Posts Tagged ‘Death Knight’

Lore Creators and Item Designers Should Talk to Each Other

My paladin is halfway to 76 now, and it seemed like a good time to start browsing the various Wrath factions and the rewards they offer. Indeed, a good idea, since I spotted two walrus people rewards available at level 76, with honoured reputation. Since I’ve been a friend to the Walrus for quite some time, I already am honoured, so this will be a quick flight point off my next ding for a serious chest upgrade both for my grinding and my tanking sets. Nice. Beyond that, the Kalu’ak offer items which are more or less in-character, including leatherworking recipes, a combat fishing pole, a harpoon… So far so good.

Next, for my paladin, I’m looking up Argent Crusade. Now here’s a band of historical paladins all united in the goal of exterminating the undead hordes of the Scourge, so I’m assuming that I’ll find some equipment helping a paladin to do just that. Either some kit to kick some righteous butt as a Retribution paladin or spell power plate. And still good, that’s exactly what you can find, at various reputation levels.

So we go to the doomed counterpart, the Knights of the Ebon Blade, the DK’s faction. Here you should find tanking and DPS plate and weaponry for the Death Knight (and the Retribution paladin), right? Err… no, not really. There’s only one cloak offered there, a spell power cloak. Which does jack for Death Knights. No other accessories (jewelry) available there, dead people don’t need no stinking rings. One tanking plate piece, one DPS plate piece. No suitable 2-H Rune weapon, the only 2H on offer is itemized ass-backwards for DKs (any plate-wearer but fury warriors if I understand fury itemization, which I might not). It actually looks at first sight like a decent weapon for… a hunter.

Patterns? Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting and… the Revered pattern is for, wait for it, tailoring. A soulbag for warlocks, which almost makes sense for the faction. Steptoe, I apologize, looks like combat knitting isn’t out of character for Death Knights after all.

So let’s look up the magicians of the Kirin Tor. You’d expect gear more focused towards the arcane arts, wouldn’t you? Well, if you need a spellcasting cloak, you’ll find one there. There’s also a spell dagger, and at exalted, some nice robes for the clothies. But if you’re a mage, priest or warlock hoping the Dalaran mageocraty will help you beyond these three elements, tough luck. The rest of the kit appears to cater mostly to the Elemental or Enhancement shammies, the feral droods and oh, there’s also a rogue dagger in the mix. And as a bone, one tailoring recipe at exalted. Yay. From a quick glance, looks like cloth wearers would be better served to prioritize a faction like the Oracles. Makes sense.

This is the kind of disconnect which earns WoW a reputation of having a rather weak lore (despite countless quests, NPCs and storytelling elements). Now I can fully understand the overreaching requirement to give incentives for all classes and many builds to grind rep on as many factions as possible – after all, rep grinding is one of those tools which help Blizzard keep both casual and hardcore players in the game for a long time, whether it’s going to be one major long term objective (casuals) or a quick stepping stone before grabbing leet Naxxramas purplez for the less casuals. Still, I was expecting some more consistency there.

The Ebon Blade in particular strike me as an extreme let-down, and show very clearly where they could have gone a good bit further with the implementation of the hero class. As I’ve said before, the starter quests are marvelously done. But what would have been a really great addition would have been to add other class-specific intermediary steps at 65 and 75 where the DK does another series of quests strenghtening their lore and allowing them to upgrade their starter gear. And at the very least, there should be a kick-arse 2H epic runeblade available at exalted for them, and it really bugs me that there isn’t.

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Odds and Ends before Christmas

In no particular order, and on Steptoe’s request:

Of the joys of being a two-man guild (instead of a one-man show)

Some people have a specific sense of what being back means

Some people have a peculiar sense of what being back means

A new DK needs professions!

Chain mail needs to be knitted

Chain mail needs to be knitted

Acronyms are HARD

The Unholy Death Knight rotation explained to Steptoe

The Unholy Death Knight rotation explained to Steptoe

Dragonback flying
I know it’s not my private mount but it looks great nonetheless:

Makes me more likely to grind Rep for the red proto dragon mount

Makes me more likely to grind Rep for the red proto dragon mount

The Kirin Tor Tortue quest

Much virtual ink has been spilled by many on this topic already, first by Rohan, and then a bit later by none less than Dr. Richard Bartle. Being a slow leveler, not on as often as everyone else and having taken my DK to 70 before resuming leveling on the paladin, I only did this two nights ago.

As a player, and to stay in line with being a Bartle apologist, I experienced the same sense of disturbance as everyone else who hasn’t just shrugged it off. I do also feel it breaks away in a poorly done manner from the tone WoW has presented to us, and as others I feel this is one prime example where having quests which allow you to actually make moral choices rather than being just a straightforward storyline with player actions between the reading would have been not just great, but actually important for the game.

As a character, and yes, despite NOT playing on an RP server (I know many people believe I’m actually on one, am not, never have been), I sometimes try to put stuff into a roleplaying perspective, things looked different. The toon seeing this quest is a blood elf blood knight (sounds a bit redundant, no?). And while I imagine the character would definitely have scoffed at the hypocrisy of the Kirin Tor (“Our code forbids us to torture but you can do it for us” – interesting political statement for the matter, and this one is too out of place in WoW, as Scott Jennings has pointed out), it’s a lot less shocking for this character than it would have been for an alliance paladin, in particular a Draenei (or so I imagine).

See, the toon is one of the few (OK, given how many blood elves the game throws at you in Outlands, actually not that few) survivors of a race deeply addicted to magic. After facing near extinction at the hands of the Scourge, their Blood Knights derived their powers by leeching it off a Naaru in order to become the protectors of their people. And while the events leading to the Shattered Sun Offensive have redeemed the class in the sense that they were now granted free access to the holy energy powering their spells, their magic addiction has not been cured.

The storyline which involves the infamous quest revolves about the fight between a power who seeks to bar access to arcane magic to all mortals, and mortals who try to preserve that access. From the perspective of a defender of an entire race addicted to arcane magic, who has been using and abusing all means available for the greater goal of preserving his people for a long time, this isn’t out of character at all. I’ve long seen Blood Elves and the Forsaken as pragmatists who will use whatever it takes to achieve their objectives. For the Death Knight it won’t be much different, if you have played the final act of the starter quest at all. They believe themselves beyond redemption anyway, and while they wouldn’t perhaps derive any pleasure from doing this now, they certainly aren’t in a position to play the holier-than-thou crusader about zapping prisoners for information.

So here I am, the player uneasy about the quest, the characters not having an issue with it. Paradoxal? Definitely. Here’s hoping that similar elements will be used and introduced better in the future.

Last but not least

The paladin is level 74, about half-way to 75. I went to Dalaran, got two cooking dailies done so far, still 40 quests left in Borean Tundra, trolled some Winter’s Veil achievements. That’s the pre-break update.

Merry Christmas to all readers, and best wishes to you and yours.

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Frost Death Knight Macro: Hungering Cold / Bandage macro

Here’s the Frost Death Knight’s equivalent to the pallie’s Bubble + Bandage macro:

#showtooltip
/cast Hungering Cold
/use [target=player] Heavy Frostweave Bandage

Useful when things start getting out of hand with an AoE pull.

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Short Update: Pallie and DK in Northrend, one Week to XMas

I managed to get some playtime in this weekend.

On the Death Knight, I quested a bit more and then parked the toon in Howling Fjords, about 3/4 exp to go to level 71. I respecced the dead guy to Frost for a while to see if I could get it to work for me, using a build with more avoidance than what I had so far to make for a bit more versatility and try out the ice cold version of DK AoE killing.

The build I’m using is this one, and in practice, it has a good rhythm to it. Hungering Cold is like a pallie bubble, it buys you time to apply a bandage before getting back to arse kicking. Frost Strike and Obliterate create some massive arse kicking when needed.

That being said, in terms of sheer survivability for solo leveling, I like Unholy better and will be respeccing once I pick the toon up again. The added damage generated from the third disease at my current gear level as well as the ghoul to make quite some difference, not to mention that two glyphed death strikes on 3 disease are enough to replenish a good 60% of my HP. It’s just plain smoother leveling.

And the third tree, you ask? Well, I still can’t be arsed to spec blood. I know it has some serious butt-kicking potential but for some reason the tree just doesn’t appeal to me so far.

On the paladin front, she’s earned the I’ve Toured the Fjord achievement, obviously cleared the zone, passed level 72 and moved to Borean Tundra.

The one striking thing is that at now roughly similar gear levels, the DK still outdamages my ret pallie by a good 20%, which tends to convince me that the level-70 based nerfs have definitely gone too far. The other thing is that despite the changes to the class, the paladin remains too passive in terms of gameplay compared to all other classes I’ve played. There’s just still too much time when you’re merely autoattacking and waiting for the cooldowns to give you something to do. Perhaps with patch 4.0.3…

At the end of my session, and seeing how various quest rewards have been of the tanking plate variety, I’ve decided to respec to prot for a while to see how the tree plays. I’ll try that one out after my next business trip.

In Howling Fjord, looks like Kamagua is the new STV or something. I’ve been ganked by level 80 players a lot more than anywhere else. I blame the walrus people dailies.

The transportation between Kamagua and (with intermediary stops) and Borean Tundra is original and fun, BTW. Just a tad too much waiting for my taste, but at least I now have a complete flight path between the Fjord and the Tundra.

Been trying to level my fishing and my cooking as well. The buff food I can make from the drops / fish in the Fjord is very nice for a healadin, but for Ret or the DK… not so much. Except for the Dalaran  Clam Chowder, which is, however, a bit of a pain to prepare, since the Succulent Clam Meat doesn’t actually stack has to be stacked manually (thanks for the hint, Tritax). Since I’m a bit slow-witted, it took me quite a while to realize that the best way was actually not to open the clams containing it before cooking, since the unopened clams do stack.

I’ll probably hit a wall soon until I reach Dalaran, where it appears the next set of recipes can be obtained.

And that concludes the present episode of my adventures in Northrend.

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Death Knight Macro: Rune Strike Wrapper

Here’s a cool macro template to get your rune strike into your opponent’s face:

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cast [nomodifier] Rune Strike
/cast Blood Strike

Make one for each of your relevant runic abilities (not RP, only runes) and you’ll be sure to dump RS whenever the opportunity is up.

If you need to conserve RP for Dancing Rune Weapon or a Gargoyle, simply hold down any modifier key and the spell will be cast without RS. Oh, and make sure RS is first in your macro, the other abilities are on a cooldown, which would prevent RS from being cast on the same keypress otherwise.

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First DK Tanking Experience

Last night I logged on and was basically minding my own questing business in the still almost sparkling new (for me) Howling Fjords when I get a tell asking me if I were willing to tank Utgarde Keep.

After trading standard disclaimers (First time in instance, first time tanking on the DK and I don’t actually have anything resembling tanking gear, you guys still OK with this?), I took advantage of the DK’s almost unique flexibility, death gated to Ebon Hold, changed runeforge enchant to add 4% parry, and then went ahead and respecced to a more tankey build for good measure. I stuck to an unholy base build because I’m used to 18-second disease cycles by now and changing that right before trying out a new role was, well, not really a good idea.

And off we went on our merry way.

The group was quite spread out, level-wise. I was the lowest, followed by a 71 mage, a 72 priest, and a 72 and 77 rogue.

And how did it go?

Not that well. Compared to the paladin, DK tanking is a strange affair. First and foremost, I felt a lot more squishy than what I remembered from the tankadin (haven’t actually tanked on that guy for ages), and while gear obviously accounts for a lot (I had 475 defense and 89% avoidance last time I checked), the shield and holy shield with their 45% additional avoidance really do make a difference in terms of how in control you feel.

Speaking of control, the next hurdle is controlling a fight. Long essays have already been written on the relative ease of tankadins, and if you haven’t tried out tanking on a DK yet, let me tell you, there’s a real difference right there. Oh, with an unholy leveling build, you do AoE mobs all right. In a normally well controlled setting. In this UK run? Not so much. I felt, for instance, as if I were almost constantly with runes on cooldowns and no buttons left to push. For all the fuss over Righteous Defense, when you’re lacking a snap AoE spell like consecrate to pick up things like Prince Keleseth’s adds (I have either Death & Decay, using 3 runes, which is a rare commodity in mid-fight, or Unholy Blight, dependent on having some RP left), having a 3-mob taunt would sure have come in handy.

Then there’s the other thing which just became quite worrying in the patch notes, the nerf to Icebound Fortitude is something which would bug me in the future. The oh crap button this represented to give me a small health cushion when stuff started to get hairy will definitely be missing once it’s down to 20% instead of 50%.

In short, lots of room for improvement in my gameplay, and quite some adjustments I need to take. I’m quite frankly wondering whether I should just make sure to now level the paladin and the DK pretty much in parallel and use the pallie for tanking on invites and postpone any further experiments on the dead guy till endgame after collecting some decent and appropriate gear for the task.

On the other hand, I’m no quitter. We’ll see where this leads.

And how did the run go itself? Trash to first boss, no real problem. First boss: 1 rogue disconnects, we attempt to 4-man it, wipe, get another rogue, healer disconnects, get a balance druid accepting to heal, wipe a second time then kill the bastard. Next boss pair, the mage remembers that you need to kill both pretty much simultaneously after we wipe. We call it a night. A blue cloth hat dropped for the mage.

Funny factoids:

  • After summoning, one of the rogues and my DK are found unguilded (since Steptoe isn’t back to actually invite my toon to our 2-man operation). 5 seconds later and our PUG has become a guild run :)
  • To my surprise, one of my brand new guildmates remarked that I was the first DK who’d actually accept to tank since the release. That’s really unexpected. Oh, sure, there’s the non-tank rerollers who might not be too keen on experimenting while leveling, I can understand that. On the other hand, before I started to lag behind the leveling curve, you barely couldn’t take a step in Outlands without treading on another DK’s clown shoes. For some reason I just can’t fathom that nobody else would have taken the chance, tried it out and then stuck to it. Heck, before dual specs, no other tank can change enchants and respec as conveniently as a DK. I’m really surprised here.

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Lack of Posts: Short Update

I’ve been on the road quite a bit, which deprives me both of playtime and of post material. To keep it short: I came back this weekend, continued leveling the DK who is now 67, and still in Terokkar with quite some quests left. At this rate I’ll probably ding 70 in Nagrand. I’m more or less inserting some mining skillup runs in the meantime, just hit 245 which opens up small thorium veins. Mining is definitely the least pleasant gathering skill to level despite the changes to allow more skillups through smelting. Bleargh.

The DK will be my new JC since I foolishly threw that profession away for herbalism on the pallie ages ago. Haven’t really started leveling that one yet, though. Tons of ore ready for that part, after all, that’s what banking mules are good for.

I’m still not too happy with the amount of ganking going on (no, I didn’t move yet), although I have to say that when you’re getting attacked in mid-combat by an equal-level drood and just have him eat dirt four times in a row, it has some upsides. It’s the serial bored high-level gankers which get on my nerves. Comes with the territory, I guess.

Has all of that made me a better PvP player? Not really. I’m just more paranoid. And that’s all for this short update.

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Unholy Death Knight Macro: Suppressing the Death Grip Ghoul Leap

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.

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Death Knight Learning Curve, a Good Place to Train

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.

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Some Thoughts on Death Knight Versatility

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.

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