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.


----------------

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.

Self-Absorption: I'm Totally Flattered Edition

Like pretty much the entire WoW blogosphere, I've been contacted by RC of Grinding to Valhalla to be profiled on his site, and, as the post title suggests, I'm blushing. GoV is a blog/project that collects responses from WoW bloggers to RC's questionairre, and compiles them for your enjoyment. I interpret it as an exploration of the pysche of a WoW blogger. Much like a scientific survey, he gathers and organizes data (which doubles as entertainment!), and we can look at this accumulation to learn more about our world than we could when we could only see our own small corner of it. There are some very interesting common threads among those who choose to respond (whoda thunk bloggers would tend to be aspiring writers!?!), and just surfing the site and looking for connections has been entertaining. And if nothing else, you're bound to stumble upon a fun WoW blog that you never saw before.

Most blogs, like mine, tend to labor in obscurity, and I'm surprised by the gems I missed for so long when I finally stumble upon them. There has got to be a better solution for connecting the WoW blog audience with the WoW blogs themselves. Maybe some kind of search engine? The blog Azeroth community (and others) take a stab at this problem, but they are dependent on a lot of people all remaining interested, and there is little/no mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff. For instance, my recent excursions (and the wowinsider daily blog feature) have brought me to Skeleton Jack, Death Knight Spree, and I heart bubbles, all of which have taken their rightful place in my bookmark list/rss reader.

You can read my interview here. I'll keep you posted as my responses to parts 2 and 3 are posted.

10-man versus 25-man rewards: GC gets smacked around on the forums.

Poor Ghostcrawler. He's appointed himself (or been appointed? I don't know) the liaison between the playerbase (who one could liken to a very large pack of ravenous dogs) and the Blizzard developers. Which is basically like volunteering to get spat on, considering the normal caliber of debate on the WoW forums (though I've got to say, it has been improving in some of the more serious threads, like the one I'm going to talk about today, which is almost exlusively a reasoned debate amongst polite adults. What the hell?!?)

I went sooo totally crazy with parenthesis there! [raises hand] Parenthesis-five!

Anywhoodle, I'm not a GC hater. He's just a guy trying to do his job the best he can. He's generally quite nice, reasonable, and clearly very smart. But this time he and his team have made a bad decision (yeah, I said it!), and now he's stuck defending it to an increasingly angry mob. An angry mob who hasn't been fed (a new raid instance or any new content or the promised class balance changes or even new freaking dances!!) in a loooong time, and their collective belly rumbles for fresh meat at the smell of GC's drawn (metaphorical) blood.

The thread I'm talking about can be found here. C'mon, you knew I was going to get into this debate.

Don't be fooled by the initial post. This thread doesn't turn into a debate about whether 10 or 25 mans are harder than the other, despite appearances. That ship has already sailed with Naxx. What this thread is really about is the investment/reward equation between the two styles. Ghostcrawler makes a valiant attempt to defend the path Blizzard has already locked into (they aren't going to delay 3.1 another 2 months to retune everything), but I gotta say that it looks like he's getting battered in this debate. From my perspective, it looks like he's forced to defend a weaker position, and after all of the responses in that thread, he must realize now that they've made a mistake.

What is this weaker position? Here are the choice quotes:

"We have positioned our 25-player content as more difficult and therefore capable of generating better rewards. Managing a group of that size requires a little more effort and we figured if the rewards were the same, we'd steer pretty much everyone towards 10-player raiding. At this point we don't want to do that. "

and

"I understand your point on the 25 loot being of higher item level. However we explored this issue quite a bit and I still believe that some non-trivial number of players just prefer the larger raids. How can that be?
...
[lists some ways 25 man raids are more epic]
...
So for those reasons, and a few others, we think the smartest design is still just to let players decide if they prefer 10 player raiding or 25 player raiding. Some have a small group of friends and want to not have to put up with the weak links or undependables. They like the pressure it puts on every player to perform. Others have large, social guilds and like to assemble 25 players together. They may be more tolerant of being able to bring the 25th player along even if he isn't stellar. They may like all of the reasons I mentioned above. It's just a preference, just like Horde vs. Alliance is a preference. "

Is it just me, or did he just completely contradict himself there? One side of his mouth is saying "no one would do 25s if they had the same loot as 10s", while the other side is saying, at the same time, "many prefer 25s because they are more epic and will do them anyway". Which is it, GC? You seriously can't have it both ways on this one. There is no wriggling out. Maybe his left hand should tell the right what it's typing.

To illustrate, here are some of the key responses. Believe me, there are literally hundreds more in this vein, and I have yet to see a strong rebuttal to the thrust of these claims.

"So if this is true (i.e. a non-trivial number of players prefer 25-man) then why would giving out the same loot in 10-man as 25-man "kill 25-man"? If people like 25-man for the reasons you listed above, they'd do just fine. "

BIF!

"The conceptual basis you're describing is great - people should be choosing the path they actually want to play - but instituting a charity tier in 25s makes appropriate risk/reward tuning for 10s extremely hard to do. If you want to put anything nice in the 10-man path, you get the choice of making the encounter trivialized by 25-man gear or out of tune for 10-man gear."

POW!

"If you make it easy for 25-man gear, you can't put in a decent reward. Because it's easy. If you make it a challenge for 25-man gear, you can provide a cool/rare reward, but you're making the encounter too hard for the gear in the 10-man path - it's effectively additional 25-man content. "

ZAM!

"I really like this idea. Yes, 25 man raids recquire more organization, but why can't the reward simply be more of the same loot? Give a 25 man instance 3x or 3.5x the loot drops of a 10 man, but make it all the same loot.

Right now, I'm in a 10-man guild. We don't have the players for more. We're all RL friends. And I'm chafing. I know there is better loot out there, and that we could have that better loot easily, but it means breaking the core purpose of the guild: all RL friends. And the only reason it is 'better' is because someone decided the challenges involved with organizing 15 more people is worth an entire tier of loot. In the first tier, it's the differance between having Heroic gear and real Raid gear. "

WHAP!

"So by following this line of logic wouldn't it make sense to allow equal gear to drop in both sets of content since, as you have stated, people who prefer to raid in a 25 man setting would continue to do so for the reasons listed above and equality of gear would not be a detrimental factor.

I'm not a huge fan of the notion that the determining factor in whether or not I can access better loot is the number of people I can bribe to log in on any given night. "

ZING!

"[difficulty of organizing 25 people is ]Often mentioned by raiding guilds for why they deserve better loot. But the flaw with it? It only applies to their officers, their key members, the ones who have to do the right thing. Much of the rest? Clockpunchers, who merely have to not do the wrong thing.

If anything, 25 man raids result in a greater amount of loot in the hands of less deserving individuals than the reverse. "

PWNT!

"So correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that the only reason for 25mans dropping way better gear is because it's harder to get 25 people together? because honestly, it's much harder to get 10 players that are capable of doing the encounters properly than it is to get a successful 25man going. a loss in dps for a 10man is much more significant than a loss of a dps in a 25man.

So really, the higher level loot is justified by the "difficulty" of getting 25 players together? "

FACE!!


And that Batman-style pounding of GC's concepts and contradictions was just the first 2 pages of the thread after he posted.

Poor guy.

--------------------------

I can't tell GC how to dig out of this hole immediately, because frankly it's too deep for this patch. But next patch is going to be a big opportunity to get this right.

It seems that if GC and his team want to keep raiding tiers the way they are, but the only reason 25s are a tier higher is because of organizational challenges, then the only way for him to be logically consistent (rather than hypocritical) is to only reward the raid leaders for the extra organizational challenges. So raid leadership gets gear a tier higher, while the other 21 people in the raid get gear a tier lower. At least that one isn't a self-contradiction.

Another suggestion thrown out there is: if the only reason loot is a tier higher is because of organizational difficulties, then why not give both instances the same loot, but make 10-mans slightly harder than 25-mans to compensate for the organizational challenges? This would work OK, but would probably be a nightmare to balance and actually implement.

From my perspective, the best solution is to have the same loot drop in both 10 and 25 man versions of the instance, but allow 25-man groups to gear up faster overall as compensation for the organizational difficulties. If 10-man bosses drop 2 items per kill, 25-man bosses should drop at least 6.

Problem solved. Everyone is happy. No one is getting anything handed to them that they don't earn, and no one is being left out as a second-class citizen just because of the size of raid they prefer.

Tobold and the "Fun" Fallacy

Let me start out by saying I love Tobold's blog. I've been reading it daily for years now. It's one of the things that inspired me to start blogging in the first place. I find his analysis to be intelligent and well-thought-out in general, even when I disagree with him.

But wow, do I disagree with what he posted today. And I don't think he's really thought his opinion out to it's ultimate conclusion.


In short (and I can't do it justice here, just go read it), he posits that reading raid strategies, watching raid videos, and learning about your class outside of game on sites like Elitist Jerks and reading guides on how to play: those things are not "fun". He cites Raph Koster's Theory of Fun to support his statement, noting that "the fun of playing a game comes from the learning experience you have while experimenting with the game." According to Tobold, people who do this outside research are "optimizing the fun out" of the game and "games aren't meant to be played this way" [emphasis mine]


I think Tobold is misapplying the concept from Koster's book, and more to the point has a bit of tunnel vision on this subject.

In essence: just because Tobold finds one style of play "fun" doesn't meant that other people aren't having "fun" by playing a different way, nor does it meant they are playing wrong (against the way things are "meant" to be played). Just because they come to a game with a wealth of outside knowledge does not mean that there is not more "fun learning" to be had from the game.

I'm guessing that Tobold has encountered some rude, arrogant people in his raiding experience lately, because he likens "expecting the rest of the raid to study up on how to play their character and watch raid videos" to "trying to avoid talking to other players". Every member of my guild comes prepared and yet one of our chief joys is all of the interaction we have with each other, talking to each other on vent and in-game chat. We just spend that time having fun and talking about advanced strategy and our personal lives (I'd argue these are much richer topics than basics on how to play your class or guesses on how to deal with basic bosses), rather than spending all of that time playing teacher to people who don't feel like looking things up for themselves. Tobold doesn't seem to realize that teaching other people the basics of how to play is work. And we don't log in so that we can do a job to benefit someone else who, again, isn't putting out the effort themselves. Believe it or not, we can interact with each other about things other than the basics that one can look up on EJ or stratfu. And for the record, myself and my guildies do often help each other improve our basic games, and we have members who have been tutored instead of being kicked.

In fact, those sites are simply tools. They can't make you good. You still have to execute the plans and the guides, and tailor them to your own situation. You still have to notice and avoid the void zones and lava waves, you still have to be able to control your aggro once you know how to do it, and you still have to adapt your rotation to different situations even after you've used the basic EJ class guide as a starting point. It's not like anyone expects anyone else to just mechanically copy a guide, and in fact rote repetition doesn't work. How can I read the same EJ guide as everyone else, and then do 1k more dps than them in similar gear? It must be because I'm mindlessly copying what I read, I guess?

The main thing I get out of EJ is that someone else better at math than me did all the math for me. When I sit at the talent select window, I submit it's more fun to make the decision "I want to take the talent that gives me the most return in my single-target dps over my aoe" or something like that, and less fun to sit there doing the math to figure out which talent is mathematically better than another all on my own. Then I use that as a starting point to freestyle and improvise my own decisions in new situations, and to enjoy optimizing in bread and butter situations: making my execution better.

Because for me, the main fun of this game is excelling. I don't mean just "beating bosses". I mean being the best at my job that I possibly can. At getting my rotation tighter or my threat higher every single attempt. Getting hit by fewer lava waves every attempt. Pushing myself to the limit of what I can do, and not just on my own in my insular world, but doing the best I can as part of a team. Optimizing how we work together, and getting our communication to its most efficient and effective point. This is fun and social at the same time, even though we look up boss videos and EJ guides! Tobold doesn't seem to think that's possible, because his way to have fun, his type of learning (the basics) is the only type of fun learning their is in the game. The type of learning we do either doesn't exist in Tobold's head, or I guess isn't "fun" for some reason.

Raid videos are a slightly different story. We plan to go into Ulduar cold, but that doesn't mean we think going in there having already researched the strategies is morally reprehensible. We just all agreed that that is what we would all find more fun. If the people Tobold plays with don't find the same things fun as he does, THEN WHY IS HE PLAYING WITH THEM? In my opinion, he should find some other people who like going in without strategies, and raid with those people instead of complaining about how unfair it is that everyone else doesn't want to play the game exactly the way he wants to.

In the end, WoW is not a terribly deep game. If the "fun" for you is figuring out the basic class and boss strategies by trial-and-error, it might take you a long time to attempt everything, but you actually gain very little in the end, because there frankly isn't that much substance there to begin with. If that's what the game is for you, you might as well quit as soon as you know your class well enough to beat every boss once, even if it's just barely. However, the game has unprecedented breadth, and that means there is room for everyone to play the way they want to. The fun for me is challenging myself to beat the boss faster and better, and there is room for both of us, just probably not in the same raid group. :)

There's also the matter of information disparity and the conflict inherent in that. Your guild is asking for trouble if every new member must use trial-and-error to figure out everything for themselves. That means that no matter how good you get, you'd always have to drag people who don't even have a basic clue. And you'd have to pay your repair bills for the wipes incurred while they try to figure out the boss.

In fact, how is such a system sustainable? Once your first group of raiders learns a boss, are they allowed to give the strategy to others in the guild? Or does every new member have to figure it out themselves? If you give them the strat, then guess what? All you are doing is shifting the burden of explaining the fight to the raid leader. When the player could just as easily go learn it themselves rather than burdening someone else, or making 24 others wait for him or her. It doesn't make sense to me.

Being willing to read EJ and watch videos on your own also has the benefit of proving to the raid group that you are willing to put in effort yourself instead of being dragged as a leech. You are taking responsibility for yourself instead of insisting that the more experienced raiders carry the burden for you. And you are showing respect for the fact that 24 other people are taking some of their few leisure gaming hours to do this activity with you. Don't waste their time. Just leave the guild and find a guild that has the same standards you do.


----------------

Tobold also seems confused about what people mean when they say "WoW is too easy", since he sees that statement as a paradox to the claim that players "need to study hard to succeed," which he sees as implied whenever a raid leader demands EJ research or encounter videos. I don't think it is necessarily implied. I also would replace "succeed" with "excel", which are two very different things. By "succeed", Tobold seems to mean "down the boss at all, no matter how sloppy" (making that assumption is the only way I can see the paradox he sees)

When I say WoW is "easy", I mean the bosses are easy to beat, and it is too easy to get the absolute best gear (i.e. when you see someone in Best-in-Slot gear, it's equally likely that they are a terribad leaching scrub as it is that they are an elite expert player). But optimizing my own play and my teamwork with my guild is not "easy" - it's the primary fun challenge in the game for me. Making the bosses harder would simply add another layer of challenge on there for me beyond what I have already, and I would like to have that.

---------------------

Tobold is such a reasoned and thoughtful individual that I would ascribe an oversight like this to something getting in the way of his intellect. In my experience, when a smart person says something that ignores certain aspects of the issue, it's because they have an emotional investment in reaching a certain conclusion, and are trying to shoehorn a rational argument into supporting the thesis they have already decided on. God knows I've been there.

It sounds like Tobold resents (probably rightfully) when people tell him and his friends they aren't performing well enough, and he personally doesn't enjoy reading strats ahead of time or having to learn about his class outside the game. He doesn't like that these things have become the social norm in his social ingroup. Other people are forcing the bar to be raised to a place he doesn't want to go; it's a lot like trying to compete for the home-run record without using steroids: everyone else is using them, so now you have to use them to keep up even if you don't want to. This example isn't perfect, because steroids break the agreed-upon rules of the game, and WoW strategy videos don't. But you get what I'm going for: being forced by those around you to escalate to places you don't want to go.

It reminds me of Sirlin's ideas about how in competitive gaming, winners play the actual game by its actual rules, and scrubs are limited by their own made-up rules about what is "fair" and what is "cheap". They try to reshape the game into what is most fun for them, and you simply can't do that in a multiplayer game, as much as you might insist that other people play the way you think is fun. Tobold isn't a scrub, because this isn't a competitive game. He just has a completely valid alternative preference for what is "fun" to him. But the part of the analogy that holds is that people who limit themselves to their own made-up rules don't get to experience the higher-level fun of the "true" game. Expert chess players or Street Fighters or Starcraft players are playing the game on a different level than the guy who picked up the box at Wal-Mart an hour ago. But that guy is going to reach that higher-level, "actual" game much more quickly by reading a strategy guide and then practicing with the added knowledge than he is by playing thousands of games to try to work out what units to make. Again, this analogy isn't perfect, but I'm not an analogyologist, so give me a break.

What I'm trying to get across here is that Tobold and I are choosing to play a different game. We each have our own set of made-up structures based around what we find fun. I think we both have equally valid opinions. I don't think either of us should be acting like we have moral superiority for which one we choose. I don't think my game is "higher-level" (despite my strained analogy above), nor that Tobold is a "scrub". He just enjoys different things than I do, and that's fine.

Basically, he seems to be mistaking his own feeling-based opinion for a Categorical Imperative. He doesn't find the pre-research fun, he prefers the social aspects of raids, and for him the game is figuring out the boss and figuring out the class on your own, through experimenting and group discussion. I don't see anything wrong with this, it's just not the way I enjoy playing. But more power to him to enjoy this himself. I just find it . . . inconsistent when he condemns others ("this is really a poor attitude") for finding fun in a different way than him, as though they are perpetrating some ethical failing. This is not an issue of ethics, or Right and Wrong. In the case of "what do you find fun", there is no "poor attitude" and "good attitude". Just because Tobold thinks this is the right way to have fun doesn't make other ways to have fun morally inferior, and I think in his intellect, he realizes this.

I'd like to close by pointing out something good from Tobold: I think he makes an excellent point in the comments section when he says,

"I think a good raid leader and the officers of a guild should discuss with players that don't perform well, and give them individual pointers on how to improve performance, based on Recount stats, not just "go and read up somewhere and come back when you do 3K dps". I think a raid should spend some time discussing strategy before a new boss fight, should spend some time discussing what exactly went wrong after a wipe, and should discuss how to do better, not just send people to some boss strategy site or to YouTube."

I still think you are awesome even though I disagree with you Tobold, keep up the great work on your blog!

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.

Friday Laziness: When Does Champions Come Out?

Obviously my last post was an April Fool's joke. Except it probably wasn't funny enough to qualify as a joke. April 1 kind of caught me off guard; hopefully I will plan better next year.

But, even with the fun of achievements and Ulduar on the horizon, I'm in the same place right now as the entire WoW community seems to be: bored and out of stuff to do in WoW that really revs our engines. Either we are playing other games, going through the motions, or trying to freshen the game by trying it from another angle. So most of us only log into our mains during the cut-back raid times, and spend the rest of our gaming time on alts or other games (I'm finally getting deep into Fallout 3, which I strongly recommend, especially if you take the "Bloody Mess" perk).

I do find my mind wandering, looking for another multiplayer experience that really grabs me. Fallout is based on feeling alone and desolate, and it excels as an RPG and game, but is missing the social and competitive elements of WoW, a lack which I notice. Though I'm decent at shooters, they don't tend to hold my attention as multiplayer hobbies. Team Fortress 2 and Quake Live have only managed to take up a few afternoons or evenings for me before the rest of my brain feels neglected. I've been reaquainting myself with StarCraft for the past few evenings, but it just isn't the same.

What I really need is another MMO. Unfortunately, none of the MMOs out there strike my fancy. I really hate to get into this, because I'd rather put that whole stupid "WoW tourist" thing behind me, but what I want to talk about is Champions and how I wish it would come out now while I'm bored, instead of later when I'm busy with Ulduar.

Though I respect them as games, I'm not looking for something like EVE, and Lotro and WAR and EQ2 and Vanguard I know from experience are too much like WoW to feel different for me, except for the fact that they have poorer art direction (imo) and lose some of my favorite WoW features. Obviously, OMG real consequences games like Darkfall are out, and FF11 has an appealing setting, but I also know from experience that I don't enjoy the forced grouping or extended battles of that game. And I already played City of Heroes into the ground before picking up WoW. Not saying they are bad games, just saying that they don't have what I, one particular person, am looking for. This is not meant as a flamefest.

Ok, SWG is a bad game.

But anyway, the only new MMO I know is supposed to come out this spring is Champions Online. Built by mostly the displaced CoH team with a new license, I expect CoH2, which is fine by me. I loved CoH, but it just didn't have enough depth or content.

Looking around the internet with all my might, I can't seem to find a solid release date for the thing. All reports say "Spring 09", but umm...that's ending pretty soon? Shouldn't they have a release date out by now, even if that date is "the end of May"? Or will it just be pushed back?

The really sad thing is that Champion's best bet is to land a week ago. The WoW juggenaut has ground to a sickening near-halt, and millions are just chomping at the bit for a fun, appealing MMO that isn't going to drive them away immediately with it's hardcoreness. I know some people think that WoW subscribers trying other games is a bad thing for those games, but I disagree. Sure, you get all the terribad entitled griefers, etc., but you also get the great players and good average joes. You just don't notice the positive parts, because they aren't as loud and obnoxious. Or maybe they just aren't grouping with you. :)

And think about this: if Champions releases, say, a month after Ulduar comes out, guess who goes to try Champions? A mix of 1) people who hate WoW, and 2) people who either suck so much at WoW or are such social outcasts there that they jump somewhere else for a clean slate.

If Champions comes out now, at least a bunch of those dreaded "WoW Tourists" will be people who are successful in WoW and just bored, rather than the entire starter playerbase of Champions being WoWhaters, comic fanboys, and outcast ninjas/botters/griefers.

And if Champions is of good quality, I'll likely keep my subscription to it in parallel with my WoW subscription, at least until Starcraft 2 comes out and I have to choose between 2 of the 3 to devote my game time to. So I'll be a member, rather than a tourist. If someone would just come out with a game with even comparable levels of quality, content, and fun in my eyes. God knows WoW needs a real competitor, so the devs will get a wake-up call. I think right now they are quite well aware that they are free to screw us as much as they feel like, because we don't have any other legitimate place to turn. But that's a topic for another day, and I'm lazy.

Tonight, we're downgrading to Jack Daniels. Mmmmmm.

I've decided to quit WoW

Instead of WoW, I'm going to play Darkfall exclusively. I just felt that my leisure time wasn't filled with enough real consequences.

I especially love to play the Corpse Run Minigame that shipped with Darkfall as an added bonus. At first, I just logged in, got killed on purpose, then spent the rest of my night in enjoying the cerebral challenge of traveling unarmed back to my corpse while trying not to get re-killed by other people who hadn't lost all of their armor or weapons. No wussy "rematches" in this game, no sir!

A few days later, I figured out that I needed to play with other people to reach more advanced corpse-run scenarios, including the 60-man Corpse Run Raids advertised on the game's website. I joined a guild, and now instead of logging in and playing Corpse Run, I log in and play the other exciting mini-game Wait For Rest of Team So I Don't Get Raped By Another Roaming Gang with One More Person In It.

At least in Darkfall, when I get killed, I can be confident that the other person was more skilled than me and I clearly deserved whatever pounding I got for being a noob. One of my favorite parts of the game is how, when I get jumped by 8 other guys and then they repeatedly teabag me as I try to recover my corpse naked and weaponless, I know I really deserved it for being stupid enough to be lower level, or stupid enough to not bring 9 guys with me, or just for being a really bad player. And that's what my leisure time is really about: getting the punishment I deserve for being a noob, or meting out that punishment to others who are bigger noobs than me.

Now excuse me, I need to crouch-walk into this wall to max out both my Crouching and Walking skill while waiting in line for the outhouse, where I'll be able to work on the coveted Shitting and Wiping skills. Oh hey, you dropped a coin. I would pick it up for you, but I haven't worked enough on my Bending Over skill yet. I guess I'd better play some more Corpse Run, huh?

Sure, it's not perfect over here either, but Darkfall has one feature I like that WoW doesn't have, so that makes it automatically better than WoW in every way and you are a stupid genital-less noob cock-wrangler for liking WoW.

What was that? You say you are going to spend the hour I'm Corpse Running tonight running an entire beautiful instance full of cool-looking loot you get to keep, then maybe do some PvP where you get to test your skills over and over against opponents instead of losing once and then being unable to fight for the rest of the evening? And in your game there's a variety of decently-balanced classes, instead of a million identical earth magic and polearm users?

Wow, you are a wuss. Go have fun in your sissy-game for sissies, you big sissy. Talk to me when you grow some balls.