Death Knights in Cataclysm: what will change?

Well, we've finally gotten the big talent tree revamp we've all been waiting for.  It's obvious that the Death Knight trees are far from finished, but we are starting to see themes forming, and getting some idea of what will change.  A lot remains to be implemented and seen, so it's hard to judge these too deeply.

Overall:

• New rune cooldown system: this one was announced a while ago.  Simply put, runes of each color refresh one at a time.  You essentially get half as many runes during ongoing fighting, but if you are inactive for a bit you can start out with all 6.  Each of the 3 colors is basically its own energy bar.  The damage and runic power generation of the abilities and talents has been doubled across the board to compensate.  In theory, you should have more free GCDs since waiting a second to use a rune won't lead to a large dps loss down the road as future recharges are delayed.
• Runic Empowerment: Until recently this was a first-tire frost talent, but is now baseline for all DKs.  When you use a runic power ability like Frost Strike or Death Coil, you have a 45% chance of refreshing a random rune. That's a lot of free runes.  This adds an element of randomness to all rotations.  I'm worried that it will undercut the new rune cooldown system because you'll feel pressured to always have at least one full rune of each color on cooldown in case this procs.
• Each spec gets its version of death runes right off the bat, as well as a key ability (heart strike, frost strike, perma-ghoul).
• Anti-magic shell no longer generates runic power off of damage by default.  This does remove a measure of skill from the class (timing AMS to optimize free RP), but hopefully new abilities will make up for it.

Blood:

• Now a pure tanking tree, and the only tanking option.  Our own Prot tree!
• Blood presence is now the tanking presence, having the same effect as the current frost presence
• We just pile on the cooldowns: IBF, AMS, Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield, Rune Tap, and Will of the Necropolis all in one tree!  Also, WoN now procs a free Rune Tap heal and refreshes the ability's cooldown, adding an active element to save yourself when low on health.  We clearly have more cooldowns than other classes, and it will be very interesting to see how hard this is to balance.
• Block equivalent: in Wrath, Death Knights have been at a disadvantage for smaller-scale fights because of a lack of a block-style mechanic (druids can proc a mini-shield on crits).  There was mention of a block equivalent a while back, where we would have a chance to auto-heal for a percentage of the damage we take.  That appears to have been scrapped, as it does not appear in the current talent trees.  I still hope it makes a comeback.
• Innate crit immunity: say goodbye to defense rating, the most annoying stat ever in the game!  It was confusing and served as an unecessarily stark barrier-to-entry, and required too much outside research to even begin to understand.  Good riddance.  Now we get PvE crit immunity from Blood talents, just like other tank specs.  Hurrah!
• Attack Power Debuff: just like with Block, DKs were the only tanking class with no attack power debuff they could apply to enemies (Demoralizing Shout, etc.).  That's finally changing, as talents in the new blood tree give Blood Boil the ability to apply that debuff, making it into a damaging Demo Shout.  Another great call by Blizzard, it's a necessary tanking tool that we went without for too long.
• Dancing Rune Weapon: now you can parry for two!  In a great leap in the realm of MAKING SENSE, having a second weapon flying around in front of you gives you a sizeble bonus to your chance to parry.  But wait . . . is that another tanking cooldown?  OK, guys, this is getting a bit ridiculous.  6 cooldowns?  That's a lot of runes and runic power being devoted to survivability (even though IBF can be talented to be free!).  Hopefully that won't cripple our threat.
• Sub-specs can only go 10 points into another tree at most.  This leaves you with very few attractive talents currently within reach for tanking.  You're basically picking between a reduced DnD cooldown and a fear immunity. 

 Frost:

• With blood presence taking over tanking duties, frost presence now boosts damage and runic power generation (sorry, no more self-healing)
• Pillar of HOLY SHIT (aka Pillar of Frost): I'll just link the tooltip for you:"Calls upon the power of Frost to increase the Death Knight's Strength by 20%.  Icy crystals hang heavy upon the Death Knight's body, providing immunity against external movement such as knockbacks.  Lasts 20 sec."   Notice anything . . . missing?  Like, say a cooldown?!?  It used to be at 1 minute, maybe wowhead isn't displaying it.  33% uptime is still pretty good - but where will we get the spare frost rune?
• You can now choose between a dual-wield talent and a 2-hander talent.  This is quite a relief, as I'd love to have a 2-hander spec without a pet.
• Frost DKs now get the 4% increased damage debuff for raids that was previously limited to combat rogues and arms warriors.
• On a Pale Horse was moved to early Frost.  I find myself constantly wishing I could fit this mount-speed talent into my builds on live.  I hope Blizzard follows through on the promise to leave you  points for optional talents so I can pick this up.
• The top tiers of unholy have little worth subspeccing into, so you'll end up putting the majority of your extra points in blood in the current build.  

Unholy:

• The biggest change to unholy is the loss of Bone Shield.  Most players underestimate this talent's current impact in raids.  Taking 20% less damage at all times is huge.  It prevents some insta-gibs (hello Mauradin cleaving me as I run past him on heroic gunship), reduces healer panic from big aoes, and makes you all-around the most survivable dps in any raid.  Get lucky enough to be the first Mark on heroic Saurfang and laugh all the way to your purples.  This would be even more important in the new Cataclsym healing environment, so it was placed 11 points into the blood tree to prevent non-tanks from getting it.
• The damage buff Hysteria was removed from Blood and replaced with a similar cooldown called Unholy Frenzy in the blood tree.  Sudden Doom also got moved from blood to give unholy free death coil procs.
• Ghoul Frenzy keeps getting buffed in the beta builds.  It's more afforable with the new talent philosophy, but it remains to be seen if 1 unholy rune will ever be worth it, especially now that:
• Scourge Strike costs 1 unholy rune, instead of 1 frost + 1 unholy.  Obliterate and Death Strike, the other FU abilities, remain unchanged.  Blizzard will presumably be introducing some use for the extra frost runes, as they can't possibly expect us to just cast extra Icy Touches, especially given the ludicrously long disease durations we get from epidemic.
• The likely solution to the frost rune problem is the new Festering Strike, which further extends disease durations and is the first 1 Blood + 1 Frost ability.  I don't see the other trees getting use out of this when they could cast Obliterate or Heart Strike.

Problems:
These builds are clearly still early and in flux.  Some of the priority things for Blizz to work on:

• Top-tier talents are lackluster in Frost and Unholy, especially for sub-speccing.  At least Improved Icy Touch, Icy Reach, and Vicious Strikes should be both reworked and shuffled.
• Ghoul Frenzy should either have its rune cost removed, or be reworked to be a desirable cooldown.  Maybe reduce it's duration to 30 seconds, double it's damage effect, and give it a 2 minute cooldown.
• Frost needs its "required" dps talents to be reduced in number.  Dual-wielders can only afford 1 optional utility point, while 2-hander-wielders can technically afford 4, but are forced to put two of those into Icy Reach and the other 2 into tier 2.  The whole tree really needs rearrange-in'.
• Can you tone down the cooldowns in Blood just a little bit?  And are you sure threat won't be an issue with all those resources going to staying alive?
• Festering Strike will have to be implemented very carefully.  Not only will it have to do more damage than an Icy Touch + Scourge Strike (remember, unholy gets Reaping automatically, so blood runes become death runes after being used for blood strikes), but it will also need a way to deal with the fact that you aren't going to be using the blood rune for a blood strike, and thus won't be getting a death rune later.  In the same patch, Festering Strike was added to Reaping, meaning that the Unholy rotation currently looks like SS > SS > FS > FS > SSx6 or something (I'm not really accounting for the new rune recharge mechanics there because I haven't tried them).

Any further evaluation will have to wait until I can actually get into beta and find out the real consequences of the new talents, the new rune cooldown system, and haste's effect on rune refresh speeds.

Death Knight Cataclysm Changes

Why are we seeing so many PvP-only abilities in these class previews? None of them so far moreso than the Death Knights:

New Death Knight Abilities

Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.

Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike -- the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.

This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.

Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent's next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can't reflect an ability, you won't be able to copy it either.

Dark Simulacrum will work on nothing in raids. It's purely a PvP ability. Don't DKs already have enough defensive cooldowns in PvP? And ranged attacks? Do they really need a weakened version of Spell Reflect (OK, well it's actually balanced since DKs don't have to switch to a shield).

The same with Necrotic Strike. There will be maybe 1-2 bosses with self-heals over the entire expansion where NS might be worth casting. But really, it's purely for PvP. Sigh.

That leaves Outbreak. Great for both PvP and raids. I love it. Reading it first made me excited about the preview, but I was quickly disappointed as I read the other abilities. Switching targets will no longer be nearly as painful, and Outbreak is especially a boon for tanking, giving us a way to react to situations where we don't have runes available in an emergency. It will also make raiding rotations more interesting, because on single target fights you will likely be replacing IT/PS with Outbreak every 5th cycle. It will definitely raise the skill cap for the class.


The skill cap will also go up from the biggest change to the class: the new rune system.

Right now, DKs must spam their abilities the exact moment a rune comes off cooldown. Every second the rune is off cooldown and unused, that resource is going to waste. This leaves so little room in DK rotations that I often find myself wasting RP because I can't afford to take the time to Death Coil.

In Cataclysm, each of the 3 flavors of rune (blood, frost, and unholy) will recharge one at a time. So, for instance, if you use both blood runes, one of them will refill, then the other will refill (right now they both refill at the same time). The benefit to the change is that the first blood rune isn't going to waste if you don't use it immediately. It doesn't start being wasteful until both of them refill.

This will slow down DK rotations a bit, and all abilities will be adjusted to hit harder to compensate. I'm happy because this fits more with my idea of a DK . . . it always seemed wrong that my specials sometimes did less damage than my white swings.

With the rotation slowing down, and the wiggle-room before runes go to waste increasing massively, the devs get some space to add other abilities to the rotation, make runic power more valuable, and offer rune regen (through haste) and RP regen as useful bonuses. DKs as a class will be much more flexible. The change is great.

If it still doesn't make sense (I found it wicked confusing at first), GC gives a good example to clarify:

"I'll try another comparison. Imagine that all rogue abilities cost 100 energy. They have to wait until they get 100 energy, and then immediately use an attack so that they aren't wasting future energy. That's how DKs play now, except they have 6 runes to watch. Now imagine the same rogue except all his abilities cost 50 energy. If he hits an attack when he has 60 energy, then 50 is consumed but he has 10 energy still left and a head start on the next attack. That's the way we want DKs to play.

If that still doesn't make sense, then focus on what the experience will be, which is that you'll have more breathing room in your rotation and won't have to hit a button every single GCD. If you don't use a strike the second it's available, that's more okay because the extra tank will store extra rune resources rather than just wasting it. You'll still be hitting a lot of buttons though."

As for the talent trees and masteries: they are strong, but uninspiring. I mean, disease damage? I am thankful that Frost will be viable for both 2-handers and Dual-Wield, because I enjoy both playstyles greatly, but haven't been able to try frost lately because I love my Shadow's Edge too much.

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Much like the Warrior preview, the DK preview offered a number of "under-the-hood" mechanics changes, but little in the way of "flash" or excitement. Even though the changes are unequivocally good - and point to some great design minds working at Blizzard - I can't help but be disappointed.

Though, it's only fair, as DKs are the newest class, and already had the most pizazz. But with DK numbers declining already as the freshness wears off, I wonder if mechanic changes will be enough to hold people. I anticipate a lot of players will be drawn back to their DKs because the old inflexibility of the rune system turned them off. We'll wait and see as the other previews are released.

Death Knights get a "Prot" talent tree

Jiggawhozawhuuu?

Cataclysm class changes are coming thick and fast, and will be relentless through this week. To avoid overshadowing the rest of the DK changes, Ghostcrawler announced today that Death Knights would no longer be able to tank using all of the three talent trees, and would instead be getting a "Protection" talent tree, just like Warriors and Paladins.

This tree would be called "Blood" and the tanking abilities from the other 2 trees would be consolidated therein. This seems to set up Unholy as the 2-handed dps tree and Frost as the dual-wield dps tree.

I'm definitely surprised. We'll have to wait to see how the implementation goes down. With what little information we have, I'm firmly against this. One of the things I enjoyed about my DK was being able to switch specs as I got bored (or based on what type of content I was doing), and the flavor and playstyle of my character would change with it, while still allowing me to tank or dps. For instance, in Ulduar, I basically had to use Blood as my tanking spec because it was helpful on Iron Council and pretty much required on hard-mode Vezax. But lately I've been able to play Frost as my tanking spec because it is great for aoeing down easy heroics while I farm emblems: DnD, glyphed Howling Blast, Blood Boil, take a nap.

From the dps side, the flexibility of DK specs has helped keep my interest as I've been using a different spec at each tier. The transformation of the Frost tree into the DW tree dampened this somewhat, but there were still two distinct options for 2-handed dps. Specs are going to be a lot more limited going forward, and that's a bad thing.

But that's probably the point: balancing DKs has likely been hellish when they essentially have 6-7 talent trees while most other classes have 3, especially when tweaking one DPS tree influences a tanking tree, and vice versa. And they needed a solution to DK masteries, since the new system of investing points in a tree couldn't reasonably yield both DPS and tanking stats.

Honestly, I expected a more ingenious solution to the problem from the Blizzard designers (not that I could think of one). I'm disappointed.

But it's not the end of the world! I'll still enjoy my DK, and who knows what other changes they have in store. We'll find out tomorrow. Being the most recently-designed class, I'm expecting the new DK talent trees to be the most similar to their current incarnations compared to the older classes. But I'm very excited to see the promised revamp of the rune system to make it more flexible. Tanking can get frustrating as a DK when you really need some runes to react to an emergency and they just aren't available, and DPS has become all about optimizing rune usage, making DK dps a lot like Paladin DPS (where you are locked down by Global CoolDown limitations), except we also have to keep track of resources while Paladins just have to hit the right attack as soon as the GCD is up (not a dig at Paladins!).

It should be an exciting week for WoW players.

Scourge Strike: an Odyssey of Disappointment

3ps

From the moment that beta information about DKs started leaking, the Unholy talent tree appealed to me most. I liked how it focused on the disease mechanic more than the other trees, making me feel more like a DK. And why would I care about Blood or Frost when I could control a ghoul, run and ride extra-fast, summon a gargoyle, create a swirling mass of death and destruction around me, and all the while be protected by a shield of bone?

Well, clearly it was far too fun. Unholy Blight's implementation as an aoe aura is gone. No DPS spec can afford to spend points in the utility talents like the increased run and mount speeds. And worst of all, the tree's signature strike, Scourge Strike, has been the only real story of failure for the new class.

Originally, it ignored armor, doing shadow damage instead. This was cool, but it turned out it hit too hard in PvP, and not hard enough in raids (where the target's armor was heavily debuffed, reducing the value of ignoring armor). Trying to correct this problem has led to a series of changes to the strike in almost every patch, none of those changes actually solving the problem.

The absolute low point was when, for an entire patch, Unholy DKs no longer even spent the talent point in Scourge Strike, finding it more effective DPS to contort their spec into the frost tree to focus on Obliterate as their FU* strike instead (*in this case, FU refers to the strike's cost of one frost and one unholy rune, not the developers' attitude towards unholy DKs). The devs were pretty much OK with this, and Ghostcrawler recently admitted that they only revisited SS because of player complaints. I specced out of Unholy and went for blood when this change occurred, especially in light of just how much armor penetration (useless to unholy, key for blood) was going to be on the raid gear going forward. I missed my favored spec and my trusty ghoul Beetlegobbler, but I persevered.

After that, a patch made SS marginally useful again, but not useful enough to bother with talents and glyphs that propped it up, such as Reaping and Epidemic. Hearing that Unholy was key for Anub'arak hard mode (which turned out to be true), I tried Unholy again. The disease-a-palooza was fun, but SS was still not doing too well, and armor pen still wasn't useful enough for the spec, considering how unavoidably prevalent it is on gear now. It seemed kind of sad that Unholy's viability outside of aoe situations was entirely predicated on abusing a badly-designed Glyph of Icy Touch for bonus RP to do more Death Coils, to the point that another Icy Touch was more valuable to your DPS than another Scourge Strike.

But when 3.3 hit the PTRs, a ray of hope shone on the beleaguered strike. The changes seemed genius: they fixed everything wrong with the strike while keeping its flavor. The attack would do physical damage, making armor pen attractive, but then also do a fraction of that damage on top as shadow damage. That shadow damage would be affected by talents and be able to crit independently, making many talents in Unholy attractive again. Along with the change to Glyph of Icy Touch, this brought the spec back to where I felt it was originally intended to be, and where it had been back when I fell for it: using Reaping to get more Scourge Strikes.

This change went through months of favorable testing on the PTR, without much change to it at all. Then it hits the live servers for less than two days, and already a nerf was hotfixed in.

Let's put aside the fact that other, more overpowered mechanics have been left in for months at a time.

Apparently, Unholy was doing too much damage now. I didn't really notice during our raid, given how I wasn't really paying attention to the meters with everything else going on. My first thought was that it was fine. If the dps was too high, OK, let's nerf it. They just removed the ability for the shadow portion to crit independently, I thought, how bad could that be?

Turns out: pretty fucking bad.

According to the DK math gurus over at Elitist Jerks, the change was enough that the Unholy rotation and talent spec revert to what they were before the change. The playstyle is back to being less fun and flavorful. In the end, all they have accomplished with this change is making armor penetration marginally more attractive.

Ugh.

Can you just get it right, guys? This is so disappointing. Once we are done with Anub Hard, I'm respeccing back to blood to get off this roller-coaster of suck.

The worst part? Ghostcrawler's post today explaining the change. Please note before reading this statement that they nerfed the ability in less than 48 hours.

"Will it stay this way for long? It's too early to tell. This implementation has a chance of working out, but we also want to see the Icecrown hard modes start up as well as the new Arena season kick in."

You read it right. They are going to leave it as-is (which is to say, broken) until they get some data from Icecrown hard modes and the new arena season (I refuse to capitalize arena, the game's greatest mistake, GC).

Those are months away.


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To be clear, I'm not asking for SS or unholy, or anything about DKs, to be overpowered. I just think it's clear that Blizzard's intent is that players use SS and Reaping, but no matter how many changes they make, they just can't seem to make that appealing without breaking the game. I don't enjoy the playstyle of Unholy without those, so I'm one of the people who would like SS to be viable without being broken. And I'm quite disappointed with how badly they've done so far, and with how quick they are to break the spec while being so slow to fix it.

3.2 Death Knight Changes - Tanking

First off, let me tell you a little story.

My 10-man raiding guild doesn't do 25-man Uld, so we aren't running around in piles of 226 gear like other guilds that you see getting the 10-man hard mode achievements. So they are more of a challenge for us than they may seem to be for others.

For a few weeks, we've been trying to do the Iron Council Hard Mode by killing Steelbreaker last. Since his damage keeps increasing and he's there the entire fight, you need a tank who can handle Fusion Punches for about 5-6 minutes straight with just one healer, while the Fusion Punches just get stronger and stronger. FP hits like a truck on its own, is nature damage (so not mitigated by block or armor), and puts on a debuff that must be dispelled the instant it is applied. It's taxing to heal.

We tried this encounter dozens of times with a pair of uber-geared warrior tanks. We wiped over and over to tank death. Then we brought in one comparatively undergeared and inexperienced DK tank. We wiped once due to dps death, then completed the hard mode on the next attempt.

Not only did we win, but while healing the warrior on Steelbreaker stressed our paladin, keeping the DK alive was a trivial joke.

And I could give you a dozen other examples. DKs are completely broken against the current design of raid encounters, particularly hard modes. I would argue that this is almost entirely due to the fact that their cooldowns mitigate magic damage while blocking does not, and they have more cooldowns than druids. I don't really think that nerfing us across the board is the best idea. I think everything could be fixed if you just made blocking work against magic damage and gave Berserking a defensive benefit to bears.

So DKs, don't be surprised about what you are about to read.

Patch 3.2 PTR DK tanking changes:

• Frost Presence: 10% bonus health reduced to 6% bonus stamina.
• Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes. [from 1]
  
• Veteran of the Third War (Blood tree): Stamina bonus reduced to 1/2/3%. [from 2/4/6%]
  
• Toughness (Frost Tree): This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.
• Priest and Druid talents that used to grant 25% armor on crit heals now grant 10% reduced physical damage.
• The paladin ability Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.

Cooldowns
The doubled IBF cooldown is brutal. We've gone from cooldown chaining (I can pretty much always have one up against Steelbreaker) to only using them when we think we need some protection. Though it hurts, this is an understandable change, since our cooldowns are the key to our dominance in the tanking realm. Also, I'm sure the devs think planning your cooldowns is a more tactically fun playstyle. This is a comparative nerf to Frost, as one of its key talents increased the duration of IBF. There were also "stealth nerfs" to the other primary Blood and Frost tanking cooldowns, as I'll detail below.

I really like the actively defensive playstyle of being the "cooldown tank". It's a lot more fun to me than the more passive defenses of other tank classes (I couldn't believe how comparatively simple druid tanking was when I tried it this weekend). But the cooldowns are really what make us overpowered, and particularly the fact that they protect us from magical damage. One thing many people overlook is that all 3 other tanking classes have a low-level "cooldown" active at all times in the form of block. As long as block is reasonably balanced, we should actually be the worst class to tank pure physical damage. Our real advantage comes from the combination of anti-magic cooldowns and high health. Since the new "crushing blow" is always high magical damage, such as Sarth's breath or Steelbreaker's Fusion Punch, we are far and away the best tank for challenging content. This clearly needs to change.

However, I think a much better and more elegant solution is to buff block (as they are doing, except do it for druids too), and then - let me emphasize this - make block mitigate magic damage.

Excuse me for a moment, but it's a fucking travesty that this isn't in the game already. If the facts show that DKs need an overall tanking nerf, that's fine. But don't nerf them to the ground just because they are the only tank you were smart enough to design without a giant blind spot for magic damage. Make the new "predictable magic crushing blows" a test of skill at using tank and healer cooldowns, not a test of whether you "won the character select screen" or massively overgear the content. Even if you keep nerfing cooldowns and health, DKs will still be the best tanks for those encounters because, as the cooldown and anti-magic tanks, they will be the ones best able to respond to those crushing blows. The best alternative is to buff magic mitigation for the other classes.

Armor
Plain and simple, Death Knights were in danger of hitting the armor cap. So we were going to take an armor hit no matter what. The priest and druid buffs to armor were about to become useless on us, so the change to the healers is a positive. This is also a "stealth" nerf to the frost tree, as Unbreakable Armor is modified by your armor value.

HP
The bonus from Frost Presence was more than cut in half. Blood DKs saw their health reduced even more, which in turn nerfs Vampiric Blood as well. I don't really think health nerfs were needed. Though HP is one of our strengths, we'll be more dependent on it than ever with the nerfs to our cooldowns.

Dual-Wielding
The new talent Threat of Thassarian should make Dual-wield tanking viable, if balanced correctly. My fear is that DW tanking will become the only viable option due to the availability of 1-handed weapons with tank stats versus the complete absence of 2-handers with tank stats. I've always been in favor of the current philosophy that DKs tank with "dps" weapons. It saves them from having to make bosses drop tanking 2-handers that no one else will use. The devs agree, because they stated that they would not be putting in tanking 2-handers for this reason. So now I'm afraid that the community will decide that dual wielding will be the only option for tanking going forward.

However, this may not come to pass. For one thing, a pair of faster 2-handed weapons vastly increases the chances that you'll haste a boss's attack as a result of parrying you. Secondly, Rune Strike is noticeably absent from the ToT talent, meaning tanks with big honking 2-handers will have a strong threat advantage. Third is the fact that the reason dual-wielders have higher potential white damage is because DWing scales better than 2-handers with attack power and, in some ways, hit and expertise. Tanking DKs will have low values of all 3 of those. Finally, dual wielding locks us out from using the Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle, and I know most DKs would prefer the health boost and big chunk of free defense over the parry offered by the alternative. Hopefully, these factors will combine to balance the two out, and I won't be forced to collect a pair of tanking 1-handers.

Threat:
See DPS patch notes. The short summary: Blood threat remains largely the same. Frost is nerfed (Frost Strike and perhaps dual-wielding causing weakened rune strikes), but may be able to compensate a bit thanks to 2 points being freed up from Blood of the North. Unholy loses its AoE threat crown with the change to Unholy Blight (RIP, oh how I loved thee), but should see a single-target threat increase from its new form: a stacking DoT added to Unholy's Death Coils. Scourge Strike was nerfed, but Blood Strike was augmented and a new Unholy talent causes it to buff your other attacks, so these should balance out.

Conclusions
Overall, we just saw a devastating, but mostly justified, nerf to our survivability. It remains to be seen just how squishy we've become, but we may drop straight from the best tanks to the worst, especially since Paladins just got a massive tanking buff on top of everyone's block being increased. Our threat has been a little high, and once we see the numbers I think our threat will end up in a decent place. Unholy just dropped from best aoe spec to average (it remains competitive thanks to Wandering Plague and more convenient access to the reduced DnD cooldown).

The most important thing to remember right now is: don't panic. We have no idea how this is all going to pan out, and I would not be surprised at all to see some of these changes be reverted or tweaked. If you are worried about it, get on the PTR and test it!

Recent Developments in Death Knighting

There were a couple of patch notes for DKs a few days ago; mostly of little consequence. Note that for now, they only apply to the PTR. Hail of bullets incoming:

• The Unholy talent Ghoul Frenzy had a 10-second cooldown added. The cooldown was added because the move generated Runic Power. Before a boss pull, I could just sit there and hit GF over and over start the fight out with a full RP bar. Since GF lasts 30 seconds, the cooldown should have no effect on its normal use; it just fixes this exploit.
• Death Strike has had some confusing changes. The new change makes it do better healing if you are specced for it in the Blood tree. The ability has already been nerfed overall, but still provides some minor healing when you have your diseases on the target.
• Both of our DPS tier sets had changes to their bonuses. The wildly overpowered 4-piece tier 7 bonus, +10 RP per FU Strike (SS, Oblit, DS) was nerfed in half, and it's still good. Meanwhile, the 2-piece tier 8 bonus was buffed from 5% crit on RP moves (DC, FS) to 8%. Previously, Unholy and Frost wanted to keep 4-piece tier 7 and ignore tier 8. Now, that choice is not so clear-cut, and is going to vary from DK to DK depending on what other pieces you need. In my case, 4-piece tier 7.25 is always going to beat 4-piece tier 8.10, so I won't be rolling on any tier tokens from Uld 10 until everyone else in my raid has them. It seems most likely that Unholy will want to keep 7.25 even over 8.25, while Blood and Frost will find the tier 8 itemization of expertise and armor pen over haste and hit to be more to their liking, justifying the loss of the stronger set bonus. The itemization for tier 8 just isn't as good for Unholy, and Unholy relies on its FU move more than any other spec, making the tier 7 set bonus even better.
• Tangential effects: the equipment manager will help us dual-role DK's switch gear more easily, and 10-man raiders will now have more access to the awesome crafted belts and boots from Ulduar.
  

Since writing my guide to Unholy DPS and my guide and tips for Frost tanking when 3.1 first hit, I've discovered a few more things that can improve on those guides. Duck!

Unholy DPS

• Correct use of Ghoul Frenzy: use it just before a pull, so your pet benefits for the first 20 seconds or so of the pull, and the rune will refresh before you need to it.
• Use Blood Tap every time it is up. Little-known fact: it refreshes the blood rune as well as making it a death rune. This means that the best time to use it is right after you used both blood runes. The absolute best time is to use it right after you did a Scourge Strike using both blood runes (as death runes). That will mess up your rotation the least. If Bone Shield is down or has less than a minute left, use the "free" death rune on that. If Bone Shield is OK, use it on Ghoul Frenzy. This lets you fit GF into your rotation without hurting your SS spam.
• Other good times to use GF are when you have a lull in fighting or have to run away from melee range. Any time you aren't going to be able to make use of the unholy rune, hit GF.
• Spec: my original spec had points in Morbidity, which buffs DC and Death & Decay. There is less aoe in Ulduar, and I've seen math saying that the DC buff isn't worth the points in the talent. Instead of my previously recommended build, put those points in Necrosis. Here are my new recommended Unholy specs: 12/0/59 and 0/10/61.

Frost Tanking

• I've fallen for the Howling Blast glyph. It applies Frost Fever. Though Blood Plague and Pestilence are still effective, for most aoe pulls this glyph means you no longer need to use them. Instead, you can shoot off an HB, benefit from the disease, use a Blood Boil that benefits from the disease, and still D&D. That's a lot of aoe threat. It fixes the problem I used to have with being unable to use D&D, Pestilence, and HB in the same rotation. I highly recommend it for offtanks especially. If you are your guild's main tank on bosses, it's much less useful on single targets and I've pick up a different glyph instead.
• Spec: After playing around with the previously-recommended spec, I've moved around a few of the points in Unholy and Blood. I dropped points out of Morbidity (since HB/BB makes D&D's cooldown less of an issue and I never DC in this spec) and Virulence (don't need the minor increase to hit on spells). Instead, I added points to Hunger for Blood, which was buffed heavily in 3.1 and provides a lot of threat by fueling Rune Strikes and Frost Strikes. Here's my new Frost tanking spec, 14/51/6.

As they say in Ebon Hold, "Suffer Well, Bitches!"

Mimiron is a Big Meanie-Head

So the Ulduar progression train keeps right on running from station to station. Self-congratulations incoming:

My guild is only the 3rd horde guild on our server to down Mimiron in any form. We killed him no May 5th.

I have never server 3rd'ed anything before. But as Ixo so graciously says in his ingenious blogroll button: we are teh 10-man pwnzorators.

I've started poring over Guildox to see concrete proof of our success. As I am extremely fond of repeating until your ears bleed, this raid team earned an Amani War Bear without ever having set foot in BT or Hyjal. In scrub gear, we did something that was supposed to be reserved for tier 6+ guilds. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to see my chiropractor, as I seem to have pulled a muscle in my arm from patting myself on the back so hard.

Anyway, GuildOx tracks progression using achievements, which is way more dependable than stupid wowjutsu's gear-tracking method. The downside is that it can't tell if you've killed a boss unless you got an achievement.

Auriaya was bugged during the first week, and her adds would respawn mid-fight even though they weren't supposed to. This meant that if you killed her that first week, you automagically got the "Crazy Cat Lady" achievement, which allows us to track who killed her the first week, and when. I had to change my pants again when I discovered that we had a server 2nd kill of Auriaya 10. And that's not just horde side, that's server-wide.

On Monday, we downed General Vezax after much wipeage, likely another Horde server third. I have seen Yogg-Saron, and it turns out that he hurts.

But seriously, enough of my bragging. We're doing well at...a game. It's not like we won the Tour de France after recovering from ball cancer and still having single-nut sex with our supermodel girlfriend on top of a pile of million-dollar bills while having an awesome last name like "Armstrong".

Mimiron, like Freya and Thorim before him, was another case where after the first 3 pulls, I thought there was no way we'd ever win this encounter. It just seemed too complex, and the arm section was just brutal in phase 2 (and 4). It was even worse than those, though. It was the first fight in Ulduar that reminded me of the difficulty of old-school vanilla wow raiding, where you wiped on Chromaggus or Twin Emps every night for weeks and loved it.

But just like those other Keepers, once you learn the fight and embed it into your muscle memory, it's quite doable. We downed him last week after 3 nights total of attempts spread over 2 weeks. We cleared straight to him this past week, prepared for another night of wipes. We one-shot him. W. T. F?!?

Still, the hardest boss I'd seen the game to date (I learned how easy he was after trying Vezax). Phase 1 is easy enough if your ranged can just learn to spread out and move when the napalm comes. The healers will need to have tight coordination with each other to heal the napalm victim while keeping the tank up through Plasma Blast, so named because it makes even geared tanks bleed. The #1 killer on this phase was a ranged dps standing too close to a healer and getting them both napalmed. Spread out, and watch where the tank's turret is pointing so you know if you are the next Napalm target. As melee, I just had to position myself so that there was a clearing in the mines right behind me so when I turned and ran from an electric explosion, I wouldn't gib myself on the land mines. If you are an Unholy DK like me on this fight, you have three ways to save your ghoul from certain death from this electric explosion:

1) If he is buffed enough, he can survive it. This requires at least full naxx 25 gear plus Kings, Fort, and MotW on both you and the pet.

2) Huddle. You may not even know that your ghoul has this ability, but it reduces incoming damage by a large percentage for 10 seconds.

3) Little-known fact: your ghoul's Leap ability can target friendly players. Create a macro that makes the little guy leap to you, and hit it once you've cleared the mines. The macro is:

/petpassive
/cast [target=YOUR NAME] leap


Phase 2 makes healers cry. Every time we start phase 2, our healing lead starts begging any god she can think of to please make it stop. The gun turret in the center of the room randomly blasts people, and pulses aoe fire damage, and fires rockets that will land on your head for ONE MILLION DAMAGE (not making that up!), and since that clearly wasn't enough, when he starts "spinning up", you either get behind him or get riddled with bullets. To death.

We finally got the hang of keeping the casters close enough to the boss to easily get behind him. It helps the healers a lot if I pop my defensive cooldowns, like anti-magic shell, when the aoe pulses are happening. The main thing is to call out on vent when you see a big red rocket fire off of his back into the sky, so everyone in the raid can check their feet for a red circle that indicates the spot they are standing on is about to become a nuclear fallout zone. It's pretty safe to just strafe a bit as soon as you see the rocket launch. If it was going after you, you should now have moved enough to avoid it. I do this reflexively now.

And it's on to Phase 3. You can blow through this phase FAST if you do it right. Avoid the temptation to aoe down the adds. Instead, focus single target dps on the Assault Bots, then have a melee pick up the electromagnet off the boss and call for dps on the boss while he's down. Two big tips for this one that will save a lot of wipes: 1) set loot to free for all so I can pick up the magnet, and 2) drop the magnet DIRECTLY UNDER THE BOSS. You can't do what I did at first and just drop the magnet willy-nilly. You have to overcome the difficulty of 3-dimensional space on a 2-D screen and make sure you drop the magnet right under him, or it won't work, and you'll prolong the phase. Just rinse and repeat this 2-3 times as quick as you can. As soon as the helicopter lifts back off, get back on the bot so you can do it again immediately, and just let the tank hold the little adds until the end of the phase. You'll have time to clean them up with aoe while V0L7R0N (hardy har har) forms.

Phase 4 defies description. He has 3 parts that have to die at the same time. There are mines, and double rockets of death, and Pewx2, and OMG RUN OUT. Your tank has to be really careful to strafe slowly and carefully when moving around when the center is spinning up. If he causes the base to move during the spin up, you might end up with the gun pointing directly at your raid. It feels buggy, honestly, and I know we're not the only raid group to think so. Just be careful.

Funny story: he drops greys. Our Master Looter stepped over to loot him, and reported that his corpse contained no shiny epics or badges, just some grey-named engineering-themed vendor trash?

Panic ensued on vent until the boss despawned and we saw that he had been hiding within him a giant glimmering treasure chest full of...treasure.

Having killed Vezax, I now look back on Mimiron and laugh at myself for thinking the robo-gnome was "hard". But I definitely see him being a big roadblock for most guilds attempting this. It takes the raid to a whole new level beyond anything else in Ulduar. Best of luck to anyone attempting him. Your reward is going to a sea of saronite-flavored tears.

Death Knight Guide for Beginners

Death Knights: everyone can roll one at 55 now, and even though the abilities are parceled out pretty slowly as you level, it can still be overwhelming to pile on all those abilities so fast as you rocket through Outlands. Plus, you have all those talents that you don't know what they do. Why not put all 61 points in the blood tree?! Plus, their runic resource system is totally different from that time-tested blue bar you're used to.

It can get pretty confusing. Some abilities cost one rune, but some cost 2 or three of different colors, and some cost runic power, but it's not clear how you get runic power, and some cost a kitten and sixpence, which is way more than a bushel.

By this point, many of you have tried a DK, but most lay abandoned in Hellfire Peninsula after you experienced that completely epic starting area and haphazardly spent all those free talent points in whatever looked cool. Now he or she is sitting in the Thrallmar Inn with a free talent reset and you have some free time between Ulduar raids, so it's time to pick that baby back up!

Hopefully in the future I'll find the time to wax poetic about what a design triumph DKs are as a class. But for now, I'm going to try to boil DK mechanics into the simplest form I possibly can.

First, the basics of how Runes and Runic Power (RP) work.

You have 6 runes: 2 Blood (red), 2 Frost (blue), and 2 Unholy (green). You cannot change this, you will always have two of each. Going forward, I will use B, F, and U as shorthand for the runes. Once you use a rune, it goes on a 10-second cooldown, then you can use it again. This keeps you from spamming the same button over and over.

You also have an RP bar (not to be confused with a place to get a drink and meet people named Drzzzztz or Seferothh with Dark Pasts), which normally goes to 100. When you use a rune, you gain RP. If the ability you used takes 1 rune, you gain 10 RP. If it took 2 runes, you gain 15 RP. Death and Decay, which costs 3 runes, gives you 20 RP. Pretty much any ability that doesn't cost RP generates it. There are other ways to get RP through talents, but let's not complicate things with that just yet.

Since using a rune puts it on cooldown, the sooner you use it the sooner you can use it again. So use rune abilities early and often. You should generally wait to "dump" your RP until either a) all of your runes are on cooldown because you were a good little DK and used them all up just as fast as you could! or b) you are about to cap out RP, which would make any further RP generation go to waste.

Now let's build on that by talking about skills. When you start, the game gives you just enough skills to get by: Icy Touch (F), Plague Strike (U), Blood Strike (B), Death Strike (FU), and Death Coil (40 RP)

Already, you can see something interesting. There are no abilities that costs two of the same color rune, and the only two-rune ability costs FU, and no B.

IT and PS each place a different disease on your target: Frost Fever and Blood Plague, respectively. Your Blood Strike and FU moves (like Death Strike) get stronger if your target already has the two diseases on them. Such is life as a DK: in general, you want to open with IT and PS to get your diseases up at the beginning of every fight. Get used to it. Once diseases are up, unload your runes in Strikes, then use Death Coil when all runes are on cooldown. You could seriously just grind to 80 on single-targe mobs playing this way, if talents didn't have to appear and muck everything up.

At base, your other B rune abilities are Pestilence and Blood Boil. They are both only useful in AoE situations, as is Death and Decay. DnD is a strong aoe spell, and Blood Boil is a weak one, but cheap. BB gets stronger if the target is diseased. Luckily, Pestilence will spread diseases around for you. A very strong aoe attack for any spec is to drop DnD, cast IT and PS on a target, then spread the diseases with Pestilence. See how conveniently that uses up all 6 runes? Now you're thinking with portals!

Since your F and U runes are generally tied up in FU attacks or the disease combo, you'll rarely get another ability that uses just one F or U rune, and if so it will be in the talent tree. Pretty much all of your other rune abilities are from talents. You do get the ability to root using Chains of Ice for 1F, but that's mainly used in PvP.

Meanwhile, your other base options to use Runic Power, aside from the direct Death Coil damage (remember, it's different from Warlock's Death Coil because it has no fear effect), are defensive. If you have some RP, you can use Icebound Fortitude for general defense, an Anti-Magic Shell for magic (duh) defense, or use Brain Freeze (an interrupt like Kick or Counterspell) or Strangulate (a silence effect on a long cooldown). Basically, hit IF if you are in trouble.

You'll also have a few abilities that don't have rune or RP costs. These include your summonable ghoul, Horn of Winter (which should be up all the time and gives "free" RP), Empower Rune Weapon (resets all your runes, best for emergencies where you really need a certain ability RIGHT NOW), and Blood Tap (allows you to turn a B rune into a Death Rune temporarily; a more advanced move to master).

And that brings us to Death Runes. Death Rune can stand in for any of the other rune types. So if you have 2 Ds, you can, for instance, BS x 2, or use an FU strike, or IT+PS. They give you more flexibility and options, but they also define your rotation based on what spec you are in by allowing you to use your best move a bit more often than you can at base. The Death Rune talent in each tree, along with the new RP moves in the tree, give each talent tree it's flavor and differentiate their play styles. Here is a quick rundown of how each spec plays when leveling:

Blood
The Blood tree overall focuses on self-healing. It uses most of its RP on Death Coils, though it can summon a floating blade that copies the DK's attacks occassionally. This tree buffs Death Strike as it's preferred FU move, and replaces Blood Strike with the more powerful version, Heart Strike. HS does more damage and has a built-in aoe "cleave" effect. Many of the talents in the tree buff HS.

Blood differs from the other trees in that it generates Death Runes from it's FU attack. This makes sense when you consider that per rune, Heart Strike is buffed into being the tree's strongest attack. You want to get more B Runes in exchange for fewer F and U runes. When you use Death Strike, those 2 runes will regen as Death Runes, which can then be used for 2 Heart Strikes instead of another Death Strike.

So, after opening a fight with IT and PS, use Death Strike and 2x Heart Strike. Once those runes cooldown, you'll be able to throw out 4x Heart Strike and a Death Strike. After that, just use IT + PS whenever your diseases fall out, spend B and D runes on HS, and spend spare FUs on DS.

Here is a sample leveling Blood spec. Season to taste.

Frost
The best way I can describe the Frost tree for DPS is that it's focused on burst damage. It gives you a number of direct damage abilities, and buffs the hell out of their crit chances and damage. It will use its RP on Frost Strike, which is a supercharged replacement for Death Coil that can only be used from melee range. It also provides an alternative FU move, Howling Blast, for AoE situations, and is the only tree with an AoE CC ability (Hungering Cold, 40 RP).

For Frost, Blood Strikes are weak and really only used to generate Death Runes for your big FU strike, Obliterate. Normally, Oblit removes diseases on the target, but one of the Frost talents prevents this, making the move spammable.

So a Frost rotation would start with PS+IT, Blood Strike x2, Oblit, Frost Strike. Then you'd just spam Oblit x3 once all those rune regenerate (2 normal FUs plus 2 Ds available), FS. Rinse, repeat. No frills, just straight-up big-crit pwnage.

Here is a sample Frost levelling spec. Best served...COLD!!!

Unholy
You want frills? Oh, Unholy's got frills, buddy. It's got a perma-Ghoul (your ghoul becomes a controllable pet rather than the passive companion it is for the other specs), a run speed increase, and a mounted speed increase. It can blow corpses up (thought I recommend you not spec into Corpse Explosion). It can summon a Gargoyle for big burst damage. A lot of your dps (20% ish) comes from your ghoul. You'll use your RP to put up Unholy Blight, an aoe damage aura (which is also better damage on single targets than DC), and then spend extra RP on Death Coils in between. This tree provides some protection in the form of Bone Shield and includes a replacement FU move, called Scourge Strike.

Don't let the low numbers on the SS tooltip fool you: it cuts through armor. SS is your heavy hitter, and you want to spam that bitch! To that end, like Frost, Unholy gives weak-ass Blood Strikes that serve only to generate Death Runes to fuel your SS-happy war machine.

The rotation is exactly like the Frost rotation: IT+PS, 2x Blood Strike, Scourge Strike, RP dump, followed by a hefty 3x Scourge Strike.

Here's a sample Unholy leveling build.

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As you can see, the DK resource system necessitates dps "rotations" where you apply diseases, then generate Death Runes to set up your spec's heavy hitter, whether that be Heart Strike, Obliterate, or Scourge Strike. Unload DCs or FSs between rune cooldowns, and you'll mow down anything in your path.

You can also augment your performance through gear and glyphs. You can see recommended major glyphs for each talent tree by clicking the provided link to the talents. I recommend all levelling specs use Glyphs of Pestilence, Raise Dead, and Horn of Winter as their minor glyphs. As for gear, focus on Strength first, with Attack Power a close second. Hit and Expertise Ratings are excellent until you get around 8% hit or 6% expertise. Haste and Crit ratings are also strong. Armor Pen is OK, but not recommended for Unholy, and Agility takes up the rear, but isn't useless. Though many of your abilities appear to be spells, please note that Spell Power, Intellect, Spirit, and spell-specific buffs have NO effect on your attacks!

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Those are the basics. There is a LOT more to playing a DK well, but this overview should get you off the ground (and out of the Thrallmar inn) and making headway through Outlands.

Enjoy, and Suffer Well, brothers and sisters of the Ebon Blade!

Death Knight Tanking Tips and Tricks for Ulduar

What you have: A DK who wants to tank. If not, then maybe you know a DK that needs a trip to the Academy of Getting Hit in the Face & Sciences.

What you don't have: My extra-special tips 'n' tricks for DK tanking (alas, I cannot find a way to make that "n" backwards). Let's rectify that.

I've been offtanking Ulduar as Frost, with this build and glyphs. High threat, high damage mitigation, and high chance of milk shakes for every 100th customer!

1. In general, Howling Blast followed by Blood Boil can be very strong snap aoe threat. The glyph of HB is great for this, because it puts a disease up on every target, buffing the Bloodboils. In aoe situations, I tend to not bother with Icy Touch, Plague Strike or Pestilence, instead using those runes for an extra HB/Oblit and Blood Boil (or a Death and Decay). I call this "the IcyHot".
   
2. Use the shortest cooldowns early. All else being equal, you should use Anti-Magic Shell first, then Icebound Fortitude, then Unbreakable Armor, then your trinkets one at a time. you can probably weave another AMS in there too, with it's 45-second cooldown.
   
3. When tanking a single target (such as a boss), be careful not to be overzealous with your Frost Strikes (or Death Coils if you aren't Frost). It's more important to alway save RP for a Rune Strike than it is to keep your RP near zero.
4. Get a mod that shows you clearly when you get a Killing Machine proc. Go out of your way to use a Frost Strike with the proc. If you are aoe tanking, use Howling Blast instead, but frankly you should be using Howling Blast every cooldown anyway if you are aoe tanking.
5. You can do pretty decent dps while offtanking. As long as you have some aoe threat, there's no reason you have to always be attacking the things that are hitting you. When Razorscale is chained down, I just let the adds beat on me and help the DPS on the boss. When tanking Pummelers on XT-002, I just use HB and DnD every cooldown, but otherwise I spend the entire fight DPSing XT or his Heart while letting the Pummelers beat ineffectually on my armored ass. Just make sure you keep the adds in front of you to you can dodge/parry.
   
6. Save aoe for the right moments. This is especially important if tanking the arena during Thorim (they invented the word "frantic just so I could use it to describe tanking the Thorim arena. True Story, Webster told me). The first few attempts, I dropped DnD at the start, and it went to waste by hitting only one or two mobs. Instead, watch your rune use and drop DnD when the large group of weak Citizens spawns. On that fight, I tend to save Death Grip for the Runecasters, DnD for the citizens, and Taunt for the Vykrul warriors. Then I just group everything up and spam the IcyHot while dumping RP on the primary kill target.
7. You can damn near solo the adds on Ignis, especially now that the encounter has been nerfed into the ground. When they first spawn, taunt them off the healers and hit them with IT, then smack them with an Oblit or FS as soon as they get in range to solidify aggro. Then, turn and run directly through the fire patch. Watch the add and snare them with Chains of Ice when they are just inside the fire. Then, you can run around the outside of the fire in a circle, casting CoI every few seconds, to keep them in there. Now that it only takes 10 stacks rather than 20 to make them molten, this is extremely easy. When they have 9 stacks, run into the edge of the water (we have the tank move Ignis in a rectangle around the center line so the fire is always near a pool) and Death Grip, then call for a ranged dps to blow up the add while you run to grab the next one. Repeat.
8. Use your ghoul to help the DPS. I tend to pop mine every cooldown on most fights, or specificially when Razorscale is chained down. Try to summon it right after a big aoe, rather than right before.
9. Remember to stay in Frost Presence when tanking. I totally didn't wipe my raid on trash 3 times the other night because I was in Blood Presence. Totally. Didn't.
10. When you need to switch to dps mid-fight, remember that you can switch presences, weapons, and sigils during combat. I have the luxury of having two separate weapons of similar power, so I enchant one with Stoneskin Gargoyle for tanking and one with Fallen Crusader for dps. If I need to switch to pure dps mid-fight, I equip the dps weapon, and Awareness sigil and switch to Blood Presence. Fights where this is useful include Freya and Iron Council.
11. In an emergency when all of your other cooldowns are down, you can use Army of the Dead to mitigate a big hit. The secondary effect of channeling the spell is that your avoidance (dodge/parry) gets converted directly into damage reduction. If a Fusion Punch is incoming and all your defenses are spent, you can pop AotD and mitigate 40-60% of the impact.
    

Next week, I'll make a similar list of tips for Unholy DPS, including an in-depth exploration of how to make effective use of Ghoul Frenzy. Here's a freebie: make sure your ghoul is alive before you use it.

Have a good weekend, I know I will.

OMG 3.1!!!! Emelon Down (and switching mains)

ZOMG 3.1 came out last night! And though server maintenance seemed interminable (every hour we got a new announcement saying they would make an announcement in an hour), the patch was surprisingly stable and low on bugs compared to past patches, especially ones of this magnitude.

My guild is full of realists, so instead of dashing straight into Ulduar, we had reserved this evening for everyone to get their addons squared away, set up their dual specs, and explore the new non-raid content. As it turned out, the patch was so stable that we were ready to raid at one point, so we threw together a quick raid on the Vault of Archavon and the new boss therein, Emelon the Storm Watcher.

But before I get to that, I have some ...news. I'm not sure yet if it's bad or good for you, but I'm pretty happy about it.

I'm switching mains.

Up until now, I've considered myself a proud member of the Rogue community, trying to encourage other rogues to enjoy the class and be proud as well, despite that fact that rogue numbers declined this xpac faster than any other class. However, a confluence of factors compelled me to switch mains. I have a level 80 DK, and I'd really been enjoying playing her lately, more than my rogue. I liked getting back into tanking a bit (as my offspec, when needed), and having that flexibility was such a boon, especially when my guild only has 2 other toons capable of tanking, so if one of them doesn't show we usually have to call a raid or bring alts. Dual spec makes this even better (and didn't help my rogue help the raid).

My 10-man raid is also caster-heavy, so I figured the unholy buff would be better than the rogue buff for our group overall. Though my rogue was in almost full Best in Slot, my DK also has excellent gear and was able to be competitive with my rogue (at least before he got buffed in 3.1) on DPS. The bottom line was, I was having more fun and getting more variety out of my DK (and I gotta say, womping things with a 2-hander was a factor), and it was a win/win for my guild. We didn't even have a DK main until now, which kind of made Malygos more of a bitch than he really had to be.

I also had another major reason to be disappointed with my rogue. Rogues offer the absolute least raid utility of any class. Period, end of story. Rogues bring the fewest buffs to the raid.

Consider this: Rogues are now the ONLY class that can't either offer tanking, healing, or replenishment if needed. They are also the ONLY class besides hunters who do not have an innate ability to buff a raid regardless of spec (Mark of the Wild, Battle Shout, Imp HP buff, etc.), and hunters have the advantage of being one of the more convenient replenishment sources (90% of raiding hunters are specced for it because it's their strongest DPS spec), a stronger misdirect, kiting ability, can bring more buffs from their pets, AND have buffs within their specs that are at least as good as whatever rogues can get. And let's not even get started on Battle Rez or Bloodlust for raid utility.

This isn't a big deal in 25 man raids, since it's pretty easy to get all of the major buffs covered. But in 10-man raids, it's inexcusable. You need to stack buffs, and every player needs to be buffing everyone else.

Before, I brought 4% physical damage to a raid with only 2-3 physical DPS, and a weak misdirect. I couldn't reliably use Tricks to buff someone else's dps because there was usually no one else in melee range with me, and Tricks wouldn't reach the mages or hunter, not to mention threat issues. Now I bring Horn of Winter AND 12% magic damage to a raid with 3-4 magic dps, AND tanking capability. It's no contest.

Rogues need to provide another buff. Preferably at base without it needing to be talented into. I'd recommend they make the 4% physical damage innate to poisons, and replace it in the Combat tree with something else like the bleed debuff (currently the purview of feral druids and arms warriors).

But anyway, yeah, now I play a DK instead of a rogue mainly. The rogue isn't gone, I just won't be playing him as much anymore, nor paying as much attention to min/maxing him.

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And so it was that my Unholy DPS DK took on Emelon the Storm Watcher in a 10-man raid with my guild. We went in totally blind: not even a hint of strategy or research. It was thrilling: the fear and anticipation of not knowing what was going to happen, and trying to be prepared and alert to react. It was a blast! I definitely enjoyed the Tobold style of fun last night. :)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

There's a new branch off to the right of the central, circular room as you approach Archavon. Turn down that branch, and you face a short hallway with just 2 trash mobs. They look like bluer, glowing-er versions of the stone trash you are used to fighting. They appear to be lightning revenants. When they get low on health, they start to quickly stack a buff on themselves that increases their damage heavily. You need to burn them fast right at the end, so they don't go around one-shotting your raid.

After clearing the trash, you face Emalon himself, which looks just like Archavon as far as I could tell. His room looks a bit smaller (thought that could just be my imagination). He's surrounded by 4 adds. Though they look like the lightning trash you just killed, they have different names and much lower HP pools.

As we stood there buffing up and planning, we went with a classic strategy: AoE down the adds, then kill the boss. Simple. Time-tested.

Wrong.

He spawns new adds periodically throughout the fight, and by the time we could kill even one of the originals, a new one had appeared at full health to take it's place. Around this time, one of them started to grow, gaining stacks of the buff to his damage. We kept AoEing. Then suddenly everyone was dead! A quick check of our combat logs revealed that the lightning add had zapped us all, so we decided to just focus on DPSing the boss down and ignoring the adds, and seeing how that went. The trash before the boss had triggered the buff based on HP, so as long as we didn't hit the adds too hard, we were safe, right?

Wrong again. Around the same distance into the fight, we all suddenly died all at once.

But this time, we noticed that the supercharge seemed to be triggered by Emalon himself (he emoted when he did it), rather than by the HP of the add. We also noticed, from all the pain, that Emalon had a Loken-style lightning nova with a long cast time that you had to run away from him to avoid. This is a nice anti-M&S measure to the fight.

When we got back, we decided that we would dps the boss until he supercharged an add, then we would focus DPS down the charged add before he could kill us.

It was a close thing, with the adds reaching 9 charges more often than not. But we did it. On our third attempt, we defeated the new raid-wiping VoA boss after going in blind. It was an awesome experience.

I thought the fight was very well-designed, for a simple WG boss. It had a good reason for using both tanks and it put damage control in the player's hands: run out of the nova, and your healers have less to heal through. In a way, this makes the dps players "heal" themselves, which is great, and forces them to pay attention beyond spamming their rotation.

The best part of the design is that it required quick focus, coordination, and high dps to survive. All the dps had to switch to the add immediately, or wipe the raid, and they had to do enough dps fast enough to beat the stacks. It was a rare instance of placing responsibility on the dps, rather than putting it ALL on the shoulders of the tanks and healers while the dps got to goof off and spam their rotations.

I can't wait for tonight's Ulduar-10. We'll be going in semi-blind this time, with a bit of knowledge of the abilities of the early bosses, but not strategy spoilers. Wish us luck!

Some Talent Specs for Patch 3.1

In case the patch hits tomorrow (I'm still saying next week, but many think we'll be seeing extended maintenance tomorrow), here are my speccing plans. I won't really cover the other rogue specs, except to go over the change to needed weapon speeds due to the change of Wound and Instant poison's proc chances to a proc per minute model. This change essentially equalizes the number of poison procs you get based on your weapon speed, so fast weapons are no longer the end-all-be-all for poison damage. Big bravo to Blizzard for that one, as rogue weapon speed has been a major problem this entire expansion cycle.

I now recommend a slow mainhand for HaT (optimizes poison procs off Evis), and weapon speed no longer matters as much for Mutilate. Mutilate rogues should start using their highest dps weapons, feeling free to mainhand a 1.8 speed weapon. Slower mainhands also become very important for Combat rogues, increasing the rate of poison procs off Sinister Strike and Eviscerate. All rogues still want a fast offhand for Deadly Poison, which was buffed this patch and was NOT converted to ppm, so it begs for a fast weapon.

Combat Rogue

Spec:
15/51/5

If you happen to have 2 swords or maces that are better than your fist/dagger combo, just move those 5 points around to the other specialization.

Glyphs:
Glyph of Sinister Strike
Glyph of Slice and Dice
Glyph of Rupture

(Advanced tip: Adrenaline Rush glyph is OK if you find that you can get a very good rotation going without the SnD glyph. However, NEVER remove the SS or Rupture glyphs)

Rotation:
Xs/5r/Xe
(3s/5r/5e)

What did I just say? In the rotation notation (c wut i did thar?), s stands for Slice And Dice, r for Rupture, and e for Eviscerate. Env would stand for Envenom if I were using it. The number before the letter symbolizes how many combo points you want to have before using the ability. The reason there are X's before s and e is because they vary based on your gear. If you are in all blues, 5s/5r/5e is probably what you should aim for. As your gear gets better, start reducing the number of combo points you put into Slice and Dice, and see how low you can get it without letting SnD drop and still doing a 5r and 5e. You can also be very effective if you drop to a 4e instead, if it allows you to remove a combo point from your SnD. Rules of thumb: NEVER let SnD drop, and don't plan a rotation with less than 5 points per Rupture. Cut combo points from Evis or add them to SnD instead to make your cycle fit your gear level.

If you are going into Ulduar on Tuesday, then you can probably comfortably go with a 3s/5r/5e rotation, occasionally only doing 4e if you get unlucky with energy and combo point procs.

Dual weapon specs (for instance fist/sword) are dead. I recommend the above for Ulduar, though 18/51/2 (Xs/5r/Xenv rotation) and 7/51/13 (drop SnD glyph, 4s/5r rotation) are also viable. The former is a bit unstable without full Relentless Strikes, and the latter requires more time on your target to get the most from Rupture, which won't be ideal based on what I know about Ulduar fights. All of these specs will put out similar DPS if you get the rotation right.


Unholy DPS Death Knight:

Spec:
12/0/59

After your gear improves, you may get better dps from 0/10/61 because Black Ice got buffed to also effect shadow damage. However, keep in mind that you lose the threat reduction from Subversion, so you better have a great tank, or your gonna find your face will be the one tanking. The floor.

Yes, you will be tempted to deviate from my spec and take Dark Conviction because that 5% extra crit looks pretty on your character sheet. However, since many of your abilities don't care about your crit, it turns out that the math shows DC to be inferior to the points spent in Unholy. It may look like a good talent (and it's not bad) but you'll be giving up DPS if you take it.

Use a 2-hander, as the latest patch nerfed dual-wielding hard. Look at DPS first, then speed (slower is better because it increases your Strike damage by a small amount), then stats.

Glyphs:
Glyph of Scourge Strike
Glyph of The Ghoul
Glyph of Dark Death (new!)

Rotation:
IT>PS>BS>BS>SS --rune dump [edit: I meant Runic Power dump, not rune dump]
SS>SS>SS --rune dump

Keep spamming SS (Scourge Strike) until your diseases drop. Hopefully, you get lucky on Glyph of SS procs and don't have to recast IT (Icy Touch) and PS (Plague Strike) very often. Generally, use Blood Runes for BS (Blood Strike). When Bone Shield needs a refresh or the Ghoul needs a heal from Ghoul Frenzy, I tend to Blood Tap one of the Blood runes and use that, because it hurts my rotation the least. For your rune dump, put up UB (Unholy Blight) if it has dropped, otherwise Death Coil.

Keep your Ghoul alive and resummon if he dies, and pop the Gargoyle in time with your trinkets and other temporary buffs, as he takes a "snapshot" of your stats when he is summoned, allowing him to benefit from your trinket buffs for his entire 30-second duration.


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I'm pretty excited to try out these new specs on Live. Combat rogues were just plain buffed, while Unholy DKs still look very strong, and actually gained a bit of fun and an improved talent tree layout with more real, viable choices, in exchange for a few nerfs and the loss of the ability to come back from the dead as a ghoul and/or buff the entire raid group with run speed. I'm not sure if it's an overall buff or not, but it looks like an improvement to the design, so either way I'm pretty happy. Class balance seems to be going so well even as the design team seems to be getting 10- vs. 25-man raiding so wrong.

Death Knights in 3.1: Frost Tanking Guide

Death Knights are simultaneously simple and complicated.

Though these new kids in town have been subject to more changes in the past few months than probably all other classes combined, the experience the dev team brought to class design really showed in this first foray into creating a totally new class since WoW launched all those years ago.

Though sometimes frustrating or broken, the rune and disease system is clever for forcing the player to use a wide variety of abilities instead of simply spamming the strongest one, and for allowing flexibility in resource use without handing the player unlimited resources of every type. The class also does a lot of other things right, despite it's flaws.

But this isn't an essay on the design triumphs of the Death Knight, at least not today. Today, it's about passing on all the factiods I've gleaned from poring over EJ and other websites and doing hands-on research about two specific DK specs, how they work, and how they will change in 3.1.

Unholy DPS:

I fell in love with the Unholy tree in beta, and played it almost exlusively up until a few weeks ago. It remains my favorite dps tree. I will delve into it's intricacies in an upcoming post. I had intended to write it up here, but the Frost tanking discussion ran on waaaaay too long and I needed to get back to my real job.

Frost Tanking:

But when trying to tank in today's aoe-now-ask-questions-later, fights-longer-than-10-seconds-are-for-losers environment, my love affair with Unholy became strained. With so much of my dps relegated to the ghoul and gargoyle, I found my TPS (threat per second) severely lacking as I tried to keep up with the dpsers I was raiding with. I loved Unholy Blight, but its slow and steady nature meant it took too long to build the aggro I needed (or to be more exact, the aggro my mage's tender, easily-bruised faces needed me to have). Sure, through perfect play I could keep up . . . unless there was another Unholy DK in the raid. Then, a bug would cause all but one of us to lose our third disease, thus severely reducing our damage (or in my case, threat). It was the last straw when I raided with 2 Unholy dps DKs, so I decided to try another tree (note: this bug is fixed in 3.1, though Unholy threat can still be a bit hampered in other ways).

I'm not a big fan of Blood as a tanking tree. I know and salute some who love that tree for tanking, but I grew up as a warrior tank in the TBC mold, where heals were coming steadily and your job was to still be alive when those heals landed. Avoidance was less important (since the heal was coming whether you dodged or not, so why waste their mana) and instead the focus was on HP (so you didn't die between heals) and armor (so the healers could slow down their steady stream of heals a bit). This is no longer so strictly true, with avoidance working very well for DKs (especially in tandem with Bone Shield and Rune Strike, our primary threat ability), and spammed heals no longer quite as necessary. I can see how Blood could work for some people. But for me, I would always rather focus on reducing my incoming damage and letting healers worry about filling my green bar. Whenever I think about switching to Blood, I start thinking about using Blood Tap at the wrong time and overwriting a healer's heal, wasting her mana. It's just not in me to use a tanking spec based on self-healing; increasing my own survivability is more my style.

So I settled on Frost. I found out later that it is actually the highest threat tanking spec, and will continue to be so (though by a smaller margin) in 3.1. All of your damage comes from you, with no perma-ghoul, gargoyle, or phantom sword. Talents will cause you to crit a lot more, and Howling Blast is exactly the snap-aggro aoe move you need for today's ridiculous aoe pulls. I tried it and finally managed to hold aggro and even keep up with the other tanks on single-targets. Plus, I was seeing a lot of big honkin' crits! The Frost tree gives a lot of crit from talents, which is nice because my base crit is somewhere around 6% in my tanking gear. I was sold.

Here's my spec pre-3.1: 11/50/10

Using Glyphs of Rune Strike, Icy Touch, and Obliterate. Some DKs prefer Glyph of Frost Strike in place of one of these, but I have tons of avoidance and found that I was using almost all of my Runic Power on Rune Strikes anyway. After 3.1, glyph choices will change a lot.

In the current Live environment, you can pretty safely skip Plague Strike and Blood Plague altogether. Most single-target pulls will start with Blood Tap to convert a Blood Rune to a Death Rune (though some prefer to save this for using Unbreakable Armor without disrupting your rotation). Then open with:

IT>Ob>Ob>BS -rune dump
then
Ob>Ob>Ob -rune dump

Then I fall into a rhythm of refreshing IT whenever Frost Fever drops, using Blood Runes for BS, and otherwise Obliterating. Every once in a while this will leave me with an extra rune. If it's a Death Rune, I'll use it for an extra IT. If an Unholy Rune, I'll usually just wait a few seconds til I can use it on an Oblit, eventually shaking an extra Death Rune free for an IT.

Depending on your gear level and buffs, HB on every cooldown might be better than Ob. Generally, a very high-end weapon and high Expertise will tend to favor Ob (since it's a melee strike), while weaker weapons and more hit rating will favor HB (since it's a spell that doesn't scale with weapon damage).

Generally on aoe pulls I'll drop Death & Decay, then IT>Pest, then wait for my runes to cooldown and HB as soon as I can

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The talent trees will also get quite a re-arranging for the upcoming patch. Here is my post-3.1 Frost tanking spec, with glyphs, and an analysis that only applies to post-3.1:

Spec: 11/51/9

Analysis:

No self-respecting DK tank should miss the first 5 points in each tree: Blade Barrier, Toughness, and Anticipation. Blade Barrier is being nerfed in 3.1, but is still a powerful and mandatory tanking talent. I'd also highly recommend 3 more points in Frost for Improved Icy Touch. Many DKs only read the "added damage" part and don't think this is a tanking talent, but it also reduces the target's attack speed by another 6% (that's 6% more physical mitigation for 3 points! What a bargain!). The only reason to ever skip this is if you are an expert and KNOW, FOR SURE, that another expert in every one of your raids will be applying the same debuff to your targets (for instance, via a warrior's Thunderclap). If not, you want that mitigation. Otherwise, take it, no matter how much you want other talents.

From there, you have two choices in the Frost tree: either go down the "Improved Icy Talons" line if you know your raid will be relying on your for the Windfury buff, or pick up Killing Machine and one more talent point instead. Deathchill vs. Hungering Cold for that one free point is highly debated. I tend to go for HC because it applies the Frost Fever disease instantly to an enemy group, helping the damage of a Howling Blast alpha strike for quick threat.

For survivability, you want Frigid Dreadplate, Unbreakable Armor, and Improved Frost Presence (which is greatly changed in 3.1). 3.1 removes the avoidance bonus to Lichborne, so skip it. Guile of Gorefiend also lends some survivability by extending Icebound Fortitude, so pick that up. Acclimation may look tempting, but it's very nearly useless on most bosses considering how infrequently they tend to use magic attacks. The points are better spent elsewhere. After that, the choice is obvious about taking the other talents for threat and skipping the PvP and Dual Wield talents. You should be burning RP on Rune Strikes too fast for RP Mastery to be beneficial. I wish I could fit in the range increase on Icy Touch, but it's just too situational to give up the other threat talents. Annihilation (Oblit no longer removes diseases) and Blood of the North (death runes) are key to a strong rotation, while all the other talents I chose pumped the maximum threat.

Where to put your "floater" points in Blood and Unholy is again up to debate. Bladed Armor is the strongest threat choice in Blood for a Frost build, so you can't go wrong with 5 points there. If you have any remaining points to put in Blood, avoid the temptation of Dark Conviction and instead go for 2-Handed Mastery. Again, I chose Virulence in Unholy for the +hit. I wanted to put some points in Morbidity to make Death and Decay more viable, but with Howling Blast being more usable at the beginning of fights, D&D may fall out of favor with Frost, so it may be wiser to put those points in Two-handed Mastery and Bladed Armor once you try out 3.1. One point in epidemic allows for a smoother rotation that I prefer, but there are totally viable rotations that don't use it. I find that with a 20-second disease cycle I can fit in one more Obliterate before needing to Icy Touch again, in most cases.

Speaking of rotation, the new Frost is less reliant on Frost Fever and the value of Plague Strike and Blood Plague has been improved thanks to the change to strike scaling with diseases (strikes now go up by a percentage of your damage rather than a flat value per disease) and the addition of shadow damage to Black Ice. Now your rotation on single-targets should start off like:

PS>IT>Ob>BS>BS -runic dump (Frost Strikes if you have the RP)
then
Ob>Ob>Ob

Then repeat those moves in a priority order. If your diseases are up, hit Oblit if you can. Use Blood Strikes when you have diseases up and nothing but Blood Runes available. If your diseases have faded, re-apply PS and IT (PS first because IT does more damage to diseased targets). You should end up relying quite a bit on Oblit, which should give you a number of Rime procs you can use on free Howling Blasts whenever you have a free global cooldown.

Remember to either macro Rune Strike into all of your moves, or hit it whenever it lights up. Only Frost Strike if you are over 60 Runic Power. Othwerwise save it for RS.

There are also some viable rotations that apply diseases using the new glyphed Pestilence (glyph causes it to refresh diseases on your target) or glyphed HB (causes it to apply Frost Fever). I don't personally like them and don't think they will shake out to be as good as my more "traditional" rotation, so I don't recommend them.

On aoe pulls, your standard is going to be:
PS>IT>Pest>HB>BB (Blood Boil, buffed in 3.1)

If you need LOTS of aoe threat RIGHT NOW on a new pull, hit Hungering Cold then Howling Blast.


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So that's what how to play a Frost Tanking spec, both now and post-3.1. My DK is on my mind lately, so expect more DK posts in the near-future. I'd like to discuss Unholy DPS, DK design, and general DK tanking tips.