paladin

This is a response to Spinks' That 'women in gaming' post. I posted a comment to that post in haste, and didn't really convey what I wanted to convey. So this is my second stab at it.

Proposition 1: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic.

I completely and utterly agree with this proposition. It's pretty much self-evident.

Proposition 2: A significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic, because of the way games are designed.

I completely disagree with this proposition.

Aside from the few companies who are stupid and/or deliberately provocative (*cough*Rockstar*cough*), modern Western games--not gamers, but games--are extremely respectful to women. They feature strong, competent female characters. Off the top of my head consider Jaina, Sylvannas, Jaheria, Bastila, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Leilana, Morrigan, Wynne, April Ryan. Western game rulebases do not differentiate between male and female. Female characters are just as likely to be successful as male characters.

Female villains are just as daunting as male villains, without resorting to offensive caricatures. Quite frankly, this is something the game industry does better than any other media out there. Consider Onyxia, Queen Anora, Kerrigan, SHODAN, GLaDOS, Carmen Sandiego. There aren't that many female villains, but the ones that are tend to be drawn quite well.

Most game companies also go out of their way to be welcoming to women. A decade ago, when Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, they wrote the rulebooks using female pronouns (she, her instead of he, his), to basically hammer home on every single page the point that women were welcome. I don't really know how successful that method was, but I thought it particularly stylish, so I copied it for my own writing.

In my experience, the modern game industry is more respectful of women than most modern movies, music, television, fiction, and even media aimed mainly at women like romance novels¹. In my opinion, the only genre that routinely treats women better than modern games is young adult fiction, and even young adult fiction rarely has good female villains.

So then, how do we square the fact that many gamers are misogynistic, when most games are not, and in fact do make significant efforts to be respectful to women?

I think it is a combination of three factors.

The first factor is that gamers, especially teenage gamers, are treated badly by female culture. Male culture has mostly absorbed gaming to the point where almost every young male games casually. But female culture still looks down on gaming. Exactly how many guys would tell a girl that they gamed on first acquaintance? Versus pretty much any other hobby? What other moderately mainstream hobby carries such social stigma as gaming?

So is it any surprise that some gamers, especially teenage males, lash back defensively? It completely fails to excuse that behavior. Misogyny is inexcusable. But if the misogyny stems from this cause, then there is really nothing that game makers can really do. They've been trying to make games more popular and more main-stream for years now.

The second factor is that it is much easier for like-minded gamers to find each other and group together, reinforcing their negative tendencies. This is because gaming communities are heavily internet-based. In a smaller or geographic-based community, the community leaders could police these behaviors, and bring deviants in-line with the rest of the community norms. But in a very large community, such as the internet, the deviants just slink off and form their own sub-community and impose their behavior on others.

Again, I am not really sure what game makers can do about this. Would you really accept limitations on your right of association? Imagine if you could not choose your guild, but were randomly assigned to one. And you could not easily switch guilds. What would the social structure look like? What norms would prevail? I think it would prevent the reinforcement of an individual's misogyny, but it would also prevent reinforcement of some positive norms. Not to mention that most people want to play with their friends.

As well, so much of association is carried out on Vent and external message boards that the game maker cannot control.

The third and final factor is anonymity. Anonymity dehumanizes people. You don't see other people in the game, you start to see just characters running around. These gamers do not see how many women actually play the game, do not see that real people control the characters that they are insulting. Anonymity also reduces fear of reprisal. People act badly just because they can. They pay no social price for their vitriol.

Consider the game of chess. In many ways, chess maps to gaming in that very few women play, and it has a low social cachet. Yet, chess culture is not nearly as misogynistic as game culture can be. Now, maybe it's because chess is more staid, but I think it is because chess lacks that culture of anonymity. Everyone uses their real name and are ranked with that. And as a result, chess culture is far more respectful to everyone than gaming is, even if almost no women play.

But then again, none of you agree with me about anonymity and real names. Everyone is too concerned with "privacy" in video games². And so we reap the consequences of that decision.

That's where I stand on this issue. I agree that a significant portion of gamer culture is virulently misogynistic. However, I think the games themselves have done a really good job of driving out disrespect to women in the actual game and rulebase. I'm not sure that there is too much more that they could do. They can't force female culture to not stigmatize gaming. I think gamers would fuss if they made a solid attempt to break the right to choose your associations. We've already seen that gamers howl if their precious "privacy" is in any way threatened.

So what's left? Fiddling with crafting and pet collecting in a futile effort to entice more women to play? (Does anyone really believe that women don't game because there's not enough pet collecting?) And this will reduce the misogyny how exactly? More women in the game won't matter because you cannot force the misogynists to associate with them. Social shame is pretty much the only option to control them, and that path is blocked.

Games cannot be held responsible for factors out of their control. Modern games have done, in my opinion, a superb job of creating strong, competent female characters and generally being friendly to women. If I had daughters, I would much rather them take Sylvannas as a role model than most other characters in non-gaming media (though maybe with less emphasis on the whole "raising the dead" thing).

1. I read Regencies, and kind of frankly, sometimes I wonder that women accept the way women are treated in a significant minority of those novels, let alone how men are treated. If women were treated that way in a male-dominated medium, there would be Senate hearings. Also, what's the deal with red hair?2. Meanwhile, your local government is probably putting your house plans and property taxes up on the internet. Not joking, by the way.

"Gosh, this sounds familiar" was a feature of the talk on WoW-Twitter when the Alpha was first announced. It appeared that the start of the Catacysm F&F Alpha closely coincided with the Wrath of the Lich King Alpha leak 2 years earlier - make that 2 years to the week earlier. Speculation then run rampant - "How long will the Alpha Last?", "When will we get the Beta?", "What does this mean for the release date?" etc. but no-one really had much of a clue.

If Cataclysm was following Wrath's development timetable then the Alpha turned into the Beta somewhat earlier than ones expectation. This has been explained away as a rush due to poor Alpha feedback and widespread information leaks, far more widespread than Wrath, which I suppose is a reasonable rationalisation. Beta start dates are small beans to our prospective Nostradamus's though as the real date of contention is the release date, and for those who want to believe that Cataclysm is mirroring Wrath's development schedule the next week or so is a key milestone. The release date of Wrath of the Lich King was announced on the 15th of September (for true obsessives this was the 3rd Monday in September), 2 months prior to the 13th November launch. If the smart money of a mid-November release is correct then a announcement may be imminent.

If Cataclysm is to be mid-November then we may or may not see 4.0 go live about one month before that date. When 3.0 was launched the devs. still had a full month to add to and polish Northrend before anyone would step foot there, whereas the whole of Azeroth is being redeveloped in this latest expansion. Putting unfinished zones which aren't absolutely new (such as Winterspring) off-limits will be much more difficult to justify to the subscriber base, and so its' live date will be much more fluid. Furthermore, holding off on launching 4.0 till new 80+ content is released makes a lot of sense; class balance could well be shot to hell, making top-tier Wrath raiding content nigh-on impossible.

Hey, it could happen :P
And with that rampant speculation out the way, go and enjoy the Battle for Gnomeregan/Fall of Zalazane.

As I’ve declared in Twitter and my fevered dreams, my goal before the expansion pack is to hit the armor cap. Initially it was just to see 75.00% damage reduction in that armor tool tip on my character sheet (45,697), but them’s small potaters. I have bigger fish to fry–the raid boss armor cap–49,905 armor. That number has seared itself into my soul.

During a 25man raid I have about 44,000 armor (which is an obscene yet seductive number) in my armor set. With in-combat buffs, correct consumables, and the like I can push that much higher.

Last night I asked Antigen to pop an Aura Mastery-enhanced Devotion Aura for me once we were in Saurfang’s frenzy period and I had chugged an Indestructible Potion. The results were impressive, maybe, but disappointing in that they could have been a lot better. For example, I should have gotten the Holy Pally with Improved Devo Aura to do it (no offense, Ani).

In any case, I definitely did not bring my A-game.

46,294. Pitiful!

Here’s what I did wrong:

1. Mongoose on my sword. The proc offers a nice chunk of agility, but you can’t count on that. Exceptional Agility is a much better, more consistent bet. Worth 52 armor, before Kings.

2. Had a Stoneblood Flask up. The better consumables choice for armor would have been an Elixir of Protection (800 armor) mixed with an Elixir of Mighty Agility (90 armor before Kings).

3. Didn’t have Pillars of Might equipped, which cost me 1088 additional armor.

In total we’re talking 2030 additional armor I could have had at that moment. My hit would be abyssal, but sacrifices must be made in the name of science, eh?

I doubt that 2030 armor will be enough to close the 3611 armor gap, even with buffs and procs. I’ll probably have to grab some additional pieces to push me over the finish line. Specifically, I’m thinking of the following:

• Heroic Bile-Encrusted Medallion for +84 armor
• Heroic Sanctified Lightsworn Handguards for +213 armor
• Heroic Gargoyle Spit Bracers for +714 armor
• Heroic Unidentifiable Organ for +238 armor

In total that’s worth 1249 armor. Hell, upgrading my shield to the heroic version is also worth 389, though clearly only one of them exists. So, sum total we’re talking an additional 1638 armor from upgrades.

Combine that with the 2030 armor from not being an idiot and I’m looking at 3668 armor, easily enough to put me over the hump. And that’s before buffs.

Back to the seas, Queequeg!

One of the good things about WoW is that Blizzard never deletes old characters, and Blizzard allows to have up to 10 or so characters on each server. However, each character's name is unique per server.

I wonder if this combination of factors will reach a boiling point as Cataclysm approaches. It is getting harder and harder to find a name for a new character. Instead it's a continuous round of "That name is not available" until you finally hit some acceptable combination. I think this factor has contributed to the large amounts of odd names and non-standard characters used these days.

Over 5 years worth of names have been locked away. And that might present a problem when Cataclysm hits. With two new races and a large overhaul of level 1-60, people are going to be making lots of new characters which will require new names.

Maybe it's time that Blizzard starts looking into ways to free up some of the names that are gathering dust. Deleting characters is excessive. But maybe Blizzard could unlock the name of any character under level 40 and that has not been logged in for 4 months. Anyone could take the name, and if the old character logs on, she will have to choose a new name.

I was skeptical at first, but I really like the way Cryptic handles names. They use "characterName@accountName". In-game and on nameplates only the Character Name is displayed, while the full name is shown in the chatbox. Though, the character name is emphasized and the account name dulled. To friend someone or send tells, you use the account name.
It's really nice to be able just create a new character with the exact name you want, and not have to play "That name is not available" roulette.

After admitting the problem last week, that I’ve been terrible at spending time in beta, I was determined to rack up some quality time there over the long weekend. I ended up burning through the entire zone of Deepholm, dipping my toe in the pool that is Vashj’ir, hitting a roadblock in Kezan, and then finishing up the Worgen starting storyline in Gilneas. This is going to be a pretty heavy post full of screenshots and minor spoilers, so I advise skipping if you want to stay pristine when Cata launches. I’d put it behind a more tag, but I hate when people do that, so you all must suffer for my vanity.

First thing I did after firing up the beta was get my Draenei paladin set up with glyphs (I’ll talk about that a little later on) and then head over to Stormwind to follow the breadcrumbs to Deepholm. This involves going to the Maelstrom itself where Thrall is working to repair the rift. You talk to the big guy himself, then the wyvern rider nearby who will shuttle you through the whirlpool and into Maelstrom. It’s a pretty incredible sequence, eye candy galore.

Just that minor area with the whirlpool and the sea splashing all around you is probably one of the most beautiful locations in game.

Once we dove into Deepholm, the sound bites the wyvern rider was spouting off seemed to fade off at the end of every sentence. Which is funny, because at the same time the Fungalmancer Glop’s little speech being spoken on the other side of the zone was echoing like the little bastard was sitting right next to me. They need to work on speech distance/triggers I think.

This is probably part and parcel for a new trend in making the world seem more “alive”, in the sense that everyone talks more. With actual speech. I kept running into little scenes or events where once a simple text bubble would have sufficed, but instead it’s fully voiced.

So storyline progression definitely got bumped up a notch in Deepholm. How about questing? Well, truth be told, I found Deepholm’s quests intensely boring. There were a few really fun ones (like a fight against a dragon where you get tossed onto a floating rock and have to hop from stone to stone dodging breath attacks and dealing damage, lots of fun!) but the majority of the quests were “go to this hub”, “do these six quests involving killing certain mobs or retrieving items”, and then “here’s the next hub to go to”. I guess that’s the bread and butter, but still… yawn.

In the end, Deepholm felt like a chore to rip through. I started there at level 82 (which I realized after the fact might have been a bad idea) and finished the normal quests/storyline about two bubs short of 83. It was bizarre going through a whole zone and not dinging once.

Another thing I noticed while in Deepholm was how tough the mobs were. I usually finished each at about 70% health, and would have to pop cooldowns if I managed to get two or three. Of course, I was still in a mix of half 272 gear from Hyjal and half 251 gear from ICC10 (came with the premade character) while quests were doling out between 288 and 300 pieces. Not to mention I was only level 82, while the zone mobs were between 82 and 83, so I think I was generally unprepared for the whole place. So don’t take it as gospel that whole zone is crazy hard.

Lastly, speaking of loot, the tanking gear in Deepholm was pretty sparse until the last few quests. Even so, with defense now automatic from talents, the tank gear has basically devolved into three kinds of pieces: avoidance+master, avoidance+avoidance, or avoidance+hit. Oh, or threat+mastery, though one could say that’s really a dps piece.

In any case, I found myself favoring mostly the latter for questing, while hoarding avoidance pieces for dungeons. Mastery is fun to accumulate. Avoidance remains less so.

Under the sea, under the sea

After Deepholm, I returned to Stormwind to sit on the docks and wait for the boat to Vashj’ir. While sitting there I was surprised to see a troop of soldiers walk up and (true to all the extra blabbing going on) muse in full voicing about the mission ahead of them and the military prowess of Nagas, and other minutiae. It was a nice break from sitting there like a dope, or alt-tabbing a waiting for the sound of a boat pulling up.

Once we set sail, I recognized the “mercenary crew” as the guys from outside ZA and other locales. There was Budd, who seems to have picked up an interesting accent, and Samir the shirtless repair guy, and other fine folk. I could already tell who would be a story driver in the zone ahead.

Eventually a released Kraken ripped the ship apart and we all tumbled into the briny deep.

When I “came to” I was stuck in a bubble. I believe what was supposed to happen was I’d regain the ability to move, or float towards the air pocket that some npcs were hiding in, but instead I was stuck in place and couldn’t move or cast. So I drowned. Annoying.

Unlike Deepholm, the sparse time I spent in Vashj’ir was a lot of fun. I wasn’t doing the hub-clearing dance autonomously, I was actually engaged in the world around me. I don’t know if it was just because I was enchanted with the zone design, but it felt like what Cata questing should be: interesting,

Underwater movement is usually terrible in video games, but it was actually very fun in Vashj’ir. Totally intuitive too. You touch the ground and run, or you jump and fly/swim around. Made total sense and wasn’t a hindrance at all. Well, the only drawback I can think of is sometimes it was hard to judge my distance from a mob or item in a three dimensional, floating space. I’d have to pan the camera to get the proper sense of depth. But that wasn’t really a huge deal.

Hitting 83, and Tankadin combat thus far

After some questing in Vashj’ir, I finally dinged 83. Two to go.

Nothing much gained outside of a new talent point and a healing spell. I allocated the point somewhere stupidly and went merrily on my way to continue questing under the sea.

Before I pivot to starting zones, I wanted to speak a little bit about how it was to play my tankadin. I know we haven’t been receiving as much design attention lately and generally it’s because we’re in a pretty good place in terms of rotation. We have our Holy Power, we have our 15% block, we have our stable of attacks. The pieces are in place and it seems like all that’s left in the numbers game–how much does this attack hit for, how much damage does this reduce, etc.

The rotation as it stands now is predictable, but still varied, thanks to Grand Crusader. The framework we’re operating in is: CS, _, _, CS, _, _, CS, HP dump, _, CS, etc. Every other other attack is Crusader Strike (or HotR), we weave in Judgement, Holy Wrath, or Avenger’s Shield/Grand Crusader procs, and then dump Holy Power when needed on ShoR, a heal, or Inquisition.

I’m still hopelessly in love with Grand Crusader, so ignore any fanboi-ish squeal about how awesome it is to have a proc emanating from me. Here’s the “power auras” for it, by the way:

I also stopped being a dope and figured out how to show glyphs (thanks to the kind folks that offered tips in the comments and Twitter) and ended up going with Judgement, ShoR, and HotR for Prime and (initially) Seal of Truth, Consecration, and Holy Wrath for Major glyphs. After noticing that my Holy Wrath still wasn’t stunning elementals, I swapped that out for the Focused Shield glyph.

You know what’s more than a Grand Crusader proc? A Grand Crusader proc critting for 15k damage. Focused Shield is a beast of a glyph and definitely amazing for questing. I wasn’t aoe tanking as much out of fear for my life, so any extra single-target damage was icing on the cake.

Kezan, before the Fall (and Gilneas during)

After a while my mind wandered and I decided to roll a Goblin toon to take their starting zone for a spin. If only because I love Goblin character design and cannot wait to roll one on live. Just looking at the character creation screen you can see this impressive amount of detail that puts even the crisper Blood Elves and Draenei to shame, let along the terrible-by-comparison vanilla races.

They really need to redesign the vanilla races’ appearance.

Unfortunately the tenth quest in or so was broken as of the latest patch so I couldn’t get further than level four or so. What I did see though was a lot of fun, if not a bit depressing. Kezan is awfully bleak.

One thing about the Goblin starting zone that I absolutely hated was the storyline. (Sorry the following is a spoiler.) The basic idea of the starting experience is you’re in line to be the next Trade Prince, and you’re trying to “out-Goblin” the guy with the job currently so you can take over. A lot of the characters at the company you run call you Boss, and act like your employees. You go to a football-ish game and the coach says you’re some fantastic player who is the only one who can pull out a win in the game.

It’s like an institutionalized Mary Sue situation. It’s awful storytelling and just doesn’t make any sense… why would the boss be the one who goes down to the mines and knock around the dissenting jungle trolls? Why would the boss be the one who goes and kneecaps some deadbeats in Drudge Town? Why would the boss do his own shopping, on a quest given by his assistant?

“You’re the usurping Trade Prince-wannabe Goblin” sounds like something a terrible fanfic writer would vomit up. How will this jive with future dealing with the faction leader? How is it that you have an entire race of potential Trade Princes? Can they also be the half-Draenei son of Garona too?

Bah.

In terms of the overarching story, Gilneas is leaps and bounds ahead. Though, to be fair, I only saw the first four levels of Kezan, and it could redeem itself. For the time being though, I am in utter awe of the Worgen starting experience. Blizzard totally knocked this one out of the park.

When I last played my Worgen I was having a fun time dealing with no passive health regen, incredibly tough mobs, and a constant snuffling sound that made any further leveling torture. I set aside the Worgen until the next build, and I’m glad I did.

I finished up the quest I stopped on, went into a cellar to turn in the quest, and when I emerged the fields I was questing in were swallowed up by the sea. Now THAT is phasing

Later quests involved evacuating some npcs and doing random quests to get them to flee for you. One quest involved going into an apple orchard, and when I entered there I had to stop for a second and take in everything. Perhaps it’s the wistfulness I’m feeling at the imminent start of Fall and end of Summer, but I was completely caught up in the scenery. The haunting music, the twitching tree branches with orange leaves, the stomp of a raging Ettin in the distance. I forgot I was playing WoW. This really is a whole new experience.

Also, apparently my Worgen’s human form is Venom.

I also was witness to a fantastic take down of someone in general chat. Some mouth breather was complaining about bugs and specifically why they had to “play a buggy piece of crap” and some rational soul responded with “If you think you’re here for any reason other than discovering and reporting bugs, you should not be in beta.” The mouth breather had no reply. Well done for the responder.

Later quests took me around the zone and then finally to the Battle of Gilneas, which was one of those “get this ridiculous buff from this npc and kill waves of mobs” deals, ala the Battle for Undercity. Droll as it was, the fun part was in the aftermath when Tobias (spy worgen) and I snuck into the cathedral where Sylvanas was meeting with her lieutenants over how the Battle was going.

She is such a malevolent badass, I love it. I’m looking forward to the storyline turn of the Horde becoming less the “noble savages” and more a real antagonist in the story arc.

Afterwards, I assaulted the Horde forces assembled in Gilneas with a glaive thrower, and then snuck aboard a zeppelin to sabotage it. The quest that officially has the Worgen evacuating Gilneas seems to not be done yet, so all that was left was to take a Captain Placeholder-esque fellow across the ocean, into the sunset, and over to Darnassus.

So there was some chatter in the blogosphere over the last couple weeks about women or feminism in WoW. No real comment on that issue, but on reading some of the posts, I had a random thought:

What if Garrosh was female?

Would Garrosha still be presented in the same fashion that Garrosh is, as a hot-headed warmonger? What would the player-base's reaction to a female character who displayed the same traits as Garrosh does?

I actually started thinking about this while playing the Starcraft storyline. There is only one female character¹: Dr. Ariel Hanson. The thing is that there is nothing wrong with Dr. Hanson. She's smart, educated, kind, a leader for her colonists. She is entirely unobjectionable. She is also completely uninteresting. For all of Tychus Findlay's flaws, he was a far more intriguing character.

You kind of see the same thing with female Warcraft NPCs. The only interesting (non-villain) female character is Sylvannas Windrunner. The other ones, Jaina, Tyrande, Liadrin etc., all tend to fall into this unobjectionable category. They're all competent, powerful, smart, non-sterotypical² characters.

The female villains are interesting. Lady Prestor had style, and I really liked the portrayal of High General Abbendis of the Scarlet Onslaught, as revealed through her diaries. But this doesn't seem to extend to female heroes.

Varian and Garrosh are at least interesting characters, even if they are terribly flawed. They generate debate and passion. But it seems very unlikely that Blizzard would make a female NPC like those two.

I wonder if that's a defensive reaction. To keep people from objecting to their portrayal of female characters, they make those female characters unobjectional. It's just too bad that this process seems to make them uninteresting as well.

1. Discounting Kerrigan/Queen of Blades as she is a villain.2. At least, they don't match the sterotypes of previous generations.

written by:
Meryl

Writing a guest submission is never an easy thing to do. I feel like I should introduce myself. My name is Meryl, Holy Paladin in a casual raiding guild. I've been playing WoW since February of 2006 and raiding since early 2008 (College degree>wow)! When I saw the call for guest submissions for poor ol' Ferraro due to her broken finger I couldn't help but write this article. I had an interesting exchange in /g with another pally in my guild the other night and asked Ferraro her thoughts and after thinking about it figured I'd write an article for you guys. This of course is just my experience and is by no means any sort of final list.


When Wrath was released this fight was not 'lawlfreemount' it was more like 'zomgwtfcan'tgetthisdown' kind of fight. I remember only 2 guilds on my server ever having this down at first and the mere idea of even seriously attempting it meant you were L337. The method overwhelmingly employed now (at least on my server) is bring in a Holy paladin (or a shaman that can tank heal well) that knows what he/she is doing, 2 tanks and 7 well geared dps and just burn the fight down asap. When this fight was progression content nothing could be further from the truth. You needed people that understood the mechanics of the fight. On normal mode avoiding flame walls became quite boring, although it's always entertaining to watch that 1 guy continually get hit by it. Ever. Single. Time. What I liked most about the fight is the coordination it takes: Between having your off tank kite the drakes around to people avoiding flame walls, to a portal team taking the portal and getting out as quickly as possible it felt like the right amount of work for the right amount of reward.



This fight was one of the first raid killer fights I ever saw once I started raiding regularly in WoW. I give most of Naxx a pass due to the fact that it was recycled content so more than likely you knew a couple people that had done it in vanilla days (well, a couple of the 1% folks who cleared it) so the content just didn't really feel as epic as it maybe should or could have. Everything about this fight just seemed a little over the top. The first time I hopped on the train to get to him I knew I was in for a good time. Actually engaging the boss I remember thinking it was weird to be fighting the bosses toy cars instead of the boss himself. The constant movement during this fight is on par with the movement in the Sarth 3D fight but it never felt as hectic to me. The most nerve wracking part of the fight for myself in my guild runs was always Phase 3 having to burn down all 3 vehicles at the same time so they didn't revive each other. It was very on the edge of my seat healing but an absolute blast. The hard mode version of the fight is even more fun and intense. Downing this boss the first time was one of the first big 'holy sh*t that was bad ass!' moments for me in WoW raiding.



Confession time. This boss is at no.3 not because it's difficult. Not because it's amazing for lore purposes. It's no.3 because I'm a holy paladin. Fair? Probably not. Scientifically sound? Definitely not. But it's my list and my opinion so here we are.

If a fight ever were designed for a holy paladin in mind this fight is definitely it. Everything about it is meant for us. Our Crusader Aura allowing us to swim for portals faster than others. Our single target bomb healing abilities (just to name one, you can any of your own here) to our amazing throughput for healing. It's a day at the proverbial candy store for us. Aside from that this fight is freaking amazing and unique. You get to heal a boss instead of kill it. Kudos to blizzard for thinking outside the box on this one to break up the usual flow of kill boss no.1, kill boss no.2, rinse/repeat 10ish more times and collect shiny purplez. It's a nice break from the norm and not to mention a great way to show all those dirty shamans and druids where their place is on the meters (way way way way way below you). It also gives me a chance to use a libram other than my super boring one.

On a side note, after one night where my guild had another holy paladin running with us, one of us did quite well on this fight, another. . . not so much. We were discussing it in /officer and the idea was thrown around that perhaps this person needed some help in understanding how to holy paladin. It was decided we would link him some valuable information. I thought I might share it with you guys in hopes that this training will give you some tips in what spells you should select. You can thank me in the comments section.



I am what you call a lore nerd. I get all into the story behind the bosses. The cut scenes in Wrath made the game 100% more enjoyable for me. The wrath gate cut scene was probably my favorite moment in Wrath up until downing the LK for the first time. Never mind that Arthas is one of THE main baddies when it comes to Warcraft lore. Never mind that he drops probably the sexiest looking mount pretty much ever(side note, wtb cool mount pst). The lore around this fight and the build up to it has been unmatched previously in WoW. To this point you had a raid where you knew the stories, you had read the text of the quests if you were into lore and you might have even read some outside lore about the bosses to know the back story depending on your level of being a nerd. This fight had an entire expansion geared to it from the very start. You had entire quest chains, you got to actually become the Lich King in one quest. The death knight starting quest chain and it's climax (Beautifully done video by the way). You had an absolutely amazing cut scene at the wrath gate to further the story and set up the eventual confrontation. 3 heroic 5 man dungeons all filled with lots of lore candy and even a little mini fight/chase scene with Arthas himself. Months and months of build up. The fight itself feels pretty epic the first time you do it. The RP with Tirion at the beginning, the actual mechanics of the fight: Defile positioning, phase transitions, Valk stuns, the Lore involving Terenas that is thrown in as a mechanic of the fight. The first time you get him to 10% and watch the raid get 1 shot (and if you're like me freak out because no one told you that was part of the fight. fml). Moar lore and fantastic RP. To the amazing finality of this expansion to see that achievement tick across your screen. The last part that makes this fight so beautifully executed is the final cut scene. If only every end raid boss could be done this way. Arthas is at no.2 on this because while he is a fun fight and a lore nerds wet dream, the normal mode version of the fight itself is not overly difficult and at this point is pugged regularly in 3 hours or less (for a full 12/12 clear) on 25 man on my server.



Before I get into this I'll briefly say that the no.2 and no.1 slots are very close in my eyes but a few things set them apart. If you disagree with me, totally cool. It's an opinion list and we're all entitled to ours but for me from my healing point of view this is where I stand and here's why:

This fight, while not as lore intensive fight, is and was much more difficult. Several reasons: No 30% buff to overpower you through the fight. More mechanics to keep track off. More running around like check with head cut off-ism to deal with. Between tanking p1 adds, watching insanity stacks, getting people out of tentacles (BoP is your friend), Not failing on brain link, ensuring that your portal teams go into the correct portals, watching out for Lunatic gaze in p3 (it seems simple to just turn around for 3 seconds but wow was there some fail going on back in the day). That's just the normal mode. Take out the keepers and this fight gets a lot harder. Alone in the darkness is still not an easy fight unless you were clearing it in your Ulduar gear. That covers the difficulty of the fight. My other reasons for putting this above Arthas are as follows: going into the brain to experience his visions at the time was the most lore intensive a fight had ever been. Getting to see some of the earlier lore with all 3 visions inside the brain was just plain cool. Did I mention this guy is a freakin' Old God and thus immensely more powerful and crazy that Arthas ever though about being? Not to mention that the mount he drops from alone in the darkness is way cooler than some dumb old horse that Arthas is still /qqing about. Helicopters>horses imo.

I did not forget ToC. I just didn't enjoy the raid that much. Wasn't very pleasing to me either from a mechanic standpoint or a lore standpoint. I could have never raided ToC more than once and been happy.
So that's my list. Hope you enjoyed it. What are you thoughts? Agree or disagree? Should make for some interesting discussion in the comments.

Written by:
Jack Flag

So with Ferarro succumbing to her wounds of a crippled finger, I thought I’d do a write up of the feared, frosty lake of death.

When Wrath first dropped I absolutely hated Wintergrasp. That might have been more to the fact that as a level 72, I would run in assuming that similar level Alliance were also there looking for a fair fight. Typically things wouldn’t go smoothly and I abhorred the vehicle dynamics. As time went on and I started to branch into alts, I looked to a method of BoA gearing and saw a clear cut path that required those funky little shards from Archavon (seriously? I want to know exactly how many shards they had, cause the coffers have to be running dry by now). Slowly but surely I started attending the hourly assaults and defends on the keep; it was only a matter of time until I was hooked. Now WG is my guilty pleasure; attack or defend, I love it. I’ve even come around on the vehicle mechanics. So I thought maybe a few tips on how you can make your WG more enjoyable and perhaps help turn a lost cause into a win. On my home server (Blade’s Edge), Horde will have the keep 75% of the time. That was flipped at the start of Wrath mind you. Now Horde will own the keep at the peak hours of the day, and the Alliance picks it up in the wee hours of the morning. From 5 minute sweeps, 30 minute epic wars, and 15 minutes of “Holy Tenacity Batman- that Warrior tank is stacked like a raid boss!” I’ve seen it all. Perhaps you will too.

First rule about Wintergrasp: We don’t talk about… You’re going to die. If you don’t want to accept it, then at least plan for it. The simplest way to prevent or avoid this - stick with your team. Unless for some reason your faction had a 40 man strategized raid prepped prior to the battle, most of everyone involved is a lone wolf. Don’t be a lone wolf, at least not at the beginning. A fair fight is not what you want in WG. It’s all a numbers game. The more of you, the better chance you have to bring your target down. This is true for your enemies as well. If you Rambo into a group full of fresh enemies, you really shouldn’t expect to be making it home for dinner. Of course you could be in your Protection gear with 16 stacks of tenacity and capable of defending Molten Core (but I wouldn’t rely on this). If I see someone running alone on the battlefield, I always assume they have (or will have) Tenacity and am very cautious to engage. Another advantage of fighting within a group, is that everyone surrounding you is going to benefit from a kill (not to mention any passive or castable buffs you might throw out). This in itself is one of the keys to winning WG. The faster your raid is ranking up, the faster you will have access to vehicles; and vehicles are how you win WG (more so from the Assault side). Now if you do die, there are typically a few general responses: The first is to try to exact a revenge kill if you were caught with your pants down mining ore next to a workshop you should have been paying attention to… (guilty). This response usually will lead to sweet, sweet justice or another visit to the graveyard because the guy who killed you has friends… with him. The second is to pick a new objective, put the pedal to the pony, and ride out to save the world… or at least the lake. This is usually your better option of the two. Sometimes a fresh target will open new opportunities and windows to re-focus you on the task at hand.

Remember that lone wolves thing? I’d hope so as it’s only a few lines up. Being a solo player in a raid full of solo players isn’t always bad thing. Most of the time players in WG know what needs to be done and share a common mindset. When enough lone wolves know what they are doing start running together you get yourself a decent wolf pack (crickets). It only takes one person to break a wall or topple a tower. Sure it’s harder and more time consuming, but it only takes one. If your opponents have a choke point or a strong defense set up at the keep or towers, it might be time for a flank. Go over to the opposite side of the map, grab a siege or catapult, and start wreaking havoc. Again, one of two things will happen. You’ll either succeed and destroy the objective, or you’ll draw the attention of the defenders, allowing the main assault force a better chance of breaking through. Either way, both are a success in my books. I can recall on two separate occasions taking a siege engine through the two west walls, while everyone and their parents, grandparents, kids, and cousins-twice-removed were duking it out in the east, before someone noticed me.

Typically there will be anywhere from 1 to 40 people spouting orders in the raid or general chat. Nothing like 40 potential raid leaders for 1 raid. Blade’s Edge has about a handful of Horde that have a reputation on the server for being WG leaders or MVPs. We’ve either seen enough combat or worked with the raid enough times to have a general cohesiveness with the realm in terms of leading a PuG assault or defend round. I wouldn’t suggest trying to force your way to a raid leader position, but rather scan the chats and see who or what needs help, or if you have any valuable intel on the battle at hand. Calling out the location of enemy Siege trains, if there are a swarm of enemy players on route to take a work shop, or if you think that you see an opening and want to get a small raiding party for some offense of your own. Communication is key. Sure there will be ruses, red herrings, and spam; but sift through it and you’ll find a lot of valuable material that’s key to winning the round. Keep in mind these are just tips, by all means play the game as however it makes it fun for you. Also, these will be written from a Horde perspective (though not necessarily all just from a Paladin in battle).

Offense. So you need to take the Keep. The enemy doesn’t want you looting the vault and they certainly don’t want you meddling with their shard vendors. Autobots roll out! Make your way with the majority of the raid in attempting to capture Broken Temple Workshop and Sunken Ring Workshop. These are you primary garages used in breaking the keep. Keep an eye on your map and pay attention to the chat notices if any of your 3 towers are under attack in the south. At this point you’ll see a lot of small rank vehicles pumping out. I tend to fully rank up and go for a siege asap. If enemies are sparse, go scouting with nearby allies for stragglers or potential lone wolves trying to cap an unguarded workshop. Once you have access to sieges call out your side (ask for gunners!) and lead a train (hopefully others will follow you) towards the East or West wall. I usually pick the one with the least amount of traffic so as to offer the flank bonus for the team. If you are driving the siege take it to the wall closest the tower and aim at an angle; your siege engine has a huge cone where it hits. You can easily hit the tower and the wall at the same time (SIEGE CLEAVE FTW!). The middle courtyard can be really tricky on offense. If there are enemies everywhere you can probably kiss your tank goodbye, but spam that ram anyway. From here on out it’s basically a task of either ploughing through and just sheer will powering the enemies down, or pick another wall and try to sneak (hopefully the enemies will ignore the other tank in the room) through another wall to lead in. Also if you are an engineer cackling like a maniac and chucking bombs at weakened walls is highly recommended; it certainly is stress relieving. One thing of note though. The longer the battle goes on, the fewer catapults there should be on the field. It’s distressing when 12/16 Horde vehicles are on the field and 11 of them are catapults – all with 3 minutes remaining (true story).

Defense. So you need to keep the Keep (see what I did there?). That’s probably not in your enemies wishes. They’ve been stocking shards and you are now preventing them from cashing in. The most successful strategy? Bubble-hearth and wish your comrades good luck – right… Stand firm paladins as now is your time to stand firm for a just cause… you know epic loots and stuff. Typically starting on a keep turret is always a solid opening. Depending on your view distance and location you can actually land shots right in front of the two siege workshops. Always lead your target and when you can fire into mobs of enemies, you suffer no damage penalty/per target(s) hit. If you’ve gotten your ranks up on the turret or keep traffic is low, it’s time to move out. Keep watch for warnings popping up in your chat frame that should give you an idea of where the enemy is shifted. If you really want to shift the battle in your favour, then dropping the Southern towers is a must. If you take the same type of strategy as the offense, scout out to a low populated Workshop, or drive the long way around from one of your own to the opposite tower. Work at them and you can throw the assaulting team a ‘running out of time mindset’ this can make the rest of the round super easy – or super hectic. Remember that call-outs are good, simple things like ‘Inc siege train West’, ‘East Wall Breached’, ‘Southern Tower Assault on me’, and my personal favourite ‘LOOK a gnome! Get him!’ If you chose to stay back at the base then chances are you will be running into enemy vehicles, or perhaps enemies in your keep. Priority is simple. Kill the vehicles first. They can’t make progression (unless they are all rocking engineers) without vehicles. You can take advantage and attack the vehicles while standing right in the middle of them. It almost is a sense of stealth, cause your unit bar is all that can be seen until it the vehicle dies. If there is a huge push and the Alliance are swarming, never be a afraid to bubble and run out into the middle of them. You’ll probably draw a lot of fire which will buy your team valuable time, and it gives you the ability to assess the situation (barring a Shattering Throw doesn’t spoil your party). Every bit of damage helps, so drop your Consecrates on choke points and fallen walls, and be wary of any healers (keep yours alive! kill the others!). Either time will run out or you’ll be running out of the keep if you get overwhelmed and have to take the loss. It happens, just remember next round – It’s personal!

Success! You’ve defended or taken the keep. Go spend some shards, join up for the next VoA loot piñatas, and remember your experience. If you worked with key players in making this past round a success, take note of who they are and look for them the next time.

Thanks for reading and remember, it’s not about how many epic drops you get… it’s about how many gnomes you punted to get them!

-Jack Flag

So, we've been in Cataclysm beta for a fair few months now, and they finally made level 85 available. Now, i can start considering my future as a player.

As you might expect, i'm sticking with my Paladin and i'm staying Prot spec. I just like the tree changes overall. I mean, wrath was major for tankadins. The next one makes it fun. You know, almost every talent in the new tree seems really fun. I look at each one in turn, and with only a few exceptions, they're damn awesome. Guardian's Favor, Protector of the Innocent, and to some extent Reckoning and Judgements of the Just, look boring, but everything else is essentially new and fun.

I'm liking the proc systems they're bringing in. Tanks didn't have any interesting proc-based weapons in ICC like casters did. Now, we get those awesome procs in our talents.
If we're aiming for a November release, i'm honestly expecting PTR during september.

Gevlon made an excellent point on blogroll listing: For simple socials the “worth reading” is inseparable from “I like him”. For a social, liking is everything.

Most of Gevlon’s assertions are so stupid it pisses me off. I read his stuff everyday, because 1) I’m curious how’s he’s gonna piss me off today; and 2) once in a while he comes up with brilliant and/or extremely well-articulated ideas. I loved his take on feminism, largely because I felt it offered the best diagnosis and the most pragmatic solutions.

I can’t stand the guy, but he’s very much worth reading and one of my favorites.

On the other hand, Antigen’s posts are gigantic waste of valuable time and limited internet space. Still, I keep him on the roll cause I like the guy. I have no idea what he’s been writing about, but he thinks I’m engaged thanks to this macro:

/goto http://hazmacewillraid.blogspot.com
/open commentBox(series=1)
/castRandom typeString(“ZOMG GRATS”, “LOL”, “Nice!”)

Distinction of "worth reading" and "I like him" are applicable to lots of things.

If Mike, one of my best friends in rl, applied to my guild and named me as a reference, I would absolutely thrash his credentials:

"Mike is the coolest guy. He's hilarious, and you'd definitely want to hang out with him at a bar. With that said, he is the nubbiest fury warrior I've ever seen. He aligns all his spells on the numpad 1 through 9 and clicks them in order as they come off cd. In other words, he plays it like it's a ret pally. He's a complete disgrace to the entire warrior community and I really don't know what he was thinking bringing his nonsense to this sacred, elite organization."

The fact that you are my friend, the GM’s girlfriend, or Miley Cyrus’ tweeter buddy is irrelevant. You are either raiding worthy or you are not.

I tend to be skeptical of progression guilds that market themselves as an organization “formed by a close circle of friends” or “chartered by the divine secrets of the ya ya sisterhood” or anything like that. I know their intention is to highlight comradery, but such emphasis implies lack of brutally objective meritocracy.

Someone called me yesterday to conduct a reference check: “Hey, John Doe is applying for such and such position in my shop. Didn’t you used to work with him? How is he?”

I busted it out just like this: “John is an amicable guy. He’d make a great neighbor for Sunday BBQ parties, but I’d never want him in a foxhole with me.” It’s a fucking jungle out there man. I don’t need a friend. I need a cold, calculating, alert ninja sniper to watch my back.
Edit: This goes without saying, but there are plenty of people who’d make an excellent foxhole buddy and a bar buddy at the same time.

I know my beta reportage lately has been nothing short of abysmal, and I apologize for that. I finally got my lazy self back on there last night to check out the changes applied in the latest build that dropped earlier this week, as well as poke around with all the glyphs.

First things first, let’s talent about talent and spell changes. Here’s what’s pertinent to Prot:

The Vindication change isn’t that shocking, since they mentioned earlier their intention was we were not going to let us aoe-attack power debuff. The Grand Crusader change makes sense as well, since HotR was basically giving multi-fold chances to proc the effect over just Crusader Strike.

Sanctuary’s new damage reduction effect brings us in-line with the baked in damage reduction that other tanking specs currently enjoy with their respective tanking stances/forms. The wages of our tanking “stance” being usable by Holy or Ret.

And lastly, Consecrate is just getting slapped around a bit more as part of the tanking aoe nerf. Hurrah.

Oh, and apparently the Guardian of Ancient Kings animation is now in beta!

As for glyphs, I was excited to check out the new interface and all the new (not yet finalized) glyphs available for the class.

So, I logged onto my Draenei pally and attempted to fly to the nearest flight master (at the World Tree) to make my way to Dalaran in the most round-about way possible.

After three crashes while trying to enter the part of Hyjal where the world tree is, and a bug report later, I then just hearthed to the Exodar and fumbled around for some way to get to Stormwind. I then got hopelessly lost, huffed, puffed, and logged over to my Belf pally who was in Orgrimmar.

One zep later and I was up in Northrend. I flew my way over to Dalaran and found the various Glyph vendors outside of the Inscription building. I loaded up on all the Paladin ones and started learning them, one by one.

Many minutes later, I then happily opened my glyph window and found …

And nothing had changed. This begs the question: where are my glyphs, exactly?

I’m sure I missed some little trick to make them appear in beta, so playing musical chairs with them will have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, let’s look at the list of glyphs pertinent to our spec. Some of them are pretty cool.

Prime Glyphs

• Crusader Strike – Increases Crusader Strike’s crit chance by 5%
• Hammer of the Righteous – Increases the physical and Holy damage dealt by HOTR by 10%
• Judgement – Increases Judgement’s damage by 10%
• Shield of the Righteous – Increases ShoR’s damage by 10%
• Word of Glory – Increases Word of Glory’s healing by 10%

Major Glyphs

• Consecration – Increases Consecration’s cooldown and duration by 20%
• Dazzling Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now also dazes
• Divine Protection – Removes the physical damage reduction of your Divine Protection, but increase the magical damage reduction by 20%
• Focused Shield – Your Avenger’s Shield now hits 2 fewer targets, but deals 30% more damage
• Holy Wrath – Your Holy Wrath now also stuns Elementals and Dragonkin
• Salvation – No longer reduces threat over time, but completely removes threat as long as the Glyph is active
• Seal of Truth – Increases expertise skill by 10 while Seal of Truth is active

Minor Glyphs

• Blessing of Kings – Reduces mana cost by 50%
• Blessing of Might – Increases duration by 20 minutes
• Lay on Hands – Reduces cooldown by 2 minutes
• Truth – Reduces Seal of Truth’s mana cost by 50%

In case you’ve missed the explanation given by Ghostcrawler, Prime Glyphs are meant to be obvious, useful glyphs that directly affect threat or damage taken (in our case), Major Glyphs are situational, and Minor Glyphs are more for quality of life or cosmetic changes.

I’ve already said in the past that in Cata I intend to dual spec a trash/threat spec and a boss/survival spec, and these glyphs (while not final) are totally playing into that.

I can see my threat spec using HotR, ShoR, and Judgement for Primes; Consecration, Seal of Truth, and Holy Wrath for Majors; and, well, Minors don’t matter in this scenario.

Contrawise, a survival spec would possibly use Crusader Strike or Judgement (depending on what does more threat), ShoR, and Word of Glory (assuming us using WoG in our rotation pans out) and then Seal of Truth, Focused Shield, and Consecration for Majors. Then, for say a magic-heavy fight, I could swap in Divine Protection instead of Consecration.

Of course, the glyph design is not anywhere near finalized. Case in point:

That Avenging Wrath glyph no longer exists. It’s far too obvious a dps increase to be a major under the new paradigm.

The Seal of Truth one is on the bubble. It’s still in for now, but it’s pretty much a no-brainer given the stat savings it offers.

Overall, I like the design of situational major glyphs, it makes character customization more interesting and cerebral than running around with the same three glyphs all the time.

Now, how about some minor glyphs that are actually interesting? Too much to ask for?

I was surprised the other day when I logged in a found that I had advice in the mail from a long-time, though anonymous, reader:

I thought I'd go through this faithful reader's concerns, and talk about my choices about my current gear. (Points slightly rearranged for ease of response.)

Your armory makes me cringe. Drop the MP5 and SP gems and the MP5 enchants. Utter garbage. Gem pure int with 1 Nightmare Tear in the helm.

This is the major point where I differ with what I see as established Holy paladin theorycraft. Most high-end paladins gem, and even enchant, pure intellect. Personally, I like getting socket bonuses, so I use SP/Int, Int, and Int/MP5 gems. So far I haven't had any issues with mana. But if I was to change anything, this would be it.

I'm not really sure what MP5 enchants are being discussed. The only MP5 enchants I have are the faction head/shoulder SP/MP5 ones. As far as I know, MP5 is considered better than crit, so these enchants are the ones to use.

Get the 245 libram from Triumph Emblems. It's BiS.

I use [Libram of Renewal]. My loyal reader suggests using [Libram of Veracity] instead. I am somewhat puzzled by this. The point of gemming full Intellect is to spam Holy Light. Holy Light spam costs a lot of mana, and reducing the cost of HL by 10% is very powerful. Plus HL spam tends to have high overheal, so extra spellpower often just increases your overheal.

Pick up another 400 Haste. Stop wearing MP5 gear. Crafted legs are BiS. 60 Frost gloves are BiS. Crafted boots are BiS

These are pretty good suggestions. To be honest, I kind of just take gear as it drops. I don't do 10-mans, though, so I'm relatively behind on badges.

Consider a 51/5/15 spec for better HPS and efficiency.

I use a 51/20/0 spec for Divine Guardian. I think Divine Guardian is a really powerful cooldown that is extremely useful.

Drop Glyph of BoL, it's garbage. HS or FoL is the way to go.

I disagree here, Glyph of Beacon of Light is a better choice. It saves a bit of mana, saves a GCD every so often, and most importantly, staggers your BoL and SS refreshes. Taking two GCDs in a row to refresh buffs is a long time between heals. As for the other two, HL is the spell of choice, so buffing the other two is less valuable. Better to buff the spells you use most often, and Beacon is always up.

Drop enchanting for JC.

My second profession is already Jewelcrafting. Seems kind of silly to drop Enchanting at this point.

Seriously, after you got denied from Reclaimed I thought you would at least try to fix your !@#$. It just bothers my soul that you have a blog and give people advice when your own character is such a wreck. I feel bad for your guild. You at least owe it to them to research your class and play correctly.

Heh, Reclaimed was two years ago. I'm somewhat surprised that someone would remember and consider it important enough to reference. Or take time to look up my armor, make notes, create a character on my server and send me an anonymous mail with advice.

Still, the "bothers my soul" line is a tad over-wrought.

It's always useful to see what better players are doing. Let's take a look at Diamondtear of Paragon.
The immediate difference I see is that Diamondtear gems and enchants pure intellect, and does gear for haste (though she uses the same legs that I do). Otherwise, we use the same faction enchants, use the same libram, and have similar specs and glyphs.

Today, we’re going to countdown my 10 favorite encounters in World of Warcraft to tank.

The first problem I encountered working on this post was I had way too many nominees. So I cheated. Well not really, its my blog, my rules. Basically, I combined a couple of similar bosses into one entry, since what I’m really after in this post is what made these bosses fun from the tanking perspective.

But before we get into the countdown, I have to find Casey Kasem to DJ for me. In the meantime, let me give a brief one sentence mention to the Bosses that didn’t make the cut. Consider these Honorable Mentions.

• The Twin Val’kyr – I love the whole Light and Dark aspect of the bosses, it reminded me a little bit of Hydross.
• Four Horsemen (Level 80) – The way you have to trade off the bosses, and trying to maximize threat to burn one down while staying alive.
• Leotheras the Blind – Paladins had some unique advantages against this boss and exploiting those was fun.
• Hodir (Hard Mode) – A test of how fast you could hit your Taunt button. That was fun.
• Loatheb, Level 80 – Taking less damage than your healers is fun.
• Reliquary of Souls – While Phase 2 stunk (you HAD to have a Warrior), Phase 3 was probably one of the few moments where Paladins really shined in Burning Crusade.
• Moroes – It was fun being able to negate his main ability, called Garrote, three different ways with Stormform (Dwarves For the WIN!), Blessing of Protection and Divine Shield.
• Thaddius – Not so much the boss, but his two guards Feugen and Stalagg would slap their tank across the room to the other guard. Flying tanks were fun.

Now I’ll turn it over to Casey.

#10

Thanks Honors. We begin the Tank Countdown by going old school, all the way back to the first Raid instance of the Burning Crusade. Here at #10 on our countdown, Netherspite!

Netherspite was a dragon that lived in the upper reaches of the Level 70 entry raid, Karazhan. He makes the list because he had one of the most fun mechanics I’ve seen in a Boss fight. When you start the fight 3 portals form and shoot beams at Netherspite. Players had to stand in those beams. Standing in the Beam gave you stacking buff, and allowing the beams to hit Netherspite gave him a stacking buff. You wanted that buff hitting you and not him. For a little added fun, the beams were color coded. Tanks needed to stand in the red beam, and the position of the Red beam changed once a minute. In addition, you got an exhaustion type debuff after standing in the beam so you had to alternate with your other tank.

Part of what was fun about the boss was the stacking buff the Red Beam gave you automatically put you at the top of the threat list, but also kept increasing your Hit Points. As we discovered in ICC when the buff hit 30%, tanks find it fun to have silly amounts of HP. I don’t know that I’ve seen a boss with such a cool mechanic before or since, and it was a very fun encounter week after week. He also gets the nod because we did some really crazy stunts near the end of the expansion, like the night we had Holy Priest take the Red beam. She survived, and we all had a blast.

#9

We continue the countdown by looking at the final raid instance of the Burning Crusade. Death Knights from all over Azeroth can meet the namesake for their AoE attack. From the deep in the Black Temple comes our #9 Boss, Gurtogg Bloodboil.

Gurtogg needs to enjoy his moment in the sun here because I promise you he won’t make any Healers top 10 list. The fight was really tough on healers. But I wasn’t a Healer. I was a tank. This fight used a mechanic similar to Lady Deathwhisper’s heroic mode. Bloodboil would put a stacking debuff on your tank that reduced armor, and also was an undispellable Damage over Time (DoT). A single tank could only take so many application before they would be unhealable. The healers had their hands full with something akin to unchained magic which meant only certain healers could heal at any given time. Normally stacking debuffs are no trouble, you simply tank swap. The twist for Gurtogg was that he wasn’t tauntable. Everyone, including your melee DPS had to watch Omen to make sure the Tanks were #1, #2, and #3 on threat. The Tanks couldn’t get out their TPS epeen either. You had to stay close to your fellow tanks, and execute tank swaps by manipulation of the Threat meter. To add to the fun, Gurtogg had an attack that reduced the threat of the current tank.

This fight was about controlling your TPS in a really skillful way. You needed to know when to back off, and when to put the pedal to the metal. You had to really work together as a tanking team, which is another part of the fight that made it very fun for me.

That’s as much as we have time for today. I’ve already got all 10 lined up, but the post was getting a little long so I decided to break it into 3 parts. Be sure to check back next week, when we will continue the countdown.

I’m still in shock we pulled this off. I mean, not completely, I did know it was going to happen. Mathematics demanded a kill, and we gladly complied. Still, it’s a pretty big deal for the guild that all our hard work paid off. I could not be more proud of our raiders, this was a kill we all needed to keep the faith.

We started the week with a rough patch, to say the least. Tuesday was… brutal… and we’ll leave it at that. So Wednesday we had something of a chip on our shoulders that demanded satisfaction. We buckled down and righted all the wrongs that held us back on Tuesday and still managed to get to Sindragosa with the usual 2 hours left in raid. Our game faces on, we got to work.

The first attempt was ok. We had a flawless first air phase, then a disastrous second. The second attempt we did immaculately until the third air phase, then the attempt collapsed. Shaking the rust off, as we say.

Subsequent attempts were so-so, generally requiring battle rezzes to be used in air phases, which was killing me. At least at this point we were hitting phase 3.

Finally after another attempt where the same mage (who I don’t often bring, but was dragging along as an Unchained Magic human shield) died for the umpteenth time to a Frost Bomb, I removed him from raid–something I should had done attempts ago–and brought in a newly recruited shadow priest.

Around this point we also imposed some pretty severe discipline onto vent. Basically, the rule became in phase 3: no talking unless it’s a healer announcement, a tank swap, or something life threatening. Everyone else just focus and lock it down. I think this was a huge key to our success.

The next attempt we got the fight to 7%. It was going fantastically, but Ana was cut off from heals momentarily and died, and then I went to pick it up but was eventually rocking way too much buffet stacks. Still, everyone was filled with hope. There was not a single air phase death that attempt. There was even a great raid awareness moment where a block got dropped the opposite way from where we were taking them, and everyone got out of the way, and then we kept the correct direction going afterwards. All in all, the mojo seemed to be back.

So we lined up again, and after a quick stupid wipe, we did what was destined to be the money shot. Air phases were nearly perfect, we had one death because someone was DC’d, but we kept going. Phase 3 starts and I get to work. Ana and I swap like clockwork, blocks go down with expert precision, healers are calling out roles and switches through vent without interruption. Finally we hit the single digits and it’s just gogogo time.

The enrage timer was ticking down, leaving us about a minute at that point. Everyone just pushed it as hard at they could and as I watched Sindy’s health slowly tick away from 3%, to numbers I never dreamed could lie beyond that. The “holy bleep” moment of “this is going to die” hit me in a euphoric wave, and then the Frost Queen crashed over dead and coughed up her purples.

I scored the 277 token from her for a hefty, hefty amount. Worth it nonetheless. Everyone was elated, and for some reason we rode that high over to heroic Putricide just to throw in some faux-attempts and get some idea of the mechanics of the fight.

Obviously we didn’t get very far. This is indeed our next dragon to slay, so to speak. I look forward to our coming weeks together, Putricide.

Oh, and as a humorous sidenote: remember how I said I was going to start rolling for Abom Duty? Well, prior to the first pull Ana, Nordic, and I rolled off for the right of riding the Abom. Nordic always wins, and I thought I finally had him when he rolled an 11. I then rolled a 6. Ok, well, Ana could be our last hope, right? Wrong. She also rolled a 6!

Curse you Nordicslayer.

Nonetheless, with five minutes left in raid we swapped it over to normal mode and quickly did the achievement in preparation for our eventual drakes scramble.

Great raid night overall, and a fantastic end to an ignominiously beginning week.

The Original Bargain

THQ and Penny Arcade kicked off a debate last week on used games. Tycho compared used games to straight-out piracy, and got a lot of heat for that view. Here is my perspective on the issue.

Our society created a bargain called copyright between creators and consumers. Creators got certain rights, such as the sole ability to make and distribute copies and derivate works for a set period of time. Consumers got certain rights, such as the right to sell or lend their copy to another person, and to quote snippets of the work in other works, such as essays.

By and large, this bargain worked pretty decently up until the end of the last century. Creators got enough rights that they could make a living selling their work. Consumers did not get penalized for using works in a normal manner. Aside from maybe Disney's efforts to extend the term of copyright for far longer than originally set, the copyright bargain was fair to both sides.

But this bargain was forged when all creative works were physical media. Digital media, on the other hand, differs from physical media in subtle ways. That difference may be enough that the old bargain is no longer fair to one of the sides.

Differences Between Physical and Digital Media

There are two major differences between physical media and digital media.

First, physical media can degrade. Why buy a new book instead of a used book? Well, for one thing, the new copy is pristine. A used book might have water stains, or torn or dog-eared pages. Some barbarous philistine may have underlined or highlighted sections.

That concept of pristine doesn't really apply to digital media. Pardon the pun, but digital media is rather binary: it either works or it doesn't. Your game either installs and runs, or it doesn't.

Second, copying physical media is expensive. Copying a paper book is an arduous process for an individual consumer. There's no concept of making a backup copy of a book, or a transformative copy to a different format.

Copying and manipulating digital media, in contrast, is trivial. That's pretty much the whole purpose of computers: to copy and manipulate data.

Because copying physical media is so expensive, copyright's restrictions on copying really only affected the corporations and not the end consumer. But digital media changed all that.

Conclusions

These two differences have put more pressure on the creator side of the bargain. It is important that the bargain is fair to both sides. The harder it is for creators to make money, the fewer works that will be created. There is such a thing as "killing the goose which laid the golden eggs." At the same time though, making end consumers jump through hoops is just going to annoy everyone.

I think that the differences between physical and digital media are strong enough that the copyright bargain may need to be adjusted. For example, maybe we could ban resale and lending, but cut the copyright term to 5 or 10 years. So the creators can make more money, but only for a shorter time.
If we had a political class worth a damn, maybe they would look at this issue and hammer out a reasonable compromise. But we don't, so we'll just muddle along, trying to force the old bargain to apply in a world that it is not suited to.

Larisa had an awesome blog topic: Players I admire and players I look down on.

Players I Admire

1) Mages who top the decurse count on LDW. I don’t know which one of our three mages is doing it, but he is so fast I don’t even know I was inflicted until I parse the log. A mage undoing that many curses that fast has to be proactively looking for shit to decurse. He’s got no qualms about sacrificing his GCD for the team.

Me? I throw a tantrum when I have to rebuff Kings on brezed players. These resurrected assholes are making me burn my precious GCD on them. It's MY GCD.

When someone calls for Salv, I just feign ignorance. Again, it's MY GCD. I love me and since they're not me, I don't care.

2) Warlocks specced for Demonic Pact and hunters speced & glyphed for Improved Hunter’s Mark. These folks would rank right below Ghandi on Moslow’s Pyramid. Think about it: they are purposely gimping their dps to benefit the others… wtf... that is a fascinating concept I can’t quite grasp… our demo lock voluntarily descended to the bottom of the recount for the silly humanity. He then fed us with two fish feast and five loaves of felbread. He is Jesus.

Players I Look Down On

1) Players who are habitually late to the raid. There’s a clear distinction between being friendly and being respectful. If I throw a hissy fit because you always show up 10-15 minutes late, it’s not that I’m being unfriendly. The problem is that you’re a disrespectful asshole. It’s not that you don’t have time. The problem is that you fail at time management.

2) Players who go AFK during Freya trash. The scrub didn’t understand why we were so upset since we don't really need all 25 to clear the place. My GM ripped into him: “Auto follow? You were on auto follow? Do you know what I would do if my girlfriend had me on auto follow? I would kill her by standing at the edge of the water and turning until her head is completely submerged. Auto follow? Fucking auto follow?”
3) Back-seat raid leaders. These people are hilarious. Tell me if this sounds familiar: It’s 3rd and 5. You’re trailing by 6 with 2 minutes left. You’re running no-huddle offense. The QB calls out the play: Red 39 Z-fly Go! The tight end interrupts him with an audible “No no that’s stupid! Power I power I.” The right tackle won’t even settle down “No, I’m reading John Madden StratFu right now. It says… wait… give me a minute.”

i broke my finger last night. typing sucks. typing this sucks. so help me and my stupid finger by sending in an article youd like to see posted on paladin schmaladin for all the paladin world to see by writing us at theblueaffair@hotmail.com. as i slowly crawl from the edge of death and darkness, ill post the submissions chosen by our team. thanks.

pray for me.

-f.
(p.s. injuries make me dramatic.)

I don't roll on tier tokens against tanks/healers. I just don't. As far as I'm concerned, decked out tanks and healers are indirect dps buff for me-- in the form of higher threat cap and increased survivability. Plus, it makes me look like a real classy looter.

After 9 months of ICC, I got my first heroic tier token tonight. I got me the shoulders, because it's a purple hazy glowy symbol of respect of an uber raider.

You know, my favorite wow past time used to be standing on dal bank steps impressing myself with my gears. I stopped doing it, because I found out nobody cared. I was the only one impressed with myself :(
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If Mike, one of my best friends in rl, applied to my guild and named me as a reference, I would absolutely thrash his credentials. I mean, I would GO TO TOWN:

Unlike the last game, last night’s actually lasted a decent amount of time and was (at least for me) much more fun.

We did this concept before, everyone rolls a level 1 and then races from one point to the other on foot, with deaths a plenty just about every mob over level 10. Last time we did Orgrimmar to Everlook; last night we did a track I thought would be much more ambitious, Silvermoon to the Dark Portal (by way of the Tirisfal zep).

Starting at the gates of Silvermoon in a huge naked pile, the gun first and we all broke for it.

Eversong, as you can imagine, was little trouble. I’ve leveled through the zone many times and knew the danger spots. I cross the Dead Scar at the north end than dodged down the road into the halfway point and crossed east towards the scar, and then down into the Ghostlands.

Ghostlands was pretty breezy, with only one rough spot at the beginning that was promptly cleared for me by the pack leaders who were torn apart by lynxes.

Towards the end of Ghostlands I was chasing Antigen, and then took a screenshot of my pursuit. I didn’t realize screenshotting made you stop running momentarily, so I had to shelve that after it cost me a chance at passing him.

We soon passed into EPL, which was definitely the hardest zone of the race. It wasn’t just the mob levels (though that did result in bats flying from across the zone to eat our faces), it was that there was no clear way to pass into WPL without crossing through huge groups of mobs. I elected to go south down the road and then cut southwest along the mountains, north of the Infectis Scar, rather than follow the road and go through Corin’s Crossing.

That was a huge miscalculation and cost me any chance at a win, I suspect. The graveyard was way too far away to make corpse hopping viable.

At this point the leaders for the rest of the game were established, and those that fell behind terminally quickly settled into a perma-bottom place. Poor Falowin tried to cross the mountains at some indeterminate point and ended up spending most of the race in EPL.

Eventually I squeezed my way out of EPL, probably in 7th place, and started making my way through WPL. The West was all about following the road and then corpse hopping past choke points where mobs were parked on either side of a road. There was a bear pincer moment, a spider pincer, and one point where you pass a field with caster skeletons on your right and a spider on your left. No way out there.

I think I ended up gaining time in WPL, because once I crossed into Tirisfal I started seeing people again.

I barely made the zeppelin, and the entire time I dashed up the tower I could hear Vili (already on the boat) shouting “GO ZEP GO, LET’S GO!” To his consternation I disembarked with the rest of them to STV.

Heading north through STV wasn’t terrible, though somehow I fell far behind Vili, but ended up ahead of Antigen. Either way, a few tigers later and I was cruising into Duskwood, land of the roaming soldiers. The only make up for the annoyance of all the mobs camping the road was how close graveyards were to each other.

You could tell we were in the final phase of the race at this point. The leaders were passing through Swamp of Sorrows while myself and the two immediately behind me were barely entering Deadwind Pass. The next two zones (Deadwind and the Swamp) were amazingly easy, not a mob in sight. Well, I got chased by a crocodile at one point, but I easily outran him.

Eventually Cendra took the win and crossed the ribbon (aka, the Dark Portal) and passed into Outland. Vili and Freezedealer quickly followed taking respective second and third place. I managed to pull fourth, and the stragglers (except for Falowin, who was in WPL at this point) began to trickle in one by one.

While waiting there I’m sure we drew a few questions from the various 50s and 60s that crossed through the portal into Outland. How often is it you see a pack of level 2 and 3s just hanging out there?

At one point a demon ran up the steps and caused a minor panic, thinking he was coming for us. Once he passed someone, everyone opened fire, but obviously didn’t do much of a scratch. As Antigen said, “where was the defense on that?!”

Once the rest of the close-by stragglers came by, I took a picture and we called it a night.

I hope everyone who participated had fun. I personally had a blast, and was immensely relieved the results seemed by the books. One more game to go!