Merry Winter's Veil!

Season's greetings from Thestis and his tiny reindeer.

Leaving the Wasteland

Decided to delete Wastelander, my other blog, as I got fed up of updating it and nobody was reading it anyway. Not even you, Matthew, the only person who reads this one.

Happi Burfdai Azeroth

It's the 4th anniversary of World of Warcraft and look what I got in the mail:


There's probably some law against sending animals via the postal service. Ah well.

He's so cute!

Top Heavy

As if in response to my previous post, fate has kindly gifted me with 3 snazzy new tanking items from the various quests revolving around The Nexus in Borean Tundra.

Here's how he looks:


Look how big those pauldrons are! Yikes! It's a good thing Almarov is built like a pack mule or he'd probably have collapsed by now.

EDIT: Still can't get rid of those flaming spandex trousers though. Grr.

Wrath of the Lich King: First Impressions

I have a couple of gripes with the new expansion. Admittedly it has some of the most polished areas in the game to date and some of the most interesting quests I've yet seen (bluffing my way through an excavation site full of Iron Dwarves whilst disguised as a golem is a personal favourite) as well as an amazing sountrack.

However... I have yet to see a single tank-based reward from any of the quests that I've completed so far.

My favourite aspect of jumping into the Burning Crusade was the sheer amount of item upgrades that I got in the first zone. So far, however, Almarov has... One. And that's a crafter item.

Scanning through AtlasLoot to see when I can expect some tanking gear (there's none in any of the first two starter instances, suprisingly) I noticed something. There isn't any tanking gear until level 75.

That's 4 levels (and probably several weeks) away... Until I can start replacing some of my kit.

Northrend Ho!

Scourge Assault!

Grab your sword and fight the... Scourge..!

The brain-munching masses have just started performing mass assaults on Orgrimmar and Stormwind, employing a mixture of gigantic flesh golems and air support in the way of large numbers of frost wyrms.

Almarov can't really deal with the wyrms... We'll leave that to the hunters.

Or the mages:

Wastelander: A Post Nuclear Blog

As there's nothing much happening in World of Warcraft, as people sink into a lethargy and play cards whilst waiting for the release of Wrath, I've started work on a side project that I aim to update alongside OffTankadin.

This blog, however, focuses on Fallout 3 and my numerous playthroughs of it.

You can find it here.

Scourge Invasion

Oh sh-

Brain Flakes: Start your zombie day off the right way!

You'll probably know about the Zombie Infestation event that's currently on the go in preparation for the release of Wrath. If you don't, then zombies are appearing all over Azeroth and are attempting to turn players who in turn go on to infect entire villages.

So, being the RP-wannabe that I am I've refused to spend much time as a zombie (apart from when I found out that using Divine Shield whilst infected will instantly turn you) and instead am focusing on cleansing everybody that I can and patrolling the low-level areas near to Stormwind. Westfall seems to be a hotspot of Scourge activity, so I'm spending most of my online time there protecting low level questers and some of the more essential NPC's.

It's also a fantastic excuse to let rip with some of my more powerful anti-undead spells and give some players a taste of what a paladin can do. The zombies are currently rather easy to take down, however they're very likely to infect you with the plague which is proving harder to dispel as time goes by.

The constant development of the plague and new vectors (Cockroaches now) appearing in cities suggests that Blizzard are building up to something; Probably involving good 'ol Arthas paying us a visit sometime soon.

The Demon Barber of Stormwind

You'll probably know this but with patch 3.0.2 barber shops opened throughout Azeroth, allowing players to change their hairstyles, markings, horns etc. I played about a bit on patch day and settled for giving Almarov long, black hair and a beard - In order to finally get rid of his dimple chin.

The abandonment of the pony-tail, however, did not go down too well with Nel, who gradually persuaded me to restore Almarov to his former style, but with a beard this time.

So, this is his current look:


Pretty cunnin' dontcha think?

Heroic Slave Pens

Wow. Just... Wow. That was frighteningly easy.

Apart from 3-4 wipes due to everybody messing about with new skills and talents (Nel trying to heal everybody using only Wild Growth, for example) the instance was laughable. Once or twice the group found ourselves questioning whether we had in fact set the instance for Heroic.

So, yes... Everybody is a little overpowered right now.

One thing that this run highlighted was how greatly improved paladin single-target threat generation is, as I only lost aggro once and that was easily corrected with Hand of Salvation (which I'll talk about in more detail another time).

Overview
Heroic Slave Pens
Party Members:

Protection Paladin (70) - Almarov
Feral Druid (70) - Shemyaza
Feral Druid (70) - Delffie
Marksmanship Hunter (70) - Velaxis
Restoration Druid (70) - Nelspa

Wipes: 4

Bosses Downed: All

Run Time (Approx): 1hr 15m

Hammer Time:- Hammer of the Righteous Musings

I'm going to give a rundown of each new talent/skill for paladins in a seperate post. First off the block is the 51-point Protection talent, Hammer of the Righteous.



I love this skill, I really do. It's an immense boost to aggro generation (With Blazeguard I'm averaging around 1,000-1,300 Holy damage per strike) on three targets, with "Adjacent" being within about 6 feet of each other... Useful for tightly packed groups of enemies, which paladins already excel at anyway.

Also, as it's not reactive damage like the majority of paladin abilities you can run up to a caster, bonk them on the noggin to generate some (armour bypassing) threat and throw down a consecration to keep your party-members happy.

When I got my first critical hit with this spell (Care of an unfortunate Wretched on Quel'danas) I burst out laughing as it managed to strike for about 2,500 damage. It, coupled with the new Strength changes and Attack Power scaling, opens the gateway to solo-paradise for Protection Paladins; dailies that used to take ages to do because of lack luster damage potential can now take half the time. Couple that with AoE grinding and you'll be done in moments.

This all pales in comparison, however, to the main draw of this spell for me; the sound effect.

DONK!

Murphy's Law Crits You For 10,000 Ironic Damage

Figures, as soon as I gear up to start writing the next blog entry after messing about on the new patch (That looks to be going live this evening), I log on in order to say hello to everybody and find out that my game card ran out 6 days ago. I'm also not going shopping again until the patch hits.

D'oh.

Stay tuned.

"I urr zoider drinkuur."

Returning to Uni on Saturday, for Fresher's Week. Hopefully, between the social drinking and serious drinking, I'll have chance to update about my thoughts on the new changes outlined for protection Paladins (and, to a lesser extent, tanking in general) coming in the next patch and the expansion.

"Probably Rats"

I've quite fancied having my own blog for a little while now, but could never find a suitable theme or topic (or any I could really talk about). Spurred into action recently by a friend restarting his own blog about his general life, I decided to bite the bullet, so to speak, and start writing about my experiences as an average paladin tank in World of Warcraft.

I flicked through the internet for... Oh... Two minutes... And settled on using the same blog host as he did.

So. Here we are. Boxes all over the place as I'm still unpacking, and there are odd sounds coming from the basement, but It's roomy enough and with a new lick of paint it'll look pretty good... It's probably rats anyway.

...Probably...

...I'll get my sword.

So, here's a little about me:

My character is Almarov; a level 70 human Paladin on the EU realm 'Nordrassil'. I'm currently a Champion (Level 70 member) of the guild "Equilibrium" and the second of two protection paladins capable of tanking level 70 content. The other being Lorion - Who is, frankly, an awesome tank and a seemingly inexhaustible well of paladin-related knowledge.

My usual questing/instance partner is my better half:- Nelspa, a level 70 restoration druid, who does an outstanding job of keeping me upright (most of the time, when I don't go and do something stupid) and has an uncanny ability to get all her drops the first time we run a dungeon. Grr.

At the moment, Almarov is protection specced and (sporting a mixture of Blue and Epic items) geared for Heroic dungeons and early/mid Karazahn - If only real life didn't interfere so often and I didn't have to bail out from most Karazahn runs, I might have better equipment.

Anyway - That's the introduction over with. Maybe the next post will even be about paladins! Shocker.