Patch 4.1 Prot Paladin Changes

PTR now has 4.1 up and I'm downloading the client. I hope to have videos of the revamped ZA and ZG.  ZA was one of my favorite places to raid because it was fast and had a lot of fun mechanics. I wonder how many of those mechanics they kept? Along with this came a sort-of-nerf of Protection Paladin survivability, and made hit worth even less as a stat than it was before which "kicks" butt. What did they do to Rebuke and Word of Glory?

Now updated: 4/26/2011

Raid Building 101: Number Two, Make It So

Raid Building 101 is a weekly article detailing the finer (and sometimes the not so finer) points of building and leading a successful raid group. Be it a world first or super casual, Raid Building 101 has something for you.

I was once told that you can judge a manager by how little or how much things change when they are gone on vacation.  The smaller the change the better I was told.  I thought that if everything went smoothly wouldn’t they just fire the manager then?  That’s when I realized a good manager makes sure everything gets done by making sure the next in command is capable of doing everything he does so when he leaves there is no break in the productivity of the employees.  As a Raid Leader eventually you will need a break, maybe just a week once and a while or perhaps a summer off.  It’s hard to let go of your baby, but if you have done your work and you have other officers/Raid Leaders that agree with the way you do things then there shouldn’t be much of a break in raiding.  How do you get those other raid leaders trained up?

Hotfix Rodeo: Two Nineteen Eleven

It's time for another edition of Hotfix Rodeo! Unfortunately I've been so busy with RL stuff, playing WoW, and making Gordrin's posts all pretty that I haven't had much a chance to even write in my own blog! T'is sad, really. /excuse. ANYWAY I was thumbing through my RSS reader this afternoon, checking out the last few days worth of gaming news when I stumbled upon a post about some recent hotfixes. Now, after patch 406 most of the hotfixes are hardly anything to post about, mainly fixing small issues that arose as a result of the patch "that killed bear tanking LAWLZ". There are just a few items from the last week that I would like to cover and in my usual fashion I'll expand upon those.

In totally unrelated news I finally got my camel mount from Ramkahen. That faction was very low on my exalted priority list (only the mount was even of interest to me) so it took me this long. I personally think the mount looks great; they handled model scaling very well and the mount looks regal as hell.

Raid Building 101: To Trox or not to Trox

Best trinket eva

Raid Building 101 is a weekly article detailing the finer (and sometimes the not so finer) points of building and leading a successful raid group. Be it a world first or super casual, Raid Building 101 has something for you.

Motivation is one of the main things most people who write columns for raiding touch on at one point or another. Motivated raiders show up prepared, afk less, and want to kill bosses as fast as they can. Motivated raiders also deal with wipe nights much better and don’t care as long as progress is shown. The issue is what motivates people? As the name of the column says there are many ways to motivate, you can yell and scream like Troxed or calmly explain everything and call things out like I do. What type of motivation is for you and your raid?

Raiding Video: Putting everything in Raid Building 101 to use.

We had an exciting week this week in Malice of Haomarush.

We downed a few new bosses, but I wanted to share a video.  I finally swallowed the bullet and recorded a fight with my mic on the entire time. (I hate how fraps doesn't have a push to talk detector)

Anyways, I've been talking about switching up strategies mid-fight if something is going wrong and in this video you can see we ended up at the end with only two gongs left so we only used one of them on an air phase, and then just ate the bullet on the last air phase because we used the gong to interrupt searing flames which wipes the whole raid.

I know a lot of people read my Raid Building 101 postings, so I thought you'd see how we run things.  And Titleist (aka Srixon) always has something to say at the end.. "oh lord"

Make sure to click it and watch in HD if you want to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBQ5tEs2peo

Raid Building 101: Chances of success? 33.33%, repeating of course

Should we wipe it?

Raid Building 101 is a weekly article detailing the finer (and sometimes the not so finer) points of building and leading a successful raid group. Be it a world first or super casual, Raid Building 101 has something for you.

The next installment of Raid 101 talks about failures. Failures are not always bad; wipes can teach you a lot about what kind if leaders/raiders you have. They also can point out strengths and weaknesses in your team, and sometime’s it is just dumb luck that gets you killed. As a raid leader you are expected to quickly analyze the way the wipe happened and then adjust the raid strategy if needed.

4.0.6 Warrior Changes aka How we avoided the NERF BAT

Patch 4.0.6 saw some changes to the quintessential plate melee class of World of Warcraft. Just like the Paladins, the Protection Warriors have been all but left alone, while Arms and Fury saw some sweeping changes across the board. Let's get down to the changes…..

Patch 4.0.6 Paladin Changes

Well 4.0.6 is finally here and with it come a couple of needed changes and a few interesting ones. To be honest not too much effects Protection, but there are some important changes in the other trees that are fairly major. For the most part Retribution received a slight buff and Holy received a slight nerf.

More after the jump.

The Great Druid Hubub 2011 aka Patch 406

You're doing WHAT?!?!

So here we are, patch time. People have been talking about this patch for ferals for quite some time now. I'll be honest, I just don't see the big deal. I've been reading QQ on the Wowhead forums for like the last month and even from some of the more regular druid posters. Who knows, maybe this patch could be more impactful than I think. I guess that would be my former hunter self talking. Until they take the top spec and make it a giant joke for 2 expansions running (ahem, I'm looking at you BM hunter w/ kitty companion) - I consider anything else lackluster. I will say that when I was on my shaman they continued to buff us to high hell. I guess GC has a soft spot for Resto Shamans. This patch I feel is a comfortable medium, and for once I find myself agreeing with some of the adjustments. I'll go over the changes in reference to feral tanking one ability at a time. Let's talk about the gloom and doom "day the druid died" after the jump.

Raid Building 101: FER THA SWEET LEWT!

Raid Building 101 is a weekly article detailing the finer (and sometimes the not so finer) points of building and leading a successful raid group. Be it a world first or super casual, Raid Building 101 has something for you.

So you’ve made your raid, step into the door of Bastion of Twilight, and the question pops up. How are we going to handle the loot? BoE Items are known to drop often in here so you may be dealing with loot rules before you even kill a boss. Crap, did you forget to make a loot policy before you started your raid? No worries. I’ll go over most of what I know about loot systems as there are scores of hybrids everywhere. You may have a slightly different loot policy in your guild.

What do you do with your loot? More after the jump.