Oct 29

Before I say anything else, I will say this: this is not a QQ post. In fact, I think Chill of the Throne is, in the end, a good idea (at least now that we’ve dug into the itemization hole, as it were).

What Is It

Chill of the Throne is a buff, similar to Sunwell Radiance in BC, that allows all enemy mobs in Icecrown Citadel (coming in 3.3, currently on the PTR) ignore 20% of their targets dodge. Essentially, if you are tanking IC, you can subtract 20% from your total avoidance; however, boss hits will be adjusted to compensate. Let’s continue the disussion.

Why Is It Here?

A couple people from WoW’s development team explain why they are implementing this spell, and Ghostcrawler discusses it a bit more. To summarize, tank avoidance is too high. This is primary because the team that planned out Wrath’s gear did not count on having hardmodes with higher item level gear–in the end, the gear people have is better than the gear the development team thought it would be. This means that, in order to offer any chance of a challenge to a raid, the hits that do actually hit the tank (ie, the ones that are not avoided) have to hit really hard in order to have any chance of killing the tank. What you end up with is healers having to time their big heals to land right after a bit hit (or else spam their biggest heals) and tanks that are unable to reactively use cooldowns.

Ideally (and Ghostcrawler has stated multiple times that this is the aim for Cataclysm), damage from a raid boss should be lower but more consistant (”smoother”), and the challenge in keeping tanks alive should be healers having to worry about running out of mana (i.e., not overhealing) and tanks having to use cooldowns more retroactively.

So, to try to push things that direction for the last raid of this expansion, Blizzard is nerfing avoidance artificially and also nerfing the amount of damage the bosses do (resulting, basically, in lower avoidance but higher mitigation, albeit mitigation via less damage), hoping to smooth out all these giant spikey hits while still creating a risk that the tank will die.

What It Is Not

This is not a worse nerf for druids than other tanks. Let me repeat myself: druids will not suffer worse from this nerf than other tanks. “But druids can only dodge!” you might say. Well, let’s take a look here.

Theoretical (i.e. made up) Avoidance Outside Icecrown

Adjusted with 20% Less Dodge

It’s easy to see that both tanks end up with the same amount of total avoidance. Now, you could go and make arguments about dodge being better than parry for certain tanks, etc. etc. but the main point is that other tanks are being hit just as hard as druids.

Another Note on Gear and Item Level

Guys, just because new gear has a higher item level does not always mean it is better. Ghostcrawler has said time and time again that it’s not designed that way–gear should be a choice, you shouldn’t be able to train a monkey to buy all the newer, higher item level gear and be a better tank/healer/DPS than you were. (This is part of my issue with gear scores in general.)

This public service announcement provided to you by The Altoholic.

Related posts:

1. Two Runes Enter: Stoneskin Gargoyle vs. Swordshattering
2. Role Consolidation, or “Great, Now I’m Useless”
3. PTR 3.0.8 Live
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking

Aug 31

I’m surprised at how long it’s taking the whole PvE discipline priest mindset to sink in, even among other priests. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been discussing specs with other priests and they say something like “Of course, I don’t PvP,” to which I reply “Yeah, me neither.” The response almost invariably is “Oh… then why aren’t you holy?”

Discipline in PvE is all about healing via mitigation. You won’t have the throughput or super-strong AoE that a holy priest is capable of, but you have plenty of tools to be a powerful healer and a very strong single-target healer. Furthermore, your used-up shields will count for zero overheal (because the damage they absorb uses up the shield before the target starts to take damage again!). Let’s go into detail.

Power Word: Shield

Power Word: Shield is the bread and butter of the discipline tree. A large number of talents are designed around making PW:S faster, more powerful, or cause additional effects. Even Weakened Soul, designed to keep you from shielding too often, ends up providing a benefit in the end. Let’s take a look at some talents in particular:

• Improved Power Word: Shield: Pretty straightforward, directly increasing the amount your PW:S absorbs.
• Soul Warding: One of the cornerstones of the discipline tree, Soul Warding completely removes the cooldown on and reduces the mana cost of PW:S.
• Rapture: Another defining discipline talent, Rapture is one of the primary ways in which you will regain mana during a fight. This is one of the reasons discipline priests gem for intellect instead of spirit.
• Borrowed Time: In addition to providing 40% more spellpower toward your PW:S (it already uses 80.68%, according to WoWWiki), it also provides you with 25% haste until your next spell–and Penance (see below) doesn’t eat the effect.

Divine Aegis

Divine Aegis is, most simply, a miniature Power Word: Shield that appears on a target after you heal them with a critical heal. The mini-shield absorbs an amount of damage equal to 30% of the amount of the heal, including overhealing. Disc priests favor critical strike chance, so this is a very nice talent. If you crit multiple times before DA is consumed, the effects will stack, but only up to 125-times-the-level-of-the-target (10,000 for level 80 targets).

Renewed Hope

Renewed Hope is a very nice raid-wide buff that gets applied whenever you cast PW:S (which is often–this buff should be almost at 100% uptime). It provides a raw 3% damage mitigation to the entire raid. Go to your WWS/WoL log for a fight, look at “damage taken by raid,” and figure out 3% of that. You “healed” approximately that much damage just by casting PW:S every 20 seconds! For my latest Mimiron 10 kill, this was just shy of 100,000 passive healing. It is important to note, however, that the buffs don’t stack with multiple disc priests.

Renewed Hope also increases the critical strike chance of Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Penance (your three primary throughput spells) when the target has Weakened Soul, easing the pain of not being able to shield the target again.

Penance

Penance is one of the most recognizable healing spells in the game. People who have never seen a discipline priest in action will whisper you, “What is that spell you cast that goes pew pew pew?”

Image courtesy of Wowhead

Penance is a channeled spell. It heals in three ticks, each capable of a separate crit. The first tick hits immediately, the second one second after the start of the cast, and the final two seconds after. Penance is a very strong single-target healing spell, and also stacks Grace (see below) to three stacks all by itself.

Grace

Grace is a buff that appears on a player when you heal them with Flash Heal, Greater Heal, or Penance. Grace can only be on one target per priest at a time, just one of the reasons disc priests excel at single-target healing. At three stacks of Grace, you will heal your target for an additional 9% (other healers do not benefit from the buff). As mentioned earlier, Penance can stack Grace three times on a target in a single cast.

Power Infusion

Power Infusion is a fun little spell that is pretty straightforward–reduce mana cost and increase casting speed by 20% for 15 seconds. I usually find a caster DPS who knows how to use it properly and use it on them every cooldown, complete with an addon that notifies them that they have the buff. (On a side note, it also has one of my favorite looking animations in the game).

Pain Suppression

Perfect for those predictable big-tank-hits, Pain Suppression decreases damage taken by 40% for 8 seconds. It also increases resistance to dispel mechanics, a very PvP-oriented effect.

Typical Talent Spec

Your stereotypical disc healing spec looks very similar to this 57/14/0 spec. A few of the talents, especially in the holy tree, can be moved around, but that is a discussion for another post!

Gearing and Gemming Choices

Discipline priests will focus on critical strike chance for more Divine Aegis procs and bigger heals, intellect for a larger mana pool and better mana regen via Rapture/Replinishment/Shadowfiend, and spellpower for general throughput. You won’t find discipline priests going for a lot of spirit, as it does less for us than our holy brethren. Disc priests usually aim for approximately 10% haste without raid buffs, so that the magic 15% haste (which reduces the GCD to one second) is achieved in raids.

Assessing a Disc Priest’s Performance

Any good healer knows that glancing at the healing meters is not a good way to assess healing performance; however, this is even more true for discipline priests because of the way they do a lot of their healing: via absorbs. Absorbed damage isn’t recorded in the combat logs, and thus not reported on addons such as Recount (however, there are addons and combat log analysis tools that attempt to accurately capture and display this information). For this reason, disc priests will almost always be very low on the meters.

For example, let’s take a look at the same Mimiron 10 kill I mentioned earlier.

As you can see, based on recount’s numbers, I did less healing than the restoration shaman, who was on the raid, and considerably less than the holy paladin, who was on the main tank. Had I been main-tank-healing, my effective healing would be even lower. However, let’s take a look at a graph generated from the numbers provided by World of Logs, a combat log analysis tool that takes disc shields into account:

As you can see, Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis accounted for 429,473 healing, almost 45% of my entire healing for the fight, skyrocketing the amount of healing I did. Also, remember that since shields are damage absorption, any shield or DA proc that is used up has absolutely zero overheal. Here’s a screenshot of my overall healing for the fight, so you can see how things played out a bit more:

I hope you learned something from this humble article. Disc is a very strong PvE healing spec, especially on a single target (such as a tank). Spread the word: discipline priests aren’t just for PvP anymore!

Related posts:

1. Changes to Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking
2. These are the People in your Raid
3. Foray into Multiboxing: RAF Experiment Done
4. Another Change due to PvP Balancing
5. Baby Healer Dings 80

Jun 30

World of Warcraft’s default UI updates your action bars when you learn a new rank of a spell. For example, when you train from Wrath rank 1 to Wrath rank 2, the button where Wrath rank 1 was located on your action bar automatically becomes Wrath rank 2. It’s important to note that each rank of a spell, each training level of a skill, etc. has a unique ID number. So when the UI updates your action bar from Wrath 1 to Wrath 2, it’s replacing the spell ID 5176 on that button to spell ID 5177. Same thing for professions; when you move from Enchanting (Apprentice), spell ID 7411 to Enchanting (Journeyman), spell ID 7412, you actually unlearn the former spell and learn the latter one. WoW automatically updates your action bar for you.

However, WoW does not update the action bar for your second spec. I leveled through my 60’s mostly healing instances on my priest. Almost every time I visited the trainer, I was in my healing spec. During those visits to the trainer, I learned all my new spells, not just my healing ones. So, when at level 68 I finally switched back to my shadow spec, none of the action bar buttons for this spec had the correct rank of the spell on them. I did not notice for a level or two, after I was becoming frustrated with how hard it was to kill mobs.

So remember–if you’re leveling up with dual specs, each time you train, it’s worth it to switch to your alternate spec and check to see if any of the skills you just learned need to be updated on that particular set of action bars.

This public service announcement is brought to you by BinaryMuse.

Related posts:

1. Dual Specs Not Dead Yet
2. Clarification on Dual Specs at the Class Panel
3. The Death of the Epic Mount Quests
4. My Day as a Tree
5. Double-Specs Not Dead Yet

Feb 23

Corpse Explosion is a talent in the death knight Unholy tree. It didn’t used to look like this, it used to say something to the fact of:

Corpse Explosion
1 Unholy
Cause a corpse to explode for craptastic Shadow damage to all enemies within 20 yards.  Will use a nearby corpse if the target is not a corpse.  Does not affect mechanical or elemental corpses.

I feel certain that if the WoW tooltip system supported italics, that “craptastic” would indeed have been italicized.

The reason Corpse Explosion sucked so badly was two-fold: first, its cost was an unholy rune. I have so, so many better things to do with an unholy rune, like say for instance, casting Scourge Strike? The second reason it was a horrible talent is because it did very little damage. Put those two things on the fact that you needed a corpse to even use it and you’ve got yourself a truly worthless talent.

My guess is almost nobody took it, because a little while back it was changed. Now, it costs 40 runic power and does significantly more damage. How much more damage? Well, I wasn’t sure, so as I respecced last weekend to pick up Anti-Magic Zone, I decided to nab Corpse Explosion too, and take it for a test drive.

Short version: I like it. A lot.

Long version: In my current tank gear, Corpse Explosion does approximately 1000 damage to affected mobs. That’s not as much as a Death Coil, but it’s AoE, and unlike Unholy Blight it does not take time to do its damage. It’s really good for quick bursts of AoE damage or threat (assuming there is a corpse around). Violet Hold comes to mind, as does the hallway between Noth and Heigan (the one with all the bats and stuff). And in AoE situations, if Unhoy Blight is already ticking, or if the mobs won’t live long, I’d rather toss out a Corpse Explosion than a Death Coil.

Furthermore, if you cast it on your ghoul, he will explode! This includes both pet ghouls and Risen Ally ghouls. I’m not sure if it actually explodes them per the spell or if it makes them cast the “Explode” spell, but either way they do indeed explode.

It also helps that the spell is insanely fun to use anyway. I mean, just look at that picture at the top of the article! Furthermore, it can be cast on player corpses. Raid member die to Heigan’s dance? Take THAT! Completely owned that ganker on a PvP server? Forget /spit, just explode their corpse! Nothing quite as humiliating.

In case your wondering, after a corpse is exploded you’re left with either a pile of bones or a hunk of meat with bones sticking out–both of which can be looted, skinned, mined, and so forth as normal. As an added bonus, the pile of whatever is always the same size, from a gnome death knight (kill it!) to Gruul.

All in all, my test drive is pretty much complete–Corpse Explosion is staying on my action bar.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Unholy Tree
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking
4. Tanking as an Unholy Death Knight
5. This Just In: 2.4 Hits the PTR!

Feb 17

Today I am going to lead you on a discussion about the two major tanking runes for Death Knights: Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (SG) and Rune of Swordshattering (SS).

Diminishing Returns

One key contept to understand in this debate is that of diminishing returns. Diminishing returns on avoidance stats, new to WoTLK, is a method of making a certain attribute less useful the more you have of it.

For example, let’s pretend that 100 dodge rating increased your dodge chance by 1%. For your first 100 rating, you’d have a 1% dodge chance. But because of diminishing returns, the next 100 rating might only give 0.95% dodge chance. The third 100 rating might give 0.90% dodge chance, and so on. This is an oversimplification of the topic, but it gets the point across–if you’re interested in more, check out this thread at TankSpot.

Why Does it Matter?

It matters because both runes provide their avoidance outside of diminishing returns. That means that the 25 defense skill from SG provides a straight 3% avoidance (1% miss, 1% dodge, 1% parry) and SS 4% (straight-up 4% parry).

Benefits of Swordshattering

Swordshattering, as mentioned, provides a plain 4% parry chance, while Stoneskin Gargoyle provides only 3%. Furthermore, 2% HP is not a lot, though it certainly shouldn’t be discredited–for a tank with 30,000 health, 2% would only be 600. Furthermore, since Rune Strike only becomes usable after a parry or a dodge (not a miss), Swordshattering is a slightly better threat rune (extra 2% chance to activate Rune Strike).

Benefits of Stoneskin Gargoyle

The major benefit of the Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle is the ability to build your tank set without worrying so much about remaining at 540 defense (the soft cap for being uncrittable by level 83 raid bosses). Although technically not superior to SS, SG allows you to gem and enchant for things other than defense rating, and gives you freedom in your gearing choices–especially since it is hard to remain uncrittable as a death knight once you start upgrading to epic pieces with better avoidance.

Conclusion

The conclusion is this: there is no definite conclusion! (I told you this was a “discussion”!) If you can remain uncrittable and use the Rune of Swordshattering, great! However, if you feel you want more gear/gem/enchant options, or need to reach the defense “cap”, by all means use the Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle, there’s nothing wrong with it!

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking
2. Chill of the Throne: Sunwell Radiance 2.0
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
4. Two Pugs Enter: Stupidity vs. Ignorance
5. Patch 2.4

Jan 15

In my recent death knight series–specifically, the frost tree article–I mentioned that the cooldown for Howling Blast would be removed, likely shooting dual-wielding DPS death knights to the top of the charts in DPS when compared to other specs. Well, it appears that the devs agree, and a five-second cooldown has been reinstated for Howling Blast.

We knew there was a risk in taking the Howling Blast cooldown off. Unfortunately, we saw dual-wield DK numbers as high as ever even with the Killing Machine and Gargoyle nerfs. It typically only happened when the DK was fighting multiple targets, which suggests Howling Blast is the right thing to change.

In another blue post, Ghostcrawler reiterates that dual-wield is supposed to be “on par” with the other, 2H DK specs, which is a shift in thinking from every other class that can dual-wield. I find this particularly interesting–that is, I can’t help but wonder why they changed their thinking in this case. At any rate, I’m a fan of big two-handed weapons, so I’m relieved that dual-wielding–wich is only really viable with one spec–isn’t going to become the only respectible DPS build.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics

Jan 11

Welcome to Part 7 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about the unholy talent tree.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

The Unholy Tree

The unholy tree deals the most magic damage of any of the death knight trees. It focuses on improving the duration and strength of the death knight’s diseases, and also brings significant improvements to the death knight’s ghoul. Furthermore, unholy has arguably the best AoE damage of any death knight spec.

Death Runes

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that causes certain runes to become death runes after using certain abilities. For unholy, this talent is Reaping. This talent changes blood runes into death runes when using Blood Boil and Blood Strike.

Strike

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that gives you a new strike. For unholy, this ability is Scourge Strike.

Scourge Strike is a melee attack that deals its damage as shadow damage–which means that it ignores armor, a boon for both PvE and PvP.

Aura

Each death knight talent tree has a passive aura that affects your party or raid. For unholy, this aura is Unholy Aura, which boosts your raid’s run speed by 15%. There is a lot of disagreement about whether or not Unholy Aura is a good investment of two talent points for PvE raiding–my personal opinion is anything that gets folks out of the (insert random element here) is great, and the aura is a boon to leveling and grinding.

Runic Power Ability

Each death knight talent tree has an ability that uses runic power as it’s 51-point talent. For unholy, this ability is Unholy Blight. Although Unholy Blight isn’t as fun or as useful now as it was during beta, it is still a great spell (especially for 40 runic power come 3.0.8) that deals AoE damage over time to all enemies in range. Great for both AoE tanks and DPSers.

Unholy death knights also have the option of speccing into Summon Gargoyle. This commonly underrated spell does very good damage, and the developers have stated it will be nerfed.

After patch 3.0.8, the ability Corpse Explosion (which currently costs an unholy rune to cast) will cost only runic power, and will do significantly more damage than it does now.

Raid Buffs

Unholy’s most notable “buff” isn’t really a buff at all. Anti-Magic Zone places a stationary, translucent bubble on the ground, and spell damage taken is reduced for anyone inside the dome.

Furthermore, unholy death knights can spec into Ebon Plaguebringer. If they do so, when any of the death knight’s diseases are on a target, that target also takes additional spell damage from any source.

Unholy DPS

Unholy DPS depends heavily on diseases and other magic damage. Talents like Epidemic, Crypt Fever, Ebon Plaguebringer, Wandering Plauge, Rage of Rivendare and Unholy Blight improve disease damage and utility, as well as AoE damage. Unholy also receives a DPS and utilility boost in the form of Master of Ghouls, which causes a summoned ghoul to be treated like a controllable pet with no duration (it will last until it is killed or is dismissed). A MoG ghoul does quite a bit of damage, and should not be scoffed at.

Unholy Tanking

Unholy is a popular tanking spec. The general concensus is that (before patch 3.0.8), unholy is the better tanking tree after a death knight has enough avoidance to keep Bone Shield up for 30 seconds or longer. However, after patch 3.0.8, Bone Shield will only have 20% damage mitigation, instead of 40%, and it seems likely that, at least in theorycrafting, frost will come out ahead, although unholy will remain a solid tanking tree. The additional AoE damage brought by the tree makes it especially popular for AoE tanking 5-mans and heroics.

Unholy DPS Specs

• 17/0/54: Unholy DPS
  This is the basis for most traditional unholy DPS specs. Some of the points are flexible. After patch 3.0.8 brings 70% passive AoE avoidance to ghouls via Night of the Dead, I suspect placing two points here from Desecration will be quite common.

Unholy Tank Specs

• 10/5/56: Tank
  An unholy tank build, while keeping the staple five talent points from each tree, focuses on good AoE threat and additional magic avoidance via Magic Suppression and Anti-Magic Zone. Other points, such as those spent in On a Pale Horse, can be moved around in the talent tree per the tank’s preference. Bladed Armor from the blood tree is popular, as the AP gain from tank gear is quite significant.

Rotations

I will keep track of runic power, but only runic power generated by runic abilities, including the Glyph of Icy Touch. I will take Dirge into account. If you have more runic power during a section where you are dumping runic power, keep doing so until you cannot any longer.

While Death and Decay is our most efficient AoE spell, be sure to be careful with this ability while not tanking–don’t steal aggro!

DPS Rotation

1. Start by applying your diseases by using Icy Touch and Plague Strike:

2. In a single-target scenario, use your blood runes to Blood Strike twice; in an AoE situation, use Pestilence and then Blood Boil (the AoE situation steals a death rune from you, which causes you to miss out on a Plague Strike later–simpy replace it with Blood Strikes):

or

3. Now ScourgeStrike:

4. Use Summon Gargoyle or Death Coil (or Unholy Blight in an AoE situation) to dump runic power (one global cooldown):

//

5. Wait for your frost and unholy runes to cool…

…and cast Scourge Strike again:

6. Now wait for your second death rune to cool…

…and Scourge Strike once more:

7. If your diseases are still up, you can Scourge Strike yet again. Otherwise, Icy Touch and Plague Strike applies the diseases:

/

8. You’ve got a bunch of runic power, use it on your Gargoyle, Death Coil, or Unholy Blight:

//

9. Time to repeat the rotation.

Tanking Rotation

For a tanking rotation, follow the guidelines in the tanking article.

Related posts:

1. Tanking as an Unholy Death Knight
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Blood Tree
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight

Jan 11

Welcome to Part 6 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about the frost talent tree.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

The Frost Tree

The frost tree is mistakenly referred to as both the “tank tree” and the “dual wield” tree. While there are talents in the frost tree that significantly boost dual-wielding ability and mitigation, none of the death knight’s trees are meant for any one role.

That being said, the frost tree is a very strong tanking tree, especially at lower-levels of avoidance (where a death knight tank wouldn’t have enough avoidance to keep Bone Shield up very long).

Death Runes

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that causes certain runes to become death runes after using certain abilities. For frost, this talent is Blood of the North. This talent changes blood runes into death runes when using Pestilence and Blood Strike.

Strike

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that gives you a new strike. For frost, this ability is Frost Strike.

Frost Strike is unique in that it costs runic power, rather than runes, to cast. The attack cannot be dodged, parried, or blocked, so is a reliable source of damage. Thus, frost death knights do not cast Death Coil as their runic power dump.

Frost also gets a second double-rune ability, called Howling Blast. More on this in the “Frost DPS” section, below.

Aura

Each death knight talent tree has a passive aura that affects your party or raid. For frost, this aura is Frost Aura, which boots your raid’s spell resistances by an amount equal to the death knight’s level–so, at level 80, every raid member would gain 80 spell resistance. This does not stack with a shaman’s totems or a paladin’s auras, but it does stack with the frost tree’s Acclimation.

It is common for frost DPS death knights to skip this talent, unless required by the fight or the raid leader.

Runic Power Ability

Each death knight talent tree has an ability that uses runic power as it’s 51-point talent. For frost, this ability is Hungering Cold. This ability is very situational, and seems to be most fitting for PvP, tanking, and “oh crap” moments. It does place Frost Fever on every mob in a 10 yard radius from the death knight, giving a boost to one of the frost death knight’s primary abilities–more on this later.

As mentioned above, frost death knights will find themselves casting Frost Strike as their primary runic power dump.

Raid Buffs

Frost death knights bring additional physical mitigation to the tank in the form of Improved Icy Touch–the slower the boss hits the tank, the less damage the tank takes. Furthermore, if specced into it, death knights bring melee haste in the form of Improved Icy Talons. This does not stack with a shaman’s Windfury Totem, though a shaman must spec into Improved Windfury Totem to match this death knight talent.

Frost DPS

Frost death knights will do most of their DPS via (gasp!) frost damage. This has the benefit of ignoring armor mitigation (since frost damage is magical). Frost has two double-rune abilities: Howling Blast, and (because Howling Blast has a cooldown), Obliterate. Annihilation, which allows Obliterate to deal damage without consuming diseases, is a must for this spec.

Frost DPS tends to be spikier than the other specs, do to talents like Killing Machine, Deathchill, and Rime.

Frost is also the primarily the tree that makes dual-wielding death knights viable; we will discuss this later in the article.

After Patch 3.0.8

3.0.8 will be removing Howling Blast’s cooldown, which will likely make frost DPS even more reliant on magical damage, and will also likely increase the viability of the dual-wield spec.

Frost Tanking

Frost is a very strong tanking tree, due to talents such as Lichborne, Frigid Dreadplate, Howling Blast (for AoE threat), Unbreakable Armor, Guile of Gorefiend, and Frost Strike (which cannot be avoided or mitigated, and is good for threat). Frost also offers a good amount of control, including slowing mobs melee attacks and a mass, 10-second crowd control.

Frost DPS Specs

• 17/54/0: Raid DPS
  Almost all two-handed frost DPS specs will look like this. Dark Conviction in the blood tree serves to increase the proc rate of Killing Machine.
• 15/37/19: “Tri-Spec” Dual Wield
  This is basically the only talent spec that makes dual-wielding death knights viable. You will want a slow main-hand weapon for larger ability hits and Blood-Caked Blade procs (when your offhand procs Blood-Caked Blade, it’s calculated from main-hand damage), and a fast offhand (combined with the haste) for more procs. Howling Blast is your primary double-rune ability, since it deals damage independently of weapon damage. The rotation is very simple because there are no death rune procs. After patch 3.0.8, the idea is to proc free Howling Blasts as often as possible.

Frost Tank Specs

• 11/53/7: Tank
  Frost tanking specs vary, and there is a lot of debate about which is best here and there. I would go with something along the lines of this one; you get all of the strong mitigation talents (including the spell mitigation talents in deep frost) and Bladed Armor (because you will have a ton of armor).

Rotations

I will keep track of runic power (denoted by “X RP”), but only runic power generated by runic abilities, including the Glyph of Icy Touch. I will take Chill of the Grave into account. If you have more runic power during a section where you are dumping runic power, keep doing so until you cannot any longer.

Because of the skikey, proc-ish nature of the frost tree, you will have to determine the best time to use Howling Blast (on a six-second cooldown) instead of Obliterate. You will generally want to save them for Rime procs, except in AoE situations, as Obliterate does quite a bit of damage on its own. (Remember, after patch 3.0.8, this will not be a problem.)

DPS Rotation

1. Start by applying your diseases by using Icy Touch and Plague Strike:

2. Use your blood runes to Blood Strike twice:

3. Cast Obliterate or Howling Blast:

or

4. Frost Strike to dump runic power (one global cooldown):

5. Wait for your frost rune to cool…

…and cast Icy Touch again, followed by Plague Strike:

6. Now wait for your second death rune to cool…

…and Obliterate:

7. Obliterate again:

8. You’ve got a bunch of runic power, Frost Strike it away. This will eat a couple global cooldowns:

9. Time to repeat the rotation.

Tanking Rotation

For a tanking rotation, follow the guidelines in the tanking article, using Howling Blast as your double-rune ability when you can.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Blood Tree
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Unholy Tree
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics

Jan 11

Welcome to Part 5 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about the blood talent tree.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

The Blood Tree

The blood tree is full of talents to boost your single-target DPS and self healing. While blood is a very popular leveling spec, and will probably be a popular end-game DPS spec, it is currently a little weak in AoE and tanking–this issue has been spotted by the developers and they have indicated they are working on fixes.

Death Runes

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that causes certain runes to become death runes after using certain abilities. For blood, this talent is Death Rune Mastery. It is the only talent of its type that procs only from double-rune abilities (Death Strike and Obliterate). The blood tree has strong synergy with Annihilation, in the third-tier frost tree talents. Annihilation allows you to use Obliterate without consuming your diseases which alters the blood rotation a bit.

Strike

Each death knight talent tree has a talent that gives you a new strike. For blood, this ability is Heart Strike.

Heart Strike is an upgrade to Blood Strike. You can see that they each cost only one rune, and each do basically the same thing; Heart Strike simply has higher numbers and the added benefit of preventing haste effects on the target (after patch 3.0.8, Heart Strike will no longer prevent haste effects, and will instead strike an extra target, upping blood’s AoE potential). Because Heart Strike only costs one rune, blood specced death knights will focus on a high frequency of strikes, rather than a lower frequency of harder-hitting strikes (which is the norm for death knights). Blood specced DPSers will use Death Strike or Obliterate in conjunction with Death Rune Mastery to get multiple Heart Strikes out.

Aura

Each death knight talent tree has a passive aura that affects your party or raid. For blood, this aura is Blood Arua, causing each raid member to heal themselves for 2% (4% after patch 3.0.8) of the damage that person does.

Runic Power Ability

Each death knight talent tree has an ability that uses runic power as it’s 51-point talent. For blood, this ability is Dancing Rune Weapon. While on a longish cooldown, this ability does good DPS and scales very well with gear. Some death knights opt for Gargoyle in the unholy tree instead. (This will likely change once Gargoyle’s damage is brought down.)

Blood death knights will also find themselves casting Death Coil as a general purpose runic power dump due to the talent Sudden Doom.

Raid Buffs

Blood death knights bring a raid buff called Abomination’s Might. This is the same buff that is provided by a shaman’s Unleashed Rage.

Blood DPS

Blood DPS is all about keeping your health high for Blood Gorged and pushing out tons of physical damage. Talents like Vendetta and Rune Tap make blood a great leveling or grinding spec, and the high amount of self-healing via Bloodworms, Mark of Blood, and Vampiric Blood lends itself to soloing group quests and elites. With talents such as Two-Handed Weapon Specialization, Dark Conviction, Bloody Vengence, Hysteria, and Dancing Rune Weapon, you will find that blood is a very strong single-target DPS tree, but a bit weak in AoE.

Blood DPS Specs

• 51/13/7: Raid DPS w/ Annihilation
  This spec includes Annihilation, from the frost tree, to allow you to use Obliterate without consuming your diseases. The downside is that you have to spend extra points in frost to get to it, as it’s on the third tier. However, I’ve taken Toughness on the first tier, to boost the AP gain from Bladed Armor.
• 50/0/21: Raid DPS w/ Gargoyle
  This spec opts to use Gargoyle as a runic power dump instead of Dancing Rune Weapon. This spec benefits from the strength-increasing talents of unholy, but by leaving out Annihilation, Obliterate consumes your diseases, altering the blood rotation significantly.

Rotations

It should be noted that these rotations will not include your major runic focus dump (Dancing Rune Weapon or Gargoyle). Simply replace your Death Coil sections with your chosen ability, and do not use Death Coil (other than Sudden Doom procs) while the abilities are draining runic power.

I will keep track of runic power, but only runic power generated by runic abilities, including the Glyph of Icy Touch–talents such as Butchery will modify this value; simply Death Coil until you can’t anymore.

The blood DPS rotation depends rather heavily on whether or not you take Annihilation from the frost tree. This is because without it, Obliterate removes diseases, and you have to reapply them after the first part of the rotation. However, since only the second half of the rotation is different, we’ll split when we get there.

Both Specs

1. Start by applying your diseases by using Icy Touch and Plague Strike:

2. Heart Strike twice:

3. Obliterate, converting your unholy and frost runes into death runes:

4. Use a runic power ability until you can’t anymore–either Death Coil or your “big” runic power dump. For this example, we will assume a Sudden Death proc (for a free Death Coil) and then use 40 runic power on another one, using up two global cooldowns:

Here is where the rotation changes depending on your spec. If you took Annihilation, your diseases are still on the target, and you can continue to use your strikes; if you didn’t, you will need to reapply your diseases.

With Annihilation

5. Once your frost and unholy runes cool down…

… use Obliterate again, creating two more death runes:

6. Now use your blood runes and death runes to Heart Strike four times in a row:

Notice how, after the final Heart Strike shown above, the death rune (that changed back to unholy) didn’t get placed on its full 10 second cooldown; that is because it cooled down after using the second Heart Strike, and sat dormant during the 1.5 seconds we used to Heart Strike a third time, and thus gave us a 1.5 second bonus to cooldown time when used. See the basics article under “Basic Death Knight Combat”

7. Now you have 80 runic power, and possibly a Sudden Death proc, so Death Coil your heart out (assuming you’re not using one of your bigger runic power dumps).

8. Since that used up three global cooldowns (approximately), your runes should be about cooled down…

… and it’s time to start the rotation again. Use your death runes on Icy Touch and Plague Strike to rebuild your diseases, as in step one.

Without Annihilation

Here is where we left our runes in step four, above:

5. Since you don’t have Annihilation, you must reapply your diseases. Wait one second for your frost rune to cool, use Icy Touch, and immediately Plague Strike:

6. Now use both blood runes and both death runes for Heart Strike:

Notice again the 1.5 second cooldown on the last unholy rune, for the same reason as mentioned in the “With Annihilation” step six.

7. Since you had to Icy Touch again, you’ve got quite the store up of runic power; you should be able to Death Coil at least twice, probably three times due to Sudden Death. This uses three global cooldowns:

8. Now it’s time to Icy Touch and Plague Strike, reapplying your expiring diseases and starting the rotation again.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Unholy Tree
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics
5. Tanking as an Unholy Death Knight

Jan 10

Welcome to Part 4 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about death knight tanking.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

Death Knight Tanking

Tanking, at its most basic, has a basic goal (well, really two equally important goals combined into one): hold aggro of the mob(s) while staying alive. Like DPSing, these goals can be accomplished with an appropriate spec, gear, rotation, and some amount of skill.

Gear and Attributes

As mentioned earlier, tanking death knights will want to focus on several attributes.

• Defense Rating (until capped at 689, or 540 defense skill)
• Stamina, Armor, Dodge (and agility), and Parry (and strength)
• “DPS focused” attributes (for threat)

One thing to keep closely in mind while gearing up is that death knights do not use a shield. They are designed to tank with a two-handed weapon, and a higher-than-average amount of avoidance. For this reason, you will want to avoid items with stats such as block rating and block value, and concentrate instead on parry or dodge. Note that strength increases parry indirectly, as does agility dodge, and with the baseline death knight ability Forceful Deflection, death knights get extra parry from strength (this is strength calculated after talents and buffs, so it is very nice).

Dual-Wield Tanking

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not a fan of dual-wield tanking. A lot of people out there are bound and determined to make it work, and that’s fine, but don’t send me emails asking my opinion, because my outright answer will be that that’s not how the class was designed. Blue posters have gone so far as to literally say that they want both dual-wielding and two-handed weapon DPS specs to be viable, but are not designing the class to effectively tank by dual-wielding.

The main reason for this is the fact that, while dual-wielding, your hit chance goes through the floor. You have a much harder time hitting a boss mob, and many mobs have an increased swing speed after parrying an attack, meaning you take more damage more often. Making up your miss chance with hit rating means you’re spending your item points budget on hit rating instead of mitigation/avoidance attributes.

However, this topic leads us to our next point:

Two-Handed Tanking Weapons

Basically, there are none. By that, I mean there are no two-handed weapons in the game that focus on defense rating and stamina, except for this green quest reward. While it may be a decent weapon to hold you over until you can reach uncrittable by other armor alone, it will not hold out in the long run. Also keep in mind we can’t use a shield, making it even more difficult to reach the defense cap. These are things you should keep in mind while gearing up. (Being able to dual-wield two tanking weapons, which are all one-handed, is the primary reason for the idea of dual-wielding tanking in the first place.) In the meantime, try to find a nice weapon with good damage for threat, and as much stamina and other “tank-like attributes” as you can. PvP weapons may end up looking very good for death knight tanks, since resilience can effectively take the place of some defense rating for purposes of uncrittability.

Patch 3.0.8 was going to introduce two two-handed tanking weapons, but they were removed during the PTR testing phase.

Buff Food

As usual, there is some great buff food out there for tanks. The two I recommend are:

• Strength (for parry) and Stamina Food: Dragonfin Filet
• Expertise and Stamina Food: Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak (who came up with that recipe?)

Frost Presence and Threat

Don’t be a n00b–remember to switch into your high-threat, high-mitigation, high-health Frost Presence before you start tanking! (I only say it that way because I tanked a few group quests in Unholy Presence…)

It should be noted that death knights have only two abilities that deal bonus threat–that is, threat above and beyond the normal threat done by damage. These abilities are Death and Decay and Rune Strike. So, the majority of your threat will come from high-damage abilities, which is then amplified by the Frost Presence threat modifier of 45%.

Rune Strike is an ability that only “lights up” after you dodge or parry an attack. It does a high amount of damage, and also, as mentioned, extra threat. However, once patch 3.0.8 hits, this spell will do less damage and more threat, as it was created as a tanking tool, and instead PvP death knights are using it to mow down dual-wielding classes in PvP.

Rune Strike is a “next melee” ability, meaning once you use the ability, your next regular white attack will be replaced with the Rune Strike.

Bonus Mitigation

Death knights have a nice ability to hit to keep the damage down a bit (and even more depending on talent spec! Again, more on those later). Icebound Fortitude is the spell to which I am referring. After patch 3.0.8, this ability will be weaker but scale with defense skill, making it more like a Shield Wall for death knight tanks and less like a Divine Shield in PvP.

Get Over Here!

In addition to a normal taunt, death knights have an ability called Death Grip. It basically pulls a mob to you (note that most boss type mobs are immune!) and forces it to attack you for three seconds, much like a warrior’s Mocking Blow. Note that this is not a taunt! After the three seconds are up, the mob will go right back to the character with the highest threat against it.

Be careful with death grip. Don’t use it to pull all the time just because it’s fun; remember, if you pull a mob to you, it will immediately start hitting you in the face, causing the healer to have to heal you before you can build threat on the other mobs in the pull–making for an unhappy, and quite possibly dead, healer. Pull with Icy Touch or some other ranged attack in these cases.

There are, however, some advanced tactics you can use with Death Grip, especially if you have a good, non-laggy Internet connection. One I use with one of my favorite mages is to select skull, queue up Death and Decay (see below) and target it, but don’t cast it yet. The mage will start polymorphing his target, and just as he starts I’ll click to cast Death and Decay and and Death Grip the primary mob to me before the polymorph lands. Now, the mob is sheeped in place, my primary target is hitting me (where I can build threat and prepare to spread diseases), and although the healer is forced to heal me, all the mobs have to run through my Death and Decay to get to him or her, so I’ll get aggro anyway.

Be careful, as if you have casters in your group of mobs, this may not work 100%, but you can pick and choose which mobs to death grip and crowd control for best results.

Oh No!

Death knights receive a very fun “Oh crap!” button at level 80: Army of the Dead. While fully channeling the spell, this ability summons several non-controllable ghouls that will, at its most basic, run amok and taunt things. This can be a great way to buy time for your party to battle rez and heal up, etc.

Tanking Rotations

Tanking rotations, like DPS rotations, depend heavily on talent spec, so see the related articles later in the series for more details.

Let’s take a look at a typical multi-mob pull. This also works very well for an AoE DPS rotation (just make sure you’re not in frost presence, and hold off on your high threat abilities until the tank has aggro).

1. Death knights have only two “high amount of threat” abilities, and one of them is Death and Decay. This ability is a targeted AoE attack, and is often compared to a paladin’s consecration. You will often open with this ability, either right away, or after using another pulling ability. Let’s start out with DnD (notice its expensive 3-rune cost):

(Also, if for a split second you thought I was talking about the other DnD… well, you’re as geeky as me!)

2. On a pull with multiple mobs, such as this one, you will want to get your diseases down quickly with Icy Touch and Plague Strike (costing a frost and an unholy)…

…and then spread them around with Pestilence (one blood), once all mobs are in range (Glyph of Pestilence helps here):

3. To help build even more AoE threat, assuming health is not an issue, I usually use Blood Tap here to get an instant any-purpose rune (remember, death runes count as any rune you need)…

… and hit Blood Boil to explode my diseases on every mob in range (should be all of them!)

(Note that your death rune will immediately switch back to a blood rune.)

4. If you have the runic power, you can use a runic power dump, such as Death Coil, to build threat here. Remember to keep looking for your Rune Strike!

5. From this point out, you can follow the steps outlined in the DPS article and use one of your double-rune abilities:

6. Before long your remaining unholy rune will be cooled, and you can use your double rune ability again.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
2. Tanking as an Unholy Death Knight
3. Two Runes Enter: Stoneskin Gargoyle vs. Swordshattering
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree