Being an asshole with an opinion on pretty much everything, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I ended up making a blog. My goal is not to create some shrine to my own awesomeness (Because such a shrine would have to be far too large for the hosting limits on free websites like this one, and I'm too goddamn cheap to pay to host anything), but instead to have an outlet for all my various opinions and ideas as relating to World of Warcraft, and the Paladin class in particular. I tend to be a wordy motherfucker, which makes posting anything on the WoW forums a pain, and most intelligent posts tend to get buried in "NERF __________ LOLZ" and "ZOMG FIX _________ OR I QUIT!!" posts anyway.
So here it is, my blog, condescending title and all. Eventually I hope to fill it with the various opinions and useful bits of theorycrafting that nobody feels like filtering through the useless crap on the WoW boards to find.
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With all that said, I suppose that its time for the obligatory (I am so funny, right?) "about me" section.
I've been playing World of Warcraft for around 2 years now. For the first 1.5 years or so, my main was a rogue. When I started playing, I had no idea what to do at all. In fact, without my first guild, (the long deceased HardOCP, which was formed on the forums of the somewhat popular computer enthusiast website, [H]ard|OCP) I probably wouldn't have been able to decide on a faction, or even a server. But decide I did, and so the troll rogue Dushkarra was born.
After around 8 months, I wound up in one of the top guilds on Stormscale, JUICE
Now, why do I use the term "they" instead of "we" to describe out WSG crew? Because, quite simply, I was growing very bored and frustrated with the role and performance of rogues in PvP at the time, and so I sharded my PvP gear, specced combat daggers, and started leveling a warlock to pwn noobs with in my spare time.
The warlock was entertaining enough in PvP, but all the hassle of trying to gear up both an alt and a main before the new honor system meant that I would never be truely competitive with the warlock, so after awhile, I stopped playing it, and focused more on my rogue. It was at this point that I started to get really bored with WoW, or so I thought. A combination of RL schedule conflicts and disinterest put a real dent in my raiding time, and since I no longer had to farm 250g worth of consumables and repair money a week, I suddenly had a lot more time to just mess around with the game. This was what lead me to my salvation: the paladin class. Before this time, the paladin was the only class that I had never played past level 25-ish. In fact, I had never played one past level 13! So, I decided I would start playing my little pally alt on another server, since everything else had gotten stale.
By the time patch 2.0 rolled around, my paladin was in his low 20s, and I was starting to have alot of fun. I had a few deadmines runs that were quite literally the most fun I'd had on WoW in months. I was main tanking, I was main healing (and on one run, I was doing both!), and in general doing everything that I never could on my rogue or warlock. It was at that point that I realized that what I was bored with wasn't WoW, it was DPS. Pushing backstab and Slice and Dice for 4 hours may help kill bosses, but it had become mind numbingly boring. The next little epiphany happened when I decided to do some WSG matches at level 29. Initially I tried running around killing things like I was used to, but my un-enchanted greens were pretty useless against all the twinks. So I decided to try pvp healing for a change. What I discovered was what I had intuitively known, but never experienced: a well-played healer can make an enormous impact on the course of a PvP match. I watched dozens of flag captures that would never have happened without me, and I laughed as a lot of the twink rogues, used to healers that dropped dead after 2 seconds, spent upwards of a minute trying to kill me (kick notsoez?).
So, I decided that when TBC hit, I would re-roll as a paladin. I spent most of my last month pre-TBC collecting good blues to speed my future main's leveling, collecting the mats for her epic mount, and doing anything else that would in some way help me burn past all the stale 1-60 content and into Outlands.
Several months later, my love of this class has not waned at all. I am currently exploring all that healing has to offer one in this game, but I've also been working on a solid tank set, should I ever get bored with keeping people alive. As for ret, well, I love big numbers as much as the next guy, and I'm sure I'll give in to temptation once I acquire some good ret gear (I vendored all of mine when I hit 70, like an idiot).
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With all that out of the way, I feel that, on this, the first post of my blog, I should set out some ground rules for my nonexistent readers to keep in mind when writing their nonexistent replies to my nonexistent articles:
1. If you're going to troll, troll well. I feel that this is important enough to be rule #1, since while your typical, garden-variety troll is nothing but a nuisance, good trolling can really add a lot to a community, imo. (Joram, one of the better trolls on the WoW forums, is always entertaining to read, for instance)
2. Refrain from posting racist/discriminatory language. I honestly don't care about "foul" language in general (god knows I curse like a sailor at times), but I intensely dislike it when people post racial slurs and things of that nature. We're all people here, so take your superiority crap and shove it.
3. Posting mindless personal attacks is just annoying. If you think that I (or another poster) am an idiot, feel free to say so, but you better provide some good reasoning. For example, "You're a goddamn idiot, since you believe that X is true, when clearly it isn't, for reasons Y and Z." is a good post. "your a fuking dumass, palis r supposed to b X but your to stupid to realize it!" is not a good post
4. Which brings me to my final guideline: Write in proper English. I don't care if you have a few spelling or grammar errors, or if you use some common internet abbreviations (imo, iirc, afaik, etc.) but aol-speak, caps-lock, and anything else that wouldn't make it past a 4th grade teacher is, shall we say, distasteful to me.
Any comment that flagrantly violates any of the above guidelines will be having a fun-filled session with my delete key.
Annnnnnnnd that's pretty much it for now. Expect a few angry/bitter rants directed at particular sections of the paladin community soon.
