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Monday, November 11, 2019

Day ??? Of Classic WoW

It’s been a while and somehow I’m already level 44 on my main paladin Sevotarthe. Most of my play time has been on the weekends, and I’ve enjoyed early morning sessions slowly but surely making progress.

I’ve been mainly tanking and healing when I group into dungeons, and I’ve been pleased by how good the groups have been. Everyone has been nice and helpful, and rarely have we even wiped. My favorite dungeons are probably Razorfen Downs and recently Uldaman. RFD is much more straightforward, and as a paladin I love all of the undead mobs, which make holding agro so much easier. Uldaman feels like a sprawling archaeological dig site and it gives a real sense that I’m exploring a lost city and ancient ruins. There’s also been a popular strategy when fight the last boss Where the group runs him to another room to avoid some of the adds he spawns, and when he’s chasing your group it feels like an epic escape.

My professions have started to take a back seat, and I’m going to recommit to working on my blacksmithing before I get to level 50. I’ve got a lot of mithril to mine, but I enjoy progressing the professions to help me make my own gear.

I’ve started flagging myself for pvp when in the open world, and it’s been a lot of fun having the occasional skirmish between willing Horde players. It’s one of the things I like about playing on an RP realm because PVP is something players opt into, and if I’m not in the mood or I don’t have the time I can opt out too. With phase two coming out this week, I am very excited about the increased world pvp. Some epic battles await, and some of my most fun, even in defeat is still to be had.

My goal is to get to level 60 before the new year, and it looks like I might be able to make it happen. Not sure what I’ll do once I get there, but I’m enjoying the journey. How about you? How are you enjoying classic wow?

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Day Three of Classic WoW

I was able to wake up early again and play more on Sevotarthe. Today's goals were to explore the Jasperlode Mine, continue to level up my professions, and continue to make progress through the quests in Elwynn Forest.

I was excited to be able to mine and use the copper ore to craft gear and equipment for my character and my alts. I really like the feeling of being able to work towards acquiring items to make my character stronger. Not having to rely solely on quest rewards and random drops is really nice because I know I can get the gear I need by putting in a little time and effort.

The Jasperlode Mine did not disappoint in the rewards I found there. I managed to get a fair amount of copper, two chests, and I was able to take down a rare spider in the back of the cave that dropped a nice item that I could send to one of my other characters. I'm definitely going to be back in this cave in the future. Not only is it less populated that the Fargodeep Mine because it's off the beaten path from Goldshire, the caster kobolds have a chance to drop candles that have a ranged ability. This will come in handy when I'm trying to tank as a paladin since they don't have any ranged abilities to pull mobs with.

After completing the quests in that area of the zone, I headed south to try to kill Princess. This endeavor was a fun lesson in reading carefully. I scanned the quest text and I saw a farm mentioned. So I went to the farm, and since there were boars there, I figured Princess would spawn eventually. Another player was also in the zone killing boars, and I figured she was on the same quest. She was and we grouped up. Continuing to kill boars for at least five minutes, there was no sign of Princess. The warlock then realized that we were at the wrong farm. We were at the Stonefield's farm, where the quest turns in, while Princess is at the Brackwell Pumpkin Patch to the east. So we went in that direction and finished the quest without a hitch.

It was a funny moment, and one of the reasons I'm glad that I've been fortunate to have such nice people in my groups. Otherwise I might have been killing boars for a lot longer before I reread the quest text a little more carefully.

I managed to get to level 10 during this play session, and I was pretty happy with how much progress I had made in my profession leveling. The only problem was that I had been training to learn new recipes and skills that I was all out of coin to do much more crafting. In the future, I'll need to focus more on making money and less on spending it all.

Day Two of Classic WoW

After playing my Human Paladin, Sevotarthe Einkill, to level 8 in the morning, I was happy to take some time to play with my wife on a pair of Dwarves. These characters are intended to be played in dungeon groups that we do, and as such their primary source of experience will be dungeons and dungeon quests once they get up to about level 17 or so.

My wife is playing a priest, and I'm playing as a warrior with the intention to tank. Odaren Dankil, brother of Otarthen and Ochiren, will be a protection warrior and serve as the tank for our group. We were able to quest through Coldridge Valley without too much trouble, and we made good progress in Dun Morogh until we came to a pair of quests that required the acquisition of items from a small set of monsters. With the high population of other players in the area, it got to be frustrating to wait for respawns and be under so much competition.

We did manage to get to level 8 during this play session, and then we switched over to other games for the remainder of the night. We were playing with the intention of following the quests and completing all of the quests. After encountering the competition due to the plethora of plucky players, we decided that if that kind of situation happens again, we'll just skip those quests and grind experience by killing monsters that more rapidly spawn.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Day one of Classic WoW

The launch of the long awaited classic wow servers felt like New Year’s Eve. There were dozens of streamers ready to log in, and it felt like there was a buzz in the community. I had the character selection screen up and ready to go for when the servers went live. When the time came I was happy to be able to login without any trouble. I thought it was really cool to see so many people, as Northshire was packed with humans beginning their journey.

I didn’t play for very long as I had a DnD session, and when I tried getting back on later in the evening I was met with the familiar queue time I remember when I was in high school playing on a high population server. Nothing like the classic experience. After about a half an hour I got to play some in Dun Morough until I got disconnected and wasn’t able to reconnect. By that time it was time for bed.

This morning, though, was not problem. I was able to login without a queue, and I could play for about two hours leveling my paladin through the first part of Elwynn Forest. I made a group to kill Garret Padfoot with a nearby warrior on the quest, and later I was trying to group up with a warlock to make killing Goldtooth in the Fargofeep Mine easier. The warlock wasn’t on the same quest as me so we just killed kobolds until we went down a tunnel and stumbled upon a rare spawn. We were able to get the boss down, but we fell with him, and when we recovered our bodies the respawn rate was more than we could handle. I made myself some armor and leveled my blacksmithing and mining, and I’m looking forward to venturing to the Jasperload Mine to the north and fine the treasures the await.

Currently, I’m level 8, and my goal is to finish the zone completely before heading to Westfall. This way my professions should be high enough, and I’ll most likely be a higher level which will make the transition into the higher level zone smoother.


Thursday, August 22, 2019

Role Playing in Classic WoW

Hail and well met traveler. I've been thinking lately about an aspect of the game that I've never really focused on, role playing. I've always played on a role playing server, but it's mostly to play with friends who go me started in the game. I never really role played in the game, and since playing more D&D, I've been more interested in the fun aspect of putting myself in the mindset of my character as I play.

The main character I intend to play in this way is my Paladin. My current plan, to make it more seamless with my gameplay, is to use a set of macros. The macros would cause my character to say certain things that would correspond to the spells and abilities he is using. For example, if he casts Blessing of Might, he'll say "Light give you strength," or something like that.

I'm only going to do that for abilities that have longer cool downs. So abilities that have cool downs longer than 15 seconds or so. It would get kind of annoying if my character was saying something every time they attacked.

I do plan on doing this for all of my characters not just my paladin, and I'm looking forward to making the things they say fit with the characters that I'm creating. I'm not great at typing things quickly in chat while playing, and having these macros will help me add a little flair to my game plays.

I'm excited to start playing next week on the RP realm Bloodsail Buccaneers, and I'm looking forward to playing around a little with my characters and their stories. I've got a backstory for each of them, and while nothing is set in stone, I think that it's a good start.

Friday, June 14, 2019

Seal of Righteousness (Paladin Threat)

The next round of Classic WoW beta stress tests is coming around, and I've been thinking about what I want to test during the time I have to (hopefully) play on the beta servers. Since I am so interested in playing a protection paladin, I'm interested in how Seal of Righteousness interacts with different one handed weapons.

I learned during the last test that the spell deals more damage with a two handed weapon equipped, and I'm interested in seeing how the damage works with weapons of different speeds. My guess is that a faster weapon will be ideal for threat generation as more weapon hits mean more holy damage applications of the Seal. I'm also interested in testing whether the Seal's damage will apply if I'm unarmed (in case that's faster, and because some mobs do disarm). With the faster weapon being ideal, I am wondering how advantageous it might be to use the Skinning Knife while tanking (at least early on) since it's weapon speed is 1.6 seconds, which is considerably faster than any sword or mace I could find.

The tradeoff I'm wondering about with using a fast weapon is that the white hits will be low. So even with a lot of holy damage the low white hit damage might still mean lower threat. I'm going to try to farm enough mobs to vendor enough items to afford to buy weapon training and different weapons with different speeds to see how the damage of Seal of the Righteousness scales.

This may not yield anything very interested or illuminating, but it'll give me a better idea of what I will be testing when I start tanking my first instances. Just like I plan on test different talent builds, I'm interested in seeing what the best weapon/seal combo is to be an effective tank.

I always hear about how the game is 15 years old and everything has already been theory crafted, but it isn't 15 years old to me and I haven't theory crafted everything out. Having started playing so close to the release of Burning Crusade, I didn't get a chance to play as much Vanilla as I would have liked, and now I'll get that chance. So I'm going to try and figure out as much as I can.

What are you interested in learning (or relearning) as you dive back into the game?

Update: I got to play some of the stress test today and last night, and I found out that the faster Skinning Knife did not reduce the holy damage from Seal of Righteousness. So I'm going to give it a try tanking to see how it does while tanking dungeons. I imagine that it might be particularly useful at the start of fights, and if I can get a decent enchant on it, it could be worth until I can find a fast enough weapon with Intellect or plus Spell Damage stats.


Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Paladin Tanking in Classic WoW

One of my favorite features from the former versions of World of Warcraft is the talent specialization trees. I enjoy earning a talent point every level, and playing around with the structure to see what kind of combinations of abilities I could find that might work well together. As a paladin player for the vast majority of my time playing WoW, I have tried out countless combinations of talent builds to theorize the perfect arrangement of points for my desired play style.

Thankfully there are plenty of sites available for classic talent trees and I have contributed a significant amount of traffic just playing around with the paladin. Because the paladin has a hybrid set of skills, there is a lot of variability with how one decides to play the class. You could select for mostly damage points with some off healing, mostly damage with pvp oriented talents, mostly healing with some damage talents for soloing, mostly healing with some pvp talents, most tanking with some off healing, or mostly tanking with some damage. That’s a broad overview, as there are tons of slight variations that players will make, but you get the idea. 

My goal in classic it to try my hand at tanking dungeons on a paladin while having some utility when soloing quests and pvp. I will play two paladins, one by myself and one in a group. Both will try to tank primarily, but the one going solo will have more Retribution take ya to help with killing things quicker. 

Paladins are fine tanks but they have some weaknesses. They have armor and self heals plus a plethora of buffs to support their group. However, they lack a taunt, and because mana is their primary resource maintains threat over longer fights is a struggle. With that in mind, I have an idea for a spec that aims to alleviate some of the mana and threat struggles that the tanking paladin faces.

https://classicdb.ch/?talent#syVz0MZV0xhZVfe00bo


Going down the Holy side of the talent tree, I opted for Divine Intellect 5/5 and Divine Strength 4/5. The bonus to intellect will help my mana pool, and the bonus to strength will improve my block value. The 4/5 in the Divine Strength is to move down the rest of the tree to pick up the Improved Blessing of Wisdom 2/2. I anticipate using Wisdom as my primary blessing to help with mana regeneration. Consecration is an obvious choice as it does holy damage over an area which will make tanking three or more mobs a lot easier. Improved Seal of Righteousness 5/5 is also desirable as it will increase the holy damage I deal, which is where my threat generation will come from.

Moving to the Protection portion of the tree, I am picking up a surprisingly low amount of talents considering I'm trying to tank, and I've debated about what to focus on here. Should I focus more on damage mitigation or hit rating. I've opted for the damage mitigation, which is why I'm going with Toughness 5/5 to increase my armor contribution. I've also picked up Redoubt 5/5 to increase my block chance after receiving a critical hit, and those ten points will unlock the Improved Righteous Fury 3/3 to increase threat generated from holy spells.

To build on the threat from holy damage and to help manage the mana I use, I went with Benediction 5/5 to reduce the mana cost of my Judgement and Seal spells. Moving down, I've got Deflection 5/5 for the parry chance to help mitigate damage, as well as Improved Judgement 2/2 and Improved Seal of the Crusader 3/3. Being able to Judge more often plus increasing the holy damage a target takes by an additional 15% should both be useful in helping my threat, especially on a boss fight. I'm going to opt not to pick up Seal of Command even though it is one of my favorite spells in the game because it's not really useful while tanking. This also frees up a point to spend in Vindication 3/3, which will help reduce the damage I take. I'm then getting Improved Retribution Aura 2/2 for the increased holy damage taken by attackers. This opens up one point that I can put into Sanctity Aura which increases the holy damage done by another 10%.

Between the increased damage from Improved Seal of Righteousness, Improved Seal of the Crusader, plus Sanctity Aura, by holy damage from Seals and Judgement alone will be a bunch of bonus holy damage not including Consecrate. My planned rotation on a boss fight is to start with Retribution Aura. Since the boss will probably be hitting me before I'm able to start hitting him this will be some initial holy damage. Once I Judge with Seal of the Crusader, I'll swap auras to Sanctity and cast Consecrate followed by Seal of Righteousness. Then I'll be Judging on cooldown, and using lower ranks of Consecrate throughout the fight if I need to. On trash pulls I plan on using Retribution Aura and not worrying about Seal of the Crusader since it will use more mana without very much yield since the fights will be shorter. Consecrate will be my go to with more than two mobs, and lower ranks will be used after the initial pull.

The key to all of this working as I have planned is that the damage players give me some time to get the initial threat built up on boss fights, and I'll be using markers to prioritize kills on trash to help ensure they are attacking the same target that I am. Consecrate and Ret Aura should produce enough ambient threat to keep mobs on me even if I'm not attacking them. I still plan on tab targeting to get a couple of melee swings with Seal of Righteousness up to ensure that they ancillary mobs are taking holy damage, but I think this set up will work well.

If it doesn't, I'll be swapping to a more conventional tanking spec. My main concerns are that I will be squishy since I won't have the bonus shield block, I won't have Blessing of Sanctuary, and I won't have Holy Shield which all provide added mitigation. Gear wise, I'll try to accumulate a mix of spell damage through rings, trinkets, and weapons, while maintaining a solid amount of stamina and armor. I'm excited to see how this build works out, and I'll keep updating on how the spec is progressing through leveling and eventual end game.


Sunday, June 2, 2019

Questing in Darkshore Contd.

This morning I continued to work on the Darkshore zones on my Void Elf warlock. The quests I focused on are taking me to the north to investigate the activity of the Shatterspear trolls who have been increasingly antagonistic to the local night elves.



After meeting up with the Sentinels who were already in that area, there seems to be just some laboring trolls digging away at the highborne ruins for artifacts. Upon killing a patrolling Overseer, I Ickes up a latter that suggests some cooperation between the Shatterspear Trolls and the Horde. I’m then sent to dispatch the horde camp off the northern coast. While there I come across a prisoner who has information about the leader of the Shatterspear that will help us ensure his defeat. The mission then shifts toward gathering the amulets from the troll shamans to craft an arrow that can break the trill leaders defenses. After gathering the material and taking out some lieutenants the attack on the troll camp commenced. Once in the heart of their territory I got to pilot an ancient to dispatch a large number of the trolls which set the stage for the final encounter.

The leader of the sentinels were there, and together we took down the leader and lifted a missive from the horde warcheif outlining their coordination to assault the night elves.


All in all this part of the story was interesting to see how the horde is reaching out to new allies to go on the offensive against the Alliance. The later part of the zone did have a nice ramp up and feeling of epicness as we sought to take out the troll leader, especially piloting the ancient to take out masses of trolls. I'll be interested to see what happens in the southern part of the zone.