Death Knight Glyphs and Runeforges – Patch 3.1.0

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

They’re small, sometimes overlooked, and aren’t included in the box.   But when used properly they are game changers. It’s time to get out the special doll and point to where the bad man put his…

Glyphs and Runeforges

Runeforge Changes

• Rune of Cinderglacier now procs per minute instead of a 5% chance.
  • Good. This change needed to be made for the rune to be anywhere near effective
• Rune of the Fallen Crusader: This weapon enchant now provides only 15% strength, but its chance to proc is doubled.
  • So now it’s at basically 100% uptime but the strength gain was reduced to minimize burst damage.
  • PvP change
• Rune of Razorice now affects Frost damage done by the death knight only, but stacks up to 10%.
  • Frost DPS change. Intended to be placed on two weapons to get the % up as fast as possible.
  • Makes Frost the largest burst damage spec for DKs

Glyphs

• Glyph of Blood Boil: This has been replaced with Glyph of Heart Strike, which adds a snare effect to Heart Strike.
  • I guess a ranged snare was too powerful to have when it was not from a frost rune. Good thing that this speed debuff will be undispell-able just like Chilblains. Entirely a PvP glyph
• Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon: Increases the duration of Dancing Rune Weapon by 10 seconds.
  • PvE blood glyph. Keep the blade out longer, do more damage with it for less RP. Important for DPS efficiency
• Glyph of Dark Death: Increases the damage done by Death Coil by 15%.
  • Blood DPS Glyph. It’s their only RP dump, might as well make it more useful
• Glyph of Death Strike: This glyph now increases Death Strike damage by 1% per 2 runic power, but has a limit of 25% increase.
  • Almost restored to its former glory. The DS glyph is back in style. Great for PvP when you’re not being told to burst and for farming alone.
• Glyph of Disease: Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.
  • Huge Glyph. Transforms 1 Blood rune (least valuable) into X Frost / Y Unholy Runes depending on what you get caught in the AoE. A must have for any DPS spec.
• Glyph of Howling Blast: Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.
  • If Blizzard didn’t incorrectly implement Icy Talons then this glyph could be mainstream for Frost DPS DKs
• Glyph of Hungering Cold: Reduces the cost of Hungering Cold by 10 runic power.
  • Still horrible.
• Glyph of Icebound Fortitude: Icebound Fortitude now grants at least 30% damage reduction, regardless of defense skill.
  • Still horrible, but less than before
• Glyph of Plague Strike: Bonus lowered to 20%.
  • Why you would ever glyph this skill is beyond me. Perhaps it’s because it’s raw DPS, but I still say this Glyph is not worth it.
• Glyph of Strangulate: This glyph has been changed to reduce the cooldown by 20 seconds.
  • AWESOME. PVP Change to the maximum.
• Glyph of Unbreakable Armor: Increases the amount of damage absorbed by Unbreakable Armor by 20%.
  • Reduces the amount of suck and fail that UbA produces by 20%
• Glyph of Unholy Blight: Increases the duration of Unholy Blight by 10 seconds.
  • More bang for the buck. Lets you throw out a Death Coil every other rotation, also allows UB to overlap better with Gargoyle.

Miscellaneous Changes

These are two very important changes I think I need to address here separate from everything else.

• Ebon Plaguebringer: Multiple death knights can now use this debuff against a target without overwriting each other.
• Necrosis: The damage from this ability will no longer benefit multiple times from damage increasing effects.

The Ebon Plaguebringer change we knew about but I don’t think you really understand how strong this change really is. The more unholy DKs you stack the more damage your casters will do. Raise eRDPS by stacking one class? Didn’t Blizzard want this to NOT happen? Expect this to change.

Necrosis’s change is interesting in that it will only be affected by one singular damage increasing effect… but what they mean by this is that only ONE buff to your damage will modify Necrosis’s damage. In other words, only ONE AP booster (probably going to be GBoM) will add the value of its contribution to Necrosis. This was done more or less for balance purposes only.

Death Knight General Changes – Patch 3.1.0

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

Now let’s turn our unwavering gaze on some subtle, or overlooked changes in the midst of all this 3.1 excitement…

Armor Penetration

Is it now worth it?
When Blizzard took a look at their current implementation of the Armor Penetration stat I think they realized a very important problem: Placing a worthless stat on tier pieces would make players unhappy. I say armor penetration is worthless because it simply does not scale in PvE very well and that’s going easy on the term “worthless.”

As a prime example let’s look at Patchwork (the DPS optimal scenario): He has enough armor to reduce the damage you do on your melee attacks by about 30% of their physical value. As a Tank, I pop obliterates with raid buffs for about 2300 non-crit on his dome; against a target with 0 armor (made possible with a cooperative warrior) the very same obliterate hit for about 3500 damage.

In relative terms Patchwork has less armor mitigation than your standard Naxx tank, half as much to be exact (As I cannot find a published value for Patch’s armor mitigation, I have no choice to assume my testing is accurate, if you have better numbers please let me know!). If you are one of those weird DPS people who decided to aim for ArPen and got your magic number up to 50% then you would be mitigated against about 15% less than everyone else hitting with physical abilities. Whoopdie freakin’ doo!

Compare your damage to the person who went with expertise and got around the 8% rear quarter dodge (assuming their hit capped). You will do 15% more damage but miss 8% more of your attacks. Total, you’re only getting away with an increase of 7%. If you would have just gotten up to the expertise line you would pump out 1% extra damage.

Now that Blizzard is giving all classes 25% more bonus from ArPen the question of worth actually comes into play. The benchmark by which I determine worth is always in the latest raid instance (Ulduar ATM) and thus far it seems like bosses have a marginally higher amount of physical mitigation which makes armor penetration just as worthless as it was before the patch. If Blizzard puts some more armor on their bosses then of course this opinion will change.

Flip Side: You could argue of course that with the bonus amount of ArPen you get that you can now squeeze out some more damage by jumping onto a fresh DR curve if you’re already expertise and hit capped. This is a very viable argument and the ONLY instance which I would recommend flipping into ArPen. The curve looks better than Haste…

Haste

Armor Pen is no longer viable!
… At least it did look better until you see the extra haste bonus. If you’re a DK then forget everything I just said above this section of the post: If you have to choose between getting your haste rating up and getting ArPen up, it looks like haste is the winner. The reason for this is simply that you will now get more of a bonus out of the haste than you will the ArPen; 5% more of a bonus to be precise.

Of course if you’re any kind of decent you will remember that Haste rating was sooooo nice that Blizzard took it off the DK epic sigil from Heroism Rewards and replaced it with critical strike rating.

The end idea is that even though Haste and ArPen are both getting buffs, both are still equally worthless to Death Knights as most of our attacks are yellow damage and bypass mob armor to an extent.

Hysteria

Damn
Changing the % based damage stacking really sucks. It used to be a great way to get the most amount of burst damage that you could if needed. I guess this just means that one physical DPS guy gets to have his +% damage buffs rotated instead of stacked.

Overall: a neutral change.

Death Knight Talent Trees and Skills – Patch 3.1.0 – Unholy

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.

Doesn’t matter who smelt it, YOU dealt it! It’s stinky, toxic, and will kick major ass. That’s right! It’s time to talk about…

Unholy

Is the hot chick at the party

Unholy has been given breast implants and a cooch that emits pheromones in such volume that all DKs go rabid when they get near it. This is not an overstatement at all. I will explain why at the end of this section.

Death Knight Talent Trees and Skills – Patch 3.1.0 – Frost

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.

Put on your mittens and earmuffs — mine are made from baby polar bears.  It’s time to go…

Frost

Wait… I thought I was a tank class

When I first posted the build 9347 notes I knew that Blizzard would screw up my class almost beyond recognition and the most recent (most likely LIVE) notes confirm this. Lichborne has been reduced entirely to a PvP talent and Unbreakable Armor blows royal cock for tanking. DKs have, at best, been relegated to dedicated OT duty in case shit hits the fan.

Death Knight Talent Trees and Skills – Patch 3.1.0 – Blood

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

With 3.1 upon us, I have dove in and looked around at all the changes with the current build. Here I will be giving you my take on each of the changes for Death Knights tree by tree.

Hmmm, let’s start with…

Blood

Got some ROIDS

I was really hoping that Blood got the buff it needed to become viable against Unholy in terms of sustainable damage and my prayers were answered… to an extent. Let’s take a look into the world of the Blood DKs and how everything just got turned upside down for them.

No One Said Being Good Is Easy – Part 6

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

My highly-paid counter-snipers earned their bonuses so I return to conclude with this thought:

I Am Better than You

The dilemma of being better than most of your server

Fixing The Server’s Players

Specifically: Players who are bad

Do not try and be politically correct about this topic. If you do, you will find that you can’t say anything. There are players of this game that are (somehow) terrible at its game elements. Maybe they have a physical handicap that prevents them from playing at the same level as those of us fortunate enough to have not been crippled by an accident or born handicapped. Maybe they’re just terrible at the game.

No matter what the reason may be, address these people directly and with no bullshit. Ask them if they know what they’re doing (or did) wrong. Start off cordial, progress to educational, and then if they resist, to hostility. A good example follows:

You: “Terbad, do you know what you did wrong that fight?”
Terbad: “No, is there something I should know about the boss?”
You: *Facepalm* “Yes Terbad, you aren’t supposed to stand in the blue lightning that comes from the sky. It kills you rather quickly.”
Terbad: “Oh, I thought it was a ray of power which makes you stronger.”
You: “Nope, it just kills you, let’s try again and this time, stay out of it.”
*** Terbad fails again ***
You: “I thought I told you not to stand in the lightning!”
Terbad: “I didn’t stand in the lightning, but I couldn’t avoid the purple circle on the floor!”
You: “Yes you could have… you could have strafed left.”
Terbad: “How can you watch both our characters at the same time!?”
You: “I have my camera zoomed out as to have a better view of the battlefield.”
Terbad: “OH WOW, I CAN SEE MYSELF!”
*** Terbad is kicked from the group ***

That is a pretty solid recollection of my run-in with a rogue who thought that the blue drakes in Occulus 2nd boss healed you when they breathed their lightning on the platform as commanded by the boss you are trying to kill. Turns out he not only did not know anything about Occulus, but he also didn’t know anything about the game. He had actually bought his character on eBay — as the friend he invited to come with us on the run would later tell us.
The moral of the above story is that some people you can teach and some you can’t. The ones you can teach may be willing to learn. If they are, keep them around… they’ll figure it out and become average raiders. The ones you can’t… get rid of. Put them on ignore, get them out of your guild, get out of the way of their Failtrain. You don’t want to be anywhere near it when it crashes at LOLZ MPH into the wall.

/Rant

Thanks for reading! Please send all praise, constructive criticism, anger, and psychotic behavior in the form of comments to Surazc. Or money. Money is good too.

Part 5

No One Said Being Good Is Easy – Part 5

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

Well, the cloning tanks are smashed, the death ray is on the fritz, and the Colombian Cartel’s shipment will be late, but at least I can still say:

I Am Better than You

The dilemma of being better than most of your server

You are in the same boat as I am, like it or not…

People like US

Admit it or not, you are in the same boat as me. Elite and Casual joined hand in hand ‘till death (or that little X in the top right of your screen) do us part. You are part of the Blizzard train until it either de-rails and kills us all, or comes to an all-stop and the conductor kicks us out on our asses.

I encourage each of you to look at your guild mates. Find the people that consistently do things wrong, or slow, and chew them out. “We are a friendly laid back guild,” is not an excuse to ask for AVERAGE game play or class action. You are a friendly laid back guild whose player population won’t get to see all the content in the game first, but you will see it when Blizzard nerfs it into the floor.

This can only happen if your guild plays at the MIDDLE OF THE CURVE between “Skilled/Devoted” and “Terrible/Idiotic.” If you have a couple of severely weak links in the guild chain, cut them out of the raids. Not the guild, just the raids. Believe me: you will make more progress if you’re carrying less dead weight through the hallways.

Assholes:

I am one, you do not have to be like me

You may be able to tell by the way I write that I am a complete asshole. I don’t care, it’s part of my personality… a flawed part, but part of who I am. Don’t bother contemplating the source of my being an asshole. It isn’t related to WoW.  I’m an ass in the game because I’m an ass in real life, and that’s all you need to know about it.

I come from this angle because being good doesn’t mean that you have to take an aggressive attitude about being good. This is something that I do quite frequently, and it doesn’t exactly make for the best first impressions. It does, however, get my points across more frequently than being nice about them. It is far easier to defend a point (or to take one down) if you adopt the aggressive attitude and not the passive one.

To put it another way, if you want to carry groups through instances then be my guest… I will do no such thing.

Come back for the conclusion of Surazc’s rant saga in Part 6: “Fixing the Server’s Players.” Hopefully, he doesn’t mean with chemical weapons.

Part 4

No One Said Being Good Is Easy – Part 4

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

How should I begin today? How about:

I Am Better than You

The dilemma of being better than most of your server

True Champions

You know, people like me

This whole blog post is NOT about me waving my gigantic, floppy E-Dick in your face and screaming profanities. As much as it might seem that way, I promise you it isn’t. I’m trying to get across my frustration at the reduction in difficulty to game elements and how it has stupefied the player base of the game.

I am what you would classify as a “hardcore” gamer. I play around 5 different MMOs at any given time and dominate my class in whatever sphere of game play or role I have chosen to master. I have more time than you do to devote to games and I’m not ashamed of my lifestyle. Some call it tragic, I call it awesome.

The mentality I have here though is not the “hardcore elitist fuckwit” attitude; but rather the, “How did we get here?” attitude. Forgive what will seem like a racist statement: If MLK were to rise from his grave and take a look at the black culture of today he would smack the shit out of all the rappers and hip-hop artists running around promoting a cultural image of avarice and greed. I am to WoW what MLK would be to the black community: A wake up call.

Look backwards people. Look at the way things used to be. Do you remember back when UBRS was HARD? Blizzard made tactical use of sight blocking and knockbacks, they made casters intelligent with their roots and fears, they made the game genuinely challenging and fun. Remember when MC had its debut? I do. I remember wiping in MC for hours on end against Domo and then finally rallying together the raid to go see big daddy Ragnaros for the first time. I remember the joys and shouts of elation when we finally killed big papa Rag’.

Why were we so happy when we finally killed him, did it have to do with the fact that we got loot? No. Did it have to do with the idea that we just killed the hardest boss in the game at the time? Nope.

What about the idea that forty people all came together and worked up a plan that was executed with flawless precision to achieve a common goal? Yeah, that sounds like it.

Then we had Onyxia, Razorgore the Guild Annihilator and Vaelestraz the GQuit Machine. I remember walking into BWL for the first time after its release once we had all been attuned to the instance and dying for DAYS straight until finally we figured out how to coordinate and get the boss fights done. Don’t even think of forgetting Nefarion’s fight and how epic that landing sequence is. It’s like being right in the middle of the greatest action movie ever made.

Killing those bosses back then MEANT something. What does it mean that you’ve killed every boss in Wrath? That you can find a PuG sponsored by one of the better guilds on the server? Grats, you got lucky… take your achievement and GTFO.

If the villagers with pitchforks and torches haven’t broken through the portcullis of Surazc’s secret lair, we’ll have Part 5: “People like us, and assholes.”

Part 3

No One Said Being Good Is Easy – Part 3

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

Heading straight on in:

I Am Better than You

The dilemma of being better than most of your server

What happens when you make everyone feel like a champion?

The biggest problem that exists with WoW

As suggested in the subtitle, the biggest problem that exists in the game is not an element of game play or a class issue, it is a semantic argument on the word “Champion.” For all those who read my rant on PvP and wanted to argue the semantics of what “Hero” means, I will cut this debate off at the head with a definition, compliments of dictionary.com:

Champion – Noun: “a person who has defeated all opponents in a competition or series of competitions, so as to hold first place;” or “a person who fights for or defends any person or cause.”

When I use the word champion here I am utilizing the first context as when you kill a raid boss or members of the opposing faction, you are defeating your opponents as to declare your supremacy over them (your now defeated foes).

Well… to answer my own question (bad form, I don’t care): If you lived in Greece long ago, you would have an Olympic competition to determine the true champion of any given event. The nature of the word implies that there can be only ONE champion of anything at any given time as he has defeated all opponents. There can be more than one hero… there can be only one champion.

This game has forgotten that. WoW has tweaked its content so far down easy street that champions are a dime a dozen. Heroes are apparently whatever Blizzard wants to call them. Tier Sets used to be a status symbol; however, now they are nothing more than a joke.

Being so far removed from anything closely resembling difficult, a majority of the players in this game have developed what I call “Garriot Syndrome” aptly named after Richard Garriot, creator of the Ultima Online series of games. Garriot Syndrome is a degenerative mental condition in which you believe that no matter what you are faced with, no matter the challenge put before you, that you will triumph because you are the hero.

While this was true circa 1950s movies, it is not true in practice. People wipe and die on content all the time, why should you be any different? Oh yeah, I know why. Maybe it’s because Blizzard has brought the difficulty of their content down to such a manageable level that the only way it is hard for anyone of mediocre intelligence is if they make it harder on themselves by imposing a goal or handicap. The achievement system is merely a distraction from the fact that WotLK has about 40% of the content that BC contained.

Yep. 40% of the content, and you paid just as much for Wrath as you did for Crusade. Genius move Blizzard.

Surazc soldiers on in Part 4: True Champions or, “people like me.” So don’t touch that dial because… well, he boobytrapped it.

Part 2

No One Said Being Good Is Easy – Part 2

Surazc – Death Knight Tank

Let’s see. Where was I?

Oh yes.

I Am Better than You

The dilemma of being better than most of your server

Do You Ever…

Join a PuG Heroic and…

Find yourself in the middle of ineptitude? I do. Frequently I will walk into a group as the tank and inspect my healer and find that they are wearing 3/5 Valorous with some heroic badge gear and almost always will have their 4 pc. bonus because of the 2 Hero’s pieces they are wearing to complete their Tier set. I look at their healing numbers after I die… 980 HPS max. How is this possible?

On one occassion I asked my shaman healer Marrianna why I was getting <1000 HPS.  She told me that she didn’t use keybindings. I wanted to kill myself IRL. On another raid, the priest said he would rather “Play with my cat, she is more interesting than the damage you are taking.”

At first I wanted to attribute this to the fact that I am an awesome tank, probably one of the best DK tanks on the server in skill alone (I solo’d the second boss of Heroic Occulus when my PuG group died to lightning) and I take damage pretty sparingly. When I do take it, I’ll either Death Strike some of it back expecting a heal to come or scramble for a healing potion, trinket, or Dark Pact.  However, the more I ran with PuG healers the more I discovered that the average healer on my server simply doesn’t understand the concept of a good tank.

Think, “I could do better than that!” I do. It doesn’t matter what aspect of the game we’re talking about. DPS, Healing, Tanking, or CC. I run across at most 10 players a day who know their class better than I do and I would feel confident letting them do their job without interference from me. The sad part is that most of them are in my guild, Damage Networks, or Templar Knights (all considered to be the “elite” of the server). I find this to be no great coincidence.

Join a 10 man raid and…

Die more than usual? While this doesn’t happen to me on my Death Knight (being my main, I’m not allowed to be saved to PuG Raids) it does happen to me about 60% of the time playing any other level 80 character (not all my own, some are my friends’ characters). Why is this? It seems that no matter what I do or what role I play, this 60% more than usual death figure doesn’t change.

I did a little math to search for the answer. As a healer I try to keep everyone alive but put priority on the tank. When 70% of the raid doesn’t move out of “fire” and either die or take massive damage, it makes it very hard to keep them alive AND keep the tank up. This problem is further exacerbated when the TANK stands in “fire.”

Usually I will run out of mana, can’t heal, and everyone dies. When I’m DPS, everyone else dies to fire because our healers suck. As a Tank, the same is true as my DPS example.

Find people with the achievement, but don’t know the fights? Seems to be the norm actually… It’s possible to engage the boss, die in the first two seconds, have the other 24 people kill the boss, and STILL get the achievement.

Want to slaughter the innocent? No… damn, thought that maybe I’d have a little bit of a connection with my audience there.

Ready for Part 3?  Surazc reveals, “The biggest problem that exists with WoW,” while he attempts to find his misplaced flamethrower.

Part 1