The Scourge

No More Dings

2010-07-08T11:31:00.015-04:00

I'm comming out of retirement for one last post. I dinged 80 for the 10th and final time yesterday. It was only 6 months past my goal but then again I took three WoW breaks totaling 11 months away from the game.

Since this was a DK blog and my Death Knight was my first 80 I'm giving him a position of honor. Top Left.

Omenscourge dinged 80 on 12/04/2008 and you can easily see my exploits with this toon in the archives. This toon was a joy to tank with and was very effective at DPS as well. Even though I've rolled him out a couple times lately I still have never seen Maly with this toon which is all that is standing between him and his Champion of the Frozen Wastes title.

As of now, this toon is a blood tank and I mainly use it to run guildies through BC era dungeons as I can easily solo any of them without waiting for heals. He still sits in his Naxx era gear and maybe someday I'll do the heroic grind with him to up him to T9.

The first toon I leveled to 80 after my first Hiatus was Bearcat my druid, dinged on 8/18/2009 . This was my first tank back in BC and I tanked with him all the way into T5. Come wrath I thought I'd try my hand at healing so I ditched all my feral gear and geared him as a tree. I quickly discovered I love tanking and enjoy DPS I could give a rats ass for healing myself and he went boomkin for the duration. I have recently converted him back to a Bear again and you can find me in the heroic Q. He still needs a lot more emblems before I'm happy with him but now that I don't have any leveling to do I have more time to tank.

My next 80 was my first 70 and the first toon I ever raided with. Omenator, my Warlock dinged 80 on 9/8/2009. When Wrath hit I was sporting full shadoweave along with battlecast gear. Combined with a Felguard - Siphon Life spec this toon had more self healing that my shadow priest did. It was also a felony how fast it could level. Run through a group of mobs, dot them all up and let the felguard bat clean up. Specwise he is now back to Affliction and serves as my banker since it is the only toon that I have leveled enchanting high enough to DE any greens or blues I pick up along the way.

To say destroying mobs with an Elemental Shaman is fun would be the same as saying I like breathing. Watching a mob lose half its health with one key just brings out the kid in me. Totemomen dinged 80 on 10/15/2009. It took a little longer but then again this toon wasn't anywhere near 70 when wrath hit. In fact it was one of many 60's. This is also the only toon I have ever healed a 5man, heroic, or raid with. Which is to say I've done it a few times only when the guild is desparate. Healing is just not my thing but it makes me appreciate those who do heal me while I am tanking all the more.

I took another hiatus in October with the birth of my second child. WoW is a lot of fun but Family is always first, followed by work to support them second. When I did find time to get back into game just after the first of the year I leveled my ret Pally Omenknight next. I acheived 80 on this toon on 1/16/2010. The stories about Ret being OP are true. More mobs the better even. This toon had originally been a pocket healer as a dual box to 60 long before Wrath ever came out. But a big 2H Axe later and it was a PvE destroyer.

After playing a melee toon I thought I'd go range and powered up Omenpotestas the Frost Mage. For true AOE grinding there is nothing better. Pop Ice Shield, ride around a large group of mobs in a circle. Drop off the mount and Fost Nova them all in place. Next Blink away and start the Blizzard. At worst the pack would close on you and you'd Nova, Blink, and Blizzard again. Then it took 3 hours to loot all the corpses. I ran a bunch of heroics with this toon as Arcane but will definately go back to Frost when it's time to push this toon to 85.

Then it was back to the ground. Omenwar was a fury warrior all the way to level 70. It has been Prot ever since and dinged 80 on 2/26/2010. And you may flame a former DK blogger for this next sentence. As a tank I prefer the Warrior. That's right, in my opinion Charge > Death Grip. Actually, it's Charge+Thunderclap > Death Grip + Death and Decay. I have run so many dungeons with this toon that the Triumphs are only good for gems these days. On the extremely rare occurrence I can make a raid between family and work, this is the toon I tank with. Sorry fellow DK's, I have betrayed your trust a second time.

Next, it was time for more work. Such is life. I didn't get back until late May. I dinged 80 on my Rogue, Hiddenomen, on 6/11/2010. I have been running heroics with this toon and have just started getting into world PvP. Or to be more specific, my guild loves to ensure the Allies on my server never have a shot at VoA. So I have thrown my lot in with them as well and enjoy watching clothies try to hide when they see me coming. As of right now this is my second best geared toon just behind Omenwar. I dumped a lot of gold into this one power leveling Engineering but it has been worth it for the tinker chants. Now if I could only get two swords or two daggers that I like.

If there are any Shadow Priests out there, you'll have to explain the fun of these toons. If I want to DoT something to death I'll play the warlock in a cold, dead, heartbeat. I realize shadow is the only way to solo a priest to 80 and I dinged mine that way on 6/28/2010. Damage is fine, while questing I could hit 1,200 dps and toss nearly 2k in dungeons on the way to 80. Just something about the play style doesn't sit with me. Oh well, I have enough other toons to keep me occupied and I'm glad I did it.

My final class to hit 80 was my Hunter, Huntomen. I dinged yesterday, 7/7/2010, in a guild 5-man with some of my friends. I saved the hunter for last. Not because I dislike them. I saved this toon for last because it was my first toon I ever leveled past 10. I eventually abandoned it for over a year at level 36 in favor of the warlock. But because this was my first it will always be one of my favorites. I haven't had time to gear this one yet but you can believe that will happen before Cataclysm comes out. Not to mention this is my only toon with a turbo-charged helicopter so I have to fly around on it.

The other part of my goal was to ensure each and every toon had epic flight. That was achieved long before they hit 80. In fact, I refused to level a toon past 70 without it. Now some of you are saying that is a ton of gold, where did it all come from. The simple truth is questing from 70-80 will net you over 5k per toon if you always take the most expensive quest reward and vendor it when it's not useful to you. Combined with a couple toons with mining, herbing, and skinning, I was never in want of gold.

So there it is, unless my life changes I am basically done raiding. Either way, I am definitely done blogging. To my guidlies of the past couple years, thanks for all your support. You know I always have a toon ready for a heroic whenever I'm online.

For my readers, thank you as well. It is heartening to see that even after being gone for more than a year I still get a hundred hits a day and will soon reach the 100,000 milestone.

Cheers

Quick Don't Look, You didn't see that

2010-02-18T09:50:00.006-05:00

As you know after essentially quitting my DK and blog at the end of March last year I quietly snuck back into Azeroth after several months to level the rest of my toons. So far, my DK, Druid, Lock, Mage, Pally, and Shammy have all hit 80. They all have epic flight as do my 73 warrior and 73 huntard.

I'm playing the warrior right now and after leveling to 70 as a dual wielding titan gripping furious SOB I wasn't real happy with him. Then a guildie suggest I take him prot, hooked me up with the cobalt set, and AOE grind all my quests to have more fun.

I gave it a try.

I died attempting to solo Harold Lane too many times to count. Then something clicked. Pieces fell into place and I was a tank again. Naturally I joined LFG for a random and was pleasantly surprised with the insta-q.

UK.

I haven't tanked in almost a year. I've never tanked with a warrior. All my tanking knowledge came from being a Bear in BC and DK tanking a year ago.

I think I did OK.

The Druid and Shammy were both melee toons so they got exposed to all the bombs at my feet. When the tank takes 70% of the damage for the entire run it is a safe bet it was a smooth one.

Damn I've missed being a tank. Just don't tell my wife.

WoW.com's Bad Business Decision - Time for a Boycott

2010-02-03T11:18:00.004-05:00

I have been a long time reader of WoWinsider and subsequently WoW.com. While I occasionally enjoyed the drama in guild watch I myself wasn't terribly disappointed when it was removed. That did not appear to be the case with the general public based on their comments.

In today's edition of the classifieds Adam Holisky an editor at WoW.com posted the following comment after deleting several comments and banning people from posting.

"I'm giving a warning here -- we have banned several of you who seem to not be able to move on. The constant barrage from a few of you is not welcomed, and is considered a very low form of trolling. You are welcome to participate in the community here with different email addresses if you like, but if you continue to demonstrate your inability to be polite and respectful, we will make the bans wider.

This is a community here, and we're not going to be like the general forums.

End of discussion."

I disagreed and replied with the following.

"@ Adam

I disagree with WoW.com's response to the many requests to have drama reinstated and believe that you are collectively making a bad business decision for two reasons.

First, your audience have clearly demonstrated a desire for a feature that you have in the past provided yet refuse to now. Any time a business eliminates a product or service feature it risks alienating its customers. Based on the feedback I have seen on this column since it has changed I would say that risk has become reality.

Second, your response to the repeated requests (albeit some not so polite) by banning people from commenting and expressing their disagreement further erodes the relationship you have with your readers. Even those of us who have not be banned are alarmed that opposing viewpoints are not tolerated in all instances. By all means edit the asshats, but don't blanket censor the disagreement.

Both of these points ultimately tie to the fact that WoW.com makes its money based on readership. Both of the points will reduce readership and ultimately revenues and your ability to earn a paycheck by writing about a game you love to play.

Afterall, the service WoW.com has a relatively low barrier to entry with the biggest obstacle being the relationships you have cultivated with Blizzard and with their fan base. Neither of those are protected and therefore it would make good business sense to reconsider your collective policy of not only not providing what your readers want, but also the heavy handed treatment being doled out towards those who are unhappy with the changes.

Regards,"

Now I personally believed that to be polite and respectful.

It was deleted inside of 5 minutes.

Personally I am less upset about the removal of the drama section of guild watch, I am abhorred that legitimate debate is suppressed. I am quite sure WoW.com will not pick this post up in their Daily Quest feature but I feel compelled to bring this practice to light. It is an old business adage that ignoring your customers best be done at your own peril.

Therefore, I am encouraging other bloggers to pick up the torch and let's collectively show WoW.com that their readership expects to be heard.

Accountability

2009-12-30T21:09:00.007-05:00

Time to hold myself accountable. At the beginning of the year I set the ambitious goal of continuingng to raid with my DK and provide reasonable if not exactly cutting edge suggestions on how to get the most out of your toon. I also had the ancillary goal of leveling all 9 other classes to 80.

Of course what I didn't know at the time is which way my life would turn. These WoW goals were set assuming life outside in the real world would remain stable.

It didn't.

However, I still believe it is important to see how I did against these goals as with all goals in life.

The real world saw my work schedule become very busy as we had several major initiatives going in the office. It also saw the decision to have another baby, the full pregnancy, and the birth of my daughter. These factors led me to quit WoW at the end of March. I just couldn't do it all.

After four full months away from game I came back to find my small group of friends mostly back in a guild we ran Kara and Gruul's with and I was welcomed back there as well. I spent a couple solid months leveling toons when time permitted but never got The Scourge out for another spin beyond respeccing him when all the points got refunded.

I took additional breaks from WoW on a regular basis especially after my little girl was born. So here are the results.

As you can see my druid went from a T5ish feral tank to 80 and is a boomkin. My lock is back to affliction after leveling as a felguard siphon life spec. Gotta say with full Frozen Shadoweave this build had so much self healing I don't think I ever ate or drank. My hunter languished and went from 70 to 73. I took my rogue up to 70 and have plans on finishing it someday. My Shammy made it all the way from 61 to 80 and is now a heroic resto but I just don't make the effort to be a fantastic healer and usually let a dps or two die during the run.

My mage is up to 70 and remains the frost AOE grind champion but has yet to go any farther. My pally went from a resto pocket healer at 60 to retribution for the solo push to 71. There is no spec more OP than Ret Pallies IMO. My priest went from being a pocket dual box healer at 60 as well and is now full shadow. It is also a hard to kill toon with all the self healing. If it has mana, the mob(s) is dead. My warrior is a dual wielding titan gripping disappointment. At level 70 it has the lowest dps by far from all my toons and while I may not be optimal at rotations I do look up standard rotations for each class so I am somewhat competent.

That leaves my DK. The Scourge sits in the same gear he had the day I retired. He hasn't stepped foot outside of Dalaran except for a single fishing excursion. It was a very fun toon but I think I don't run heroics with it to collect badge gear because I don't want WoW to have that much influence on my life again.

On the subject of heroics and the new random pugs I have run a ton this week while on vacation on my Lock, Boomkin, and Shammy. Overall I have had good experiences. Only one run did I have to deal with asshats and I can count the complete wipes from 30-40 runs on one hand.

Lastly, I am somewhat amazed that after 9 months of shutting this blog down I still average 100 hits a day. That is a long way down from the 750-1000 I had at my peak and I wonder how far could this have gone had I devoted the attention to it that it deserved. I had several good e-mail interviews for DK of the week feature but ultimately the feeling of obligation to generate fresh, relevant, daily content was also a contributing factor to my departure.

I hope 2009 treated everyone who shared this journey with me well and I wish you all the best in the new year.

Regards,

Omen aka The Scourge

Life after WoW

2009-05-27T09:00:00.002-04:00

It's been two months since I canceled my account. In some ways leaving the game has been easy, in others not so much.

The biggest issue I have with WoW is also its biggest attraction. The persistent nature of the game. Even when you are logged out events that affect you continue to transpire. This is a powerful motivator to not log out, not miss anything.

I figure I was playing 20-25 hours a week before I quit. Six to eight of those would have been raiding, the rest doing the daily grind. Fishing, crafting, dailies, running heroics for rep, etc, etc, etc. Most of that time was not truly fun.

The time spent raiding also included tons of down time for breaks and wipe recovery.

Outside of the game I was putting another 10-15 hours a week into this blog. Between the two it was as if I had a second full time job with no pay. I'll admit it was one I enjoyed.

In my resignation post I identified two aspects of my personal life I had let slack. Reading and my health. I have addressed both of those.

I have read a couple books but have focused most of my readings on online journals and blogs that deal with my professional interests of data modeling, economics, decision theory, and personal finance.

I write a blog on my professional interests and it is achieving my goals. I don't update it near as frequently as I did The Scourge, but then that is the nature of my professional thoughts. Insight takes longer to develop and distill in that arena. My readership is also much lower but that is also a nature of the material. However, I am getting the right readership. People who can further my career.

As for my health I indicated I had put on a few pounds. I know myself. If I don't have a good kick in the ass by someone other than my wife I will not exercise. So I hired a trainer. In just a few weeks I've dropped a few pounds, lost an inch from my waist, gained a lot of endurance, am a little stronger, and have the energy to keep up with my son at the park.

Gaming wise, I played a number of games. I tried Diablo 2 again. It was fun and I could see a lot of the Death Knight in my old favorite class the necromancer. I also finally got Warcraft 3. I'm not and RTS fan and WC3 is definitely not WoW. I did join iRacing and settle into it. I've always had a love affair with racing and this is much cheaper than buying a spec Miata. The beauty is, I can fit my racing schedule more easily into my routine and if I need to quit for something in RL, 9 or 24 people are dependent on my being there.

But it's not easy walking away from something that was a big part of your life for two years. I still lurk on a few blogs. Afterall, WoW blogging really is a community and especially amongst us fellow DK bloggers. Death Knights continue to be in the good hands of Me And My Ghoul and Death Knight Tactics, though the loss of Skeleton Jack leaves another hole in the group.

I have no intentions on removing this site from the web, but two months after WoW I can say I have no intentions on coming back.

My Non WoW Blog

2009-04-22T07:31:00.002-04:00

This post will have nothing to do with WoW other than to say I actually don't miss the game. I do miss the community around it.

Part of writing The Scourge was to see if I had what it takes to be a blogger and had real life not intervened I would still be playing Warcraft and keeping this blog up to date.

I'm not terribly surprised that blogging has gotten into my skin. I've kept a journal at work for over 6 years now. I have found it invaluable in tracking my accomplishments come review time as well as allowing me to see developing trends in the day to day office politics. Blogging is not a big shift from that.

I have been writing a blog for the real world for a couple weeks now and expect I will continue with it. Some of you may find it interesting. Many of you won't.

As with The Scourge I write about what I am familiar with. For my new blog that covers topics on decision theory, data mining, personal finance, business, and macro economics. So for those of you who may be interested in those topics from a practitioners point a view, feel free to stop by. I can be found at http://www.broadcastthoughts.net/

For those of you who were hoping for more Death Knight updates I recommend you peruse Skeleton Jack for your DK needs.

Following the herd

2009-03-31T07:28:00.002-04:00

out the door.

When Phaelia left to have a baby it didn't really phase me since I never followed Resto4Life.

Yesterday BRK pulled the plug.

Today it is my turn.

To be honest it's something I've contemplated. I like to claim I'm pragmatic and can be happy with 95% of the benefit for 50% of the effort. But when it comes down to it, I'm not satisfied. Never have been, never will.

I launched this blog for two reasons, one I wanted to give blogging a spin, and two, at the time I couldn't find any good DK blogs. If you look at my link list on the right you will find plenty of good blogs.

The reality is, to achieve my blogging goals I need to put in more than 50% of the effort. That is time I can not afford to commit. For the past two years WoW has dominated my nights once my son goes to bed. I've given up more sleep than I care to admit. I've done what I could to minimize the impact on my personal and professional life, but I know I haven't eliminated it.

In the year prior to taking up WoW I read the following books:

Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The Purchase of Intimacy
The New Direct Marketing: How to Implement A Profit-Driven Database Marketing Strategy
How to Lie With Statistics
Making Great Decisions in Business and Life
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Personal Financial Planning
The Nine Nations of North America

Since I started WoW I haven't read a single one. I personally believe I am not as interesting as I once was.

Before WoW I was a part time college professor in addition to my day job. I haven't taught in two years. Though to be honest I don't think I will take that up again anytime soon. Student demands for grade distortion, cheating, lack of willingness to study or do homework frustrated me to no end. There were exceptions of course.

I've put on 15 pounds while my bike gathers dust.

So there I was deluding myself I could have it all. After all BRK was a middle aged professional like myself. He had a wife and kids like myself. He was more successful at raiding than I ever was. He was more successful at blogging than I ever was, or likely ever would be. What I didn't see was how much he was sacrificing at home until he admitted to it yesterday.

Truth is, I don't want to be BRK, or even like him. I want to be the same guy my wife fell in love with 13 years ago, only a little older. That will still include computer games, just not ones with persistent worlds where I fear if I'm not online I'm missing something. They will be the kind where I can hit save and walk away and don't rely on 24 other people to achieve my in game goals.

To those of you who know me IRL, we'll keep in touch. To everyone else I've met in this fascinating game, I wish you the best of luck in achieving what you want out of life. It's a rough world out there and I hope I have added a little enjoyment to y'all as I know I have received my share of enjoyment from you.

Cheers,

Monday Morning Blues

2009-03-30T08:22:00.003-04:00

I didn't get much playing done over the weekend. Outside of a couple dailies and fooling around in a couple dungeons didn't do anything exciting.

I'm still trying to score my first Maly run. I honestly don't care whether it's 10 or 25. I also don't care(but wouldn't pass up) about loot in there. I raid to see content and I still haven't seen this fight outside of Tankspot, or gotten a kill.

I'd really like to have that before 3.1 hits.

In the meantime I'm collecting mats for Northrend Inscription Research. One I can use the mats to finish capping my scribe prof, two I'll hopefully discover some of the better new glyphs early on and be able to make some easy money.

I have about half a dozen good entries for my next DK feature. It's going to be a hard decision. If you aren't chosen don't worry there are always future weeks as well.

I ran a nexus regular pug on my hunter over the weekend. We had a DK tank. He was level 70 with 61 points in Frost. Not exactly ideal spec and I would argue that while leveling just grab a few pieces of +def gear and tank with a DPS spec. But it was clear the guy hadn't tanked before. That's OK too, we all need to learn sometime.

The tanking basics that you need to know regardless of class.
1) Only pull when your healer is ready
2) Know where a safe place to tank the pull is
3) Don't pull when a Patrol can join the fight
4) Make sure you have a way to establish and maintain aggro on all mobs that are not CC'd
5) Use Line of Sight to ensure casters come to you
6) If you do not have the health, mitigation, and avoidance to survive a 5 pull, use CC
7) Slow Down and Think

For DK's Items number 4 & 5 means use DnD either on the mobs where they are (assuming #2 isn't violated) or apply rule #5 and make sure all the mobs have to run through your DnD as they come to you.

I bring this up as there were numerous trash pulls I died on since feigning death would have put the mobs back on our healer that much faster. I'm sure some of the expert hunters out there could give me some tips on kiting casters in tight spaces. I know I wasn't good at it.

Fun night out

2009-03-28T12:21:00.003-04:00

Nothing exciting was going on so several of us friends decided to run the daily heroic UK last night. Ordinarily there would be nothing of note from that place. What made it more entertaining is I tanked it in a full DPS 17/0/54 spec.

With my tank gear I was uncritable of course and still had 30k health unbuffed with 26k armor nd 34% avoidance. Needless to say that was still more than enough to handle the place. Not to mention we all have raid experience.

Ingvar only got one dark smash off before we dropped him. The extra 500 DPS I brought to the table really sped the place up.

We also do this for out alts on occasion. We did a regular UK 4 man with an Enhance Shammy as the "tank" a hunter kitty as off tank, my boomkin and a holy pally. Since the shammy didn't really have any aoe aggro tools beyond pulling with a chain lightning we used lots of CC. I'd root melee toons and the hunter would range ice trap casters.

So remember raiding is srs bsnss but kick back and have some fun on occasion.

More Changes on the PTR and other things

2009-03-27T07:30:00.004-04:00

Let's start with the other things. WoW Insider linked my feature of Mundien which lead to my second largest daily visit total. I got an e-mail from Mundien stating that his graphic card died so he can only access e-mail on a friends computer. He wanted to pass on his thanks for y'alls interest and support and added that tanking with 1000ms means you really have to anticipate where the mobs will be versus where they appear on your screen.

So lets talk PTR. MMO Champion has the latest build notes up and if you haven't heard by now master of ghouls and night of the dead are changing places.

Unholy DPS specs that rely on a perma ghoul will be just fine since you will still be able to get both talents. Blood and Frost DPS specs that used to dip into unholy to get the perma ghoul are going to go without.

Now we all know perma ghoul without night of the dead is not that permanent since they die to AOE a lot so this may not be as big of a nerf as we think on the surface. That said, I'll leave the hard core theory crafting up to our friends over at EJ. The same goes for Death Strike nerf.

Over the next few days I will replace my hybrid Tanking/DPS build linked on the right with several builds for 3.1. I honestly haven't used my hybrid build in a while. It works great for small guilds in heroics and Naxx 10 but it just doesn't perform well enough to forego the respec costs to change back and forth between dedicated tank and dps in Naxx 25.

The builds I am planning on putting up are Blood Tank, Unholy Tank, and Unholy DPS. The expectation is that you will have dual spec and pick two out of three. I have seen rumors that ebon plague stacking has been fixed but I don't yet have evidence I'd rely on 100%. As soon as I find it I'll pass the confirmation on.

Featured Death Knight - Mundien

2009-03-26T07:41:00.003-04:00

This weeks Featured DK is Mundien of Spirestone. He's an Unholy Troll Tank still getting geared up for Heroics with his friends. His biggest problem, you can't play WoW while deployed at Sea.

Mundien is in the Navy and life shipboard isn't conducive to doing anything other than reading the webs. Therefore his play time is limited to days in port.

When Mundien is available to play I'd recommend running dungeons with a Wyrmrest tabbard on. As he gets honored and eventually revered with them they have 3 solid tanking peices that will last him well into heroics and even Naxx. Regular Halls of Lightning will be a good place to start. If Loken can be convinced to give up his trinket Mundien will be well on his way to getting the 689 defense rating needed for raids when he's back this summer.

What was your former main? I raided on my undead lock, Mundin, formerly of Team Cartel on Dunemaul Through the second half or so of BC, and back in Vanilla WoW days, I was a dwarf Healadin with positively mediocre gear in a guild called Not in the Face on Gorgonnash (also named Mundin).

How does your DK compare to your former main? The DK is pretty much exactly the class I’ve been waiting for. I love the lock, and the pally was fun, and I enjoyed my warrior for the little bit I played him, but I always wanted something that I viewed as kind of a mix of the three. The other classes never really appealed to me. The DK is almost TOO much fun.

I have to agree with this. My lock was fun and so was my bear, but the DK really combines some of their playstyles quite well.

My least favorite thing about DK's is ....... the stuff I’m seeing on the PTR reports, I don’t know how fun it’s going to be when I get another chance to play. I’m optimistic, but I’m also seriously considering going back to the lock for a while. That nerf bat can hit pretty hard.

I honestly believe we will come out of 3.1 in decent shape. The tanking nerfs won't be fun but I don't feel they are game breakers for us. Both blood and Unholy will have viable tank specs. I can't say much for frost since I still haven't done much with that tree outside of dual wielding.

What are you most proud of with your Death Knight? The fact that he was 73 when I left for deployment, and through a few port visits on really spotty internet in several different countries, he’s now 80 and not terribly far off from heroics…I know he’s got SSG, but give me a break, I don’t have much choice right now :P

Not only will I give you a break on using SSG, I'll suggest you are the prime example of when and how to use it. SSG provides the bridge required to get uncritable and makes gearing up much easier. Keep rocking the instances while in port and I have no doubt that you'll make a fine tank when you can dedicate the time to it.

So for all of you on Spirestone, give Mundien a /Salute when you see him. He's out there doing the work that allows us to have fun back here.

/attention
/salute Mundien

As a reminder if you want to be featured fill out the form here.

No Immortal for me

2009-03-26T07:26:00.003-04:00

After my previous night of Disconnects I get logged on for the remainder of Naxx last night. I am pleastantly surprised to learn that everything but Four Horsemen and Frostwyrm is clear. That tells me despite my DC issues the guild did well in the remaining quarters.

I was still in a DPS spec from the night before where I had been asked to respec. We only had two tanks so I was asked to tank Baron in my DPS spec. My only concern was I just traded out my tank cloaks for a shiny new Platinum Mesh Cloak. The only problem was since I didn't expect to be tanking and our guild chanter didn't have any titanium it was chanted with +16 def rating. That left me 11 def rating below the cap.

I advised the RL and my healers and they said don't worry. We use the zerg technique where all DPS starts off on Thane and kills him first. Then Baraon, then Lady, and last Zelick. My job was simply eat however many stacks it took to get Thane down while tanking Baron. As soon as Baraon was taunted off of me go relieve the holy pally tanking Zelick in the back.

Went like clockwork.

I honestly never asked whether there were any boss deaths yesterday but it didn't matter come Saph. We had a new ele shammy in the guild who didn't have a chance to get any frost gear and he went down on Saph. But that was the only death in there.

Kel took us two attempts since the RNG played mean with us on the first one. We have two off tanks pick up the scarabs when they come out. Both of them got mind controlled at the same time while tanking scarabs at around 15%. Needless to say that lead to a complete wipe.

The second attempt, everything was going smooth. The rogues, DPS warriors, and all 3 of us DKs were doing a good job interrupting the Frost Bolts. Mind Freeze FTW. Then I got mind controlled. I was sheeped twice but not long enough to keep me from death gripping a resto shammy and one shotting him. Why can't I do that when I actually want to?

Still a fun relaxed night of raiding.

Disconnects FTL

2009-03-25T10:14:00.002-04:00

I was all excited to run Naxx 25 last night, grab some emblems, grab some screenies, and have something interesting to say on the blog.

Guess the interwebs had another idea. We were doing a slow thorough clear trying to ensure no one died on boss attempts.

On Anub, I DC'd 30 seconds in. I think I'm logged back in, I see my UI is hosed and DC again. I relog see Anub is almost dead on the other side of the room and DC again. I get back in and was able to grab my emblem. I still don't know what dropped. Not that I contributed.

On Faerlina, I DC two more times. And when I can get logged in my latency is anywhere between 500 and 1300 ms. Things are not looking good.

I whisper the RL that I am going to entirely reboot my computer and router while they clear trash to Max to see if that helps

On Maxx I DC right when she enrages.

I had been hoping to tank but I'm glad they asked me to be DPS. With the plague quarter coming up I excuse myself from the raid. There is no way I'm surviving the dance with these DC issues. Not what I wanted to do, but not fair to blow everyone's chance at an achievement because the interwebs decided to be mad at me last night.

Major Tanking Glyphs in 3.1

2009-03-24T13:10:00.008-04:00

Tanking Glyphs are going to be tough come 3.1. There are a lot to choose from. I took a trip to the glyph vendor on the PTR and took a few screen shots for you.

I've broken them down into four categories. Non tree specific, and each tree.

Non Tree Specific

Right off the bat we have 5 major glyphs competing for three spots. All 5 are threat related.

Rune Strike is straight forward increase in TPS for all DK's. Given the changes to Blade Barrier it's not my favorite, but it's still damn good.

Death and Decay is an oldie but goody. Who doesn't want an additional 20% damage on our highest threat AOE tanking ability.

Dark Command may or may not be the biggest tanking DK glyph in the game. It is situational but when you absolutely need the taunt to hit, this glyph puts a melee hit capped tank at the hit cap for their taunt as well. If Ulduar has lots of mechanics like Gluth where two tanks have to taunt off of each other this will be required.

Glyph of Disease is the much ballyhooed glyph that allows pestilence to refresh your diseases on your current target at the same time as spreading/refreshing them on the AOE packs you are working on.

Dark Death is a straight up threat increase by pumping up death coil damage. Though as a tank this is probably lowest on my priority simply because death coils are lower priority uses of RP than other abilities.

Blood Tank Glyphs

The reality is, Death Strike can apply to all trees but I put it in blood since it is the primary strike FU for blood given the changes to lichborne. More damage equals more threat. This will be a common theme.

Vampiric Blood brings the healing benefits to this talent up to 25% uptime given the 2 minute cooldown nerf.

Frost Tank Glyphs

Unbreakable armor buffs the mitigation of this talent even further. Like all our mitigation cooldowns this took a nerf but for the 20 seconds its up this will go a long way to ensuring you survive what ever is thrown at you.

Howling blast, Obliterate, and Frost Strike are all threat enhancers. They all contribute to your damage output which will ensure the mobs hate you that much more.

Unholy Tanking Glyphs

Bone shield's two extra charges becomes even more valuable as our avoidance and BS's cooldown got nerfed.

Unholy Blight's 10 extra seconds frees up more RP for rune strikes and deathcoils to increase your threat.

Scourge Strike remains the same and continues to refresh your disease on your primary target.

Summary

It remains to be seen whether Dark Command will be required. Right now if you miss a taunt on Gluth or the 4 horseman you can survive until it comes off cooldown with good gear and decent healers. That may not be true in 3.1.

Assuming Dark Command is not required my immediate reaction is to take Vampiric Blood, Disease, and Rune Strike for blood tanks. I'd lose disease for Dark Command. While refreshing diseases is nice for main target and AOE, I'm not hosed if I don't maintain 100% uptime for either single target or AOE.

My Frost Glyph selection would be Howling Blast, Unbreakable Armor, and Frost Strike. Since I've never tanked as Frost I won't be offended if any Frosties suggest otherwise. If I need Dark Command I'd probably drop UA. 20% on oh shit is nice, but the likelihood that the 20% is actually the difference between a wipe and a kill is probably less than that of a missed taunt.

Unholy tanks will have to take Bone Shield. With impurity I would also grab Death and Decay to take advantage of the AOE synergy. Last I would grab Scourge Strike to keep my single target threat up. The disease glyph doesn't do anything for AOE threat and we will be spamming SS on our main targets anyway. If I have to lose one for dark command I'd drop the DnD glyph.

Ask The Scourge Time

2009-03-24T10:32:00.003-04:00

It's Tuesday and the servers are down.

It's Tuesday and I haven't had much to blog about in the past few days.

It's Tuesday and I haven't had an Ask the Scourge post in a couple weeks.

So if you have a DK question, I will provide a DK answer.

On unrelated notes.

I have a couple great DK features coming. Some of you have some fascinating stories. Keep 'em coming. If you want to be featured you can fill out my form and e-mail it to me.

I've also had just a couple people step up on the Scourge Event. About a month ago I proposed this idea and several of you said that would be cool. Very few of you have gone out and rolled an extra DK over on Nazjatar to make the event happen. As a reminder the sign up is on the right and can be found here.

Last for some entertainment, BRK has been doing Baby Hunter movies. If you haven't seen them go check them out. My hunter is level 70 and I've learned more about strafing than I ever knew before. I was just happy I knew how to trap. So for fun I went out and rolled a hunter for kicks and giggles and using BRK as a guide I leveled to 6.

Check that out, the first 6 levels and only 5.5% of my damage came from melee. Apparently BRK can teach an old dog new tricks.

As for patch 3.1 I'm calling for it to drop in two weeks on 4/6. (I have no basis for this opinion)

Foul Trouble

2009-03-22T19:09:00.003-04:00

I'm personally a Football fan. But my Alma Mater is in the big dance. They were also highly seeded and was carrying a 15 point lead in the second round just before the half. With 3 minutes left we are behind by one because we've given up 26 points in Free Throws.

Foul trouble is costing us the game.

OK Scourge what does this have to do with raiding?

Fair question.

Every time you make a mistake it's like a foul.

Pull aggro off the tank and at best the raid needs to reposition. At worst you just got ganked.

Miss a taunt, foul.

Violate Raid Rule 1B and die because you stood in the shit that kills you, foul.

Snipe a heal, foul.

AOE a CC target, foul.

Some fouls are more egregious than others. Anything that gets the main tank killed will generally lead to a wipe.

But enough of the little fouls will wipe you as well. They add up. Every time a DPS dies that puts more pressure on the healers and brings you that much closer to the enrage timer.

You can take action to foul less. Stack your stats properly. Make sure you have the right gear, chants, gems, consumables. Practice your techniques in heroics. Listen to your raid leader.

The point is, don't sweat one or two small mistakes. But if all 25 players are making one or two its going to be a long night of wipes. From a raid leaders perspective, sometimes you just have to bench a player that commits too many fouls.

5 seconds left and my team has a 2 point lead. But we just dropped a couple free throws and have to go back on D. We were heavy favorites in the game and just may prove that over matching your opponent, or over gearing the raid may allow sloppy play to not ruin the night.

Surviving foul trouble on Sarth + 0 when over geared happens. If its Sarth + 3 you just can't afford to commit the fouls.

Missouri pulled it out and beat Marquette 83 v 79 and moves on the the sweet 16. Now we have a few days to regroup and clean up our play.

Featured Death Knight - Deekow

2009-03-20T21:15:00.007-04:00

Deekow was the first to fill out my questionaire. Since he's an entertaining blogger I figured I'd feature him. So if you want to be featured next week, fill out the form and I'll pick the most entertaining one and get you posted.

First let me say its nice to see you back in action again Deekow. I look forward to what's next with your blog.

If you happen to be on Runetotem Horde side /who Deekow and tell him hello.

At the time of this writing Deekow has a whopping 4,265 achievement points and is sporting a 0/31/40 dual wield build. You also won't find a nicer collection of gear than what he has. Epic may be achieved but its truly impressive.

Prior to rolling DK two weeks after Wrath Deekow could be found leveling his hunter to 55. He claims to have really liked his hunter but "The Death Knight is everything I wanted a character class to be."

I got a kick out of his answer on being a deathtard. "I seem to screw up spark duty the first attempt any given week on Malygos. Second attempt onward, I'm golden though." Now I've yet to see Malygos myself, but I'm told there is a good macro to help with that on wowwiki.

#showtooltip
/cleartarget
/clearfocus
/tar Power Spark
/focus
/stopmacro [target=focus, noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Death Grip

I like to (raid, pvp, instance, solo, etc) Please provide details.

Raid and instance. I'm a social player as it is, and the fact that I can bring Deekow to the party and tank or dps as needed, even swap on the fly, means I'm playing exactly the class I want, having fun the whole time. And raiding, well... I'm new to WoW raiding and it's entirely different from what I was used to with EQ in years past. In some ways, WoW has dumbed down raiding, especially when you look at seriously involved lore and scripts like you had with EQ Planes of Power and such. But, it's also much faster paced, which I can entirely appreciate, and no matter where you raid, there's NOTHING like the feel of pulling off the seemingly-impossible with 24 of your closest friends. Nothing in gaming anywhere will come close to the feeling of Sarth 3D the first time, for example. 3 Weeks later and I'm still buzzing from that when I think about it.

What are you most proud of with your Death Knight?

Earning my place with the J!NX raid team. J!NX is a big name and kind of intimidating, but the raid team is really just a bunch of raiders with individual goals and personalities. As a newer raider, I had more of an uphill challenge than I think most other raiders do; but, I think I'm also a good gutcheck and example of why EVERYONE should bring their A-game (research fights, know your class, bring consumables)... if I'm doing it as a self-proclaimed scrub, there's no excuse for anyone else. There are certainly many better players than I am, but I've proven I'm an asset rather than a liability, to be sure. We're a newer raid guild as well and it's fraggin' awesome to be a part of that guild getting where we are today. Man... I raid with J!NX, how fucking cool is that?

Dekow's blog is linked at the top of this post as well as in my blogroll, it's good reading, entertaining, and something you should go check out.

Now don't feel you have to be an Uber raider like the Kow is to be featured. You don't have to be a blogger either. If you are having fun with your DK and have a cool story of something you did that works great too. If you're level 58 fresh out of starter, the PvP king, or just can't survive the first boss of a heroic you're toon is still worth being featured.

Kara Key Solo'd

2009-03-20T20:03:00.004-04:00

Here it is. My fourth Kara Key. Big difference from my first one. When I keyed my lock I basically relied on others to walk me through each step and while I contributed reasonable DPS I definitely needed a good group to run the dungeons.

My second key was on my Bear. I was focused and tanked all the runs needed. They weren't clean runs but they got the kills required.

My third key on my hunter was just for fun. By the time I leveled him to 70 the key requirement was already dropped. But I keyed him anyway since I didn't think a non attuned toon belonged in Kara. This is the same feeling I have about Death Knight tanks getting uncritable by relying on Stoneskin Gargoyle. Some of the earliest posts I did were about getting 540 defense long before 3.08 came out.

Before you go off and think I'm being elitist about SSG, just realize that as you gear up and get defense on all your gear its possible to hit 540 with just a few enchants and a couple gems. Overall your stats will be better balanced between mitigation, avoidance, health, and threat.

Back to the key chain. I digressed more than usual but I just finished dinner and an adult beverage with it.

I only ran the minimum required for the key. Therefore my foray into SV and Arcatraz avoided all the bosses. I also skipped Murmur in Shadow Labs. I did full clears on Sethek Halls, Old Hillsbrad, Mechanar, Botanica, and Black Morass.

I did them all solo in an Unholy tank spec. For the most part I did them in my tank gear with frost presence because the 1700 DPS was more than sufficient. I only died once on a trash pull in Labs where I wasn't paying attention.

Black Morass was a little hairy since my new mouse decided to not respond and 500 ms lag didn't help.

The mouse and lag problems led to me missing 2 mobs as they made their way to the shield. All in all, soloing with 86% shield left wasn't bad. My Death Strikes healed me for around 2,600 health per pop and I used those about as often as scourge strikes.

So if you have a touch of nostalgia and looking for something to do before 3.1 hits, getting keyed on your own is very doable.

Featured Death Knight of the Week

2009-03-20T08:59:00.006-04:00

I'm toying with another idea for a regular feature. My Ask the Scourge hasn't played out as well as I'd like. So here's my idea. I have a form as part of this post. Copy paste it into an email to me at
o m e n s c o u r g e @ g m a i l . c o m and fill out the questions.

Once a week I'll select an entry based on whatever criteria grabs my attention. I'll then write a blog post about the player and their answers. Whenever possible I'll use your own words as well.

The armory link won't be posted, it will just save me some time in looking stuff up. I may also email back a few questions based on your answers.

Death Knight Name & Server:

Armory Link:

Screen shot:

When did you roll your DK?

What was your former main?

How does your DK compare to your former main?

I was called OP because I ........

I was called a Deathtard because I ........

My favorite thing about DK's is.......

My least favorite thing about DK's is .......

I like to (raid, pvp, instance, solo, etc) Please provide details.

My favorite tree is...

I prefer to DPS/Tank/Both

What are you most proud of with your Death Knight?

If I could change one thing about the class I would change......

Anything else about your Death Knight we should know?

Closer to Kara and other fun stuff

2009-03-20T07:58:00.002-04:00

Of course I forgot to send my screen shots so no pretty pics today.

I have one more step before I get my Kara key. Black Morass. Yesterday afternoon between fishing to restock my dragonfin fillet I ran Old Hillsbrad. Gotta say, other than the annoying first half this was the easiest dungeon to solo on the chain.

Why annoying?

When you are clearing and burning the shelters the guards do two things that annoy the crap out of me. They run, and they scattershot.

The running is annoying since you it takes more time to loot them since they aren't piled up at your feet.

The scattershot is 3 seconds where you can't do crap. Usually it comes the same time I want to mind freeze the warden to prevent its heals. Speaking of mind freeze, it works on Kel Thuzzad's frost bolts in Naxx.

Once you get to Thrall the rest is easy. Just remember to death grip the casters to you in the waves before Epoch and you're good as done.

I also ran some of our mid 60's alts through Slave Pens. Make sure you keep your health within a runic healing potion from full health so you can clear Rokmar's DoT on you when you drop him. Other than that real easy place.

Last AN heroic was a little buggy on Anub. When he would resurface he would run directly away from me. Guess he was scared. Omen showed I had aggro, target of target showed I had aggro but he wouldn't let me tank him properly. This also meant I had no control over which was he was facing for the pounds. Not to mention his pounds were hitting with the castbar only being half full.

Made the fight a little harder but we still scored the kill.

Naxx Clear

2009-03-19T08:09:00.004-04:00

OK, so for my new guild this isn't a big deal. But for me it is.

Now I'm just a Malygos kill away from scoring my Champion of the Frozen North title. In two years of playing this will be my first title. I came too late for the battleground PvP titles and I never was progressed enough in BC to get those titles. Not to mention I'm too cheap to shell out 1,000g for "of the Shattered Sun."

It's interesting to me how different groups can struggle with different fights. My friends and I have tons of trouble with Four Horsemen, but one shot the construct quarter. My new guild is the opposite. Grob and Gluth just give us all sorts of fits.

On our third attempt at gluth one of our chow kiters went down early. I was dpsing in my tank gear since we had lost tanks in the prior two attempts. I popped frost presence ran back and picked the chows up. It was the difference between a kill and a wipe and I was proud of myself.

Grobbulus just farted all over us. Someone kept taunting right when he would spray his slime which kept us DPS from staying on the boss since we had to kill slimes. I don't know how many times the raid leader yelled about that as well as tanking the slimes in the clouds.

Thaddius was a clean kill this week and we have to give our heals tons of kudos for it. I DC'd right when a polarity shift occurred. I saw the DC coming so I warned everyone on vent and of course my polarity changed and I stood there trying to blow up the raid. By the time I logged back in I was dead and the boss was 20%.

It's not uncommon for me to get one DC a night but this was actually my third. The first came right when I had a mutating injection on Grob. Any guesses on whether I lived through my own cloud?

After Thad we went into Frostwrym and this was my first time ever seeing Saph. The fight was actually pretty easy. I imagine it will be tougher when the healing regen nerfs hit and all us melee actually have to care about staying out of the blizzards.

Kel on the other hand proved a little difficult. I'm not sure what the problems were but we had off tanks die on a couple attempts as well as the main tank. On the last attempt we lost the main tank and the remaining off tank with about 400k health left. As one of the remaining players, I called the army out and blew every other cooldown I had. I was at 25% health and one of 5 remaining players standing when Kel went down. Ugly but done.

I picked up 3 more pieces for my tank set including my 7.5 legs. If I choose too I could have the 4 piece bonus by combining the 7.5 chest and legs with the T7 Shoulders and Gloves. Three more seconds of IBF would be nice, but the shoulders and gloves I am currently wearing are too much of an upgrade.

My health using the standard Unholy tank spec has me at 29.6k unbuffed. My AP in this shot is still buffed from endless rage so it should be 3418 which is still not bad for a tank. I will also eat a snapper extreme when tanking for an additional 40 hit which I sorely need. I am also 3 emblems of valor away from a nice cloak upgrade and my bracers are still DPS bracers. If I ever replace those I can free up some gems for strength or stam depending on need.

Not bad when all said and done

2009-03-18T07:55:00.006-04:00

Naxx 25. We are clearing 3 quarters for the night. I log on all ready to tank and was one of 6 tanks in the raid. My new guild has a raid policy that they will pay respec fees if you are asked. For loot you still roll on your main spec which has been identified as tank. Outside of 5 mans I've only DPS'd for them in the week since I joined.

My time will come.

Since my main spec gear is mostly Naxx 10 and Heroics I had priority over any offspecs for tank drops I could use. For the other main spec tanks in the raid, most of them already had the i213 level gear. So I cleaned up. Tanked my EPGP rating down the drain but at least I'll be on more level footing.

So lootwise here's how I did.

For the second time in a week I upgraded my tanking shoulders from the Halls of Stone quest blues I had. Earlier I picked up the T7 shoulders, but those got upgraded again last night with the Pauldrons of Unnatural Death. I had the mats for my scribe chant, but I will have to gem these this afternoon. I'll put a +27 def in those so I can crit cap with the gear changes.

I also scored a pair of Callous-Hearted Gauntlets. These will be getting the armsmen enchant on them for the additional threat today.

The last piece I won was the T7.5 chest. Only due to a bug it got miss looted to a shaman who was supposed to recieve the shamy chest that dropped. So in the next few days I'll go from T7 to T7.5 and get my Valorous Scourgeborne Chestguard.

As for dishing out the pain.....

Like my tank set, my DPS gear is primarily Naxx 10, crafted, and heroics. Which is not to say it's bad gear but there are clear upgrades in heroic raids for me. I went with the 17/0/54 2H Unholy DPS spec even though there were two others in the raid. After two quarters one of the other DK's had to leave so I only fought for Ebon Plague with one DK for Military Quarter.

I'd like to say I held my own in there.

I should have been 3rd overall for the night but you can't DPS when dead and Azzure went down when a mind controlled understudy broke free on Raz early in the fight. On most boss fights I was in top 3 as well. Tonight should be interesting to see how I do on Patch. It's been a very long time since I've seen him in heroic where my raid buffed AP is well in excess of 5000 and my paper doll says I'll do 900 white damage DPS.

So with 3 Quarters down for the night with no wipes I picked up my 50th emblem of valor and Heroic Military Quarter achievement.

As I said, not bad, not bad at all. Tonight we should clear the place. All we have is construct and Frostwyrm. Assuming we get the clear I'll pick up 3 more achievements including the fall of Naxx and be a Malygos kill away from getting Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

Kara Key Update: Mech

2009-03-18T07:41:00.003-04:00

I'll be putting up a Naxx 25 post in a bit but wanted to keep you aprised of my Solo Kara Key quest.

I hit up Mechenar yesterday so I could finish getting my Arcatraz key. As with previous dungeons trash is easy. DnD, IT, PS, Pest then spam RS and trade off between DS and SS depending on health needs.

One boss was a little harder.

Notice anything missing from Mechanno Lord's debuffs? Should be to the lower left of my ICEHud. No Diseases. Damn thing was immune.

No diseases means no self healing. It also means I don't hit as hard. To compensate I put more focus into maintaining my mitigation cooldowns cycled. I also changed my rotation to be BS and OB only for runes. BS to convert the bloods to death and Obliterate since it plain hits harder and I was no longer worried about cleansing my own diseases.

Had it gotten real hairy I could have called the army out. I also still had lichborne in reserve. As it was, I downed him with about 6k health left but by the time I was around 10k health I knew I was winning the DPS race.

The rest of mech was easy. The mini gauntlet to Panthelon was fun, but they were spaced well enough I could keep my self healed and only fight one group at a time.

Another step in the chain

2009-03-16T18:35:00.004-04:00

Since I won't be raiding again until tomorrow I'm going to abuse my power and continue to regale you with my quest to solo the entire Kara key chain and all keys and attunements required.

This afternoon I went into Botanica. I need it and Mechenar to get my Arcatraz key. My memory tells me that Bot was one of those instances I liked to avoid since it usually took forever.

I went in with my tank gear on in frost presence. At 1600+ DPS I had the firepower, but the real beauty is by keeping my diseases up on all the mobs and death strikes I had virtually no down time.

The only two bosses that posed any hardship, though not much, were Laj and the Warp Splinter. Laj summoned a lot of flowers that were out of my AOE range. I decided I needed to seriously up my DPS so I called the Army out and essentially put round up on the weed and was done with it.

The only issue Warp Splinter caused was also with his adds. I wanted to maximize the time between his heals with the adds so I kited him around his room.

He was still getting his heals but I was doing more damage between them than he was healing himself for. I was also maintaining my health so it was just a matter of time before he dropped.

There's a side benefit from soloing these as well. My alternative activity in the afternoons is pug or farm. I looted 86g and vendored another 65g between boss drops and vendor trash. I also walked out with 8 greens to DE, 4 stacks of netherweave, and 16 sunfury signets. Surprisingly my Auctioneer tells me I can expect another 75g from selling that crap. Not bad for 45 min and a lot more fun than fishing.

Bring Back Attunements

2009-03-16T08:23:00.003-04:00

I'm going to beat a dead horse this morning.

I think we should have attunements for raids, and heroics. Four months into Wrath has convinced me of it.

Blizzard dropped attunements so more people could see raid encounters. I'm going to assert without any supporting evidence that attunements did not serve as effective gate keepers to keep the multitudes from raiding.

I started playing WoW a little after BC was out. I don't know anything about the Classic attunements. I do know what was required for Kara. As for T5 and T6 requirements, those were dropped before I ever considered hitting those raids.

My first Kara toon was a warlock and I was terribad. I didn't know squat about hit rating. Aggro management was a foreign concept. Consumables, yeah right. Yet I still got my Kara key without any real difficulty. In fact I had to do less work to key my lock than I am my Death Knight.

Why? I got carried. I never even had my own Shadow Lab or Arcatraz key. All it really took was a run through of Labs, a few trash pulls in Steam Vaults and Arcatraz, complete Durnholde, and finishing Black Morass. Needless to say since I was carried through that, my lock had to be carried in Kara as well. 350 DPS FTW.

In addition to the above, my Death Knight also has to do/has done full clears of Sethek Halls, Mechenar, and Botanica so I can get into Labs and Arc.

When I decided I wanted to raid on my Bear I started doing research. I wanted to tank and I quickly learned tanks can't be carried. I looked forward to and enjoyed getting my bear keyed for Kara. I willingly ground instances for rep and drops to better my toon so when I was keyed I would be prepared. By the time I hit revered with the factions I knew their dungeons and was ready to handle them as a heroic.

Fast forward to Wrath. Only key you need is Violet Hold. Talk to two people and you're done. Heroics, be level capped. Naxx, nothing. Malygos, so long as you know someone who's downed Saph you're in.

I know all the hardcore raiders say lol naxx, but the fact is people still wipe in there. Hell I still wipe in there. With no attunements you would think more than 30% of the player base would have seen the inside of Naxx by now. Wowjutsu only show 3.7M raiding toons. Of those only 78% have downed Anub'Rekhan.

If the attunement process was actually a roadblock to raiding I would expect many more players/toons would have been to Naxx, but with a lower percentage of boss kills.

So if the attunements aren't a road block what value to they bring to a player who wishes to raid. It sets clear measurable goals that provide feedback that you and your group are making progress towards being able to kill a raid boss. Attunements provide gear checks, and gear that will aid in scoring a kill. Attunements provide practice for movement, situational awareness, and developing and implementing tactics that will allow you to progress.

Attunements assured your fellow raiders you had the basic commitment to not waste their time and gold on needless repair bills.

Back in BC, the requirements to enter T5 and T6 content was simple. To get attuned you cleared the previous content. Even for alts, this gave players and opportunity to gear up and learn how to employ their new toon.

Blizzard missed the boat on Naxx. But it's not too late to put some requirements on Ulduar. Even if its as short as Heroic Loken drops a key it will go a long way towards ensuring players are ready for the content at hand. Or Heroic Halls of Stone and complete the tribunal if the Lore fits. Even better, require a full Naxx clear before you can move on to Ulduar. The hardcore raiders can spend 3 hours for their alts while the casual raiders can learn not to stand in the fire, let the tank get aggro, and have a clue on what gear is good for our toons.

After all raids aren't fun when you wipe on the first boss half a dozen times or more.

Tank Kiting

2009-03-15T17:42:00.004-04:00

Based on previous polls I've done, I know quite a few of you are new to tanking. One of the skills you will need to master is kiting bosses.

When moving a boss around you never want to turn your back on them. As soon as you do you lose all your avoidance and your healer starts burning their mana faster. Assuming you don't die.

So to move the boss safely you need to either walk backwards or strafe the mob.

I'm a mouse driver which means I have to kite bosses with the keyboard since my 3 button mouse doesn't let me go backwards. Whenever I need to kite I use the arrow keys. It's not as smooth but its better than turning your back.

My mouse died on me so I did get a cheap $40 5 button mouse and my two extra buttons are bound to backing up and strafing left. I tend to go left more than right. Kinda like the reverse of Zoolander.

So what does this have to do with learning to tank kite. If you read my last post I'm working on my Kara key and I'm doing it solo. Grand Master Vorpil in Shadow Labs has to be kited.

So here I am kiting him backwards to avoid the void walkers getting to him. This is on the south pass after we already went north. For an 80 DK tank this should be relatively easy to solo, or take a dps healer if you want. This is a good boss to practice kite tanking on if you don't have a lot of experience.

Just keep moving. Never turn your back. Profit.

Going Old School

2009-03-15T11:43:00.004-04:00

Last night I did my first ever AQ20 run. We 6 manned it with me tanking. I didn't think to take a single screen shot.

We also 3 manned Attumen to try and score the mount. He dropped like a rock but didn't give the horsey.

Next we 2 manned Onyxia since we were in the mood.

However, I decided I need my kara key on this toon so I started the quest chain. I'm at the point where I need to go into Shadow Lab. Problem is, I don't have the key. So it's time to solo Sethek Halls.

I'm sporting an Unholy Tank spec at the moment, but went in with my DPS gear on and in blood presence.

Looks like I needed to refresh my diseases and hit a death strike instead of taking pictures like a tourist. That said, self buffed in a tank spec I was still pushing 2,100 DPS which is more than double what this instance was designed for in regular. I think the rest of the chain should be fairly easy as well. If it gets rough I can always put on my tank gear too.

Gear, Specs, Ebon Plauge, Desecration

2009-03-13T07:44:00.003-04:00

I need to complain about outdated gear more often. Apparently the loot gods heard me. Since Naxx 25 was clear for the week we did Naxx 10 last night. Gluth hooked me up with a new set of Tier tanking shoulders. Good Doggie. Slotted these with a +27 def gem and made sure to put my inscriptions Pinnacle enchant on em too.

When I logged on I was still in the Blood Tanking spec but we already had two prot pallies so I was asked to respec DPS real fast. In the interest of time I went with a 50/0/21 Blood DPS spec since I was already glyphed for blood.

Perhaps it is unfamiliarity, perhaps it is the spec, but I only did 3,100 DPS on Patch. With 17/0/54 I've hit 4,500 DPS on Patch 10.

This brings me to the Ebon Plague stacking bug. T'hell with only one unholy DK in the raid. Losing 1,400 DPS is likely worse than two Death Knights going down 300 DPS due to fighting for the third disease.

If you haven't seen it by now, there is a new build on the PTR and I want to talk about one item only. Desecration. That one talent that just seems so good on paper, but in reality, just doesn't make the cut. Sure if you have an extra 5 points in a deep unholy DPS build you might take it. Even then, it was mostly for filler. Let's face it. Relying on a plague strike, which we try to avoid using, to keep this up and hoping the boss doesn't move wasn't the best idea.

Everyone please cross your fingers that the desecration change goes live. If you still don't know what I'm yammering on about, the new Desecration procs off of Scourge Strike. I don't care if you are meleeing Grobulus, you will almost always be standing in a desecration area. For every 1,000 DPS you do, this will increase it by 50. On a 3 minute patch fight where you would normally do 4,000 DPS this will increase your total damage by 36,000. It adds up.

Look for desecration to become a staple of Unholy DPS builds if this goes live.

And now for something completely different, Blood Tanking

2009-03-12T16:48:00.004-04:00

Since I needed to respec tank, and most the raiding DK's in my new guild are unholy I decided to spec blood to tank. I went with the live version of my PTR Blood Tank spec.

So far all I've had to test it on was a mount run in Heroic CoS. My biggest fear would be holding AOE aggro and to make it worse, one of the best DPS locks I've seen from my new guild came along.

Talk about a threat test.

I even had the pally put might on me instead of kings. I saw this lock throw 4500 DPS the other night so I knew it was going to be rough. Especially without impurity or unholy blight to juice up the AOE threat.

Here's my overall damage breakdown.

With all the AOE trash pulls DnD on top is no surprise. HS and RS were absolute staples. However, with all the AOE I need to get in the habit of using blood boil, especially when 3.1 hits.

Overall by DPS was 1655 which equates to 3,144+ TPS. The DnD and RS would bring that average higher. The threat is not as consistent as it is with Unholy. It is much more dependent on strikes than disease damage or DnD so it varied a lot. I spiked to 5k several times but barely had 1k at times as well.

Mitigation wise I feel the absence of Bone Shield with this spec. That lead me to using the rare health potion a couple times. I'm not about to say blood is squishy. I didn't stay on top of my cooldowns. I never used IBF and I think I remembered vampiric blood twice and rune tap 4 times the entire run.

They only concern I have prior to 3.1 is snap AOE aggro. As unholy I would have blight up the entire time you do the gauntlet after the third boss on the way to getting the mount if you beat the timer. Towards the end of the gauntlet the last pack of adds aggrod on us and my runes, DnD, and empower rune blade were all on cooldown. 4 mobs aggrod and ganked the healer.

When 3.1 hits that won't be an issue since you can hit blood boil to pick them up. Just something to watch out for in the mean time.

Gear Problems

2009-03-12T14:45:00.003-04:00

Sooner or later everyone realizes one or two pieces of gear are in need of serious upgrade. For me, it is my tanking shoulders and tanking cloak.

Currently I'm sporting the Pauldrons of Reconnaissance from Halls of Stone. I've been wearing these to tank with since late November. My upgrade options aren't great either.

There's Abomination Shoulderblades from Patch 10, but he only gives those up for me on the PTR.

Burdened Shoulderplates and Pauldrons of Unnatural Death both drop in Naxx 25. I may have a shot at these now that I changed guilds. Problem is, it will take a bit before I get priority in the EPGP system we use. However, most of the other tanks may not need these.

I also have 6 heroic emblems right now, 69 more or the tier piece from Loatheb or Gluth and I can get my T 7.5 Shoulders. There's also the 10 man version but I haven't had much luck with those either.

My last shoulder option is Wapach's Spaulders of Solidarity. I may get lucky and see these drop, but then again even if they do I'll have to roll against everyone and their mother since they sell for ten grand a pop on my server.

As for cloaks, I'm in much the same boat. I've been wearing the Wyrmrest rep piece since November as well. Here I only have 5 options and three of them require 25 man raids and my luck sucks on the other two.

Personally, I plan on taking luck out of the equation and saving my emblems for Platinum Mesh Cloak.

To offset the expected reduction in defense rating between 13 and 20 rating I'm sitting on a +27 defense JC gem so I can change out without any issues. Now I just need a bunch of emblems or luck and I'm good.

Some Nights, you just fail

2009-03-11T07:06:00.002-04:00

Last night was one of those nights for me. I hadn't planned on raiding and wasn't prepared to do that when I logged on. It was late and I planned on doing a little fishing.

The back story goes, I applied and was accepted to a raiding guild on the server. I truly enjoy my friends but due to RL we are down from fielding 9 people in January to 4-6 people now including myself. When I joined the new guild in the afternoon I asked whether I would be needed as a tank or dps. I was told we'll figure it out tomorrow, don't bother respeccing.

So I log in and its 10:30 which is half way through their raid night. I instantly get whispered, can I tank zombie chows. I reply that I'm still DPS spec and that I can't get on vent due to my son trying to go to bed. They ask me to come anyway.

You pick up a lot more chows in 25 than in 10's and in a pure DPS spec even with tank gear on I just couldn't survive the stacking debuffs with that many. Not how I wanted to make a first impression.

On to Thaddius, they ask me to tank Stalagg. I reiterate my concerns that even though I'm uncritable I'm in a DPS spec. Apparently, this was missed. I dropped like a rock.

We sort out that I shouldn't be tanking in a DPS spec and re-attempt the fight. First polarity I blow myself and 3 or 4 other people up. Who's the leet raider now biatch?

At this point my son is asleep so I sneak onto vent. Once on vent and I can hear everything I did my part. I DPS'd, made my jump, and stayed tight to stack my charge, and didn't blow a transition.

This morning before I left for work I made sure to respec tank so I can actually survive a hit in 25's. Now I just need to find some gold so I can get some Icebane gear. I'm broke after powerleveling Jewelcrafting last weekend.

Poll Results: Progression Update & Ask the Scourge

2009-03-10T10:57:00.003-04:00

There has been a clear shift towards the content being clear since the last time I ran this poll. That said about a quarter of you are still leveling your DK to 80. Are these alts perhaps?

Another quarter are in Naxx but haven't gotten Maly down yet. Our small guild coalition cleared Naxx for the first time last week. Too bad I missed 4H through Kel so I still haven't gotten the achievements.

Nearly a quarter of you are in Heroics while another quarter have cleared Maly and are probably waiting on Ulduar.

What does this mean? There is a good spread in Death Knight experience to draw upon for topics. Raids, Heroics, general specs, gear questions, etc etc etc.

In other words lots of good blog fodder.

I didn't do an Ask the Scourge last week so I'm tying one into this poll results. Have a question? Just drop a comment and I'll give an answer.

Eye Candy

2009-03-09T21:10:00.002-04:00

Every now and then you just get a killer shot, then you find it in your folder.

Evolution of Personal Professions

2009-03-09T11:51:00.005-04:00

I've noticed something I do with all my main toons over the years. My profession choices go through three stages.

Each stage is all about getting the most for my toon with the least amount of effort.

Stage 1 - Gathering the Gold.

This stage is characterized by two gathering professions. I always take skinning and depending on the server economy will take mining or herbing to go with it. The goal is to maximize earnings while developing the toon. For my DK, I took Herb since there would be tons of new scribes. I know a lot of new DKs picked up JC and or BS, but all classes went inscription and herb prices were through the roof. Skinning is just extra income on kills.

I do not bank mats for later use, I sell them at the highest possible price I can get. It makes more sense to buy everything you need on the AH and focus on the easiest method you have for making gold.

This stage lasts until I have epic flight on the toon as well as all the epic craftables I reasonably plan on getting.

Stage 2 - Bang for the Buck.

Once I've covered my big ticket items I look for a crafting profession to replace skinning with. My criteria are ease and cost of powerleveling and immediate value to the toon. For Scourge that meant Inscription. Since I still had tons of Sons of Hodir rep to farm I knew I would get the most value out of the shoulder enchants for tanking and dps. Not to mention I could still make some good money buying cheap northrend and lower herbs to create glyphs while selling the icethorn I was herbing on the AH.

Stage 3 - Optimizing your choices.

Once you have one crafting profession up and running its time to save up and determine which additional crafting profession will add the most to your toon. For Death Knights, jewelcrafting has a minimal edge on most the other profession due to Str scaling better than straight AP. So over the weekend I dropped about 4,000g and powered my JC up after dropping herbing.

Net result, I have best in slot shoulder enchants for both roles. 3 27 strength gems in my DPS gear along with one of the better DPS trinkets replacing my meteor whetstone. And soon I will have 3 41 stam gems for my tank set, also upgrading one of my weaker tanking trinkets along the way.

Chaining Cooldowns

2009-03-08T09:25:00.002-04:00

I've been out of touch the past few days with the folks coming to visit, my better half being sick, and watching the progeny go apeshit with grand parents in town.

Doesn't mean I don't have any thoughts on the DK changes announced on the PTR. A lot of our tanking Oh Shit buttons got beat up by the nerf bat.

Wanna know why?

Cooldown Chaining.

If you had been following the PTR forums there was some substantial tank testing done with a patchwerk like boss that increased its damage continuously and attacked every second. With proper usage of cooldowns and will of the necropolis the DK tank lasted way longer than the other classes.

A couple months ago I suggested you can keep your healers happy by actively managing your defensive cooldowns. This was taken to the extreme.

Now Bone Shiled has a 2 minute timer and Blade Barried was modified so it will be effectively impossible to stack enough avoidence to keep BS up 100% of the time. Lichborne has been modified, Vampiric Blood, and Unbreakable armor have been hit.

What this means is, we can no longer ensure we have a defensive cooldown up at all times. We actually have to use them for their purpose, Oh Shit moments and boss enrages at the end of the fights.

From a tactical standpoint, look to stack cooldowns instead of chain them. Boss gonna dish out 20,000 DPS to the tank in plate for 30 seconds, pop everything and ride it out.

Other changes I like. A lot of you will be unhappy with a 10 second howling blast that does its full damage again. I like it as a snap aoe aggro generator for when adds spawn.

Other changes appear to be focused on evening out the damage we do and make it lest bursty. This will upset our PvP friends but in the long run will be fine for PvE, both as DPS and TPS.

Raid With Us: Guest Post

2009-03-06T21:54:00.002-05:00

One of my Chaos Brewing (CB) guildies Nekron posted this up on our guild forums.

Enjoy.

"Raid with Us"
Nekron of Sen'Jin
Parody of "Come Sail Away" By Styxx
Horde Capitol Recordings

I'm zepping away, off to find the new Lich King
I've got to be Strong, strong to face the mobs that out level me,
In group, I'm the healer, don't die on me,
we'll search for the rare spawn, at every chance,
and we'll try, oh Thrall, we'll try, to kill 'em all!

I look to the group, scars of past attempts with one drake up,
Some geared, some not,
I think if I were DPS, this boss would be dead,
We move on to the next boss, so the raid lead says,
But somehow we messed up and wiped again,
But we'll re-group and try once more, to fight again

A gathering of Horde Del appeared before our group,
they cried this this Battle Cry, and here's what they yelled
They yelled 'Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!
Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!"

"Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!
Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!

I thought that they were newbies, but to our surprise,
They mounted up and charged in, headed for the boss,
Yelling, "Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!
Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!"

Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!
Come raid with us, come raid with us,
Wanna raid with CB!

I'm pleased to say I was not online during this Sarth Attempt :)

Thanks for the laugh Nek, and thanks to our coalition guild Horde Del Diablo who makes our 10 man raiding possible.

PTR Blood Tank Results

2009-03-06T07:19:00.004-05:00

I didn't get a whole lot of time to test my Blood tank spec yesterday like I had hoped. My better half was sick and my folks came to visit. I did sneak in a Heroic Violet Hold run. I may have just converted to Blood for tanking in 3.1. It was that good.

First the bad news, AOE threat is an issue. Even with Morbidity and a 15 second cool down on DnD it is possible to lose adds. Worse, it becomes even more important you establish a kill order or at least ensure DPS is using an assist to target your target. We had a Hunter pulling 3k DPS on the run and whenever they targeted someone I wasn't they pulled aggro.

This is easily solved with smart play and shouldn't truly be an issue. As for grabbing snap aggro on adds when DnD is on cooldown? The new and improved, as well as talented, Blood Boil will do just fine. Even without diseases up, this will capture the attention of all the badies long enough to cement threat properly so your heals don't get ganked.

To make this even easier, I have determined it is best to go with the numbers and trade out Subversion and get Death Rune Mastery. My Heart Strikes and Obliterates won't quite hit as hard on average but overall I will get more Heart Strikes in which should increase my overall threat as well as even it out since I will spam 6 strikes per 10 seconds instead of 4.

Doing the easy math, my OB's hit for 2,249 on Cyanigosa while my Hearts nailed her for 1,750. I'll still use OB's to convert the Unholy and Frost runes over to Death Runes, but that will allow me to pop a lot more Heart Strikes. In addition I am more likely to have a rune available for Blood Boil should an add show up.

Overall single target threat is good as well. We were maybe 15 seconds into the fight and I was already pumping 4,400 TPS in a 5 man with Horn of Winter being my only buff. Give me might, kings, mark of the wild, food, and a flask and this number easily grows past 6,000.

Lastly, I would add that this output was done primarily without the benefit of glyphs. The bone shield and scourge strike glyphs I was rocking just don't add any value to a blood build.

I need to do some research on the new glyphs before I really have some recommendations for blood. Unholy Tanking is easy, the new Pestilence, Scourge Strike, and Bone Shield and you should never have to worry about keeping your diseases up. For blood I would definitely keep the Pestilence, might get the new Plague Strike, and need to think about the third. I am a little torn on the PS one as well. With the pestilence glyph I may not be using PS all that much, even on single target.

PTR Blood Tank Spec Details

2009-03-05T13:37:00.005-05:00

I've modified my original blood tank spec and still haven't had the chance to test the mitigation side but raw DPS on the test dummy is really improved over what I've been getting with other specs.

So I went to work on what was left of the test dummy in Ebon Hold.

It can still be targeted but it is no longer a tall wooden figure with a sword and shield. Makes me wonder if Blizz doesn't have a sense of humor.

You can also see the new desecration animation in the shot. Its the golden circle on the ground from another DK.

OK, on to the numbers. My Unholy PTR Tank Spec generated 962 DPS on the boss test dummy with Horn of Winter. On Patch it tossed 1600 DPS. I will caveat that bladed armor was not working at the time.

My first pass at a blood spec gave me 1020 DPS on the target dummy. This includes Horn of Winter and the BA fix. That clearly wasn't a huge improvement so I went back to the drawing board and modeled a new spec off of some high end blood tanks I've seen in various places. New DPS in Frost Presence with Horn of Winter: 1198.

Now you're asking what's the spec?

47/14/10

Blood

Subversion 3 points
Blade Barrier 5 points
Bladed Armor 5 points
Two Hand Specialization 2 points
Rune Tap 1 point
Dark Convition 5 points
Improved Rune Tap 3 points
Spell Deflection 3 points
Bloody Strikes 3 points
Veteran of the Third War 3 points
Mark of Blood 1 point
Bloody Vengence 3 points
Abomination's Might 2 points
Vampric Blood 1 point
Will of the Necropolis 3 points
Heart Strike 1 point
Might of Mograine 3 points

Frost

Improved Icy Touch 3 points
Toughness 5 points
Icy Reach 2 points
Lichborne 1 point
Annihilation 3 points

Unholy

Anticipation 5 points
Epidemic 2 points
Morbidity 3 points

My test dummy experience did not match what theory crafting would suggest. I did better without death rune mastery by spamming obliterates whenever I didn't need to refresh my diseases. However, I should have been able to generate about 500 more raw damage with one extra cooldown for each pair of unholy and frost runes converted to death runes using Heart strike. Recount didn't agree. That said, it would be easy to move the points from subversion to death rune mastery with further testing.

Beat by the tanks

2009-03-05T06:37:00.005-05:00

Construct Quarter Naxx 10. I'm on DPS for the night. Running a 17/0/54 spec. Be Imba and Wow-Hero's says I'm geared better than anyone in the raid. And I go and turn this performance in on a boss.

Varnek was one of our tanks no less. Would you be surprised I was actually proud of myself, and not for sucking. Does the damage breakdown help?

Death and Decay plus Unholy Blight accounted for 85% of my output on a boss fight. WTF was I doing?

I was kiting Zombie Chows on Gluth.

Unholy DK's are excellent Chow kiters for 10's and pretty damn good in 25's too. It's actually quite easy. Keep UB up at all times and drop a DnD every 15 seconds. All that changes is the positioning.

10 man version is on the left and 25 on the right. The red circles are Gluth where he should be tanked on the far side of the room. The light blue squares are the grates where the Chow's spawn. The black circle is the path you should run in and the arrows point the way. The red X is where you should drop your Death and Decay.

In normal mode the Chow's only spawn from the center grate so it makes sense to keep your DnD right next to it. In the heroic version they spawn from all 3 grates. This requires you to run in a larger circle and placing your DnD near the middle of the room will go a long way to ensuring that you pick them all up as the run for the dog.

In both cases getting an earth bind totem or frost trap makes things a bit easier. Having unholy aura does as well. The reason you run in a circle rather than back and forth is so you can avoid as many of the infected wound stacking as possible. You want to keep these low so you don't get instagibbed by all the chows.

Since you are running in a circle and have all of the Chow's aggrod on you, they will be nicely packed for AOE during the decimates.

Last, if one seems to be getting away you have IT, Death Grip, and Death Coils to bring them back to you.

Keep your Bone Shield up and you'll do your part to down a boss and toss some really impressive DPS to boot. Just kidding on the DPS part.

PTR Blood Tank Test Dummy

2009-03-03T22:41:00.003-05:00

So I've fooled around a bit with a Blood Tank spec on the PTR this evening. I hope to raid test it tomorrow afternoon or Thursday.

Right now I have my doubts. From a physical mitigation standpoint I am trading Mark of Blood, Improved Rune Tap, and Vampiric Blood for Bone Shield, and Lichborne.

For magical mitigation I loose the improved AMS and AMZ and get Spell Deflection.

On the boss test dummy I put up 6% more DPS than the Unholy build. The problem is, the unholy build relies on Necrosis and BCB which don't count fully against the dummy.

Gotta say the extra 1,300 Health unbuffed isn't anything to complain about.

Needless to say, I am worried about AOE situations though. I did make sure to grab morbidity for a 15 second Death and Decay, but that, diseases, and blood boil are all I have. And before some of you say the only additional thing Unholy has is Unholy Blight, I'll remind you UB, DnD, and the diseases are buffed through Impurity which any blood tank build will not have.

Initial reactions are mixed. I'll reserve judgement until I have a chance to actually tank something in Naxx.

Poll Results: Patch 3.1 DK Plans

2009-03-03T07:24:00.004-05:00

So the patch has been on the PTR for a week and we have all had a chance to read up on all the changes and perhaps even test them out. Right off the bat I knew my interest in a 5/45/21 Frost AOE tanking build was dead in the water with Howling blast moved to the 51 point spot in Frost.

Therefore I decided to stick with Unholy for both my tanking and my DPS specs. So did a lot of you.

What surprised me is that 10% of you thought you would retire your Death Knight and go back to your old main. I know my sample is highly biased in favor of Death Knights just because the people who read my blog play them. Could this result help explain my VoA pug yesterday? Have a lot of Death Knights decided to go level their old main and get it to 80 prior to Ulduar's release?

Either way, for the time being it just does not look like Blizzard is succeeding in balancing the trees. The majority feel Unholy is the way to go. While blood is left hanging in the dark.

I question whether blood scales better though. One of the top raiding guilds in the US is on my server Alliance side. They got special access to Ulduar to do some tank testing the other night. Regrettably they biased their results with using more healers on the DK tank than the other classes but it was interesting to me the used a Blood Tank for the test.

I should be able to score some PTR time this Thursday and maybe I'll try out a Blood 2H tank spec. Something along the lines of 50/8/13 so I can get morbidity in Unholy to help with the AOE and obviously skip DRW in blood.

I have a new poll up and I'm asking an old question. How far is your progression with your DK? Last time I was surprised by the number of people still leveling.

The Culling has begun

2009-03-02T17:30:00.002-05:00

The astute among you will recognize this as VoA. Heroic to be exact. What else seems odd in this picture?

Any guesses?

If you guessed I'm the only DK you are right. I know its Monday and most people have already done this but seriously I've never seen a VoA pug with less than 5 DK's in it.

I should have tanked instead of DPS. The two pallies we had were teribad. 1800 TPS FTW. Needless to say, several of us were one shot before everyone figured it out.

Longest Arch kill I've ever seen.

Stumbling blocks and other musings

2009-03-02T08:14:00.003-05:00

The Four horsemen determined we would no make any more progress for the week. I need to do more research before we hit them again. Our biggest issue appeared to be class composition. We just didn't have a way to tank and heal four separate quarters. We had a hunter in one corner using a gorriladin and mend pet. Trading horsemen with a DK who wasn't on vent.

I was tanking in a pure DPS spec (not advisable even with the gear). On our best try we got Baron to 18% and Kor to 31%. Perhaps a bit more practice would help. We also had a few members in the raid who typically don't run with us.

Either I miss read wowwiki or there is another trick I'm missing. Either way we cleared 3 quarters and 2 bosses. Last week we cleared 1 quarter plus 1 boss. That's a lot of progress in one week. Tomorrow everything resets and we will start all over again.

Two months ago I set a goal of getting all 10 classes to 80 this year in addition to raiding on my DK. I can't say I've made a lot of progress. I'm just having too much fun with my death knight. Especially since I can do a dungeon or two in the hour and a half I have in the afternoons. In BC I would use that time to work on alts. Now I can farm emblems, or work on my fishing.

Since I set my goal I've got my Shammy to 64 from 61 and is still resto. My druid was resto for most of 71, but I respecced him boomkin to finish it out and ding 72. I had sold/deleted all my feral gear when I went resto so I wouldn't go back. I went Boom so I could DPS on quests and actually make some progress. I also dropped about 400g into getting his alchemy from 375 to 424. I was happy to make that all back by selling the elixirs of strength and agility I created while leveling it.

I also staged my Hunter in Howling Fjord and thought I might work on leveling him some, especially since he's my only miner. The other advantage to leveling him and by druid is they both already have epic flight. That's 10k gold I don't have to spend on these toons anymore.

Before my DK I had never bothered with Cooking and Fishing. Man I was missing out. I have cooking at 448 and fishing is 380 something (Armory is down atm). I'm at the point where I can fish up the good stuff for my favorite strength and hit foods. Combined with daily cooking rewards and spending the award on extra spices means I can cheaply keep myself supplied and sell the extras. I can easily make a couple hundred gold a day with this. Only problem is that it cuts into my Sons of Hodir time. I'm about half way through revered with those guys.

I'll put up another Ask the Scourge day tomorrow so feel free to e-mail me any questions you have in advance.

PTR Tanking Recount Review

2009-02-28T20:06:00.005-05:00

The other day I tanked a few bosses in Naxx including main tanking Patchwerk. I was using my PTR Unholy Tank Spec I posted about earlier.

Here is my recount breakdown.

I was quite happy with how the spec held up from both threat and mitigation and barring any new changes to DK talents will stick with this as is.

Impurity really pumps up the damage Death and Decay does. The new Outbreak also allows Scourge Strike to hit really hard. My tank gear while very sound does not hit nearly as hard as my DPS set, and with the benefit of Outbreak my SS's were hitting very well.

Single target rotations are essentially IT, PS, BS, BS, SS and burn RP on UB, RS, then DC in that order of priority. If UB is up, and Rune Strike is available use it. If UB is up and RS is queued and you are still waiting on runes and have extra RP toss your DC's to maximize your threat. The second half of your rotation should be SS x 3. Assuming your glyph procced and refreshed your diseases keep using SS as much as possible. Use BS to convert your runes as required and maintain your RP priorities.

Multi target tanking remains similar to live. Start with DnD, IT, PS, Pest and dump RP into UB on the first pass. As your runes refresh focus on using SS. Use BB to convert runes and assuming you have the new pestilence glyph, use it just before your diseases drop off your primary target. Finally, maintain the same RP priority from single target. UB, RS, then DC.

For mitigation keep your Bone Shield up as much as possible. BS should be your third major glyph. Keep RP on hand for IBF and AMS as needed. If the magic is really coming in use empower rune weapon to cycle in AMZ. Lastly, save Lichborne for the final enrages. Increasing the bosses miss by 25% when he hits the hardest will allow your healers to keep you up at the end.

Top 10 Reasons the PTR Sucks

2009-02-27T17:04:00.003-05:00

I'll be the first to admit. I was not ready for the PTR. The issues caused by Blizzard are the easiest to deal with. I'd hate to see what Big Bear Butt would have to say about the asshats.

So here are my top 10 reasons the PTR sucks.

10. Hey I'm on the PTR, nvm it just crashed
9. Hope you like the default UI, because yours won't work
8. If you personally can't double for Fort Knox, don't plan on buying anything
7. People who are there only to flex their epeen
6. Raids will disband after one bad pull, even when no one dies
5. Players decide that they are too good and don't follow simple instructions (Don't beat on the damn gargoyles when they are stoneskinned)
4. Test Forum QQ
3. Ebon Plaguebringer stacking is still bugged
2. Asshats galore
1. My friends can't make it past the copy queue

If you plan on copying a toon to the PTR I highly recommend you ask your guild to loan you its bank contents for consumables, mats, and gold before you copy over. Then copy your toon twice to double that up.

Bring as many of your friends as you can and tons of patience. Dealing with the bugs and crashes will try Mother Theresa's calm. Throw in all the nastiness and it can get unpleasant.

Hang in there though. You will find a few diamonds in the rough. There are good people there and there are bugs with the talents, dual specs, new UI improvements and there are plenty of opportunities for quality feedback to make the game even more fun.

Finally, have a plan for being there. Mine is to test a dedicated tank and DPS spec. So far Unholy hasn't changed much from live and from a DPS perspective swapping Gargoyle and Unholy Blight doesn't have a huge impact.

Another One Bites the Dust er Two Actually

2009-02-27T07:44:00.003-05:00

Decisions Decisions.

Go beat my head against the wall on the PTR with Hodir, or lead the coalition back into Naxx to finish out the Construct Quarter.

I'm sure most of you hope I did the former and have screen shots and strategies as well as how to Tank or DPS in there.

I chose the latter.

I chose my friends for the same reason I choose to raid with them and not in a big guild in the first place.

Besides most of the Hodir testing was the patience of people wanting to test him. I think Blizz found their patience was thin if the QQ on the PTR forums is any indication.

So back to our Naxx run. About half of the raid had never seen Thaddius. The first attempt was awful. One of the tanks on Stalag was too far away from the tesla coils and blew up everyone on their platform. The second attempt, most of us made the jump but we didn't pick Thad up in time and he got way out of position and we basically had 1 healer and two tanks up. We let them play ring around the rosy until the healer went oom for practice. Third time was the charm.

It wasn't so long ago that we had issues with Maxx, so it was nice to see our second quarter get cleared, especially in the same run. We still had some time so we moved on to the Plague Quarter.

Noth was cake. We all just piled on top of him which forced his adds to come to us so Mortify (Frost DK) could pick them up while Dayrok tanked him.

Heigan taught us all how to dance in two tries. Several of us felt we were gypped on the first attempt with lag. Either way he fell and we moved on to Loatheb.

If you haven't seen that fight the trick is to keep the spore debuff off the tanks, and precast heals for the window where healing is allowed.

We are looking to add a third night in this week so we can make a run at the military quarter. Guess I'll need to do some research since I've never been in those fights in any of my 25 man pugs.

I predict that the coalition of Chaos Brewing and Horde Del Diablo will score a Kel Thuzzad kill before Ulduar is released.

Tanking Naxx in the PTR

2009-02-26T13:59:00.005-05:00

So we got a pug together for about an hour in Naxx. I co tanked with a DW Blood tank. Laugh now, but his gear was so sweet it made my cry.

I used my Unholy 10/11/50 spec to get a feel for it. I have to say I feel lost without my ICE Hud. I went so far as to move my portrait right under me so I have some indication of what runes and RP I have available. I still had a hard time seeing if and when my diseases were up. I know that contributed to lower DPS and TPS.

Even so I ranged between 4,000 TPS up to 6,000 on occasion and was able to hold of some seriously hard hitting DPS. Out of the 8 of us in raid I was clearly the least geared. The majority of them were in 4/5 T7.5 and many had titles that indicated they downed Sarth 3D or at the least cleared Malygos.

My DPS is down about 25% from my hybrid spec I typically use on live but that isn't a huge concern while tanking so long as the threat is there. The healers didn't have any trouble keeping me up and I only used lichborne to see what it looked like.

What it does tell me is that 10/11/50 will be a viable Tank Spec. I'll need some time to parse my recount to determine if I need to change up the talent selections some.

And of course just to remind me nothing will stick with my toon a drop I want fell off of Patch.

PTR DK Roundup Feb 26

2009-02-26T07:20:00.003-05:00

So it's still fairly early in the morning and we have had our first couple days on the PTR. I am downloading the first new build as I write this. Here is what is being reported on the PTR about DK's. (Note: the forums were wiped clean sometime last night)

Bugs
Bladed armor isn't working
Ebon Plaguebringer isn't stacking
Obliterate has a bad tooltip and doesn't generate RP
Blood of the North not converting death runes
Changing presences burns an extra blood rune
Class starter quests are not awarding talent points

Feedback on forums
0/32/39 and other variations of DW is dead
Frost tanks are upset the nerfing to DW has hit them very hard as well
Ghoul Frenzy isn't worth the point and given the perma ghoul is now low enough in the tree all DK's can have one if they want it Unholies feel like they lost something special

Feedback I recall from yesterday as well as my limited experience
Outbreak is a sweet talent now.
Some DPS specs need more RP dumps. It's not possible to blow all the RP between rune cooldowns.
The new PS and Pestilence glyphs are at cross odds. PS buffs the hell out of a worthwhile strike while Pestilence means you only ever need to apply your diseases once.

Supposedly the new build has solved the Dalaran crashes and perhaps we will start to see some groups forming and get some feedback to how stuff works on real mobs in lieu of the test dummies.

Momma Didn't Say Knock You Out

2009-02-26T06:20:00.005-05:00

Our little coalition is really stepping up. We were still 30 minutes late getting started but in two hours we downed 6 bosses, only wiped once, and other than two deaths on Frogger, only had one player death, and that was on trash.

Our raid was pure melee DPS outside the heals. In fact we had 4 tank capable toons. I respecced pure Unholy 17/0/54 DPS and was rewarded with an extra 1,000 DPS for the night. Makes me all squeamy inside waiting on Dual Specs. I knew the prot warrior would still be tanking but who I put on DPS duty came down to whether the Feral Bear of the Frost DK could dish out more hurt. Turns out it was the bear, so he went kitty.

We also had 3 healers last night. I was a little worried that rolling with an extra set of heals was going to gimp our dps. My worry was unfounded. Last week we were pulling about 14,000 raid DPS. This week we were nailing down 19,000 with one less DPS player.

After utterly destroying Anub I called for an attempt at Momma Said Knock You Out on Faerlina. We decided to destroy the trash and just tank the widow right there on the platform. That was our mistake. She went into a frenzy 20 seconds into the fight and was right on top of us as we burned the adds down. Next week I will have her kited away while we drop the adds. So we didn't get the achievement. but we did knock over a minute off of our fastest kill time.

Here's a tip, if all the adds are down on the widow you can burn your Army of the Dead. On a little over two minute fight, getting the army out for 42 seconds while it pushes and extra 1900 DPS will really crank up your totals. I beat our rogue by 75,000 total damage on the fight and cranked 4,768 DPS including my Ghoul and Gargoyle. This easily clears my best output I ever had while dual wielding. Of course I am better geared since then but it's comforting to know the basis of my 3.1 DPS spec can really dish out the pain.

Maxxena potentially posed a problem for us since we were pure melee. What's the best way to get players off the wall? Given the heals and DPS we had, we chose to have the Frost DK tank and our Prot Warrior used intercept to get out to the wall to unwrap us as needed. Worked like a charm.

Needless to say with how well every one was doing in all phases of the raid, Tanking/DPS/Heals, Patchwerk was a joke.

By the time we moved on to Grobbulus we had only had 3 total deaths. Two on Frogger(Marxi wasn't one of them) and one on a trash pull where a DPS just couldn't wait on the tanks. Grob farted all over our first attempt and we wiped in an ugly way. But that was the only time he did that. Grob is not a melee friendly fight. Ideally all the DPS is ranged. T'hell with the ideals. We kicked his ass with no deaths on the second attempt. I think we were all frustrated with him from last week. Especially since a RL emergency prevented us from continuing the run as planned.

At this point we were 10 minutes from our stop time. I called for one attempt on Gluth so people could see the fight. I fully expected we would leave him up. Out of the 10 of us, only 5 had ever seen it. So after the explanations we set the Prot Warrior and Feral Bear to trading tanking duties on Gluth to avoid the stacks. We had the Frost DK kite the zombie chows. We used melee AOE to drop them during the decimates. Once again, not the ideal set up. Once again no one died to a boss.

Tonight we will clear some trash and should get our Construct Quarter achievement.

Unholy Tank Spec patch 3.1 take 1

2009-02-25T17:32:00.004-05:00

This is the first pass I am making at an Unholy tank spec for 3.1 on the PTR. I have not had the chance to tank anything with it yet but I will list out the talents selected nonetheless.

Blood
Blade Barrier 5 points
Bladed Armor 5 points

Frost
Toughness 5 points
Improved Icy Touch 3 points
Icy Reach 2 points
Lichborne 1 point

Unholy
Anticipation 5 points
Vicious Strikes 2 points
Morbidity 3 points
Outbreak 3 points
Necrosis 5 points
Blood Caked Blade 3 points
Unholy Blight 1 point
Impurity 5 points
Dirge 2 points
Magic Suppression 3 points
Reaping 3 points
Anti-Magic Zone 1 point
Improved Unholy Presence 1 point
Crypt Fever 3 points
Bone Shield 1 point
Ebon Plaguebringer 3 points
Scourge Strike 1 point
Rage of Rivendare 5 points

Outside of the extra mitigation talents in Frost I tried to pick up singe target threat talents to round out the dedicated spec. Hopefully I'll get a test run in sometime tomorrow.

Initital DPS tests on the PTR

2009-02-25T16:04:00.003-05:00

I managed to squeeze a DPS test in on the PTR before the world server went down using the 17/0/54 spec.

Right now Bladed Armor is bugged and I don't have the AP increase from it and my non buffed AP is a little over 200 points lower than on live. However, there is a clear increase in my DPS, but a lot of that is due to a dedicated DPS spec. Same rotation on live for 3 minutes I get 1842 DPS on the boss test dummy self buffed. On the PTR I am hitting 2165. Once BA is fixed I expect that to be even higher.

I have a second issue that I think will increase my DPS once it's resolved. ICEHud crashes my PTR client. I use ICEHud to track my runes and RP so I'm pretty sure my rotation wasn't as clean as I'd like.

On live my scourge strikes were hitting for 2220 on average. On the PTR they hit for 3124. SS got a buff on its own in addition to Outbreak now buffs SS as well.

My Plague Strikes also went from a whopping 370 hit on live to 1725 on the PTR. That is a huge buff.

I didn't see any real difference in my DPS by including DnD on the boss target but I'm sure on AOE fights I will get more out of it.

Here are my Current DPS Talents:
Butchery 2 points
Subversion 3 points
Bladed Armor 5 points
Two Handed Specialization 2 points
Dark Conviction 5 points
Vicious Strikes 2 points
Virulence 3 points
Morbidity 3 points
Ravenous Dead 3 points
Outbreak 3 points
Necrosis 5 points
Blood Caked Blade 3 points
Master of Ghouls 1 point
Unholy Blight 1 Point
Impurity 5 points
Dirge 2 points
Reaping 3 points
Desecration 2 points
Improved Unholy Presence 2 points
Night of the Dead 2 points
Crypt Fever 3 points
Bone Shield 1 point
Ebon Plaguebringer 3 points
Scourge Strike 1 point
Rage of Rivendare 5 points
Summon Gargoyle 1 point

I'm still not sold on Desecration and BCB seemed a little light compared to live. That could be a disease issue since I don't have my debuffs easily visible and I may have lost something while testing. I will most likely move the 2 points from Desecration into Wandering Plague.

Prag's Notes

2009-02-25T10:38:00.005-05:00

New talent, Upgraded Helm increases the iLvl of your helm 13 levels and upgrades itemization accordingly.

10 Minutes on the PTR

2009-02-25T07:29:00.003-05:00

So I only had about 10 minutes on the PTR last night and I submitted 4 crash reports. Needless to say I just don't have a lot to report so far. I'll get about an hour and 30 minutes this afternoon but it's raid night tonight so I won't get a lot of time until tomorrow.

I did get my toon copied twice. I am setting one up for dps and the other for tanking.

I did get the DPS toon specced. I went with a 17/0/54 Unholy Build. On the blood side it is real easy to recall from memory my choices. Subversion, Butchery, Bladed Armor, and two handed specialization.

In Unholy I picked up Gargoyle, Master of Ghouls, and Ravenous Dead. I skipped Ghoul Frenzy for now. The tool tip says it's channeled and I want to get more information from the theory crafters on the PTR before I recommend it. From my initial napkin math, Outbreak appears to be on par with Wandering Plague for 3 points. Since it now buffs Scourge Strike I went with it since it should contribute to single target DPS more.

I also put a few points in Desecration, but I may pull those back out in favor of wandering plague. I'm still concerned due to movement fights that Desecration may not provide the bang for buck I know I can get from WP. Finally I know I kept Morbidity for DPS. I did this because my DPS spec will finally have the threat reduction from subversion and I will be able to include DnD in my DPS rotations now.

For tanking I was able to pick my blood and frost talents but didn't have time to do my unholy tree. I will initially be going 10/11/50. Blood will give me blade barrier and bladed armor. For frost I'm picking up Toughness, Improved Icy Touch, Icy Reach, and Lichborne.

Though I haven't started my Unholy Tanking tree I know there are some talents I will and will not get. I will not have Gargoyle. I will not have the perma ghoul. Since I don't need to combine DPS and mitigation in the same build the two pets do nothing to contribute to my threat so I can use those points elsewhere. I will be taking the AMS/AMZ talents in addition to Anticipation of course.

Other thoughts....

Virulence is now in the first tier and unless you need the dodge you will be taking this in the Unholy tree. I'm not sure whether I like this just yet. I'll have to review some of my old recounts to see how often my "spells" were missing. I don't recall it being all that frequent. But then again, dodge does jack squat for DPS so its still better than anticipation in the front row.

I'll be monitoring the PTR test realm forums and EJ during the day so I can maximize my efforts when I get on this afternoon.

Countdown to the PTR

2009-02-24T17:45:00.003-05:00

Assuming this is the only file I need, I should be live just before bedtime. I figured I could do some dailies and fishing this afternoon with this downloading in the background.

Then again, maybe not. Good thing I planned on taking the missus and jr out to dinner tonight.

Ask the Scourge Ghoul Edition

2009-02-24T09:04:00.004-05:00

It's Tuesday, maintenance is going on, and it's time for Ask the Scourge.

I received an e-mail from Randul the Dwarf over at http://wheresmedrink.wordpress.com/

1. When dpsing, how should one treat their ghoul, especially as unholy? Should we treat them like hunter pets and do everything we can to keep them up or should we just let them drop and consider their dps additional?

2. What is the proper usage for army of dead? When should it be used and under what circumstances?

Currently I would say for Unholy DK's that have Night of the Dead, let your Ghoul die. Don't waste the RP on a death coil to heal it, just summon another. That said, if you have the perm ghoul you should try to keep one up at all times. They add as much as 400 dps to your efforts. Granted that's not the 2,000 BRK gets out of his pet but it's still a large hit to lose.

If the talent changes for 3.1 go through as they now stand it becomes more important to keep your ghoul alive and not let it die mid fight. MMO Champion is reporting NotD reduces raise dead cooldown by 90 seconds. Master of Ghouls drops it another 60 seconds. This means you will have 30 seconds without a ghoul should you sacrifice it or it dies on its own. That's approximately 10,000 less damage on a boss fight to let him die. Therefore use a DC to heal the bugger.

As for Army of the Dead, the taunt does not affect Raid bosses, but it does heroic bosses. However, their taunt does affect adds in raids. Therefore, you should not be using it in heroics unless it is a last ditch effort to stave off a wipe. There are exceptions to this and the first one that comes to mind is the tribunal event in Halls of Stone.

In raids I have to give credit to Bloodmourne's post at Elitst Jerks for the details but the gist is, use it when there are no issues with adds for a sweet DPS increase. I like to pop mine on Maxenna right when she enrages. That's a good time on Patchwerk as well.

Have any other questions please let me know. If they are about 3.1 I'll give my opinion but at this point everything is in flux and the QQ has definately commenced on the forums.

Patch Notes 3.1 revised for PTR

2009-02-24T07:29:00.002-05:00

So the first thing I see this morning is a WoWInsider piece on DK changes for the PTR.

The good news is, I finally got my toon back in queue. But my AOE tanking 5/45/21 spec isn't going anywhere.

I'm not going to detail all the changes, you can see that over at WI as linked. I am going give my initial thoughts on stuff that jumps out at me as they relate to PVE.

The cool down on Raise Dead has been changed to begin when your pet dies. Not when it's summoned. It did get shortened to 3 minutes from 5 and Master of Ghouls drops that another minute as well. Night of the Dead is also being modified to provide a flat reduction in cooldown. I would suspect 1 minute per point on Raise Dead and 5 minutes per point for Army. This would ensure you can still instantly summon a new pet when yours dies as well as maintain the effective cooldown on Army with this talent.

Non Perma Ghouls will also only be up for 1 minute now. No more popping a Ghoul twice on Patchwerk, save it for the enrage.

The raid wide auras are going the way of the do do. While Mark of the Wild replicated the Frost Aura there is no replacing the Blood and Unholy Auras which reduced healer load and increased raid DPS. They still provide personal benefit and for dedicated min maxers may still be good talents.

Howling Blast got moved to the 51 point position in frost. This killed my desire to have HB and UB in the same build. On the surface people might think that could be OP but you have to realize both those talents, and DnD, were buffed by impurity which could not fit in that build.

If blizzard has the goal of moving more DK's out of Unholy this change goes against that. Unholy will remain the AOE tank of choice. Because HB just won't hit as hard as UB with impurity.

The bastard talent of the Unholy tree Outbreak got nerfed. I know it was to offset the buff to Scourge Strike but still, there remains no reason to take outbreak now or in its proposed form.

Between the buff to Plague Strike and the changes to Desecration we may see this become a more important talent again. The reason to avoid it in the past was due to high mobility fights and the overall weakness of PS to pull Desecration back up.

Needless to say, all of this will remain up in the air until the patch goes live. As soon as I get my toon on the PTR will will be testing a UH Tank build and a UH DPS build. I will also dedicate the two builds to their role since there will be no real need to have hybrid builds anymore. At 1000g for dual specs I highly recommend you go that route.

15 Emblems in 3 Hours

2009-02-23T08:20:00.002-05:00

Last night was one of those Heroic nights you just truly enjoy. We put together a guild run and mowed through 4 heroics in short order.

CoT, Check. VH Daily, Check. Azjol-Nerub, Check. UK, Check.

A couple of us picked up the On The Rocks achievement while in UK. Of course it helps that we blew all our cooldowns and dropped Keleseth in 42 seconds. As soon as I ran in and got my RP above 50 we popped Blood Lust. I hit my Orc Racial for a bit more juice, summoned my gargoyle then called the army in as well. As the tank I cleared 2800 DPS on the one fight.

For the night I held over 1,900 dps tanking the four and scored the Staggering Legplates finally. Now its time to go broke regemming again since I can drop a ton of +hit gems. C'est la vie. After all it's not a bad problem to have.

Audacity, Hubris, Deathtard, You be the Judge

2009-02-23T08:08:00.003-05:00

So I log in yesterday afternoon to run some dungeons on an alt and I see a raid forming that peaks my interest.

First thing I do is check class, level, and guild of the person advertising it.

I chose to pass on the raid. Might as well say, Deathtard looking to be carried in BC End Game raid. PST.

I suspect his dungeon blues from Ramparts will really give him all the hit he needs to whack bosses 5 levels above him. I seriously hope he wasn't going to tank.

I will concede these requests happen from members of all classes but this doesn't help with our reputation.

DK Trinket Review

2009-02-22T16:18:00.006-05:00

So I've decided to review trinkets based on the types of queries people are finding my sight with. To date there is not a lot out there on the subject and I know whatever I post will generate some disagreement and hopefully some discussion.

As usual, I will compare tank trinkets separate from DPS trinkets and I will list my top 10 as found on WowHead. I will provide some qualitative insight into my rankings. I've done my best to account for On Use and Proc abilities in setting my weights but I haven't done extensive theory crafting on them, especially the procs.

Tank Trinkets

For Tanking I've weighted Stamina and Defense highest with defense taking priority. Hit, Strength, Expertise, and Dodge are also highly rated but not as much as Stam and Def. Armor also gets a factor in this. For On Use effects I adjusted the value according to its maximum up time. Procs, I tried to see if I could get a sense of up time from the comments. Needless to say, some of these make the list on the basis of their mitigation while other make it based on threat.

Here are my Top 10 Tanking Trinkets. You can mouse over them for their details.
1. Repelling Charge - Thaddius Naxx 10
2. Essence of Gossamer - Hadronax Heroic AN
3. Figurine: Monarch Crab - Jewelcrafting 400
4. Indestructible Alchemist Stone - Alchemy 400
5. Darkmoon Card Greatness - Nobles Deck
6. Bandit's Insignia - Sapphiron Heroic Naxx
7 Defender's Code - Heroic Naxx
8. Grim Toll - Heroic Naxx
9. Seal of the Pantheon - Loken HoL Reg
10. Valor Medal of the First War - Emblem of Heroism vendor

DPS Trinkets

For DPS I rated Hit the highest followed closely by STR and AP. Crit, Armor Pen, and Haste are included as well. Once again I tried to account for on use and proc effects.

Here are my Top 10 DPS
1. Fury of the Five Flights -Heroic Sartharion
2. Darkmoon Card: Greatness - Nobles Deck
3. Mirror of Truth - Emblem of Heroism vendor
4. Bandit's Insignia - Sapphiron Heroic Naxx
5. Incisor Fragment - King Dred Heroic Drak'Tharon
6. Mighty Alchemist's Stone - Alchemy 400
7. Grim Toll - Heroic Naxx
8. Figurine Emerald Boar - Jewelcrafting 400
9. Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood - Keristrasza Heroic Nexus
10. Loatheb's Shadow - Loatheb Naxx 10

I'm sure some of you have different opinions so let's hear them. All I ask is that you be kind to each other if the debates heat up.

Sixth Pic

2009-02-22T07:30:00.005-05:00

If you read a number of WoW blogs you may have noticed the bloggers are having a game where they post the 6th picture of their 6th folder and discuss it.

Well I've been tagged by TGAP George over at I'm Tanking What?

So without further ado...

That's me as a bear getting ready for my guilds first ever attempt on Nightbane. I'd like to say it was successful but I'd be lying. Outside of Real Life forcing my Co-Tank and Co-Raid Leader I still run with most of them. The members were:

Uruz - Prot warrior, my co-tank and co-raidleader. He renamed his toon for wrath but after our first run in Naxx had real life come up and he's not playing these days.

Marxihunt - Was one of our top hunters back in T4 and is now our go to rogue Marximo.

Suzysunshine - An affliction lock that went from 300dps to over 1000 by constantly studying her toon. She now plays our awesome pally healer Lampost.

Aupoirve - Resto shammy came out of retirement briefly to help me kill Onyxia as posted here. He now plays Beercan who goes back and forth between Feral and Boomkin.

Verna - Holy Priest that is level 80 in Chaos these days. RL has also impacted her ability to raid so when she is on she mostly focuses on leveling an alt.

Kahlamnel - Arcane mage who was the source of our Kara team's nickname "Sacrificial Mage" Since Kahl and Verna are married he is dealing with the same RL issues. Both of them have ready spots and promises to be geared up when they have time to come back.

Bearcatomen - this was my feral bear seen in the picture. Bearcat is now level 71 and specced into tree and just doesn't see much action.

Ishidu - was our other top hunter and remains with the guild we were all part of then. He did fill a spot for us recently on an OS 10 kill.

Bighappy - another hunter from our guild back then. I still bump into him in Dalaran on occasion and have done the occasional group quest together while leveling in wrath.

Teutates - feral druid who is still guilded with Ishidu and Bighappy. Tater had to take some time off from WoW for RL issues and I haven't seen him in awhile.

So my sixth picture is a walk down memory lane and reminds me why I choose to be in a small guild over a big one. I can remember the folks I've raided with because they are my friends. If you asked me to name the folks I hit SSC with I could give you 6 or 7 and half of them were just mentioned in this post.

OP at 58

2009-02-21T09:22:00.005-05:00

So I'm preparing my toon for the Scourge Event (Make sure to sign up) and I just hit outlands at level 58.

I had forgotten how OP we are at that level. If you recall at level 58 you don't have Death and Decay, you don't have your 51 point talents, and if you're like me you went straight to the Dark Portal without buying any Glyphs or Enchants.

Even so, I could easily take 3-5 same level mobs as Unholy and never see my health drop below 75%. If it did, it was just one Death Strike away from being replenished. Rotation was simple, IT, PS, Pest, BS, SS then dump RP into DCs.

With that in mind, here is what my recount looked like.

438 DPS, at level 58?!!? I remember benching a warlock from Gruul's runs in BC because they couldn't hit 500 DPS. Seriously, this is entry Kara DPS 12 levels ahead of schedule. I even have a couple wasted talent points on this toon such as On a Pale Horse just so I can ride around some. I'm guessing I could easily clear 500 in ramparts since the mobs will live long enough to maximize my dots.

It's no wonder so many deathtards are out there. I had forgotten how little skill it takes to level a DK in outlands. It only took me 45 minutes to do all of level 58 and ding 59. Warcraft Realms still only shows about 22% of the 1.5 million death knights have hit level 80. Which is lower than the 30% for all classes. This difference is statistically significant as well. This tells me that once many of the players level past easy mode they start to abandon their toons as they realize getting solid DPS or effective tanking out of a DK at level 80 actually takes some skill.

Still surprised how easy kicking ass at level 58 is. Guess I've forgotten in the 3 months I've been 80.

I'm on the PTR

2009-02-20T15:57:00.004-05:00

We'll at least Omenscourge is. I just got confirmation of a successful copy.

As soon as I can log on the PTR, my plans are to test 5/45/21 for tanking. This combines Howling Blast with Unholy Blight.

I will also be one of the thousands testing dual specs, assuming they are implemented.

Lastly, I will play around with deep Unholy for DPS as well.

Any other DK issues you want reviewed?

EDIT: Well I had copied my toon over but apparently Blizz wiped it out. As soon as they open the copies back up due to the queue being full and I get over there I will start testing.

Feeding the Ghoul

2009-02-19T22:34:00.004-05:00

I'm sure all you Unholies know that your perma ghoul can be buffed. If you didn't know that, you do now. It's always a good idea to have your ghoul out when the party/raid is getting their buffs on.

Regrettably Mages putting AI on them doesn't convince them they can jump off a ledge.

Ghouls benefit from DK auras, bloodlust, totems, horn of winter, pally buffs, warrior shouts, priest buffs, abom might, ferocious inspiration, and the list goes on.

You can feed them too. That's right, whip up a batch of Spiced Mammoth Treats and watch your Ghoul go wild.

He will hit harder and live longer, which all adds to your DPS. You may be able to find these on the AH and I would assume raiding hunters will be bidding up the price for them. You can make them with a chunk o' mammoth meat and 1 northern spice. The recipe requires cooking 400+

As you can see, Hammersmasher was happy to get a treat. Now I just need to go find some mobs for him to work off all those extra calories on.

Making Headway

2009-02-19T08:37:00.005-05:00

So after a week off our two guild alliance went back into Naxx 10 last night. And we are making headway.

As always we start with the Spider Wing where we one shot Anub. Faerlina took us two tries since we changed up tank assignments from what we've done in the past but other than that went real easy.

Maxxena dropped on the first try which was great since we have had problems with her before. Our allied guild has a feral bear that came last night. Varnek is nicely geared and even in 10's was pushing 40,000 health. We let him MT Max figuring he had the health to survive not getting healed during her wraps.

We mostly had cloth caster drops since we didn't have any clothies in the raid but Max was kind enough to drop Cloak of Armed Strife for us. That is such a huge upgrade over the Wyrmest rep blue I wear for tanking. But I passed on it so Dayrok could get it. He tanks 100% of the time whereas I change back and forth based on need. As a guild we will get more benefit from him wearing it. Since my goal is to see content as a raid leader it just made sense to not roll myself.

So the Spider wing was clear we had the choice between construct and plague. I reviewed recount for the first three bosses and decided since we only had two healers and our combined DPS was sufficiently over 12,000 we went to Patchwerk.

There is a little confusion out there regarding Patch's hateful strikes. For 10 man Naxx, Patch will target his hateful strike on the second highest melee threat. Health totals ARE NOT FACTORED. Therefore send in the two tanks, let them get a good lead on aggro, then let the melee run in. We had Dayrok MT him and set up Varnek and his 40k health to soak Hatefuls.

For healing we had our Resto Shammy Nekron keep up Day and Lampost(Holy Pally) watch out for Varnek.

Everyone did their job and Patchwerk fell like it was a scripted event.

Anyone who has ever been past Patches will recognize the chat log I lead off with. To be fair to Beercan he had a weird DC issue that threw him out of the instance and he was bringing some respawn slimes with him. Marxi was trying to show off playing in the frogger slimes.

Hubris will get you every time.

We then put in three attempts on Grobbulus with our best one getting him down to 18%. I've only seen that fight once before in a Naxx 25 pug where we one shot him. Only two others in the raid had ever seen him before either. I considered the wipes as good learning and in fact made sure people still standing continued to fight as if half the raid wasn't dead to get more practice. I truly believe we will get him down tonight.

Our goal tonight is to get through Thaddius. Gluth worries me a little bit with his Zombie Chow. That's a mechanic most of us haven't encountered yet. We are also going to start the night with Obsidian Sanctum and I think I'll leave one drake up for an attempt or two

Scourge Event Sign Up

2009-02-19T08:12:00.005-05:00

There seems to be some interest in the Scourge event, but to be honest it we need a lot more interest to truly make it worthwhile. 10 Death Knights doesn’t conjure feelings of dread in anyone. Two level 80’s of any class will come in and wipe us out.

For the event to work we need at least 30-40 people to express interest, more is even better. It’s not like a running of the bulls where everyone sets up a tauren and starts running. Before the event can even start, all the participants will have to complete the class introduction quests in their entirety. That means you will have to invest 2-3 hours in the event before we even start to organize.

I haven’t decided a date or time yet, but if you want to go ahead and start your event DK, roll Horde side on Nazjatar PvP. Y’all know I’m not big on PvP but an event like this will be a lot more fun if we have to worry about the opposing faction. Once we have enough baby Death Knights over there, it is just a matter of calling up the troops to go wreak some havoc.

When it comes time I will see if I can convince my guild to let us borrow our vent channel for awhile. I’m also hoping one or two of you have fraps. At the very least I think it would be cool to mount up in a big line of Death Knights a couple of rows deep and get a good screen shot for Around Azeroth ala Braveheart.

We will start our escapades in Tarren Mill. Activities will include a game of hot potato with the Mayor of Southshore. Rules are simple, Death Grip the mayor to you and try to hit him with a strike before someone DG’s him away from you. Who ever scores the killing blow wins.

Of course we will sack south shore while we are there.

Assuming the local alliance don’t roll out and lay waste to our raid, we will take a few minutes to ride to Elwynn Forest(have your hearthstone set for Stonard) for a Death Knight Hogger raid. This time, the goal will be for someone to kite hogger into my unholy blight. I of course will run all over the place and pop UB at random. Whoever gets Hogger pulled into my traps wins. However, if you kill hogger while pulling him around you will be penalized and force to solo Deadmines before being allowed back in the raid..

From there we will ride to Stormwind and make a beeline for the tram. Once in the tram we will head to Ironforge and whoever gets closest to the Dwarf King before they die wins. You are not allowed to run back to your corpse to improve your position. Essentially this will be a suicide mission at our level and hopefully we will be able to get a good screen shot of a bunch of bodies in Ironforge.

So that’s three contests and three winners. Since I don’t have anything vested in Nazjatar and it is likely most of you don’t either the winners will receive a writeup here at The Scourge. It will be a short Q & A with your primary Death Knight featured.

Signing up is as easy as rolling a Horde Death Knight on Nazjatar and leaving a comment with its name on this post. Once we have a good 30 or 40 I will post a date and time.

Ask the Scourge Day a little late

2009-02-18T08:50:00.002-05:00

Since I had to travel yesterday I didn't have time to put up an Ask the Scourge post. So here it is a day late.

As always I'll try to research your answer if I don't already have a clue on it.

Obligitory UI Post and Discussion

2009-02-17T21:29:00.010-05:00

I had to fly half way across the country and back today so I could sit in 4 hours of meetings. Needless to say my usual morning posting didn't happen.

When I got home and finally checked my e-mail I had a question about an addon I'm using in my UI. After responding I decided it was time for the ubiquitous blogger UI post.

We'll start with a full screen shot from tanking Faerlina the other night.

I have all the really important stuff right in the middle for easy review. As information becomes less important for my immediate attention it is pushed away from the middle.

The center of my screen is dominated by ICE Hud and Deadly Boss Mobs.

The DBM warning moves into position centered just above the ICE Hud information. In this case Faerlina just went into an enrage and at the time of this shot had 7.2 seconds left.

ICE Hud is highly customizable. I have my Health and RP on the left. Just inside those bars are the health and energy of my ghoul. On the right side I have the health and energy/rage/mana of the mob I'm targeting. Just beneath me is the name and meta data. In this case Grand Widow.

To the right I see all the debuffs on the mob. The debuffs prioritize mine on the the top right. In this shot I have UB, Ebon Plague, and Frost Fever up. If she had any buffs they would appear opposite on the left .

The last piece of information ICE Hud give me is my active runes across the top. In this case I have one Unholy rune available for use. Given what I know about my debuffs and my available unholy rune, I should use a plague strike next.

In the Bottom Center of my UI I have my Pet information, Omenmeter, and key abilities.

Here we see a second confirmation my Ghoul is up and currently does not have a lot of energy. He is set to follow and is on defensive stance. More importantly gnaw is on cooldown.

Having Omen meter so visible allows me to quickly decide if I need to worry about aggro issues. This is true for Tanking and DPS. In this case Drax was second in threat and was positioned in case I went down he could pick up tanking.

I also have AMS, a health stone, Empower Rune Weapon, IBF, AoTD, health pot, and AMZ all within easy perusal. I can tell that I have the runes to change stances if needed and see IBF is on cooldown.

On the bottom left I have my primary attacks using Bartender, and my chat window.

DBM gives me lots of information in my chat window. I run prat which provides the timestamps as well as the level and class coloring for normal chat. I also black out the background so it is easily readable regardless of what's behind it.

All my primary attacks are here with bartender and they are keybound to keys I can easily use with my left hand since I drive with my mouse. I also have Dr Damage which puts the average attack value of each ability on the keybind.

The last portion here is DoTimer for my cooldowns. If I need to know exactly how long until I can use an ability I only have to look down to the left from all the action.

The bottom right has more info from DoTimer, Bartender, and includes recount.

Here I see my buffs and timers for the debuffs I have on my targets. Once again if I look here I will notice I do not have Blood Plauge on my target, but I have 15 seconds left on frost fever. My cursor was apparently over one of my raidmembers but it shows down in the corner where I don't have to make an active decision.

You can also see DBM has started the enrage timer since it was getting close. As the countdown closes in on zero seconds the warning moves towards center.

Recount is also down in the corner since I don't make decisions using it while in combat. I'm sure you know by now I like reviewing recount data after raids to decide what is working for me and what isn't.

The last part of my screen I really want to draw attention to is the upper left. I use AG Unit Frames to see the health, or living status, of everyone in the raid. I also have my FPS, latency, and durability displayed here.

I believe it is AG Unit frames that is also putting the heals and damages on each member. To be honest, I only glance at this to see who is alive and who is dead. In 5 mans the frames are configured to show mana so I know when to slow down on my chain pulls.

The top center just has the unit frame for my targeted mob. I primarily have this so I can inspect players when I target them.

The top right has my mini map and shows all my buffs. The only buff I look to find during combat is Horn of Winter. In a 25 man raid I don't even bother. I was one of 3 DK's and I know the DPS DK's will keep that up at all times to increase their position on the damage meters.

With this layout I can get the information I need while in combat by looking at my toon, or down to the right or left. I don't have to go hunting all over my screen to find something important. I'm told by ergonomic engineers this speeds my reaction times and slows the onset of fatigue.

Which Two-Hander is Best

2009-02-16T09:27:00.003-05:00

If you read my Heroic Raid Pug post you know I scored a Jawbone last night and am very happy about it. This morning there are a couple active threads on the forums as to which iLevel 213 weapon is the best.

There are currently 5 iLevel 213 two-handed weapons in the game, in addition to the Betrayer of Humanity which is ilevel 226. If you get a chance to roll on a BoH, go for it. Until Ulduar you can not get a better two handed weapon for Tanking or DPS, even then you may have a hard time upgrading this.

Any of these five weapons will be great for Tanking or DPS.

This ranking only matters if you have a choice.

So here are the five contenders:
The Jawbone
Inevitable Defeat
Death's Bite
Cryptfiend's Bite
Armageddon

Not counting racials which favor Axe's for Orcs and Mace or Sword for Humans, as well as Maces for Dwarves we will rank these based on Tanking and DPS.

Tanking
Inevitable Defeat
Death's Bite
Jawbone
Cryptfiend's Bite
Armageddon

Why, ID is the clear favorite with the most stamina, has the most Agility to buff your dodge, tons of Expertise to avoid boss parries, and a good helping of strength to scale your threat. DB and JB are very close for tanking. DB has a bit more stam and you trade Hit for Expertise between them. Crypt beats out Armageddon due to having Agility to help with avoidance.

DPS
Death's Bite
Inevitable Defeat
Jawbone
Armageddon
Cryptfiend's Bite

For DPS, DB and ID trade places. You just can't pass up the Hit and Crit it has to offer. ID has more expertise than JB and I'd take it's agility over the jaw's haste any day for DPS. On the low end, Armageddon benefits from scaling on strength to make it better than the agility Cryptfiend has to offer in addition to its raw AP.

Heroic Raid Pugs

2009-02-16T07:08:00.009-05:00

So I scored a Heroic Naxx pug last night. As the main tank. I even was able to bring Dayrok from the guild in as Primary Off Tank.

Two of those previous sentences should tell you a lot about the state of Raid pugging in WoW. A month ago a raid pug was 18-20 members from a guild looking to fill a few spots.

This pug was as pure as it gets. Here are some highlights of the raid base.

12 of the DPS could not clear 2,000 dps, even on trash.

Only two consistently broke 3,000.

Of the sub 2,000 dps 6 were below 1,500 and two of those couldn't even clear 1,000 dps.

It's called hit rating people.

On the heal side our best healers were a pair of priests that could reliably maintain 1,800 hps and a druid that almost single handedly healed me through Anub'Rehkans Locust swarm since no one else bothered to heal me. We even had a pally healer who didn't know how to heal raid members not in his direct party. Not to mention his heals wouldn't have been up to par in most heroics.

For tanking we had myself, Dayrok from the guild, and another prot warrior who couldn't/wouldn't get in vent. Kind of hard to adapt to directions and changing threats when you have to stop and type stuff.

Needless to say we wiped a few times. And when we didn't wipe I died on trash too many times to be acceptable in a guild run. That said, in the 3 hours I was able to stay we downed four bosses which futher convinces me heroic raids are easier than normal ones.

After sortin out Anub, I was asked to use the kite method on the second attempt instead of expecting to be healed through the swarms.

The trick is to stay out of the slime while walking backwards. Note my 3100 TPS, that was fairly typical of my early single target threat.

After we downed Anub we moved on to Grand Widow. Dayrok tanked the adds while I tanked Faerlina. Nice to say we one shot her. With a decent healer corp I beleive I could have withstood the enrages to get some folks their Momma Said Knock You Out acheivements. I did eat one entire enrage since the priest didn't get the MC off until the thing was over. Did I mention about half the raid got their first emblem of valor off of Anub?

Maxenna was our next target. This time it made sense to let Dayrok tank her since she is a single tank encounter. I tossed on my DPS gear and underperformed to my standards at exactly 3,000 dps. That still had me second on the meters :( No way this group will handle patch. Max went down in one shot and I rolled 96 on a new piece of sexiness.

I've joined the 203.6 wep club. There is a lot of debate which weapon is better for tanking or DPS. You hear weps such as Inevitable Defeat, Betrayer of Humanity, Death's Bite, and Demise. Rarely do you hear Jawbone, but the simple truth is, the Jawbone > than any 186 DPS weapon. Any DK sporting a Titan Steel Destroyer or Colossal Skull Clad Cleaver will want this bad boy. Tanks and DPS alike. Gotta say it helped my single target threat. Remember my Anub action shot with 3,000 TPS? You'll see a similar number if you look close at Faerlina.

OK, I'll fess up on this threat meter. It was on trash, pulled away from the group so it was barely taking any AOE from anyone else, and I just scored a big scourge strike crit. But I've never seen 6,400 TPS on my toon. As we went on to Noth I consistently held 4,000 TPS which is a huge improvement over where I was at.

We went on to two shot Noth with Dayrok tanking him while I picked up all the adds. At that point it was bedtime for me so I had to roll. All in all, not bad for a pug that could barely heal and had lackluster DPS.

Props to Big Red Kitty

2009-02-15T16:34:00.003-05:00

Over the years I've read Big Red Kitty off an on and was always entertained even though I barely play my hunter.

One of the things I've always respected about him was his willingness to help people help themselves in game. I recall a story where someone begged him for money. He offered them 50g if I remember right(or some other ludicrous amount) for several stacks of light feathers. The player who was clearly new, compared to someone just looking to make a buck, went out and gathered the feathers over a few days. BRK was happy to pay up.

I bring this up because I belong to a blog advertising program called entrecard. You get credits by people advertising on your blog, or you dropping your e-card on other sites. You can see where other blogs advertise just below my blog rolls. You'll notice I only allow WoW blogs to advertise on my site. Anyway, I've wanted to advertise on his site for some time now. Needless to say his site is always more popular than I can afford.

I sent him a note asking if he could clear his ad queue a little bit to bring down his price some. He did one better. He set me up so I can advertise on his site for two days. Once again demonstrating that he is willing to help people in addition to keeping them entertained.

It's not likely that you have never seen his site. In the event that you haven't or its been awhile since you have I highly encourage you to go check it out at http://www.bigredkitty.net/

/Cheers for BRK

Sunday Morning Writer's Block

2009-02-15T08:20:00.007-05:00

Other than chasing the AH for a few minutes on Friday and Saturday I haven't been in game much. No way in hell I wanted to tank wife aggro for playing on Valentines.

In the 15-20 minutes at a time I can play I've figured out the most lucrative fishing to do while leveling. I had been using baubles to fish in the highest zone I could to support leveling my cooking. But now my fishing is at 340 and cooking around 430. It will be a long time until the fish I catch will grant skill ups in cooking and by then I'll be capped.

So I fish in the pool just outside the portal in Wailing Caverns. For some reason a lot of people like to pretend to be pirates. At a 22% drop rate Deviate Fish sell for about 75 silver per on my server. I get about 8 per 10 minutes which works out to around 35g an hour. I figure if you're gonna waste time fishing you might as well make some money out of it.

I've also decided high end cooking has one of the best arbitrages in the game. I can buy 15 bonescale snapper for about 10g and sell the 5 snapper extreme for 30g. The trick is stock piling spices but the cooking dailies usually take 5 minutes to do, get 4-5 spices, and grant 9 gold. All told, its like someone giving you 30g a day for 5 minutes of work just because you leveled cooking.

Changing gears, I'm looking through my screen shots over the past year or so. I've always heard healers complain that all they ever see are feet and bars while raiding. Here is what I saw for a year tanking as a feral bear.

I don't miss looking at that furry backside. At best when not backed against a wall I would be able to see a bit more.

This just looks so much better.

This also reminds me I need to remember to take more action screen shots. I inevitably forget to mid fight.

Well it looks like I pushed through my writers block by forcing something on paper.

A Scourge Event

2009-02-13T08:00:00.004-05:00

So I have an idea I've been kicking around and I want y'all input. I'm thinking about doing an event. The idea would be to get a full raid of 40 DK's at level 58 and stir up a ruckus.

Possible targets would be downing a fel reaver or going after an Alliance town or possibly even stormwind. At minus 25 levels to the king that might be a bit hard to pull off without some higher level assistance so we may focus on Southshore and see how long a group of 58's can hold it until the locals come in on their 80's and clean us up.

I'd feel sorry for the first ally that comes flagged into our raid and 40 DK's play hot potato with death grip. I say I'd feel sorry but I'll probably be too busy laughing.

So to pull this off we would need a lot of interest and some planning. First everyone who wants to come will have to roll a new DK and push it through the starter zone. Next we would have to set a time where the majority can make it.

If this sounds like a bit of diversionary fun to you, leave a comment saying you're in. If we get 20 to 30 comments real fast I'll start working on the logistics.

One I'm Pleased With

2009-02-13T07:43:00.003-05:00

I'm not a big achievement whore. I don't go out of my way to get them. You won't see me chasing down the holiday ones. I do do children's week. Brewfest, love is in the air, winters veil, and the others I just don't care. Exploring, rep rewards, and all the PvP ones will only show on my sheet if I get them doing other things.

However there are a few I like and a few I want.

And I got one of those last night.

The missing piece was Old Kingdom. I had run it back in December as DPS but we didn't down the mushroom boss and I had never been back in. A couple of my guildies wanted the rose drop and there are some nice tanking bracers in there so we ran it.

Elder really wasn't that bad even though you can kite it to the stairs to avoid the immunity issue. Standard rules apply, burst the guardian down before you have a problem.

Prince was fine, if you follow Raid Rule 1B (Stay away from the shit that kills you) you will drop him quickly.

We just missed the achievement on Jedoga. Her third worshiped got killed by a pet just before she consumed him. We would take them down to 25% so her enrage wouldn't last long or hit hard. As it is, our pally had no trouble keeping me up through it.

Herald was annoying. The PvPers amongst us will have fun with that. I could easily kill the feral kitty, the hunter, the shammy, and even myself by just AOE tanking. I could not burst through the Pally's flash heals. Even using strangulate and and mind freeze to give myself 7 seconds to try and drop her she would come out and flash heal back to full. So I would just make sure she was busy self healing and keep myself alive and wait for the Calvary.

Amanitar was actually fairly easy once you know how it works. We would have the ranged all hang out by our pally who would use consecration every now and then to clear out the mushrooms there. Any time a green one would appear by me the feral druid will kill it. Therefore I just had to stand next to a healthy one, wait for the debuff, pop UB and I'd be fine. The hardest part was staying ahead of the the threat list. Getting shrunk every 10 seconds or so and losing my damage output was murder on TPS.

And with the mushroom down I got my Dungeon Hero. Now I just need to find a pug on a KT and Maly clear so I can get the one achievement I do want. Champion of the Frozen Waste.

A Good Day Tanking

2009-02-12T06:59:00.010-05:00

Between a lag spike, disconnect on a boss, finally seeing Xevozz and Zurmat in VH I took 58% of the overall damage over 3 heroics.

I got home a little early and was ready to smash some face. Nekron was still specced ele dps and Tharizza(lock) was on in our allied guild. Between the two of them I knew I had all the AOE dps I would need. We pugged in Corm(feral kitty) and Phet (Holy Paly) and went of to Heroic AN in hopes of the essence of gossamer.

We one shot AN in 25 minutes. Since I still had plenty of time we hearthed back to Dal and went to Heroic VH. This was the 8th time I've been in there and I had never seen these two bosses. We got Xevozz first and though I kited him I stayed down below which didn't leave enough room from his bubble things and we had our only wipe on the three runs. Once I knew what to do it was cake. As for Zurmat, he died so easily I still don't know what he actually does.

I'm sure it was nerve racking for the rest of the group when I disconnected right at the start of the last fight. When I got logged back in, Corm was in bear form and Cyanigosa was at 65%. I unloaded as much threat as I could and eventually pulled her off so we could score the kill.

I still had some time so we decided to do a mount run in CoT. I already have the mount but no one else did. Phet couldn't stay so we replaced him with another pugged holy paly Jiblette. Only Corm and Nekron had the riding skill and we blew through CoT so fast we still had 3 minutes to spare after killing the boss. Corm is now flying first class.

Then I had to go.

I logged on later in the evening for what I thought would be a raid night. As soon as I logged, the pally from H HoS whispered me to see if I'd tank the heroic daily for his pug. It was occulus. I've only done Oc once before and after killing the second boss we quit. I still don't like that place.

If I ever have to go back I'll use a slightly different tactic on Mage Lord Urum when you aggro him 3 times to grab his adds. What I did was drop a DnD on him and hope that grabbed all the spawns. Each time I lost my DPS in those three fights since I just didn't grab enough AOE threat. I know if the DPS dies its their own damn fault but as a tank I take it personal when anyone dies that's not being an asshat.

What I should do is hide everyone behind the tree so the mobs are forced to LOS us. Then send the ghoul in to aggro the boss. As soon as that's done, recall the ghoul which should bring all the mobs to our location packed much tighter, then AOE tank as normal.

Once we actually fought Urum he wasn't too bad. Just the standard walk backwards in a circle kite job where you wait for him to run to melee range every time he casts.

Well we made it through and I finally accomplished something that I've been meaning to do.

Even better, since it was the heroic daily it counted towards my proof of demise and my Champion of the Frozen Wastes. It also gave me two extra emblems. Between the 5 from here, the 9 from my earlier three runs, and the extra from beating the CoT timer I picked up 14 emblems yesterday. Outside of the equivalent in Kara that's a record for me. That also gave me the 80 I needed to go pick out my T7 Tanking Chest.

Ahh half way there. To be honest the two piece bonus sucks but I am looking forward to the four piece. I made sure to gem and chant it up nice since I'll be wearing this for a very long time. Now if only I could score some good shoulders. As it is, my self buffed stats while tanking are starting to look pretty good these days. 26,600 Health and I still get my Def Cap without Rune of the Stone Skin Gargoyle.

Told you it was a good day to be a tank.

Rune of SSG = Deathtard?

2009-02-11T13:20:00.002-05:00

As y'all know I like to keep up with the official DK forums. I know I'm a masochist. Explains my job.

When Blizzard introduced SSG, it was to assist Death Knights in attaining the uncritable status so they can begin to run heroics.

This is all well and good. I know there are many DK's out there who switch between DPS and Tanking and rely on this rune to ensure they don't go splat.

What I'm seeing is too many Deathtards out there thinking they can tank anything now that they are def capped. So off they go with 20k health 20k armor and 30% avoidance wondering why they keep wiping since they are Def Capped.

SSG can replace defense gear, it doesn't replace the grey matter between the tanks ears.

Heroic HoS Event with Lag

2009-02-11T07:24:00.005-05:00

I tanked Heroic Halls of Stone last night for some guildies and a pugged healer again. This time we grabbed a holy pally that just repecced and was wearing mostly ret gear. Unlike my HoL run the other day, this pally proved skill > gear and did a fine job.

The only problem during the run was my lag.

Most of the run it was around 400ms which is not fun when you are used to 200.

There are lots of AOE pulls in HoS. Including several where you will get 10+ mobs at a time. Of course not all of them are elites in those pulls. That said, there is an easy way to tell if you are AOE tanking right.

If the bodies look like this at the end of the pull you did it right.

See how neatly they are lined up in a circle around where I was standing? I believe there were 15 on that pull. Using the standard DnD at my feet. Death gripping the one elite to me and then putting my diseases up for a pestilence followed by Unholy Blight, not a single mob aggrod on anyone else.

Now the title of my post mentions the tribunal event with lag. After we talked to Brann my lag spiked up to 900 ms and stayed there for the entire fight. Our Pally was worried. As an AOE Tank we actually have an easy time on this event. So long as the DPS and your healer don't stand in the lasers this is easy.

Here's how you do it. Stand about 3 steps up from the bottom in the middle. The walls on either side of you there are within 10 yards. This is important as it will not be possible for a mob to go past you with your AOE's up.

When the first 3 pack appears drop a DnD at your feet. From there IT, PS, and Pest and let the DPS kill them. I had the advantage of having an ele shammy, lock, and hunter for DPS last night and given my horrible reaction timing this was key to our success.

After the pack dies use your Unholy Blight. Now some of you may be thinking WTF Scourge, why pop an AOE damage ability with no mobs up. Lag is your answer. With the positioning I had, UB would aggro anything that tried to run past me. Using it after the fight ensured that over the next 20 seconds any spawns would come for me regardless of my poor reaction times.

This was the insurance I needed to make sure no mobs slipped through. Rinse Repeat and collect loot. Towards the end of the event when the mobs are coming every 15 seconds in larger packs with the bigger golems, go ahead and pop your Army of the Dead. This will give you some additional breathing room and take pressure off your healer.

There you have it, even with severe lag it is possible to tank the event. In fact two of my guildies scored the Brann Spanking New achievement.

Poll Result: Spec Interest

2009-02-10T13:29:00.003-05:00

With 2 hours to go, this was by far the most answered poll I've put up with 132 people responding.

Not surprising given my own bias towards Unholy, the Unholy Tanking and DPS comprised nearly half of the respondents. Frost combined for a third of everyone, while Blood couldn't quite muster a 5th.

Regardless of tree the split between DPS and Tanking was 51/49.

When the PTR goes up, I plan on trying to create a Frost based Tank/DPS spec similar to what I have for Unholy. The goal will be the same, be a competent tank, and provide solid DPS.

I define Competent Tank as someone who can hold aggro (single target and AOE) and not die. From the mitigation standpoint I will be trading the improved AMS, AMZ, and Boneshield for Lichborne and UA. For aggro I will be losing Impurity, wandering plague, scourge strike, and a few others but will pick up Howling Blast and Frost Strike.

Solid DPS is a little more harder to measure since it is boss dependent. I know my dps varies considerably between heroics and raids so I will do my best to compare it to my current values.

If I can nail down a decent Frost spec, and I find more hours in a day, I'll take a look at blood for those of you who like that tree as well.

I'll also try to score some screens from Ulduar since I haven't dropped and graphics on you since Ony.

Servers are down, so Ask the Scourge

2009-02-10T07:19:00.002-05:00

It's that time again. Blizz is doing some maintenance and supposedly dropping a small patch on us.

So I'm going to encourage everyone to ask their burning DK questions they have.

I may have the answer, I may not. If I don't I'll try to figure it out or find it. It may lead to a
new post such as the DK Profession post.

Later this afternoon I'll review the results of the spec interest poll.

In the meantime, what's on your mind?

Sacrifical Ghoul in Heroic HoL

2009-02-09T07:33:00.002-05:00

So we are trying to help our prot warrior build a DPS gear set for those fights we only need one tank and it make sense for me or our bear to tank it. He wants the Axe Lokken drops in heroic.

Our Holy Pally was AFK so we pugged in a tree to heal us. The tree had a couple heroic epics so we figured we should be fine. Especially since Dayrok(prot warrior), Marximo(combat rogue), and myself have run this and downed Lokken several times. We also have a guild Hunter(Linthia) in the group who hasn't had a ton of raid/heroic time but knows what she is doing.

We took the General charged to get Lin her achievement. Per DBM, it was the fastest kill on that boss I've ever done.

On to Volkan. Well maybe not. We didn't count on the Slags being a problem.

Our usual tactic is to allow whoever is tanking to run through all the slags and face pull aggro them. Once they are on the steps the tank will start applying threat. When rock does it, he thunderstomps on the steps, when I do it, I DnD there. In all the runs we have ever done we've never had problems with that.

First run in, druid puts a hot on rock half way through since he dropped to 95% health. About 20 slags came for the tree. He was only half way through. I dropped DnD on the three to save his ass which of course aggrod every thing on me in my DPS gear. No problem, pop Frost grab some heals and keep running for the stairs.

No heals.

The tree continued to HoT up the tank but didn't toss a single heal my way. Needless to say I went down and since we hadn't made the stairs yet the only other person with aggro on all my pissed off mobs was the healer. Guess who died next.

We explained the pull to the druid again, no heals until we are on the stairs on the other side.

Second try, as soon as the tank made the stairs, the druid put a heal on him. The druid was still in the middle and pulled aggro again. The rest of the scenario played out the same way.

Third try, we changed things up a bit. Instead of the tank running first which might scare the druid into healing we sent my ghoul.

So here's the DK tip of the day for Halls of Lightning. When you get to the slag pit, target a slag all the way over next to the stairs on the other side. Then send him in to attack. Wait 2 seconds and everyone else run to the stairs.

The ghoul will aggro everything on the way so the entire party can make the other side without any damage. As soon as the ghoul dies you will get bum rushed by a ton of slags. Have the tank pick them up and burn them down.

Sounds great on paper. Druid healed the ghoul since it was about to die and not everyone was across.

Fourth try, we convince the our pugged friend to not use any heals whatsoever until the tank has picked up the slags on the stairs. This time he didn't. He ran up the stairs and towards the side and aggro'd the elites there.

At this point we said we were done and all dropped group. Our pally was back from dinner so we reformed, used the ghoul trick on the slags and went on to get our hunter the shatter resistant and timely death achievements by one shotting everything else.

And the axe didn't drop.

A Small Milestone

2009-02-08T16:49:00.004-05:00

This is my 101st post. The Mish Mash report of my recent activities was number 100. In the two months and six days it has taken me to write 100 posts I've been visited over 13,000 times.

BRK probably gets that in a day or two.

That's OK, I know there are a little over 50 of y'all who visit me every day and I can only assume you find my ramblings entertaining and informative.

On average each visitor checks out 1.7 pages and stays for nearly 3 minutes.

The most popular entries I've made continue to be my talent spec discussion, professions, consumables, tanking primer, and being uncritable. Basically everything I've called out on the right.

I have also had 123 comments in that time. Though that number is inflated by me replying to what y'all have to say. Including Matticus accusing me of coining the term Deathtard. I will take no credit for that, however I may have helped popularize it :)

When I think back to my first post, my goal was to give Death Knights a voice and help demonstrate that we are capable of being more than the fad of the month and not everyone is a Deathtard. Since that time, warcraft realms has seen another 200,000 DKs join the ranks. And a ton of us have dinged 80. In fact nearly 300 thousand more of us and we are the most populous class at level 80.

We also made it through the 3.08 "nerf" fairly well. I still see DK's topping damage meters on a regular basis and believe we will continue to hold our own in 3.1.

So here's looking forward to the next 100 posts, may you find them entertaining and informative and worth coming back for.

Cheers,

Mish Mash of Activity

2009-02-08T14:28:00.005-05:00

So I'm starting to get back into my routine and don't have anything truly noteworthy at the moment to discuss.

Our coalition continues to make progress finally, but I missed Naxx when we finally got Maxxena down. This coming week, I plan on leaving one drake up for a couple of attempts in OS.

I was recruited to join one of the top 10 guilds on the server. Seems they need some more raiders and after pug tanking for one, I made their wish list. When I said thanks for the compliment I prefer to stay with my friends, they tried to see if we would merge our guild in. Nice to know you can make a positive impression.

On the same lines, after we downed OS, we decided to do Vault 10, but one of our healers was saved so we had to pug another in. After the run, the healer said to keep him on our collective friends list since it was nice to pug with competent players.

Speaking of compliments, I am happy that Skeleton Jack is currently advertising on my blog. Make sure to click the link, and if you can't find it, I do have him in my DK blogroll. I find it is an excellent source of DPS information.

Back to my neck of the woods. I firmly believe, if we as a guild ever decided to focus our efforts purely on raiding we could rule the 10 man scene. But at times after a hard month at the office it's nice to sit back and fish.

I've been doing a lot of fishing as of late. In fact I've leveled it to 310 and got my cooking to 395 in the past couple of days. I'm starting to get to the point where I can supply a nearly endless amount of cheap buffs that the most valuable way to dispose of them is just use them while running around.

Last thing I did was go out and download the PTR client. I've never played on the PTR before but I really want to try out the 5/45/21 tanking spec to see if combining howling blast and unholy blight in the same build will truly pay off, as well as be able to DPS worth a damn while not tanking.

I will also be posting another Ask the Scourge day this week. I didn't get a ton of questions last time but it did lead to the profession post which with the help of all the commenters turned into a good resource.

Last, my DK tree interest poll is almost over and I have a lot of responses. I suspect it will lead to some new research topics since there is a good amount of interest in Frost and Blood as well.

Patch 3.1 Notes Scourge Style

2009-02-06T08:11:00.005-05:00

So here are the notes, copy pasted directly from WoWInsider.

Gargoyle and Unholy Blight have swapped talent positions. Gargoyle's damage has increased and runic power cost per time has decreased.

Pestilence – this spell no longer causes damage but just spreads diseases. Blood Boil is intended to be the general area attack, and has been changed to be castable on targets with no diseases on them, but does extra damage if diseases are present.

Unbreakable Armor now absorbs a flat amount of damage that increases as your armor increases. It no longer boosts armor.

The Frost tree has been shuffled. Among other things, PvP talents such as Endless Winter are closer to the top of the tree where Blood and Unholy death knights can access them.

Sudden Doom – this talent now procs a Death Coil rather than requiring an additional button click. It works similarly to shamans' Lightning Overload.

Magic Suppression and Blood of the North have been reduced to 3 ranks for the same benefit.

Blood Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.

Unholy Blight becoming a 21 point Unholy talent is huge for AOE tanking. Consider this, in one spec you can now have Morbidity, Unholy Blight, and Howling Blast. You kidding me. 5/45/21 will be the new tank spec of choice. You won't have bone shield with it, but the changes to Unbreakable armor will offset that. You will have 18 seconds of IBF and 20 seconds of UA every minute. If its real ugly you can cycle in Lichborne too.

51 point Unholy 2H DPS will become one of the top DPS choices with Gargoyle getting rebuffed.

Blood will be happy with automatic, always criting, death coils. Talk about increasing your DPS or TPS for the blood tanks. Especially since the sudden doom proc will not consume a global cooldown.

With the reduction of Blood of the North and Magic Suppression to 3 points each that will allow a bit more flexibility for deep tree Frost/Unholy specs a bit more flexibility for the good stuff.

The changes to Pestilence and Blood Boil aren't a big surprise. The net damage between the two will probably be fairly similar to what it is now. As it is, you should only be including Pest in your rotation to spread diseases anyway.

Given the changes to the talent trees expect a free respec when this finally hits.

Damn I get excited about AOE tanking the more I think about this. I can see an early rotation being IT, PS, Pest, HB, BB, UB followed by DnD, OB, BB with Frost Strikes dumping the RP. If you can convince your DPS to wait on the first HB you will aggro like mad. Single target will be IT, PS, HB, BSx2 with FS RP dump followed by OB, OB, HB with FS as the RP dump. MMMMMM.

Now if they just throw in Dual Specs as well so we can have a full on DPS spec too we will be gods.

Onyxia Solo'd Sort Of

2009-02-05T07:49:00.008-05:00

So I was in Dustwallow to pick up the fishing quest and thought to myself, "I started WoW in early BC, I've never seen Ony, I bet I could solo her." So off I went.

I talked a friend of mine in Dalaran to group with me so I could convert to raid and not get punted from the instance. Strapped my tank gear on, ate a food buff, and walked in.

Needless to say trash was easy.

Ony phase one was cake. Just back yourself against a wall so the knock back doesn't interfere with you and just work your DPS rotation. When you get below 75% health spam a couple Death Strikes to bring you back up.

Phase Two was a little more difficult. Since you are the only one in the place the whelps all go after you. In addition it was more difficult to keep the diseases up on Onyxia and time hitting her with Death Strikes. Eventually I made it through.

Entering Phase Three, I was very low on health, got feared immediately, then my diseases dropped off.

Had I been thinking I would have Death Pacted my Ghoul which would have brought me back to half health. Retrospectively, I believe this would have bought me the time I needed to get my diseases back on and Death Strike back up to full health so I could survive her deep breaths. I didn't and with all my other cool downs blown, turned into a ghoul and died shortly after entering phase 3.

She is killable as a solo Unholy DK. A solo Blood DK will have a much easier time.

About this time a guildy logged on and asked what I was doing. I decided to cheat. Since his main was a feral druid I had him log onto his full T4 level 70 Resto Shammy.

The results speak for themselves. In fact Aup basically only healed me in Phase 2 and tossed lightning bolts the rest of the time. Gotta say, the tremor totem was nice to have as well.

So I didn't pull off the solo kill. I had fun, scored lots of vendor trash, and got to see a boss I'd never seen before.

The AOE Grind

2009-02-05T07:29:00.003-05:00

When I was leveling my first toon, a warlock, I thought I had a handle on AOE grinding. Use my pet to round up four to five mobs, DoT them all up, then fear which ever one came towards me. After a minute I'd have to run all over the place collecting loot since they all died in different locations.

Then I ran Sunken Temple. There was a Frost Mage in the group a little out of the level range on the high side. We had a room full of dragonkin melee mobs. He Ice Shielded, grabbed a preists PW: Shield and proceeded to gather up all the mobs. Frost Nova them in place. Blink away. Then Blizzarded them down. When they started to close in on him, it was a simple case of rinse and repeat.

I was awed. The control was amazing.

Eventually, I leveled my own Frost Mage to 60 so I could enjoy it as well.

Death Knights make fantastic AOE Grinders, especially if you are Unholy or Frost. First we aren't squishy like the mages and locks are. Second, we can produce tons of AOE damage while taking a hit. Third, we have the health and mitigation to stand in there.

So here's how you do it (This is the Unholy version).

Step One: Find a bunch of melee mobs in fairly close proximity you want to kill. Lately I've been using this technique on the mobs you kill for the Sons of Hodir dailies.

Step Two: Cast Bone Shield and mount up on your horse.

Step Three: Ride next to several mobs close enough to aggro them. Unlike a Frost Mage, you do not need to circle them into a tight pack to be effective, you just want them to come to you.

Step Four: Pick one out and hit it with Icy Touch. This will dismount you and all the others will start to come your way.

Step Five: Drop DnD, Plague Strike your first target, hit Pestilence followed by Unholy Blight.

Step Six: Loot.

Frosties obviously won't have Bone Shield or Unholy Blight, but they do pick up nicely with Howling Blast.

Effectively you are just AOE tanking without a pocket healer. Easy to do on non elites and makes those kill and drop quests go a lot faster.

DK Flexibility

2009-02-04T13:33:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I closed my poll review with a suggestion that all DK's try both Tanking and DPS roles. It was a blanket statement and there will be exceptions but I stand by it.

Grimtorn indicated that with his tank heavy spec his DPS would be off even in a full set of DPS gear. I agree with this, while a tank spec in DPS gear will never put out as much damage as a pure DPS spec, there are times where a raid only needs one tank(Maxenna comes to mind). Unless you are a prot warrior or pally, you can add more value by providing DPS and letting them tank than the other way around.

Wheresmedrink has two toons and the other is an effective tank. I'd argue his DK will be better at tanking magic heavy fights than his warrior would.

Kaleyen had the issue after collecting a full tank set was needed as DPS and had to rebuild.

In every case, your off-spec role will never be optimal, but it can be the difference between killing a boss or continuing a raid should someone need to leave.

Poll Results: Primary Roll

2009-02-03T09:16:00.003-05:00

It's been a week and the poll is now closed.

The first thing that catches my eye is not a single person chose Off Tank. I think it is a fairly safe assumption that anyone filling that roll chose to answer whichever is needed.

Half of you that answered only provide DPS. This is reasonably consistent with my experience where most of the DK's in a raid are there for DPS only and have no interest in tanking. Needless to say, if you are looking at my talent spec for ideas you can avoid blade barrier, toughness, and anticipation. If you aren't going the dual wield route, I might suggest dropping those points into subversion, dark conviction, two-hand specialization on the blood side. That won't pick up all 15 points but will be more dps than what my spec provides.

Twenty percent of you said you tank. There are times I am envious of people who have the MT role for a guild, then there are times that I'm not. I enjoy tanking. but we all know it can be hard work. Needless to say, if all you plan on doing is tanking you can drop some of the lesser DPS talents and push down to lichborne in Frost.

I'm in the 30% that do what ever is required. Need me to tank, sure no problem. Gotta have someone soak hatefuls on Patch 25, I'm there. Got tanking covered and just need some solid melee DPS, all over it. Life is expensive for us. To fill what ever role is necessary whenever we are needed, we absolutely need two sets of gear. For example, in the last week prices on Titansteel helms have come down dramatically on my server. I grabbed one of each for tanking and DPS for about 1000g each. Throw in two meta gems, two blue gems, and two arcanums and I blew through 2,700g like it was monopoly cash. The upside, I can tank, I can OT, I can DPS, so in the rare times I do have time to play lately, I can score a run or a raid without a lot of difficutly.

The DK Flexibility to change from Tank to DPS between fights is one of our biggest advantages, and I would encourage everyone, especially the pure DPS, to give it a try.

Professions for a Death Knight

2009-01-31T10:45:00.006-05:00

I had a request the other day to review professions in light of their benefits to Death Knights. Needless to say this will be a long post. For the min/maxers in the crowd you will need to compare the benefits of each profession against its closest substitute. For example, how much better are the Inscription Shoulder Enchants than the exalted Sons of Hodir ones? Questions such as these will help you decide which two jobs you want.

I will try to break the walls of text down enough that their crits don’t kill you. I’ll review the 3 gathering professions first and then cover the crafting ones. I am also assuming money is no object and you are making your decision based purely off of benefits.

Gathering Professions:

It’s safe to say all three gathering professions are moneymakers. If you are willing to devote an hour a day to these you can rake in big bucks. But that’s true for any class, so the question becomes how do these directly benefit the Death Knight.

Skinning – At max skill you get Master of Anatomy rank 6. This gives you an extra 32-crit rating. DK Tanks can skip this but DPS may be interested,

Herbalism – Lifeblood allows you to restore 2,000 health over 5 seconds at max skill. This doesn’t have a lot of benefit for DPS and even when tanking, the likelihood that this skill is the difference between living and dying is incredibly small. This provides less than 1% of health per second for most tanks.

Mining – Cap mining and you’ll pick up 50 stam. For tanks this will translate to 550 health in Frost Presence, Taurens will get even more. As a tank you are better off with this health buff than Lifeblood from herbalism.

Crafting Professions:

Hope you saved a lot of gold. After you get your epic cold weather flying leveling these to cap will cost you. However, these will provide much more benefits than the gathering professions ever will so min/maxers take heed.

Alchemy – The first benefit is Mixology, which doubles the duration of flasks and elixirs you can make as well as buff their effects. Wowhead comments indicate buffs between 20% to 50%. That means your Mighty Strength gives at least 10 more STR than the usual one etc. There are also two nice trinkets currently, one for DPS and the other for Tanking. Neither is best in slot, but they are nothing to sneeze at either.

Blacksmithing – As of patch 3.08 there are no craftables in BS that a Death Knight would kill for that are Bind on Pickup. Therefore the only benefit this has for us is the ability to add 2 gem sockets, one to your bracer and one to your gloves. If you are a tank and stacking stamina you can easily surpass the stam that Alchemy has to offer with these two slots. Needless to say, two extra gems can be a great boon to DPS as well.

Enchanting – As with most crafting professions there are very few benefits you can’t get off the auction house. For enchanting, what Deathknights will look for are the two enchant Ring spells, 24 Stam for Tanks and 32 AP for DPS. Since these are the only way to improve your rings you will realize the full gains from these.

Engineering – The beauty of this profession remains its helms. You can get some of the best DPS and Tanking helms as early as level 72. Titansteel helms for DPS and Tanking, which you can buy from any Blacksmith, will surpass these in quality. There is also a good trinket that is really nice for tanks and can be fun for DPS as well. The sonic booster grants 81 stam but can occasionally buff AP by 430.

Inscription – The only reason to take this profession is the best in class shoulder enchants. Getting Exalted with Sons of Hodir is nice, but these chants for Tanking and DPS blow them out of the water.

Jewlcrafting – BoP Trinkets for Tanking and DPS, check. Sweet sweet JC only gems, check. The trinkets aren’t best in class but they are very good, it’s the 41 stam and 27 str gems that should get your juices flowing. That’s 17 more stam and 11 more strength than any non JC gem. Add in the fact that these will fill any color and your golden.

Leatherworking – How does 114 AP sound to your wrists if you're DPS, 90 Stam sound better for tanking? If this sounds good, get yourself some Fur Linings and prepare to be OP.

Tailoring – DPS might be interested in the 300 AP proc cloak enchant but there is nothing for Tanks.

Let's see how the professions stack up on some key stats.

Stamina:
Jewlcrafting - 51 Stam (17 more stam per gem x 3 prismatic gems)
Leatherworking - 50 Stam (90 fur lining - 40 enchant bracer)
Mining - 50 Stam
Blacksmithing - 48 Stam ( 2x24 stam extra gems)
Enchanting - 48 Stam (2x24 stam ring enchants)

Strength/AP:
Jewlcrafting - 66+ AP (11 extra str per gem x 3 prismatic gems)
Black Smithing - 64+ AP ( 2x16 Str gems)
Leatherworking - 64 AP (114 AP - 50 AP wrist enchant)
Inscription - 64 AP (114 AP - 40 from Sons of Hodir)
Enchanting - 64 AP (2x32 AP ring enchants)
Skinning - ~36 AP (Crit rating 32 x EJ APE factor)

I didn't include trinkets since they can be replaced by drops. These two rankings also do not do justice to the buffs to Elixirs and Flasks.

Thanks to all the commenters in helping to clarify this post.

A Little Progress

2009-01-30T08:17:00.003-05:00

Yay!!!! Chaos Brewing killed Sarth 10 last night. OK seven out of the 9 members who are level 80 killed Sarth. We had to bring in 3 friends from former guilds to help out.

Originally I planned on tanking but our newly respeced feral druid is still too undergeared to provide DPS. So we put him on off tank duties (Survival of the Fittest FTW) and he helped our warrior take care of the trash and he grabbed adds on the boss.

That put our Warrior as main tank on Sarth and left me to DPS. We cleared through the Drakes so effectively that a couple people suggested we try One Drake Up. I made the call to take them all down anyway. It was the right call. We wiped on Sarth once and at the kill on the second attempt had our Main Tank, an Elemental Shammy, and a Hunter standing at the end. It wasn't pretty but it was a kill.

I'm confident that with our full crew of nine and our combined friends list we can start making some progress. Lootwise our Mage got the sweet caster neck which is a huge upgrade for him and our new Bear scored the T7 glove token which will really help him convert from Boomkin to Bear.

Raid Consumables DK Style

2009-01-29T08:38:00.009-05:00

Face it, if you're guild is not topping your server and dropping Sarth 3D on a regular basis, you can use some help in the stats department while raiding, and possibly in Heroics.

Most of the following will apply to both Tanking and DPS so if you can find a good supplier for one just stock up and you'll be good.

I'll break this down into Battle Elixirs, Guardian Elixirs, Flasks, Food, and Others.

Battle Elixirs

Elixir of Mighty Strength - This is the premier battle elixir for Deathknights. At 50 strength this will dramatically increase your, and your ghouls, DPS and your TPS while tanking. Even better this will scale with Blessing of Kings. This should be your default choice.

Elixir of Accuracy - If you are seriously hurting for hit take this elixir over the mighty strength. At 45 hit this will ensure you land more blows on the bosses which will increase your DPS and TPS more effectively until you are close enough to the hit cap that this will put you over.

Guardian Elixirs

Elixir of Mighty Fortitude - Whether Tanking or providing DPS this guardian elixir will take some pressure off your healers. It increases your over all health by 350 and returns 20 hp5 to you. The hp5 will really help with splash damage as DPS and will reduce mana taxation while tanking. Like Mighty Strength, this should be your first choice for guardian elixirs.

Elixir of Protection - If you are DPS don't bother with this one. If you are tanking and undergeared this might be worth looking at. 800 armor is nothing to sneeze at, but with the buff to Frost Presence this is probably not going to provide as much value as Mighty Fort. But if you absolutely need the extra mitigation on melee heavy tank jobs, this is the way to go.

Elixir of Mighty Defense - Ideally you are defense capped without Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle or Sigil of the Unfaltering Knight. But if you aren't and the 45 defense rating this elixir provides gets you over the 689 defense rating threshold use this. Don't ask, just do it. Then go out and put swordshattering on your weapon and smash some faces. DPS don't try this one at home.

Flasks

Flask of Endless Rage - If you are on a progression raid night and know you will be wiping a lot, quaf one of these and enjoy its 180 AP increase. From a DPS and TPS perspective this better than the elixir of Mighty Strength. If you are DPS and don't have to worry about AOE damage because you have great AOE heals in your raid go ahead and use this full time. If you are tanking, make sure you don't need the buffs from the guardian elixirs first.

Flask of Stoneblood - Very few fights will you absolutely need the 650 health this gives you. That said, as a tank on progression runs where you expect to wipe a lot this will be preferred over the Elixir of Mighty Fortitude.

Food

Dragonfin Filet - Mmmmmm, Yummy. 40 Strength and 40 Stamina good for Tanks and DPS alike. As with all things Death Knight, Str > 2 AP due to scaling which makes this the first choice in food buffs.

Snapper Extreme - Like the Elixir of Accuracy this food buffs your hit rating, 40 hit to be exact. It also tosses in the obligatory 40 Stamina. If you aren't hit capped this is a good choice.

Worg Tartare - Provides the exact same buffs as Snapper Extreme. Which one you use doesn't matter.

Mega Mammoth Meal - Chances are your favorite chef will drop one of these and with 80 AP and 40 stamina you won't go wrong by pulling up a chair and chowing down.

Other

In the event your raid or heroic does not have a priest, you can use Scroll of Stamina VIII to replicate the 132 base stamina that their buff provides. Don't bother with the Strength or Agility versions since your Horn of Winter will overwrite them.

All that's left are the BC Weight and Sharpening Stones. While they will increase your DPS and TPS a little they probably aren't worth the effort to go back and farm. If you can't drop the boss with all of the above, you probably won't with these either.

EDIT-- thanks to Wheresmydrink for reminding me the sharpening and weight stones don't work in wrath anyway.

Single Target Damage Breakdown

2009-01-28T12:29:00.003-05:00

The recount shown above was from the Heroic Sarth kill I DPSed last weekend. I was on Sarth the whole time I did not try to provide AOE assistance on the adds since we had plenty of mages and locks.

Even with a Big Two Hander, ordinary melee came out on top. I burned my runes as fast as they'd pair up for a scourge strike and stayed under 100 RP as much as I could.

What catches my eye in this report is Necrosis kicked out 5.8% of my output and I only had 4 points in it. What you don't see is the 3.5% of damage blood caked blade caused for me fully talented. This indicates that Necrosis is now providing more bang for your talent point buck than BCB post 3.08.

Also not seen here, is my DoT uptime was 74%. It should have been 100%, or very nearly there. I got lazy and relied on my glpyh of Scourge Strike since I only used Icy Touch and Plague Strike 4 times. I think I will need to adjust my addons a little to make the debuff icons more apparent so I don't miss them falling off as much.

Wandering Plague contributed a nice bit of damage to all the mobs running around me even though I did not intend on hitting them. A nice little side effect. Had I tossed a few pestilences my overall DPS would have shot up a few hundred points.

Take aways, between Necrosis and BCB get the former. Make sure you keep your diseases up. And free AOE attacks are good.

Gotta Question? Ask the Scourge.

2009-01-27T07:32:00.003-05:00

So today is maintenance day and I'm on my last day of being out of pocket. I haven't had much time to troll the forums or other DK sites but I will tomorrow.

I know a lot of people are afraid to post a question on EJ or the forums because you don't want to get flamed. Here's your chance to ask it.

You can leave a comment here, or you can send me an email at my address listed at the bottom of the page. Either way I will answer it. I will keep you anonymous if you want, and I won't call you a deathtard.

If you are actively trying to improve your game (ie asking a question) you will never be a tard.

Besides, the former professor in me believes if you have a question someone else wants to know the same thing. In fact, I expect I will learn a thing or two as well.

So whatdya want to know?

DPS in Tank Spec

2009-01-26T22:08:00.004-05:00

Before I got back on the road for the last leg of my travels I scored a Heroic OS run. I went as DPS.

First thing I did, was port to Ebon Hold to change out the rune on my new axe to fallen crusader and took the summon.

I'm sporting my unholy Tank/DPS spec. As I've said before the purpose is to be capable of tanking through Naxx 10 as well as provide solid DPS regardless of content. I did drop the point in Corpse Explosion for one more in Necrosis.

I also strapped on all my DPS gear since the tank stuff just doesn't pack the punch. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to screen shot the damage distribution of my attacks before I headed out.

I will say my rotations on the trash packs were IT, PS, Pest, UB, BB, SS.

On the drakes and Sarth I used IT, PS, BB, BB, SS followed by SSx3+. Using the sigil of scourge strike I rarely had to reapply my diseases. I also dumped RP into my gargoyle, unholy blight, and deathcoils.

My ghoul also did much better surviving the AOE with night of the dead, and I wonder if it doesn't help the gargoyle as well. I know mine took a wave and kept on hitting.

I didn't top the charts but I was close. The 3832 I tossed was on the second drake where melee stayed on the whole time. For the entire run, including Sarth, I cleared 3k dps.

Min/maxers would have done more with the pure unholy dps spec or the dual wield spec, but I like that I can hold my own as a tank and dps without respeccing.

Your turn.

It Finally Dropped

2009-01-25T15:41:00.004-05:00

3 pugged DPS, my favorite Pally to heal me, and two people rolling on the drop.

To make matters worse, the batteries in my mouse died on the first attempt and I use the mouse to drive so I stood in the novas and died.

Second attempt looked good and my computer DC'd after the second nova.

Third attempt, the ele shammy who was undergeared died before he could pop Blood lust.

But third time was the charm and we downed him fast enough a couple people got the timed achievement.

And I won the roll.

Whew.

As far as tanking went, threat appeared to be well in hand. In fact I had such large threat leads I went ahead and used my gargoyle on the bosses. Lamp said post patch 3.08 I'm a tad easier to heal, but I can still take a few spikes in damage.

With my new gloves, titansteel helm I finally bought this morning, and my new axe my health is 26.4k and armor is pushing 28.8k.

Emergency Funds

2009-01-25T08:08:00.004-05:00

I always keep about 1,000 gold on my bank alt for rainy days. You never know when you'll need it.

Last night was a good example. I managed to squeeze in an hour's play time and after killing King Magni we were able to put together a guild Vault 10. Well I say guild but we still needed 3 members from an allied guild.

I was MT, and while keeping an eye on Omen was pushing upwards of 4200 TPS when he wasn't picking me up and tossing me across the room.

After killing him, he was nice enough to drop a new pair of gloves for me, specifically the tanking variety. Too bad my other Tier piece is the DPS chest. In any event, these had 28 less defense rating than the daunting gauntlets I had been wearing.

So I needed to regem at lot to get back to the crit cap. I also had to enchant these. I went with armsman for the extra threat and parry. All told I spent about 300g.

This is where the emergency fund comes in. I'm not a farmer. Its not in my play schedule to grind for hours or fly around and herb every zone. Therefore, when I'm less than 1,000g I will focus on getting back to that level as quickly as possible. Once there I will stop so I can go back to doing what I enjoy most. Running heroics and raids.

Keep a stack of gold on hand, you'll never know when you'll need it.

Poll Results: Difficulty of Normal versus Heroic Raids

2009-01-23T08:14:00.003-05:00

So the poll closed yesterday. Nearly everyone who felt qualified to compare 10s versus 25s believes the 10 man versions are harder.

I tend to agree. The normal raids just do not provide any opportunity to recover from a mistake. They are also sufficiently difficult that if a tank or healer is under geared the encounters will be too much to handle. There is a little wiggle room for DPS, but not nearly as much as the heroic versions.

Another telling clue to the relative ease of heroic raids has been the proliferation of guilds willing to pug as many as 7 or 8 members on a regular basis.

This would be the equivalent of pugging 2 to 3 members of a 10 man raid. Outside of Vault 10, I just have not seen that happen. You would think, the success rate of heroic pugs would lead to greater 10 man pugs as well. I have to think the relative difficulty of normal raids prevents this.

To sum up my opinion, I believe the normal raid encounters are more difficult to complete due to less room for error and under geared players than heroic raids. The difficulty in organizing 25 people is less than putting together the right 10 people to clear the same content. Adjusting the hitpoints and damage output of the mobs and bosses are not balanced between the two at this time.

Threat Issues?, Not so Sure

2009-01-22T06:24:00.004-05:00

I've been hearing we are having some threat issues from various forum reports.

To the right you will see the damage done and damage taken from a Heroic CoT run last night. These are the overall numbers and individual bosses usually had my damage lower than everyone else.

Needless to say, when the tank takes 72% of all damage in the run, and I didn't try to pick up the little zombies, I think it's safe to say I did not have any issues holding threat.

However, I did feel that both my AOE and single target

were off. Had I had DPS in the 3k range I would have had more issues. But that is just a gut feel that I can't put a finger on.

It could be due to the change in runestrikes damage. I know it is supposed to have a 1.5 threat modifier.

Rune strike went from being my number 2 source of damage on heavy AOE tank runs (DnD beat it out) to number 6 with it's damage contribution cut in half.

Until I get a few more runs under my belt post patch, I think the jury is still out on Unholy threat production.

Baby DK

2009-01-21T07:44:00.005-05:00

I forgot how Death Knights start off with dress. So macho. Can kill anything.

Anyway I rolled another death knight for a couple of reasons. One I wanted to enjoy the starter quests again. This time I can appreciate them more since I'm not learning the mechanics at the same time. The other reason it with just a bit of effort I can hit 60 in Hellfire and test a few things out.

I'm a cheap bastard and respeccing on Omenscourge is getting expensive. So I'm going to level this guy blood to 60 so I can learn the ins and outs of more blood talents, then I will respec to a frost tank spec and try to tank ramps a few times.

To be honest my biggest concern with the plan will be finding 3 other DK's who don't want to be Deathtards in ramps and a healer willing to pug that insanity. This will be harder since I haven't had a toon on that server in over a year and don't know many folks anymore.

To sum it up, new DK = cheap testing on other trees.

Sigils, Runes, and other 3.08 Impressions

2009-01-20T18:47:00.007-05:00

So I've had my first look at 3.08 and discovered a couple things.

If you want the new raise ally spell, you have to go train it. 36g

If you want the new runeforge stoneskin Gargoyle, you have to train it. 36g

Fad of the month Deathtards deleting their toons. Priceless.

Needless to say you have to go train these. Though if you are defense capped, and don't have a bunch of defense gems and enchants, you may want to hold off on the rune.

With the new rune I can afford to lose 127 defense rating and maintain uncritable status. I only have 46 rating between gems and chants. But I lose 3.76% avoidance after I take out enough defense to get me back to the cap. With my gear, I will be worse off with this rune. Your mileage may vary.

If you are not defense capped, get this and plan on working towards achieving the cap without it.

The tanking sigil is 15 emblems which I would presume you get while dpsing. But the sigil I'm most happy about is Haunted Dreams. I had this and it would proc 173 haste on occasion.

Look at it now!!!!

Yeah Baby!! 173 Crit for 10 seconds. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I'm really glad I dropped the emblems on this.

Why I like DPS meters, even on trash

2009-01-20T08:06:00.002-05:00

If you've seen some of my screen shots you will notice recount in the bottom right corner. I always have it on and running.

Unless I'm researching something specific using recount it always shows overall damage, that includes trash in a dungeon or raid, and when out questing stuff you only hit twice.

Every now and then I like to flex my epeen with the meter especially when I'm in a guild run, just to give some friends a hard time after a big AOE pull but that's actually not why I like them.

DPS meters provide feedback on personal progression.

I keep track of my dps results on bosses and overall for every dungeon/raid I do. I also note whether I'm tanking or DPS. Then I can use the comparison over time to determine if my new spec, rotation, or gear are truly improvements.

I look at bosses separate from the overall because at the end of the day, if the boss didn't die you did. DPS on bosses is what gets the phat lewtz. DPS on bosses is what gets you invited back to a raid. Even when tanking your DPS matters. I can look at recount after a run and see in tank gear I did 1785 dps on Cyanigosa heroic last night. Since frost bumps that by 1.9 that meant I averaged 3392 TPS for the fight. Next time I go back I can make a comparison whether my threat has increased or not.

I look at overall DPS because I believe DPS on trash does count. Just not as much as bosses. Higher DPS on trash means more time spent killing bosses, means more bosses killed. Again the comparison is over time not between players.

I also pay attention to DPS of individual players, especially those I run with frequently. It gives me an idea of what content we are capable of, including whether its reasonable to push to be a timer etc.

A lot of people malign the meters, but when uses properly they give great feedback to performance. Just don't post your 5k dps in general chat when one howling blast scored you the Jenkins title.