 Brilliant! A day after I spoke to Consider about writing up our concerns, having been frustrated by the latest Beta patch, Naha on the official beta forums has done exactly what we intended. Awesome, saves me a lot of time. Also shows how Consider and I were wanting to express a wider view shared amongst other DK testers. If you are in beta, please cross-check your own problems with the DK current state against Naha’s post and provide your  Back in the old days, I had a Paladin called Hammerjudge. Creative name, eh. Actually, I had two. First one was in Australia, then when I knew I was moving to the UK, I bought an EU kit (whilst in Australia, from shatteredcrystal), then levelled a Dranei on EU. I healed for a while whilst earning a slot in my awesome guild the Dottagers, then tanked, then WotLK was announced and I was sold on a DK, who was August 20th, 2010 | 4 comments |
 From: General beta chat |  Tags: Cataclysm Beta, maintankadin, paladin, tank 
August 9th, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Mechanics and systems beta | Tags: Cataclysm Beta, tank, vengeance  I posted these thoughts below in the new thread on official beta forums, which I’m hoping will become a DK Tank thread. It has some great points in it before my post, which are worth reading too. In our pwnwear forums, we have a thread which will talk mostly about AOE Tanking. It’s valid that the earlier point that casting death strike effectively puts bone shield on cooldown. The 3 rune DnD makes it an opener, combined with blood August 6th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: DK talents - specs - glyphs - mastery - rune system and rotation | Tags: Cataclysm Beta, talents, tank  This sigil has stats. Not complicated fancy proc blah blah, just nice, easy-to-measure stats. I’m happy about this change, particularly getting stamina on the sigil. Quest reward from near completion of first zone, Mt Hyjal. This is an alpha image, so I don’t know what the stat values will be like on beta now. New sigil: Azralon's Twisted Rune July 1st, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Cataclysm Beta, Quests, gear, levelling and instances beta | Tags: alpha, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, sigil, tank  We had a simple question today, about a heroic mode tank who got parry-gibbed by Sindragosa. Melee dps need to remember that whilst parry-haste is mostly off in ICC, which I wrote about in February, it is on for Sindragosa and Deathwhisper, but it’s really Cindy for whom this risk is real due to her melee damage hurting. Here’s a diagram to help your dps. June 24th, 2010 | 2 comments |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: expertise, icc, parry haste, parrygib, sindragosa, tank I have raided as a maintank and as an off-tank. I don’t really mind, as long as the encounter is interesting. Some people don’t like the term “off-tank” or think it’s out-of-date. Others don’t want to think of themselves as an off-tank because it implies you are of secondary importance. I like the term, because everyone knows it means “the tank who is not on or is the secondary tank for the big boss”.
I have two tank specs, and most tanks who will never dps can do the same. It’s a nice situation. When I first joined my guild, on trial, I sometimes played as a dps before securing my spot in our tank corp. At another time in the past, I had a tank spec and pvp dps spec. This post is written for those tanks who can carry two tank specs. I’m not talking to those top 300 tanks who April 30th, 2010 | 5 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, General chat, choose spec | Tags: 5-man, blood, dual spec, frost, heroic, raid, spec, tank, unholy On the train this morning I read Everblue’s blog on the coming raid changes, and he pointed out a factor I hadn’t thought of yet: the varying healing requirements of 10 and 25 man. I quickly checked plusheal.com and wom, no comments there. Whilst Everblue’s a clever chap, surely one of the thousands of noisy bloggers has talked about this already? He points out that tanks will have the same stamina in 10 and 25 man raids, unlike now, April 28th, 2010 | 17 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: balance, healers, mmorpg design, raid, tank To recap: the Lich King fight has three phases where you are in the centre, and between each of them are transition phases when you move to the edge. Moving between the phases also requires a strategy Each time you are in the center he gains a new ability or two like Spell “Soul Reaper” not found. whilst other abilities remain, like Infest. On the second edge-phase he spawns more raging spirits than the first time. The clever design feature here April 23rd, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Boss strategies | Tags: icc, lich king, raging spirits, strategy, tank, transition For the general non-hard mode tanking population, glyph of rune tap is a bad glyph. A few readers noticed (and one commented on other forums, in fact in their guild application as a DK tank) that in my grid of Blood specs, the hard-mode specialised AOE spec includes this glyph. Firstly, how’s its maths work? Your Rune Tap heals yourself for an additional 10% of the effect, and also heals your party for 10% of their maximum health. This April 19th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: blood, glyph of rune tap, hard mode, healers, lich king, Rune Tap, sindragosa, tank I’m really enjoying the anticipation of Cataclysm, the news snippets from Blizzard which fuel more speculation and conjecture about what’s in store for us. Being a tank in Cataclysm, and not dying in two hits from a boss, will be quite refreshing. I’ve talked about this quite a few times before. One of the age old topics of avoidance vs stamina recently came up, and for once it wasn’t a redundant circular argument; because in Cataclysm dodge and parry April 17th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: avoidance, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, healers, stamina, tank This mechanic will be difficult to tune and might possibly need to be changed altogether to work. Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you’ll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage. It sounds like an intended DK analogy to shield block or savage defense. Those abilities always offer damage reduction, based on a simple probability which has no conditions. If you block or crit, you gain the damage-reducing effect. There is no secondary test about whether you were April 12th, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, dk, healing absorption, tank Cataclysm will take mobility fights to the next level. Already a feature in WotLK but not a new idea to WoW, most famously starting with Baron Geddon in Molten Core where you became the bomb and had to move away from the raid or wipe everyone. (I reflected on MC for the five-year anniversary). In ICC, the easiest examples are Putricide and Rotface where mobility, situational awareness and directional-sense are crucial. Situational awareness is a selection criteria to get April 12th, 2010 | 5 comments |
From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: Cataclysm speculation before Beta, keybinding, mobility, tank Quite a few tanks really don’t like the idea of an Icy Touch spam build. At its most extreme, this kind of spec involves skipping any talent which helps you do strikes like [Obliterate] in favour of those which help you slam Icy Touch. The playstyle is then use death runes for icy touch. Many tanks do not like it out of principle, and strongly argue against using it, because Blizzard have said they will nerf it if they March 31st, 2010 | 9 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.3.3, 3.33, frost, icy touch, it, it spam, tank, threat I’ve been reflecting a little on how strongly I identify myself as being a WoW player. There are a few dimensions to it. Do you admit to being a gamer? Many players do not admit they play WoW to their non-gaming friends. If the friend isn’t a gamer, they might not understand, and it’s often easier to just be silent on the matter. If they’re a workmate, depending on your job, it could be career-limiting to tell them you’re I am guilty of focusing on threat a lot in my analysis. I do value survival more highly, though, but perhaps it takes up less of my theorycrafting because there aren’t so many variables to consider. Threat and survival are usually disparate goals, and you need to choose a mix of tank talents which lands you somewhere on the spectrum between them. If you think graphically, the choices are often like this: If you want more survival talents, those March 25th, 2010 | 2 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: 3.33, lego, spec, survival, tank, threat, utility Just a quick note to point out a spec worth investigating further, no epidemic Frost, both DW and 2H. Read my post and discuss in forums over here. By the way, on the website blog you’ll see “(Comments are closed)” on some blog posts, when it’s not actually true, most comments are open. It’s a bug I’m trying to fix. March 24th, 2010 | Visit our forum to comment |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.33, epidemic, frost, tank Bug fixes:
That’s from the patch notes. Rime used to ‘double dip’ its Obliterate, which contributed to DW I have given most of the lead posts a once-over where they relate to tank specs, checking for 3.33 accuracy. Largely done, and there isn’t much change in 3.33 tank specs anyhow. The most significant change to specs is [Improved Icy Talons] which I talked about the other day. Generally Blood tanks will have already spec’d into [Will of the Necropolis], but if not, you should seriously think about it. I consider it mandatory for raiding, and optional if March 23rd, 2010 | 3 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.33, dk, spec, tank We’ll probably see 3.33 this week. There are a few important changes we all know about: [Icy Touch] gives loads of threat, [Will of the Necropolis] is always available and [Improved Icy Talons] stacks with itself (45% melee haste); the last being confirmed by Ghostcrawler. Other Frost changes to talents in 3.33 are not so tank-oriented but will help give us a small threat boost. Icy Slam Icy Touch will hit like shield slam. In Frost Presence, it will March 21st, 2010 | 21 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.33, blood, frost, patch, ptr, spec, tank, unholy There really is quite a lot of meaning packed into these posts. What do you guys think? Top guilds and raid encounters difficulty Players try to play that card a lot, that skill isn’t a big deal because the mechanics are all pretty easy to understand, and therefore it’s the class mechanics that are to blame, not the player. I don’t buy it. I’ve seen the world first, or even server first kills of difficult bosses. Those February 26th, 2010 | 9 comments |
From: News discussion | Tags: improved icy talons, tank, will of the necropolis Tanks do a lot of taunting off one another. Last week I was reflecting on a post from Chev about taunting. He has tabulated the number of debuffs your fellow tank should have before you taunt. What’s remarkable is that a standard table, without many footnotes or explanatory exceptions, is able to capture this taunt dynamic. That’s because there usually isn’t much more to it than simply “at x debuffs, do the tank switch”. On some fights, you could Significant changes for DK tanks. Probably help dps too, but I don’t write about that as much, like DW Frost dps might be viable (instead of lame). Awesome, [Will of the Necropolis] is now an unconditional effective-health boost. Fantastic. Unless a strike leapfrogs you into death (with massive overkill) it means Blood tanks have more EH than before. It’s not possible to model it mathematically because the value of WotN is a function of the damage you incur February 20th, 2010 | 8 comments |
From: News discussion | Tags: 3.3.3, 3.33, blood, patch, tank, will of the necropolis Choosing how to spend your Emblems of Frost is also a decision on whether you get the 4-piece set bonus, which is particularly complicated if you’re a strict 10-man tank. For DKs, we are alone in having a fucking awful 2-piece set bonus. Look at it. Useless for every boss fight in ICC. That bonus is an insult. The decision on set gear is different for a tank who is unlikely to get into a 25-man ICC to one February 12th, 2010 | 22 comments |
From: Gear and stats | Tags: cataclysmic chestguard, emblem of frost, gear, set bonus, tank, tier |
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