Project X

So in between trying to gain acceptance of being a ret paladin, I have been working on another side project, making a Moonkin Tank (from hereon known as Project X). I intend to make this a high armored, high threat caster dps tank, and I'm taking it pretty seriously.

I finally ground enough rep last night to acquire the awesome Earthwarden, and slapped spell damage so I would still be able to put out more threat, kinda like how prot pallies do it I guess. The real kicker is the 500 armor on the weapon. Not many players are aware that Moonkins get a 400% bonus from armor items, the same as our feral druid cousins. But I'll put this down to the lack of moonkins overall so not many are aware of this. This is even less apparent when you consider that many of these boomkins wear a lot of cloth to keep up with the dps of mages. Still Rexamus isn't any exception. For the time being, he's got cloth shoes and gloves, but I'm hoping to replace the shoes with the Moon-walker badge rewards and the gloves from Kara.

A side benefit of grinding Cenarion Expedition rep is getting the Ashyen's Gift an excellent caster ring with a great amount of spell hit. Awesome as a moonkin. Getting this ring means that when I ding exalted with The Violet Eye, I can then trade in my caster version for the tanking version, which has got 392 armor on it... pure bliss for druids.

I'm also currently on the AH bidding for a Badge of Tenacity, comes with armor... oh yeah.

I can already see that making a tank is going to take a long time and insane amounts of pvp to get enough resilience to be crit immune (need 224 resilience from what I read). But much like my ret paladin, I think I'll be ecstatic with the result.

GG

Well the guild is basically on life support. We lost our GM and Guild MT due to lack of progression which is pretty much the death knell for the guild. Now I have to go through the whole re-application process again. I can't go back to applying for another Kara/Gruul's guild since I need to progress further in the game.

Ah well, I've started applying and I'll see what comes out of it. For a ret paladin it's nigh on impossible. I can't simply spam trade saying 'Ret paladin lf SSC/TK guild', it'll just erupt a huge amount of 'Retlol' 'respec' calls. I just cbf with rejects like that. Some people are suggesting I apply as holy first and then switch ret later on, but that's not fair to myself or for the guild.

Sooo what else is there to do but run heroics in the meantime hey? I thought yeah a couple of smooth heroic runs would do the trick on my boomkin. But noooo...

I mean seriously WTF?!!! Ever since Blizz lowered the requirement from Revered to Honored to get into heroics its ruined the skill level. I'm sick to death of pug scrub tanks walking into heroics with greens that don't have any defense and expect to tank. Slack dps you can put up with, but a sloppy tank (especially in a heroic) is an absolute no-no. Its started happening in pug Karas too, getting tanks decked in greens is just doing my head in.

So now I'm grinding the BG's instead and letting off some pent up rage at some horde.

GFG.

As long as its not healing...

Its been an interesting couple of weeks since I last logged on. The guild has been downing Gruul on a regular basis, and most of our guys are so ready for SSC yet can't progress simply because of numbers. Its been incredibly frustrating. So a small number of our guild have started doing ZA, and I did manage to squeeze in there to have a bit of a tour around.

Been experimenting during this time, and last night was asked to be the MT tank in Kara for our second group, I was a little shocked to say the least. My previous tanking experience involved OT the week before and prior to that, was running lowbies through VC! I haven't tanked a 70 instance normal or heroic! I had seen pally tanking done a few times and know some awesome Prot Paladins like Colossis and Dumarthon (props guys). And much like Ret Paladins, aren't usually given their due.

Anyway, it went surprisingly well and was a lot of fun, and we cleared Kara (except for Nightbane and Netherspite) in about 5 and a half hours. Pretty good for my first try as mt. Rexkicker doesn't exactly have incredible gear either, about half Kara epics that the warriors didn't want and half blues. Big ups to the healers on that run, gg! :)
Oh managed to score Gorehowl from Prince! Not too shabby.

While prot tanking isn't really my forte, it sure beats the hell out of healing for me, and would have to come a close second. So I'm happy that I've had the experience doing all three raid aspects with my humble paladin, healing, dps and now main tanking. Its not something that every paladin has a chance to do, so I feel like I'm lucky in that regard.

I'm trying to decide on the Gorehowl vs my S1 Arena Mace. It basically comes down to whether the PVE dps is greater from the Gorehowl with more AP or the expertise racial bonus from the mace. Its a tough decision to spend the money on the mongoose enchant especially when I know the sword from ZA is within my grasp.

I'm also really close to getting my S3 Helm and upgrading my chest piece to the Bulwark of Kings. After tonight I'll be about 180 arena points short so should get that in a weeks time. I've also got 5 nethers for my chest now, and have another 30 badges (so potentially 8 nethers then), but my tanking was a bit too good, and now need to consider spending some of those badges on improving my tanking gear! Crap....

Back to it

Well, things have calmed down now, the guild split into two out of which I joined one half of it, so its back to raiding again. We're desparately short on healers for the time being, so I switched to my healing gear (which isn't exactly shabby at 1600+ healing unbuffed) and helped out for Kara. It also meant that we could bring in a new healer to gear him up quick. Its a costly exercise though because that's 100g in respeccing costs (50g to spec holy and it'll cost me another 50g to spec back).

We had a full clear of Kara that went smooth as. We one shot everything except for Netherspite where we wiped a few times as we lost our OT by then. Although, it was worth it, as I picked up the Mithril Band of the Unscarred! Holy hell that's a nice ret pally ring. As far as I'm concerned it made healing worthwhile. I also got other great tanking gear too since our main tank is already fully geared and we had a druid off tank, I picked up new tanking boots, ring and helm.

I'm glad to see the guild getting back to business. Sure we're short on tanks and healers now, but at least we've retained enough of the old guild and brought in new 70's to field two Kara teams. Hopefully this should put us back on track for 25 man raids again.

What the F?

I originally wanted to post about the usefulness of Pally power while raiding (and even in 5 mans with another pally), but the weekend proved to be quite an eventful one for my toons, and I'll have to post about that some other time.

So gearwise, Rexkicker got a few new things, the pants and the trinket from Heroic Mech dropped, so I was stoked, and plus I had finally saved up enough honor for the pvp necklace. This pushed the pally to the following base stats:

AP Unbuffed: 1868 (with Mongoose enchant)
Hit Rating: 93
Crit Chance: 27.36%

So I now feel that I've completed my gearing for Rexkicker now, and I've pushed him as far as I can on my own prior to getting any SSC and TK content.

I also gave the Boomkin some much needed love, and gave him a Kara run. But it was ace, Curator was nice enough to give up the Staff of Infinite Mysteries, and as I was the only caster that needed it (we had a strangely high number of melee), I got it by default! Hoot!

Then it all went to hell....

The GM went nuts after some guild world pvp didn't go according to plan. What I thought was supposed to be a casual fun event turned out to be the catalyst to destroy the guild. We had intended to raid a Horde city but while we managed to succeed in hijacking the zeppelin ferry, the guards kept knocking people (me included) off the airship with their knockback shots. So it kinda fell apart from there, but the GM rq'd the guild. What the heck for? Over some fun for a change?

Then it got worse, after convincing the interim GM that he was over it, he then just screwed everyone over. After being reappointed the GM (which I didn't agree with as you can't have a GM that rq's after petty incidents like this), he ninjas the guild bank of about 570g and about two tabs worth of valuable items (some worth about 2k gold!). He also appointed his level 1 alt as the GM, removed his main and stripped the officers of their rights so they couldn't do anything to stop the looting of the guild bank. He went further by taking down the forums and locking vent. He pretty much killed the guild because he didn't want it to live on after he was gone.

So Sepuku you tard, I hope you had your fun, and have to reroll horde because you are just a disgrace. Go emo yourself and /wrists.

Rant over.

My Precious

Awesome! After spamming trade chat all day again yesterday for someone to make my Red Belt of Battle I gave up and started doing my mining run and thought I'd spam in the general world chat instead. And bingo! Found someone to make it, and they did it for cheaper than what I was offering in trade at 1200g... nice! I'm not totally broke now.ef

Got Gruul's tonight so the upgrade is very nice, but I just couldn't grind enough pvp in time to be able to pick up my necklace. Sitting on 12,200 and still need another 3k to pick it up. :P I'm starting to wondering why I ground all this rep to get the exalted rewards when the pvp gear available is far superior for pve than the pve gear.

Oh, and I'm digging this 2.3.2 patch. For me its a buff, since I run with low spell damage and hopefully it'll get leaner once I pick up my legs from heroic mech.

Needs more power... Rawr!

Man, started the long expensive road to squeeze more damage out of Rexkicker.

Since its server maintenance night, no raiding was on the cards and so I decided to do a heroic mech run to try and get a better trinket and the legs to replace my S1 Arena legs.

The legs are ultra cool, the Greaves of the Bloodwarder and I want them! Been there a few times now and still no luck on either of them.

I've started spamming the Barthilas trade chat as well looking for someone to make me the Red Belt of Battle, the best dps plate belt in the game. Offering about 1.4k gold for it, but no takers so far.

You're probably thinking, dude, make it easy for yourself, you could pimp a dps class for more dps at a lot less effort. Well yeah I could, but the same could be said for doing up a beat up car. You take an old car, and do it up, trying to get the most you can out of it, and forget about the cost. When you're finished, you stand back and enjoy it, and get immense sense of satisfaction that at the end of the day you have something unique that is not the cookie cut dps class you always see.

So that's what I want out of my retribution paladin. Something that at first people may scof at it, and just ask... Why?! But when they take a look under the hood, I hope they'll be pleasantly surprised.