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.

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.

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.

Skills

• Pestilence does no damage and has been reduced to 1 rank
  • No surprise there, we knew that change was coming
• Plague Strike and its disease Blood Plague no longer remove HoTs
  • If you’re a regular reader you know what my opinion is on this issue. Makes druid heals near impossible to deal with, also allows casters to heal and remain mobile, thus becoming a problem for DKs to deal with.
• Raise Ally can no longer be used in Arena
  • Good. It was broken in terms of power
• Raise Dead: Duration changed to 1 minute and CD lowered to 3 minutes.
  • I feel this balance change works out just fine. Now you don’t have a ghoul that lasts the whole fight, but you will have it every fight that matters. The extra DPS off rune CDs will be a nice thing to have.

Talents

• Bone Shield: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes from 1 minute.
  • Another in the long list of tanking nerfs. Blizzard is making it clearer to me that DKs were never intended to MT anything…
• Desecration: This talent now has a 100% chance to be triggered, works with Scourge Strike, and instantly snares targets within the Desecration area. Additional points in the talent increase the damage bonus and snare magnitude instead of increasing the chance it will be triggered.
  • Well, while it now functions better as a talent dump, this talent still causes large amounts of graphical lag and thus, I still don’t like it. The addition of Scourge Strike to the triggers though is nice because it means it will always be up.
• Ghoul Frenzy: Grants 25% melee haste to your pet and heals it for 30% of its maximum health. Costs 1 Unholy Rune.
  • Not bad now. I guess someone at Blizzard read my suggestion and changed this idiot skill. Now if you proc out free diseases from Scourge Strike you can max your DPS by casting Ghoul Frenzy and Icy Touch.
• Impurity: This talent is reduced to 4/8/12/16/20% bonus to attack power scaling.
  • It was too good. It now is pretty well balanced.
• Magic Suppression: Now has 3 ranks (down from 5) for 2/4/6% magic damage reduction.
  • Free talents are always good, so is taking less damage from magic. In frost presence this means you will take 11% less magic damage, down from 21%.
• Master of Ghouls: Now also reduces the cooldown on Raise Dead by 60 seconds. This talent now requires at least 25 points in the Unholy tree, and has Night of the Dead as a prerequisite
  • All DK pets now have AoE avoidance and are on a 2 minute re-summon cooldown. PvP is still retarted with a pet that is nearly as hard to kill as its controller.
• Night of the Dead: Redesigned to grant a flat reduction on cooldown to Raise Dead and Army of the Dead instead of a reduction from using abilities. Requires at least 15 points in the Unholy tree; prerequisite for Master of Ghouls.
  • Wait… Now Raise Dead has no cooldown. Awesome. Corpse Explosion spam with Ghoul = Massive damage.
• Outbreak: No longer increases Blood Boil damage. Now gives a 7/13/20% damage bonus to Scourge Strike. Plague Strike Bonus lowered to 10/20/30%.
  • Whoops. Blizzard buffed a skill that is already too good. Expect this to be changed or reverted.
• Reaping: Now procs on Blood Strike and Pestilence instead of Blood Strike and Blood Boil.
  • This is nothing more than a push towards using Wandering Plague and Unholy Blight as the main sources of AoE damage for Unholy. Could be worse.
• Scourge Strike: Damage increased. Bonus damage for diseases now increases damage done by a percentage rather than a flat amount.
  • Wonderful… Scourge strike is like the King Cake for the Carnival of Unholy buffs. Expect this talent to now put out retarded amounts of damage.
• Shadow of Death: This talent has been removed.
  • Damn. Sad to see repair-less deaths go. It was also fun to put out more damage after dying than I did when I was alive because of a glitch in the scaling.
• Unholy Aura: Replaced with Improved Unholy Presence. Allows the death knight to keep the movement speed bonus of Unholy Presence in any presence, and increases rune regeneration rate while in Unholy Presence.
  • WOAH NOW! Blizzard has gone nuts. Now your runes regenerate faster when in unholy presence which MAKES IT THE BEST PRESENCE IN THE GAME NOW. Faster rune regeneration equates to more abilities which equates to more armor bypassing damgage.
• Unholy Blight and Gargoyle have swapped places in the Unholy tree. Gargoyle is the new 51-point Unholy talent.
  • Gargoyle is at 80% of its former glory damage.
• Vicious Strikes: This talent no longer affects Death Strike.
  • I would hope not with a talent that improves DS damage by 10% now in the Blood tree…

Overall Impressions

If I had to pick between Unholy, Blood, or Frost for the main spec DPS position in my DK brigade it would have to be Unholy hands down for the following reasons:

• Improved Icy Talons still does not stack with Windfury
• Hysteria no longer stacks with itself or TotT or Death Wish
• Unholy has more passive damage additions
• Dancing Rune Weapon got the nerfbat
• Frost is still confused about its status in the DPS realm.
• Blood is more gear dependent than any other spec for our class
• Ebon Plague now stacks with Curse of Elements.

Those reasons, especially number 7, are why I believe you will see unholy as top DPS in raids. If not for the caster utility, then for the stupid amount of DPS it puts out in an AoE over time. Chaining corpse explosions together is awesome too and a large amount of free damage.

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.

Skills

• Frost Fever: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented.
  • Woot. In essence, removes Epidemic as a required talent to be of any use to a raid.
• Frost Presence: Now grants 5% damage reduction instead of 15% magic damage reduction.
  • Damn. Wait until you see the changes to Anti-Magic Shell… they make this look not that bad.
• Obliterate: Bonus damage for diseases now increases damage done by a percentage rather than a flat amount.
  • Only another part in nerfing the disease-less spec. Could be good for tanking though as the disease DoTs we have are essential to maximizing threat generation.

Talents

• Runic Power Mastery, Glacier Rot, Killing Machine, Chilblains, and Endless Winter: Positions have all been shuffled around
  • Chilblains and Endless Winter are moved around in the tree to make them more PvP friendly (read: accessible). Killing Machine, Glacier Rot, and RP mastery moved around to push players who get the first 2 mentioned talents all the way to the bottom of the tree for Howling Blast and Frost Strike.
• Black Ice: This talent now provides a 2/4/6/8/10% bonus to Frost and Shadow damage instead of 4/8/12/16/20% to Frost.
  • Buffing an over-used spec is a bad idea Blizzard. I’m going to add this into the list of the “I told you so’s” that I have running up. Expect to see Scourge Strike do retarded amounts of damage when live hits.
• Blood of the North: Now also increases damage dealt by Frost Strike by 3/6/9/12/15%.
  • Major Boon! Making Frost Strike do more damage will help out Frost Agro so much (especially with the frost reduction from Black Ice) that it’s silly. Also could help out with killing Prot warriors in PvP.
• Chillblains: Now a 15/30/50% movement speed debuff up from 30%. Can no longer be dispelled.
  • This is the single-most important PVP change for DKs in 3.1. You no longer need Chains of Ice. Just Deathstar IT and you’re good to go.
• Frost Aura: Replaced with Improved Frost Presence: Allows the DK to keep the health bonus of Frost Presence in any presence and decreases magic damage taken while in Frost Presence.
  • This is why Blizzard reduced the base magic reduction in Frost Presence… no wait… it’s only 2% extra magic mitigation. We got fucked.
• Glacier Rot: 3rd rank added, and damage bonus increased to 7/13/20%.
  • More damage is always good.
• Howling Blast: Base damage and scaling doubled. This ability no longer deals bonus damage to targets with Frost Fever. 8-second CD. Swapped positions with Hungering Cold in the talent tree.
  • YAY! Blizzard listened to what I had to say and fixed their idiotic mistake with HB!
  • Well, this means that I can open with HB in my rotation now. Deathchill HB just got a lot more dangerous in Arena as it is an instant max-damage AoE nuke.
• Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons: These talents now have new icons.
  • Fuck my life. Do something useful with your time. Please.
• Improved Icy Touch: Now increases Icy Touch damage by 5/10/15% instead of by 10/20/30%.
  • I guess Blizzard realized that IT was a Deathstar beam in PvP. Saw this one coming.
• Lichborne: No longer improves your chance to be missed. Now correctly grants immunity, and will break all effects to which Lichborne makes you immune.
  • Well, I’m upset about the miss % chance for PvE… but fixing the PvP Immunity problem makes it almost worth it.
• Rime: When this talent triggers, it also resets the CD on Howling Blast.
  • Interesting… now your obliterates have a chance to make HB free and RESET ITS COOLDOWN. Refer to Glacier Rot: More damage is always good.
• Runic Power Mastery: Moved up to tier-1 and reduced to 2 ranks (15/30%).
  • Trash talent… still. Could be useful if you wanted to give a larger buffer to Gargoyle or DRW but IMO it’s not worth the points.
• Tundra Stalker: Now increases the damage on abilities by 3/6/9/12/15% instead of 2/4/6/8/10%.
  • More damage is always good.
• Unbreakable Armor: Now grants damage reduction instead of physical damage reduction. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes from 1 minute.
  • This change is important. Notice how it also reduces magic damage now. Essentially makes up for the Frost Presence nerf… or at least it would if the CD was still 1 minute long. They did NOT increase the duration. Shame on them.

Overall Impressions

Most of the Frost changes were made in response to the Shadowfrost spec dominating Arena along with Howling Blast damage simply being too good in 3.0 (stacking HB with Impurity is top DPS spec in the game right now).

One of the things I find interesting is that Frost has been given a bonus to Shadow damage in the amount of 10%. This not only helps with agro generation from Death and Decay but also affects the Blood Plague DoT for an average of 40 extra damage per tick (while tanking) which equates to about 13.3 DPS. If you watch the video you will understand an important concept that I will put forth in regards to DPS with Black Ice and how we may be able to break the game again.

The rework on Unbreakable Armor (UbA) is not something that I like, but at the same time, it isn’t something I hate either. I’d rather have extra damage reduction than extra armor any day of the week, but the CD increase and the removal of the +parry is, in my opinion, not worth it.

The changes to Blood’s Blade Barrier along with the removal of Lichborne’s miss and the increase on the cooldown timers have crippled the DK ability to Main Tank in easy mode and will push all the FotM tanks out of the class and into Paladins… where they belong.

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.

Skills

• Blood Boil: damage increased to make up for Pestilence no longer doing damage. It now does some damage to un-diseased targets and extra damage to diseased targets. Its radius has been decreased.
• Blood Strike: Bonus damage for diseases is now a multiplier rather than a flat bonus.
• Strangulate: no longer does damage and has been reduced to 1 rank.

The change to Pestilence demanded the change to Blood Boil to make up for the AoE DPS loss but if you’re Blood DPS then you don’t care about area damage as you should be focusing on single target elimination.

Blood Strike’s change is a big deal. The issue that Blizzard had with blood DPS is that the bonuses to BS and HS from diseases were not strong enough to dissuade DKs from going with the disease-less blood spec which rolled in with 6 consecutive heart strikes for massive damage. DPS change, but it has some pretty hefty tanking implications (we’ll make more threat).

Strangulate no longer does damage and has 1 rank. Don’t quite understand WHY they made this change other than the fact that it didn’t fall of when Rogues used Cloak of Shadows and they bitched about it; completely a PvP change and an unnecessary one at that.

Talents

• Abomination’s Might: This talent can now be proc’d with Death Strike
  • More of a PvP alteration to the tree than anything else. This makes DS more than useful to a blood Death Knight in any PvP situation as it not only heals you but also increases your attack power.
• Blade Barrier: Now grants 1/2/3/4/5% damage reduction instead of parry
  • Damn. Our heyday is over! 5% flat DR is definitely NOT better than the parry % but I guess that’s why they changed it. Expect to see this altered again later down the road to 1/2/3/4/5% parry to line up better with the talent from the Warrior’s Arms tree
• Blood Aura: Replaced with Improved Blood Presence. Allows the DK to keep the healing bonus of Blood Presence in any presence and increases healing received while in Blood Presence by 10%
  • Does not augment damage done and it doesn’t affect rune CDs. PvP change only… and a big one. More details in the video link.
• Blood Gorged: Grants ArPen instead of Expertise
  • Double Damn. Removing the expertise bonus means that blood DKs will now have to pick up 5 more expertise (skill not rating) with gear and thus sacrifice some AP / STR / Crit
• Bloody Strikes: Bonus damage this talent grants to Blood Boil has been reduced to 10/20/30%
  • WHO CARES! Blood DPS focuses on single target elimination and not AoE damage. This change was made to reinforce that way of thinking
• Bloodworms: Now heal more
  • So they’ve taken a gimmick talent and made it… more gimmicky? Bloodworms really don’t have much of a use outside of PvP except when you’re nonstop grind farming by rolling your face over 1-4. Doesn’t affect raiding in a significant way so it will still be skipped by every smart raid DK
• Dancing Rune Weapon (DRW): Damage done by and duration reduced by 50%. Cooldown set to 90 seconds
  • I guess this is Blizzard’s way of giving blood a RP dump that isn’t Death Coil. If it is, they fucked up. Dancing Rune Weapon already only put out 50% of the DK’s damage (which admittedly could be 2.5K DPS) and that was when it worked correctly. Now we have to deal with a shorter CD, cool… but what do we do with the 90 second cooldown? That’s NINE RUNE ROTATIONS OF DEATH COIL. Give me a freakin’ break.
  • On this note, I believe it is wrong to complain about something and not offer a solution so here is my proposed DRW change:
    • Dancing Rune Weapon (Blood 51 pt Talent): When your Runic Power reaches its maximum level you summon a Dancing Rune Weapon to aid you in combat. It lasts 1 second for each 13 runic power you had and perfectly mirrors your physical attacks. While the Rune Weapon is active, you generate no Runic Power
  • If blood DKs went into Runic Power Mastery for this talent it would effectively allow them to have 13 seconds of better DPS at the cost of a no RP rune cycle. IMO, this is a good idea. So good, in fact, that I’m posting on the forums right now.
• Improved Death Strike (NEW): Increases DS damage by 10%/20% and critical strike chance by 3%/6%
  • With the changes to how Death Strike works this talent (given its position) is designed to offer an alternative to Annihilation by opening up DS as a replacement for Obliterate. Unfortunately, this will never happen until my DRW change is accepted and the talent is worth getting.
  • TL;DR: It’s a PVP talent to keep you alive longer.
• Heart Strike: Bonus damage for diseases is a multiplier rather than a flat bonus, no longer affected by Glyph of Blood Strike
  • The multiplier is only 10% which makes HS total damage 120% of its original if you have both the diseases we have active. Effectively cripples disease-less blood spec.
  • The second part of this change was a bug fix so we’re ignoring it.
• Hysteria: Now causes health loss rather than damage
  • Well, I guess they wanted to address the bug where Paladins with Seal of the Martyr were unintentionally killing themselves. Damn, there goes my fun.
• Might of Mograine: No longer affects Obliterate
  • Well shucks. Obliterate was a 100% proc for Abomination’s Might and a staple of the disease-less Blood spec (hence the nerf) to set up the max AP bonus and generate Death Runes. Pushes Death Strike harder.
• Scent of Blood: Will now proc on dodge, parry, or damage taking, and grants 10 RP per charge. No internal CD
  • BEHOLD! Free rune strikes. Get this one.
• Spell Deflection: Increased reduction to 15/30/45% reduction from DD spells
  • Meh. Blizzard nerfed our parry rating and then they buff this. Without seeing Ulduar live I think this is STILL a trash talent and isn’t worth getting at all.
• Sudden Doom: Reduced to 3 ranks, automatically casts the Death Coil it procs.
  • Now that they’ve gotten rid of the GCD annoyance from Sudden Doom it’s worthwhile to take. Free DPS, can’t argue.
• Vampiric Blood: CD increased from 1 minute to 2 minutes
  • I think this is an Arena change to be 100% honest. Having a blood DK pop himself back up to full HP every 1 minute was a little bit stupid. Converts this talent into Warrior Talent: Last Stand
• Will of the Necropolis: Added 15 second internal CD.
  • Why not just rename the talent “Will of the Failure?” The entire point of this talent WAS to improve your eHP below 30% so that your healers didn’t panic and get you killed. Probably changed due to PvP purposes.

Overall Impressions

It seems like Blood got the PvE buffs it needed while at the same time crippling the disease-less spec. PvP has been made workable for Blood now that Howling Blast is gone from our reach with the addition of Improved Death Strike. I could actually see deep blood making a showing in Arena combat because of the way that Improved Blood Presence is going to work.

Too bad the Development team doesn’t grasp the concept of the words “Useful Additions.” Making Blood Gorged grant armor penetration only serves as a massive downgrade from the expertise you originally gained from the talent. I thought that Blood DKs were supposed to be the masters of martial combat from Arthas’s camp… not the super strong HULK SMASH ArPen machine we’ve been made out to look like.

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

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

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

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

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