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Friday, July 22, 2011

Orv is Gonna Get It! Or: Nymphy Comes Home to WAY too much Srsness.

Nymphy is an arcane mage who had to take a break from the internets for a week to deal with the Real Life Boss and comes back to find her funny and witty blog that she writes with Orv completely and utterly ruined by, not one, but two (two!) srs posts.

  See?! This is what happens when I leave. You, the reader, expect to find some humorous content to read in your spare time. Perhaps something to give you a chance to chuckle or smile in your busy day. Instead what did you find this week? Yeah, I hear you. Two srs posts by Orv. I apologize right now if he made you fall asleep. I mean, omgwtfbbq?, who wants to hear about pally talent trees? I lol’d at the names of their talents. All I could see is more of the same ego boosting abilities that I have to listen to Orv go on and on about every night. He tries to explain their importance to me but all I hear is that Peanuts teacher’s voice going blah blah blah I am so great blah blah blah. Orv! Get some real talents that read like mine! How about a little Torment(ing) the Weak or Incanter’s Absorption? Yeah, yeah, Blessing of Kings is great and all that, but you can find that buff a dime a dozen. How about feeling important when everyone is like “Ooh Nymphy! I want Focus Magic” and immediately starts parading their crit numbers in front of you? Yeah that’s right. We don’t need no prissy talents like Pursuit of Justice. You think Internet Dragons care about your pursuit of justice? Nope! Not a bit. They do care when they are on the receiving end of my Improved Arcane Missiles and Arcane Blasts.

  In all seriousness (in the midst of all the tanking is srs business posts) I hope that people got a lot out of the tanking posts. Orv is a super amazing tank (shh! don’t tell him! God I can feel his ego swell from over here!) and knows his stuff. He tanks for me both in game and out and saves my squishy self time after time, so I can vouch for his knowledge of things tankadin. And I fully support overthrowing Team Heals’ tyranny. But not officially, you understand. I mean they keep me alive in raids so if I were to out and out support this venture I would see my floor time increase dramatically followed by suspicious claims that I broke Line of Sight. While standing in the middle of an open field. So never fear readers, your laughs are incoming... as soon as I clean up the mess Orv left around here!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Protection Paladin Talent Guide: For Leveling via Dungeon Finder

Orvillius is a Protection Paladin with the mighty Eff the Ineffable on Azuremyst. With Nymphy away this week he’s abandoned all pretense of being half as funny or witty as she is and keeps putting up serious tanking posts.

NOTE: If you're here looking for patch 5.04 paladin talents, you want to go to the updated guide.

  The other day I was feeling a little bored before raiding time and decided to dust off my level 40 bear druid and spend some time on him. It had obviously been a long time since I’d touched him, because his talent points had been reset. When I went to spend those points I realized that I have no idea where to put them. A couple of helpful twitterfolk pointed me towards their own specs or helpful guides, but the experience got me wondering whether there are people out there who are as confused by the Prot Tree as I was by the Feral Tree. I hope this is helpful for any brave folk who have decided to level up as a Prot Pally, and find themselves unsure of exactly how useful all of these talents will be. The talents are listed in the order I think it is best to fill them out. Some of this is a matter of opinion and if you’re leveling with a healing buddy/dps buddies you may need to swap the order around a bit to better match up to your needs!

Monday, July 11, 2011

Eff the Healers, Let's Have a Tank Circle!

Being a tank for Eff the Ineffable, Orvillius is particularly sensitive to the tyranny of healers. What with their members only healing channel and their posh sense of entitlement, seeing this Circle of Healers reboot floating around was just too much! Using ancient Paladin secrets (replacing ‘heal’ with ‘tank’), Orv reforged the healer meme into a mighty tanking meme.

1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?
Orvillius, human protection paladin, 0/31/10

2. What is your primary group tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
I mostly tank EtI’s 10 man raids. I used to pug weekly 25 mans in WotLK, but with the raid lockout change that became impossible.

3. What is your favorite cooldown for your class and why?
That’s a tough one, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say the new Holy Shield. It’s on a super short cooldown, so I can pop it any time I feel like my healers might need a little breathing room.

Friday, July 8, 2011

The Cutest Little Babies in the World (of Warcraft).

 Nymphy is an arcane mage from the US-server Azuremyst. She is a well liked toon by other people across other servers and time zones. She was recently felled not by an ordinary raid boss, but instead was slain by a little 5-baby instance group with the buffs of Squee and Cute on their side.

 #Dwarfling, #Sproutling, #Sapling, #Knightling, and finally #Tankling. Those of you that follow us on Twitter are familiar with these hashtags denoting quite possibly the cutest babies born this year to the bloggers and players of WoW. A couple of them with their own blogs have caused us to squee and exclaim over posted pictures and new adventures. It wasn’t until recently that we all came to the conclusion that, well, they make up the perfect 5-man group. That idea took root here and I became determined that this should be blogged about. After all, it is only fitting to talk about babies born to bloggers in a blog post! So it is my very special pleasure as a fellow blogger, WoW player, and mom to introduce this special little 5-man.

Monday, July 4, 2011

How to Build a Good Reputation as a New Tank (In the Post RDF World)

Orvillius is a human tankadin who was started back in Vanilla, but never reached level cap until WotLK. Orvillius dinged level 80 the week the random dungeon finder was released, in a Forge of Souls random, and spent the next couple months figuring out how to get invited to tank a raid. Despite these "handicaps" Orv established a reputation as a competent tank on his small server, joined a solid raiding guild (if one that was a little late to the party) and did manage to down the LK before Cata dropped.

Nymphy is a human arcane mage of the species called DPS. Also not been leveled capped before Wrath, she has since started a career of being belittled about loving the floor which has sometimes been at the hands of tanks. She felt like she had to come here to prevent Orv’s preaching on how to be a good tank and that it needed a dps perspective. While tanking is srs bsns, this post needed to be prevented from taking that tone. Who wants to read a dry account of tanking anyway?

Rhii is a mage-blogger-turned-resto-shaman who tries to talk seriously about healing at least once a week but usually just tells stories about fail PuGs and all the tanks she has on ignore. She’s been a healer since mid-Wrath, starting out raiding as a holy paladin and changing to resto shaman in ICC. She is moonlighting here at D/E the Tank because Oh My, Kurenai! no longer pays the bills. Wut?!


Back in prehistoric times, like when tBC was current content, 5-man dungeons were a BIG DEAL. There was a rep grind just to unlock the heroics, there were CC requirements as strict as, or even stricter than, Cata heroics, and there were attunement quests required to get in the front door of many raids. With all the time a player spent pugging for dungeons it was, speaking as someone who never personally got to level cap in BC, easier to build a reputation as a good tank, a good healer, an excellent chain trapper, a mage who never let their sheep expire, etc. In WotLK attunement requirements were removed and the difficulty curve of even the heroic dungeons was flattened considerably. This was great for casual players who wanted a level-capped toon, but not so great if you were trying to build a reputation as a competent tank! I don't think I've ever been in a guild where we had enough back up healers, so I'm going to just assume here that healers ding level 80 and have guilds offer them cookies and other bribes to come join their healing stables.

While Orv was leveling from 60-79 there was no dungeon finder, and he had to sit in the LFG channel pimping himself out, or desperately seeking a healer, if he wanted to run a dungeon. This worked in his favor as, after a while, he knew a few good healers, a couple of really solid DPS, and even another tank or two he could turn to for advice as he leveled up and unlocked new content. While that is more than many tanks have when they hit level cap today, I can't remember more than one or two occasions where those connections got Orv into a raid, and both of those were well after Orv had already established a reputation as a competent raiding tank. The point of this rambling paragraph is that while Orv did not have the benefit of the random dungeon finder while leveling, he still reached level cap in the same situation that many newly level 80 tanks find themselves in today. His guild was not going to drag him through heroics and older raids to gear him up, his gear was ok for heroics but sub-par for the current tier of raid content, and if he wanted to get into a raid he was going to have to PuG himself out.