Getting Back Into It

Its been several years since my last post. However i recently started playing World or Warcraft again a few weeks ago. I'm going to get back into writing about it. Although, I'm a little late to the party for Warlords of Draenor.

As I just finished levelling my main focus at the moment is getting gear from crafting and dungeons in order to get to the higher content. I'm also looking into farming gold in order to pay for game time solely with WoW Tokens. More on that later.

Tank Consumables - Food, Potions, Flasks and Elixirs

Interesting post showed up a few days ago on pwnwear.com. I'm not going to re-post Gravity's masterful work but I will provide a list of the consumables form best to good.






Food

1. Fortune Cookie
2. Mushroom Sauce Mudfish
3. Blackbelly Sushi
4. Lavascale Minestrone
5. Grilled Dragon
6. Crocolisk Au Gratin

Potions

1. Earthen Potion

Flasks

1. Flask of Steelskin

Best Cataclysm Tanking Enchants

Here is a quick list of the best enchants for not only Deathknights but all tanks in Cataclysm. Organised by item slot. A great site to see how your doing on gear score and enchants is WoW-Heroes.





Head

• Arcanum of the Earthen Ring - From The Earthen Ring faction. See my Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide for more details.

Shoulder

• Greater Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz - From the Therazane faction. See my Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide for more details.

Chest
You have two choices here. I am personally inclined to saying that Peerless Stats is the better of the two is you take all tanking aspects into consideration such ans survival, threat and damage. Of course if all your going for is a huge health pool then Greater Stamina would be for you.

• Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats - From enchanting or the auction house. Best in my opinion.
• Enchant Chest - Greater Stamina - From enchanting or the auction house.

Pants

• Charscale Leg Armor - From Leatherworking or the auction house

Boots
Three choices for this slot. With the new patch 4.0.6 lurking around the corner the Mastery enchant might not be the best choice for Deathknights due to the mastery nerf we are getting. Of course if your tank class relies heavily on mastery and you already have a speed boost go with the Mastery enchant. If you rely heavily on master and do not already have a speed boost I would go with the Lavawalker enchant. And if you are laking in stamina and/or need a speed boost go with the Earthen Vitality enchant.

• Enchant Boots - Mastery - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Boots - Lavawalker - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Boots - Earthen Vitality - From enchanting or the auction house. Personal best for now.
• Enchant Boots - Precision - From enchanting or the auction house.

Bracers

• Enchant Bracer - Dodge - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Bracer - Greater Expertise - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Bracer - Precision - From enchanting or the auction house.

Gloves

Two choices for this slot. Again with patch 4.0.6 and the DK mastery nerf coming I think DK and other tank the do not rely heavily on mastery or are laking in HP

Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide

Here are my thoughts on how tanks should gain there rep in Cataclysm. I will list the reputations in the priority of what I think is most important first down to the least important. Keep in mind that this guide is for tanks only with emphasis on Deathknights.

The Earthen Ring

The Earthen Ring is at the top of my list due to the simple fact that there is no dailies for this faction and it contains the tanking head enchant. It is the most "difficult" to build rep with. The only way to gain rep is to make sure you complete the regular quests and wear your tabard while in dungeons until revered for the tank benefits from them. You can go further after getting where you need to be with the other tank factions but this will bring nothing more to you as a tank.

Enchants

Arcanum of the Earthen Ring (Revered)

Items

Friendly: Tabard of the Earthen Ring

Honored: Stone-Wrapped Greaves

Revered: None

Exalted: None

Quartermaster

Provisioner Arok - Shimmering Expanse 49.1, 42.1

Therazane

Therazane makes it in second for the tank shoulder enchants. As a raid tank

Best Deathknight 4.0 Spec

Hey, so like everyone else I have not been posting recently due to the new expansion Cataclysm. I've been spending all my free time getting to level 85 and setting up our new guild website. Now that that is done I will start posting interesting changes about Deathknights in World of Warcraft again.

I thought a good way to start off posting about a new expansion would be to post a compilation of what are considered "best" Deathknight specs. Keeping in mind that this blog is raid tank oriented the DPS spec are considered offspecs.

Deathknight Raid Tank Spec
Your base for raid tanking in 4.0 should resemble this. You will have 2 spare point to place in one of these talents Abomination's Might, BCB, Virulence or Crimson Scourge. Most endgame raid tanks think Crimson Scourge is a waste of points unless your the designated AoE tank. You should look at what your other raid members and tank are bringing to the raid before spending the last 2 point. It will have a big impact on what you select.

If your wondering about the sub-spec into frost for Lichborne you can read more about it here. The short explanation is; with the use of the Lichborne macro you get an extra defensive cooldown.

Lichborne Macro:

#showtooltip Lichborne
/cast Lichborne;
/cast [@player] Death Coil

If you want to do your own homework here are the sources I look into.
Elitist Jerks - Blood | DK endgame tanking [4.x]
pwnwear.com - Index to all the DK Tank 4.0.3 info

pwnwear.com - Death Knight Cataclysm (85) Tanking Guide

Deathknight DPS Spec
Since DPS is an offspec for me I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

Hot nerf for Deathknight Tanks

In the latests news from blizzard fine tuning of patch 4.0.1 us Deathknight tank are on the recieving end of the nerf bat. While we are getting the least changes out of all the tank classes it's still a nerf. Blizzard decided they were goin to bring our talented Icebound Fortitude damage reduction down from 60% to 50% for a 10% drop and increase the cool down of the ability from 2 minutes to 3 minutes for a 1 minute increase.

Not the worst nerf ever but it will make each of our cooldowns that much more valuable. I don't think this will be a game changer seams to me that it's being implemented only to make us be that much more careful when blowing CDs.

View the official source here.

Blood Shield Tracker - A Death Knight Tank Addon

 So we have this new fancy mastery, Blood Shield. While this sounds very nice on paper blizzard provides no way of tracking this new ability. Good thing our friends over at the pwnwear.com community have developped a new addons called Blood Shield Tracker. This is a great tool for tracking the new ability.


The Blood Shield Tracker addons not only tracks our blood shield but also tracks the average healing we will get from our next Death Strike. As you can see in the screenshot. The larger bar on top is the Blood Shield the smaller bottom bar is the estimated heal for our next Death Strike.

As of this writing, the addon is still in beta phase the developers aren't hiding that. My guess is that it is very near completion. It has a very nice management interface with a mini-map icon is you enable it. You can also customize the look of Blood Shield Tracker. In my opinion, the ease of customization is this addons only remaining weak point.

You can download it from here at cursed.com and discuss it here at pwnwear.com.

Using right now. It has my vote. Can't wait to see what we will have once this come out of beta. Thanks guys.

At Long Last, Deathknight Tank Buffs

Long awaited buffs put us back in line with other tanks as far as effective health. And the buff to IBF is a very nice plus.

Reading the original post, I do belive that the changes are effective immediately although the spell tool-tips will not be updated right away.

3.3.2 - No Deathknight buffs

While DKs are saved from beeing in patch notes this time, for better or for worse. We did find ourselves with a hidden buff, well if your a DK tank in T10.

All tank T10 sets found an armor increase of about 1000 on the chest and gloves. Like I said not a direct DK buff, but we'll take what we can get. The entire Scourgelord's Plate set now has 10,261 armor its name.

For entire patch notes you can go here. See the Item section for details on armor increase.

Happy tanking.

pwnwear.com?

Hey I would just like to bring http://pwnwear.com/ to everyone attention. This is a great site where you can find almost everything DK related. The site contains analysis log and multiple other informative tools and posts all summed up by Gravity in a way that you don't need to analyse/read them for hours.

The site is definitely worth checking out and participating in. Pwnwear.com has earned a place in my Sites section at the bottom left hand side of the Home page.

3.3 - Fall of the Lich King

A litle late but here it is. The death knight patch new for 3.3. Make sure you check out the killer patch trailer.

While not much has changed as far as are class goes, the increas threat on RS should prouve to be a nice buff for us DK tanks. Also with the addition of 1 hander version of  "Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle" called "Rune of the Nerubian Carapace" will we see the rise of the dual-wield Death Knight? Here are the DK specific patch notes for more detailed changes and the youTube version of the patch trailer.

Patch 3.2.2 - Buffs?

First thing first, Onyxia is back! Now on to Death Knight news. As far as I can tell we seam to have a pretty nice patch, as far as DKs go, this time around. We see some buffing on the tanking side of things and a small nerf in arenas.

Patch notes:

• Frost Presence: The damage reduction granted by this ability has been increased from 5% to 8%.
• Pets
• Gnaw: This death knight ghoul ability now has a 1-minute cooldown.
• Talents
• Blood
• Heart Strike: Secondary targets of Heart Strike now take half as much damage.
• Subversion: Now also increases the critical strike chance of Scourge Strike by 3/6/9%.
• Vampiric Blood: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute and duration reduced to 10 seconds.
• Frost
• Threat of Thassarian now also causes Rune Strike to use both weapons when dual-wielding.
• Unbreakable Armor: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute and changed back to granting 25% additional armor while active instead of flat damage reduction based on armor. The amount of strength granted has been reduced to 10%.
• Unholy
• Bone Shield: This ability now has 3 charges instead of 4. Cooldown reduced to 1 minute.
• Dirge: This talent no longer grants additional runic power from using Obliterate.

So what do you guys think of these changes? Let us know in the comment section.

3.2 Unholy Tank Spec

Finding topics to blog about is alot harder then I first realized.

I started a thread on my guild's forums a few days back for an unholy tank spec. While I got some good feedback from a friend there I wanted to get some more public feedback. I'm going to make a copy of the discussion here feel free to comment on it.

Tusam:
Here is the spec I'm thinking of. Please make sure to also look over at the glyph section.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#3hvS-up33B9svc,3I-3eO,10192
The only point I'm not too sure about so far is the 1 on UB. But I'm sure some of you here will break this spec down and offer valuable advice :D .

Atrophos:
Oh Tusam... When will you learn that Unholy is just not as good as either of the other two trees for tanking? lol


With that being said I've made a few modifications to your spec if you're dead set on Unholy. Explanations first, than my take on the spec.


Scent of blood: Unholy is generally more an AoE tank spec than single target, and even with single target tanking you will find that Scent of blood procs constantly and even with only two points, you'll be generating more runic power than you have time to dump in a proper rotation.


Ravenous Dead: It's a good threat talent that scales with your gear, The 3 points here can come out of BCB very easily, as BCB is pretty terrible while using a 2h. A 30% chance once every 2.5 seconds to deal 50% weapon damage? Not worth it at all imo.


Blood Caked Blade: See above.


Night of the Dead/Master of Ghouls: Reducing the cooldown on your pet to 30 seconds isn't really necessary, unfortunately you have to have it maxed in order to get permanent ghoul. Either way, this allows you to have an extra cooldown by saccing your pet every minute for a big heal. (You can argue that you can summon and sac your pet in an emergency situation even without it being permanent, however that's a full GCD to summon it before you can sac for the heal. In most emergency situations, the delay will kill you anyway) Plus who doesn't like having a permanent pet?!


Anti Magic Zone: I see no reason not to get this with the abundance of magical AoE damage in the current raiding environments. Even if you are the only one getting the absorption it's a 75% magical reduction for 10 seconds. The idea here is that Unholy is already short on automatic tools/cooldowns imo, such as Vampiric Blood or Unbreakable Armor, this gives you one more tool to fill that spot or cycle a cooldown on hard mode encounters.


Desolation: I'm not terribly sold on this, as when AoE tanking you are generally going to be using your blood runes on pestilence/blood boil, however it does provide you a little extra threat versus single target encounters, and there aren't any talents that are significantly better than it at this point in the tree.


Wandering Plague: I don't know about you, but raid buffed in tank gear I have somewhere around 16% crit chance which makes this talent practically useless on single target, and I suspect that even while AoE tanking you'd need to have 4+ mobs on you nonstop for it to actually be worthwhile.


Glyphs:


Bone Shield: no brainer


Disease: A glyph that isn't terrible for AoE tanking, but absolutely useless for single target situations. Glyph of Scourge Strike gives your SS a 25% chance to refresh your diseases, so while AoE tanking, you can get the same benefit by rotating SS, Pest, Blood boil without the need for IT or PS and On single target allows you to go SS, blood strike, blood strike, DC, DC, repeat for a max threat rotation.


Anti Magic Shell: Again not a terrible glyph, but with AMZ now in the picture you can replace this with a great threat increasing glyph in Glyph of Rune Strike, or if you aren't at the spell hit cap, possibly consider a Glyph of Dark Command as a missed taunt can be an auto wipe.


With all that considered, here is what I believe to be the best overall Unholy tanking spec:


http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#3hv99DmUEXGFea,36Y3eO,10192


Now get back to work!

Tusam:
No... I will never learn. I love they way unholy DK plays.


I like the spec atro, you brought up some good points.

Atrophos wrote:
Ravenous Dead: It's a good threat talent that scales with your gear, The 3 points here can come out of BCB very easily, as BCB is pretty terrible while using a 2h. A 30% chance once every 2.5 seconds to deal 50% weapon damage? Not worth it at all imo.

I never though of this as a scaling TPS talent.


The only "real" change from my spec to this is Desolation. Once set into my rotation I generate 5k avg TPS(by omen) my snap aggro isn't very good. I'll see what changes Desolation brings to my TPS.


Even as an AoE tank if someone chooses a different target then mine to focus on they rip aggro. Its always been like this for tanks. I was wondering if anyone had pointers on how to address this issue. The only way I can think of is using a marking macro, and mark the focus target. Raid assist is needed for this though.

Atrophos:
On Aoe pulls, get your diseases on main target, pestilence, then blood boil like there's no tomorrow while tab targeting for scourge strikes on individual targets in between.


If you DnD, pull, Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence, you're one blood rune short for blood boil, i ALWAYS use Blood Tap for the extra rune in that situation. Blood boil on pestilenced targets will give you aggro long enough to start tabbing between them.


I left Desolation in, the changes were:


-3 points Wandering Plague
-1 point Scent of Blood
-3 points Blood Caked Blade


+3 points Ravenous Dead
+3 points Night of the Dead/Master of Ghouls
+1 point Anti Magic Zone

Tusam:
Sorry, when I said this...

Tusam wrote:The only "real" change from my spec to this is Desolation.

I meant my in game spec.


As far as AoE goes I guess tabbing through targets would work... still a pain in the ass if a bunch of different people are on different targets.

Finally good 25 mans

I had a few good attempts at 25 man raid now. I need to say I'm very pleased.

The difficulty curve from 10 mans to 25 mans is not as steep as I thought. I was expecting the bosses to hit harder. There is however something I was not aware of and I'd like to put it out there so others can learn from my experiences. Some bosses in Heroic Ulduar have abilities that the normal mode bosses do not. For example, Auriaya on heroic has an ability called Sentinel Blast that must be interrupted as soon as possible or it will wipe the raid. She does not have this ability in normal mode. As I said just watch out for these "Heroic abilities".

I'd also like to mention that I'm very pleased with the 25 man raiding group we've put together. I wish it upon everyone to have a raiding group like the one exclusion has. Also if your interested in beeing part of this group you can always throw up an application on our recruitment page.

25 mans, an itch I can't wait to scratch

Due to limited time on wow and the loyalty to my guild, I haven't had many chances to run 25's. I did pug Sartharion once, but we call know that doesn't really count now, does it?


There might be an answer to my call. Our guild recruitment has been going reasonably well. We got a 25 group together but were short a couple of healers, so the recruitment efforts press on.

I'm exited to get into 25s so I can compare it to 10s. Just the raid leading aspect and the fact that 25 people need to be organized. I can't hide the fact that I also like some of that epic lewt. I'm anxiously anticipating our next attempt at 25 man Ulduar this comming Tuesday.

Raid well,

First post

Recently I was given an opportunity to transfer to a PvE realm and join a 25 man raiding guild with some friends. Well my friends transferred over a few alt characters to test the water, a good thing too. Turns out the guild we were going to raid with was drama ridden and our friends that were in that guild /gquit.

I'm a little glad that this happened as I quite enjoy the people in the guild I currently raid with. Needless to say, for now I'm sticking around on Magtheridon. Still trying to get my friends to transfer this way.