Altitis

Unholy Death Knight Macro: Suppressing the Death Grip Ghoul Leap

2008-11-19T09:59:13Z

If you’re leveling unholy, and have specced Master of Ghouls, you may be familiar with the following situation:

There’s a group of mobs relatively close by. Your plan: pick one out with Death Grip, load him up with diseases so that by the time any adds follow, you can hit pestilence and spread the infection around for AoE goodness.

You hit Death Grip… and while your pull flies to you, your Ghoul leaps to its former position, pulling the rest with it and getting trounced fast. Your clean pull is now a bit of a mess.

The macro solution requires two macros.

For Death Grip:

#showtooltip Death Grip

/petautocastoff Leap

/cast Death Grip

Then for your first disease (I usually use Icy Touch when DG is on cooldown for the ranged pull)

#showtooltip

/petautocaston Leap

/cast Icy Touch

Why not enclose Death Grip between autocastoff and autocaston? Apparently the server doesn’t really handle the player cast and the toggles in their proper sequence, that means Leap is toggled off and on before Death Grip is executed and the Ghoul still leaps. Silly, eh?

Anyway, the above works pretty well too.

This was a post from Altitis.

Unholy Death Knight Macro: Suppressing the Death Grip Ghoul Leap

Death Knight Learning Curve, a Good Place to Train

2008-11-18T23:09:12Z

In HFP, there’s the Valley of Bones, close to Zeth’Gor, with buzzards which will normally aggro on death. With Death Grip, you can pull one away safely, kill it, and then start a 3-4 buzzard chain in short sequence.

These chains should be a good way to get really familiar with the cooldowns of abilities, and if you’re blood or unholy, death rune buildup and consumption.

Bonus point, the buzzards can also be integrated in a quest chain at the nearby Zeppelin crash site (after stealing ravager eggs and purifying hellboar meat), and there are tons of Zeppelin debris around for the collection quest you can get at the same place.

This was a post from Altitis.

Death Knight Learning Curve, a Good Place to Train

Some Thoughts on Death Knight Versatility

2008-11-19T14:55:14Z

One thing I found rather fascinating with the DK: each spec handles quite differently than the other two, even if all you’re doing is solo PvE.

Let me explain. My “for keeps” first Death Knight is now a level 62 orc. I specced him unholy, did my rounds in the starter zone, the Plaguelands and now HFP. You could say I’m starting to be quite confortable with the class’ rotations and ability timings.

I rolled a second one because I wanted to try out Blood, and later, just before the end of the newbie quests, took advantage of the free respecs to switch to frost DPS.

And one thing strikes me.

Every single spec handles differently. Oh, the basics are still here, you still apply diseases then leverage them for max damage. But the order, timings and cooldowns of each spec are vastly different, and so far, quite unique.

This was a bit unsettling at first. I expected quite some differences between unholy and the other two (ghoul pets and extended disease DoTs pretty much make that a given), but blood and frost are also very distinct. I don’t know how much this is by design, and will probably generate quite an adapting curve at each respec, but this is definitely another plus to the class.

The other thing I’m starting to see is that strict rotation thinking doesn’t really cut it. It’s more like a rough sequence of events which can be summed up like this:

Load up diseases
Burst with Runic Power if available
Unleash Frost + Unholy (FU) or Blood Abilities
Replenish own health if necessary

There’s a talent in unholy T2 which extends the duration of diseases to 18 seconds, which means DKs with this talent will have longer timespans before needing to refresh their rotations. Stuff is usually long dead before that, however, so for normal leveling mobs, the point is pretty moot.

Some things to consider pre-65 (haven’t investigated the rest, too lazy to build hour-long spreadsheets):

Obliterate is the hardest hitting strike and uses FU runes. It is a finishing move of sorts, though, as it consumes all diseases
For Unholy builds, Scourge Strike is your core choice until level 64 if your mob has too much health left to make an Obliterate worth it. It’s also a FU ability.
For Blood, Heart Strike is the preferred spell until level 64, and it runs on a blood rune.
At level 64, Blood Strike (B) outperforms Scourge and Heart Strike until their respective next ranks.
For Frost builds, there’s a must have T3 talent, Annihilation, which makes Obliterate not consume diseases, making Obliterate the best choice. Frost Strike, while producing only 50% of Obliterate’s spreadsheet damage cannot be blocked, parried nor dodged however, which makes it a good tanking strike (duh).

Nothing exactly clearcut in the above scenarios. Now all three trees have talents which transform some runes into Death Runes (universal runes) which give more flexibility to spell sequence. In Blood, the talent in in T3, requires an Obliterate strike, and transforms Frost and Unholy into Death Runes. Both Blood and Frost builds may probably have a good synergy if they incoprorate both Annihilation (Obliterate doesn’t consume diseases) and Death Rune Mastery (transforms FU runes into Death Runes on Obliterate) into their respective builds.

Unholy’s own Death Rune talent is in T6 and uses a Blood strike to transform a Blood rune into a Death rune.

Frost’s take on this is even deeper in the tree (T7) and also uses either a Blood Strike or Pestilence to create a Death Rune.

Where does this leave us? Well, as you see, while leveling, each build is going to have different priorities. Unholy will require liberal use of blood runes to have enough unholy and frost / death runes available to sustain its diseases and use Scourge Strike.

For Blood, Obliterate will be a finishing move. After diseasing his target, Heart Strike following by RP abilities will produce a good output and a quite stable routine before having to refresh diseases. If an enemy can be finished by an Obliterate + sequence, the next fight will have death runes handy for flexibility.

Frost has to alternate between Obliterate and Blood Strike in order to maximize DPS.

Lots of things to consider. Factor in that your Disease front-loading may be resisted and you need to recast these, and contrary to my initial impression, there’s simply very little you can do in terms of clear, regular rotations. Most of the time I admit that if I’m starting to be in a cooldown bind, I still resort to pretty much random button mashing

Looks like while Death Knights are a very powerful class while levelling, they also appear to be a rather complex class to master properly.

And I like that.

This was a post from Altitis.

Some Thoughts on Death Knight Versatility

Extreme Hardcore Guild Wins Wrath, Jumps the Shark

2008-11-18T09:17:05Z

So Nihilum and SK Gaming merged, rushed to level 80, and then proceeded to clear all raid instances weeks or even months before the unwashed masses. Good for them.

When you pay a monthly subscription to burn to content which is meant to last other people a couple of months within 2 days, that’s your business.

Then something interesting happened in the PR statement released below (emphasis is mine):

“We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?“

By that statement combined with the timing of the whole thing, Twentyfithnovember (that’s the new name of the merged operation) made one thing clear. They no longer represent anyone in this game but themselves. Not even what you would qualify as a hardcore guild.

Mind you, it’s not the fact that they rushed through content and cleared it all within two days, it’s the fact that they take this and act as if they were any reasonable measure of anything.

By their own words, Twentyfithnovember have just rendered themselves completely irrelevant. They aren’t even a role model for the other gamers, they’re just a cadre of people sponsored to raid and churn out world first.

The one thing which they have made crystal clear is that Blizzard should in no way listen to anything they could say in regards to content tuning or balance, in the best case they could be treated as an extended QA team to spot and test out bugs on the PTR. For anything else, their point of view is so far removed from the reality of the playerbase that they could just as well be playing a different game altogether.

And that’s actually what they are doing.

This was a post from Altitis.

Extreme Hardcore Guild Wins Wrath, Jumps the Shark

If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

2008-11-17T17:38:21Z

… Get out of the kitchen!

While I have another post planned to join the chorus of bloggers writing about their first Wrath experiences, I have come to a realization this weekend.

Let’s call it by its name and not beat around the bush.

I’m a carebear.

I’m a PvP wuss.

Long time readers may remember that I rerolled on a PvP server in Spring to join some friends. Leveling there at late evenings during the last 6 months of the Burning Crusade wasn’t really heavy on world PvP. I had a couple of encounters in areas where you expect them, mainly STV and Hillsbrad Foothills, and a couple of skirmishes in HFP more recently. All against the perhaps dozen alliance players in the same level range, and (I thought) pretty much all in good fun. If we decided not to ignore each other, it was the typical Rock-Scissors-Papers game with the twist that the player who started it would most likely live.

Wrath exposed me to the other side of it, though - level 72+ players camping just outside of Thrallmar on their epic flyers, in twos or threes, hellbent to deny the aspiring DKs passage. Level 78 players escorting their guildies through Howling Fjord quests and hell-bent to slow the progress of the opposing faction level 70-71s around.

I realized, there and then, that I’m not cut for a PvP server. Oh, I do enjoy organized PvP, within the boundaries of the formalized engagements which you can find in BGs, arenas but also outdoors encounters like Halaa. I like more or less balanced engagements where I feel I have at least a shot at at, even if it means being outnumbered.

I however derive no pleasure in ganking lowbies myself, so there’s no sense of compensation in the nature of “do unto others…” from the gankfest. I’m getting pissed off when I get 2-shotted while trying to read a quest text, and that’s been happening far too often for my taste since the 13th.

Steptoe having apparently left on another of his semestrial smoke breaks, I’m again in an almost people-devoid guild.

Which has me reviewing my options.

Anyone has any suggestions for a casual, late night, EU-English carebear horde player? Ideally the server should not suffer from login queues, have reasonable BG queue lines up to 1am server time and horde should win BGs from time to time.

Open to any ideas.

This was a post from Altitis.

If You Can’t Stand the Heat…

First Evening in Wrath (One In a Million Voices)

2008-11-14T10:06:27Z

I decided to join the army of deep red wannabes in Ebon Hold for my first steps in Wrath. I’ll keep it relatively short and spoiler free. The backstory is well done, the build-up of the DK’s first three levels too. If you haven’t done so already, here’s one warning though: At some stage, you will gain the quest The Light of Dawn. At the top of the screen, you should have a yellow indicator indicating the equilibrium of forces between two factions, and below, potentially, a countdown.

If there’s no countdown showing on the third line, stay put at Browman’s Mill. There’s an event in progress, which holds a key piece of storytelling, and when I mean key, it really holds the story together. Go make yourself a cup of tea or something, the event will reset about every 10 minutes. Getting in there in the middle will make you want to stick around for the next round anyway, but unlike other story pieces, once you’ve stumbled upon the end, you will only get the audio afterwards… which can be mixed in with emotes from other players and whatnot.

So how does the heroic class handle? That is a bit more difficult to answer. The class is definitely powerful, but it is also complex to take stock of. If you haven’t tried it, it handles a bit like a rogue on slow-motion where all combo points aren’t always useable. By design, you’ll be alternating between several abilities all the time, about 5 per rotation (though most of the stuff will be dead before you finish a rotation anyway. Yay for training dummies).

The fact that it’s not a 1 or 2 button spamming class is definitely nice. On the other hand, you’re mostly always doing the same things in the same order, so it’s also a bit of a faceroller - you just have to roll from left to right

When going to bed, the DK was level 59 and about 500 rep off friendly with Argent Dawn, and still plenty o’ quests left to do in EPL. I’ve tried out unholy so far, and will probably respec to blood for a comparison at 60, but the undead just roll over and die before me. There’s a bunch of elite abomination wandering about in Andhoral, with about 11k health, and they were no problem at all either. Compared to the endless fight those represented on my then prot pallie, it’s certainly a very welcome change.

Will I stick to the class in the long run? I have no idea. I’ll most certainly be riding around in HFP over the weekend and then decide.

In terms of server load, Blizzard was on top of their game on our cluster. There was no visible performance hit in Ebon Hold at all, despite the starter part being packed full with other wannabe death knights. The other thing which is very well done is using the phase technology to make the area evolve over time (which also trickles down the population and avoids brand new level 55 DKs in starter greens with only 3 abilities to have to constantly dodge duelling challenges by the level 57s in full blues with all of their availabilities ready. These two populations play in different story times and simply don’t mix.

In terms of races, in the end I went for looks first and picked a male orc. The just look badass in the dark plate set, although as is often the case, with the blue set you have at the end of the DK intro storyline, I tend to believe that shrugging with these on would probably squish the Death Knight’s brain neatly between shoulder pads.

Finally, one thing which I realized this morning which would definitely add to the heroic dimension of the class, Blizzard shouldn’t have stopped with just the introduction quest series, but added a new series of story-driven quests every 10 levels to renew the Ebon Hold story line and, possibly, refresh the gear set with an upgraded kit with again matching looks and colours. That would definitely have added to the epic feeling of the class.

And that’s it for a first evening in Wrath. I’ll probably move the pallie to Northrend over the weekend to test the temperatures there. Got some righteous arse-kicking to do after all this defiling.

This was a post from Altitis.

First Evening in Wrath (One In a Million Voices)

Altitis Reskin for Winter / DK

2008-11-13T13:18:13Z

Here’s the other little project, a new template for Altitis - or rather just a simple re-skinning of the previous one. I still pretty much like the quite simple layout I had since late Summer, I just grew bored of the colour scheme.

Thanks to Wordpress’ child theme functionality, the reskin was a matter of mere minutes, in fact the long part was the graphic work dabbling.

Tell me what you don’t like about it if you want it changed

This was a post from Altitis.

Altitis Reskin for Winter / DK

Getting Wrath Off Retail? Slightly Risky Business

2008-11-13T12:03:40Z

My nominal office (when I’m not gallivanting around abroad) is at half a stone throw distance from an airport. Which contains, despite some people’s notion about the backwardness of Switzerland, a bunch of shops. One of which, amazingly enough, happens to be an electronics shop.
When BC got released, I went to said electronics shop during my lunch break, and picked up my copy - at that time, a good dozen remained on the shelf.
Fast-forward to today. The shop opens at 8:30 in the morning. I’m flying back from my last trip, landing at 9:00. I’m at the shop at 9:15. Given that at noon last time, there was a good dozen copies of the first expansion to be bought, I was sure to find Wrath there at 9:15, wasn’t I?
Wrong. Despite several of my own work colleagues who I identified as WoW players the past couple of years quitting the game, the shop had already sold out all its copies. Most had been pre-reserved, something I hadn’t even considered necessary.
Bugger.
Plan B: go to work, then start making the rounds of the supermarkets during lunch break. I had already planned a trip which would take me through 5 different stores within 90 minutes if needed, some of these remote enough that people would have to drive there instead of just casually strolling around the corner (to my esteemed American readers, in tiny Switzerland, although we own 2 cars, 3 houses and 4 bank account per individual, we usually don’t get into one of these cars every time we have to go to the loo ). That round-trip was certainly immensely more attractive than plan C - downloading the whole thing on my DSL line.

So lunch arrived while my apprehension about ending up burning fuel for nothing (don’t know about you but here, Big Oil is a lot less keen on lowering the price at the pump when the Barrel price drops than they were eager to yank it up NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW when the prices were rising) and getting stuck with said plan C was growing by the minute.
Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, the first store had a good hundred copies and no lines at the cashier’s desk. I also snatched a copy of Pink’s latest record, Fun House, at a 20% special launch discount price (I wish I could actually see Steptoe cringing while he’s reading more evidence about my hopeless lack of musical taste. Hey buddy, she’s got one of the most amazing voices in commercial pop-rock these days, at least to me, so bugger off). I’m a sucker.

Now I only have to finish slaving through the day writing a trainer’s guide for a new training programme, and it’s either off to Northrend or to Ebon Hold (depending on what area hasn’t crashed, but if BC is any indication, chances are both areas are actually on the same instance server nodes - the smart thing would be to have Ebon Hold implemented on the Azeroth server instead, bound to see less load after this coming weekend than Northrend. Sorry, my inner geek is showing). Oh, and a small personal project may be finished today too, but more on that whenever it’s actually finished.

Anyway, have fun with the new expansion. I’ll be there shortly.

This was a post from Altitis.

Getting Wrath Off Retail? Slightly Risky Business

This is Why Being an Explorer Type Keeps the Game Enjoyable for Years

2008-11-13T13:23:21Z

Nibuca over at Mystic Chicanery has a fascinating post up about the current stage of the Wrath opening world event, and the reaction of most of his guildies.

I’m currently again away on travels so I’m missing all of the fun, but as Nibuca so eloquently describes, as long as you keep your eyes wide open, the game never grows old. If however the only thing that ever matters is the endgame, you’re not really getting all your money’s worth out of the game.

Read Nibuca, it’s much better said that whatever I could piece together. I fully agree, second and concur with the entire post.

This was a post from Altitis.

This is Why Being an Explorer Type Keeps the Game Enjoyable for Years

Paladins, Beware of Bloodicide!

2008-11-10T13:13:48Z

Back in the day when I was playing FFXI online, all classes (or jobs as they are called in the game) have a special move on a 1-hour timer (I think they’ve actually doubled that. So much for dumbing down the game for casuals. If you want hardcore, go play FFXI). The white mage job (the archetypical healer, think priest)’s special move was called Benediction, a powerful AoE Heal available on level 1 and free of MP costs.

The spell used to be nicknamed Beneicide, though, because it generated an insane amount of aggro and would normally lead to a cleric sandwich in short order, unless you had a monk on top of his game and with his own special not on cooldown going all out, resulting in either a very dead mob, a very dead monk while the tank had to use the time to get back to second position on the aggro table (ahead of the white mage), or a wipe if the white mage was stupid enough to try and save the monk’s arse (since he would remain ahead of the tank’s threat by the time the monk died and bit the dust).

Fast forward to today and WoW. Post 3.0.3 and the Ret hotfixing craze, Seal of Blood / Martyr is the most powerful seal for a blue geared paladin ready to head out to Northrend.

Still wearing mostly the rep pvp blues with the odd green and purple piece, I’ve exchanged my trusty old Crystalforged Waraxe for a Khorium Champion sitting on the AH. And went to town to farm the cloth for my DK.

Before patch 3.0, Seal of Blood had little impact on soloing. The blue-geared scrub Retadin I had become to farm SSO dailies would run out of mana long before the healthbar had dropped to a significant level, Blood hitting for decent but far from spectacular amounts.

Until the end of the hotfixing festival, the good ole’ Seal of Casino was producing more dps for my soloing purposes, so again, Seal of Blood had no impact on me.

With 3.0.3, Blood beats Command by a good 150 dps for me. No question on which one to chose. In fact, I’ve removed Command from my action bar at present. So when I went into the reader-suggested Blasted Lands mine and then to HFP’s expedition armory (that’s what I finally chose for my 300 runecloth collection), I started to have way too many near-death experiences for confort.

Bloodicide: Using Seal of Blood without remembering that the self-damaging part has scaled with the damage dealt and starts to really hurt after a while.

Back when I was levelling up this pallie as a prot-specced achingly slow leveling machine, there was a saying in my guild: paladins only die if they want to. Nowadays, the saying is:

Bloodicide is the first death cause among paladins.

Can’t imagine what happens when you’re raid-buffed.

This was a post from Altitis.

Paladins, Beware of Bloodicide!