Recent Entries
Equinox Returns!
I previously wrote about our hero Equinox (Defender of the Horde!) back in 2007. Basically, it’s sort of a graphic novel based in and created with WoW. The author had taken an extended break, but I was very excited to learn recently that new stories are coming out this year again. As I write this, Equinox: Defender of the Horde has two new stories available in their Northrend/2010 section and it sounds like additional stories are planned for release every Friday. I think I’m going to have to go back and read the old stories all over again now!
Posted Saturday January 9, 2010 in Humor, World of Warcraft by Chris Curtis
Prot Paladin Raid Cooldown
Yes, it’s another WoW post. =) Many protection spec paladins (i.e. tankadins) aren’t aware that a new damage reduction cooldown was added in the most recent patch (3.3), so I figured I’d help get the word out. So, in patch 3.3, the Divine Guardian talent in the Protection tree was reworked. Essentially, what happens is that when Divine Sacrifice is activated, the paladin gains the Divine Sacrifice buff (to receive redirected damage from the party, not raid) and the entire raid including the casting paladin receives the Divine Guardian buff, which provides a 6-second 20% damage reduction for everyone.
The problem for a tank using this is that if there is much raid damage going on when used, there is a large chance that the redirected damage will take the tank down to 20% health quickly, thus increasing the likelihood of getting one-shot by a boss’s next hit.
The trick here is that the Divine Guardian buff will persist even when Divine Sacrifice has fallen off. So, what we need is a macro that activates the ability and then gets rid of Divine Sacrifice as quickly as possible to avoid incoming tank damage. This will still leave the Divine Guardian up and the 20% damage reduction it provides to the entire raid for the full 6 seconds.
#showtooltip Divine Sacrifice
/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.5 /script CancelUnitBuff("player","Divine Sacrifice")
The macro is from the Maintankadin forums. It casts Divine Sacrifice and then cancels it 0.5 seconds later, which allows for latency with the servers so that your character actually has the buff active in order to cancel it.
My own latency is almost always below 0.2sec, so I was able to use 0.3 in the macro safely as a margin of error. You may want to adjust the number based on your own average latency. (To test the macro, you’ll need to be in a party and within 30yds of the party member before you can even activate Divine Sacrifice to test it and ensure that Divine Sacrifice is being canceled correctly.)
Posted Thursday December 31, 2009 in World of Warcraft by Chris Curtis
Time for Comments Again
I turned off commenting quite a while back due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of comments the site received were spam. I got tired of being reactive and cleaning it up and since this site really doesn’t get much legitimate commenting (hey, I can accept that I’m not popular, heh), I decided the easiest solution was simply to turn comments off altogether.
Well, somehow I missed the news about the Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam services over the last couple of years. They’re services that’ll essentially try and “verify” for you whether a comment is spam or not. So, I found the Low NoSpam addon for EE (it’s actually a combination module and extension, I believe). It seems to work pretty well so far, at least.
So, enjoy your commenting again. If anyone’s out there, at least!
Posted Thursday June 11, 2009 in pMachine / ExpressionEngine, Weblogs by Chris Curtis
Holy Paladins - a.k.a. Healadins
Warning: if you don’t care about WoW, you won’t care about this. =) However, since WoW is one of my bigger pastimes - and I’m woefully slacking on posting to the site - I figured I might as well share some info.
My main character is a protection paladin, Teneral (Shadow Council realm). However, with the recent dual talent ability addition, I decided to give healing a try, so I’ve been working more on my healing gear and learning quite a bit more about that aspect of the class. There’s an amazing amount of information available “out there”, but a lot of it is outdated and other information just isn’t that good. Finding the useful stuff can take some effort. So, I figured I would share some of the information I found on the off chance that others might be able to make use of it.
HolyPaladin.net has a great variety of information useful to, well, holy paladins. Some information’s also much broader than that and is applicable to other specs/classes. The Choosing Gear section is, of course, all about how to choose your gear. Haste, crit, Mp5, spellpower, etc. There’s other information about tactics and strategies to take in both PvE and PvP.
For recommendations on specific gear, what I found on I am a Paladin came in very useful. The author put out a 3-part guide regarding Ulduar gear (and more). Part 1 covers gems, spec/glyphs, and macros. Part 2 covers the majority of the gear slots. Part 3 continues the rest of the gear slots and then talks about enchants, flasks, and food. There are plenty of other useful posts on the site, as well.
These are far from the only good resources out there (Elitist Jerks has a fantastic “Compendium” thread), but they should give other people in a similar position to me somewhere to start. Enjoy!
Posted Tuesday June 2, 2009 in World of Warcraft by Chris Curtis