Posts with tag blessing-of-kings

BoK brings up something I've thought a little bit about lately: their guild will occasionally run an encounter "blind," which means they'll go in without researching or learning any boss strategy ahead of time. This is generally something that only the highest-level guilds often do, and even then only on the PTR -- by the time bosses hit the live realms, their abilities are usually posted online somewhere. But some guilds enjoy a challenge, and doing a raid without knowing what's coming definitely keeps you on your toes. A lot of raiders think that's actually the "right" way to do it -- Blizzard's game doesn't come with strategies installed, so if the designers created the fight correctly, it should be clear, just from watching buffs and boss animations, what to do during a fight.

So today's query is: have you ever run something blind, or would you like to? I haven't run any raids blind -- my guild raids so little already that when we do, it's best to be fully prepared. But I did run the new 5-mans blind on the PTR, and it was an interesting experience. You really have to stay alert and try to analyze the fight as you're doing it, look for buffs and balances and try to position yourself as best you can, all while running your usual casts and abilities. It's a fun challenge, though as the fight gets tougher, it's probably less fun -- we were running with premades on five-mans, and I doubt a high-level raid would be as easy on us. Still, some of you must do it regularly, or at least be interested in going blind. What say you?

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• World of Raids highlights the Caith UI, a widescreen UI compilation.
• Runeforge Gossip gives a quick walkthrough of Rawr.
• WoW players that weren't around for Onyxia 1.0 might not know about this pretty sweet trick from OutDPS.
• Blessing of Kings asks... is Spell Haste bad for the game?
• We're coming up on Winter here in the States, so we might want to buddy up with this recipe soon.

While I'm not one to whine about incoming nerfs and changes for any of the classes I play, it sometimes gets a little annoying to see the developers tweaking things here and there trying to get the balance just right. Ghostcrawler recently said that in comparison to other classes, "... paladins (all 3 kinds) have been a bigger headache to balance this expansion, usually in the favor of the paladin." While we might not always think this is the case, there are several times since the moment 3.0.2 hit to start the expansion off where things just felt too easy. From ret pallies in substandard gear out performing all other classes to holy pallies being able to chain cast Holy Light with little regard for mana, the class has been a little off at times.

Blessing of Kings asks an excellent question: how often should we be running repeatable content? Certainly Blizzard has considered this issue before -- they've gone with daily quests in the first expansion, and recently they've been rethinking just how often we'll be rerunning dungeons, too. But both of those time periods are fairly arbitrary to us: is it possible that we should start running things twice a week (once during and once on the weekend), or maybe do weekly quests instead of daily?

BoK says: possibly. Rohan suggests a weekly quest that rewarded 70g instead of the daily 10g reward we usually get (not including the XP bonus which kicks it up to 13g). Players who don't have time to run every day, but do have the weekly availability (like me -- I play mostly on the weekends), would be able to still pick up the reward. I'll go one step further, in fact: what if we had an option? What if we could choose to run a quest daily (and get a bigger reward overall), or run it once per week, using up all of our daily chances for that week, and getting a smaller total reward? That seems to be the best way -- those who could log in every day would get a larger reward, while those who couldn't could still get more than just the single daily.

Rohan also says that Heroic and BG quests should remain daily, and on that we agree: those quests are perfect for creating variety every day, and getting people to run those instances. In fact, those would be fun to see expanded -- maybe Blizzard could create weekly series of daily quests that followed a small storyline across dungeons or BGs. Blizzard has done a pretty good job balancing out repeatable content periods, but it's always nicer to have more options.

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• RP Made Simple takes a deep look at an up and coming RP mod, Gryphonheart Items, which allows you to create custom vanity/flavor items to trade and share with others using the addon.
• Alterac Volley has added another Daily Quest Guide to their site, this time tackling the Midsummer Fire Festival.
• World of Snarkcraft reviews Wowhead's new Profiler feature.
• Blessing of Kings breaks down the patch 3.2 emblem changes, and gives some thoughts of their own.
• Should Rogues pick up Killing Spree in their PvE raiding spec? Slice and Dice says yes!
• Elemental Shaman extraordinaire Binkenstein is hard at work rounding up all of the applicable patch 3.2 changes.

We've heard about WoW in schools before, but usually it's at schools of higher learning, where they're studying social networks or how society evolves. But a group in North Carolina is planning to put WoW in schools in a different way: by using situations in World of Warcraft to develop literacy, mathematics, and other competencies. WoWinSchools has math lessons and other tests based around WoW terms and knowledge: one example question asks "Which types of heals produce a greater number of recovered hit points during an encounter?" Another wants to know "Which buff (a spell that enhances a character's abilities) is more effective for your character, Blessing of Kings or Blessing of Might?" The idea is to use situations that the kids are familiar with in World of Warcraft (raiding, for example), and apply higher level thinking to those situations.

There are even creative writing suggestions dedicated to the game, from writing an RP story about a character in Azeroth, to writing a song parody (that one should be taught by Professor Turpster) or designing a quest chain. And lest you think they're just joking around, there's a whole slew of research behind the idea, too, and it definitely makes sense: kids who play World of Warcraft are much more likely to be interested in problems about DPS and Healing rather than Susie and Bobby's apples that we added and subtracted back when we were kids in school.

It seems like the only place this is implemented is in one afterschool program -- while there are lots of good ideas here, it's not necessarily being used in many classrooms yet (and my guess is that not every student in schools would vibe with a World of Warcraft-based curriculum, either). But it is a plan in development, and anything that better helps teachers understand what their students are interested in is probably worthwhile.

Both Blessing of Kings and Unbearably HoT have posts up talking about the Shroud Loot System, a looting system designed to serve as an alternative to the standard DKP setups. The main point of SLS is that unlike DKP, it rewards points not just for downing content, but for just attending content, so that the focus is more on attendance and participation rather than progress (which, you'd assume, would eventually come if people are constantly showing up). Instead of kills, points are awarded at the beginning and the end of raids (no matter how much progress is made), and then when an item drops, players can bid points either by "Shrouding," spending half of their DKP (whoever spends the most gets the item), or by bidding a low fixed cost (and then they roll off for the item, with whoever wins paying the low fixed cost). BoK has a great example of how it works: either you spend half your points (if you have the most overall DKP, you're guaranteed to win) or you take your chances against a dice roll.

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Honor's Code takes a look at how they'll be utilizing the dual spec system as a Protection Paladin in Ulduar and begins assembling a patch 3.1 talent build.
• Do you enjoy Buddhist's over-the-top PvP videos, such as Ming Must Die? RogueRogue.com is (probably) proud to present: Six Silent Shadows. Be warned, this video contains some vulgar language. Okay, maybe a lot of vulgar language. Consider it NSFW.
• With all the hoopla around the Blizzard Authenticator lately, you may be interested in The Stoppable Force's walkthrough of the activation process.
• Our own Paladins discussed which judgement does what, but Blessing of Kings tells you the who, when and why about optimizing judgements.
• Skrooge is on a quest: Make 25,000 gold in as little time as possible, using only the auction house. His quest began with only three things: Auctioneer Advanced, 100g, and a tuxedo.

Eyonix has posted some bad news for Pallies and/or Shamans on the forums: the Shaman's Mana Spring totem, while still providing a raid-wide buff, won't play nice with the Paladin's Blessing of Wisdom spell. The two mana regen buffs will essentially be equivalent, but won't stack in the upcoming content patch.

The reasoning? Eyonix says that Blizzard feels that Pallies and Shamans brought too many unique buffs to a group, and that this change was designed to pull in an either/or choice: either Pallies can hit up Blessing of Wisdom, and Shaman can go with Healing Stream (which isn't, apparently, being combined with the Mana Spring totem as we first heard) or do some cleansing with their Water totem slot, or Shaman can use the raid-wide Mana Spring, leaving Paladins open to use Blessing of Kings.

Which makes a strange kind of sense, even though lots of Pallies and Shammies will likely be disappointed to hear of one less unique buff they can bring to a raid. There is one hidden benefit here, however: since raids were previously recieving both benefits together (and now can only get one or the other), we can probably look forward to a buff for at least one (since the Totem suffers the weakness of not being portable, you'd expect it to have some extra ability) or both.

After a wait that I was beginning to suspect wouldn't end, the 3.1 PTR is finally online and we have some new 3.1 patch notes. Though there are some noticable changes announced earlier this month missing from the latest patch notes, all of them seem to be in the current PTR build, only undocumented (most undocumented notes here are via MMO-Champion). As with all undocumented changes -- they may change at any time. For a complete rundown of the changes listed in the patch notes (and the changes not listed in the patch notes!), read on.

How about that. Blizzard dropped bombs of announcements yesterday with the proposed changes to Patch 3.1. Yesterday, I asked what changes you expect or foresee with the new patch, but I don't think any of us seriously expected the huge changes that they announced. Wished for, maybe, but didn't really think it would happen.

In fact, some of these changes were more unthinkable than the fake patch notes we had posted earlier. I mean, no more ammunition for Hunters? Wasn't that one of the most wished for wishes in the history of wishland? The closest thing Blizzard ever came to fulfilling this wish was with Thori'dal, the Star's Fury (which I hear is a Rogue weapon). Now, everyone and his uncle can have their own version of the legendary bow. Kind of.

Oh, and guess what? Blessing of Kings is baseline now. Take a moment to reflect on that a moment. It's freaking trainable! The best raid buff in the game is available to all Paladins now, regardless of spec. After years and years of the Paladin community whining asking for it, it might actually become reality. Blizzard seems to have a knack for turning our worlds upside down. I mean, I wouldn't actually be surprised anymore if BigRedKitty's *ahem* "patch notes" actually come true now. Alright, probably not that far out, but you know what I mean. What about Patch 3.1 has knocked your socks off so far? What other changes do you expect?

• Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

This is very, very awesome. It's a wonder this didn't happen earlier, actually. I think many of us expected this to happen back in the Wrath beta, but instead it was turned into a 5 point talent in the Protection tree. The unanswered question is whether or not we'll get the full 5 talent points baseline, or if we'll still need to spent talent points to improve it. Personally, I'm going to assume we'll get the 10% BoK baseline, it's the only way this would even remotely make sense.

It's a sweet time to be a Tankadin. I know that AoE tanking is no longer the exclusive domain of Paladins, but that's cool. With the changes to the way tanking works now, tanks generally generate threat by dishing out more damage... and boy does a Protection Paladin deal damage. Because Protection is the tanking tree, a PvE-oriented endeavor, I'm going to put away my PvP-fanatic hat aside and focus on a build that is optimal for tanking. Don't worry, even in this spec Paladins are still formidable. That's just the way it works in the new world.

We see a big change right away on the first tier with Blessing of Kings made accessible to all. It's not quite the baseline spell we've been asking for, but it's close. Some players can choose to pick up a scaled down version for less than five points, but since this is standard raid fare, we're throwing in 5 points here including Improved Blessing of Kings. We're also going to pick up Divine Strength on this tier, which was moved from the Holy tree. It's important to note that pretty much everything we use scales off attack power now, too, so more Strength means more pain. And more pain means more threat. Strength also contributes to block value, so we'll be looking to get Strength in our gear, too.

Welcome to Ask a Beta Tester! We're not going to waste any time today, and just jump in feet first with Jerematic's question...

Are there any other world PvP objectives, beyond Wintergrasp?

There aren't any objectives as far as things you can capture, no, not really. However, there are little PvP areas in certain zones. For example, there are PvP quests in Grizzly Hills. You take the quest, you are PvP flagged as long as you have the quest, and you have to complete it in a nearby area. In the Grizzly Hills example here, the Horde and the Alliance are duking it out in a massive logging camp that they've chased the Venture Co. away from. Have you ever wanted to ride down a river on the back of a huge log? Wrath'll do it for ya.

Chalios asked...

I'm a prot pally and I was wondering that since Blessings of Kings is going to be 2% stat increase base with an extra 8% on the improved version, will Greater Blessings of Kings start off with 2% as well at base and scale with the improved version or will it still be 10% and provide me with an extra 4 talent points?

The Greater Blessing will work the same way regular ol' Blessing of Kings works in Wrath. 2% per talent point. You don't get to skip out on spending 4 talent points.

So, where were we? Right. Paladin changes. While everyone and his mother got whacked by the nerf bat this build, Paladins got little more than a love tap from the devs, making me think that the Light, indeed, is watching over us all. As I mentioned in an earlier post, while seal damage got nerfed, the new talents and tree shuffles are shaping up to be good for the class.

Holy was left mostly untouched, leaving many Holy Paladins feeling distraught and apprehensive. As I've learned throughout the whole Wrath Beta experience, it's always just best to... chillax. Don't worry about it. Blizzard changed Beacon of Light last build and it's somewhat overpowered, but even though they've already said they'll tweak it a bit more, they left it as is this build. Everything will balance out in time. For this build, however, Retribution gets a chance to shine -- but so does Protection, and boy, does it shine bright. If you thought Retribution got some love, wait til you see what Protection got.