Intro

I was originally going to write about the new Blood Tanking changes but there isn’t that much info available at the moment on how Blood Tanking will work in Cataclysm. Instead I’m going to write a little guide on how to deal with pugs (pick up groups).

The first problem in being a Death Knight Tank is that from the onset in a pug you will have a bad reputation. There is a lot of bad Death Knight tanks and they get remembered more so by the community as its “cool” to make fun of Death Knights.

The only way to overcome this bad reputation within the group is to know what you are doing and do it well.

Pro tips:

• Reading other DK guides about what talents and glyphs to use
• Asking questions on the DK forums about anything you don’t understand
• Macro’ing certain abilities like Rune Strike to your other melee attacks
• Watching videos of how to tank dungeons you haven’t been to before
• Be polite and ready to do the dungeon soon as you port in
• Knowing what rotations to use on single mobs and groups
• Watch the healers mana and it get’s low ask if they need a mana break
• Remember to Use Horn of Winter and Be in Frost Presence!

What’s your role?

A tank should generally know where to go in an dungeon and provide some leadership to the group. You set the pace for the group so you need to try and be fast as you can without doing things that can potentially wipe the group.

Your job is to keep threat on all mobs that are attacking the group. All damage should be direct at you so the healer doesn’t waste mana healing the whole group.

It also help if you know the boss fights and explain quickly explain them to the group in case someone is new to the dungeon. It could just be a few remarks like “stop dps when vines come up” or “stand here, I’ll tank the monster over here”.

What Specialization to use?

For 5 mans and heroics I’d say frost. As frost works well even if you gear isn’t that great. It also has some awesome AoE threat with Howling Blast and a great “oh crap” button with Hungering Cold. You can go Blood and Unholy but at the moment their more for raiding as the scale better than frost, but frost to me is still the number one 5 man tanking spec.

What dungeon’s to do?

Some dungeons are harder to tank than others. I’d advise newer players not to sign up for a random dungeon as this can put you in dungeons that might be a tad too high for you and therefore harder to tank.

I generally find a dungeon I enjoy doing (or has good tank drops) and stick to it until I’ve leveled up and can’t do it anymore. If you want to challenge yourself after a few runs on the same dungeon, try pulling bigger groups in the dungeon, but make sure your healer can handle it otherwise you could wipe the group.

I’d keep doing selected dungeons until you hit the level cap, then go to dungeons with tank drops you want. After you have geared up a bit you can do random dungeons or move onto selected heroics (provided you have hit the def cap etc).

How other players can negatively affect your run

When you use the LFD system you are put in a group with four other people who you might never see again. You will also group with players who might not know how to play their role/class properly. The following is a list of things that other players might do on your run that can make your job harder or wipe your group.

DPS (damage dealers):

• DPS will try to off tank the mobs and might pull agro on them – Get a mod like “skullme” that will auto mark you target and ask the dps to only hit the skull marked target.
• Some impatient DPS will try and pull the mobs before you can – This is really annoying as a tank, so ask the DPS to not pull. If they continue to do it vote to kick them or just stand back as the mobs bash them to death. Remind me as a tank it’s your job to pull each group.
• DPS uses knock-back spells or deathgrip – Just ask them politely if they can stop doing it and explain why their bad. Deathgrip will make the mob attack the user for 6 seconds and knockback spells are meant for pvp and can agro more mobs.
• DPS wants to roll on your tanking gear – Sadly you can’t do much about this, DPS can roll on your tanking gear if they can equip it. All you can do is roll need and prey you get it. If the DPS wins you could try and ask them for it as you are the tank.

Healers:

• Healer isn’t really a healer just signed up to heal as its a faster queue – Kick it soon as you can.
• Healer want’s to DPS rather than heal – Remind them of their role and what they signed up for. If they find healing that boring they shouldn’t be doing it.
• Healer wants you to go faster – Don’t do this, play at the speed your comfortable with. It’s better to be a bit slower in pulls rather than wipe the group and have to spirit walk back to the dungeon

Those are just some general things that can happen and every group is different. Some may be great while others might be your worst nightmare.  Just try to be reasonable and polite while asserting your wishes firmly without being a dictator.

Final points

You will have great groups and very crappy groups in the LFD finder. Don’t let the bad players or groups get you down. Just do your best and most of the time you should have a fun experience, even if you are doing the same dungeon a lot of that tank drop.

Be firm with bad players and try to remember they are probably not aware of what their doing is wrong, so take the time to point out why what their doing is wrong in a firm but polite way. Some players can be reasoned with on any level though that should be vote kicked out of your group. But also on the other hand players may thank you for pointing out their mistakes if you provide solutions to the problem.

And remember this:

If the Tank dies it’s the Healers fault, if the Healer dies it’s the tanks fault, if the DPS dies it’s their own dam fault.

The other week I rolled a Blood Elf Death Knight by the name of “Cathartik”. You can see his armory profile at the bottom of the post.
I decided even before I roll him that I was going to make him a tank and level him by just by doing dungeon runs. I thought it would be interesting to track his progress by blogging about it and write some newb guides to DK tanking.

A lot of new DK’s seem to get confused by multiple DK tanking builds. It’s true that you can tank in all three tree’s of Blood, Frost and Unholy with two handed weapons or two one handed weapons. But for the new DK’s its recommended you go Frost using a two handed weapon. Until you get some nice epic gear at 80.

Here’s the build I’m currently using along with what glyphs to use: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#eSQeNhlIJIHf6h,wYae-3,11723

You should get all your Frost talents first so you can get Howling Blast at 60 (get the glyph as well!). Then you should get Blade Barrier and Anticipation next in any order.

It’s recommended that you start tanking at 60 as you will have both Death and Decay and Howling Blast at your disposal. You can start at 58 if you really want to. You need to have a good rotation set up in order to keep multi-threat. You basically need to spread your diseases and blood boil to keep multi-threat. So ask the dps to hang back a second till you do that.

I currently use this rotation on my DK for groups at 64:

Death Grip/Strangulate (if not on cool down) > Howling Blast > Plague Strike > Pestilence > Blood Boil > Obliterate
Then Frost strike as your rune dump then maybe Blood Boil then repeat.

The rotation is basically applying diseases via Howling Blast and Plague Strike. You then use Pestilence to spread them to the other mobs and Blood Boil to do damage to any mob effected by a disease. Once my diseases are up I use Obliterate then I have enough runic power to my frost strike once or twice.

I currently use this rotation on my DK for single mobs/bosses at 64:

Howling Blast > Plague Strike > Blood Boil > Obliterate > Frost Strike

Basically the same rotation without pestilence. If you need to grab agro quickly on a mob thats running for a dps or healer then hit it with Icy Touch as it produces a lot of threat now (Patch 3.3.3.).
Please don’t just spam Icy Touch though, you will keep agro but it lowers your damage a lot and makes you look noobish.

Next entry I’ll talk about upcoming Cataclysm change that makes Blood the only tanking tree.

I think I was off WoW for about 2 years. I sold my old accounts (two of them 0_O) back in the burning crusade days.

At the time I didn’t have the time to play WoW and didn’t really see that changing anytime soon. I didn’t miss WoW at all until a few months later and from then on I would have “urges” to play it. Like I’d miss playing my Feral Cat Druid or I’d miss healing on my paladin.

These urges weren’t really enough on their own to push to back into WoW. Then a friend told me about some upcoming additions in the new expansion such as old zones changing, new race/class combos,two new races and heroic deadmines. That’s that finally pushed me over the edge and I ran out and brought a World of Warcraft Battlechest and Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

So now I have a level 45 Druid (Feral Cat spec) called Ashbrooke.

For me WoW is so much more enjoyable now as leveling in azeroth is a lot faster due to exp increases and using the dungeon finder tool. The new dungeon finder tool lets you queue to do a random or selected dungeon with players from your battlegroup. So there’s no more standing around in Stormwind on the LFG channel spamming for a healer or tank. If you choose a random dungeon you are rewarded with a bag that will contain a nice class/spec appropriate blue on completion of the random dungeon.

All the “classic” dungeons seem like a push over now. You can steam through dungeons like Uldaman in 30-40 depending on how good your group is and from my experience most of the are great. Pugs are so much better now most people seem to know how to play their roles and with stuff like the dungeon finder group buff and heirlooms you just breeze through dungeons that were harder before.

Another cool change is that mounts are available now from level 20 for a normal land mount and 40 for a epic land mount with reduced costs. The normal flying mount now can be brought at lvl 60, its faster now at 125% of movement speed and it only costs about 650g for training and the mount! So leveling in outland is going to be fairly easy now.

I can’t wait to hit 80 or 85 if the expansion comes out before I’m at 80!
Also I’m dying to hit 55 so I can roll a Death Knight and have that as my tanking alt who will level up just in dungeons.

You can check out my character Ashbrooke below.

This very thing happened to me with Facebook and now its happening again with Twitter.

I totally blame celebrities for this whole mess namely Ashton Kutcher. Celebrities did made twitter more interesting for me once I got past the honeymoon period of “oh cooles I posted on the Twitter!” but now they are alerting news services of all kinds to report on the current buzz which is Twitter.

This isn’t cool, I signed up to Twitter towards the end of last year when it was a lot smaller therefore greatly cooler. I was blogging but found I didn’t want to post every little thought as it would take up too much time. Twitter helped me solve that problem by limiting posts to 140 characters. I had a nice warm feeling posting updates and knowing I was being a rather large net nerd at the same time.

Now that feeling is gone, yanked from me by half arsed tech writers who couldn’t think of another freaking second life related story. Noooo, now the stupid news paper writers are all about the Twitter, “oh Ashton Kutcher just posted something funny!, “Hugh Jackman called the opera house the opera centre” oh noes!

I think my girlfriend Melody feels very much the same way I do about Twitter as she does about the Twilight series. She read the books years ago and had to order them from America to read them, now her favorite series is a fad for stupid sheep like teenage girls, much like Twitter.

Well screw you mainstream media (Find something else to report about!) and screw you Kutcher.*

Fads suck!

*I’m so not being serious.

This smarmy looking tool (pictured above) is Kevin Rose the guy who created digg. I’m going to have a whine today about the website he “created” (paid web developers to make based on copied ideas). But firstly why do I have a problem with Kevin? Well you can read about it here.

So onto why digg bugs me. I generally look at digg during my lunch breaks basicaly because I like to read interesting news articles while nom’ing away and I do enjoy it too some extent. But lately digg has been annoying me lately because of the following. Reasons gained from overuse but which has also given me a deeper insight into the inner workings of the beast.

• Agenda Groups: It seems like a lot of the articles have certain agenda’s behind them such as PS3 fan boys constantly digging up articles about xbox hardware failures.
• One billion friends required to make it too the front page: It seems a small percentage of the site members have control over what makes the front page and what doesn’t. If you’re a new member that posts a genuinely good article etc, don’t expect it to ever make the front page or even get past 10 diggs.
• Same sites linked over and over: Site’s such as cracked.com, college humour etc are dugg up over and over with most of the submission being pretty similar to each other.
• Numerical Lists: Top 10 ways to do this, 15 inspiring images of whatever. I’m sick to death of these lists taking up space on the front page. They’re from the same old sites such as cracked.com and poorly written lists on unimportant subjects e.g. The 15 most over hyped horror movies. They’re also on separate pages, so you have to look at multiple pages to help the owners of the site generate some ad-sense money.
• Anonymous Buries: You can bury any article on digg anonymously and you don’t have to provide any details of why you are burying it. This just leaves things too open to abuse in my books.
• Old Internet Meme’s: You might of seen this image years ago and had a laugh at it, but guess what? It’s back on the digg home page this month and maybe next month. This meme will never die because at least 30 people on digg haven’t seen it and digg it up rapidly.

/end rant mode

Time to go and enjoy my weekend now that I’ve gotten the bile out of my system!

I had a feeling Bioware was going to make a Star wars MMO months ago when I saw they were hiring people for a unnamed MMO project and I was proven to be right this morning when I got a newsletter from Bioware.

Theres not a huge amount of info at the site currently. Other than a basic FAQ and some interesting lore.

Let me summarise the important parts of what I’ve learnt:

• Setting: The game is set 3,500 years before the rise of Darth Vader and 300 years after the events in knights of the Old Republic.
• Race: At the moment looks like human is the only confirmed race.
• Classes: There will be Sith and Jedi of course and a number of other “classic” star wars roles. I hope there some sort of bounty hunter/thief class.
• Environment: The site says you will be able to travel between different planets.
• Pay Per Month: The price is unknow at this stage but will most likely be the same as WoW and Warhammer online.

I’m not too sure about the art style at the moment. In some screen shots it looks great and in others the characters look a bit cartoony. It is still early days though so this could change in the future and I’m not that worried by it.

I’ve signed up for the newsletter at the site so when I hear some more details I will post them here. I’m such a huge star wars nerd I can’t wait for this game to come out!

P.S. I promise the next post won’t be star wars related.

I never seem to plan to play MMO’s, it’s usally someone else who talks about it and then makes me want to go buy/play it.

This was the same for Warhammer Online. I hadn’t intended to play another MMO after World of Warcraft, but a family friend was full of excitement about Warhammer Online and I guess that rubbed off on me. Plus the fact I would have someone to play with was another buying point.

My highest character is only rank 8 at the moment so I’ll just give you a brief run-down off things I like in Warhammer so far as opposed to a full review.

• Public Quests: are area based quests that you trigger by crossing over into an area where a Public Quest is taking place. They are comprised of three stages and reset after the final stage is complete. You are rewarded at the end based on your participation and a random dice roll.
• Tome of Knowledge: This tracks everything you do in the game, from achievements to what monsters you have encountered etc. You can refer back to it at any time and you can also get quests from the tome itself.
• Less Grind: When you are sent out to find 4 bear hides, you will get 1 hide for each bear kill rather than getting 1 for every 20 bear kills.
• Professions: They seem on par with WoW in leveling difficulty, but they don’t impact on the game as much. I’m just leveling my cultivating and alchemy professions just so I can make dye for my armour.
• PvP Collision Detection: In most other mmorpgs you can just run through everyone in PvP situations. In War you can’t which is great! Tanks can block choke points now and protect the squishes!

I’m currently playing on Anlec as a Witch Elf (Ashbrooke) and a Chaos Chosen (Triptych)