look awesome with that lance.

But this is minor. Compared to what I have used the most time on. Ulduar. Its so much more than Naxxramas ever was in its remake. I want more. I cant wait to visit it again. Its alot harder than Naxxramas, and hopefully it will get even harder along the way. And its just so much more interesting. I didn’t do Naxxramas in Vanilla wow, so that was also a new instance for me. But this is so much more appealing. The jump in diffucelty seems good, it reminds me a lot of what we encountered in Tier 2 in TBC, The eye and Serpentshine. Seems like a good balance.

I have been in there as 25 man and 10 man. One night each so far. The first event on normal mode, is good fun. Its seem to be more like a gimmick fight already though. As the Flame Leviathan is so easy. I have only been passenger on a demolisher so far. So I have been the one, thrown up on the boss to kill the batteries. Its great fun, but no real challenge. And as we all know easy mode bosses, becomes dull fast. Vehcicles or not.

But then there is all the rest, 13 more bosses. Normal mode and hard mode and loads of challenges in achievements. I have had the pleasure of Razorscale in 25 man the first night. Nice fight, we had to watch and keep the wathchers stunned or there deadly chain lightning, was a real damage dealer. You have to keep in mind not to run to far away from the healer and you need to be rdy to fast switch to the dragon when it get drawn down by the harpoons. And then on top of it all there was a really tight enrage timer. We had our best try on 20% the first night. Well, within our reach. But the encounter is already nerfed (See 15-4-09 changes), less damage from thrash and the enrage timer have got 2 more minutes on it. That was a change which came after our night in there as 25 man. So don’t know how it is now, my guess is we will steamroll right over it. Shame, cant really see why they nerf em already. Way to fast imo. But guess that’s the new blizzard/activision policy.

Last night I ventured in there with a 10 man guild group. Levitant down first try, easy mode. Then we went to razorscale again. Now in his new nerfed mode. We took him down first try. A bit messy at the end, but had a new tank and 1 new healer, which had never seen the fight before. But 1st try he went down.

Then we took the decision to have a look at Ignis the furnace master. Hehe, that was fun. First up he have some pretty interesting thrash, finally some hard thrash again. You cant just gather em and Aoe em down. You need to play to kill em. Brilliant. Especially the Fire elementals, which makes the whirlwind. Took some casualties from us, great fun.
Ignis, hmmm. He is hard. I think we took 10 try’s on him. Getting him to 65% or so at the best try. We had a lot of problems with people dying. When he charged he made 20K hits on our plate weares. Which im not sure is intended. But nevertheless the fight seems very fun, and will be a challenge to master. Im looking forward to see more of him later on.

We decided to go pay XT-002 deconstructor a visit, to see what he was up to. It’s a 2 phase fight. Phase 1, is a tank and spank phase. With him putting different debuffs on players, which have to run out, as they make aoe damage to nearby players. Pretty straightforward. But you still have to pay attention to what happens. Then we have phase 2. He spawns 3 types of adds. Plummer, they need to be picked up by an OT. We did not use more energy on em, just Off tanked. Bombs, which need to be killed by ranged dps. They explode when killed and do aoe damage. Last but not least, we have the scrapbots. Small robots, which if they reach the boss heals him up. Further more, the boss goes into a stun mode and unveils his heart. (Yes, a robot with a heart. Would rather call it a powersource.) You can then dps the heart, and that damage will be taken by the boss when he comes out of stun mode. (Just be aware, if you kill the heart, he will reset and you now have the boss on hardmode. Great way to turn a fight around, good thinking blizz.)
He as Razor have a tight enrage timer, but dps’ing the heart during phase2, helps a lot on that one. After some getting used to the fight, we got him down. This is for me a brilliant fight, very well done and fun in all aspects.
I guess a lot of you are interested in knowing how the dps is, in a retribution point of view. My judgement to it, taking into consideration the small amount of playtime I have had on it yet. Is we are in a good shape, I would stretch it to say, we are in a even better state than pre. 3.1. In my 10 man run, my dps wa s around 3,8K-4K dps. That’s not a bad dps, considering 10 man and on thrash and bosses. I ended the night with a pretty good result. The kill try on the Constructor my recount showed 5,2K dps, and that’s in a 10 man. So I have good hopes for Retribution dps in the future.



That what a bit about what I have seen and experienced in Ulduar so far. When it comes to Retribution in general after 3.1. A lot have changed, a lot. Gearwise, statwise and what abilities to do when and why.
I will try to build a Ret manual for 3.1. Lookout for a link on the sidepanel to the left, anytime soon. It will be a post, that will be upgraded and build upon, when ever I have any usefull information to add to it.

Until then take care and have fun in Ulduar, I know I will…

3.1 Retribution specc

Its now official. 3.1 is near. So its time to get the specc sorted. So I dived into the mmo-champion calculator and this is what I came up with.

A 0/17/54 specc, more specific this 3.1 Ret specc

This specc ofc has all the talents that will raise my dmg, and then the rest is put into talents that would lower my downtime on stuns, silences and the like. Thats done with talents like Stoicism, Guardian's Favor and Toughness.

I was lurking on this talent, Aura Mastery. The wowhead dosent seem to be updated on this one. But in the patch notes it says - Aura Mastery: Now grants anyone affected by Concentration Aura immunity from Interrupt and Silence mechanics, and increases the effectiveness of all other auras by 100%. Lasts 10 seconds. 2-minute cooldown.

The interesting part is the bold part. Wonder if thats any good in a dps perspektive. If you stack it with other cooldowns ?

Birthday

No, im not dead.

I have been sick for a long while, which have made my game time low and my time infront of the computer low... :)

I have been playing some Burnout - Paradise city, to blow up some steam. And im actually more and more looking forward to 3.1, with new WoW energi.

And then its my birthday today... :) 29 years.

Happy birthday me... hehe.... Have fun all.