And it starts...

Hello,

This blog will cover my various thoughts on items about WOW, my hobbies, issues, and probably other random things.
I'm always looking for discussion on things tanking, and of course even more so for tanking items relating to paladins. I don't often find discussions on many places intriguing or attention holding, hopefully this blog will provide engaging items.

Lets start with the basics...

I'm 26 years old, currently unemployed despite my efforts. I'm somewhat of a self proclaimed journeyman, jack of all trades, master of nothing sort of person of sorts.
I've worked in retail as a stock manager at a major higher end company. A web designer, and electronics specialist, mobile car audio technician, a former high tier Junior A hockey player, on call mechanic, tattoo artist, all around pc builder, a degree holder in Ornamental Horticulture, among many other things.

I find a great interest in a big many amount of things, which is probably why science channel, history channel, g4 etc. are tv stations that I frequent the most. Anything I have interest in I tend to drive myself into learning every small niche about.

On WoW: I started my gaming in wow with their first Beta program. I had been a longtime EQ player as a Gnome Enchanter that participated in end game raiding. WoW seemed to be a huge jump in graphics, gameplay etc. And of course as proof now, it held my attention. I played through BETA as a druid, going through all of the trees. Upon release I rolled a NE Druid on Thunderhorn, when WSG was introduced I spent a great amount of time in there until I had found a guild wanting to break into raiding. In the end I had progressed through MC in its earlier days.
Sometime after I sold my character, picked up a car out of the deal and hadn't played for a few months. At some point the urge to play again came, so I picked up a new account and rolled a Dwarf Hunter on Shattered Hand, this was my first go at a PVP server in WoW, looking back on it, I don't know why I ever played on a PVE server.
After hitting 60 I began raiding with an Australian guild and shortly after joined it. Raiding at 3am no less. Around this time my alt ret paladin character I had used exclusively for pvp had hit 60. I had started to fly with more than retribution, I tried every spec including protection. After some period of time I had settled on protection for its survivability. I had toyed with trying to tank but not much....

Early in BC my best friend (a warrior tonk) and myself left the guild and started our own project. We ended up in Karazhan with the help of others. Around this time the notion of switching my Paladin to fulltime Protection was brought up, I was still leery as it was still very much hated by everyone in the WoW community. I decided to give it a shot, I was already known on my hunter as a sound player, I figured it anyone could make it work, it would be me. Dreador and myself had always made fun of paladin tanks, and I was a bit concerned about his response, however as a pleasant surprise he said pretty much what I had thought about it. If someone could do it, it was me.
Somewhere around that time drama had infiltrated our guild, just around the time we had joined some new friends in doing Karazhan runs jointly. As time proved our guild was going to crumble and fast which led to us joining them. The GM of this guild was certainly leery of having a paladin tanking in a raid. Heroics? sure. But raiding is a whole nother beast. It took that one first raid to change his mind.
That very raid had spurred so many new ideas, tactics, strategies in my mind. Ones that I later found out were answers to a great many of questions other paladins had.
As we progressed through Karazhan I was making note in print of necessary things, ideas, strategies, tricks. With the help of Dreador and Ciderhelm through his warrior guide of all things, I had found a foundation, one I believed would work soundly.
I started typing all of these things out on wordpad, completely crude, unformatted and jumbled around. Many paladins had spell damage greatly spread through their gear. I was one of them in the early days. I started looking at options to increase my survivability, without trashing my threat. I had spent alot of time looking on wowhead and the armory for what would work. Spell shields, everything. I had finally had a notion that would completely change everything. "Weapons have a ton of spell power on them!" With a weapon alone dedicated to threat, it was more than enough to start tanking in Karazhan, I then could completely focus my gear on mitigation.
At some point during our ventures into Kara, I had become the first Protection Paladin on our server to tank Prince successfully. I even made a video montage on this. An overwhelming pride that I still carry to this day.
We then around this time merged with a few small guilds at first, continuing to farm Karazhan, we then merged with another similarly sized guild, to break us into Gruul/Mag/SSC.
This was another challenge for me. Dreador and myself were already Officers in our old guild, however our GM had to fight to get me an officer spot, as the other GM was adamant that his Paladin Officer was top notch. In the end he had secured my officer position. Our very first TK raid, the debate in officer chat was "Take the paladin healer, or the paladin tank.." With arguements that my mechanics don't lend well to TK. All the trash packs were easily negotiated because I was able to keep control of any mass amounts of trash. We came to Alar trash and I made myself heard "Let me aoe tank all the phoenix adds, let the others take the humanoids." Sure enough I tanked the adds without issue. On Voidreaver our first night, I consistantly held aggro for 50% or more of the fight each attempt. After that raid, their GM lamented his comments, and said that because of me, I had changed his views on Paladin Tanking completely. Yet another source of pride that I still carry.
I was also able to have the great pride of having a partner in tanking that didn't see me as the add tank or offtank. Dreador saw me as an equal, this was something I was quite aiming for, the Paladin Tank community was young, there was still alot of hatred towards it, it was a constant fight for acceptance and proving others wrong. Because of that many days it bolstered my resolve to keep on.
We charged through Gruul, tanking his was a nonissue, silences? NP! Around then Dread had came upon network issues where he had insanely high Latency, Around that time I got the shot to tank Mag, and I did so without a problem, Bubbling during the roof cave in completely negated the damage, and no loss in threat, it even made the process easier on healers.
SSC was another place we were charging through easily, on Leotheras after some fixes with our Lock Tank, it was a fight we held down easily. It was another proving ground sort of fight. Avenger's Shield timed just right ensured me or another tank had aggro every time, and not a dps or healer. at Hammer Of Wrath range I was unstoppable with threat, controlling him was never an issue.
Around this era we ran into more drama, and in the end our side of the guild took over. At some point during later SSC/TK time, I had taken a group of mostly casual guild members, and we dropped the first 2 bosses of Hyjal with nearly no issue. The rest of the officers smelled blood and we powered through it mostly, shoving our ranking on the server up. Early BT we went back into SSC, destroyed Vashj, it put alot of trashtalkers to silence. Later on when they rose again to laugh about Kael, we went back in TK and killed him too. Just before the PRE WOTLK patch we had destroyed Illidan. We continued after the patch for a while destroying the raids and had went casual for fun until the next expansion.
During WOTLK we leveled fairly fast. Got into Naxx10, shortly after drama had arose, Dreador saw the oppertunity, and we created a guild, one that would end up going far in a very short period of time...

Tyrants...
Our first night, we crushed through all of Naxx, we had started pugging 25's and put an insane amount of effort into recruitment. We scrutinized every portionof an applicant, very much the elitist mentality throughout the core of officers. We took undergeared yet intellectual people, put them into epics and very much so powered through 25 as a guild. We had gotten farm runs down to a science.
We had Sarth 3d down, maly down, your mom down and anything else of interest down.
Around this time I had decided to clear up some issues I had come across years ago. It had landed me away from freedom completely for 3 months. Starting the mid of January. On april 1st I got home, bought a can of Skoal, ate some chinese food, logged in and flew out of dalaran and killed 2 deathknights at once, I knew I still had it and was finally home.
Ulduar hit, we had as officers completely wrote off raiding 10man version, we went right after 25man. We destroyed things. We very quickly got to Yogg Saron, around this time member ran groups had cleared 10man successfully. We were ranked number 4 on our server, and had won respect from our server.
Yogg proved to be what would disperse us as a guild. We broke up and I had bounced around in a few guilds after a fashion of time. Not really into raiding. For whatever reasons I had looked back on it and it was something I saw was played out in my heart. I had stopped doing Ulduar largely, and found myself in an up and coming guild. They still had many internal issues that would and still does prevent them from climbing anywhere.
Dreador had recently gotten back into the game, ICC dropped and we both had interest of getting in there. Being in many ways of similar mind, we didn't want to fool around in sheer pugs with questionable people, with questionable policies on gear.

Thus Abomination was born. OH Hay were recruiting :)