You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore When I Kiss…

It’s been a busy week.  Memorial Day, lots of raiding, and my first piece of tier 8.5!  Just wanted to post that quick.  I’ll post some pictures and other things regarding raiding and raiding guilds tomorrow.

-V

Dirt Off Your Shoulder

Time to celebrate!  I finally got that first piece of loot that I’ve been waiting for last night.  Shoulderplates of the Deconstructor dropped from the XT-002 Deconstructor (obviously) and my GM passed to me because my tier 7 shoulders were horrendous.  Anyway, we downed Flame Leviathan, Deconstructor, Kologarn, Auriaya, and the Iron Council last night and we’re going to try to hit up Mimiron tonight… should be fun!

-V

Are You Telling Me This Sucker Is Nuclear? – Blizzcon 2009

I really want to attend Blizzcon 2009 this year.  I had the tickets in my shopping cart last year and was about to check out but couldn’t get confirmation from my brother that he would be around that weekend (being that he lives in the Los Angeles area and he would be my housing for the event).  So this time around I’m going to buy them, and then figure out who’s going with me.

The first round of tickets went on sale this past Saturday.  Unfortunately, I was not in the right state to buy the tickets… this usually means hungover and sleeping on someone else’s couch.  I’m making the commitment to get up early and try to get tickets during the 2nd ticket opportunity on the 30th.

Wish me luck!  I want a Grunty the Space Marine Murloc!

-V

Like What Are My Skills?

I’ve been tanking for the better part of half a decade now.  While I mainly played my warlock throughout the original World of Warcraft, I also leveled a protection warrior as my alt, helping to tank Molten Core for my friend’s guild.  This eventually became my main character in the Burning Crusade, and I tanked all of Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, Magtheridon, and parts of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Caverns.

What I’ve come to learn through all of this is that skill is definitely greater than gear.  I can name numerous people who used their guild to gain exceptional tanking gear only to fail at tanking because they did not possess the experience or skill to be an effective tank.

The overall amount of situational awareness that you need as a tank is much greater than that of people in DPS roles and usually more than that of people in healing roles.  To be able to be aware of when aggro is being lost, while keeping track of your own health as well as boss positioning and other distractions the enemy can throw at you (stuff on the ground that you’re supposed to get out of), takes a tremendous amount of vision and concentration. On top of that, there is the pressure coming from responsibility.  It’s no surprise that great tanks are usually the ones leading the raids.  The tank needs to be able to take the pressure of knowing that one false move could essentially fail the attempt.  The pressure of leading the raid is basically icing on top of the proverbial cake.  This is all in addition to the fact that the tank has the best idea of what’s going on during attempts because of their need to be completely aware.

So yeah, skill is better than gear.  Experience and knowledge outweighs shiny purples.  But there is a point when it won’t matter.  What?  Did I just say that skill doesn’t matter at a certain point?

Yup, I did.  And I think I’m at that point.  I am fortunate enough to be in a guild that is currently raiding 25 man Ulduar and we’re pretty successful at it.  We should be hitting Mimiron tomorrow to get in some attempts and should hopefully try General Vezax by next week.  Unfortunately, I joined under the assumption that I would be raiding Naxxaramus.  I could not attend raids for the two weeks after I joined and lost any raiding priority I would’ve gained by attending.  So another week or two goes by, and then the 3.1 patch hits.  Being a pretty strong raiding guild, Naxx is no longer a priority.

So, stuck in my mismatching levels of gear, I proceeded to raid.  I could see why my GM was hesitant to bring me along for Ulduar.  A glance at my gear shows that I have only 1/3 of my gear from 25 mans, while the rest are a mix of 10 man, heroic, and crafted gear.  I still have no pieces of 7.5 tier gear in my tanking set.  And as a prior post indicated, I still haven’t gotten any loots from raids, which means I’m tanking for bosses such as Thorim, Freya, and Kologarn in gear that shouldn’t be letting me live for more than 5 seconds.

And yet skill, experience, and knowing how to customize what gear I have has allowed me to be a very useful part of the raid up to this point.  But around Thorim is when I realized that my gear won’t cut it anymore.  The longest I lasted on tanking Thorim himself (after the main tank was killed) was about 9 seconds, and that was with the burning of all my cooldowns as he would get off about 9 attacks in 6-7 seconds.  He was hitting me for about 19-22k health, and my health pool was at a little over 38k fully raid buffed.  If I got hit twice in a row without something close to a full heal between them, I was down for the count.

I guess this was more of a ranting analysis than anything else.  Skill is definitely better than gear… but if the boss can kill you in one or two hits, skill really doesn’t matter anymore.

Wish me luck in gearing up a bit over the next week!

-V

Allow Myself to Introduce… Myself

It’s been a busy weekend so I haven’t had a chance to post (My friend Rachel just graduated from college!).  I’m also going to switch my titles to include quotes from movies as well.  Anyway here we go!

While I did a general intro about myself in my first post, I wanted to give more detail into my character.  This is my tanking talent spec.

As you can see it is an Unholy tank spec which is perfect for my current situation in my guild.  I mainly function as a trash pull tank/off tank.  It has been proven to be especially useful in the Arena of the Thorim fight.  I also specced heavily into increased Scourge Strike damage so holding single target aggro is pretty easy as well.  I’m thinking about pulling 3 points and putting them into Virulence as it will help with aggro, but for now my threat output is pretty good at around 6000 threat per second when I get fully into my rotation on a single target.

My single target rotation is currently:

Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Bloodstrike, Bloodstrike, Scourge Strike, Unholy Blight, Deathcoil, then the same rotation again except with another Deathcoil replacing the Unholy Blight.

My AoE rotation is:

Death and Decay, Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence, Blood Boil, Unholy Blight.

Unfortunately with this rotation, there’s really nowhere to dump runic power, but you will always have enough to burn any cooldowns like Anti-Magic shell or Icebound Fortitude.  The trick here is saving a blood rune so that you can have Death and Decay up most of the time.  With 3 DOT spells, Unholy Blight, Death and Decay, as well as intermittent use of Blood Boil on every target, most people will have a hard time pulling any of the mobs off of you, especially your target mob.

-V

Hurt – Tanking 101: Part 1 Threat and Survivability

Well, since this is a blog about death knights and tanking, I figure tanking is a good article to write about.  This is an intro on tanking and will probably be moved into its own page after I tweak it a bit.

In World of Warcraft, there are 3 major roles: Damage (DPS), healing and tanking.

Tanking refers to the act of taking the damage from enemies that would otherwise hit your group or raid members.  There are also two main factors for tanking, survivability and aggro.

Survivability

Survivability is your ability to live through the attacks of an enemy.  First you need to be able to take the hits, which means you need stamina and armor.  Armor mitigates any physical damage done to you.  If you’re a plate wearer like a death knight, you should be at or above 50% damage reduction.  Your second method of surviving is avoidance.  This refers to the enemy missing you, or you dodging or parrying attacks.  Also in the tank’s repertoire are emergency cooldowns which many increase their avoidance, health, or armor.

Aggro

Aggro is the term used to describe the tank having the focus of an enemy.  Aggro is based on the threat mechanic in WoW.  All the damage or healing you do generates threat.  In order to hold aggro, your threat needs to be greater than everyone elses’ (to a certain degree).  If a person in melee range surpasses the threat of the person who as aggro by 10% or a person outside of melee range surpasses the tank’s threat by 130%, that person will pull aggro from the tank.  Tanks usually have specific abilities that increase their threat generation.  For death knights, being in frost presence increases their overall threat generation.  Also, tanks have a “taunt” type move which immediately transfers aggro from the current focus of the enemy to themselves.  The way the taunting mechanic works is two-fold: the immediate change in aggro and the instant increase in threat to the amount that the person with the most threat has.  While taunting while you have aggro may not seem like a waste, sometimes it is beneficial to taunt in these situations as it will affect the target for a few seconds and equalize your threat with the top threat generating player.

As your companions get more geared, they will be generating more threat because they will be dealing a lot more damage or healing a lot more.  In order to keep up, you need to gear up as well.  Your best way to increase threat generation is to get hit capped and expertise capped.  Being hit capped refers to having enough hit rating to prevent any misses from occuring.  And being expertise capped means the same except for dodge and parries.  Usually hitting those caps is enough to keep aggro as none of your moves should be avoided by the target.

Next time I’ll be talking more specifically about gear and ways to gear up!

-V

Beautiful Day – Part 2

As my last post indicated, I was looking forward to raiding on Tuesday night with the prospect of my first loot win with my guild.  Unfortunately, the game had other plans and decided to drop mostly shield block tanking gear instead.  However we did get through exactly the amount of bosses I estimated and we will probably continue along that path.

New gear… to be continued.

-V

Beautiful Day

Tuesday is upon us!  Time for Ulduar to reset and get some raiding in.  I’m especially excited for today because I’ve been saving up DKP and working my way up the ranks of my guild.  I’ve been in my guild since early March 2009, and while I’ve been raiding for the last month, I hadn’t had enough repute with the guild to be consistently invited to raids until last week.  This should be my first full raiding week and I should have enough DKP at this point to win my first piece of loot with my guild!

I expect that we will be clearing Flame Leviathan, XT-002 Deconstructor, Razorscale, Ignis, Kologarn, and Iron Council tonight.  Tomorrow will probably be Auraiya, Hodir, Freya, and Thorim.  And Thursday we’ll probabably start our attempts on Mimiron.

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to link my potential loot and a nice screenshot before I go to bed tonight after raid.  I’m also working on a Death Knight FAQ page for those of you who are new to DK’s.  It should be up by the end of the week and if you have any questions you’d like answered in it, just leave a comment!

Happy Server Maintenance Day!

-V

Wrong Way – Wintergrasp

From now on I’ll be naming my posts after song names to make things more interesting.  Take a guess who sung/recorded it, leave a comment!

Blizzard just recently announced their new patch notes for 3.12.  One of the more significant changes happens to be the big changes being made to Wintergrasp and the daily quests associated with it.  It seems that they will be changing the daily quests into weekly quests with increased Stone Shard rewards.  Oh Blizzard… what are you thinking?

It’s no secret that Wintergrasp was causing major lag issues, not only inside the battle zone but outside throughout Northrend.  There’s really not much Blizzard can do about it as the increased number of participants just create too much of a load on the server.  On Bleeding Hollow during popular playtime hours, you can see as many as 4-6 full raid groups on both sides of the battle… that’s around 400 people in one zone!  But is changing the quests from dailies to weekly quests the right way to go about fixing the problem?

The reason why I like Wintergrasp is the epic scale of the battle.  It’s like what Alterac Valley used to be prior to making it the speed runs they are now.  Not only is it epic, it’s against your sworn enemies on your server, making it even more satisfying to know that you denied the opposing faction of your server the luxury of having the Wintergrasp buff.  By implementing these changes to quests, Wintergrasp battle sizes will undoubtedly become smaller, reducing the associated lag.  It may help remedy the lag problem, but we’ll be losing yet another epic scale PvP environment.  On top of this, another problem that will most likely show up is going to be with weekly quests.  This is going to be a brand new element being put into the game, and as we all know, something completely different usually ends up being buggy the first time around.

I’m hoping this is just a short term solution to the problem.  What Blizzard really needs to do is to host Wintergrasp on another server under the guise of a phased Wintergrasp.  Just like the quest The Battle for the Undercity is completely separate from the real Undercity, Wintergrasp needs to function in a similar manner, allowing people not partaking in the battle to be free from the lag.  If Blizzard required people to enter battle via the portal in Dalaran, it could spawn another phased area on another server.  Obviously, something like this is a long term solution and will take time to implement.  I just hope Blizzard realizes that cutting the number of people partaking in Wintergrasp by way of reducing incentive to participate is not the right way to go about fixing the problem.

-V

Let’s Get This Ball Rollin’!

Welcome to DK Tank LFG! If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is a World of Warcraft blog with a twist of Death Knight. I’ve been playing on the Bleeding Hollow server since two weeks after launch. Since then, I’ve played extensively as a warlock, warrior, and death knight.

I’ll be catering mostly to the death knights out there but I will try to sprinkle in some theorycraft as well as some general stories and reflections based on the game itself.  If you found your way here, drop me a comment and say hello!

-V