Patch 4.0.1 Paladin Tanking

While I didn't like what I read about the paladin changes up front on MMO-Champion, I find that I am actually quite happy with the implementation. There were a bunch of things to note before I got from 'WTF?!' to 'Aaaah, cool!'. I'll list those below:

Hassle-free Blessings!
With Blessing of Wisdom folded into Blessing of Might and Blessing of Sanctuary's effect being talent based, this leaves two paladin blessings: Kings and Might. The kicker is that both are applied on everyone in your party/raid. That means a tankadin does Kings by default. A second paladin does Might. End of story. Combining that with minor glyphs reducing mana cost for Seal of Truth and Kings, we can be buffed up and running without drinking multiple times now! YAY!

AoE tanking changes!
So, they weakened Hammer of Righteousness (unless you have more than ten mobs around you) and put consecration on a longer cooldown. WTF?! Well, that's not so bad. Since they also buffed Holy Wrath and put it on a 15s cooldown. Between the shorter Hammer cooldown and Holy Wrath we are fine. We can throw in a consecration every half minute as well. Glyph for both Consecration and Holy Wrath and it feels like we have more AoE power than before. The AoE stun of Holy Wrath, applied to Undead, Demons, Dragonkin and Elementals is incredibly power- and useful.

Holy Power?!
Holy power is a nuisance, but we can live with those combo points easily. Crusader's Strike and Hammer of the Righteous generate one holy power each. The proper tanking use for Holy Power is to accrue 3/3 Holy Power and then use Shield of the Righteous.
Don't waste Holy Power! Using SoR with less than 3/3 is a waste, generating more Holy Power while at 3/3 is a waste as well. That means avoiding accidental use of Shield of the Righteous and ensuring use at 3/3.
To avoid using Shield of the Righteous too early, I moved it away from my spam/rotation buttons (1-5).

To ensure that I don't waste holy power generation, I installed Power Aura's Classic and set it up to show Holy Power clearly. I am amazed that Blizzard gave us a notice for Avenger's Shield but not for the critical Holy Power. But hey.
I put Shield of the Righteous and Avenger's Shield on Mouse Wheel Up and Down respectively, making one finger responsible for reacting to AS procs and full holy power.

This WoW-Forum post shows the proper Power Aura setup. See summary below:

1. Install Power Aura Classic
2. Type /powa to enter the configuration menu, press the button "import" and copy inside this code(repeat for each code)
3. • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8471; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; buffname:holy power; bufftype:10; texture:65; alpha:0.95; threshold:1; PowerType:9; aurastextfont:18; size:2.44; torsion:1.1; y:20
   • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.851; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:66; alpha:0.95; threshold:2; PowerType:9; size:2.3; y:22
   • Version:3.0.0W; b:0; g:0.8824; thresholdinvert:true; icon:Spell_fire_meteorstorm; bufftype:10; texture:67; alpha:0.95; sound:23; threshold:3; PowerType:9; size:2.5; torsion:1.1; y:20

I've chosen the following talent and glyph setup and am quite happy with it:
http://wowtal.com/#k=-wcHRfv.a5o.paladin.-BYW5A

Cue Card: Noob Paladin Tank

I get 'how to' questions from people who start playing a paladin tank on a regular basis. Here are some of the re-occurring points:

Your Buffs

Use Blessing of Sanctuary!
Kings may sound attractive, but Sanctuary is essential for mana returns. As of Patch 3.3, Sanctuary gives 10% Strength and Stamina, 3% less damage taken and 2% mana gained on block, parry and dodge. Compared to Kings, we loose 10% agility for 3% less damage and loads of mana. BoS is superior. If you can have two blessings, get Blessing of Might. If you can have three, get Kings as well.
Note: BoS is available from level 30 onwards. Use Kings before that.

Use Seal of Vengeance!
Seal of Vengeance is the proven superior seal to Righteousness and Command. It puts a stacking DoT up on anything you hit, and grants you 33% weapon damage as bonus as soon as your target has a full stack of 5. Also, when you use Hammer of the Righteous which hits 3 (or 4 with the glyph) targets, each of those gets the DoT.
The Glyph of Seal of Vengeance grants you 10 expertise. Expertise, not expertise rating. It takes you 26 expertise to be soft-capped and reduce a bosses chance to dodge or parry your hits by 5.6% each. 10 Expertise covers a lot of that without using item budget on gear and gives you a great advantage.
Note: SoV is available from level 64 onwards. Use Righteousness before that.

Use Divine Plea!
Divine Plea is used by holy and retribution paladins as a mana potion every minute. For protection paladins, it is used as a damage reduction and continuous mana gain. For that, you have to put two talent points into Guarded by the Light in the protection tree. Guarded by the Light reduces spell damage taken by 6% and refreshes Divine Plea each time you hit something. Add the 1 minute cooldown on divine plea, and you can have it active all the time while fighting. The Glyph of Divine Plea further makes Divine Plea attractive with a flat 3% reduction of all damage taken while Plea is active. So - get the talent, get the glph, use the Divine Plea before you pull.
Note: Divine Plea is learned at level 71. You'll have to wait if you are below that level.

Use Righteous Fury!
This increase the threat generated by your spells by 80%. If something is running off unexpectedly to squash a damage dealer or healer, most likely you forgot to re-activate your Righteous Fury. It should always be active while you are tanking, unless you have an encounter  specific reason why you don't want this bonus threat.
Note: Learned at level 16.

Threat Abilities/Rotation

The best threat a paladin can deliver results from a 9/6/9 rotation. This refers to using your five primary threat moves in an alternating sequence between short and long cooldowns. Short is six seconds, long is eight or nine seconds. Let's look at those abilities:


Hammer of the Righteous
This hits three (with glyph four) targets in front of you. This is extremely handy when picking up groups of mobs. A hit with this ability counts as a direct hit for Seal of Vengeance and will apply the SoV damage over time debuff to the target.
Cooldown: 6 seconds. Learned at level 60. 51 point protection talent.

Shield of the Righteous
Hits only one target, but hits it hard. Boring and straightforward compared to Hammer of the Righteous.
Cooldown: 6 seconds. Learned at level 75.

Holy Shield
Holy shield does two things. It increase your chance to block an attack by 30%, which considering the chance to be missed, to parry, to dodge and the normal chance to block will result in no straight hits anymore. Since we are no longer dealing with crushing blows from bosses, this is less important today, but still a useful damage mitigation factor. It also deals damage to anyone who's attack you block.
Cooldown: 8 seconds. Learned at level 40, 31 point protection talent.

Judgement of Wisdom (or of Light)
This places a debuff on your target. Mana (or health) gain on hitting the target as well as the additional talented debuff from Judgements of the Just, which reduces the target's  melee attack speed by 20%. This is easily missed, but is a significant factor in damage reduction for tanks. All tank classes have an equivalent move, not using it means you are taking more damage than you should. I prefer Judgement of Wisdom for the mana returns, as do most mana-based raiders. Judgement of Light is less useful with the trickle of healing it provides not quite up to countering raid damage effects.
Cooldown 10 seconds. Can be reduced to 8 seconds with 2/2 Improved Judgements talent points. Should be reduced to 9 seconds with 1/2 Improved Judgement. The additional point doesn't provide a gain in threat since there is a short time gap in the 9/6/9 rotation anyway. Learned at level 12.

Consecration

Places the quite visible paladin field on the ground. Any hostile mob in the field will take damage from it. This is useful, but can be problematic if some mobs are not supposed to be hit. It also requires a bit of foresight to avoid damage losses from having put down the field in the wrong place. So choose your tanking position first, pull with that and trigger happy dps and mind and put down the consecration field accordingly.
Cooldown 8 seconds. There is a glyph that makes it last 10 seconds, but this actually creates problems in the 9/6/9 rotation timing and is a bad glyph to use. Learned at level 20.

LFD and queue tanks

The Looking For Dungeon tool is awesome. It highlights that there are more than three dps for each healer and tank and that there are fewer tanks than healers. Queue times for dps are measured in minutes, while tanks don't have any waiting time. As a consequence, there are many non-tanks exploring the option of off-spec tanking.

Anyone new to a role will face certain difficulties getting to know the ropes. Some are more obvious, others are quite obfuscated. I'll make an effort this weekend to provide some tips that should eliminate the most common mistakes and answer the most common questions.

[Emblem of Frost] and [Emblem of Triumph] Shopping List

Badges have been reset. I updated my badge shopping overview with the new stuff.

Badge-Type	Heroism	Valor	Conquest	Triumph	Triumph	Frost	Frost
Slot	ilvl 200	ilvl 213	ilvl 226	ilvl 232	ilvl 245	ilvl 251	ilvl 264
Head	crafted	n/a	58 T8.25	50 T9.10	75	95 T10.10	n/a
Shoulders	n/a	60 T7.25	n/a	30 T9.10	45	60 T10.10	n/a
Chest	80	n/a	58 T8.25	50 T9.10	crafted	95 T10.10	95
Legs	n/a	75 T7.25	39	50 T9.10	n/a	95 T10.10	crafted
Gloves	60	n/a	28	30 T9.10	n/a	60 T10.10	60
Belt	n/a	n/a	28/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	60
Bracers	n/a	60	n/a	n/a	crafted	n/a	n/a
Boots	crafted	40	crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	crafted
Back	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	50
Neck	25	n/a	19	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Ring(s)	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	35	n/a	n/a
Trinket(s)	40	n/a	n/a	n/a	50	n/a	60
Gun/Whatever	15	25	19	n/a	25	n/a	30
Weapon	50/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
off-hand/Shield	25/35	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

See also:
See also:
T10: Craftables using Primordial Saronite(ilvl 264), BineOnEquip raid drops ilvl 264
T9: Craftables using Crusader Orbs (ilvl 245), BindOnEquip drops ilvl 245
T8: Craftables using Runed Orbs (ilvl 226), BindOnEquip raid drops ilvl 213, 219 and 226

Which Gems should I use as a tank?

I'll try to be short and precise here, but let me say something clearly first: equipping a tank is always about a balance of stats. It is never about all this or all that. For specific encounters one may swap a bunch of pieces or even prepare a full kit maxed out for one aspect, but for your bread and butter tanking, you do want a good balance.

I'll list the gems by socket colour and include the non-epic choice for budget gemming.

Please note:

1. You don't _have_ to match socket color, you'll only loose the socket bonus. However, the socket bonus can be qutie nice. You should definitely get each +sta socket bonus.
2. Don't forget to get an [Eternal Belt Buckle] for that extra gem slot.

Blue Sockets are the easiest to fill. All tanks need stamina to build up their effective health.
[Solid Majestic Zircon] (30 sta) or [Solid Sky Sapphire] (24 sta).

Red Sockets are our second choice. Dodge (or Parry) plus Stamina improves Avoidance and Effective health at the same time without wasting any budget. Druid's benefit more from straight agility and can not parry, so avoid the Regal and Defender's cuts if your tank on all fours.
[Regal Dreadstone] (10 dodge+15 sta) or [Regal Twilight Opal] (8 dodge+8 sta).
[Defender's Dreadstone] (10 parry+15 sta) or [Defender's Twilight Opal] (8 parry + 12 sta).
[Shifting Dreadstone] (10 agi+15 sta) is the druid's choice.
[Delicate Cardinal Ruby] (20 agi) is a good alternative, especially for shared cat/bear gear pieces.

Yellow Sockets are a bit of a bother. Tanks usually do not need to gem for hit, expertise or crit, so we need to find a good use for those.
[Enduring Eye of Zul] (10 def+15 sta). Great for all plate tanks.
[Stalwart Monarch Topaz] As the plate tank budget alternative.
[Nightmare Tear] +10 all stats or [Enchanted Tear] +6 all stats are the bear's first choice for yellow sockets. I'll still need to see what to take next if needed.

Meta Gems are very easy:
[Austere Earthsiege Diamond] (32 sta + 2% armor) is the smart choice for effective health.
[Eternal Earthsiege Diamond] (21 def + 5% SBV) is a great choice for shield tanks running heroics or T7 content, or of course for use in a block set.

Of course the list above won't make it into the next expansion, but I hope it will be of some use until then.

What should I spent my badges on?

As this matrix below shows, you can get a 2xT8.25+2xT9.10 set without ever setting foot into a raid. Considering that not all equipment slots have an equal amount of item budget and that the item budget for head and chest is high, I'd recommend the following shopping list:

[Emblem of Conquest] (you can get about 50 per day)

• 58x T8.25 head token
• 58x T8.25 chest token
• 39x non-set legs
• 28x belt
• 19 neck
• anything else

[Emblem of Triumph]  (You can get 53 per week: Daily heroic 2/day, ToC10+25 30/week, VoA10+25 4/week, Ony10+25 5/week)

• 30x T9.10 shoulders
• 30x T9.10 gloves
• anything else

Tips:

1. Shift-click the lower level badge and type the number you want to downgrade.
2. Triumph badges can be downgraded next to the vault in the Dalaran Sewer Inn.

See also:

• Craftables using Crusader Orbs (ilvl 245)
• Craftables using Runed Orbs (ilvl 226)
• BindOnEquip raid drops ilvl 213, 219 and 226
• BindOnEquip drops ilvl 245

---

Badge-Type	Heroism	Valor	Conquest	Triumph	Triumph
Slot	ilvl 200	ilvl 213	ilvl 226	ilvl 232	ilvl 245
Head	crafted	n/a	58 (T8.25)	50 (T9.10)	75
Shoulders	n/a	60 (T7.25)	n/a	30 (T9.10)	45
Chest	80	n/a	58 (T8.25)	50 (T9.10)	crafted
Legs	n/a	75 (T7.25)	39	50 (T9.10)	n/a
Gloves	60	n/a	28	30 (T9.10)	n/a
Belt	n/a	n/a	28/crafted	n/a	n/a
Bracers	n/a	60	n/a	n/a	crafted
Boots	crafted	40	crafted	n/a	n/a
Back	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	n/a
Neck	25	n/a	19	n/a	n/a
Ring(s)	n/a	25	n/a	n/a	35
Trinket(s)	40	n/a	n/a	n/a	50
Relic/Idol/ Sigil/Libram/etc	15	25	19	n/a	25
Weapon	50/crafted	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
off-hand/Shield	25/35	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

---

/inspect

Quite frequently I see someone ask for an Enchanter, Blacksmith or Jewelcrafter and am happy to help them out. As a tank, I am of course qutie partial to help out other tanks. Several times now I have had a look at a tank's gear, gems, enchants, talents via /inspect (and at their glyphs via the Armory) and asked them if they'd like a bit of advice. Since I play all four tank classes, I have pretty good visibility on what there is to know. =]

The overall response has been quite positive, and I am sure to have pointed a number of tanks into the right direction. I do note however that what I do actually tell each of these tanks happens to be virtually the same each time. For that reason I'll go and write down some of these things here. I'll make a deliberate effort to not write 'the mother of all guides' because there are lots of places already with those. I'll focus on a particular aspect and go for it.

As a first topic, I'll take this very generic one: What should I spent my badges on?

[The Culling of Time]

I've been trying for a while now to do the Culling of Stratholme heroic as a timed, multiboxing. My last post already described what changes I made, but neglected to mention one that may not be obvious - I stopped looting any trash a while ago. Yes, there may be good stuff in there, but I don't want to waste the time. It may be a reflex and may not seem to take any time, but it does. The real difference however was using the druid's swipe to counter the zombie-daze threat to /follow and doing the PvE changes as detailed before. This morning I managed to get to the end of the gauntlet with 4 minutes remaining on the timer.

My short dash to the sides street with the timed mob was interrupted by some frantic untangling of my shamans from some of the flavour scenery, but the I got what I wanted to archive - CoS heroic timed while multiboxing! That puts me at one of four drakes for the PvE shaman group. I'll try my luck again to complete the set.

Heroics take 2

In the last few days I have used my fresh bear tank rather than my imba-geared tankadin together with four shamans in heroics. To my absolute surprise, this works better, even though there is a serious difference in gear.

Having the ability to hit everything around you with swipe on the move makes things like Culling of Stratholme much safer. Nothing is more annoying than missing one shaman being hit by a zombie and then drop out of /follow range due to being stunned. Spamming swipe does away with that problem.

The paladin works fine, but requires more attention than the druid. Having three buttons for boss tanking (mangle+maul, fairy fire and lacerate) and one button for aoe-trash tanking (swipe+maul) allows me to focus a bit more on what I am doing with the shamans. As a result their damage output improved to around 2k each. Not that much, granted, but enough to get solidly into the comfort zone in a heroic.

Today I missed doing CoS timed as narrow as it gets, less than a minute too slow. I had to drink a lot to keep the shaman's mana up. Taking a hint from this, I bought dual-spec for the last three and gave them a PvE dps spec rather than the vanilla PvP setup. Next to that, I set up a different gear set for PvE. Currently that changes just a couple of pieces: rings, one trinket, neck and the odd item here or there.

However - the difference in setup is clearly noticeable. I'll go and save up some badges now to get some more PvE gear and see how it goes.

The Headless Horseman Redux

Last year, I made a serious effort to get the horseman's mount. When Hallow's End was done, I had spent well over hundred tries by myself and a number with guild mates trying to get the mount. No Joy.

This year, I was determined to not waste any chances. I parked my level 80 boxing chars, the shamans and also the unused druids at the Scarlet Monastery. I bought my old level 70 cloth boxing team there to have summons. I was prepared to level my hunter's a bit further to 75 today if that had meant that they could summon.

But, all that setup was a waste of time.

Taking four of my shamans and my tankadin into the graveyard wing, I set my cap for the first daily farming session. But... the first shaman's summon already gave me what I wanted! =]

I used the other three summons and got a spellpower ring each time, as well as this year's horseman's blade. Then I took off to Dalaran. I found that when you mount up in the city proper, you are locked to landmount mode, but if you mount up on the landing pad or on the Violet Parlour's balcony, the mount goes into flying mode. Outside no-fly zones, the mount swaps modes as you land or take off. One difference between a normal land mount and the horseman's mount is that it doesn't stay vertical like normal mounts. Instead it will take a 90 degree angle relative to the ground, which can look a bit silly depending on where you stop. Excuse me now while I dance around the room celebrating. Time to cook!

Ehm, Lol?

[02/10/2009]
23:21 [Shabruno]: get a life >.> that mount + [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]? bullshit
23:21 [Takano]: jealous? =]
23:21 [Shabruno]: Just a lil
23:21 [Shabruno]: But still, [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] is no life luck 'O.o
23:22 [Takano]: actually, I have that from level 60 raiding
23:22 [Shabruno]: Sure, and my name is napoleon
23:22 [Shabruno]: what ever, cya (:
23:22 [Shabruno]: gonna play on a not noob sever (:

And the guild news link from back in the day. I recustomized the char when that became available, but hey. =]

Some people...

Game Performance

For a good while now I was not really satisfied with the performance of WoW on my gaming computer. I have now made a few small changes that have significantly improved the performance of WoW on my machine to my great delight! I made three changes, two are setup and one is hardware.

First off, hardware. I spent 145 Euro on an OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB. What? It is a Solid State Drive, in a nutshell flash memory - like the card you put into your digital camera - working like a hard drive. The key selling point for those things is that unlike normal hard disks, they have no seek time. A normal hard disk needs to rotate the disk(s) and move the read/write head to the right place to access certain data. That can be very bad, if scattered, small amounts of data need to be read. Unfortunately, that happens very often in WoW where we all notice machine lag - in cities, where every players visible gear pieces need to be loaded.

SSD technologo is nothing new, but used to be quite expensive: 500-600 Euro for an affordable consumer model. There are still SSDs offered in retail for non-server use in this price range, and there are a bunch of things you don't really want to buy that are around 100 Euro. And then there is the OCZ Vertex and it's successor the Vertex Turbo. Unlike some of the budget SSDs - some also made by OCZ - it has a great controller and gives very respectable performance compared to the expensive options.

In lieu of any proper mounting kit for the 2.5" HDD form factor of the SDD I used cable ties to fix the small SDD to the chassis of my gaming rig as you can see in the picture above. When I originally bought the ThermalTake Armor case I was miffed that I had to either take one with a window or wait. Now I am quite happy to look at my little silent but effective new toy when I want. =]

WoW can be copied to and run from nearly any storage device - such as a USB stick or an iPod - I didn't just copy the entire client to the SSD. Instead I copied only the /data directory from the WoW directory to the SSD. That directory holds the by now about 13GB of game data files of WoW and that is where all the reading happens. All the other folders are for addons, settings, screenshots or whatnot, in essence things that change frequently and I left those on the raid hard disks.

Then I used Symlink to instruct Vista to redirect read and write access to the WoW-data directories for both WoW installations on my computer from the hard disk to the SSD. That's it.
Using Symlink is also a good idea when using regular hard disks if one is using move than one WoiW installation - for example for easier setting and/or addon management.

The third change I made was to disable Vista's Superfetch service. Superfetch is supposed to proactively load data from the hard disk to memory before a program actually asks for it. To do that it tries to predict what the running software will request. A nice idea, but not very useful for something kinda intricate like WoW's data files. WoW itself is also loading data proactively. It does load the next zone while you are approaching the zone boundary. I am no expert in either Superfetch or WoW's methods, but clearly disabling Superfetch significantly improved the performance of my system. I can only guess that having the hard disks of my raid array jump left and right to follow the predictions of Superfetch and WoW itself is the reason for this. To disable Superfetch, follow these instructions (enabling works the same way, just backwards).

Before these changes, I would often loose characters on /follow while flying at 280% speed in Northrend. In particular in busy areas or at zone borders. Thinking about the data reading that is going at the time, that makes sense. Today I flew all over Northrend and instead of having a fit I had a smooth flight with only one or two times that I had to renew follow due to phasing.

Likewise, before the changes I was suffering from massive machine lag when hearthing to Dalaran. There are just too many people with too many textures too load, damning me to sitting idle for two minutes or so before I can move smoothly - if at all since people come and go. Now, after waiting only a polite 2 seconds, I could move as if I was alone on the server. I chained up my shamans in a konga line, each following another and rode a couple of times all around Dalaran just after hearthing there and none of the /follow strains broke! Happy joy joy! =]

New status: Arena Fodder

After having a lot of fun in Alterac Valley and Wintergrasp my shamans now have all the PvP gear that does not require arena rating. I also collected enough emblems to purchase the [Totem of Hex] for all characters.

One thing that I totally missed was the awesomeness that is the [Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem]. Essentially, it allows a shaman to pop a 4k damage shield that lasts 15s with a 30s cooldown. When looking at incoming burst damage on a 20k health bar even with 800+ resilience, this is an immense help.

To celebrate the promotion from 'Hateful Farming Noob' to 'Arena Fodder', I took the girls to the hairdresser and told them to go wild. This monochrome look is the result. =]

My druid Ægis and the hunter group are slowly making their way up the level ladder. The Worgen were morphed from wolf-family to ornamental pets that can pretend to fight, but hey, there are many other pets out there.

Worg pack!

=]

Hateful Farming Noob

That's me in the last few days. I am splitting my solo play time between WG/AV on my five shamans to collect a starter set of ilvl 200/213 pvp epics and leveling my druid Ægis and the four hunters.

I do surprisingly ok in level 80 PVP, even though the level 70 resilience doesn't really cut it and things are a lot more bouncy now. Various knock backs and death grip have joined fear as multiboxer hazzard, not to mention retri-pallies who make their pretty lights while encased in their bubble.

I love that level 80 honor gear does not require badges from various battlegrounds, as I always disliked my negative impact with too many chars concentrated in one spot in the smaller battlegrounds. In AV, I go where needed and can play in a strategic fashion. WG is more hectic in this aspect, but being able to take out vehicles extremely fast is a big plus.

Tomorrow I will get the hateful pants. I worked around the ilvl 213 WG chestpiece for the hateful set. Bracers, belt and boots are next.

Boxing Update

What has happened since my last post?

Aquired 4x Titanium Spellshock Ring.
Bought 5x Tattered Dreadmist Mantle for 40 badges each.
Levelled 1x Shaman and 4x Druid from 60->75.5
Dual-speeced 1x Shaman resto and replaced Flame Shock with Earth Shield and Chain Lightning with Riptide, leaving the other elemental spells in place and sequence.
Bought 4x Protective Barricade of the Light for 35 badges each.
Bought 4x Hateful Gladiator's Mail Spaulders for 31600 honor each.

My short range goals are to get the 5th shaman to 80 and start WG/AV with the five shamans grinding for level 80 PvP gear. I plan to do 5v5 arena as before with four shamans and one other person sorting the healing.

80

After enjoying flying around in Northrend I set to the Sons of Hodir quest chain in Storm Peaks. After also doing the Frosthold and Earthen quests in western Storm Peaks, I started my work for the Argent Dawn. Then the Shadow Vault, the Fleshworks and the Death's Rise quests and....DING!

A bit of shoring up materials and then my first level 80 shaman weapons were sorted: [Titansteel Guardian]. Time for bed! =]

Finally!

After some questing in Sholazar and Zul'Drak my shaman group hit level 77. The first thing I did was jump back to Dalaran, and test /follow with epic flight speec in Northrend with one character. I was a bit worried that it might break and make epic flight for the group near-useless. It worked out fine! Yay! YEEEEHAAA!

So I dug into the purses of my various characters to shore up the next money for the other three shaman's flying pleasure. Fortunately enough, I am a compulsive miner and had been a busy bee. Yet, I still could only buy the epic flying skill and cold-weather flying for three of the four shaman. So I took all my fungible assets and chucked them at the auction house. At the end of the day I had enough liquidity to sort out the last shaman.

I spent 24800g on this yesterday, but flying around fast in Northrend with five characters at once is well worth it. Time to take the four shaman to Storm Peaks and do the Sons of Hodir quest chain! =]

Back to boxing!

Being basically done with everything not on a weekly lockout that I could possibly do on my tankadin, prot warrior and unholy tank death knight, it's time again to look at my boxing!

This weekend, I did the Violet Hold on normal three times and Drak-Theron Keep once. My level 75 shaman did have quests for both places. While the yield of quest xp for Drak-Theron is much higher, Violet Hold is much quicker.

I wasn't very lucky on my first go at Violet Hold. My first random boss was the water elemental, called 'water boy' through clenched teeth. Fighting him at the door, I got through it. Then, the next one my personal least favorite random boss - the ethereal who summons his AoEing orbs. I got through both of those without any deaths. Then I fumbled on the final boss moving my shamans in the wrong direction after the threat-wipe and teleport - straight into the breath! =]

The second and third go saw me mowing down the voidwalker, beholder, doggie and the ethereal again - plus drop the dragon both times. That brought me up from 75.5 to 76! I took the shamans to the basin for some relaxed questing to 77 now.

How the desktop changes!

Looking over some old stuff, I noticed how much my setup has changed since I started boxing two years ago. Originally, I used three additional Sony VAIO notebooks that I borrowed from work to to bring up the number of computers to five. Not knowing where to put them, I originally just put them left and right, which was very simple, but not ergonomic at all.

Being fed up with this, I build a shelf above my computer desk to hold the additional notebooks, which looked much more tidy and formed a rough three by two matrix. This was much much better and was my setup for the remainder of the time that I used one computer per WoW session.

Finally then, last summer, I made the step to one computer running all five sessions and using KeyClone to broadcast my keyboard input. I had added one 22" screen between the two 19" displays I already had. I continue to use Multiplicity by Stardock to control both desktops that I use with the master keyboard and mouse. The additional notebooks went back to the sample stock at work and their space is now occupied with all the stuff that usually accumulates around computers.