Most Viewed Posts of the Last Month

For those of you curious about the effect of keywords and content on the incoming views, this could be an interesting list for you. Check each of these and notice the keywords. The top 5 in order from most viewed to least of the past 30 days are as follows:

Cataclysm Faction Reputation Guide
Weekend Update: No Dailies in Hyjal
Daily Thoughts: Hyjal
Daily Thoughts: Uldum Thoughts and Screen Shots
Daily Thoughts: Ret Gets Buffed in Patch 4.0.6

 

Note here that people are really interested in checking up on the new Cataclysm zones and the new factions. Hyjal it seems is of particular interest to a great many people, probably because there’s no dailies (yet) but a ton of great loot. In a future content patch blizzard will be adding some along with changes to the zone. This would be a great time to write some relevent articles and drive more viewers to your site. For those not so interesting in writing blogs, but reading them, I’ll be doing a full guide for the hyjal dailies once they come into existence.

Daily Thoughts: The Great Reign of Griefers and Trolls

The lull before cataclysm brought out the Great Reign of Griefers and Trolls. This time was expected to end after the release of Cataclysm, when the expansion should have brought about more activities for these griefers and trolls to do that weren’t griefing and trolling. Many theorized that these players had previously been so occupied diving into the content, in some way or another, that they weren’t bored enough to be so driven to harass those who don’t think everyone in the game is a ‘bro’. Occasionally of course, griefers and trolls end up harassing each other. This is similar to a gang war. The major except is after the words are done flying between the two players or groups of players, no one has been shot. On the other hand, many innocent by standards in /trade or /general have lost precious IQ points in fray. Now we are weeks into the Cataclysm and the tremendous amount of rude players have not receded into the black depths of their parents basements (or where ever they come from). No, they are still out in force! For the first few days of Cataclysm it seemed even worse. General chat in hyjal was just as abusive and useless as trade chat usually becomes. Douches were out in mass sniping kills, jacking nodes, and otherwise doing whatever they can to be as selfish, unhelpful, and unpleasant as possible.

Now weeks later, trolls in trade chat haven’t quite died down to normal levels, but there’s even more nerd rage spam about someone ninja’ing something. Players are more likely than ever to find their elementium node stolen after a mob hits them while they were trying to mine. After such an event, even a /say of “really” could result in being spammed by the offending players guild with “umadbro”. Although I haven’t been personally privy to this event, I’ve heard many stories of 3 guild-mates joining a dungeon queue as tank or heals for the quick queue time, then refusing to tank or heal. At which point, given the simple majority, they kick anyone from the group unable or unwilling to tank or heal until they find someone who can. You might be shocked by this, but yes, the griefers are organizing. (more…)

Weekend Update: It’s Over 9000!

It’s official. This blog has reached over 9000 views. Any other group might have waited until 10,000 views to care, but no, not us nerds. We know the significance of over 9000. Even blizzard acknowledged the importance with the achievement. Although faster than I expected, I saw a paladin with over 9000 gearscore. He was actually not very good. Proof again that skill > gear.

 

That’s really all for today. I’m just working on gearing up my warrior, leveling my shaman, and possibly a little archeology on my paladin for some nice epics (I hope).

Thanks everyone for reading this and helping me reach… over 9000.

Daily Thoughts: It’s Not Christmas Anymore

Apparently today is the official day after the Christmas holiday time for my universe. Last night my significant other took down our tree and decorations in the midst of a living room cleaning frenzy, and today the tree at the office where I work is packed away into boxes to wait for the next year.

So, I’m now waiting for christmas again. Though, I sincerely hope it doesn’t take until december to find my presents, which apparently someone buried all over Azeroth. Yes, I’m talking about Archeology epics. This profession is a little soul-sucking, but I really want Zin’Rokh, the epic level 85 bind-to-account 2h weapon. Aside being a substantial upgrade for my ret main, would also look nice on my fury warrior and death knight once the paladin upgrades or finds a replacement. There is also a very nice healer trinket for my holy set or my resto shaman once he hits 85, and a caster ring, which lacks hit or spirit, making it a viable upgrade for my holy paladin, resto/ele shaman, or boomkin. The trinket and ring are also bind-to-account.

Although the grind to get any of these (which I haven’t yet, by the way) is pretty long, at least due to the nature of the BOA epics, only one toon needs to be an archeologist unless you really care about multiple toons getting the pets and mounts. Just last night I got the Fossilized Raptor mount and although it’s pretty cool, I have no desire to level archeology on any other toons. I’m glad I have the last of the fossil solves that I have any interest in, but we all know we really want the gear.

For those looking to start archeology, a couple important tips:

  • Do it now, they’re making leveling even longer in patch 4.0.6
  • After 100 skill you don’t get anymore skill points for leveling, so don’t solve any of your finds prior to that skill level, in 4.0.6 it seem they’re lowering the number to 50. So at least head to 100 prior to the patch dropping.
  • They’re also limiting the amount of fragments you can collect to 200 per race. Each solve takes a minimum of 35 fragments, rares solves up to 150 fragments. Some people were saving all the fragments of the race they wanted loot from (the 2h sword is from troll), in order to only solve that race once they were high enough to find the item. This won’t work after 4.0.6 either.
  • Unless you have a real preference of which toon gets pets/mounts/achievements, level this profession on your fastest character. Any toon with 310 flying, paladins for aura, druids for quick flight form, etc. The faster you can move the faster you get to dig sites and to the survey points
  • A decent guide/explanation of the profession can be found HERE.

Daily Thoughts: Argaloth

For those who were worried that cataclysm wouldn’t be hard, my repair bill after the Omnitron encounter in Blackwing Descent would serve to lessen those fears. There are also, though, quite a few who are now worried that cataclysm is too hard. For those people, I’d like to refer Argaloth. He is the first boss in Baradin Hold, the new VoA like boss area in Tol Barad. He drops current tier pvp pieces along with, you guessed it, a couple pieces of PVE tier. I’m not entirely sure if he has a stronger bias towards PVP, as so far after 3 kills and 6 epics, my guild has only seen 1 tier piece. Even better, it was for a class not represented in that raid. Either way, we still have a way to get some epics without too much trouble. Argaloth does serve the function as acting as somewhat of a gear check. Think of it as the entrance examto cataclysm raiding. In 10m at least (and I’d guess 25m would be similar) each dps player must average 10k dps during the encounter to not hit his rage timer. This really isn’t hard with basic heroic/badge gear and some cheap gems/enchants.

Wowhead was nice enough to put up a little description as well as strategy for Argaloth. Check it out after the break.

(more…)

Daily Thoughts: Ret Gets Buffed in Patch 4.0.6

The above chart was featured in a WoW insider Scattered Shots article, you can see the full article HERE.

Notice retribution at the very bottom of the raiding dps specs. Now, this doesn’t include the traditionally low raiding performance “pvp” specs such as subtlety rogues, but ret pallies are still easily 25% below the top performing dps spec and also lower than the next lowest by almost 1,000 dps. Naturally, I’d love to run around topping the meters, but balance at least is much preferred to the current state of affairs. Did we paladins despair though? Of course not! We knew at some point the useless mastery would be reforged into something we wanted, at least a little, and boost our dps. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom (is always wisdom when they’re buffing your class right?), also buffed our bread and butter attack, Crusader Strike. Check out the paladin class changes.

Paladins

  • The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.
  • Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%.
  • Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.

Talent specializations

Retribution

  • Divine Purpose: The chance for applicable abilities to generate Holy Power has been reduced to 7/15%, down from 20/40%, but instead of generating 1 Holy Power, the next applicable ability used consumes no Holy Power and acts as if the paladin has 3 Holy Power.
  • Hand of Light (Mastery): A percentage of the damage done by Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm is done as additional Holy damage.
  • Repentance is no longer broken from damage done by Censure (Seal of Truth).
  • Glyphs
  • Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.

The two biggest changes we have here are the 20% more base damage to crusader strike and our mastery changing. Mastery is now a passive holy damage buff to key attacks and our old Divine Purpose talent has become the same as what Mastery was.  Depending on what this percentage ends up being, we could see a very significant boost to damage. This mastery also gives blizzard an easy knob from which to tune our DPS if it’s ever too low or too high. Holy paladins are also probably a little excited about the slight buff to divine plea which provides an extra 2% mana (3% talented) over a shorter time span.

I’m really excited to see ret damage come up to par with our other dps pals and for the first time was considering copying my toon over to a test realm to see the changes first hand before they went live, alas, the page isn’t currently loading. Maybe there’s a bunch of other enthused paladins clogging up the internet.

The rest of the 4.0.6 patch notes can be viewed HERE.