The Practical Paladin

Ahh, buff food.

I love you, I really do. However, it seems not many share my affections. Most players I know are content to eat food right off the floor.

I’m ok with some people doing this. If the warrior or mage wants to eat the week-old fish that the druid threw onto the ground, that’s fine for them.

When I see a paladin bend over, ready to stuff his face in the buffet that has been laid out, I get a little sick to my stomach.

We’re paladins! We’re supposed to hold ourselves to higher standards than others! Week keep our plate armor cleaner and shinier than death knights and warriors. We keep our hair conditioned properly and our skin exfoliated better than the priests and mages. We shouldn’t eat the trash that all those lesser classes subject themselves to!

Worry not, fellow light-lovers. I’ll show you the way to stuff your face in style.

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BUFF FOOD - PALADIN STYLE

• Protection
  • Dragonfin Filet – 40 Stamina and 40 Strength
    • This is your threat food.
    • 40 Stamina is the most important aspect of buff food. Before talents and other buffs, that’s 400 health. While that might not seem like a lot. I’ve had my fair share of close calls when the tank was within a couple hit points of dying.
    • The benefits of 40 Strength is two-fold. One, it increases our attack power by 100 with divine strength and blessing of kings. This in-turn increases all of our threat generation. Secondly, it increases our block value by 25 with Divine Strength and Blessing of Kings. This helps mitigation as well as pumping up our highest threat move, Shield of Righteousness.
  • Blackened Dragonfin - 40 Stamina and 40 Agility
    • This is your avoidance food.
    • 40 agility increases our dodge, armor, and crit. The armor and crit bonuses are negligible, but the 40 agility increases our dodge by about .77%, which tends to add up.


• Retribution
  • Snapper Extreme or Worg Tartare - 40 Stamina and 40 Hit Rating
    • Stamina is a low priority stat for dps, although it has a slightly higher value to melee dps than ranged dps due to lots of melee-damaging ablities.
    • If you have not reached the hit cap of 263 after gems and enchants, this is one way to get it. Hit is the most important stat for Retribution, until you’re at the cap. Once you reach 263 hit rating, this loses most of its importance
  • Dragonfin Filet – 40 Stamina and 40 Strength
    • 40 Strength is the reason we eat this food. Once at hit cap, no other stat comes close to increasing our dps. Retribution paladins scale incredibly well with buffs, especially strength/attack power buffs. With Divine Strength and Blessing of Kings, we gain 100 AP from this fish dish.
  • Mega Mammoth Meal or Poached Northern Sculpin – 80 AP and 40 Stamina
    • Due to talents and and Blessing of Kings, this provides 20 less attack power than the Dragonfin Filet, however, it does have one advantage. This food is much cheaper than the previous food. If you’re low on gold, this is an acceptable substitute.
    • Beacause of the bonus spell power, Fish Feast is slightly better than these two options.


• Holy
  • 40 Haste Rating, 40 Crit Rating, or 46 Spell Power
    • Depending on the situation, much like protection, we should use different food. I keep a stack of each food on me at all times. If I’m raid healing, I put on my haste set and use the haste food. If I’m tank healing and mana regen is not an issue, I’ll use the spell power food. If I need to worry about mana regen, I”ll use the crit food.

Why do you play WoW? I sometimes ask myself this. In fact, after reading this post by Anea at Holy Discipline, I asked myself this very question.

“John (that’s me!), why are you still playing WoW?”

Sometimes, I don’t have the answer to that question. Sometimes, I log-in out of habit. This is usually followed by a short break, maybe a week or two, before I come back and start enjoying myself again.

Right now, I know the answer. However, today the answer is different than it was last month, and it might be different a month from now. This is one of the reasons why I think so many people enjoy the game. Its built up by lots of different meta-games to form one Voltron-esque mega game.

I got into a conversation with a friend about the new Transformers movie and subsequently the Transformers toys. We reminisced about the good old days of action figures and mutating robot-cars. He reminded me about the Constructicons, which I had completely forgotten about. These Constructicons were smaller transformers that when pieced together with each other would form a larger robot.

World of Warcraft is a Constructicon.

There are many different pieces that fit together to make the larger, whole version. You have the profession game, the Auction House game, the raiding game, the PvP game, the achievement game, the collecting game, and the list goes on-and-on, but without having all of these pieces, WoW wouldn’t be whole. It wouldn’t be what it has evolved into.

So, back to the question at hand. Why do I play WoW? Before I answer that, I want to talk about why I don’t play WoW.

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WoW sucks, here’s why.

• I don’t like dailies.

They bore me. I don’t like doing anything repetitive and monotonous (I don’t know how I leveled two Horde paladins…). Dailies have always been a means to a very specific ends for me. In the Burning Crusade, that ends was exalted with the Shattered Sun for the Pally Tank shield. In Wrath, that ends was the Silvermoon title. Some people take dailies too far, and treat them like a job. I never understood that. I play video games for fun and to escape from RL, not to move from my RL job to a virtual job. I guess this is also why I never enjoyed any of the Sims games.

• I can’t stand farming.

Farming, much like dailies, is incredibly boring and tedious. I have power leveled most of my professions, and for some, like Jewelcrafting and Engineering, this has cost me about 2k gold. I would much rather pay that fake currency then spend some of my real time doing something I don’t enjoy. Again, thanks to my AH work, I’ve been able to afford the power leveling without any negative effect.

• I don’t like wiping on bosses.

Especially when the cause is something I can’t control. This is one of the reasons I’m not in a bleeding-edge guild, pushing the envelope of progression. The guild I’m currently in is largely a casual, friendly environment. Sure, we raid, and we are progressing, but I would rather have someone else in my place if they want. My raid leader and guild master is pretty lax on invites, and whoever’s on at the time will generally get an invite, assuming they’re geared appropriately. However, I am the best geared holy pally, and we have no disc priests, so they pretty much need me whenever I’m on. However, I will gladly step out if someone else wants to come in.

• I don’t care about gear.

Gear is needed to complete content, not something to hoard and worship. Its not that I don’t care about gear at all. I wouldn’t want a PuG warlock who barely put out more dps than the tank to nab the KT sword (yes, its happened and I was upset). I ask myself a couple questions when it comes to gear upgrades: “Do I need this piece of gear to perform my job adequately?” if yes, I’ll try for it, if no, I ask “Will someone else benefit from this?” If yes, I’ll pass for them.

Ok, now we go back to the question. Why do I play WoW?

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WoW is awesome, here’s why.

• The only real PvP is in the AH.

I play the AH meta-game. I enjoy making gold off of other players. I enjoy buying items cheap and selling high. I enjoy turning different materials into items that other people buy. Right now, I use jewelcrafting, alchemy, tailoring, enchanting, and inscription to make money. Turning ore, cloth, and herbs into gold is a lot of fun. One of my favorite sights in game is logging into my bank alt and seeing message after message from the auction house with gold waiting for me.

• The only (other) real PvP is in battlegrounds.

I love battlegrounds. I love running around on my max level ret paladin and smashing faces. Fearing a death knight’s ghoul, then destroying him is wonderful. Battlegrounds provide more adrenaline than any other part of the game for me, and when I want that rush, I queue up.

• “It’s a wipe… Oh wait, nevermind. Nice heals.”

I love raid healing. I’ve tanked and dps’d in raids, and they don’t compare to healing whatsoever. Watching health bars drop and having the power to pull them back up is a lot of fun. It can be stressful at times, especially in new content, but its always fun. Having a raid-leading tank go down to a sliver of health and call for a wipe only to watch his health bar pop up to full a millisecond later is exhilarating. As a healer, I don’t have to worry about my position on meters and I don’t have to worry about positioning any mobs or bosses.

• I like being in control.

When I run 5-mans, I prefer tanking, and when I raid, I prefer healing. Both of these positions afford me some control of the group. In 5-mans especially, everyone is looking at the tank to set the tempo and lead the run. If the tank says wait, you wait. If he says to kill skull then X, you follow that order. If a dps says to wait while he smokes, unless you’re on a boss, you’ll probably go on without him. I am granted with similar power as a raiding healer, I get to decide who lives and who dies. If I see a dps standing in a void zone/fire/big-black-circle-of-death-with-raining-hate I can choose to heal him or laugh at/berate him while he’s eating pavement.

• My absolute favorite part of WoW right now is leveling alts.

I’m an altoholic. On my main realm, I have two level 80 paladins, a 73 hunter, a 63 death knight, a 61 druid, a 53 warlock, a 47 rogue, a 37 mage, a 20 shaman, and my bank alt warrior. I have toons sitting on about 10 different realms, all waiting my return. I love getting new spells, talents, and abilities. I eagerly run to my trainer ever two levels, skipping the whole way in anticipation of what will be bestowed upon me. Picking up Ghost Wolf and Water Shield on the shaman recently was awesome!

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I’m sure these reasons are going to change. In fact, I know they are. I’ve enjoyed wiping on bosses before. Participating in progression kills after wiping on the boss a bunch of times is satisfying at times. I’ve gone through periods in which I couldn’t stand playing an alt and leveling through the same quests and zones again.

Regardless of why I, or anyone else, plays the game, its very clear that Blizzard wants the majority of us to find something we do enjoy about the game, even if we don’t enjoy everything. Knowing that there will always be something I enjoy, is the biggest reason that keeps me coming back to the game. That’s why I still play WoW.

I’m angry. I’m not an angry person usually, but I’m angry now. I’m angry at people. I’m angry at my guild. I’m angry at achievements and old-world travel and professions. I’m angry at myself.

I logged on last night with the intent to raid. That didn’t happen. We had enough people to go into Ulduar, but we didn’t. Why, you might ask? Its these damned achievements.

My guild’s main tank is an achievement Whore. With a capital Whore. He’s so whorish for achievements, he puts RL whores to shame.

I spent the night fooling around Dalaran, playing with professions and drumming up mindless conversations while waiting for the raid to be formed. An hour and a half after invites were supposed to go out, I got a whisper from my guild leader. Our main tank decided that he was not tanking anything during the Midsummer Fire Festival, and thus there would be no raid tonight.

I could feel my anger begin to rise. One and a half hours wasted. Nice.

I immediately logged out without saying anything. I didn’t feel like blowing up at people who didn’t deserve it, and instead decided to conjure up ways to get our main tank killed in our next raid, without wiping the whole group. “Huh, you taunted the trash off the OT? I’m sorry you didn’t get any heals.” /evillaugh

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I hate farming. HATE IT! I hate it like Jon hates Kate. There is a special place in Hell that I have reserved for farming. However, sometimes its necessary. It takes a lot of self-control to not gouge out my own eyes and force myself to listen to Maroon 5 when I have to farm.

Farming for herbs in STV sucks even more than any other farming I’ve had to do. The place is way too massive, with way too many rivers and mountains. Having to fight off mobs to get to some goldthorn sucks, especially with an untalented rogue. I need to log into my alts more often.

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Price gougers and dumb under cutters can kiss my ass. Paying 4g per dreamfoil is a crime and violators should have their accounts deleted. I whispered the person with these auctions and told him he’s an idiot with no business sense and no one was going to pay his exorbitant prices so he should just take them down and repost for 1/2 price.

“lol no retard”

Nice response, Jack. But what did I really expect? I then bought all of them then asked for more. I give in to0 easily sometimes =/

I had about 400 stacks of ore on my Jewelcrafter waiting to be prospected. I made a macro I could spam, which should give my carpel tunnel in about half the time:

/cast Prospecting
/use Saronite Ore

I cut all the gems in popular cuts and started posting them. About five minutes after posting, I checked again, and I was being undercut on most of them. And not by just 1c or 1s like most smart ah posters. I was being undercut by up to 10g on some gems. I whispered the person that was doing this and said:

“Hello sir. Stop undercutting my gems. You’re an ass. Have a good night.”

I then immediately /ignored him because I’m a coward. At least I’m a coward with proper grammar.

A recent post by Slow Wolf got me thinking. In his post, he talked about not getting proper blessings from the two paladins in the raid, even after asking for them. Obviously, those players were either stupid, lazy, vindictive, or a combination of the three. I commented on the post that I agreed with his feelings and that these acts would not fly with me. I said that I would have kicked the ignorant players, especially in a pug situation, which this was.

I started thinking about this, though. Would I actually kick the paladin for not giving me the proper blessing? I haven’t kicked out dps warriors for not keeping up battle shout so I could provide kings. I haven’t kicked out mages for not providing arcane brilliance or tables. Why would I make the exception for paladins? Since I have a lot of experience with the class, I seem to hold pally players to a higher standard than others, especially because I don’t always know the mechanics behind the other classes. Its a double-standard that I want to rectify.

There are a lot of new paladin players out there, and I’m in the process of writing a guide to help them out, however, I wanted to make this post before getting out my guide for a couple reasons.

1. I feel this is something important. You may fail at your class, but you shouldn’t be bringing down other classes too.
2. People are talking about this, and I want to shut them up.

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BLESSINGS, AND WHY WE LOVE THEM

Paladin blessings are some of the best buffs in the game. Some classes provide similar buffs, but there isn’t one other class that can provide all of them like we can. Paladins can give out up to four blessings, depending on spec. These include:

• Blessing of Wisdom (and Improved BoW) – Provides Mp5
• Blessing of Might (and Improved BoM) – Provides Attack Power
• Blessing of Kings – Increases all stats by 10%
• Blessing of Sanctuary – Reduces all damage taken by 3% and gives 2% max mana back each time the player blocks, dodges, or parries. *In patch 3.2, this will also give 10% stamina, which will not stack with Blessing of Kings 10% stamina.

Blessing of Sanctuary is unique in that it requires a large investment into the protection tree to obtain, and in order to get the most out of it, the player with the buff must be a protection paladin. However, it will grant 3% damage reduction to anyone with it applied, and with patch 3.2, it will also grant 10% stamina, which doesn’t stack with Blessing of Kings. This solidifies the blessing as the main pally tank blessing.

Blessing of Might is equal to Battle Shout, which can be provided by a warrior. They even have an equal to Improved BoM in Improved BS.

Blessing of Wisdom can be brought by shamans in the form of Mana Spring Totem. Yes, they have an improved version too. Using this totem, locks the shaman out of other water totems, including healing stream totem.

Blessing of Kings is completely unique. No other class can provide this buff. The only thing that comes close is Mark of the Wild by druids. However, MotW does not scale with gear like Kings does.

Now that we have some basic understanding of each of the blessings, lets go over each class and spec and which they would prefer. Although I am providing a list of blessings for each class, if someone requests a specific blessing, give it to them. Also, this is a priority list I have assembled based on my experience, so yours may be slightly different, such as hunters or rogues preferring kings over might.

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BLESSING PRIORITY LIST

• Paladin
  
  • Holy – Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary
  • Protection – Sanctuary, Kings, Might, Wisdom
  • Retribution – Might, Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary

• Warrior
  
  • Protection – Kings, Sanctuary, Might
  • DPS – Might, Kings, Sanctuary

• Death Knight
  
  • Tank – Kings, Sanctuary, Might
  • DPS – Might, Kings, Sanctuary

• Druid
  
  • Restoration – Wisdom, Kings, Sanctuary
  • Balance – Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary
  • Feral DPS – Might, Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary
  • Feral Tank – Kings, Sanctuary, Might, Wisdom

• Shaman
  
  • Enhancement – Might, Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary
  • Elemental – Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary
  • Restoration – Wisdom, Kings, Sanctuary

• Hunter
  
  • Might, Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary

• Rogue
  • Might, Kings, Sanctuary

• Priest
  • Healer – Wisdom, Kings, Sanctuary
  • DPS – Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary

• Warlock
  • Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary

• Mages
  • Kings, Wisdom, Sanctuary

This list is meant as a general guide. When in doubt, follow this list of blessing priority. If you have any questions, feel free to ask the player which blessing they would prefer.

There is a very awesome addon called Pally Power which makes handling blessings incredibly easy and efficient for paladins in groups, and I plan on covering it in a day or two, so stay tuned for that!

If your server is anything like mine, there are tons of level 80 paladins running around that have no clue what they’re doing. They could be ret paladins gemming intellect, prot paladins with a caster sword, or even a holy paladin who has no clue what beacon of light or sacred shield are. For a while, I was fine with this. Eventually, after being /kicked out of enough groups and being put on enough /ignore lists, they’d start to learn what was going on. I drew the line when four of my guild’s top raiders rolled paladin alts, and made those mistakes listed above.

To fight against this, and to keep from having to repeat myself every day, I decided to write a guide for all the new paladins. This will have very little, if any, theory-craft because that’s not what these newbies need. This will cover basic gearing, speccing, gemming, enchanting, rotations, and a little bit about the mindset needed for each role. The first guide will cover retribution, with protection and holy to follow later this week. This will be strictly a PVE guide, because I don’t PVP much, and probably suck at it.

Although my original intent for this guide is to inform my guild and friends, I hope the information herein will be useful to anyone who has or wants a level 80 paladin, but is unsure on one or a few aspects of paladin’ing.

I think every WoW blogger has to do some sort of UI post at one time or another, posting screen shots of soloing and raiding and what all their cool addons are. This is not that post. This is, however, related to addons and UI, but is most definitely not my raiding setup.

I have two raiding toons, and they’re UI’s are fine-tuned and are efficient for what I need to do with them. I’ve tried to move everything out of the center of the screen, except for only the most important pieces of information, such as my unit frames on my healer or my dps meter on my ret pally. =)

When I play an alt, I have a completely different frame of mind from “What’s important for me to know so I don’t hold the raid back.” I’m more of the “What can make these quests I’ve done 100 times already less sucky and boring?” and “Why are these flight points so GD far apart?”

That first thought is solved by DoubleWide and Questhelper. Simple solution. Those are not what this post is about. This post addresses that second feeling of agitation at how stupidly slow the Azeroth Taxi Service is. My favorite addons for leveling are Peggle and Bejeweled. Here’s a screenshot of the pair in action:

Yes, I do run them side-by-side. I am so good, that I can launch a ball in Peggle, then go match some gems in Bejeweled. I’m pretty sure my skill in both addons is over 450. Blizzard is developing a special racial trait just for me that gives me +10 expertise to peg-hitting and gem-sliding.

Every Friday, I’m going to make a non-WoW post about whatever I want. Since this is my blog, I think I can get away with it. The Friday Free For All(heretofore known as FFA) can be about one topic, or many. It could be something reflective or something /silly. I might get extremely serious or I might post pictures of clowns. Basically, the Friday FFA is a way for me to write whatever I want without having to worry about anything.

With that said, I shall get my first Friday FFA underway.Today, I’m going to make a list of wholly unrelated items, that are ordered in a completely arbitrary manner.

1) Troll 2

MOVIE MONSTERS
One of the best-worst movies I have ever seen. The movie was called Troll 2, so apparently there was a first Troll movie, presumably involving a singular troll, so naming the second movie in the series Troll 2 seems like a logical step. Except that the movie wasn’t about trolls. In fact, the movie contained absolutely zero trolls. None. Nada. Zilch. So, if I had gone into the movie expecting trolls, I would have been let down right away. Instead of trolls, the movies main antagonists were goblins.

Yeah, goblins. It gets better, too. These goblins all live in a town called, get this, Nilbog. Nilbog backwards is Goblin. These writers were genius. Apparently, the only way these goblins could survive was by luring unsuspecting vacationers into their town for a meal of some of their special home-grown food and milk. After the travelers consumed the food, they would turn into plants, which the goblins would then feast on. Watching some movie goblins feast on a plant-person was a new high in cinema for me. It just keeps getting better though.

KEY PLAYERS
The main protagonist of this gem is a schizophrenic boy who talks to his dead grandpa through mirrors. He also has a habit of ruining family meals by pissing all over them. Literally whipping out his wang and putting out some fires all over the pot roast. The willpower shown by the father to not slap the shit out of the boy for that act was pretty exceptional.

The sister is pretty crazy too. Not piss-in-your-sandwich crazy, but she's getting there. For one, she’s a hopeless romantic who never can understand why her dad seems to think that her boyfriend is a good-for-nothing, even though he has no job and spends all his free time with his friends. At one point, the girls boyfriend comes over for some love-makin' with his friends waiting right outside the window. Nice. Stay classy, my friend. She also may or may not be a professional bodybuilder. The jury's still out on that one.

Oh, and the father has a southern accent for some reason, even though no one else does. The mom seems normal, but she's probably pumped full of meds.

FINALE
The movie ends as the boy and his family destroy the goblins in Nilbog and head home. When they get home, the boy heads upstairs for a nap, and when he comes down, some goblins are eating his plant-mother. Oh no, she ate some bad food. The movie fades to black as one of the goblins asks the boy “Do you want some?”

Is that what passed as horror in the 80’s? Anyways, the movie is awesomely bad and can be watched for free on Hulu, which is where I saw it. If I were to rate this move, which I’m going to, I’d give it four BrownPoints out of five. Yes, I did just make up that scoring system. Sue me.

2) Smart People

And I mean smart in the most sarcastic way possible. For those of you that don’t know, my job is to provide tech support in a corporate office, which leads to a lot of dumb questions. One of the best I’ve received in a while is from one of our owner’s assistants, so I had to be nice to her. This was pure gold, though.

The power in her office building had gone out the night before and she had no idea what to do. /facepalm. You could try turning on the computer. “Oh, I didn’t think of that! Thank you!” You’re welcome, now please don’t call me again unless the computer catches on fire.

A note for anyone calling into tech support: Restart/turn on your device before calling in. Seriously! This fixes a lot of issues, and were just going to ask you to do it when you speak with us. When we get you on the phone and ask you to restart your machine, and you tell us that you already have done it, three times even, we wont believe you. Especially when we make you restart it and the problem is gone. If I ever get addicted to anything harmful, I’m blaming you.

3) New high school graduates

This is a love-hate relationship. I hate them, and they love to piss me off. There are no worse drivers than new high school graduates. They drive around with stupid messages on their cars, while talking on the phone and cutting you off. I wish I could slash tires with my mind. The only good thing that's come out of this, is that my morning commute is a little lighter since school got out. Hey high school graduate. No one cares about you. Get out of the way and shut up! Also, welcome to the real world. Get out as soon as possible.