Recently in Medros Category

Below you will find a gallery of a few of the more spectacular sights I saw in the month or so between the launch of Wrath and when my paladin Medros dinged 80. Enjoy.

I dinged 72 tonight in Borean Tundra, over a dozen quests still left to go, and wondered to myself. Is there a benefit to doing both of the starter zones, Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord? On beta I did both, and found I was barely halfway through Grizzly Hills before I got the quest in Dalaran to fly out to Sholazar. That was also before I had a 20% jump start in xp from my previously mentioned daily plan. I am almost certain I could get by pretty effectively without having to do the Howling Fjord, and instead moving on to Dragonblight right away. The lore of that zone makes it even more tempting, I assure you.

The flipside to all of that, of course, is gold. Cold, hard cash. If I do all the quests available as I go along, Borean, Howling, Blight, Grizzly, Sholazar, Zul'Drak, Storm Peaks, Icecrown, well I should hit 80 by Sholazar or Zul'Drak, I would think. In Beta I skipped a big chunk of Grizzly Hills to move on to Sholazar, and hit 77 about halfway there. I am pretty sure I would have left Sholazar late 78, or somewhere in 79 if I had stayed in Grizzly. This means it wouldn't have taken much in Zul'Drak, or maybe an instance or two, to hit 80 in that zone, leaving me roughly 2-2.5 zones of pure quest gold plus dailies.

This will be even better on Telaan, who will be leveled third, cause he is doing 2 dailies every day, and is nearing on 71.5. I suspect he will be into 72 before I pick him up to level again. How all of this might hit Ameland or Arita I am not sure, while I am pretty sure Connroe will be hit hard since he has about 22 levels to go and a long road to go. I think I will take him in chunks. In the end, this leveling thing can be tricky. In BC it took me 3 70s before I perfected it for Telaan, and I just do not know how close I can get this time to perfection. I had time between my toons to evaluate, collect, prepare. I do not see any Unidentified Plant Part type items that are tradeable in Wrath, so that might be hard. Time will tell, I suppose. What do you all think?

When Wrath came out, as I have chronicled before, I did a lot of different things. I rolled Connroe, my Death Knight, and worked him through the starting experience, then power leveled his Inscription to 360 or so. I worked on Medros, then Arita, and then Telaan, with a bit of time on Ameland to work on his skinning. In fact the only played toon I have done nothing on in the 9 days since Wrath is my lowbie hunter, whose enchanting I would like to get up so that I can DE all the greens I am making to progress my various skills.

The problem is that while I am 71 on 3 our of 4 prior 70s, I know people with less free time than I have who have gone from 65 to 75 in the same time. I have spent so much time repeating the same quests, the same areas, the same actions that I have slowed my own progress. Therefore I have decided to focus on Medros, much like I did in the early days of Burning Crusade, as my first and primary toon to level, and will level him up to 74. I will then decide if I want to level him to 77 or 80, or swap to Arita for some leveling. After both are up where I want, I will work on Telaan, as two Ret Paladins back to back would be really hard to do. I will still do the proper dailies on all three, but when it comes to questing Medros will be number one. What lessons have the first 10 days or so of Wrath taught you?

As I write this it is just over 48 hours since I installed Wrath of the Lich King and boy have I been busy! As I mentioned in a recent All Things Azeroth, I started off by making my Death Knight named Connroe, then I completed my daily plan. This plan was given to me by Makea of Murloc Queen and went like this: clear out quest log completely, travel around Outlands getting all of the daily quests you can, then log out on the Isle of Quel'danas and wait for Wrath launch. After Wrath is installed, turn the Isle dailies, then return to Shattrath to turn in dailies there. Once Done there, I flew out to the Netherwing Ledge and turned about 10 dailies there to complete the daily quest plan.

I did a full 25 dailies on two of my 70s, and the rough numbers from those dailies was roughly 300k XP and about 150g. The one mistake I made was on making the fishing daily as one, and it gives no XP or gold, just the bag. On my Druid I did 16 dailies, netting about 200k XP and about 100g. I personally feel that since I would have spent time in game anyway, and am not hurting for gold, that this was all a very good way to spend a few days ore Wrath. Once I finished the daily turn ins, I took all my 70s to Northrend and trained them in all of their professions, costing roughly 300g for two primary and all three secondary skills. Once they were all at inns, getting rested XP, I logged back to my Death Knight and got him through the first phase of the starting experience.

On day 2 I began to work on Connroe right out of the gate, thoroughly enjoying doing the experience when it counted. I quickly made it through the experience and stayed in Stormwind at the end to begin making use of the 1500 herbs I had stocked up to level Inscription. Right now Connroe is *350* and am waiting to hit 60 or so in order to train up to Grand Master. Connroe is also right now at 150 in Blacksmithing, though I may take a break from leveling that for a bit due to the large number of new Death Knight miners in the game, including some guildies. The last thing that I have spent time doing, or I guess lucked into, was that I got all 5 toons(Medros, Ameland, Arita, Telaan, and Connroe) hearthstoned in Dalaran. I knew it would take a couple days for Argent Dawn to see a nice number of 74 Mages, and I found one in Stormwind who was willing to portal all of them to Dalaran for a generous tip. The Mages I saw in /2 were talking 100-200g per portal the night before, and I was not willing to throw my gold away like that.

As for today, I intend to finish getting all my 70s the Borean - Howling - Dalaran Flight Path connections(all Tuskarr villages, Dalaran, and the alliance settlements) in order to facilitate easy travel through the first 3 zones of Northrend. Then, I think I am going to let Connroe rest a bit, and work on getting Medros to level 74, the point where he would have gotten the ability to go to Dalaran anyway. So, how have you spent your first 48 Wrath filled hours? Are you, like the SK Gaming/Nihilum mega guild, trying to get into raiding and clear Wrath on 25 man? Or are you just relaxing and leveling comfortably?

A few days back, when the first ret nerf hotfixes came in, the ones with the JotW changes, I had a short comment based conversation with Zach Yonzon, who is WoW Insider's resident Paladin expert, where I railed against the changes, while admitting that it is quite possible the dps changes were needed for PvP. Zach admitted that the JotW might need some looking into, which is a decent shift in his opinion. As the nerf bat kept swinging, Zach tried valiantly to see Blizzard's perspective.

I too was trying hard. Very, very hard. I don't PvP, so it could be reasoned that I do not understand the playstyle's minutiae. 36 hours ago I was all ready to give you my thoughts on what I thought would be the last swing of the nerfbat. At that point, I felt like I was back about 1 month ago. I was killing stuff about the same speed, I was running out of mana about as much, it felt like the only thing that had changed was I had a few new spells, and a few things had differed. Then came the word from Ghostcrawler on the Beta forums that they weren't done yet.

Apparently the already significant nerfs to Divine Storm, all of the seals and judgments, Judgment of the Wise, and Hammer of Wrath, as well as nerfing the spec down to equal to where they were before 3.0.2 and making Retribution Aura critical to a Paladin's dps, they still feel that there is more swings of the nerf bat in store. To make this worse, the 'if's and may be, and only if's seemed to count for little, since the hot fix went live either before, or very shortly after the post. So much for warning us, GC.

So now, we the DPS Retribution Paladins, long called lolret, and retardins, are back in the basement. Instead of nerfing us to the ground, they have once again nerfed us into the basement. They balance level 80 talents to a one month level 70 game. They tell us one time that we are fine in PvE, then the next time they tell us we were too good, too powerful, and must be nerfed. I, like Zach and many other Retribution Paladins, am tired of the nerfs. As of last night, after this nerf went live, I was literally worse off than I was 30 days before. It took me a lot longer to kill mobs, I ran out of mana significantly faster, and my dps was barely noticeable. Grats Blizzard, you have undone months of good will.

I want to preface this with the disclaimer that what I am about to mention is beta info, and may not actually go live. It also may not reflect the state of Ret when the 3.0.3 patch goes live. That said, these are my opinions, and I stand by them.

So a new beta build was pushed up to the beta realms tonight, 9138, and the expected nerfs to Paladins have come in, and they are hurting. Let me point out that the changes that Blizzard said were coming for Retribution Paladins was intended to impact on their performance in PvP, as everything was said to be fine in PvE. Right. Divine Storm is now physical. Yup, PvP. Armor now takes some of the oomph of the spell when used in PvP. Seals and Judgements are down, in fact there is almost all 'down from' numbers on the MMO Champion site when going through the ret spells.

Judgement of the Wise now grants the paladin 15% of his base mana. (Down from 33%)

Wait! What?!? This isn't a strictly PvP thing. This is almost more a PvE thing, cause you generally won't last long enough, if you are going to run out of mana, if you don't have time to drink. This is almost entirely a PvE nerf, and one I can't say I like too much. This hits both my Paladins right in the mana bar, something that Ret has always had issues with before. Based on my math, Med has a mana pool right now of 5658, and the JotW gives back 975. In the current iteration, that same proc would give me less than 500. 443-444 mana, to be exact at a 15% broken down from 33%. Blizz, my friends, I understood the PvP, but this? This is a snuck in ninja to what was supposed to be the solution to the mana problem.

I have been growing incredibly frustrated with WoW of late, since I had grown really comfortable with questing and farming on my characters. I blogged about all of this, hoping that someone in the community would know how to fix all of this. To remind you, I have a general macro, and a Paladin macro, both of which uses the bird in Outlands and my cat in the old world, where flying is not allowed. The Paladin version has the added code to swap my aura's between Crusader and Retribution, so that I am always able to fight and fly to my best.

The old macro, posted here, was:

/cast [nocombat, nomounted] Crusader Aura; [mounted] Sanctity Aura;
/stopcasting
/use [flyable]  Cenarion War Hippogryph;
/use [nomounted,noflyable] Reins of the Swift Frostsaber
/dismount

As I explained, the aura's and the mounts are all on the GCD, which prevent them from being used one after the other. For some reason, though, even removing the aura bits still didn't actually do what I needed. The new, and working macro, is as follows:

#showtooltip
/cast [flyable] Swift Blue Gryphon; Swift Mistsaber

As you can see, the new macro, even being the extra line for the tooltip, is much shorter and more concise, but also does exactly what I need. It summons the right mount based on location, dismounts, and works perfectly after much testing. I do not see any reason, when patch 3.0.3 hits, why the following will not work.

/cast [nocombat, nomounted] Crusader Aura; [mounted] Retribution Aura;
/stopcasting
#showtooltip
/cast [flyable] Swift Blue Gryphon; Swift Mistsaber

I will, of course, let you all know when I have had a chance to test 3.0.3 for that macro and see if it truly does work as well as it does in text on the blog. Cheers!

While many of watch the crawling progress bar of our installs for patch 3.0.2, I thought I would let you know what talents I recommend for a couple of my classes. These will be for the specs I choose to play, and are not necessarily going to reflect what you will, or may choose to select for your characters. First up, I am going to start with my beloved Paladin class, and their Ret build. This will be a 0/3/58 build.

I feel this build maximizes crit rating while still giving some points into the new lower tier and more accessible Blessing of Kings in Protection tree. Admittedly this does not have the full 5 points in Kings, but it gives us some, and can always be changed if the majority of players you group with have the full one, or just wait five weeks and hit 72 so you can go full in. As with before, I have chosen to ignore Pursuit of Justice and Eye for an Eye, as I do not feel they are worth those essential points for the next month before Wrath goes live.

I also left Divine Purpose out in order to get those 2 extra points in Improved Blessing of Kings, and these points can be added back in later if you feel the need. Crusade, while potentially nice, will not, I think, improve the damage output enough to go 3 in for this talent. Maybe at 80. Essential talents from my time on beta are Repentance, Improved Ret Aura, Art of War, Judgment of the Wise, and Divine Storm. That last one, of course, is why we limit the diversity of our talents. Sheath of Light is a good one, giving your heals a much nice kick to them. Flash of Light can heal for enough to keep you alive in a pinch, and with the new push back changes even a Holy Light can be hit for almost a full to top heal.

The big thing about the new Ret tree is that it seems to focus in two areas. First it boosts crit rating. With a crit rating of 205 before, I had a chance of 23.5%. I will be sure to add in my new crit rating here ____% when the servers go live, and with all the bonuses to crit, I am sure that percentage will get a bump. The second focus is on mana. Ret gear is well known for it's lack of int and mp5 points, and as we of the Light use mana for a lot of put spells, we have long been those of the oom. This tree will fix that. Judgment of Light being used alongside the Judgment of the Wise talent and Divine Storm triggers, a ret Paladin should have little to now trouble staying healthy and mana filled for a long, long time.

While this isn't the idea spec, it is what we can do with the points we have and the month that spans between this patch and Wrath. Remember, we heard at Blizzcon that there will be a 3.0.3 patch coming in a week or two, and that might in itself bring us more changes still to the live game. I would love your thoughts on this spec, and even your thoughts on other Paladin specs. For now, I am off to look into the Druid trees, and get a refill of my drink. 32% done installing...