gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

After getting my raid needs in order I started playing in Wintergrasp, the new PvP zone in Northrend. I tried it out during beta testing and enjoyed the mix of game type, vehicles, and buildings. Even though the zone was very buggy at the time I had a lot of fun.

I know PvP isn’t something everyone is into and I’m on a PvE realm for a reason, but I find Wintergrasp is a good PvP tryout for people new to it. You have large groups, so there is less pressure to perform well. It isn’t difficult to get into a turret or vehicle at some point and blowing stuff up with those is always fun. There are daily quests and you can still get most of the rewards even if your side loses. The only downside is the 2.5 hour delay between games, but I think it is a necessary feature to prevent both abuse and burn out. And there’s always Strand of the Ancients, which is a mini-Wintergrasp battleground, if you just can’t wait. Read more… »

After finishing off Naxx with Sapphiron and Kel’Thuzad last night my guild headed to Obsidian Sanctum. We worked on three and then two drakes up, but what with the post-patch server conditions ended up settling for a one drake kill. We were running with three warrior tanks that evening, so I was asked to tank the flame and whelp adds.

Here is the combat log report from our one drake up kill (the log is set to anonymous but you shouldn’t have a problem seeing me). Note who had both top damage out and top damage in. How did that happen? Well, I kept almost all of little adds pissed off for most of the fight (one of the warriors acted as an emergency pick up, since the AoE tank can’t move well) with Pestilence (I love it being off cool down), Death and Decay, and Unholy Blight. Oh, and I forgot to change into my tank gear that attempt. Yeah, wouldn’t recommend that last part. Nice numbers, though.

My guild attempted raiding last night. Timing graveyard runs while working on Sartharion + 3 drakes between Wintergrasp caused server crashes was… interesting. We moved on to Naxx but the lag drove us away before we could even clear the one wing we hoped for.

I had worked out my new talent build in advance (DPS build, DPS/tank hybrid build) but there are a lot of little changes to get use to. I created a macro to combine ghoul summoning and the new player version of ghoul summoning, cause I’m out of action bar space already. I was also able to get rid of my Pestilence/Blood Boil macro. I had it setup around the cool down of Pestilence and to be honest I rarely use Blood Boil these days, so I just replaced it with plain old Pestilence. I love the lack of cool down, for those times I get an unexpected add or just screw up and apply it before both (or any, I admit) diseases are up. Read more… »

As you’ve no doubt heard patch 3.0.8 is being rolled out. You can all thank me for the roll out, I respected and got some gear enchanted on Monday so now I get to respec again Tuesday and pine over the wasted enchanting mats.

If you’ve kept up with the various changes in this patch you know death knight changes are significant. The changes from the launch of the public test realms to today have also been significant. We’ve been teased with changes only for them to be taken away. Check out Blizzard for the official patch notes (as of this posting they aren’t up, but will be at the link provided). I also love MMO Champion’s coverage of patches, as they cover the notes and the stuff left out of them. I don’t want to do a point by point reposting of death knight changes this patch, but there are certainly plenty of items worth highlighting. Read more… »

Massively has an interesting article on some death knight polling results as taken by GamerDNA. The article, available here, looked at 500 regularly playing death knights main characters and posted some easy to read pie charts.

I’ll leave the chart viewing to you, but here’s some of the interesting summaries I’m seeing from the numbers. Read more… »

My guild had a pretty good week of raiding (having a good week doing anything is always hard when it ends on Monday).

We cleared Naxx 25-man, including our first Sapphiron and Kel’Thuzad kills. We cleared Obsidian Sanctum with one drake up. Finally we went after Malygos for the first time and got him to phase 2 (we won’t mention no one was left alive for it).

Malygos especially was interesting as we’re using a death knight and druid combo strategy for the Power Sparks. The death knights use Death Grip, or “yoink,” the sparks to the raid followed by a druid root. We stack up a few sparks, AoE them down, and nuke Malygos with the resulting stacking buff. Since rooting isn’t an instant cast we worked out the death knights should also use Chains of Ice to slow down the spark after the yoink. So I have yet another spam based macro:

#showtooltip Death Grip
/cast Death Grip
/cast Chains of Ice

I think I’ll use it for PvP, too. All the Horde insist on running away from me after I yoink and beat on them.

First the big news, no new tank weapons for death knights.

Ghostcrawler: The two-handed Blacksmithing tanking weapons are not going to be implemented.

Indeed, we did not want to stick DKs with these weapons forever, nor did we want to start itemizing 2H tanking weapons forever. DKs were designed to tank with 2H dps weapons.

The new sigil and runeforge enchant should help players with low defense.

Original thread can be found here.

If you read the thread it is about concerns of death knight tanks getting stuck with one of two tank weapons for the rest of the game, barring more tanking two-handers being released. A valid concern, and Ghostcrawler comments on that with things we heard back when the death knight was first announced. So no new weapons, but we’re still going to be better off defense wise than we were. Read more… »

Like the upcoming changes to enchants in patch 3.0.8 now, leg armor will be having a mat change as well. [Frosthide Leg Armor] and [Icescale Leg Armor] will soon require a [Frozen Orb] in additional to their regular mats. So if you have the means stock up on either or both leg armors now.

In the same vein (though this is much older news) if you plan to run Naxxramas 25-man and you don’t already have your frost resist gear made do so now. [Icebane Chestguard], [Icebane Girdle], and [Icebane Treads] will also require a [Frozen Orb] each to be made after the patch.

One of my guild’s resident shadow priests recently asked me about Pestilence. He had been reading on ShadowPriest.com about our Pestilence spreading his Devouring Plague. As it turns out, and I hadn’t thought of it before (though it is right there on the tooltip), Pestilence spreads any and all diseases. After going over my rotation on an AoE trash pull (Icy Touch, Plague Strike, then Pestilence) with him he and the other shadow priest made sure to cast Devouring Plague on my target in the first 5 seconds. Their reaction to Devouring Plague damage on large trash pulls was great.

With our regular tanks back from the holidays I was able to respec and re-glyph for pure DPS this week (not to mention much better DPS gear than when I last got to kick butt and take ghouls). Staying unholy helped with the Devouring Plague trick. Not only did I spreading their disease in mass, but along with it I’m giving it a 13% damage boost on all the affected mobs. We only cleared one wing of Naxx trash doing this (we cleared the other three wings the night before, go guild!) so I don’t have a good, previous WoW Web Stats report to compare our run too, but we’ll keep the trick up next week and see how notable of a difference there is, assuming WWS can deal with who’s disease is who’s.

As any enchanter will tell you there is an issue of too many shards and not enough dust for skill ups and general enchants. Blizzard tried to make shards more in balance with dust but ended up just reversing the imbalance. Patch 3.0.8 is bringing changes to help balance dust and shards more (less dust, more shards in short). As with all classes the enchants that death knights want are being affected. Read more… »