I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at different Death Knight talent builds. I’ve read about which talents work, which ones don’t, and which talents will advertise your ignorance to all who inspect you. Based on everything I’ve read I think I’ve come up with very reasonable, rational talent builds while playing my Death Knight.

It comes as a bit of a surprise then to find out just how rare my current spec is according to this report. Why, I’m not even on the chart at all. Even something silly like jamming all 71 talent points into the Blood tree is more popular than my (or anyone else’s) Blood tank spec.

When the cataclysm finally hit I was under the crunch of finals week and a nasty head cold. Both conspired to drive me away from the mad rush to explore the new world. Finals week is now over but the head cold remains. Thanks to this blasted sickness I was merely the fourth or fifth person in the guild to hit 85 and my guildies are now gearing up much faster than I can keep pace with and still continue living.

Gosh, it’s like my body doesn’t even realize that a big bad Internet dragon broke the whole world and I have to fix it.

Every new patch adds more things to do but only the release of a new expansion can truly overwhelm. Suddenly, I have jewelcrafting dailies to do, ore to mine, foodstuffs to steal, Pebble to rescue, and on and on and on. Oh also, I feel obligated to be raid-ready by the end of the month at least because you know, I’m one of the two main tanks in the guild and tanks are in such short supply as it is, etc. etc.

I feel like every time I sit down at the computer I find that I can’t back off easily because of the plethora of chores and tasks that need doing. Here’s the thing, they don’t need to be done. Not immediately in any case. Really, there’s plenty of time to steal food from the dwarves to give to the Dragonmaw, I don’t need to stress about how I’ll ever get to max level blacksmithing on top of that today.

I’m not talking about my class or my faction or whatever, I’m talking about me. I feel that raiding with a fever should give me a super stat bonus as a “omg look he can barely sit up isn’t that pitiful!” buff.

On the other hand, being quasi-delirious does make all the colors and sounds super intense so that’s something I guess.

But then again, I don’t know if it’s worth the crazy messed up dreams later. Dreaming a psychedelically-colored Magmaw has broken loose and is chasing you down the halls of your old middle school makes for a dizzying night.

Another rule brought about by my craptastic trinkets!

I’m slaving away for these jerk orcs for the hope of getting one of the exalted trinkets before the next expansion comes out and they cant even be decent enough to sell me a proper tabard? No I don’t want a teleport to Tol Barad. There’s already a portal from Orgrimmar, how does this tabard help in any way? Gimme rep from dungeons jerks!

This is clearly where they’ve been hiding the trash that should have been in ToC. It feels like you can’t go two feet without bumping into another group of evil warlocks/reanimated skeletons. With two bosses and a very linear path to take this instance crawls.

And what is up with that first boss? I think we get it Blizz, you don’t actually have to play the stupid music or include a “brand new bag” for us to get that its a reference to an actual person. I guess Blizzard never has been accused of being too subtle.

Zindo, Nocturne resident rogue, noted that people really don’t seem to be getting the shared damage link on the second boss. He’s wrong of course. We get it, we just can’t be arsed to stop attacking. As a tank, I don’t care. When I healed for this boss with my guildies however, it was a different story.

Yes, you guys are bastards.

New Rule – Death to immunities

Remember how immunities were all the rage in vanilla and BC? Rag, Hydross, Curator, etc. all had immunities to certain schools of magic. This was fitting lore-wise but frustrating to play against. If you wanted to spec for Fire or Arcane or whatever you basically got a kick in the teeth on these types of fights. Heaven help you if you were a shaman farming the Elemental Plateau. There was even talk of having Sapphiron be immune to frost magic in the remake of Naxxramas for WotLK.

Then Blizzard decided to basically shelve the whole terrible concept and never use it again.

If only…

Ahune’s back and he’s as annoying as ever. All the adds are immune to frost making it very irritating to round them all up. Its not difficult, its just irritating to have Icy Touch essentially yanked out of my spellbook.

New Rule – Moar soulsssssss

Nocturne recently teamed up with another 10man raiding team to have a go at some 25man ICC. The raid went very well and the Nocturne folk cleaned up loot-wise. Zen finally got a new shield, Zarat got the Nibelung he’s been lusting for and I didn’t do so bad myself.

I got the drops from Festergut and Rotface that I needed for Shadow’s Edge. In anticipation for this, I had been hoarding primordial saronite for a while so that the moment we were done raiding I’d be able to get my new weapon.

Now its time to feed a thousand souls to the axe.

New Rule – No more capitalism please

As I mentioned above, I’ve been hoarding primordial saronite. Even with 7 80’s all running daily heroics for purchasing saronite I still felt like I wasn’t making progress quick enough so I did something that I do my best to avoid: I started using the auction house.

I have every profession maxed out between all my alts. I basically have a license to print money if I want. The thing is, playing the auction game bores me senseless and I absolutely loathe waiting around for auctions to sell. The interface for creating auctions is also pretty clunky although its better now than ever before.

But I needed saronite so I sucked it up and posted auctions for about twelve cut epic gems. I didn’t really want to do the research on which cuts were selling best so I just threw up a variety of a few I knew would be popular. I didn’t count on the Solid Majestic Zircon being my chief moneymaker but it didn’t take long for me to get the message. Every Solid cut I posted would get snatched up in minutes. By the end of the first day of auctioneering I had made somewhere near 10k gold from gems alone.

I could easily keep doing this. I could branch out into other markets as well. I could hit the gold cap, finance epic flying for all of my alts and do all the other things crazy rich people do. Thing is, its possibly the least fun thing I can think of to do in WoW. Therefore, a pauper I shall remain.

New Rule – We’re here to see the wizard, let us in!

This new contest for guilds to win Cata beta invites has been weighing on my mind since the second I found out about it (thanks J). I sent off the official email on behalf of myself and Nocturne within an hour of reading the rules and now its just a waiting game I suppose.

I haven’t been in oodles of game beta versions before but the WotLK beta was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced in this or any other video game. I liked the rapidly evolving environment, the sense of pioneering the unknown and helping guide the direction of the game.

I’m one of those people that likes to thoroughly research something before I jump in and do it. I pugged Naxx on a number of different toons in the Beta so I could have a leg up on knowing what to do when the expansion went live. I like, and actually need, to be able to have some kind of experience with a raid fight before I can start to formulate a workable strategy.

Ask Zindo what it was like for me trying to come up with a simple strategy for the Blood Princes before I’d done anything except read the list of abilities the bosses would use. Deer in the headlights man, deer in the headlights.

So I’ve put on my ruby slippers and I’m taking my guildies and we’re metaphorically off to see if we can get in to see the wizard for Cataclysm.

Yes, the trip is metaphorical, my ruby slippers are not. Be jealous.