Author Archives: admin

Ghostcrawler has contributed a great deal to an already large list of consolidated warrior issues on the Mists of Pandaria beta forums, and then just kept on posting. It’s actually a lot to consider — so much so that I’m fairly certain I can get two big posts out of it. This post will be the one that tries to break down what it all means.

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Between Ghostcrawler’s blog post and Zarhym’s additional notes on the forums yesterday, we now know a lot more about how account-wide achievements are going to work. No preamble this week, folks — let’s get right to it. A lot of questions were answered, but there are still a few unknowns.

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It’s hard to believe it’s already May 2012. It seems like just last week that I was standing in line at BlizzCon with my guildmates, trying to make small talk and failing completely at it. Most of our interactions involved people watching and commenting on the information put forth at the various panels like those annoying people in the movie theater who feel the need to rate every preview on whether or not it will completely suck (see above). Anyway, with any luck Mists will be released by the end of summer (I’m betting on an August launch, myself), so what better time than now to get your paladin ready so that you hit the ground running when the servers come back online? The time will come during the next expansion when your hard-earned purples will be replaced by mismatched greens, but more work put into getting the best purples available to you now will keep that dreaded day far in the future. Also, how hard you hit is dictated by the strength of your gear, and the amount of time it will take you to kill a mob is dependent on how much damage you can dish out. Get out there and run some heroics. Get whatever drops you need from those, and spend your valor points on more gear. Queue up in the Raid Finder and grab your tier. The two-piece bonus will change to a flat 15% damage increase to Crusader Strike, so unfortunately, you won’t get 2 holy power per Judgment cast, but it’s still a pretty decent extra chunk of damage. PvP gear might be worth a look if you’re on a fairly active PvP realm, as both Horde and Alliance will be sharing the same starting zone, à la Hellfire Peninsula. And this is probably a minor point, but all of that haste that some of you have been stacking isn’t going to be real handy when the average encounter only lasts, at most, 20 seconds. Speaking of gear, if you are one of those lucky individuals who grabbed a Gurthalak in Dragon Soul, remember that the proc will remain rooted in the ground. So unless you plan on pulling everything you can to that one area (an unlikely scenario, since you’ll probably be running wild, competing with other players to tag mobs and such), I’d look into getting a different weapon. Talents and glyphs The devs have said that their intention with the new talent system is to prevent cookie-cutter builds (presumably because they don’t like cookies). Regardless, certain talents will obviously pull ahead in certain situations, situations such as questing or instance farming. Let’s go over an example build for solo questing and discuss some things. If we go with the 1/2/3 scheme that seems to be pretty popular lately, I would probably go with a 2/3/3/2/3 build at level 85. Long Arm of the Law gives you a short sprint every time you use Judgment, which will be quite often. Pursuit of Justice would be useful if we had an abundance of holy power after combat, but seeing as we should be dumping all of it in Templar’s Verdicts during combat, I’m going to pass on this one. Also, Speed of Light’s cooldown is too long to make me want to choose it over Long Arm. The second and third tiers were a bit of a toss-up, really. A friend and I were debating about the runner snaring of Burden of Guilt over Repentance, as well as the instant-cast Flash of Light from Selfless Healer versus the no-cooldown absorb of Sacred Shield. You really can’t go wrong, though I just don’t like the cast time on Repentance when you’re trying to minimize your down time. Selfless Healer would definitely pull ahead if you were questing with a friend. Unbreakable Spirit was sort of a no-brainer, really. Clemency has never really impressed me, and Hand of Purity only becomes attractive if you’re being camped by a gang of warlocks. (And I’m sure that, with such shining examples of proper warlock behavior as Adam Holisky and Megan O’Neill, they would never do such a thing.) Finally, for the fifth tier, the general thinking is that for passive is better than active for such short encounters. I mean, you could take Holy Avenger, but with its 2-minute cooldown, you’re not likely going to see a lot of use out of it overall. With Divine Purpose, even if you see a proc every third encounter, you’re still getting more use out of it than HA. As for glyphs, I’m probably going to start off with Immediate Truth, Double Jeopardy, and either Exorcism or Ascetic Crusader for majors, with Mounted King, Righteous Retreat (mandatory), and Winged Vengeance so I can look like a butterfly.

I have had my hand in the cookie jar that is the Auction House a few times during Cataclysm, and if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that information is your best friend. I downloaded Auctioneer / Auctionator to spot cheap bids and track how my own sales were doing. I browsed The Undermine Journal for data like average prices, standard deviations, and recent auctions. Even WoW Insider’s own Gold Capped column helped me identify potential markets and provided general advice. All of these things made my profits possible.

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When Mike Sacco passed down the orcish proverb “Every orc is worth a dozen,” my world changed. Never had life been so simple, so distilled down to the real truth. If I wasn’t strong enough as one person, I should just be as strong as more people. It was so simple that it just might work — well, according to an orc.

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The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You’re playing the game, you’re fighting the bosses, you know the how — but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

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