3.2 Frost DK DW DPS Run Down

Over the weekend, I took the plunge and dove into respeccing and regearing my Death Knight. For those who may not know, Death Knights got a full refund of talent points necessitating a revisiting of my spec. I was rather enjoying the playstyle I'd found, so I didn't wanna switch things up too much. However, I did want to see if the new changes in favor of dual wielding panned out like they were intended.

With that in mind, I went with a 14/57/0 spec. I filled up the "Nerves of Cold Steel" talent as well as the "Threat of Thasarrian" talent. I removed two points from Two Handed Weapon Specialization and kept almost everything else the same.

It's important to note that my aim is to be able to do two things well with this spec. The first, I'd like to be able to DPS in a PvE environment competitively. The second, I'd like to feel competitive in PvP Battlegrounds. Thus, some points are chosen for that sort of utility, even though I know it makes my spec not "the best" raiding spec or "the best" PvP spec. It's a hybrid spec. For instance, my PvP needs are what entice me to spec into both Rune Tap and Chillblains. Keep that in mind in your criticisms :-).

This also reflects itself in my choice of glyphs. You can see from the link above that I'm going with:

• Howling Blast - To spread Frost Fever and, thereby, Chillblains. Awesome for keeping melee away from demolishers, etc.
  
• Disease - One button, one rune refreshing of diseases. Totally a must for DPS as it lets you throw in a lot more Obliterates
  
• Rune Tap - For the self/group heal. This is a utility thing that I enjoy. If you're looking for more DPS, go with the Glyph of OB as it is totally worth it.
  
• Horn of Winter - These three minors are pretty much "no duh" choices.
  
• Pestilence - for the obvious
  
• Raise Dead - for the obvious
  

So, basically, in switching to a Dual Wield spec, I dropped my old glyph of Death Grip (which is great for levelling, but not all that useful in end game stuff, even if I really love the ability) and picked up the Glyph of Disease which is just essential for your rotation. I'm still ironing it out, but it ends up looking something like:

IT > PS > OB > FS > BS > Pest > OB > OB > FS (repeating basically Pest, OB's, FS as they come up and making sure my diseases never fall off. Also, I throw in a HB whenever Rime procs... looking for the shinies around your player)

It's pretty simple, fun, and puts up respectable numbers. With the addition of the glyph, I was doing better DPS than I was pre-patch right away even using my 2h weapon. Then I switch to my DW weapons and saw my DPS go up ~100 more on the same dummy. This is certainly not battle tested, but I would argue that my 2H weapon is far better than my 2 DW weapons, yet still I was putting out more DPS as a DW. It seems to me to confirm the general rumors I'm hearing that DW >> 2H for the Frost tree DPS spec.

I know that in the course of my research, it was tough to figure out what DW weapons to use. I know you want a slower weapon in each hand, but it was still hard for me to find "easy to get" 1H DPS weapons. I didn't want to farm anything, just purchase some stuff because I wanted to test it before I took the plunge. This basically limited me to emblems, seals, and/or currently achieved rep items. In the end, I settled on:

• Fang of Truth from Wyrmrest Accord (Revered)
• Grasscutter from Emblems (50 Heroism)
• (edit: far better to pick up are two Reaper of Dark Souls if you're revered with Ebon Blade since they're slower and have decent stats)
  

These replaced my two hander Death's Bite.

I'm also working on a DW tanking spec too, but I'll reserve a separate post for that.

So now that I've thrown all this out there, please feel free to shoot me advice and critique. I'm sure I've missed things or could have done things better. In particular, I would love advice on what to look for as far as DW stats on weapons. I find that I don't really understand that stats on them so much right now. Just keep in mind that I'm choosing to run with a hybrid spec for fun, realizing it means I'm not going to "top the charts" DPS wise in a raid. That's not the point of what I'm doing. I want to maximize this spec while retaining the utility in both PvP and some PvE (mostly heroics, maybe some low-end raiding). Thanks in advance!

(edit: In response to some comments and further research, I posted an update here with some clarifications about the IIT buff and how it affected my rotation.)

On The Outside Looking In

The roar of the crowd startled Fulguralis from his sleep-deprived musings as he paced towards the mailbox outside of the large tent. He had just finished up another set of dailies and had been tasked by his new bride to take care of the mail. Kicking at the dirt path, he glanced longingly towards the coliseum that towered over him on the tournament grounds.

Having been recently completed, the coliseum was a hive of activity with busy bees buzzing in and out of the massive structure, going about their business as if they had been there all along. Fulguralis reminded himself how empty the grounds had been until late, and felt a distant pang of regret that he and his adventurers alliance were not yet prepared to preform in front of the tournament crowd. They still had work to do elsewhere in Ulduar.

Having been reunited with his heart, bound though it may now be, he was nevertheless happy to hear it racing at the visions of glory and adventure glancing at the massive structure brought to mind.

"Someday," he muttered, returning his focus to the approaching mailbox. "Hopefully it's sooner rather than later."

In the days following his marriage to the Paladin, Fuubaar, he had found himself quite busy with the mundane. It seemed that one could not take an extended vacation in Azeroth without accumulating mountains of work upon one's return. It would be a while before this Warlock was back in full action.

The mailbox materialized in front of Fulguralis, and he glanced down at the letter he was carrying. A dab of pink wax had been dripped, pressed, and hardened to close the letter, and he studied the embossing left in the wax. It read: Seal of Light Postage.

"Paladins," he sighed, then shrugged and dropped the letter along with several others like it into the mail slot.

Looking towards the future, Fulguralis tried to puzzle out how he was going to fit his daily chores into his already reduced raiding schedule. Somehow, he knew he also needed to take some time with a few close friends to check on some old dungeons. Rumor had it that activity had picked back up inside, and he could always use the emblems awarded from clearing those cesspools out. Besides, killing stuff was far more fun than preforming "Last Rites" on some dumb dead walruses. Or is that walrusi?

One thing was for sure, next time he was in Dalaran he was going to stop by the gear shops and check out what new wares there were offering, as well as write down a list of gear he needed before he could hope to take on the challenges in the colesium. He knew he needed quite a bit.

He began to mount up with that aim in mind, reminding himself to be sure to stop by home and let Fuubaar know what he was up to. She seemed to get upset when she didn't know if he was safe, and he certainly didn't want to deal with a righteous fury. Demons were one thing, but an angry wife was quite another.

As he was mounting up, two burning blue eyes fixed on his from across the path, momentarily arresting his thoughts. I know that woman, he thought, but couldn't quite place from where. Of course, the eyes gave away that the woman in question was a death knight, but as far as he could remember, Fulguralis hadn't fraternized with any of the undead. In fact, he purposefully tried to steer clear of these new additions to his majesty's regiment of mercenaries if only because he found their unrefined abilities to be somewhat of an annoyance. He also found it vaguely amusing that they attempted to inflict their enemies with diseases. If only they knew how to really corrupt!

He stood motionless in locked gaze with the woman for a moment that seemed to stretch into the abyss. A sad look appeared to run across her face as she broke eye contact and melded into the crowd. I know her, he thought, frustrated by the tantalizing nature of the elusive recognition. He stared for a few more seconds at the spot where she'd been standing before shaking his head and mounting up. Kicking his heels into the sides of the dragon, the beast thrust it's muscled wings downwards, stirring up the dust on the dry dirt path and launching animal and rider into the dreary sky that hung ominously above the grounds.

Fulguralis adjusted his hood as the chill air rushed across his face, stinging his exposed skin. Suppressing a shiver, he thought of the warm arms waiting for him at home and smiled.

On Lifetapping, Extended Raid IDs, and the Emblem Changes

When scrolling through the patch notes the other day, I apparently missed this little gem:

Glyph of Lifetap: Duration of the buff from this glyph increased to 40 seconds.

That's a pretty huge increase and will be awesome I think. I'm pretty certain you should be able to fit a lifetap comfortably in your rotation every 40 seconds. In fact, I would wager that it's almost necessary on a boss fight to prevent going OOM. The key is to space them out to keep the buff up while minimizing how often you need to do it so you don't hurt your DPS. I'm thinking, for me, it'll probably end up being a tap about every other pass through the rotation.

Your goal should be to end a boss encounter, having never gone OOM throughout, as near as possible to empty on mana, minimizing your downtime. On a perfect encounter, you'd be able to sprinkle life taps into your rotation within 40 seconds (but as close to 40 seconds apart as you can), slowing your mana drain to end the fight with your last cast consuming your last mana. That'd be nearly impossible to gauge, as there are so many variables, but if you keep that goal in mind, you can probably hone your skills a bit. This change may increase the usefulness of talenting the "improved life tap" since the fewer taps you have to do, the better... especially if you can space them out to keep that buff up.

Still, the idea holds that you don't want to put too much emphasis on keeping this buff up that you let DoTs drop off or stray from the basics. It's the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

In other news, I ran the new Crusader dailies last night, and they're pretty fun. Nothing ground breaking, but the new landing area up north is decently interesting. If you can catch it, there is a crazy Lurker-like boss that spits at some dudes on a boat. I'm not quite sure what that is all about yet, but it's cool looking. Blizz is also setting the stage for the Black Knight's return, though you could probably guess as much from the patch notes. Still, I think I expected something a bit more epic to that end, but it was really just investigative grunt work. In any case, I like the long, over-arching story lines, so I'm not going to trash on it.

My first purchase was to pick up the tabard that'll let me "hearth" it to the tournament grounds. Totally going to be worth it as I plan to do the dailies at least until I can upgrade my squire. They did put in a summoning stone to facilitate getting groups to the instances, but I think it'll still be nice to be able to teleport there on my own as well. I look forward to running some heroics and testing out the new emblem system. Conquest emblems hit me right where I need it, as we aren't near putting Ulduar on farm and I've not gotten a whole lot of gear upgrades from there. Thus, the items purchasable with the Conquest emblems are a good upgrade for me.

I think the ID and emblem changes are really casual guild friendly. Say what you want about "easy mode" or whatever, but as an officer it really opens a lot of doors for me. What with the summer exodus and just normal guild atrophy, we've been a lot smaller as of late, raiding only with our alliance. We also probably couldn't commit to more than one 10-man day per week. Before, there wasn't a lot of interest in running nightly heroics or starting a 10-man team because you couldn't really get anywhere with that. However, with extending raid IDs and getting emblems from heroics, this allows us to progress at our own pace, not forcing us into a repetitive weekly cycle. We can actually get somewhere!

Needless to say, I think this may re-energize our guild and lead to a lot more group work, which can only be good. I would suspect a lot of small to medium sized guilds find themselves in the same boat. I know you can make cases about the negatives of the moves Blizz has made, but I'm going to go ahead and side on the positive for these changes. From where I'm sitting, it's a smart move and done well. I just wish they had seen fit to offer the extra server capacity needed for the sudden onslaught of heroic instancing. We wanted to get in and run a quick VH, but definitely couldn't as "additional instances could not be launched at this time". That sort of messages makes me want to set fire to baby bunnies. Granted, that's just plain fun, but all the same...

In any case, we're going back into Ulduar tonight, and I'm really hoping my addons are functional, or it could get messy. Of course this weekend is extremely busy for me, so I won't get to spend the quality time with the patch that I'd like to. I'm hoping next week to have experienced the new PvP stuff, analyzed my DK respec, and thus be able to write about that a bit, so stay tuned if that's your thing. That's where the real changes are anyways. Also, it'd be REALLY nice to get into some 5-mans, maybe even the new one, but some of that may be dependent on servers. Ugh.

3.2 Frost DPS DK Patch Notes

Word on the street is that Frost DPS has become the new dual wield spec. Looking at the patch notes, I'd tend to agree. The problem now is that I don't have two good one handed weapons, so I can't really test this myself. Anyone know of any I could pick up? It's seemed to me that one handed DPS weapons are hard to come by. I actually would enjoy DW though.

Frost fever got buffed which is nice and should increase your focus on keeping that one up especially. I feel like the other changes are relatively minor, a couple cooldown talents were tweaked, but I'll have to play with it a bit before I know what it means for me. Remember, I'm going with more of a PvE and PvP hybrid here (slanting more towards PvP), so my playstyle is probably decently unique.

I don't like the change to Frost Strike, as it was pretty sweet in PvP, but I guess it was probably warranted. PvP saw a ton of changes in this patch, so I really have no clue about how it's going to feel until I've mucked around with it for a month or so. I'm not sure what I'll do with my free respec either, since I may swap around some points and try something different. I'm relatively sure I'll try to stay in the Frost Tree though, because I just enjoy the playstyle I've grown accustomed to.

Anyways, I've copied the pertinent points below. Feel free to consult the full notes elsewhere, I'm just trying to break it up into small chunks and give you an idea of what I'm looking at.

Chains of Ice: Now reduces movement by 95% instead of 100%. The main effect of this change will be that targets of Chains of Ice will not have to re-issue a movement command to continue moving.

Frost Fever: Damage done increased by 15%.

Frost Strike: This ability can now be dodged, parried, or blocked. Weapon damage bonus reduced to 55%, down from 60%.

Icebound Fortitude: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.

Blood of the North: Reduced to a 3-point talent. Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 3/6/10%. There is now a 33/66/100% chance whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.

Lichborne: Duration reduced to 10 seconds, and cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.

Threat of Thassarian: New 3-point talent. 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. Off-hand strikes are roughly one half the effect of the original strike

Toughness: This talent now grants 2/4/6/8/10% armor instead of 3/6/9/12/15%, placing it in line with similar abilities of other classes.

3.2 Warlock Patch Notes

It's official! 3.2 is live! I finally got some "for real" patch notes. I'll be trying to talk about them in chunks over the next few days in a schedule that may look something like this: today = warlock (because there aren't very many), tomorrow = frost DK, Thursday = PvP stuff, Friday = Misc. Depending on how those go, I may combine or divide if it turns into a giant or teeny post. We'll see, but I just wanted to put the requisite "it's here" note up since I know all my readers read me and only me forever and ever or else. *evil cackle*

Warlocks

• Banish: Effect will now be cancelled if Banish is recast on a banished target. - Umm, k? Spell check on canceled (minion peeve of mine). I didn't have a problem before... but okay.
  
• Dreadsteed: Can now be learned at level 40. - dumb but no surprise here.
  
• Felsteed: Can now be learned at level 20.- dumber
  
• Shadowflame: The angle of the cone effect on this ability was inadvertently very small, making it difficult to use. Its cone is now the same size as similar spells, such as Cone of Cold.- I'll take it... it was kind of a PITA.
  
• Soulshatter cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5 minutes - This will be put to good use, I promise.
  
• Talents
  • Affliction
    • Pandemic: Now also increases the critical damage bonus of Haunt by 100%. - Buff, small but better than naught.
      
  • Demonology
    • Fel Domination cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 15 minutes.- awesome, now you can "revive" your pet in combat without too much hassle.
      
  • Destruction
    • Empowered Imp: The warlock's critical hit chance is increased to 100%, up from 20% for the next spell cast after the Imp critically hits a target. - score one for the little guy.
      
    • Fire and Brimstone: Reduced to 2/4/6/8/10% increased damage from Incinerate and Chaos Bolt on targets afflicted with Immolate, down from 3/6/9/12/15%. - nerf, I guess destro was just that much better. I guess it'll bring affliction and destro more in line.

All right, that's it for now. Like a classic rock radio station, you just got a two for Tuesday. Hope you enjoyed it.

Affliction Warlock Gearing 102

I wanted to revisit a topic that is probably an old hat for most of us: gearing. By this stage of the game, you have probably done your homework and have a pretty good idea of what stats you're looking for. If you're still unsure, here's the short version of the story: get to spell hit cap as quickly as you can, and then try to snag up as much spellpower as possible. It's really that simple early on.

Now, I'm not talking about folks who are far down the gearing ladder. Gearing 101 would be for the folks who are levelling or just starting our their lives at 80. It's my belief at that point that you really can keep it that simple. Don't worry too much about hit when you're levelling, but it's good to start collecting it for when you hit 80 and want to start running group things. Keeping things simple = good in my book.

The point I wanted to bring across today is what starts to occur after you've gotten the basics covered. There will come a point sometime when you're nearing the end of Naxx that you'll start to realize you're not seeing as many "big" upgrades. That is to say, where before you were probably finding pieces that were just better across all stats than your previous pieces, now you're probably starting to see that some trade-offs must be made.

For instance, perhaps you have a piece drop that will only give you like 1 more SP, but is loaded up on Int and Haste. Or you are debating whether to keep your hit talents to make up that extra 3% when you could just gear for it and spend those talents elsewhere. The point here is that you're going to eventually reach a threshold where "keeping it simple" is no longer "simple". What happens then? If you're like me, you don't really want to overcomplicate things and do tons of spreadsheets and lists and maths. There are some people that love to do that kind of thing, and there are plenty of gear lists out there to consult.

In my experience, however, I've found that since my playtime is pretty limited, I don't have time to go after all the "best in slot" pieces. I pretty much have to make the best of what drops come my way, and I can't always plan them out in an organized, spreadsheeted manner. So how do we keep it simple in this case?

The easiest way is to be sure you understand the weights of each stat as it goes towards our DPS. You don't have to do tons of research to break this one down. In fact, I'll give you the link where it's already been done. Nibuca, who has long been my favorite affliction warlock did the maths for us several moons ago. You can find that particular article here. It's one of my faves.

She does a wonderful job explaining things and I've found that my playstyle and gear levels usually end up being very similar to hers, so I'm choosing to take most of her calculations at face value*. The simplest way to do things is to get the addon Pawn, use Nib's values, and, for the most part, trust the numbers that it kicks out. The addon even lets you compare two pieces. However, I never want to advocate blind usage of an addon, and we should strive to at least have a basic understand of what's going on, even if we use an addon to make life easier.

In that spirit, lets look at what Nib's stats are really telling us. Pawn basically allows the user to add a weight to each stat, so it can calculate how they go together and give you a simple value for comparison. Obviously, different stats will weight differently in how they effect our DPS. Ignoring the weights everything except for major stats, we get the follow weight relationships.

Int=0.17, Crit=0.69, Spirit=0.67, Hit=1.5, SP=1.37, Haste=0.77.

These numbers are mostly arbitrary, in that it's not so important what they are, but whats vital is how they relate to each other. Thefore, we can set a simple priority ranking of stats that looks like this: Hit (until capped)>SP>Haste>Spirit/Crit>>Int, and we can look at the relative weights in order to make an informed gear choice.

It's interesting to note that Haste is really our second best stat after we're hit capped and is roughly half of the DPS gain that SP is. Thus, if you're looking at two pieces and one bumps you up by 1 SP but the other bumps you up by 3 Haste, pick the haste piece ftw. That's a very cut down example, but it illustrates what we're looking at I think. An addon like Pawn makes this very simple, but we can also keep in mind the relative weights and make an informed decision on our own. It make take a little more work, but at least we know what's going on.

I mention haste specifically, because I think it is an often overlooked stat for us. It really is that good. Yes, better than spirit. Even with the 1/3 to SP conversion. That is taken into account with these weightings.

You can apply the same principles to talents and gem slots. If they increase a certain stat, you can check out the ratings and compare your trade-offs. I don't have specific numbers for talents, but gems are a bit easier to compare (Nibs actually gives pawn values for these, which is nice): you just need to figure out what gem you'd like to put in, and then you'll know the stats you're looking at, and it's back to a basic stat comparison. If you, for instance, always put in +19 SP gems, you can just take that on to the other stats when you're doing your comparison.

I would certainly recommend proper usage of the Pawn addon as well as a perusal of Nibuca's wonderful article, but the point here is that we obtain a basic understanding of what is really going on with these things. Thus, if, say, patch 3.2 hits and stuff gets changed, you can adapt your thinking, find some new numbers on the intrawebs, and get on with (fantasy) life.

I don't know about you, but I certainly prefer to maximize my playtime... without sacrificing the top spot on the meters of course ;-).

*Note: Better gear changes these weights because of diminishing returns and other miscellanea. You'd have to download, install, and run (there's a great guide at the Den too)your own Simulationcraft to get your personal numbers. I don't do this, but rather "ballpark" it to try and make an intelligent decision. This is also why I don't blindly rely on pawn. Nibs gives several gear level examples in her article, and the important thing to note here is that the relationships mostly stay the same. In fact, haste seems to get more weight as you gear up. I'd be somewhere around the T7 set curve now, so I should probably modify my pawn numbers, I just haven't yet. If you're going to use her numbers, keep in mind the gear level she's advertising. If you prefer Elitist Jerks T8 values, you can find those here, as they do the same kind of thing with a lot more mathiness.

Mic Check

I did a lot of Aion beta-ing over the weekend, so I don't have a whole lot of WoW news to talk about. Besides, what really IS there to talk about in WoW lately? We're all waiting for this stinking patch, and some people are progressing in raiding, but not a whole lot is going on it seems. Since high school football season is starting, I'm down to only one raid night a week (two if I'm lucky), so my toons are pretty stagnant as well.

I did get on WoW to do some PvPing this weekend, and it may be just me, but did the Ruin server group get together and decide to take Alliance stupid pills? I mean, I know the Alliance isn't normally the pinnacle of PvP awesomeness, but this weekend we just seemed especially bad. I mean, I lost four Alterac Valleys. We NEVER lose AV. I couldn't win a WSG to save my life. At least we seemed to still keep Strand of the Ancients close. I don't know what was up, but it was like we were just doing stupid stuff at every turn.

Anyways, I wanted to go with a more general MMO discussion topic today in light of the lack of specific stuff to talk about. Like I said, I did a lot of Aion beta playing this weekend with two goals in mind. First, we wanted to try out putting a Legion together (WoW Guild) just to see how it works. In Aion this will cost you around 11k Kinah (think copper in WoW, but no other tiers of money, so if everything were in copper. Or, if you've been to Mexico, think pesos to dollars). It's looks bad, but it only takes you about a level of questing between three people to build that kind of cash up. Not too bad.

The second aim was to experience the game with the addition of the voice track. They hadn't added the voices up until now, and, honestly, I hadn't really noticed that they were missing. I mean, something in the back of my mind must of noticed their absence, but I guess in a beta test, I'm not playing critically. That is to say, I'm expecting it to not be completely polished.

After experiencing the addition of the voice track, it was sort of like a revelation to me of just how important that sort of thing is to the feeling of immersion and the vibrancy of the world. I may not have realized it wasn't there, but I certainly noticed what it added. All of a sudden, I wasn't just demoing some game, I was a character in a fantasy realm.

I'm not gonna make the claim that Aion's voice track is stellar. If anything, it's probably pretty average as far as those things go, but it's done well and adds a lot to the game. In particular, the voice overs were added for the quest cut scenes, and those go a long way to pulling you in. It's something I would have liked to see WoW do more (random cinematics), even if it's just little snippets here and there.

So I wanted to ask today: just how important is the voice track to you? Is it something that you're highly critical of? What are your favorite parts of WoW's voice track?

I have to say, for my part, I think the minion voice track for Warlocks is one of my all time faves. I mean, the random sayings usually still make me laugh. Especially since I've really been questing around with my Felguard for the first time, having specced demonology just for random world questing and fun. Also, if you're an old school Warcraft fanboy like me, you have to love the random run ins with classic characters like the ghost footmen or peasants that have the same voices you remembered and loved in the strategy games.

"Right-o."