whats the first relic you can getFollow

Nope, the earliest leveled one is level 52, I think. It drops in Blackrock Depths: Libram of Truth. It is a tiny step above worthless. While there are some others in Dire Maul and Scholomance, they are also incredibly worthless, especially since seal durations were increased.

The first decent libram you are likely to find is the Libram of Wracking from a group quest in Hellfire Peninsula. It has a little more use at least. If you instance you can pick up Libram of Saints Departed at 61, and if you PvP you can get the same libram by a different name at 62 in Zangarmarsh.

If you're holy, there's a decent libram from the Nesingwary chain in Nagrand, and if Retribribution, a good one in Shadow Moon Valley.

Well, you could get Egan's Blaster pretty easily in the 50s ;)

But seriously, I agree. It's retarded how long we have to wait to have anything in that slot. I've always felt Relics were inferior to ranged weapons as well. I mean, would they be so OP if they gave like +10 to a stat or something in addition to so equip or situational feature? At least it's better than having nothing in that slot at all =/

Don't confuse the lvl 50 "librams" with the relics that paladins can equip. The other kind are quest items that you can turn in to an NPC at Dire Maul or Burning Steppes with a handful of other mats in order to gain a head/leg enchant of limited value. Pre-BC, these Arcanums may have been worthwhile, but today I think the only people bothering with these librams are doing it for the Shen'dralar rep only.

In History of WoW, subsection History of the Paladin class, subsection History of the Libram slot:

Opon release all chars had the same paperdoll they have now. The libram/relic slot was unused in paladins, druids and shaman.

The slot wasn't used for quite a long time and very few people even cared. However, at some point in vanilla endgame itemization started adding pretty insane stats to items, some of those were bows like one that drops in Zul Gurub that rogues, warriors and hunters would fight over at the time.

In the infighting that took place in nearly every wow related board between the 3 classes that could equip the bow, each class would boast about great reasons about how said bow was an amazing item to them. But they were being watched by the classes that couldn't equip anything in that slot. Major QQ took place, someone poped up in the O boards suggesting that those 3 classes needed something to equip in that slot because not being able to equip anything in it puts them at disadvantage in stats compared to other classes that could gain lots of stats from a certain bow or a certain wand.

In said thread someone mentioned that the Paladin WC3 units had books in their hands and that paladins are often depicted in wow artwork carrying a book and that said booksy items could be made to be equipped in that slot.

At the time endgame was level 60 and Blizz had been working on AQ content and rearrangement of pre-endgame itemization from level 50+, so with the realease of AQ they also added, in that level range, said Libram items as suggested by someone in the O boards.

I still think it was poorly implemented. The bonuses on the librams suck, I would trade any libram for the armor plated shotgun any day.


Edited, May 16th 2009 12:34am by xorq

I understand that Blizz doesn't want every class to need or fight over ranged weapons. What I don't appreciate is why the librams/totems/relics give the non-ranged classes such laughably cruddy mods to an existing ability, rather than acting like a straight stat-stick to boost our attributes like a wand is for the other magic users or like a gun is for warriors and rogues. Give a pally a handful of stamina and a splash o' crit just like the benefits from any other green/blue/purple drop for our compatriots. We wouldn't be having this conversation if all an Armor-plated Combat Shotgun did for a Warrior was slightly reduce the Rage cost of a Thunderclap or something equally stupid like that.

The tank Libram is stupidly useless. 300ish extra sheild block, a normal melee attack from trash in a Heroic hits for 600ish. My block value is 900+ so that extra 300 is wasted except on a slightly more powerful sheild of the righteous. Against a boss that block value is used for 2 melee swings from the boss every 10 seconds and even then I only have a 50% chance to block it, so once every 10 seconds I block an extra 300... yay.

I was looking at DK sigils compared to ret librams. I seen one that increases base damage of one of their attacks by more than 300... our Libram increases Crusader Strike by 116ish. Not even increases the base damage, just a flat increase. That an awesome 20dps extra.

Nothing makes my Paladin armor shine like a bottle of Rogue tears wiped on using a Feral Druid's pelt.

Yah, well, that's another problem too. Blizz scales all classes so that they get stats differently, so they end up giving warriors more AP than paladins, and then they decide that they need to have the same DPS, even with different amounts of AP.

Which then leads to a riddle of formulas and mismatched thresholds all over the place that they end up having to hotfix over and over to keep the last tier of raid in some balance.

The problem with an itemization slot having low value (and low variety) doesn't mean the problem is that it makes the class weak. The problem is that it removes customizability from the class. For warriors and rogues that slot weighs a ton and there's lots of options (except for tanks), for us there's something like 1 libram per spec, in many different quality ranges. If they're going to keep going that way they might as well just merge the libram effect to the spell and be done with the librams.



PvE:

Tank: All the other classes make stronger tanks when the same stats are given. The difference isn't that great. But since it's not the strongest of tanks it's certainly also not OP.

DPS: not stronger than the other melee DPSers given the same stats. So, not OP.

Healing it's probably the most limited in multi-target healing, and the one with the least instant cast healing. The single target healing ability doesn't seem to greatly outperform the other classes. So also not OP.

PvP:

Tank: You have to be joking.

DPS: Cannot reliably kill a healer unless the healer runs out of mana. Weak against certain classes and specs. The fact that 70% of the population chose to play the few classes and specs that ret is good against is totally a different story and I thank you all for your tasty tears.

Healing: Different strengths and weaknesses from the other healers, but not significantly stronger or weaker. For 2v2 pally combines better with heavy melee than the other healers, but other healers are better combination for other classes. Sure, the Flavor of the Month has been DK for nearly a year now, which favors pally healers, but that's not pally being OP.



Edited, May 19th 2009 11:57pm by xorq