Suffer well, friend

I just wanted to give a warm farewell to Skeletonjack, a fellow DK blogger, who has recently quit WoW. So both of my influences (him and BRK) are down and out. Head over to his site and wish him good luck in whatever he does. Also, he has (Or had, not sure) a donation set up to support someone going through a nasty sickness. It’s a great cause, and I’m not sure whether the drawing for the raffle has gone on yet.
I’m going to try to live up to his post quality, but it’s a high bar to hit. Just the same, expect the drought of posts to end.
~Suffer well, brothers and sisters!

Tank you very much!

So, I decided to dive into the wide world of tanking.
First problem; GEAR.
I am, as I write this, sitting at 460 defense and 18k health.
Waaaaaaaaiiiittttt…
I was at 20k with PvP gear, but I learned (The hard way) that early tank items have their budget eaten by defense. I have half a tank set and no tank spec, so hold back on the “WHOMG SCRUBKNIGHT!”. I have recently tanked H VH (Well, xevozz anyway) with 400 defense, and a Druid healer (Meaning no spike heals). So I realized; “Hey, I’m not bad at this!”
All I’m trying to say is; Try tanking. If you become known, even just in your guild, as a good tank, you’ll have groups with no trouble. If you become known as a bad tank… Well, not so much. Work on it though, and if your guild doesn’t at least give you a chance to try again, even in a heroic or 80 normal, look for a new guild. Especially if it’s just because you’re a DK.
UPDATE: Now at 20400 hp in frost presence, and 545 defense. Yay!

3.1… WOAH!

I know i’m a little late to the party on 3.1, but there’s a reason. Two of them. One with a red ribbon logo, and one with lightning bolts… Yes, Rogers cut my internets. Apparently I was overusing bandwidth, but after explaining I had someone stealing bandwidth, they advised that I lock it and activated it again. Then… The storm knocked out our internet again. So I’m back, and starting to raid finally. There are 3 mods that I cannot live without in 3.1 raiding, namely Talented, OPie, and, obviously, Omen3.
Talented is even more amazing in 3.1, with two specs to manage. People on our server were spending 2 hours setting specs, getting them deleted at the drop of a hat, and resetting them on all their characters. Talented SAVES your specs, and you can set them again easily.
OPie puts less used commands of your choice onto ring menus brought up with a keypress, including raid markers. It is a LIFESAVER as a raid leader… For those… iffy… trash pulls in sarth that need marking NOW, to using macros to announce position changes at a keypress for several, it just makes things easier.
Omen3, well… If you don’t know what this does, you shouldn’t be raiding.
Why didn’t I mention DBM and Bigwigs? Simple. No worky. They broke with all the stealth changes in 3.1. Not reliable for a lot of fights. Believe me, I know first-hand. Painful.
~MRGRLRGLRGLRGLRAH!

Why raid pugs are hit and miss.

WARNING! RANT INC!
So a raid pug is advertising 3 wings of naxx down with plague left. WRONG. Sapph and KT only. People were dancing around the ice blocks, saying ‘lol there’s an aura noob.’ Noob? I was running naxx back when you needed 8 priests, one in every group! Well, no, I wasn’t, but I got dragged along on my first account to learn strats. Level 60 naxx, let me tell you, was a lot harder.
There was a dps doing 630 dps, WITH NO TALENT POINTS, he gets kicked after the wipe. I was third on the damage meters, with 1350 on a melee unfriendly fight with unattackable portions. Everyone screams, KICK THE DIP#^%* IN GREENS! I had three greens, tyvm, almost all gemmed ones with blue gems in them. One of them was chuchus tiny box, a best in slot pre-naxx. I get kicked, and get an apology from the raid leader, saying that he was facing a gkick if he kept me. I said, ‘np, just a raid, not worth it.’
So now I’m saved to a cleared naxx, with a 30g repair bill, and no loot to show for it. This is why I never, ever, pug raids.
So I’m working on gearing up, and my ignore list now includes everyone on that raid except the leader.
-BOW BEFORE YOUR RIGHTFUL KING!

Big money, big money, no repairs, no repairs!

3k gold. Only 2k from my epic flyer! Almost geared and glyphed up for heroics, and I’m already pulling 1.5k group buffed. That’s enough to qualify for patchwerk!
I’m thinking of accepting guest posts, but only by writers who have proved themselves. I’d love to have a DK post their views on the class, or possibly someone else giving an outsiders view on DKs.
In other news, I’ll be trying to add in tags. I went on wordpress search on a tip, and my blog is unsearchable except by the exact title! /facepalm.
(Note: this has been fixed. Props to wordpress for bug squishing.)
Led my first Wrath raid yesterday, for VoA normal. Our class balance failed, 3dks, 2 pallies, and 2 warriors. We beat him, with 4 min to spare in WG. A dk piece dropped, and I lost the roll by two. Grr.

Working on voice chat kit

Well, working on my voice chat/recording setup. Have my eye on skullcandy lowrider headphones, and as for mikes, I’m open for suggestions. I currently have a cruddy intergrated setup, with wireless fm headphones and a tower mike. My podcasts and ventrilo sound like I swallowed a kazoo.
Speaking of podcasts, once I get my new computer ( I blog from an iPod) I’ll be reviving my WoW podcast. You can check out some old eps at my podcast page. Beware, I had a cold for most of them and was running a machine with 192 mb of ram, so my lookups are slow.
-Today we avenge our fallen brothers!
WARNING! NERD RANT AHEAD!
UPDATE: The source fails. 1 month back order. On a featured, sale priced item. They ordered A HUNDRED! ONE HUNDRED! NATIONWIDE! Or at least, “I think…” Yeah, good inventory management. Jeez. Your support team didn’t even know! So now I have to wait a month for them to be shipped, minimum. Get your act together! This is why CC (Circuit city, not crowd control.) is gone. /endnerdrant

DO NOT WANT!

Well, blizzard’s been screwing with death knights on the PTR, making some downright freakish rotatations possible. Plague strike always sucked for frost, leading to its non-use in frost rotations. Then they nerfed the hell out of IT to bring it to equality with PS.
So now they don’t use that, either. Diseaseless blood is dead. Now we have diseaseless frost. Not sure of the exact rotation, but it’s pretty powerful.
In other news, 3.1 hitting in 1-3 weeks. Am I the only one who finds that ironic?

My First Epics!

Well, 9 hours into being 80, and I have two epics. One hateful gladiators piece, and one T7 tanking piece. There’s a kicker, but I’ll get to that.
I had just done wintergrasp (3 Kbs, 5k honor… And 10 deaths /facepalm) and thought, epics? Sign me up. So I did H VoA, thinking, hey, I do pretty good dps. After putting up with a downright SPASTIC tank who would charge after the leaps (Bear tank, don’t flame me bro! Heh… Flame retardant.), forcing the melee dps to head over to the new location, instead of waiting for the return, I still had a good 1.5k dps, with 50% ToT ( time on target). This placed me 7th of 20 dpsers. No death knight stuff dropped. None.
I think, heh… 1.5k raid buffed dps… I still have the buffs… I head out, and get into a 10 man. We kill him, with a much better tank (/glare) and we loot him. 2 emblems of heroism, per usual, but.. Wait… 2 DK items, one DK i.e. Me. The kicker I mentioned? Both were gloves.
I’m still mad.

Funny gank, the state of raiding

So I was farming crystallized life in wg while the horde controlled it, when I got a debuff. I thought, hmmm… These flowers don’t cheapshot!
Being in total PvE mode, it took me a good 10 seconds to realize I had an UD rogue on me.
Being mid-rotation, having just done my second blood strike and a RS, with 2 death runes, 80 RP, and in unholy pres, it took me a good 4 seconds to kill him with 3x SS, one RS, and one death coil.
Moral of the story: Don’t attack a mid-rotation UH DK, low health or not.
On to raiding; if you aren’t in a hardcore raiding guild, and you aren’t a tank, you have two options, at least on my server; VoA for +-10 mins after WG capture, or the occasional half-pug of naxx made by a raiding guild that is short a dps. Full pugs? One a week, at most. OS? Good luck. EoE? No. Almost never, and those just want a keyed person.
-Suffer well, brothers and sisters! (Apologies to skeletonjack.)

Ding. Seriously this time.

Prepare youselves, the bells have tolled!
Shelter your weak, your young and your old!
Each of you shall pay the final sum!
CRY for mercy! THE RECKONING HAS COME!
Yes, I did ding 80. My current spec is possibly the best in existence, ruthlessly poached from Skeletonjack. My dps went from 705 to 1600 (!) in quest blues/greens, crafted bracers, and rep sword/chest. Imagine the possibilities with heroic/naxx gear!
Yes, heroics and naxx are level options for me. A couple groups are okay with anyone hit capped and who puts out 1.5k dps, of which I will fit both criteria <url=soon. I was a little hesitant about the runeblade of demonstrable power, for the distinct lack of strength, but it gave me more dps. If you do not have the vengance bindings and the runeblade pre-raid, keep hitting yourself. The runeblade is the same level as naxx 10 gear, for the price of two repair bills, and the bindings ARE PERFECTLY ITEMIZED FOR DK’s! No haste, no stam, and all for 12 saronite bars (free-2.5 gold each depending on smith) and an eternal fire (why hello, 20-50g on ah or 20 mins of revenant farming!)
-Harken, cur! Tis you I spurn! Now feel… THE BURN!