After almost 5 months since the release of Wrath of the Lich King the first real content patch finally has gone live and with it all our fears and hopes collide as everyone scrambles to try to get onto their respective servers. I’m not going to delve much into the details about errors and issues this patch has but I will say that so far it doesn’t seem to be as bad as Patch 3.08 considering the sheer amount of content that’s in this one. For the most part the few bugs I’ve encontered so far haven’t been too grim although there’s one issue with the new dual talent system and talent windows that I find amusing. Some of my talents after having “learned” them will later appear grey as if I never learned them such as on my Death Knight who has 0/1 Heart Strike. I know I have the ability because it’s on my bar and I can’t use it yet the talent GUI shows that I don’t have it learned. That’s not even the worst part, last night while switching between talent speccs on my priest (yes she finally hit 80 a couple weeks ago but I haven’t pained myself to update >.<) one of my speccs “unlearned” itself and I had to reapply talent points mid-fight in Old Kingdom!

For people like me who have 3 active characters that they play on this patch is hell! The reason why is because I had to give them all new talent points/make new glyphs etc… and I decided to respecc my warrior Arms and so spent some time purchasing PvP gear and enchants/gems to go with her new specc. Good thing there are new dailies with the new Argent Tournament to help fund all this tri-character gold sinks I have at the moment.

At heart if you haven’t noticed by now I’m more of a casual player/PvPer than a hardcore raider (although I use to be at one point) so what are my plans for all my characters? For now I’ll get into what I want to dual specc and how I’ll play with each character.

Yiedra – Warrior

• At the moment I respecced her Arms-PvP even though I have gimpy Arms/PvP gear at the moment. I decided on 60-11-0, I didn’t get improved slam or sudden death since one is situational and the other has been nerfed. Although I my have to reconsider on improved slam at least since I lack a rage dump. I’ll have to play around with the specc for a while since I haven’t been Arms since my Arena days in TBC.
• My second specc will be Protection-PvE to tank in instances/raids when I get the chance and will probably be a variation of what I’ve been using so far, something like 5-8-58 or 12-8-51 for maximum punishment and threat. I personally think the 2nd specc is better once you have enough mitigation gear to make up the talents lost in Prot.
• I’m still not sure but I might swap out my Death Knight for my Warrior to do 2v2 with my Holy Paladin partner Somnium.

Xiedra – Death Knight

• I have no idea what my second specc will be to use as dual specc, in fact, I’m not even sure what my first specc will be since the talent trees and abilities have been changed considerably enough to change the playstyle. Everyone has been min-maxing for weeks but to be honest I think it’s still undecided what THE new PvP specc will be. So for the moment I’m sticking to my earlier theory-crafting and specced Blood 52-2-17. Yeah I messed up, I should’ve put 5 points into Necrosis instead of 2 into Epidemic (forgot that they increased the base duration of diseases, doh!)
• After playing around with the new Death Strike and the it’s glyph, I’ve found it does just as much damage if not more than Obliterate and it heals! So going deep into frost as blood isn’t nearly as advantageous as unholy except for 2 points in runic power mastery to give our DRW 3 seconds more uptime. I didn’t test using Obliterate with it’s 20% more damage glyph but I would imagine it would be about the same as Death Strike, however the overall advantage unholy gives for PvP outweighs the benefit.
• Taking a point out of Blood and putting it into Corpse Explosion could also be viable for a little bit more burst in arena but without Gnaw it will probably be difficult to pull off.
• Frost also seems to be totally viable for PvP and my prediction is that Blood and/or Frost will be the new PvP speccs for 1 reason: They each have an undispellable and easily applied snare. Blood requires melee range (and a glyph) so Frost’s Chillblains may be the way to go… ranged hamstring QQ.
• My second specc will probably be a PvE oriented DPS build once I figure out a build I enjoy that does decent DPS.

Ziedra – Priest

• Yeah she dinged 80 a while ago and she’s been a busy bee collecting PvP gear and PvE gear.
• My first specc with my priest is Disc-PvP (60-11-0). Although I’ve theory-crafted over and over again the possibility of using Holy to PvP with I can’t for the life of me convince myself to use Holy just for one spell (Body and Soul) considering the overall utility Discipline gives. I could be wrong and I do plan to at least try it out for a week or so to see if it is viable, considering my arena partner is an Enhancement Shaman it’s a bit redundant considering she has newly revamped Cleansing Totem and Earthen Power. Although having snare immunity and a speed bost is a peeler’s dream come true. Cleansing Totem and Abolish Disease combined will already have Unholy Death Knight’s cryinig a river.
• The second specc is Shadow-PvE (14-0-57) since I can heal instances just fine with my Discipline specc so I opted for Shadow for the utility it brings and it’s fun.

Stay tuned, there’s still a ton more for me to write about the new patch. New Arena Season, class changes, new glyphs, and more XD

Tags: 3.1.0 Talent Display Bugs, Arms Warrior 3.1.0, Death Knight Blood PvP, Disc Priest 3.1.0, Patch 3.1.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Death Knight, News, Patch Notes, Priest, Talents, Warrior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.