Heya guys!!  So today, I’ve got tons of stuff to throw into this post.  The downside is that it won’t be a perfect breakdown on talent trees, rotations, etc…  But it will have TONS of good stuff for you about some of the new tricks out there.  But first, today was awesome!!

I walk into work about 1-2 minutes late.  I’m tired, worn out, and I just don’t want to be there.  I walk to the front to figure out what is going on for the day and my boss says, “Who wants to go home?”  No hesitation, it was like mental instinct and reflexes kicked in as I instantly shouted out, “ME!!!  ME!!!”  One of my co-workers followed up about 5 seconds later with a, “Wait.  I wanna go.”

I stuck with the first come, first served policy and insisted I should get to go because I said something first.  He was asking me to flip for it.  Which, while laughing, I said no way in hell.  He then offers to Rock, Paper, Scissors for it.  Laughing harder I said, “WTF would I wanna do that?  That doesn’t help me get out of here at all!!”  ROFL.  10 seconds later (the boss was on the phone) my boss waves me to go.  I shit you not, I RAN out of that place so fast!!  No way in hell I was gonna walk and give someone a chance to call my ass back.  /SPRINT 

Talk about an early Christmas.  Man.  I cannot think of even one time I was asked whether or not I wanted to go home from work before.  /WIN  I’m not really sure why we didn’t need someone today.  Over staffed maybe…  But I sure as hell was NOT gonna stick around and ask questions in case it made them change their mind.  Know what I’m saying?!?! 

I came home, took a good long nap.  Went to store, came home, cooked, cleaned, and watched some Burn Notice!!  OMFG today was an AWESOME DAY!!! 

LOL, so enough of my wonderful day!!  Let’s get into some of that good old fashioned Death Knight loving from me that you guys have missed so much eh?!

BLOOD Disease-less Spec

You’ve heard me refer to Batmack a few times now.  The main reason is that he is a DK in my guild, and one of the best players in game I’ve ever met.  Now I won’t go to him for theorycrafting or other info always, but when it comes to pure talent at playing this game, he’s one of the best around hands down.  He can tell you how to murder something. 

Here is the WWS link as well, but this should only last about 2 weeks since it is not on a paid account:  WWS Report.

Now the interesting points here are as follows:

• Recount does not track Army of the Dead for anyone but the player himself.  So while my Recount will track my AotD, it will not track and display Mack’s AotD.
• AotD *does* count as part of your DPS.  Moron’s who say it doesn’t are the same idiots originally saying that hunter pets shouldn’t count as part of their damage.  Like I said, morons.
• WWS does not properly track AotD, so the WWS report is not 100% accurate as well.
• Yes, this is a disease-less rotation.  He did not use IT or PS once.
• In game he did 6800 actual DPS with everything added in.  Yeah, 6800 DPS.  It was not a typo.
• He wasn’t even going to spec Blood.  Our Enhancement Shaman was missing so he went Blood and I went Frost for raid buffs.  LOL.

51/0/20

The spec is straight forward.  I’m not going to break down why you make the decisions here that you do, or how to alternate the points up.  But basically this is your big bad boy here.  We’ll go into talent choices and more in another post dedicated to Blood. 

Rotation

Now I’ve seen some variants on this one, but honestly I’ve not seen one rotation out there outperform the simplistic and useful one that Mack used.

OB -> HS -> OB -> HS -> DC -> DC

That’s it.  You can honestly do the attacks in any order, so long as you are using the Rune CD’s immediately.  The rotation is very tight, leaving only 1 second for mistakes.  So you have to be on the ball and you need to Expertise cap.  But outside of Rune management, it’s straight forward.  You don’t have to try to work in Sudden Doom procs, you don’t have to manage diseases, you don’t have to do awkward rotations that change depending on the cycle, etc…  I’m honestly considering trying out Blood for the first time in my life.

FROST Spec

So I’ve always been a fan of Frost oriented themes in in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy world.  It’s pretty f’ing cool in my book.  In fact when I first played in the Beta I rolled out as a Frost Knight to test it out.  But sadly it was pretty suck when I got in.  And it has been for the most part since until recently.  So I finally went back to test it out.

Now, let me start of by saying this upfront.  No matter how good you are, I do not recommend ever picking a brand new spec and rotation one hour before a raid.  >.<  OMFG it was awkward and painful as hell.  I should have run a good couple of 5 mans first to get the hang of it.  Ah well…

So lets just skip past all of the details and get into the pics…  They tell a story.  If you look at BOTH of them, in order, then you should realize what I did before you even get to the next section of text…

And the second pic…

Sigh…

So points of interest:

• If you didn’t notice, I forgot to train.  Yes, I am THAT much of a hardcore Unholy DK that I’ve never trained Frost or Blood Live.  I’ve done all of my testing with those specs on PTR only.
• Frost Strike, untrained, was still the highest % of my total damage done.  That makes me really wonder how much more it would have done had it been trained.
• I did not use HB once, even if I had a Rime (on Patchy).  I was having a rough time.  Deal.  I was new to this. 
• I did this in Blood Presence, not Unholy Presence.  I do not know if that was the right call.
• I changed up my rotation half way through the run.  I was originally in Unholy Presence and using the 6xIT Rotation.  And another one even before that.  I have no idea what was the best.  I’d really need to play them all for a while to figure it out.
• Death Runes are the only way to make Frost rotations work since they do not use PS ever.  It makes things awkward.
• HB on a 5 second cooldown has not helped this spec at all.  It still makes Frost stupidly clunky and not fun imho.

21/50/0

The spec is the backbone of any 2H Frost spec, and can be used for the 6xIT Rotation or for a more standard Rotation as well.  You can tweak it around some, but like I said before about the Blood one.  We’ll cover that all more in depth in a post especially for Frost.

Rotation

On Patchwerk I used:

IT -> BS – > OB -> OB -> FSx3

That rotation is not necessarily perfect.  If you’re wondering how it works you pop Blood Tap at the beginning of the fight for the starting Death Rune to make it work.

Alternative Rotation 1:

IT -> BS -> IT -> IT -> OB

BS -> IT -> OB -> IT -> IT

This uses Unholy Presence.

You work in FS on any Killing Machine proc (sometimes pushing back a Rune).  If you will go over 100 RP, and you have Runes ready you immediately fire off a FS whether you have a KM proc up or not.  This rotation is a PITA.  You mess it up once, and it borks you up bad.  I highly recommend DRM for it becuase it gives you a lot more wiggle room if you do mess something up.

Alternative Rotation 2:

IT -> BS -> OB -> OB

ITx6

This uses Unholy Presence, and you have to pay attention and try to use as many FS’s on the KM procs as possible.  There’s another iteration that basically is like AR1 but has another IT in it.  The permutations are rather extensive really.  But the point of those is to break up the IT’s to give you more time to react to use FS without wasting a KM proc on an IT.

DW Testing

So I finally got some pimptastic 1H’s!!!

I spent some time training the skills up too.  Not one 1H skill above 270, lol.  So I’ve got Swords and Axes to 395 each now, and I’ll probably skill them up the rest of the way in an instance or something so that I don’t have to put that much effort into it.  Skilling up weapon skills is boring…

But the upside is that I will now be finally testing out some DW builds myself and seeing how they do!!!    More incoming, but don’t expect to see me in a raid as DW for at least 1-2 weeks.

Achievements!!

We FINALLY picked up Heroic: Shocking!

But of course the 3 Drake Sartharion Achievement eludes me still.  Not because I suck.  Not because we can’t do it.  But because I always seem to oversleep, have to go out, or don’t log in when we do it!!!  Damnit I’ve missed like the last 4 times now.  Hell my guild one shotted it one time, and did it in just 3 tries this week.  Grrrr!!!

And don’t even get me started on The Immortal.  OMFG.  We actually did it.  We made it to Saph without one death.  But then one of our guys dc’d after the Ready check.  He got killed by the Blizzard before anyone realized he was dc’d in the back alone.  No one died the entire raid, even after that happened.  Not one death.  Except for a lousy dc that happened right at the end.  How lame is that?!!?  /sigh

BLUE POSTS ZOMG!!!

If you follow MMO Champion or World of Raids at all you may have seen some of the supposed incoming changes to Death Knights in 3.1 release.  Here is a reprint in case you do not.

• Gargoyle and Unholy Blight have swapped talent positions. Gargoyle?s damage has increased and runic power cost per time has decreased.
• Pestilence ? this spell no longer causes damage but just spreads diseases. Blood Boil is intended to be the general area attack, and has been changed to be castable on targets with no diseases on them, but does extra damage if diseases are present.
• Unbreakable Armor now absorbs a flat amount of damage that increases as your armor increases. It no longer boosts armor.
• The Frost tree has been shuffled. Among other things, PvP talents such as Endless Winter are closer to the top of the tree where Blood and Unholy death knights can access them.
• Sudden Doom ? this talent now procs a Death Coil rather than requiring an additional button click. It works similarly to shamans? Lightning Overload.
• Magic Suppression and Blood of the North have been reduced to 3 ranks for the same benefit.
• Blood Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.

As I said in my previous post do NOT expect these changes to be what you think they will.  For example Lightning Overload procs 1/2 damage Lightning Bolts.  So Sudden Doom might do the same.  1/2 damage DC’s.  Expect the restructuring of the Frost tree to impinge on DW builds making HB and KM more difficult to attain.  See where I’m going with this?

The interesting thing to note is whether or not Blizz has taken notice of the disease-less Blood spec, and how useful it is.  Or even the fact that the best Frost specs never even use Plague Strike, aka Blood Plague.  Whether or not they address these issues since disease use/management is supposed to be CORE to a DK will be entertaining to me to say the least.

As will their poor attempts, yet again, at class balance.  Ah well.  I’ll be filling you guys in as more develops.

PTR

Something intersting for you guys though is that I have made arrangements with my guild master now for the 3.1 PTR deployment.  From everything I’ve read the PTR will only release bosses on a limited basis like they did in Sunwell.  So some bosses will never be accessible ever until Live.  Others may be up only for 1-2 nights top for testing, and then go the way of the Dodo until release.

So Rage has given the go ahead for cancelling any and all Live SK Raids after 3.1 is released to PTR so we can explore some of the boss content in testing phase.  I’m not sure how much we will get a chance to see, but hopefully if all goes well I will be giving you guys some very early release info on the Uludar bosses and content!!

Power Leveling

I’m helping out a friend who has decided to take a gamble and try out my server.  I’m going to be helping power level her some as my DK.  So I will also have some information coming out to you guys soon about tricks of the trade for pl’ing up friends through old world instances, etc…  We should be starting this weekend, so more to come soon!!

I’m done.

This post was Epic.  I’m taking my kitten Shadow over to Mythra’s house so she can rebond with her momma cat, and we’re gonna chill or something…  I’m not really sure what the hell we’re doing…  I need to grab a movie.  Peace Out!!

-Suffer Well Brothers and Sisters.

Tags: /rl, Blue, Fun, Rotations, Specs