Back in the day when I was playing FFXI online, all classes (or jobs as they are called in the game) have a special move on a 1-hour timer (I think they’ve actually doubled that. So much for dumbing down the game for casuals. If you want hardcore, go play FFXI). The white mage job (the archetypical healer, think priest)’s special move was called Benediction, a powerful AoE Heal available on level 1 and free of MP costs.
The spell used to be nicknamed Beneicide, though, because it generated an insane amount of aggro and would normally lead to a cleric sandwich in short order, unless you had a monk on top of his game and with his own special not on cooldown going all out, resulting in either a very dead mob, a very dead monk while the tank had to use the time to get back to second position on the aggro table (ahead of the white mage), or a wipe if the white mage was stupid enough to try and save the monk’s arse (since he would remain ahead of the tank’s threat by the time the monk died and bit the dust).
Fast forward to today and WoW. Post 3.0.3 and the Ret hotfixing craze, Seal of Blood / Martyr is the most powerful seal for a blue geared paladin ready to head out to Northrend.
Still wearing mostly the rep pvp blues with the odd green and purple piece, I’ve exchanged my trusty old Crystalforged Waraxe for a Khorium Champion sitting on the AH. And went to town to farm the cloth for my DK.
Before patch 3.0, Seal of Blood had little impact on soloing. The blue-geared scrub Retadin I had become to farm SSO dailies would run out of mana long before the healthbar had dropped to a significant level, Blood hitting for decent but far from spectacular amounts.
Until the end of the hotfixing festival, the good ole’ Seal of Casino was producing more dps for my soloing purposes, so again, Seal of Blood had no impact on me.
With 3.0.3, Blood beats Command by a good 150 dps for me. No question on which one to chose. In fact, I’ve removed Command from my action bar at present. So when I went into the reader-suggested Blasted Lands mine and then to HFP’s expedition armory (that’s what I finally chose for my 300 runecloth collection), I started to have way too many near-death experiences for confort.
Bloodicide: Using Seal of Blood without remembering that the self-damaging part has scaled with the damage dealt and starts to really hurt after a while.
Back when I was levelling up this pallie as a prot-specced achingly slow leveling machine, there was a saying in my guild: paladins only die if they want to. Nowadays, the saying is:
Bloodicide is the first death cause among paladins.
Can’t imagine what happens when you’re raid-buffed.
LOL! I can tell you what happens, actually. Last night in Sunwell our raid’s ret pally one-shot himself by accident with it. =)