Coping with the undead

Whenever you fight against a Death Knight there is more than just the plate wearing, glowy eyed psycho in front of you to worry about; there is also his pet ghoul to deal with. The threat this little beast poses to you differs greatly depending on talent expenditure but is always something you need to keep an eye on.

When it comes to Ghouls there are two main types you need to concern yourself with; pets and minions. By default every Death Knight is capable of summoning a Ghoul minion for 2 minutes which is not under the players control, this minion is generally weak with low damage output and health while being highly susceptible to AoE effects.

The main problem with a minion Ghoul is that it is an excellent target for the Death Knights ability Death Pact; this sacrifices the ghoul in order to restore 40% of the players health. This sacrificial heal is capable of critting for a 60% heal and can be further boosted by Vampiric blood; when fighting against Death Knights it is in your best interests to prevent this.

So how do you prevent the Death Knight from sacrificing his Ghoul? The theory behind it is simple; most players who plan on sacrificing their minion only summon it when they need it and while the Ghoul is clawing its way out of the ground it is unable to be targeted by Death Pact preventing an instant sacrifice. As soon as you spot the Ghoul being summoned you should use whatever incapacitate or silence effects you have on the Death Knight before quickly killing the Ghoul.

Should the Death Knight be foolish enough to summon the Ghoul before he requires it then make sure to kill it first; not only will he not have the runic power to instantly sacrifice it but there will be little to no damage on him to be healed.

When it comes to dealing with pet Ghouls things become a little more difficult; unholy Death Knights are able to precisely control their Ghouls, giving them specific targets to attack and being able to recall the ghoul safely from danger. When the Ghoul is controllable it also gains the ability to stun its target for 3 seconds every 30 seconds in a similar manner to a Hunters Intimidate skill.

Pet Ghouls typically have large amounts of health too and are able to Huddle to reduce all damage taken by 50% so simply CC’ing the Death Knight while killing the Ghoul is rarely a good idea as it will require significant effort; further to this an unholy Death Knight is able to resummon his Ghoul far sooner than any other spec due to the Night of the Dead talent.

Due to this speedy resummon and the pet Ghouls higher health pool a further threat becomes apparent; a Death Knight is able to command his ghoul to explode by casting the spell Corpse Explosion on it where it will detonate after a short time for 25% of its health. This explosion can typically hit for nearly 5k health, causing obscene burst damage in combination with normal attacks.

So how do you deal with this versatile monster? The best way is to control it; unlike most undead it is susceptible to fear effects as well as anti-undead spells such as Shackle Undead and Turn Evil; use such skills to buy yourself time to engage the Death Knight on his own. Alternatively if you have a friend nearby with a taunt skill it is possible to taunt pets off their current target and onto a more sturdy class making it a great means of generating free rage or Rune Strike procs.

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Recently Blizzard have changed the way arena teams are paired up with each other and in the process completely overhauled the way in which rating is gained or lost; the main problem is this system has yet to be decently explained leading to many arena players wondering what exactly is going on.

What has happened is that every player now has a separate invisible rating called the matchmaking mating which is not viewable by the player leading to its nickname of the “spooky ghost rating”. What determines each player’s matchmaking rating appears to be data from past arena game performance.

When you que up to arena matches now you are placed up against teams that have a similar average matchmaking rating to your team to help ensure you are always playing against players of a similar skill level; the reason behind this change was to stop new teams hitting a wall that stops their progress when they keep running into experienced players who reform their teams to try new setups.

If you win or lose a match your team ratings still adjust as normal depending on the current team ratings; what this leads to is players with low team ratings but high matchmaking ratings gaining large amounts of points per win since they should be matched with high rank teams allowing them to quickly rise in the ranks without disturbing less experienced players.

Where this system can be unfair though is the fact that top teams can end up matched against low rated teams that have high matchmaking ratings. Since the matchmaking ratings are similar it is expected that the games will be fairly close however for every win a high rated team has they stand to gain very little while every loss costs dearly; this means it is going to be much much harder for high level teams to stay at the top, giving little incentive for them to play more than their mandatory 10 games a week.

Equally it will be very hard for players who perform poorly in the arena to simply reset their teams when their rating drops low since they will still be matched with low ranking players making it much harder for them to advance to higher ratings; what will matter now is consistent performance rather than a lucky win or loss streak through a setup change.

On top of these ratings you will still have your own personal rating which is designed to show your overall contribution to a team and prevent players from simply being boosted; this should always converge towards your team rating as you play more games.

Overall these changes to the arena will make for much more challenging and fair matches for every player and provide a closer estimation of a players actual skill levels all while making things far more challenging and risky for the battle to become a Gladiator. The players at the top will only be able to stay there if they truly are the most dominating teams in the battlegroup!

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Controlling Your Pet As  Death Knight

New unholy Death Knights often complain that they have problems controlling their Ghoul and many find that they do not get the most out of it in terms of effectiveness. The following article aims to outline some of the tricks and macros that change your Ghoul from being a simple fire and forget DoT pet to an effective part of your character.

The first thing you should understand is how to maximize your Ghouls raw power. When you first summon your Ghoul it takes a snapshot of your current stats to determine its own; the two key attributes relevant to it being your stamina and strength. To get the best possible results from your Ghoul you will want to summon it when you are buffed and preferably with any strength procs such as your Rune of the Fallen Crusader active.

The best way to activate your procs before summoning your Ghoul is by using the target dummies located in most main cities. For PvP and Arena it can be far more important to have the most health possible on your Ghoul to ensure its survival so equipping a tanking set before summoning can give a significant increase to its health for a small reduction in its strength.

After you have your Ghoul summoned it’s important to understand how to control it. The best pet stance to choose for maximum control is passive and you will want to take both Leap and Gnaw off auto cast; this allows you to specify exactly who your Ghoul attacks as well as pull off several unique moves. The first thing you will want to create is a Ghoul recall macro as follows.

/cast [target=player] Leap
/petfollow

What this macro does is cause the Ghoul to instantly leap to you if in range and follow you; since you will be in passive stance your Ghoul will not run off again to engage another target. By doing this you can keep your Ghoul out of dangerous situations caused by him either chasing someone too far or to keep him out of the lava waves when fighting Sartharion.

The next macro you will want is an offensive one.

/cast Leap
/petattack
/cast Gnaw

What this macro will do is cause your Ghoul to leap to your current target and begin attacking it if it is not currently near it; Gnaw will not cast since it was not in range to begin with. If your Ghoul is currently attacking your target though and is next to it Leap will not cast since you will be too close however Gnaw will causing your Ghoul to stun the target for 3 seconds.

Between these two macros you have complete control over your Ghouls mobility and its stun. The final macro you will want is to get your ghoul to explode for a massive burst of damage.

/target pet
/cast Corpse Explosion
/targetlasttarget

This will command the Ghoul to explode starting its fast cast timer; do note however that if the Ghoul has just used an ability which activates its global cool down then it will not explode but the runic power cost and cool down period of Corpse Explosion will be used. Either time the ability carefully or quickly turn off auto casting on Claw before exploding your Ghoul.

By combining these macros together you are able to get the most of your Ghoul by precisely directing its movements and chaining together your Ghouls stun and explosion with several of your own large hits. With timing a combination of your Ghouls explode and a critical Scourge Strike hit can deal 8-10k damage instantly and reliably; truly dominating a target.

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Spell Resistance – The Easy Way

Previously I have covered just how devastating spell resistance can be in PvP and the importance spell penetration has in countering its effects; but spell resistance is by no means only important in PvP game play. Throughout much of the PvE content in World of Warcraft there are numerous encounters with high amounts of elemental damage; in fact it has been fairly traditional that most raid wide damage taken by players will be elemental in nature be it from curses placed on you or a damage aura.

It has normally been quite hard to increase your spell resistance to help counter this damage without having to equip specific resistance equipment which would heavily compromise your ability to perform your normal tasks. With WotLK however it has become much easier to gain spell resistance without any massive changes, allowing you to be far more durable and reduce the pressure on healers; the following is a list outlining the simple ways you can increase your spell resistance with minimal sacrifice.

For every spell type except for Arcane there are classes that can provide an aura or a buff that will increase your spell resistance by 130 (23.5% mitigation against bosses) these auras will not stack with each other or with the spell resistance provided by Mark of the Wild but will stack with all other effects.

Several classes are able to increase their resistance levels via talents; Mages can gain 140 resistance (25% mitigation) to all spell schools with a fully talented Mage Armour and frost Death Knights can gain 150 resistance (27% mitigation) from the Acclimation talent.

All classes are able to enchant their helms with 25 resistance (4.5% mitigation) to a single school of magic while Leatherworkers are able to place unique fur linings in their bracers that provide 60 resistance (11% mitigation) to a single spell school.

Alchemists are able to create lesser flasks of resistance that provide 50 resistance (9.5% mitigation) to every spell school, this can be further increased by the Alchemists mixology ability to 82 resistance (15% mitigation)

All of these simple means are widely available at a very small cost to other attributes and when combined can provide massive amounts of mitigation; for example a frost Death Knight could easily achieve 330 resistance (59.5% mitigation) to any spell school by combining their Acclimation talent with a flask and another classes aura; all without wearing a single piece of resistance based equipment.

This high level of resistance would allow the player a lot more flexibility in raids as he would not have to worry so much about avoiding raid wide damage which can lead to a greater amount of time spent fulfilling his role instead of changing position.

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Spell penetration always has and will likely always remain a highly misunderstood statistic on peoples equipment. Before WotLK pretty much nobody deliberately sought it out, treating it as the red headed stepchild of itemization that seemed to have no use.

With WotLK however things seem to have changed as many classes have come to realise just how important it is for them in PvP; a movement that has mostly been spearheaded by the Death Knights unique mechanics making certain things stand out. To understand just how important spell penetration is though you need to have an understanding of how spell resistances work.

Every spell and melee strike in PvP has a basic 4% chance to miss completely, this can then be further increased by racial traits to 6% or even further with a few classes talents. This basic miss rate works exactly like your chance to miss in PvE content and can be countered with hit rating; for a death knight, a missed attack does not fully consume a rune but instead puts it on a 1.5 second cooldown only.

Separate to this basic miss chance is a spell resistance check which can work in one of two ways depending upon the skill used. Damaging spells or elemental melee attacks that only deal damage come under the rules of “partial resistance” while spells with non damage based effects such as polymorph, entangling roots and chains of ice come under the resist rules of “binary resist”.

Attacks which fall under the rules of partial resistance have a chance to have anything from 0-100% of their damage resisted; increasing in 10% increments. The chances for this damage mitigation are dependent on how much resistance the target has; the highest effective level of resistance against a level 80 target is 400 which will yield average mitigation of 75%.

A class such as a Paladin is able to activate an aura which will grant them and their allies 130 shadow resistance which gives a proportional amount of average damage mitigation against partially resistible spells that works out around a 24% damage reduction. This amount of damage mitigation is very significant and can be crippling when attempting to burst down a target.

Far more crippling however is spell resistances effects upon binary spells. Since a binary spell generally does little or no damage a partial resist would do little to protect you from its effects; instead what happens is the average damage reduction that would have applied to a partially resistible spell gets added as additional miss chance.

Taking the example above a binary shadow spell would have an extra 24% chance to miss its target completely should it be under the effects of a Paladins aura. For classes such as Priests who rely on long cooldown abilities such as psychic scream landing for their survival a resist of this nature can be catastrophic as they cannot simply cast the spell again if it does not work. Similarly a spell cast by a Death Knight that is resisted in this manner will fully consume its runes placing them on a full 10 second cooldown, making resists fully capable of completely crippling their rotation.

Considering the damage such low amounts of spell resistance can do it is well worth gathering around 130 spell penetration should you decide to seriously PvP; especially for classes that are reliant on binary spells with cooldowns.

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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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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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In addition to the three basic rune types; blood, frost and unholy, there is a fourth unique type of rune known as a death rune.

Death runes are special in that they temporarily replace one of your normal runes and allow you to utilize it to power your abilities, as if it was a rune of any needed type. Death runes allow a great deal of flexibility in your combat rotations by allowing you to swap weaker attacks for stronger ones or giving you more chances to utilize your reactive abilities.

Death runes are generated in two unique ways; the first is through talents or unique item bonuses that cause any rune consumed by a specific ability to become a death rune. This change in rune type is temporary, lasting until you either consume the rune, upon which it will return to its default type, or it will revert back to its default state after spending long enough out of combat.

Since death runes generated in this fashion start off on cool down they are generally only of great use for creating higher damage output rotations and burst damage since they allow you to utilize your strongest attacks more times in quick succession during a rotation.

The second way you can generate death runes is by the ability Blood Tap which instantly converts one of your blood runes into a death rune at the cost of a little health; it will also refresh the rune cool down, making it available for immediate use.

Unlike other death runes, the rune generated from Blood Tap will remain a death rune for 20 seconds before reverting to its normal state, allowing it to be utilized multiple times. Also, since the rune is immediately activated, Blood Tap provides you with the capability to quickly utilize a reactive ability without prior planning, making it a vital tool for effective PvP and for emergency survival.

There is a knack to utilizing death runes properly however, since if you do not time your abilities carefully timed you can find that you mess up your rotations. An example of this would be if you were anticipating a death rune, a frost rune and two unholy runes to activate and planned to utilize two strikes that consume a frost and an unholy rune.

If your death rune and frost rune activated first and you were just spamming your attack then you would instantly use up the runes and be left with two unholy runes that would be unable to be used for a second attack. By understanding how your abilities consume runes you can avoid this.

When any ability is used, it will always consume ordinary runes before death runes; if it cannot find sufficient runes then it will check for any death runes and consume one of them instead. So if in the above situation, you waited for all of the runes to come off cool down; the first strike would consume one frost and one unholy rune while the second would consume the remaining unholy rune and find no frost rune, so will use the death rune instead.

By keeping an eye on the order in which your runes activate, you can ensure that you utilize them in the most effective way possible.

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One of the core mechanics of the Death Knight is their reliance upon diseases and they are currently the only player class to be based around their frequent use.

Many of a Death Knights attacks become more effective the more diseases they have placed upon their target but only the Death Knights own diseases will cause this scaling effect; the attacks will not benefit from other player created or various item based diseases.

The two basic diseases a Death Knight has access to are Frost Fever which is applied at range by the Icy Touch spell and Blood Plague which is applied by Plague Strike.

Both diseases deal damage over time to the target and have a secondary effect; Frost Fever slows down the targets attack speeds while Blood Plague has a chance per damage tick of removing a heal over time effect that is on the target.

In addition to these two basic diseases, a third disease can be gained by talenting into the Unholy tree and picking up Crypt Fever. This third disease is automatically placed on the target when you apply either Frost Fever or Blood Plague and acts to increase the damage of all diseases on the target by 30%. Crypt Fever can be further improved by talents, turning it into the Ebon Plague which increases the damage the target takes from any source of magic by 13% in addition to its old effect.

Most of the Death Knights primary damaging attacks all increase in damage by a fixed amount per disease on the target making it important no matter what your spec is to keep your diseases up on your target at all times; generally the first attacks you will ever make when fighting will be Icy Touch or Plague Strike.

The big exception to this is Death Knights who talent heavily into their Frost tree; many of the talented attacks gained such as Howling Blast do not scale with diseases but instead only increase in damage when Frost Fever is upon the target; this allows them to ignore Blood Plague for the most part, giving a little more flexibility.

The most important attack that is reliant upon your diseases however is Death Strike which heals you for a percentage of its damage, dependent upon the number of diseases active on the target. Without any diseases active, your Death Strike will not heal, but when there are diseases present you will gain 100% of the damage as healing along with an additional 50% for each disease on the target.

With one disease active you will heal for 150% of the strikes damage, all three diseases will yield a 250% heal effect; this is especially important to remember while levelling as the healing provided by Death Strike allows a Death Knight to solo without any down time and with a little care makes you more than capable of successfully taking on many of the game’s elite monsters by yourself.

Due to this reliance upon diseases, a Death Knight can be severely reduced in effectiveness in PvP when fighting against classes with dispel mechanics, making a Shamans disease cleansing totem their natural bane, especially since in order to reapply the diseases, additional runes must be expended, preventing Death Knights from utilising their big attacks

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