Something has to change.

I need to talk this out, and this seems like the right forum.
Missing the LF1M Archimonde kill hurt my heart, I wanted to be there so badly. However, real life has to come first, and there was just no way I was making raid that night.

The job I have now, with the promotion I got, is a HUGE opportunity for me. If we can ship this project on time it will be a huge boost for my resume in a very short time frame. It will let me write my ticket for my next job, ideally with a less insane CEO. In less than a year, it could put me places I expected to spend 2-3 getting to. But that very short time frame means a huge amount of work, and that means long hours. On top of that, I'm doing a whole bunch of things I've never done before, like managing people, and it's taking a lot of time and energy.

It's after midnight on a Saturday, and I'm still at work. What's worse, I could work literally all weekend and not be even close to out of things to do. I spent 4 hours running Kara this afternoon. I don't regret the Kara run, that was fun, but I really should have spent that time working. I'd be a lot further along, a lot closer to getting out of here.

What's worse, what's a whole lot worse, is that I haven't been to the gym since I started playing WoW again. It started out as a medical thing (Doc said take 2 weeks off), but it quickly turned into just not going. WoW's not responsible for that, but it's sure as hell not helping. I'm trying to get in early, so I can leave early, so I can play WoW, instead of coming in an hour later after hitting the Gym, and staying an hour later. Or coming in at the same time and hitting the gym after work.

As the subject suggests, I am now planning on making a Deathknight in WotLK, principally as my new raiding main toon.

If everyone would be so kind as to help me with two things:

1)  Help suggest some good dps plate gear to level in Outland with, including crafted items and random "of the Soldier" greens; and

2)  Help me track down and/or craft said items to prepare for WotLK.

Any help is appreciated, thanks! 

It looks like Blizzard finally got a paladin player on their dev team. Yes, after nearly four years, we finally get the talents and abilities we've been dying for.

I dub today: Happy Day. A day we will all remember as the day that end game raiding for holy pallies changed drastically. We're no longer flash of light bots. Yep, we now are being actively encouraged (through a LOT of talents) to get in there and judge our fucking brains out. Blizzard wants us to judge EVERYTHING we've got. Even non-offensive judgements like light and wisdom will now be able to put up the 3% raid crit bonus.

Instead of the usual holy/prot build that most of us holy pallys use, come Wrath we'll mostly be Holy/Ret. And this is a good thing. Here is what looks like will be a typical OMGAOE holy build:

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAztGzhVuzxRtZVf0xh

This gets us into Beacon of Light, which looks to be the Circle of Healing of Wrath. It's a gimmick and will probably have the hell nerfed out of it, but for now, rejoice my faithful. This also puts us into some serious haste territory through Judgement of the Pure that encourages us to JUDGE JUDGE JUDGE. Since Conviction in the ret tree now gives us 5% spell crit and we can also pick up Heart of the Crusader (3% raid crit for ANY judgement), the ret tree really looks like fun :)

Another spec that will be popular, and the one I'm particularly excited about is this:

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=sxAzthzhVuzxRhZif0xh00h

That's the paladin HoT spec. No, really. We get a muthafucking HOT when we crit. And since we pick up about 16% holy crit JUST FROM TALENTS we're going to be HoT'ing a LOT. I love this spec because we pick up Pursuit of Justice (run speed) and a little Imp Might.

With some synchronization between pallies, it's possible to drop points in some auras and other buffs to really maximize your talent point spending. I'm excited as hell, to say the least.

For the first time, I will be raiding completely on my linux machine tonight. The game, all addons, and all the extra programs used to run my G15 keyboard are up and going. It was a big pain in the ass to get the keyboard working.

The only thing that hasn't made the transition yet is Ventrilo. Trying to run vent via Wine has not produced much optimism, so I'll be stringing a wire across my office to run Vent on a nearby windows machine.

Other than that, I should be 100% tonight, barring any crashes or other catastrophic failures. I'm at about 60fps standing around in Shatt, so I'm hoping Black Temple will be just as good.

So after having to post my almost stock UI I am going to finally break down and put something together that is all clean and shiny. I plan on using all ace mods because updating mods is what has kept me from doing this in the first place (I've had some nice, clean UI's in the past but updating mods has been such a pain that I think I have the UI error message burned into my screen). I got Bartender rolling atm and am begining to play with that a bit. From you experienced UI enthusiast...any advice on useful and lightweight mods that I can integrate (besides the standard grid, omen etc)?

So I've been pouring over Cheeky's Spreadsheet for a decent while this afternoon (slow day at work), and I've discovered something:

With my gear options currently, I could see some bizarre dps increases and decreases depending on how much +hit and +haste I opt to use.

My options, more or less:

1)  [Bindings of Lightning Reflexes] vs. [Wraps of Precise Flight]

2)  [Cloak of Fiends] vs. [Drape of the Dark Reavers]

3)  [Shattered Sun Pendant of Might] vs. [Choker of Vile Intent]

4)  [Valestalker Girdle] vs. [Boneweave Girdle]

5)  [Black Bow of the Betrayer] vs. [Legionkiller]

In short, I have a lot of applied theorycrafting ahead of me.  Next time we step into BT I might start dinking around with my gear and see how I do.  Depending on the amount of haste, sometimes the crossbow comes out over Illidan's bow, and all hell breaks loose if I opt to use all of my haste gear (in short, I get to weird "humps" where more haste doesn't help, as my shot rotation gets borked due to bad autoshot casting times).

Whoo boy.