Jan 10

Welcome to Part 3 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about death knight DPS.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

Death Knight DPS

The basic goal of any DPS character is always the same: to do the most damage possible without pulling aggro. With the proper spec (and we will discuss each in depth later), rotation, gear, and skill, a death knight is capable of putting out quite a bit of damage. So let’s jump right into it!

Gear and Attributes

As we discussed earlier, DPS death knights will want to focus on the following attributes, in order:

• Hit rating (until you reach the raid cap of 295, assuming a two-handed weapon)
• Strength/Attack Power (2 attack power per point of strength, strength scales w/ Blessing of Kings, etc.)
• Agility/Crit Rating

These are the most beneficial attributes for a DPS death knight. Armor penetration and haste, while better than nothing, are not that great for death knights.

Buff Food

There are several types of buff food that are very beneficial for a DPS death knight. Level cooking, or make friends with a cook!

• Attack Power Food: Mammoth Meal, Mega Mammoth Meal
• Hit Rating Food: Snapper Extreme
• Crit Rating Food: Wyrm Delight, Spiced Wyrm Burger

Diseases

Icy Touch and Plague Strike both apply a disease to the target (Frost Fever and Blood Plague). The unholy talent Crypt Fever (and Ebon Plaguebringer) apply a third disease to the target whenever either of the other two are active. Keeping targets diseased is important, as they cause damage over time and amplify the damage of your strikes when active on a target. Pestilence is a great spell for AoE situations, when you want to get your diseases on all targets in range quickly.

Give it a Shout! … Sorta.

Death knights have an ability similar to a warrior’s shout, but not a shout, per se: Horn of Winter. It buffs you and your party’s/raid’s strength and agility. Right now it costs runic power to use, after patch 3.0.8, it will instead generate runic power and have a 30 second cooldown.

Ghouls

Death knights have an ability called Raise Dead. This ability will change in patch 3.0.8, but first let’s look at how it works now.

Before Patch 3.0.8

First, if you target an NPC humanoid corpse, or you have Corpse Dust (sold by reagent vendors) in your inventory, you can summon a non-controllable pet called a ghoul. This “default” ghoul works much like a druid’s treants used to, using it’s sometimes unpredictable AI brain to help you kill stuff. The ghoul will stick around for two minutes, at which time he will despawn (or, more accurately, fall apart). Three minutes later, when the cooldown on Raise Dead is over, you can do it again.

Second, if you instead target a dead party member (say, who died in an instance, etc), you can use Raise Dead to raise that player as a ghoul. Your five-minute cooldown will still trigger, but this ghoul will be controllable by the player you targeted! As a ghoul, the player will have access to abilities that depend on energy, like a rogue, including some basic attacks, a stun, and a “self-destruct button” that causes them to explode and do AoE damage.

Finally, if you spec unholy and take the talent Master of Ghouls, any ghoul raised from the corpse of an NPC of via Corpse Dust will be given a pet bar, be under your direct control, and will not have a limited duration. (If he dies, you still have to wait for the cooldown on Raise Dead.) Unholy ghouls, as they are referred to, can be very beneficial in both PvE and PvP, and put out a decent amount of DPS. This is part of the reason unholy is such a popular leveling spec–but that’s for a later article.

After patch 3.0.8

This spell will be split into two spells: Raise Dead, which will raise a pet for you like normal, and Raise Ally, which will only raise a fallen player character and has no reagent cost and a 4-minute duration. The cooldowns will be separate.

DPS Rotations

Though we will cover specific rotations for different talent specs later in the series, the basic attack pattern is still the same:

1. Use Icy Touch or Plague Strike to get one disease on the target, then use the other to get the other disease up. This uses up a frost rune and an unholy rune:

2. Use your double-rune ability (Obliterate, Howling Blast, Death Strike or Scourge Strike, depending on talent spec). This ability uses one frost and unholy rune at the same time:

3. Do something with your blood runes. This depends heavily on talent spec, so for now we’ll stick with the basic Blood Strike (two of them in succession):

4. While waiting for your frost and unholy runes to come back, use one of your runic power dumps (we’ll stick with Death Coil here).

5. Once your runes are cooled down again…

…you will generally use your double-rune ability twice in a row (since your diseases are already on the target).

AoE Rotations

Death and Decay is one of the death knight’s strongest AoE spell–but be careful, it is also a high threat ability. Don’t pull aggro from the tank! We’ll talk about AoE strategies more in the talent spec articles, but take a look at the tanking article under “Tanking Rotations” to get a better idea of the abilities you’d use in an AoE situation (they are very similar).

Related posts:

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

Jan 9

Welcome to Part 2 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about gear for your death knight.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

Death Knight Gear Proficiencies

Death knights are proficient in plate armor; that-is to say, they can wear any type of armor. Like DPS warriors, you may very well find mail or leather gear pieces that have better stats than available plate armor. Of course, if you are tanking, you will want plate armor.

Death knights are able to use several weapon types: 1H and 2H swords, 1H and 2H axes, 1H and 2H maces, and polearms. They may dual-wield one-handed weapons–we will discuss the pros and cons of doing this later.

Gear Attributes Overview

Attribute priorities are very similar for all death knights, though certain attributes will favor certain specs over others.

Strength/Attack Power: All death knight spells scale with attack power, even the ones that seem more “spell like,” such as Death Coil. Death knights gain 2 attack power for every point of strength, just like warriors. Strength will be your primary attribute. Strength for a death knight also increases parry chance more than normal.

Agility/Critical Strike Rating: A death knight requires 62.5 agility to gain 1% melee critical strike chance, but no spell critical strike chance from agility at all. Critical strike rating is good for any death knight, but is not as important as for other classes (for example, a feral druid). Death knights get extra critical strike damage on spell critical hits due to Runic Focus (this is baseline, not talented). Also, talents such as Wandering Plague make a higher critical strike chance attractive. Tanking death knights get dodge from agility.

If specced 5/5 into Bladed Armor, every 18 agility increases a death knight’s attack power by 1, due to gaining 2 armor per point of agility.

Hit Rating/Expertise: Like any DPS characters, DPS death knights will want to reach the hit cap. Expertise is also a good stat for both tanking and DPS death knights, as it reduces the chance for a mob to dodge (from behind or from in front) or parry (from in front only) an attack.

Haste: Haste rating directly increases how much of your DPS comes from normal (white) attacks. Death knights draw a smaller portion of total DPS from white attacks, so haste is not as strong for death knights as other classes. However, Necrosis, Blood Caked Blade, and Killing Machine make haste a bit more valuable to Unholy and Frost specced death knights. Dual-wielding death knights will always benefit more from haste.

However, haste also decreases the global cooldown time, allowing death knights a little leeway in their already very crowded rotations.

Stamina: Obviously as important to death knights as any other DPS/tank character.

Armor Penetration: Armor penetration is decent for some death knights, most notably those that are Blood specced. Blood’s specialty is physical DPS, so armor penetration helps quite a bit. Other specs, such as Unholy (with Scourge Strike) deal their damage as magic damage, which ignores armor anyway.

Caster Stats (Intellect, Spirit): As useless to death knights as they are to warriors–death knights gain no benefit from them.

So, in summary: DPS death knights should focus first on reaching the hit-rating cap (and what expertise is available), then on strength (or attack power), and finally critical strike rating. Tanking death knights will focus on capping defense rating first, then on the traditional tanking stats such as stamina and armor. Death knight tanks are a bit more reliable on avoidance than other tanks, but we’ll discuss this in the tanking article.

Dual-Wield vs. Two-Handed Weapons

There is a lot of discussion in the death knight community over whether dual-wielding is viable, or should even be allowed at all (for lore reasons). There is, however, a vocal minority of death knights that continue to use two one-handed weapons.

Blizzard’s stance is that they don’t want either choice to “win out” in the end; there are talents scattered about the death knight’s trees that benefit one system or the other. Dual-wielding helps build early threat while tanking due to faster swings, and allows a death knight to stack mitigation by using two tanking weapons, which are all one-handed. However, dual-wielding significantly decreases your chance to hit a mob, which is further complicated by the fact that most boss mobs do a “haste counterattack” when they parry a blow. Furthermore, since many death knight abilities are based on weapon damage, they will hit harder while using a two-handed weapon.

Dual-wielding for DPS, assuming the proper talent spec, is just as viable as two-handed specs. In the end, it is all a matter of taste and preference, though I have a feeling most death knights will stick to two-handed weapons for both DPS and tanking.

Recommended Glyphs

While certain glyphs definitely favor specific talent specs, most death knight glyphs are very good for any spec. We will cover the PvE focused ones here.

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Icy Touch: This glyph is great for any death knight. Generally, the DPS contribution of Icy Touch is very low, and the extra 10 runic power at the start of the fight lets you start unloading runic power dumps more quickly. Patch 3.0.8 will change this glyph to remove the damage penalty.

Glyph of Obliterate: Practically required for Frost right now (one of your primary double-rune abilities), and very, very good for Blood as well. Unholy death knights don’t use Obliterate. Patch 3.0.8 will remove the per disease damage penalty, and will also remove the Howling Blast cooldown, possibly rendering this glyph much less useful for frost.

Glyph of the Ghoul: Ghouls provide quite a bit of DPS while they’re up, and this glyph just bumps that number higher. This glyph is great for Unholy death knights with a permanent ghoul, and will become even better after patch 3.0.8.

Glyph of Bone Shield: Unholy death knights only. Extra mitigation for tanks, and another charge (two charges after 3.0.8!) means longer periods of increased DPS for DPS death knights.

Minor Glyphs

Glyph of Pestilence: Manditory for all death knights. There are not very many good minor glyphs to choose from as a death knight. You will use Pestilence any time there are multiple mobs up, and this glyph saves you the hassle from reapplying your diseases when a mob is just a bit out of range.

Glyph of Horn of Winter: Currently lowers the cost of Horn of Winter, but in patch 3.0.8, Horn of Winter will have no cost, and this glyph will increase the duration of the buff for 60 seconds.

Glyph of Death’s Embrace: Good for Unholy death knights who willw ant to keep their pet alive.

Related posts:

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

Jan 9

Welcome to Part 1 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about the very basics of the death knight.
» Back to Introduction / Table of Contents

What is a Death Knight?

Death knights, as we think of them now, are warriors of the Scourge, tasked with serving the Lich King in battle. Player created death knights are death knights who have broken away from Arthas’ control at the battle of Light’s Hope Chapel. The in-game faction “Knights of the Ebon Blade” consist of Arthas’ former death knights.

Class Basics

Death knights…

• …are limited to one per server per account.
• …will not replace an existing character (you do not “transform” one character into a death knight).
• …will take up one of your 10 character slots per server.
• …can only be created if you have a level 55+ character already (patch 3.0.8 will allow you to create a death knight on any server if you have a level 55+ character anywhere, but for now you can only create one on a server where you have a level 55+ character).
• …start at level 55.
• …can be either faction (PvP realm rules still apply).
• …can be any race.
• …wear plate armor.
• …may wield 1H/2H swords, 1H/2H axes, 1H/2H maces, and polearms.
• …can dual-wield.
• …equip “Relics” in their ranged slots.
• …can not equip shields.
• …can tank and DPS.
• …do not have distinct tanking and DPS talent trees.

Starting a Death Knight

To create a death knight, you must have a character on your account that is level 55 or higher. At release, the death knight can only be created on a server where you have a level 55 character. This will change in patch 3.0.8. When you create a death knight, you may choose any race of any faction (but PvP realm rules still apply). You may only have one death knight per server, though a blue post recently revealed that they may remove this restriction in the future.

Your death knight will start at level 55 at a new starting area called Acherus: The Ebon Hold. Here, you will play through the story of how your death knight breaks free from the Lich King. At the end of it all, you will be about level 58 (I was able to go straight from the final quest to Outland in beta, though in live I leveled to 60 in the Plaguelands).

Your death knight is also “born” with a set of pretty good green quality gear. You start off with no talent points. As you complete quests to advance the story, you are awarded pieces of blue gear and talent points–a few at a time. This is nice, as it doesn’t force you to place all your talents at once, helping to keep you from being overwhelmed. However, it may be a good idea to decide which tree you want to go down ahead of time–we will discuss talents in depth in later articles.

Basic Death Knight Combat

Death knight combat is based on a new system which uses two types of resources: runes and runic power. I’ll cover the very basics here.

Death knights have six runes: two blood runes, two frost runes, and two unholy runes. Many of the death knight’s abilities cost runes to cast–some one rune, some two runes, and on very rare exceptions (I can only think of two) three runes. Before you start combat, all your runes are ready to go:

When you use a rune, it gets placed on cooldown. Normally, the time until you can use the rune again is 10 seconds; however, when a rune finishes cooling down, you have a two-second “grace period”–for example, if your rune finishes cooling down, and you wait one second to use it again, the rune will be placed on a nine second cooldown; if you waited two seconds, it would be on an eight second cooldown. Eight seconds is the shortest the cooldown will ever be, unless an attack doesn’t land, in which case the cooldown is only one second.

Here’s what it would look like if you used an ability, such as Plague Strike, that uses one unholy rune:

As soon as the ability is used, the rune starts counting from 10 seconds–after the 10 seconds are over, that particular rune is “cooled” and can be used again.

Certain talents (Death Rune Mastery, Blood of the North, and Reaping) allow you to transform certain runes into death runes when they activate. Death runes count as any type of rune, and add a level of complexity to death knight rotations. Say we had Reaping, shown above, and used Blood Boil, an ability that uses a blood rune. Because of Reaping, that blood rune will become a death rune. Also, keep in mind the unholy rune we used earlier has been cooling down.

Abilities that cost runes to cast generate runic power, or “RP”. Abilities that use one rune generate 10 runic power, abilities that use two runes generate 15 runic power, and abilities that use three runes generate 20 runic power. After patch 3.0.8, all abilities that use more than one rune will generate 15 runic power. You start off with zero runic power, and it builds until it hits the maximum of 100 (unless you have points in Runic Power Mastery). There are certain abilities that cost runic power to cast, including all the 51-point talents (Dancing Rune Weapon, Hungering Cold, and Unholy Blight). While not in combat, runic power slowly fades away, much like rage.

A couple death knight abilities cause a disease debuff. These diseases have different effects, but many death knight abilities scale off the number of diseases on your target–so, to get the most out of your abilities, make sure you’ve got your diseases on your target at all times.

We’ll talk about specific rotations to use while tanking and DPSing in later articles.

Presences

Death knights have three presences, which are similar to paladin’s auras, except they affect only the death knight. Switching to a presence costs one rune of the type that matches the presence’s name, so you won’t do it in combat very often.

Blood Presence is your traditional DPS presence, increasing damage done and healing you for a small amount of the damage you do.

Frost Presence is your tanking presence, giving you extra mitigation, health, and decreasing spell damage taken. This is also your presence for dealing extra threat. Death knights only have two abilities that deal “bonus threat,” so most of your threat comes from dealing high amounts of damage, amplified by Frost Presence.

Unholy Presence is primarily a PvP presence. Increased movement speed is, obviously, a boon in PvP, and the increased attack speed and global cooldown reduction allows you to frontload a lot of damage before a target can get away or start kiting you around.

Runeforging

Death knights get an additional skill known as Runeforging. This skill allows death knights to enchant their weapon with special, death knight only effects, but requires you to be near a Runeforge, which exist only in Acherus: The Ebon Hold and in the Shadow Vault in Icecrown. These enchants take the place of a regular weapon enchant, but tend to be better than their “normal” counterparts.

Death Knight Roles

Death knights can perform well in either a DPS or tanking role. The intent is for every tanking class to be able to main tank fights, and this includes the death knight. We will discuss tanking, DPSing, and decisions on gear and talents that affect a death knight’s ability to perform in these roles further in later articles.

Related posts:

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

Jan 9

Wrath of the Lich King gave us not only the ability to level to 80 and see all the new content along the way, but also to gain the ability to play a brand new class: the death knight. Assuming you have a level 55 character, you will be able to create a death knight on that server right away.

Death knights, being a new class, have been given quite a bit of attention recently. There is a lot of information about them on the Internet. However, because death knights were designed from the ground up, a lot of that information has changed, both between beta to live, and in patches and hotfixes since then. A lot of misconceptions about abilities and strategies still exist. This series will help to sort everything out, and give you the information you need to play your death knight, or group successfully with a death knight.

State of the Death Knight and Upcoming Changes

As mentioned, death knights are a new class. While every class in the game has been changed significantly in Wrath of the Lich King, only the death knight is brand new. Even as we speak, PTR 3.0.8 testers are experimenting changes to death knights, in both DPS and tanking aspects: changes to Rune Strike, adding sigils, easier-to-reach defense cap, additional AoE and tanking tools for blood… the list goes on and on. Over time, the information in this particular guide will be somewhat dated, but remember to check out the rest of the blog for updates and changes.

So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight?

This series will be broken up into 7 parts. We’ll start off with the very basics of the death knight, and move to more advanced topics from there. I will admit that this series will be PvE biased; I am not good at PvP, so even if I liked it you would not want to get your advice here!

These articles will be released over the next few days. If you can’t access a specific article, check the date and time it should be published! All times are in Pacific Standard Time.

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics – January 9th, 9:00 AM
   
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear – January 9th, 2:00 PM
   
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS – January 10th, 9:00 AM
   
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking – January 10th, 2:00 PM
   
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Blood Tree – January 11th, 9:00 AM
   
6. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree – January 11th, 1:00 PM
   
7. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Unholy Tree – January 11th, 5:00 PM
   

Related posts:

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

Oct 9

Today, I took my first foray into Death Knight tanking by tanking Nexus. I’m currently leveling as Unholy; I have tried both Blood and Frost, and while Frost is decent, I can’t really get into the swing of either. Unholy just really works for me. So, that’s the spec I use.

The talent spec I used to tank (because that was the one I was leveling with!) at level 72 was 7/0/56 Let’s take a look at some of the key talents in this build, as well as talents I did not have.

Blood Talents

Talents I Had

• Butchery (Threat)
  I really enjoy having a lot of Runic Power. Your mileage may vary. I don’t know if I’d have this talent in an end-game tanking spec, but it’s nice for leveling.
• Two-Handed Weapon Specialization (Threat)
  Obviously a DPS buff. Since Unholy can be a bit more weapon-damage based than frost (though not as much as Blood), and it’s a great leveling talent, here it is.

Talents I Didn’t Have

• Blade Barrier (Avoidance)
  This is a really nice ability to have. It used to activate when all your runes were cooling down, but now only your Blood runes. You blow through them quickly with Blood Boil, so this will be a great end-game tanking talent, but not necessary while leveling.

Talents I Didn’t Have

• Toughness (Mitigation)
  Obviously a great tanking talent, mandatory for any end-game tank, but not present in my leveling build.

(Frost tanks, which will be very common, will, obviously, go much further down this tree.)

Unholy Talents

Talents I Had

• Morbidity (Threat)
  I love Death and Decay. It has a high rune cost, but there is almost no better way to open a multi-mob pull as Unholy, and the runes actually work out pretty well in the end, but we’ll get to that. I didn’t find myself casting Death Coil a lot, unless it was a single mob, but this is a nice leveling talent and it was there.
• Outbreak, Necrosis, Impurity, and Dirge (Threat)
  These are the standard DPS increasing talents you’ll take early in the tree. Also, I repeat my sentiment about having lots of Runic Power.
• Reaping (Threat)
  Death Runes count as any sort of rune. As you’ll be casting Blood Boil a lot, this is a great talent.
• Desecration (Threat)
  This is a controversial talent. Some people use it in their tanking builds, while others say it’s a 100% DPS talent. I have it for leveling, so I guess I’ll decide later. Here it is anyway.
• Bone Shield (Mitigation)
  The big mitigation talent for Unholy. Every tank should have it. A minute isn’t as long as it sounds, and with such high avoidance, it is possible to keep the buff up for quite a while.
• Crypt Fever, Ebon Plaguebringer, Wandering Plague, Rage of Rivendare, Unholy Blight, and Scourge Strike (Threat)
  The bottom tiers of the Unholy tree really focus on your diseases. You have several talents that improve the effectiveness of your diseases, and Unholy Blight, while not a disease in and of itself, counts as one for the "per disease" abilities, and Scourge Strike’s damage scales with the number of diseases.

Talents I Didn’t Have

• Anticipation (Avoidance)
  A no-brainer for an end-game tank, but not in my spec, mainly because of my level.
  
• Blood Caked Blade (Threat)
  I’ve seen a lot of Death Knights with this in their builds, but I just don’t like it. From my tests, it results in approximately a 1-2% DPS increase, and it’s just not worth it, especially with Necrosis right near it.
• Magic Suppression -> Anti-Magic Zone (Mitigation)
  This pair is really a powerful combo against magic-weilding mobs. I don’t have them in my leveling spec, for obvious reasons, and I haven’t played with them at all. We seemed to do OK without them.

There are certainly more that can be listed, but those are the really big ones.

BFU
Death and Decay
Deaty and Decay is a great way to get initial aggro on a large group of mobs. It is very similar to a Paladin’s Consecration.

U, F, B
If the primary target is close (ie, melee range) I’ll use Plague Strike to get one disease on it, and get the Desecration buff. Otherwise, I’ll use Icy Touch to get the other disease up (since it is a ranged nuke). Either way, both spells get cast on the mob, which causes the talented third disease, followed by Pestilence as soon as the other mobs are in range to spread the love around.

So now, we’ve got three diseases on every target in several yards. If I’ve got the Runic Power, I’ll hit up Unholy Blight (60 Runic Power) to get another "disease" ticking away on the mobs.

Remember, each disease is causing threat on the mobs, as well as setting you up to use your "per disease" abilities.

B, B
Your runes will start coming back a bit staggered (since you used three at once and then three in sequence), but eventually you’ll use two Blood runes to cast Blood Boil twice. This does two things: first, it builds threat on all your diseased targets, and it scales with the number of diseases (and since every target in AoE range has 4 diseases, this is a good amount of damage). Second, it sets up both Blood Runes to come back as Death Runes, which count as any type of rune. So, you can use them to Blood Boil again, if necessary, or use them to Scourge Strike your primary target.

FU, FU (FU)
You’ve used up your two Blood Runes, and they’re coming back as Death Runes, so now you can now give a big "FU" to the mob (sorry) and Scourge Strike it twice (or three times if you use your death runes–sometimes, if the primary target is near dead, I’ll switch to the secondary target to build some threat on it). This is a high-damage ability, that scales with the number of dieases, and causes its damage as shadow damage. This is huge! Shadow damage ignores armor, so you are basically getting a super-buffed, permamant Executioner enchant built into this ability.

Related posts:

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

Jul 14

[Edit: Mystery solved, answer at the end of the post!]

There is something strange about this screenshot, and it’s not just that Alliance practically steamrolled the horde in Arathi Basin (though that is rare). Check out the chat box.

I said “[Demonic] archim”? I meant to type “bahaha” after killing a particulary nasty Warlock with a fellow defender of the Stables. At first glance, all I saw was the “archim” and thought my hands weren’t on the home row, and said such in /say. But then, I realized, that wouldn’t have come out “archim” anyway, and also, I spoke Demonic?

The majority of the people who saw this probably thought, “Oh, he typed ‘/s [Demonic] archim’.” But, I didn’t. At least, I didn’t think I did. I even hit enter to bring up the chat line, then alt+up a few times to check what I typed:

So what happened? What was it that made me speak in Demonic? I am, after all, only a Night Elf Hunter.

[Edit] Thanks to my good friend Marcelo for pointing me to http://www.wowwiki.com/Curse_of_Tongues:

Actually causes the target to speak Demonic in emotes and chat. A CM on Blizzard’s official forums joked on how coders spent time coding this curse to do just that.

Related posts:

1. This Was Interesting, Everyone
2. Even a Single Kara Pugger
3. My Addon: Nice Try
4. New Blog Azeroth Rule
5. Blizzcon, Cataclysm, and Stuff

Apr 1

Today I’m going to take a look at two druid talents: Nurturing Instinct and Improved Leader of the Pack (you couldn’t have guessed, huh?). For those of you with no tooltip skills (lol lrn2tooltip newb), at 2/2 points, Nurturing Instinct (NI henceforth) improves your healing by 100% of your agility and increases healing done to you while in Cat form by 20%, and Improved Leader of the Pack (ILotP) applies a buff to you and your party members that causes healing equal to 4% of the character’s total health everytime they get a melee or ranged critical strike.

I am a huge fan of ILotP. My druid is level 45 as of now, and I have approximately 2000 self-buffed HP. With a critical strike percentage of about 23%, ILotP fires off all the time (the healing can only happen once every six seconds, which is probably fair, because I often see several strings of crits within a couple seconds; that would add up to quite a bit of healing!).

Nurturing Instinct used to suck. Really badly. It used to improve your healing by 25%/50% (per point) of your strength. Druids are pretty crit dependent*, and tend to stack agility over everything else. Now, however, NI improves your healing by agility, which is nice for soloing and off-healing a group when in your tanking or DPS gear. My question was whether or not (1) NI made your HoTs tick more if you cast it and then switch to Cat form, and (2) whether the healing from ILotP was affected by the 20% aura from NI. Time to pull out the old calculator!

Read more… »

Related posts:

1. Travel Speed: Travel Form vs. Mount
2. Why I Love Druids
3. Moving Forward
4. …And Two More Make 70
5. My Day as a Tree

Mar 27

My druid is currently level 39. That means soon I’ll be forking out about 80 gold to get me a shiny new ride. Definitely faster than travel form, but has a three second “cast” time. This got me to thinking: how far do you need to go before your travel form is not as good as your mount? For going from the Auction House to the Bank, surely travel form is better, as by the time I can mount up, cheetah-girl* is already there. So I did some math.

Running at normal speed, we all know, is 100% run speed. Woah, mind-bender there, huh? We’ll say that running at normal speed gains you X units per second. Travel form, at 140% run speed, would net you 1.4*X units per second. A mount, after three seconds, gives you 160% speed and 1.6*X units per second, and an epic (ground) mount 200% speed and 2*X units per second. To make the math nice and even, we’ll make X = 10. That gives us:

Running = 10 units/second
Travel Form = 14 units/second
Mount = 16 units/second
Epic = 20 units/second

The key here is, of course, that travel for gets a 3 second head start. After one second, travel form is 14 units off, while the mounted druid is still rubbing her hands together. After two seconds, 28 units to 0. After three seconds, travel form is 42 units away and the mounted druid is just getting on their cat/kodo. One second later the mounted druid finally makes it 16 units, but the travel form druid is already 56 units away. So how long until the mounted druid catches up with her cheetah sister?

Since I grind in cat form a lot, I figured I’d do the math for both cat and travel forms against both normal and epic land mounts. Here are the results:

16 seconds for a land mount to catch a cat.
9 seconds for an epic land mount to pass a cat.
24 seconds for a land mount to catch a travel form druid.
10 seconds for an epic land mount to catch a travel form druid.

This means that, at level 40, I can get at least from the mailbox to the flight master in Stormwind (probably farther–I’ll have to do some time tests later) as a travel form druid than on my shiny new mount!

*I apologize sincerely for this link.

Related posts:

1. The Death of the Epic Mount Quests
2. Welcome to Outland! Again.
3. …And Two More Make 70
4. New Mount and Vanity Pet Storage
5. Nurturing Instinct and Improved Leader of the Pack

Mar 6

Patch 2.4 is getting closer and closer, and it’s bringing with it some changes–and some not so changes. Let’s look at some highlights:

The Life Tap nerf is gone! The spell on the PTR has been reverted to it’s regular X health for X mana state, and Kalgan has confirmed that no other nerfs are planned for warlocks this patch.

The Mortal Strike style debuff added to the shaman Flametongue Weapon and Totem buffs have also been reversed.

One of my favorite changes so far is this: many spells that hit multiple targets will no longer hit crowd controlled enemies! More specifically, any spells which are not considered AoE spells will not hit extra targets. This includes a druid’s Swipe, a hunter’s Multi-Shot (but not Volley), a shaman’s Chain Lightning, a warrior’s Cleave (but not Thunderclap), etc. I am surprised to note that there are a few missing spells, such as a rogue’s Blade Flurry.

There are several AV changes, as well, including the option to, once again, join as a party (does this just mean party, or also raid?).

These changes are in addition to the plethora of other changes being made. Check out the Test Realm Patch Notes for more information! (Note–that link will go out of date once a new PTR is up, so check out the alternate notes on WoWWiki.)

Related posts:

1. This Just In: 2.4 Hits the PTR!
2. 2 More Reasons Feral Druids should be Excited about Wrath
3. Patch 2.4
4. 2.4 Primal Nethers and Hunter Issues
5. Mods for 2.4 Coming Around

Feb 26

Hortus posted today that another version of Life Tap will be implemented on an upcoming PTR build (which, by the way, means that this isn’t the last build–have to wait some more for 2.4). I don’t know what the change will be yet, but I do know that warlocks all over are complaining like crazy about the previous Life Tap nerf!

Related posts:

1. Another Change due to PvP Balancing
2. Big 2.4 PTR Changes!
3. Patch 2.4
4. New WoW Model Viewer Works with 3.x
5. WotLK in Closed Alpha, or So They Say