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Gearing up in Ulduar

So I've been very fortunate. A *lot* of tanking pieces have dropped in our first few weeks in Ulduar. I just checked and I'm #49 on warcrafter.net

Last night I just got what is regarded as the current Best In Slot for Paladin Tanks : Unbreakable Chestguard. That marks the 5th upgrade for me since we started raiding Ulduar.

Damn you achievements!

So in the time between Patch 3.0 and the expansion, most of my time has been spent getting all the achievements I can for the 'old world'.  The Loremaster ones are especially brutal.  But I have to hand it to Blizzard, it's kept me in the game more than I expected it to prior to the expansion's release.  Even with all the Paladin nerfs.  

Damn you retribution.....damn you.....

On a side note, thanks to the instance nerfs we've managed to reach Illidan.  Hopefully we'll kill him this week.  Our guild's goal of doing BT before the expansion: check!

Finally got an upgrade in beta

Finished a rather epic quest chain involving Arthas, and got the
Betrayer's Choker. I cut an Enduring Dark Jade for it, and it proc'ed a perfect cut. So it's quite the lovely item now.

WotLK update

Well I've hit a lull with the beta (mostly cause I reached where things start to be either not implemented or are capped), so time for a dump!

My paladin tank is 77 now, managed to get it right before they changed the required xp for levels 71-77.  Did the quest chain to enable my flying mount, which was a couple of easy quests.  However it seems you still can't use the flying mounts everywhere, bugged locations such as flying into Borean Tundra will unmount me.

I still haven't upgraded any gear other than main hand, although now that I can cut gems (it was previously broken) I re-gemmed all my gear with the +18 stamina.  I figure now that I have the stamina to spelldamage talent in deep protection that stacking stamina and being an Effective Health whore was the way to go.  I have 18+k health self-buffed now...haven't really grouped up with many other people with buffs to see what my raid health is going to be at.  Still need to get all the +stamina enchants, but I'll probably wait till it's live to really focus on it.

This leads me to believe that anyone wearing T5+ gear may want to consider replacing gems and enchants on their gear, and make them last well in to the later 70's.  I have a Shadow Priest I copied over as well with only T4 level gear and I've only really replaced one item so far and I've completed all the quests in Valiance Keep.

Jewelcrafting got a lot of content that doesn't seem to work recently.  The daily quests are there which give you tokens as a reward.  There is another vendor that has pretty much most of the rare recipes for 5 tokens each (as well as a mat or two for 1 token).  It looks like you'll be doing this instead of hoping for a world drop or hitting the AH (which is a good thing).  I'm looking forward to doing these, unfortunately the drops for the dailies don't appear to be in yet.

There's also Gem Perfection, which is a passive skill you can learn once you get 77.  Supposedly it works like Alchemy specializiation in that each cut has a possibility of yielding a 'perfect' cut instead of the normal one.  The perfect cut should have a tad better stats, and the tooltip indicates it only works on uncommon gems.  So far it hasn't proc'ed.  It may be bugged.

Questing 70+ as Protection Paladin

Just wanted to let everyone know that dps has increased for the Protection tree.  My spelldamage has doubled due to Touched by Light.  I switched to a quest green 1H so I could get more dps from Hammer of the Righteous, and it does put out some good damage.  I'm anxious to try tanking with this new setup.

Other than my main hand I haven't upgraded a single piece of gear and I'm now level 73.

I'm in the WotLK beta

I've spent most of my time just getting used to the new seal/judgement system and the new prot talents for Koln.  New zones are beautiful.  Terrain is no longer monotonous.  Each zone has different visual areas, turn up your graphics settings if you can.  It's pretty.