Lo-Quality WoW

Been in sort of a dry spell in terms of raids.  I probably should have been using that time to restock my Hunter up.  I’ve only been doing the dailies for gold but that’s sort of used as a reserve by all my characters.  But since I’ve had time off and on for the past couple of months, I really started working on my Paladin.

Among all my characters, my Paladin was my blacksmith character.  However, she didn’t get much attention because at that time, the Plush Kitty Toys was mainly made up of Paladin’s and Hunters.  Which made the instance runs at that time rather interesting.

Now, I have great respect for properly played Paladins.  The guy who was the Main Tank for the PKT before moving to another guild was a pally and he did an excellent job.  His wife, who also plays a pally, mentioned that one time she was using his character in a battleground and nobody could kill him.  They would keep whacking away and he just wouldn’t go down!

She play a retribution pally, and she’s a terror in the battlegrounds herself.  I’ve seen her reap huge kill numbers in a battleground that far surpasses my numbers as a hunter.  The funny thing is, I remember a couple of us helping her to fine tune her combat rotation, which made her even more effective! 

And the group I run with, his a paladin too and again, he’s a solid tank.  I have practically no worries that he won’t do his job.  There’s also a healing pally in the raid group who is also excellent and knows just when to hit people with just the right spell to keep them up. 

Now these are people who are very good at playing their paladins.  I am not.  For the most part, it’s a chore for me to play her.  Remember, I usually play a Hunter, or a Rogue, or a Mage, all quick attack classes.  Even my Warrior was setup to be a fast kill dps for awhile.  But the Paladin is more of a slow and steady type of dps.  Granted I’m using two-handed weapons but even when I was using one-handers it seemed to take forever.

But as with any other class, it does handle certain fights better than other classes.  Because they can take quite a bit of damage, and heal themselves, you can take on certain higher level mobs, multiple mobs, or elites and still have a good chance of being alive at the other end of the fight.  I’m just used to things being dead in 3 or 4 attacks within seconds of contact.   

For the most part, that had also been my progression with her.  I would level her up slowly but surely for awhile, go back to others, and then return at some later time to continue.  Right now, she’s sitting at lvl 51, which is twice the amount of any of my lower level alts.  But if I recall correctly, she was probably my third or fourth character I made and was pre-Burning Crusade.  She was my first dwarf character and I had wanted to check out their starting area after doing my night elf hunter and human rogue. 

It’s always a chore to relearn how to play something after you hadn’t been playing it for awhile but when it also includes class changes, it’s especially jaring.  For instance, if I recall correctly, seals would have to be reapplied after you consume them for a judgement.  Now that is no longer the case.  But when I first noticed that my seals weren’t being consumed, I thought I had been playing her wrong all this time until one of my guildmates told me they had changed that mechanic!

Beyond that, it’s fun going through some of the older areas again, although I’m having a devil of a time remembering where to go for quests.  And since I don’t have all my flight points, sometimes just remembering how to get to a place overland is interesting. 

As I mentioned, she’s also my blacksmith character.  Or at least she was my only one until the Death Knights became available.  So my DK, I decided to do blacksmithing with him as well.  And since I decided he would be a weaponsmith, naturally I made my paladin a armorsmith.  Which was fine until I realized I didn’t seem to have any of the recipes the armorsmithing quest giver required.

So naturally I had to look it up and found out that to get the necessary recipes to become a weaponsmith, you had to complete a quest chain for the Mithril Order.  Now that took some time, a lot of effort, and quite a bit of money since after awhile I got frustrated trying to mine the ore myself.  Which also frustrated me since I know I had a large supply of stuff like iron and mithril ore but had sold it off while my mage was leveling up her jewelcrafting! 

So right now, she’s getting up there and I hope to have her at 80 before Cataclysm comes out.  Of course once she’s there, I’m not sure but I’ll probably dual-spec her as healer/tank.  She’ll be my first “healing” class to ge that high actually and I’ll have to learn how to play a healer in a group.  But it’ll be nice to have some flexibility in what I can offer a group instead of just being the “hunter guy”.