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!

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!

DING- nah, just practicing.

So, I’m about 900k into 79, and I get invited into a party for VoA. I’m wondering why, and the guy tells me, ‘Just trying to help out a fresh 80.’
I’m thinking… Uhhhh… 79?
And then I realize I fired off my ding macro a leetle early. Whoopsies.
And now, for a NEW CAR! Oh, sorry. I meant new post series. I’m going to be looking at machinima made with WoW, both le creme de le creme… And le
creme de la crap.
My first thing falls under the first category; The world of war: blind,
commonly known as BLIND. You can find it by searching for Warcraft blind, or even just BLIND, on YouTube. It’s put out by Perculacraft, and due to the idiocy of youtoube urls and having no copy/paste (Posting on an iPod) I can’t link it. Suck it up. Then go watch this amazing piece of animations. These are NOT stock WoW animations; blizzard, hire this person! All I’m going to say. Go watch it. Now!

The Home Stretch!

600k Experience left for me in level 78. I’m almost through the leveling process, planning to hit 80 sometime in late March/early April. If you think I have blogoreah now, just wait. I have plans… Eeeevil plans. Ahem.
Though, as I noticed… I’m going to run out of quests. I may have to either do dailys for the final few days, do an instance or three, or (Gulp) go into storm peaks without an epic flying mount.
This is just a bit of advice: Never skip grizzily hills. Loads of quests there, some of my guildies didn’t touch Icecrown or Storm Peaks until 80. And that’s a nice cash injection when you do ding; in Icecrown alone, at 80, you can make nearly 2,000 gold (!) by questing to the achievement, due to the Exp conversion. Never skip stormpeaks, either, unless you have normal flying. Dear lord, the flight times! (Offer on the donations still open fwiw.)
ANYWAY, the original point of this post was not to set my pet textwall on you, although ask me about Norse mythology in game and I’ll be happy to sic him on you- Ahem. My original idea, pre randomness attack, was to outline a post series overview. I.e. Recurring topics, for those who don’t speak bloggerese.
I will be doing the following kinds of posts, after I hit 80. Until then, too focused. (Never seen a focused geek? Pray that you never do. We’re scary.)

Instance strategies for Death Knights. (Some slightly overleveled, gimmick runs possibly.)
Gear suggestions (Useful and otherwise)
Spec ideas (Ditto)
Actual specs (See above)
Looks at new content, either when I make it to my guild’s A team (I.e. Only team, we’re looking to get bigger) or looks from a fresh view
Lore (if you ask nicely… And literately.)
Views of death knights from others PoV (Possibly)
And finally, stories. If something strange, humorus, stupid, annoying, or ironic happens in WoW, and it happens to me or any of the people I play the game with, expect to hear about it.

That’ll do it for now, I will try to keep up with all these, but may have trouble for reasons that I’ll keep to myself right now (And that will surprise you.). But hey, you’re not paying me to do this (Waiiiit a minute…) so be happy with what you get!
UPDATE: I dinged 79 while posting this. Wish me luck!

The Little Things

WARNING! QQ POST AHEAD. SCROLL DOWN TO ANYWAY TO AVOID QQ.
Sure, I know. Things happen, bad things, stupid things, your fault or not. Part of the game. World of Warcraft. But there are these little things that really piss me off. Exhibit 1: Wintergrasp, this morning.
I’m farming revenants, after having won WG. Even without the flying mounts to position you properly, revenants are pretty easy for a level 77 Death Knight. I pull one flame revenant, and two elementals. Disadvantage one: 3 Lv. 80 mobs, one with almost elite health and damage, on a 77 character. Normally, I’d just go, ‘Oops, bad pull’ and shadowmeld or pop a few cooldowns. However, I had just respecced unholy for the first time in ninteen levels. Disadvantage two: Rusty on spec mechanics. I was also at +-80% HP when I pulled. Keeping count? Now, with three knocks against me, what swoops in but an 80 blood elf ret pally. Disadvantages four and five: Facing my counterclass at three levels below. And sure enough, opens with an arcane torrent, silencing me (Somehow). In the one second that I’m helpless, he gets a crit off on me, bringing me to 30% from 50%. I fire off a scourge strike (glyphed), he cleanses and proceeds to kill me.
If you need that many advantages to kill a 77 at 80, then… Wow. Just wow.

ANYWAY

To stop this from becoming a qq post, there’s a few other things that bug me and are slightly less angsty.
First of all, there’s the pet AI problems.
Any BM hunters out there will know what I mean. Your pet will constantly reposition the mob while they have aggro, dragging it away. Poor ratgrinder (I kid you not with the name.) pulled a withered troll into thrym in zul’drak, leading to an ‘Oh shi-‘ shadowmeld by me. For those unaware, Thrym is Fel reaver 3.0 (or Gankasaur 4.0, depends who you ask.), except hitting for 9k on ghouls. Personally, I’m hoping not to find out plate hits.
And thirdly, flying mobs. Went afk on flyer above Gun’drak, came back to the GY under where I died, my corpse floating above me, irretrieveable. Died mid fall.
-Elune be with you!