gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

Based heavily on the Elitist Jerks Death Knight forum here are what are considered to be the standard tanking builds for patch 3.1. Tank builds differ from DPS builds in that since a tank isn’t trying to do a single thing very well (i.e. lots of damage) more flexibility in builds is called for. Some tanks may want more damage mitigation, others may need more damage talents for better threat generation. These are solid builds worked out by the top theorycrafters, however you are free to adjust them to suit your own play style or needs so long as you understand deviating from the standard makes you, not others, liable for the consequences.

As before there are two popular tanking builds, one for frost and one for unholy. Frost provides better initial threat and constant damage reduction while maintaing AoE threat generation ability. Unholy provides better AoE threat, more damage mitigator buttons, and raid buffs. Blood tank builds may appear later, the new Will of Necropolis is certainly nice in some settings, but the jury is still out on blood being as viable overall as frost and unholy. I know, nothing new there.

So let’s go over our two standard tanking builds so you can setup your own build from there. Read more… »

Patch 3.1 is due out soon (Blizzard Trademark 2009) so I’ve been working on my patch to do list, based on the current PTR patch notes and other reports from the beta testers. For a major content patch I don’t have a lot of items to do on patch day at the moment, but that may change once the final notes are released (or I realized I missed a big update). Read more… »

A while ago I started to work toward getting an [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]. It is by far the best trinket available for death knight DPS and, if you can spare some defensive stats, is pretty good for tanking as well (threat and parry). There are actually four types of this card and they are earned by completing Darkmoon Nobles Deck, which itself requires you to collect the nobles cards 2 through 8 and the ace. The cards themselves are created by inscriptors via Darkmoon Card of the North, but the created card is random so it can be any of the numbers and of any of the four new decks introduced in Wrath. Oh yeah, fun with expensive mats and the random number generator to come. Read more… »

Stuff going on in the real world, blah blah. Not in game as much, blah blah. Haven’t posted much, blah blah. Whatever, let’s get to some good stuff. Some guild death knights were interested in macros used so here’s my list of death knight specific macros I shared with them. Read more… »

Blue socket gems are a bane for DPS classes. At best a blue gem provides you with half the DPS value of our favorite gem, [Bold Scarlet Ruby]. Socket bonuses aren’t worth going beyond an all strength gem strategy, given they are usually small amounts of secondary DPS stats or even worse, stamina. However we have to use blue socket gems
for one thing that makes it worth the trouble: meta gems. Read more… »

WoW Insider reported on a really neat death knight bug. Their video shows it all, but to sum up if a death knight duels someone in Ratchet or Booty Bay and then death grips their opponent while on a moving boat, but the opponent is on the dock, then the opponent will go flying off across the continent.

I’m sure the first reaction of most death knights is: zomg must try! However DeathKnight.info has the same story, but with warnings from Blizzard GMs to not attempt to do the bug.

As is typical for tech support communications to end users the GMs don’t say why we shouldn’t do the trick. It appears characters are getting stuck (bad for the player) and GMs have to get them out (annoying for the GMs). I wouldn’t think the bug does anything negative to the servers, but I’m no expert. I can see there being a negative side affect if every death knight starts doing this, however. Still, flying through mountains is neat to see.

So I wonder, knowing how the bug works and that GMs are asking people not to do it again, how many people would want to still try it at least once?

Here’s some additional stat weight links for Wowhead. The stat weight values are the same, but these links lead to item browsing rather than comparing items you specify. Just click on the armor slots you are interested in and you can easily see the top slot items in game right now.

You’ll note there are also weapon links here. For whatever reason this method allows for weapon DPS to be scored. It it worth noting that in many cases you should be more concerned with a weapon’s base damage than its DPS or stats, but a quick guide to look at doesn’t hurt.

Among the many features of Wowhead is their gear compare feature. It is a nice way to compare the stats between two or more pieces of gear and is a principle way I go over my gear wish list. A less used aspect of the compare page is the stat weight score.

Stat weighting allows you to assign a fixed numeric score to a piece of gear, based on its stats. Each stat is giving a fixed amount of points, usually ranging from 1 to 100 on Wowhead but any fixed range works, and Wowhead then calculates a final score based on how much each stat is worth and how many of that stat the item has. For example strength is usually worth 100 (being our best DPS stat) so 10 strength on an item gives the item a score of 1,000. If the item also has 5 crit rating, which is worth 47 in the stat weight presets I’ll go over, then the item is worth 1,235 (1,000 from the strength, 235 from the crit). Read more… »

One thing that can be overlooked from all of the patch 3.0.8 changes we went through is a lot of our glyphs can tuned, too. For the most part the negative effects of a glyph were removed, but a few changed almost entirely. I don’t want to go over the changes themselves (breaking news sites and blogs are good for that) but rather do a favor for both death knights and inscribers out there. What death knight glyphs are actually useful? Read more… »

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… »