Part One of building a paladin begins with young Jocy, a level 27 paladin who was all but forgotten in Silvermoon City. As a reward for signing up for the Warlords of Draenor (WoD) expansion, the gods of WoW allowed one player of any level to be “boosted” to max-level 90. The child tapped for that honor was Jocy. The boost also came with a free set of armor for her Holy (healing) spec. She got her Retribution gear (damage dealing) from the Timeless Isle, which Wild and Fist collected for her.
I took a snapshot of Jocy’s gear and specs not long after her boost for comparison in expectation of the next patch. Those results are at the bottom of the post.
Part Two of building a paladin began with the release on 14 October of the Iron Horde pre-patch. This patch is preparation for the coming release of WoD. The biggest change is the “great statistics squish.” I’ll get to the statistics comparison in a moment.
There are a great number of things that have to be done to turn a vanilla wrapped paladin into an effective combatant and healer. Glyphs had to be bought and installed. Enchantments also had to be purchased added to her gear sets. Addons to improve her abilities had to be set up. A long list of spells had to be re-learned, not to mention spells that changed or were deleted by the patch. Finally (I think this is the last thing), spell rotations were set up for combat and healing. All of that has been completed.
Part Three of building a paladin puts all that hard work into practice. Even after all of the above, Jocy is far from being ready to enter a dungeon or raid. She needs to practice her spell rotations and get comfortable with them. That will be an ongoing task.
Feeling a little more confident, Jocy decided to take a peek in the Blasted Lands, where the invasion from Draenor is expected to emerge from the Portal there. I expected a crowd of players and was prepared to jump into a large battle. That is the kind of thing pre-patches generally have. My past favorite was the house to house battles in Orgrimmar. I was kind of disappointed that Jocy found only a small tent camp and a couple of quests to get her started. Things were very quiet. The quests required killing, but Jocy wasn’t ready for that just yet. Soon, though, after some work on the practice dummy, she’s going back to the Blasted Lands.
Comments on getting the patch installed: The first attempt failed utterly. The second attempt at loading the game went pretty well, though. There was one issue that resulted in having to do a computer reboot, but once that was done patch 6.0.2.19033 loaded without any problems. I’d have to say overall it was a pretty smooth transition. Another very pleasant surprise is that my more important addons all had up-to-date upgrades supporting the patch. The only addon that failed was Xperl, which I have been using practically since I first started playing. The author has abandoned it, it hasn’t been updated in a year, it isn’t stable, and its too complicated to fix. I can use the default setup that WoW provides for now. Eventually I’ll have to select and learn one of the other addons that provide similar features, particularly when/if I consider raiding.
I took a snapshot of Jocy’s gear and specs after the patch went live but before all of the gear upgrades she got. That should give a good comparison of the before and after statistics as a result of the squishing of stats. The stats look very vanilla WoW sized. I’m going to hunt down an old snapshot at some point and compare Wild’s vanilla stat set with what he has now. That should be interesting.
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| Pre-Patch Stats |
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| Post Patch Stats |
And that’s a Wrap!
BOOM!
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