Thanks to Linda & Mike from Shattered Hand for sharing these with me.

No related posts.

Continuing on down our path of leveling Warlocks, here we go into the next couple of level brackets. This guide will cover both Affliction and Demonology builds, just as we did with the Warlock Leveling: 1-29 guide. However, unless I decide to dual spec after all, this might be the last time I address Demonology since my personal preference and play style is for Affliction.

Important Spells
Summon Felhunter: (Level 30) Your newest demon, and probably the most useful one you’ll ever have. He can silence casters, he can remove most harmful effects on party members, and he restores his mana as he attacks.

Hellfire: (Level 30) An interesting spell to say the least. Every second this spell blasts the area around you with fire damage, and it deals that damage to you as well. It certainly has its place in fighting groups of mobs and dealing some AoE damage, but I usually suggest it only when you’re protected by your Voidwalker’s Sacrifice spell unless you’ve got a healer with you.

Shadow Ward: (Level 32) It’s not a great spell that you’ll be casting all the time, but during these levels and many of those to follow you’ll run into mobs that deal Shadow damage to you. It’s great for reducing damage when facing those mobs, but otherwise worthless as is the case with all resistance spells.

Create Spellstone: (Level 36) We now get a soulbound temporary weapon buff that increases our DoT damage by 1% and increases our haste by 10, making their damage happen faster. For the price of a single soul shard you get an item with 5 charges that applies those buffs for 1 hour which persists through death.

Howl of Terror: (Level 40) An AoE Fear spell that can hit up to 5 targets within 10 yards. It’s great for saving your butt when you’re surrounded.

Death Coil: (Level 42) An excellent instant cast spell that deals Shadow damage, applies a 3 second Fear effect, and heals you for 300% of the damage it deals. This spell is absolutely full of win.

Leveling Areas: Quests and Instances
Questing Zones
My personal preferences for these levels are Arathi Highlands, Stranglethorn Vale and Alterac Mountains for your 30’s and low 40’s. From there I suggest you move on to Searing Gorge, Tanaris, or one of those zones over in northern Kalimdor that I can’t stand questing in for some reason but which still provide good experience.

For Horde side I know exactly where to level during each bracket, which quests I like to do and which to skip, and at what level to move on to a different zone. I’m not quite there yet for my Alliance toons and I have a hard time right now figuring out where to go for the 30’s in particular. I went with the ones I mentioned above this go around, though I don’t remember for sure what I did with the 80 Mage before her.

Basically the same rules apply here that we had last time; stick to a level appropriate area and look specifically for quests and quest areas that line up with with your play style.

Instances
As for instances, you want to hit Scarlet Monastery, of course, as it is still one of the best sources of gear for this level and the gear there usually lasts for 10-20 levels after you get it as well. Warlocks will favor Library and Cathedral for the most part. You will probably end up in a run or two of Uldaman which isn’t bad but not especially good either as most of the good items that drop in there have random attributes.

As you get into your 40’s you want to get into a few runs of Zul’Farrak and Sunken Temple as well. Both of those instances will have potential gear upgrades and the experience from all the mobs in them is really nice as well. As you move up in the 40’s then the big daddy of low-mid level gear drops opens up in Blackrock Depths, which is an amazing instance on so very many levels.

Demonic Domination
At this point with leveling being the goal in mind, there are only two demons that I consider viable. The Voidwalker which we’re already familiar with, and the Felhunter which is our only new demon during this level range.

I suggest you stick with the V-dub until you’re around level 36 or so as you will get more benefit from his tanking abilities in this range than you will from the Felhunter’s utility abilities and buff. You should really take the opportunity to play around with your demons though, to find out which ones really suit you.

Don’t ever feel like you have to stick with a specific demon either. If your VW works great for these melee guys right here, but the Felhunter/Succubus work better for the casters right inside the cave, it’s alright to use the Void outside and then summon the Fel/Suc when you move on into the cave, and then back to the Void on your way out. (You are draining souls from every mob that you kill, right?)

New Tactics: Affliction
Voidwalker Rotation: /petattack, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Life Tap, Drain Life, Drain Soul
Felhound Rotation: (Shadow Bolt/Immolate), Corruption, Curse of Agony, Life Tap, Drain Life/Soul
Screw it I’m a Warlock Rotation: Shadow Bolt, Immolate, Corruption, Life Tap, Drain Life/Soul

The tactics change for us just a little bit during this range, but they’re a change for the better. When you get into your mid-30’s you’ll get enough new spells, talents, or ranks of spells that you can safely drop the VW in most cases to switch over to the Felhunter’s superior DPS, buff, and Devour Magic abilities. Occasionally you’ll stick with the Voidwalker for his Sacrifice ability or even his tanking skills, but generally the pup is the way to go.

At this point you can begin a more aggressive form of Drain Tanking where instead of relying solely on Drain Life to restore your health, you now heal from applying your Corruption spell to targets via Siphon Life. So each time Corruption deals damage, you gain a percentage of that damage as healing, and the more targets that you have Corruption on, the more life you gain.

If you’re using your VW, then you want to generate threat a bit slower so you’ll start with CoA instead of Corruption so that you aren’t as likely to pull threat early on. If you do pull threat then either burn the mob down with Shadow Bolts and drains, or Fear-Drain the target until it’s dead while sicking your VW on another target. You can also use your VW’s Sacrifice ability to bubble yourself and absorb the damage you would take.

If you’re more into the Felpup, then you know he’s not going to hole agro anyway so screw the threat generation and just start killing things. Get Corruption on your targets first so that you have the life flow coming in, then apply CoA for extra damage. From there you can either use your Drains to keep your power supplies topped off, Shadow Bolts for direct damage as well as increased DoT damage from our Shadow Embrace talent.

It’s important to know how much damage you actually deal so that you know which spells you need to cast on them. The reason Shadow Bolt is in parenthesis up there is because you don’t always need it. If the Corr/CoA combination deals enough damage to kill the mobs then just apply the DoTs and move on to the next target. If Corr/CoA doesn’t kill them then you either need to apply another damaging spell (SB/Immo) before your rotation, a Drain (Life or Soul) at the end of your rotation, or you’ll need to use an AoE spell after you’ve pulled a few mobs to finish them all off.

For the “Drain Life/Soul” portion, use whichever one is most needed. If you need life, then go for DL, and if you need mana then go for DS instead. If you need both, then use DL to get the mob down below 10% health and then switch to DS to finish them off and grab the 15% mana restore from our Improved Drain Soul talent.

As for the Screw It I’m a Warlock Rotation, that’s your single target burn sequence. Start with a SB to apply Shadow Embrace, apply Corr/CoA for DoT damage, and then either follow up with a second Shadow Bolt or just burn them down with your drains.

New Tactics: Demonology
Voidwalker Questing: /petattack, Curse of Agony, Corruption, (Health Funnel), Drain Life
Felhound Question: /petattack, Curse of Agony, Corruption, (Fear), Drain Life
Voidwalker Dungeon Soloing: /petattack, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Demonic Empowerment, Health Funnel, Life Tap, Drain Life, Drain Soul

I took Demonology down a path of soloing dungeons, so basic play styles might vary here. If you look back at the Warlock: 1-29 post you can see what I did during most of my questing as Demo, and that all applies here as well.

There is very little difference in how you will play now compared to how you played at a lower level, except that the VW gets stronger and better at holding threat, and your Felhound similarly deals more damage and becomes the bane of all casters’ existence.

If you decide to quest with the Felhound then you’ll need to be a bit more aggressive in killing mobs because the only threat generation the pup has is its damage while you’ll likely be doing more of. A way to get around that to some extent is to go ahead and go through the rotation until you draw agro, then send the pup after a second target while you Fear the existing target and then Drain or Shadow Bolt them to finish them off.

Doing that allows your pup to build up threat on the second target while you finish off the first one, and then you can move back into your rotation on it while replacing Fear+Drain Life with Health Funnel if the cuddly little puppy needs some love.

When you’re soloing instances you move into a much more defensive role. While you still apply your DoTs and Drains to the target, your primary concern is keeping your Voidwalker in charge of holding agro. If you start building up your threat then you either need to back off for a bit, switch your VW’s target around, or go into an aggressive DPS phase and finish them off.

For the most part though, soloing on-level instances is heavily reliant on resource management. You can’t just throw all of your abilities out there and expect it to work. Keeping your VW alive involves using Health Funnel, which generates threat. Keeping your health up in order to use that funnel requires you to use Drain Life which also generates threat. Keeping your mana supply high enough that you can reapply your curses while also taking care of your demon requires you to use Life Tap which, surprise surprise, also generates threat. And having those fights not take twenty minutes or longer requires you to use Corr/CoA to help with the DPS which also generates threat.

During the trash pulls you’ll mostly stick to going through the same motions you would while questing, doing your best to keep the VW in control of the threat. When things get out of hand and you pull something off of him, then you need to switch him to that target to get it back or start burning through your resources to kill the mob(s). You’ll also want to keep your Soul Stone active on yourself at all times because the simple fact of the matter is you never know what might go wrong, and when it does go wrong it generally means you’re dead.

When it comes to bosses you pretty well stick to the same form of combat, keeping your pet up as much as possible while also keeping yourself up. If your threat gets too high and the boss comes after you the first thing you should do is Sacrifice the VW to give yourself a bubble against the damage, and then run towards your demon so that he’s able to get threat back faster instead of having to run after the boss doing nothing until he’s pounding on you.

After that you’ll either need to heal yourself or heal your pet, so Drain Life and Health Funnel are your friends. Just don’t get too carried away or get too anxious and generate more threat than your pet can take back from you. If you see that your threat is going up then stop applying the DoTs and just focus on Drain/Funnel to keep your team alive, and then step it back up again once your threat has dropped down to a safer level.

Talent Points and Glyphs: Affliction

At level 30 we pick up the key to Affliction Drain Tanking, and it just gets better the farther we go down the tree.

Siphon Life 1/1: When you deal damage with your Corruption spell, you are instantly healed for % of the damage done. In addition, the damage done by your Corruption, Seed of Corruption, and Unstable Affliction damage over time effects is increased by 5%.

Shadow Embrace 4/5: Your Shadow Bolt and Haunt spells apply the SHadow Embrace effect, increasing all shadow periodic damage dealt to the target by you by 4%, and reduces all periodic healing done to the target by 8%. Lasts for 12 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

Shadow Mastery 5/5: Increases the damage dealt or life drained by your Shadow spells and your Felhunter’s Shadow Bite ability by 15%.

Dark Pact 1/1: [Instant Cast] Drains 1200 of your summoned demon’s Mana, returning 100% to you.

Contagion 5/5: Increases the damage of Curse of Agony, Corruption and Seed of Corruption by 5% and reduces the chance your helpful Affliction spells and damage over time effects will be dispelled by an additional 30%.

Improved Felhunter 2/2: Your Felhunter regains 8% of its maximum mana each time it hits with its Shadow Bite ability and the cooldown of that ability is reduced by 4 sec. In addition, increases the effect of your Felhunter’s Fel Intelligence by 10%.

Malediction 3/3: Increases your spell damage by 3%, and increases the periodic critical strike chance of your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells by 9%.

As I mentioned above, Siphon Life is the key to serious drain tanking with a Warlock, and it’s how you go from being a defensive player to an offensive one. The more people you DoT with Corruption, the more health you get back. Shadow Embrace will get finished off later, but for right now we just want to increase our damage with the side benefit of reducing the target’s healing. Notice that it doesn’t kick into effect unless you’re casting Shadown Bolts (no Haunt yet), so it will mainly only come into effect during bosses or when Nightfall procs for instant Shadowbolts.

Shadow Mastery again is taken for an increase in our damage, as is Contagion. Dark Pact gives us a backup ability to Life Tap, allowing us to steal mana from our pets rather than constantly sacrificing our health. Improved Felhunter is there for just that, making him better. It also has the side benefit of restoring his mana when he attacks which keeps his supply high for when we’re using Dark Pact.

Malediction only provides us with an increase to spell power right now since we don’t have the talents yet to allow Corruption to crit, but we will have that ability in two more levels.

Malediction and Shadow Embrace are the two talents you can swap points to other locations for if you would like since their effects are more situation or do not come into play yet in this level range. If you want to replace Shadow Embrace I would suggest Suppression 3/3 for an extra 3% Hit along with 6% reduced mana cost for your Affliction spells and Amplify Curse 1/1 for a Haste buff to your curses which will make applying both Curse of Agony and Corruption on the same target much faster.

If you want to wait for Malediction then I suggest Improved Howl of Terror 2/2 instead which will make your 5-target Fear spell an instant cast which can be a true life saver when things are getting ugly and you need a few seconds to recover.

Glyphs

Major
Glyph of Siphon Life: Increases the healing you receive from your Siphon Life talent by 25%.

Glyph of Corruption: Your Corruption spell has a 4% chance to cause you to enter a Shadow Trance state after damaging the opponent. The Shadow Trance state reduces the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt spell by 100%.

Glyph of Life Tap: When you use Life Tap or Dark Pact, you gain 20% of your Spirit as spell power for 40 seconds.

Glyph of Siphon Life is the new arrival for this level bracket, providing an additional 25% healing from Siphon Life. The more mobs you fight at once the more applications of Corruption you can have running, and the more life you are able to gain.

Glyph of Corruption starts to shine even more now if you did go ahead with the Shadow Embrace talent, giving you now two chances to proc instant Shadow Bolts. If you took Shadow Embrace then I suggest this as your second glyph, but if you did not then I would lean towards Life Tap instead.

Glyph of Life Tap is going to increase your DPS a bit when you use it by adding Spell Power based on your Spirit. It’s not going to be a huge bonus at this level, but it will later on. I still haven’t used it yet myself, but I probably will soon since I’m now in Outlands myself.

Minor
Glyph of Unending Breath: Increases the swim speed of targets affected by your Unending Breath spell by 20%.

Glyph of Drain Soul: Your Drain Soul ability occasionally creates and additional soul shard.

No change here with the minor glyphs, with my personal preference being for GoUB over GoDS.

Talent Points and Glyphs: Demonology

The “big” spell for Demonology at level 30 is Mana Feed which will give your pet mana when you receive mana as well. In the build that I had previously you won’t get it at level 30 which is the soonest possible, unless you put 5 points into Unholy Power before putting the 2 into Master Summoner that I mentioned in the last post. If you want to switch those around that’s up to you, personally I prefer having an instant pet first which is why I went the path that I did.

Unholy Power +3, 5/5: Increases the damage done by your Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter and Felguard’s melee attacks and your Imp’s Firebolt by 20%.

Mana Feed 1/1: When you gain mana from Drain Mana or Life Tap spells, your summoned demon gains 100% of the mana you gain.

Demonic Aegis 2/3: Increases the effectiveness of your Demon Armor and Fel Armor spells by 20%.

Master Demonologist 5/5: Grants both the Warlock and their demon an effect as long as the demon is active.
- Imp: Increases Fire damage by 5%, and increases the critical effect chance of your Fire spells by 5%.
- Voidwalker: Reduces Physical damage taken by 10%.
- Succubus: Increases your Shadow damage by 5%, and increases the critical effect chance of your Shadow spells by 5%.
- Felhunter: Reduces all spell damage taken by 10%
- Felguard: Increases all damage done by 5%, and reduces all damage taken by 5%.

Demonic Empowerment 1/1: [Instant cast] Grants the Warlock’s summoned demon Empowerment.
- Imp: Increases the Imp’s spell critical strike chance by 20% for 30 sec.
- Voidwalker: Increases the VW’s health by 20%, and its threat generated from spells and attacks by 20% for 20 sec.
- Succubus: Instantly vanishes, causing the Succubus to go into an improved Invisibility state. The vanish effect removes all stuns, snares and movement impairing effects from the Succubus.
- Felhunter: Dispels all magical effects from the Felhunter.
- Felguard: Increases the Felguard’s attack speed by 20% and breaks all stun, snare and movement impairing effects and makes your Felguard immun to them for 15 sec.

Demonic Knowledge 3/3: Increases your spell damage by an amount equal to 12% of the total of your active demon’s Stamina plus Intellect.

Demonic Resilience 1/3: Reduces the chance you’ll be critically hit by melee and spells by 1% and reduces all damage your summoned demon takes by 5%.

Demonic Tactics 5/5: Increases melee and spell critical strike chance for you and your summoned demon by 10%.

Glyphs

Major
Glyph of Voidwalker: Increases your Voidwalker’s total Stamina by 20%.

Glyph of Health Funnel: Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while channeling your Health Funnel spell by 100%.

Not much has changed in relation to our glyphs, so for Demo I suggest you stick where you’re at for right now and be ready for the Felguard to hit next level instead.

Minor
Glyph of Unending Breath: Increases the swim speed of targets affected by your Unending Breath spell by 20%.

Glyph of Drain Soul: Your Drain Soul ability occasionally creates and additional soul shard.

Again we have no change in minor glyphs.

Gearing Up
As we continue to gain levels our preference on stats begins to shift now as I mentioned it would. We now shift into this position instead:

Spell Power > Stamina > Hit Rating > Intellect > Spirit > everything else

Affliction will feel the need for Hit a bit more than Demo, but both specs should be going for it when it’s available.

Putting It Into Action
And since there have been a few requests for more of my fabulous artwork to be included, here’s one depicting the use of Siphon Soul for those of who enjoy Affliction:

And for those who instead prefer to unleash the Fel beasts upon your enemies, I give you Demon Soloing:

Related posts:

1. Warlock Leveling Part I: 1-29
2. Druid Leveling: 1-20 (Balance)
3. Mage Leveling Part I: Beginning

Now I’m not going to just link you the BiS gear for every slot, because in most situations thats not easily accessible to me. I like to consider myself fairly middle of the road (for a regular raider) so the gear I talk about here will be available to most of my readers as well. I won’t be focusing on the stats and everything for every single piece, instead I’ll be going over how all our gear synergizes as a whole and what benefits or pitfalls it may bring.

First off, I’ll start with the gear that we’ll be holding over from previous levels of content, our tier 9 set. From what I’ve seen the optimal pieces to keep are definitely the t9 helm and legs (I’m rocking the ilevel 245 versions, which shouldn’t be to hard to get especially because pugs regularly steamroll TOC25) optimally you’d be able to score the 25man heroic-level versions. The helm is wonderfully itemized, and is still holding its own compared to drops I’ve seen in ICC. The pants are also good, but my main reason for keeping them is because the t10 pants are terribly itemized and don’t have any arpen at all while the t9 legs still have a fair amount. It also seems that holding onto the gloves instead of the helm is also viable, although there are some good options for that slot at higher ilevels.

Sticking with tier gear, a lot of our tier 10 pieces have some strange itemization, but the ones that I’ve gone for first are the shoulders and chest. The t9 shoulders were also kind of lackluster so t10 is a big upgrade, not to mention that I’m an orc so how am I supposed to not go for a pair of spiked shoulders that look huge and awesome on me =P. I had the Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate before I acquired my t10 chest, which wasn’t that awesome since it was kind of a side-grade. The t10.5 version of the chest scales up wonderfully though, not to mention the set bonus is entirely too awesome to pass up (especially when combined with our t9 bonus).

To make up for the fact that some of our t10 gear is kind of weird at times, almost all the badge gear we can get is wonderful. The back is BiS until heroic content, not to mention it has a fair amount of arpen and a socket. After my tier and the cloak the next upgrade I went for were the gloves, which are itemized beautifully again with more arpen. The t10 gloves are decent if you’re in dire need of some hit (more on the entire hit-cap thing later in this post T_T), but as a MM player that arpen is awfully tempting. Speaking of hit the badge belt is also awesome, it has a ton of hit rating and a total of 3 sockets (after the buckle) which means you could throw 20 hit gems in all of those and have around 3% on one piece. I upgraded to this from the 25man Anubarak belt, which was a little painful because that belt was really good at the time and itemized perfectly for a marksmanship hunter. But with a lot of gear I have is so barren in the hit department that I couldn’t resist.

The ilevel 264 crafted items cost an arm and a leg at the moment, but in my opinion its definitely worth it. We already have our t9 legs so I won’t be breaking that up (although the crafted pants are pretty sweet), but the crafted boots are awesome and a big upgrade from most available alternatives. I was lucky enough to score the boots off of 10man Festergut which are itemized well and make the 264 boots more of a sidegrade. They are still a decent sized DPS boost, despite that some stats are being moved around. But since getting this gear is still pretty cost-prohibitive (for me at least :<) I’m not chasing after crafting them right away instead I might start selling some Primordial Saronite until the prices come down a little bit.

For the other slots that can only be filled by drops there are quite a few decent choices. For the neck piece I’m still rocking the Charge of the Eredar, if you have the dough to spend you can easily get pretty close to BiS with Wodin’s Lucky Necklace from the auction house (or off trash in ICC). When it comes to rings theres no reason not to go for the Ashen Verdict ring, it scales extremely well and once you get to exalted its awesome (AP proc, gem socket, hit rating, what more do you need!). For your second ring the Dexterous Brighstone Ring from Triumphs is still a contender, although I have the ring off 10man Saurfang which is a wonderful upgrade. When it comes to your ranged slot theres a great bow off 10man Lady Deathwhisper (which drops all the time o_O) and if you can afford not having any stats on your bow (apart from a badass proc) Zod’s Repeating Longbow off Lady Runs-Her-Mouth 25man is BiS until heroic content (I was skeptical when I first got it, but after a short adjustment period I’ve fallen in love). As for a stat-stick in ICC there’s a serious fucking drought of hunter-itemized weapons. Sure there’s a staff off of 10man Rotface, but it’s not that amazing (better for kitties IMO). There’s a decent polearm off of Blood Princes, it sacrifices a large portion of agility budget for arpen and some hit (my calculations place it below Quel’Delar still). If anything you can hope for Distant Land off 25man Festergut (again, more designed for feral druids IMO). If you have the gold to spend I’d suggest investing in a Battered Hilt (its better in overall DPS than everything listed so far except Distant Land). Or you could end up like me stuck with a 232 weapon, looking silly =[. If you’re hoping for that brilliantly itemized weapon just keep dreaming about stuff like this and this (or maybe this) from the Lich King.

One of the most talked-about items for hunters are definitely trinkets. One of the most easily accessible is the Needle-Encrusted Scorpion (from heroic Forge of Souls), despite its low proc-rate it certainly pulls its weight once you’re able to soft-cap arpen with it. Also the Whispering Fanged Skull off Deathwhisper 10man is a wonderful trinket to keep around if you aren’t worried about arpen or are close enough to hard-cap that soft-capping is no longer a concern. But the elephant in the room is definitely Deathbringer’s Will, it has a HUGE amount of passive arpen on it (11% percent O_O) and wonderful procs that can change your entire rotation. I managed to get my hands on it, but only by forgoing any loot in 25man ICC for a month to secure my position on top of the SK list for my raid group (this was before we even downed Saurfang once, so I was pretty much pissing into the wind). It’s definitely worth it DPS wise, not to mention it makes you feel like a total badass. If you don’t have access to this bad boy, the old standby Darkmoon Card: Greatness is still viable (or Death’s Verdict/Choice for that matter).

After this wall of text crits you you’re probably wondering what all this means. On my toon this gear puts you ridiculously under hit cap (you’ll need 3/3 Focused Aim for sure), with a severe lack of haste (I know it’s not a big deal but having slow slow slow Steady Shots are a pet-peeve of mine T_T), and a fairly high amount of crit along with soft-capped arpen (100% when the scorpion procs). This combination of gear leads to some changes to our play style as well, based on set-bonuses and procs and all that jazz. Two piece t9 is still awesome, so Serpent Sting still needs to be up as much as humanly possible (rolling on multiple targets if you’re really a big dog). Two piece t10 augments this further, while the 15% bonus damage proc is active you can reapply your SS (during the Steady Shot phase of your rotation) and refresh it with Chimera Shot to constantly keep that damage bonus to Serpent Sting up on the target. Deathbringer’s Will procs add another layer on top of what we already know, when we proc either Aim of the Iron Dwarves or Agility of the Vrykul along with the t10 2-piece (and even Culling the Herd if you’re feeling cheeky) you want to reapply SS and refresh it with Chimera Shot as I went over earlier. Keeping up this “super-sting” is a HIGH priority because its doing 15%-18% more damage and has an augmented crit chance based on either 600 agility or 600 crit rating, this provides a big bonus to our overall dps not to mention our Chimera Shot damage. While these procs are up you definitely want to pause and do a Rapid Fire/Readiness cycle to maximize the amount of shots you can crank out while under the effects of such bonuses. One proc I haven’t talked about yet is the arpen proc, due to the exponential nature of armor penetration the closer you are to soft-cap the more important this is. For me, when this procs I have to do my best to stand still and crank out a high frequency of Auto Shots and Steady Shots (hasted as much as possible) since the boss is effectively naked.

Despite the shortcomings presented by ICC gear, overall I think Blizz did a pretty good job designing things (except no weapons! :<). Our set bonuses are influential and fun, not to mention they can change our entire rotation sometimes. Sure it makes things more complicated if you really want to squeeze the maximum amount of DPS out of your toon, but personally I get bored when things get too repetitive or easy. Hopefully this guide helped you to make your own choices on what gear you’re gonna be shooting for depending on how you play. I don’t recommend copying me item for item,  but I do hope my logic in choosing items has helped you decide whats right for you. I’d love to hear the choices you made or trends you’ve observed at higher gear levels. Also feel free to send me some gold to aid in my gear “research” =P thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Frosty Gear in 3.3
2. How to choose Gear without a lot of Math
3. Solve the Avoidance Problem, Eliminate Tank Gear

The result is Infinite Ignore (also known as “InIg”). I can’t possibly do better than ChaosInc has done describing InIg, so here’s the official description:

• There is No cap on the number of people ignored.
• It hooks directly into ignore/unignore commands
• You can import your existing list from WoW
• Your Infinite Ignore list carries across all your toons on the realm
• If you are sick of the little voices in your head, you can ignore yourself too

OK, I don’t know why you’d ignore yourself, but you can, if you want to.

There are only three commands which are peculiar to InIg: import (to import your original WoW ignore list), reset (to clear the ignore list), and list (to, well, list everyone you’re currently ignoring).

As you can see, we’ve continued coverage of add-ons that help deal with the people who motivated Anea’s blog post.

You can get InfiniteIgnore from Wowinterface or Curse.

Music for this segment is provided by Freeplay.com and is entitled “Silence,” by Pierre Langer and Scott P. Schreer.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium Segment #7: DeclineDuel
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #10

Dalaran was crowded, but that was nothing new. Despite the masses of city residents and visiting adventurers the orc moved through the foot traffic with familiar ease. After releasing his mount at the flight pad to rest he made his way down a few well-traveled roads before descending into the network of tunnels that wound under the entirety of the magical metropolis. Things were a little less glamorous in the tunnels, which was probably why the hunter spent most of his time here. Of course a few of the less savory denizens of Dalaran made their living in the Underbelly, but they knew who deserved a wide berth (it helped to have a heap of canine muscle trotting beside you). The underground thoroughfares remained fairly crowded as the orc reached his destination.

He rounded a corner and was assaulted by the welcome commotion of his favorite haunt. Despite being in the heart of the Underbelly the Cantrips and Crows Tavern was always doing good business, bringing in a crowd who were after a little more secluded atmosphere, whether to seek a little peace and quiet (at least as peaceful as it could be in the busiest hub on the entire continent) or to conduct business away from the common passerby. The orc’s muscular bulk made the thick planks creak as he crossed over the cloudy water and into the tavern proper. He scanned the large common room, quickly finding a seat at one of the many mismatched tables looking over the docks and water below. The noise of the tavern’s many patrons, whether at the long, sturdy bar or around the crackling fireplace, was comforting to the greenskin as he settled into the soft time-worn leather chair and stretched his arms out wide. Even Sleet, a grizzled Frostworg matron that had become attached to him after his time spent with the Sons of Hodir, laid down stiffly and rested her scarred snout on wicked paws.

“Thakarron, it’s good to lay eyes friend! Got a fresh bowl of stew for you, Brella made some changes to the recipe after you suggested that new marinade for the Shoveltusk and it’s become a favorite once again!” blustered the well-known proprietor of the inn, setting out a simple bowl of simmering house stew on the wobbly wooden table along with a tall glass of sweet herbal tea.

“Same to you Ajay, it feels nice to have some time to relax,” replied Thakarron, his friendly smile was made fearsome by his broad tusks. The orc picked up the battered spoon and scooped up a spoonful of thick reddish brown broth along with a small hunk of dark shoveltusk shoulder. A heady aroma of garlic, rosemary, and other flavorful spices filled his nostrils as he let the decadent broth coat his tongue. The shoveltusk had just the right amount of marbling and was a mix of sweet marinade and gamey meat as it melted in the orc’s mouth. “Give my thanks to Brella, she’s outdone herself as always,” complemented the hunter, around a mouthful of hearty stew.

“I’ll try, you know shes already amazed that a ‘filthy greenskin’ like you could be such a good cook!” exclaimed the human jokingly, a wry smile beneath his salt and pepper mustache.

A guttural chuckle spilled from the orc, at odds with his menacing appearance. Brella was a young battle axe, even for a Dwarven woman, and firmly believed that the stout little people were clearly the master race of Azeroth. “Maybe its better you just tell her I bow before her endless skill with pot and ladel.”

The innkeeper barked with laughter and slapped the hunter heartily on the back, a gesture that barely stirred the muscular orc. “You always were more clever than I, Thakarron. Anyway, I’ll leave you to your business, stay as long as you like, I’ll have your room ready if you wish!” With that he turned and made his way to the back of the house, mingling with other patrons as he went.

Thakarron quickly gulped down his stew, the heat of it helping to protect against the cold that permeated all of Northrend. He was almost finished when Sleet nudged her large muzzle against his leg, her mouth open and tongue lolling out. With a sigh Thakarron fished out one of the last pieces of shoveltusk with his spoon and let it fall down toward his pet worg. Before it could even touch the ground Sleet caught the morsel in her mouth and gulped it down, letting out a chuff of approval before returning to her strenuous task of comfortably lounging.

Now that his meal was pretty much finished Thakarron slid his bowl to the side and took a simple journal bound in supple brown leather along with a writing set from his pack. With a delicate touch he opened the cover, exposing creamy parchment pages of utmost quality. He uncorked his inkpot and dipped the oversized quill, plucked from a roc in Sholazar Basin, into it. The orc paused with his hand over the page, his heavy brows furrowing in thought. After several moments he finally began to write in heavy skittering script…

***

I’m still not sure why I am writing this, I have told myself that it is because I feel like my exploits could provide knowledge to others. But perhaps this is an attempt to immortalize my fellow adventurers and I, so even in death we are not forgotten. I do not fear death, no true Orc would. What I do fear is meeting my end before I can serve my purpose, whatever it may be. In these dire times nothing is certain, so it seems this journal is an effort for my tale to live on beyond me. It is my hope that I can educate others through the horrors and wonders I have seen. My lessons won’t be taught in some soldier’s practice pen or in the children’s lecture hall. These lessons will be written in the blood of my enemies, told by the point of my arrows, and backed by experience wrought in the crucible of combat. I am Thakarron, proud hunter of the Horde, friend to many and enemy to countless more. Here I recount my adventures through Northrend, in peace and in battle, I hope whatever tales I record here bring honor to our brethren and terror to any who would stand against us. Lok’tar ogar!

As our war in Northrend pushes toward our final goal, the death of the Lich King, I find myself tested like never before. Not by the trivial bloodsport of the Argent Tournement, or the possessed gods and technological marvels of Ulduar, and certainly not the decrepit liches of Naxxramus. The foes here are great, but so to is the chance for glory. I am not rushing in headlong, the bloodlust of our past is certainly the path to destruction when the sakes are as high as they are now. For now we journey slowly through the Citadel of the Lich King, aided by heroes of the Horde as well as the warriors of the Ashen Verdict. I have acquired many wonders and relics so far, and tales of others have perked my interests. My father drilled into me to “train hard, fight easy” a phrase he lived by, considering his axe was never far from his hand. So at this time I hone my skills, my bow arm has never been stronger nor my marksmanship more unerring. Despite this I continue to search for further ways to push myself. I have heard whispers from the denizens of Storm Peaks of a exceedingly rare beast, a creature more myth than flesh. A holdover from times of ancient magic and rampant power. I cannot resist such a chance to track down a legend. Perhaps I will have to take a leave of absence from Icecrown when the opportunity presents itself. My only worry is that Sleet will become jealous, she is already as fickle as any Orc woman, a trait I do not place in high regard!

***

Although the first entry was short, Thakarron was satisfied for now. He closed the journal and quickly wrapped up his  writing set. Several of the other patrons risked glances at the orc, seeing a greenskin writing with both speed and skill was a rare sight. No jokes were made though, many either knew of the hunter’s reputation or simply saw the ancient longbow stowed across his broad back. He took a long drink of the herbal tea before leaning back on his chair and shutting his glinting blue eyes for a bit of relaxation.

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So a quick post here, if any of you have been keeping up with recent events in the gaming community there have been some big things happening over at Activision. Big scary things.

Last week over at Activision, everyone’s favorite gaming company (which also bought Blizzard, much to our cumulative joy) the COO Vince Zampella and President Jason West of Infinity Ward were terminated. From the looks of it, this whole ordeal wasn’t very friendly. Outsourced security guards were present at the actual termination, to both escort them off the premises and keep any information from being passed to other Infinity Ward employees. Infinity Ward plans to pursue a wrongful termination lawsuit, which Activision will surely contest.

The repercussions are sure to come fast and furious, since Infinity Ward has been touted as one of the tightest knit group of friends and developers. Who’s to say that more Infinity Ward employees won’t follow their leadership and leave Activision to head towards greener pastures? Speaking of green, other publishers will definitely be throwing some crazy cheddar down to secure Infinity Ward if they do leave Activision as a whole. In case you’ve decided to become a hermit for the last few years, Infinity Ward developed the original Call of Duty, as well as perhaps the best-selling video game of all time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Although we don’t know what kind of legality Activision has on the CoD IP, you can bet that its pretty ironclad. They have announced that Sledgehammer Games will be working on the next CoD title due in 2010, while Treyarch continues to develop a Vietnam Era CoD. There’s rumors that IW wanted to work on a new IP apart from CoD, or at least pursue a different angle, something that Activision probably wasn’t very happy with. Regardless if another publisher (EA? Microsoft?) decides to pick up IW who knows what could happen, needless to say the future of Infinity Ward is definitely in flux after recent events.

What does this mean for Blizzard? Like Infinity Ward, Blizz is definitely a tightly knit group of highly skilled individuals that has made some awesome games. Infinity Ward has also gone on record talking some serious shit about big, bad Activision. Although Blizzard hasn’t said anything bad to the public, many of us can see that the two could easily be at odds. A lot of long time Blizz fans have noticed many changes, that could be the result of Activision’s (more specifically Bobby’s) financial mindset influencing what Blizzard wants to do. They’ve been known to release games when they feel that they are ready, not when the calendar says would be the peak time. I for one have nothing but respect for Blizzard’s efforts to put out quality products, but I’m not sure Activision is a fan. If WoW takes a turn towards annual expansion packs in an effort to suck more cash out of us, I won’t be very pleased. The growing number of microtransactions aren’t a very good sign either.

Finally, you can’t help but think that Activision and Mr. Kotick didn’t know what message they would be sending by terminating the creators of one of the most successful games of all time. Its a statement that you ain’t safe, no matter how much money you put in our pocket or how fervent your fans are. If you conflict with our interests, you ain’t safe. Bobby Kotick pretty much dropped his pants and showed us what he’s working with, and he isn’t afraid to do what he thinks is right for Activision’s financial future. So what does this mean for Blizzard in the future? You can bet they had one hell of a morning meeting the day after this all went down.

So although Deathwing may be the big boss of Cataclysm, but all the destruction he wrought isn’t shit compared to what Mr. Kotick could do to Blizzard as a whole. Regardless of what happens, things have definitely gotten a lot more interesting for Blizzard, as well as the rest of the gaming community.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this whole situation, and if this is your first time hearing about it I hope this post provided a good bit of insight!

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You can use the general information from this post in conjunction with the Death Knight Tanking Guides for AoE rotations I use for questing. I use pretty well the same exact concepts and rotations when doing AoE Tanking on my Death Knight when the situation calls for me to focus on AoE to grab and maintain agro in an instant so that I can then settle into a tanking rotation.

For the purposes of this article when you see any form of “(BFU)” it is an expression of the ability’s Rune Cost, where “(##)” will show the amount of Runic Power that is required for abilities with RP costs rather than Rune costs. When using our Death Runes they will be noted as “(DD)”.

This guide also contains only information up to level 70, so spells obtained only at higher levels will not appear in this guide.

Death Knight Specs: Quick Overview
Any Death Knight spec can do AoE grinding to at least some degree. Frost and Unholy are much better off than Blood is in the AoE category (though perhaps not so much in the survivability area), but any spec can technically do it. Some just need to branch out a little bit more than others.

All DK’s have access to Death and Decay which is a solid AoE ability though it does come with a heavy Rune cost.

Spending 11 points in the Unholy tree grants you access to Corpse Explosion which serves as a Runic Power version of AoE damage to be used when you are in a Rune Blackout (all runes used and on cooldown). Corpse Explosion does require a non-elemental, non-mechanical corpse in order to be used, but it is another option for AoE damage once you’ve laid down the hate and started piling up the corpses. But any corpse will do, including a fallen comrade.

With 8 points in the Blood tree you can have Scent of Blood 3/3 which gives you a 15% chance after a dodge or parry to have each of your next three auto-attacks generate 10 Runic Power which could be taken in addition to Corpse Explosion to help fuel its repeated use. I don’t know that it’s a great option, but there it is if you happen to be a CE freak (like me).

You can spend 14 points in the Blood tree to get both Rune Tap (B) which will restore 10% of your health when used, as well as Death Rune Mastery which will cause the runes used for Obliterate and Death Strike to regenerate as Death Runes. Having both Death Rune Mastery and Blood of the North maxed will give you four different attacks that will grant Death Runes to help fuel whatever ability you might want to use.

Since I’m focusing on Frost here, I will point out that I suggest you get all the way through the Frost tree (level 60 minimum) before you branch off into the other trees. As for the rest of the spec, I suggest you follow the guide I offer in my DK Tanking: Frost Edition guides.

Frost AoE: General Information
You can use either a single disease or a double disease method for this, though my personal suggestion is that you go with a double disease, dual wielding Frost build.

Howling Blast (FU) is your largest source of AoE damage, and using things like your Killing Machine procs and your Deathchill ability to maximize your damage by providing auto-crits go a long way towards burning down the largest group of mobs in the shortest amount of time. Rime procs will give you free uses of Howling Blast as well as resetting its cooldown, so keep a keen eye out for those as well. You may want to consider using an addon such as PowerAuras Classic to help you keep track of your procs if you have trouble with them.

With Frost you are going to make frequent use of Howling Blast for AoE damage and applying the Frost Fever disease, Obliterate (FU) to generate Rime procs for free Howling Blasts, Blood Boil (B) for DK-centered AoE damage, Pestilence (B) for disease spreading, and potentially Death & Decay (BFU) as well. If you branched out into Unholy for Corpse Explosion (40) then you have a Runic Power AoE as well, which is centered on the corpse that it’s used on.

Pulling

As a Death Knight you have several tools to use for pulling mobs. The most obvious of these is Scorpion’s famous move, Death Grip, which will pull the targeted mob to you and “force” them to attack you for three seconds. Some mobs are immune to the physical pull, but they will still agro you and chase you down after you use it. Death Grip has a pretty big cooldown all things considered, but it does not require any runes or runic power to use.

You also have two sources of ranged AoE pulling, in the form of Howling Blast (FU) and Death and Decay (BFU), which can both be used to pull a group of mobs instead of just one. Howling Blast is a bit better if you are pulling the group and moving on to pull others as well, where Death and Decay is probably better off cast as you near the end of your pull so that you can make use of its DoT (Damage of Time) AoE effect.

You also have two forms of single-target ranged pulls in Icy Touch (F) and Death Coil (40). Death Coil requires RP to cast, so it’s not the greatest spell for pulling, but when you find yourself high on RP and nothing else to spend it on just yet you might as well get some use out of it.

If you don’t have much, or any, Runic Power built up during a pull, feel free to use your melee abilities rather than simply body pulling. Primarily you want to use Plague Strike (B) for this in order to establish a disease, or Blood Strike (B) to get your Blood Runes converted to Death Runes for use in the next round.

There is one other spell I want to mention here for pulling, but it will actually be more useful after the next step happens to help get stray casters to come to your centralized area. The spell is called Strangulate (B) which is a single target, 30 yard ranged Silence spell that lasts for 5 seconds. When you use that on a caster they will rush towards melee range as long as they are silenced, and 5 seconds should be more than enough for you to get them within range of your AoE spells.

And of course you do still have the old fashioned, tried and true body pull which can be done either mounted or on foot, which simply requires that you get within agro range of the mobs. Some locations allow for or maybe even require that you use Line of Sight (LoS) techniques to agro the mobs and then move to a location that they cannot attack you from so that they must run around it to engage you; running to the other side of a wall is a perfect example of this as they will run around the wall as well and then stand there clustered together to help with your AoE.

Centralize
In my other AoE Grinding guides I mentioned a step here that I called “Corral”, which is basically just gathering all the mobs up into a central area so that you can AoE them down from there. You want to do that with a Frost DK as well, but it’s not quite so big a deal as it is with a Mage; instead it’s more like grinding with a Paladin where as long as they are within your AoE range you really don’t care how close they are to one another.

To be technical on the subject, you do want the mobs to be within 10 yard of each other so that you are able to hit them all, but with the exception of casters they should all be ganged up around you to begin with. Again, using the various spells mentioned in the Pulling section above and things like LoS are key to getting the mobs centralized and ready to burn them down.

Reposition
Where a mage wants to put some distance between himself and the mobs, a Death Knight just wants everyone to look straight into his scourgefire eye sockets and see their own deaths rushing forth to meet them. As a DK you need to embrace your tanking habits and be sure to get as many mobs as you possibly can to be in front of you so that you can make use of all of your avoidance on them. You do this by repositioning yourself which usually consists of just backing up while facing them so that they get in front of you.

Some mobs just move in odd patterns and constantly seem to move behind you no matter what you do. In those cases you can either plant your back against a wall, or just ignore that one mob until you’ve taken out the others. Another option that is open to you is to use your Hungering Cold (F) ability to freeze everything in place, reposition yourself where you want to be (with all the mobs in front of you), and then either wait for the spell to wear off or hit them with a ranged AoE like Howling Blast to break them all out again.

Strategic use of Hungering Cold can make the difference between a successful AoE grinder and an exceptional AoE grinder. Use it to freeze the mobs in place, use Pestilence to spread your diseases (which does not break the ice), and then use a bandage on yourself if needed to restore your health and also allow your other runes the time they need to cooldown. Once you’re ready (or the 10 second timer is up) spread your diseases again with Pestilence and then go back into your rotation. If you do not have the Glyph of Disease to refresh your diseases for you then you will need to reapply them via Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Pestilence. If you do have the glyph then as long as the diseases are still on your current target it will refresh them and spread them around once again.

Important Note: Because our survival talent from the Blood tree, Blade Barrier, doesn’t come into effect until our Blood Runes are on cooldown, I suggest you go ahead and use up any remaining Blood Runes during this step. If you haven’t spread your diseases yet or you did spread them but they’re wearing off, then use Pestilence, otherwise go for Blood Boil if there are two or mobs near you or Blood Strike if there is only one.

Death to the Living!
Once you’ve gathered up the mobs and got them in place it’s time to burn those suckers down. Each DK has their own personal play style, so if you have another way you prefer to do this then by all means go with your own if you prefer, and of course feel free to leave any comments, suggestions, or criticisms you might have.

Rotation
1st Rune Set: Icy Touch (F), Plague Strike (U), Pestilence (B), Blood Boil (B), Howling Blast (FU), RP Dump
2nd Rune Set: Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast (Free)], Howling Blast (DD), Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast (Free)], RP Dump

Technically our first rune set will actually be a sporadic mishmash of whatever you happened to use to pull all of the mobs to you, but we’re talking about the rotation here.

The first rune set establishes your diseases, spreads them around, and then hits with two AoE spells. Your Runic Power Dump for the first set is probably going to be Frost Strike (40). If you have enough points in Unholy then it can be used for Corpse Explosion (40) instead if you want more AoE.

Frost Strike hits hard and it’s great for chopping down your groups faster which will lead to better survivability overall, but CE will help bring down the group as a whole so use whichever serves best in your situation. If you’re taking quite a bit of damage then it’s better to increase your single target DPS with FS to kill some of them off, unless the mobs are already low enough on health that CE might finish one or more of them off for you. If you’re doing fine on your health then stick to AoE spells as much as you can so that you get the most damage on the most targets for the resources you spend.

In the second rune set we focus more on AoE damage to bring down the mobs as one. With the initial Obliterate we are hoping for a Rime proc to use Howling Blast, but if we don’t get one then we’re moving right along to a regular Howling Blast and getting those Blood Runes (Death Runes in this case) back on cooldown to proc our Parry buff again. Whenever Rime procs go ahead and use your Howling Blast; if that screws up your rotation because HB is on cooldown then simply replace the HB with Obliterate instead and try for another Rime proc.

Remember though that we aren’t trying to tank an instance with this, so we aren’t so much worried about maintaining threat as we are simply killing everything around us. If Howling Blast is available and you still have multiple mobs on you it’s perfectly acceptable to use HB instead of Obliterate for the AoE damage. Rime is more likely to proc when using two weapons instead of one, so it’s especially acceptable for a 2H build to use HB over Obliterate since the chance to proc Rime is lower.

I’M GONNA DIIIIEEEEE!!!
Settle down now, you’re a DK…you’re already dead. Before we get on into the next section, let us take a break and talk about what to do when things go wrong and suddenly you’re in trouble.

The first choice you have is something I already mentioned up above, which is using Hungering Cold to freeze everything within 10 yards of you for 10 seconds. This gives you time to either use a bandage or put your running shoes on and get the heck out of there (only a coward runs from combat, but only a “moron” throws his gold away on unnecessary repair bills).

Another option that we have open to us is Death Pact (40 RP, requires level 66) which requires you to sacrifice your ghoul in exchange for 40% of your health to instantly be healed. It’s a big heal and it comes in very handy. For this reason I save my ghoul for when I need heals rather than using him for extra dps, pulling, or whatever. The one thing you need to watch out for is the runic cost of Death Pact. If you are taking a beating, be sure to build up your RP but try not to use it unless you have more than 30-40% so that you can DP when needed.

You also have the use of Icebound Fortitude (20) after level 62 which will give you 12 seconds of damage reduction to lessen those blows.

You can also make an adjustment to your attack rotations, replacing Obliterates and/or Howling Blasts with Death Strike (FU) instead, to heal yourself for 5% of your maximum health for each disease you have on the target.

If things are really getting hot, you’ve already used everything available to you that we’ve talked about here, then the only other option you have left to you (besides potions and such which you should already be well aware of) is to make an emergency switch over to Blood Presence (B) which increases your damage by 15% and heals you for 4% of the damage you deal. By default you should be grinding in Frost Presence (F) which increases your Stamina by 6%, your armor from gear by 60% and reduces damage you take by 8%. Losing Frost Presence can be a very dangerous thing when you’re already getting beat on hard enough to be worried, but if you can dish out enough damage in a short enough amount of time then Blood Presence can potentially save your life by switching to it, landing a big attack for the heal (Death Strike is optimal for this), and then switching back to Frost Presence for your damage reduction.

All Your Sparklies Are Belong To Me
And now that they’re all dead it’s just a matter of collecting loot and moving right along to the next group. A lot of your damage is going to be dealt over time rather than in bursts. So when you do get procs like Rime and Killing Machine, it’s a good idea to move right into your next pull to take advantage of those if you aren’t in need of healing. Timing your Rime/KM procs so that they’re used together is an excellent way to bring down a lot of mobs in a short amount of time.

What Spells Do I Use Again?

Howling Blast	Blood Boil
Corpse Explosion	Death and Decay

Filed under: Death Knight, Guide, Leveling Tagged: AoE, Farming, Frost, Instance, Leveling, Solo, Tanking

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Tanking: Frost
2. Death Knight Tanking: Frost (61-70)
3. Final Edition: Prot Paladin AoE Grinding (Part 1 of 2)

Discussing the stat changes
We break down and discuss the stat changes that await players in Cataclysm.

To buff or not to buff?
That is the question. The answer depends on how you feel about the new buff for players in the Icecrown Citadel Raid.

Pre-Cataclysm Gnome/Troll Quests
We discuss the news and lore regarding the Gnome and Troll events coming soon to World of Warcraft.

Icesnake’s Addon Emporium #11
Icesnake brings us an addon this week called: Free Refills

Listener Emails and Comments
We thank you all for listening and talk about what you had to say this week.

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Related posts:

1. WoWphiles Podcast Show #10
2. WoWphiles Podcast Show #20
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #17

The Icecrown Citadel Zone Buff has been implemented into World of Warcraft starting today. In case you aren’t familiar with it, the buff in its current state increases total health, healing done and damage dealt by 5%. In time the buff will grow stronger and will scale up to a reported 35%. That’s a pretty significant buff.

The buff is optional however, and players have the ability to tell a member of their faction that they do not want to receive the buff and can experience the encounters as they were originally designed.

So why is this buff even here at all? The buff will make it easier for everyone to progress through Icecrown Citadel and make The Lich King accessible to raiders of all levels. Less experienced raiders will love this addition to the game, while the most hardcore of raiders will do doubt be less than pleased to see anyone and everyone killing the final end game boss because they had 35% more damage and healing.

I myself fall somewhere in between. I like the buff because it will be helpful in getting raids over the hump when they are stuck on a particular boss. But I also don’t like the buff because part of me will almost feel like a kill of Sindragosa with the buff for example, doesn’t mean as much as a kill without it.

Should I worry about feeling like I am cheapening my experience and taking the easy way out by taking advantage of the Icecrown Citadel buff, or should I be thanking Blizzard for giving me a way to make the boss encounters more manageable?

Again, it’s a completely optional buff, but making the decision to use it or not to use it is where the problem lies.

What are your thoughts on this raid buff? Do you feel like it minimizes your kill because you are buffed?

Related posts:

1. Icecrown Citadel: The Epic Battle We Hoped For
2. Ice Crown Citadel Announced
3. Feeling a Chill….of the Throne!

There are several professions to choose from in the game, and it’s a question that comes up often when someone rolls a new toon: Which professions should I take? Heck, even I ask it when I’m rolling a new class, or when I’m thinking about trying out a new one.

There’s no definite answer to this question as it can vary based on what you want to do with the character, what you want to accomplish with them, whether you want to make gold, improve yourself at end game, supply your alts, or any number of other reasons. That’s not a question that I can answer directly because I’m not you. What I can do though, is give you a list of what benefits you get from certain professions.

If you want a nice overview of the various professions then I will direct you to WoWWiki Professions for information about what each profession is and so forth.

If you are interested in power leveling professions, then I direct you instead to WoW-Professions.com. When I want to power level my professions (which is basically every single time), this is the site I turn to for reference on what I need to buy and in what quantities.

Gathering Professions: Basic Information
The one term I want to make you familiar with in case you aren’t already is Training Cap. All professions are limited by a Training Cap, which is a certain level of the skill that you cannot go beyond until you have reached certain requirements. The Training Cap (TC) for all professions are multiples of 75 (75, 150, 225, 300, 375, 450). Also, each of those caps requires a certain character level before you can train to move up into the next skill range.

Skill Level 1-75: No requirement (crafting professions require level 5 to train)
Skill Level 76-150: Requires Herbalism Skill 50+
Skill Level 151-225: Requires Character Level 10, Herbalism Skill 125+
Skill Level 226-300: Requires Character Level 25, Herbalism Skill 200+
Skill Level 301-375: Requires Character Level 40, Herbalism Skill 275+ (trainers in Outlands/Northrend only)
Skill Level 376-450: Requires Character Level 55, Herbalism Skill 350+ (trainers in Northrend only)

Herbalism: The Mighty Harvesters

Herbalism allows you to pick herbs across the world that are used by players with the Alchemy and Inscription professions. Other professions use them on occasion as well, as do a few quests here and there, but those are the two sources with the highest demand for herbs. If you want to get crafting professions to go with this one then those are the two you want to choose from.

Each time you reach the training cap with Herbalism you get a new version of a spell called Lifeblood which will heal you for an amount over 5 seconds. Lifeblood has a base amount that it heals you for which is then increased by your character’s maximum health (though I can’t find anywhere how much it is increased).

Lifeblood is an instant cast spell, does not break stealth/invisibility, has a three minute cooldown, and it makes springy little flowers pop up from the ground/floor whenever you use it.

Skill Level: 75 Lifeblood (Rank 1): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 300 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible.

Skill Level: 150 Lifeblood (Rank 2): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 480 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible.

Skill Level: 225 Lifeblood (Rank 3): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 720 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible. (Side Note: This is the highest rank for a level 19 Twink.)

Skill Level: 300 Lifeblood (Rank 4): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 900 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible.

Skill Level: 375 Lifeblood (Rank 5): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 1200 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible.

Skill Level: 450 Lifeblood (Rank 6): Uses your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, healing you for 3600 (increased by maximum health) over 5 sec. Can be used while stealthed or invisible.

Interesting Facts
Though it really makes no sense to anyone, there is a sword called the Phytoblade which requires Herbalism Skill 100 to use. Why do you have to be able to pick fancy flowers to use this sword? I don’t have a clue, but there it is regardless.

The Tauren race receives a +15 Herbalism skill from their Cultivation racial. It’s great for being able to pick higher level herbs faster, but it’s a drawback in that your skill level requirements to gain the additional ranks of Lifeblood are similarly increased by 15, so you receive the first rank at Skill Level 90 rather than SL 75, and so on.

You can purchase a Leatherworking Pattern from an Alliance vendor to make Herbalist’s Gloves which provide a +5 Herbalism bonus which can also be enchanted (see below) to provide a total of +10 to your skill.

There are a number of Enchants you can get to increase your Herbalism skill as well: Gloves – Herbalism +2 Herbalism, Gloves – Advanced Herbalsim +5 Herbalism, Gloves – Gatherer +5 to all Gather professions.

Mining: Hi-ho! Hi-ho! It’s off to work we go!

Mining allows you to gather Ore and the occasional Gem by using your mining pick on mining nodes across the world. Mining also gives you the Smelt ability which can turn Ore into Bars. Raw Ores are used primarily in Jewelcrafting, while Bars are used in Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Jewelcrafting. Materials gathered with Mining are used in some of the other professions at times as well, and in quests (mostly Alliance quests).

Each time you reach the training cap with Mining you get a new version of a passive buff called Toughness which which provides a flat bonus to your Stamina based on the skill rank.

Mining also requires you to have a Mining Pick, or other item that counts as one, in order to gather ore/gems from mining nodes.

Skill Level: 75 Toughness (Rank 1): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 3.

Skill Level: 150 Toughness (Rank 2): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 5.

Skill Level: 225 Toughness (Rank 3): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 7. (Side Note: This is the highest rank for a level 19 Twink.)

Skill Level: 300 Toughness (Rank 4): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 10.

Skill Level: 375 Toughness (Rank 5): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 30.

Skill Level: 450 Toughness (Rank 6): All your hard work spent mining has made you exceptionally tough, increasing your Stamina by 60.

Interesting Facts
An Engineer can craft the Goblin Mining Helmet which grants +5 Mining skill when you have it equipped. It binds when picked up so you have to make it yourself in order to wear it, and it does require you to be able to wear Mail armor to wear it.

While Dwarves seem a perfect fit for a racial modifier, there are actually no existing races that provide a bonus to Mining.

There are a number of Enchants you can get to increase your Mining skill as well: Gloves – Mining +2 Mining, Gloves – Advanced Mining +5 Mining, Gloves – Gatherer +5 to all Gather professions.

Skinning: I’ll rip the secrets from your flesh!

Skinning allows you to “loot” skins and hides corpses of beasts across the world after they have already had their dropped loot removed. The skins and hides are used primarily in the Leatherworking profession, but also see frequent appearances in Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Tailoring as well.

Each time you reach the training cap with Skinning you get a new version of a passive buff called Master of Anatomy which provides you with a boost to your Critical Strike Rating.

You can use skinning on corpses of beasts that other people have killed who are not in your party, so long as they have been looted. Also note that beasts in the initial starting area of each race cannot be skinned, nor can critters.

Skinners require a Skinning Knife, or another item that counts as one, in order to use the skinning ability on a corpse.

Skill Level: 75 Master of Anatomy (Rank 1): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 3.

Skill Level: 150 Master of Anatomy (Rank 2): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 6.

Skill Level: 225 Master of Anatomy (Rank 3): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 9. (Side Note: This is the highest rank for a level 19 Twink.)

Skill Level: 300 Master of Anatomy (Rank 4): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 12.

Skill Level: 375 Master of Anatomy (Rank 5): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 20.

Skill Level: 450 Master of Anatomy (Rank 6): Skinning all those dead animals has broadened your anatomical knowledge, increasing your critical strike rating by 40.

Interesting Facts
If you want to get extra serious about your Skinning abilities you can get both Finkle’s Skinner (main hand dagger) and Zulian Slicer (one hand sword) which each provide the wielder with a +10 Skinning skill.

While they are not available for play just yet, the Worgen race that is coming in the Cataclysm expansion will receive a +15 Skinning bonus as well as an increased speed in skinning.

There are also two Enchants that benefit the Skinners: Gloves – Skinning +5 Skinning, and Gloves – Gatherer +5 to all Gather professions. There is no +2 Skinning Enchant as with the other gathering professions, though I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Related posts:

1. Skinning Etiquette
2. Racial Analysis: Tauren

From the official World of Warcraft Forums, Blizzard has now provided us with new information regarding the stat and item changes that will be in store for players prior to the release of Cataclysm.

I have expressed my concern over the removal of some stats that I have come to know quite well such as Defense, Spell Power and Mp5. I understand Blizzard’s reasoning behind the changes but my thoughts on the subject have ranged from skeptical to cautiously optimistic.

“As the game has matured, we’ve run into increasingly complex issues with the current stat system. Many stats are inherently confusing, and the way they interrelate can feel convoluted”

Part of the difficulty I am having with this major change to the game probably stems from my being the type of person who enjoys research, reading theorycrafting, and studying stats. Yes, that does make me a super geek, but it’s part of why I love this game so much. I hope that “simplifying” stats does not mean “dumbing down” and those of us that enjoy the process of analyzing why stacking a certain stat is best will still get to experience that challenge.

So, putting my own feelings aside, I bring you the full list of changes for you to digest. (I can almost certainly guarantee we will discuss this in detail in the next episode of the podcast.)

What You’ll See on Gear

Stamina – Because of the way we will be assigning Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers will end up with more Stamina than before. Health pools will be much closer between plate-wearers and other classes.

Spirit – Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.

Intellect – Intellect will now grant Spell Power (more on this below). Intellect will also provide less mana than it currently does.

Haste - Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you “do stuff” more often.

Block Rating - Block is being redesigned to scale better. Blocked attacks will simply hit for 30% less damage. Block rating will improve your chance to block, though overall block chances will be lower than they are today.

Parry – Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

Mastery – This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It’s directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.

Armor – The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

Resilience – This will only affect damage done by players and critical damage done by players. It will not impact crit chance, mana drains, or other such effects.

Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating – These will all still appear on gear as well. Aside from situations mentioned elsewhere in this list, in general these will function similarly to how they do now, though the details — such as how much Hit Rating you might need to effectively combat high-level creatures (more on this below) — are likely to change.

Being Removed from Items

Attack Power - This stat will no longer be present on most items as a flat value, though it will still show up on some process. Strength and Agility, which will be present on items, will grant the appropriate amount of Attack Power (generally 2 Attack Power per point of Strength or Agility) depending upon which stat a particular class favors. Agility may provide less Crit than it currently does.

Spell Power – Spell Power is another stat that you’ll no longer see present on most items. Instead, as mentioned above, Intellect will grant Spell Power. One exception is that caster weapons will still have Spell Power. This allows us to make weapons proportionately more powerful for casters in the same way they are for melee classes.

Armor Penetration - This stat will no longer be present on items. Armor Penetration will still exist in talents and abilities.

Shield Block Value - This stat will no longer be present on items, since the amount blocked is always proportional to the amount of damage done. Talents and other effects might still modify the damage-reduction percentage from 30%, however.

Going Away Completely

MP5 - This stat will be removed from the game completely. Holy paladins and Restoration shaman will be redesigned to benefit from Spirit.

Defense - Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Spell Ranks - Spell ranks will cease to exist. All spells will have one rank and will scale appropriately with level. The levels at which you can learn certain spells are being changed in order to fill in some of the gaps, and we will be introducing some new spells to learn along the way as well.

Weapon Skill - This stat will be removed from the game completely. Classes will start with all the weapon skills they need to know and will not need to improve them.

What Else You Should Know

Combat ratings - All ratings will be much harder to “cap out” at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

Reforging – While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

Gems – We are changing the gem colors of a few stats as a result of these adjustments. For example, Hit is likely to be blue instead of yellow. We’ll have more details on this in the future.

Changes to Existing Gear

As with previous expansions, we plan to roll out these changes and modify all existing gear shortly before Cataclysm launches, though it’s still too early to say exactly when. For the most part, the gear you have will still be good for you, though there will be exceptions, such as warriors using leather and mail armor.

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:

* No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
* No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
* You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
* Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

If you are a melee DPS class, druid tank, or hunter, expect to see:

* A lot more Stamina. Bear-form Stamina scaling will be lowered as a result.
* Strength if you wear plate. Agility if you wear mail or leather.
* Existing Attack Power becomes Agility and Stamina.Armor Penetration becomes Haste or Crit.
* No Intellect on melee gear. Hunters won’t need Intellect since they will no longer use mana. Shaman and Retribution paladins will get mana and spell damage in other ways.

If you are a DPS caster, expect to see:

* A lot more Stamina.
* All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
* No Spirit. You won’t miss Spirit, though, because you won’t need it for DPS or mana regen.

If you are a healer, expect to see:

* A lot more Stamina.
* All of your Spell Power converted to Intellect and Stamina.
* Spirit instead of MP5. You’ll probably be happy with Spirit, though, because mana regen is going to matter more than it does currently. Healing paladins and shaman will benefit more from Spirit than they do currently.

If you are a Balance druid or Elemental shaman:

* You will still share gear with Restoration druids and shaman.
* Your gear will have Spirit on it. It won’t have Hit on it.
* You will have a talent that converts Spirit to Hit. We will adjust talents accordingly so that you want about as much Spirit as, say, a warlock wants Hit.
* Hit on rings and other such gear will still benefit you.
* Raid buffs will no longer boost Spirit, so you shouldn’t find yourself unexpectedly over the Hit cap because of buffs.

Many lower-level items with nonsensical combinations of stats, such as Agility and Spirit, will be changed. We’re also updating quest rewards, trade skills, and loot drops to support better itemization for class builds that weren’t widely available or used prior to The Burning Crusade (such as Balance druids).

We’re aware this is a lot of information to take in, but this is still only a piece of the larger picture, and many of these changes rely on integration with other systems we haven’t yet discussed in detail. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll continue to tell you more about these changes, along with all of the new and exciting features we have planned for Cataclysm.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: Yuki Learns You Stat Weighting (p1)
2. Guest Post: Yuki Learns You Stat Weighting (p3)
3. Prepare your toon for Cataclysm

The Warlock is one of those four classes that I’ve always wanted to level but just never could bring myself to get excited about the class enough to really take it anywhere. I spent the last two months playing on a wide variety of my characters from new toons to twinks to DK farmers on new servers and on up to my Alliance Mage who hit level 80 a few weeks ago.

Last night (last night as of about…4 weeks ago when I started writing this) I flew my Mage twink into Loch Modan to turn in a quest and as I landed at the flight master I saw a Warlock there with his Voidwalker out. I don’t know what in the world caused it, but I had a sudden desire to level the Warlock and nothing else. I turned in the quest since it was just right there and then relogged over to my Warlock who’s been sitting idle for weeks at level 23 and who hadn’t even bothered getting her Succubus yet.

In this bit of leveling bloggery I’m going to cover the first 29 levels of being a Warlock in one go, and I’ll be offering advice on both Affliction and Demonology specs. I have no experience with Destro, but considering the fact that literally every single Warlock I have grouped with in low level LFG this year have been Destro it’s apparently a viable spec as well.

As we move on into this guide let me say for the sake of doing so, that this guide expresses my own personal experience with the class. There very well could be better ways of doing things, there could be information that I’m missing because I wasn’t aware of it, or something that I have “wrong” according to another lock with more experience than I. That being said, I have soloed instances at level with the Demonology build and tactics I mention in here, and I have soloed group quests and instances slightly below my level with the Affliction build, so I know they work.

Character Creation
If you want to roll a Warlock, then you’ve got a pretty limited selection when it comes to race choices. You’re not as bad off as Paladins and Shamans right now with four each, and you’re nowhere near as restricted as Druids with two, but you are the next one on the list with only five races to choose from.

Alliance: Human, Gnome
Horde: Orc, Undead, Blood Elf

For Alliance, Gnome will provide the most benefit while leveling due to a higher Intellect, while the Human will provide the most benefit for end game with the Diplomacy increase of Reputation rewards as well as having Every Man for Himself.

For Horde, Blood Elf is your highest Intellect race and they also have a mana restoring racial which will save on your Life Taps, Orc will have the strongest demons and highest stamina (by 1 point), and Undead offers a healing mechanic to balance your Life Taps while also being the coolest race in the game.

You really can’t go wrong with any of the choices, but there’s a quick view of what each one has to offer. My personal taste is Human for Alliance and Undead for Horde, but that’s just me.

Important Spells: General
First off is the list of spells that all Warlocks are going to use. In referring to the spells below, DoT = Damage over Time, for those who aren’t already aware. Unlike so many other classes, almost every spell that the Warlock gets in his early levels will remain useful while leveling. Rather than list every spell they get in detail here, I’m going to focus on the big ones that are going to help you take down the mobs you need to for completing your quests.

Shadow Bolt: Your starting dps spell that you’ll be spamming when you start out. Its cast time gets longer as you level up, and if you’re following either of the two specs that I’m discussing in this series, then you aren’t going to get any faster than 3.0 second cast times on it.

Immolate: Your first DoT spell that also deals damage when it hits. It has a cast time where many of your other DoT’s do not, which makes it a fair choice for pulling. The higher you get in levels the less you’ll use it, but early on it’s a solid source of damage.

Summon Imp: Your first demon pet, primarily a dps caster pet that provides a Stamina buff as you level. For 95 coppers you can train this wicked little fellow at level 1. No longer requires a quest to obtain.

Corruption: One of your best DoT spells that you’ll be using for the rest of your Warlocking days.

Life Tap: A signature ability of Warlocks to convert your own health into mana.

Curse of Agony: Another DoT spell; deals greater damage the longer the spell lasts.

Drain Soul: A channeled version of a DoT that deals more damage if the target is down to 25% health or less. It also provides you with the resource for many of your other spells by generating Soul Shards each time a target dies while being drained, and having a chance to generate additional shards each time it deals damage.

Summon Voidwalker: Your second demon pet, primarily serves as a tank, though his DPS is decent at this level.

Felsteed: Summons a Felsteed which serves as a mount. Why is this listed in the Important Spells section? Because it’s one of the coolest mounts in the whole game, and only the Warlock can get it.

Ritual of Summoning: Open a summoning portal that can be used to summon raid or party members. Requires two additional party members to be present and participate. Casting and using this spell are a bit more involved, please click on the link and read the details if you wish to know the specifics.

Summon Succubus: Your third demon pet, a combination of DPS and Crowd Control that’s great for both PvP and PvE.

Embracing the Darkness: Demons
Up to level 29 you have three options to choose from. You can train your Imp at level 1, Voidwalker at level 10, and Succubus at level 20. The Imp used to require a quest but you can now train the ability at level 1. All other demon pets (for this level range) require a quest to obtain.

Each pet has its own benefits and drawbacks, and can be useful in various situations. Each of these three pets is viable in both PvE and PvP as well. They all have unique contributions to each, and you can use whichever one best serves your current needs. The Imp is the only demon you have access to that does not require Soul Shards to summon, so if you ever find yourself out of shards (Bad Warlock!) then the Imp is your only fallback if your demon happens to die.

Every Warlock should take advantage of the Imp’s additional dps as soon as they can afford to train it. At level 10 you will need to decide whether you want the faster kills that come from using the Imp or the extra safety that comes from using the Voidwalker. And at level 20 you will need to make a similar decision on safety versus the Succubus’s damage and crowd control abilities.

Personally I use the Imp until level 10 and then switch to the Voidwalker until around level 36. The Succubus never really thrilled me.

Leveling 1-10: Starting Area and Starting Zone(s)
Rotation Option 1: Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt
Rotation Option 2: Immolate, Corruption, Auto-Attack or Wand
Rotation Option 3: Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Auto-Attack or Wand [Requires level 8]

Starting out you’ll pretty well be doing nothing but Shadow Bolt spam. With the reduced casting times and mana costs along with the increased health and mana regeneration rates up to level 15 you might as well just spam the crap out of this thing. Your DoTs are still a great source of damage, as is your Imp, but where spamming Shadow Bolt in previous patches would have run you out of mana every 1.5 pulls you can now cast it all you want. If you run out of mana, just stop and stand there for a few seconds (don’t even bother drinking) and you’ll be back to full mana in no time.

If you want to go with a more traditional Warlock combat style then start off with Immolate since it has a cast time, then use Corruption for a second DoT, and then finish the mob off with your pet and a combination of either weapon attacks or wand shots (if you happen to have one). Leveling early on will go a whole lot faster if you pick up a wand a level 5, because you can count on your wand’s dps to outshine your DoT spells at this stage.

When you reach level 8 you can add your DoT curse to the mix in the form of Curse of Agony. You can start doing more multi-mob pulls once you have this since you can have up to three DoTs ticking on each target now, but since you still don’t have a tanking pet you might find that pulling more than two, possibly three, is about as far as you can go. If you’re skilled at Fear Juggling, then you might be able to handle a fourth. Taking that many mobs on at once though is going to be very taxing on both your health and your mana, so don’t expect to do it all the time.

While Fear is an excellent tool in PvP, it can either make you or break you in PvE. Fear can cause social mobs (almost every Humanoid in the game, and some others) to pull other mobs to you while they are feared. So if you cast fear on one target and he runs close to another mob that you haven’t agroed yet, he just might do it for you and pull his buddy. Or, he might pull several of his buddies and suddenly you’re fighting five mobs instead of just one. If you’re going to do a large portion of your leveling solo then you need to get used to using Fear. If you’re going to be grouping a lot or running a lot of instances, then you need to be familiar with its use while also being fully aware of the fact that you might kill yourself and everyone else with you.

Fear Juggling is a tactic I use when fighting multiple mobs that involves casting Fear on a target, casting Corruption and/or Curse of Agony on them, and then casting Fear on a second target and using your DoTs on them the same way. When you Fear a second target it removes the fear effect from the first target, so you’re “juggling” the mobs by sending them away one at a time and refreshing your DoTs on them while you do it. Fear Juggling is very mana intensive and it’s dangerous if you’re fighting humanoids because of the chance of unintentional pulling. However, if you find yourself fighting more mobs than you know you can handle then you might as well take a shot at mana intensive victory rather than simply welcoming the spirit healer.

In general, people will tell you not to use Fear at all when grouping or in an instance, but if you’re familiar with how to use it and the potential dangers then it can still be a very effective tool. The good thing about Fear is that it’s effect is fairly easily broken, so casting Fear followed by a Shadow Bolt can often serve the purpose you need it for in group environments. Let me be clear that I do not encourage you to use Fear in group settings, but neither do I reject it. If a Warlock shows that he knows how to use the spell, then I have no problem with them using Fear even when I’m tanking or healing (as long as they don’t fear the tank’s target).

Leveling 10-15: Starting and Secondary Zones
Rotation Option 1: Immolate, Corruption, Wand or Drain Soul
Rotation Option 2: Shadowbolt, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Wand or Drain Soul
Rotation Option 3: Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Fear, Drain Life or Drain Soul

This level range is where you should get a feel for whether you want to be a DoT Monkey (Affliction) or Backseat Driver (Demonolgy). Get a feel for combat and what you enjoy doing. If you like to cast several DoTs all over the field, then you’re probably more of an Affliction junkie. If you like having your pet keep most of the agro while you manipulate the field, then you may be more suited for Demonology. If you aren’t sure, then my personal suggestion is Affliction for leveling, though I’ll give props to Demonology for being able to solo instances at level.

At this point you should no longer be using Shadowbolt spam to kill things as you have more useful tools in other spells. If you’re going for Demonology then you don’t want to bother with Shadowbolt anyway because you don’t want to risk drawing agro off of your pet. If you’re Affliction, then you’ve got DoTs and Drains to worry about rather than 3 second Shadowbolt casts (at least for now).

I want to emphasize now the importance of the Drain Soul spell. It’s your only source of Soul Shards, and while you aren’t going to be using a ton of them right now, you will use them more and more as you level up. It’s especially important to Affliction locks since their spec will allow them to restore a large portion of their mana any time they kill their target with Drain Soul.

Regardless of which spec you take, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of using Drain Soul as your finishing move on every mob early on. If you don’t have anything more important to do (like heal your demon or summon a new one) then you should be using Drain Soul on every mob once it reaches the last 20% or so of it’s health. There’s a macro you’ll most likely want to make use of as well, which you can find down towards the bottom in the Suggested Macros section.

Leveling: 15-29: Quests and Instances
Rotation Option 1: Immolate, Corruption, Drain Soul
Rotation Option 2: Shadowbolt, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Drain Soul
Rotation Option 3: Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony, Fear, Drain Life or Drain Soul

You’re finally able to start queuing up for random dungeons at this point, though whether or not you do so is entirely up to you. I happen to enjoy PuGs for the most part, so I do randoms on all of my toons personally. If you do run random dungeons during this level range then you will probably want to disregard the rotations up there and stick to something simpler and more effective such as casting Corruption on every mob in the pull (letting the tank have a few seconds to agro them all, of course) and then if you’re level 20 already you can start using Rain of Fire to AoE the mobs down, or you can tab-target back through all of the mobs and put Curse of Agony on all of them as well.

Your Void Walker should do a decent job of maintaining threat at this point, so I suggest you stick with him for your leveling. You do get the Succubus at level 20, but in my experience she really sucks for anything other than PvP, and personally I preferred using the Voidwalker or Imp in PvP as well. It might just be my play style, or how I used them, or who knows what, but I preferred sticking with the Voidwalker.

I keep the Voidwalker out even when I’m running random dungeons, actually. The only time I make an exception is when the tank is confident in their ability to tank the instance and specifically ask me to switch the pet. In that case I generally switch out to the Imp for increased DPS, though in instances with humanoid casters I did occasionally pull out the Succubus instead so that I could CC the casters.

In solo questing you’re going to be better off just leaving the Void out there to tank mobs for you while you DoT the mobs up with Corruption and optionally Curse of Agony, Life Tap to refill your mana, Drain Life to get your health back, and then Drain Soul to finish off the mobs. If the Voidwalker is tanking multiple mobs then you may need to cast Health Funnel to keep him alive, switching over to Drain Life every other cast or so instead so that you don’t bleed yourself dry trying to plump up the blueberry. If the VW is low on health after a fight then you have three options: health funnel, bandage, summon a new one. Personally, I just summon a new one to replace him. I don’t coddle the blueberry like he’s some hunter pet, the thing’s a freaking demon forced to do my bidding and suffer pain in my place.

General Tactics: Warlocks
Warlocks are strange, beautiful little creatures. They survive by melting their opponents’ faces, capturing the souls of the weak, and striking fear into the hearts of those who would stand in their way.

Learn how to manage your threat.
This one is pretty big. It might not be as important at level 10 as it is when you get higher, but only because mobs don’t hit as hard at that level and you can take a few hits before you’re dead. I strongly suggest you go get yourself an addon to keep track of your threat. A couple of weeks ago I would have said that Omen would take care of you, but I’ve since learned of an amazing addon (or pair of addons) called TidyPlates and ThreatPlates which are absolutely brilliant.

Omen will let you know you’re pushing those threat limits with a sound and a screen flash (the flash does nothing for me, personally), and I really like the sound aspect since that’s my biggest initial alarm that I need to back off for a few or at least switch my target.

ThreatPlates is your big visual notifier and I love it. Threat levels are color coded for green/yellow/red, and the border around targets who you have agro on will let you know who’s hungry for your flesh and who’s focused on your Voidwalker like they should be. Rather than duplicate an already great explanation, I’m going to direct you to a post that gives you just that at Tank Like A Girl.

Managing your threat is important for all three of the Warlock’s talent specs. Whether it’s the Voidwalker doing the tanking, or another player, you need to know your boundaries and stay within them. Warlocks are very well known for their ability to draw agro, so be prepared from the earlier stages of your playing to know when it’s time to back off and when it’s time to pull out all the stops.

General Tactics: Affliction
Low level Affliction is handled in one of two ways. Either you try to keep yourself safe by letting your pet take agro while you carefully dps them down, or you use your pet as just another tool in your belt and slay them all yourself.

Personally I like to play low level Affliction is a twisted form of AoE grinding, which I call Chain Pulling. The “definition” of Chain Pulling will change as you level and get new spells, but for right now it means using your Voidwalker to grab threat on multiple mobs while you cycle through them all with tab targeting to load up your DoTs and burn through them all. This is a somewhat involved method of leveling because it includes manually switching your pet’s target so that he maintains threat while you work your dark magic.

The explanation is fairly simple, while the execution can be a lot harder. In essence you want to send your VW after the first target and go ahead and let him hit the mob once or twice, then cast Corruption on it. Target a second mob and send the VW after it now, allow him to hit once, cast Corruption, target a third, let him him, cast Corruption, and so on.

That’s the simple part. The hard part is managing your threat throughout the process. You can either switch the VW’s target throughout the fight so that he can maintain consistent agro (hard), you can use a more aggressive offense and start focusing your damage on the earlier targets to burn them down individually (not as hard, but a bit more mana intensive), or you can combine Chain Pulling with Fear Juggling and /insanelaugh at all the chaos you’re causing.

If you decide you like Chain Pulling then you can improve on it once you’ve gotten used to threat management to include Curse of Agony and/or Immolation into the mix for extra damage as well. I prefer to use CoA over Immo because of the ramping damage of CoA, which makes it easier for VW to hold threat. Immolate causes damage when it hits as well as when it ticks (not to mention it has a cast time), so it’s not the best for how I like to play.

1. You are the collector of souls.
Almost every Warlock build should make use of the Drain Soul spell for finishing off a mob’s hit point once they’re low since we all need shards and the damage of DS increases when mobs are low on health. Affliction has a special reason for it though, because of their Improved Drain Soul talent which restores 15% of your maximum mana if the target dies while you are using Drain Soul on them.

2. You don’t have “Life” and “Mana”, you have only Power.
This is going to come into play much more in later levels than it is right now, but never forget that with the Life Tap spell both your life and mana can be used to fuel your spells. All the Lock builds have Life Tap, but Affliction gets the Improved version that grants an additional 20% mana when it’s used. Affliction is also the master of Drain spells (such as Drain Life, Drain Soul, and Drain Mana), which can be used to fuel either of your Power sources (Life and Mana).

You have the ability, with Affliction especially, to end every single fight with 100% of both your health and mana if you learn to Life Tap when you need mana, Drain Life when you need hit points, and Drain Soul when you need them to die (and get shards, and restore mana).

General Tactics: Demonology
Low level demonology is all about keeping your pet alive and maximizing your potential without negating the usefulness of your pet. You start getting talent points at the same time you get your most beneficial leveling pet, the Voidwalker.

So here’s a list of things you need to know for leveling up as Demo:

1. Your Pet’s life matters more than your own. (sort of)
If you’re only pulling single targets then this isn’t necessarily the case, but generally speaking if your pet dies then you’re screwed and will soon join him in the twisted nether. All of your talent points are going into improving the demon which makes you less powerful than other specs. During this level range there’s not a huge difference between your effectiveness and another spec’s, but chaos is something you sow, not something you want to deal with yourself. The best way to keep yourself alive, is to keep your pet alive, which means sacrificing your own hit points in order to restore his.

Your first tool for this is Health Funnel which you get at level 12 and deals damage to you in exchange for healing your demon. The spell is channeled, so while you’re healing your pet you can’t do anything else.

To counter the damage that you deal to yourself with Health Funnel you need to use either Drain Life which you get at level 16, your Health Stones, or you can use items like health potions and bandages.

2. Your pet isn’t dead, he just died.
When your pet is going down faster than you can keep him up, and you know it, get yourself another one. You can cast your Summon Voidwalker spell even while you have one sitting right there in front of you. So when things start to look ugly, it’s not a bad idea to just start summoning a new one to take his place. The default casting time to summon a pet is 10 seconds, but that can be reduced to 0.5 seconds and almost no mana cost with three talent points.

He might not be able to grab threat back right away, but his taunts will kick in soon enough. How fast your pet is dying determines how early you need to start summoning a new one, and much threat you generated in the mean time determines how hard it’s going to be for the demon to draw that threat off of you.

Macro Suggestions

#showtooltip
/petattack [nocombat]
/petattack [mod:alt]
/startattack
/cast Immolate

This macro is bound to my 1 key and is how I start every fight when solo questing or soloing instances. You’ll notice that the “/petattack” line appears twice, first with the “[nocombat]” modifier and then with the “[mod:alt]” modifier. The first line means that my pet will attack the target only if I’m not in combat right now. The second means that the pet will attack the target as long as I am holding the Alt key when I activate the macro. The “/startattack” line causes you to auto-attack the target, and we end it by casting Immolate.

If I’m not in combat when I use this then my pet will begin attacking the enemy I have selected, I will begin to auto-attack the target, and I will begin to cast Immolate. If I am already in combat then my pet continues with whatever action he is already taking (even if that’s no action at all), I will begin to auto-attack, and I will begin to cast Immolate.

If I am in combat but my pet is not doing anything (and he’s not set to Passive) then I will auto-attack and cast Immolate, and then my pet will move in to attack after Immolate is cast. If I’m in combat and my pet is already attacking his target and I am not holding Alt when I activate the macro, then my pet will continue to attack his current target, while I auto-attack and cast Immolate on my current target. If I’m in combat and my pet already attacking his target and I am holding Alt when I activate the macro, then my pet will switch his target to my target and begin attacking it, and I will auto-attack the current target as well as casting Immolate.

Basically this macro sends both you and your demon into combat with a single button, and it allows you to continue casting Immolate on various targets without forcing your demon to constantly change its target unless you are holding the Alt key to force a target change.

#showtooltip
/cast Sacrifice

This is a simple macro that causes your Voidwalker to cast his Sacrifice spell which will give your Warlock a bubble to absorb incoming damage. You can access the ability in the default interface by either clicking on the ability in your pet’s action bar, or by holding the Control key and pushing the corresponding number on your action bar. Rather than rely on either of those actions I prefer to simply make a macro for it instead.

/run i=”Soul Shard”d=GetItemCount(i)-12 for x=0,4 do for y=1,GetContainerNumSlots(x) do if (d>0) then l=GetContainerItemLink(x,y) if l and GetItemInfo(l)==i then PickupContainerItem(x,y) DeleteCursorItem() d=d-1 end end end end
/cast Corruption

SPECIAL NOTE: If you copy this macro, you will need to replace all of the quotes (“) with your own because they will not copy over correctly into the macro interface and you will get error messages when trying to use it. You may also need to replace the parenthesis, but I think the quotes are the only things that will cause an error. If all else fails, just write it down and then type it out yourself.

This macro is used for controlling the number of Soul Shards that you are carrying around. You can get addons to manage your shards for you, or you can save yourself the memory usage and just use this macro.

Notice that unlike most of my other macros this one doesn’t start with the “#show” or “#showtooltip” line. That’s because it takes up too much room to fit that in there because macros have a character limit. As such you will need to choose an appropriate icon for the macro rather than the default “?” icon that will change its appearance to match the contents of the macro.

Also notice the red number 12 up there. That’s how many shards I’ve designated to keep in my bags. When you activate this macro it checks your bags to find out how many shards you are carrying, subtracts the designated number (12 in this case) from that, and then deletes any extras. So if you have fifteen shards it will delete three of them. If you have twelve or fewer shards then it will not delete anything. You can change 12 to any number you want.

After deleting the shards it will cast Corruption on my target, if I have a target. If I don’t have a target, then the extra shards still get deleted but nothing is cast. This is how I apply Corruption to a target, which I do to literally every mob that I face, so I constantly have my shards monitored by this macro to always delete any extras.

Talent Points and Glyphs: Affliction

Improved Corruption 5/5: Increases the damage done by your Corruption by 10%, and increases the critical strike chance of your Seed of Corruption by 5%.

Improved Drain Soul 2/2: Returns 15% of your maximum mana if the target is killed by you while you drain its soul. In addition, your Affliction spells generate 20% less threat.

Improved Life Tap 2/2: Increases the amount of Mana awarded by your Life Tap spell by 20%.

Soul Siphon 2/2: Increases the amount drained by your Drain Life and Drain Soul spells by an additional 6% for each of your Affliction effects on the target, up to a maximum of 18% additional effect.

Fel Concentration 3/3: Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting Drain Life, Drain Mana, Drain Soul, Unstable Affliction, and Haunt spells by 70%.

Improved Curse of Agony 1/2: Increases the damage done by your Curse of Agony by 5%.

Empowered Corruption 3/3: Increases the damage of your Corruption spell by an amount equal to 36% of your spell power.

Nightfall 2/2: Gives your Corruption and Drain Life spells a 4% chance to cause you to enter a Shadow Trance state after damaging the opponent. The Shadow Trance state reduces the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt spell by 100%.

Corruption is the bread and butter of the Affliction tree, so you want to buff it up as much as possible. Improved Corruption does that with a flat 10% damage increase while Empowered Corruption increases it by a percentage of your spell power. Drain Soul is your “execution spell”, the one you should use to kill off every mob you can, and if you happen to be the one that delivers the final blow while using Drain Soul then Improved Drain Soul will reward you with 15% of your maximum mana which will save you time as well as Life Tap casts.

Soul Siphon is going to shine mostly in the increased damage it gives to Drain Soul, but it will also give you more health per damage tic when using Drain Life. Fel Concentration will help us get the most effective use out of our draining spells by reducing pushback which is always going to cause us problems otherwise. Improved Curse of Agony is a bit of a filler at this point, providing a minor damage boost to CoA since it is the primary curse that we will use during this level range.

Nightfall gives us a nice boost to our damage by allowing Shadow Bolt to become an instant cast spell when it procs. Nothing says “DPS Boost” like having our hardest hitting spell, which is also our longest cast time spell, become an instant cast. I don’t personally use regular SB casts a whole lot while I’m leveling because of my playstyle and preferences, but most experienced Locks use it during their downtime while DoTs are ticking and do not need to be refreshed to increase their damage output.

Glyphs

Major
Glyph of Corruption: Your Corruption spell has a 4% chance to cause you to enter a Shadow Trance state after damaging the opponent. The Shadow Trance state reduces the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt spell by 100%.

Glyph of Life Tap: When you use Life Tap or Dark Pact, you gain 20% of your Spirit as spell power for 40 seconds.

Glyph of Corruption – does that effect sound familiar? If you take another look up at the talent tree you’ll see almost the exact same effect from the Nightfall talent. The difference here is that the glyph only procs off of Corruption where the talent works off of both Corruption and Drain Soul.

The GoLT may or may not be useful depending on how much Spirit you have. Most likely you aren’t going to have all that much, so it will not shine as much now as it will later. When you look at it 20% isn’t all that large a number, giving you only 5 SP per 100 Spirit. Still though, 5 SP is 5 SP no matter how you slice it, so ifyou want a flat, sure increase to your damage output rather than relying on a proc then this is the glyph for you.

Minor
Glyph of Unending Breath: Increases the swim speed of targets affected by your Unending Breath spell by 20%.

Glyph of Drain Soul: Your Drain Soul ability occasionally creates and additional soul shard.

If you find yourself frequently using up your Soul Shards, then GoDS is going to be your best bet in this case, otherwise GoUB takes the top slot. Personally I find myself having way more shards than I will ever need so I prefer GoUB for the increased speed while swimming. It’s only useful during the few moments that you’ll be swimming, but honestly our minor glyph selection sucks and I get more use out of the situation buff of GoUB than I do the near-useless (to me) gain of additional shards when I never even use up the ones I already have.

Talent Points and Glyphs: Demonology

Fel Synergy 2/2: You have a 100% chance to heal your pet for 15% of the amount of spell damage done by you.

Demonic Embrace 3/3: Increases your total Stamina by 10%.

Improved Health Funnel 2/2: Increases the amount of Health transferred by your Health Funnel spell by 20% and reduces the health cost by 20%. In addition, your summoned Demon takes 30% less damage while under the effect of your Health Funnel.

Demonic Brutality 3/3: Increases the effectiveness of your Voidwalker’s Torment, Consume Shadows, Sacrifice and Suffering spells by 30%, and increases the attack power bonus of your Felguard’s Demonic Frenzy effect by 3%.

Fel Domination 1/1: [Instant cast, 3 minute cooldown] Your next Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter, or Felguard Summon spell has its casting time reduced by 5.5 seconds and its Mana cost reduced by 50%.

Soul Link 1/1 [Instant cast] When active, 20% of all damage taken by the caster is taken by your Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter, Felguard, or enslaved demon instead. That damage cannot be prevented. Lasts as long as the demon is active and controlled.

Fel Vitality 3/3: Increases the Stmina and Intellect of your Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter and Felguard by 15% and increases your maximum health and mana by 3%.

Master Summoner 2/2: Reduces the casting time of your Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter and Felguard Summoning spells by 4 seconds and the Mana cost by 40%.

Unholy Power 3/5: Increases the damage done by your Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter and Felguard’s melee attacks and your Imp’s Firebolt by 12%.

Since a big part of Demonology is keeping your pet alive and active, you need to help him stay alive. Fel Synergy does this by allowing us to heal our demon by dealing damage, Improved Health Funnel does so by reducing the damage the demon takes while also allowing us to heal larger amounts while sacrificing less of our own health at the same time, and Fel Vitality helps by increasing the demon’s Stamina and Intellect and it does the same for us (though a lesser percentage for us than our demons). Soul Link seems a bit like a step backwards by redirecting some of our damage to our pet instead, but if you’re dead then your demon is dead anyway, and thus you’re screwed.

We also need to make our demons stronger and we do that by making use of Demonic Brutality for an increase in damage as well as taunt effectiveness, and Unholy Power boosts the demons’ raw damage output.

Fel Domination and Master Summoner provide us with a way to get around the long (10 second) cast time for summoning our demons by reducing the cast time to 0.5 seconds when activating Master Summoner and also reducing the casting cost drastically.

Glyphs

Major
Glyph of Voidwalker: Increases your Voidwalker’s total Stamina by 20%.

Glyph of Health Funnel: Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while channeling your Health Funnel spell by 100%.

I prefer using my Voidwalker as Demo during these levels, so the GoV grants a very solid boost to his health which makes him last even longer in fights. It’s a bit stronger for solo play that it is if you plan on doing a lot of dungeon runs and such, but it’s a solid glyph.

The other option I would suggest for this level is going to be Health Funnel which will make you immune to damage based pushback, which will give you time to redirect your pet to any mobs that are attacking you while you cast your HF without having to worry about losing the cast and wasting the mana you spent on it.

Minor
Glyph of Unending Breath: Increases the swim speed of targets affected by your Unending Breath spell by 20%.

Glyph of Drain Soul: Your Drain Soul ability occasionally creates and additional soul shard.

These are the same as for Affliction – If you find yourself frequently using up your Soul Shards, then GoDS is going to be your best bet in this case, otherwise GoUB takes the top slot. Personally I find myself having way more shards than I will ever need so I prefer GoUB for the increased speed while swimming. It’s only useful during the few moments that you’ll be swimming, but honestly our minor glyph selection sucks and I get more use out of the situation buff of GoUB than I do the near-useless (to me) gain of additional shards when I never even use up the ones I already have.

Gearing Up: Connecting the DoTs

Specific Items
The one thing I’m going to point out here above all others is Wands. It’s fast, free, ranged damage that is both cheap and easy to find.

The best source for these levels is going to come from the Enchanting profession. The first wand you want is the Lesser Magic Wand which can be used at level 5 for 11.3 dps, followed by the Greater Magic Wand at level 13 for 17.5 dps.

There are a number of other wands in the game, but for their level and how easy they are to obtain those two wands are at the top of the list. You can also find wands that provide you with bonuses to specific stats if you would rather have stats instead of dps, and there are wands that you can get in your upper teens such as the Gravestone Scepter that you can get from the Blackfathom Villainy quest at level 18 which gives +1 Spirit, +5 Shadow Resistance, and 29.0 dps.

Just remember, the wand is a great tool for some free dps, but Warlocks have the tools to potentially never experience downtime where a wand is literally needed.

Stacking Attributes
Gear for Warlocks during these levels doesn’t change much from one spec to another, so use the following guide regardless of your spec.

Spell Power > Intellect >= Stamina >= Hit Rating > Spirit > everything else

Spell Power is the driving force behind all of your damage, so make sure it’s high. Intellect and Stamina are sort of one and the same for you as both of them essentially provide you with more mana. Hit Rating doesn’t need to be capped while leveling, but you want to take it when you find it if you’re not having to sacrifice other stats to get it.

As you increase in level you will find shifts in your stat priorities. Most notably will be an increase in the importance of Spirit as well as a shift in Stamina becoming more important than Intellect. During these levels though, what I have listed up above should be your guide.

Related posts:

1. Warlock Leveling: 30-49
2. Mage Leveling Part I: Beginning
3. Mage Leveling Part III: 40-58

Patch: 3.3.5
New raid: The Ruby Sanctum, inside Wyrmrest Temple, Dragonblight
Bosses: Halion the Twilight Destroyer, and his drakes:
– Baltharus the Warborn
– General Zarithrian
– Saviana Ragefire

Rewards: All-new loot
Drakes will only drop an Emblem of Frost
Same item levels as in Icecrown Citadel

Zarhym said:
As we prepare for the public testing phase of minor content patch 3.3.3, some players might come across information regarding upcoming content that isn’t yet available. To avoid any confusion, we’d like to tell you about an exciting new raid dungeon we are working on for content patch 3.3.5.

The Ruby Sanctum

A powerful war party of the Black Dragonflight, led by the fearsome Twilight dragon, Halion, have launched an assault upon the Ruby Sanctum beneath Wyrmrest Temple. By destroying the sanctum, the Black Dragonflight look to crush those that would stand in the way of their master’s reemergence into Azeroth and to ultimately shatter the Wyrmrest Accord – the sacred bond that unites the dragonflights.

The battle that is to come will surely deal a crippling blow to the Red Dragonflight, however, it is up to you to stop this unprecedented offensive and defend the Ruby Sanctum. First you must face the assault of Halion’s servants, Saviana Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn, and General Zarithrian, before squaring off against Halion the Twilight Destroyer, a new and deadly force in this realm.

The Ruby Sanctum will feature 10- and 25-player content, Heroic difficulties and all-new rewards! Stay tuned for more information as we get closer to its release.

Not a whole lot of information there, but not too bad either. Looks like we’ll have another raid ready to go before Cataclysm hits, which makes me think we might be leaning more towards that November date for it’s release after all since we know of at least 2 patches now before it hits.

I’m looking forward to it, personally.

Related posts:

1. Onyxia Returns for Patch 3.2.2
2. New Patch 3.2.2a Slipped in today
3. Patch 3.2 coming tomorrow 8/4?

1. Open the vendor window where you will buy whatever it is you need.
2. Open the chatline and type “/fr addstack” and then shift-click on the item you want to keep stocked, followed by the quantity of stacks you want to always have on-hand.
3. Hit “enter.”

If, in the future, you no longer need the item in question, you can just use the same “/fr addstack [item]” with a quantity of zero.

FreeRefills will also restock out of your bank. This can be turned off, although I can’t see why I would ever do that. One terrific way to make use of this feature is to keep potions that you use a lot of stacked high and deep in your bank, but only carry the one or two stacks you expect to use in an instance. Then when Auction House prices are low for your potions/scrolls/flasks/beverage-of-choice you can stock up and refill the bank.

FreeRefills will work with anything sold by vendors; candles, food, drink, Arcane Powder – anything at all. And it’s excellent for keeping your lower-than-raiding-level toons stocked up so you don’t find yourself low on health, out of food, out of water, out of bandages, and having to run through a gauntlet of Fel Orcs to get to the nearest friendly town without at least filling up your health  (and mana, if you use mana).

So, in summary, FreeRefills can help you stay alive, help your healer keep you alive, and make other players think you’re more courteous than you really are, because you always show up with food, drink, and reagents.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #9
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #10
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8

Unfortunately do to some technical difficulties we have to delay the recording of Episode 21. The show will be back next week on our regularly scheduled day. We had some quality content lined up for this episode so it’s unfortunate that we have to push it back but we will give you a great episode next week to make up for it.

In the meantime you can do the following:

Catch up on past episodes

Subscribe via iTunes

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Friend us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Related posts:

1. WoWphiles Podcast Show #13
2. WoWphiles Podcast Show #1
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #4

Our intrepid band returned to Ice Crown Citadel Monday night determined to face down the mother of all Frost Wyrms, Sindragosa.

We started by taking the elevator down to her room. I had bad flashbacks of the Serpent Shrine Cavern ‘Elevator Boss’ as the elevator flew down, but fortunately no one died. Our resident explorer and Warlock extraordinaire, Neo, warned us to not go into the room. We found out why quickly. Spiders descended down on webs and engaged us. As we were fighting them, smaller spiders would come down and join them. Once we got the big spiders down, a group of Vrykul came and attacked us, followed by more spiders. You know, after tanking the Adds in Heroic ToC, I’ve really had my fill of spiders. I’d like to take a tactical nuke to the entire Nerubian Kingdom. We eventually just ran out of the room and out onto Sindragosa’s ledge. We cleared the first trash pack and Rimefang landed. We cleared the second trash pack and Spinebraker landed. We opted for Rimefang first. He had a Frost Damage Aura and did the same kind of things he does in the Pit of Saron with throwing ice on a spot on the ground. Then we pulled Spinebreaker. He has a nasty cleave and a fear. So you get feared, and because you didn’t roll a Warrior, your DPS gets cleaved. Warriors can Bezerker Rage out of the Fear, and keep Spinebreaker positioned. The Cleave isn’t deadly to melee DPS or at least it wasn’t to our group.

As soon as Spinebraker hit the dirt, Sindragosa came flying in and immediately aggroed. “Will you look at the size of that thing!” This had to be the biggest dragon I’ve ever seen in the World (of Warcraft).

Sindragosa is unfortunately a fight that is very hard on people with higher latency. At certain points she pulls everyone to her and then does a big Frost damage explosion. If you are slow getting away or your latency shows you somewhere where you aren’t, you can get killed. Several of our team struggled with that during the attempts.

We decided to wear some Frost Resist for the fight, so I had my ‘Hodir’ set with the Icebane Chest, Belt and Boots. It did mean that my threat generation was a little lower than normal and we lost one attempt to our DPS warrior pulling and getting the raid cleaved. Unlike Spinebreaker, Sindragosa cleave will one shot your non Tanks.

But the most difficult part of Phase 1 was managing the Ice Blocks. Like Sapphiron, two people get picked to be turned into Ice Blocks, only this time you have to break them out. But you need the Ice Blocks to shield you from the Frost Bombs she’s dropping. You have to position yourself with the Ice Block between where you are and where and the Frost Bomb will drop while doing ‘Goldilocks’ DPS. Not too much, or you’ll break the block early and leave everyone scrambling for the other Ice Block. Not too little, or you’ll lose precious DPS time on Sindragosa while she’s on the ground. Goldilocks means ‘just right’.

Sindragosa is an execution fight and it took us a while to learn the execution. It took several attempts for us to finally see a Phase 3, and on that attempt we hit her Enrage timer. We need to get better at Phase 1 and 2 so we can get more time at practicing Phase 3.

I feel like it’s a fight we can get once we learn it. Now that she is our target we’ll really focus on her until she’s down.

Related posts:

1. Facing Rotface
2. Once Bitten Twice Shy

No, that picture doesn’t really have anything at all to do with this post here (well, he has three claws, and it’s Patch 3.3.3, so maybe that’s something), it’s just a nod to a special friend. He knows who he is, and he knows what it’s for.

Moving right along, it’s time to discuss the latest and greatest patch coming up: Patch 3.3.3

You can find all of the non-PvP patch notes as of this post’s publish date here in this post. I will have the PvP patch notes listed on my Fiery Weapons blog if you would like to know about the upcoming changes on those.

The information in blockquotes are the patch notes themselves, where text outside of the quotes will have any comments I wish to share on the section above, or perhaps below.

Dungeons and Raids

The Culling of Stratholme
Players may now skip the initial introduction dialog to this dungeon once they have completed it at least once.

I absolutely love this change. This thing was such a horrible waste of time, I can’t wait for this change in particular to come to pass. My inner lore nerd loved it the first time, but seriously, once was (more than) enough.

Classes: General

Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.

Umm…yay? Maybe my lack of 25-man raiding leaves me behind on this one. Extra range is good, I just don’t know how much it really matters.

Death Knights
Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.
Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost
Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100%.

Talents
Blood
Abomination’s Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.
Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

Frost
Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength. The previous functionality of this talent can now be attained via the Glyph of Chains of Ice.
Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.
Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.
Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

Unholy
Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight’s diseases on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to the target should stay the same.

If you have taken a look at my recent posts on Death Knights, you will know that I have some interest in this class now where before I would not have even bothered looking at this section.

I have no familiarity with Blood, but the changes seem to be buffs rather than nerfs, so I think Blood Knights will enjoy those to some extent at least.

I like all of the changes to Frost here. Endless Winter now has some potential for my Frost Tank since I have no use for Chains of Ice outside of PvP, but can always use more Strength. ICT being a passive buff is good news as I’ve considered adding it to my spec here recently. I haven’t delved into NoCS yet since I’m just now getting into the dual wielding side of the class, but I will gladly take an increase in my damage. And the buff to Unbreakable Armor sounds great since Strength contributes to one of our primary forms of defense.

Hunters

Talents

Beast Mastery
Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards.

Switching buffs like this to an aura seems like an excellent change to me. It’s one more thing helping to establish what a particular class/spec has to offer a raiding environment, that does not require luck with the dice. I’m pretty new to the hunter scene, so that’s about all I can say about this one right now.

Mages
Frostbolt: Spell power scaling on this spell has been increased by approximately 5%.

Talents
Arcane
Arcane Empowerment: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc off of critical strikes. The self damage buff remains unchanged.
Incanter’s Absorption: This talent now only grants additional spell power when damage is absorbed by Mana Shield, Frost Ward, Fire Ward, or Ice Barrier. The limit of 5% of the mage’s health on the spell power buff has been removed.

Fire
Burning Soul: Threat reduction is now 10/20%, up from 5/10%.

Frost
Brain Freeze: This talent now allows your next Fireball or Frostfire Bolt to be instant and cost no mana. There is a small internal cooldown to keep the Frostfire Bolt from immediately triggering Brain Freeze again.

Priests

Talents

Discipline
Renewed Hope: now has a 60-second duration, up from 20 seconds, but a 20-second cooldown.

I’m not a priest, so I don’t have much to say on this one. Longer durations are good, longer cooldowns can be bad. I assume it’s good? /FailAtPriests

Rogues

Rupture: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes.

Talents

Subtlety
Filthy Tricks: Now Reduces the cooldown by 5/10 seconds and energy cost by 5/10 of Tricks of the Trade, Distract and Shadowstep abilities, and reduces the cooldown of Preparation by 1.5/3 minutes.

Ghostly Strike: If the rogue has a dagger equipped, this ability now deals 180% weapon damage instead of 125%.

Hemorrhage: If the rogue has a dagger equipped, this ability now deals 160% weapon damage instead of 110%.

Slaughter from the Shadows: Now adds 1/2/3/4/5% damage to all attacks in addition to its current effects.

Waylay: The debuff from this talent can now be caused by Backstab in addition to Ambush.

Allowing Rupture to crit is going to appeal to a lot of rogues out there. I have played around with rogues quite a bit, but I haven’t gotten all that high in level, so some of these I’m not too familiar with. However, I do know from playing a Sub Rogue that these changes look great to me. I know Sub has been sort of slacking here for a while, so increased damage and being able to use a debuff at any time rather than only when stealthed looks like a big step in the right direction.

Shaman

Flame Shock: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes and is affected by spell haste.

Talents

Elemental Combat
Elemental Oath: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.

Enhancement
Unleashed Rage: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.

Allowing Flame Shock to crit when it tics makes my many Shamans smile. I know from raiding with my wife’s Enhancement Shaman that she’s often disappointed with her DPS in comparison to others in the raid with lower gear scores. I don’t know that these changes are going to completely fix that, but it will be a step in the right direction at least.

Elemental Oath and Unleashed Rage both becoming passive auras rather than procs is great. It was never extremely hard getting the buffs up and keeping them there, but wasted downtime is wasted downtime no matter how you look at it. Fixing that looks like a great way to improve on one of the Shaman’s core traits of buffing their groups.

Warlocks

Immolate: The damage-over-time component of this spell can now produce critical strikes.

Talents

Demonology
Demonic Pact: This effect now has a 45-second duration, up from 12 seconds, and a 20-second internal cooldown.

I have always played a Warlock as either Affliction or Demonology, both of which don’t bother with Immolate after lower levels. I would imagine Destruction locks would get more use out of it while leveling, before they switch to other spells (just guessing here), but at the least it will help you clear through all of those mobs while you’re working through your lower levels.

Warriors

Revenge: Damage done by this ability (base and scaling) increased by 50%.

Talents

Fury
Rampage: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc from critical strikes.

The Warrior is another class I’m not too familiar with simply because I find them boring beyond belief. Increased damage on Revenge is nice for those that use it, and Rampage being made a passive aura like those of other classes is of course a good thing since you’re no longer having to rely on crits to proc the buff.

Items

Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orb for various other trade goods.

Glyphs

Death Knights
Glyph of Disease: When this glyph causes Frost Fever to be refreshed, it will now also trigger a refresh of Icy Talons.

Mages
Glyph of Fireball: No longer increases critical strike chance of Fireball. Instead, it now reduces the cast time of Fireball by 0.15 seconds.

Mechanostriders: Summoning any of these mounts is now perfectly mechanical-sounding!

I think Frozo is a great idea. Running random heroics over and over as I did on my Mage, I found quite a supply of Frozen Orbs and nothing at all to do with them. Sure they are used for crafting certain items, but there’s only so many of those that anyone needs and then they just stack up or you sell them on the AH for a fairly cheap price given the large supply that’s available right now.

The DK glyph will be good for some, not so much for others. I don’t see any need for it on my Frost Tank, but others might enjoy it. Since I’ve only recently joined the DK Fanclub after being a leader of the DK’s Suck Club, I don’t have a lot to contribute on that one.

The Mage glyph is a bit odd to me. Maybe I just haven’t played Fire in so long that I don’t fully understand it’s purpose? Reducing the casting time by 0.15 seconds seems a bit odd since the vast majority of time-reducing glyphs do so in increments of 0.1 seconds. I’ll leave it to the Fire Mages out there to put a value on this one, but from my previous experience with Fire I’d say this one isn’t worth my time.

Professions

Runed Orb: Recipes which require this item have had their material requirements significantly reduced.

Fishing
The “Monsterbelly Appetite” daily fishing quest has changed so it now takes place outside the The Violet Hold in Dalaran. The quest still requires a Severed Arm and has been renamed to “Disarmed!”

Inscription
Most recipes that required 2 inks now only require 1.

Mining
Titansteel Bar: Creating this item no longer results in a cooldown.

Tailoring
Glacial Bag: Creating this item now invokes a 7-day cooldown.

The cooldown and location requirements have been removed from creating Moonshroud, Spellweave and Ebonweave.

Reducing material requirements is always good for the crafter from a leveling and personal money making standpoint, though it may reduce the income from selling that service to others. I personally see it as a good thing, but we’ll see on that one.

I hate fishing, and this change isn’t going to do anything to change that for me. For those of you who do like fishing though, I hear this is a pretty big change in the right direction as it was pretty annoying and out of the way in the past.

Inscriptionists (I don’t give a crap what you want to call them, I took the profession the day it was released and was one of the first to get it to 450 on my server so I’ll call myself what I want) will like not having to burn through quite so many herbs to get their crafting done, especially during the leveling process. I think in the long run the biggest change is going to be even more people trying to take over the glyph market on the AH. I’d like to say it’s good, but I think we will have to wait and see the actual results on this one.

I love the fact that the Titansteel cooldown is going away so that I don’t have to keep all those mats sitting in my bank so that I can use them once a day. The downside is that there will be no more selling of your titansteel cooldowns, but the upside is that you won’t have to buy them. Since I haven’t sold a cooldown in weeks, I can’t say that the downside really bothers me much in the least.

Removing the cooldown from Tailoring cloths is equally is cool as it was for the Titansteel, with the same benefits and drawbacks to go with it. I know back when I actually had a tailor I would have loved this, though now I’m not sure how much I would care. The massive cooldown on the bags is sort of boring to me. If people want full 22 slots, then they’ll go buy full 22 slots. I don’t see that the cooldown on the bag is necessary, but it’s not one that I care about either way since 2 extra slots means nothing to me and I’m not a tailor.

Quests

Many quests which require vehicles have had their vehicle mechanics updated and improved in the interest of fun.

I know my wife absolutely hates vehicles, particularly those that involve flying. This might get her and people like her to enjoy them a bit more; but with so little detail who’s to say? I already like them myself, so if they’re more fun then by all means, proceed Blizz.

User Interface
All Alert pop-ups now have new and fresh Alert icons.

New and fresh icons….yippy?

Auction House
If the Auction House on a realm is unavailable for any reason, an alert will pop up informing players who attempt to access it.

Players can now Right-Click to place an item in the Auction frame.

Entire stacks of a specific item type can be placed in the Auction frame and several options have been added for choosing how to list auctions.

Stack Size: If a stack of items has been added to the Auction frame, players can select the size of the stack they wish to sell. If an invalid stack size is entered (i.e. a stack of 21 Saronite Ore), the Create Auction button will be grayed out.

Number of Stacks: In addition to selecting the size of a stack, players can select how many stacks of an item they wish to sell (i.e. if a player has a total of 43 Saronite Ore in the Auction frame, they can choose to list 2 stacks of 20, 4 stacks of 10, 8 stacks of 5, 43 stacks of 1, etc. If the number and amount of stacks listed results in a remainder, the left-over items will be placed back in the player’s bags automatically).

Stack Size and Number of Stacks are linked mathematically so that altering the variables of one may automatically calculate the amount of the other (i.e. if a player puts 20 in the Stack Size field and 43 Saronite Ore are in the Auction frame, the Number of Stacks field will change to 2 by default. If a player only wishes to sell one stack of 20 Saronite Ore, the Number of Stacks field can be manually changed to 1).

Price: Players can now choose to input the price of an item Per Stack or Per Item by selecting either option from a pull-down. If Per Item is selected and a player is selling a stack of that item, the Auction House will multiply the selected Per Item price by the amount of that item in the stack. If Per Stack is selected, the player can enter the total price he or she wishes to charge for each stack of that item being listed.

Auction Post Completion Bar: If multiple items or stacks of items are being listed at once by a player, a Posting completion bar will appear showing the total progress of each individual auction being listed once the Create Auction button is selected. The greater the number of individual listings being made in a single press of the Create Auction button, the longer this process will take. Players can still browse the Auction House while the Posting completion bar is in progress, but moving around will interrupt the progress, similar to moving while attempting to create multiple bandages with First Aid. Just as with creating bandages, auctions that were completed prior to the character moving or otherwise canceling the actions will successfully be listed.

Knowing that the AH is down is good I suppose. If I have trouble accessing it I just leave, personally. But I guess getting a notification will save me a bit of time. /shrug

Most of the other changes are simply making the default Auction interface work like most of the auction addons right now. They all sound good to me, but I don’t think they do enough to make me give up my addons. They are moving in the right direction though, so props to Blizzard for the sake of progress if nothing else.

The Auction Post Completion Bar isn’t bad I suppose, I know from setting up Auctions last night that this feature is already built into the latest version of Auctioneer as it threw me off at first as to what in the world was going on. Not bad, I guess, but not great either.

Dungeon Finder
The Deserter debuff given to players who leave a dungeon prematurely when queuing via the Random Dungeon option has been increased to 30 minutes, up from 15 minutes. The cooldown for using the Random Dungeon option remains 15 minutes.

The Random Dungeon cooldown is no longer displayed as a debuff. Instead, players will see the cooldown time remaining displayed in the Dungeon Finder window when Random Dungeon or Random Heroic Dungeon is selected from the pull-down.

If a player in your party has the Deserter debuff, or is on cooldown from the Random Dungeon option, his or her character name will be displayed in the Dungeon Finder window listed as “On Cooldown,” preventing the group from queuing.

Anyone in a dungeon party can now re-queue their group for a dungeon, as players will still be prompted whether or not to accept their chosen role.

People who drop group for stupid reasons, or no reason at all, really bug me, so doubling the timer is a great idea in my opinion. (Not that I think it will solve the problem in any way.)

Allowing anybody in the group to re-queue is a cool idea. I’ve had a few groups now where the group leader dropped group or got kicked, and then the person who got leadership after them wasn’t aware of it and didn’t requeue us. Most of the reasons why it would be needed are sort of negated by the times that it would become useful, so who knows on this one. I like the sound of it, though.

The other parts mentioned here aren’t a big deal to me.

Players who use the Vote Kick option will now be prompted to provide a reason for kicking a party member. This reason will be presented to everyone in the party except for the person voted to be kicked.

When joining as a group, more generous level requirements will be used instead of Random Dungeon level requirements so that players of different levels joining together will be eligible for a greater number of dungeons.

World Event bosses (such as Ahune for the Fire Festival) will now be accessible through the Dungeon Finder. Players must use the Dungeon Finder to access these bosses.

Parties randomly created via the Dungeon Finder will always be arranged in the party interface from top to bottom in the following order: tank, healer, damage, damage, damage.

If a random party is created via the Dungeon Finder and a player cannot roll Need on an item, a reason will now be provided.

I like the reason why being added to the Vote Kick option. So many people see something pop up and just immediately click ok, and it’s lead to more than one group completely falling apart because someone was just being a dick. It might help, it might not, but I’m staying optimistic on this one for now.

I really like the change to level requirements when joining as a group. I have a lot of guildies that are just far enough ahead of me, or behind me, that we can’t queue together for much of anything, so I like the sound of this one.

Being able to queue for world events is a great idea, grats to Blizz on that one for sure.

The other changes are nice, but not especially deserving of comments. I will say though that I love that I won’t have to answer the question of “why can’t I roll need on the gloves?” ~ “Because you’re a freaking Warrior! You don’t need cloth gloves with spellpower on them!” (I should have SS that one and sent it to Gevlon.)

Authenticator Frame: If a player has a Battle.net Authenticator attached to his or her account and selects Remember Account Name at the login screen, the next time that player logs into World of Warcraft, a field to input the Authenticator code will be displayed below the password field.

The World Map will now provide an option to display different levels of a multi-layered dungeon, zone, or city (i.e. players can view the map of the Dalaran Sewers without having to be in that location).

The Authenticator Frame is nice for those of us that have them, making it a bit less bother to use them.

The map option is nice, I know I’ve wanted to use it a time or two myself so it could be pretty cool. I’d really like to see Blizzard step it up and give us maps to old world dungeons like they have with the ones in Wrath. That’s what I’m waiting on, Blizz. Hook me up!

Quest Tracking Feature
The Quest Tracking Objectives Frame can now be widened via the Interface Options menu.

The short description for a tracked quest is now displayed on the Map in the quest pane.

Quest items in a player’s inventory which begin quests now each have an exclamation point overlaid on their icons to make them more easily identifiable.

If a players selects Track Low Level Quests, the quest objectives will no longer appear dim on the Map, nor will the exclamation points appear dim over NPC heads or on the Mini-Map.

Objectives Frame
The Objectives Frame will now list the number of quests displayed at the top. In addition, players can now click on the word “Objectives” at the top of the Objectives Frame for a list of sorting and filtering options which will determine how quests are ordered. Any quests or achievements filtered or sorted out of the Objectives Frame are still being tracked and are simply hidden in this frame.

Sorting
Sort by most difficult quests.
Sort by least difficult quests.
Sort by quests closest in proximity to the player (this will automatically update as players travel around).
Manual sorting: This allows players to Right-Click on each quest name in the Objectives Frame and determine in what order they should be placed.

Filtering
Toggle achievement tracking.
Toggle completed quest tracking.
Toggle tracking quest objectives in other zones.
Players can now Shift + Click on a quest objective or check the Track Quest box on the Map to track a quest in the Objectives Frame.

The quest tracker changes sound good overall. Most of them don’t really do anything for me since I always do my quests in my own order anyway and sorting doesn’t matter to me. For new people or those who just happen to be more obsessed with organisation than I am, I’d say it’s pretty good.

The one thing I’d like to see them do with the tracker is to let me move the flipping thing. I don’t care about widening it, sorting, minimizing, et cetera – I just want to be able to move it.

Bug Fixes
When speaking to an NPC for which a player has 2 or more quests and not all of them are complete, the incomplete quests will now correctly show as a gray question marks in the dialog box. In addition, repeatable quests will be properly colored as blue exclamation points or question marks in the dialog box for NPCs with multiple quests available, or for which the player has multiple quests in progress or completed.

This bug has annoyed the crap out of me here lately, so I’m glad they’re getting it fixed. Some people say they’ve been dealing with it for months and others haven’t seen it at all. I had a few problems with it sometime last year and then it cleared up until a few months ago.

Related posts:

1. Patch 3.2: Full Notes Revealed
2. Patch 3.3.5
3. [Patch 3.2] PTR Up, Ardent Defender Mechanics Discvoered

Here’s an overview of add-ons covered in the Emporium so far; I’ll try to keep this up-to-date:

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium Addendum: Rethinking Grid
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium Segment #7: DeclineDuel

The song “Orange Mace” was performed by Lady Naga, a singer/songwriter originally from Zangarmarsh. She came from a modest upbringing. Her father was a steam pump operator and her mother was a sea witch turned stay at home mom.

Lada Naga has been quoted as saying that if she hadn’t become a singer she would have liked to have become, “the best healing priestess in the world.” She goes on to say that the song “Orange Mace” was inspired by what she calls, “the most beautiful mace I’ve ever seen.” She is of course referring to the legendary weapon Valanyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.

(‘’)

Related posts:

1. Video: Ensidia Cheater’s Paradise
2. New Details about World of Warcraft Cataclysm from BlizzCon
3. New World of Warcraft Battleground: The Isle of Conquest

It’s a topic I’ve talked about before, and others have spoken about them as well.

Here in the good old U.S.A. these new puppies (Wind Rider Cub and Gryphon Hatchling) sell for $24.99 each, as this time around you’re purchasing not only the code to the in game vanity pets, but also a plush toy. Blizzard is selling the toy actually, which comes with the in game pet code, but really I’m pretty sure that most of the people who will buy these will do so for the in game pet more than the toy. I could be wrong, but that’s my guess and the reason for me listing them in that order.

In the case of the Pandaren Monk and Lil’ K.T. from the first round of microtransaction-vanity pets, half of the purchase of one pet was donated to charity. This time around it’s all going to Blizzard. Now, don’t take that as an argument from me, I’m just stating the facts for you here. You can find my thoughts on microtransactions in the posts I linked you to above (or to summarize, it doesn’t bother me).

I’m not a big fan of vanity pets, though there are a few that I like. But my wife loves them. Why does she love them? I have absolutely no idea, but that didn’t stop me from buying the monk and K.T. for her. Of course, I was also able to buy both of those two for less than the price of one of these, not to mention I didn’t have to bother with Shipping and Handling, nor did I have to pay and wait for the delivery time. Oh yeah, and sales tax, can’t forget Uncle Sam’s share of the cash now can we?

Going with the longer shipping option (8-10 days instead of 1-2), the two of these together comes out to $64.11 USD after all fees and such are applied. If you go for the higher shipping then it’s a little over $3 more.

How do I know that total? Well, I did mention my wife loves these things didn’t I?

Related posts:

1. Vanity Pet Analysis: Lil’ K.T.
2. Microtransactions: Final Thoughts
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #7

I’m sure a lot of you use Power Auras since it has gotten a lot of press from names a lot more reputable than mine. In this post I’ll go over my set up and how to recreate them, hopefully these will inspire you to play around a lot with your own auras and make some cool stuff (and then show them to me of course) =]

So Power Auras is a highly configurable addon that can track pretty much anything that can happen to or be caused by your character (trinket procs, buffs/debuffs, low health, missing buffs, cooldowns, etc) the downside is that you’ll need to do a lot of work on your end to make this addon work to its full potential (out of the box it really doesn’t do much of anything). I won’t go into the simple stuff, instead I’ll talk specifically about the Power Auras I use and why I use them. Here are a few awesome guides to familiarize you with the basics or just get a nice refresher:

Ghadamon’s Guide (MMO-Champion) – A good introduction, as well as how to use some of the more complex functions.
Food Before Flowers (NoStock UI) – Slightly more general, but covers a lot of ground.
Aliena’s Tutorial (Tankspot) – Yet another take, good tips on setting up several basic auras.
Nibuca’s Power Aura Posts (Mystic Chicanery) (part 2) (part 3) – Several posts highlighting the diversity of Power Auras, as well as basics.
Rilgon’s Hunter Auras (Stabilized Effort Scope) – No basics here, awesome hunter specific auras showing off how deep you can really go with the configuration utility.

NOTE: There’s also a bunch of video guides on youtube, so just do a search for “Power Auras” or “Power Auras guide” and you’ll get a bunch of results to comb through.

Alright lets get down to business (to defeat the huns? O_O) here’s a few screenshots showcasing all the auras I use, I couldn’t put them all on one since they are practically never all up at the same time and they end up overlapping each other and making a big mess.

These are some very simplistic auras that show me real basic information. The little red triangles pop up if my target does NOT have a Hunter’s Mark on it (mine or anyone elses). The yellow parentheses tell me if I have the Improved Steady Shot buff. When the green arc at the bottom appears that means my target doesn’t have a Serpent Sting cast by me on it (another hunter may have a sting up, but I don’t care about that in this case). The little red circle in the middle pops up to let me know when my Kill Shot is usable (target under 20%, shot not on cooldown, etc). There isn’t much to say about these auras, they tell me basics so I don’t fuck up on something simple, like forgetting to use my Kill Shots as often as possible or whatever.

Since being in Viper for too long really sucks I have these 2 auras that are a little more complex and combine settings from several auras into one. The smaller set of blue squiggles show up when my mana is at 20% or less and I am NOT in Aspect of the Viper, this lets me know to either use my Mana Injector or to flip into Viper to regain mana. The large squiggles only show when my mana is at like 98% or greater and I AM in Aspect of the Viper, this means to get the fuck out of Viper and back into Dragonhawk so my DPS can stop sucking.

These 2 are long duration buffs that help  me remember that while I’m under the effects of these buffs I should try my best to stand still and pump out as many shots as I can as quickly as possible. The large light blue circle appears to track the duration of my Rapid Fire. The little red mask thing tracks the duration of Bloodlust (both of these are generally never up at the same time, since stacking these isn’t recommended). These are as easy to make as the basic auras, just with the timer function enabled and the duration of the buff plugged in.

This group of auras shows my short duration procs that really change the way I do my DPS. The inner symbol pops up whenever a certain aspect of my Deathbringer’s Will procs (blue = 600 crit, yellow = 600 agi, silver = 12000 AP). The purple symbols appear when my Needle-Encrusted Scorpion procs (temporarily capping my ArPen), this lets me know that I should stop moving, pop Rapid Fire (if its stacked with a DBW proc even more so) if possible, and squeeze out as many Auto/Steady Shots as I can. The big orange circle appears when my 2 piece tier 10 bonus activates, I tried to make this aura big and obvious because its super important that I refresh my Serpent Sting while I’m under the effects of this buff (so my Chimera Shot can continually refresh the 15% damage bonus). The best case scenario would be proccing both the 600 crit rating proc from DBW as well as my 2-piece bonus at the same time so I could constantly refresh a Serpent Sting that deals an extra 15% damage as well as a much higher chance to crit (this is where keeping 2-piece tier 9 is a big deal).

Anyway thats all the auras I use, I hope this was worth reading and helped you guys get into Power Auras if you haven’t before or think of a few new ideas for your already existing auras. If you want it I’ll post up the text files to import my settings into your Power Auras (once I figure out how O_o). I’d love to see any comments about how you use Power Auras, since I definitely wouldn’t pass up a chance to leech ideas off of someone else >:]

Related posts:

1. Hitting the Mark! Part 3 – Abilities and Rotation
2. Hitting the Mark! Part 4 – Itemization and Glyphs
3. Macros for Huntering

Holidays
We’ve got two holidays happening in game and we aren’t doing either of them. Want to be our holiday reporter?

News That Caught Our Attention
Some disturbing news of real life violence involving a WoW player. We also discuss some of the Tom Chilton interview with Game Informer

Rude Disrespectful People
I read Anea’s Blog Post and we discuss player behavior.

Evinrue’s NPC of the Week
She’s back this week to talk about Renault Mograine.

Icesnake’s Addon Emporium
Icesnake brings us a very useful addon: Advanced Trade Skill Window

Listener Emails and Comments
We talk about what you had to say this week.

More Movie Fun
Modem has some “Must Haves” and “Hell No’s” for people to cast in the WoW movie.

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Related posts:

1. WoWphiles Podcast Show #16
2. WoWphiles Podcast Show #18
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #21

Segment Number 10: Advanced Trade Skill Window

Guest voice by Victoria Tietjens (Icesnake’s granddaughter)

Advanced Trade Skill Window (which I herinafter refer to as “ATSW”) is a complete replacement for Blizzard’s tradeskill window with more overview and special functions.

This replacement, which works for all tradeskills, including enchanting, provides you with:

- a better overview
ATSW is bigger than the standard window, resulting in a much better overview over the thousands of items you can produce. Additionally, it lets you sort your recipes either by groups (as in the standard window), alphabetically or by difficulty. Alternatively, ATSW even lets you create your own groups and sort the recipes the way you like!
ATSW also has a filter function: enter something into the filter line and ATSW hides all recipes that don’t contain the text you entered. But this filter function can do more: it’s a powerful search function that can filter for minimum/maximum level requirements, producable item counts, item rarity (color) and reagents necessary. If, for example, you wanted to search for recipes for items made from iron, at least level 20 but no higher than 40, and green or better, you could enter a simple formula (explained in the radme.txt file) and have just those recipes displayed.

- more comfort
ATSW has a production queue: you can queue several different items and have them all produced automatically by just clicking one button. If you’ve ever had to wait for a number of parts to be made before you could make the item you really wanted, you’re going to love this.

ATSW is able to consider items you have to produce in order to use them as reagents in the production of other items. So if you need item A to produce item B, you don’t have to manually produce first item A, then item B. ATSW does that for you; you just tell it to produce item B and it automatically queues the production of item A and – afterwards – item B. If you are missing some reagents to produce both items you get a message telling you exactly which reagents you need.

ATSW helps you when telling your friends what reagents you need for a specific item: just click on a recipe with your shift-key pressed and the chat line opened and the reagent info will be added to the chat line.

ATSW shows you what reagents you need to process the whole production queue. It even tells you how many of each reagent you have in your bank, on alternative characters on the same server (in this case, it can even tell you on which characters) and which reagents are buyable from merchants. In case of buyable reagents ATSW can automatically buy all missing and available items from a merchant when you are speaking to him.

Most of ATSW’s functions are available from buttons in the Gui and are self-explanatory. There are also some commands you can enter from the chat line:

You can enable (or disable) a specific trade skill; for example, if you don’t have a toon that knows blacksmithing, you’d probably want to disable blacksmithing in ATSW.

The “reagents” command will display a reagent window that displays all reagents needed for all saved queues on all characters. It also allows you to fetch all necessary reagents from your bank. This window can also be set to appear automatically whenever you are at your bank in the ATSW options. Imagine not having to take notes about what to buy for your engineer when you’e on your bank alt!

And you can delete all your saved queues. This might come in handy if you have, for example, saved a queue with a character you deleted.

You can download ATSW from WoWinterface.com or Curse.com, or get it with WoWmatrix.

Music for this segment provided by Freeplay.com entitled “Compliments to the Chef,” by Akihiro Yamamoto.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #11
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #9
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8

Death Knight Tanking: Frost – Last week’s post getting you up to level 60.

Introduction
As I write this article, my Frost DK is currently sitting at level 71. The image below will update itself as the Armory information is updated though, so you may see him at a higher level in this picture when you read this.

Last week’s post discussed getting up to level 60, your base spec as a Frost Tank, and the general tactics and rotations used for tanking. This time around we’re going up to level 70 and will get a bit more focused on the actual tanking practice, and discuss branching out into the other trees to finish off our primary tanking requirements.

I mentioned last time that I’ve been using a two-hander while I tank, and people on Twitter requested information about Dual Wielding instead, so that too will be included.

General Tanking Information: Weapons
When I mentioned on Twitter that I was posting about tanking with a Frost DK I had a lot of people ask about dual wielding. At the time I had only tried two-handed tanking and was doing well with it. As I know it’s a question that needs answering though, I went ahead and took a shot at it to see what kind of results I got.

Dual Wield Tanking

I did a lot of searching for decent weapons that I could dual wield that would prove more beneficial than the sword that you leave the DK starting area with (and for the record, I do urge you to take the Sword rather than the Axe if you plan on tanking). The best I could find were ones that were rather easy to obtain, Adamantite Rapier (+15 Stamina, +16 Dodge Rating). They are crafted weapons from a Blacksmith, and my Death Knight is a blacksmith himself so he crafted his own. They require 12 Adamantite Bars (which is 24 Adamantite Ore) if you want to get some crafted for yourself.

The Rapiers require level 66 to use, so you have a few levels to gain before you can switch to them, but your DK sword or a solid two-hand drop from an instance should work just fine until then. The Rapiers aren’t all that great from a damage perspective, but they provide a nice boost to avoidance/mitigation that will help with your survival.

After crafting the rapiers I opened a Death Gate to Ebon Hold so that I could make use of my Runeforging skill to apply the Rune of Swordbreaking to them:

Rune of Swordbreaking Affixes your one-handed rune weapon with a rune that increases Parry chance by 2% and reduces the duration of Disarm effects by 50%. The Parry chance stacks on the two weapons giving +4% overall, but the disarm reduction does not stack with itself.

Two Handed Tanking

I replaced the DK starting sword with the Shaarde the Greater which drops off of Tavarok in the Auchindoun: Mana Tombs instance. I did just fine using Shaarde, but I didn’t especially notice any great increase in my tanking ability while using it over the DK sword. If it happens to drop for you then grats on a new sword, and if it doesn’t then don’t sweat it.

At level 68 I left Outlands and hit up Borean Tundra in Northrend where I replaced Shaarde with the Axe of Frozen Death (+37 Strength, +54 Stamina, +28 Hit, +43 Crit), which is pictured above (at an odd angle). I now use this axe for when I’m tanking small groups or bosses that are not heavily melee focused, and for when I am questing. I am also trying out the Rune of the Fallen Crusader rather than Swordshattering (4% Parry, -50% disarm duration).

Rune of the Fallen Crusader Affixes your rune weapon with a rune that has a chance to heal you for 3% and increase total Strength by 15% for 15 sec.

Axe of Frozen Death is a reward for a three person group quest in Borean Tundra. The quest chain leading up to it isn’t very long, so you can get it pretty soon after arriving in Northrend, but the quest was beyond my capability to solo as Frost. I managed to get the guy down to 20% health twice, but after he killed me for the sixth time I enlisted the help of another DK in the area and we took him down after two tries.

(My thanks to @Tarinae, @Shawndra, @schwarzwald, @OreoNation, @TheAllianceGuy, @MvPruett, @mageic, @adlib421, @VariantAvatar, @krizhek, and @Nochecazador on Twitter for helping me get the link to Shaarde the Greater since I put this part in blog while I was at work where I cannot access Wowhead.com)

Dual Wielding vs. Two Handed
As far as holding threat goes, I didn’t notice a significant difference between the two styles. DW was a bit better on groups of trash while 2H was a bit better on bosses. I did have a little trouble tanking one boss as DW, but at that time I was still getting used to managing my procs and kept forgetting to add Obliterate to my rotation. In that fight I switched over to Shaarde after losing threat a second time and had no problems the rest of that encounter. I think this was probably a situation of Tank failure more so than a difference in the actual weapons though.

The more comfortable I get with tanking as a DK and the more I get used to my abilities, the more I begin to lean towards DW instead of 2H. With limited weapon choices in Outlands I believe that you’re best bet is to do what I did and stick to dual wielding during trash pulls and using a heavy 2H for bosses. Progressing into Northrend though, finding a pair for slow weapons to DW will give you the highest damage and most threat.

While the damage from Howling Blast is not impacted by your weapon choices, your damage and threat are tied into your weapons. The Threat of Thassarian talent causes Obliterate (and other attacks) to attack with both weapons when you use it, and the Rime talent gives your Obliterate a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Howling Blast and make it rune free for your next cast. The somewhat hidden benefit when those two are mixed together is that both of your weapons used during Obliterate have individual chances to proc Rime, so you get two rolls for that 15% chance each time you use Obliterate when dual wielding.

Since my choice of good one-handed weapons right now is fairly limited I will continue switching between the two styles, but as I find better options I’m almost positive at this point that I will end up dual wielding at level 80, and quite possibly sooner than that if I can find some weapons that don’t suck.

In the end Frost Tanks can do just fine whether they’re using 2H, DW-Fast, or DW-Slow. If you like to use dual diseases then you’ll be stronger if you decide on dual wielding slow weapons, while using the single disease method will work better with 2H or DW-fast.

If you are going to do a single disease style, then you’ll probably be a little bit better off either doing 2H or DW with fast weapons. If you want two diseases then you’ll want either DW with slow weapons, or 2H. DW with fast or slow weapons work in either case, but fast shines more in single disease where slow shines more in two diseases.

Frost Tanking Spec

I’m going to point out one change I made to the spec from last week’s post, and that is replacing Acclimation 1/3 with Lichborne 1/1. That may get changed as I get into Northrend dungeons, but for Outlands, especially in the upper 60’s you need all the fear removal you can get. Even with the Human racial and the PvP trinket you get from the DK starting area, you still don’t have enough fear removal to take care of every encounter.

Rather than paying for a respec I just added a point into Lichborne and was at only 4/5 Anticipation when I actually hit level 70. But if you haven’t started your DK yet then I would suggest you go with this build instead of what I had before. If you have already followed the previous article’s advice, then don’t worry about it too much as it worked out just fine for me.

For the best survival at end game you will end up having points in Acclimation anyway, so it’s not bad to leave it the way it is if you have already spent your points as I suggested in the previous post. Acclimation is not going to help in every encounter or even every dungeon/raid, but there are certain encounters (Twink Valks anyone?) where the resistance offered can be significant. Of course, at end game you probably will not be using Lichborne since it’s more geared towards PvP, so the choice is yours whether you want more survivability leveling up with a respect at end game, or if you just want to deal with trouble now to save that shiny gold coin later down the road.

Lichborne 1/1: Draw upon unholy energy to become undead for 10 sec. While undead, you are immune to Charm, Fear and Sleep effects.

Blade Barrier 5/5: Whenever your Blood Runes are on cooldown, you gain the Blade Barrier effect, which decreases damage taken by 5% for the next 10 sec.

Anticipation 5/5: Increases your Dodge chance by 5%.

Pay special attention to that conditional statement at the beginning of Blade Barrier’s effect. Both of your Blood Runes need to be on cooldown before its effect happens, so be sure to use those runes when they’re available so that you don’t short yourself on one of your primary defenses.

Glyphs
Glyph of Obliterate: [Major] Increased the damage of your Obliterate ability by 20%.
Glyph of Unbreakable Armor: [Major] Increases the total armor granted by Unbreakable Armor to 30%.
Glyph of Howling Blast: [Major] Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.
Glyph of Frost Strike: [Major] Reduces the cost of your Frost Strike by 8 Runic Power.
Glyph of Disease: [Major] Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.

Glyph of Pestilence: [Minor] Increases the radius of your Pestilence effect by 5 yards.
Glyph of Raise Dead: [Minor] Your Raise Dead spell no longer requires a reagent.
Glyph of Blood Tap: [Minor] Your Blood Tap no longer causes damage to you.

I switched my glyphs up a bit from last time so that I’m now using Howling Blast and Disease. I still like the use of Disease for leveling/questing purposes since I do so in an AoE grinding style, but Disease is not so much a need as it is a convenience. For pure tanking purposes, Disease is actually a fairly poor choice.

Since I prefer the Two Disease approach to tanking, Obliterate becomes more and more useful to me. Howling Blast is a big contribution to both damage and threat, and it shines really more in a single disease build than a dual disease, though it is still useful for either one.

My current plan is to replace Disease with Obliterate, and hang on to Howling Blast for the time being. I am trying to decide whether I will be better of with Frost Strike or Unbreakable Armor for level 80, and there’s a fair chance I might take both of them and drop Howling Blast when I get there. I’ll certainly keep you informed on that part as I go along.

New Spells: 61-70
We get some new spells/abilities in the level range that are key to our tanking abilities (hello Taunt). We also get some that are just plain useful (Path of Frost).

At level 61 we get one of our big attacks, Obliterate. This spell does good damage and its damage is increased when its target is diseased. Normally using this spell consumes the diseases you have on the target, but thanks to our Annihilation talent that is no longer the case. In addition, our Rime talent gives Obliterate a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Howling Blast and cause our next Howling Blast to consume no runes.

You also get Path of Frost at 61 which allows you and your group to walk on water. Any damage at all breaks the effect, but you can instantly cast it again as long as you have a Frost Rune available. A special note on this one, it essentially makes water into solid ground, so unless you want people to hate you it’s not a good idea to cast this when you know your group is jumping down into a body of water expecting to live and then they end up dead instead.

At level 62 we get one of our signature tanking skills, Icebound Fortitude which makes you immune to stuns and reduces damage taken for 12 seconds.

At 64 we receive Blood Tap which damages us for 6% of our health (so the more you have the more it hurts) in exchange for converting a Blood Rune into a Death Rune (which can be used as any type) and ending its cooldown. It’s great for when your runes are on cooldown and you need some emergency threat or damage. Most often I find myself using this ability either for a Blood Boil or Death Strike, though I have used it for a necessary Pestilence, Hungering Cold, Obliterate, and Howling Blast as well. Be sure to use it when at least one of your Blood Runes is used, preferably both, and then use it as needed.

When we reach 65 we finally get our actual taunt, Dark Command. It’s a single target taunt with an 8 second cooldown, but since our only other taunt has a ridiculous cooldown on it, we’ll take this one gladly.

Also at 65 we get our first real party buff in Horn of Winter. It increases Strength and Agility for your group for two minutes. It has no cost, so you might as well keep it active at all times as long as you’re somewhere that fighting can take place.

At 66 we get our first “oh crap” button in the form of Death Pact. This spell allows you to sacrifice your Ghoul which instantly heals you for 40% of your health. At this point I usually don’t bother bringing out the ghoul unless I intend to sac him in the first place and instead just have him reserved for boss fights or emergency heals. If you use it like I do then be sure to remember that the GCD is in effect after summoning the ghoul, so you have 1.5 seconds between the summon and the heal, so don’t wait until the last second to use it.

At 67 we get a nice threat booster from Rune Strike. It’s a bit of an odd attack as it can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack, but on your next attack after using it you hit the target with a high threat attack instead of a normal auto-attack. The best way I’ve found to use this one is to just macro it to my attack keys and spam them in between attacks to use them whenever they’re available. Of course if you use this method of macro then you want to either be spamming the next attack you plan on making or one that you know the required runes are on cooldown.

Moving on up to level 68 we find Anti-Magic Shell. It costs 20 RP to cast it, but you’ll receive 75% damage reduction from spells in return, and the damage absorbed will grant you RP as well. It has a short duration and a long cooldown, so make sure you use it wisely.

We finally finish up our Presences at level 70 with Unholy Presence. Your movement speed gets increased by 15%, as does your melee haste. I primarily use this one for the increased movement while I’m questing and such, but the melee haste is a big deal too and it’s definitely noticeable at this level. If you fight in Unholy Presence you’ll find your runes going on cooldown a lot faster than usual, which means you’ll wait longer in between special attacks each time you burn through your runes and have to wait for them to cool down.

Learning the Rune and Runic Power System
This section probably should have been brought up in the first post, but I didn’t think about it when I was writing it, so you’ll have to settle for this post instead.

Knowing how your Runes and Runic Power work is going to be the overall deciding factor on whether you can fill your role or have your name listed amongst the thousands of Death Knoobs that plague the servers today. Do you want to have a clue as to what you doing, how you’re doing it, and why? If so, then continue on. If not, then turn around and bend over, and I’ll show you what right where you can stick your rune blade.

Runes
All DKs have six runes, two of each type (Blood, Frost, Unholy), and they provide us with our primary resource for using our abilities. There is a fourth Rune type called the Death Rune which can be used as any type of rune you want it to be. The Frost and Unholy trees both have talents that allow you to convert your Blood Runes into Death Runes, and the Blood tree has a talent that converts your Frost and Unholy Runes into Death Runes.

For describing the use of runes I’m going to use just the first letter of the tree to describe them, so we all have: BB FF UU

As a Frost Tank we’re going to use our Blood Runes (B) individually, and for the most part our Frost and Unholy Runes will be used in pairs (FU). The paired FU runes may be in a single ability such as Obliterate and Howling Blast, or individually by use of Icy Touch (F) and Plague Strike (U). Our Death Runes will be used for whatever spell happens to be the most important at the time, which we’ll get into details on a bit later.

Frost generates Death Runes from the Blood of the North talent, which makes your Blood Strike and Pestilence spells cause your next Blood Rune to proc as a Death Rune instead.

To borrow a term from the Comprehensive Guide to Death Knight Tanking (best DK Tank resource I found), a “Rune Blackout” occurs when all six of your runes have been used and are on cooldown. During these blackouts is when you want to use your Runic Power so that you can fill in the gap before your runes come back up and you can get back to business.

When you have a large pool of RP you want to spend it on Frost Strike to pump out additional damage and threat on a single target, but you want to reserve 20 RP at all times so that you can use Rune Strike, which is a big buff to your threat.

Tanking Trash

You might notice that I’ve made an adjustment to the rotation here, switching Blood Boil and Howling Blast. The reason for that is because now that we have the Blade Barrier talent from the Blood tree, we need to get rid of those Blood Runes early on to activate the talent.

I also removed the AoE rotation as I’ve decided I’ll have another post dedicated to DK AoE that will cover that. With this post we’re sticking strictly to tanking and since you never know what crazy things might happen in a dungeon you’ll need to get used to thinking on your feet in those situation anyway rather than trying to rely on remembering some random rotation you read on my blog.

I have also broken the rotation down into two “sets”. Each set is a cooldown of your runes, so each set rotates through the use of all of your runes.

First Rune Set: Icy Touch (F), Plague Strike (U), Pestilence (B), Blood Strike (B), Howling Blast (FU), Frost Strike (60+ RP only)

Second Rune Set: Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast if Rime procs], Obliterate (Death Runes), [Howling Blast if Rime procs], (decision time)

The First Rune Set establishes your diseases, spreads them around, and then hits with an AoE to solidify threat on the group. It also uses both Pestilence and Blood Strike to convert our Blood Runes into Death Runes to allow for more Obliterates and Howling Blasts in the second set. Frost Strike will use up extra RP if you have 60 or more, otherwise it should be ignored in favor of using Rune Strike.

You have the option of using Obliterate instead of Howling Blast at the end of the first set in hope of a Rime proc, but with AoE being the staple that most of your DPS are likely to use you probably want to get some more AoE threat than just your diseases. If you’re in a guild run where you know people will work with you then go for Obliterate, but if you’re in a PUG then just play it safe and Howling Blast for now.

The Second Rune Set is where we dish out our serious damage and also where our Rotation becomes our “Rotation”. Obliterate will hit our primary target and has a chance (two chances if dual wielding) of a Rime proc if it hits. Those Rime procs are what we’re hoping for each time we use Obliterate. If you get a Rime proc, then fire off a Howling Blast. If you don’t, then use another Obliterate, and so on. If Obliterate hits, then both weapons hit and you get two rolls for a Rime proc. If Obliterate misses, then both weapons miss so no Rime procs for you.

We also have “(decision time)” in that second set, where you need to make the call on what to do next. You can either use your remaining FU runes for another Obliterate, or you can use Icy Touch/Plague Strike and then use your Blood Tap ability to refresh a Blood Rune as a Death Rune and use it for Pestilence. If you go for Obliterate then you risk having both of your diseases fall off. If you go for the IT/PS then you’re only using two Obliterates, and if neither of those gave you a Rime proc then you’re low on AoE damage/threat and are going to have to make up for that in the third set by using Blood Boil as either one or both of your Blood Runes which means they will not become Death Runes in your fourth set, which means you’re rotation just went out the window.

You also have the option of using a straight Howling Blast in place of one or the other of those Obliterates, relying on straight ability uses rather than procs. A proc is always a gamble, but if you’re dual wielding then you have a higher chance of getting those procs. If you take the chance on the Obliterates, then chances are you’re going to get at least one Rime proc out of the deal and you should easily maintain threat. If you don’t take the chance on the Obliterates, then you’ll probably still hold your threat, but you won’t be tapping your potential at all.

Tanking Bosses
Now that we have our hard hitting abilities, it’s time to change up the boss rotation as well.

Boss Set One: Icy Touch (F), Plague Strike (U), Blood Strike (B), Blood Strike (B), Obliterate (FU), Frost Strike (60+ RP only)

Boss Set Two: Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast if Rime procs], Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast if Rime procs], Obliterate (FU), [Howling Blast if Rime procs], Frost Strike, Frost Strike

I like to establish a nice burst of crit when I open on a boss, and the best way to do that is to us your Deathchill buff which gives you a guaranteed crit with your next Icy Touch or Howling Blast. Deathchill requires a Frost Rune to cast it, but the buff lasts for 30 seconds. So use it and then wait for your Frost Rune to cooldown before moving in to attack. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, but I wouldn’t want to blow a Frost Rune in the middle of combat, so I use it here instead.

If you are using the Glyph of Howling Blast, and the boss has adds, then open up with it and replace the first Blood Strike with Pestilence. Otherwise open with Icy Touch instead and follow the rotation above.

Blood Strike hits pretty hard, gaining an extra 25% damage from both diseases being applied, but the big reason why we’re using it is to convert those Blood Runes into Death Runes for round two where we can lay down some serious Obliteratious Hate. (Yes, I just made up the word “Obliteratious”.)

If you have over 60 RP, then go ahead and hit the boss with a Frost Strike as well. If you don’t, then ignore it for now and save your RP for Rune Strikes to generate extra threat on the boss each time you Dodge or Parry his attacks.

When your diseases are getting ready to fall off, go ahead and reapply them, make use of Blood Strike whenever your Blood Runes are available to convert them into Death Runes for the next set, keep your RP down around 20-40 by making use of Frost Strike, take advantage of Rune Strike every chance you get, and don’t forget your other buffs (Unbreakable Armor, Icebound Fortitude) as well.

After level 65 we finally get our Taunt, Dark Command, which should be able to handle any threat situations that arise, and Death Grip is a good backup if by some poor roll of the dice it actually misses.

I already mentioned it in the New Spells section above, but I’ll list it here just to bring it back to mind. At level 66 you get access to the most potent heal in the DK arsenal – Death Pact. It requires you to sacrifice your ghoul to cast it, but it restores 40% of your total hit points when you use it. It’s one of the best heals in the game overall, surpassed only by the Paladin’s Lay on Hands spell.

Addons and Macros
You may want to get an addon to keep track of your procs, especially Rime (or Freezing Fog, as the proc’s buff is called).

The addon that I use for my scrolling combat text, Parrot, is able to set sound notifications to specific triggers, one of which is Freezing Fog (Rime). If that’s something you’re interested in then you may want to give it a shot.

For those that need a visible queue you’ll want to use something more like Power Auras Classic, which I have installed and uninstalled a few times now. I love the concept, but don’t care so much for the follow through on the addon, but I’m finding that the audio isn’t quite good enough for me since I like to have other sounds on at the same time as well as audio warnings from Deadly Boss Mods, so I’ve installed PAC once again and will see how I like it with the DK.

There are also a number of addons that you can use to monitor your Rune cooldowns as well as your Runic Power. I can think of five of them right off the top of my head, but which one you use is a matter of preference so you’ll have to decide which one for yourself. There are similar addons that monitor the DoT timers of your diseases if you’d care to use one of those. I’m not so big on that myself, so I don’t use one, but they are available if you wish to make use of them.

The only Macro that I’d like to bring to your attention right now is the one that you’ll use for your Rune Strike ability, which you can tie into as many macros as you want.

#showtooltip
/cast Blood Strike
/cast Rune Strike

It’s that simple. Just replace Blood Strike with whatever other spell(s) you have on your action bar and you can spam all you want in between attacks.

Some of the addons I’ve already mentioned are also capable of notifying you of when you have dodged or parried an attack, and they can help save your fingers some effort if you would rather use Rune Strike with an addon than simply spamming buttons.

Alternate (Recommended) Spec for Level 60
I have updated last week’s post to include this as well, but just in case you aren’t in the habit of checking my old posts, here it is anyway. This is a revised spec for level 60. After spending five days doing almost nothing but running random dungeons and leveling my professions I needed to make a change.

The change isn’t huge but it is significant, especially for the mid-to-upper sixties. I removed the single point in Acclimation and replaced it with Lichborne, which makes you immune to Charm, Fear, and Sleep effects for 10 seconds. When you run randoms in your 60s you are going to run into a LOT of Fear effects. Enough so that my human racial and my PvP trinket were not enough to take off all of the fear at times.

The magic-based damage reduction from Acclimation isn’t bad, it just didn’t provide enough benefit (especially with only one of the three possible points spent in it) for me to take it over Lichborne given how often I had to deal with fear and how seldom I had to deal with spell casters.

That being said, when you get to level 80 you’ll find Lichborne to be almost worthless as its main purpose for end game is PvP rather than heroics or raiding. If you don’t mind dealing with the fear while you’re leveling then you can save yourself a respec and just go with Acclimation.

Filed under: Death Knight, Guide, Leveling, World of Warcraft Tagged: AoE, Frost, Tank

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Tanking: Frost
2. AoE Grinding: Frost Death Knight Edition
3. Why not restructure Death Knight talent trees?

Acknowledging our fantastic listeners
As always we start out by giving love to you guys that listen to the show and reading your emails.

Buffs, Nerfs, Rumors and more.
Paladin tanks got a nerf, Death Knight tanks got a buff, and everyone might get a Deathcharger. The mobile auction house is in development and there may be more content before Cataclysm.

The Language Barrier
Are cross-continent dungeon parties having trouble understanding each other?

Spirit vs Mp5
What you want and why you want it.

Evinrue’s Fallout of the Lich King
Evinrue is back to give us her take on the Fall of the Lich King Cinematic.

Spoiler Segment: Fall of the Lich King
We discuss our thoughts on the cinematic.

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Related posts:

1. WoWphiles Podcast Show #18
2. WoWphiles Podcast Show #16
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #10

[NOTE: This post is meant to cover you only up to level 60.]
[NOTE 2: I have updated the spec details and link for level 60 to help you in tanking Outlands instances. Removed Acclimation 1/3 with Lichborne 1/1. Details below.]

Introduction
As I write this article, my Frost DK is currently sitting at level 65. The image below will update itself as the Armory information is updated though, so you may see him at a higher level in that picture when you read this.

About a week or so ago I posted about A Death Knight Tank, one named Khanus in particular, and how how that DK inspired me to want to finally make a DK of my own and actually focus on leveling him as a tank to see for myself just how hard it would be to successfully fill that role with a DK.

I planned on leveling a DK sometime within the next couple of months or so, but circumstances changed a bit here and there and I decided to roll him early rather than waiting. I’m pretty well known for my patience outside of the game, but for some reason when I’m in a virtual world that aspect of my personality disappears and when I want something I want it now. I didn’t have a character named Psynister on this server just yet, so that’s how this fellow came to be.

I didn’t want to be just another Death Knoob out there, so when I got started with this guy I did my research first and smashed faces later. I did a lot of reading on different blogs and forums to get everyone’s general views of how to tank with a DK and I found a lot of really good information out there. I found a lot of bad/old information as well, but we don’t need to waste our time with that.

General Tanking Information
The first thing that I want to throw at you here, besides the unnecessarily long introduction up above, is that all three of a DK’s talent trees are capable of tanking. You can find that little tidbit of information just about anywhere you look for tanking info.

That being said, only Frost and Blood are really considered to be high end tanking specs at this time. Recent nerfs to Unholy have reduced their effectiveness. That doesn’t mean they can’t still do it, especially if an experienced player is behind the keyboard, but if you’re new to DK tanking then stick with Frost or Blood.

Tanking with a DK is different than tanking with other classes. You don’t really have a set rotation you’re going to go through (sorry, no 96969 business over here), and while you do have two taunts, one of them has a long cooldown and both of them are only single target. So you can’t slip into a single style of play and assume that it’s going to work for you all the time. You need to be flexible, and you need to be able to react to the situation as it changes.

Death Knights have a very unique system of resources as well, having to manage both a Runic Power pool and a Runic system as well. Managing those can be tricky at first, and using abilities without being aware of their Rune costs can completely kill your ability to act as a tank. Focusing too much on your Runes though makes you waste your Runic Power, which means you’re throwing away additional DPS which in turn is throwing away threat. It sounds pretty complicated, and when you’re new to it it certainly seems that way, but the longer you play with it the more natural it will become.

Frost Tanking Basics
I was misinformed from previous playing experience and discussions prior to the two or three most recent patches, that Unholy was the main spec for AoE tanking. However, the real king of AoE threat generation comes from the Frost tree.

Frost tanks have two primary styles of play: single disease, and dual disease. You also have the option of using either a two-handed weapon for big hits, or dual wielding weapons for additional stats and smaller, but faster attacks. My personal style of playing works better with dual diseases right now, and up to this point I have only tried two-handed tanking and so cannot comment on the dual wielding yet. [Dual Wielding is covered in the follow up post, however.]

Frost Tanking Spec
Alright, it’s time to get a little more specific about how to tank with the Frost DK, and the first order up on that list is what sort of spec you should be running. As I mentioned, I did a lot of research before I actually rolled this character, and the spec I am using is what I felt was the best route for me to take after that research.

Alternate (Recommended) Spec for Level 60
This is a revised spec for level 60. After spending five days doing almost nothing but running random dungeons and leveling my professions I needed to make a change.

The change isn’t huge but it is significant, especially for the mid-to-upper sixties. I removed the single point in Acclimation and replaced it with Lichborne, which makes you immune to Charm, Fear, and Sleep effects for 10 seconds. When you run randoms in your 60s you are going to run into a lot of Fear effects. Enough so that my human racial and my PvP trinket were not enough to take off all of the fear at times.

The magic-based damage reduction from Acclimation isn’t bad, it just didn’t provide enough benefit (especially with only one of the three possible points spent in it) for me to take it over Lichborne given how often I had to deal with fear and how seldom I had to deal with spell casters.

Improved Icy Touch 3/3: Your Icy Touch does an additional 15% damage and your Frost Fever reduces melee and ranged attack speed by an additional 6%.

Toughness 5/5: Increases your armor value from items by 10% and reduces the duration of all movement slowing effects by 30%.

Black Ice 5/5: Increases your Frost and Shadow damage by 10%.

Annihilation 3/3: Increases the critical strike chance of your melee special abilities by 3%. In addition, there is a 100% chance that your Obliterate will do its damage without consuming diseases.

Killing Machine 5/5: Your melee attacks have a chance to make your next Icy Touch, Howling Blast or Frost Strike a critical strike. Effect occurs more often than Killing Machine (Rank 4).

Chill of the Grave 2/2: Your Chains of Ice, Howling Blast, Icy Touch and Obliterate generate 5 additional runic power.

Frigid Dreadplate 3/3: Reduces the chance melee attacks will hit you by 3%.

Glacier Rot 3/3: Diseased enemies take 20% more damage from your Icy Touch, Howling Blast and Frost Strike.

Deathchill 1/1: When activated, makes your next Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Frost Strike or Obliterate a critical hit if used within 30 sec.

Rime 3/3: Increases the critical strike chance of your Icy Touch and Obliterate by 15% and casting Obliterate has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on Howling Blast and cause your next Howling Blast to consume no runes.

Hungering Cold 1/1: Purges the earth around the Death Knight of all heat. Enemies within 10 yards are trapped in ice, preventing them from performing any action for 10 sec and infecting them with Frost Fever. Enemies are considered Frozen, but any damage other than diseases will break the ice.

Improved Frost Presence 2/2: While in Blood Presence or Unholy Presence, you retain 6% stamina from Frost Presence, and damage done to you is decreased by an additional 2% in Frost Presence.

Blood of the North 3/3: Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 10%. In addition, whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence there is a 100% chance that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates. Death Runes count as a Blood, Frost or Unholy Rune.

Acclimation 1/3: When you are hit by a spell, you have a 10% chance to boost your resistance to that type of magic for 18 sec. Stacks up to 3 times. [Revision: Replaced by Lichborne]

Lichborne 1/1: Draw upon unholy energy to become undead for 10 sec. While undead, you are immune to Charm, Fear and Sleep effects. [Revision: Replaces Acclimation]

Frost Strike 1/1: Instantly strike the enemy, causing 55% weapon damage plus 137.5 as Frost damage.

Guile of Gorefiend 3/3: Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Blood Strike, Frost Strike, Howling Blast and Obliterate abilities by 45%, and increases the duration of your Icebound Fortitude by 6 secs.

Tundra Stalker 5/5: Your spells and abilities deal 15% more damage to targets infected with Frost Fever. Also increases your expertise by 5.

Howling Blast 1/1: Blast the target with a frigid wind dealing 518 to 562 Frost damage to all enemies within 10 yards.

Glyphs
Glyph of Howling Blast: [Major] Your Howling Blast ability now infects your targets with Frost Fever.
Glyph of Frost Strike: [Major] Reduces the cost of your Frost Strike by 8 Runic Power.
Glyph of Disease: [Major] Your Pestilence ability now refreshes disease durations on your primary target back to their maximum duration.

Glyph of Pestilence: [Minor] Increases the radius of your Pestilence effect by 5 yards.
Glyph of Raise Dead: [Minor] Your Raise Dead spell no longer requires a reagent.

I am currently using Disease over Howling Blast because I really enjoy AoE grinding while I quest, but as far as tanking goes Howling Blast is probably going to be better for you overall if you plan on sticking primarily to dungeons or questing with groups rather than solo questing and grinding. I am also using the Death Strike glyph in place of Frost Strike to test it, but I’m going to replace it tonight because I completely misread what it did and get very little benefit from it where reducing the runic cost of Frost Strike will grant me more threat generation during boss fights.

As for the minor glyphs, you want those two glyphs and you want them before any others. Pestilence is higher priority than Raise Dead, so if you are only able to get one of them for some reason, go for Pestilence.

Tanking Trash (Up to level 60)
Trash tanking is where all of your AoE spells really shine. The other members of your group dictate where your AoE spells get cast in your “rotation”, whether you need to front load the AoE threat or if you’ll have to time to start and spread your diseases first.

The research I did frequently pointed out that being able to react to your situation is the key to being a good DK tank, and I have found that to be entirely true. As such, I have developed my own rotation here for what works well for me, based solely on how I like to play. There may very well be a better rotation to use out there, but this is what works for me.

Disease Rotation: Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence, Howling Blast, Blood Boil
Heavy AoE Rotation: (Icy Touch), Blood Boil, Blood Boil, Howling Blast, Pestilence

I prefer using the disease rotation because it gives me the most control over threat during the fight and it gives me the chance to use my AoE spells on other groups of mobs that might get pulled in unintentionally for whatever reason. A lot of people like to power level through vanilla content and then start grouping in Outlands having no idea how to participate in a group.

I would like to say that most of my pulls go off smoothly without having to worry about patrolling mobs or accidental agro, but that’s not the case. I’ve found in my experiences in Outlands so far that it’s better for me to stick with the Disease Rotation up above so that I can hit the AoE spells for instant threat on bad pulls rather than blowing them all at the front of the fight with my intentional pull and then having to run around generating crazy threat on multiple mobs that are chasing my healer.

In the Heavy AoE Rotation I put Icy Touch in parenthesis because if you have the Glyph of Howling Blast then that spell will apply the disease for you which is the main reason I suggest casting it. If you don’t have the glyph then cast Icy Touch first to both establish a disease that can be spread immediately after the AoE as well as to build a solid level of threat on at least one of the mobs in case things don’t work as planned.

Howling Blast is going to deal AoE damage in a radius centered on the target you cast it on while Blood Boil is going to deal AoE damage centered on you. So when you cast Blood Boil, make sure you’re near the mobs that you need to generate the threat on or else you’re wasting the cast.

I most often use the AoE rotation when additional mobs get pulled that I was not intending to have to deal with, which is primarily a patrol in a dungeon I’m not especially familiar with and as such did not see. When a group of mobs comes in that I wasn’t expecting I move in the direction that the mobs are moving, and use my AoE spells on them.

I start off with the double-Blood Boil because when these pulls happen the mobs are almost always already mixed into the group and heading for the healer or whoever may have pulled them, and that usually means that the mobs are right next to me. If the mobs get pulled and are not already next to you then you can either use Howling Blast instead, you can run towards them and use Blood Boil, or you can wait for them to get closer to you and Blood Boil from where you are (if they have to get through you to get to whoever their target is). By default I will run towards the mobs to hit them with the AoE threat because that puts me right in the middle of them and better able to react to the situation in case my Blood Boil misses, it gets me closer to other mobs that might have been outside the range when I used the AoE, and if my AoE burst isn’t enough to put me at the top of the threat list then I’m close enough to throw another one at them immediately.

Tanking Bosses
Tanking bosses is a whole different ballgame all together. Since our strongest method of generating threat on trash mobs is AoE we have to completely switch our rotation to build and maintain maximum threat on a single target. This is where your other spells are going to come into play and where you’re going to refresh your diseases by casting the basic spells that apply them (Icy Touch and Plague Strike) rather than refreshing them by using the Glyph of Disease or using Howling Blast to reapply your Frost Fever.

I like to load a lot of DPS onto a boss at the beginning of the fight and then settle into a rotation.

Boss Rotation: Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Blood Strike, Death Strike, Frost Strike

When you are about to pull a boss, you want to be sure to use your Deathchill buff which gives you a guaranteed crit with your next Icy Touch, and starting with a crit is great for building your initial threat. Deathchill’s crit boost also works for Howling Blast (if the boss has adds so you pull with AoE), Frost Strike (if you have runic power built up to use it right away), and Obliterate (level 61) spells if you decide to pull with those instead. I would personally use either Icy Touch of Howling Blast for the initial pull, and since IT requires only a single Frost Rune it gets my vote for being the spell of choice unless the boss has adds that will also be hit with Howling Blast.

Plague Strike is the second attack and requires you to be within melee range, but deals Shadow damage to the boss and applies your second disease, Blood Plague.

Blood Strike is a great way to boost your threat, and since we have both of our diseases applied it’s a perfect time to use it. Blood Strike deals an extra 12.5% damage for each disease you have on the target, so using it after IT and PS grants an extra 25% to the Blood Strike’s damage.

Because of the cooldown situation of our runes, the next spell on the list is going to be Death Strike which will damage as well as healing you for 5% of your maximum health for each disease on the target; Since we have two diseases applied, that means we’re healing ourselves for 10%. You may need the heal, you may not, but the attack is dealing damage regardless which will build threat and the heal is just an added bonus. If you started the fight off with some runic power already built up then you can skip this attack and move on to Frost Strike instead.

Frost Strike comes up next to make use of our Runic Power (RP). Assuming you hit with the previous spells you should have enough RP built up to use this when starting the fight with no RP at all, even if you are not using the glyph. This is a nice, hard hitting attack to use up your RP. Your only other option for using RP at this level is Death Coil, which is a decent attack that can be used at range, but I prefer sticking with Frost Strike unless something causes me to be distanced from the boss.

At level 60 you don’t have access to Obliterate just yet, so for now you are going to rotate between the spells already mentioned. When your diseases are getting ready to fall off, go ahead and reapply them with Icy Touch and Plague Strike (even if you have the Glyph of Disease), make use of Blood Strike whenever your blood runes are available, keep your RP down around 20-40 by making use of Frost Strike, and when you feel like you need a boost to your health go ahead and take advantage of Death Strike for the 10% heal.

If you are facing a boss that has an attack such as Fear, knock back, stun, or something that otherwise has a chance of putting distance between yourself and the boss, then you may want to make use of the time to get back to melee range of the boss by casting Death Coil. Your two ranged attacks right now are Icy Touch, Death Coil, and Howling Blast so if you get separated from the boss go ahead and make use of one of them while you move back in so that you continue to generate what threat you can while closing back in. I recommend Death Coil first, Icy Touch second, and Howling Blast third for the sake of making the best use of your resources.

If anyone manages to pull threat off of you then your only option for this level range to taunt them with is Death Grip. Since this is the only “taunt” we have right now I never use Death Grip for pulling a boss unless it’s absolutely necessary. If one of the dps pulls the boss off of me by jumping the gun then I will use it at that time, but using it to start the fight off seems like a bit of a waste to me, so I save it until it’s needed. For trash pulls, Death Grip is fine to use whenever needed, especially to get a caster within melee range, but for bosses I like to save it. There’s nothing wrong with casting Death Grip to start off a boss fight, but from my experience it’s unnecessary and better saved for a time when it’s actually needed.

Watch Your Buffs
I want to point out that the spec that I suggest above gives you a couple of buffs that you need to keep an eye out for.

Killing Machine: This talent gives your auto-attacks a chance to make your next Frost attack (Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Frost Strike) an auto-crit.

Rime: This talent gives you the Freezing Fog buff which makes your next Howling Blast cost no runes to cast.

You don’t want to miss out on free critical hits, and you don’t want to miss out on free AoE damage. Better yet, you don’t want to miss out on free AoE damage that will automatically crit if you happen to have both of them proc at the same time.

Killing Machine is a PPM (Procs Per Minute) buff, meaning that it can only happen so many times each minute. Because of this you are going to have a higher chance of getting this buff by using a slow, two-handed weapon than you will from dual wielding and/or using fast weapons. Killing Machine isn’t taken quite so often by dual wielding Frost tanks, so if you are not using a big two-hander then you may want to consider spending those five talent points in Icy Talons instead to reduce your target’s attack speed while also increasing your own, and you may swap the one point in Acclimation to Improved Icy Talons to provide a melee haste buff to your party as well as a constant haste buff to yourself.

Because of the Death Knight’s unique resource system(s), you need to be able to manage both resources without digging yourself into a hole of inactivity where all of your runes are on cooldown and you have no runic power to use. Using your Runes too fast on low damage or low threat spells is not going to pay off for you in Runic Power. Similarly, though somewhat opposite, not using your Runic Power means that you’re wasting the resources generated by your Rune abilities. Use your Rune powers to deal the damage you need to supply your Runic Power, and then burn through your Runic Power while your Runes are cooling down. Keeping that cycle up is how you manage a constant stream of threat on your targets.

Filed under: Death Knight, Guide, Leveling Tagged: AoE, Frost, Tanking

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Tanking: Frost (61-70)
2. AoE Grinding: Frost Death Knight Edition
3. Why not restructure Death Knight talent trees?

When you decide to be a 10 man raider, what you are basically saying is that you don’t care about World or Server firsts. That’s just part of joining the 10 man scene. Although I’m sure a 10 man strict guild has gotten a server first here or there, 25 man raiders have a built in advantage with their higher iLevel gear. It is far more likely a 25 man guild will get a server first on 10 man than a 10 man guild.

We should also remember that before Wrath came out, there was an idea that Arthas would only be available as a 25 man raid boss. 10 mans could fight him, but he’d escape and leave a chest. He would only actually die in a 25 man raid. Instead, the Devs decided to give 10 and 25 man raiders the full encounter, and both groups get to kill the Lich King. 10 man raiders should be very pleased at that decision.

But it got me thinking about the 10/25 man split experiment for Wrath, and ways it could improved for both 10 and 25 man raiders in Cataclysm. Let’s look at the disparity of rewards, disparity of challenge, and the disparity of expectation.

Let me get my bias out of the way right at the front so you know where I’m coming from. I consider myself a 10 man raider, but not a 10 man Strict Raider, meaning that I will occasionally PuG a 25 man. Our guild used to combine the raid teams to do a once a month 25 man, but we haven’t done that recently. Despite my bias, I will do my best to look at each area objectively. In the event that my bias affects my view, at least you know what that bias is.

Disparity of Rewards

It’s well known that 25 mans give the best rewards. This isn’t only in the fact that 25 mans give the highest iLevel loot. The 25 mans also drop the crafting reagents, and they are the only places to acquire legendaries.

We’ll talk about the difficulty difference, or what i call the disparity of challenge in a moment, but let’s look at another reason why 25 mans give the best rewards.

The disparity of rewards is partially motivated by a recruitment concern. The premise is that if 25s and 10s dropped the same rewards, then fewer people would do 25s, and most would flock to 10 mans. Since by definition, 25s need more people than 10s, reducing the available pool of players would have a greater impact on the 25 man guilds than the 10 man guilds.

But this does put a strain on 10 man guilds efforts to recruit. 10 mans are looking for recruits who have decided to forgo the greatest rewards in order to raid with a smaller group of people. Some 10 man Guilds have become little more than a farm system for 25 man Guilds. People come into the ‘minor league’ 10 man guild, get geared, and then leave for an opening in the 25 man ‘big leagues’.

25 man guilds also had the power of incumbency working for them at Wrath’s launch. While there were some 10 man guilds farming Kara and progressing in Zul’Aman, the notion of a 10 man Guild wasn’t widely known or accepted until Wrath.

Now there are many 10 man Guilds on every server and during Wrath we saw the rise of the 10 man Strict Guild that requires its members to forgo doing any 25 man content. Players continue to choose 10 mans despite the disparity of rewards.

Disparity of Challenge

There have been pages upon pages written discussing the difficulty difference between 10s and 25s, and wherever you fall on that argument, another page probably won’t sway you. I think everyone can agree it’s a hotly debated topic.

One of the reasons that 25 man raiders perceive 10 man content as being easier is the superior gear rewards they received from 25 man raids overgear them for the content from the moment it’s released. ICC10 feels much different with a group in a mix of 219 and 232 gear than it does for a group with 245 to 258 gear. The Devs could limit what gear you could wear in a 10 man, and have for some achievements, but so far their implementation has been a bit obtuse and the exact rules are not well known or understood.

There are other factors that make 25 mans harder, like DPS requirements and how much damage the various Boss abilities do. Most of that can simply be attributed to scaling. WoW.com’s Scattered Shots column had a great analysis of just how much DPS players get out of buffs. 25 man raiders have access to more buffs than 10 man raiders, so they get superior scaling from both the additional number of players and the additional number of buffs and debuffs.

25 man raiders deal with a much greater opportunity to make mistakes. There is simply a much greater chance of 1 person in 25 making a mistake than 1 in 10, but 10 man raiders lose much more from a single death in the raid than 25 man raiders do. 25s are much more likely to have soul stones and battle rezzes increasing their buffer for mistakes over 10 mans.

I admit to begin baffled at some of the encounter changes between 10 and 25 man. Specifically, I’m thinking of Lady Deathwhisper. 10 man raiders could handle a mind control element in the KT fight, why did it have to be removed from the 10 man?

I think that ultimately it’s a decision by the Developers and Encounter Design Team. They could choose to make 10 man encounters as difficult as their 25 man counterparts but choose not to. This is done partly to justify the disparity the rewards, and partly a way to allow more people to see the content through the more forgiving 10 man raid.

Disparity of Expectation

I believe there is an expectation put on 25 man raiders that they will raid 10 man content as well as their 25 mans. Whether this expectation comes from the player herself or the guild, it is there nonetheless. With all the Tier gear being Emblem bought, running both version is the best way to increase the number of Emblems you get each week.

10 mans also represent an opportunity for the 25 man raider to fill in gear slots where they haven’t been lucky with drops or have gotten outbid.

It provide the 25 man guild an opportunity to experience the dynamics of the Boss fights. This can really help the guild when it sees those fights on 25 man and with the limited attempt mechanism every pull counts.

You can see this expectation in the price of the Emblem of Frost gear. It’s more expensive than the Emblem of Triumph gear partially because the Devs expect the 25 man raiders to run ICC twice every week, once one 10 man and once on 25.

Cataclysmic Improvements

I believe the 10/25 raid split was one of the best features of Wrath of the Lich King. It gave players much more freedom, and allowed more players than ever to experience the wonderful raid content the Devs work so hard to produce.

I wonder if the system couldn’t be improved by going one step further and making the choice to be a 10 man or 25 man raider a bit more defining.

Art

I would propose having different Tier Art for each raider. The Devs did a little of this early on with different skins, but I would go further and actually have different models. People should be proud of their choice of content. PVPers look different from PVEers. 10 man Raiders should look different from 25 man Raiders.

Lockout

The Devs could address the disparity of rewards, challenge, and expectation by enforcing a shared Raid Lockout on 10 and 25 mans, but only for the current Tier. So, for example, only ICC would lock you into 10 or 25. You could run the older raids on both.

Immediately, there is no expectation of 25 man raiders running a 10 man. They will save their lockout for their main activity.

This also has an advantage for the Developers. They have been looking to slow down progression with gated content. By only allowing a player to run the instance once during the week, they will slow down Emblem income and limit the drops players get.

They could address both the disparity of challenge and rewards. The 10 and 25 could drop the exact same gear. The Itemization Team wouldn’t need to create nearly as many items, and you’d avoid the issue of the best Trinket dropping in a 10 man. The Encounter Design Team could design the Encounters to be challenging to both raid sizes. The Team would have a much better handle on the average iLevel of the players raiding each instance. This would let them better tune the encounters to be approximately equally challenging regardless of raid size.

The one issue that seems like it would not address is the recruitment issue. The concern is that you would see a vast reduction in 25 man guilds as well as gut the pool of potential recruits for 25 man guilds.

We apparently need to give players an incentive to go to 25 man raids. We must conclude that since people would flock to 10 mans were there no incentive, that 25s are actually less popular.

Perhaps something could be done with the new Guild Leveling System, but I’m not sure that would be enough. 25 mans feel more epic to some players, but I’m not sure that would be enough either. Players seem motivated by only one thing in this game, and that’s the gear. Players will go for the best gear they can get.

Since the main challenge to 25 mans seems to be logistical in nature, and there is very little the Devs can do to change that, perhaps the rewards should be as well. It takes far more effort to put together and run a 25 man raid than a 10 man. You have 2.5 times more players to manage. So if the Boss drops 3 Epics on 10 man, he should drop 6 Epics on 25 man. Tier Tokens should scale up as well. 10 mans would see 2 Tier Tokens from a Boss while 25 man raiders would see 5. That would better correlate the reward to the challenge.

It would be interesting to see what players would choose to do if the 10/25 man split was more of a choice between two playstyles rather than a choice about loot.

Related posts:

1. Ice Crown Citadel Announced
2. Emblems of Triumph Pick Order (10 Man Raider)
3. Spending Conquest Badges as a 10 Man Raider

Today’s post is brought to you by a mixture of frustration and QQ. It’s a bit of a rant, and a bit of just putting my thoughts down into words. This blog is here to give you information about leveling your characters and having fun while you do it, but today’s post is about raiding and some of the parts of it that can suck from time to time. But hey, it’s my blog and I’ll QQ if I want to.

[I'm at work as I write this, and having just finished writing it things are now starting to get busy. I don't want to have this ranty post dangling in my mind all day, so I'm going to go ahead and post it as is without rereading for mistakes. So here's a heads up for you.]

Start at the Beginning
Right now my main character is in a casual raiding guild. We do run progression content three nights a week, but we take a pretty laid back approach to it.

For instance, we don’t have sign-up lists for dungeons we’re running, instead the raid leader looks at who all is in the area during the designated raid time and whoever shows up is who gets to go. Now, obviously we can’t take ten DPS into ICC and expect to get anywhere, so we do make a group that actually functions with the right number of tanks, heals, and deeps. And we can’t take twelve people into a 10-man raid, so people do get turned away. The people that don’t get into the raid are put onto a Turn Away list so that they get priority in being chosen for the next raid.

Generally that means you are more or less guaranteed a spot in the next raid, but again there may not be enough slots to hold everybody in particular roles, so you may get turned away twice in a row, but that is noted too for the sake of fairness and trying to get everyone cycled through in raid slots since we’re still only large enough for 10-man’s without having to PuG in extras for 25’s.

A Problem Arises
I’m getting to the problem, hold your horses. You know how long winded I am, sheesh!

We’ll start with me since my side isn’t quite so big a deal to me as her’s is to her. Last week we decided to hit ICC-10 with the guild and both my wife and I got our invites, so in we went. We wiped either once or twice on Lord Marrowgar as people who had never been there before got used to the fight, but we quickly recovered from that and took him down after we got used to him.

We moved then to Lady Deathwhisper where we wiped several times. The fight with Marrowgar was explained to me before we began, so I was pretty good on that one. When we got to LD though we asked for an explanation and nobody gave it, so while a couple of people were afk I tabbed out and did some research myself. As I got near the end of a YouTube video on her someone gave me a quick run-down of the fight, and while things didn’t match up with the video they sounded alright to me so we went with the guild plan. We wiped once, we wiped twice, we wiped thrice, and then we wiped again.

The guild’s plan was to have everyone focus on the adds when they popped so that the raid as a whole had more time to focus on LD in between spawns, while the video I watched mentioned doing something similar except that one ranged dps stayed on LD the whole time to get her down to Phase 2 sooner. The four times that we wiped there were tons of spawns and we were getting ready to call it a night. So on the fifth attempt I broke the cardinal rule of following the raid leader’s plan and I focused my mage on Lady Deathwhisper alone. I had seen during the failed attempts that we had a strong enough mix of melee and caster DPS to take down the mobs even if I wasn’t focused on them, so I changed up my role for the last attempt of the night.

When I made the change over to focusing on LD we had about one third of the number of spawns come out and it was the only attempt of the night that we actually made it to Phase 2. She still ended up wiping us again that night, but it certainly went a lot better. Nobody brought up my decision to change what I was doing, but we decided to give it another shot the next day. So along comes tomorrow and since we had such an improvement with the encounter as a whole with my switch the previous night I went ahead and followed the strategy of me focusing on LD again.

The fight was going well, but towards the end of Phase 1 one of the guild members asked over vent, “Bels (that’s me), why are you only targeting the boss!?!?” Being in the middle of a boss fight, I didn’t bother explaining myself at that time, I just kept on doing what I was doing, and sure enough we took her down about a minute later. Everybody was pleased and I replied during the looting, “To answer your question, with all the wipes last night I went ahead and implemented what I saw in the research I did last night. It mentioned a change to a single person versus what we were doing, so I gave it a shot.”

My little bit of rebellion for the sake of helping the guild there turned out to be a blatant improvement on the result of the raid, but I did still break the rule of always following the raid leader. I don’t mind following directions, but when something’s broken and nobody’s fixing it, I’m sorry but I’m going to do something to try to improve the situation. The raid leader and two of the officers gave me a bit of a talking to about doing things the guild’s way and their reasons why. It was a bit excessive given the fact that my change resulted in success, but whatever, I understand the concept of being a team and following the leader so I’ll do what I’m told.

I started to see the problem arise in the next boss fight when the raid leader started off the explanation of the fight with, “Regardless of what the online strats tell you, this is how we do it…” Alright, so I obviously pushed a button by not following the strategy on the last boss, but my research had been done on Deathwhisper alone since she was the bottleneck, so I listened to the plan and away we went to down another boss. The next boss comes up and again “Regardless of what the online strats tell you…” That time it was a bit annoying, but whatever.

We made it up to Festergut with similar comments and after three wipes there we had to call it a night and would pick it back up a couple of days later. The day to go back in arrived and I sat there waiting at the portal as usual, and my invite never came. “I’ve got Bels down as a turn away. ” It seemed a bit odd to me that I was turned away despite being saved to it, but that’s the way it goes sometimes so I went and did other things.

An Issue Persists
A couple of days pass and the guild’s headed into a different raid, so I show up to it and wait at the portal; no invite. “I’ve got Bels down as a turn away. ” No problem, I was really more in the mood to play my Warlock that day anyway, so no big deal. The other raids for the week were using alts to clear ICC and VoA, both of which I was already saved to. No problem with that, sorry I didn’t have an 80 alt to give them a hand with it.

And now we find ourselves at last night’s raid. The guild is scheduled to hit ICC, and we’ve got about 45 minutes or so before raid time, so I check the clock on Wintergrasp and decide to head over there while we wait. WG opens up and the battle begins, and in less than 10 minutes we kicked the Horde in the teeth and took back Wintergrasp, which opened up VoA to us. There were only about eight people in the guild online at that time, but the question comes up if want to switch the raid to VoA for the new boss since we just took WG. Everyone agrees with that, so VoA it is.

I was already there at the portal, but it was definitely too early to go in and we didn’t have enough people online yet anyway, so I started farming ore. I then noticed that my CurrencyFu addon showed my Honor Points at 75,000 and that it’s red. So I say to myself, “Self, it’s a bit odd that we just happen to hit exactly 75k honor, and the fact that it’s red seems a bit odd too.” So I ask in guild what the honor cap is and my buddy in the guild tells me 75k it is. So, I decide I better go to Stormwind and spend the honor points now before I forget. So I teleport to SW with my mage-porting goodness, grab two pieces of gear, port back to Dal, take the portal to WG, and there I am at the portal again in about six minutes time.

During that time other members had signed in and were showing interest as well, so I starting killing off the random Horde that were still flying around while I wait for the raid invites to start. One of the other guild members whispered me, “Crap, I think I missed the raid invites.” I still hadn’t gotten one myself and neither had my wife who was also waiting at the portal, so I replied, “Fyn and I haven’t gotten one either, I don’t think they’ve started yet.”

Eight of the guild members were sitting there in WG, and three of us at least hadn’t had any invites yet. I keep on killing the horde losers that think they stand a chance against twenty of us, and then I get another whisper from the same guy, “Dude wtf? I got in, but you didn’t?” I check the guild roster, and we’ve got 9 people in WG, but still no invite for me or my wife. I ask her if she knows what’s going on and she says she hasn’t heard anything either, so we go ahead and wait. A few seconds later, in comes the message in gchat, “I have Bels, Fyn, and (two others) as turn aways. Sorry, guys. “

I just fought to take WG with two of my guild mates, sat there for 25 minutes for the raid to start, and then got turned away despite already being on the Turn Away list twice in a row. I can’t say that I was very happy at that point. I wasn’t exactly mad, but I was disappointed in how it was handled and I was a bit upset. I didn’t really feel like playing the mage right then, but I wasn’t sure what else I wanted to do so I hung out there for a minute trying to figure it out. The guy that whispered me did so again, “Why did I get invited and not you? You were here way before I was?!” I didn’t know either, but something about his comment in addition to me being frustrated just killed my desire to play for the night so I logged off of vent and exited the game.

Things Get Worse
I decided I was just going to go watch some TV or something, so I started to do that and noticed the look on my wife’s face. I might have been frustrated, but she was flat out pissed. She had been waiting there at the portal on her Enhance/Resto Shaman almost as long as I had, but she hadn’t received an invite either. But she also saw something that I didn’t see, which was two other members of the guild get summoned to the instance. One of the people summoned to the instance was a DPS, and the other was a Healer. So my wife (DPS/Heals) and myself (DPS) were turned away, but two other people were summoned to fill those two slots.

After being turned away from raids the previous week, I can’t say that I was all that surprised to be turned away from VoA last night, and I can’t help but feel that being turned away three times in a row where you usually endure only one, has something to do with my going against the guild’s plan on Lady Deathwhisper. Yes, I ignored the guild’s strategy. But, I did not have the guild’s strategy explained to me until after I had done the research myself, and the change that I made obviously had a positive impact on our performance.

Now my wife, on the other hand, is main spec Enhancement and really wants to be able to run some raids as a DPS. When she gets in on the raids though, about 75% of them she’s asked to heal in instead. She doesn’t mind doing that, it’s why she dual specced in the first place, but she really wants to do DPS. And despite the good intentions of the “Noted as Turned Away” system, she’s actually been turned away more than anyone else I’ve seen in the guild. She’s arrives early to the raids every time, fully prepared, and yet she’s turned away. And when she’s not turned away she’s almost always asked to use her secondary spec instead.

Where We Stand Now
As far as I am aware, the guild operates on inviting people who are in the instance’s zone because they want to take whoever shows up to raid, not stick to a specific set of people all the time. They want people who are making an effort to participate and be a part of the raids, not people who simply expect to get invited and feel like they deserve a raid spot. The guild doesn’t want elitist attitudes or favoritism in the guild because that’s why they all left their previous raiding guild. So they keep some open practices in play to counteract those that have worked out pretty well and I’ve actually enjoyed that quite a bit.

But the actions taken by the raid leader/guild leader last night seemed to go directly against that. Two people who were ready and waiting to fill the last two slots got turned away for two people who logged in late and had to be summoned to the instance? I haven’t been in the guild for all that long, but I can’t remember a raid in which that particular healer hasn’t been in, and the DPS that was summoned is in pretty well every raid when he’s logged in as well. Hmm, doesn’t seem very anti-favoritism to me. But, I’m just a rebel, so what would I know?

There are reasons why I am such a big fan of leveling, and doing it solo. Situations like this remind me why I play to level, not to raid. Maybe Belsynis needs to find himself a nice, forested mountain range and take a vacation for a while.

Now, about that DK tank… /rollnewtoon

Filed under: World of Warcraft Tagged: Rant

Related posts:

1. Raid leading Ulduar 25
2. Are most Ulduar raid guides lacking?
3. Tank as you Level Up, Part II, 40 to the Cap

This week we’re going to look at an add-on that will help you dominate the economy on your Realm. AuctionLite is the add-on for the day traders of World of Warcraft. While not as comprehensive as the bettter-known Auctioneer, AuctionLite has a lot of functions that make working the Auction House a lot less of a chore.

AuctionLite adds some new tabs to your Auction House interface. Instead of being limited to searching for all gems, or blue gems, for example, if you know the name or part of the name of an item you want to buy, you can use AuctionLite to search on that name or partial name, and it will list all matching auctions, complete with prices per item and per auction. If you’re buying, then you can bid on one, several, or all of the auctions, or buy them out. AuctionLite will also track historical prices so you can see at a glance, after a little history has been built up, if you’re overpaying or getting a bargain.

If you are selling, you just drag the item to be sold into AuctionLite’s “sell” interface, and it will search for all current auctions for that item. You can choose how many stacks, and how many items per stack, you wish to sell. AuctionLite will automatically undercut current auctions, or, if there are no current auctions, and no history, triple the vendor price. You can adjust prices to suit yourself before placing the auction.

AuctionLite will also add tooltips to items, with vendor and auction prices, and disenchant values. You can also instantly view your own auctions on the “Auctions” tab.

AuctionLite even has a “favorites” feature to help you find items you want to buy faster.

AuctionLite is also multilingual; as of this post, it is available in English, French, German, Korean, Chinese, and Russian.

You can get AuctionLite through WoWmatrix, or from WoWinterface or Curse

Music for this segment was provided by FreeplayMusic and is entitled “Sly Jackal,” by Hal Goldstein.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #11
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #10

Now that I’m back I thought I’d try and be more active in the blogging community, instead of just posting stuff I wanna write. Besides this is a big help since I often live in a non-creative loser doldrum. Well lets get down to it, this is the Blog Azeroth for the week of January 25th, hope you all like it!

So you may be wondering why I’m writing about melee DPS survival. No I don’t play a silly DK (at least not one thats raiding). No I don’t have a secret healer alt. And no I’m not some stupid melee huntard. Despite all this, there are still things a ranged DPS can do to help out the melee, whose job can often times be pretty tough (its hard to do other things when your stuck up Marrowgar’s ass).

1. Share your DPS – When effects that need to be DPSed down appear (bone spikes for example, etc etc) be sure not to neglect the melee that are affected by them as well, even if you need to run around a little. Freeing up a healer is of course a higher priority, but once the ranged/healers around you are all good don’t forget about your plate wearing buddy down by the boss’s feet.

2. Sacrifice DPS – Other mechanics require a ranged DPS to stay off the boss for a long time to handle special tasks (kiting Blood Beasts, handling adds on Jaraxxus, or what have you) and taking care of these things is generally a lot easier for us than for melee DPS. We don’t have to move to switch targets. Hunters especially have abilities that help on kiting (Distracting Shot, Concussive Shot, Frost Trap, etc). So be quick to use them instead of letting them get loose and smack on the melee (them getting hit makes them die more, and when it comes to Blood Beasts it makes the entire raid die more). They often have enough on their plates already!

3. Don’t  stress the healers – Generally melee DPS will take more damage than ranged DPS will, they’re closer to the boss and have less time to react to AOE effects (sometimes they even have trouble seeing them) and also may have to run away from the boss if he does a proximity effect. This means healers will be focusing more on the  melee than on ranged DPS, unless we’re being stupid and taking damage from EASILY AVOIDABLE effects. If a healer has to heal us its less likely they’ll be able to get the heal off on a melee DPS (or even worse a tank), this is bad. We have a lot of time to get away from shit (cold flames, fire/ice/goo/poison/shadow/what-the-fuck-ever patches) so we should rarely if ever take damage from such a mechanic.
Another way to take some weight off the healers is to control adds (we have Distracting Shot and Misdirect for a reason) to keep them from having to heal themselves or panicking and losing their shit. Pull off the boss drop a Misdirect on the tank and yank that add back into place, or if things are heated pop Distracting Shot, man up, and kite the damn thing yourself until it gets under control again. If we play better and worry more about situational awareness instead of DPS (getting off that one last Steady Shot is not worth sitting in a pile of flaming crap) it in turn helps the melee DPS play better, which continues to snowball and eventually makes the whole raid better. Shocking!

These tips are pretty simple, and even though a lot of them are small they really do help the rest of your raid team. If we can play with this mentality (and the melee DPS also play their best) it makes it a lot easier for them to stay alive and whack the boss with whatever big weapon they have. As I hunter I have as big of a rivalry with kitty druids, combat rogues, or unholy DKs as the rest of you do, but I still try my best to help them stay up (its not like they can top our DPS anyway guys so don’t worry about that >:])

Well this was my first BA Shared Topic, so I’d love any feedback on how to improve writing this kind of thing. Hope this helps some people, even if they aren’t hunters (melee DPS that can see what ranged DPS have to do from their perspective will probably be just as helpful as one of us reading this). Thanks for the read!

Related posts:

1. Shared Topic: Situational Awareness, or Driving The Tank
2. Shared Topic: Best Paladin Changes
3. How Much DPS Do You Do?

All I can say about Healbot is “AWESOME!”

Dump Grid. Seriously. Run WoWmatrix or go to Curse or WoWinterface and get Healbot. Do it now.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium #4: Grid
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #8
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #9

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Acknowledging our fantastic listeners
As always we start out by giving love to you guys that listen to the show.

Talent changes in Cataclysm
We discuss Ghostcrawler’s comments on talent changes in Cataclysm

Patch 3.3.2
A new minor content patch is coming to World of Warcraft. What should we be excited about?

Leveling in Dungeons
We talk about leveling a character using the dungeon system.

Icesnake’s Addon Emporium
Icesnake brings you two addons to take screen captures when you get achievements and ding a new level.

Evinrue’s NPC of the Week
Evinrue is back to tell us about Uther the Lightbringer

Modum’s Lament on the Idiocy of Players
Modum gets feisty..watch out.

Warcraft Armory datamining
Lots of interesting data from the WoW armory compiled at Armory Data Mining.

WoW Movie Follow Up
Comments from listeners on who they’d like to see in the World of Warcraft Movie

Related posts:

1. WoWphiles Podcast Show #18
2. WoWphiles Podcast Show #16
3. WoWphiles Podcast Show #19

I don’t know what it is about these two classes; we’re like a couple of brothers. There never seems to be as much emotion when a Warrior talks about a Druid, or a Deathknight, as when he is discussing the Paladin. Maybe it’s because we share gear, I don’t know. The people behind those Warriors and Paladins, especially those players who choose to go deep Prot, are more alike than they realize. The only dynamic I’ve seen close to this is Warlocks and Mages. Those guys fight like cats and dogs as well.

My personal favorite is the Warrior who has a Level 80 Paladin, DK and/or Druid as well and claims he’s unbiased in regards to class because he plays all three. I have an 80 Druid and Warrior. I play all three. Having a Level 80 Warrior helps me understand some of their issues better, but in no way does it make me class neutral.

Warrior Tanks have issues. They have underused utility, and their DPS is lower than other tanks when tanking. They also have some ‘quality of life’ issues like Heroic Strike and the way Rage works. But on the core issues of Tank Survivability and Threat Generation, Warriors still have parity with all other tanks.

The DPS while tanking issue didn’t exist prior to 3.3. I can’t recall a Tanking guide every talking about the need to do as much DPS as possible. In fact, I remember one guide for Fury Warriors going Tank that specifically told them to ignore their DPS. What mattered was threat, and that was correct.

What has really highlighted the DPS issue is Festergut, who is a DPS race and has been something of a roadblock for some guilds. At a certain level, the difference between guilds comes down more to quality of the players of their DPS players. Guilds with better DPS players will clear more content faster. Some guilds, which are just on the edge of having the DPS to down Festergut, are frustrated and their Warrior Tanks are worried that they might be holding them back. Some went so far as to make a case that the DPS difference was the difference between a wipe and a kill. It’s never a good feeling to think that because you want to play your favorite class in your desired role, that you might be holding back the efforts of 9 or 24 other people.

However, the Devs didn’t buy it. Yes, Tank DPS was relevant, they said, but it wasn’ t the difference between a kill and wipe. The Devs felt that raid could get more Raid DPS by the improvement of their DPS Class, rather than more DPS from the Tank. When their concerns fell on seemingly deaf ears, many Warriors got very upset. Their anger was directed mainly at Paladins.

Warriors have raised the concern they will be benched due to their low DPS. Yet, the Developers have not seen this mass migration away from Warriors happening. Even when Warriors hammered on Paladins and Druids supposed huge advantage in EH, Guilds didn’t change. Why would they change now, when they haven’t changed in the past?

Warriors make the valid argument that it is balance issue when the raid has to work harder because they have a Warrior tank versus a Paladin or Druid. Paladins have faced what Warriors are going through before. We required external cooldowns for things like Sarth3D, Vezzax, and Firefighter where Warriors did not. Back then Warriors told us it wasn’t a big issue because you don’t solo the raid boss. It was the powers of the entire raid that are brought to bear against the Boss. That’s what matters. Now suddenly, that argument doesn’t hold water anymore. It’s funny how that has changed.

By Tankspot’s own data, it’s Druids who have the lead on DPS in every fight analyzed. Druids also have more EH than Paladins, yet it is the Paladin who the Warriors attack again and again. (DKs are difficult to parse because their specs can be both Tank and DPS.) Is it really just because we share gear, or is there more to it?

How quickly they forget their past dominance. They were the go to Tank for 4 years. Encounter design was used to prop them up and make sure they stayed in the premier position. They were even exempted for the Hybrid tax. Of course, past dominance must feel like something of a hollow victory for them.

Now, they just can’t stand the idea of Paladins being on top for even 4 weeks. And let’s not forget Warriors are receiving a buff to their main attack next patch to help their DPS. I don’t know Warriors well enough to comment on how much this will help.I hope it helps their DPS issue, while not unbalancing single target TPS.

I’m not against Warriors getting buffs they need, especially to an area I don’t consider core to the Tanks job. It is also completely irrelevant to the Devs what I think. They aren’t asking me for my opinion on Tank balance issues, and they don’t need my permission to buff or nerf a class as they see fit.

I just get the impression that some of these guys won’t be happy until we’re back in the tBC model of Warriors being the best tank, and by a good margin. If that is what they ultimately want, I think they are going to continue to be frustrated.

Now I’m going to conclude this piece with a controversial conspiracy theory. Like most conspiracy theories there’s not a shred of truth to it, but it’s interesting to think about nonetheless.

The rational among you may wish to stop reading at this point.

First off a little history lesson:

About halfway through Wrath, the Dev Team told us that during Burning Crusade they were making sure Warriors were the best tank. From Ghostcrawler himself we have “we made no attempt to balance the tank classes” and “When there were situations that other classes started to outstrip warriors, we took steps to make sure the warriors still came out on top”

Of course, this isn’t what the Dev Team was communicating during Burning Crusade as Paladins fought for acceptance as Tanks. What they told the community during that time was “we don’t want to (or want the players to) find some rigid hierarchy by which classes are measured in their tanking potential to the third decimal point”

I’m not sure how you could call one class being on top anything but a ‘rigid hierarchy’, but I digress.

I remember that post well because it gave hope and encouragement to a lot of struggling Paladin tanks, and it gave Blizzard another 3 to 6 months of subscriptions from those Paladin tanks as they waited to be ‘fixed’, a fix that wouldn’t truly come until the next Expansion, Wrath.

Now what does that have to do with the current issues with Warriors?

One of the design points of Wrath was 4 viable tank classes. How can you tell if that’s been achieved? Certainly design goals met would be a big part of the annual review for your design team. Perhaps some middle manager set a goal for tank representation across the classes. Whether or not the Dev Team hit the benchmark would impact their annual review. Somewhere along the way Blizzard started to ‘check their work’ by looking at representation of Tank classes for Raids and hard modes. What they found was that overwhelmingly people were still using Warriors. Ghostcrawler himself stated the number of Paladins Tanks testing ICC on the PTR was ‘imperceptibly low’.

How in the world do you get the community to diversify its choice of Tanks?You have to prove to the community they are really strong tanks. You have to put them on top.

Of course, you can’t tell the community that’s what you are doing. You have to continue paying lip service to balance much as they did in Burning Crusade.

Am I crazy? Off my rocker? That’s entirely possible. No, check that, it’s probable!

But I tell you what. If somewhere halfway through Cataclysm, once it’s doesn’t matter anymore, they ‘come clean’ like they did about Burning Crusade in Wrath, remember this post!

Related posts:

1. AE and the Paladin, the Nerfbat cometh?
2. Legitimate Warrior Concerns
3. When DPS Goes Tank

Guest voice by Rakeleer Frostfyre

Continuing in our not-necessarily-for-raiding vein, this week I’ll tell you about not one, but two add-ons: AchievementSnap and DingRecorder.

I’m sure that everyone has heard the old “screenshot or it didn’t happen” taunt. Some people won’t go look up the facts on the Armory, but you can post a screenshot on Flicker and they’re perfectly happy to accept that as proof. AchievementSnap makes sure that you will have a screenshot of every achievement you earn after installing it, and, thanks to the way WoW creates filenames for screenshots, you’ll have a nice timestamp for the achievement as well.

DingRecorder does exactly the same thing when you level; it automatically takes a screenshot, so you will not only have proof (as if being level 80 isn’t enough to prove you were level 15 at some point, or 55 for DKs), you’ll have a timestamp to prove *when* you leveled.

There’s not much to the configuration of these mods; for AchievementSnap, you can toggle it on or off, and set minimum and maximum levels between which it will be active, although why you would ever want it turned off is beyond me. DingRecorder allows you to show or hide the User Interface, show your /played information (or not) and send a message to Guild chat that you’ve leveled.

AchievementSnap is available from WoWInterface.

DingRecorder is available from WoWinterface, Curse, and through WoWmatrix. The Curse version seems most up-to-date.

Music for this segment is provided by Freeplay Music and is entitled “Witches Approaching” by Patrick Smith.

Related posts:

1. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium Segment #7: DeclineDuel
2. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium, Segment #9
3. Icesnake’s Add-on Emporium Segment 12: Infinite Ignore

I didn’t put two and two together until we were running Heroic Old Kingdom for the daily but the vampire boss in hOK is none other than Prince Taldaram. He even conjures a Flame Sphere just like he does in the Raid fight.

When you make the Three Princes pull, Prince Valanar yells something along the lines ‘that Naxxanar was merely a setback’. Really, they used that line again. I chuckled. That sounded familiar, so I decided to see what he was talking about. Naxxanar is the big Scourge fortress in Borean Tundra where both Horde and Alliance have a long quest chain that culminates in Valanar’s death. So two of these guys we’ve killed before, what of the third? Keleseth turns out to be first Boss in Utgarde Keep. He’s the guy who puts someone in an Ice Tomb. He also is a quest giver in the DK starting zone. So we’ve seen all 3 of these Bosses as we leveled up. That’s pretty cool, but I didn’t realize it until now.

Our plan for the Princes was to put me on Valanar, Boston (Blood DK) on Taldaram, and Jagdelf (Survivalist Hunter) on Keleseth. Jagdelf was the 3rd different ranged tank we had used. Our first night we used Neo (Desto Lock) but he wasn’t available Monday. Then we used Lakini (Boomkin) but we needed him to grow some roots and do his best tree imitation for us.

One would think a new person in this pivotal role would cause extra wipes for our group, but one would be wrong. Each guy has stepped up to the challenge and attacked it. Serpent Sting did the job keeping aggro on the Dark Nuclei. The Keleseth tank needs 4 Dark Nuclei on him to survive the Empowered Shadow Bolts that he throws out. Jag did a fantastic job.

Our group handled Empowered Vortexes from Valanar very well, and melee did a great job running with Empowered Flame Spheres from Taldaram. Donkatonk (Arcane Mage) is the other guy really on the spot in this fight. His job is to keep the Beach Balls from hitting the ground. They are really called Kinetic Spheres but I like to think of them as Beach Balls. You have to keep them bouncing.

We were handling everything they could throw at us, and then all three dropped. We even got the Orb Whisperer achievement. We excitedly passed out the loot (some DPS plate for Blueshield the Fury Warrior and Healing Robe.) After that was over we started looking for how to get to the Queen’s room. On the way someone in the raid realized said ‘did we just one shot that?’ Indeed, we had.

We went around to the ramp on the right and made the first pull which looked like a standard 3 pack we had fought before the Princes. Only about 7 to 9 mobs came. It was probably only 7 but it felt like 9. Whatever confidence we had gained over one-shotting Princes was quickly dealt with by the Lich King’s forces.

After we rezzed and ran back, we tried the left ramp. That went much better. The trash mobs have this annoying Polymorph:Spider spell. When I got ’spidered’ my mobs would run off and try to introduce themselves to Jag. My favorite trash is the Liches. They have an ability called ‘Lich Slap’ which knocks you across the room. Don’t have your back to another group or mobs or she’ll Lich Slap you into them. Put your back to a wall when you tank her.

We finally cleared the trash and were facing down Blood Queen Lanathel.

Boston had me on the Boss and the two us sharing Blood Mirror. He then set up the ‘bite’ order. In the fight, one of your players gets ‘bitten’. They get a massive buff to their DPS. Then after minute they have to bite someone. This continues until everyone is bitten. If there is no one to bite or you don’t bite someone in time, you’ll be mind controlled for the rest of the fight. Blueshield was kind enough to demonstrate this for us when his bite target died to Fatal Attraction.

Ah, Fatal Attraction. Fatal Attraction is when two players get linked. They have to run to each other and blow up. It took a couple of attempts to figure out Bites and Fatal Attraction without losing people.

Blood Queen also has an air phase where she flies up in the air and starts raining down shadow bombs on everyone. As a Paladin tank, I found this a good time to heal myself and take some pressure off the healers. The Boss is hovering in the air and everyone is spread out taking damage. It would also have been a great time to pop Divine Guardian if I had had a brain in my head to remember it.

Lanathel hits harder than just about any Boss I’ve seen so far in ICC. My health hasn’t yoyoed like that since Heroic ToC. Part of it could be how hard she hits, but some of it, I’m sure, is the stress our healers are under. Damage, both raid and tank is intense. Looking back at my damage in TankTotals it was about 70% Physical and 30% Shadow. So I went with double Stam trinkets.

We had a choice to make at this point. Continue burning attempts on Blood Queen or go to Putricide. We decided to stick with Blood Queen. We would have had to clear Putricide’s trash, and we felt like even though Blood Queen was a tough fight, the mechanics were more manageable than Putricide.

We spent the rest of the night working on her. We got through multiple air phases. Our best attempt was about 39% followed by several attempts where we didn’t even get her sub 80%. Like the Princes, there is a lot to learn. I have every confidence that we’ll get her in time.

Related posts:

1. Three Princes
2. Facing Rotface
3. Shared Topic: How to HELP Melee DPS Survive

“There are differences in how tanks generate AE threat, and therefore damage. Warriors are jealous of the DK and especially paladin persistent area-based damage, and the others are jealous of the warrior’s burst AE threat on incoming adds. Druids are jealous of anyone with more than one button. “

Let me stop right here and comment. Other tanks really seem to overestimate Consecrate. The spell isn’t the be all and end all of AE Tanking that other tanks think it is. It is actually a fairly weak spell and won’t hold aggro against other tanks AE. Because it ticks like a DoT, Thunderclap and Shockwave can pull off it due to their ‘snap’ aggro nature. I’ve personally seen Blood Boil, and DnD pull off of Consecrate. Although talking with my Blood DK co-Tank, we both seem to think the other one has the leg up on threat during an AE pull. I haven’t tanked enough with a Druid to see how it interacts with Swipe.

But comparing Consecrate alone to the AE toolkit of other tanks isn’t really fair. Tanks blame Consecrate, but its really the entire AE toolset of Paladins that they envy.

Paladins have an amazing array of AE tools of which Consecrate is only a part. Think about it. Nearly every spell in our rotation has some sort of AE component. Hammer of the Righteous, Seal of Command (Cleave), Seal of Vengeance/Corruption (when combined with Hammer of Righteous), Holy Shield and Holy Wrath all have an AE. When the whole arsenal is brought to bear, Paladins can produce excellent AE threat and damage.

“So, yes, one way of handling this is to give every tank a burst AE attack like Thunderclap, a sustained AE attack like Consecrate, and a mass taunt like Challenging Shout just for good measure. That’s the kind of thing we are really reluctant to do though because it just works against the justification for having 4 tanking classes when they all perform the same way including using the same kind of tools. Now, on the other hand no tank should be horribly gimped in any of those situations, and except for rare exceptions they really aren’t. We’re mostly talking quality of life issues here. “

I’d love to have something like Challenging Shout. I’d love a snap AE aggro tool like Thunderclap, although in IceCrown, Holy Wrath does a very nice job of creating that snap AE aggro.

But GC is right here. If you give everyone the exact same toolkit there really isn’t much point to having different classes. The important distinction is that one Tank isn’t horribly gimped, and GC concludes that they really aren’t.

“Long-term, the paladin manner of generating AE damage and threat is probably too good, especially given how simple it is. “

WARNING!!! WILL ROBINSON!! WARNING!!

Bells, whistles and alarms should go off in the head of every Paladin who reads this. If GC thinks our AE threat is too good, it’s probably in line for a nerf. Hopefully, the ‘long-term’ he’s talking about here is Cataclysm. /cross fingers

I hope the Development team keeps in mind that Paladin tanks can use Holy Wrath on virtually everything in IceCrown right now, but the spell has an ‘Undead only’ restriction which makes it useless most of the time. Also like Consecrate, Holy Wrath is a hungry little bugger. Holy wrath uses 20% base mana and consecration uses 22% base mana.

“To be honest, we have very mixed feelings on the whole AE tanking game. We brought the druid and warrior more in line with the paladin for fear of recreating the Shattered Halls / Mount Hyjal experience, where other tanks just weren’t competitive.”

Let’s not forget that during the days that Mount Hyjal and Shattered Halls were relevant content, Warriors were far and away the best tank, and this was by design. “… in classic and BC because warriors were designed to be the best tank. When there were situations that other classes started to outstrip warriors, we took steps to make sure the warriors still came out on top.”

Mount Hyjal was how a lot of Paladin Tanks got their Tanking spots. It’s how I got my shot at T6 content. Paladins had to fight tooth and nail for their spots because we had such an uphill climb against preconceived notions from Vanilla that Paladins were healers only and the massive benefit you got from having a Warrior tank.

We touted our AE threat generation because it was really the only advantage we had. Our slogans back then were things like ‘When in doubt, round ‘em up and Consecrate’, ‘Who needs CC?’ and ‘CC stands for Constant Consecration’

We carved a niche out for ourselves as ‘the AE tank’. Warriors were better on single targets. Warriors took less damage, and got Uncrushable at the touch of a button. Warriors had better cooldowns. Shoot, Paladins didn’t HAVE a cooldown in those days.

But nobody could hold a pack of a dozen Ghouls off a Seed of Corruption spamming Warlock like a Paladin. And once enough high ilevel Badge gear was available that Paladins could meet the Effective Health minimums for a fight, we started getting some shots at bosses as well. Raid leaders started to think, ‘gee, if the Paladin can hold threat so well on the trash, he can let our DPS go all out on the Boss as well’.

We even came up with gimmicks like using a Paladin Tank healing a Warlock to control Morogrim Tidewalker’s murlocs or using our mana based resource system to limit damage done by Reliquary of Souls in Phase 3.

But mostly Paladins were relegated to offtanking, adds and farm kills.

“What that has led to of course is the AE tank + AE style of damage for almost every pull. You need the tools to be able to tank legitimate adds fights (imagine lots of incoming mobs), but does that mean every pull needs to devolve into that? We’d like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone’s AE tools isn’t going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can’t afford to have a “best AE tank”, and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren’t fair enough.”

‘aren’t fair enough’ is further indication that Paladins are in line for nerfs. I don’t like being nerfed, no one really does. I can only hope that they are thinking Cataclysm at this point and not a minor patch in the IceCrown cycle. GC’s modus operandi is to talk about the nerf for a while before revealing what the actual nerf is. This is his way of softening the blow so to speak.

As I pointed out above Paladins needed the ‘best AE tank’ during tBC. But today, Paladins are competitive tanks in every way. We simply don’t need ‘best AE tank’ as our niche anymore. We can get our tanking spots based solely upon our ability as Tanks. Raid Leaders pick those tanks that “are available, confident, prepared, and understand what they’re doing and know their weaknesses.” – Ciderhelm, founder of Tankspot

But as far as the design challenge of not having every pull devolve into an AE situation, Rohan over at Blessing of Kings has some great ideas. I’ll defer to his wisdom on this one.

Personally, I enjoyed the Crowd Control of tBC era heroics, but I wonder if players will be willing to go back to 45 minute to hour long heroic runs when sub 30 minutes have become the norm in Wrath.

Ultimately my fear is that the Developers will miss the mark and overnerf Paladin AE especially given the limited amount of PTR testing any minor patch receives. But until we have something concrete from the Dev team, I’m forced to take a wait and see approach.

I do wonder if a making it harder for Paladins to hold AoE will cause Paladin tanks to queue up less often as a Tank in LFD. Paladin Tanks are by most accounts one of the most popular tanks to see in LFD. If less queue up as Tanks it would make the queue problem even worse than it is today.

Related posts:

1. Using Sacred Shield As A Paladin Tank
2. Shared Topic: Best Paladin Changes
3. Why an Undead Paladin Makes Sense

The last installment of the Protection Paladin AoE Grinding Guides has waited quite a while for the final piece of the puzzle. It has been asked for several times by my readers and while I took the request seriously I’ve certainly failed to deliver on that promise. At least until now. Well, sort of.

I am going to start off with some updates from the previous guides as recent patches have changed the way some things work. After the updates we’ll get into the juicy part and start talking about the portion we’ve left uncovered so far; AoE Grinding in Northrend.

As you read, keep in mind that the whole point of this post is tell you how to AoE Grind. This isn’t a tanking guide to tell you how to tank Heroics and Raids. Even once we reach level 80 and I begin discussing that, I’m still focusing the information here on AoE Grinding whether it be for mat farming, reputation farming, gold farming, elite mob solo thrill seeking, or showing off your greatness to those around you.

Part 1 here is going to cover the technical side of things, what you need to do with your character. Part 2 is going to cover specific areas for you to grind in. I’m splitting this post into two because I’ve had this portion written for weeks now, waiting only for me to get together a full list of specific locations across all of the zones in Northrend for you to grind. Rather that keeping you in the dark even longer, I’m just going to give you what I have right now and then write another post for the rest of it at a later date.

Update: Glyphs
In the AoE Grinding: Glyph Edition post I gave you what I felt at the time to be the best glyphs for helping you while you leveled. Since that time though, we’ve had some changes that definitely impact those choices.

I will break down the glyphs by level here, listing Majors first, then Minors, and each of those sections will have glyphs listed in the order that I would recommend them. Also, take note as you read this section that these glyphs I recommend primarily for the sake of solo leveling, not necessarily for raiding.

If you like using Exorcism to pull at low levels then you might want to go ahead and use it’s glyph over Consecration. With Exorcism now having a cast time where before it did not, I’m not sure how much I would use the spell while leveling up, and so I’m not sure I could justify devoting a slot to a spell I use once per encounter instead of one such as the Glyph of Consecrate which will be used constantly.

By this point the only Blessing you should be casting on yourself is Blessing of Sanctuary, so the glyphs for Might/Wisdom are now worthless. You probably aren’t going to have to recast Seal of Wisdom (SoW) very often, but just in case you find yourself cycling through SoW/SoL during combat, this is the best way to save your mana through the use of your Minor glyphs.

I’m slipping Glyph of Sense Undead into the mix here because during your run through Eastern/Western Plaguelands you’re finally going to start fighting enough undead that having this increase in your damage is going to start paying off. Using this glyph prior to level 50 is going to be a bit of a waste in most cases, but where you level is what decides that. At the same time it’s usefulness takes another dip when you get to Outlands, but surprise surprise it picks back up in Northrend.

If you don’t like the idea of buying and replacing glyphs, then go for GotW over GoSU until you hit Northrend.

Divine Plea is going to help keep your mana topped off while using the glyph will help keep your health topped off. Once you hit level 71 I suggest you finally replace GoC with GoDP. You are also going to finally have enough attack spells on your action bar that you will find using the 969 rotation is the smoothest way for you to grind, so having an extra 2 seconds on Consecration is going to throw you off instead of helping you out as it did before, so I suggest dropping it for Holy Wrath instead. While the 969 rotation is used to describe the preferred rotation for tanking, it’s use applies the same to grinding.

As for minor glyphs, I suggest you stick with those three until Blizzard introduces some more minor glyphs to us, but only LoH and SU have any real importance, and SU only when you actually activate the ability associated with it and with the assumption that there are Undead for you to fight in the area.

HotR and DP are your two primary glyphs that you don’t want to give up at this point. SoR and HW are interchangeable here though based on where you are going to grind. If you want to grind undead mobs then you’re better off with HW, otherwise you’ll get more use out of SoR.

I want to emphasize once again that these glyphs are for leveling and grinding, specifically here at level 80. If you want to tank dungeons and heroics then you’re going to have a different setup on your major glyphs when you hit 80 so that you can maximize your threat generation.

Update: Talent Points
There hasn’t been a whole lot of change in the talent department, but to give you a single glimpse at how you should spend your points, here you have it.

Level 10-30
Divine Strength 5/5: Increases your total Strength by 15%.
Anticipation 5/5: Increases your chance to dodge by 5%.
Improved Righteous Fury 3/3: While Righteous Fury is active, all damage taken is reduced by 6%.
Toughness 2/5: Increases your armor value from items by 4% and reduces the duration of all movement slowing effects by 12%.
Improved Devotion Aura 3/3: Increases the armor bonus of your Devotion Aura by 50% and increases the amount healed on any target affected by any of your Auras by 6%.
Toughness (+2) 4/5: Increases your armor value from items by 8% and reduces the duration of all movement slowing effects by 24%.
Blessing of Sanctuary 1/1: Place a Blessing on a friendly target, reducing damage taken from all sources by 3% for 10 min. and increasing strength and stamina by 10%. When the target blogs, parries, or dodges a melee attack the target will gain 2% of maximum displayed mana.

Level 31-60
Toughness (+1) 5/5: Increases your armor value from items by 10% and reduces the duration of all movement slowing effects by 30%.
Reckoning 3/5: Gives you a 6% chance after being hit by any damaging attack tht the next 4 weapon swings within 8 sec will generate an additional attack.
Sacred Duty 2/2: Increases your total Stamina by 8%, reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield and Divine Protection spells by 60 seconds.
One-Handed Weapon Specialization 3/3 Increases all damage you deal when a one-handed melee weapon is equipped by 10%.
Holy Shield 1/1: Increases chance to block by 30% for 1-0 sec and deals 274 Holy damage for each attack blocked while active. Each blog expends a charge. 8 charges.
Ardent Defender 3/3: Damage that takes you below 35% health is reduced by 20%. In addition, attacks which would otherwise kill you cause you to be healed by up to 30% of your maximum health. This healing effect cannot occur more than once every 2 min.
Reckoning (+1) 4/5: Gives you an 8% chance after being hit by any damaging attack tht the next 4 weapon swings within 8 sec will generate an additional attack.
Redoubt 3/3: Increases your block value by 30% and damaging melee and ranged attacks against you have a 10% chance to increase your chance to block by 30%. Lasts 10 sec or 5 blocks.
Combat Expertise 2/3: Increases your expertise by 4, total Stamina and chance to critically hit by 4%.
Avenger’s Shield 1/1: Hurls a holy shield at the enemy, dealing Holy damage, Dazing them and then jumping to additional nearby enemies. Affects 3 total targets. Lasts 10 sec.
Touched by the Light 3/3: Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 60% of your Strength and increases the amount healed by your critical heals by 30%.
Guarded by the Light 1/2: Reduces spell damage taken by 3% and gives you 50% chance to refresh the duration of your Divine Plea when you hit an enemy. In addition, your Divine Plea spell is 50% less likely to be dispelled.
Shield of the Templar 3/3: Reduces all damage taken by 3% and grants your Avenger’s Shield a 100% chance to silence your targets by 3 sec.
Combat Expertise (+1) 3/3: Increases your expertise by 6, total Stamina and chance to critically hit by 6%.
Guarded by the Light (+1) 2/2: Reduces spell damage taken by 6% and gives you 100% chance to refresh the duration of your Divine Plea when you hit an enemy. In addition, your Divine Plea spell is 100% less likely to be dispelled.
Hammer of the Righteous 1/1: Hammer the current target and up to 2 additional nearby targets, causing 4 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage.

Level 61-80
Deflection 5/5: Increases your Parry chance by 5%. (Retribution Tree)
Improved Judgements 1/2: Decreases the cooldown of your Judgement spells by 1 sec. (Retribution Tree)
Benediction 4/5: Reduces the mana cost of all instant cast spells by 8%. (Retribution Tree)
Vindication 2/2: Gives the Paladin’s damaging attacks a chance to reduce the target’s attack power by 46 for 10 sec. (Retribution Tree)
Pursuit of Justice 2/2: Reduces the duration of all Disarm effects by 50% and increases movement and mounted movement speed by 15%. This does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects. (Retribution Tree)
Crusade 3/3: Increases all damage caused by 3% and all damage caused against Humanoids, Demons, Undead and Elementals by an additional 3%. (Retribution Tree)
Reckoning (+1) 5/5: Gives you a 8% chance after being hit by any damaging attack tht the next 4 weapon swings within 8 sec will generate an additional attack.
Benediction (+1) 5/5: Reduces the mana cost of all instant cast spells by 10%. (Retribution Tree)

Update: Pulling Mobs for AoE
At level 16 you get your first taunt that you will also be using to pull mobs, called Hand of Reckoning. It will taunt a target for you, though it can miss, and if the target is not already targeting you then it will deal Holy damage to them as well. This should be your primary method of pulling mobs throughout the game in order to take advantage of the damage that it deals (1 + half of your Attack Power) to mobs that aren’t already targeting you. You can use this spell to pull additional mobs to you after you’ve already started your AoE grinding, but be sure to use it on mobs that do not already have you targeted so that it will deal damage to them.

At level 20 you get a spell that can be used to pull, called Exorcism. You will generally deal more damage with Exorcism than you will with Hand of Reckoning, but it does have a cast time and using it does remove your ability to damage mobs with HoR if they target you from your Exorcism cast. It’s a ranged spell with a 1.5 second cast, so it’s fairly easy implement its use for pulling as long as you don’t try to cast it during combat which removes all of your avoidance.

The best way I have found to use both Exorcism and HoR in a single pull is to cast HoR on the first target followed by Exorcism either on the same target or an additional target. Personally I would target a second mob for the Exo cast so that I had two mobs that had already taken damage before I start my AoE rotation, but you can do it either way.

At level 50 (assuming you’ve spent your talents as I suggested above) you get your big pull spell which is Avenger’s Shield which will hit up to three targets and dazing them in the process. If you spend talent points in Shield of the Templar as mentioned above, then you also silence those enemies when you hit them which will help you in pulling caster mobs which are usually the bane of your Paladin existence.

Both Avenger’s Shield (AS) and Hand of Reckoning (HoR) can be used while in combat without sacrificing your ability to dodge, parry, and block enemy attacks. HoR needs to be cast on mobs that are not already targeting you to be of any use, but AS can be cast on any mob that is within range and still be beneficial. You can either use it to help kill the mobs you are already fighting, or to pull additional mobs to you.

If you wish to use all three of your pulling spells in a single pull then the best way to do it is to cast HoR on the first mob followed by Avenger’s Shield on either the same mob or one close to it, and then take advantage of the Dazing property of AS to cast Exorcism on another target. If you can use each of the three spells on different mobs then you can get the best results for killing the group quickly. If you have three groups of mobs, or one or two groups along with a pathing mob or two then you’ll have the best setup you can get. It’s alright to cast Exo when you’ve only got one or two mobs on you and they aren’t hitting you hard, but any more than that and you’ll be better off sticking to just HoR and AS.

New Spells: 68-80
Alright, enough with the updates; it’s time to move on to something new. First up on that list is our new spells that open up after level 68.

Avenging Wrath (Level 70) Increases all damage and healing caused by 20% for 20 sec. Cannot be used within 30 sec of being the target of Divine Shield, Divine Protection, or Hand of Protection.

Divine Plea (Level 71) You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec, but the amount healed by your Flash of Light, Holy Light, and Holy Shock spells is reduced by 50%.

Shield of Righteousness (Level 75) Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage based on your block value plus an additional 390.

Sacred Shield (Level 80) Each time the target takes damage they gain a Sacred Shield, absorbing 500 damage and increasing the paladin’s chance to critically hit with Flash of Light by 50% for up to 6 sec. They cannot gain this effect more than once every 6 sec. Lasts 30 sec. This spell cannot be on more than one target at any one time.

Avenging Wrath is what is often referred to as our “Angel Wings” because that’s the animation put up when you use it; a couple of wings that pop up behind the paladin. It’s a 20% damage increase for 20 seconds that also cuts your healing spells in half while it’s active. If you’re just grinding then you might as well use this whenever it’s not on cooldown just to help you clear the mobs faster. The cooldown is only 3 minutes, which is pretty standard for a cooldown buff.

Divine Plea becomes one of the most welcome additions to your arsenal, providing you with a near constant resupply of your mana while in combat (25% of your mana over it’s duration). It has a 1 minute cooldown and a 15 second duration, but if you’ve spent talent points in Guarded by the Light then you will refresh it’s duration every time you make an attack. “Attack” in this case refers to a melee attack, not a spell. So Judgement of Light will not reset your cooldown, but a melee attack will. This spell should be on you at all times. Use it right before a pull, shortly after a pull, or whenever you are not in combat and need to get some mana back.

Shield of Rightousness is a strong single target attack spell that fits nicely into your rotation. Use it to take down the mobs that you’re fighting even faster, but as a single target spell it’s not as important as other attack options if you find yourself low on mana unless you have only one mob to fight.

Sacred Shield is our reward for reaching the current (as of 3.3) level cap of 80. It’s generally considered more of a healer’s spell than a tank’s, but since we’re soloing here and it does have a useful effect we’ll count it as another tool regardless. It absorbs 500 damage by default, and the amount is increased by our spell power. As I write this my own paladin is only level 78 so I have no personal experience using this spell. As I ponder it though, I don’t think that I would include it in my default grinding rotation, simply because I don’t take much damage right now as it is. It certainly still has it’s place as a damage absorbing spell, but with so many other options available to us for healing and damage prevention I’m not sure that it will matter. Perhaps one of my readers can enlighten us though. (I know Cassinni’s out there somewhere.)

Grinding Locations: Northrend
Once you reach level 68 you have two options open to you. You can either stay in Outlands where your best AoE Grinding will likely be found near the entrance to the Black Temple raid entrance, or you can head on to Northrend. You will have an easier time handling the mobs near black temple, but you will get better rewards overall if you just head straight to Northrend.

If you reach Northrend at 68 then either of the starting zones in Northrend will suffice, otherwise you will do better in Dragonblight though you may have have some gear issues if you’ve skipped questing in Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord.

I will get into further detail on where to go and which mobs in particular you should be grinding on in Part 2.

Posted in Class, Leveling, Paladin, World of Warcraft Tagged: AoE, Grinding, Leveling, Paladin, Tanking

Related posts:

1. AoE Grinding: Frost Death Knight Edition
2. Using Sacred Shield As A Paladin Tank
3. Mage Leveling Part III: 40-58