Help me suck less

[kate]

Thanks guys so much for the advice - here's my plan:

1) Gear. Yeah, I have been cash-poor because I just can't get excited about dailies, and don't really enjoy playing the AH. I think between all my accounts I might have maybe 2k gold. Eek. I do have a smelter, and I guess I could spend a week just farming up gold, so I can buy some other gear.

2) I'll run my tank through some dungeons with pugs. Instant queues will help.

3) Going to try to gem and enchant a little better to avoid things like being over the defense cap. Though, actually, once I replace my legs I think I'll wind up at the raiding cap, since the upgrade has better stats but less def.

I do kind of wonder if it's worth the effort since Cata is coming out relatively soon - if it's fun, I'll keep at it, if not I'll just level and wait for Cata where there'll be a whole new set of things to learn how to do and new gear to get.

I will say that I have noticed, as I slowly collect gear from drops, that things are getting a little easier. For example, in FoS, in some of the 4-5 mob fights at least one of my guys usually would die or I'd have to spend so much mana healing myselves during each fight (healing my DPS - my tank generally doesn't need much healing there) that I'd have to drink after every fight. However, now it seems like I might only need to drink 2x during the entire dungeon (including Bronjham). And on Bronjham he usually is only able to do the corrupted soul thing 2x where before it took me so long to dps him down he might get off 4 of them.

Here's hoping the crafted stuff will get me past this! Thanks again, all, for the help!

[Toned]

I ran prot 3 ele and resto till I had enough gear to go prot/ele x4. You may want to do the same with your paladins do prot + holy + 3 ret till your rets get more gear.

You still have 4-5months before Cata you have plenty of time to do whatever you want :P

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Here's my lazy-ass gear-up-your-paladin-group-without-pulling-out-your-damn-hair strategy:

• Do not worry about buying scrolls of enchanting off the AH yet. No, really. They won't make enough difference at this point to care about and you'll just be replacing the gear you enchant with better gear anyway, costing you twice as much. Exception is when you can enchant your own gear and you have the mats. You do have an enchanter, right? If not, go make one now. You won't regret it.
• There are a few things I would buy from the AH that maximize your money spent there as you won't get anything better for a long time. (Will go over the gearing stuff later.)
• Don't sweat being unable to completely clear a heroic. As long as you can kill the first few bosses, you'll gear up and make money while doing it.
• The dungeon finder is on 15-minute cooldowns, so you can do something else for the rest of the 15 minutes if it's a hard one like HoS/HoL/FoS/etc.
• For your tank, I would get your Argent Crusade rep up to revered quickly so you can get the Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector. Also get Hodir rep up for Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle. This will get you good enchants and will make money in the process.
• For your rets, get Ebon Blade rep up to revered (should be easily done by finishing all their quest lines in Icecrown) for Arcanum of Torment. Also get Hodir rep for Greater Inscription of the Axe. Again, will get you good enchants and will make money in the process.
• IMO, do not target specific gear in instances with a few exceptions (noted below). Target getting badges instead.
• Get some Drums of the Wild. It will help more than enchants and they're cheap, especially if one of your guys is a LW.
• Make sure you're running a good aura mix. I usually run AF/ret/fire/frost/shadow while killing and switch ret for crusader aura when traveling/dailies. Also make sure you're covering all 4 blessings.
• Yes, they're nerfing pally cleanse next xpack but they haven't yet. Put cleanse on bars so the same button causes 1 to cleanse 2, 2->3, 3->4, 4->5. Spam it when you get poisoned/diseased/feared/etc. and it'll help a ton.

Next, for starting gearing up, I _highly_ recommend the following:

• RUN, DO NOT WALK and go repeatedly farm Ahune the Frost Lord for The Frost Lord's Battle Shroud for your rets and Icebound Cloak for your tank. EASY as hell, just kill the hailstone (use Seal of Light x5) and then keep moving and DPS the core when it comes out.
• Go to the AH and get Darkmoon Card: Greatness x4 for the rets. Do dailies (as noted above) until you can afford this. Helps greatly and you won't replace it anytime soon.
• Hit LFD for a random heroic. If it's one that's easy for all-paladin groups to do (DTK, UK, CoS, first 2 bosses in UP, OK, Nexus) then go ahead and do 'em. Skip bosses that are slow or a pain; you're just here for badges and cash from drops.
• If you get a hard heroic or one that you can't do or that takes forever, just LFGTeleport() back home and LFD for a specific dungeon (see next).
• While your heroics are on cooldown or used up, LFD for Pit of Saron normal. Ride around the right side past the first two casters, jump off the little point of land hugging the right edge, aggro the first and second skeleton laborers and pull them down to the lower level. Kill them and wait for the two drake riders to path back away from the middle. Ride past the torch and swing wide to avoid that skeleton laborer and hug the left side by the edge of the pit (careful, you can't get back out easily if you fall in) and ride up the steps to Garfrost. Put up Seal of Light, pop Divine Plea x5 and go to town on Garfrost. Strafe everyone a few steps to the side when he throws rocks and chase him around while he builds weapons for you. Disenchant tons of caster staves and leather stuff and enjoy your new Ring of Carnelian and Bone and Garfrost's Two-Ton Hammer upgrades on your rets. LFGTeleport() out and requeue for Normal PoS again and repeat. Takes about 3 minutes per run depending on gear. Repeat ad nauseum until your rets are all upgraded. Socket STR gems and enchant with Berzerking if you can afford it or Greater Assault/Massacre if you can't. This is your badge farming run when other things are on cooldown.
• When you get bored/tired of PoS Garfrost runs, queue normal ToC. Farm this for Banner of Victory for your rets (drops off Paletress) and Black Heart for your tank. You can queue these individually if you have trouble (see below for my strats).
• Buy the Libram of Valiance/Libram of the Sacred Shield as soon as you have enough badges. This should be your first badge purchase.
• Get 2-pc Liadrin's Conquest Gloves and Chest first.
• Get Helm of Thunderous Rage x5 next (by then you'll have enough +def that it won't help to get more).
• Once you can do it, LFD for PoS Heroic and kill Garfrost once a day for the plate bracers for the rets.
• You can run normal FOS for the legplates (as I see you've been doing) and the bracers but it's not very time-efficient. Just depends on what you want to spend your time on.

Finally, for specific instances, I did the following (assume heroic unless otherwise specified):

• Garfrost(normal) is noted above.
• DTK: Kill the Soulmages first. Stun with HoJ to prevent pools. Start on left or right edge of hall so you can move out of pools easily. Run Seal of Command on trash for extra AoE. Skip the frost mage boss if you can't kill him using Seal of Light. If you can pull the individual raptors out of Dred's pen before him, you can kill them and make the fight a lot easier. Just remember to keep whoever has grievious bite topped off on health. Last boss is a cakewalk with any gear level.
• UK: you've done this so grats and keep it up.
• Gundrak: Will be hard to kill colossus until you have better gear. Use Drums of the Wild for resists. On Sladran, face all pallies the same direction and stack them up. WHen he casts poison nova, strafe entire team left or right to avoid it and continue DPS. Shouldn't take more than one nova before he dies. For Colossus, face/stack all paladins and pull golem. When he changes to elemental, strafe left->back->right->back and keep moving out of the pools. Keep seal of light up for heals. The second transition will be the hardest because you'll probably be out of room and or unstacked because of him moving around on you. Do your best. The other bosses are tank n spank with the last boss just requiring you to move quickly away from him when he whirlwinds.
• Nexus: easy instance. Seal of Light on mage boss, kill the frost bitch first. Go back to entrance and around right side to elemental boss. Pull a plant up to him for extra HoTs, stack under his feet and tank n spank. Kill Chaotic Rifts and tank n spank Void boss. Keep jumping on dragon boss while keeping rets to the side; cleanse everyone when she roots you to the floor.
• UP: Kill first two bosses. Stupidly easy with Seal of Light. Don't forget to cleanse off disease from abominations. Port out and requeue next when done with the first two as you won't kill Skadi until you get better gear, probably. If you want to try him, pull all mobs down to the doorway where they spawn and tank them there. You won't get hit by frost there. When ready, kill dragon in one pass and start killing him. WHen he whirlwinds, bubble and heal if needed, then finish him off. Last boss is stupid easy after killing skadi.
• CoS: Make sure you turn Meathook away from the rest; otherwise, tank n spank. Turn Seal of Command on for Salramm. The rest is just tank n spank, just remember to keep Mal'ganis turned away from the rets at the end.

I'm sure there's more but that's the basic routine I followed. Once you've finished most of the above, you'll have enough gear that you can start changing things up and taking on stuff you couldn't do before.

[jinkobi]

One thing to add about Gundrak. If you can't kill the Colossus you can go in one side and kill Sladran- then walk out and go to the other entrance and kill Moorabi. Requires you to physically walk/fly to Gundrak but it's an easy 2 badges for lik 5-7 mins.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Good point. Basically a free badge. :P

Also, it should be noted that I purchased only a 5g +def/str/stam ring, 3/4 Spiked Titansteel boots and 4/4 titansteel destroyers on my rets before starting this. All teh rest of their gear was quest rewards, including quite a lot of +defense tanking gear as that's the only plate the quests offered. I think they were at about 2700ish GS when starting heroics. At that point, I felt lucky to pull off 1300dps. They're easily pulling 3k DPS on the target dummies now.

[OzPhoenix]

Here's my lazy-ass gear-up-your-paladin-group-without-pulling-out-your-damn-hair strategy:

• RUN, DO NOT WALK and go repeatedly farm Ahune the Frost Lord for The Frost Lord's Battle Shroud for your rets and Icebound Cloak for your tank. EASY as hell, just kill the hailstone (use Seal of Light x5) and then keep moving and DPS the core when it comes out.

Must be nice to have a <100 ms latency.

I don't know about US players, but Ahune is essentially unmeleeable for all-Pally teams here in Oz I reckon.

For one, being all melee means putting not a single point of damage on him in P1. In P2 which lasts only a short time, you'd need to do massive DPS to knock him down even halfway (he's got like what 850-900k health?) before re-doing P1 (Part 2).

The other issue being with 250-350ms latency, by the time you've reacted to the impending spike in P1, and moved, the server has already calculated you to have been hit by it I reckon, because even with constant movement I couldn't avoid getting almost continuously spiked.

If Ahune is a doddle for an under-geared team of all-melee then I'll be fairly surprised.

[blast3r]

There is a ton of good information in the responses.

I have a Pally team as well and love them. They are still undergeared but my prot is coming along. Your HP seems a bit low.

The dungeons I found I could get badges on were the following. Clearing some of them.

UK
Nexus
Gundrak
One in Dalaran..name escapes me
UP

I just tried to kill as many bosses as I could to get emblems then would upgrade a piece here and there.

[Solon]

Ahune wiped the floor with my undergeared team. Most members were 1 shotted with quest gear/rep gear. It took him a while to down my tank, but it was a lost cause from the beginning.

[kate]

Thanks for the huge post, though in my case, Ahune is doing very bad things to my people... Partly it was because it was the first fight, and partly because I really am badly geared, comparatively, and partly because I think my reflexes are for crap on fights with any kind of movement.

Other fights that are tricky - the bloody jousting with ToC normal is kicking my ass. I can take 2 of the 3 but then something happens like - instead of my tab targeting the actual enemy, it targets their horse so for a few seconds my people don't move to attack, and in that time one of the enemy gets back on a mount and by that time my whole team is weak enough that they can then take out at least 1, then 2 people, and at that point I've lost. And it's *really* frustrating to go back because that whole bloody pageant thing has to happen first, so it winds up taking forever to try again, by which point I've decided to do something more fun, like stab my eyes with spoons.

With FoS, I can easily take out the first boss, but the Devourer just wrecks my party - we're undergeared to the point where I need to fight that guy *perfectly* and since I'm just not the fast-twitch kinda gal, any mistakes wind up with at least 1 ret dying, then another, and by that point there's not enough DPS. I can get past this to be able to queue for PoS on my tank by going the PUG route, but my rets get kicked off of teams all the time as DPS because they aren't ridiculously overgeared. Maybe if I spec them holy I can get them onto pugs to get past devourer and then farm Garfrost.

What I'm saying with this is that fights that are being labeled as "really easy" or "cakewalks" are often not for me - I have no heroics on farm (except maybe for the first boss in UK, which still takes some time to get to to the point where it's actually quicker to just farm FoS and there's more chance of a useful drop there)

With regards professions and reputation grinds:

I have enchanting & tailoring on my tank (I don't know why I picked those 2 for the tank), blacksmithing and mining on one of my rets (who I might make into a tank to get the 2 extra gem + stamina bonus from mining) , jewelcrafting & alchemy on another ret, and everyone else's professions are low enough to not matter.

Reputation-wise, my tank is exalted with Hodir, revered with AC and most others. Rets are all revered with Hodir and Ebon, right now. I'll re-check to see if I have all those lovely arcanums. In either case, I can very quickly get the rets to exalted - the dailies + farming tons of relics from HoL on normal will do it.

So an update:

On my paladin I now have the shoulders and gloves of Liadrin - bought the shoulders because they were cheap, same for gloves. Next purchase will be the sacred shield libram. I am going to re-do some gems (I think I have a couple that have some def in them, which is just silly since I'm over the raid defense requirement as is). I'll also check into the arcanums and glyphs and whatnot I have on my rets.

When I have time today, I'm going to just spam run ToC normal in pugs with my tank to a) get the whole pageantry thing waived, and b) hopefully get black heart or some other tanking gear.

[OzPhoenix]

Kate,

First up, I agree with you on ToC - frankly I find it boring to do the jousting (particularly having just completed the whole valiant jousting for Champion of the Horde). It can be done of course, but I just skip that one.

As to FoS, Bronjahm will be easy as I think you've found, bu thte Devourer requires you to react pretty much perfectly throughout the fight, one wrong move and it's four dead Rets. There's nothing inherently un-melee-boxable about it, but it's a tough fight to learn.

If I may offer some advice - there's three dungeons you should focus on.

UK

Prince Keleseth: This is a basic tank 'n spank. Ignore the cocooning of any party members, if you like save the Rets 4xDivine Storm for it - it'll be quite sufficient to break the cocoon. Make sure consecrate is down when the skeletons come in, that, along with normal attacks should be sufficient to dispatch them. If needs be, pop 5xDivine Shield for a bit of damage-taken respite.

Skarvald And Dalroon: This is another basic tank 'n spank (which is why UK is so good for early multiboxers), with only a small twist. The twist is to make sure that both bosses die at the same time or nearly the same time. Concentrate on Skarvald first (he hits harder), get him down to about 60k, then switch to Dalronn. Normal attacks with their AoE elements should then finish of Skarvald almost exactly at the same time as Dalronn drops. If one drops significantly before the other, you'll need to pop Divine Shield as the "dead" one ignores the tanks threat and smahes into the Rets.

Ingvar: This one might seem like is a bridge too far at first but there is a method to him. Firstly you have to have independent movement keys for the Rets. Run right at Ingvar and have the Prot pick up agro and run a little past Ingvar to turn him around. Then Consecrate, and slowly move the rets to a 45 degree angle (so that they're not directly behind Ingvar). I have W,A,S,D for Ret movement, so I run in, throw the Shield, turn around and hit D repeatedly until they're at that 45 degree angle. It means that Ingvars deadly stomp will probably not hit them (as he rarely turns on a 45 degree to do it). If he does turn to face them, swing them right around to the Prot and have the Prot then run past Ingvar to turn him around again. In Phase 2, try and tank him near a column, and be prepared to use Divine Shield when the whirling axe of Ret death comes out... lol.

DTK

Trollgore - another basic tank 'n spank. Just make sure to engage him with all the pallys just below the top of the stairs to avoid the corpse explosion he does on the mobs that fly in every now and then. If DPS is slow it can be a little bit of a struggle, but again that trusty 5xDivine Shield should get you through it.

Skip Novos and Dred (until geared up anyway)

Tharon'ja - a very easy tank 'n spank with half the fight spent in a skeletal form in which your gear won't matter anyway. There's a poison cloud he drops in phase 2, but it's weak and easily moved out of.

The ability to do Trollgore and Tharon'ja makes for the Random dungeon achievement on this one, so Novos and Dred can be safely skipped for much much later.

Old Kingdom

Elder Nadox - again a tank 'n spank with a twist. At some point in the fight, he'll go immune and summon in a Guardian spider - just smash that down and resume beating on Nadox.

Prince Taldaram - the only tough thing here is the fire sphere thing he does. Be prepared to 5xDivine Shield through it if you get it once, and run if you get it more than once. Should he decide to incapacite the Prot and that little life-drain phase he does, just switch to one of the Rets until the Prots free'd up.

Amanitar - The fungus boss - his "catchphrase" is to minimize you about 40 or 50 seconds into the fight. As Divine Shield dispells this mechanic it turns it into an extremely standard tank 'n spank. Should your DPS be low enough to get to a second minimze spell, just keep a good mushroom nearby and have the prot blast it as soon as they get minimized.

Skip Shadowseeker.

Herald Volazj I expected this fight to be tough - possibly even too much for my under-geared Pallys - but it turned out to be really easy. He'll cast Insanity at 66% and 33% health I think it is. You shouldn't even need to switch off the tank, just battle your ret-images down as quickly as you can and you'll quickly find your party restored. If the fight drags on, use Divine Shield after the second bout of Insanity.

CoS

With a little gearing you should also be able to clear out H CoS. Meathook is the only real problem to this dungeon, he does an AoE cast, that does bugger all damage but frustraingly interrupts spell-casting. The Prot needs to be using Seal of Light, because the Rets will only be able to get off insta-cast Flash of Lights to heal the Prot. You could try for it without good gear, but it may be too hard, but this should be your first new dungeon once you've got some badge gear on.

Even without hitting the Random this is good for 9 badges a day - and there's quite a few other dungeons where you may be able to pick out the first boss or two (even in HoL the first two bosses are basic tank 'n spanks with only minor twists for example). Once you get a bit of gear on, you'll be able to do more for sure. More realistically, popping the random every 15 minutes, knocking off the 1st boss in bad random pops etc, you could get 20 badges in a decent session without stretching too much.

Others

Here's the full list of bosses I was able to drop with just starting gear (admittedly this included the crafted i245's and i200 weapons) (final bosses, and hence random achievements for extra badges italicised).

UK: Keleseth, Skarvald&Dalronn, Ingvar

DTK: Trollgore, Tharon'ja

OK: Nadox, Taldaram, Amanitar, Volazj

CoS: Meathook, Salramm, Epoch, Mal'Ganis

GUN ( entering via the side exit after wiping on Slad'ran... lol) Moorabi, Eck

HoL: Bjarngrim, Volkhan

Oculus: Drakos, Varos

UP: Sorrowgrave

Normal FoS: Bronjahm

Hope this helps.