WoW 3.0.2 Patch Notes

[Deathwing]

From the way you guys are describing it, DK's and tanking don't look fun. I've tanked as a druid and warrior, and their rotations have enough flexibility in them to "forget" stuff. Rune rotations look punishing enough as is, and it looks like DK's will require much more attention on top of that.

DPS, however, looks like it would be fun.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Well, optimal threat rotations are in a bit of flux right now because threat is so ridiculously high that you can flat out -not- dps for a good 10+ seconds at times that you don't really need to maintain anything. For paladins if you go 9/6/9 it's practically impossible to out-agro them as a dpser. When we we're doing headless horsemen runs I'd do my initial AS->judge->hammer burst, melee with SoVh on and then eat some chips and catch up on the last season of Weeds without having to touch my keyboard until Phase 3 when I dropped another avenger's shield to solidify agro until dead.

Needless to say it's insanely fun because you can do so much other shit. I think it's why I enjoy tanking so much. With healing you're constantly working a /stopcasting macro just in case of overheal or chaincasting cheap shit. With DPS'ing you have to worry about rotations and clipping GCD's. And while that's all well and good, nothing beats hitting 4 abilities on a trash pull and then alt-tabbing to some japanese girls breastfeeding eachother.

[mek]

DK's abilities are spread out pretty evenly from 55-70, so even when you're done the starting area, your gameplay will be very simplistic.

[Deathwing]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Well, optimal threat rotations are in a bit of flux right now because threat is so ridiculously high that you can flat out -not- dps for a good 10+ seconds at times that you don't really need to maintain anything. For paladins if you go 9/6/9 it's practically impossible to out-agro them as a dpser. When we we're doing headless horsemen runs I'd do my initial AS->judge->hammer burst, melee with SoVh on and then eat some chips and catch up on the last season of Weeds without having to touch my keyboard until Phase 3 when I dropped another avenger's shield to solidify agro until dead.

Needless to say it's insanely fun because you can do so much other shit. I think it's why I enjoy tanking so much. With healing you're constantly working a /stopcasting macro just in case of overheal or chaincasting cheap shit. With DPS'ing you have to worry about rotations and clipping GCD's. And while that's all well and good, nothing beats hitting 4 abilities on a trash pull and then alt-tabbing to some japanese girls breastfeeding eachother.

Links please

[Pyros]

I don't think it's punishing, but there will be worlds of difference between a good DK and a bad DK in term of threat, while the difference is much lower, or the retard treshold much lower, when tanking as a feral or a protadin(warrior is the middle ground).

It's especially hard because, on top of maintaining a threat generation through rotations that have to be in a certain order, and take into account misses/dodges/parries, you also have to closely monitor your defensive cooldown(unbreakable armor, icebound fort, bone shield, vampiric mostly) to use them both efficiently or when they're needed and get the most out of them at any time depending on the flow of the fight. Blade Barrier emphasizes the DK gameplay pretty much. It's a very nice talent, but it forces you to constantly be spamming stuff to make it proc else it does pretty much nothing, and at the same time due to the nature of runes, you can't be spamming random stuff, it has to count else it's a huge waste of ressources.

It is, definitely, the hardest tanking in terms of perfection. You can Al Bundy your way through 5mans easily though, just by "dpsing" mobs. DK threat is quite insane, due to well, their insane damage. You're dropping 6-7k crit bombs in frost tanking quite often, and your high parry gives you more parry haste=more passive threat. In fact I'm pretty sure if they overtune a fight in terms of DPS reqs, a DK will be required to tank, because they can do a ton of DPS while tanking. Assuming a DK can survive the fight, obviously.

From my experience, tanking as a DK can be tiring, and you might sometimes miss a detail because you're too focused on your rotations, while in comparison, tanking as a protadin or a feral, you have plenty of time to check the raid, what's going on, the idiots not in their spot and stuff like that. I'd say it'd be impossible to lead a raid correctly and tank as a DK correctly at the same time. It is very similar to doing old heroics as a prot warrior. Sunder tab shit and all this crap. Different in execution, similar in difficulty/twitch.

But again, those are mostly end game main tanking matters. For 5mans, while you'll definitely meet SHIT DKs and you'll have to rebuild your black book of bad tankers, it's not overly complicated to do a decent job. Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Oblit/Scourge/HB, Bloodx2 or Heartx2, all this depending on spec, spam that, while it's not the most efficient way, it gets shit done, and it's not terribly hard, you just press what's lit up.

I do believe however quite a few DKs will drop the class before hitting 70. While it's really easy as shit to level a DK, it's also not very casual friendly when you get like 15abilities in the span of 2levels, along with 50talent points. Many people will be overwhelmed and will be happier playing their char they already know well, especially since 3.0.2 has wotlk talents, so there will be absolutely nothing new but at 75 and 80 for most people. And for those DKs reach 70+, I believe some might also give up before hitting 80, after being confronted to "real" 5man tanking(aka not 5man DK hellfire ramparts shit when totally overgearing it). The first decent difficulty 5mans, around 75+, are fucking brutal for DKtards.

But this is all for tanking, for DPSing, due to the nature of the game, it's much more laid back, and who cares if you suck, you're just a DPS, there's more of you in the raid.

[Zhaun's_Shade]

Are enhancment shaman using 2h weapons as valid as ones using 2 weapons?

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Zhaun's_Shade

Are enhancment shaman using 2h weapons as valid as ones using 2 weapons?

No. Maybe in PvP, and even then, not really.

[Zhaun's_Shade]

Originally Posted by Pyros

No. Maybe in PvP, and even then, not really.

So if I love hitting things with 2h weapons, my choices are Arms Warrior, Ret Paladin and all flavors of Death Knight?

(I am still struggling to figure out what I am going to play in 2 weeks.)

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Zhaun's_Shade

So if I love hitting things with 2h weapons, my choices are Arms Warrior, Ret Paladin and all flavors of Death Knight?

(I am still struggling to figure out what I am going to play in 2 weeks.)

If you want to hit things efficiently with a 2h, yeah pretty much. Enh 2h is a relic of the past pretty much, everything is built around DW nowadays. There's one DK build that somewhat relies on dual wield, but it's unsure yet if it's really viable, and it'll be for DPS, and probably not the first tiers of raiding either(DW is more demanding in terms of item budget I guess or something, and the build relies on high crit too or whatever). But other than that, it's a class built around 2h usage. Retadin and Arms wars also exclusively use 2h, and fury use a 2h in each hand ^^.

[Guzrog]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

With healing you're constantly working a /stopcasting macro ... nothing beats hitting 4 abilities on a trash pull and then alt-tabbing to some japanese girls breastfeeding eachother.

First, I don't get too deep into the mechanics as I like to have fun and crunching numbers and building macros is prohibitive to that. However, I used a shit ton of /stopcast on my mage a year or so ago and I thought they patched it in so you didn't need to use this anymore, maybe I'm missing something.

Also, as the man said.

Link?

[darksensei]

Originally Posted by Zhaun's_Shade

So if I love hitting things with 2h weapons, my choices are Arms Warrior, Ret Paladin and all flavors of Death Knight?

(I am still struggling to figure out what I am going to play in 2 weeks.)

If hitting things with two handers is your thing, Fury warrior all the way now.

[Zhaun's_Shade]

Originally Posted by darksensei

If hitting things with two handers is your thing, Fury warrior all the way now.

Thanks I'm not into dual wield though. Something about it bothers me (yes, I know it is wierd). Fury is just dual wielding 2h right? There isn't a secret single 2h-weapon style for Fury I don't know about, is there?

[Deathwing]

Originally Posted by Guzrog

First, I don't get too deep into the mechanics as I like to have fun and crunching numbers and building macros is prohibitive to that. However, I used a shit ton of /stopcast on my mage a year or so ago and I thought they patched it in so you didn't need to use this anymore, maybe I'm missing something.

Also, as the man said.

Link?

I believe the /stopcast Zehn is referring to is actually stop the heal because it will be mostly wasted and he'll save mana.

I believe the /stopcast you're referring was to get around client -> server lag and allow spells to be cast consecutively quicker. You're right, some patch in TBC changed that when the "can I cast a spell?" check was moved from client side to server side. All you need now is a mod(like Quartz) to tell you what your lag was when you initiated the spellcast to get the same effect.


Zhaun, single 2H fury was killed when imp slam was moved to arms. You CAN do it, but you'll be gimping yourself.

[Rica86]

Speaking of deathknights, I plan on playing one from the get go when wrath comes out, just based on what little I know about the class it seems fun for me. But up until now, I'd been trying to not look into it too much to try to keep the game fresh longer once it comes out. But thinking of it now, I'd really at least like it know a decent spec for leveling since I've looked at the trees and nothing there makes any sense whatsoever since i know next to nothing of their abilities and maybe a basic run down on how their abilities work with each other, just so I'm not flying in blind and want to just give up. Anyone that could give me a little heads up, or maybe a link to somewhere with some decent info. I tried checking out the DK thread on EJ, but i really don't want to sift through the 140 something pages it was when i looked if I don't have to.

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Rica86

Speaking of deathknights, I plan on playing one from the get go when wrath comes out, just based on what little I know about the class it seems fun for me. But up until now, I'd been trying to not look into it too much to try to keep the game fresh longer once it comes out. But thinking of it now, I'd really at least like it know a decent spec for leveling since I've looked at the trees and nothing there makes any sense whatsoever since i know next to nothing of their abilities and maybe a basic run down on how their abilities work with each other, just so I'm not flying in blind and want to just give up. Anyone that could give me a little heads up, or maybe a link to somewhere with some decent info. I tried checking out the DK thread on EJ, but i really don't want to sift through the 140 something pages it was when i looked if I don't have to.

I'll try to sum up, but I'm too lazy to do builds and shit.

First things first, DK work off 2 ressources. One is runes, you have 3types of runes, and 2 of each; the other is runic power, and you generate it from using rune based abilities. The rune types are the same as the talent trees, and they're Blood, Unholy and Frost. Blood runes usually fuel blood centric abilities and so on. Runes are on a 10secs cooldown, meaning once you use 2 abilities that use a frost rune, you can't use another until a frost rune has refreshed. Each ability generates 10runic power(RP). The DK has 3 stances, Blood which is a DPS stance, Frost which is a tanking stance, and Unholy which is usually a PvP stance(increases runspeed and reduce GCD to 1s). A basic rundown of your abilities:

Icy Touch is a frost ranged attack that applies a melee speed reduction type disease(like thunderclap)

Plague Strike is an unholy melee that applies another disease.

Blood Strike is a blood melee that does more damage based on the number of disease on the target.

Death Coil is your basic attack that uses RP to do damage(or can heal undeads).

Death and Decay is a huge ground targetted AE that uses 1 rune of each.

Then you have the 2 runes based attacks(Frost and Unholy), Obliterate, which is somewhat like Blood Strikes, only that it does much more damage, but consumes the diseases on use, and Death Strike which heals you based on the number of diseases up.

Blood is a melee oriented tree, with self healing abilities(thus the name). It has all the stuff to hit hard with your weapon, and is somewhat similar in gameplay to an arms war. It's tied with unholy for the best tree for leveling spec, and the best at solo killing elites. It's better than pretty much every class in the game for leveling, because of the self healing making it impossible to die, reducing downtime to 0, and making pretty much every quest in the current game soloable, with a very few exceptions. Pretty much every talent is worth it in Blood, but Scent of Blood, Spell Deflection(until raiding), Blood Aura(until raiding and even then) and Will of the Necropolis(because of the position, Might of Morgraine and Heart Strike are much better). It's up to you to find what you prefer, some aren't worth using if you don't plan to group.

Frost is a more caster oriented tree, with solid tanking abilities and some of the best pvp tools. It has many armor ignoring attacks, and some decent AEing in the form of Howling Blast. It is however the worst tree for leveling, mostly because it offers nothing to help with leveling in terms of self healing. It is however considered as the best tanking tree at low level of gear, so if you plan on doing a lot of instances, frost is a solid choice. It also happens to have the only DW focused talent in all trees, in case you want to do that. Useless talents would be Killing Machine if you're not DWing(high cost low return), Runic Power Mastery, Endless winter, Chillblains and Acclimatation if you don't want to PvP.

Unholy is the disease based tree, which focus on dots, debuffs, shadow damage and cool stuff. It's probably the tree which has the most "trainable" abilities, and it also has the Ghoul based talents. It's a very solid tree for an all purpose DK. It's extremely potent for soloing due to getting a permanent ghoul, increasing run speed(reduce time between mobs), increasing mount speed and it compensates the direct lack of self healing of blood by adding one more disease, which lets you heal more off your healing melee strike(Death Strike). The worthless talents for leveling would be Corpse Explosion and Night of the Dead(since your ghoul is already permanent). It has the best AE of all trees, and you can actually somewhat sustain AE leveling especially if you sub blood for the self healing stuff.


I think that's it for the introduction, there's much more to the class, especially since each talent tree offers alternatives to the basic abilities to replace them in rotations and such. Rest is probably best learnt when playing, if you want builds, you should check the EJ thread, the last few pages(5 or so) were about leveling, and I'm pretty sure people have been posting detailed builds for blood and unholy leveling.