How to counter a Death Knight in PvP Combat.

If there is one aspect of game play that Death Knights are truly dominating it is player versus player combat, a fact that is mostly due to players not being used to a Death Knights capabilities and counters; while those who play Death Knights themselves know much more about the class and how to counter all other classes in the game.

But for all the outbursts of the term “overpowered” that are thrown around by many players, Death Knights have weaknesses aplenty when you learn more about them. In general there are two types of Death Knights you will encounter in PvP; Unholy and Blood. Frost spec Death Knights are quite rare in PvP due to the fact that without the support of a healer they are exceptionally fragile in comparison to the other two specs.

The primary weakness of a Death Knight is their susceptibility to snare and root effects; they have no means of escaping crowd control such as a Paladins hand of Freedom or a Druids shape shifting and must rely instead upon either Death Grip to close the distance gap or their own snare Chains of Ice.

Due to this weakness it is very easy to keep your distance from a Death Knight as a ranged class if you simply save your main escape tools such as disengage, blink, fade etc. until after the use of Death Grip.

For melee classes this snare vulnerability can be exploited by employing hit and run tactics; feral druids and rogues can dump an entire energy bar of attacks onto a death knight before dancing out of range again with impunity while their energy regenerates. This “Lancing” tactic is even more effective when used in combination with stuns and disarm effects to prevent reprisal attacks.

The second main weakness of a Death Knight is their reliance upon cool downs for their defense; abilities such as Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield provide significant increases to their defense but are easily surmountable when you take their weakness to snares into account. After a Death Knight utilizes a strong cool down, simply back off and wait for it to expire before re-engaging. In the case of Bone Shield which lasts until it runs out of charges simply kite while throwing the odd ranged attack to steadily remove the buff.

Once these defensive cool downs have been used, a Death Knight is actually rather fragile and vulnerable to burst damage.

As their final main weakness, Death Knights are exceptionally disease dependent for their damage with between a quarter and a third of their strike damage coming from them; these diseases can be removed by any healer in the game except Druids. By combining kiting with disease removal it becomes exceptionally hard for a Death Knight to kill a good healer without assistance or a lot of skill, especially when you factor in that Death Knights have no healing reduction debuff and their only stun comes from their fragile pet and is of a short duration.

By keeping these three simple weaknesses in mind it becomes a lot simpler to fight and win against Death Knights; it is key to remember that for a smooth kill you will require patience and timing, there is no speedy way to dominate a Death Knight in the same way traditional classes were doing in The Burning Crusade.

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Step Right Up – There’s Gold To Be Made!

The Darkmoon Faire is an event that goes unnoticed by many players throughout the game but is of the utmost importance to others for one simple reason. When the faire arrives, you are able to turn in Darkmoon decks for epic trinkets.

Traditionally all Darkmoon cards have been world drops which made them a very random and unpredictable thing to gather but in WotLK things have drastically changed. All of the Darkmoon cards for the expansions four new decks can only be created by Inscribers with the spell “Darkmoon card of the North” which is learned at 400 Inscription skill from trainers.

Creating these cards requires the following materials:

• 1 Resilient Parchment (bought from vendors)

• 6 Snowfall Ink (Created from two Icy Pigments)

• 3 Eternal Life

• 3 Ink of the Sea (Crated from two Azure Pigments)

Azure Pigment is created from milling any Northrend herbs and Icy Pigment has a 25% chance of appearing per mill of low level Northrend herbs and a 50% chance per mill of Lichbloom, Adders Tongue or Icethorn.

So, why is this information important? The first thing to consider is how much the Darkmoon cards themselves are actually worth. Most of the cards created are not highly sought after and will only sell for a few hundred gold. But Nobles cards are worth a small fortune; selling for between one and two thousand gold each. This high value is due to the fact that they make what is essentially the best trinket in the game for many classes, the Darkmoon Card: Greatness

On average it should take 24 mills of high level herbs, or 6 stacks of herbs in order to create the inks needed for one card. If you luck out and create a Nobles card you have just made yourself a small fortune from around 300 gold worth of materials. Since the card you create is random you only have a 25% chance per craft of creating a Nobles card so it can be risky; you may get lucky or you may only break even.

What is more important, however; is that all inscribers who are currently creating Darkmoon cards are amassing a huge amount of Azure Pigments beyond what they require; come patch 3.0.8 you will be able to trade 10 Ink of the Sea for a single Snowfall Ink.

The net effect will be that Inscribers will be able to suddenly create a mass of Darkmoon cards without the restriction of a limited amount of Snowfall Ink; instead, Eternal Life will be the resource in demand!

And this is where the opportunity to make a lot of money arrives. Your first option is to stockpile Azure Pigments and Ink of the Sea while there is an abundance of it around, and then create your own Darkmoon cards after the patch for lower than the current cost. Alternatively, the demand for Eternal Life should skyrocket after the patch, allowing you to make a tidy profit there as well.

It may take a while for the prices of the affected items to change however; as, like all things related to the Darkmoon faire, demand tends to only increase close to and during the fair actually starting – so you will need to be patient with your investment.

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Some time ago we did a post about the passive buffs you can get from several professions.  Profession Buffs are a good thing, especially the passive variety.  But when it comes time to really Dominate, there is something to be said for the item buffs you can get from the crafting professions.

So let’s take a look at the itemization bonuses from each of the crafting professions.  Now, we always tell everyone to take either mining and herbalism when it comes to making extra gold.  But if you have listened to us and have really begun trying to Dominate your server, you also know that you should be actively doing other things eventually to make money in world of warcraft.

Our complete system for Domination is to have a set of toons with almost all of the professions so that we don’t have to rely on the AH for anything.  This can take a TON of time for the casual player.  In order to get the good stuff from any profession you have to get to level 60, and profession skill 350 so that you can take the grand master training, and then the best stuff from each profession really starts at level 400 most of the time.

Lawbringer has 6 toons that have done this (horde side on a single server).  With 11 professions in the game, that means if each one has a different profession, there is still one toon with an open profession slot.  But when it came time to plan for raid spots for those alts and planning for making the most of each toon, some changes were in order.

Keep in mind that we can only really consider this because we make almost all of our gold from the AH anyway.  If you are relying on your professions to make gold you’re missing the point in the first place.  Professions should primarily be used because they help your toon.  Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t make gold with our professions (we rant about disenchanting all the time) but it does mean that you should pick your professions based on a slightly different set of criteria when it comes to end game content and making gold is not the first priority on your list.

You should still end up having a good number of professions on your toons.  That is, if you have several toons you are preparing for end game raids.  If not, then just use your professions in your quest for more gold.  Also, choose the gathering professions for the passive buffs as they will aid your leveling.  But as you get closer to 80, or on toons you plan on taking to 80, there is another path you should consider.

Every little thing counts when it comes to getting geared for heroics and raids into Naxx.  If you are looking for a spot in raids, professions may very well be the thing that gets your stats and DPS up to the point where you go from being the odd man out to the MVP.  Skill has a lot to do with raid sucess of course, but when you combine skill with extra bonuses from gear it will show.

We already covered alchemy, tailoring and engineering in the passive profession buffs article.  We also covered the spellthread items in Untangling The Spellthreads.  So let’s look at Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Inscription, Jewelcrafting and Leatherworking.  Each of these professions has item enhancements in the form of extra sockets, enchants, inscriptions and items that you can only get from these professions giving you a noticeable extra boost from many of your gear slots.

Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing is a great overall profession for the plate wearer.  We also suspect that in future patches Blizz will add some nice mail items as well that will be worth having.  Blacksmithing can also make you some gold from a few crafted items, but again, that’s not our point in this discussion.

What we do want you to see in Blacksmithing are two of the level 400 items:

• Socket Bracer
• Socket Gloves

At level 415 Blacksmiths also get the Eternal Beltbuckle recipe, but that one is BoE, so you can get it without doing Blacksmithing.  Everyone should purchase a few eternal belt buckles for the extra socket.  These three recipes used together will give you 3 extra gem slots on your gear.  If you were gearing up a tank to be uncrittable, you could use 3 Mystic Autumn’s Glow Gems in these slots and grab an extra 48 Defense rating in 2 minutes with at a very reasonable mat cost.  48 defense rating is nothing to sneeze at and could save you a ton of time trying to gear to hit the defense cap.

Enchanting

Enchanters get several ring enchants.  There are only three level 400 skill enchants, so you don’t get as much versatility as sockets, and only have 3 choices.

• Enchant Ring: Stamina
• Enchant Ring: Greater Spell Power

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Fishing and Cooking Your Way To HUGE Profits

We’ve always said that your main toon needs to be a cook.  Unfortunately not everyone listened to us.  They probably wish they would have when the Winter’s Veil achievement became available and they hadn’t ever cooked anything but a little bread.  Now they had just a few days to try to catch hundreds of fish, or grind hundreds of mobs for cooking mats.

Well stop that.  Don’t NOT listen to us again.  There are some great new high end buff foods in the game, but unless you are a cook, you probably will never be able to afford them.  But for the cook, it means the same thing in the other direction – you can make really big gold from cooking if you put in the effort.

The other thing you have to know is that you simply MUST add fishing in order to do this.  The high end fish are not any harder than the BC fish to get and that alone makes them easier than farming for worg haunches.  Yes, we know leveling fishing is a pain.  Yes, we know it is tedious to level cooking.  But what if we also told you that you could maybe get 5 gold EACH for a cooked fish?  Would that make it easier for you?

The big reason why these buff foods will be worth so much has to do with one thing: Northern Spices.  Prices always boil down to supply and demand.  In this case the way the game is currently structured means VERY limited supply for cooking mats.  The stuff you make from it rivals alchemy potions so demand is also there.  Low supply along with high demand equals very high prices.

The only way you can get Northern Spices is from doing the cooking dailies in Dalaran.  Every time you complete the daily cooking quest you get a bag of spices and a Dalaran Cooking Award.  One of the cooking quests gives 2 awards.  The awards are used to purchase te new recipes OR you can spend 1 award for 10 Northern Spices.

The average person can easily complete the cooking quest every day.  In order to get all of the available recipes you would have to do the dailies each day for about 50 days to buy every single new recipe available, although about 5 of them are pretty worthless so let’s just say 30 days.

You have a pretty good chance of getting 3-4 Northern Spices each day from the spice bags as well.  So at the end of your first 30 days you have all the best recipes and 90 northern spices.  That sounds good until you begin to look at how many Northern Spices you WANT to have.

Price check on Fenris shows Northern Spices going for around 7-10g EACH.  If you can even find fish they are selling at about 2-4 gold a pop.  Even things like worg haunches are commanding 1g each prices.  And that’s on a server known for rabid undercutting.  Ask anyone in the Dominate guild how fast prices can crash on us.

So if we are seeing prices like this on a server with a low price economy and a large market, it’s a pretty safe bet that prices are pretty much like this on most servers.  So here is the deal.  If the mats for Dragonfin Filet are selling for a minimum of 10g, it’s pretty easy to assume that you can sell the food for 15g each.

As a test, that’s exactly what we did.  We bought 10 northern spices and a stack of Dragonfin for 195 gold.  We made 10 Dragonfin Filets and went right back to the AH with a price of 25g each.  We posted 5 singles and one stack of 5.  Before we logged in again the next day, every single one had sold and there was 250 gold in the mailbox.  Now just imagine if you had fished up the fish and gotten the spices on your own!

If you’ve been reading DYS for any length of time at all you know we’re not much into farming.  But if there is a way to make it worth the TIME farming compared to working the AH then we consider it.  In the case of cooking and fishing we may just have a winner.  But here is what you need to do:

If you have level 70 alts, get their cooking leveled up and get them a port to Dalaran.  Have each one of your alts do the cooking quest every day and buy Northern Spices with the rewards.  Have your main get the best selling recipes from their rewards until you can make almost everything and then start buying Northern Spices.

In my case, I have 4 toons in the 70’s and an 80 main.  So in the next 30 days, now that I have all the recipes I want, I can also collect about 1800 Northern Spices.  Now you can see how this turns into BIG bucks.  With 1800 Northern Spices and just 3 stacks of fish a day (about an hours work for the fish and maybe 30 minutes doing the dailies) I know for a fact I can make at least 10 gold each on every single one, and probably more like 20g each.  That’s 600-1,200 gold a DAY for two hours worth of work. Since this is about what I expect to make every single day at the auction house for the same amount of time spent it’s definately something I’m going to do.

Of course, I spent a TON of time leveling alts, but you probably did too.  Put them to good use and for heaven’s sake stop being a hardheaded numbskull and GO LEVEL COOKING AND FISHING!  You never know when a trade skill will hop up and get really good really fast like this.  Go get near a stove and Dominate!

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If you are still using a single screen for your computer, and we assume most of you still are (cough – Gavin – cough), you know what a pain it can be to run the game full size and do – well, anything else.  The whole routine of Alt+Tab is a mess.  But recently we ran accross a really slick little free bit of software that can end all of this for you and truly revolutionize the way you operate your computer with WoW running.

Playxpert is a revolutionary program. With its motto, “The death of alt+tabbing,” it seeks to end full-screen alt+tabbing in games by having this nifty little tool as an overlay on top of DirectX (Windows 3D) Applications. When it’s open it places a toolbar that is completely customizable with widgets inside any game you choose!

The core (included with the program) widgets are:

• An Internet Browser, so you can check your email whenever and wherever
• A Tunes player, which plays music in a specific folder, and also from popular players like Winamp
• A System Diagnostics utility, which shows how many resources are being used by your computer at the time the widget is opened. It also has live graphs showing performance.
• And last, but definitley not least, the Friends widget. This one is my favorite. Through this widget, you can talk to friends through MSN, AIM, Yahoo IM, ICQ, and more, all through windows that run in WoW!

Alongside these core widgets is a small but growing library of fan-made widgets with one for the armory, and another for wowhead, that all run in game! There is no reason to ever alt+tab again!

Another bonus of this great program is that its 100% free! The developers will add features such as custom skins that will be an optional paid offer, but the core app and the widgets are free.

Now before I post the link that you’re all eagerly waiting for, I have to discuss one bad thing. This program is Windows XP specific. It doesn’t work with Apple or Linux Operating Systems.

You can still install it in Windows Vista, but the in-game overlay is temporarily disabled as the developers work out the last kinks with the software. The developers have announced that an update is coming along shortly which will enable it.

So, if you really want to have access to information, talk to your friends, see another character’s profile, jam to music, and Dominate your server all at the same time; then go grab what certainly seems to be a slick way to Dominate with Playxpert here.

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When you were leveling didn’t you wish you could get your hands on one, just one, really good piece of gear? And when you did … didn’t you wish it would stay good for more then 2 levels ?

Well, Blizz first gave us the Refer a Friend program, but the bonuses end at level 60. Bummer when you still have 20 levels to go.  But they have added a new class of item you might have seen a time or two.  Introducing the new Heirloom Items, also known as “Hand-me-Downs”.

The concept is pretty simple and very innovative. It gives players that have reached the end-game content the ability to make the progression of other characters they create (Alts) faster and smoother while setting them apart from the rest in a visually obvious way.

There are quite a few Heirloom items available for purchase, and as of this writing there are only 2 ways to get them. We will cover both in a bit.

Heirloom Items are BoA (Bind on Account). This means that you can mail them between other characters on your account of the same faction (on the same server). So your 80 Warlock can pick up a set of plate shoulder piece and mail it to your lvl 13 Paladin, or even your level 1 Paladin. Your paladin can level as long as she likes and then pass it off to your level 67 Death Knight, and so on.

Heirloom Items’ stats scale to the level of the character wearing them. That means that the same Item would be worth the same thing to any character no matter their level: BLUE, (SUPERIOR) gear, at every level.

This means that Heirloom items will transform based on the type of gear that the character is capable of wearing. That is to say the same piece of “plate” shoulder gear would be “Mail” to the level 13 Paladin but “Plate” to the level 67 DK.

Blizzard obviously wanted to add something to the game for people interested in trying new classes or who just generally love playing alts. One must also assume that they are listening to their subscribers’ feedback since they are bringing back one of the most popular weapons of the old world. Seriously how much more fun would it be to have your Level 1 Warrior or Paladin wield a Bloodied Arcanite Reaper?  An updated version of an Old World level 60 crafted item, referred to by some, as the “coolest looking weapon ever”. Bear in mind that 2 years ago (Pre-BC), Arcanite was today’s Titansteel.

Heirloom Items come in 2 types: PvP (with Resilience) and PvE.

PvP gear can be picked up when your faction controls Wintergrasp at the cost of a few hundred Stone Keeper’s Shards.

PvE gear can be purchased via Emblems of Heroism (the new Badges of Justice).

As of this writing, the only items available are the two most noticeable items: Weapons and Shoulders along with Trinkets. How many level 10 characters have YOU seen wearing Shoulder slot items or wielding an Arcanite Reaper?

Ok so here it is broken down for you with links:

PvE gear

Weapons:
Ranged (Bow)
Dagger
One-Handed Mace
One-Handed Sword
Staff
Two-Handed weapon (< ---- Bloodied Arcanite Reaper)

Armor:
Cloth Armor
Leather Armor: Melee and Caster versions
Mail Armor:  Melee and Caster versions
Plate Armor (Only one version of PvE Plate armor)

Trinkets:
Melee and Caster versions

PvP Gear:

Weapons:
Ranged (gun)
Dagger
One-Handed Mace
One-Handed Sword
Staff
Two-Handed weapon

Armor:
Cloth Armor
Leather Armor: Melee and Caster version
Mail Armor: Melee and Caster version
Plate Armor: Melee and Caster version

Trinkets:
Alliance and Horde version

You will note that both the PvP and PvE shoulder armor comes with a 10% experience bonus. After a complete field test, both with and without rested experience, we can conclusively state that the experience bonus from the heirloom items AND rested experience bonus DOES STACK! That’s a 20% xp increase folks. If that doesn’t inspire you to roll a new character nothing will.

Proof by the numbers:

Mob xp: w/o Shoulders: 57 With Shoulders: 63 (57*1.1=63)

Mob Rested xp: w/o Shoulders: 114    With Shoulders: 126 (114*1.1=126)

As far as enchanting goes only enchants that have no level requirements are possible. Runeforging and anything else that would make an item Soulbound will not work. Which makes Crusader one of the better enchants that can be placed on a weapon for melee and Spell Power for casters. For the use the weapon is going to get the mats just may be worth acquiring.

So if you always wanted to level another character but felt the grind was just not worth your time, this may be an opportunity to reconsider that. Up to 20% xp bonus and one of the best weapons available sort of changes things a bit. Not to mention that you get to level (and DOMINATE) in Style!

So ask your guild what they need most Tanks or Healers and see if you can fill that gap and make a difference where it counts for your guild/team. Get out there and DOMINATE

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With an understanding of the core mechanics behind the Death Knight class and its reliance upon diseases, the next step to effective use of your death knight is to create your personal optimal combat rotation.

There are four key things to take into account when creating your combat rotation; death runes, diseases, runic power and time, each of which has the following effect.

Death Runes – By including death runes in your rotation you can create attack patterns that deviate from the normal rune set, how this will be applied varies depending on your talent choices.

Diseases – Most specs will want both diseases to be active at all times but Frost can get away with only utilising Frost Fever; the talent Epidemic also extends your disease duration allowing you to utilise two sets of runes before having to refresh your diseases causing a longer rotation.

Runic Power – It is important to ensure you never waste your runic power by letting it sit unused at maximum; you should plan for how much runic power will be generated in your rotations and look for ways to use it when you are waiting for runes to recharge

Time – Ultimately you only have a set amount of time to utilise your attacks before you need to refresh your diseases, you runes recharge and your rotation ends; using only single rune abilities will cause you to go beyond your disease duration by the time you account for the time it takes to use up your runic power.

By taking these factors into account, the best rotations will always be the ones that use up all of your runic power and every rune you have, before you need to refresh your diseases.

To give you an example of how to plan out your rotations I will show you the thought process behind my personal Frost spec rotation.

Icy Touch -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate -> Obliterate –> Frost Strike -> Frost Strike.

This rotation is designed for single target damage and uses Blood Tap on the first rotation to swap a blood rune for a death rune in order to fit Obliterate twice into the rotation. With the talent Blood of the North, the blood strike in the rotation will generate a death rune to fuel the following rotation.

In total the rotation consists of 6 attacks which will take a total of 9 seconds to pull off, well within the disease duration and fitting in nicely with the regeneration time of your runes.
Untalented the rotation would generate only 50 runic power, which is not enough for the two frost strikes but the talent Chill of the Grave increases this to 65. By using the Glyph of Frost Strike to reduce its cost to 32 runic power; 65 runic power is enough for both strikes.

If I wanted to replace one of the Obliterates for an additional Blood Strike and a Plague Strike, the rotation would become sub optimal since it would generate more runic power than it utilised as well as take longer to execute than it would for your runes to refresh.

By trying to take all the factors above into account you can create a large variety of combat rotations for different situations such as PvP or AoE. Finding the right rotations for you is half of the challenge of the Death Knight class and is what you build your talent and glyph choices around.

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