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What’s the one thing that would prompt me to post again in spite of the fact that I’m swamped busy with schoolwork and other real life obligations at the moment? OH YEAH THE CATACLYSM BETA IS OPEN. All that crying and moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth over new abilities, talents and configurations?

Let it all out and don’t stop throwing tantrums until Cataclysm goes live!

I’ve been looking over some of the new information on Mmochamp and I’m both annoyed and satisfied with quite a lot of the talent restructuring for Death Knights so far. The Blood tree, and it also looks like Blood presence, is shouldering all the tanking responsibility as previously announced. One thing I wanted to make particular note of is the way they’re really pushing hard to make you choose between good talents. Naturally, after that I’ll post the disjointed word vomit that constitutes the rest of my initial reactions to the changes.

Choices choices choices!

Blizz has been saying they want to make us choose between good talents for a while now and from the looks of the beta talent trees they’re off to a good start.

Suppose you’re a Death Knight tank and you’ve spent most your talent points in Blood and are now looking for things in Frost and Unholy to pick up. We’ll assume you’ve spent 57 points in Blood and that your build now looks something like this.

So what next?

Personally, I really have a hard time living in a world where I know I can’t drop DnD every 20 seconds or so. Do I ever actually do that? Of course not but its nice to know that if I need to drop DnD for whatever reason I’m not going to be limited by its innately long cooldown. Ok, so I want Morbidity. Uh oh, its pretty deep in Unholy now. Well, I suck it up and spec for it anyway because I value it just that much and now my talents look like this.

Huh, only one talent point left! But I wanted to make my Icy Touch hit harder and I wanted to pick up Runic Empowerment! Tough.

Now the theorycrafting may end up saying that Runic Empowerment is as much a staple as Sanguine Fortitude but that isn’t the point right now. I want Runic Empowerment. I want Morbidity. I can only have one. This feels like an interesting decision to have to make.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these talent trees evolve in the coming months.

Word vomit

• Hysteria is called Unholy Frenzy and is on the third tier of Unholy now. Still able to be picked up by tanks, still handy to have around.
• Sudden Doom lost to deeeeeeeeep Unholy. Also reverted back to just making your next Death Coil free, not automatically launching one for you. Another button to push when your runes are down likely.
• No cost to activate Icebound Fortitude again, yay!
• Vendetta, now called Exsanguinate, moved to tier one of Blood. Has anyone ever taken this ever? Surprised its still kicking around.
• Dancing Rune Weapon gives 20% extra Parry chance now. On the fence about this one. Perhaps I’m still locked into the historical mindset of Parry being mostly garbage but I was hoping for a little bit more from the reworked 51 point talent.
• Magic Suppression/Anti-magic Zone still in Unholy. I’m being entirely greedy with this but uh… can Blood get those instead? We’ll trade you uh… Blood Parasites and um… Exsanguination!
• On a Pale Horse retains its mounted movement speed increase thus ensuring its place as my leveling tree for the second expansion in a row.
• Pillar of Frost sits on the fifth tier of Frost and prevents you from being knocked back and boosts your Strength by 20%. No knockbacks for 20 seconds, nice!
• Lichborne unchanged, still stupid.
• You can still kinda make a really super ghetto Frost or Unholy tank spec but only kinda… kinda. Not that I recommend those sorts of shenanigans of course.

All this talk about Cataclysm class changes has made me think about all the changes and speculation that happened in this expansion before Wrath went on sale. I thought it would be nice to go back now and review some of the ways the Death Knight class has changed over time. Its good to know where you come from after all.

The Prelude

Way back in 2007 was the first time we had official word about the Death Knight class. At the time, patch 2.2 was on the PTR and my first character was level 42 in Stranglethorn Vale. I didn’t yet know how frustrating it would be to be a paladin tank, wrestling with mana issues, playing the inferior sidekick to warriors but staunchly refusing to admit the truth, and the pressures to raid as a healer and only a healer. I didn’t yet know how much I would love tanking as a Death Knight in the far future.

Fast forward to Blizzcon 2007 and we have MMOChampion reporting on the brand new Death Knight class. Most notably and relevant to our situation today we have a sneak peek at a few Death Knight abilities:

Known Death Knight skills

• Unholy Embrace
  Instant Cast. 5 min cooldown.
  Target is embraced by a silhouette of darkness for 6 seconds, corrupting any healing spells and effects cast upon or currently affecting the target to cause damage for 50% of their healing potential instead of restoring health. Any damage shields cast upon or currently affecting the target will also be instantly consumed, dealing 50% of their absorption potential in damage. Once afflicted with Unholy Embrace, the target cannot be afflicted with Unholy Embrace again for 1 minute.
• Army of the Dead
  Raises several temporary minions (ghouls)

A clear reminder that a lot of iteration happens during the testing process leading up to the release of a new expansion.

Skip ahead a little and we’re approaching the Alpha testing of Wrath of the Lich King. The most talked about topic concerning Death Knights is which runes they’ll imbue their runeblades with and the various pro’s and con’s of each configuration. Popular configurations include 4 frost, 1 unholy, 1 blood and other setups like 6 frost and the balanced 2 frost, 2 unholy and 2 blood. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Ultimately the Most Pointless Phase in Death Knight History” as a result of these discussions.

Alpha

Closed alpha begins. Leaks begin flying around the interwebs with videos popping up on Youtube showing Tauren Death Knights rampaging across the Plaguelands demonstrating what is theorized to be one of the best and most interesting Death Knight abilities: Corpse Explosion. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Omg I Can’t Believe I Ever Thought That Ability Would Be the Best” as a result.

We are given our first look at the first talent tree setup for Death Knights: Alpha Build 3.0.1.8303.

A select handful of Alpha testers begin to gain notoriety for their analyses and insights into playing as a Death Knight with Jayde arguably the most popular scoring a win for female Blood Elf Death Knights everywhere. Jayde posts three videos that made a huge impression on me showing the playstyle and abilities as each of the three Death Knight specs. I have the Unholy video but the one that made the biggest impression on me was the Frost one and I cannot for the life of me find that video anywhere. In the video, Jayde is in Terokkar Forest fighting Warped Peons. He casts Hungering Cold freezing them all and then follows it up with Howling Blast to light the screen up with big numbers. At the time, Howling Blast was a guaranteed crit if your target was frozen so it worked fairly well with Hungering Cold. It certainly made for a whoaaaa moment watching the video.

The Vision

The devs have frequent conversations with testers and players generally about their intentions and design goals for Death Knights. They state one of the most important concepts for the Death Knight class is the ability to use any talent tree for tanking and dps alike. They say that the Death Knight is their great experiment in this regard and if it goes well, paladins and warriors will almost certainly get the same treatment. They talk about how they almost gave Arms warriors the ability to block with their two-handed weapons but decided not to for a number of reasons, one of which was to see how the Death Knight worked out first.

Beta

Closed beta begins and I begin spamming the refresh button on my inbox hoping for an invitation. I get my invitation after a short while and I quickly install the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The current talent build at the time: Beta Build 3.0.1.8770.

As you can see even by simply looking over the picture, we’ve come a long way since Alpha. One of the prominent issues being discussed at the time was how blood worms should be spawned. Death Knights were finding Outland leveling a breeze thanks to the enormous amounts of self-healing they could generate and blood worms were a particular concern. They spawned every time you hit Death Strike which led to some pretty strong burst healing. I was Blood even back then and I was enjoying my immortality.

I ran my first instance as a Death Knight around this time. Thanks to the Improved Blood Presence talent it was possible to run instances with groups made up of nothing but Death Knights. Death and Decay had a horrify effect to it that randomly caused enemies to cower in fear before you and that crowd control combined with the damage put out by 5 Death Knights dropping Death and Decay and smashing skulls was more than enough to keep the whole party topped off. Hellfire Ramparts and the Blood Furnace had never been roflstomped so badly before.

Death and Decay, like so many other Death Knight abilities has had a pretty sad history of completely justified nerfs. It was good damage, could be cast to a specific place on the ground at ranged, CC’ed enemies without having them run away from you and provided a ton of self-healing with the Improved Blood Presence talent. Then the Blood Presence talent got reworked, then the horrify effect was shunted to a glyph and then ultimately removed altogether. All of which was necessary because that spell was totally broken. Unholy Blight, Lichborne and Shadow of Death looked to each other nervously in anticipation.

Throughout Beta you can really see the evolution of the talent trees go from a very Burning Crusade mindset to a more “enlightened” Wrath of the Lich King model. Talents like Blood Rune Mastery are phased out and Death Runes become the preferred method for utilizing “wild card” runes to preserve the original intent to let you imbue your runeblade with whichever runes you wanted.

Wrath Live

Wrath of the Lich King goes live with this talent build: WotLK 3.0.3.9183.

The night the expansion goes on sale at midnight, I’m walking into the mall alone. There’s more cars in the parking lot than I expect. I enter the door and turn the corner and see three very long lines already formed. I stand in the first line to pre-pay and talk to some guys who I would describe with my best raider leet-speak as “total noobs” until we’ve paid for our copies. As we finish paying we’re instructed that the lines for distribution are divided into a Horde line and an Alliance line. The noobs as it happen are Alliance players. This strikes me as being very right.

The employees of Gamestop rally the people in line by having the Horde line shout out “For the Horde!” as loud as they can. The Alliance people shouted something too but its quickly drowned out by continual Horde shouting. Rude? Sure, but come on Allies, give it a little oomph.

I race home with my copy and find myself headed to the Dark Portal a few hours later. Nine days later my Death Knight, Shayzani, dings level 80. I leveled entirely as Unholy since I wanted to give something new a try and because I was wise to the On a Pale Horse’s value while questing.

My first heroic is Violet Hold which I dps’ed as Unholy. I was in one of the first ventures into Naxxramas on my server and saw Patchwerk die when the raid was mostly decked out in leveling greens and tier 6. My first epic is the Chained Military Gorget. My tank spec was likely 7/8/56 (as pictured below) or some such nonsense and I had Rune of the Fallen Crusader on my tank weapon since we weren’t spoiled with Stoneskin Gargoyle like today’s kids and also maybe because I forgot about Rune of Swordshattering.

Changes

Throughout this long process of ups and downs in Death Knight iteration a lot of really cool abilities were introduced, some were radically changed seemingly every patch and some were lost forever. Notable mentions include the following:

Lichborne – Today its nigh on useless but early on, existing even into the live builds for a short time, Lichborne was one of the most rockin’ tank talents ever. When you popped it you were given an additional 25% chance to be missed by enemy attacks and you could use your Death Coils to heal yourself a bit. It was a great emergency button and once it was gone Blood and Unholy tanks were free from having to put 11 points into Frost.

Dancing Rune Weapon – Sure its only a little different now but back when it was first implemented there was no damage penalty on the Rune Weapon’s swings. You could also cast Army of the Dead and your Rune Weapon would cast its own Army right along with you. I ended up beating Krystallus in my first Heroic Halls of Stone run with only myself, another Death Knight and our 26 ghouls left alive at the end. The word you’re looking for is “epic”.

Death and Decay – I covered Death and Decay earlier but as a quick recap its history is as follows: awesome ranged AoE with built-in CC > good ranged AoE with glyphed CC > good ranged AoE.

Bone Shield – The original implementation of Bone Shield led many people to believe that Unholy would be the strongest tank spec in endgame raiding due to avoidance reaching a point where Bone Shield’s uptime would allow an amazing amount of damage reduction. But 20% off isn’t all that much though right? I mean its good and all bu—wait, what? Bone Shield granted 40% damage reduction? That’s right, 40% damage reduction. Awesome.

Shadow of Death – One of the most novel talents we’ve ever had in the game was this talent. It proved to be a nightmare for pvp where after killing off your stupidly over-powered Death Knight opponent she would get right back up off the ground and start eating your face off as a ghoul. Also, if you died in an instance you could run out as a ghoul and if you finished zoning out before the Shadow of Death buff expired you were alive and whole once again. Ultimately the devs pronounced Shadow of Death to be way too difficult to balance right and scrapped the whole concept.

Unholy Blight – This spell was deemed too awesome for players to have and was mutated into the horrifyingly lame version it is today as a result. At one point, popping Unholy Blight gave a self-buff that generated a black cloud of insects around your body that would do damage to all enemies in a 10 yard radius. The spell effect looked awesome, it added a truly unique flavor to the Death Knight experience and wreaked havoc on groups of enemies, npc’s and players alike. Rather than overwhelm players with such a high amount of pure awesomeness, the devs decided making it into a simple debuff with no visible particle effect was a better idea.

Suffer Well

We’re at the end of the Wrath expansion now and its been a long ride. Now we’re looking ahead at another expansion and with it, a host of new changes and radical shifts in gameplay. The great experiment with three tanking talent trees has concluded and the developers have decided to do an “about face” on the issue entirely. Some people are overjoyed, some people are disappointed. No doubt the change will free up developer time and ease their workload but I still see the vision of using any talent tree for tanking as the most brilliant idea Blizzard ever had for class design and wish it could have gone further by extending the same treatment to other tanks as well.

Regardless of whatever changes are made, be they to the rune system or to the talent trees or any of a myriad of individual spells, its going to be interesting to see where the Death Knight class goes in the future and what creature it becomes. No doubt we’re in for a lot more growing pains but hey, we have to grow quickly to catch up to the other classes right?

Through it all, suffer well.

Since I’ve been asked for my thoughts on the Cataclysm Death Knight preview I’ll share some general impressions.

New abilities

Outbreak – Ok. That’s about all I think of this.

Necrotic Strike – Very cool. As they said, this fits the Death Knight theme/motif/flavor perfectly. Obviously pretty sweet in pvp but anytime you have a mob that can heal its going to be useful in pve too.

Dark Simulacrum – It ain’t gonna work like so many people seem to think its going to work. They told us if it can’t be reflected by Spell Reflect it probably won’t work with this either. So no, heals most likely won’t be effected, you won’t be making any death knights teleport to Moonglade or Stonard and you most likely wont be Blinking or Ice Blocking or Bladestorming or any other of a host of things people are convinced you’ll be able to steal. This is going to let you spit fireballs like Mario and not a whole lot more.

And that’s still pretty freakin’ cool!

Rune System Changes

I’m afraid I don’t quite get what they’re planning for the way runes will work so I can’t speak to that. Yes I’ve seen the diagrams and the illustrations and the clever explanations and I still can’t make heads or tails of it. I’m just going to have to see how it goes once they start giving out beta invites. The only coherent thought I have about this right now is “…so…do I… do I still get to do Heart Strike spam?”

Talent Changes

Speaking as someone who has been a Blood tank since Naxxramas, Blood turning into Prot kinda sucks. I have no doubt whatsoever that it’ll make Death Knights better tanks just as I have no doubt that they could have balanced it so we could still tank as any of the three talent trees. I think they’ve done a damn fine job of keeping things balanced throughout this expansion. Yes, Blood has been ahead but the other specs haven’t fallen so far behind that they’re unusable even in progression raiding. So, meh.

But whatever, I dislike the decision quite a bit but realistically all it means for me is that the tank spec I’ve already been using is going to get super-buffed. Still…

Extremely disappointing.

Mastery

Healing Absorption looks interesting and if it works off overhealing then its awesome and I love it. If it doesn’t, its neat in theory but rubbish in practice. Frost and Unholy are dead to me forever since they’re no longer going to be potential tanking trees so I wouldn’t even care if they were deleted entirely, let alone care about their mastery effects.

This is a crazy fight. Nocturne’s first kill came late last night and by the time Rotface’s health had hit 5% everything had started to fall apart. Little oozes were everywhere and the big ooze was kersploding and Rotface himself was of course, vomiting all over everyone.

Having been in the role of Ooze Kiter Extraordinaire for each of our attempts, I share with you now some (hopefully useful) tips on the care and management of oooooze.

Spec

I tried two different specs for this job and custom-made them specifically with the Rotface fight in mind but also serviceable for general tanking should the need to fill in for a fallen bear arise. The first one I used was a Frost spec and the second one was an Unholy spec.

Frost

The spec: 10/56/5

A two-handed Frost spec that trims out the points needed to beef up dual-wield featuring extended range howling blasts and the Improved Icy Talons buff in case your raid group needs it.

This spec played pretty much exactly how you think it would. Howling Blast on cooldown, Icy Touch if a bit more threat is needed, etc. It is what it is. Were I to use such a spec again I would go for Hungering Cold as well, honestly not sure why I didn’t.

Unholy

The spec: 13/8/50

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner to go with an Unholy spec.

Here’s what makes Unholy awesome for this fight:

• 20% less damage taken throughout the entire fight (you’re not getting hit by anything that removes a charge of your Bone Shield thus it has a 100% uptime.)
• 6% less damage taken from magic
• Stronger Anti-magic Shell

I didn’t end up using Anti-magic Zone very much even though there were moments where I could have for a few seconds I suppose. It probably isn’t worth picking up and the point could be swapped for Unholy Blight or something else to beef up the abilities you will be using. Sad because I do love me that Anti-magic Zone. Someday I’ll find a justification for taking it (besides the fact that its hella cool looking)!

Faster Pussycat, tank tank!

Despite the header for this section I don’t advise actually trying to tank the big oozes. The header was also my guild note for a long while but I never figured out why. Ashmaw, enlighten?

So now it comes to the actual kiting part. We found it easier to cleanse the debuff asap since dealing with the 50% healing reduction was just too risky. People with the debuff would run their ooze to me until it merged with the other little one at first to make the big ooze. Right around the time the first big ooze is created you’ll have a section of the floor just about to flood. Go the other way if the flooded part is close by you and strafe away from the ooze.

Ever heard of a jump-shot? Its what you should be doing with your Death Coils to keep the big oozes fixed on chasing you. Don’t know what a jump-shot is or how to do it? Let’s ask our hunter friend Pike from Aspect of the Hare!

This movie of Pike’s helped learn me to jumpshot proper-like back in the Burning Crusade and hopefully she won’t mind me linking it here. If she does mind of course, it’ll be gone right quick!

To see the original page this video comes from, head on over to Pike’s site.

So coming back to Rotface, we find ourselves strafing away from the big ooze and we’re being awesome and jump-shotting it with Death Coil and we’re very pleased with ourselves.

Uh oh. The room just flooded right in front of you and the big ooze makes turning around a bad idea. No problem. You were probably getting a little starved for runic power anyway right? Pop Anti-magic Shell and continue on through the flooded area as normal. Anti-magic Shell will nullify the slow effect of the flood and convert the flood’s damage into a full runic power bar. Blessing of Freedom is pretty handy too if you’ve got a paladin in the raid. Yeah, I still call it Blessing of Freedom. Deal with it.

Remember also that if you’re dealing with a stubborn little ooze who won’t play nice and merge with the big ooze you can hit it with Chains of Ice to make sure it gets eaten up. To clarify what kinds of snares and taunts are effective against which ooze type here’s a reminder.

Little ooze

• Immune to taunt
• Immune to Death Grip (both the taunt and the pull)
• Susceptible to Chains of Ice and other roots and slows

Big ooze

• Susceptible to taunt
• Susceptible to Death Grip (the taunt effect, wasn’t drunk enough to try pulling it closer)
• Immune to Chains of Ice and other roots and slows

If I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong (I never get anything wrong, ever) just holler at me! Good luck on your own attempts at this guy!

For Chastity of Righteous Orbs.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary Tank?

Shayzani, Blood Death Knight

What is your usual tanking environment?

10mans, 5mans

What is your favorite encounter to tank, and why?

This is actually a difficult one. I love fights where I spend all my time hunting or chasing things down. Alar was like this as I was charged with picking up phoenix adds, Anatheron was fun because I was on the infernals, etc.

As far as WotLK goes, actually one of the fights I like most is Vezax even though I usually despise fights that make me just stand in one spot doing my rotation over and over. Something about how Vezax is solely raw physical damage… I dunno. Being able to withstand the onslaught really makes you aware of your durability as a tank.

What is your least favorite encounter to tank, and why?

Kel’thuzad. Staying awake through phase 1 was brutal. At the time, I had my old terrible computer that ran the game at, surprise, 2fps when tanking so seeing void zones open underneath me while actually tanking KT was really intensely difficult. 5 minutes of waiting followed by standing in one spot is really not exciting.

What do you think is the biggest strength of your class, and why?

The biggest strength of the Death Knight is its variety. Being able to tank with all three talent trees simply cannot be overstated. On top of that, each tree specializing in its own niche means you can always change things up if you get bored with Heart Strike spam. Not that Heart Strike is boring. I love Heart Strike <3

More specifically, cooldowns. Death Knights are the iPhone's of the tanking world. For any given problem we can say: There's an app a cooldown for that.

and weakness?

Initially I think our strength was our biggest weakness in this expansion. Contradictory enough? In the beginning, DK’s were really powerful and were rightfully nerfed. And then that scenario repeated itself over and over again. The original iterations of Death and Decay and Imp. Blood Presence for instance were entirely ridiculous for instance. An aoe that you can drop in a place of your choosing that caused good damage, high threat, and feared your enemies? Your raid being healed for a non-trivial amount based on the damage you do? It wasn’t a wonder that all-DK 5mans were steamrolling through instances in Outland.

What is your favorite thing about the class you chose for your primary Tank and why?

Cooldowns! Anti-magic shell, anti-magic zone, army of the dead, bone shield, icebound fortitude, vampiric blood, rune tap, the list goes on and on.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel is the best tanking assignment for you?

Pfft, 25mans.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the most?

Death Knight.

and the least?

Hard to say. I’ve never played a warrior at max level for more than a few minutes but it felt terribly clunky and just plain bad with multiple mobs

What is your worst habit as a tank?

Despite everything I’ve said about how awesome DK cooldowns are, I all too often hold back from using them. Its a common line of thinking: Is now really the best time to use it? I bet I’ll need it right after its over so I’ll just save it. FFS its a DK, use the damn cooldowns.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?

Stopping for mana and dps who won’t take responsibility for their aggro.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks for PvE tanking?

Sure sure.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?

Healer feedback first. Then, if there was anything in a fight that I felt particularly concerned about I’ll go over combat logs to see what it was specifically and if I have a cooldown for it (which I do).

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your tanking class?

That the Frost tree is “the tanking tree” and anything related to that fallacy.

What do you think is the toughest thing for new players of your class to learn about tanking?

The proper ways to burn runes and manage cooldowns. Lots of buttons to push.

If someone were to evaluate your tanking ability via tools like fraps, recount, and World of Logs, what tendencies would they notice?

I like to stand in bad things to get runic power from Anti-Magic Shell. Comes from playing a paladin throughout the last expansion. Mmmm spiritual attunement.

Avoidance, Mitigation or Stamina and why?

Yes.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

I compulsively try to maintain a state of being at expertise and hit cap. Drives me nuts otherwise. Beyond that there’s just the usual run of tanking stats and priorities. You know, shield block, spell hit and run speed increases.

What Tanking class do you feel you understand least?

Warriors. I mean, why would you want to be one again?

Addons for tanking?

The most important addon for tanking is RatingBuster. After that I use Magic Runes, Need to Know, Tell Me When, Quartz, etc.

I’m sick. I don’t know what with. I know I’m dizzy and tired and feel sick to my stomach.

I also know that in my delirium tonight I’ve felt compelled to work on the site a little. There’s a new link on the sidebar here to a page about Blood tanking info that I’m calling “The Blood Furnace” for now. The Blood Furnace in the game is a place where the servants of Illidan worked to extract, refine and improve the blood of the demon Magtheridon. It was a research center essentially and I think that concept fits with what I’d like my own Blood Furnace page to be like eventually.

For now I just put up some random bits of information. I’ve put off doing this for so long that I figured I’d start putting up drafts of the page if I couldn’t post a finished and polished product immediately.

I think I'm a fan of these little dropdown boxes.

You can hide the info you’re not interested in and show all the stuff you do want. Novel concept.

Anyway, I’ll be working on the page more in the future when I’m not clutching the armrests of my chair to keep from spinning off into space.

I wondered how and if they’d handle Bone Shield’s overpoweredness when they reduced its cooldown back down to a minute. Mmochampion has new patch notes listed today that address the issue.

• Bone Shield: This ability now has 3 charges instead of 4. Cooldown reduced to 1 minute.
• Glyph of Bone Shield: This glyph now grants 1 additional charge instead of 2.

So instead of six charges when glyphed, it’ll have 4 total. Hopefully this will mean it will have a decent and reasonable uptime instead of being completely broken. I like Unholy and all but its nice to have a choice between tanking trees instead of being shunted into just one.

This is the part where I smirk at the paladins, warriors and druids.

In 3.2.2, Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield are going back to a one minute cooldown. Icebound Fortitude will be (as it has for a little while now) on a two minute cooldown.

When the new patch changes were first leaked on mmochamp a day or two ago it wasn’t readily apparent that the cooldowns on the talented signature abilities had been reduced. All I saw was that they were reducing Vampiric Blood’s duration and hacking the bonus time that the glyph gave as well. I blanched, suffered an aneurysm, started rebuilding an Unholy spec and then fell into a childish, stubborn pout. I was quite relieved and a little surprised to see more of the picture. Two thumbs up on these changes.

This is how I always thought things should have been after the first time they nerfed the talented signature tanking cooldowns, i.e. Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield.

You see, once upon a time the signature tank cooldowns for Death Knights were all on a one minute cooldown. Icebound Fortitude, a baseline tank cooldown, was also on a one minute cooldown. This setup was deemed to be overpowered. The solution Blizzard chose was to double the length of the cooldown on the talented signature abilities and to leave Icebound Fortitude alone.

I facepalmed when that change was rolled out. It seemed fairly obvious to me that out of the four cooldowns it was Icebound Fortitude that was the most troublesome. The talented cooldowns are all very good yes, but they’re not as heavyhanded as a simple "You take half as much damage now" ability.

Vampiric Blood for instance boosts your health and increases the effectiveness of healing done to you. I like this concept. You’re still going to take just as much damage as you would have without the cooldown but your ability to handle that damage is greatly improved.

Unbreakable Armor is a Frost thing and therefore not something to be cared about. It wasn’t any good at the time anyway.

Bone Shield was a little iffy, I admit. With high avoidance levels it was potentially very powerful with a one minute cooldown. Get lucky enough and its uptime could be extremely high.

Then you have Icebound Fortitude. Something not spec-dependent and is simple, straightup damage reduction. A lot of damage reduction in fact.

I always said that the talented abilities should have kept their minute long cooldowns and Icebound Fortitude should be on a 2 minute cooldown.

Enter 3.2.2 and look what’s happening.

Yeah. I approve.

I’ve plugged her site here before but I’ll say it again: go check it out! You should also subscribe to her feed to make sure you don’t miss a post.

Today’s New Rules are brought to you by Ambrosine!

New Rule – All spellpower gear will have class restrictions on it

Maybe, just maybe, if the gear specifically says NOT FOR YOU, DEATH KNUGGET, I will finally stop seeing them wearing it. No really, I was out questing on my huntard, and inspected this DK to find out why he took so long to kill things and…yeeeeep, SP gear. This was just yesterday. What the hell people? Look at your starting gear…you know, the blues, that get handed to you when you start? Do you see spell power there? No? SO WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GET THE IDEA THAT ITS GOOD FOR YOU?

…of course, someone, following that logic, will now try to tank without any defense gear…

New Rule – All paladin gear from here on out will be variations on Judgement

Because really, that’s all we want, anyway. It can even all be the same colors and it won’t really matter! Oh noes, we won’t get to visually e-peen anymore, you say? Well tough shit, I like not looking like a fruity power ranger. Judgement, I’m sorry I ever mocked you for having a skirt. I
didn’t know what was to come…

New Rule – There shall actually be 3 sets of priest tier

None of this healing set/DPS set, Blizzard is lazy nonsense. All that happens is that holy priests end up starting at their set in mild confusion due to a nod or two do their disc brethren in its itemization, and disc priests end up in a cobbled together set of holy/shadow/offset gear. Shadow priests don’t really exist in a raid setting, so who knows what they’d think.

New Rule – More robes will show cleavage

I have the t8 robes sitting in my bank and I don’t want to equip them, because I’ve gotten rather attached to my LOLBEWBS model (currently in ToC flavor, as opposed to the previous Naxx25 flavor). I’m not sure why, as a female, I’m so entranced by draenei cleavage, but it really is a shame to cover it all up again. Just sayin’.

I read a handful of posts from various and sundry blogs over the weekend that gave me the shivers. Nearly six posts from six different places that talked about how great parry was for Death Knight tanks because it “didn’t have diminishing returns” for us.

The truly horrifying part was the number of comments these posts had applauding the author for their work in spreading this information. There are no words to express how I feel about that.

So here it is in big letters:

PARRY IS SUBJECT TO DIMINISHING RETURNS NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE

Its amazing how long some ideas stick around after they’ve become irrelevant or wrong. Originally, Blizzard toyed with the idea of making Death Knight tanks so-called “parry tanks” where a lot of our focus would depend on or be centered around the parry mechanic. You can sort of see that in the original alpha and beta talent tree versions.

One of the first things we ever heard about Death Knight talent trees in fact was that they were thinking of making Blood the dps tree, Frost the tank tree, and Unholy the pvp tree. This idea was scrapped before even the alpha version of Wrath and yet still to this day that concept persists.

When Wrath went live and the folks over at Elitist Jerks started their theorycrafting, numerous posts were made under the assumption that Death Knights received more benefit from parry than their paladin and warrior counterparts. The assumption was entirely unfounded and quickly disproven.

The truth is that parry rating is less desirable for Death Knights than it is for other tanking classes. Due to Forceful Deflection we run into the diminishing returns effect on parry rating quicker than paladins and warriors. Parry rating itself is subject to the steepest diminishing return effect of all tanking stats. This is true even after dodge and parry ratings were adjusted to be more equal.

The only time you will ever hear of Death Knights getting any form of parry that is not effected by diminishing returns is when you’re talking about the 4% parry from the Swordshattering runeforge enchant. With that, you always get 4% parry just like the tooltip says you will. That’s it. Just that one time!

There should never be a time where you try to stack any amount of parry.

I’m not saying you need to avoid parry like the plague, I’m just saying that you should look at it in its proper place. Its simply as peripheral a stat can get and still be of use to tanks.

Don’t believe me? Check out these links to see smarter people than myself prove it:

• WoW Wiki on Diminishing Returns
• Whitetooth on Diminishing Returns from the Elitist Jerk forums

Check out the middle part under the big chart in Whitetooth’s thread for a host of related links and info.