I have a plant outside my office. Well, I didn't put it there but since I have the closest proximity to it, I call dibs. It is starting to get pretty big, and it has been a while since the plant lady trimmed it. I am starting to hit it with my head as I walk to the get a drink, go to the bathroom, or go talk to my boss. The nerve. This plant had better learn a thing or two or I just might trim it myself.
If you are an inferior species, your choices are adapt or die. This plant better adapt and quick or it will lose a limb. I just might have to forbid it be watered as well. That will teach it a thing 'er two.
Heck, the planet itself had better watch it's step. Homo Sapiens are the dominant species now. We can dictate pretty much whatever we want to thanks to science and technology. We can extract food, heat, and whatever material need we can imagine out of the Earth. We have adapted, and we have grown dominant. For too long, people have been oppressed by the planet and have had to struggle and scrap for everything we have out of constant oppression. It's time the planet learned a thing er' two. It's Earth's turn to adapt or die.
Reckoning has gotten a very bad reputation since the days of BC, and especially after the first Reck bomb. Right now it is opposite of useful if you are a protection paladin, even if it was a 1 point talent. A white hit + seal proc is not a ton of damage or threat, and more white hits mean more parry opportunities for less threat and more incoming damage; granted there are like 2 bosses in ICC that parry haste, but I want to get away from that model and parrys should actually mean something in the future. Here is reckoning in it's current form:
Reckoning (5 talent points? WTF?!?) Gives you a 2/4/6/8/10% chance after blocking or being hit by any damaging attack that the next 4 weapon swings within 8 sec will generate an additional attack.
Since reckoning is an offensive ability at it's core, it seems that it's proper place is in the Ret tree. I have grown fond of the 2PC T10 and I want to keep some randomness in the Ret Paladin rotation. Plus, Ghostcrawler and the dev team seem to be loving the idea of "Fun" abilities woven into our rotations based on procs and random crap that might happen in your rotation. In that spirit, I propose the new Reckoning:
Reckoning (3 talent points) Your melee critical strikes have a 5%/10%/15% chance to allow you to cast a Hammer of Wrath within 10 seconds, but at twice the mana cost.
The mana cost thing is in there just to give the player a downside to the ability. If you spam it too much, you will run out of mana, or good players can regulate their mana and still have fun and do great DPS. It also allows the paladin some sort of ranged attack, potentially to keep pressure on a healer in PVP, or hit another target. Maybe even:
Improved Hammer of Wrath: (2 or 3 talent points based on balance) Your Hammer of Wrath will now strike 1/2/3 additional targets within 15 yards, but each hit strikes at 75%/66%/50% damage.
Just something like this would add a lot of fun to the game for Ret pallies, and also potentially make the glyph a little more useful. For me especially, I like the randomness of an extra divine storm, but without the GCD locking that currently happens. Heck, right now Hammer of Wrath hardly makes it into my rotation due to it hitting like a rubber mallet. Come back and talk to me when it procs a seal.
I don't think this would make paladins overpowered again in PVP, although I wouldn't mind a little padding since I am terrible in Battlegrounds . It would also mix up PVE a lot in addition to filling in the flavor of this next expansion, "The Fun Button"
It also seems useful but optional. This wouldn't be terribly useful for single target fights. It also is very dangerous in the hands of a noob, as trash and heroics aren't going to be the AOE fests as Wrath is currently, and it will make the clcRET users have to think a little before mashing that next shiny button, which even I am guilty of most times.
I want to see dual spec become useful for Ret pallies as well. You have one spec for single target DPS, and one for utility/multiple target fights. If I want to tank or heal, there should be more of an opportunity cost involved than casting for 10 seconds. I should have to leave the instance, see the trainer, and buy glyphs.
P.S. Yes I saw the Tankspot post about fixed game mechanics. Yes I remember vividly the Reck bomb video. Yes I went half mast.
Crushadin said: "Jack quit... sry i didnt let you know."
I am not surprised in so many ways:
-Being a friend of an officer and apping to the guild for a raiding spot. -Acting like a cock to me and others on the forums. -Switching mains. -Failing in every way on Herioc Dreamwalker. -Vanishing without a trace.
If you read this, and haven't seen the first episode of Big Crits go check it out: www.bigcrits.com
The featured raiders at Big Crits are all being asked to do a self bio to give people who watch the show an idea of who they are as gamers. I don't know whether this is to communicate to the viewers that the players are people, or to plunk down their phat gaming resume.
For some reason, gamers can be a very discerning breed when presented with a gamer peer. We immediately size them up based on their pedigree and/or gaming preferences. I have heard more of my share of gamers sneer when someone presents that they play Wii, Farmville, or whatever the casual flavor of the month is.
Gamers are gamers are gamers. Whether you grew up playing Magic: The Gathering, SNES, or frisbee golf, there is a spirit common to everyone one way or another that it is all about playing and having fun. If anyone wants to play, go play with em.
That being said, I want to share my bio.
As long as I can remember, there have been video games. Being a youngin' I can remember the allure of arcade games and knowing friends with these things called computers and Ataris. If I could manage to find a quarter, or get one from my parents, I think it found a home in the nearest arcade cabinet. The NES was my gateway drug: Super Mario 3, Megaman 2&3, Battletoads, then to the Sega Genesis, N64, and stopping at the PC Games, with a minor detour playing games on Macs (my dad is a little of an apple fanboy.)
My little brother and I were fiends at whatever game came our way. It's hard to say it but he is a much better gamer than me, even though I spend vastly more time playing than him. Any type of competetive game we played I think he won more than I did. Marathon deathmatches, Doom, Command and Conquer, Starcraft, Goldeneye 007; we hashed it out on em all, and any given day I think he could best me.
Consoles sparked my interest but PC games fueled the fire. I still game on consoles a bit, but there is nothing more satisfying than playing PC games on a rig you built yourself. Not only that, but Emulators and ROMs got me through many summers of boredom. I got caught up on SNES JRPGs, Super Metriod, and other games I missed by having a Sega as a kid. You can play a lot of free stuff that you can find if you look hard enough. Super Mario RPG was my unicorn though; I don't think I ever found a working ROM for many years, and when I finally found one, we were playing Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR, and it didn't quite stand up.
I remember resisting playing WoW for a very long time. I knew it would be fun and good, but the concept of paying a monthly fee to play a game seemed foreign to me; after all, I got through college playing cracked PC games because I was poor and had bandwidth. I started playing about a month or so after I split with my first fiancee, when some roommates of mine introduced me to it and hooked me up with a trial key. This was back in May 2006.
Saltycracker will be my first and only I think. I leveled him from 1-60 in around 15 days of playtime, but quickly got bored because there was not much to do for a retnoob at 60. BC came and I went Holy then Ret then Prot and cleared everything. Wrath came and I tanked and ansgted through T8, where I went back Ret and now roll my face with the best of em.
Being an electrical engineer I still dabble in consoles a bit, but I find more fun breaking them and modding them than actually playing some of the games. I gave my little brother a chipped Xbox with a ton of roms on it for christmas five years ago and he says it's the best gift he ever got; I had to replace the hard drive in it recently because it wore out. I currently live in Denver, Colorado and am extremely lucky to have a great friend and fiancee Erin. We are getting married in December in New Mexico.
Gong Show took me in, gave me some loot and then shat me back out. Although I thought I did an acceptable job as a DPS paladin, they thought otherwise. Halfway through my trial, another paladin came in and eventually took my raid spot after about 3 bosses worth, and I thought he was a friend of an officer but I could be wrong. It was a pretty shady transition and after talking with the other paladin. I guess he applied to GS before I did, but couldn't join because he still wanted to raid with his previous guild. He had better gear than I did before I joined, and did more DPS than me on those few encounters, but not by a very big margin. My exodus from the guild may not have been entirely performance based, especially since these world ranked guild go through recruits like kleenex.
Gong show keeps a thread where raid members make comments about your raid performance, and here is how mine read:
Poor communication skills Popped tons of ghosts on DW Pulled aggro on beasts on Saurfang Got hit by an extra block on Sind p3 Almost faceplanted an orange slime on a Putricide hard attempt and said he was fine when I asked him about it because he had rocket boots Pretty bad at princes
Overall just dies a lot to random shit it seems, and a ret should be able to pull a little bit better numbers
Any criticism is good criticism so let's break this down.
-Poor communication skills.
I am still scratching my head about what this means, but I think this means in raid communication, i.e. raid chat and vent chat. I started to speak more towards the end of my trial as opposed to the beginning, but that's how it goes when you join any guild.
-Popped tons of ghosts on Lady Deathwhisper (HM).
Tons of ghosts apparently means 1 per attempt, and just as much as the other melee were failing on them. Granted recruits are under a microscope, but if it is happening as much as the other member melee, isn't the bar set there?
-Saurfang Beasts.
There is a bug where if you have Avenging Wrath active, it will bypass the AOE reduction buff that the beasts get. My AW buff was expiring heading into the beasts phase and I got hit by a blood beast, which in Hard Mode is a big deal; the raid is trying very hard to starve Saurfang of runic power in any way possible (BoPs on boiling blood raiders, tight taunt transitions, efficient killing of blood beasts.)
-Got hit with extra ice block on Sindragosa P3 (HM)
I never ever ever got hit with an extra block unless we were already wiping. In fact I never died to a phase 2 ice bomb, or screwed up a block position.I am scratching my head on this one as well.
-Orange Slime (Putricide HM)
This one aggravates me more than any other. I was trying my best to be proactive at killing the orange slime when the raid leader says he wants some initial damage on the ooze, and I had the foresight to use my rocket boots if the ooze picked me to chase. It did, I did. Is wiping to a bomb going off a more preferable option than using a cooldown to prevent it?
-Pretty bad at Princes (HM)
Guilty. It took me a few kills to get this one right. Shadow Prison is pretty tricky especially when there is nowhere to go when a non-empowered shock vortex goes off in the middle of the raid, or when all the melee gets a movement speed debuff right before an empowered one; this formula equals a huge pile of melee corpses and usually the ranged had to finish off the fight.
-Overall just dies to a lot of random stuff
I don't think I died any more than anyone else during attempts. The only two preventable deaths I could think of are:
1.Standing too close to the choking gas bombs a couple times when they went off
2.Vile spirit spawning right on top of the melee, waiting about 5 seconds before using any sort of AOE and promptly getting punched in the face. 5 seconds is more than enough time for a misdirect or a taunt.
-Low DPS
I was consistently in the top 5 in fights where you had to stand still and kill stuff, just what DPS paladins are good for; we have a severe penalty for switching targets. Fights where target changes happen often (LDW, Putricide, Blood Princes) I was usually hanging in the low middle range of the other melee in the raid.
Taking this criticism for what it is worth, I know where I need to improve. I also know how thin the line is between acceptable and unacceptable mistakes in world class raiding guilds. Part learning curve, part raw deal. GLHF Siqwence.
My brain is full and I want to put some of this in the cloud.
-Getting kicked out of Gong Show -New Guild - Big Crits! -Economy WTF -US political system -Entitlement inside and out of WoW -The aversion to original ideas or why the remake/reboot is so comforting.
My old raid guild died. Eden. It was a super fun place to raid with amazing cool people, but the management just fell apart. Kudos to Serenity, and her husband but in the end they created a place that needed infinite upkeep from them and it was too much to handle. I guess they brought it on themselves with a complex set of policies from everything to recruitment, gear audits, four DKP systems, scheduling each and every raider to each raid ahead of time, and even a policy of how to logout to Eden standards. Pretty damn anal, but to each their own. I applaud them for realizing they needed to shed the yoke while they had the chance, even if it meant that all their raiders would no longer have a home.
My new guild, Gong Show is pretty awesome too. The players are great, and they are very knowledgeable and skilled. I like to think of myself as a good player knowing strats, knowing how to gear, spec, gem, play, be aware, and all of the things that a good raider should be, but I am still learning stuff from these guys. Great fun.
The raid/guild leader is really impressive as well. He knows the fine line of positive and negative reinforcement very well and can motivate the raid very effectively, which is great considering he content we are learning (Heroic Putricide is going to eat shit tonight)
I really hope we kill Lich King on heroic soon, and I want to give everything I can to ensure that we do. 5 nights a week sounds a lot more fun that it is, and I really would rather be doing something with Erin on a few of those nights, but once farming hits 2 nights is all I would really like to spend doing this crap. Even then I will just be feeding Blizzard just to grind.
I think my time with this game is getting close to done. I don't agree with Blizzard's current model of providing content. I don't like this expansion at all, with the exception of Ulduar and Icecrown. Everything else has just been a loot padded house of farts. The only conflict I have right now is a sense of loyalty to the guild I play with. They brought me in and I feel that I owe them a debt that I need to repay by being useful to them. For now I want to help them get to the end goal, Arthas.
I guess the game has been challenging up until now because I have been trying to carve out a place for a Ret paladin in the grand scheme of things, and I feel like I have accomplished this. Not that I have single handedly accomplished this task, but that I have shown the people I have played with that Paladins can do as good or if not better than any pure DPS class. Ret paladins are accepted now and people realize their usefulness and have been accepted into the mind of a raid leader instead of shoehorned in by Blizzard because of the buffs they provide. PUGS can look for a DPS and a paladin can stand on their own feet.
Blizzard's WOLK formula is starting to show it's age, and I think Cataclysm will be a bandaid. It was a slippery slope shoveling gear down people's throats so that they can experience the content. The gear is why a lot of people played, to see how much they could perform and be able to upgrade their performance with better numbers. Now, people have the expectation of easy gear, and when it finally reaches the parity where everyone has the same gear as everyone else through nerfing and retooling, subscriptions will plummet.
It is the paradox of homogenation. I felt a sting when I learned that the uniqueness of my class was going to be shared with everyone else with the raid buff changes that accompanied WOLK. I understand why it was done and I enjoy not having to seek a elusive 1 raid member to make the raid machine perform. Nonetheless, this meant that raid members and classes were now interchangeable to a degree and some classes were at a comparative (dis)advantage. With the gear and stat changes coming with Cataclysm, it feels like more of the same. Blizzard is going to shoehorn you into the stats they think you should be using and leave no wiggle room in terms of how you gear.
I might be eating my words when I see the final changes (Talent tree overhauls, new mechanics, etc.) but I feel the same sting coming. My question to myself is, do I want to keep funding this type of homogenization, or swallow my concerns and have marginally less fun. Time will tell.
