First!

Banned!

Oh wait, that would be bad....not banned. Uh, where to start? Wall of text INC! Suckers!

I suppose the name.

Every paladin blog it seams is named after some in-game ability or another. But this blog is only going to be mostly a paladin  blog, since that is my main and I have far too many of them to be considered entirely sane anymore. Also, most of my alts are Blood Elves, becuase I clearly have issues with my sexuality, or so the 50 bajillion 12 year olds that make up the majority of Mr. Worldwide-Webb would have me believe (doncha hate it when they hyphenate after tying the knot?)  So paladins have this thing for using the words Sacred, Holy, Divine, Justice, etc, and the Blood Elf racial is Arcane Torrent (best bloody racial there is! [see wut i did thar?]). So you guessed it! My choice of names was randomly decided by opening up the dictionary and pointing at words. Providence, no?

Why start blogging?

Lots of reasons, getting my voice (as it is) heard, writing out my ideas somewhere, messing around. Mostly, I blame Blessing of Kings. He tends to post these hypothetical meanderings so of all the sites I go to I comment on that one the most. Also I like to put my character name instead of my google account or some other such. I usually post as Kalamadea on any message board (+10 interwebs for getting the referance! aww, I'm a nerd /sadface), but I like to post as my wow moniker for wow related stuff, and that means my main: Elladrion.

So thats the Blog's name. Now the player. Thats Me.

In Vanilla, I hated wow. HATED. WOW. All my friends played it and would never shut up about it. All the customers at work played it and would never shut up about it (I worked at a hobby shop at the time, sweet gig if you can persist off of eating dirt). I hated it (the game, not the job). I hated hearing about it (the game, not the job). I hated knowing the lingo (I'll stop now, for your sake) becuase that meant that I had been around people droning on and on and on about it long enough to understand the lingo! GAH! And every time we'd go to hang out "Man, you gotta play!" "Man, you'd love it SO MUCH!"

So I started playing in March of 2007. W8wut? Yeah... Burning Crusade had just hit, my birthday had just happened, Me and some friends (my blog, my grammar) moved in to an apartment together and they just so happened to have an extra computer. Did you know that they say the first hit is free when you try drugs? Damn it all if they don't have a good buisiness model. Free computer, free first month, free game (birthday, remember?), and of course Blizzard was in on the scam too, they introduced elves to The Horde. Who could be paladins. FML.

I like elves, always have. Love em. I like that they're beautiful and lithe and agile (I tend towards none of that RL). I love that they're so ancient and wise and long-living. They look human, indeed physically the best traits of humans, but they're not so damn mundane as humans. I can look in the mirror and see a human. I can look in the mirror and see a big clumsy stocky dude with too much facial hair that needs to stop eating so darn much (24 Hour Fitness can only goes so far...) In short, I'd be a dwarf if I weren't so tall. Thats real life. Thats reality. Thats...well thats just boring, really. And thats always the issue for me: real life is kinda meh. Fantasy and sci-fi? Now THERE is the action, THERE is what captures the imagination and runs wild with it!

So right, elves. I was talking about elves. The Dungeons and Dragons elven ranger was always my favorite archetype growing up (I didn't know tolkien, or I would have said Legolas was my favorite archetype. Now I know better). Later in my teens I also had a pension for the Paladin: aka The Paragon. Superman. The Boy Scout. The Good Guy. In the '90s, every hero was an antihero. They're dark and moody and don't follow the rules, they're fun. They're a rebellious teen's ideal. But then I started to look at these extremes, these pure characters...and they had merit. Plus, anybody that played D&D in 3.5 knows how much rangers sucked, and how much humans rocked. So, I played some paladins. The paragons. The Boy Scouts. Also, there were some angels (Astral Devas) via an expansion book that let you do that (I have a thing for angels too, especially the Herald of Destruction, Archangel on the warpath type. Goddamnit I'm a nerd, what the heck happened to me?!) And all this was coming to a head in March of 2007 which I swear should be important to me for some reason...oh right, that wow thing.

The One, The Only

I will mention, as of this writing, Elladrion is still the one and only Elladrion in all of wow. He is unique and individual, just like a snowflake. He's a prety butterfly with delicate wings of gossamer. Or something. Anyways, so I like elves, I like paladins, all my friends played Horde (FOR THE HORDE!), and now I have a free month on a free computer with a free game. Did I mention something about FML? Yeah...

So Lord of the Rings movies are out by now, and the shop I work at has been selling the miniatures game and I'm pretty heavy into both and reading WAY too many wikis about the world in my downtime at work. Elladan and Elrohir are the twin sons of Elrond and they are getting pretty cool looking miniatures around this time, but both names are taken on my server. THANK GOD! That would have sucked, in hindsight! Instead, I had to come up with a semi original name kinda sorta based around LotR characters. Fan-fucking-tastic! Elladrion, the elven paladin is born unto this earth! Divine prophecy fulfilled! The 2nd coming is nigh upon us! Dogs and cats, best of buddies, all is right with the world!

Except I'm terrible. Now, I don't know that I'm terrible. Yet. And I blame my friends for this, the same friends that got dealt me druuu...er, gave me wow. Nobody horde-side knows how to play paladins. They know they hate them, that they suck to try and kill and are ioncredibly annoying and can freaking BUBBLEHEARTH the moment you get he upper hand!. Well,m thanks to these friends (or warriros, almost all) I'm enamored with the idea of paladin tanking that has been propegated with this new expansion, so I level as protection. But NOT as an aoe grinder.Oh No, I got to 70 one, single, glorious mob at a time. And I didn't judge since that took away my seal (why would you ever DO that?!). So my roomies would come out, and watch me fight a mob for a minute, minute and a half, and comment on , autoattack all the way man! Sweet zombie Jesus on a pogostick it was slow, but that was the whole game for me and I didn't know any better. And I never died. I could kill elites, I could handle adds, I could do my own group quests and handle 2 orange mobsa at a time (3 required cooldowns. My warrior roomie was disgusted). It was great! I was hooked in the only was an obsessive cumpulsive can be hooked to anything: completely and by the balls.

So I finally get to 70, still patch 2.0, and I start tanking normals with my friends/guildies who a) have no idea how paladins work and b) don't want to discourage me. See where this is going? Yeah, I was bad. Horrid even. I stacked stam for health and int for mana, so it could last through a fight. Yes, you read that right. Reading it again won't change it. I stacked Int as a prot pally. I didn't even know what defense rating was, other than something warriors spoke of occasionally. But my firends, they were pretty damn good healers, and since they had to be to keep me up in dungeons by golly they did, and nary a word but praise was said. The jerks. But I never had an aversion to PUGing, and did so a fair bit, and good lord does the ugly, dirty truth come out (and then some) when you're with strangers on the internet!

At first I thought it was just them, these people with their stupid epics! Jeez! Of COURSE I'm not as easy to keep up as your epically geared buddy tank! It's you, not me! YOU suck. I rock! My FRIENDS don't have any trouble keeping me up (so the jackals lead me to believe), you're just a bad healer! And you too! And you. And you. You. You. You, man, there's a lot of people telling me I'm bad at this sorta thing, what the heck? Of course, it all culminates in one glorious, painful night raiding kara with thes "friends". Well, not a night, more like 20 minutes before I leave raid and huddle myself into a weeping, mopy fetal ball on the floor, sucking my thumb and asking when mommy will be home.

"Google , " (asked I) "what are other protection paladins doing that I'm not? Oh. Oh. Ah. Really? I'm that far off base? Are you sure? So how SHOULD I be gearing then? Oh FML."

Yup, a simple 15 minute google search and I was devastated, everything I (thought I), EVERY SINGLE THING I knew about protection paladins was wrong, -I- was wrong. Seemed all the paladins were still healing, I guess I could do that. And boy, did I. I spent the rest of the expansion as holy until very late in 2.4 when they made ret viable, and by then I just PvPed. I Healed everything up to some T5 content as holy, I still to this day love karazhan as the bestest raid EVAH!

Alts: The Slow Decline into madness

Did I mention I was a prot pally in BC? I think I did. Then a Holy paladin for the remainder of BC? Cool, I'm on fire. Have you ever tried to kill stuff as prot or holy in BC? Yeah... not so much with the killing, more with the outlasting until the mob becomes so bored it dies. And a differant circle of friends is playing off server, so I make a hunter and they peter out prety quick while I'm left BGing at 29, fighting all the twinks and waiting for friends to coem on. Wait, -I- have a 70, -I- can make a 29 hunter twink.

So I did. And it was hella fun. Fighting other twinks in BGs, running up and down the road in duskwood, encountering level 30+ players on their way to stranglethorn (no mounts till level 40 back then). I quickly stopped challenging anyone that wasn't at least level 33, no sport in it. I once killed a level 38 priest on my 29 twink (clutch Arcane Torrent FTW) and another time killed a level 34, a 35, a 33 then the 34 and 35 againbe fore they finally rez-zerged me down! What FUN! But all my friends that made twinks started to tire of it and level, and I didn't ever want that to be on the table. I start a 2nd hunter just to level "Now there's no reason to level the twink!" thinks I, and I'm right.Huzzah! About this time the infamous BigRedKitty has been oging at it, and i'd been enjoying it (you newer people are sorely missing out, he unfortunately had to quit a few years back). Then he posted the video of him single-handedly (with his pet) taking 2 of the 4 adds in moroes out of the fight. O. M. G. This! So much THIS!

I raced to 70 on my non-twink hunter (Ithrandil. That link to the right. Yeah, that's the one), I read all the guides I could, all the blogs, all the how-tos. I would NOT be a huntard, not-no-way-no-how! And I wasn't, I could chain trap with the best of them, I could control my pet like you wouldn't believe, I could spam my macro and keep my littly kitty alive through anything! I rocked! Best yet, I could KILL THINGS! SO MUCH MQSRDPS! It was glorious! He basically replaced Elladrion as my main for a good part of BC, I got into more pugs and topped more than a few dps charts, and certainly got farther progression-wise in raids even as Elladrion got moved into a proper raiding guild. But now there was no reason to twink, since I could do it on a 70, get more gear, and use more abilities. Suddenly my friend's remark about twinking being like watching the special olympics makes sense. So I laugh. Anyways. then 2.4 happened, and RL meant I couldn't make raid times, which left only PUGing (HAH! I was ret by now. PUGing as a loladin...riiiight....) and PvP.

And ret was FUN! Not good mind you, just fun. Then something amazing happened, cross-realm premades. It was all ventrillo based, you joined the vent server, and everybody would queue for the same AV at the same exact time, and you usually got 30+ people all in that specific AV. And the strategy, which I still follow (becuase it WORKS DAMNIT!) would be posted by the leader through macros, and was entirely dependant upon which group you were placed in for who would go where, so the few non- premades could also follow it. It. Was. AMAZING! I spent most of the last summer leading up to wrath doing that, long after I didn't need any gear. Thats the gear set I chose for my Figureprint, and the one I still have and you see me wearing up top. It's badass. Even though season 2 was considered the badge of the noobs back then with all the creme de la creme in their fugly Brutal Gladiator sets. Screw you people and your "mad skillz"!

Wrath was fun. Great, really, I'll talk more about it in later posts, but I really, REALLY enjoyed wrath. Bounced around a few servers and guilds (on alts that is, never transfered), Healed until 4.1, then went ret and rarely looked back. I didn't like where healing went in later wrath although I came to really enjoy tanking (now with less noobness!) It was also the only time I've been in a truly hardcore raiding guild, ending up 9/12 HMs in icecrown, which is a big deal for me since I never even saw Hyjal in BC, let alone Black Temple or Sunwell! I did level quite a few more alts by the time Wrath was finished though, all my toons except Terathis were 80 and at least badge geared and antering ICC pugs.

Unfortunately the guild disintegrated in Cataclysm, most people quitting or changing servers, which brings me to <Insomnia>, as of last week. We'll see how it goes, still a Trial agian so I haven't gotten to raid with them yet.

Obviously I shorted you on Wrath and Cataclysm stories. Gotta have SOMETHING to talk about later!





TL:DR version:

I'm a paladin, blah blah blah!