“Munch, I am going to grab some water, do NOT touch the frag belt I just modded, alright?” Says a goggle-wearing Death Knight…

*Boom*
What part of do NOT touch did you not understand!?
The part… with you being … a Blood Elf…

Welcome class, my regrets for your classmate, he should have known not to stand near Munchy in the middle of an explosives lab. Worry not, Gnomes will be even more replaceable once we get access to Goblins! Trust me, he will be in good hands.

As any character, you should pick up two professions. The first reason for this is to simply make some quick cash, because face it, you can not repair all that plate gear on you without any cash, students! Secondly, professions have an indirect and/or direct effect on our performance as a Tank. Each profession has gear that can be created for any player in WoW, but they also give special bonuses for you to boot!

There are 3 gathering skills (skinning/mining/herbalism) and 8 crafting professions, each of these gives a flat-out buff, special ability, or gear enhancement specifically for the player. Any combination of these has a chance to be beneficial for a class in WoW, but as a Death Knight Tank, what should we be looking for out of our professions’ bonuses?

Well, with 24 different combinations of skills available to a single player,  and the ability to only pick 1 of those combinations, it can be quite a challenge to pick which is beneficial to both your income of Gold and increased performance as a Tank. Let us cut into this so-called chase and explore which skills will be beneficial as a Tank, but do remember, you are entitled to your own opinion! (Just your opinion may not be most beneficial as a Tank).

Note: The benefits listed are based upon 450/450 skill in them!

Gathering Skills

Simply put, each of these skills allows us to take from the world. Whether it be picking flowers, finding ore inside of a rock, or ripping the skin off of an animal, each acts as a base for practically every single profession in the entire game. All are simplistic to level up, as well as great ways to rake in the cash.

Herbalism
Pickin’ flowers eh? Fine, if you want to frolic amongst the Priests you may. As a Herbalist the ability Lifeblood is granted to your worthless soul! Once clicked it allows you to be a Resto Druid for 5 seconds, every 3minutes. This meaning that you can heal yourself for 3600 HP with a bunch of pretty little flowers placed all around you. How  useful! Hell, another free Heal is never a thing to pass up, so in that case it is  certainly an O.K. profession to fill in the void.

As a Herbalist, your Herbs are needed by Scribes and Alchemists in order to create potions, flasks, glyphs, and scrolls. Since there is constantly a great market for all of these items it will rake in the cash substantially. Even if you do not AH your findings and instead use them to craft your own items you will be able to save a KILLING on some very pricey Raid Flasks/Glyphs!

Elno’s Word: Alright, it is certainly an easily defended choice of profession. The Lifeblood ability produces a noticeable amount of HP, and it is very simple to level. Is it my top choice? No, but it is definitely a good option to consider as a Tank.

Mining

If bashing a rock, armed only with a tiny pick, does not sound manly to you, then I have absolutely no clue what would be. Out of all of the gathering skills combined it is the proud owner of the most useful “ability” for a Tank. Toughness at its max level of 450 adds an extra 60 STAM to your stats. A little over 600 HP by leveling one of the easiest trade skills in this entire game? Sign me the hell up!

From a money perspective, you will be able to mine Ore needed by Jewel Crafters, and turn that ore into bars for the Engineers and Blacksmiths (Jewel Crafters as well) on your server. Titanium and Titansteel bars will sell for an absolute killing, and the gems you gather as you scour the regions for these nodes will be able to be turned into useful gems to place into gear.

Elno’s Word: Honestly, I would be hard-pressed not to take up Mining as a Tank. It is practically brainless to level, produces an excellent amount of cash, and gives 60 STAM to boot! What is not to like about this?

Skinning

The Native Americans used practically every part of any animal they would kill. It is a damn waste to leave that Rhino laying there to decay! Luckily Skinners will take these rotting carcasses and recycle them into useable pieces of fine leather. The bonus it gives, however, is the least-desired out of all of the Gathering Skills. Master of Anatomy, despite having a badass name, is not desired for a Tank. We do not need Crit, if it comes off of the 2H that is perfectly fine, but we should not be gemming/enchanting/leveling trade skills solely to get the extra Crit. However, as a DPS the extra 40 crit is not half bad.

As for being a tycoon as a Skinner, your audience is not horrible. You get Leatherworkers and maybe a Tailor to consume your dead animal skins as they make “stylish” clothing articles for everyone to wear. Yes, you are the sole reason RPers look so good, congratulations!

Elno’s Word:  Despite being useful, I would rather pick flowers than skin wild beasts, the benefits are just not worth my time. Although it is the easiest Gathering skill to level, a Tank should not be touching this with a 10 ft pole.

We can dance if we want to!

Tradeskills

At this point in time of WoW there are 5 different Trade skills to choose from. All of which have their uses and perks in-game. Most of the trade skills require gathered materials that one (or more) of the three Gathering skills can acquire, because of this many people level a gathering skill and a trade skill that cooperates with it well. The perfect synergy, but what Trade skills (if any) will we be choosing!?

Tailoring

What could be less many than picking flowers for a living? Why making dresses of course! First of all, as a Death Knight we do not even bother wearing Cloth, and as a Tank this goes double do to the lack of useful Stats and armor. This is solely needed for the clothies, and just incase you have not noticed, we wear PLATE, especially as a Tank. The only use we would be getting out of Tailoring will be the bags, so if you are that dead set upon leveling it, go make a Priest for Christ’s sake.

Tailors can make leg enhancements for everyone, but as a perk for a Tailor these leg enhancements only cost a mere 1g thread to create. These enhancements are called Master’s Spellthread and Sanctified Spellthread; they give 50 spellpower and 30 STAM, and  50 spellpower and 20 Spirit respectfully. Just to burst your bubble, despite the fac that we do have Spells as Death Knight Tanks, they do NOT scale based upon spellpower, instead they work off of our Attack Power. That perk? Useless, but hey, you can make a Magic Carpet mount which makes it totally worth it! (Seriously, it is pretty epic)

Edit: Thy whom make bags also have an embroidery for their cloaks, on top of the Spellthreads for their legs. Shadowguard Embroidery, Darkglow Embroidery, and Lightweave Embroidery would be their names, and of course the mats are pretty cheap and worthwile. However, if you are a Tank, it is TOTALLY not worth your time to go for any of these. First, Darkglow and Lightweave are completely useless because once again, we do not use spellpower and do not even have Mana as a rescource. Shadowguard is not half bad however, but for the amount of time to get to that point in Tailoring is just not worth a 400 AP chance on hit proc on my cloak.

Elno’s Word: For Christ’s sakes, I know it is extremely easy to level, but there are absolutely no perks into leveling Tailoring. Even if it was useful, do you really want to be THAT GUY who makes dresses at the Ebon Hold?

Enchanting

Everyone who wishes to accomplish anything end-game will find your name and make you their new best friend, seriously. You are the guy that can boost their performance, and you can make a killing off of doing so. As an Enchanter you suck the life out of all of the useless Green/Blue/Epic items of the world and turn them into useful materials needed to put powerful spells in your’s and other’s gear. So pick up that rod and let us get to work!

As a perk for Tanks, you can Enchant Ring- Stamina to both of your rings. 30 Stam x 2 = 60 Stam! Yes, about 600hp solely off of Enchanting, and that is pretty frickin’ sweet. Plus, you do not have to go out of your way to buy mats for your own personal enchants, so you will be guaranteed to save a killing off of that.

Elno’s Word: YES! 600 HP extra is certainly a magnificent bonus, just a small price to pay for being the “enchanting bitch” and staying at the bank after Raid nights enchanting guildy’s gear. Trust me, it is made of pure win, and some arcane.

Conclusions Part 1.

As I said earlier, you can make great cash off of any of these gathering skills/trade skills, but which ones should you choose from a Tanking perspective? So far Mining, Herbalism, and Enchanting are the only “viable” options that we have explored so far. Do not worry though, next week we will take an in-depth look into Black Smithing, Jewel Crafting, Engineering, Leatherworking, Inscription, and Alchemy. I hope to see you all there!

Do you have a Death Knight Tanking question you want answered in The Death Knight Tank and You: weekly miniguide? Drop us an email at Plaguedcandles@gmail.com !

Happy WoWing!
-Elno

The Arena, a place of gore, death, but most of all, glory. One must take everything, ‘lest he wishes to lose everything he has worked hard for in this life.  Do you have what it takes, Death Knight?

PvP or Player verses Player is a hit or miss for most people, but as a Death Knight I have found it to be one of the most fun things I have done in WoW. The Gladiators will be a regularly updated mini-guide (much like The Death Knight Tank and You) to inform all of my PvP loving pupils on how to reach the top and kill many.

As with anything you will do in WoW a spec has to be chosen, but in PvP especially you must be very comfortable with this specific spec. You should know your build inside out, better than you would you own child. Why? The answer is very simple, PvP is INTENSE you are getting nuked by some Mage, then out pops his buddy, what buttons do you hit?

I don’t know, I just took the spec for teh Ghoul! *dies*

In PvE you have some sort of warning when to pop OH SHI- buttons, whether it be knowing the boss fight or some mod like DBM, you generally have a good idea on when to pop your buttons to help you live. Sadly, you generally will have little to no warning of when to smash those buttons in a PvP environment, you are playing against real people, they do not have a set amount of damage or an ability that only goes off every 30 seconds on the second.

As a Death Knight any of the specs are viable, although some are much more popular than others, they all work perfectly so long as you know how to play them correctly.  One important detail that you will be noticing when speccing for PvP is that you can be quite a bit more creative, there is no “best spec” per-say, merely some talents that you like and those that you do not. Of course there are essentials that would be down-right idiotic to not snag, but for the most part you can be pretty lenient with what you choose, so long as you know what you are doing.

Unholy 0/17/54

One of the leading PvP builds is currently the Unholy 0/17/54 build, this is designed to give you the best of two worlds, the burst of Unholy coupled with the very basics of mitigation in the early Frost Tree. This is the spec that I am fond of for a few reasons: you are VERY difficult to defeat, there’s the ghoul permanent pet (3 sec stun), gargoyle, diseases that are a pain in the ass, and of course ridiculous amounts of burst.

Let us take a quick look at the two pets you receive as Unholy, first is your perma ghoul. Think of him as a gimped Rogue, he can ninja jump onto your opponents from afar creating some bad ass distractions as well as a 3second stun every minute. Plus, he does some delicious amounts of damage so he is a great thing to keep alive, besides Pets are some of the most annoying things to have to ignore while PvPing, they can be deadly as sin because they just do not stop kickin’ your ass. The stun that I mentioned earlier should really be used only when needed, I like to hit my opponents up with it after they have used their trinket either on my Resto friend’s Roots/Cyclone or Aifel’s Sap/Frost Trap (3.5, seriously)/Kidney Shot/Gnaw (oh wait). Using your abilities at the correct time in the Arena or just BGs in general can make or break the fight, so just bind that pretty stun to a key and use it when it is necessary.

The Gargoyle is probably one of the worst things you can throw at your opponent, it ROCKS them like they were a baybeh. Basically all it does is fly around and throw “Wrath” spells at your opponent for 30 seconds. The only downside is the 60 RP lost in order to summon it and the 3min cool down, the Gargoyle should only be used when you need an extra 300-500 DPS thrown at your opponent when bursting them down.

The reason Unholy DK’s tend to stay alive for so long is the amount of burst that we can throw out, I mean honestly I am pretty damn squishy for a guy wearing Plate, but if I can get you to focus on your own self-preservation and not taking me down, you’re dead. We have 3 diseases, and the 3rd (Ebon Plague) from the talents increases Spell Damage used on the target by 17% and 30% more disease damage taken. Yes, it is ridiculous, and I like it that way.

To sum up the Unholy Build, “The best offense is your best defense”, it is so true in this case! All you have to do is out burst your opponent and keep yourself alive with your OH SHI- buttons, if you can do both of those at the same time, you win at playing 0/17/54.

So, Munch, the lettuce stalks are down! *cymbal crash*

I have seen a few variations of Blood, and the most successful one seems to be the 51/0/20 build. Blood is known for its heavy amounts of survivability in PvP, as well as some support it can offer to the player’s partners via some abilities. Do not fret, it does plenty of damage to hold its own in PvP, but the more memorable thoughts of your fight against the Blood DK will be how LONG the battle was.

A great chunk of their survivability comes from their self-preservation (healing) via Death Strike, Rune Tap, and of course Vampiric Blood (the blood-exclusive OH SHI- button focused on increasing HP and receiving more Healing for 10 seconds). Couple your Rune Tap with Glyph of Rune Tap and your friends get 10% of the amount healed as well, which takes a great chunk of stress off of your healer, or just allows you to function better without a Healer.

Comparatively to Retadins, Blood is also very strong in supporting their partners on the field of battle. While Retadins can bubble, hand of freedom, and heal their comrades to cheat death and live to fight another day, Death Knights merely cause more death and destruction. Abomination’s Might is a perfect example, the talent works off of Heart Strike/Blood Strike/Obliterate/Death Strike, and when it is procced via one (or more) of those abilities, every comrade within 45 yds of you is granted 10% more AP for 10 seconds. Not a bad burst, eh?

Hysteria is arguably the Blood Death Knight’s BEST use of support in terms of blowing stuff up. Basically you pop Hysteria on a comrade or yourself and get to do 20% more damage for 30 seconds, exceptional for a time when burst is needed, and needed FAST. However, with most things in life, there is always a price for doing so, that price is 1% HP every second for the duration.

But hey, when your team is taking a beating your Healer (or lack of one) can not fix, pop your Rune Tap for quick heals and maybe a Mark of Blood on an enemy. For 20 seconds, or 20 of his damaging strikes, the target of the abuse is healed for 4% of their total HP. Not a bad trade-off!

How does one summarize Blood? “The best defense is your best offense” Sure, the Unholy bastards have you beat in terms of burst, but your team will be a TON stronger than theirs thanks you. So if you’re a guy who enjoys getting in peoples faces while helping your team mates, pick blood!

Frost 0/53 /18 and 10/54/7

There are two ways to play Frost in PvP, you will either DW if you have really good 1H weapons, or you will rock the 2H. Either way, you are going to be a complete menace, and certainly a pain in the ass. In a basic perspective, Frost is sort of the “middle man” of the three Talent Trees (PvP wise of course), it has excellent burst, good survivability, and a heavy helping of CC. Comparatively speaking, the burst is amazing, but Unholy may actually have it beat by a little bit (depending on your weapons of course), the survivability out of Blood is probably a decent-amount better, but Frost is certainly nothing to scoff at.

CC however is very, VERY delicious, it really is the only Tree with any sort of “CC” on its own. The permanent ghoul gives a 3second stun, but as Frost you pop your Hungering Cold and freeze everyone around the Death Knight for 10 seconds. Now do remember, like a Hunter’s Frost Trap, any damage done to a frozen target will break the CC, so make sure your partners are not complete idiots.

As far as survivability goes, you have Lichborne to pop out and become immune to fear/charm/sleep effects. Remember that Warlock problem you used to have? Oh wait, you never had one because you were immune to all of their bullshit for 15 seconds with AMS up, oh yes, that red puddle WAS the Warlock “problem”! It does not even stop there, Fridgid Dreadplate gives the Frostie a 3% chance for attacks used on you to miss. Think of it as extra avoidance really. As an added bonus count Toughness as a Frost Talent and you are a frickin’ Tank, delicious Armor, plus the 30% reduced duration on movement slowing effects.

The burst, do I even need to explain it? Killing Machine + Rime = WIN, Frost Strike crits = WIN, Obliterate crit? = Where’d his health go?

Feel like being the middle-man? Think you have what it takes to control rediculous amounts of crit-age in your hands? Frost will be your friend!

And we are letting this fine piece of steak out of her bindings, why?

Conclusions

As I stated earlier, each of these specs can be catered to your needs, there is no set-in-stone way to spec for PvP, but it is generally best if you follow the spec’s outline. IE for the Unholy build go for 0 talents in Blood, 17 in Frost, and 54 in Unholy, but these can be in whatever place your little heart desires! So go out there and make me proud, team, or come back laying on your shield.

Note: It will take much time until you find your perfect build, so try a few out, and do not be afraid to tool around with a new Tree, sometimes the best way to learn PvP is starting from scratch.

“Death Knights… can’t use… shields, idiot…”

They best not fail then,

“Damn straight…”

Death to the living!
-Elno
P.S. The avatar on the top of the page is going to be posted on each of the posts that I write, Aifel will also have his coming in the near future. Now you can distiguish who is writing what instead of going on a wild goose hunt!

DEATH KNIGHT SMASH!

“My precious, so beautiful. Swordy, you have a scratch on you! WHO TOUCHED MY SWORD!?” Screams a VERY pissed-off Blood Elf…

Greetings students, now not too long ago I posted a little something having to do with two stats called Hit Rating and Expertise. Once you have enlightened yourself with that post on the basics of the two, we may continue on with our lesson today!

Finished? …No!?
“…Think they… can read… any slower?”
How about we do not find out the answer to that question.

Hit Rating

As you have read, the “Hit Cap” is the amount of Hit Rating we need to not miss anymore with spells and abilities. Completely untalented and not taking any buffs into account, the melee Hit Cap is 8% chance to hit, or more commonly known as 295.11 Hit Rating. Said melee Hit Cap ensures our ability to always hit with our melee abilities, such as Obliterate, Scourge Strike, Death Strike, Plague Strike, RUNE STRIKE, ect. As the Death Knight Tank, it is a good goal to have to reach the Melee Hit Cap. Think of it this way, every time you miss, you do not gain the amount of TPS that you could have off of that specific ability, and less TPS gives the DPS a greater chance to pull off of you.

The spell Hit Cap works the same way, except it takes quite a bit more HR to acquire this cap, a 17% chance to hit, but as an exact number it is commonly known as 445.91 Hit Rating. Yes, Death Knights actually do use spells, and depending upon your spec you may be using more or less of them. Every spec has Death Grip, Pestilence, Blood Boil, Death Coil, Icy Touch, and Dark Command (Taunt). If you are a bad ass Frosty like myself, Howling Blast is included into that list, so pretty much anything that you can use while disarmed, but not while silenced is simply classified as a spell.

445.91 and 262.32 HR are our targets as any Death Knight, so how is one going to reach the cap? There are a few variables that will come into play, if you are an Alliance player and are confident that you can get a Space Goat to tag along on every Raid that you will be doing, you can shoot for 1% LESS Hit, as they constantly give this to their group as a passive bonus.

Shadow Priests and Balance Druids also have spells that they can use to boost the Raid’s chance to hit, Misery or Improved Faerie Fire will give the players attacking the target affected with this debuff a 3% more chance to hit said target with their spells.

As a Death Knight, the only buff we can contribute to the two mentioned is possibly the 1% Space Goat hit. In turn, how will we be able to boost our own Hit Rating without including gear, which is our goal here as both Tanks and DPS?

Virulence is a Talent available on the 1st Tier of the Unholy tree, with 3 Ranks in it you will gain 3% more chance to Hit with spells. Just from taking 3 simple ranks you have knocked the 17% spell cap to 14%, not including Raid Buffs!

For those of you who bothered to level Cooking or can manage to mooch off of a friend of alt, you can grab some Snapper Extreme to boost your HR by 40 which is about 1% chance to hit with melee and 1.5% (abouts) to hit with spells, not bad at all.

So on a good day with Virulence and Misery/Imp FF (not including food buffs) it will take 11% spell hit to cap up, which is approximately 288.53 HR. Yes, that is a few HR more than the Melee cap, so in turn it is not as  hard to cap up with your spells with a decently-balanced Raid. Just make sure that your Spriest/Druid is reliable enough to keep on top of those! (Although for the Spriest it just works off of VT I think, and if they are not casting that, they need to reroll)

Elnoriah, what the Hell? How come 11% spell hit so close in HR to 8% melee hit?

Great question! They actually scale much differently, which is damned good or else it would be a hellish nightmare to even think about getting spell capped. About 32.79 HR is required to get 1% of melee hit, whereas it only takes 26.23 HR to acquire 1% spell hit. Thus proving that even though they are 3% off from each other, the numbers are not that far off.

Tanks: Do we need it CAPPED?

It is a great goal to get the Hit Cap and not miss as a Tank, but to be honest, we are already stacking so many other stats it can be pretty damn tricky to get capped. You want to be as close as you physically can be, so I would still recommend snagging Virulence, because regardless of the fact that some Tanks may be using more spells than others, we ALL need to Taunt. Taunting is a SPELL it has a chance to MISS, and we certainly do not want to be missing with one of our Taunts. Plus, we get a frigate-full of TPS the more we are able to Hit, seriously, who wants to argue that TPS is a bad thing to have?

So the verdict, no we do not have to be capped, but that does not mean that we should completely neglect in trying. We are here to take the damage, but in order to do so, the boss has to be pretty pissed with us and target us as the “most threatening” player in the raid. Yes, we are able to Tank decently without being capped, but in the end our job just gets that much easier the closer we are to the cap.

Expertise

In my professional opinion, the Expertise Soft Cap of 26 is the most important secondary stat we have as Death Knight Tanks. Despite the fact if you are HC’d or not, mobs/bosses still have an ability to Dodge your melee abilities and white damage attacks (AKA weapon damage). Once you have acquired the Soft Cap of 26 Expertise bosses will never be able to Dodge your blows any more.

Sadly, they can still Parry, but that is a different story!

As a Tank we want to at least reach the Soft Cap, but generally it is not advised to go searching for the Parry cap because that is about 56 and you would be severely lacking in the Tank avoidance/Dcap/HP departments in order to do so. To a Tank Expertise (HR as well)  is a “secondary stat” meaning you should only be getting these stats subconsciously or only after you are completely finished with your primary goals, which of course are 540 Defense/More HP than your body has room for/Delicious amounts of avoidance.

Now that I have crushed your hopes and dreams of being a Hard Capped (unable to be parried) Tank, I can give you a physical number to shoot for. 26 – 30 Expertise is the goal as a Tank, but once again do not speand your hopes and dreams on reaching these numbers, focus on being a Tank first.

“Oi, idiot… are there… any ways… to help get this… Soft Cap… without gear?”
For you Munchy, there is no hope, but for my pupils, damn right there are!
“Oh snap… I’m going… to cry to my mother!… Oh wait… you’re technically… my mother…”
Sadly I lack the body parts required to be your “mother”, besides this lesson is on Hit and Expertise for Tanks, not “The Birds and The Bees”.

Every Talent Tree gives a Talent that gives either 5-6 Expertise depending on the Talent, thus lessening the amount we need to go for to hit the Soft Cap by the respected numerals. Of course those damned Blood Tanks will be getting the 6 Expertise with the Veteran of the Third War talent, allowing them to only require 20 Expertise to hit the Soft Cap. Our friends from Frost and Unholy will receive 5 Expertise when speccing into either Rage of Rivendare or Tundra Stalker making our respective Soft Caps need only 21 Expertise from gear/food.

Also, take into account that some specific races get a +5 bonus to Expertise when using a specific type of weapon. As an example, Orcs that use Axes get a +5 to Expertise with them, so not a bad trade-off at all! So, a Blood Specced Orc Tank using a 2H Axe will only need 15 Expertise to get Soft Capped. Holy shit…

Let us just say this is very, very, VERY easy to achieve. Now a days Expertise can be found practically anywhere we turn, so let’s go and snag a ton of it, hoard it to ourselves, and yell at the clothies!

Conclusions

Both of these are very important to us as Tanks, as I have said earlier (and will keep repeating until I forget to do so) the more attacks that successfully hit a Boss/Mob, the more Threat we create. Threat is a very good thing to have, and it is almost as important as being able to receive the damage that we will be receiving in turn of having so much Threat on our target. Still, just remember that even though both of these caps are very helpful, your Defense/Avoidance/HP are still your most important Stats as you gear up.

Happy Wowing!
-Elnoriah

Information on HR was found at Skeleton Jack.com

We find our Death Knight hero perusing his favorite weapons at his home, the Ebon Hold…

It came to me the other day, on the 14th of November WOTLK turns 1yr old. To top it off, the Death Knights that were extremely unbalanced at release are now pretty much as stable as the rest of the classes in WoW. I bring up the 1yr anniversary because around now it really hit me that this “new class” (Death Knights) were going to be able to use 2h weaponry to Tank.

What… the… hell?

This made no sense to me, using a 2H weapon is just a stupid idea you would get no Defense or avoidance that you would from “Tanking Weapons” and shields, so why bother!? Runes were the answer, and they still are in fact. The Death Knight class, as you know, has a special skill exclusive to themselves somewhat like the old Rogue poison skill. This skill is Rune Forging, the ability to put a Rune onto a weapon of your choice, and some of which are exclusive to either 1H/2H/or are interchangeable.

As a 2H Tank you would be insane not to be using Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle, 2% more Stamina is a great bonus, but 25 Defense (skill not rating) is frickin’ amazing. It makes up for our lack of shields and THEN some! This single Rune was what allows us to Tank with a 2H weapon, and it feels great. Hell, a free Enchant and it can be changed around with another anytime I want for free? Sign me the hell up!

Dual Wield Tanking is an interesting concept, and Blizzard has been trying their hardest to make it a viable to Tank with, which so far has been successful. The problem with this is that you will generally lack a bit more Drating than the 2H Tanks because of your lack of Stoneskin Gargoyle, but this really is not a huge problem, all you have to do is switch a few gems around. In turn of not using this Rune, you are able to use Rune of Swordbreaking on both weapons, giving you 4% Parry and 100% reduced disarm time.

There is in fact a 2H version of  Swordbreaking, but 2H Tanks tend to stay clear of that due to the fact that losing 25 Defense would force them to use most of their gem sockets for Defense. Is 4% Parry really worth a lack of 6-8 STAM gems? Hell no, but due to the amounts of Drating on Tanking weapons, the losses for DW are not even close to the amount 2H would be losing.

That should be easy enough to see the point, basically both use different Runes because DW Tanking lacks a Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle 1H version. Though, just as the Red Dragonflight have our backs in Eye of Eternity, Blizzard has swooped in to saved the day in 3.3! Yes, this is correct, Death Knights now have a Stoneskin Gargoyle 1H Rune, IE. a 1/2 strength Stoneskin Gargoyle Rune that you may put on both weapons. (1/2 + 1/2 = 1)

Death Knights

• Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.
• Talents
  • Unholy
    • Night of the Dead: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 45/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
    • Scourge Strike: Redesigned. The base ability now deals 50% weapon damage plus an additional amount as physical damage. However, for each disease the death knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadow damage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.
    • Unholy Blight: This talent now deals only 10% of Death Coil damage as a damage-over-time effect on the target.

Yes, see right off of the WoW Community site’s 3.3 Patch Notes for those of you non-believers. Besides me squealing at how little they changed Death Knights, let us view our major focus at this time, the fact that 1H weapons now have their own version of Stoneskin Gargoyle.

I miss that worm!

How is this such a big deal? For starters, DW do not need to suffer from a lesser amount of Defense (and crippling some enchants/gem sockets towards being used for Drating). They can now be on-par with the 2H Tanks in terms of not having to switch out gems in order to hit the DCap. However, this would force them to not use Rune of Swordbreaking. They would lose a huge edge they had over the 2H Tanks, 4% more avoidance, and honestly, this was worth the 2k HP that is generally sacrificed by switching between the two.

Luckily, we do not have to choose one or the other to use as a DW Tank, there are multiple combinations you can use in order to get the most out of your Runes/weapons. How about we check out some predictions I have for what will be plausible next patch for DW Tanking Rune combos?

Predictions on how this will be used to get the most out of your Runes.

Some people may find it in their best interest to stay the same and not have a few sockets/enchants in order to keep the 4% Parry and 100% less disarm time from Rune of Swordbreaking. This still is not a bad way to go, because that much avoidance can seriously be worth the amount of HP lost.

Now there are two things that I can see these use for, the first being a creative thought of using Stoneskin Gargoyle on one of the 1H weapons, and Swordbreaking on the other, giving you a mix of Defense/HP and 2% Parry. Essentially you do not have to sacrifice any Enchants/Gem sockets, and you still get a good portion of  avoidance. I dub that, “the best of both worlds special”, you basically get two great bonus for a very limited sacrifice of stats. This would be used if you are wielding 2 Tanking weapons, with at least 1 of which having a bit of Drating on it already, otherwise this may not be in your best interest.

Remember back to what we discussed earlier, that Stoneskin Gargoyle was created so that 2H weapons which had no Drating would be viable to Tank with. Are there not really frickin’ good 1H DPS weapons that have no Drating on it either? Yes, I said it, we can get away with Tanking with 1H DPS weapons. Think, these weapons are generally slow which is what we WANT but 1H Tanking weapons generally are fast as hell. The only downside with this is that you would be losing any of the Tank stats that are found exclusively on 1H Tank weapons (Avoidance/Defense Rating, but the Drating is made up for by Stoneskin Gargoyle!).

By using 1H DPS weapons to Tank with, we would get higher Threat because their only purpose in life is to increase your DPS. More DPS = More Threat! Plus it is much more common to find a 1H DPS weapon with Hit/Expertise than a 1H Tank weapon, which in turn makes it easier to get to the Hit Cap and Soft Expertise Cap. The possibilities are ENDLESS!

In Short, Blizzard is giving us many more choices to chew over as DW DK Tanks. Just changing Runes around can affect your entire play style as a DW Tank thanks to the new Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle.

It’s times like these when I sort of which that I was still a DW Tank.

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

P.S. Rouges/Enh Shammies, we’re stealing your weapons

Oh I'm on a ROLL today!

We find our hero polishing his armor in the Ebon Hold. What a damn show-off!…

Yes I missed last week class, but there have been a few Real Life things that came in the way. Luckily it ended in great news! (My mom is rid of the dreaded Cancer, AKA surgery worked!) Regardless, we have a lesson this week, and I do plan on teaching it to you. Dust off those notes, and grab some paper because it is time to learn about how to Tank as a Death Knight.

Around June I started talking a bit about how to build up your Death Knight Tank with Enchantments, Gear, Correct Talents, etc., yet one thing that I have yet to cover is HOW you play a Death Knight Tank. Aside from not being able to wield a shield, the play style of a Death Knight Tank is where you can completely tell the difference between them and the rest of their Tanking Brethren.

You will generally use most of the same abilities as a Tank, as you would a DPS in that spec.

There is no secret to it, DK Tanks do have a rotation, and the only thing that will ever change in said rotation is when a Rune Strike pops up, because you can never be 100% certain when you will avoid an attack. Now how come we would not use some random-ass secret abilities made specifically for Tanks? For a simple answer, merely because we do not have many set-in-stone high threat attacks that only a Death Knight Tank would only use.

Fine Rune Strike, but that really is a give-me!

So, what are the rotations that I will use as a Tank? Maybe they are right, mayhaps they are wrong, but regardless they have yet to fail putting me on the tops of the Threat Meters. Seriously, I have had to just stop hitting a boss so that other Tanks can rip them off of me! Luckily you have caught me in a good mood, I will teach you the Rotations I use to build and keep Threat as a Death Knight Tank!

My newest pupil! No other than, Dylan the Raging Warlock!

Let us start with Frost, one thing that you will notice immediately with Frost is that I will not even touch Pestilence! Glyph of Howling Blast allows me to spread Frost Fever, the only disease we care deeply about as a Frost Tank, within my HB. This is huge, I can now use a Blood Boil instead of a Pestilence, thus increasing my Threat in a noticeable amount.

Frost (When the weather outside is frightful…)
AOE

HB->BB->BB->OB->FS      Part 1
BB->BB->OB->OB->FS      Repeat until diseases are close to expiring then redo Part 1, rinse and repeat

Obviously Rune Strikes will be popped inside of the rotation at any time possible, I have it key bound to Mouse wheel Down so whenever it procs I can hit it easily. Rime is used when it has a Killing Machine to couple with, although it may be used before then if it has 1-2 sec before expiration and still no Killing Machine proc. This is so I can get a free critical + a free HB at the same time, thus allowing me to continue with Part 2 of my rotation for a longer amount of time.

Single Target

IT->PS->BS->BS->OB->FS            Part 1
OB->OB->OB->FS              Part 2 Repeat until diseases are close to expiring then redo Part 1, rinse and repeat!

The commentary before is still in action here, nothing different happens in terms of when I Rune Strike use it ASAP for maximum winnage! I tend to like to wait 1-2 seconds before I use the FS I mentioned in both of those rotations, generally either to wait for a Killing Machine proc, and just to keep the Threat increasing even after the Runes have been off Cool Down for a bit.

All it needs is a Rain of Fire in the background...

Unholy (I’m a wee bit rusty!)
AoE

DnD->IT->PS->Pest.-> DC        Part 1
BB->BB->SS->SS->DC           Part 2, repeat Part 1 when diseases are about to push the daisies!

As with Frost, I will use Rune Strike at whatever point possible, there really is no strategic use for it, just go! With Death Coil you now should watch to make sure that Unholy Blight is always on your main target, do not let it take precedence over your actual Rune abilities, but keep an eye on it. Do remember to put Bone Shield up at whatever point possible, extra damage reduction is always gets the Elnoriah Stamp of Approval.

Single Target

IT->PS->BS->BS->SS->DC              Part 1
BS->BS->SS->SS->DC               Part 2, once again, switch to Part 1 when your diseases somehow decide to stop being used!

One thing that I have not touched upon yet in the Unholy Rotation is simply the fact that they have a major advantage when it comes to switching their rotations. They can stay in Part 2 for quite a long time due to all of their diseases being constantly renewed due to the awesomeness that is the Glyph of Scourge Strike. Lastly, Rune Strike should always come first in terms of your RP(Runic Power) dump, use DC only when Rune Strike is not available.

Blood (Hey, I’m  a rookie!)
AoE

DND->IT->PS->Pest.->BB->BB->DC  Part 1 Diseases GO!
BB->BB->DS->DS->DC            Part 2, when Diseases are cured by a pill, put them back on with Part 1!

Your main concern here as a Blood Tank is to keep your diseases up, you want your BBs and DSs to HURT, and in order to do so you will need a lot of Runic Power and a load and a half of Diseases up on your targets. Now, if you are only Tanking 2 mobs, you are going to want to replace the BB’s with Heart Strikes, they will do more TPS, but it can only hit 2 targets at a single time.

Single Target

IT->PS->HS->HS->DS->DC     Part 1
HS->HS->DS->DS->DC   Part 2, you know the drill, keep rolling your face on these keys until Diseases run out!

There really is not much to it, just a very strong amount of TPS.  Yes, it is effective and delicious (there I said it class, are you happy now?). Although, this is the easiest rotations of the bunch, but the amount of abilities you need to play with and switch around during the fight can make Blood Tanking fun.

Have a Rotten Halloween!

Like I said earlier, most of the abilities you will be using as a DPS, you are going to most likely be using as a Tank for that same spec. It really is funny, every other class has more than 1 specific ability set for Tanking, we just have our Rune Strikes, and we can not even count that into a rotation, we just play frickin’ wack-a-mole with it! Funny, eh?

Do remember class, your gear is always important, so aren’t your glyphs and spec, but your rotation is what will make and break you as a Death Knight Tank. If you are just randomly mashing buttons like an imbecile, you are doing it wrong, sure your Frost Fever will not run out, but 6 Icy Touches will not get you the threat you need to keep the boss off of Mr. 3k TPS Lock. (Note: 3k TPS is what they do when they are level 1’s! Seriously!)

Class dismissed, go try some of these out! Hell, even be bold enough to write a comment either critiquing my rotations, or even talking about yours.

Next week’s lesson? Yes there will be one!
“You are the most… idiotic… smart ass… of all time.”

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

P.S. Cranky Munchy is cranky! I put strips of Gnome in his salad; it makes him go nuts!

^That was my expression, too!

“Aifel, yo, AIFEL!”, so screams a desperate-looking Death Knight. “Great, this one looks like he will be out for quite a while, damn Warriors…”

Munchy, are you ready? We are going to have to fill in for Aifel today, it seems as if he will be on a little, “vacation” for a bit. Regardless, remember back to our last episode of our Podcast? We perused through some of the recent search terms to answer questions, and laugh at how freaky some of our readers are, and we actually found a diamond in the rough, so to speak. Give us the question, mate!

“First of all… I’d like to thank… the Academy!”
“What is… Hit Rating… and Expertise????!”

To the more seasoned veterans of WoW, this is a simple question, but it actually is quite unknown to much of the player-base! Both of these are extremely important for both Melee DPS and Tanks, and Hit Rating is also a golden rule for any Ranged DPS. The only person that should never have to worry about either of these stats is a PvE healer, PvP Healing actually requires a bit of Hit to help with CC. (The more you know!!!)

“Fine… idiot… let’s start with… Hit Rating!”

Hit Rating: “Hit refers to physical damage that occurs as a result of an attack made with melee or ranged weapons. Basically it reduces the chance to miss with your attack (see below). The chance to hit increases by 1% per 32.79 hit rating points at level 80, 15.77 hit rating points at level 70, and 10 hit rating points at level 60. The base chance to miss with maximum weapon skill against an opponent of equal level is 5% for two handed and 24% for dual wield. With Patch 3.0, both hit and spell hit use the same basic hit rating attribute within the combat rating system, although the similarity largely ends there — they are effectively distinct attributes derived from the same rating.”

This is a definition brought to you by WoWWiki, how about we break this chunk down to understand what Hit Rating really is.

The first line basically means that without the “Hit Cap” any damaging attack has a chance to miss. Hit Rating reduces the chance for said attacks to  miss by X Percent by Y Amount of Hit Rating Points (found in gear/gems/enchants), and X/Y are determined by the level of the character. For Melee/Phys. Ranged you have to be Maxx’d out in the weapon of your choice in order for these percentages to be completely accurate. It also goes on to say that the Spell Hit and Physical Hit are now combined so “Hit Rating” has the same mechanics both ways.

From that description we know this, if you do not have enough Hit Rating so that a certain % of your attacks will always hit, you are basically boned as a Tank, and ESPECIALLY as a DPS. For each class/spec the amount of HR that you will be needing will be a different number, this is due to what talents would generally picked up by said class/spec. Sorry guys, but some classes are gifted with more HR Talents then others, DEAL!

Come Munchy, when we break this, it will be called "The Elnoriah Memorial for Dummies!"

There is such a thing as TOO MUCH HR! This is where the balancing comes into play, because of course, you are not aiming to hit for every frickin’ White Damage attack to land full force on every mob. That would require a number of HR enchants/gems in your gear, subtracting from your other precious Stats! Most classes shoot for the Spell/Ability hit cap, some may suggest to go higher, or lower depending on your group makeup. (Space Goats give +1% HR to your group)

As a Tank, you always want to have your Taunts/Abilities land, you do not want to give that Hunter shelling out nukes-in-a-bullet in the back there the satisfaction of pulling off of your sorry ass. We are usually all set from the amount of hit our gear gives us as a whole, but still, make sure you are as close to the cap as physically possible, it DOES help.

The DPS, if you are not Hit Capped, get the hell out of my raid, seriously, unless you are supposed to be carried by the dude shelling out 14K Death Coil Crits, go do some Heroics. This is the MOST IMPORTANT stat to always have Capped as DPS, it should not even be debated, if you can not hit with all of your abilities, your DPS will suffer more than the +28 AP enchant will make up for. HR will be balanced like this until it is taken out of the game.

Onward Munchy!
“Expertise… it is like… Spinach Ravioli!”
True that ‘partner!
“Shut up… fleshy…”

Expertise: “For boss-level mobs (which are calculated as your level + 3) the soft cap is 6.5% dodge or 26 expertise (214 expertise rating), and the hard cap is 14% parry or 56 expertise (460 expertise rating). Melee DPS classes will usually focus on the soft cap, since bosses cannot Parry when attacked from behind. Some tanks will like to collect a lot of expertise in order to avoid boss parries, which may result in the Parry-Hasting effect.”

“What the hell, man!? I thought we were good to go as Melee DPS/Tanks once we are at the Hit Cap!?” Response: WELCOME TO HELL! How about we fix you up with a good ol’ breakdown of this excerpt from WoWWiki?

REPTAR!!!!!

The first sentence means that Expertise is the stat that reduces/eliminates the chance for a mob/boss to EVER Dodge and Parry your attacks. The cap that Melee DPS needs to worry about is the “soft cap” of 26 Expertise, in order for their attacks to never be Dodged. Tanks will need to some-what focus on the 56 Expertise so the Bosses will not be able to Parry and Dodge their attacks! The Second sentence means that because you Melee classes stand BEHIND the Boss, your abilities are only able to be Dodged, thus meaning that the only worth-while cap to go for is the 26 Expertise Dodge Cap. Then we find that Tanks go for 56 Expertise to attempt to hide from the Parry-Gib monster!

Casters/Phys. Ranged DPS you do not need to worry, this is only Physically taking that Stat-Stick of yours and whacking a boss. If any of you do that, I will turn you over to Munchy and he WILL turn you into spices for his salad.

Why the hell can’t you eat them Munch!? It would be so much less time consuming!
“Idiots go… straight to… my thighs… like you…”
Sassy!

So essentially, Expertise is that friend you hang out with after you and the Hit Cap have gotten married and had 3 kids. Yes, he is important and you would not want to lose him, but your Hit Cap/Wife is a lot more important then your Expertise/Best Friend. Both have Caps, meaning that if you do not reach a certain amount, you will be “teh suck”, this should include Tanks, if our Taunts/Abilities miss, we will not gain as much Threat as we need.

Do remember, as a Tank, your Dcap/avoidance/HP should be in priority, the real way to get better Hit/Expertise is to merely get better gear. Okay, the occasional gem/enchant may not be a bad decision if you are REALLY lacking in HR, but STAM should be the focus. It’s your call there, Caesar, go ahead, cross that river!

Death Knight Tanks, report here double time Thursday for your weekly update on how to Tank like a Pro!
“Weekly!?… and YOU… a PRO!?… if I still had… a soul… I would laugh…”

We need to stop letting you go to bars with Aifel, don’t we?
“Hops are… vegetables… too!”

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

I told you Phil, Alex looks good in a dress!

We find our favorite Death Knight carefully perusing his personal armory in the Ebon Hold…

So last Sunday I decided upon something, something game-changing in its own way. Due to my account being hacked and them screwing with my lovely spec, I decided it was a perfect time to change it up a bit. As you all know I have been Dual Wield Tanking for quite some time, and it was fun, but honestly not as fun as good old Two-Handed Tanking.

As for every action, be it WoW or anything else, there is usually a few Pros and Cons, and DW Tanking v.s. 2h Tanking is no exception. Just remember, this is based on my experience, anything you would like to add do not hesitate to add a comment.

Pros

Dual Wielding: You are wielding two weapons made specifically for a Tank, thus allowing you to get more Tanking stats such as Avoidance. Taking a look at any Tanking 1h, we can see that they go much faster then any 2h you would be wielding, this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. With faster weapon speed your Rune Strikes are able to hit a lot faster, thus allowing you to use more abilities and acquire much more threat then the average 2h user.

Due to Rune of Swordbreaking on both of our weapons, we gain 4% more Parry, which in turn gives two bonuses to a DW Death Knight Tank. An avoided attack is what  is used to trigger one of our largest Threat Creators, Rune Strike, so in addition to being able to use them faster, we in turn get more of them due to the extra 4% Parry! Any attack that is Parried will be avoided, meaning that you will not take any damage from the attack, so the increased amount of your avoidance via Parry helps your survivability quite a bit.

So more threat, better survivability, and stats on the weapons that are focused for Tanks, how could 2h Tanking every think to top this?

2H Tanking: First of all, you do not need to use extra talents in Frost just so that you can become viable, as a Tank. Just use the bare minimum that you would like and put the rest in the respective trees that you desire. This is actually pretty big, a lot more choices/customization can be used in the 2H Tanking as opposed to DW due to your ability to take less Talents in Frost.

Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle, take a look at that, yes at the moment it is only for 2h users which means there is a high advantage in a few ways due to a single Rune. This adds 25 Defense SKILL, with my gear I never have to gem or even think of gemming or enchanting for Defense Rating which in turn allows me to gem/enchant my gear for more useful things. The “more useful things” is of course Stamina and lots of it, I actually have about 2k more HP as a 2H Tank than as a DW Tank, although if you take a look at the Rune again, we also gain 2% Stamina overall just by showing that Rune off.

You will hit like a TANK! Sure, 2h weapons are extremely slow, most ranging at about 3.60 seconds between attacks, but they hit for quite a bit. Can anyone say 5k Obliterate crits? I sure can, which in turn results in a TON of threat. Sure, for me it was still about 600-700TPS less than DW, but it is highly viable.

More HP, 3-6 more talents usable outside of Frost, and less worrying about the Defense Cap, both styles of Tanking are worthy adversaries to each other. Both 2h and DW Tanking have great Pros, but which one is actually the “best”?

Conclusion: DW in my opinion has some better pros, the amount of threat that I gained was about 600-700TPS, which is nothing to scoff  at! Though I lost about 2k HP, the massive boost in avoidance increased my survivability more than the HP was worth. Now remember, you should at least have a decent set of gear before attempting to DW Tank, when you take a hit you feel it a lot more as a DWer.

Yo, Rilgon, I'm happy for yah and Immah let yah finish, but Elnoriah has one of the best looking Drakes of ALL TIME!

Cons

Dual Wield: The one thing that any Tank should be scared of when thinking over the choice of DWing is the dreaded Parry Gib! Whenever anyone parries an attack, they get a faster attack to follow up shortly after, this goes for bosses too. With two fast weapons, the boss has a much better chance to parry your attacks, and thus much more of a chance to Parry Gib you (I.E. Hitting you for an instant attack following one of their normal attacks). This can be extremely deadly, and in turn can usually be the end to a DW Death Knight Tank. remember, the longer a fight goes, the more chances the boss gets to hit you with a Parry Gib, as well as the less mana the Healers have to spend on picking you back up after a fall. The only way to lessen the chances is to get GOOD DPS, shorter fights = less chances for a Parry Gib!

As a Dual Wielder it is much harder to become uncrittable by raid bosses due to a single reason, you do not get the Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle like our 2H cousins. You are missing out on 25 Defense Skill and will have to gem/enchant to pick yourself back up to the cap, which then results in a bit less HP. remember what I stated earlier, the avoidance you gain makes up for this, at least in most fights.

2H Tanking: The slowness of the weaponry can become a minor problem in the sense that it takes quite some time to be able to use a Rune Strike, but your giant Axe/Mace/Sword should make up for that with a 4k crit when it does come around. A minor con, but somewhat noticeable when you compare the two side-by-side, for sure!

The only other con I can think of would be that you would have port to and from the Ebon Hold to put a new Rune on your weapon any time that you would like to change your spec (to a PvP or DPS of course!). The reason you do not have to do this with your two 1H weapons is that you should NOT be using Tanking weapons to DPS, seriously! There is no Tanking 2h thus meaning you will have to change the rune when you wish to do something other than 1h DPS!

Conclusion: 2H Tanking has minor (if even) cons to it, whereas the DW ones can be risky with sub-par groups/mediocre gear. The lack of cons would be the answer to WHY most people seem to 2H Tank, sure the DW seems to have better pros in my opinion, but as I have said, the cons are a big risk.

So, is one better than the other? Yes and no at the same time, both are extremely viable for Tanking and should be considered as choices, but for me I just prefer to use my 2H. No, not because I do not trust my Guild or have faith in my Tanking “skillz”, it is merely a fun aspect! Come on who WASN’T interested in the fact that Death Knights could run around with Arms Warrior weapons and Tank perfectly, (when they were announced)?

Come Munchy, people to kill, places to Tank!
“… you never… take me… Tanking…”
True, but you get to rip off some Gnome’s limbs! GNOMES!
“…I’m a… vegetarian… you twit…”

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to place yourself in the Halo universe? Well now you can. You are no longer invincible, you can no longer run as fast or jump as high, you can no longer regenerate your shield over time. Why? Simple. You are just a well trained human.

That’s right, in Halo 3: ODST, you take on the role of Rookie, a human. As a matter of fact, the entire ODST squad are humans, because lets face it, Master Chief was overpowered. Though, regardless of whether you’re a genetically enhanced super soldier or not, you are guaranteed to have months of fun with this game… Quite literally months. ODST brings a new campaign, new characters, new maps, a new multiplayer mode, and new achievable medals in game, to the board. What more could a gamer want?

The campaign (which I have now finished through multiple 6-12 hour shifts at my friends houses) offers 20-30 hours of gameplay (depending on the number of players, difficulty and whether or not you take the time to enjoy the game), and the multiplayer mode; Firefight (practically endless), promises never to have the same experience twice, simply meaning when you play it, it’s always going to be a little bit different from before. The array of new characters is surprising, especially Buck (the shotgun enthusiast) who’s modelled after and voiced by one Nathan Fillion (yes, that’s right, that extremely cool guy from Serenity and Firefly) who also voiced our favourite Gunnery Sergeant Reynolds back in Halo 3.

The only thing that is debatable in regards to ODST, is whether sprinting up behind a wraith and throwing a grenade inside is ultimately more mindblowingly, eyepoppingly, jawdroppingly satisfying than blasting hoards and hoards of grunts to pieces with your incredibly well missed, Fuel rod gun. In terms of multiplayer, the only other game out/coming out is probably Call Of Duty 5. Despite it being rated 8.6/10 on the international gaming network, ODST has come a long way in terms of new (and old) content, with the introduction of fully explorable maps; New Mombasa, the reintroduction of the famed and dangerous scoped pistol (yay!) and health packs which give the sense of vulnerability enhancing the gameplay even more (especially when you take out that wave of Hunters that’s pestering you) and finally visor mode acting as a useful night vision tool. However, as with most things in life, change is expected. The Flood for example, are no where to be seen (finally!) and all new equipment that debuted in Halo 3, including the battle rifle and dual-wielding (which didn’t go down so well with the fans).

Overall, the game is worth the money that you’d pay for it (£29 from TheHut.com), especially if you were never one to buy Halo 3. This ensures you can play both ODST, Firefight, and Multiplayer Halo 3 with all maps available. I’d have to agree with IGN’s rating, but still think it’s worth investing in.

My last post talked about all of the Death Knight changes in the latest patch, in particular, Scourge Strike becoming viable again for Unholy Death Knights.  However, what has turned out to be even more interesting is the unexpected changes to the new cookie-cutter talent specs and the different rotation.  Unholy plays like an entirely different animal now.

There are actually four viable Unholy specs now, consisting of some combination of 2h vs. dual-wield and blood presence vs. unholy presence.  Yes, you read that right; unholy presence.  As far as I’m aware, unholy presence has never been viable until now and let me tell you, it’s damn fun to play.  I’m getting ahead of myself though.

Here are the four basic builds:

2H Blood Presence – 16/0/55

2H Unholy Presence – 14/0/57

DW Blood Presence – 3/13/55

DW Unholy Presence – 1/13/57

The biggest difference between all of these and past Unholy specs is that Reaping and Epidemic are no longer worth taking.  The reason for taking Reaping used to be that by converting blood runes to death runes, you could substitute a Scourge Strike for two Blood Strikes in the second half of a 20-sec rotation.  However, after the patch, two Blood Strikes do more damage than one Scourge Strike.  Therefore, the death runes are useless and so is Reaping.  In the case of Epidemic, it just turns out that the old 20-sec rotation, made possible by longer disease duration due to Epidemic, provides less DPS than a new 10-sec rotation and spec that includes filling out Necrosis and Desolation in place of Epidemic.  This new rotation does end up clipping the end of your diseases, but that also provides some flexibility in fights where you have to break your rotation to react to threats in encounters.  It also does slightly less AoE damage as a result of missing out on the one Blood Boil every 20-sec that was part of the old AoE rotation.  The bottom line though is that the simulations and live testing support that these new specs and rotations outpeform the old ones.

The new rotation is basically the same for all four specs.

Single Target
IT – PS – SS – BS – BS – DC – (HoW, if necessary and off CD) – DC
Dual wield substitutes Blood Boil for Blood Strike, with the exception of performing Blood Strike once per 20 sec to keep Desolation up.

AoE
IT – PS – Pest – D&D – DC – (HoW, if necessary and off CD) – DC
IT – PS – Pest – BS – SS – DC – DC

For all specs, auto-attack will account for the largest amount of total damage, followed by your ghoul, and Death Coil. Death Coil will be your hardest-hitting ability.

One of the open questions from my last entry was whether the revised Bone Shield would continue to last 5 minutes or 1 minute.  It indeed lasts only 1 minute now, which is a bit of a pain to work into the rotation.  However, so far, I haven’t had too much trouble remembering to work in a Blood Tap-Bone Shield once per minute.  I insert this in place of a Blood Strike  using the following macro:

#showtooltip Blood Tap
/cast Blood Tap
/stopcasting
/cast Bone Shield

You could also show the tooltip for Bone Shield, but I found this confusing as it showed the ability as being on CD because there is no unholy rune available.  So at first, I sat there waiting for it to become available, but in fact, it should be available as what you really need is the blood rune first,  THEN the unholy rune.

So how do you know which spec is right for you?  2H and dual wield are very close, with dual wield being slightly ahead in BiS gear.  I recommend choosing a spec based on whatever is the best weapon(s) you’ve currently got.  I actually found the difference between blood presence and unholy presence to be significant for the level of my gear, which is averages between ilevel 213-219.  Granted, I tested on a target dummy with no buffs other than Horn of Winter, but I saw a 300-400 dps advantage for unholy presence over blood presence.  Another benefit of unholy presence, and ultimately the one that had the most impact for me, is the fact that it plays so much faster because your GCD is reduced from 1.5 sec to 1.0 sec and your rune cooldowns are shortened.  After playing in Unholy presence, switching back to blood presence seemed agonizingly slow to me.  Blood presence is going to scale better with raid buffs, which will draw the two closer together.  The point at which it seems to make sense to switch to the blood presence build is when you have 200-300 haste, basically when you’re doing Crusader Coliseum regularly.  In fact, once you switch to the blood presence build, haste has a surprisingly high stat weight; higher than everything except strength.

Another question that is logical to raise is whether we should forego Unholy altogether and pick blood or frost instead.  I’ve tried the others and personally, I’m just more comfortable with Unholy at this point, so I’m glad that the numbers seem to be pretty close between all the trees.  Blood and frost do seem to provide slightly better single target damage.  However, Unholy occupies a special niche when it comes to raiding.  Our damage in fights that require sustained AoE is extremely high.  The whelps in the Onyxia fight is an extreme example, but demonstrates our AoE potential.  As a debuff, Ebon Plague provides the greatest raid utility of all the trees.  13% increase to all magical damage and 30% increase to all disease damage is significant.  This is even more important in 10-man raids where you’re less likely to have a warlock or moonkin to provide a similar, but ultimately inferior buff that can only be spread at great cost to their DPS.  Finally, bone shield, while intended as a tanking talent, is both a near-constant 2% damage increase AND provides 20% mitigation from ALL forms of damage.  Bone Shield contributes significantly to your survivability in a raid environment.  Blood and frost simply don’t have a talent that compares.

The new face of Unholy is here.  It looks quite a bit different, but it’s a good-looking face nonetheless.

OBJECTION!

We find both of our favorite Tanks having what seems to be a heated debate, though most of the words are along the lines of “nou”…

Alright, you there students, welcome back from your little vacation, too bad that it does not last forever right? Hah, no, you just were so eager to see me again that you forgot you were even on vacation right? Nonetheless I have quite a few lessons planned for you students, and trust me they are delicious.

This week we will be talking about how to gem properly, an easy subject yes, but it is somewhat debated still. No matter what socket you have it should be devoted to any Blue Stamina gem of at least +24 STAM, except for of course the Meta Gem’s requirements. The first thing you must do is click this link, it will bring you to the list of Meta Gems on WoWWiki.com, pick out the one you would use as a Tank and report back.

If I need to make it any more obvious stay after class, of course it is the Austere Earthsiege Diamond. The delicious amount of +32 STAM and 2% more Armor Value from items is something that no Tank should try and resist, because they are of course two things we all love, Hit Points and less damage taken.

As you should know, each Meta Gem can only be equipped to the Meta Gem socket, which is located on any decent piece of head gear. The other requirement is that you must have a few specific gem colors equipped in order for it to be “activated” or, not just sit there lookin’ pretty and not doing anything. Our Meta needs to have at least two blue gems and at least one red gem for it to work.

The blue gems are other words for at least +24 STAM gems, apparently DPS and Healers gem with gems that do not have these stats. Odd, no? Yet our Red gem, what the hell!? There is no STAM what are we going to do!? Of course, we go to the Purple gems which count as red OR blue and they do have STAM on them, but only half the amount so let’s say 12. Why is it halved, this is because the other “half” goes to half of a Red gem’s stat, so think Parry/Dodge/Expertise/Agility/Arm Pen.

From earlier training, we should know that there are three on that list that are decent for a Death Knight Tank, they are of course Parry/Dodge/Expertise, but we have to choose one, so which is better for us?

Dual Wielding: Avoidance should be better than the Expertise correct? Debatable, but for Dual Wielding I would honestly take the Expertise over the avoidance stats, remember the Parry gib. Every hit has a chance to be parried, this is for every Tank/Melee who stands in front of bosses, and each attack of yours that is parried by the boss allows it to give them a fast attack right after the parry. Each time the speed increases  for the attack that follows the parry until it is an almost instant hit, in which case we laugh at the Tank and scream Parry gib!

For a Dual Wielding Tank I would personally choose the 12 Stam + 8 Expertise rating, the Expertise accounts for a little bit less than 1 point of total Expertise which is definitely a noticeable change. The opponents would be 8 Parry or 8 Dodge, Parry is not the best avoidance to bother gemming for, the amount of Parry you need to see a noticeable change is much higher then Dodge is, so generally I would be using the 8 Dodge if anything.

Like I said though, for a DW Tank, we want our hits to be parried as little as possible, so the value of Expertise to us is a lot more cherished then that of the Dodge in this case. Honestly though, you will not be shunned if you think otherwise, like I said this is more of a personal choice when playing the master of Parry Gib.

I sport the T9 Shoulders well, eh?

Two Handed Tanking: My argument is practically reversed in this scenario, the reason that DWing is scared of the Parry Gib is because you have two very fast weapons which give you more attacks, which results in more possible chances to be parried. If you are swinging around with a giant Axe/Mace/Sword you have a 3.4second swing time abouts, and only one weapon, making it a much lower chance to be parried and to get the Parry Gib.

Expertise is nothing to scoff at for sure, but it is a lot less “needed” so to speak when using the Two Handed weapons. At this point you should choose between the Parry/Dodge and decide accordingly, but like I said, Parry does not scale as well as our friend Dodge does in this case.

Now if you would rather use the Expertise, that is not a bad decision either, less Parries even from the slow weapons assure a greater amount of damage which results in a bit more threat.

Death Knights are honestly weird this way, for the most part we gem the same, but when we have to make some of the more specific details it can be debated easily. Really, this is why I love to be the Death Knight Tank, I get so many more choices that can easily be explained and accepted rather than having to stick with a list of specifics and always going by them.

Great job today class, hopefully I will see you all back next week with more teachings from the messed up mind of me, Elnoriah!

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

In patch 3.2.0, 2h Unholy death knights found themselves in a strange position. The theorycrafting suggested, and the live tests ultimately bore out, that using Obliterate as the primary FU strike with 0/17/54 would actually generate more DPS than using Scourge Strike (SS). Being forced to forgo the defining strike for Unholy DKs just didn’t seem to make sense.  Blizzard agreed, but moved forward with the changes because essentially it didn’t cause any real problems in the short term. We just had to stick Obliterate on our action bars where Scourge Strike used to be. However, the devs reiterated their desire to return SS to its rightful place in the Unholy rotation. It appears that’s going to happen in this next patch.

3.2.2 Death Knight PTR patch notes

• Frost Presence: The damage reduction granted by this ability has been increased from 5% to 8%.
• Gnaw: This death knight ghoul ability now has a 1-minute cooldown.
• Talents
  • Blood
    • Heart Strike: Secondary targets of Heart Strike now take half as much damage.
    • Subversion: Now also increases the critical strike chance of Scourge Strike by 3/6/9%.
    • Vampiric Blood: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute and duration reduced to 10 seconds.
  • Frost
    • Threat of Thassarian now also causes Rune Strike to use both weapons when dual-wielding.
    • Unbreakable Armor: Cooldown reduced to 1 minute and changed back to granting 25% additional armor while active instead of flat damage reduction based on armor. The amount of strength granted has been reduced to 10%.
  • Unholy
    • Bone Shield: This ability now has 3 charges instead of 4. Cooldown reduced to 1 minute.
    • Dirge: This talent no longer grants additional runic power from using Obliterate.

In addition, the amount of armor penetration gained per point of this rating has been reduced by 12%.

The impact on Scourge Strike and Obliterate

• The change to the Subversion talent in the Blood tree helps out Scourge Strike significantly by increasing its critical strike chance by 9%.
• The reduction in value of armor penetration rating in 3.2.2 will reduce the damage of Obliterate.
• Obliterate is further weakened by the fact that Dirge will no longer provide runic power from Obliterates.

It’s easy to see how Scourge Strike is becoming stronger while Obliterate is becoming weaker, but is it enough to push it past Obliterate? The current theorycrafting suggests it is with the following build:  17/0/54

No epidemic or reaping?  Glyph of Icy Touch?

In addition to taking Scourge Strike again in this build, there are a few other notable changes. The first is that there is no benefit to going into the frost tree for any 2H unholy build or gear set-up. So it’s back to Blood for those extra 17 points. Surprisingly, it also appears that Reaping and Epidemic are no longer optimal talents and will result in a DPS loss.  Glyph of Icy Touch, not Glyph of Scourge Strike, should replace Glyph of Obliterate in this new build due to a new rotation. You’ll want to keep Glyph of the Ghoul and Glyph of Dark Death.

The rotation and priority system
PS – IT – SS – BS – BS – DC – HoW – DC
PS – IT – SS – BS – BS – DC – DC

The priority system remains the same:
Diseases (PS/IT) > DC if max runic power > SS > BS > DC w/o max runic power > HoW

Auto-attack will account for most of your damage, followed by your ghoul, and Death Coil.  Death Coil will hit the hardest, followed closely by Scourge Strike.

Stat Weightings (A.P.E.)

“Consider” over at Elitist Jerks has provided the bulk of the theorycrafting on these changes in a great post here:  http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t72364-2h_unholy_dps_scourge_strike_you_belong_me/.  The stat weights below were calculated by him for this new build.

Stat Weights:

AttackPower 1.00
Strength 3.05
BeforeMeleeHitCap<8% 3.05
HasteRating 2.29
CritRating 2.10
ExpertiseRating 1.65
HitAfterMeleeHitCap 1.40
ArmorPenetrationRating 1.30
Agility 1.05
WeaponDPS 6.03
WeaponSpeed 238.1

Haste has become slightly more valuable than crit in this new build as auto-attacks will account for more of your total damage.  Strength is as important as ever and armor penetration has become much less so.  The 4pc T9 set bonus continues to provide a huge boost.

Set Bonus values:
2T7 38.98
4T7 40.68
2T8 118.64
4T8 101.69
2T9 144.07
4T9 647.46

Other Changes

• Bone Shield currently has 4 bones that last 5 minutes with a 2 minute cooldown.  The patch notes indicate that the number of bones is being reduced to 3, but the cooldown is being reduced to 1 minute.  The new tooltip for bone shield no longer states that it requires 1 unholy rune to activate.  The EJ post indicates that bone shield will last only 1 minute instead of 5, but this change is not listed in the patch notes or the tooltip at this time.  If the official information is current, then we’re looking at a nice buff to this ability.  If the information in the EJ post is accurate, we’re looking at a meaningful nerf.  I’m keeping a watchful eye to determine which is in fact correct.
• The changes to Threat of Thassarian will help dual wield frost DKs in PvP, PvE solo, and tanking (for anyone who’s actually doing that).
• Tanks will get 3% of their damage reduction back from a buffed frost presence.
• The reduction to Unbreakable Armor’s cooldown is very nice for frost tanks, but the reduced strength increase from 25% to 10% will probably ensure that frost DPS will avoid this talent in the future.
• The reduction in Vampiric Blood’s duration will help mellow it out a little for PvP, while the reduced cooldown will ensure blood tanks have this ability available more often to help recover from burst damage.
• Heart Strike’s damage to the secondary target is being nerfed; not much else to say.

Patch 3.2.2 is bringing some exciting changes for all death knights, but for 2h Unholy DPS the impact is huge, with a return to our defining strike, a move away from some long-standing talent choices, and a new rotation.

Yarrrg!

Our favorite Death Knight is found on a rowboat in the middle of Wintergrasp…

*Hic* Dun worreh, Im’mah comin, arrg…

Yes, it is that time of year again, the time where we get drunk and dust off our pirate hats. Pirate day is today (well an hour and 45min on the East Coast), and of course I will not be there until later at night due to some real-life commitments. Worry not, since I will not be there until all of you are passed out, that just means you can split my fair share of grog.

Quote me when I say this, after that Heroic Daily is done for tomorrow, I will be Bloodsail Admiral Elnoriah and take Booty Bay for my own!

Now to figure out a way for the Bruisers to take a “vacation” if you will. I am sure Munchy could organize some sort of trip for our green-skinned friends, right Munch?

“…They all…. gonna… die…”

Alright then, before I leave you all I would like to give a shout out to my guild, <Blue Oasis Buccaneers>, it is our national holiday, make sure to save me some grog. And please remember to keep the sharp objects away from Gradii after his 2nd drink, he might hurt someone.

To kick off the WoW Pirate experience, here is a little video out of the Illegal Danish series, a song called the HMS Theramore, enjoy!

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

No, not THAT Frost!

Koltira, buddy, remember I saved you awhile back from the Scarlet Crusade? Yes, it is time to pay up, give me your shoulders you slimy bastard.

No Love, Elnoriah….

I will be honest, pretty much all I have been doing lately is playing the Death Knight, Dual Wielding is just so refreshing, it is a lot harder to balance the gear and the stats, and a bit more challenging to play. Now, before we go deep into the play style of it, should we not learn a bit about my spec? As most of you should know by now, this spec will obviously be a little bit different from the normal Frost Spec.

Two-Handed Frost Tanking: Alright, my Frost spec is a general and common build. There really is not that much that I could and should be playing with, some people switch a few more points into Blood for the Two-Handed Weapon Specialization which is not a bad idea at all, because 4% more damage is quite a decent amount to add to your damage. Though, what I would be taking it out of is a bit of an awkward sacrifice, should I take it out of my Unholy Tree’s Epidemic so that my diseases do not go for and additional 6 seconds/full rotation. Not a smart move in my opinion, because honestly, it makes more sense, a full rotation is more threat then a bit of a rotation and diseases. Other then that, it is your general common Frost Build, lots of nice Death Runes, and the Avoidance/Armor Bonuses that Frost is known and loved for.

Dual Wield Frost Tanking: This is where it begins to get interesting, my DW Frost spec is odd to say the least, the lack of Death Runes disturbed me at first. But really though, I never seem to have a time where it has seriously effected my abilities as a Tank, people still do not pull off me so that is a great sign. The funny thing is that I am pulling around 700 more Threat per Second (TPS) then with the 2H, why though, I have been trying to figure out two things. First, Rime, which is a talent that has a chance on each Obliterate critical to give you a free Howling Blast, which is a huge threat booster, had been proccing significantly more than it did during 2H Tanking. Then the second was why am I doing more threat with two one-handed weapons?

Threat of the Thassarian was the answer to both of those questions, when read it says Obliterate/Frost Strike/Blood Strike/Plague Strike have a 100% chance (with 3 Ranks) to do damage with the off-hand weapon. Okay, that would explain a bit of Threat, but why was Rime proccing so often, it is not like my Obliterates get a better chance as one-handed weapons to proc that skill. Of course I was wrong in a sense.

Butlers are for cool kids only!

Opening up the combat log, every time I would Obliterate an enemy, I would hit with my main hand Obliterate, then a white damage strike, followed up by the off-hand Obliterate. Two Different Obliterates! If I Crit with both of them, it essentially counts as two Obliterate Criticals. Now, basic Math will tell each of us that Two Critical Hits have a better chance to proc Rime then One Critical Hit, thus explaining why Rime was proccing that much more.

Howling Blast is one of the hardest hitting, and practically a Frost Tank’s best ability as a Tank (aside from good ol’ Rune Strike), so getting one that costs no runes and does the normal amount of damage and can still be a Crit is a huge threat boost, obviously.

Another big threat giver was all of that delicious Parry that I have gotten out of DW, all due to the Runes that I am using on my weapons. Both have Rune of Swordbreaking, which each give 2% more Parry, and 50% less time disarmed. Parry of course triggers our largest threat-giving attack, Rune Strike, so the more parry I get, the larger chance to use Rune Strike. Pretty simple concept, no?

Similarities, of course: Except for the DW only talents, and the lack of some extra blood talents, these specs are almost identical. Why though, mostly because I really do enjoy the two talents in Blood that I always take. Sure, there are definitely some Frost Talents that I would not have mind taking, but to sacrifice some extra threat and to take 5% more damage, it really is not worth it. Honestly, my DW spec is based right off of my 2H spec which is a spec I am very comfortable with, there really are very limited (if any) flaws in that spec, so basing my DW spec to look like it seems practical.

Happy WoWing!
-Eld

Exactly my point!

“Woohoo! You can’t catch me!”, screams Elnoriah as he runs away from the Stormwind Guard, apparently kidnapping small children is a criminal act to the Alliance. Who knew…

I will be honest, I loved my small break from Elnoriah for that week, it made me feel great to pick up the Healer and go practically full-time on him. Of course though, there always has to be some experiment to do to drive Gradii crazy on my Tank. If you have been reading Plagued Candles for awhile you should know that I was supposed to try out dual-wield tanking, but due to some unfortunate events I decided it would be best not to futs around during raiding.

Do not fret, I have been futsing, and futsing with some risky business to boot!

Alex has a 71 Resto Shaman, and he seems to like to do Nexus a bit, I suppose I should not be blaming him, it is nice and fast with a ton of experience at his level. But Nexus, seriously? Christ I hate that instance, but nonetheless I decided to help him out on his most recent escapade, but under one condition, I would do a little experiment that he would yell at me for.

There was much less yelling out of him when he realized it was not Blood Tanking, but instead it was Dual-Wielding and honestly it did not go too badly, but of course the Tank in our guild reminded me that it was still a normal instance. So  I decided that the best way to find out what Dual-Wielding feels like in a spot closer to my level of play would be to go play Meat Shield for a 5man H ToC, with of course the Heroic Defense Cap. (Yes, the Heroic Defense Cap is actually a couple of points under 540)

To my surprise I did quite well, we had a few mess-up but none of them were tank specific ones at all, so I call that a success for sure. So, I was feeling pretty damn good of myself with my two horrible one-handed. Then of course I was presented with the awesome power that is Peackeeper’s Blade, but I am going to restrain myself from using that just yet.

Then, the guild decides that” since it is Monday night let’s try and down as much junk as we can in our never-ending 10m Uld race to the finish”. There were some okay upgrades, I think some of the more squishy people snagged some daggers, and we downed Ignis with flying colors. This was probably the best day for testing out my new experiment, I got a wide variety of tests and also a bit of feedback from the Healers.

Without this axe I would feel much more pirate-like!

One thing though, the Parry Gib is horrid, if we have bad DPS, I am going to be royally screwed, seriously. And last night felt like one of those slow nights, one of the PUGs kept getting disconnected, and one of the healers was not the best geared, but still though we did not do horrendously. Honestly though, if we got more guildies on then I would have no problem with the Parry Gib, in theory at least.

Another downside would be my lessened HP, due to the fact that I had to switch out either a STAM trinket, or two gems for Defense Rating, I knew I was going to lose a fine chunk ‘o Health. It is not going to murder me, but it is definitely a visible loss between the lack of 48 STAM in gems and about 10 STAM because my one-handed weapons are pretty bad.

Luckily though, I did manage to gain quite a bit of avoidance while Dual-Wielding. Because of the runes on my weapons, I gained 4% parry, plus whatever amount of strength was already on the weapons to begin with. It ended up being about 5% parry and only .50% dodge decrease, of course we all know what this means. Due to the major increase in Parry, my Runestrikes have been increasing exponentially! Plus since I have much faster weapons I am hitting quite a few more than I did with my slow, clunky, two-handed axe, so in the end I have gained about 700 Threat Per Second (TPS) overall.

Right now, the bonuses are balancing out the negatives of Dual-Wielding, so for this week I will be continually testing out Dual-Wielding, and of course writing about anything and everything I have noticed. So expect about two more posts about Dual-Wielding by the time Sunday rolls around!

-Happy WoWing!
Eld

Alright! Yea! *High Five*

We find our friend, Elnoriah, playing a nice relaxing game of golf, wait, isn’t he supposed to be killing?…

I hate that frickin’ Priest, always preaching about how being pure and healing others is better then killing. To hell with him, well not really, he is quite a nice person, it is just, he’s been hogging all of the fun. Whatever, a little vacation is always a nice thing to have now and then, right students? Right, nonetheless, you should not be taking a vacation from your studies, you still have much to learn.

We have come pretty far since the start of these lessons back in June, but there is one thing that I would like to dedicate this lecture to, and as you have guessed, Key Talents. No, I am not going to say specific talents for each tree, what I mean are the two/three (or four really) mandatory talents that you should take if you wish to be even a half decent tank. Depending on your spec you will have at least two of the talents that I call “mandatory” in order to tank efficiently, there are two in the Blood tree that quite a few people like to skip over. Either way, you can find each of these in easily reachable spots on each of your three Talent Trees!

Disagree with me all you want, but that guy working his ass off to keep you alive, as well as your raid would thoroughly appreciate if you at least if nothing else used common sense and put a few points in to each of these. Even the best tank needs to max these out for maximum performance.

Anticipation: This talent resides in the Unholy tree and is the third talent to the right on Tier 1 of said tree. In order to max out this talent, or make it so that you can put no more talent points into it, you must put in 5 of your well saved Talent Points ( a.k.a TP). Each point spent increases your chance to dodge by 1%, and with 5 points in the talent you get a free 5% dodge. As you all know, Death Knights are not able to use shields, so blocking is an avoidance we will never be able to use, so we must make due with what we can of Dodge and Parry. 5% is absolutely nothing to scoff at, this is seriously a big difference, you now avoid 5% more attacks, that is like 1/20 attacks as an estimate . Though your job is to protect the party/raid members at all costs, a big part of your job while rating is to do so but allow the Healers to conserve as much Mana as possible.

Like I have said in many previous posts, avoidance is your Third-Most important stat, other then making sure you have 540 Defense Skill and a ton of HP, this 5% is a great boost to make sure that you need not gem for avoidance to get the extra boost. This is a give-me so really there should not be much of a debate over this being a decent/good talent to take as a tank, it’s just 5 talents, what else would you use it on!?

DANCE PARTAY, DYLAN!

Toughness: Once again, another easy to pick out Tanking talent, just like the rest of our Tanking brethren’s Toughness talents, it increases our Armor Value from items by 10%. To break this down, each and every piece of armor in WoW be it cloth or Lazar armor, has some sort of Armor Value to it, the tanking stat called “Armor” that reduces the damage you take by attacks by some %, yes that is based on your Armor Value of your Armor. Okay, [Elnoriah's Super Cool Shoulders] give 10,000 armor, with 5/5 TP in Toughness that increases by 10%. So no longer do you get 10,000 Armor Value, you get 11,000 Armor Value. The ideal amount of Damage Reduction % you should see when you hover over your Armor stat, should be at least 60%. The more the merrier, there is no point in this stat where it is not useful anymore, mainly because you do not have a choice to switch out “Armor for Dodge/Parry”.

Either way, damage reduction is something that we want, first of all so that we can take a hit and do our job of surviving to keep the baddies off of the clothies, and secondly so that the Healers do not have to bust some cool downs to keep use alive. Once again straight forward, for any tank that is looking through the talent trees should immediately say, “Damage reduction, hot dog, *click 5 times*!”

Just a special note to all of you PvPers, this is not a bad talent to pick up then either, the movement speed reduction is nice for those times when you get hit by a Hamstring or slowed by an enemy. And the armor is not a bad thing to grab either, less damage taken is more survivability!

Blade Barrier: This one is definitely debated among many, for there are numerous amounts of  Tanks that can do their job fine without it. Personally though, I would put this as a required talent for a few reasons. First of all it unlocks the second Tier of Blood which is something I love to dive straight into, but mostly for the straight up delicious damage reduction. Like the rest of the Tanking Talents we have discussed today, this has 5 ranks you can click through, and once again to make maximum usage you should get all 5 of them. Once you have 5/5 you take 5% less damage for 9seconds every time your Blood Runes are on cool down, and as any Death Knight should know, every single rune should be on cool down after a full rotation of anything. So in theory you should take 5% less damage 99% of the time during any given fight, which as we have seen before is obviously a significant number once you keep stacking the amounts of damage you take during a fight.

Many have shown us that it is easy to Tank without this talent, although I would have to say most of who are Dual Wielding Tanks, so they already have Avoidance up the Whazzhoo, so in theory they generally take not as much damage as a Two Handed Tank. Putting aside the delicious “parry gib” this would be completely true, still though I would put this as one of the Key Talents for a Death Knight Tank.

First time as a guild, 3rd try, *High Fives Gradii*

The Fourth, Kind of: As I said with Blade Barrier, on the first Tier of Blood it is an optional talent that many (mostly DW) Tanks will acquire if they see fit. This next one is more of an option, seeing as you do not need it to tank with, but also because you need 5points in Blood in order to take this talent. So you would have had to take Blade Barrier anyways to get this delicious prize. Yes, I am talking about Bladed Armor! This talent is based off of a Warrior talent, except it has a few more ranks, with 5/5 ranks Bladed Armor can give 5 AP per 180 armor value, and as a Tank you have a lot of armor value. The Warrior equivalent at 3/3 gives 3AP per 108 armor value, so in the end if you do the math, they are generally pretty even with their AP bonuses. Either way, more AP is more Threat in the language of the Tank, so if you took Blade Barrier, why not take 5 more TP’s and hit up extra AP land?

The Lesson: As with any other Tanking Class, even the Death Knights need to have a few certain talents in order to achieve greatness, although we Death Knights definitely have a creative advantage over the rest of them. We get three whole Trees that are each viable to Tank with, where as they each get one. Still, remember each of these talents and spec in them accordingly, and I promise you, it will have been worth your while.

Writer’s Update: Our Podcast will be worked on tomorrow and Friday, and if everything goes accordingly you should expect this deliciousness to be up at least by Friday Night. School as you all know has started up a bit, but hopefully that at least gives me some time to want to sit back and relax to writing a bit more. Anyways, incoming more Tanking, and hopefully some Healing posts. Happy WoWing!
-Eld

The latest FourTwoZero tweet from Robert Bowling of Infinity Ward confirms the inclusion of dual-wielding in Modern Warfare 2! Whether that’s just for pistols or for all weapons it’s not clear (I would imagine pistols and SMGs) but still, another cool little snippet. It’s going to be a long wait til November…

UPDATE!

IGN reports this morning that dual-wielding will be pistol only, and will be balanced by a lack of sight aiming and harder hip aiming.

This tabard DOES match my hair...

“How ya’ doin’ mon?” asks an oddly looking Blood Elf with blue hair dressed in a Tribal fashion. You ponder whom it could be for a moment, then realize of course! It is Elnoriah!

First order of business, yes if you have seen a couple of my most recent twitters you should have noted that I am in fact going to be away in South Dakota/Montana for about a week, lucky you, you do not need to read any new Plagued Candle posts for a week. Sadly this is not my last trip of the summer, but this should be the best by far, LOOK OUT BADLANDS I’MMA COMIN’!

Seriously, I swear, they're building Trollgrimmar!

Secondly, you are most likely wondering why the hell I have all these bones on me, and this revealing dress. (I’m all Elf ladies, all Elf) Yes, I think I have caught the race obsession Roz from the Reputation Grind, who often preaches suggests every WoW player should play a particular race, the Trolls. Fine, I will admit it, I love the Trolls, they have almost as wacky hair as Blood Elves. To top it off their accent always makes me laugh, but it is too late to pick a Death Knight and Priest race now, yet it is never too late to become an honerary Troll, right? It just so happens though, that I became a Champion of Sen’jin this particular morning, so what is next? Of course, get exalted with those bastards and get a cool title, and of course an even cooler mount!

Writer’s Update: Keep up the good work all, and I will see you all Saturday! Happy WoWing!
-Eld

50pts to Gryphindor if someone knows whom that face belongs to!

“Who’s your Daddy!?”, screams the blue haired elf beating on the target dummy in Silvermoon City. “Hmmph, well this one was obviously not made to sustain blows from a REAL tank!” Yes, he has quite a swelled ego…

As much as I would love to, and I mean LOVE to just end my test here with Frost spec, I could not. No, not because it is moral, or fair, but because I would not be able to live with myself not completing a simple task for a second week with a new spec. Yes, I have loved unholy to death, and honestly, it is a great spec, but the changes that are happening in the upcoming patch does make me frown. Though, I hate to quit, really I do, but Frost is just honestly SO fun! See an easy way before we go into further detail is a giant game of tanking wack-a-mole, though, there are two specs that I would like to break down for you tanks out there willing to look at frost in detail. The first would be my spec, this spec focuses on large amounts of threat, especially the boss/single target kind. The second is a guildy’s off spec of mine that was used in last night’s Nax run (Amazing job leading that by the way Mr. Raid Leader!) said spec is largely focused on the Improved Icy Talons ability. (Do not fret, we will talk about this in a few moments!)

Hot Stuff INCOMING!

Elnoriah’s Build: The tanking styles are almost similar, though the main difference is that ALL of my spells do more damage, thus resulting in more threat. Thank you to Black Ice all of my spells’ damage increases by 10%, that is a HUGE boost of threat, huge enough to really differentiate Unholy and Frost. (This fun analysis will be featured towards the end of the post.) The other thing would be that my old Scourge Strike was traded out for good old Obliterate, and with the help of Annihilation my diseases are not consumed by the obliterate, giving me much more room to use this attack freely. Why is my threat larger then his, sure I have better gear for one thing, but what is it that he does not have that I do have? That would be all of the talents I have mentioned and more, see, my spec is focused soley towards tanking the bosses, for you see, that is what I have been doing since I have joined this guild. The Unholy spec I used to have is much more of an Off -Tank spec, yes , I can tank as that spec being a Main Tank, but this was just made the taunt buttons and O SHI- buttons needed only on a regular basis. So for a simple short summary, basically my spec revolves around the idea of tanking bosses and producing the most ammount of threat possible.

God is AFK, serving justice to our members is just ONE of the services we offer.

Guildy’s Build: The second tanking choice for any aspiring Frost Tank out there would be the, as I like to call it, Imp Icy Talons Build, I called this sheer genius all during last night since from spider wing until Military, we lost our Shaman for a Rogue. Improved Icy Talons is a buff every time my guildy uses Icy Touch (which you should be using as a tank) that grants all melee attacks 20% more haste, so since 60% of the group was meleeing (tanks, lock/hunter pets, melee dps) this was practically a constant Bloodlust for them. Jesus Christ, that spiked our dps significantly, so for a lack of shamans in our guild, this guy is pro when he tanks, at least for the melee.  Obviously, by putting talent points into this here talent, he could not have put talents in some of the other talents that I use to generate more threat. Notice, he picked up Hungering Cold, before I was commenting on that, he was able to show me why he picked it. I was healing last night, and on Noth the Plague-bringer he was picking up the adds. Then Jesus Christ somehow adds were coming onto me, and his runes were all on cool down with his taunts, skillfully he popped his Hungering Cold and saved my priestly ass. The main difference is that he also has more runic power then me, 30 more to be exact. That is  enough for another Frost Strike, which of course is one of the main threat builders for a Frost tank.

See, neither of these specs are wrong at all, the only difference is what they do, yes both of them tank so in the end the job is done. The spec he has could do either OT or MT, but for our case he is generally better as an OT, he takes hits just as well as the next guy, but his threat is not as high as mine, and probably will never be. But to the dps, he is Jesus Christ himself, melee haste how delicious, I swear Klin must have been creating a shrine in his closet for him. Honestly, this guy is one Death Knight you want in your raid, no matter what the spec, he has his Talons just for you.

CHARGE ME DOCTOR!

The Cross Examination: *Straps a latex glove on* Now zen class, ve shall be looking at zee differences betveen zee Unholy and zee Frost, now take your seats and pay attention! I will be honest, Unholy picks up where Frost lacks, the place I would like to call Multi-Mob tanking, used for trash. With Unholy Blight and a much more powerful Death and Decay, unholy is the King of AoE’s likewise making it the best 5 man heroic tanking spec in my opinion. As for raid tanking, my old spec did the job right as it should, though it is a much better Off Tank spec rather then a Main Tank spec. Mostly because it does not have all of the O SHI- buttons, nor can it take hits as well as its Frost Brethren.
Now the first thing that I noticed on the first H UP run I did, was that it was much more of a challenge to put threat on multiple targets. Unholy I would just Death and Decay, Put the DoTs on, Unholy Blight, Blood Boil and they would be on me for the rest of the pull. Now it is more like, Howling Blast, Blood Boil, Blood Boil, Obliterate the Skull, Frost strikes on the UPCOMING trash mob.  So as you can see, much more target switching is needed in a frost tanking, multi-mob situation rather then Unholy where I could sip my lemonade and laugh as Death and Decay worked its magic. So the MY personal favorite for Heroics would be the Unholy Spec, even for Off Tanking, this bad boy allows you to gain multiple targets on you at once, and make sure AoE’s do not rip off of you!
When the guild needed my help in finishing up their Nax run from the week I was not there, I decided to help them the day they had to finish Plague/Saph/KT during this I tanked stupendously, much better then with Unholy. Was I doing something different? YES, it was a new spec, much more threat on the bosses was gained by moi, as well as a lot more survivability from the increase in cool downs. The healers did not need to break a robe to save me from eternal damnation from bosses, honestly, I think they loved it almost as much as me. See I love the game Wack-A-Mole, and frost tanking basically was this. You needed to watch for your Rime and Killing Machine procs, when said things happened you needed to use your Howling Blast for rime, and an Icy Touch/Frost Strike/Howling Blast for Killing machine. Rime gives the Death Knight a free Howling Blast, so more AoE for me, and Killing machine was a free crit on any of those spells of your choice. Obliterate/Frost Strike can crit for 5K, so Jesus Christ it was sometimes hard for OT’s to pull off of me! Unholy sadly will, and could never pull this much single target threat as frost, so tragic! So obviously my pick for raiding would be Frost, for MT or OT this tree owns it!

See Roz, I have proof of that night!

Of course, when I announced that my next tree to try out will be Blood Tanking, I think almost everyone reading was face palming. First of all, a good chunk of them think DW tanking is stupid/impossible to say the least, so they generally feel that Blood Tanking will be the same. Oh well, they will hopefully be eating their words, least that is my plan! So until next time, this Death Knight is, playing some PvP!

Writer’s Update: Naxx, good god, best one the guild has had since I joined. I would like to express my personal thanks to my new boss/Raid Leader, and of course long time good friend, Klinderas, for making this happen and turning our guild into something that has a damned good shot at raiding for once! Seriously man, even Aifel could not find any dirt about last night!(And that’s saying something =P) To last night and many more like it to come, I will say it was… *ahem* “FABULOUS”. There, You happy now, I said it! Happy WoWing!
-Eld

Sounds like a really awesome movie title, doesn’t it?

Don’t look at me like that. I have to admit, though, if someone had come up to me before the 3.2 patch notes hit the PTR and said dual-wielding was viable for death knights I would’ve laughed in their faces. Dual-wielding has always been an iffy functionality of the class, but Blizzard has made an effort this time to have it as something more than just an extra icon in your spellbook. But before we get into that, a little history:

When the Lich King expansion launched, functional dual-wielding builds were put together by dumping most points into Unholy for the ghoul and then going down into Frost for Howling Blast. You’d try to get the most out of your white hits by picking up talents like Necrosis and Blood-caked Blade in Unholy and then snag Killing Machine to maximize spell damage. The entire build was about getting as many crit Howling Blasts as possible in a short amount of time, relying on the ghoul for sustained damage when your spells were on cooldown. Now, this was back when Howling Blast was in the middle of the Frost tree and Summon Gargoyle was up where Unholy Blight is now, and the perma-ghoul talents were easily accessible.

When Blizzard reshuffled the Frost and Unholy trees, they destroyed most hope for a functional dual-wielding build. Players had to jump through hoops as it was to make it work, and pushing Howling Blast down to the 51-point talent position in Frost hammered the final nail in the coffin…until now.

With the current 3.2 PTR notes, there is one new talent that makes all the difference between being able to dual-wield successfully and getting laughed at all the way back  to the trainers in Acherus:

• Threat of Thassarian – When dual-wielding, your Death Strikes, Obliterates, Plague Strikes, Blood Strikes and Frost Strikes have a 30/60/100% chance to also deal damage with your off-hand weapon.

Residing 35 points deep in Frost next to Blood of the North and Unbreakable Armor, this talent allows the death knight to dual-wield and still do good damage with strikes. Because of the way this talent functions, slow (and thus higher top-end) weapons are optimal, much like Enhancement shamans, and for all the same reasons. This talent essentially turns every strike into a Storm Strike- or a Mutilate-type attack. Neat.

Threat of Thassarian is one half of the pair of talents that ultimately makes dual-wielding work. The other is a long-lost gem, having been there this entire time but rarely been utilized:

• Nerves of Cold Steel – Increases your chance to hit with one-handed melee weapons by 1/2/3% and increases the damage done by your off-hand weapon by 5/10/15%.

Taking these two talents is the only difference now between a Frost 2H build on live and a Frost DW build on the PTR. The playstyle is almost identical, though recent tweaking to a couple of core Frost  talents has made 2H Frost less potent. Frost Strike is now avoidable, making it susceptible to every kind of mitigation and avoidance in the game (much like Unholy’s Scourge Strike), destroying much hope in making it usefull for threat generation while tanking. This, combined with a 5% damage cut both on the talent and on Blood of the North’s bonus mean no more giant Frost Strike crits in PvP, but that’s another issue entirely.

Blizzard seems to be phasing out 2H Frost with the changes to dual-wielding. As it stands on the PTR, the breakdown is something like this:

• Strikes: 2H = DW
• Spells: 2H = DW
• White hits: 2H < DW

As it has mostly been in cases such as this. Dual-wielding auto attacks far out-scale those of a two-hander, especially in this kind of build.

What is interesting to note, however, is the distinct lack of Rune Strike on the Threat of Thassarian talent. This could mean one of three things:

1. It is an oversight by Blizzard and will be fixed in a future PTR build
2. It is intentional and Frost is no longer meant to be used for tanking (unlikely)
3. There will be some other way to make 2H Frost generate enough threat after the Frost Strike nerf (most likely)

The only reason I bring it up at all is because without Rune Strike hitting with both weapons, any kind of dual-wield tanking build is going to fail miserably at threat generation. The parry haste from using two weapons is so low as to be irrelevant to any decision between using one weapon or two, so the only thing stopping it is threat.

For DPS, the playstyle between dual-wielding and using a two-handed weapon isn’t changing much at all. From my personal tests on the PTR, the damage breakdown is the same (Frost Strike, Obliterate, Melee, in that order) and the spec itself is similar. I’ve been toying around with something like 10/54/7 with some variations. The Howling Blast glyph is there in place of the glyph of Icy Touch because of two things: Icy Touch is only used once every 20 seconds with the rotation, and dual-wielding procs Freezing Fog twice as often from Rime because it technically hits twice every Obliterate, allowing Howling Blast to apply Frost Fever in a way more damaging than using Icy Touch + Plague Strike. With proper timing, you can get away with using Howling Blast + Plague Strike to apply diseases and keep going, filling cooldowns with Frost Strikes and Freezing Fog procs. It works out pretty smoothly.

As more changes go through on the PTR, I’ll be sure to report any additional findings. Until then, I’m off on my quest to collect half-decent one-handers from Ulduar. Sayōnara!

Thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump look at Frosty... tank?

We find our favorite hero finishing yet another day of daily quests and screaming that he is just that much closer to the axe available for 25 tokens…

Well, I suppose I could be dual wielding right now, but honestly, I have two mediocre weapons so I would rather not have any poor guild healer strain themselves with all the delicious hits I would be taking. Do not fret friends, for I am still working on getting that sword from Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle, and with it will either be one of my current swords, or the axe from the Argent Tournament dailies. The one thing I am realising by watching our dual wield tank is that you should have a bit of expertise, or some really nice cool-downs that will help with damage taking in those tough times, come this way, I will explain myself in further detail! *Walks through the death gate*

Expertise: I am almost certain I have gone over this before, but for those of you who decided not to listen, I will be merciful and not send you to the chopping block. Expertise in a dual wield situation looks to be quite important. Expertise is the stat that allows your attacks to have a lesser chance to be dodge/parried, dual wielders in general need a lot, but for tanks you would love this stat for the parry part (well, your healer would love this stat on you). The reasoning for you to not want the mob/boss to parry your blows is an interesting one if you feel like going out and researching it, but you will hear the term “parry gib”. Due to the board of health forcing me not to implode your minuscule fragile young minds with too much information, this will be explained shortly!

Makin' our way to the top!

The Parry Gib: Bah, go to hell board of health I am explaining anyways, my readers are not vegetables! They are Death Knights with brains as strong as the armor they wear, as quick as their rune strikes! The parry gib is an argued topic by many tanks around the w=World… of Warcraft, whenever you stand in front of a boss, he has a good chance to parry your attacks. Now with every parry his/her next attack will have an increased speed, almost to the point of it being an instant strike, this is why melee generally goes behind the target, so the poor tank does not get parry gibbed from their stupidity. Yet, it is your own stupidity if you are dual wield tanking, your attacks are going faster by far, so the bosses have a higher chance to parry your blows more often. If you looked at the comments on the first dual wield tanking thought process, you would have seen Klinderas talking about the parry gib (in his usual comical ways), then you would see my “I need bettar shoulders, me need gear so me no take moar damage har har” or something around that nature. Bottom line here, expertise helps reduce the chance you get parried, so less fast boss/mob attacks, but you will still be taking a larger amount of damage than if you were two-hand tanking, more damage taking means a bit better gear. Guess what, I just got that before my trip to D.C.! *wicked grin*

Now that you are thoroughly informed to the best of my ability on the wonders of the Expertise stat, you are probably wondering, “why did I refresh your memories?” There are a few reasons for my madness, first of all you should all know my craving to try dual wield tanking, even if it does not work, I want to say I did it. There is just one problem I have run into with my thoughts of dual wield tanking, what spec will I be using? Like I said earlier, expertise or really nice damage taking cool downs will be needed in this escapade, now unholy is not a bad option for this thought, we have Bone Shield to take less damage, Rage of Rivendare for 5 expertise, as well as some other nifty things in the crevice of our tree. There is just one problem, what if unholy just will not work out for me in my dual-wield tanking, they are changing it a little in 3.2, I need a backup plan, another option if you will, but how does one come about another option? Simple of course, you pull an Edison and try until you have found your solution.

Me and Klin? We're all the defense you could ever NEED!

It is almost a certainty that almost all of you read Pike’s Blog, so you should know that she has recently finished her experiments on trying out each hunter spec for an allotted time. Well, you know what, sorry Pike but I think I may use your genius experiment to my advantage, the patch is coming and I plan to be trying my dual-wield tanking around that time. The only problem is a spec is still needed, and any spec is a viable option for me. So until then I will be flip flopping between the three trees, starting with of course Frost (notice the title eh?). I am hoping that in a week or so I will be able to report on my adventures, but note I am doing this as a two-handed tank so it is more to test out the trees rather then see what they do for me as a dual wielder, since they really do not change much rather then a few talents in frost.

My Frost Talent Tree:Already I have seen that frost has some amazing cool downs as well as nice tanking abilities, for any non-seasoned Death Knight you would generally call this the “tanking” tree, but for all of you experienced and knowledgeable Death Knights the frost tree is merely one option for a good tank. Frost, like Unholy has an exclusive AoE attack, this is called Howling Blast this bad boy damages EVERYTHING 10yards around you with a burst of frozen death!Unholy, as I have explained before, has some decent damage taking, and spell damage neglecting talents. Unholy is geared a lot more towards taking those large melee hits in a way that the healers do not need to skip a beat when they see your health drop to 5% then up to 80%. So in the end, I have come up with a talent build for frost that actually seems to be used a lot by tanks, sadly there is not as much picking and choosing for Frost as Unholy has. My Frost Spec. Right on, now Christmas in July is ON!

Writer’s Update: Juicy, don’t worry folks, more posts are coming in the works, this Death Knight is still going bonkers over the additions to Engineering, so don’t you worry there will be plenty of posts coming to a blog near you! (Preferably this one!)
-Eld

Flaming one-handers? DO WANT PLEASE!

We join our Death Knight friend once again finding there is no sword for him in King Yirmon’s recently created corpse…

“Gahh!”, he screams in despair, why does this thing NEVER drop? Since the latest patch notes, I have been thoroughly intrigued with the art of Dual Wield tanking. Blizzard at least looks like they are attempting to allow us to dual wield once and awhile if we so please, and already I have found a tank in my guild who does this seldom-used art! Why in the name of Christ’s cookies would I want to do this? Well, from using my noggin’ I have come up with a few reasons why I would like to use two one-handed weapons over a single two-handed weapon.

THE PROS OF DUAL WIELD TANKING
There are a couple of simple reasons that I have come up with THEORETICALLY that dual wield tanking may give me significant benefits, note this is only logic and reasoning so you are open to debate through comments (actually, I encourage it!).

The Runes: From what I have looked at, with two one-handers you would use the Rune of Swordbreaking to tank at least. I am almost 95% sure that this rune stacks if it is used a second time on the other one-handed tank weapon, so by using our math we can see that I would gain 4% Parry and a not so orgasmic but still cool 100% reduced rating to be disarmed. For those of you who do not tank as a Death Knight regularly, you should at least note that we can not use shields so the only way to not get hit is through the dodge or parry avoidance skills, other then that we just get beat around like a Feral Druid, so this 4% extra parry rating would boost my avoidance skills significantly to be very delicious.

The Stats: Through this point of my debate with myself, I will be using the Red Sword of Courage and the Infantry Assault Blade to give you all a visual about what I am talking about. First we can see the +25 STR and +24 STR respectively, even with dual wielding another weapon it would not be as great as my generally two-handed weapons as far as strength goes. As a Death Knight a good chunk of our Parry comes from 25% of our STR stat, though the rune in the above paragraph would make up for that, and then some, so this loss will not break me as a tank at all in my opinion. Next we can look at the +58 STAM and +49STAM stats, respectively of course. These two weapons together get  me close but still a few STAM points off most two-handed weapons I would be using, the STAM drop is not significant enough though to make the practice not worthwhile! Combining the amount of Defense Rating I get from both swords, you have a total of 71 Defense Rating. The amount I would get out of a two-hander was 25 defense SKILL at all times due to the Rune of Stoneskin Gargoyle so under calculations I would be hitting the Defense Cap still, and maybe be around 1-3 points above the cap rather then exactly on the cap.

The Talent Changes: Fret not my good friends, I shall still be mostly Unholy through and through, but there will have to be some changes to make me got a bit deeper into Frost. Frost gives Nerves of Cold Steel which in total will increase my chance to hit with one-handed weapons by 3%, now using a two-handed weapon makes hitting that much more easier, but with two one-handers I will need some extra hit chance. Another cool bonus from the talent is the 15% more damage done by your offhand, in general, this is a great talent to have, more damage done = more threat, and more threat means all your mobs stay on you as a tank, aka this talent is very very good! From there I will be getting Black Ice to increase my frost and shadow damage by 10%, this is a great talent for any spec, and I will be screwing around with this to see if I gain any more threat by taking this talent. Though the main story in my talent changes folks, is whether or not Obliterate paired with Annihilation is better then Scourge Strike. Both use one Unholy and one Frost rune, yet from the looks of things, Obliterate does a TON more damage than scourge strike in terms of damage from diseases and just the bonus damage as a whole.

New axe for PvP is oh so spicy!

Conclusion: In my personal opinion I feel that dual wield tanking will be the next step for me in the life of a Death Knight tank. This is only a theoretical standpoint of my views on the bonuses of dual-wielding as a tank, but I have seen it work through past friends and current guild members of mine. Note this is only a current look of things, not the upcoming 3.2 look which would influence me even more to go dual wielding.

Writer’s Update: Hiya all! I got back last night from my huge White Water Rafting trip, all in all it was a nice weekend away from the interwebs and kicked off my summer events for me. But now, it’s business time, I will constantly be trying to get my tanking one-handers so I may have a taste of this great practice before the upcoming patch. Don’t forget to look out for the newest Dynamic Duo tomorrow, it will be saucy (!?). Happy WoWing!
-Eld

James Reynolds, Computer Science student.

Email: jamesr87[at]gmail.com

Silly Silly Mount.

At least it came with a vaguely amusing mail note.

On a different tangent, what do people think about Death Knight’s dual wielding? Well here’s what I think as illustrated by attempting to have a discussion with joe retard from the Turalyon server:

Btw, Evan asked me what Plugin I used to expand my chat window :>

Thats enough of this drivel for today, like the post header? Worth my effort? *Shrugs*

Thinking about getting some private hosting so I can tinker with this blog more … Not sure it’s worth it.

Regards,
JamesR.