Saturday, May 29, 2010

Sariella PvE

Sariella's PvE gear is rather meh. Throughout the expansion, she has been raiding, and has seen every scene of conflict since Naxxramas. She was never anywhere near the pinnacle of progression on The Sha'tar though - Perhaps one of my many goals I wish to accomplish in WoW. Regardless of her success, she's always been a mainspecced Holy Paladin, with the occasional dip into Retribution and Protection Offspecs.

Her most recent PvE guild was Beyond Redemption, a guild I helped set up, create, and nourish. Today it is a semi-successful PvE guild (For the Sha'tar Horde standards), but it no longer contains me due to some rather messy drama regarding the failure of my PC and the distrust shown by my ex-guildmates. I have since quit raiding in it's entirety on Sariella, instead, I will wait till Cataclysm and begin raiding on my alternate Paladin, Arannia (because she's got some badass oldschool stuff I feel like showing off :-P).

Arannia we'll be covering soon, but for now, let's discuss Sariella's PvE gear, spec, tactics, etcetera.


PvE

Her gear is a mixture of some T10 equivelant gear mixed with some T9 equivelant gear. Her stuff is more Crit/Haste and Crit/Mp5 focused than I'd like, as Mp5/Haste gear is far superior, but alas, so messed up is the itemization for Holydins.

She uses a PvP cloak, as I've never been lucky enough to obtain a PvE upgrade for my previous cloak, the Shroud of Alteration. Even so, the PvP cloak is good enough, offering a truck-ton of Haste and Spellpower, and even Stamina, which I'm not terribly disgusted by, so long as I don't lose too much mana due to it.

Other notable items in her PvE gear include her trin-kets and Lib-rams. Her trinkets I am not all too happy about. I thought they were the shit whilst I was raiding, purely out of a sense of ignorance and stupidity. I've had many the opportunity to roll on a much greater trinket than my Greatness, but I've always totally underestimated how OP Solace is.

Even still, Greatness gives me a little something extra to do, a little fun tactic of mine. It revolves around waiting for Greatness to Proc for 300 additional Intellect, and then I hit Divine Plea. This increases the mana return through Divine Plea by quite a bit and is fun to time correctly, although due to Greatness' 45 second internal cooldown, and Divine Plea's 1 minute cooldown, generally I only get to use this once per fight, if at all. It also depends on Greatness Proccing at a fortunate time, and not say during a burn phase where I ABSOLUTELY MUST SPAM HOLY LIGHT FOR 100% OF ITS EFFECT ON THE TANK OR IT DIES. Gosh I can't wait for this kind of stupid encounter design to vanish in Cataclysm.

Her librams I am actually quite happy with however. The first Libram is probably the one I use most often, both in PvP and PvE. The extra Spellpower is priceless when I can afford to use Flash of Light (Non-Hardmodes, Old Content, and Heroics), and increases it's effect by quite a bit considering Spell Power isn't something I stack.

The second Libram is probably the Libram most favoured by Paladins that don't lack a brain and use the higher ilevel alternatives so they can fap over their inflated gearscores.

Tactics in PvE generally revolve around slapping up my cheese on the Main tank whilst spamming the raid. Raid healing as a Holy Paladin is akin to a mix of Whack a mole and Plate Spinning, as shown above. In other words, incredibly frustrating, dull and boring. Thank the Light it isn't my actual role though - so long as the tank is getting heals through Beacon of Light, I'm doing my job right. Not looking forward to the healing homoginization that seems to be taking place in Cataclysm, though. I like being a Tank Healer, and I like that it's the ONLY thing I can do.

Other tactics include the obvious stuff like staying out of the fire and... well that's basically it as far as raiding is concerned. Remember when this used to be hard? I don't, because I wasn't good enough to try it back then. But nevermind!

That's it for my PvE post. Coming up soon is my RP post. Thanks for reading. :D

EDIT: And because I forgot, Sari's PvE spec!

Friday, May 28, 2010

Sariella PvP

(EDIT: Big shout out to my friend Daysee for his work on the awesome banner. Thanks Daysee!)
First up, my main of mains, Sariella. I've raided on her, I've tried arena, I've roleplayed on her, I've tried both Prot and Ret on her... she's got a wide mix of gear as a result. As shown here is her current PvP gear! And she's flexing. Because it's always funny to see slender, unmuscular elves flaunt something they don't have! Bless her little (un)Holy heart, she hasn't got an ounce of strength. :-(

PvP

Her gear as shown is almost entirely PvP obtained from Battlegrounds, save for Talisman of Resurgance, Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind, and Bastion of Resolve. It's all gemmed and geared pretty much how any ordinary PvE Holy Paladin would do so, full intellect gemming, intellect enchants, intellect everything!

The only thing I haven't done was give her the best-in-slot PvE Head and Shoulder enchants, as these offer Mana Per 5 Seconds, which I don't really view as an important stat in Battlegrounds. Oh, for mana regeneration it's wonderful as Battlegrounds last quite a long time but it doesn't offer me anything in terms of survivabilty like Resilience or Critical Strike Rating does. Instead, I use this for my helmet, and this for my shoulders.

Currently, unbuffed (no self buffs), I sit at almost 1100 resilience, 24.5k HP, 23k MP, 2.6k SP, 8.11% Haste, and 24.76% Holy Crit.

Her talent spec is here.

My tactics in PvP generally revolve around staying at max range, running into melee only to regen mana, to help lock down/kill an opposing healer, or to go toe to toe with some (fellow) scrubs if I'm by myself! This generally works quite nicely but it's sad that I stand at range to evade melee'ers, the majority of have extreme difficulty getting past my Sacred Shield, Shield and Plate, but against casters I am rather hopeless. There's very little to LoS around in BGs if you're positioned wrong, and it's oh-so-easy to be on the recieving end of massive Mana Drains or Chaos Bolts. Bring friends to help you against these assholes. I have a pocket rogue. :-) Hiya, Trazzhin!

PvE post coming up next.

Welcome!

Heya! So yeah, this is the start of my blog. Everything after this post will contain something interesting, something funny, or something insightful from my experiences as a Paladin! This one though, not so much...

This blog was inspired by the complete failure of my last blog, which... kind of died as I lost interest in playing that particular Paladin on that particular realm. So, this blog will cover all of my Paladins. All of 'em. And yes, I have more than 1. I have more than 5. :-)

I am a varied player. I roleplay, I raid, I PvP (BUT no arena. Ugh. Do not want.). So this blog will lack focus, true! But it will be easier for me to stay devoted to it. Unlike all my Paladins, I am an undevoted, blasphemous little heathan. So the easier it is for me to be anything but is a plus!

Stay tuned for some introductions to the Paladins who I consider to be my "mains". Sariella and Arannia of The Sha'tar-EU! I'll cover some roleplaying sides of them, discuss their specs, their gear, what they're designed for, their professions... gosh, everything. It'll be fun.

And welcome to the Paladin trainer.