meet the "new" guy

we're home sick today so we figured it'd be a good time to update the blog. as we mentioned last post, we've been playing a lot less WoW lately. most of what little time we do play has been spent on Varynth, our fledgling blood elf protection paladin.

before we started our prot career we were, of course, using a two-hander. we didn't do much tanking in our ret days so our one-handed weapon skills were fairly feeble. that was something we had to fix right away if we wanted to be a worthy tank. how do you improve your weapon skill? you hit things. repeatedly. for a really long time. sound boring? you're right, it is.

you have some choices in how to go about this tedious process, though.

you can skill up by attacking mobs your own level (i.e., over the normal course of questing). the downside here is that your low weapon skill level relative to the mob's level means you're going to miss or be dodged/parried a lot. this, in turn, means it's going to take you forever to kill mobs and they will be gleefully beating the snot out of you in the process. maybe this is a reasonable option if you're only 15 points or so behind on your weapon skill, but if you've got 100+ points to make up this ain't the way to go about it.

if you happen to be a warlock or have a (very bored) warlock friend, you can chain-banish a demon or elemental and just auto-attack it while it's banished. we're not sure if this still works, but you used to be able to skill up weapons this way. same goes for beating on an evade-bugged mob, though those are a bit harder to come by when you actually want one (plenty around when you *don't* want one, of course).

if you're a class that can heal yourself, even if it's not your spec, you can find a mob that heals itself but doesn't hit very hard and go to town on it. some of the mobs outside the scarlet monastery are great for this. by the time they're gray to you, they won't be hurting you much but they last a good, long time. toss a heal on yourself every once in a while and auto-attack away. bring a book or something; it's a dull process.

our favorite method by far is to clear out low-level instances. if you're a squishy, this probably means running deadmines. if you can take a bit more of a beating, pay a visit to the scarlet monastery. as a prot pally, we love running SM. we gather up 8-12 mobs and burn them down with little to no downtime between groups and we pick up weapon skill points along the way. the cloth, BoE greens (and shards, if you happen to be an enchanter) and vendor trash you pick up are a nice bonus, too. it's a pretty efficient weapon skill training plan. plus, it's just damn cool to be standing in a pile of sparkling bodies when all the smoke clears...