Back in Business

No you are not doing Violet Hold for your daily heroic and fighting Xevozz. It's just me being back in the game and the blog being alive again.
My guilds advanced while I was out, Icecrown is nearly done (they carried me through Putricide, Lanathel and Syndragosa last week) and we're on the Lich King (ouch phase 5 hurts ^^). We had fun with Halion in the Ruby Sanctum 10-man normal last Thursday with my paladin. Even though it's not very hard it requires everyone learning the fight for a few tries.

For my first post after a few months out I want to talk about :

Cataclysm for paladins

You can find the changes as they are during the closed beta build start on MMO Champion.

We'll get three new skills: Blinding Light (lvl 81), Healing Hands (lvl 83) and Guardian of Ancient Kings (lvl 85). Blinding Light looks like a fun tanking talent and Guardian of Ancient Kings, even if we'll have to see if it's really effective, will surely be neat to look at. Now for Holy paladins Healing Hands is what counts.

Healing Hands (lvl 83): Heals all friendly targets within 10 yards for 683.58 every sec. Lasts 10 sec.
40% of base mana, Instant cast.

Definitely a raid healing ability, but yet another reason for us to not move, which does not really makes me happy when I see fights like the Lich King.

Holy Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

• Healing
• Meditation
• Critical Healing Effect

Meditation will be the mana regen ability of all healers based on spirit (yes we're going to need spirit as all other healers in Cataclysm).
Critical Healing will probably boost our crits to 175 or 200% of a non crit heal.

The other big change is that Flash of Light and Holy Light will be exchanged in therm of mana efficiency. FoL will become a fast expensive heal, and HL a longer more mana efficient one. And we should get a third very big and long heal. This brings the paladin model in line with priests, fast heals are expensive, longer ones are less.

Last but not least, Beacon of Light will change to not simply double our heals for free. The health pools are supposed to be bigger in Cataclysm, and the heals not as strong, which means less overhealing and the development team consider BoL overpowered as it is considering these changes. They have not yet announced the final decision, it could be BoL only working with FoL or doubling the cost of our heals.

You can read the complete reports on MMO Champion, I only discussed what I think are the most game changing points.

As a side-note, the blog passed 50K visitors during June, thank you all and I hope you'll continue to find useful things to read here.

Updates and blog asleep

Hello everyone,

I've not posted for a month, and will probably not post much more for the coming weeks. Real life is very busy right now. I'm in the process of moving to the US which, as you can imagine, is very time consuming to manage with work and all.

I've tried to continue raiding and helping my guildies, and I'm happy we're advancing. The introduction of the recent 5% buff seems to have been enough for us to down both Putricide and the Blood Council in 10 Man, and we've decided to move further into 25 Man by extending our schedule to two 25 Man raid nights a week. We hope that attendance will be enough for the guild to advance to the same point we have in 10 Man. Overall it's a nice progression since last November when we had a hard time having enough people once a week for a 25 Man. The guild is lively and I hope will stay like that once I'm not there anymore (this could sound a bit cocky but I was the gm after all).

I've been a bit surprised myself by how fast the "nerfing" of ICC started, considering not even one guild in the world had down the Lich King in hard mode (either 10 or 25) before its introduction. I would have liked for the original version to live a bit longer.

While I'm off from the internet, I advise you to read my fellow paladin bloggers, especially Rhidach on Righteous Defense, and Ophelie on The Bossy Pally that I both always enjoy to read.

Until next time, in some unknown future that I hope not to far.
Have fun :)
Shazalyn / Dreaming

Back on the blog.

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and I wish you a happy new year.
I've started to write a post about the macros I use on my paladin, it's going to be posted at some point in the week.
Expect another Healing Through too, I want to advance a little on Icecrown raid healing as the new bosses will be up soon :)

Once again, Happy New Year, wish you all the best.