RealID

Am I the only person who thinks that this is a welcome change? There are two things regarding RealID, the first being the usage ingame that allows me to talk to people regardless of which realm, faction or character I’m playing, and the second being the change on the Blizzard forums whereby all posts will be submitted using the person’s first and last names. Now to me, I’m more than happy to admit that my name is Jake Winters and that I live in the UK and am a University student studying Business and Law at De Montfort University, who uses the online alia of Astarael, Arcticious, ArcticTerrorist, Squiglet, etc. Go find me, I don’t care.

People argue that employers might google their name and find out that they play WoW, so what? You play it in your private time, no employer should discriminate on the basis of a game as long as it doesn’t interfere with your working life, and you only need to worry if you’re so scrubby that your references all say “only turns up to work half of the time, mysteriously ill the other half and plays WoW a lot”. The majority of people have names so common that you could google it and spend six hours finding everybody except the person you’re looking for. Think about it, how big headed must you be to think that people would go around googling you for fun. You’re a person, there’s six and a half billion others on the planet, get off your perch and stop thinking that just because you make a post, all 11 million WoW players are suddenly going to come banging on your door and sending you anonymous phonecalls. Seriously.

MMO-Champion won’t make a similar change because it’s “bad”. The only bad thing about it is that it might lead to a few hours of downtime, the good thing about it outweighing that tremendously in that the forums might actually see a decent post once in a wee while, rather than every other thread being a troll or flamer or god knows what other forum buzz words are used in regards to users.

I have to admit that I don’t use the Blizzard forums, and I rarely post on the MMO-Champion forums, but the reason for that is the reason that RealID is trying to diminish, there’s just no point trying to find a decent post in a haystack of shit.

Ranting asides, I’ve found myself on The Sha’tar again playing my Holy Paladin, and absolutely loving it. I feel inspired to play once again and I’m hopefully joining Mist again, something that I regret ever leaving dare I say. It’s one of the few (probably the only, now) place I felt like my voice was loud enough to be worth hearing, and the only place where I could be given the honest truth about my performance, rather than sugar coated and ignored (good or bad). Of course, that was a year ago (last June-September), things might be different now but I doubt it, Faith is still the guild leader (me and Faith made the best Holy Paladin duo), and Runningwater is an officer (good choice as far as my opinion is worth), so it’s twice as awesome as it was before.

I spent the last week doing dailies, playing AH and farming to get my Paladin’s epic mount (something I’d neglected to do for many months). I even had the Argent Tourney mount (150 Champion’s Seals back when I did the 7 Tourney dailies per day during 3.2) that I couldn’t use until I got epic flying, and now I can flap around Dalaran on my white and gold hippogryph thinking “vroom”. I also took the time to level a farming character, or at least level a Death Knight’s professions up to Outlands standards (he’s only 59 at the minute, I started him two days ago so he’s a work in progress). He farmed the majority of the Azerothian ore required to turn my Paladin into an Engineer, something which he is now a proud Grand Master at, with 340 Haste enchanted gloves and Nitro Boots to show for it. These two enchants were the primary reason for the change, I must say. Divine Plea in its current capacity is a 60 second CD that gives 25% mana back over 15 seconds at the cost of reducing all healing via spells done by half. The Engineering glove enchants are a 12 second CD that gives 11% haste over 12 seconds on a 60 second CD. The result? Offsetting my rather poor healing output for this 15 seconds every 60 by boosting my haste considerably, and gives me another CD to play with in terms of output boosting.

Divine Plea + Gloves + Avenging Wrath.
Divine Plea + Gloves + Illumination (2p set will make this exceptional).
Divine Plea + Gloves + Talisman of Resurgence.
Divine Plea + Gloves + Divine Shield + Divine/Hand of Sacrifice.

Four ways to offset my healing output during Divine Plea moments. Given that Illumination and Avenging are both on a 3 minute CD, having four minutes of boosted healing in a three minute window seems a little unusual, but ignoring the above musings and only taking the first three options listed, if I cycle Avenging Wrath, Illumination and Talisman of Resurgence, it means I (once again) free up my Sacrifices for more important raid damage moments, rather than binding them to Divine Plea to stop myself being kicked in the cunt. After all, the last thing you need to do is pop Divine Plea + Gloves + Divine Shield + Divine/Hand of Sacrifice during a moment where healing is going to be absolutely needed, and sure the 20% raid-wide shield wall will be beautiful for mitigation, but surely a 20% shield wall with no healing offset would be far more useful. For that reason, it’s probably best to just keep the Sacrifices off CD until needed, rather than binding to Divine Plea. Or, I could bind Hand of Sacrifice with Talisman of Resurgence (which seems a bit weak on its own) since it’s the weakest of the three options, and it still leaves my most powerful CD untouched for those burst damage phases. With a 25% buff in ICC, I certainly have enough HP to suck up 30% of a tank’s incoming damage for a few seconds, because chances are I’ll Sacrifice my Beacon target and simply heal myself for the duration of the Sacrifice, which should be easy enough even without the use of Divine Protection (the Forbearance CD being saved for Divine Sacrifice later on).

Enough musing, though I’m sure this might be of interest to Sheepless (though I heard he’s one of those very naughty Holy/Retribution crit stackers!), I’m feeling great about playing a Paladin again, and now that I’ve got the hard part (well, I think that the hardest part of Paladin play is the mana management and healing reductions) nailed down, I should be able to heal just as well as Faith. Except without the 277 gear. And Val’anyr. God I want a Val’anyr.