deathknight

It’s no secret we’re in a bit of a slump here. (I say "we" like there’s more than one person writing this. Hah.) I can’t do any death knight beta testing for you, or any other class, plus there’s already loads of people who beat me to it anyhow.   It’s a little depressing, to be honest.

So what do you want to read here? We’ve probably got another two or three Cataclysmless months to go – at a minimum – so I’m putting the call out there. What do you want to read on this blog?

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.
What do you want to read?

Level 20! It took a little while, because I was waiting on someone to join me on her mage and make those first 20 non-button-pressing, non-mount-having levels less tedious, but work schedules and working on some silly gaming site got in the way, so I bravely forged ahead!

Things I’ve learned:

• It takes a while before paladins are ready to tank, doesn’t it? Sure, you could charge into the dungeon finder at 15 with nothing to your name but Righteous Defense and a Judgement or two, but with Hand of Reckoning at 16, Righteous Fury at 18, and Consecration at 20, it really seems like they’re supposed to just chill and plow through quests.
• And plow through quests I did, especially once I picked up Hand of Reckoning. If I HoR and Judge a mob, it’s half-dead by the time it even gets to me. Thanks to various mini-bubbles, BoA gear, and those two buttons, I’ve done every group quest in the Ghostlands solo save for one – I knocked over Knucklerot and Luzran, and lopped off Kel’gash’s head, but I haven’t tried taking on Dar’khan Drathir yet. Besides, I’ve got plenty of quests to do.
• Mounts make everything better.
• "Lament of the Highborne" is still awesome.

So, I’ve got just a few quests to mop up in the Ghostlands – I believe I’ve got a few trolls left to wipe out, the quests to push those nosy night elves back out, and then it’s off to Deatholme to free prisoners, kill enemies, and take out Dar’khan too. I haven’t quite maxed out my engineering for this level; it’s at something like 147, mostly due to the serious lack of tin in the Ghostlands. I’ve found two veins the entire time I’ve been there. Two. So it’ll be off to somewhere else next…

…so where should that somewhere else be? When I stopped by the Undercity briefly to drop off Sylvanas’ trinket, I checked in with Ambassador Sunsorrow and he wanted to punt me off to Tarren Mill – but I’m open to suggestions. I’ll need something to do between queuing for instances, after all.

While you figure out where to send me, here’s some more screenshots.

Smelt, smelt, smelt… snore.

Oh look, it’s Tart’s mage! And our adorable minipets. BLU represent!

 

I don’t know why I’m sitting in this wagon, but… there you go.

Action shot! Take that, arcane reaver.

This screenshot is now diamonds!

A little Lament of the Highborne for you.

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.
CYOA: I’m on a horse

New Rule – No more New Rules on Tuesdays

With the fall semester in full swing and all of my classes being on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule I think it’s become a bit over-ambitious to think I’ll be able to A.) not play WoW but still impose new rules upon the game and B.) stay up all night Monday night trying to finish schoolwork and post said new rules.

I don’t want to outright cancel New Rules or anything half so drastic so instead I’m making this the last time New Rules will appear on a Tuesday morning.

And seeing as I have already been up until 4am working in a presentation for class in the morning I’ll see you all back here next week on whichever day I decide to move this segment!

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Blonde Redhead is another anachronism, they are a three piece comprised of a pair of Italian identical twins on Drums and Bass (plus vocals) and a Japanese woman on guitar and vocals. In some ways, the band seems a spiritual successor to Sonic Youth. Kazu Makino sharing vocal duties with one of the Pace brothers. [...]

*sigh* I belive this turmoil was the creation of the stress from creating my UI.

We find our hero hammering into metal as he continues to create his upgrades. Is he a robot? Who knows, only the future can reveal it...

Alright, this step is significantly easier than the first in the 3 step program to fix the economy create your new UI. First of all, now that you know what you want to do, you have to find the Addons that will allow you to create your perfect image of a UI. Your best bet is to download Curse as I mentioned in the last post.

After you download and install Curse you’ll have to make an Account. Do all that and you can finally start downloading and managing your Addons. Now that all the boring stuff is out-of-the-way, let’s delve deep into the art, no wonder of downloading Addons.

Get More Addons

To get the Addons that you want you have to either use the Curse site itself, or just use the Client. If you just click the button that says “Get More Addons” then the entire list of Addons on Curse.com will pop up for your downloading pleasure. The best way to find Addons are either a) by Popularity b) by Rating or c) by Category.

Popularity assures you that people use the thing so it’s clearly half-decent, rating tells you that people LIKE the Addon so it’s probably not bad, and Category allows you to find Addons to fulfill the role you desire.

Now, whenever you click on an Addon that you’re tempted to Download be sure to view it prior to wasting your time with it. There is a short description and links to the website and a longer description for that specific Addon so you’ll be able to view it in a video/screenshot and learn a bit more about it. Always do that before you download a random Addon to ensure that it’s useful.

When you believe that the Addon is something of value to you go ahead and click the “Install” button next to the Addon. From there it will go into the My Games —> World of Warcrack folder with the rest of your Addons.

Managing Your Addons

Whenever a Patch comes for WoW most likely your Addons will become outdated or even better, broken. In this case you’ll have to keep a watch for new Addon updates whenever you boot up your PC or however often you decide to do it. Regardless of whether it’s broken or not it’s always best to update your Addons to ensure they work/get updates for the Addon.

It can be annoying as hell, but making sure you have the most up to date Addons is a worthwhile, minor inconvenience. You always want to be able to use your UI so keep it clean, keep it right, keep it sexiful (new word, take that Webster’s).

What Addons Do You Use, Grandmaster?

Why thank you for asking my dear Student!

But… I don’t care let me make my UI…

Munchy, escort this fine man to the bowels of hell.

Students… give me… indigestion..

I’ll give you salad for dinner if you eat him.

Well… in that.. case… meatbag… *crunch*

Like I said, some of my recommendation for Addons for any basic UI are the following:

Grid/Grid Mana Bars: Grid is a basic raid frames UI. It’s useful for every role as it can allow you to see who needs debuffs/healing/has aggro that shouldn’t. It’s also very customizable which is a huge bonus so it can fit any size space that it’s needed.

Pitbull Unit Frames 4.0: These frames replace the basic Blizzard Player/Target/Group/Raid/ToT/Pet frames with highly customizable frames. It can be a pain in the ass to configure, but it’s well worth the time sink. Personally I only use the Pet/Player/Target/Target of Target frames.

Tidy Plates/Tidy Plates:Threat Plates: These Addons are great especially for Tanks. It changes the nameplates into much more desirable frames. However it also shows what creatures you have Aggro on/don’t have Aggro on. It’s extremely useful for a visual and you can change the size of the plates.

Dominos: Some people use Bartender, others use Dominos, personally I like Dominos more but either way you want to get either. They both allow you to move your Action Bars around and change the size/transparency of them. Dominos gives you 10 Action Bars to toy around with along with many other bars. Very little hassle for a worthwhile outcome.

Conclusions

The next and last post will conclude the short series and hopefully y’all will end up with much nicer-looking UI’s. Trust me the first time around is always the hardest, from there you will basically play god and evolve the UI from there. Next post we will go over actually configuring/creating your UI now that you know how to download/plan your UI out.

Happy WoWing!

-Elno

Greatness or ignominy?

That, as they say, is the question. No matter how it may seem at the present, it’s likely to end up in the middle, if anything, as it should be.

As it currently stands, you can copy almost anything which has a mana-cost. There are a few exceptions (Water Elemental and Felguard will instantly die, for instance, as they likely check themselves against your talents), but not many. Essentially all damage and healing spells can be mimicked, as has been expected all along (although in some cases they’ll be instant as opposed to having a cast time, and won’t actually consume the Dark Simulacrum debuff, allowing overpowered scenarios like spamming an instant cast Divine Light for 20 seconds straight! Obviously a bug, and likely a simple one for them to iron out). Crowd-control,  snares, and like are usable as well. We can steal demon summons, but such use is slated for removal (due to all of the understandable technical complications).

Nothing surprising so far, right?

But then you get to self-buffs: Shadowform, Windfury Weapon, Molten Armor, Dark Intent, Seals, and so forth. All of them can be copied, and for their full-duration at that.

And that’s where the problem lies.

You see,  according to this post, Ghostcrawler doesn’t have a problem with it copying Shadowform (and, likely, the other similar spells), but then states the obvious – that such abilities will have to have a Dark Simulacrum imposed limited duration, presumably similar to how buffs from Spell Steal are automatically capped at two minutes.

The big question of course, is what sort of time cap are we looking at? Because no matter which way you go, you’re looking for trouble.

• Too high (which, I would say, is probably anything over a minute)? Then raiding is going to be an utter joy. Imagine a World of Logs ranking where all of the top Death Knights are those who duel their raid’s Shadow Priest before the fight for the free +15% shadow damage, or their friendly Enhancement Shaman for Windfury (which I haven’t mathed out, but I believe would be on par, if not superior to, Shadowform). Hearthing out, dueling, and being summoned back is a process which only takes a minute or two; easily short enough to justify the huge gains we would see from these buffs even if we only ended up having them for a fifth of the encounter. If there was a truly tight enrage, you can bet us doing this would be mandatory. Even if dps wasn’t the central issue on a fight, there are numerous survivability buffs – Earth Shield, Shadowform (again!), Mage Armor, and so on – which could dramatically reduce the amount of healing we require and tremendously increase the amount of stupidity we can get away with (which is already a lot, considering Anti-Magic Shell!).
  • • The reason why you don’t see this as an issue with Spell Steal, despite having a two minute cap (which I would argue is far too long for DSim), is because there just aren’t as many dramatic magic buffs a Mage can steal. Most of these abilities which would be so incredible for us our melee-specific (such as Seals/Windfury), non-magic (Shadowform), or otherwise of limited use to their class (Dark Intent). What’s the strongest spell they can nab from a friendly player; Fel Armor probably? Nothing compared to what we can do.
• Too low (which, I would say, is probably anything under thirty seconds)? Then the fact that it can copy buffs is rendered near meaningless. Most of these buffs we wouldn’t be able to copy in normal circumstances; you’re not likely to have a Paladin refreshing Seal of Truth mid-combat, or a Priest rebuffing Vampiric Embrace (which, by the way, I would absolutely love to have access to). You’re much more likely to go up against a Mage blowing Mirror Image  or a Shaman summoning Spirit Wolves, or other such cooldown usage which, if buffs are limited to thirty seconds or less, are likely superior damage (both immediately and over time) anyways. Sure, there will be the occasional super-buff we’ll be able to ninja from an NPC and being able to copy Heroism if you’re team is without a Shaman will be invaluable, 30 second cap regardless, but generally speaking, we just won’t care. The spell will lose a lot of its luster.

The astute among you will notice that there is a gap between my definitions of “too long” and “too short”, and yes, I would say that – 30 seconds to a minute – is probably the sweet spot in terms of “too potent, will be obnoxious before demanding encounters or competitive battlegrounds” and “too weak, the ability to copy these cool buffs just won’t compare to what else the spell can do in realistic circumstances”.

However, there is another solution which, if it’s doable in terms of coding, I would strongly push for: Buffs cast via Dark Simulacrum fade when you leave combat. A much smoother, more intuitive, less arbitrary cure than some form of limited duration based on time.

Simple, and solves all of the PvE issues. As for PvP? It would take care of anything ridiculous in Battleground, and as for arenas; if you catch a Shaman rebuffing their weapons mid-combat, or are quick enough to DSim a Shadow Priest shifting back after having to heal, then I’ld argue that they deserve for you to get the buff!

Aside from the buff issue (and the fact that it’s currently on GCD, which isn’t a huge deal for PvE, but seems quite limiting for PvP), Dark Simulacrum is shaping up quite nicely, although a lot of its value will still depend on the specific encounter. If a boss does a 50k nuke every minute we can copy, that’s over 800 dps we’ll gain for free. It’s always been the case that each class has some bosses which they perform better on relative to themselves on others, but for us with DSim, it’s going to take that to a whole new level. That’s why, as odd as this may sound, I’m personally hoping that when it comes to bosses, most of the abilities we’ll be able to mimic won’t be damage ones at all, but those of other natures – healing, utility, survivability, and the like.  More “fun” (because, honestly, copying a nuke which hits for a lot is rather dull) and doesn’t interfere with number balancing.

But, hey, time will tell.

Whichever way they go, I’m hoping they try to avoid designing encounters around the use of Dark Simulacrum to be completed. I.e, imagine Kael-thas without the legendary shield, but instead he casts a buff on himself of similar nature which we would then have to copy and throw on the tank to let them survive the Pyroblast. Letting DSim make an encounter easier is fine – that is, after all, what any ability does! – simply don’t make fights designed around DSim being used at a specific time on a specific spell for you to have any chance at success.

Just too gimmicky.

C’thun and Yogg-Saron are very very connected in lore and in my own experiences so I’m compelled to lump them into one post together. First, C’thun.

I encountered C’thun late in the game while decked out in T5/T6 gear. I was asked to tank for the zone but was upstaged by a much louder, stupider tank who considered himself to be God’s gift to WoW. Instead of putting him in his place I opted to go the mature path: brooding in the back like Achilles in his tent. On the Twin Emps I simply watched from the sidelines. But then we reached what looked to me like a very non-descript hallway and the raid came to a halt. The blustery tank who had run full-tilt through the instance now reached a point that gave him pause. He had no idea what the C’thun fight was like at all and suddenly realized he was too good to be leading us scrubs anyway and from that point he took a back seat.

With prodding from Salanthe, I started directing things, outlining the general strategy. Salanthe was good enough to organize the groups in a better configuration, a talent I have yet to acquire even still, and we peeked ’round the corner. You’re introduced to C’thun through a tiny crack in the wall and if you aren’t careful you can very easily be the cause of your raid wiping before you even enter the room.

Step too close to that eyeball and you’ll provoke C’thun into nuking you with a laser beam that then chains to everyone standing near you gaining strength as it goes from person to person.

Coming upon that giant eyeball so unexpectedly made me jump a little. I felt a little hypnotized immediately. Carefully, we hugged the walls and got into position. The C’thun fight involves tentacles sprouting from the floor that need to be killed and so so so many laser beams of death that still proved lethal even at level 70. At times, a small group of people are required to enter C’thun’s belly and destroy two tentacles inside the stomach. While you’re in the stomach you take a stacking amount of damage until you die or escape via Old God-vomit. We counted on it being a breeze but were dismayed to learn that C’thun was bugged in that particular patch so that the damage you took inside the stomach scaled based on your characters spellpower. This meant we were taking insane amounts of damage and couldn’t simply steamroll this nasty boss.

At one point I emerged nearly dead from the stomach and was assaulted by a tentacle I hadn’t noticed nearby. I hung around 100hp for what seemed like forever but was actually only a couple of seconds before running away smack into a laser beam of death. I watched from the floor as about 25 remaining raid members finished the job. I attribute the bulk of the raid’s success to the healing prowess of one resto shammy cow.

And then there was Yogg.

Downing Vezax and stepping into the shattered prison room of another Old God had me confused. There was no monstrous eye, no tentacles, no… anything except for one friendly looking woman standing in the center of the room. After we engaged her and started getting the hang of blowing up faceless ones on top of her while avoiding the gas clouds of horrible death I grew to hate Sara and her loud tauntings and confusing allegia–OMG FUUUUUUUUUU–

As Sara suffered the last of our explosions the entirety of the floor erupted underneath us and the enormous mass of Yogg-Saron’s thousand maws came rushing upwards. Giant crusher tentacles, laser beams, floods of diseases, poisons and curses… this was more like it. We had many crazy attempts that ultimately frayed and fizzled in the chaos of the encounter until one night on what was to be one of our last attempts. One person died, then another. I had directed dps onto Yogg himself for a minute because we appeared to be handling the adds well enough to let them pile up a bit. Then there were five then six then seven giant faceless ones pounding on the tanks and more people were dying. I snuffed it seconds later and turned my camera around just in time to see Yogg explode in death. The same surprise and awe I experienced when we first saw Yogg’s true form was the same feeling (and then some) that I felt seeing him die courtesy of some damn fine dps folk.

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When I got asked to heal for Talisman on their first Kara trek I showed up with my Continuum Blade and my Spaulders of the Righteous, fully gemmed with stamina and spellpower. Properly garbed in fail, I was introduced to Nightbane, scourge of Karazhan.

I didn’t have a clue what was going on; mostly I was just desperately trying to learn how to play as Holy for the first time while trying to follow everyone else in the raid so I didn’t get lost. And then there was a moment where we were just hanging out on a seemingly uninhabited castle rampart doing nothing. I was standing alongside the other healers like I was supposed to and so just waited for instructions.

Then there was the sound of a great rushing wind and a colossal skeletal dragon descended right on top of our tank. The beating of its wings, the roar as it attacked and the scrape of bone and steel were the only things I heard as I stared in amazement.

What is it that a tank sees most during a raid? Well that depends. If the boss is a dragon or other non-humanoid then the tank sees nothing but giant toes the entire fight. If its a humanoid, you get a crotch closeup. So despite how much I love tanking I’m glad I’ve been able to fill other roles as well if only for the fact that I get to actually see the fights from a different, more panoramic perspective.

Fighting Nightbane looks kinda like this from a distance:

When you’re tanking you don’t see anything like that. Below, I’ve made a quick illustration of what you see while fighting Nightbane as a tank:

Toes, toes, toes and nothing but toes.

In any case, we struggled against Nightbane for a little while that night but ultimately defeated it and moved on to clear out the rest of Karazhan. There are other impressive bosses in that zone but even the Prince wasn’t as dramatic as seeing Nightbane descend for the first time.

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Icecrown is where it's at. Not Dragonblight, which has these little diversionary 'raids,' requiring us to run around a big room and learn one real boss fight. Certainly not that glowing spiraly purpley tower on the edge of the Borean Tundra.

Icecrown is where the Frozen Throne is. The Big Bad Lich King. Frostmourne. Nemesis of all, but particularly so for Death Knights who have experienced the half-life of being in his thrall. So, in the waning days of the second World of Warcraft expansion, it's still where raiders find themselves come time to join with their band of 25 or so plucky adventurers, finding what challenges they may, and overcoming them!

In my case, we've been doing the Glory of the Icecrown Raider achievements, and while a few of them were tricky (the tank swaps of Sindragosa's Buffet in particular), last night we found ourselves with only the Neck Deep in Vile achievement separating us from our mounts of skeletal swiftness. On two previous nights, we'd successfully gotten LK down to 1% before his explosion when a Vile Spirit hit someone. Unfortunately it was too late to keep from killing LK and we failed the achievement. Both times it was too late to wipe and the Lich King died without giving us our due. We were determined not to fail this time, and carefully modifying our kite path to ensure no wayward defiles were dropped in the middle, we managed to defeat him without encountering any Vile Spirits, although we still had to check our logs after the explosion to make sure.

Riding the exhilaration of the moment - and our shiny new mounts - we decided to see if we could accomplish an achievement sweepstakes for the week. We'd only just the previous week killed Anub'Arak in TOGC as a guild for the first time. I know, I know - that is SOOO 2009, but Insomnia had been working on the fight late last year, only to drop it when ICC opened. Now, in better gear the fight is certainly easier, but with better gear also comes more health, which means more healing for Anub in P3. We actually wiped quite a few times in getting that first kill.

We'd already cleared the first 4 bosses in TOGC without the careless mistakes that results in wipes on old content. 50 attempts remaining on Anub. Soulstones were placed on our misdirecting hunters who are so fond of attracting shadowstrikes. And we did what we so rarely have done; focused on our first pull, defeating the Beetle on our first try!

A few people had mentioned that they thought this hadn't been done by the other guilds on the server, and confirmation arrived in the announcement realm-wide of a realm first achievement! :) Many reading this will scoff, for it is an old achievement, but still one that is undone on the majority of realms. Trade was an interesting place to be afterward, with the mix of "you stupid nooobs, you suck. This server sux. Ally sucks!" along with congratulations from other raiders on the server.

In any case, my screenshot addon was apparently on the fritz, so all I have for you is this haphazard snapshot of the last few achievements, with my drake peeking from behind the window. Sorry.



I went to Icecrown, and all I got was this Lousy Screenshot.

Still, it was a fun night that reminded us of why we do this thing called Wow.
Have a great weekend!

It may not be politically correct, but there’s definitely something important about the old saying “too many chiefs, not enough Indians”. When you hear it, you can immediately identify the problem. In WOW you could just as easily say “too many officers and not enough raiders” but it doesn’t carry the same sense of profound [...]

I don’t usually just do short little posts like this, but I have to say: the new built-in PowerAuras are incredibly impressive. Not only is the artwork beautiful (and, more important, completely unmissable), the feature also highlights the affected ability (or abilities) on your bar with a golden glow. In addition, the auras “pulse”, and seem to speed up as the buff duration runs its course (although, admittedly, this could simply be my flawed perception).

Obviously it’s not as customizable as the original mod version, but it’s perfectly functional and plenty sufficient for myself and, I would imagine, most players:

Sudden Doom:

Freezing Fog:

Like I said, not normally the type of entry I like to make, but Blizzard really outdid themselves (in my opinion) this round, so I figured I would share.

Some other random facts noticed this patch:

• Death and Decay is hitting rather beastly. Unbuffed as Unholy in Unholy Presence, it’s about ~1.2k/tick non-crit. Amusingly, that makes it stronger than SS (at least if you’re still using an ICC weapon, like myself) even on a single target!
• Blood Boil is still rather sad. 1500 non-crits as Unholy, for instance. If they want to make that our main AoE move, it really needs to be pumped up a fair bit more – even if that means nerfing DnD, HB, and possibly Pestilence.
• Blood Plague is no longer ticking for insane amounts as it was last build. Who knows what that bug was about.
• Speaking of bugs, Outbreak still doesn’t apply Ebon Plague.
• There’s still no notification on Runic Empowerment procs.

Expect something more substantial (Uldum/Twilight Highlands reviews? Dark Simulacrum mechanics? Pestilence discussion? Who knows!) next time.

Until then!

Choose-your-own-adventure update

Bishamel has hit 18 and is paused there briefly while I do some other things. I’ll do a full update at 20. Suffice to say that prot paladinning is awesome, and holy crap does HoR do some serious damage at that level. I pull crap in the Ghostlands with it and it’s half dead almost immediately.

Mounts from Zul’Gurub

Valnoth confirmed yesterday that Zul’Gurub is gone as a raid instance in Cataclysm. This makes me sad – I love Zul’Gurub, and not just because of the mounts I can’t get to drop! – but if you want something from there, better get to farmin’. ZG’s lockout resets every 3 days, so you can be in there pretty often compared to other raids. Keep in mind it’s not just mounts – you’ll probably also want to get The Deadliest Catch by fishing up Gahz’ranka and Hero of the Zandalar Tribe by grinding to exalted with the Zandalar Tribe while you’re at it. (Full clears of Zul’Gurub – even ones where you don’t kill much of the trash – yield a few thousand rep. You’ll also want to kill trash for coins and bijous. Zandalar Tribe is super-easy to grind to exalted these days.)

So yeah, this is your last shot at the Swift Zulian Tiger (and its achievement) and the Swift Razzashi Raptor (also with an achievement). I ran a full solo clear last night. I’ve also decided to keep a small collection of Zul’Gurub weapons – so many of the items in there are absolutely awesome looking, and so many of the designs and models weren’t re-used (or were re-used in Outland).

Who’s ready to start farming?!

Builders League United

My guild, <Builders League United> (or BLU for short) has a few new people in it. It’s kind of comforting, having the general chatter of a small friendly guild again. If you’re interested in seeing what we’re about, and possibly raiding with a small-schedule 10-man Horde-side raiding guild in Cataclysm, I highly recommend checking our site, especially the BLU policies and "What is BLU?" pages. We totally have a bank tab and a tabard, just like those other guys in the Guild Recruitment channel.

Loopholes for silly pirates

So it turns out that those of us working on Insane in the Membrane and trying to grind up our goblin rep after sacrificing it in the name of pirate rep have a small loophole I just now got around to finding – we are not stuck solely freeing Knot Thimblejack or grinding on endless pirates and nomads. After some careful (fingers-crossed, bated breath) experimentation last night, I found that – barring the repeatable "reconciliation turn-in quests" that were made solely to raise goblin rep with one city and lower Bloodsail Buccaneer rep – it seems like as long as Booty Bay isn’t the primary rep recipient, you can safely do quests for Gadgetzan, Ratchet, and Everlook questgivers without lowering your pirate reputation (and earning spillover reputation with all the goblin cities, as well). The best part about this is that since I chose to get IitM on my death knight, he’s done basically none of the goblin quests scattered throughout old-world Azeroth. Time to see the sights before the sights go away, and work on my title!

Thanks for reading this post from: The Stoppable Force.
Mounts, loopholes, BLU, and a CYOA update

I have posted the below on Elitist Jerks, which is the final version of the information structure I have been sharing for input (page 3).

I’ve worked out what I’d like to put into the new EJ OP for DK tanks, and what I will exclude. I’m happy to take suggestions. I’ll start the new tank thread when the Beta changes have settled to a point where we can fruitfully write about raid tanking, which should be when we’re close to 3.9 release.

The information structure I plan to use is documented in this mindmap image.

I do not intend to do all the theorycrafting myself, of course. I will maintain a tidy and organised OP. I believe for many EJ visitors, it’s the only part of the thread they read. I’ll rely on the tank community to reach conclusions on topics like the value of mastery stat vs stamina, how to best use Outbreak, and all the other various issues for us to research for Cataclysm. I’ll then editorialise that into the OP.

The map above shows what information I think should be in the EJ OP, based on its focus on endgame raiding. As you know, I maintain pwnwear.com, within which I’ll continue to write off-topic or out-of-scope posts, plus writing for newbie tanks (I like to help new tanks get their head the role). Where there is a content overlap between EJ and my site, such as endgame raiding, I’ll maintain it in both locations. You will not need to contribute at pwnwear to affect the EJ OP. I had to think about how to manage the information spread between the two communities, because I’ll have responsibilities to both, thus combined it into a single mindmap.

In deciding what I think should be at EJ, I looked at other OPs, such as Unholy DPS, Ele shaman and Resto druid. I don’t intend to match their depth, but do want to have similar content headings.

I’m happy to take input.

On related topics:

• Big news at pwnwear
• Blood parasite testing: beta
• Stonecore instance, tanked
• Vashj’ir is huge in Cataclysm Beta, and on questing
• Death Knight goblin ding L56
• Ghostcrawler on talent tree design and playstyles

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Yesterday I posted a guest article on World of Raids about the Paladin tanking experience for someone, like me, returning to the class after a long absence. It included a new youtube video.

Regulars would have seen most of my written commentary already, which I’d mentioned in the blog ten days’ ago and written into this forum post.

What’s new is this video with commentary, of me tanking BRC as a Pally.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiKhgYXlWgA

On related topics:

• Tanking as a Paladin, Cataclysm Beta
• Tanking changes for Paladins, I’d like similar for DKs
• The waiting game for DKs in beta
• Consolidated DK feedback, Beta
• Beta 12759 DK changes
• Deepholm questing, video with commentary

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RSS feed of original content from pwnwear, originally appearing 2010/09/01. pwnwear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License., 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet cached; check the latest |

For those who aren’t already aware and thus I must safely assume live under rocks, yesterday Ghostcrawler answered a slew of Death Knight related questions and issues. Although it certainly wasn’t everything we possibly wanted to know  - which would have been quite unrealistic for him to type up – it was a series of excellent posts, just the sort that we’ve been waiting for these past couple months. If you haven’t already read these writings, I would highly recommend going ahead and doing so now.

Essentially, he hits six main points:

• 2H Frost is indeed still intended to be viable.
  • Which wasn’t really in doubt, but is still good to know!
• DW Unholy is not intended to be taking over the tree.
  • Once again, no real comment necessary, except thanks. It will be interesting to see how they tackle this issue – simply nerfing/changing/removing Sudden Doom isn’t sufficient at this point.
• Pestilence wasn’t intended to be an AoE so much as a means of preventing us from having to tab PS/IT constantly. Unfortunately, the damage makes it difficult to balance, and although they aren’t thrilled with the 50% mechanic, they aren’t really thrilled with any of their options.
  • Understandable. Tab PS/ITing isn’t the same as tab dotting; it’s much harder to do the first due to the melee limitations, not to mention the actually meaningful resource cost. There’s a few different ways Blizzard could take the skill while avoiding this issue (and also avoiding the current one of Pestilence being a single button wonder which deals 30k damage to all the mobs around you!), and I’ll delve into it tonight/tomorrow.
• There are still too many passive talents.
  • Confirmation is godsend!
• There’s nothing wrong with Icy Touch and Howling Blast hitting decently hard, as long as meleeing is more important for optimal damage.
  • Doesn’t quite address the Howling Blast single target/AoE conundrum, but it is nice to know they don’t mind it hitting decently hard in any which case.

All in all, excellent stuff.

You’ll notice, however, that I left out one big issue GC touched upon: us being GCD capped. He attributes it to the large remenants of haste we’re still likely to have on gear from Icecrown and the ArP conversion. Although that logic is sound enough, even at 0% haste, we’re still capped as bad as ever!

Picture time, naturally:

Frost

Unholy

These don’t need a ton of explanation, but still:

I assumed each spec was running in its respective presence, and that Outbreak is intended to apply Ebon Plague. I ignored Dark Simulacrum usage, Empowered Rune Weapon, Glyphs, Raise Dead (for Frost), Blood Tap (for Unholy), Anti-Magic Shell (for Unholy), the additional Runic Empowerment procs from the Death Coils casted off the runic power from Runic Empowerment Procs… and so on.

In short, I gave both trees as much benefit of the doubt as I could while still remaining as accurate as possible.

And the end result? GCD capped, for both specs, even without utilizing all of your abilities to the max, and even without considering how much worse the numbers are for 2H Frost and DW Unholy (although, admittedly, the latter isn’t intended, and thus doesn’t particularly matter).

I’ll probably make some videos of extended dummy testing with 0 haste rating to toss into the thread and further show our GCD issues are very real, and are experiencable with no haste and on paper, and primarily because of Runic Empowerment (the topic I, personally, am most curious about at this point in time!). But, hey, Ghostcrawler is only human. Can’t expect him to get everything perfect, and all of that beautiful blue feedback easily outweighs this easily proven mis-conclusion - now it’s simply up to us to show him otherwise. Fortunately, it’s an easy job ^^.

Anyways, I just wanted to get a post with a more positive tone (since so many misunderstood where I was going with the last one) on the front page, not to mention blue posts of substance are the stuff we’ve been dreaming of for months now.

I wonder how Ghostcrawler chooses which threads to respond to. Random I guess.

We’ve had a nicely-formatted post in the beta forums with all the consolidated feedback, including tanking, which Naha put together, and kept it updated, and yet he replies to Consider’s post in the public USA forums which was more about DPS, of course. At least he’s given us some information, and from that we can hope for fixes to outstanding tanking issues.

Here’s what the lead systems designer had to say:

There are a lot of questions in this thread, and I can’t answer them all, but I can hit a few.

Is 2H Frost viability still intended? — yes. Is DW Unholy viability intended? — no.

Pestilence has been nerfed too much — Pestilence was always intended as a convenient way to spread diseases in anticipation for things like Blood Boil. It was not ever supposed to be the way DKs AE, and in fact that is the job of abilities like Blood Boil. If there was a way to make Pestilence cause no damage, we’d probably do it.

Sorry. Typed too quickly.

Pestilence was designed back in the day when DKs had to use Blood Boil as their AE taunt (a truly brilliant design direction in retrospect). DKs needed a way to get diseases on many targets quickly without tab targeting Plague Strike on everyone. So Pestilence was invented to spread diseases, but based on that initial PS/IT so that it would not replace them.

However, because disease damage ended up being pretty beefy, especially for Unholy DKs, Pestilence became a quite powerful AE attack. Even worse, if was very hard for us to shackle it. It wasn’t affected by the “half damage from AE” auras we put on some trash that we wanted to be more powerful, since Pestilence wasn’t a real AE.

In short, we don’t want Pestilence to be an AE at all. We want Blood Boil and Howling Blast and similar spells to be your primary source of AE damage. I’m not saying we’ll change Pestilence at this stage because it would be pretty tricky to implement a design that let it spread diseases that did no damage (or something equally goofy). I’m just saying that our intent is not for Pestilence to be a huge chunk of your damage. It’s ultimately a utility ability.

There are too many passive damage talents — yes, we’d agree with that. It’s still something we’re working on. There will still be a few, especially high in the trees, but DKs are also slightly exempt (if such a thing exists) from our making sure that early talents are easy to understand for level 10 players.

DKs being GCD locked — this is not something we see for DKs above level 80. We do see it for DKs who are converted at level 80 in Icecrown gear to the Cataclysm rules, for one simple reason — a lot of your stats got converted to haste and you have no mastery. The equivalent would be a level 85 DK who decides to eschew all mastery on gear and stack haste to a ridiculous degree. Sure it might GCD lock you, but it’s such a dps loss, why would you ever do that? This is actually a problem with many specs and skews feedback quite a bit. Be very careful in your feedback to distinguish between whether the character you are testing is wearing Lich King gear or Cataclysm gear. If we had to do it all again, maybe we would have converted some existing gear to mastery, just to avoid the situation we’re in now where players are missing one of the big secondary stats.

It’s okay — intended even — for Frost to use ranged attack. The original “Shadowfrost” was an abomination that cherry picked select talents to boost Icy Touch to a ridiculous degree. If a Frost DK can be competitive without ever being in melee, then that crosses the line. If they are attacking at range before they close, or nuking a fleeing target, or at a second target while engaged with a first target, that’s fine.

Also, in reply to a clarification from Anaroth here at pwnwear about DKs being GCD capped, GC said:

The DK GCD lock you are describing does not happen to level 83-85 characters as far as we can tell. It does happen to players who copy over their level 80 characters and find themselves with very large amounts of haste as a result of the stat conversion. Think about it. Your character (through no actual decision you made) has only haste and crit instead of haste, crit and mastery as you will when you’re higher level. Similar mechanics affect other specs. Feral druids at level 80 have insane crit levels because all of that armor pen became crit.

If you’re in greens in Deepholm at 83 and can’t spend your GCDs fast enough (for any class), please let us know.

I’m pretty sure we beta testers can help here. I think I’m GCD locked when I test with mostly Cataclysm blues/greens, and certainly the maths on paper say I’d be close to it. One tester gave some results already, showing how dangerously close to locked she was in Cataclysm gear at L83.

A sample of the issues DK tanks have at the moment, which his post doesn’t address, and are outlined in Naha’s consolidated thread:

• blood boil causing the scarlet fever, and the talent investment in that mechanism
• the competition for blood rune and unholy runes between tanking cooldowns, death strike and other attacks
• secondary benefit of improved blood presence.

Discuss

In this forum thread, sorry, don’t want two conversations on this one.

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The Flaming Lips are a very special band for me, a chance encounter with lead singer Wayne Coyne at a Seven Eleven years ago lead me to buy Transmission from the Satellite Heart. I’ve been hooked ever since, it’s hard to pin down what kind of a band they are. Their sound is definitely “out [...]

Remember the Power Rangers? No, the original ones. The show was on in the mornings before school when I was growing up and my brother and I watched it unfailingly. The annoying thing about this was we always had to leave to catch the bus ten minutes before the show ended. Thus, every episode we saw the Power Rangers fighting random goons in hand to hand combat and then the nasty bad guy monster would get supersized and… that would be it. We left without seeing the Rangers summon their giant robot vehicles and we had only the vague descriptions of our friends for what the Megazord might look like.

One day we were late getting up and so we had to be driven to school a little bit later by a parent. This meant that we’d finally finish an episode. I unfortunately was pulled away to finish getting ready for school so only my brother got to see it. After the episode ended he came rushing upstairs yelling, “THEY COME UP OUT OF THE GROUND, THEY COME UP OUT OF THE GROUND.”

It’s these kinds of moments that keep you engaged in something; the sense of awe at the moment of discovering something, whether it be a profound discovery or a completely silly one.

Those of you wanderers of Azeroth reading can probably cite several such experiences. Typically these moments are frequent when you’re just venturing out into the foreign frontier of the Barrens, bright-eyed and innocent but become few and far between after you’ve played for a long while and have become enthralled to some pompous jackass across the country who yells at you about your performance on a quasi-nightly basis (the innuendo and lewd jokes write themselves from here).

The first time I saw a wandering elite mob was one such moment of awe. It was Knucklerot and Luzran from the Ghostlands, the two giant abominations who roam the Dead Scar. These guys were a very real and present threat above anything else you previously encounter in WoW.

Raid bosses are basically the same way but (potentially) the impression they give is magnified a thousand times over. It’s one thing to spot a Son of Arugal in the darkened forest and quite another thing to sneak into Onyxia’s lair.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. Over the next few days I’ll be posting individual posts to talk about the four raid bosses that have been the most awe-inspiring for me personally. I’ll give you a hint as to who will be appearing first in this list:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Charred Earth, move move move!

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It's been a while since I had one of these posts, and yes, I know, most of you have killed Halion quite a few times by now. This is the type of fight that the mechanics are fairly straightforward, but there are a few tricks I can mention that might be helpful for maximizing dps nonetheless.

This is likely to be my final Boss review for DPS DKs prior to Cataclysm. I don't plan to discuss the three mini-bosses preceeding Halion, as they were puggable on day 1, and although you can still get ranked on World of Logs (I've been ranked on General Z a number of times), these fights aren't true boss fights.

Halion is is a fairly simple portal-type fight, in which your dps team is split in half for much of the fight. For most groups dps is not the primary concern - especially on normal difficulty - so your priorities on this fight actually are: 1) Don't die, 2) Balance dps in both realms, and 3) Do as much dps as you can given 1) and 2).

So, here we go!

Pull/Phase One: Tank runs in from just outside the circle, often perpendicular to the raid for optimal boss positioning.
As usual, it's helpful if your tank gives a decent count before the pull so you can summon your army. As most of you know I like to summon just in time to pop haste potion just before entering combat. Then, of course, run in and start hitting the boss.
It doesn't matter whether you're unholy or frost for this fight. For the most part there are no range issues to consider, and for heroic both specs do well on adds.
So, for phase one, you should simply dps your merry heart out. Depending on when your raid does heroism/bloodlust, you might want to save your pet cooldown. My raid heroes at start of P2, so some prefer to save their gargoyle/ghoul cd. Even with heroism in P2, however, I use my gargoyle at pull, because the cd is usually up again in P3 if I use it early. Two gargoyles without heroism > 1 gargoyle with heroism. I usually pop my second haste potion during P2 heroism.
During Phase 1 you'll be standing to one side of Halion hitting him with everything you can, and the only thing to watch out for is the Mark of Combustion; obviously, if you get it run to the edge of the circle until you are cleansed, then run back in. The flame trails after Meteor strike are actually very small and you can stand almost on top of them without taking damage. If you happen to have a few empty cooldowns, pop anti magic shield, stand on a flame, and death coil or frost strike away. Just make sure to stay in melee range when doing so.

Phase Two: Take the portal and start dpsing Halion in the shadow realm, but be sure to let the tank get agro first. We pop heroism here because we want to get through the phase as quickly as possible. The main ability to watch out for is the Twilight Cutter. On normal, you can survive getting hit with it, particularly with AMS up. On heroic, you'll usually die. Obviously, keep an eye on the orbs so you know where it will come from. There are two ways to do this effectively. One is to have the tank constantly turning the boss with the orbs, and the other is to have the tank stay still between Cutters, and only move when a cutter is about to start. On heroic, to be safe we just move the boss constantly. In any case, what I like to do is move as far to Halion's front left shoulder as possible without getting cleaved, stop, and dps. We can dps on the run fairly well, but, still we are at our best standing still. I stay in that spot doing dps until Halion has turned far enough that I'm on his back left hindquarter, just before I'm in tail swipe range. Then, I strafe to his front left and start over.

Strafe - DPS - Strafe - DPS.

During cutters, I try to stay pretty much in the middle of the cutters just to be safe (on normal there is more room to continue the strafe-dps-strafe-dps strategy if you want).
Drop Soul Consumption as far to the front left as you can, so you minimize running out time while still doing some dps.

Phase Three: Actually, DKs should almost always stay in the shadow realm, since melee are much less affected by the movement than ranged. If your raid is very melee heavy, you may be asked to move back to the physical realm. But for the most part, you'll be in shadow, where you'll continue the same mechanics as P2. The only wrinkle of course is you may need to slow dps is the physical realm falls behind. No additional tricks for more dps here, I'm afraid. If you popped your gargy early, however, you should have another chance to use it in P3.

DPS for DKs should be solid on this fight. There aren't any major dps buffs, but for the most part you should be able to stay in melee range and keep hitting the boss.

Edit: Since there was some confusion in comments, to be clear, this is just a “what if we really are done” sort of post, hence the added emphasis to assume. It’s not me actually thinking we are or losing confidence in Blizzard. I still believe we’ll be just fine in due time and that there’s no cause for worry but, if I turn out to be wrong and this is it, then this post is basically my sentiments on the matter.

Let’s just go ahead and assume that, yes, Death Knights are essentially finished in the eyes of the developers. Sure, they’re all but guaranteed to pass through our trees at least once more to eliminate or otherwise condense talents such as Improved Icy Touch and Virulence but, at this point, such talents aren’t even our largest, more demanding issues. And, yes, of course they’re certain to do a number tweak patch (consisting of more than a 5% nerf to Blood Strike) at some point between now and the end of beta. Then… nothing.

So, let us say that’s it – and what indications (few and far between they may be) we’ve received would say that, yeah, that is it!

That means we would go live with Runic Empowerment as is, with the Frost Presence/Unholy Presence discrepency as is, the AoE rotations (if one can call it that) as is, the contradictory nature of DRM and the Blood Mastery as is, and so on.

What would that mean for us?

It wouldn’t mean our dps/tps/survivability would be behind. That’s a number issue, and is thus independent of everything else. Yes, our dps might end up being too low (or too high) regardless, but it won’t be because of any thing else but the number pass itself. Think of it this way: you could have a rotation which consisted of nothing but spamming Blood Boil every single GCD, and although that would be horrible in a million different ways, the numbers could still be just fine, potentially.

It wouldn’t mean our class would be unplayable. Mechanically, we function. Some things aren’t very user intuitive (AoE rotation for Frost/Unholy? Runic Empowerment?) or convenient (Tank CDs costing runes?), but that doesn’t mean that, at the end of the day, we couldn’t do our job. Of course we could – it just hearkens back to the numbers.

It wouldn’t mean that the class would be ruined for life. Of all classes, we know how much can change patch-to-patch. Just look at all the different stages Unholy DPS has gone through during Wrath: 0/32/39, Blood Subspec, Obliterate, 10-second Epidemicless, Reapingless variants, Frost Subspec, and so on. A patch can change a ton, so even if Cataclysm were to go live with us being in a less-than-desirable shape, there’s nothing to say 4.1 couldn’t turn it all around in a complete one-eighty.

But, obviously, there are some very real implications to us being “finished” as is, otherwise we wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of it. The question is, what are those actual consequences?

First off, if they don’t touch many of these issues now, then that’s likely because they don’t see anything wrong – which means they’ll never fix them. It’s possible that they’ll wake up in a couple months and see that, due to Pestilence and Blood Boil’s single Blood rune cost tanks can’t manage streaming adds the same way other classes can and that Unholy’s AoE rotation involves using Icy Touch as often as, say, Scourge Strike itself, but if they don’t notice such things now (or don’t see the problem in them), then it’s likely to just stay as is indefinitely.

Secondly, if they do realize our problems later on, there’s the “roller coaster” threat. Like I said, even if we start off behind, a patch can turn everything around, but no one wants to level and start raiding playing a class which functions in a certain manner only for it to be completely different the next patch. We’ve done that, many times, and it’s not the best design from the players’ or developers’ perspective. If we start off without a dozen glaring issues, we’re that much less likely to be put through the wringer time and time again. Best to get things right the first time whenever possible.

Third, there’s the whole fact that if really are done as is, there’s apparently a huge disconnect between a sizable portion of the testing community and the developers. We were told you didn’t like this, wanted so and so to accomplish that, and that these things were good/bad for a class – and thus we based all of our feedback on it. But then it goes live as is anyways? Did you simply disagree with what we were/are saying, and don’t see all of these things as problems, or did you change your mind? Or what? It’s a mind-boggling situation. Not to mention it invalidates so much of the testing done.

Fourth is the fun factor. This is heavily a matter of perspective, so I won’t delve deeply into it except to say the tanks plain not being able to do what they need when they need unless they can see the future (or a fight has no rng) and dpsers essentially playing Guitar Hero with whatever runes randomly light up thanks to Runic Empowerment isn’t my idea of my fun. To each their own, perhaps.

Suffice is to say it would be a huge letdown for the community if we were to go live in our present state, not to mention it wouldn’t bode well for the future of the class  in any probable scenario.

But, really, it’s not the end of the world, and certainly not of the class. We’re not broken. We won’t be baggage in raids (numbers pending). We’ll be much less than we could or should be, sure, and although that’s a shame, it’s always the case anyways as we’re never going to be perfect – largely because how there’s so many different perspective of the class (I’m sure there’s someone out there who likes the current form of Runic Empowerment and sees no flaw with it!). Life will go on.

Where am I going with this post? I don’t really know, to be honest. I lost myself a dozen times, so who even knows if this final product makes sense! The point is, that yeah, we might be done, and if so, we just have to accept that truth, and also realize the the fact that it’s not all that bad, potentially. Make lemonade out of lemons, as they say. Or, rather, lemonade out of rotten, round items which you’re told are supposed to be lemons. View it how you will!

Honestly though, I will say, as is, I would be awfully tempted to switch classes (although I likely never would, due to all the outside factors). Even if we’re far from broken, we’re certainly not improved from our present day state, while many other classes undoubtedly are. Some are shaping up so nicely!