Wrathful Gladiator is a very popular set on the PTR, but perhaps it’s because Blizzard removed the cost from the items at the vendor making it the only real option for premade characters. This was my first choice for a transmogrification set for awhile because I assumed it’d be far less popular than either the Judgement Set or its recolor, but that might not be the case if the PTR is any indication. Also, I had a very difficult time finding some accessories to fit this very well. On live servers I normally pair it with Thunderfury and Bulwark of Azzinoth but since legendary weapons cannot be used to transmogrify, I had to dig a little deeper to find things I really felt suited the set.

This is a set where you can choose to show the helm or not depending on your preference and still look good in it. The bracer graphic is completely covered by the gloves and is not visible so you ignore this item slot. Boots are important here, and as easy to pick up from the vendor as the rest of the set. The belt is very small and actually looks identical to not wearing a belt, I’ll discuss it separately in a second but, you’re going to need SOMETHING to transmogrify for this slot. This set works equally well with or without a cape or tabard and I like it just fine with either choice. I have some great cape and tabard options later on.

            If this is a set you’re interested in collecting, you can check out WoWHead’s item viewer for this set. Each of these items is bought in either your capital city or in Dalaran from the PvP vendors for relatively little honor and no rating requirements thus making it available to all with relatively little effort. Not that it really matters, but you can buy the Strength or Intellect versions of this set and look the same, but the BELT and BOOTS slot will need to be the Holy Paladin version because the strength ones use the models for Warrior and Death Knight set pieces.

            First off, somewhat unusally, the belt for this set is identical to the texture of the set so it looks like you’re not wearing a belt. I personally believe this makes the set look odd if you’re wearing a tabard, so if you’re like me and want something else, here are some belt suggestions if you aren’t satisfied with that look: Indestructible Plte Girdle, Waistguard of Reparation, Spiked Cobalt Belt, Vicious Gladiator’s Clasp of Cruelty. No matter what, you’re likely going to want to transmogrify this slot because of the large belt you are undoubtedly wearing

            Now, to accessorize! Once you’ve picked up your set, you still have a weapon, and possibly a shield depending on your spec. There is also your cape, your tabard, and even the mounts you ride around on to consider when completing your vanity uniform. I’m going to list several items for each of these categories for your consideration and then give you my recommendations and explain why I’ll be using certain items to round-out my transmogrification experience relating to this specific set. I’ll start with the one-handed weapons for tanks, since that’s what I am… As with my T2 Recolor suggestions, this is not an exhaustive, comprehensive list and it’s not intended to be. I am only providing suggestions that I would personally consider using. There will undoubtedly be items in the game I don’t have, don’t know about, or don’t believe fit the bill aesthetically, but others may disagree. If you have any suggestions regarding possible matches that I don’t cover, don’t hesitate to let me know, I’d love to hear about them, whether I end up agreeing or not.

If you are using a One-Hand Mace
Unfortunately there aren’t too many one-handed maces which match this set well, and the ones that do are rather small and simplistic-looking, but hopefully you’ll find one to your liking.

Ironfoe drops from Emperor Thaurissan, the last boss of Blackrock Depths. Being quite deep in the instance, this will be a time-consuming boss to farm, but potentially well worth it. It is a fantastic color and aesthetic match to the set.

Venerable Mass of McGowan is an easy to-acquire heirloom weapon that matches the set fairly well both color-wise and aesthetically. It is also one of the larger options available so its a somewhat more visibly impressive weapon.

If you are using a One-Hand Axe
I had a very difficult time finding one-hand axes that I liked with this set so I had to make some small concessions to my criteria for accessory selection, but hopefully if you’re in a position where this is the weapon-type you have to transmogrify that one of these selections will work for you.

Bone Warden’s Splitter drops from Lord Marrowgar in Icecrown Citadel on 10man. While not a unique model, it’s a large weapon with great visibility and this version has a reasonable color compatability. Personally I’m a fan of this model overall, though the shape of the axe, more spikes than curves, makes it a somewhat jarring contrast to the smooth and elegant flow of the Wrathful gear, but it may not bother most people.

Stellaris drops from Nethermancer Sepethrea in heroic Mechanar. A very unique weapon, this item loses some points right off the bat for the strong purple elements which make it stand out strongly from the set, but the curvature of the likes and the ornate detail of the blade help keep it consistant with the feel of the set. There aren’t many good models for this weapon type so this is one of my concession items. It’s not a bad choice by any means, it’s sure to be an eye-catching weapon, but the color contrast may put off some.

If you are using a One-Hand Sword
There are a few interesting sword models to look into for matching up with this set, some more basic, some are quite eye-catching.

Quel’Dalar, Cunning of the Shadows is a quest reward from the Battered Hilt item which drops in the Icecrown 5-man instances. I don’t know if this quest can be completed multiple times or not, so if you’ve already done it you might be out of luck (though paladins may have chosen the healing main hand version or the two-handed version which both go with this set so if you’ve saved that, at least there is that possibility for you.)

Maladath, Runed Blade of the Black Flight drops from Broodlord Lashlayer, the 3rd boss of Blackwing Lair. This is one of the largest, and perhaps the most unique, one-handed sword in the game, and a reasonably strong match to this set. The yellow is a little too dull, the blade is a little too bright, but the blade is so unique most people won’t care. It’s a fantastic eye-catcher if you can get your hands on it and is sure to be a popular choice for many sets for many classes. Can you imagine Sinlge-Minded Fury Warrior or Frost Death Knight dual-weilding this? I wish I could dual-wield…

If you are using a Shield
There are several interesting and distinctive shields that go with this set and the decision really comes down to what shield suits the individual better than which shield suits the set better since they all can work, but each shield is a very different choice from the others.

Hero’s Surrender drops from Patchwerk or Gluth in Nax25. This shield is amazing looking with a very unique model, but it’s just too damn small on a Blood Elf for me to ever use it for tanking. Some people may feel differently, but my recommendation is holy-only if you’re an elf. It works fine on Tauren for size-purposes. It matches the set fairly well though its grey is a little too muted compared to the more silvery color of the set. The flames on the shield match up fairly well with the glow of the gems on the suit. On the whole this is probably the closest chromatic match to the set, but not the best aesthetic choice.

Swordbreaker Breaker’s Bulwark drops from Felmyst in Sunwell Plateau. Like the Bulwark of Azzinoth, this is one of the largest shields in the game, almost eclipsing the character using it. It’s in-your-face bold and bright colors may turn some people off because it looks too much like a Fruit Loops comercial than a color scheme, but its the contrast of colors that really help it work with this set because it is rather plain. The yellow of the shield ties in with the set and the red and the green create a visual distinctiveness which is eye-catching and actually enhances the set in my opinion, rather than taking away from it. Normally I’m against contrasts and prefer more matching colors, but this shield works very well.

If you are using a Two-Handed Mace
There are a couple of interesting and distinctive choices for two-handed maces, some easier to acquire than others.

Sulfuras, the Extinguished Hand drops from Ragneros in Firelands. Since you can’t transmogrify the old legendary version of this which brilliantly suits the set, this is the next best thing. The colors don’t match up quite perfectly, but this is a fantastic looking weapon that is still relatively prestigious to wear and very distinctive. The yellow of the mace is prevented from complimenting the yellow of the set because of the orange highlights of the weapon, but, even so, this is chromatically and aesthetically an excellent weapon for this set.

Hammer of the Titans is a crafted vanilla weapon. While its model is not unique or distinctive, the weapon does tie in well chromatically and aesthetically to the set and is a reasonable size to look like a worthy two-handed weapon.

If you are using a Two-Handed Axe
Like the one-handed axes, two-handed axes have precious few interesting options here. I guess this set just wasn’t meant to be used with axes.

Spiked Battle Axe is a BoE world drop. This is a great choice for the set. It’s huge, it’s visually interesting and distinctive, the colors suit the set very will both in the yellow and silver areas, and it suits the aesthetic sensibilities of the set being intricately detailed for an axe blade. It’s unfortunate that the best way to get ahold of this is hoping someone puts it up on the AH because it’s a fantastic-looking weapon that will definitely garner som attention and it would undoubtedly mesh well with many different gear sets.

Fras Siabi’s Cigar Cutter is a quest reward from Dire Maul. It’s a unique-model weapon with a fairly good chromatic similarity to the set. The black and red of the blade separate it from the set a little too much for my liking, and it’s a little smaller than I would like in a two-handed weapon, especially an axe, but given the limited options for this slot, it’s not a bad choice overall.

If you are using a Two-Hand Sword
Fortunately there are some very interesting and distinctive weapon choices if you happen to be using a sword and are definitely worth looking into.

Aesir’s Edge drop from heroic XT in Ulduar 10man. This weapon suits the set very well, though the teal of the blade is a little distracting. Aesthetically this weapon model is spot-on and the golden highlights on the blade tie it in with the armor nicely. XT heroic, especially on 10man, should be effortless to knock out with a few friends and he is early in the instance so it won’t be a huge time investment to farm. My only negative for this weapon, really, is the relatively small size of th blade which makes it a little harder to appreciate its intricacies from a distance. But, it’s very eye-catching and distinctive and is sure to get noticed for its coloring alone.

Lionheart Executioner is a bind on pickup crafted weapon from Burning Crusade. This pattern is no longer in the game so if you were not a Master Swordsmith specialization prior to crafting specialization removal in Cataclysm you will not be able to acquire this item. This is sure to be a popular item because it is so distinctive, it’s just a shame that not many people will be able to have one of these. While the bright red does separate it from the set a little, the blade really sells this weapon, and it matches up quite well chromatically. I’m not sue how I feel about the Lion aesthetic since it doesn’t seem to fit with the set, but at the same time it also doesn’t contradict it either.

If you are using a Main-Hand Weapon
For you holy Paladins out there, there are some really great mace choices, which is likely what you’re using anyway.

Royal Scepter of Terenas II drops from the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel 25man on Heroic difficulty. Heroic Lich King can still be a challenge at lv85 if people are unprepared, so depending on your realm, this may be a difficult item to pick up. This weapon is very large and very distinctive and is sure to draw attention to itself since only other Lich King weapons share its model. This particular coloring, coming from the 25-heroic difficulty, will likely make it one of the rarest weapons in the game if you have one.

War Mace of Unrequited Love drops from Keristrasza in heroic Nexus. I really like this weapon with this set because of the gold crystaline flame of the mace. It’s somewhat small and not very eye-catchig on its own, but when you get a good look at it, something about it just feels right to me. The brown hilt may be a little dischordant with the armor, but I think the flame more than makes up for it.

            Finally, a set where I get to talk about tabards and capes! With a set like this, which is a neutral, muted color, I have two types of ways of looking at cloaks; matching, and “power tie.” Matching is fairly obvious, and it follows the same criteria that I use to evaluate all other items, but with Power-Tie accessories, it’s about being eye-catching and appropriately contrasting, so bold colors, intricate designs, and unique models are given extra points of consideration. My “Power Tie” recommendations are as follow: Cloak of the Unflinching Guardian is a cloak with a wonderfully intricate design and strongly enhancing contrast colors. It shares a model with all other cloaks that dropped from the 50-attempts remaining Tribute Chests in Trial of the Grand Crusader and none of those are available in the game anymore, but for those who have one of those cloaks, they are fantastic to use with this set. The Alliance versions of these cloaks are Blue and don’t contrast enough with the set to be as strong a choice in my opinion. The Permafrost Capes that drop from Al’Akir look identical to the Alliance version of this design and color, the red ones, you’re out of luck finding a substitute. Mantle of Fury is a quest reward from the Thrall questline in Mount Hyjal. It’s likely that people have already done this quest and possibly even sold whichever version of the reward they chose. But, if you’re a DPS class and didn’t sell it, this is a unique item with a good design and a strong complimenting contrast. If you ditched it, you can pick up the Bladed Flamewrath Cover from Avengers of Hyjal at Friendly, it has the identical texture, but the bottom of the cape is cropped to a point rather than being straight across. It’s an interesting design choice, but I prefer the traditional cape design. Ruthless Gladiator’s Cloak of…, a PvP cape for a PvP set. It’s a very simplistic design, but the bright red is a strong complimenting color and the gold suits the set well. It is also virtually identical to the Wrathful cloak. Very simplistic, yet somehow appropriate, the Crimson Silk Cloak is an easily crafted low-level tailoring item, so if you want a strong red in your set but don’t like the PvP cape and didn’t snag one of the amazing raiding capes back in the day, this is a great option to consider. For those looking for something a little less ostentatious and more in line with the sets colors and aesthetics, I can recommend: Gray Hair Cloak which shares a model with 7 other capes, but this is the easiest of them to pick up, since you can buy it with Justice Points. The golden scale design of the cloak is a nice fit for the ornate armor. The Wrap of the Great Turtle is identical to the Gray Hair Cloak, but doesn’t go as far down the back if you want something shorter, and it’s easy to pick up from the Hyjal quartermaster at exalted. The Cloak of the Iron Council is a BoE that drops from, who else, the Iron Council in Ulduar 10man.

            Tabards, like capes have two categories of consideration, complimenting and contrasting, and there are some excellent choices for both styles. The great thing about tabards and capes is that if you chose a contrasting shield (like the Sword Breaker’s Bulwark) or weapon, they can give the set the illusion of having those colors and helping you unify your outfit. Tabard of the Summer Flames / Skies are decent choices. Both colors work, but I prefer the red personally. The Gold trim ties it in well to the armor on its own nicely. Flames is more of a contrast, while Skies is more of a compliment. If you own one, but want the other, you can just delete it from your inventory and visit a tabard vendor in your capital city and they will give you a chat option of which you’d like them to give back to you. If you’re an Alliance who likes the color purple and opted for a purple cape to compliment/contrast instead of the reds I recommended above, the Darnassus and Gnomeregan tabards are an excellent way to extend that color further into the set. Not to mention those tabards have specific matching capes anyway. Similarly, the Scryers tabard and, to a lesser extent, the Tabard of the Shattered Sun are a wonderful way to tie in the absolutely luxurious black cape Cloak of the Black Void. The Stone Guard’s Herald PvP tabard (Horde) works well, as does it’s Alliance counterpart, Kight’s Colors. Argent Crusader’s Tabard is a brilliantly matching Tabard which creates a near-seamless intigration into the set and gives it some great eye-catching detail and highlights. It’s relatively simple to pick up from the Argent Tournament if you’re willing to grind out the questing zone to completion. It should take about a month if you’re starting from scratch. The Tabard of the Argent Crusade (which is bought at Friendly from their quartermaster or a tabard vendor) is not quite as good as its more ornate successor, but is still a decent matching choice.

            On to the mounts! Unfortunately there really aren’t any flying mounts that suit this set. The best you’re likely to get is the Drake of the North Wind which is a drop from the dragon boss in Vortex Pinnacle boss. This mount DOES drop in the regular difficulty version so at least you could farm for 12 hours a day until you get sick of it if you really wanted to. The Glory of the Icecrown Raider 25-player mount, Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher isn’t a bad second choice and most realms probably pug these achievement runs.

            There are more choices when it comes to ground mounts at least, some of the best in my opinion being Raven Lord because the blue creates a nice contrast with the set and the gold ties in really well with the set. The White Hawkstrider is another good, but rare and farming-required, choice. The White Riding Talbuk / White War Talbuk are available for both Horde and Alliance in Nagrand for a little reg grinding. Horde has two decent options in the Sunreaver Hawkstrider and the Swift Timber Wolf. And, lastly, you might want to consider the Argent warhorse / Agent charger.

            Well, that covers my Paladin Season-8 Wrathful Gladiator set discussion. Personally I’m going to display my helm, rock out with my unattainable Horde-Only red cloak, and my Argent Crusader tabard. I’ll smash faces with Hailstorm and hide behind my enormous Sword Breaker’s Bulwark. Here is what it looks like in its unified entirety…

This is a set where you can choose to show the helm or not depending on your preference and still look good in it. The bracer graphic IS visible so you will want to pick them up or find a reasonable substitute that doesn’t stand out too much. It’s a dress, so boots are less important, but are still noticeable if you’re really off the mark. The belt is very small so you can do without it if you have a reasonable substitute, but since most belts in Cataclysm are WWF World Champion size, you’re going to need SOMETHING to transmogrify them into so as not to obscure the detail of the set. I advise against showing a cape or tabard with this set due to the back being every bit as detailed as the front and you would miss out, spending 90% of your game time viewing your character from behind.

            If this is a set you’re interested in collecting, you can check out WoW Roleplay Gear which has a nice page detailing which bosses in BWL drop which pieces so you don’t need to search them individually on WoWhead. Each boss drops three pieces of loot with the exception of Nefarian. It is also possible to get a Tier-2 look-alike helm from the lv80 Onyxia raid (10 or 25). These items are identical to their Tier 2 lv60 versions except they have lv80 stats on them, visually they look the same, so it may help you farm this piece more quickly (plus, Onyxia drops a mount too).

            Now, to accessorize! Once you’ve picked up your set, you still have a weapon, and possibly a shield depending on your spec. There is also your cape, your tabard, and even the mounts you ride around on to consider when completing your vanity uniform. I’m going to list several items for each of these categories for your consideration and then give you my recommendations and explain why I’ll be using certain items to round-out my transmogrification experience relating to this specific set. I’ll start with the one-handed weapons for tanks, since that’s what I am… As with my T2 Recolor suggestions, this is not an exhaustive, comprehensive list and it’s not intended to be. I am only providing suggestions that I would personally consider using. There will undoubtedly be items in the game I don’t have, don’t know about, or don’t believe fit the bill aesthetically, but others may disagree. If you have any suggestions regarding possible matches that I don’t cover, don’t hesitate to let me know, I’d love to hear about them, whether I end up agreeing or not.

If you are using a One-Hand Mace
There are a few decent one-hand mace choices, though two of the best ones will be impossible for many people to use because they are crafted items whose recipes have been removed from the game.

Fool’s Bane drops from Terestian Illhoof in Karazhan. He is a hidden, optional boss in the instance so if you’re not familiar with him be sure to look up how to find him to farm this. The mace is a good, noticeable size with some orange highlights which tie it into the set well. It has a draconic-looking aesthetic as well which meshes with the “lore” of the set, dropping in a dragon-based instance.

Dragonstrike is a crafted mace from the Burning Crusade that is going to be extremely rare. In Cataclysm, Blizzard removed the profession specializations from the game. If you were a Grandmaster Hammersmith before Cata, you will be able to make this weapon for yourself. It is BIND ON PICKUP so you cannot craft this for others. It is an expensive and complicated crafted item, but if you have the pattern already, you’ll be able to get it for yourself. If you don’t have the pattern, there is currently no way to get it anymore, so this weapon will be extremely rare and distinctive. It is nice and large with a good color scheme and a very stylish aesthetic, both color and design-wise, a great choice to match this set.

If you are using a One-Hand Axe
There are some fantastic axes in this game, several of which that really work well with the Judgement Armor.

Warbringer is purchased from the Thrallmar Quartermaster in Hellfire Peninsula at Exalted reputation. The Thrallmar rep grind is fairly quick, just run the 3 Hellfire Citadel dungeons on normal difficulty until they stop giving you reputation then run Ramparts, Blood Furnace, and Shattered Halls on heroic once a day. If you haven’t killed Magtheredon and completed the quest started by his dropped head, that also gives Thrallmar rep. This axe is a strong, noticeable size with great color tie-ins to the set. Grinding Thrallmar rep is fairly easy at 80+ so this should only be a matter of a week or so to pick up, depending on how diligently you farm. It is also a reasonably distinctive design which should help it stand out from the set while not taking anything away from it.

High Warlord’s Cleaver is a purchase from PvP vendor in Orgrimmar. This will likely be a popular choice as it is relatively easy to pick up and very distinctive in design. A large, strong-looking weapon with great menace that will likely be used by people with many other sets. The strong, prominent silver may take a little away from the set, but overall it matches up fairly well.

If you are using a One-Hand Sword
If you’re like me, a one-handed sword is what you’re going to be using when 4.3 goes live, so it’s my top priority item to farm to transmogrify. Fortunately there are two amazing options available to people using this set, and some that are pretty good alternatives while you farm one of these two.

Broken Promise drops from the Four Horsemen in Nax25. This is the definitive sword for this set. The colors are perfectly suited to it, the design is striking, though not 100% unique, and it is an incredibly ornate and detailed weapon aesthetically. This is the sword I’m currently planning to use with this set, no doubt about it.

The Sun Eater drops from Pathaleon the Calculator in heroic Mechanar. This a very large-bladed weapon that is incredibly eye-catching because of its size and distinctive model. The colors suit the set very well as does the general aesthetic of the weapon. It is relatively easy to farm by anyone 80+ and hopefully won’t keep you waiting too long for it if it’s your weapon of choice

If you are using a Shield
There are some fantastic shields in the game, but not many that are orange. Fortunately there are two that match the set very well, and a few more that will work in a pinch that suit both tanks and healers.

Royal Crest of Lordaeron drops from Mal’Ganis in Culling of Stratholme heroic. This instance is likely solo’able for a reasonably-geared lv85 paladin since you don’t need to meet the timer to be able to kill Mal’Ganis. Picking this shield up is really just an inevitability, but could take awhile if you have bad luck with drops. I’ve always liked this shield, and while the blue border inside the crest is a little jarring in contrast to the set, the aesthetic of the shield is just amazing with this set. The shield is large and dignified making it a strong choice for tanks wearing this.

Drillborer Disk drops from Garr in Molten Core. A lv85 Paladin (and even a lv80 one too probably) has the potential to solo this boss, and you don’t have to kill any other Molten Core bosses in order to get to him either so you can be quickly in and out. He also drops one half of Thunderfury so you might get lucky too. This shield matches up perfectly color-wise, but it’s just too small on a blood elf for me to consider it suited for tanking. It’s a little bit better on a Tauren, but still comes across as too small is probably much better suited to holy paladins, or, if you really like that “I’m blocking a skyscraper with a dinner plate” aesthetic.

If you are using a Two-Handed Sword
Two-handed swords have a great opportunity to show off their matching colors and aesthetics because of their size, and these do not disappoint in those categories.

Cataclysm’s Edge drops from Archimonde in Battle for Mount Hyjal. This is a huge sword, especially on a Tauren, and its colors are right out there in your face. It has a solid, respectable aesthetic design that makes it look like an effective weapon and something cool to look at.

Voldrethar, Dark Blade drops from Hard-Mode General Vezax in Ulduar 25man. This is a fantastic looking sword. While it’s not a unique design, this version of it has a color scheme ideally suited to the Judgement armor. Aesthetically it is a very polished and sleek weapon which is sure to gather attention, especially because this version drops from a later-boss hard mode in the instance and will be less common.

If you are using a Two-Handed Mace
There are two very distinctive maces that drop from the same instance as the armor and it’s not surprise they match up well with it. Some of these are a little hard to come by, but may be well worth the effort.

Draconic Maul drops from Death Talon trash mobs in Blackwing Lair. A hard item to farm because it’s a trash drop, this weapon has a similar silhouette to other vanilla maces, but it’s the textures and detailing and the colors that really set it apart from other weapons and suit it to the Judgement set very well. It’s a strong size with a great draconic aesthetic that many people will probably really enjoy. It’s also likely to be relatively unique because of the difficulty in acquiring it.

Herald of Woe drops from Flamegor in Blackwing Lair. Not as difficult to farm as the maul because it drops from a boss, this is something you may come across on your travels while farming this instance for your set or any of the other fantastic items that drop within. It’s not as distinctive as the maul but it’s still a fantastic design with great colors that really suit the set and bring the whole outfit together. The head is a little small and may disappoint people, but overall it’s a great match.

If you are using a Two-Handed Axe
If you’re horde, one of the greatest axes in the game is available to you, if you’re Alliance, you’re going to have a slightly more difficult time finding something to truly suit this set

Dual-Blade Butcher is a Horde-only drop from Faction Champions in Trial of the Crusader 25man. Sorry, Alliance, you’re out of luck on this one. This is an incredibly distinctive weapon with a great color scheme for this set. It is going to be irritating to farm since no one ever seems to want to run this instance, but it could be well worth it just for the unique aesthetic alone. This weapon will go well with so many sets not just the Judgement, and many people will likely want to seek this one out, but how unique it is on your server will depend how many people can get people to go with them to farm it, or who saved it from the time of ToC.

Draconic Avenger drops from Death-Talon Wyrmguard trash in Blackwing Lair. A trash drop, like the Draconic Maul, this weapon may be difficult to acquire but could be quite worth it. The color scheme is not 100% identical but it’s a massive weapon with a unique and eye-catchingly distinctive blade with ornate texturing and details. Like the Dual-Blade Butcher, this weapon will go with many different armor sets and will likely be the envy of many if you happen to pick one up.

If you are using a Main-Hand Weapon
For those holy paladins out there, these weapons are for you. Fortunately you are likely using a main hand mace so you have access to one of the most well-matching items for this set in the game.

Lok’amir il Romathis drops from Nefarian in Blackwing Lair. This is to main-hand maces what Broken Promise is to one-handed swords, a weapon that looks like it was made to go with this set. Well, probably because it was, dropping in the same instance as the gear and matching the color scheme perfectly. A nearly-unique model, very impressive and regal looking, it is a spot-on aesthetic match for the set and would do any Paladin proud to wield it.

            I mentioned in my discussion of the Tier-2 recolor that I’m not fond of using cloaks with this particular armor design, however, unlike the recolor, which only had very plain, single-color cloaks at its disposal, the Judgement set has 2 amazing cloaks that really cry out to be used they looks so good and match so well. Cloak of the Unflinching Guardian is a cloak with a wonderfully intricate design and perfectly matched colors. It shares a model with all other cloaks that dropped from the 50-attempts remaining Tribute Chests in Trial of the Grand Crusader and none of those are available in the game anymore, but for those who have one of those cloaks, they are fantastic to use with this set. The Alliance versions of these cloaks are Blue and don’t match the set unfortunately; ironic Horde favoritism from ToGC in matching to an armor set previously Alliance-only. Guess that’s payback for ya. Another strong match is the Sunglimmer Drape a quest reward from the item Algalon drops in Ulduar 10 and 25. If you’ve already done this quest and selected a different item or trashed it, you’re out of luck. There are a few other cloaks in the game that are decent substitutes and match the color scheme well, but don’t quite have the detail and pizazz of these two. Even with these two great options, I’m still not sure if I’ll show my cloak or not.

            Like with cloaks I’m also against using tabards with this set, but for those interested, here are a few suggestions. If you’re Horde: Sunreaver works best but Dragonmaw is ok. If you’re Alliance: Tabard of Conquest, Ironforge, and Stormpike all work reasonably well. Both Factions can get Tabard of the Achiever and Wyrmrest.

            Flying Mounts, the best kind in the game, because they can fly, are likely to be people’s primary mode of transportation, so you want to be sure it’s as spiffy as your gear. The absolute best choice of course is Reins of the Pureblood Firehawk from Ragnaros in Firelands. Other good mounts include Black Drake from Sartharion +3 Drakes 10man (a very easy mount to get these days if you don’t have it already), and the Red Proto Drake which requires completion of “Glory of the Hero” achievements from Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. Most of these are very easy to complete with one or two people, but a few will need full groups. Failing everything else, there is always the Swift Red Wind Rider.

            As for ground mounts, Blood Elf Paladins get 2 great options just for existing in the Thalassian Charger and Thalassian Warhorse, their racial class mounts. As far as mounts anyone can potentially have, there is the Great Brewfest Kodo which matches surprisingly well; or the Ice Mammoth from Sons of Hodir. The Swift Warstrider bought with Honor Points is a pretty good choice as well.

            Well, that covers my Paladin Tier-2 Judgement discussion. Personally I’m going to display my helm, not display my cloak, use the Broken Promise as my weapon and the Royal Crest of Lardaeron as my shield. Here is what it looks like in its unified entirety… (since I don’t have the Broken Promise yet, the Romanthis has been subbed in.)

I’ve also taken some in-game footage as well. I don’t have every item listed here so I just saved some time by only showing the combinations I’m considering using.. It is available up to 480p. There is no sound.

            I’ll begin with what is sure to be a popular plate set people will be using in 4.3 because it is not class-specific; the recolor of the Paladin Tier-2, the purple Judgment Armor, (what I call “the Blessings Set”) which is healer-plate available in Outland Regular and Heroic dungeons and is likely very easy to farm as a lv80+ for any plate class and spec. I saw a few warriors on the PTR using pieces of this set and I just finished gathering all 8 pieces for my own warrior on live servers, so he may end up using this set himself on occasion (Though Wrathful Gladiator is likely what I’ll stick him in). Anyway, on to the set…

This is a set where you can choose to show the helm or not depending on your preference and still look good in it. The bracer graphic IS visible so you will want to pick them up or find a reasonable substitute that doesn’t stand out too much. It’s a dress, so boots are less important, but are still noticeable if you’re really off the mark. The belt is very small so you can do without it if you have a reasonable substitute, but since most belts in Cataclysm are WWF World Champion size, you’re going to need SOMETHING to transmog them into so as not to obscure the detail of the set. I advise against showing a cape or tabard with this set due to the back being every bit as detailed as the front and you would miss out, spending 90% of your game time viewing your character from behind.

            If you’d like to see what this looks like on races that can use this Plate Armor (every race can be warriors and death knights), you can view the set in 3d here and just change the model in the display to your preferred one (It’s pretty neat to see it on Worgen and Undead male models, and Goblin females look kinda cute in it too). I recommend choosing the “Java” quality setting if it is available for you, as it animates the models whereas the “Flash” option is stationary. If this is a set you’re interested in collecting, check out The Visual Roleplay Gear List where they have a comprehensive page on it. They list all the items and where to get them.

            Now, to accessorize! Once you’ve picked up your set, you still have a weapon, and possibly a shield depending on your spec. There is also your cape, your tabard, and even the mounts you ride around on to consider when completing your vanity uniform. I’m going to list several items for each of these categories for your consideration and then give you my recommendations and explain why I’ll be using certain items to round-out my transmogrification experience relating to this specific set. I’ll start with the one-handed weapons for tanks, since that’s what I am…

            If you are a lv85 tank that does, at least, Zandalari-level heroics and low-end raids, the weapons you are likely to be using are among the following: Mace of Acrid Death, a “One-Hand” classification mace, Lava Spine, a “One-Hand” sword, Soul Blade, another “One-Hand” sword, Elementium-Edged Scalper, a “One-Hand” axe, Unbreakable Guardian, a “One-Hand” sword, Reforged Heartless, a “One-Hand” sword, Bloodlord’s Protector, a “One-Hand” sword, Renataki’s Soul Slicer, a “One-Hand” sword, Zulian Slasher, a “One-Hand” sword, Gurubashi Punisher, a “One-Hand” mace, Stormwake, the Tempest’s Reach, a “Main-Hand” sword, Mandible of Beth’tilac, a “One-Hand” sword, and Obsidium Cleaver, a “One-Hand” axe. As you can see if you read this list all the way through, only ONE weapon carries the classification of “Main Hand” and it is a sword. So all your vanity swords, axes, and maces that have “Main Hand” as their weapon type… well, you don’t get to change your weapon to look like them. Good going Bliz… But, there IS a good possibility that you will have a Mace, Axe, or Sword, even at higher item levels since the Mace of Acrid Death can be 372 and useful even in heroic Firelands. And, while threat is devalued for tanks, the Elementium-Edged Scalper and Obsidium Cleaver both give you a strong item level Axe of 365, 378, or 391 and are great possibilities for long-term transmogrification use. The Unbreakable Guardian and Mandible of Beth’Tilac are tank mainstays so transmogrifying your sword will be extremely easy if you can avoid the whole “cannot change into a Main-Hand item” problem. Damn you Single-Minded Fury Warriors and Frost Death Knights… this is all your fault… If you are a player who is still in lower-level heroics, or even regular dungeons, there is still a decent spread of items for you from craftables and dungeons, though maces will be the hardest to come buy since there is not a craftable one for tanks. Cookie’s Tenderizer in Heroic Deadmines is likely your best bet, or the Mace of Transformed Bone. Warriors have the added bonus of potentially using Fist Weapons as their main-hand, but since I’m a paladin, I’m not going to cover those in regards to this particular set. Maybe when 4.3 comes out and I transmog this set onto my warrior too…

            Now that we’ve looked at what you are likely to have equipped, lets take a look at what you’d get to play with as far as visuals. This is not an exhaustive, comprehensive list and it’s not intended to be. I am only providing suggestions that I would personally consider using. There will undoubtedly be items in the game I don’t have, don’t know about, or don’t believe fit the bill aesthetically, but others may disagree. If you have any suggestions regarding possible matches that I don’t cover, don’t hesitate to let me know, I’d love to hear about them, whether I end up agreeing or not.

If you are using a One-Hand Mace
One handed maces have a few interesting transmogrification choices and most items aren’t too difficult to pick up, though some will require some raid farming

Mithrios, Bronzebeard’s Legacy. Drops from Normal-difficulty Lich King in Icecrown Citadel 25-player. It is a little more blue than purple (not counting the glow), but is close enough that not too many people would take notice. Also, if you are using the Windwalk enchant, the enchant has a purple tint to it that may push it over the edge of acceptable into the purple spectrum, but mostly all you’re going to see is the white cloud. Aesthetically the design of the mace doesn’t match up very well unfortunately, but it’s a fair size, not too small a weapon for a tank that it looks silly or underpowered.

The Blackout Truncheon from Grandmaster Vorpil in Heroic Shadow Labyrinth has a strong color similarity, as well as having the convenient One-Hand classification, but its major drawback is that it has its own enchant animation which is a black mist. I don’t know if this interferes with Cataclysm enchants or not, but I assume it does. The black makes it just a little too off-color for me to consider using this for myself though the purple is a reasonably close match and would otherwise be ok.

If you are using a One-Hand Axe
There are a few more transmogrification options for this type because it is a weapon that has historically been used to dual-wield.

Breeching Comet This ostentatious weapon comes courtesy of Kael’Thas Ssunstrider in Heroic Magister’s Terrace. Suitably outlandish, this magically crystalline weapon is definitely a brighter purple than the set, but still manages to suit it well. It also has a comfortable size on the character model so people will definitely notice you using this weapon. While its form is not really congruent with the armor, its eye-catching nature can help bring attention to the armor by virtue of people already looking at you.

Troggbane, Axe of the Frostborne King, from Lich King 10man is likely your best bet for a matching transmogrification axe. It is a little too spikey in design, with hard edges and points, to really fit the flowing elegance and detail of the T2 recolor, and there is some blue glow coming from the axe and pommel that will be visible even through the windwalk enchant. While not perfect, this one is fairly close if you’re an axe person; and, while you can’t solo him, 10m Lich King is a pretty easy farm these days.

If you are using a One-Hand Sword
There are a wealth of swords available that meet the aesthetic requirements of color and form to suit the set, but you really run into the Main-Hand restriction with these which is unfortunate.

My personal recommendation across all weapon types if you have the option, is Hatestrike from Patchwerk in Naxx10. It already has a strong silver and purple color scheme, windwalk makes it even more purple and really brings it out as an appropriate weapon for the set with the glow. While the enchant does obscure the detailed runes and the chattering mouth to a certain extent, it is really hard to go wrong with this sword. Its biggest drawback is being a raid drop so it could be a very long time before you get one if you’re unlucky with drops.

Edge of the Cosmos drops from Pathaleon the Calculator in regular Mechanar. While this geode-looking weapon is a little more purple than the set, it is definitely a distinctive-looking weapon that should be appealing to people. It’s biggest drawback is that it almost looks like a dagger on smaller-scale models like the female Blood Elf which I personally find disappointing. It has both the purple and gold of the set already on it and can be farmed a little more quickly because of the shorter lockouts of 5man heroics compared to raids like Naxxramas.

If you are using a Shield
Fortunately, unlike the different types of restrictions on weapons, a shield is a shield and is easy to transmogrify. There are a few nice shields that go with this set, some are easier to pick up than others.

Lets get the popular one out of the way first; yes, you can get away with using the Bulwark of Azzinoth with this set. The color does not match exactly, the shield being slightly more gray, but with a reasonable purple-tint that is close enough for most people. The rigid and spikey design of the shield is at odds with the flowing elegance of the set, but probably not enough to turn most people off to pairing them up. This shield is MASSIVE and is the only shield in the game that looks like it could do more damage than your main hand and looks like enchanting a shield spike on it would be laughably redundant. It is also the only shield that is worn sideways on the back which makes it even more unique and eye-catching than it already is. Defensively, this is the shield-of-shields when it comes to appearance. But, because of that, you’re going to see this EVERYWHERE. Doesn’t make it bad, just means you will look like everyone else who farmed it, because whether it goes with a set or not, someone is very likely gonna be wearing this.

As far as I’m concerned, the Titansteel Shield Wall is 100% perfectly suited to this set. It’s rounded elegance and detail compliment the design of the set nicely, the silver of the shield is a near spot-on match for that of the gear, and the purple glow of the Kirin-Tor rune in the center gives it the purple it needs creating a very strong unifying effect between the shield and the set. It is very easy to acquire as well, being a simple Wrath craftable. It is a little disappointingly small, but nothing as bad as the crafted shield from Cataclysm some people have been stuck with, and since it only shares its design with one other shield from Wrath, it is also fairly unique.

            That covers things from a tanking perspective, but I’m sure there are some DPS paladins out there who are going to wear this set, so I’ll cover some 2-handed weapons here as well. Again, if you are doing at least Zandalari-level heroics or some kind of raiding, you are likely using one of the following weapons; Akirus the Worm-Breaker, Shalug’doom, the Axe of Unmaking, Reclaimed Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood, Masterwork Elementium Deathblade, Skullstealer Greataxe, Zoid’s Firelit Greatsword, Sulfuras, the Extinguished Hand, Reforged Trollbane, Jeklik’s Smasher, if you’re very lucky Zin’rokh, Destroyer of Worlds, or at the very least, Oversized Oblique Ogre Obliterator. There are a good mix of swords, maces, and axes at all item levels so people likely won’t have too much trouble being able to transmog into the items that they want.

            Now, there are dozens of amazing two-handed weapons available in the game, I’m only going to cover the ones that I would personally use with this set because of my criteria of primarily color-matching and thematic similarity; but everyone has their own preferences. One last thing I should mention; the weapon you transmogrify to retains the enchant of the weapon you transmogrified from, so it is very likely that all DPS have Landslide on their 2hander. Landslide is a yellow/brown enchant and will typically not look so good with your purple-themed weapon. I don’t have a 2h mace to transmog, so I don’t know if Torch of the Damned will show the enchant or if its built-in purple flame graphic makes it immune to enchant graphics, just be warned when planning your set out.

If you are using a Two-handed Sword
If you are using a two-handed sword, there are several worthwhile options to consider when making your transmogrification picks whether you want small and unassuming or huge and ostentatious, there’s a little something for everyone in a matching purple and silver.

Shaard the Greater is a unique, geode-inspired weapon with a distinctive silhouette. It drops from Tavarok in Mana-Tombs on regular difficulty which means it can be farmed in a very short period of time. It may be a little too purple, as most weapons seem to be, but it is a nice looking weapon overall and one that can be picked up quickly playing solo.

The Mardenholde Greatsword is a world BoE with a random enchant, so your best bet to pick one up is to check the AH on your server. It’s not a very exciting-looking weapon but it matches well both in color and aesthetics. Because it’s a random drop and cannot be farmed so if you have your heart set on this item you could be waiting a long time, but instance farming always drops more BoEs than outside an instance if you’re looking for greens.

If you are using a Two-handed Axe
There aren’t many purple axes out there, in fact I think there are only 2 that I know of, but there are more with strong silver tie-ins that work just as well. Still, there’s not much to choose from in the axe category, but here are a few I believe match up well with the Tier-2 recolor.

Dark Edge of Insanity This axe from C’thun in AQ40 shouldn’t be confused with Dark Edge of Depravity which drops off Yogg. This distinctive axe is a one-of-a-kind model. It may look a little too silithid for some, and the strong pink in the center of the axe may distract too much from the set for some, but it’s a large, menacing weapon that matches up color-wise rather well all things considered. It is also the most purple-colored axe out there, so if you’re a slave to color like I am, this may be your best bet, but it will be difficult to farm, AQ40 is a LONG instance, and Twin Emperors still cannot be solo’d.

The Dark Iron Axe is a weapon you likely won’t see anyone wearing because it is an old-world quest reward from Searing Gorge. If you missed it, you can find the Ceremonial Slayer’s Axe which shares its model on the AH if you’re lucky. The colors may be plain but the design is very sturdy and subtle and it has a good size on character models so it doesn’t look underpowered.

If you are using a Two-handed Mace
The holy grail of Tier-2 recolor two-handed weapon transmogrification awaits you once you get your hands on this weapon classification. There are two, very popular, spot-on matches for this particular set. You won’t be the only one using these (at least not once people see you with one and start farming it themselves) but you’re going to look so awesome that you just won’t care.

The Torch of the Damned is a hell of a weapon for this set. It has a unique model, it has an animation, the purple matches up very well, and it looks like a weapon someone wearing this armor would carry. It’s only potential drawback is the pink hue of the flames coming from the head of the torch. I don’t know if this animation will prevent Landslide from overshadowing the weapon or not, but I hope so.

Hammer of the Naaru is perhaps the de-facto ret-paladin-looking weapon of the Burning Crusade expansion and the weapon perfectly suited to this set as a mace. A Dranaei Paladin is even using this in the Burning Crusade opening movie. It is a distinctive weapon with an eye-catching and bright head. This whole weapon just exudes Paladin, and, dropping from the first boss in Gruul’s Lair, it can be easily picked up if the drops are in your favor.

            Last, but not least, we have the Holy Paladin who will want to don this set. The shield recommendations stay the same for you. The Titansteel Shield Wall or Lost Pavise of the Blue Flight will probably be the most thematically similar to other healing shields, though it might be fun to fool everyone by healing with the giant Bulwark on your arm. The heroic version of the shield from Beth’tilac, Ward of the Red Widow is also somewhat purple, but not really enough to match, though it may work just fine for you, especially if it’s the shield you are already wearing anyway so you won’t have to transmog it. As far as weapons go you could go the same route as described for Paladin tanks but most-likely you are using a weapon with the “main hand” classification, so here are some additional recommendations for you.

            There are many Main-Hand maces that fit the bill for this set so you’ve got lots to choose from. My personal recommendation is Twilight’s Hammer which drops from Cho’gall in the Bastion of Twilight, which is something many healers are either using already, looking to pick up anyway, or may have saved in their bags after they upgraded in Firelands. It is a little too purple to match perfectly, but lets face it, you are using Power Torrent and that enchant renders almost any visual distinctiveness irrelevant because it is overpowering red or purple depending on the cycle. The purple of power torrent matches very well with the set, but the red dooms it at the same time. It’s not something you’re going to be able to get away from with almost any weapon you pick. But, if you’re sick of the hammer because you’ve been using it forever, here are some other weapons to consider.

The normal difficulty version of Valius, Gavel of the Lightbringer drops from Lich King 10man. This will be a very distinctive weapon and it is very large, even on a smaller-model like Blood Elf female.

K’iru’s Presage is purchased with Justice Points on the Isle of Quel’Danas from the Shattered Sun offensive at Revered reputation. This mace is just a little too bright-purple to match completely, but it should be passable for most people. The design aesthetic suits the armor well and its still an effective-looking size.

            There aren’t nearly as many swords to choose from as maces, but if you happen to have one, here are items you may want to consider. The heroic version of Firethorn Mindslicer. The mindslicer is not a weapon anyone really uses so if you are one of the people able to clear heroic Firelands bosses, this is likely going to be rolled on for vanity-sake anyway. It is a little bit too purple, but it’s close enough for some. It’s a larger, distinctive sword that should catch some eyes, the only drawback being you’re likely using a mace as your weapon, either the crafted 365, the Twilight Hammer, or the spell power mace from Ragnaros, so you won’t have a sword to apply this image to. Grieving Spellblade is another fantastic sword that is already purple, silver, elegantly curved, and richly detailed with runes. It drops from Grand Widow Faerlina and Gluth in Naxx10. The silver is a little more prominent on this weapon than the purple, but it still meshes very well with the set and the windwalk enchant. And, actually, there are barely a double-digit number of “main hand” classification axes in the game, never mind ones that are purple or match this set. In the incredibly unlikely event that you have an axe (unless the Dragon Soul raid or new 5mans drop one) you’re stuck with what you’ve got (and you’ll be stuck in 4.3 if they do drop too).

            I mentioned I’m not fond of using cloaks with this set because of the detail on the back of the armor that would be completely covered up, so I didn’t spend a great deal of time searching for one. But I did find two capes that go well with the set. They may not be the best options one could find, and once I found these I stopped looking for anything that might be potentially better because I was satisfied, but if anyone has any other suggestions I’d be happy to hear them. The first is the Netherfury Cape and it works well enough. Baba’s Cloak of Arcanistry is the other and it matches the set a little bit better with the silver being more prominently displayed; but, as I said, I don’t show my cloak because it obscures too much when looking at my character from the back so ultimately this particular accessory turned out to be pointless. But, if you’re one of those people who like showing their cloak, these items may be for you. The cloaks have a strong, eye-catching purple that matches well enough and has some silver embroidery on parts of the cape which compliment the silver of the set. The biggest drawback for the Netherfury Cape is the gold trim near the top and bottom which does prevent it somewhat from completely unifying the look of the set, but it might not bother some people.

            I am personally against using a tabard with this set, but if someone has their heart set on it, here are a few I’d recommend: For Alliance only, the Darnasus, Gnomeregan, and Silverwing tabards have a compatible purple but they all have distinctive yellow detailing on it which does disrupt the unification of the set. The Horde does not have any faction-unique tabards which match this set.

            As far as what mounts suit this set the best, you’ve got a few options for flying mounts, but not many for ground mounts. The Armored Blue Wind Rider is an easy-to-acquire mount in Dalaran whose purple matches well with the set and the blue is just slightly off-color of the silver in the set making it passable, but unideal. The purple of the Dark Phoenix guild mount is a little too bright but can do in a pinch and should be reasonably easy to pick up for many people. The Flameward Hippogryph from the Molten Front dailies has a spot-on purple match but the flames of the wings may put some people off of using it. There are two mounts from the Netherwing faction in Shadowmoon Valley that match well; the Purple Netherwing Drake is nice but the green saddle is kind of an eyesore to me, the Violet Netherwing Drake matches the set better of the two in my opinion. I’ve never been a fan of the Nether Ray mounts, but the Purple Nether Ray isn’t bad. It doesn’t really fit the aesthetic of the set, but if you’re a fan of nether rays, this mount is for you. Another easy-to-acquire mount, the Swift Purple Wind Rider, has a spot-on purple but the yellow fur color can be a deal breaker depending on your preferences, but even the poorest of the poor and newest of the new are able to get their hands on this mount to match. A somewhat harder to get mount is the Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher. It doesn’t match up perfectly, but the armor has a purple tinge to it and the bones, while a little too white to be silvery, aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker.

            For ground mounts, you have choices like the Forsaken Warhorse which has a lot of purple but doesn’t really suit the set aesthetically, but some people like the undead mounts so I figured I’d include it here. The Purple Skeletal Warhorse is a less intricately detailed version of the former with a lighter shade of purple which matches a little better. From Nagrand you can pick up the Silver War Talbuk which has little tufts of purple to accentuate the coloring but doesn’t quite match the set perfectly. My personal favorite with this set is the White War Talbuk. The white doesn’t quite match up with the silver but does give the mount an elegant look which suits the set and the purple horns are very striking.

            Well, that covers my Paladin Tier-2 Judgment recolor discussion, what I affectionately call my “Blessings” set. Personally I’m going to display my helm, not display my cloak, use the Hatestrike as my weapon and the Titansteel Shield Wall as my shield, though heroic Shard of Torment really made me have to give that decision some second thoughts. Here is what it looks like in its unified entirety…

I’ve also taken some in-game footage as well. I don’t have every item listed here so I just saved some time by only showing the combinations I’m considering using.. It is available up to 480p. There is no sound.

            Now, I know people who play World of Warcraft “for the challenge.” What this simplistic statement usually means when these people say this is that their mission is raiding world-firsts, to face the toughest challenges as soon as possible and be the first (or among the first) to overcome them. There are also players in the game who sit in Orgrimmar or Stormwind their entire lives and amass gold by controlling markets on the auction house. There are people who collect vanity gear, pets, achievements, mounts, tame rare hunter pets, or just “play solitaire with a built-in chat function.” Now, on the broad, over-arching subject of game design, yes, challenge is intrinsic to what makes a game an interesting or “good” game, and you NEED challenge for a game to exist. But I feel that the “challenge” from a game does not necessarily have to be the INTENDED challenge the designers implemented when creating the game, nor do I believe there is a requite floor to the difficulty of a challenge. After all, stacking blocks can be a challenge. Building an intricate scale model of the Taj Mahal out of blocks is not the same degree of challenge as stacking 5 blocks on top of each other, but there IS a basic motor-skills challenge of stacking 5 blocks. Gravity can cause you to fail at the challenge of stacking 5 blocks if your motor skills and understanding of stable structure theory aren’t very good. If raid encounters or dungeon encounters become less punishing and challenging, that does not diminish or enhance the difficulty for Mr Bank-alt McMoneybags controlling a server’s economy. It may change the relative value of items, but that only affects his profit-margin “score” after he has completed his challenge, not the challenge itself.

            I, personally, DO NOT, play this game “for the challenge” in the way that top-tier raiders describe it. Whether a raid boss is “hard” or “easy” is not my primary interest in this game despite considering myself first-and-foremost a “raider.” I don’t really play ANY game for the challenge according to common parlance; I play it for the experience I am interested in having with it. This IS a valid challenge, but it’s not necessarily the one the designers had in mind. I play BioWare RPGs on the easiest, most lolcats settings and still use cheats and trainers because I’m interested in experiencing the game’s story, atmosphere, and intangible qualities, not its combat system or strategic combat puzzles. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had a very frank difficulty called “Tell Me A Story” where the game’s mechanical and combat challenges were greatly reduced in favor of experiencing the other aspects of the game in a less intense environment. I, like countless others, love DE:HR, I love the sneaking mechanic that is at the very core of the game, but am far less interested in the combat aspect of the game and was very disinterested in the boss fights and was not thinking of them as “challenges to overcome.” They were, mechanically, nuisances that got in the way of me playing the game. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way

            For me, the challenge of a game is for me to get out of it what I want. If I want to play a game “against the rules” I need to find a way of doing that. I remember in the very first Warcraft RTS game “Orcs vs Humans” I would use the money cheat “pot of gold” 10 times to get 100k gold an then just build all over the map. I would connect the road from my town to the enemy town and then after destroying his buildings would build my own on their burned-out foundations. Sure it broke the strategy game “challenge” over its kneecap, but I was having fun. Base-building was the main draw for me in that game. Sure I liked the strategy element of the game well enough and would “play fair” on occasions, but the important part is that I had choice, control over my gameplay experience. A game’s job is, ultimately, philosophically, to make the player enjoy playing it. If the built-in challenge fails at that, that is not necessarily the designer’s fault (though certainly it can be). I can’t hold the combat system designer for Dragon Age responsible for me not giving a crap about setting elaborate traps and cooldown/ability rotations to defeat its challenges. For people who were interested in doing those things, by all accounts, the combat system was a resounding success and that game was very well received, but I didn’t want to play it the way they designed it. I am all about the one-man armies wading through legions of baddies soloing everything without denting their armor or breaking a nail (most of the time anyway). I loved other aspects of the game like the world design, the character interactions, the storyline, and the design of the weapons and armor. That’s the stuff I wanted to do, not play chess with darkspawn. One could say that I was “cherry-picking my gameplay experience,” and it’s true, but is that a bad thing? Some people will read this and think I’m crazy, or a bad player, for circumventing the built-in challenges of a game, but as I said, I may not necessarily want to play the game the way they want me to play it. If I play a game and defeat its challenge and hate every minute of it, was it a good game? If I disregard the designers’ wishes, cheat my ass off, make donuts fall from the sky with mods and never beat the game but have a wonderful time, was it a bad game?

            It is true that “challenge,” as an abstract concept, needs to exist in some form in order for there to be a “game” at all, and an interest in overcoming that challenge to motivate someone to PLAY the game (in whatever form). But the presentation of that challenge does not need to conform to rigid definitions of “hard” or “easy.” It is harder for world-first guilds to defeat the latest hardmodes predominantly wearing gear from the last content patch and whatever they’ve been able to pick up in the week or two they’ve done the content before clearing all of it and farming gear for the next content patch, than it is for later conquerors who arrive at the challenge in full current-tier heroic gear. But neither “challenge” is a “better” or more “right” challenge objectively. There is prestige in being first and in doing something “more difficult” but if you killed a heroic boss in the first day, the first week, first month, or first three months, it is very likely that the challenge, AS IT WAS DESIGNED, was the same. Encounters in the World of Warcraft are basically math problems with a graphical interface. You need to do more damage than the boss has health within a time limit or the boss wins. You need to heal more damage than you take for a specific duration, and if you can’t, the boss wins. These encounters are designed and balanced, or “tuned,” to mathematical possibilities, probabilities, and certainties. You certainly cannot complete an iLvl378 math problem using an iLvl200 calculator for instance. Don’t bring a handful of eggs to a two-dozen egg fight or you’ll be out-gunned by mathematical certainty. If you try that same math problem with an iLvl400 calculator the probability of success (all other factors being equal) is much higher and the “challenge” will not be as significant whereas if you had done it with an iLvl365 calculator. It will still be a mathematical possibility to succeed, but it will be “more challenging.” If the challenge is designed for a 378-level math problem, completing it with a 365 is impressive, but it’s not what the designers intended. We cannot compare people the challenges of average players to super-humans and expect it to challenge both equally.

            For those who play the World of Warcraft for the challenge of defeating raid bosses, I believe that the designers have eased-up on their mathematical requirements for the possible/probable/certainty measurement system, but it is up to individuals to decide if this is a bad thing or not. If you are one of the world-first gods-amongst-men who do progression fights wearing unenchanted whites, the game is probably disappointing. If you are an average skill player or even a bad player at this type of game (yes, they exist, and there is no stigma to being bad at the game, but other players in this social game are not always patient and respectful) you may think that some of these encounters are suitable for your skill level, or perhaps even a little challenging. There is no shame in being bad at something, World of Warcraft included, but there is a prevailing attitude in the player community (and, yes, I have this attitude when I am playing as well, so I am no saint or innocent) which is, “don’t be new on my time.” People want to play with people of similar skill level against challenges that are commensurate to their skill level. If the player skills are mismatched or the challenges are mismatched, then “fun” is harder to achieve or not achieved at all. It is a very difficult job for designers to manage this kind of difficulty in a game as dynamic as World of Warcraft, and, on the whole, I believe they have done a fantastic job for a very, very long time which is an amazing accomplishment. Have they been perfect? Hell no, but they’ve done a solid job.

            Yes, I did just complain on this blog not even a week ago that some things are disproportionately easy compared to other things or disappointing or unchallenging, so saying all this may seem hypocritical or contradictory, but, as I said, it is about the challenge you seek out. If I seek out a “break-my-face” encounter, that is what I want to get, and I’m going to be mad and have no fun if that’s not what I get. If I seek a marshmallow lol-fest and something is harder than I want it to be, I’m going to be mad and have no fun. Do people play Solitaire looking to wipe? Do people play Tic-Tac-Toe hoping to be world-first? There are grandmasters of chess and people who don’t yet know the rules of the game. I believe challenge is as much a responsibility of the player as it is of the game designer. People need to know what they want, know what their limits are, and respect their limits. So much talk has been about how easy this game has become, but there are people who have no business clearing hard mode content. They wouldn’t put Call of Duty on the maximum difficulty setting their first time booting it up and expect to do well. And, if they do, onlookers do not think Call of Duty needs to be nerfed, they think the player needs to understand, accept, and respect their own limitations and either reconcile that they cannot succeed at their task, or that it requires time and practice to develop skill and to improve to be ready for increased challenges. I started out really, REALLY bad at this game, now I’m complaining that hard modes are not challenging me enough. People grow and seek new challenges. Challenge is not the problem, finding the right one for you to conquer is. For me, the “challenge” is having fun. If I have to dismantle a game’s systems by cheating or modding to do it, then so be it. The game designer did not fail in creating their mechanic or difficulty curve if I’m not interested in it, they didn’t make it for me, they made it for those who would be interested. That is the very essence of diversity. I am not a fan of first person shooters as a game system, but I will play them and enjoy them on occasions. I play on the marshmallow difficulty in those games because I know I can’t headshot someone from 100 miles away with a knife while upside down and moving at max speed like some people online seem to be able to. I don’t consider the easier challenges in WoW to be a failure of designers, because reg-mode dungeons aren’t meant for someone of my skill and goals, they are meant for others. What I CAN blame on designers is a lack of content aimed at someone of my skill and goals; which is actually what this whole complaint is really about at its heart…

            Since Perculia’s post dealt strongly with the necessity of failure, my discussion of the malleability and subjectivity of challenges may seem like I am circumventing my own ability to fail and am cheating myself of the opportunity to grow and improve by overcoming challenges by rewriting the rules to better suit me. There may be something to this, but at the same time, failure is also subjective. Thomas Edison failed many times before inventing the light bulb, but he is reputed to have spoken of it as; “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.” I have certainly found many ways to “not kill a raid boss,” but how many ways did I find “how to not have fun.” Well, every time there is something that I don’t find fun, is that not a failure and a success at the same time? Every time I realize I’d have more fun playing this game if I wasn’t punished for failing at a particular mechanic, it was both a success and a failure. I fail at moving out of the path of a bullet shot at me; rather than chose to practice moving, I chose to make the bullet irrelevant. I have failed at using an opportunity to improve myself and overcome a challenge set before my by an arbitrary game system. I can no longer be hurt, I can do many more things previously inaccessible to me, I am having fun. I have succeeded in having fun, but is that success also a failure? I guess it depends who you ask. I say no; I want to have fun. I don’t care if my tombstone says “He went 92-1 in Warsong Gulch and had a 3200 arena rating,” I want it to say “I had fun.” In real life there aren’t any ways to cheat, you have to work hard. If I’m playing a video game, do I want it to mimic my real life experience to “practice” for real life, or do I want escapism where I can do whatever I want because I am denied that choice in real life? Some people want the former, some people want the latter, and some people want both but it depends on their mood. Everyone has fun in their own way. Everyone has their own ideas about what challenges are acceptable and rewarding. It is a decision we each have to make. I’ve made mine, and I’m happy with it.

            With 4.3 rapidly approaching and Transmogrification already available on the Public Test Realm, I thought I would talk a little bit (ok, A LOT) about my thought process in deciding how I choose my gear sets and how I complete these outfits with accessories and flair. My purpose here is not to make anyone’s decisions for them or to influence people in any way, merely to illustrate my thought process as I gear-up (pardon the pun) for my own personal vanity-fest in 4.3 When I look for gear sets to build, there isn’t much to it beyond “does it look cool” and “how does my race/gender look in it.” Fortunately, I’m a female blood elf so there really isn’t much that doesn’t look good on me. My biggest complaint is that I’m small, so I lose some of the detail in breastplates and shoulder pieces. Some items that look amazing on big-shoulder races like male Orcs and Tauren just don’t look as impressive or detailed on my smaller shoulders. It doesn’t mean they look bad, just less impressive or eye-catching. When it comes to accessorizing my sets though, there are three things that I look for and consider in order to determine if they’ll complete the grand-unification effect of the set or ruin it;

1) color: This is bar-none, the most important criteria for me. Does the color of the item match the gear set; and not just “kind of” match, the coloring needs to be fairly exact. If something is blue, I need a blue that will match. It can’t be too light a blue or too dark a blue, and shading can be very difficult to match (blues especially in World of Warcraft for some reason) because there can be so many variations of hue and tone with today’s modern graphics. Most sets are also not single-color even though they usually have a primary eye-catcher, the highlights and undertones are equally valuable and I look for things that share these highlights and undertones. A spot-on blue weapon with yellow highlights on a weapon can’t be a match if the gear doesn’t support the eye-catching yellow of the weapon. Everything needs to be in harmony and alignment. The colors of the weapon need to compliment the colors of the armor, not just in shade, but in concert with each other. Yes, I understand there is sometimes value to contrasting rather than complimenting colors, but 99% of the time I’m not satisfied unless the items compliment each other with parity rather than contrast to each other, even if the contrast works.

2) Visual Style: this is sort of important, but not nearly as important as color. This part could best be described as “does it look cool.” There are many, many things I think look cool in this game, but I can’t necessarily find a gearset they go well with; some items are just too unique. There really isn’t anything remotely like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, but it sure as hell is distinctive and everyone wants one because it is legendary, but it doesn’t match my Tier-1 Lawbringer set by any stretch of the imagination. So, while I love me some awesome items, and will collect them just fine, I can’t necessarily incorperate them into any “sets” I’m building as complimentary accessories. But, it is at the same time true that even if something matches perfectly in color, it has to have a certain level of visual interest to it or I won’t use it. So many vanilla weapons, especially non-dungeon gear, is very plain, very “real-world” looking and it’s just not exciting to want to use to spice up or accentuate a gear set you’ve invested yourself into.

3) Visual design suitability to the gear: That’s a fancy way of saying don’t use a smooth round shield with big spikey armor, it just doesn’t look right. There are some really spikey shields out there, or, at least shields with alot of edges. The Red Dragonscale Protector, Elementium Reinforced Bulwark, Blessed Qiraji Bulwark, Lost Pavise of the Blue Flight, and countless others that all have an extremely unique look, and I can’t always find something to do with them. Sometimes there is just nothing I can find with both complimentary colors and design philosophy to pair a shield with. And then sometimes there are several shields that can go with the same set well. This criteria really is just about if the items “look right together” in a design sense. There is certainly room for the visual irony of matching the Bulwark of Azzinoth with a plate bikini, or Onslaught Armor with a wooden barrel top; but I don’t play my sets out along those lines personally. There is a reason people pair the Bulwark of Azzinoth with the warrior Tier-6 Onslaught armor, it’s because they look similar visually; very large, very sturdy, very spikey.

It is a somewhat difficult thing to explain in words, so the best thing to do is probably to look closely at the differences between the colors and characteristics of three shields and use them as an example of how I evaluate and match items; the (iLvl264) Icecrown Glacial Wall, the Barricade of Eternity, and The Skull of Ruin. Each of these shields are “blue,” but each is a different shade of blue, each has a different accentuating color, and each has a different “character,” i.e. what it makes you think of when you look at it; what impression it gives off. This last part is obviously subjective and depends on individual taste to some extent, whether you like the character of a certain shield more than another, but no one can argue the obvious visual differences between the 3 shields. The Skull of Ruin and Barricade of Eternity don’t look like they would hang out with the same friends or go to the same movies.
	The Icecrown Glacial Wall is a very dark, muted blue; almost washed-out and dull in it’s color. The silver/grey metallic outline gives it a nice similar-tone complimentary color which is reinforced with the spines that protrude from the center to the edges. The darker-blue skull in the center is the largest source of contrast, feeding the red/orange/yellow streak that occupies the center of the shield. It is this center that truely prevents it from aligning with a completely muted, rather color-less gearset the way something like the Bulwark of Azzinoth could (like this for instance).

The Barricade of Eternity is a very striking collection of blues, both dark and light. The electric-blue base color of the shield is highlighted with the neon-blue iconography and yellow dimaond in the center. It has just enough color variation to prevent it from being too monotone and uninteresting, and all the colors work well together which creates a unified look rather than a schizophrenic one.

The Skull of Ruin is a combination of an icy, powder/sky blue with brown and white accenting colors. This is another shield I’ve had difficultly matching to because its secondary colors are so prominant and unusual. The blue of the Skull’s eyes is striking and the brown of the horns and underlying frame of the shield is impossible to ignore, creating a strong contrast within the item. If mages could use shields, it would actually compliment the Mage Tier-5 “Aldor Regalia” set fairly well, but I haven’t found any plate yet.

            Unfortunately the only one of those shields I’ve been satisfied incorporating into a gear set is the Icecrown Glacial Wall which I paired with the Heroic Sanctified Lightsworn armor. The Barricade of Eternity has a blue that isn’t shared by any plate armor that I’ve been able to find, and the yellow further isolates it from potential compatable sets. There ARE a few blue plate sets, but the hues are just too different for me to reconcile pairing the items thus far. The closest I’ve been able to find is the lv58 world-drop BoE greens “Vanguard” set which has hilarious irony potential pairing a metal bikini with the large shield, but the color differences between both the blues and the yellows is too noticeable. It also is further alienated from that armor set if your character is male because the breastplate is no longer a bikini and now has a big red jewel in the center of it. The Skull of Ruin is just too-light a blue to find anything in plate it seems. I have had a reasonably successful time pairing it with the Slayer of the Lifeless and combining both of those with the Paladin Tier-1 Lawbringer set. The bright yellow and the pale blue are able to compliment and contrast each other in a way that makes it kind of work for me. Without the sword’s companion presence to the shield, I’m not sure it will ever be able to work with any set of plate armor for me.

            I realize all of this could come across as rather pretentious, especially because until I actually sat down to write this, I never reallized how in-depth and descriptive I could be about this. Finding something interesteing or attractive doesn’t really have much thought put into it; it’s either “gotta have it,” “only sort-of interested,” or “do not want!’ That decision is basically made split-second and is never really analyzed beyond its initial conclusion unless someone has a purpose to do so. I definitely do not think all these things through while I watch the timer-bar decrease when the loot widow pops up. But in order to explain why, both to myself and to others, its interesting to see just how much I can elaborate about what draws me to one thing versus another thing.

            I’m going to put together a series of posts talking about several of the sets I’ve gathered and accessorized during my time in the game and maybe give some people some interesting ideas they may not have considered if they’re going to assemble those sets themselves.

10: Not enough new and interesting achievements. The content on the whole has been massively sparse, but there was even a lack of new “busy-work” added to the game. No new Achievement for 100+ mounts. Pets got a 125 and 150, but mounts are still stuck at 100. I have 130 mounts, why can’t I have 10 more nerd points and another free mount Blizzard? Why do you love pets more? Wrath introduced achievements and may have had 2 previous expansions with which to draw from, but by the end of Wrath people could have around 12,000 achievement points, and nearing the end of Cataclysm, people haven’t broken 15,000 yet. One could argue 4000 achievement points per expansion would seem about average, but Wrath really held the bulk of those 12k, and Vanilla and Burning Crusade had around 2000 or less each.
9: Everything was BoP. Yes, in 4.3 chaos orbs are becoming un-soulbound, but that doesn’t stop Fish Feasts (excuse me “Seafood Magnifique”), Guild Cauldrons, Dreamcloth, etc. I know it was done to give crafters a more meaningful economic advantage and to reward guild achievements, but it just felt like a massive quality of life decrease. It takes 6 stacks of fish to make one Fish Feast, if I could have stored Fish Feasts in my guild bank instead of 6 stacks of mats, that would have saved so much damn space.
8: Archeology. It had such an interesting premise and sounded like it could have been a good idea, but the “hot/cold” mini-game was clunky, unsatisfying, and crushingly unfulfilling when it came to rares. The worst part about it was that it had no continuity, no flow. When you herb or mine you can get in the zone, you can follow your route on autopilot for 8 hours and keep being excited when you find new nodes to swoop down on. Archeology was always “fuck I’m in Tanaris and my next dig is in Ashenvale…” It destroyed all flow and broke all immersion. Some dig sites were far too big to find artifacts in a satisfyingly short amount of time. I got my 20 rares achievement and never dug in the dirt again. No Fossil tanking shield, no Zinrok, ONE Tol’vir rare… disappointing and a very painful grind. They did make many improvements to it after launch, but they didn’t do enough to save it.
7: Merging the lockouts of previous tiers of content. It was perfectly fine to me to have them merge Tier-11 raids into a 10 or a 25man only because they shared the exact same gear, but old content does not. Especially now when they are about to unveil transmogrification there is more reason than ever to run old content for vanity gear if that is something you are interested in. It’s not bad enough you have to wait a week between lockouts, but now that time is doubled if you want gear from both instance sizes.
6: Artificially trying to extend content. Artificial Valor Point caps? Lowering further that Valor cap? Wait, what? High rated pvpers got to raise their Conquest cap? Why!? Epic gems only from bags from boss drops so the PLAN is for it to take 4 months for someone to get 22 epic red gems to upgrade all their sockets? How is that supposed to be fun for people? I understand they don’t want to copy/paste the Titanium-prospect into Pyrium-prospect, but while it may be uncreative, at least it fulfills the needs of the playerbase without jerking them around.
5: Firelands. It was just too few bosses, no two ways about it. On top of that it got delayed because of the playerbase’s inability to conquer the mechanic-heavy and tightly-tuned encounters in Tier-11 which caused expectations for it to be higher because it was allowed a longer development and refinement cycle which apparently wasn’t used, it just sat there till “we were ready for it.” The content got stale too quickly. The fights were not so much difficult as it was sitting enough of your members and leaning on the skill of too few in order to stack the dps necessary to down certain fights on heroic. There were too many fights where you had to sit healers and tanks to bring in more DPS. I like to describe it as “revenge of the dungeon finder;” since DPS have really long queues, we’ll just give them all the raid spots to make up for it, SUCK IT TANKS, NO RAIDS FOR YOU, GO QUEUE FOR DUNGEONS! I want a tier of content with multiple 3-tank fight after this content which had far too many 1-tank fights, especially considering how few bosses those fights were spread among. Almost fully 50% of this content patch (not counting BH) required only 1 tank to raid it… inexcusable, and not healthy for the sustainability of the 3-role system. Make no mistake, the Firelands was a passable instance, certainly not as bad as Trial of the Crusader, but it was nowhere near what I was hoping it would be.
4: Final raid tier being unveiled too quickly. 4.3 will have the Deathwing raid, that means we will have had 3 tiers of raiding content this expansion compared to 4 from last expansion. This in and of itself isn’t so bad, but there are so few raid bosses in Cataclysm compared to the number that were in Wrath. When 5-boss raids came out in Burning Crusade there were multiple raid instances to keep the total number of bosses per tier high, but things just keep feeling smaller and smaller as this expansion wears on.
3: Not doing nearly enough with the Lore. I’m not really a big lore nerd, but it is something I am able to appreciate; and even if someone doesn’t enjoy Warcraft lore, everyone enjoys a good story, and I feel we were let down in that department. Depending on who you talk to, what websites you read, and who has what insider information, WoW’s story, even in Wrath, was supposed to be so much better than it was ever allowed to be because they made the decision (and rightly so from a business standpoint I guess) to keep the game as PG and mass-marketable as possible so we never got to hear about Alextraza’s long period of being raped inside Grim Batol leading to the Twilight Dragonflight, never got to see the storyline of Uldum go anywhere, never got to truly fear Deathwing as an adversary, and so many other dead-end plots that were left to die like a canceled TV show that was just getting good. Things could have been (and were supposed to be) so much more sweeping and epic and expansive and compelling than it turned out. I have heard that several designers and writers resigned in disgust over the course of the last 6 years, but that’s only hearsay. All I know for sure is that I am underwhelmed by the atmosphere of Cataclysm, only Launch day was compelling to see the world change.
2: Tier-12 Firelands heroics are now easier than Tier-11 heroics after the nerfs. Tier-12 heroics were very largely DPS-driven and not mechanic driven. The fights boiled down to “lets keep sitting tanks and healers and replacing them with DPS until we can beat the enrage timer.” I mean, come on, people are bringing THREE healers to Heroic Ragnaros? Sure lets just sit half our healing corps for the ULTIMATE HARD MODE OF THE CONTENT PATCH, I’m sure they didn’t want to see the fight anyway or participate in the guild-first kill. There were THREE one-tank fights in 10man Firelands while only being one in 25man. Tier-11 heroic modes were limiting by strong DPS for fights like Heroic Cho’gall sure, but they were incredibly mechanic-intensive. Heroic Omnitron Defense System, Heroic Cho’Gall, Heroic Valiona and Theralion, and Heroic Ascendant Council all had more mechanics individually than multiple heroic Firelands encounters combined. This is incredibly distressing to have such an under-designed tier of content. 7 bosses. 7 simplistic bosses. 7 bosses who are, on heroic, now not as hard as many of the bosses who preceded them because T12 got nerfed and it was just a DPS-race tier that is now a slow jog. T11 is still there, un-nerfed, and you can’t out-gear many fights because of the tightly tuned mechanics.
1: I CAN’T FUCKING FLY IN SILVERMOON!!! For the last 2 months of Wrath all I could think about was how I was going to perch atop the spires of Silvermoon City on my Ironbound Protodrake and quote Batman voice-overs about protecting my city. So, in the paraphrased words Eric Cartman, Blizzard, I’d appreciate it if, next time, you took me out to dinner and a movie before you FUCK ME!

Honorable Mention 1: Rogue-only legendary. Yeah, I’m a hater. I don’t even care that I can’t use it, I just can’t stand it’s limited to ONE class only. Every other legendary that I know about was minimum 3 classes. Rogues could roll on Thoridal, let hunters have these daggers.
Honorable Mention 2: Retribution mechanics changes. It’s just not any fun Bliz. It is too clunky, too random; you wanted it to be about skill but it’s just about how many procs you get honestly… It is competitive on the meters, and that’s great, but it’s not any fun…
Honorable Mention 3: Minor quality of life changes. Why can’t I cleanse magic debuffs anymore! How am I supposed to do bad healers’ jobs for them so we don’t wipe!? Why did you take away Divine Intervention!? Word of Glory’s cooldown. Yeah, I know it had to happen, but still, awww man! Why can a Death Knight solo Yogg, Lich King, or TWO HEROIC 5MAN BOSSES AT THE SAME TIME, and I can’t solo Patchwerk? I miss judgment of Light+Seal of Light. The passenger flying mount wasn’t as cool as it should have been, just saying. Garrosh still sucks, just saying. No new Rare-hunting achievement for Cataclysm, how come?

Final Honorable Mention: Tol Barad. If it was 4 months ago, this one would be #1, but I just stopped caring about it. It was horribly imbalanced and I won almost 100 consecutive games in less than a month. It was unbalanced, uninteresting, and the 1:1 ratio was a fucking disaster that only accomplished leaving hundreds of people waiting on the other side of the bridge wondering why they couldn’t have fun too. At least you let us run across the bridge as the battle ended to cheese getting victory and honor for awhile. We had some awesome stampede parties on my server. That reward items did not get upgraded in content patches like Wintergrasp’s did only served to hurry the zone into an early grave once people got the stuff they needed from it very early on in the expansion. I don’t miss it, I’m glad I never have to go back, but I wish you had done better with it so I wouldn’t feel this way.

            This was pretty of negative so I’ll try to write a “10 good things” soon.

            There is a new building in Orgrimmar, right inside the drag, entering from the Valley of Strength, inside are the Arcane Reforger (now an Ethereal), Void Storage, and the Transmogrification guy. Reforging has a new interface which was nice, it is now radial buttons (like a multiple choice test format) and you fill in the buttons of the stats you want swapped, rather than the old style drop-down menu. Void storage offers 80 new slots of storage for Soulbound, non-Unique, non-stackable items. You cannot put in items with a “Unique” designation, you can, however, put in “Unique-Equipped” items. So, sadly, some items I would have love to have stored in there must remain in my bank, but as of this writing I have 41 items in there including old trinkets, archeology items, tabards, and some other miscellaneous stuff. You can deposit 9 items at a time, simply open void storage, open your bags, and right-click on the item in your bags and it will automatically be placed into the deposit window. The withdraw window works the same way, also with 9 slots for quick movement. Including the 1000g purchase fee, I spent roughly 3000g putting stuff in void storage, which is cheaper (and much bigger) than what a 26-slot dreamcloth bag would cost me on my server. Anyway, on to the transmogrification discussion…

            There are 11 slots available to be transmogrified of the 19 on your actual character window. To transmogrify an item simply right-click on the item in your inventory and it will appear on your character’s Dressing Room image in the transmogrify window. The price of transmogrification depends on the items you wear as its vendor price is used to change its appearance, just as it is with reforging. So if you want to transmogrify that 200g Avengers of Hyjal honored rep belt, it’s going to cost you 28g 58s. If an item has no sell price like my tier-8 gear, 10g is the blanket bill per item. Based on the gear I was wearing when I transmogrified it, my bill was 341g 14s 98c. A little bit pricy, but again, depending on how picky you are, you won’t have to spend this money money than once or twice. I costs nothing to un-transmog your gear, just like reforging, simply left-click on the item inside the transmogrify window and it will be changed to a yellow arrow icon meaning it will be reverted. Your gear will also return to its original appearance in the Dressing Room view of the transmogrify window.

            There are a few restrictions to this process; most of which most people are probably fairly familiar with if they’ve seen some of the update notes, but I’ll repeat some of them here for completeness sake (this will not be an exhaustive list, only the restrictions that really apply to my own personal situation as a player, if you want sub-lv85 restrictions, I can’t help) along with my own observations and comments:

1: You can only transmogrify within armor types; cloth-to-cloth, plate-to-plate, mail-to-mail, etc. You CANNOT change mail to cloth, or plate to leather, etc. Sadly I will never be able to tank a raid boss while wearing Vestment of the Shifting Sands without actually putting that on… weep for my crushed dreams.
2: You can only transmogrify items which are Soulbound. White-quality and Grey-quality items are not soulbound (so you cannot change your lv10 white sword to look like a lv10 Green-quality sword)
3: You cannot use the appearance of items which have no stats. You cannot turn your firelands gear into lv7 vendor-whites. So much for taking down Heroic Ragnaros in the Grunt’s Plate Armor set…
4: You can only transmogrify items which share the same slot designation. This is something that will likely crush many hopes for people once 4.3 goes live. 1hand maces can only be turned into other 1h maces. One-Hand swords CANNOT be turned into One-Hand axes, Main-hand Maces CANNOT be turned into main-hand daggers. Off-Hand Daggers CANNOT be turned into Off-Hand fist weapons, etc etc. But the biggest irritant to me personally was that One-Hand classification swords that I use in my main-hand (since, as a Paladin, I cannot use off-hand weapons) CANNOT be changed with Main-Hand designation weapons. My BiS Heroic Mandible of Beth’tilac is one-hand classification, so I can’t use most of my saved up main-hand designation weapons to change it. Very, very disappointing… You CAN, however, turn a Main-Hand designation weapon into a One-Hand weapon. The reason being One-Handed weapons can always be used in the slot that Main-Hand occupies, but Main-Hand cannot always be used in the same slot as a One-Hand designation because of the whole “off-hand” thing. Curse you rogues, death knights, warriors, and shamans, ruining all my fun… especially with Warglaives…
5: Weapons will transmogrify with their original enchants. If your weapon has Landslide on it and you change it to something, that something will look as if it has Landslide on it. The only exception to this rule is if the weapon has a built-in graphical effect which supersedes enchants. There are more items like this than you might think, so make sure you are checking the items out with Atlasloot or see them in some in-game fashion through screenshots or something to be sure things will look how you want them to. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great because it allows you to see weapons with enchants on them that they don’t meet the item-level requirement. Seeing Power Torrent on a iLvl 81 weapon from Blackwing Lair is pretty neat. At the same time, some of these modern enchants like Power Torrent, Landslide, and Windwalk can be overpowering to weapons preventing you from really seeing them well, and, sometimes, even damaging their ability to suit your set’s needs. Windwalk actually has a slight purple twinge to it and if you try and use that on a weapon that purple looks awkward on, there is no getting around it. Meanwhile anyone who has used power torrent knows that something that looks awesome with its purple effect does not necessarily look equally awesome when the red effect takes over.
6: To transmogrify, the item MUST BE IN YOUR BAGS AT THE TIME OF TRANSMOG PURCHASE. You cannot transmogrify from void storage, your bank, a vendor window, or atlasloot. If something is in your bank or void storage that you want to use the image of, you need to take it out and have it in your bags. Once you have finished changing the item you can put them wherever you want.

            For Additional Transmogrification restrictions and allowances you can check out Disenchanting Azeroth who have done some exhaustive testing.

            For those people who haven’t been saving sweet-looking gear since they first rolled their character, there are a few sneaky shortcuts you may be able to use depending on your class and what gear you are looking to use. I’m a Blood Elf Paladin, so it’s no surprise that my hair is extremely important to me, so I don’t have my helm shown most of the time. I also like my figure that I exercise constantly to maintain, so I don’t show my cloak either because it hides my curves from the back. So if you’re like me, you can save a little bit of money by not bothering to transmogrify these slots on your items. Depending on what gear you are using, you can often avoid changing your bracers and your boots as well. Many of the Paladin tiers use dresses and you can only ever see the tips of your boots and the ones you have may look close enough to earn you a pass, and gloves have become so large they come with their own bracer graphic completely covering the bracer graphics. If you really like tabards, or have one that matches especially well (for example the Argent Crusader tabard with the Wrathful Gladiator Paladin set) you can potentially get away with not changing your chest piece either depending on the color of your arms and how much your shoulders and gloves cover.

            I’ve spent a great deal of time accumulating vanity gear, and not just old tier sets, but everything. Unfortunately transmogrify will only allow me to go plate-to-plate so I can’t tank in Priest-tier lookalike, but I can still wear that kind of gear on my own time. As an enthusiastic collector of things that make me look and feel pretty, I have also had to learn the art of accessorizing. It wasn’t enough just to get all 8 pieces of Tier-2, I had to get a matching shield and weapon. I thought about going for trinkets and rings and other non-visible items, but because they’d only be seen by people who inspected you, and not just passers-by, I elected to forgo the majority of those. Sure, I might have known I had them, but, really, isn’t the point of all of this to look amazing while kicking butt? I have a hard enough time finding bank space without saving any of it for things no one else will be able to see. So I’m going to provide a little insight into my accessorizing process and how I find ways to enhance and “complete” some of my sets. Like I said, I have a lot of sets, and while my shield collection and weapon collection certainly is not as large as some, I do have a sizable collection to draw from, so this will likely take multiple posts to really draw out fully.

            I remember back in the day when Paladins didn’t stack Mastery like they do now, they instead stacked Defense to reach the uncrittable point; then after that, it was stamina. I remember what it was like tanking before I learned how amazing and overpowered Righteous Defense was, and how after I got used to it I could barely stand to tank on my warrior or death knight because of it. I remember almost never using defensive cooldowns at all because my healers always managed somehow, so I reasoned I could save them in case I needed them in the future (and I wouldn’t use them then either). It was a long, long time before I learned to use my utility as a paladin; cleansing and using “Hand of…” spells. Even on the very last day of Wrath before 4.01 came out, I still didn’t know how to do the 969 rotation, even though I understood it intellectually, I was just a button-mash tank who pressed whatever was off cooldown. I remember taking a lot of criticisms about my play personally.

            I remember the days when I was afraid of bosses like Loken in the Halls of Lightning because avoiding Lightning Nova was hard for me; being afraid of Jedoga Shadowseeker and Herald Volazj in Old Kingdom because I wasn’t good at the insanity phase and my pick up groups couldn’t kill the adds before Jedoga absorbed them meaning I was about to get smashed in the face. I remember wiping to Slad’ran in Gundrak because the first few times I did it my groups DPS wasn’t high enough to burn him and people would never free the wrapped targets. I remember wiping because we hit Eck’s berserk timer, the only 5man boss to have one. I didn’t understand it was because we were bad, not because these things were “hard.”

            I remember how proud of myself I was when I successfully led the drake-flying of my guild’s first Malygos kill. I remember the moment I realized that all we needed to do was to move to one side as a group when he shot out his spark ability and didn’t understand why anyone else wasn’t putting 2 and 2 together. I remember what it took for me to work up the courage to put myself forward in vent saying “I know what we have to do. Follow me, I’ll be responsible for our success.” I remember how happy everyone was when he died. I remember how no one was mad when, the attempt right before, the previous brave soul had flown us directly into his mouth and stopped there as we wiped in 10 seconds.

            I remember being so disappointed when I learned that Divine Protection was not the same as Divine Shield when I jumped from high places, and that I wouldn’t get Divine Shield until level 60. I remember seeing my Hammer of the Righteous bounce to three targets with its old animation. I kind of miss that compared to it’s current blood boil-lookalike spell effect. I remember how pleased I was when patch 3.0 came out and I didn’t have to refresh seals every judgment. I remember having to level weapon skills to not miss all the time. I remember when I first tried to use terrain to my advantage when fighting monsters in the world and having them evade and being ticked off about not having my cleverness rewarded. I remember How cool it was seeing level-capped players in awesome gear and wanting so badly to be one of them some day. Oh, the innocence of youth, it is heartbreaking as the old, jaded curmudgeon I am now. I’ve definitely wished on more than one occasion that I could somehow mentally revert to that state of being. Ignorance was a sort of bliss back in those days, and being bad again, just for a little while, wouldn’t be so horrible, would it?

            A lot has changed since those days, and it is with no small amount of shame that I remember some of these things. Some of these growing pains, time has aged into fond memories, but most of them still make me cringe. I was a noob in every sense of the word. I started out as casual as casual gets in terms of my understanding of the game. The more I played and the more I got experience, I learned and grew like all people do, but the plateaus are really what stand out in my memory. I remember right before Patch 3.2 deciding that I was going to become someone who studied the game, who did offline research, who learned their class and their role and the encounters and the tips. I would read forums and blogs, watch videos and read strategies. I took an ownership of myself, my play, my role, my raid, and my guild. Our success mattered to me more that just what gear I could get from what boss to improve myself; I would chose a “put the raid first” attitude. I helped the officers in my guild, I grinded 2500 Emblems of Heroism before they all got turned into Ulduar-level emblems with the patch so I could get the achievement.

            I remember when I watched my friend leave our guild for a place with better players where he felt he’d have a better gameplay experience. I remember when I first became a “main tank” because our old one left the game to focus on spending time with his family. I remember when I first felt the need to leave and join my friend, to see what it was like in a place with stronger players, and to understand the skill strata of a 12-million user playerbase. I remember choosing friendship over progression and coming back, and I remember when I reached the point when I couldn’t do it anymore and left again. I remember the horrors of being in a guild where I was a burden to them because I was unable to play up to my potential because of the raid environment, and playing poorly only made things worse and my play continued to deteriorate. I remember having so many bad feelings ingrained in raiding because of this that I had to stop playing the game entirely for months before I could begin to heal and play with friends again. I remember reading the blogs and forum posts of all these giants of the paladin class talking encounter and gearing strategy and wanting to be like them; wanting to see what they saw, think what they though, understand what they did. I still do. And I still grow. Growing never stops if you’re smart enough to keeping trying and not settle for where you are.

            In Cataclysm, I’ve taken another step on the road of improvement. I have finally managed to do what I have known I should have done for a long time but was either too lazy or still to uneducated to truly grasp; to cater my gear towards the encounter, not just per tier of content. I’m still not quite so hardcore that I re-gem and reforge per encounter, but I do evaluate my gear for every boss fight, progression or farm. In the past I had always found a generic “Best in Slot” list for tanking; an “all-around” set that I would acquire and then never take off or change. Now I enjoy the mental puzzle of gear optimizing per encounter. I’ve spent more time gear theorycrafting just for Firelands than I probably did throughout all of Wrath. I have several pieces of gear for every slot and I’m constantly playing with them to try and squeeze out that extra % towards “optimal.” Last night we killed Ragnaros on normal to close out our week and I put on so many DPS pieces to hit 8% hit and 42 expertise and stacking strength that I was down at something like 78% combat table coverage. I didn’t look at my CTC stats, but I definitely noticed myself taking much more damage than normal, and I’m sure my healers noticed it too. If only our warlock on attempting to complete his legendary staff quest hadn’t carelessly gotten himself killed while I was sustaining 18k DPS forcing us to wipe because he was no longer able to complete it, I could have ranked in the top50 of Protection Paladin DPS in the world on 25m normal (as it was I had to settle for top120). Meloree would probably approve. Oh well, there is always next week, and there are so many more things for me to improve on…

            I think it really was an issue of time. I had all the time in the world, and I didn’t want to sit around writing about the World of Warcraft when I could just log on. I didn’t feel a need to chronicle things or analyze them when I could just talk to people in-game or on vent. Now, almost a year since my last entry, I still have all the time in the world, I still recognize that I’m not in any position to give advice on the game or about my class, and I was perfectly content, until tonight, to let this place go on gathering dust along with my consecrate button. But, thanks to whatever it was that made me open up the list of blogs I used to read, I’ve seen that The Renaissance Man has continued to update his blog and has sparked something in me to create again. Whether this spark will live to enliven some creativity, or be squashed like the adds on post-nerf Al’Akir, only the future will reveal.

            What caught my eye was his series about 15 Days Through My Interface, an adaptation of a blogging challenge he picked up from Saz over at their blog World of Saz (which is itself an adaptation of Saga’s “20 Days of…” but now I’m just citing sources to appear well-read.) Saga began the challenge by saying;

“I read blogs for the person writing, rather than for the information (though of course information is nice too). But for example, I read several druid blogs despite the fact that I don’t play a druid – I just really enjoy the writing and the person behind the blog.”

            And it was really Renaissance Man’s style in writing his challenges that caught my eye. While claiming he is not big into the role-playing aspect of World of Warcraft, he certainly shows a deft and evocative hand. He described an experience he had while leveling up during the early days of pre-wrath (which I did myself), and some of the consequences of the Zombie invasion to “younger” players (read “low-levels,” but perhaps, like he and myself, also players new to the game). He mentions how some level-capped players guarded the Stormwind Cathedral to be a safe-haven in the city for people looking to hide out from the griefers and the mishaps of that event. Now, a scarred veteran of countless adventures, he returned to that place of unintentional emotional investment where he “holds his turn at the guard, in the event that something tries to violate the sanctity of the city again.”

            But what really hit me right between the eyes (and maybe a little bit in the pit of my stomach) was his post reflecting on the subject of “Screen shot representing who you are.” The Renaissance Man is a raider, and his picture of his group posing triumphantly over the vanquished Lich King was annotated with;

“He has traded blows with a 13 Dragons, half a dozen Eredar Lords (and ladies) of the Burning Legion, four titanic watchers, a trio of liches, and 2 certified gods. He has always done so willingly, but he has never done so alone.”

            If one is in the right frame of mind to appreciate it, that is one heck of an epic send-off line. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for more than 3 years. The time has gone by so quickly somehow despite the hundreds of hours of painful grinding I’ve done. If I had to describe my current feelings about my WoW experience it would be “impatience” and the never-ending truth that I am at once blessed and cursed that it is (for many things I desire from it) a cooperative game. My love of vanity gear has finally been embraced officially by Blizzard and so many are getting into the swing of things, but not enough. There are never enough people who want to run old raids with me, even on one of the most populated realms in the game; and, as powerful as I am, I can’t solo Ulduar 25 or Black Temple or Nax25. I am at the mercy of other people’s cooperation or, in my case, people’s lack-thereof.

            From my earliest beginnings, I have always thought of myself as alone in Azeroth. Almost instantly I was tired of questing with my father who rolled a new character to play with me. Almost all of my heroes and role models in my life could be called loners. The solitary knight on a quest to save the princess; the lone badass ninja of the videogames; the Lone Ranger and Batman had sidekicks, but ultimately they were one-men armies. Han Solo had an awesome sidekick, but no one ever wanted to be Chewbaka, when people had to settle for second place, they picked Luke. Even my heroes who were part of teams like The senior officers of the Enterprise D on Star Trek: TNG, I viewed as powerful individuals who were capable of great things on their own. And, of course, there is Optimus Prime of the Autobots (c’mon, no one will disagree that he was so much better than every other Autobot, do I even need to sing “The Touch” to all of you traumatized as children like me? “One shall stand, one shall fall…” ). Call it classic (and stereotypical) immature adolescant power fantasy, but I’ve never really grown out of the ideal of unrealistic self-reliance and agency.

            Through playing I’ve met people that I’ve become very fond of despite myself… and I have grown apart from them all. There have been people I considered friends… and they’ve moved on with their lives away from the game. My inability to do the same has caused a small amount of unjust resentment against them sadly, but I do know that it is in their best interests that they’ve done what they have, and it is not in my own best interest to stay, but for the moment I’m still a willing prisoner. There are people I’ve seen in-game who make me ashamed of my species, my gender, my nationality, my race, and my proclivities, and I am as much a part of them as I am apart from them. But “who” am I in WoW? I am a raider. I wish I was a one man army, but that’s not what this game is about. I have crushed some past content on my own. I’ve soloed classic Onyxia, the Fel Reaver, Doomwalker, the Storm Giant of Howling Fjord, and reg-difficulty Wrath dungeons at 80, and then heroic Wrath dungeons at 85. I will most certainly continue to try and solo things. But I am a raider. I love raiding; new raids, old raids, challenging raids, nerfed raids, loot or no loot, I want to kill things that feel like bosses, not just super-trash.

            I may consider myself alone, but it is an indisputable fact that my Paladin is not, and has not been for years. She has conquered every raid in the game, every dungeon in the game. At the time of this writing, 330 days have been played on her. She has died 5994 times, as soon as the new raid lockout opens on Tuesday, Heroic Ragnaros will push that number over 6000. Of those, 5055 have been in dungeons or raids. She has over 11,000 achievement points. She has three legendary weapons. She has 130 mounts and 100 pets. She is exalted with 53 factions. She has 45 titles. She has tanked, she has healed, she has done damage. She has been a leader. She has been a cog. She has been a burden. She has been a savior. But she has never been alone.

            When I marathoned to 85 on Cataclysm’s launch day, I had just transferred to a new server with a few of my raiding friends and we were going to start our new WoW-life together there. We were going to forge our own destiny. A few of us were in vent together for that launch-night leveling marathon. I might have been able to make it the 22 hours it took me to level to 85 by myself (and honestly, if we didn’t waste time in those 2 5-mans we did, I could have done it in 16-18), but I know I wouldn’t have been able to stay up for the next 40 without their help. I was energized, invigorated, motivated, and unstoppable… and I was talking to them in vent for every minute of it. Sure some of them nodded off and took their own breaks when they wanted to, but there was always someone there. When one would go to sleep, another would wake up and get back on, and for 3 days I leveled, quested, grinded, farmed, and tanked dungeons as fast and as non-stop as I possibly could. I was absolutely willing, and I was never alone.

I was going to blog about my race to 85, but then I spent 24 hours running on adrenaline. Hit it in just shy of 24 hours (server 13th, not bad). Would have been faster but I was dumb and ran Throne of the Tides and Blackrock Caverns hoping for some nice instance-XP, but it jut turned out to be a waste of 2 hours. Then I went to Vashj’ir first and wasted another hour on clunky 3-d movement and the inability to tell when I was going to pull something that looked far away. Once I went to Hyjal I finished the zone in an hour and was extremely disappointed by all the time I had wasted instead of just going to Hyjal first. I also died ALOT. I leveled Retribution because I thought it would be faster. It was fast enough I guess, with my 4-piece 264 tier and a heroic Brynn’troll which I didn’t replace until somewhere in Twilight Highlands I think. One or two monsters at a time was ok, but once I started getting 3+ it got hairy, and even with cooldowns and Word of Glory spamming myself, 4 or more usually meant death. I also didn’t read a lot of quests. There was one quest in Uldum where there were 6 guys guarding an item I had to click on and all I had to do was use an item in my inventory to distract them and get it, but instead I charged in and tried to kill them all with kiting and CC and luck three times, eating floor every time, because I only looked at the “where on the map do I go” indicators, and not reading how to do the quest. I killed so many 400k-elite quest mobs solo that I was supposed to weaken down to 100k with an inventory item that it’s not even funny…

Heroics… by now everyone has had something to say about them. I was in heroics before the end of the second day, and they were quite challenging in greens and without really understanding many mechanics. I wiped on Beauty trying to zerg her down before my CDs expired and the Core Hounds raped my faced so many times my healer got depressed. If only we had known you could just CC everything and laugh at how trivial it becomes. Granted, I was in a full guild group on vent with competent people, but we definitely had our struggles that first day. By the end of the week we were all in full 346 with a bunch of rep and crafted epics and halfway to our Glory of the Hero achievement. I love what they did to heroics. Blizzard has made it so that they are not a complete waste of my time to be in. Sure, now that I’m 11/12 in raids with 4-piece Tier 11 there’s nothing there for me from a gear or currency standpoint, but they really are like “mini-raids” now, so I still get to experience the feeling that BOSSES ARE BOSSES, and not just trash with triple the health because they want to be irritating. I think the heroics are a fantastic way to get ready for what people will have to do in raids so it can really prepare you if you let it. Yes, I absolutely do believe they might be just a little too hard for 50% of WoW players, especially because of all the bad habits Wrath instilled in heroic groups with the dungeon finder, and it doesn’t help when you get sent to Throne of Tides with a two Fury Warriors and an Unholy Deathknight and a Priest.

As a tank, I think I might have it easy though. I don’t really hear people complaining about healers. No one in gchat is ever like “this healer is terrible.” No, what they say are “this DPS doesn’t know how to CC” and they say “This Tank is terrible.” I hear ALOT of people complaining about bad tanks. Now, speaking for myself, I played in Burning Crusade for two and a half months. I was in the game just long enough before patch-3.0 that I got to see Paladins forced to refresh seals after judgments and 5-minute blessings. When patch 3.0 came out, I was ecstatic at all the positive changes I saw to my class. I wasn’t 70 until Wrath came out, I don’t think I was 80 until sometime in March, a good 4 months after people in Sunwell gear one-shot Kel’Thuzad on 25man. My earliest raiding memories are wiping on Gluth and Thaddius in 25man and not even being able to attempt instructor Razuvious and knowing all the tank drops worth anything in Nax were off the bosses behind him. I barely got to raid Ulduar at all because my guild wasn’t very good. Never got to kill Yogg until I transferred off the server. My first kill of Yogg-25 was a 3-lights attempt by a guild working on their first Val’anyr. I was fortunate enough to be able to get Tribute to Insanity 10man in ToC but my guild couldn’t kill faction champs on 25 until after the nerf, and even then, dps was bad so we often couldn’t kill Anub’arak on 25-normal. So I really didn’t start raiding at a high level until more than a year after I hit 80, when I transferred to a large-pop server and was in one of the first 1000 guilds to kill Lich King on 25man. I am, in the truest sense of the word, a player who started playing in Wrath. A “child of wrath,” but I wouldn’t consider myself a “Wrathbaby.” I never played in Vanilla and I never played in Burning Crusade, so the fact that I’m able to play as well as I do now in the reasonably challenging Cataclysm content is entirely about me being able to adapt and learn because I had a desire (and, perhaps, the time) to do so. So people complaining about being unable or unwilling to adapt to the Cataclysm content fills me with a profound sense of “then go home.” I just can’t muster the sympathy for them. HEROICS ARE NOT FOR CASUALS. They are meant for people who have farmed reg dungeons so much that they are trivial and the gear drops and rep rewards out of them are no longer viable ways to advance your character. They are not birthrights of dinging 85. If you wipe in heroics, either learn, adapt, improve, or go back to regs until you can no longer get anything out of them.

Last night we couldn’t raid because some of our members had unforseen circumstances, so some of us went to Icecrown Citadel to goof off. With my gear (no stamina trinkets) plus the 30% Icecrown raid buff, I had 192k raid buffed. Heroic LK’s infest fell off of me the moment it was applied because the initial hit doesn’t even dent me, nevermind get me below 90%. We put the instance on heroic and killed every boss in 3 minutes or less and got most of the achievements at the same time. Killing heroic Sindragosa before she gets the 4th Mystic Buffet cast out was at the same time satisfying (fuck you mechanic!!) and terrible because a fight that used to be mildly challenging has almost been reduced to a wrath-heroic boss difficulty level. Yes, people had to play a little bit well to avoid some of the mechanics throughout the instance, but it was still a joke. We then went to Ulduar because some people had never killed Algalon, and I’m not sure I can remember being more depressed recently. We killed him (on 10man) before his 2nd big-bang. I loved the Algalon fight in wrath. I loved getting Herald of the Titans, and seeing what this once mighty boss has been reduced to almost sent me to tears. Sadly (and thankfully, I suppose) we could not lolerskate over Lich King heroic because shadow traps still fling the people who don’t pay attention back to the non-heroic modes they belong in, and raid movement was sloppy so we never got past p2 after four or so attempts, but a lot of people had never seen the fight on heroic, so perhaps my expectations were too high for a mishmash group of people I trusted to raid and people I didn’t. I’ve heard stories of people in 10man stacking ranged dps and lusting during the p1-2 transition and pushing him into the p2-3 transition before he ever gets a Valk out. That’s gotta be kind of funny to see honestly. Perhaps, though, like Algalon, I will soon come to lament the ease of that HM encounter as well. Light of Dawn will probably take a long time to become trivial, and possibly even Alone in the Dark-25.

On the whole, I like Cataclysm. The dungeons are interesting and moderately challenging (though I do believe they take a little too long, even when overgearing and AoEing them), the raids are fun and have some reasonably unique mechanics (and OMGADDS), archaeology is certainly a vicious time-waster, questing is faster and easier than it has ever been and has some nice storylines in some zones. The old world revamp has been amazing, and flying everywhere (EXCEPT MY BELOVED SILVERMOON!!! FUCK YOU BLIZZARD!!!) is awesome. The new battlegrounds are interesting enough, rated BGs are a fun thing to do, and I’ve finally poked my head into arenas and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Here’s hoping they don’t nerf everything into the ground too quickly.

Oh, and yeah, Tol Barad sucks.