Mission 03: Zero Hour.

Ok, Basically this mission attempts to teach you about Base Defense (frankly I think it does a bad job at that because it is easier to just macro up a force). Basically there are a few things you are introduced to on this mission 1) Turrets, 2) Engineering Bay (UPGRADES!!!!!) 3) Bunkers, and 4) Reactor add-on.

Turrets are sort of Obvious, on most missions you don't need them, they are cheaper than bunkers and, more powerful, most of the time you don't need detection in your base. The main thing this mission tries to teach you is that turrets=good against Mutalisks (the flying zerg units) but it does a bad job at explaining it in my opinion since 4 mutalisks take down a turret and the ai barely sends any against you, unless you are going for the DON'T LOSE ANY STRUCTURES achievement it is not worth making any more, and even so it probably isn't as well positioned bunkers are more versatile against the waves the ai sends against you. I think they should have put burrowed roaches in this mission to teach people that turrets give detection, but yeh thats a different story. Basically if I were to take anything from this mission into multiplayer its that Turrets=Detection against cloaked/burrowed units.

Engineering Bay enables you to make missile turrets so you are granted one on this mission. This is where you get your Upgrades, these are important and remember that 1 armor means your units take 1 less damage per hit and 1 attack means your units do 1 more damage per attack. Whatever mission you are doing you should always try to get upgrades, depending on what type of army you are constructing.

Bunkers, these are the core of Terran Defense: They provide your infantry complete immunity to attacks whilst the bunker is up. Basically its like adding 350 hit points to your marines, definitly a good thing. You can also salvage bunkers so basically as long as they don't die to enemy attacks they are free so they are almost always worth it.

Lastly we have the reactor addon. Now you can add-on a reactor to your Barracks (and later factories/Starports). This enables you to produce 2 units at a time at said Barracks, however you can only produce units that don't require a tech lab (Marines, Medics (with the purchased upgrade), Vultures, Hellions, Vikings, Medivacs) Note that Medics and Vultures aren't available in Multiplayer. The point about a reactor is that you have to give up 50 seconds of unit-producing time to make double the amount of units. With a barracks this evens out after 100 seconds, with a Factory and Starport this evens out over a longer period of time. Remember that you don't HAVE to make a Reactor or a Tech Lab, 2 barracks produce units just as fast as 1 barracks with a reactor!

Ok, with the new stuff out of the way lets get the Mission Objectives out here..

Mission Objectives:

Main: Hold out for Extraction (20 minute timer)

Bonus: Rescue the Rebels (3)

Achievements: Complete Mission without Losing or Salvaging a Single Structure on Normal

Destroy 4 Hatcheries on Hard

Ok a few comments first: I am going to do a strategy that is good for both completing the mission on hard and can do the achievement on hard difficulty, this involves purposfully salvaging bunkers and is no good for those wanting to do the normal achievement.My advice is if you want to do this achievement, just do it on normal, make around 3-4 bunkers on the left entrance and 2-3 on the right entrance and have 2 scvs at each end of the base. Have a small mobile force to engage each side appropriately.

Right. So to start things off you are given 4 Bunkers, 16 marines, 1 command centre, 1 engineering bay, 4 turrets, 3 depots and 5 scvs.

Firstly do a standard opening, make an scv from your command centre, a marine from 1 of the barracks, and reactor the second barracks, hotkey your command centre and barracks.

After this salvage all 4 bunkers and move all your marines to the high ground just in front of your barracks, macro up your army following the guide below,

22 Reactor (1st Barracks)

26 Barracks

31 Depot

37 (1st Rebel callout) Depot

48 Depot

51 Refinery

52 Tech Lab

56 Depot

64 Depot

66 (2nd Rebel callout)

72 (stop scv Production) Depot (constant depot production after this)

75 Reactor (3rd Barracks)

83 Skip 1 round of Medics to get Armor Upgrade

85 move out with around half your force and save 1st and second rebel groups (not if doing achievement)

98 Barracks

110 Reactor (4th Barracks), Attack Upgrade

120 Move out to gain last force (this is when you want to move out and get the other 2 forces if doing the hard achievement)

From then on its just macroing out of the 4 barracks and keeping your units on the ramp. You might think you want to add a 5th barracks but you don't, certainly not reactored anyway.

Now, this mission is actually only hard if you rely on barracks and only make marines for the barracks you make, and the fact you end up splitting up your army, which is never really good when doing a mass defend operation.

The Idea behind the hard achievement is you move out at around the 9 minute 30 mark, right before you hear the third guy, leave around 10 marines at home and a medic and take everything else with you sweep around the first 2 rebel camps and then to last rebel camp, attack-move microing everything. Once you get to the last camp, get whatever you made from your barracks during that time and regroup, now go west of the 3rd rebel group and there is a zerg base, attack-move micro till most of your forces are up the ramp, and take out the 3 hatcheries, all whilst making more and more units from your barracks. Once the base is taken out move out of there back to the third rebel site. (Note: if your force got totally overwhelmed here it means one of 3 things 1: you forgot to upgrade, or 2: you moved out too soon3:lost too many forces going to save the rebels. I would advise saving before you plan on moving out, if it's an utter disaster, wait another couple of rounds of marines/medics and then move out. As long as you are taking out the hatcheries before 3 minutes left you won't completely die.

Once you have taken out those 3 hatcheries, continue to macro up an army till around the 3-4 minute left mark, after that you can either leave some force behind (if you actually want to complete the mission) or send everything you have to the north of the 3rd rebel camp and basically focus down 1 hatchery. Once you have done this you are granted the achievement immedietly, Note: that I was able to complete the mission AND do this achievement following the above strategy, I got completely overrun at the end and surrounded the artifact with my scvs so it wouldnt get killed and just made it, but still it is tricky to do this achievement and finish the mission, if you want to guarentee getting the achievement just mass-suicide your army.

Another note about the normal achievement: DO NOT build anything around the original bunker on the east bridge, specifically to the south west of that bunker, a nydus worm pops up during the cut-scene and if you have a building there it is automatically destroyed and you lose the achievement.

Hopefully you completed mar-sara missions and got onto the Hyperion and earned yourself the Adjutant Portrait.

A few notes about the campaign proper at the end of this: 1) I will tell you which upgrades are the best and list what you get and when, 2) Same goes with Research. 3) I highly recommend talking with everyone whenever you see a label on them, one because you can learn more about the story and two because you can get a few extra achievements.

After this mission you have access to the armory and the bridge, basically you can upgrade Medics, Bunkers and Marines.

I'll list the Upgrades here.

Marines : Stimpack - At the cost of 10 hp the Marine gains a 50% increase in attack speed and movement speed (50,000)

Combat Shield - Marines gain 10 hp (60,000)

Medics: Stabilizer Medpacks - Medics Heal 25% faster and for 33% less energy (105,000)

Advanced Medic Facilities - Medics can be trained without a tech lab (60,000)

Bunkers: Neosteel Bunker - Bunkers can hold 2 additional People (50,000)

Projectile Accelerator - Units inside the bunker gain 1 additional range (40,000)

From the first 3 missions you get 100,000 so you can get 1-2 upgrades here.

Stimpack is definitly the first thing you should upgrade, along with the Neosteel Bunker upgrade. Stimpack is great for alot of things, fast re-inforcing, massive damage. You can also use stimpack inside a bunker, which is definitly a good thing.

The extra bunker spaces is just a nice addition to base defense and useful in both the next 2 missions.

Next 2 mission options are available, personally I do smash and grab first for a few reasons 1) Firebats are pretty terrible without both of their upgrades, 2) Marauders are soooooo good and useful for the evacuation mission, 3) There may or may not be a bug where you replay this mission and continue to get protoss artifact benefits and money (it works when you are maxed on zerg/protoss artifacts and can get infinite money via it). If it does work then I recommend breezing through that specific mission on casual and max out protoss artifacts and get enough money to get full upgrades, I'll confirm and deny this in the post about it.

NB/ Durotar write up will be done tomorrow, first 3 missions took around 4 hours to write so don't really have time.

NB2/ If said bug exists in last paragraph I will still continue to do the campaign without it, and recommend upgrades based on that, regardless the campaign is obviously much easier with the protoss upgrades early along with every upgrade.

NB3/ OH YES MASTERIES POST, will do that before going to bed :D

Mission 02: The Outlaws

Onto the Second Mission: which basically covers Base and unit production, again this mission is pretty simple but here are a few habits that are good to practice for the basics of Macro in the game.

1) Hotkey your Command Centre, on pretty much every mission involving base construction you want to constantly produce scvs till you have around 2.5 per patch and 3 per gas, after that you can stop making scvs if you don't plan on expanding. I usually hotkey my Command Centre to 5, and try to get used to the hotkey for producing scvs. Just try and remember to press Hotkey->S every 15 seconds or so, if you want to cut down on the multi-tasking then just queue up scvs and do it every 45seconds to 1 minute, but remember doing this means you are going to be 100-200 minerals short of what you could ideally be.

2) Hotkey Barracks/Factories and Starports. Obviously the game hasn't introduced you to Factories or Starports yet but you should hotkey your barracks in this mission at least. Again Remember Hotkeys, Marine is A and Medic is E (these are very useful to know because you can probably win around 80% of missions with just these 2 units). I usually hotkey my Production facilities all to the same hotkey and use tab to cycle through the different buildings, but it can be beneficial to say have all barracks on 1 key, all factories on another and all starports on another.

3) Supply, The number in the top right corner is supply: you can have a max of 200 and it is increased by 8 per supply depot you make and 11? per command centre. I personally struggle alot with being supply capped, but you want to get into a good habit of making depots before you get "supply blocked", ie you have minerals to produce units but you can't make them because you don't have the available supply. Remember Scvs take 1 supply and marines also take 1 supply, so you want to be making depots around 3 supply before you get capped (IE 32/35) adding an additional 2 supply per barracks, so if you have like 3 barracks you want to be making you supply depots pretty much 1 after the other (ie 7 in advance).

4) Optimising your Resources. In-game what you want to do is keep your money low (especially in multiplayer, but in singleplayer it is useful too) If you see your money spiking and you are not supply capped and are producing from all of your structures you should put money into more unit producing structures. For this first mission I'll just say when I was spiking (supply number) and produced my next unit producing structure, for clarity, and will continue to do so, hopefully after a few missions you will see when to do it yourself without further guidance.

5) Finally, Upgrades are awesome, if you get an engineering bay then I would upgrade as soon as possible, perhaps skipping a round of units once you hit around 50 food or so, In the early missions you only have access to +1 attack/ +1 armor but later on you can get +3 attack/+3 armor for all the different types of units you get.

Remember if you want to ensure success in the campaign and you are not on a timed mission amass the biggest force possible before moving out to be safe, this is similar but different to multiplayer, in multiplayer the opposing enemy is also making units so waiting till you have 200/200 army isn't always the smartest thing to do.

OK.. onto the actual mission after the lengthy talks about macro basics, I'll be frank and say most of those aren't needed for the campaign, especially on normal difficulty and probably not on hard either but they make a big difference and really help the transition to multiplayer. Oh I also would say that if the gameplay speed is set to "normal" or "fast" in options->gameplay, set it to faster asap: this is the speed at which multiplayer is played at and overall it is better to learn the game at this speed. If you are having difficulty with a mission because you fell behind with your multi-tasking by all means put it down to normal speed or so but its really better to learn at faster than learn at normal and be thrown off by the faster paced multiplayer if you want to go into that.

First off the Mission Objectives.

Main: Destroy the Dominion Base

Bonus: Rescue the Rebels

Achievements: Collect all cash drops on Normal Difficulty

Complete the Mission in Under 15 minutes on Hard Difficulty.

Now off the bat I will say that you can probably do both achievements in 1 run but its harder to do both, I'll simply do the Normal achievement because well its easier to write a walkthrough for that, but the strategy for the Hard Difficulty is the same you just move out much earlier.

Ok, off the bat you are given a Command Centre, 8 scvs, a Barracks, 6 marines and a supply Depot. Firstly train an scv from the Command Centre and put all your scvs on minerals (select them all and right click a mineral patch). Then Select your Barracks and train a Marine. Select your command centre and right click on a mineral patch so that all your scvs go on minerals and then hotkey both your command centre and your barracks and "macro" up your army.

A few check off points:

17 Supply Depot

24 Barracks

25 Supply Depot

31 Refinery

32 Supply Depot

36 Supply Depot

37 Tech Lab

38 Barracks

45 Supply Depot

49 Barracks

50 Stop Making Scvs

53 Supply Depot (Constantly Make New Depots From this point on with 1 scv)

60 Barracks (last Barracks)

Basically you want to constantly make medics with your tech labbed Barracks and marines from all the others. If you aren't going for the timed mission just wait till you get to around 170 supply army and move out, if you are going for timed you should move out at around 50-60 food and remember to constantly produce from your barracks whilst attacking.

You should have a maxed 200/200 army just when your resources run out if you did it like this, onto the actual stuff in the mission, just north of your base are 2 cash rewards, a gas and a mineral. There is nothing to the right on the road so head west. You will come to a path that heads up to the north. Go up there to kill 3 marines and collect 3 mineral cash rewards. Go back to the road and continue west until you are forced to go south, go down here and kill the pathetic force trying to kill the rebel outpost and move onto the green sign on the floor. You gain an extra barracks, which you don't need and a couple of depots and like 4 marines and 3 medics, if you were maxed you are now oversupply, which is only a good thing :). There are 2 mineral and 2 gas cash reward scattered around the rebel base (that's the last of them), after that continue on the dirt track towards the dominion base. You will be greeted by a couple of Hellions, these are very good against your light infantry, but you should easily walk over their force. Moving further along you will see a bunker, just attack it, attack-move micro helps here but with a 200/200 army its not needed (or indeed 210/200). Just move into the dominion base and wipe everything out.

Just a note: if you find yourself at a 200/200 max army, if you don't have limited resources then you should just throw down a extra unit producing structures so that if your army gets whittled down you can get it back up to 200/200 much faster.

Doing this mission timed is harder because you have to push out that much faster, but it isn't that hard, just push out at around 50-60 food and continue to make marines/medics and rally them to your army (select your barracks and right click them on your army) This is much easier if you have hotkeys setup, you can simply press your barracks hotkey (6 in my case) and press E A A A, to make 3 marines and 1 medic without having to go back to your base.

On to the last mission (actually a little tough)

Starcraft 2 Mission 1 - Liberation Day

Ok, so now onto some sort of walkthrough of the campaign (Bear in Mind that I am in no way shape or form a good Starcraft 2 player, I know the basics and thats about it, I probably have around 60-100 apm, which is pretty average: however better than some new player to RTS and will attempt to make these walkthroughs fairly accesible.

Firstly, this will mostly be worded, I might add in some screenshots later when I upload them at some point, but for an original pass this will be mostly words.

Onto the mission though, this mission basically lets you lose with Marines and the main character Raynor (that is actually who you are meant to be in the campaign). A few things to note that will help with this mission:

1) Raynor has 1 extra range than your marines, so for optimum damage keeping him 1 line behind your front marines is optimal.

I.E: XXXX

X R X

2) Attack-move micro or Hold Position micro, these are 2 very basic concepts of micro-managing your units, the reasoning behind doing this micro is basically so that all your units can damage your opponent, Hold position micro is probably slightly easier than attack-move micro but makes casters and melee units vastly less effective.

Basically the idea is that you "time" movements with the shot time of your units, I.E say you have a unit that does an attack every 2 seconds, when it attacks you can then move that unit for 2 seconds and not lose dps before wanting to have it shoot again. With units like marines they shoot very fast so you are losing dps of your front marines by doing this micro against ground targets, but you are enabling the back marines to hit, so basically once all your marines can hit the enemy, doing micro like this becomes pointless and actually increases your time.

How do you do this micro? Well it's pretty simple.

1) Select all your units (ideally make them a control group like 1 or 2, or whatever you fancy (not required for micro but a good habit to get into))

2) Initiate a Move Order to your units by right clicking on the ground

3) Then either press the H key (For hold position micro) or a and left click on the same piece of ground for your units (For attack-move micro) to start attacking.

4) With Marines you want to do this very fast, with slower fire units like Marauders and Hellions (introduced later) you can do this much slower and achieve similar results.

Once all your units are attacking you don't need to micro anymore, for this first mission you can just attack-move across the map basically and win but on later missions micro like this can mean the difference between victory and death.

The final thing that is very important to remember is that a marine on 1 hp does the same damage as a marine on full hp: you want to keep your marines alive, in a fight if you notice that 1 marine is being focus fired: pull it back so the enemies dont hit on it anymore then have it re-engage.

When moving out on the map try and keep the lower hp marines at the back with raynor so the full hp marines take the brunt of the damage. Also remember that raynor has around 4x the hp of the marines so putting him up front is never that bad just remember that he can't die so if he gets below 100 hp I would put him at the back just to be safe.

Ok, onto the actual Mission: Lets outline the Objectives and Achievements.

Mission Objectives:

Main: Destroy the Logistic Headquarters

Raynor Must Survive

Bonus: Destroy the Dominion Holoboards (6)

Achievements: Have Raynor get 5 kills on Normal Difficulty

Destroy all Dominion Forces on Hard Difficulty.

Ok, so you have your cutscenes and stuff and get dropped in with 5 marines and Raynor. Position your marines so they surround Raynor like shown in my bad picture above and move across the map until you get to a civilian who is like "DONT GO UP THAT ROAD", which you obviously have little choice but to go up that road, but you get to encounter your first enemies. You encounter 3 marines, this might be lower on normal or casual difficulty but ye.. Basic Micro wins agains them easy.

You will probably find one of your marines is low so just switch him to the back and bring a full hp marine forward. Go up the Road and see a holoboard (your bonus objective) just kill it and move on :).

Coming up to the next bend you encounter 2 more marines, just wipe them out with basic micro. Again you probably have 2 marines in the red now so just have them at the back so they don't die, moving into the big square area you will see a mass of dominion marines, wait for the air drop and just attack move your marines and Raynor in there wiping out all the dominion and collecting the survivors. I ended up with 9 marines at this point and Raynor of course. From now on re-arranging is fine if you want to do it but completely unecessary for completing the mission, it is a good habit to get into though if you don't have medics.

Kill the Holoboard in the centre of the square and move South-East and take out the 2 marines and the holoboard here. Move south-west and kill the lone holoboard here.

Now take the path West out of the square and you will see a cut scene and be rushed by around 5 marines, just attack-move micro them and kill the building with a cannon on it and the holoboard. Moving down the ramp and there is the last Holoboard.. Kill it, with the civilian help and just move your way through town killing all dominion located there. The civilians basically solo it so the mission is kinda won at this point.

With no Particular special attention on my runthrough Raynor got 10 kills, I don't think it is possible to really fail with this achievement, but if you do just make him solo some of the stuff at the end with the civilians, he wont die really. If you followed the guide you killed everything in the mission so ye that achievement is done.

ONTO MISSION 2 O:

LOL STARCRAFT 2 (+beta patch changes :))

Kay, so It's been a week and starcraft 2 has taken up FAR too much of my time with its engrossing campaign that is diverse in pretty much all of its missions and tbh I had such a fun time playing it I had to play it and get all the achievements, I might write up a guide to all the missions on hard, going to start doing them on Brutal to get the Kerrigan Portrait at some point, but I thought: OMG not posted on my blog for like a week and although nobody reads it :DDD, I kinda like to get my thoughts down on like some sort of "paper".

Ok, so over the next few days I hope to finish my Durotar write up, I have all the screenshots and did all the missions I just never got around to writing it up. I also hope to write up all the Mar Sara Missions. They are pretty easy but they are great missions for practicing very simple Micro and Macro.

Haven't done my ladder games yet, waiting for a few friends to get into starcraft 2 so i can play more custom multiplayer games with them and then move into Multiplayer.

I want to make a comment on the new patch notes for the beta, since I might aswell make them in this post: I'll discuss the new masteries in a separate post but on talent and spell changes there are a few things I want to comment on.

First I'll comment on the druid changes since this was the first char I was levelling in my endeavour: Mostly all the feral changes are either mixing in old talents into new talents like Survival of the fittest into thick hide and stuff and rebalancing old 5 point talents into 3 point talents. The only major change is to Heart of the Wild and I presume the reduction of intellect is because it is a subspec possibility and anything too high would make it mandatory and too powerful for Resto and Balance, since it would have been 12% spellpower (or close to it) increase to both specs.

The Balance Druid changes are again very similar, obviously wanting to tone down the power of the lunar guidance talent by baking in the lunar/solar power generation into the spell, making the balance druid levelling experience that much smoother. Same thing with Nature's Grace, I personally much prefer talents that are like 100% proc and the effect is increased per point rather than points which are like MAX EFFECT but 33/66/100% chance to proc, because at max level they do the same thing but the chance to proc is much more annoying to the lower level player, especially with the new point system where you now have to wait a good 6-ish levels to get the full experience of the talent, Pain and Suffering in the priest tree is another talent I wish was changed to a 100% chance to proc and if it remained a 3 point talent make it like (INCREASES DURATION OF SW:P BY 5/10/15 SECONDS) although perhaps people could get away with 2 points there but regardless. I digress.

I won't comment too much on Hunter changes, it looks like they are very much playing around with the focus costs of some spells and focus generation of the class, the arcane shot change is probably aimed to help out lower level players but ye.. nothing much I can comment on balance wise since I don't play a hunter anyway :).

Similar thing with Mage changes, definitly playing around with how the mage gets their spells, getting water elemental early seems to be very nice and stuff like Reactive Barrier seem very nice aswell for frost, meaning in pve you won't have to spend a global on your ice barrier if you suddenly take lots of damage and weren't expecting it and in pvp meaning you get your shield up even if you are silenced, which is very nice. There was a separate post on upcoming fire tree changes, and personally what I would like to see impact get is some sort of spawn phoenix ability, I always wanted fire mages to get a fire elemental spawning type thing, I am not sure what the phoenix would do, but personally I always loved the phoenix in warcraft 3 and it would be nice to see it come into wow, it could be a lovely reactive spell so like if you fire blast the phoenix becomes like a searing totem if you blink it like increases your run speed, that sort of thing, Idk I think it would be pretty cool and iconic even if it would be hard to balance, it also could bring more variety to the fire mage rotation since you would want to proc it at some point and this sort of thing.

Only thing I want to say about the Paladin changes is 1) If Protector of the Innocent makes it to tier 1, so should Pursuit of Justice: I want to have that choice of Utility vs. Utility and without moving Pursuit of Justice to tier 1 I feel like my 10 points outside of Holy would be totally set in stone. 2) I liked the Idea of Protection choosing between threat and dr, but now they are choosing between threat,dr and self healing. It's too much unless you double the holy power regen. I know it's been said you are trying to get shield of the righteous to refresh holy shield with holy power, but then whats the point of Holy Shield, you might aswell just roll them into one anyway, It would be cool say if you could make a rotation where you went 3->DR->3-> Threat/Heal -> 3 -> DR by somewhat doubling holy power generation so you choose between threat and self heal, or you could make it a choice between holy shield and self heal and threat being a constant but choosing between 3 things is almost always too much since 1 will always get left out (mostly).

Last changes I will comment on are the warriors, since the other classes had nothing substantial changed. I am really liking the sounds of Colossus Smash, one because the name is just awesome and 2 because it seems to have synergy, my thoughts on it though are a little: Well it will probably only be used with M.S/Bloodthirst so why bother putting all the other stuff on it, but ye, idk. The best change however is that, FINALLY, fury warriors got some kind of easier to manage emergency cooldown/aggro drop in die to the sword. My god I always hated how fury was a class that was all about taking a little more damage when dpsing but also to not have an emergency cooldown other than complicated shield wall macros that take far too long to activate sometimes, was just really irritating. I also like how fury is really going back to its essence with it all being about enrages and all that jazz.

So anyway that was a quick overview of my thoughts on that patch, I'll try and dish out some more posts today on both Durotar and Mar Sara Missions

Protection Paladins in Cataclysm.

Ok, so I did the other 2 paladin specs so I'll give a stab at protection Paladins aswell.

Firstly I have relatively little experience with Wrath Tanking as a Paladin, I've done heroic tanking on my paladin which basically involved facerolling on 5 sets of keys and face rolling, yes paladin tanking is very hard ... :/.

However I haven't really raid tanked at all in wrath on a paladin, I've tanked some 10 man stuff on my warrior (Naxx and Ulduar) but nothing that major.

Lets get a few provisos I have about tanking out of the way. There are 2 ways I see a difficulty of class scaling, there are "Difficulty for the new player" and "Difficulty for the knowledgable player".

I generally consider the healer to be the hardest class to play, under the lk scope, especially Holy Paladins and to a lesser extent Resto Shamans because you don't blanket so much and you actually make individual choices on who to heal, you don't just shove out a rotation like the druid/priest or dpsers/tanks.

Then if you are a new player i consider tank to be the next hardest, since you are asked to lead a dungeon, often the tank dictates the pace of the run and is looked to for knowing tactics and stuff, especially at 5 man content this is the next difficult job.

At a raiding level however I consider the tank to be the easiest Job, and there are a few reasons why:

1) Gearing is pretty easy, you just go for the stuff with more stamina/armor on it in LK, thats pretty much all you gear for, you probably want to hit the hit cap and expertise soft cap for threat, but otherwise you are pretty much purely itemising for stamina

2) *Most* hard parts about a fight are avoided or mitigated by being a tank, ghosts on deathwhisper, Slimes on Putricide, Pact on Lanathel etc. Even if you fuck up on basic mechanics usually you have enough hp to survive.

3) Nobody Looks at a tanks rotation or threat, noone cares if it isn't 100% optimal, as long as people don't have issues with it, it's no problem: that means there is much more slack in a rotation of a tank than a dps.

Now Paladin specific in Lich King we have the fact that Ardent Defender exists, the only active dr cooldowns you have in LK is when to use Divine Protection and Divine Guardian, Discounting Glyph of Salvation, so mostly you can fully concentrate on moving, unlike say a dpser who has to pop his cooldowns on time you just have to do it at a specific point in the fight, say when you just taunt or are taking soul reaper.

These points all lead to me believing that tanking is the easiest part of a raid team in lich king, and that your tank can be significantly worse than the rest of your raid and you probably wouldn't notice or care as long as they geared right.

Like Blizzard has quoted many times Tanks are really only judged on success rate, you are judged on whether you were able to get through the fight or not.

Now, moving on to the actual topic of this post we have a few things that I like about the Protection Spec Iterations.

1) A real choice between threat and Damage Reduction. This change alone shows me that Tanking is moving to a more difficult level, I know Blizzard has said they don't want dps to have to worry about a threat ceiling and for Tanks to not worry about people pulling aggro, However to be Honest what I would hope that means is that a perfect tank with perfect dps would mean that the Dps were at a constant 85% of the threat level of a tank.

Since Perfection does not exist, this should mean that a Tank that can perform within 80% of perfection would be able to hold back 99% of dpsers without them really having to worry about taking aggro.

What I like about this system of choosing between threat and damage reduction is that it rewards those good tanks more, the best tanks that will pull out optimum threat and move bosses well and taunt at the right times meaning they can dump their Holy Power on Holy Shield instead of Inquisition. A system that rewards good players is something I definitly like.

2) The diversity away from warriors: the removal of shield of the righteous is great, I personally hated how samey warriors and Paladins felt. The Diversion of cooldowns between the 2 aswell is nice.

3) Cooldowns: Just gonna talk about cooldowns, I personally LOVE how ardent defender is changing, god that cooldown was such a total mistake in Lich King in my opinion, taking choice away from tanks just made them so easy and not taxing, it was horrible to see raid groups having to switch to Paladin tanks on Lich King for that insurance factor of Ardent Defender.

I remember chatting with some guy from Irae Aod who were one of the first groups to do 10 man Lich king (at the time of the conversation nobody had done 25 man heroic lich king) and they were like "yeh we wiped so much with a warrior and dk tank, but then we switched out our fully decked 264/277 tank with a t9 245/251 geared Paladin tank and 3 shot the boss." Comments like that really hurt me inside, the fact that one cooldown can give so much leeway on mechanics and make a difference between suceeding and defeat on an encounter, simply because the choice is removed from the player is really sad.

I like the new version of Ardent Defender aswell, a mini dr cooldown with basically 15% extra health, obviously it isn't clear whether it works on multiple blows that would have killed you or not but I don't think it would be that overpowered even if it did, considering it is only 15% healed. Regardless this is a really new and innovative cooldown and I like it alot.

I also like how Divine Guardian is being made into a strictly raid cooldown and not a personal cooldown, it seemed like a waste to have to save D.G. for a single person cooldown. It also means that having a Prot Paladin on your team gives your other tank 2 extra cooldowns (Hand/Divine Guardian) which is nice synergy as a tank partner, although perhaps a bit too powerful.

4) I like how Consecration is changing to make Paladin tanks more like well TANKS, you stand your ground, you want to tank in that spot and be like juggernauts.. that's awesome and compelling, obviously the rotation can support moving and using consecrate more but its nice to sort of only use it once every 45 seconds ideally and not have all this incidental damage.

I don't like how hammer is still the main nuke of Protection per-say: I am hopeful this will get iterated out or made a choice, considering also that they want to make Holy Wrath part of the rotation aswell means that Paladins are going to be just as good at aoe tanking in cata as they are today, since all their abilities to tank have incidental aoe. I would prefer a system where you have to choose between hammer doing single or aoe. Perhaps you could say make it so that doing C.S-> Hammer made it do single Target and Holy Wrath-> Hammer made it do aoe damage, it would be quite innovative to make certain spells affect the functionality of 1 spell but I feel like it would diversify the protection paladin class more: and make Paladins less good at aoe tanking (provided of course numbers were tweaked).

Obviously these are just ideas I'm throwing out but ye i just like the idea of using different spells to affect the functionality of this 1 spell. Exorcism could make it a ranged casted attack (like the trial of the champion boss) all this stuff, would just make it awesome and very unique.

I haven't really got much else to say other than that, it's hard to judge because I don't really play protection paladin's especially in the beta and am mostly just going off the talent trees and spells you use.

Anyway hope this wasn't too noobish of a random post

Holy Paladins in Cataclysm

Ok, so onto my beloved Holy spec: Lets get a few facts down, the only real main I would play is my Holy Paladin: I love this spec, it is the only healing spec I have fell in love with and for the next few paragraphs I am going to detail why I love it, especially in Wrath. The second fact is I do not love it because it is "overpowered", but that will be explained in the next few paragraphs.

Firstly, Wrath healing is not really mana limited, I do run out of mana as a holy paladin: But that is usually me being over-zealous on using Holy Light or not using plea enough: this sort of thing. Basically though this means my healing is basically a combination of 5 spells: Keep Beacon and Sacred Shield and Judgements of the Pure up, Holy Shock when moving and Holy light 80% of the time. Whilst Using Plea with cooldowns to compensate that loss.

Now whilst that is pretty simplistic meaning you are only really using 1 spell the majority of the time, the fact that it is a direct heal means that it is totally different from say Rejuvenation and Shields and Renew. Whilst those 3 healers (Druid/Disc/Holy) are the majority of their time blanketting a raid, relatively they are just using 1 spell and keeping up hots/shields on around 10 people whilst using other spells to either heal directly (Prayer of Healing/Penance/Swiftmend) or more blanketing (Coh/Wild Growth) meaning their healing has relatively little choice, you are sort of pidgeonholed into healing specific people at specific times with only really 3 or so heals over 15 seconds.

In contrast Paladins have free reign on who they heal, because their "job" is usually to heal the beacon target only on 1 tank fights, this means that on fights with lots of aoe damage you are basically choosing who to heal, whilst the 3 aforemented heals blanket people the holy paladin and, to a lesser extent, the resto shaman pick them back up to full hp. Basically although you don't have much choice in your spellbook you have full choice on who to heal, perhaps you might be assigned to a specific group or pact of the darkfallen target or whatever but regardless you are choosing who to heal and aren't cycling montonously.

This is precisely what I love about Holy Paladins, you choose who to heal, it doesn't matter to me that I am only using 1 spell I get to have alot of choice and freedom in my healing, even if it is in a niche role.

Now I won't make any bones about it, I have my severe doubts over Cataclysm Healing Style, not the intention of it: I think that is good, but I feel it is going to take away what I love about Paladin healing, one of the main reasons why I am quitting hardcore raiding is because I don't think paladin healing will be attractive enough in Cataclysm, along with real life issues and all this jazz.

Now I am going to make alot of points about "healing style" and will attempt to not view paladin healing in cataclysm under a "lk eye" like many people do when reviewing the current status on the beta. What I mean by this is I will make a few key assumptions and ignore numbers on the beta.

1) You can Spam Holy light constantly for a good 5-6 minutes using standard mana regen techniques and have a good 20-30% mana left. I make this assumption based on blue posts that have been made about cataclysm healing.

2) Any necessary "healing buffs" are kept active/used on cd satisfying condition 1, ie if i keep up my healing buffs and spam holy light I have 20-30% mana left after 5-6 minutes.

3) Flash of Light and Divine Light cost the same mana, and are worse hpm than Holy light.Flash of Light Heals for the same as Holy Light. Holy Light and Divine Light take the same amount of time to cast.

4) Light of the Dawn is a choice and Healing Hands is Spammable.

5) Holy Shock is something you want to use on cooldown.

6) At 3 Holy Power you want to use Word of Glory without question.

7) 80% of your Holy Power Generation will be through Holy Shock and not through Tower of Radiance.

8) I assume that tank healing is purely tank healing

9) I assume Raid healing will be group based

Now these assumptions are based on the current talent design of the Trees and what I would envisage healing choices to pan out between the 3 direct heals.

Under these assumptions I assume that whatever the Paladin is healing they will be doing a few things: Keeping Beacon up, Keeping Sacred Shield up, Keeping Jotp up, Using Holy Shock on Cooldown, Using Healing Hands on Cooldown, using Word of Glory at 3 holy power and using Holy Light with Infusion of Light.

Now if they are Tank healing they will be healing in melee for healing hands splash on the tanks and basically using Holy light Primarily, using Flash of Light if say they need to top the tank fast before some high damage point and using Divine light after a high damage point with small threat of them dying.

If they are Raid Healing they will stand with their specific group, using holy light primarily and light of the dawn when all members of the group are taking damage, mostly using flash of light in emergencies rather than divine light.

Now what I have a problem with is the first paragraph of the 3.. the fact is that you have a good 7 things you have to do, you don't really have a choice not to, I might have some of these assumptions wrong like using holy shock in cooldown mostly is what I am a little unsure about, but that would still leave 6 things you are forced to do, obviously 2 things would be far less stringent without the holy shock assumption.

Now in the same way that druid/priest healing is very montonous with lack of choice I feel like because you are having to do 6-7 things without thought you are losing alot of elements of choice. I mean alot of this ties into cataclysm healing style where you will have a max of 5 people you are healing, because overhealing matters I presume that raid healing will go back to 1 healer per group and 2 healers on tanks.

I know Blizzard's position on making healing fun is to make you choose between spells and manage your own mana and really have an obvious idea of who you are healing. Now whilst I actually don't have a problem with that at all, I feel that is a very good mantra and actually makes healing far less stressful, which it currently is today. However I don't feel its been implemented in the best possible way for a paladin. Paladin healing has lost its simplicity and has become a very complex healer.

Firstly, lets take the positives: 1) Far more viable raid healing, personally I feel they should give an aoe heal talented for a holy power dump so you have a nice choice between word of glory and this aoe heal as a power dump, that way its far less monotonous.

2) I LOVE how the position of the paladin matters, it has given paladin alot more mobility they don't currently have, its a very unique way of aoe healing and even single target healing this part of the paladin healing is my favorite.

Personally I feel that Paladin healing is going to be in a good place, I actually like the style, I would definitly find a way to generate Holy power besides Holy Shock, like I said if you don't have to use holy shock on cooldown then you have 4 main things you have no choice over and 2 you have to do based on a proc (again giving an aoe heal as a power dump along with Word of Glory would be 1 less of that) then I think the healing style is actually going to be great.

Things I don't like about Paladin Healing and the talent tree at the moment.

1) The Bloat of the tree, I know there was a post saying they like "bloat" but when I need to take 32 points in my specialised tree with 0 choice for utility and all for performance, and then the only point I can "choose" is to get pursuit of Justice for more manoeuverability.

What I envisage for a "good tree" is that you take a good 25 points all for performance with not much room for manoeuvere in your specialised tree and then 5 points in another tree you have to take again for performance. You are then with at least 6 points to choose between utility points in your tree and then 5 points to choose in the other 2 trees or further in your own tree.

At the moment you need don't really have any utility choices in the Paladin tree. (Note: I do not consider Enlightened Judgements as utility, you can argue that it is, but considering that having the hit cap and being able to Judge anywhere is vital to keep up judgements of the pure which is essential to performance)

2) The bottom of the tree: It's hideous, Improved Concentration Aura needs to be cut, improving auras is just generally a bad decision, I don't want to have to say Yes I need a holy paladin for improved conc aura, and a prot for devotion aura. I presume this talent will be cut but yes, it needs to go, or be tier 1.

Blessed Life, I like this talent and again with say some of the NEEDED BLOAT cut it will be an interesting choice, it has no real place in the current tree of course.

Denounce should really be higher in the tree (tier 3) just so that a person levelling as holy can have access to it earlier, again it suffers from the rest of the tree, and would be a nice choice, would also be nice if it could proc seals but i doubt that would happen :D.

Those are my big 2 quarrels besides what I already stated above. I believe Paladin Healing can be great, and is poised to be in a great spot, it just needs a few iterations and it would be awesome :D.

Although to be clear I won't be healing "hardcore" in Cataclysm, I still want to see paladin healing get into a great place as it is something I hold dear to my heart :).

Retribution Paladins In Cataclysm

Ok, so this is gonna be another bit of a long drawn out post on Retribution with another on Holy later, I won't comment much on prot because a) I have never really seriously played prot and b) It isn't really that finalised on the beta at the moment.

First I am going to talk about Ret, why? because I was doing Deepholm as Ret so probably am the most experienced with the new mechanics.

At first I was like, yes this feels like a good change, I mean what you essentially have is a static DO THIS ON CD ABILITY (C.S) which you will always do on cooldown and then everything else having a priority in the free globals with this being Inquisition -> Templar's Verdict -> Judgement -> Exorcism -> Holy Wrath for single target and Inquisition -> Divine Storm -> Holy Wrath -> Judgement -> Exorcism for Multi-Target.

To comment on a few things, that sort of lead me turning on this system: a) I have played feral druid (mostly this) and rogue (a little) extensively enough to know their dps systems inside out b) I really hate the standard UI, maybe I will do a post on what I hate about it. c) I always thought Paladins were about some sort of burst.

Now, I'll deal with each of these points separately. Firstly we have the fact that Inquisition is basically a Savage Roar/Slice and Dice Clone, it is basically the only ability you would use with less than full holy power and if you miss keeping it up you lose a fuck tonne of damage. Now, whilst I don't mind these mechanics I think it's laboured: Do we really need 3/6 melee dps classes feeling very samey when it comes to the dps rotation. Holy Power also seems to basically be combo points in disguise, theres nothing interesting and new about Holy Power C.S is just a new sinister strike or shred and Templar's Verdict is the new Eviscerate/Ferocious Bite and Inquisition is the new Savage Roar/Slice and Dice. It is kinda like you split the rogue aspects and thought " We will give energy to hunters but make it more like runic power, and we will give combo points to paladins but limit them to 3". I just think its a laboured mechanic, I would much rather see a clone of say the DK rune system that a clone of combo points which is already used on 2/6 of the melee classes.

Secondly, the standard UI is attrocious for Holy Power, maybe you can argue that "eventually it will be on the main frame" but that makes me cringe really, the problem with both of these is you need to know how much Holy power you have at any one time. However, this is actually a minor problem, at the moment on the beta this is very annoying, but if Crusader Strike got reduced to 3 seconds this problem would be far less intrusive.

Finally, the point about Wrath and why Holy Paladins were "overpowered" in pvp early on in the expansion was because they could blow all their cooldowns and knock somebody over without fear of dying. Paladin burst was pegged back with emphasis placed on talents like righteous vengeance and Spells like Seal of Vengeance becoming prominent. Whilst the core of the Paladin fcfs rotation remained intact. Come Cataclysm I just feel that Paladins have lost pretty much all burst. Note: I am not a PvP and never will be a PvP fanatic, I am talking mostly about PvE burst.

From my Experience as a dpser you have 2 types of Dps: Controlled Burst Dps and Sustained Dps, the definition of the difference between the 2 is obvious and best described by say choosing between an "on use trinket" and an "on proc trinket". In wrath useful "On use" trinkets went away (something I am very annoyed about personally) so basically you only had proc trinkets as a dpser, so there was no choice between increasing your damage in a 30 second period or over a 5 minute period, it was always the latter.

As a Ret Paladin in Wrath you have ways to choose between Controlled Burst and Sustained Dps, mostly these revolve around your use of Avenging Wrath, but also in a minor way seal usage. You can use your Avenging wrath on cooldown to increase your sustained dps or you can use it at specific points in a fight to increase the dps where it matters, with seals it is mostly switching to command on Valkyr's so that they die, even if that means you might lose your vengeance stack on the boss, since we want to increase our dps in that timeframe rather than the long run.

Personally I was always a fan of increasing dps in the short term, I hate people who blindly look at spreadsheets and go HUH A>B must be an upgrade when actually, especially early on in wrath, keeping a trinket like wrathstone (NEVER DROPPED (Seriously :<)) which was a reasonable on use trinket was something I would always do so that if the encounter required burst, say Valkyr Shield Popping on Twin Valkyr's that I would have guarenteed dps increases in that small time period. For the Same reason I don't tend to favour crit beyond 50% since crit works like a normal distribution curve, it becomes less and less bang for buck in a short term window past the critical 50% number, obviously in Cataclysm Crit will be much more valuable with the lower combat ratings, but I digress...

The point is that the new system is very "RAMP-UP-ESQUE", similar to how feral druids/Rogues work you have to spend a good 10-15 seconds of ramping up, on the beta this is obviously amplified by the fact C.S has a 4 second cooldown, but the problem is still there with a 3 second cooldown, it takes a long time to ramp up damage, I feel like Paladins don't need 2 mechanics to ramp up: Seal of Truth and Inquisition (Holy Power), it means your damage is very poor at the beginning of a fight for a good 10-15 seconds, this can be horribly taxing on a player who is looking out for his survival as is being advocated alot recently and I feel the Paladin should only be having to worry about 1 ramp up ability.

Ok, so bringing all this together.. Basically on its current state on Beta, the dps rotation is hideous. C.S going down to 3 seconds will do wonders for this though, it's already been posted that this change is in a build and let me be blunt: It needs to be 3 seconds if you intend to stick with Holy Power being a Combo Points system, if it is 3 seconds it makes the rotation feel totally different from a rogue and a feral druid, if it is 4 seconds it feels like a bad clone.

Let me Elaborate on that a little.. At 3 seconds you will never run out of something to do: It is always C.S move C.S move C.S move... etc with the move based on a priority system of 5 abilities (lets ignore the fact that this keeps us gcd locked because I feel like a gcd locked class is better than a non gcd locked class that only has specific windows where they can use something, also move could be used for dispelling and every 3 seconds is easily often enough to dispel or use freedom/protection... this sort of thing).

This is cool because you don't have downtime and it is both monotonous and non-monotonous in terms of C.S and the move part of the rotation respectively.

At 4 seconds you have C.S move move C.S move move C.S move move, this means that the cooldown of C.S actually becomes 4.5 seconds, you also run out of moves real fast so you end up doing nothing for the vast majority of the time, this is dull and boring and although gives you freedom to move around also means you are punished severely when having to move and you need to use an ability. Also it means you are going to be forced into 2 stacking inquisition I feel instead of 3 stacking because of timings.

At a 3 second interval your rotation looks like this:

C.S -> Inquisition -> C.S -> Judgement -> C.S -> Exorcism -> C.S -> Inquisition -> C.S -> Judgement -> C.S -> Holy Wrath -> C.S -> Templar's Verdict -> C.S -> Judgement -> C.S -> Exorcism -> C.S -> Templar's Verdict -> C.S -> Judgement -> C.S -> Holy Wrath -> C.S -> Inquisition... etc

I am not sure of the current Holy Wrath cooldown on Beta, but obviously with a 3 second C.S it needs to be around the same cooldown of Exorcism: I.E 15 seconds, so you just alternate between the 2 in the rotation, meaning that an aoe rotation swaps exorcism/holy wrath and swaps Templar's Verdict with Divine Storm.

Now obviously this does not take into account the extra holy power procs from the talent Divine purpose, which is basically a clone of a rogue talent I forget the name of, regardless the fact that it is so lovely without them only means that with them it is more lovely since you get to hit T.V more often which is always fun. With a 4 second c.d C.S you just had so much downtime it was really boring.

I am obviously not even talking about Zealotry or Avenging Wrath at the moment, Zealotry is actually a really lovely spell, however it seems pointless: Why? because you would always use it with avenging wrath, there is no time where you would use Zealotry without Avenging Wrath, so you might aswell just bake them into the same ability in my mind. The only time I can think of where you would separate them is if you have events that are say a minute apart in a boss fight and you need high dps for both, so it's better to use a cooldown on each rather than both on one and then fail at the other. Like say Lich King Valkyr's, spread cooldowns over waves rather than blow them all on one and then struggle on the next few.

So ye I feel like if C.S goes to 3 seconds and Zealotry is baked into Avenging Wrath, i.e the talent adds the functionality to Avenging Wrath, then I feel like Ret Paladins are going to be in a great place.

If we talk about my experience on beta with ret I would say that there are a few other concerns 1) Choice between Seal of Truth and Righteous is very Urgh, I couldn't really choose between them when levelling, I would think Righteous should be my seal of choice but it just feels weak at the moment. 2) I don't like that Divine Storm is usable without Holy power, it means if you accidentally press it twice you ruin your rotation, I feel that Consecration is a "Constant aoe" that you don't need a spammable Divine Storm, Divine Storm should obviously be ideally used at 3 stacks of holy power and not before.

3) I also didn't know whether to use Inquisition on mobs or just use T.V, although i have the same problems when levelling ferals/rogues so I feel thats less of an issue.

As a minor point: I don't like how the ICC gear doesn't have the extra stamina baked into it, I know you obviously want people to take the new gear in the new zones, but I feel that if I have 264/277 gear I should only be taking the blue quest rewards in the first 2-3 zones and whilst that is true for dps, I am losing around 10k-20k hp I feel of where I should be because I am not taking the quest rewards, which means some of the damage of mobs is overly high.

I'll do another post on Holy Paladins O:.