Saturday, July 10, 2010

A Beginners Guide to Paladin Tanking: A.K.A The Great Wall of Text




 Welcome you bringers of the light, you crusaders of justice, you who proclaim in a loud booming voice, "Do whats right... or I will fucking kill you!"  Todays article is all for you, oh banana shouldered ones!  Today i will be discussing the basics of tanking with a bringer of the holy light.   Paladin tanking is relatively simple (as compared with other tanking classes) in that our rotation is for the most part fixed, we only have 1 true defensive cooldown, and most of what would be our other defensive cooldowns are passive (always on) abilities, or are side effects of the spells that are already in our rotation.

    As a tank you have 3 priorities.

  1. Build threat
  2. Stay alive
  3. Look good while doing it!

    I will not be going into deep theory-crafting, gearing, or chanting.  There are many other options for that kind of thing, though I may do posts on them at a later date.


Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Patch Day Edition: The Joys, and Terrors of RealID



Mmmm, do you smell that?  Ah the sweet smell of downed servers, broken addons, and nerd rage.  This can only mean one thing! Patch day!!! YAY

Thats right kiddies we are now in the presence (well those of us that can connect) of patch 3.3.5.  This is the last major content patch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion cycle, and it brought a new raid, and a spiffy new toy with it.  New toy?  Whatever could I be referring to?  Well that would be the RealID friend system, and in this particular post I am going to be educating the great unwashed masses on how to use this new tool.


Sunday, June 20, 2010

Happy Father's Day: Cal's Surprise


All images are copyrighted by Blizzard Entertainment Inc.  I just arranged them in an amusing manner.  Please don't sue me!

Saturday, June 19, 2010

UI Setup for Tanks: Part 1




Addons.  Those little bit's of code that are supposed to make our WoW lives easier.  If used correctly they are quite adept at this task.  If used incorrectly they can vastly decrease the performance of both you, and your machine.

Every addons in existence uses system memory to do what it is intended.  Most of them only use a small amount, but the effects compound with the more addons you chose to utilize, and therefore starts to wear on your available system resources and drain them.  So the trick is getting the most bang for your buck by finding what is useful, and what isn't.  The goal is to keep your user interface (UI) as lean, and streamlined as possible while still having all essential information available in an easy to understand format.

I have found (through extensive trial and error) that most addons fall into the following categories:

  • Essential
  • Situationally Useful
  • Raid
  • Out of Raid 
  • Non-Essential but Nice
  • F***ing Useless

By now your eyes are probably rolling back in your head, and you're tasting butter.  Don't worry the seizure will pass because I am going to break this down into easy steps.

First things first.  You need to know where to get these wonderful little trinkets we call addons.  Personally I prefer to get everything I can from Curse.  They have everything I will be recommending in these guides.  So go ahead... Click the link. Get the client V4.  I'll wait.

Now that you have downloaded, and installed you're shiny new curse client you'll need to understand how to use it.  It's fairly straight forward but nonetheless you can find a tutorial on Curse's website here.

Now something to keep in mind is that this guide is being written with a tank's needs in mind.  I will cover UI setups for DPS, and Healers at a later date.  Now onto the tanky goodness!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Ubiquitous First Post




Welcome! Please ignore the villagers screaming, and wielding sharp pointy objects, thats just the apocalypse. Yes I have started a blog. Yes the world will most likely come to crashing halt because of this fact. So sit back, relax, roast some marshmallows on the blazing remains of your front lawn, and enjoy!

This is a blog dedicated to two simple things, with a lot of depth, and breadth.
  • Things that piss me off
  • World of Warcraft

So without further ado, lets get to a real post. This first one will defiantly fall under the, "Things that piss me off" category.