I’d Rather Be Wowing!

I know that I said in my previous post (although marked spoilers) that Dispersion may be a nice talent after all (given the introduction of potion sickness). That’s before I found out about this: Divine Plea, new spells for Paladin which is learnable at level 71.

So let’s begin:

Divine Plea
While channeling this spell, you gain 50% of your total mana over 6 sec.
5 min cooldown

Dispersion
You disperse into pure shadow energy, reducing all damage taken by 90%. You are unable to attack or cast spells, but you regenerate 6% health and mana every 1 sec for 6 sec.
3 min cooldown

Well, Dispersion generates more mana/health in the longer interval. In 5 min fight, both spells can only be used once, giving a slight advantage in term of mana return to Divine Plea. In 10 min fight, paladins can use Divine Plea two times, while shadow priest can use Dispersion 3 times, giving a slight (6%) advantage to the priest. Divine plea is a channeled spell, like evocation, so it will break on damage. That means paladin won’t be able to heal (or attack) during this time. Dispersion is an instant spell, doesn’t break on damage, allows the casters to move around after casting the spell, acts both like a health and a mana pot, although incapacitates and silences the priest.

Description wise, Dispersion is a spell that gets better with time. One has to wonder though, what is the span of fight lengths in WotLK. We can also argue that 6 seconds of not being able to heal is more risky than 6 seconds not being able to attack. Having a prot pally myself, I am quite excited about Divine Plea. There would be time where I am off-tanking, not receiving damage (hence no mana regen from healing), where this spell would be great to use.

The key thing in here, however, is that Divine plea are trainable at 71, while Dispersion is a 51 talent skill. Is it a good enough spell to justify it as an end talent? Many thinks that, in PvE setting, dps classes shouldn’t get hit, so the 90% dmg reduction is just a frill. Do shadow priest gets the better end of the deal here? Or do we wish we have something trainable- comparable to Divine plea - and get something else (more damage spell or group utility) as the end talent instead?

Wow, tons of WotLK updates this weekend. Especially interest for me is the new talents for Paladin. To be honest, holy and ret changes seems really awesome. But, for prot, not really much new tricks. But maybe that’s just “the grass is greener on the other side” problem.

Anyway, what I want to talk today is how the changes in Paladin affect DPS-ers, especially shadow priest.

• As most of you already have already known, there will be no more static blessing of salvation. Instead we have a very short interval salvation (called hand of salvation I believe), which I has to be recasted like in the case of the current blessing of sacrifice or blessing of freedom. This may be a terrible news for fellow dps-ers, but trust me, as a pally tank myself, it is a bit of scary. That means our threat just have to work over time. For shadow priest, thankfully, we have two sources of threat reduction: 25% from shadow affinity and 30% from shadowform. The two sources of threat reduction now make sense, but a bit disheartening too. I thought at first that we are going to need it because our dps output is going to be boosted significantly. But it may actually just to compensate the loss in the blessing of salvation. But the question is whether the other dps-ers have the big threat reduction like us? (I know that I didn’t see anything for ret pally.) If not, that means that we would be able to dish out more damage, more conveniently, than others.

• Heart crusader (2nd tier in Ret tree) allows Paladin’s judgement to increase critical strike by 3%. This talent replaced the improved seal of crusader talent, would mean that the boss is no longer needed to be sealed and judged with crusader in order to get the 3% crits boost. It’s pretty low in the tree which means that there are probably many prot paladin would be choosing these talents (although our current tree is really bloated the way it is). What it means to shadow priest is that it’s another 3% chance to crits MB and SW:D, and 3% chance to proc our improved spirit tap, and gain a temporary buff on spell power. Not too mention that we have the nice talent that boost our crits damage. Nice!

• Sanctified retribution talent (5th tier in ret) would increase the damage by 2% by targets affected by retribution aura. The damage was changed from holy damage only to all damage (also required sanctity aura). And have you heard that aura is now a raid buff? Almost all ret pally would spec for this, and with the change of aura, it almost a guarantee that if you bring a ret pally along, you would get this aura. 2% more damage, we can’t complain about it, can we?

• Swift retribution (last 2 tier in ret tree) would increase casting, range, and melee attack speeds up to 3% by targets affected by retribution aura. Can we hear the resounding wow? So, retribution aura not only increased damage by 2%, it also increased spell casting by 3%. It’s a good news for ret paladin (to be guaranteed at least 1 raid spot). I thought at first that this is equivalent to 3% spell haste, but I don’t think that it’s quite it. It would affect our MB and probably our MF spells, but I don’t think it would affect our global cooldown. While it may not equivalent to 3% damage (provided that 1:1 ratio of spell haste and spell damage still holds), it is still a pretty nice buff.

• Judgement of the pure (last 2 tier in holy tree) - judgement spells would increase casting and melee haste up to 10% for 30sec. If your holy paladin is nice enough and attentive enough to cast this judgement every 30 second, it would be a 10% damage increase (again with the 1:1 ration assumption) for us.

I know I know that these are not necessarily only for shadow priests :), but it’s nice to think that there are going to be a lot of buffs/debuffs (on boss) that would affect us.

It’s the term coined by our gl/rl to signify the nights we downed a  boss for the first time. We haven’t had one of those in quite a while, so it was a great feeling when we finally downed the dragonhawk boss Jan’alai after 5 tries yesterday. What’s even better? Val gets to off-tank for ZA run last night.

It was actually pretty scary as she is a bit low in the HP. With priest’s, druid’s, and pally’s buff, she only has 16.3k of health (compared to 18 something k for G). A bit low for ZA’s standard. But we were desperate for an OT last night and nobody seems to be available. Good thing we had super healers that makes Val’s job looks so darn easy.

The first three bosses were one-shotted. But not to say that there weren’t a lot of hiccups, mainly from Val’s side.

1. On Nalorakk, Val gets to tank the first form. But RD failed to work when taunting the troll form back the first time around. I read about this problem in the forum and I suspect that there are two reasons that this happened: (a) Val had too much threat gap and (b) Val taunted him during transformation, and not after. Good thing that G survived during both form. RD worked subsequently, thank goodness.

2. On Eagle’s gauntlet, Val gets the job of tanking the eagles and the warriors. Only problem is, eagles spawn from the front and warriors spawn from the back. It is so hard to know where Val was supposed to stand so that she can get both aggro. Maybe I should ask to tank the adds in the front instead.

3. On Lynx boss, Val was supposed to tank the spawned Lynx. Didn’t quite get him the first time around. Again, G saved the day *blush* Although Val finally gets her act together and got him subsequently.

4. On Jan’alai, Val gets to tank the adds (of course), and she had a big problem keeping them all together. There were also overconfident moment. When only half were hatched, they go down so easy that we decided to hatch all in one side…with no fire resist gear. Ouch, Val went splat.

But all in all, it was a fun experience. To think about it, Val never gets to OT with G before. Even when she was supposed to be the tank, it almost felt like everybody tries to protect her (from making a fool of herself) - from on the ball healers that didn’t mind that they had to work extra hard because of Val, from the dps that did their job awesomely and yet managed to held back from grabbing aggro without complaining about its effect on the damage meter, from surviving through and running toward me when I lost my aggro, from cc-ing with consideration to my consecrate, from the uber MT that never yells even when I lost my target and always ready to pick up the mess, and from the hunters that did misdirect that Val thorougly appreciates. I love my group. I am so comfortable running with them.

Since my last post about the successful effort in tanking Maiden caused a long dry spell of not downing her when I’m tanking. But I couldn’t help it

Val get to tank Prince yesterday and this time we down him after 1 try. Woot! It was quite an epic fight too. Our healers are just decently geared. And there’s val, with just 14k hp after all the buffs. We had 3 melee dps-ers (one was the warrior off tank), and two of them died because of enfeeble quite early in the fight. Around 10%, only Val, a hunter, 1 holy priest, and 1 holy paladin left standing. And then there were three, and finally two at just 2%. At just 0.5-1%, Val was the only one left standing. LoH was in cooldown. So does pots and the other consumables. We thought it was going to be another one  of those devastating wipes. But, Exorcism and Wrath of Hammer made their comeback by crit-ing Prince and bringing him back to the netherworld. Vent exploded with screams. Val ressed everybody and she got her T4 helm.

On a side note: I still do not like tanking Prince because moving in out during consecrate sometimes turned Val around and caused her to be blasted with the shadow nova. It doesn’t really help that you can’t see a thing while tanking him.

2 weeks in the row, our alts’ Kara run has not been successfully downed Maiden. This is really frustrating since Maiden drops some nice tanking gears for Val.

Last week: Our healers were a priest and two paladins. One of the paladin is overgeared for Kara while the other two have decent, but just about right for Kara. We 9-manned the fight with probably only 1 to 2 high dps-ers. One mistake that we did on that fight was not to have the pally off tank cleanse during the fight instead of the priest. But we figured that we need all the dps we can get.

This week: Our healers were a priest and two druids. It’s the same priest as last week. One of the druid has run with us for quite a while, that I think he had quite a lot of gears out of Kara. One of the other druid has just recently turn 70, but although he claimed to be noob, he did quite well. Interestingly enough, he seems to have more +healing than the other druid (Armory is down right now, so I couldn’t check it). We have an arms warrior as an offtank. So priest was back to the dispelling duty. This time we have quite decent dps-ers. But the healers still couldn’t keep me up. Without blessing of sacrifice, I had to keep moving out to “wake” the priest healer. But apparently I may not moving Maiden back fast enough since the healer kept getting silenced. We asked the druids to keep on HoT-ting me. But they don’t step inside before repentance. When we switched the tanking assignment so I could help with the dispelling, it still didn’t work because of the repentance issue. Also the fact that the warrior doesn’t have 490 defense may also causing him to be so hard to be kept alive.

In comparison, this was 2 weeks ago group, which we successfully got her down. We had 1 priest, 1 druid, and 1 paladin as healer. We also have the warrior off-tank to dps. DPS-ers were all quite decent. Priest was in dispel duty but I believe that the paladin helped with the BoS.

So, tomorrow we are continuing from yesterday and there may be a chance that we are going to try Maiden again. But I’m not sure what to change to get her down. We have enough DPS, no doubt about it. But the repentance kept killing us. Should I ask the druid to get ready to step in every time the repentance timer is on. There’s a chance for him to get silenced, but it should be enough to toss in hots. Any idea?

We have been thinking of forming another group to run Kara for some alts and newer 70 that want to have a more permanent raiding spot. Yesterday was our first run. We had to mix and match a bit so that not all of us were undergeared. Val was the main tank with Corro off-tanking as an arms warrior. In addition to that, we have 1 holy pally, 1 resto druid, 1 holy priest, 1 ret paly, 1 hunter, 2 warlocks, and just temporarily, 1 mage (may be changed with another hunter). One thing to notice, yes, we have a lot of pallies. Without switching people around, at first we ended up 5 pallies. And that’s a lot of blessings

So, I’ve off-tanked Kara before. But main tanking as prot pally is just so much funner. At first we did some CC, but as the run progresses and the healers got comfortable to heal Val, we use less and less, even resorting Corro to do dps instead off tanking. I love the fact that I don’t have to drink so often, although there were too many close calls to my liking. Being an MT for the first time though, I have a newfound respect to our RL/MT. With so many things going on at the same time, I’m impressed that he could tank really well and yet still be able to call out and organize things. It was just way too taxing for me. He was in the run with his priest, and it was really helpful to have him managing the pull. Unfortunately, he wont’ be on the 2nd group regularly, so I have to start getting used to tanking and leading the raid at the same time.

Positive:

- Successfully tanked Maiden for the first time ever. I had to ask the DPS to give me tons of head start, hectically smashed my buttons, but it went extremely well. It was the highlight of the run for me.
- Tanking Prince for the first time (see negative about this too).
- Upgrade to glove: Iron Gauntlets of the Maiden and boots: Battlescar Boots.

Negative:
- Messy pull on Moroes. We recovered quite nicely, but that’s due to soulstones. I didn’t use my AS because I was afraid all the adds would overwhelm me. I should have more faith on my healers and my off tanks.
- Pulls before the Curator were just not very prot pally friendly. The mana worms just suck my mana dry and when the big guy blinks and changes aggro, I didn’t have any mana to do any taunting.
- Not being able to down Prince. I’m still horrible in maintaining my holy shield, and I got crushed 2 times for both tries. The first try, it killed me. The 2nd try, things went well until the beginning of phase 2 where the hunter just ripped aggro off me. I noticed from my WWS parser that somehow Prince missed my consencrate (just 5 to 10 ticks recorded for each fight) even when I thought I was in melee range with him. After reading a bunch of post in the forums, it turned out that it could happen if the boss had a huge hit box. I was supposed to take a couple steps forward, drop the consecrate, and step backward so I don’t get thrown off by the holy nova blast. I guess that must have gimped my tps for a bit. Note to self: watch the combat text a bit more so these kind of things can be detected earlier.

All in all, it went much better than we expected. I don’t know how long these 2 Kara runs are going to work, raiding 4-5 times a week is a bit too much for me. And back-to-back Kara would get boring pretty soon. But what can I say, the badges are just too good to pass up.

After long and grueling sessions of PVP and Arena, Val finally picked up Gladiator’s Gavel and Merciless Gladiator’s Shield Wall. They are supposedly replacing the Crystalforged Sword (that Val has had forever) and Sunward Crest (for serious and hard hitting bosses). The problem is, the new gears would make Val crushable…again. I guess Val has to wait until she can pick up new gears, with more defense and avoidance stats, before she can wear her new toys. It’s really sad

On the other hand, E finally took the plunge and got herself Pantaloons of Arcane Annihilation. Yes, I’m playing with haste rating now even if it is not actually recommended at the spell damage level that E has right now. With the off-hand, E has 72 spell haste rating, which translates to 3% casting time reduction according to the tool tip (but MB has 1.44 sec casting - which is actually a 4% reduction, not sure). So far, Dr. Boom’s test seems to favor the new gear, although I can’t tell that my casting is actually faster.

I’ve read the arguments on how with a constantly moving fight, spell haste is worst than pure damage. I’ll be comparing the dps on E’s incoming Kara’s run.

1. Maiden. The first two times Val went to off tank, all she did were dispelling and off-healing. The last try, Val couldn’t smash the button fast enough and got the aggro stolen from under her nose. The party wiped, and she went back to dispelling duty. Val need another chance to redeem is tanking capability.

2. Nightbane. The only two times Val tanked Nightbane, she went down like a sack of potato. Granted that on the 2nd try, she last probably 10 seconds longer. G said that his tanking gears weren’t so much different than Val when he tanked it the first time. Although she wasn’t crushed or critted, she still get hit 3-4 k each. So maybe more avoidance is needed so that she can parry and dodge more attacks?

3. Prince. Never tried this before, but reading how tankadin can keep the threats without attacking during phase 2, which just sounds so awesome, Val definitely wants to give it a try. So, please?

Well, first off, there wasn’t any wipe, none that were caused by me at least Second, it is quite a different experience coming in as a tanker instead of caster dps. Everything seems to be more chaotic. Maybe because as a paladin, I have to worry that my RF is on, all blessings are up, etc.

The group were having fun yesterday, and that’s important. The only thing was, everything seems a bit chaotic. The druid main tank (usually off tank) keeps doing growl on my target after his own target was down, and enjoy the fact that he can get the aggro off me with just one growl. So, I tried hard to unload everything to get the aggro back. Doh! It’s just for fun and game though, so I was not worried about it. And as long as the healers don’t mind, I couldn’t care less. I did die two time…one was because the healer didn’t realize I was doing a pull…uh oh…:)

Attumen’s mount drop yesterday, and our priest healer won it. Lucky This was the first time we ever seen it drop. Could it be that I’m the lucky charm here? Or could it be the new warlock we brought along? Good loots seem to favor his way as well. I received three upgrades and 1 fun thing: Moroes pocket watch (yup, again), Eternium Greathelm, Glove token (for Justicar handguard - my first T4 every, yay!) , and the back piece with holy spell damage for 5-man tanking fun, I suppose. We stopped at Curator, although we made it there in a pretty good time. Oh well.

Well…it’s another day in Kara. But I really love the change of role there.

Our MT is off for a business trip. P suggested for me to bring Val to OT this Thurs for our regular Kara run, while having 2 of our-just-freshly turn-to-70 members to go along. We would probably end up losing a bunch of DPS for the run and won’t be clearing it in a day. To the credit of our new people though, they have been trying really hard to upgrade their gears so that they can be included in the raid (our GL actually enforces appropriate gear requirement, and I like that he does that so that we can pull our own weight in the run, especially since we are running with people from other guilds) - one constantly running instances to get his gear set and another one was slavin’ in BG. I’m really proud of them and sad also because the only time we can include them is when we are missing some DPS.

Anyway, I’m excited for the new challenge, and not to mention possible upgrade on the tanking gears, although sadden since it would be another week for E to get her off-hand from the badges (only 162 so far, I need 185, or 175 minimum). The saga of terokk just have to suffice for now on The only thing that worrisome, to be honest, is not generating enough threat. Especially with power house like Xy in the group. And on the fight where Val has to be the 2nd in the threat list, while not getting healed.

In term of gears, Val has been a bit unlucky. Whenever she runs instances, it’s very rarely that she would get a clear upgrade for her gears. But, I think she managed to have a decent raid tanking set mostly from quest rewards, crafted items, and AH purchases. Right now she has 500 def, around 62% avoidance (92% with holy shield), 10.2 hp unbuffed (around 11k with Kings), and 187 in spell damage. In other words, Val is uncritted, still about 10% crushable, but should be satisfactory for the beginning part of Kara. I’m not sure if I get to MT Maiden or Curator, although it’s probably be ideal since our bear tank can provide much more dps power than me.

In terms of consumables, I am planning to bring:

• 10 super healing pots.
• 15 super mana pots.
• 1 superior wizard oil.
• 1 brilliant mana oil (optionally).
• + stamina food buff (the best case would be spicy crawdad, but +20 stamina food buff would be ok).
• Protection, Agility, and Spirit scrolls.
• Enough pally’s reagents.
• Elixir of Mastery (battle elixir)
• Elixir of Major defense (guardian elixir)

For these two days, what I’m hoping to accomplish:

• Get my head glyph (being revered with the Keepers of Time)
• Run Mech and Bot for the waist reward quest (and hopefully possible upgrades on the gear)

It’s going to be fun!