What’s My Main Again? Oh, Right, Lag

There’s been a rather interesting issue I’ve had to fight with since… oh, since the Blood Wing went live in ICC.

See, this is what happens. Sometime between 6pm and 8pm, my latency will climb from where it usually sits (anywhere from 110-200ms, thank you ISP upgrades) to anywhere from 700ms to 17000ms. It will come back down to regular levels sometime between 11pm and midnight.

This is somewhat inconvenient, as this just so happens to be during peak times, when BG queues are at their fastest, and also when For Whom happens to raid.

Needless to say it is difficult to raid when you are rocking 5kms on boss fights.

Now, the interesting part comes in the details.

First, it is not simply bad lag. I am also disconnected very frequently in direct proportion to what is going on. Running around leveling a character in, say, the Arathi Highlands, I never get disconnected, whereas Wintergrasp features a disconnect roughly every twenty seconds.

Second, it isn’t my end of things either. I have a huge amount of evidence to support this.

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Lowbie LFG

So far, I have played three different characters through the Dungeon Finder tool. A destruction warlock, early twenties; a prot warrior, mid 40s; a discipline priest, early sixties.

Queue times, oddly enough, are basically exactly the same as they are for 80 heroics. The queue as a DPS warlock usually runs about ten to twenty minutes, the queue time as a healer is always under a minute, and the queue time for a tank is instant. Which is just bloody fantastic! Tanking is surprisingly fun, but I could be horribly misguided at the moment.

See, I’ve tanked Zul’Farrak twice now. That is the extent of my tanking experience. However, I ran Zul’Farrak with a holy priest specced into (and glyphed for!) Lightwell. I was a bit “wtf” at the start, but mr. priest kept pounding that “use the lightwell! USE IT!” drum pretty damn hard, so I figured what the hey. Thunder Clap keeps aggro pretty well by itself, I can afford to deselect my target for a second.

Turns out? That Lightwell we all mock churns out slightly over 500 health every two seconds, or basically 1500 health over six seconds. That’s pretty dang powerful for a lowbie instance, considering that’s half my hitpoints.

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Shoop da Woop Egg Nog

Merry Christmas to all, and so forth.

Seriously, why are you here? It’s Christmas, go spend time with your friends and… yeah, I can’t say that with a straight face either. It’s WoW binging time, and I leveled a warlock from level 1 to 20 in seven hours. Why do I have a warlock? Cause I don’t have one yet. I have everything else, it’s high time I added a warlock to the mix.

Druid? Been there, done that, bored out of my mind.

Death Knight? Tried that, leveled that, twice, even twinked one. I miss 2H frost so much. *sniffle*

Hunter? Everyone has one. I dominated battlegrounds back when Aimed Shot had a cast time, and I manually wove every single Steady Shot. Haven’t really played it since Wrath shipped.

Everyone knows about my mage and paladin.

Priest? Yeah I got one o’ those thingies too. Discipline was rad, lately I’ve given shadow PvP a try. It was actually very strong, the only real issues was an ineffective snare and HUGE, and I do mean HUGE mana problems. This was before 3.3 though, so I have no idea what shadow priest PvP is like now.

I do know that there are a lot more spriests running around, and I suppose they’re a threat or something. I don’t really know, I just buff myself with Mage Armor and laugh at them.

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Defensive Play

Last week I was over at a friend’s house apartment, for parties and stuff I guess (WHO THE HELL BURNS POPCORN? COME ON!), and near the end of the evening ended up playing some WoWzors.

It being the AV holiday weekend, and my paladin still needing a few honor pieces, I queued up for that and away I went, smashing faces in and so forth, whilst me and a couple other WoWheads discussed PvP balance.

We were initially talking about arena matrixes, and discussed how well unholy DK/ret/disc would run in 3.3. After all, Unholy’s getting a few buffs and ret isn’t being nerfed for once, and I casually mentioned that poor retribution had been nerfed every single patch since LK shipped.

And you know what my friend said? He said “yeah, and you guys are STILL overpowered!” I mean it was meant as a joke, his main is a death knight after all, but ARGH ret pallies aren’t OP anymore!

So a long discussion was launched, in which I enumerated the many areas with which ret paladins are seriously lacking, about the lack of control, snares, gap closers, interrupts, and so forth, all the while kicking ass in AV.

At the end of my lengthy tirade, the same friend spoke up and said “That’s great and all, but I just watched you kill fifteen people in under three minutes, by yourself, without using major cooldowns, and you were fighting no less than three of them at a time.”

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Forgle Wargle Blurgle

Pilgrim Euripedes?

No thanks. I did every world event loyally, got the titles, the pets, went hunting for specific class/race combos, and then not one goddamn bag of candies dropped in February. Then I realized I just didn’t really care at all. Bah, whatever, and so forth.

Get the midsummer’s title, Flamekeeper, on the very off-chance I spec fire again, but other than that I don’t really bother with world events anymore.

What kind of title is reasonable for an arcane mage anyways? I switch between “of the Nightfall” and “the Undying” these days (by the way, the Black Drake is an amazingly handsome mount, highly recommended, you kinda feel like a Nazgul on that thing), but those are kinda “durr hurr look at me I raid and stuff”.

Buckle down, spam BGs until I get “of the Horde”? Grab Loremaster? Go titleless because it’s just a dorky vanity thing? Whip out “the Explorer” to make people underestimate me in battlegrounds?

Speaking of that, where are all the good male draenei mages? I can’t recall having seen even one since the launch of TBC. Literally every single male draenei mage I have come across has varied somewhere between “awful” and “not quite as awful”.

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Prot Healing and Static Defense

I specced the paladin prot, gave that a try. It’s very… different from the traditional holy. Understatement of the year. 19/52/0 is the spec I went with, head to toe in holy pvp gear.

So here’s what I’ve learned:

The loss of Holy Shock isn’t nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. There have been very few situations where an arena game was lost due to a lack of an instant cast heal, and honestly we probably would have lost every one of those situations anyway.

Holy Shock was, honestly, a crutch. I don’t really need it, not even against dual DPS teams.

The extra utility a deep prot spec has is glorious. Avenger’s Shield ain’t no repentance, but a powerful snare/silence followed with HoJ every 30 seconds is extremely potent. We’ve even beaten druid teams! And, of course, the extra survivability is great. Something like 9% complete damage reduction, and 15% spell damage reduction.

Not that I can tell. Chaos Bolt + Conflagrate still hurts like hell, especially when both crit. Ow.

The trend of learning things the very hard way continues, and honestly it’s pretty fun. Paladins have a crap ton of utility, a huge array of Hands and weird little things that are extremely useful in arenas. Presumably.

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How I Spent My Evening

That, my friends, is what we call a draw in arenas. 47 minutes of pure fail and AIDS.

Yes, I have an 80 paladin, currently dual-specced PvP holy and a raiding retribution build. Yes, I arena on said paladin, though it’s mostly me and Decessus dorking around and screaming obscenities at each other. Largely because I haven’t PvPd as holy since my very well loved shockadin spec got nerfed into oblivion, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

It’s really exciting really. There are lots of guides on the internet on how to succeed as DK/Pally. Here, I’ll sum them up for you:

• The DK should remove the G and H keys from his keyboard so that facerolling is less painful.

And that is how you arena. Never mind the fact holy paladins and death knights of any spec haven’t been overpowered in months.

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Dwarf DK

Anchorite Ahuurn: The time has come for us to embrace the Feralfen and teach them that the Light has not forsaken them. Take the potion I’ve prepared and carry it with you to the Boha’mu Ruins.

Once you arrive at the ruins, drink the potion to assume the form of one of their bird spirits. Speak with Elder Kuruti and let him know the draenei are ready to welcome his people as our long lost brothers.

Beardmason: Righto!

*Much travel later*

Anchorite Ahuurn: Did you speak with the Feralfen elder?

Beardmason: Shoor did! *Tosses severed head of Elder Kuruti to the ground*

Anchorite Ahuurn: What… what have you done?! What… This was a peaceful negotiation! Why… what… why did you kill him?!”

Beardmason: *scratches head* “Uhurm… I don’t understand the question.”

Reputation with Exodar decreased by 500.

Questing for the alliance is hard. D:

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Things I’ve Learned as a Paladin Healer

Yes, I have a paladin. Some of you know that, I suspect some of you don’t. I know for a fact that very, very few of you know that I actually heal on said Paladin.

Heal instances, even.

All if you who just shivered or otherwise suddenly felt a great deal of fear are forgiven. It’s ok. I’m not exactly a very… responsible person when it comes to my actions.

Cue Scholomance flashback:

Tank: “Do we need to kill all the trash first? What happens if we just pull the bosses?”

Me: “Let’s find out!” /cast Frostbolt

(Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, there’s a room in Scholo with dozens of neutral, non-elite trash mobs. However, they all turn into hostile elites and immediately engage the party if the boss is pulled first. Good times.)

Cue Wailing Caverns flashback:

Healer: “lol ur easy to heal. much harder at 70”

Me (as warrior tank): “Really? Ok” *swaps to 2H weapon and battle stance*

I believe it was Flirt who said “Yeah… I don’t trust you to tank anything.”

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Tonight, We Dine in Hellfire Peninsula!

Just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? Oh well.

Hellfire Peninsula, as it were, is the traditional trial by fire for alts.

In the face of giant, elite robots, huge hordes of speedily respawning demons, acres of hellboars, and enough orcs clustered together to shame Tokyo on Hallowe’en, this is where your character fails or thrives.

When I went through on my mage, I had an intensely hard time. This was due to two reasons. First, I was sporting a fire spec. Not a good idea when nearly everything has fire resistance.

Second, my gear was almost entirely focused on raw spellpower, resulting in me entering Hellfire for the first time with less than 2000 hitpoints.

I died.

I died a lot.

So I respecced frost and did so much better, and my death rate dropped to near non existent. I say near, because I still did things like try and kill Cruel by myself.

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