Rawr for Warlocks

I originally, truly began to use this program when I leveled my warlock. However, it has since then dropped very low on my list of priorities. If you are not aware of, this is a program that lets you optimize your characters, by changing gear, talents, etc. to produce something that is more highly tuned, without constantly respeccing and time consuming experimenting in-game.

However, as nice as this sounds, the program has been having a lot of let-downs lately. When I first brought my results up on some forums, I was informed that Rawr is actually broken, at least for warlocks and you should not trust the dps optimizer as far as our class is concerned.

Ohh well, I can still use it to swap gear, change specs, and experiment with various buffs on. But recently, even this has started to get wrinkled. The problem is, Rawr does not recognize nearly all of the useful trinkets and items that I want to equip. Just take the first set of T10 gear. None of it appears in Rawr’s item list. It is also such things as Circle of Ossus and Purified Lunar Dust.

This starts to put a bent in the program that is really has to ignore and I find myself back to using spreadsheets and excel tables to keep track of the gear I want to get. I suppose the good news is that Rawr’s bug tracker has been made aware of these, but remains to be seen, just how soon it will be fixed.

In the mean time, I recommend caution to anyone using the program, it might not always be telling you the truth, so don’t forget to double check your results the old fashion way.

Sigils

Since this is a subject I have personally struggled a lot; which is the best sigil for each spec, I decided to put it up here. Sigils are essentially to death knight what totems and librams are to shamans and paladins, and it is not always so straight forward to pick the right one. Each tier set has been, so far, accompanied by a couple of new sigils and the variation of their abilities makes them difficult to interpret.

Like so many things, these are issues that some of us gladly leave to those with math degrees and generally too much time on their hands, to calculate proc rates, rotations, and overall output. The only good news is that both dps and tanks generally use the same sigils. This is due to the fact that death knights generate aggro through dps output. So basically what you have is a bunch of threat amplifiers, like Death and Decay and Frost Presence, and then the rest is up to your dps.

Frost has it the easiest, alas the best sigil for them is still the Sigil of Awareness. This can be bought cheap with emblems of conquest from your local Dalaran vendor. Since the patch 3.2.2, both blood and unholy now use the Sigil of Virulence, which basically acts like a miniature version of the Darkmoon Card: Greatness, procing your strength by 200 with a very high up time (estimated 80%).

The downside is that the Sigil of Virulence costs 25 emblems of triumph, so it can take many daily heroic quests for you to get it. However, Sigil of Vengeful Heart is still a very good spaceholder until you get virulence. It is sold by the conquest vendor as well, for 19 emblems, and of course it also has a chance to drop from 25-man XT-002 Deconstructor.

Tribute to Skill

There are moments when you are allowed to feel good about yourself and this is definitely one of mine; having completed the Tribute to Skill achievement on 10-man totgc instance this evening, with an awesome crew. It was particularly satisfying after having endlessly farmed both 10- and 25-man normal modes with little to no challenge of feeling of accomplishment.

Grand crusader however, was quite a struggle. The encounters we found the hardest were the Faction Champions and Anub'arak. The first severely more than the last, where the champions just simply kept wiping the floor with us. Anub'arak proved mainly a performance challenge, as it has a lot more in-built difficulty than the normal modes.

Firstly, you only have six grounds of frost to use, the burrowers now cast Shadow Strike that needs to be interrupted, and the damage is a lot more severe. The two primary obstacles are performing successful interrupts and keeping them from burrowing. We used a shaman, though a rogue would probably be a lot more optimal, with a focus kick macro as the adds and boss are tanked side by side.

It also comes to a bit of luck, when Anub'arak himself burrows, the OT will most likely still have two adds on his hands. Because the proximity to the boss, the spikes will probably hit the ice he is standing, breaking it, possibly even killing the OT if he is not maxed out. The OT must vacate the patch of ice before the spikes hit it and kite the adds to a new one without letting them burrow themselves. Since this ability is on a timer, it is has a lot to do with luck.

However, if you can master these two aspects, the fight should go through fairly easily. The only crunch is when phase 3 starts and the OT is not only taking the constant aoe damage from the boss but also melee hits from the adds.

But the fight is well worth it, even if you have to struggle. I had the luck of getting Lothar's Edge, hitch hiking my stats up a notch once more. So for now, I could not be happier but am already looking for the next peak to climb.

Death Knights in 3.2.2

I am the first to admit that I have not been keeping up with all the 3.2.2 PTR changes, until today, when I finally decided to see what is expected for the next patch. In fact, for the first time I had high hopes because so far death knights have not had a very graceful patch history and the rumor around the block was that we are getting actual buffs.

If you are doing the same, I suggest you do not trust (at least not at the time of writing this) what it says on the official World of Warcraft PTR patchnotes. They do not yet include the changes PTR testers are experiencing on the servers. Naturally, there were a lot of various changes but here I am limiting to are relevent to death knight tanking, since that is my real forte.

• Heart Strike now has a its total damage increased by 10% for each of your diseases on the target to the primary target, and half that to the secondary target.
• Vampiric Blood now lasts 10 seconds (down from 20 seconds).
• Frost Presence now reduces damage taken by 8% (up from 5%).
• Threat of Thassarian now also affects Rune Strike.
• Unbreakable Armor now increases your armor by 25% and increases your Strength by 10% for 20 seconds.

Reading the above makes me personally happy for all those death knights out there, who like me, are tired of being nerfed and beaten to perform less and less. But, as always, I find something in these notes that I cannot quite understand and we will get to that soon.

But first, lets talk about the goods news. The two most exciting news for me, personally, are the buffs for Frost Presence and Unbreakable Armor. The first of course, is self-explanatory because as a class without block, death knights are extremely squishy compared to warriors or paladins. More mitigation will take us a long way.

The second is that Unbreakable Armor finally becomes a useful cooldown. Up until now, it has provided with a fixed damage mitigation, based on your armor: 5 * Ar *0,01. After the patch, it should get a major buff and become 25% increase to your total armor. Lets examine what this means for a typical DK tank with a healthy 25k armor.

In the current game, this will provide a 1250 points of mitigation from every hit that you take. Come 40k hits from General Vezax and it doesn't take a genius to figure using this talent is useless. True, it gives a strength bonus so it is good for threat but that is hardly a selling point. Now after the patch it will instead provide a nice 6250 armor increase. For anyone wondering how much this mitigates, on a level 83 raid boss it is an extra 27.3% of mitigation.

This makes frost death knights viable for a lot things, which includes tanking encounters where your life expectancy is depended on your cooldowns, the examples which are quite numerous, like Iron Council hard mode, General Vezax, or even tanking the adds on Anub'arak (that's in Trial of the Crusader ofc).

Alright, moving on.

The Threat of Thassarian is an obvious one, it never made sense why that talent would not include Rune Strike, considering the Blizzard ever had the intention of making two-weapon tanking viable for us again. No Rune Strike, no tanking. As simple as that.

Now for the nerfs. The first does not really hit me that hard personally, for I rarily find myself in a situation where I try to aoe tank anything in blood spec. True, when tanking the adds in Anub'arak (still in Trial of the Crusader) blood spec's cooldowns and self-healing are crucial, so the ability to hit for nice threat on both adds with the same strike has its benefits. But we will coup.

The nerf to Vampiric Blood definitely annoys me. Much less for fights where you only temporarily need a cooldown like surviving a surge of darkness on General Vezax but you will feel it for fights where the longer you can prolong your cooldowns, the longer you live. When in 25-man of Anub'arak (yeah I'm using this alot aren't I?) and when your debuff begin to stack 15+ the hits are coming down too hard to survive without cooldowns. If dps takes too long to bring them down, you die.

Naturally, both the Glyph of Unbreakable Armor and Glyph of Vampiric Blood have been updated to fit the new upgrades. For Vampiric Blood, I would say that even if you have not glyphed it up until now, it becomes almost mandatory after 3.2.2. For Unbreakable Armor, the increase of armor goes up an extra 20% so if you plan to take full advantage of this new cooldown, the glyph will be necessary.

Reporting Live from 3.2

I must confess, I did not always play World of Warcraft the way I play it today; looking under the hood, bothering to understand its mechanics, or with progression in mind when entering dungeons. As such, I never actually bothered with the thought of PTR, but now, with 3.2 patch in the horizon and indeed available for testing, I told myself I was crazy as a boot if I did not give it a go.

So here I am now, flying over Icecrown, wearing a full tier 8 suit, looking around and marveling at all the interesting changes. As odd as it might seem, changes do not just jump at you from behind a corner. You have to look for 'em and I knew exactly where to go for my first one; the Argent Tournament.

The place has changed quite a bit since the last we saw it, importantly, the coliseum has been finished and dominates the landscape. The old tents and npcs are still on their familiar places, practice rings of valiants and the challenge arena for champion, but there are some new features as well. One of them is a place, just north up the slope from the grounds where the scourge has setup a fortified position, seemingly ready to assault the tournament. I have no doubt there are quests that lets us investigate it further, but I could not yet find them. I suspect, it is for crusaders only.

The emblem of triumph vendors are in place and their goods, as one might guess, look very appetising. From death knight's perspective, nice ones include the two new sigils; Insolence and Virulence. Another update that blizzard has done, concerning item tooltips, is that it provides the same function as the Ratingbuster addon, which is provide easy to read information how the change between the new and old item, would affect your stats.

Next interesting update comes from Cartier & Co. Fine Jewelry, a location familiar to all my fellow jewelcrafters. Firstly, what we have all been waiting for, epic gems, which include stones like Cardinal Ruby (convertable to e.g. Bold Cardinal Ruby) and Dreadstone (convertable to e.g. Balanced Dreadstone) are available for between 10 to 20 emblems of heroism.

Along with the new gems, the dragon's eye gems have been upgraded as well. Just as we were told, they are now restricted to their respected color sockets, but in turn, the stats have been increased, even if only in a small measure; currently, the Rigid Dragon's Eye provides a +27 hit rate bonus, while the new version provides a +34 hit rate bonus. These numbers are reflected throughout the spectrum.

I always found it extremely annoying, how slow and painful it was to collect Dalaran jewelcrafter's tokens. Now, we finally have a new way to earn them. Mind you, it is not cheap but easily worth it, in my opinion; Timothy Jones now has a new, repeatable quest, in which you turn in Titanium Powder. The powder, can be prospected from titanium ore. Not only will it increase the competition for titanium nodes, but probably revitalize the titanium ore market.

There are plenty of more very nice updates, but too many to list here now, and so our peak into the 3.2 patch ends with a shot of the much desired druid bear skin. A fellow alliance druid, deep in his thoughts near the landing platform, was happy to volunteer as unsuspecting photo candidate.

Rolling Blogs

Got around upgrading the lists and small details of the blog this morning. Characters are now finally reflected properly and the blogroll got to see some new names. I am not sure if any of you've noticed, but it is not an easy task to find good blogs these days. I have always enjoyed reading them but as time has gone forward, blogging has become more common and sadly most of the new blogs that are started, fail soon after being born.

I know my first blog did and the simple reason is, it is not as easy as it first seems. It not only takes time and effort to come up with interesting articles, but you also need an idea for your blog. In my humble opinion, that is where so many fail; they think of blogging as glorious (which granted, it can be, depending on your point of view) and neglect to select a topic or subject for their blog that they can spend hours writing about.

As a final update, most of have probably noticed that Durithim has changed guilds during the past couple of days. It has been dealt in-guild and I will not go further into it, except it is safe to say, raiding did not work us in Retribution. I am now starting over in a new guild I feel has a lot to offer and where I can make a home.

We are all saddened that our best efforts to get into proper raiding did not work out, but such is life. You win some, you lose some. Also, on the bright side, this is not the end for Retribution as it continues on as a social and leveling guild, just as it did before we started the raids. Many of the founding members are still there and it is a nice and warm place to be.