Opening Screen to the Isle of Conquest

Alright so i’ve obviously have been out of the loop for a while. Just today I stumbled upon the latest patch notes on the test server and my first impression is that it looks good overall. What stands out the most to me obviously are the PvP changes and the NEW BATTLEGROUND! The isle of conquest!

Besides the new battleground other important big changes are:

• Shaman totem queuing system with a spell to stomp 4 totems at once
• Death Knight talents/abilities getting gutted (AGAIN, surprise surprise!!!)
• Profession buffs
• More mount changes (Level 20 normal mount, level 40 epic)
• Experience from PvP
• Arena Season 7
• New 5, 10, and 25 man Instance
• and the Argent Tournament of course (something I don’t really care for)

I’ll get into what I think about all the new changes during this week in an attempt to revive the blog a bit and shake the dust off.

Here’s the official thread by Blizzard on the Isle of Conquest:

An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. But as insignificant as it may seem, this is no ordinary place. A sound of thunder as waves crash endlessly against rocky cliffs; a sound of fury as swords clash on the blood-stained fields of this island on the edge of forever.

Welcome to the Isle of Conquest.

The ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance has turned many once peaceful (and some not-so peaceful) places into theaters of constant war. The Isle of Conquest is the latest such place, set to be the location of a battle of epic proportions over the island’s precious resources.

An Alliance and a Horde general are fighting for dominance, overseeing the action from the safety of their keeps. Whichever side manages to eliminate the enemy general first will triumph on the island; failure to protect your leader will bring shame, dishonor, and defeat. There is no peace accord here, and it’s an all-out war between the factions.

Once More into the breach…

Isle of Conquest, a new battleground scheduled to make its debut in the upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, will pitch teams of up to 40 players against each other in a massive battle over this small island off Northrend’s northern coast. To win, your team will need to make use of the island’s unique strategic locations including an oil derrick, a siege workshop, and a fully equipped airship hangar. You will deploy devastating siege weaponry on the field; Light have mercy on anyone caught between you and your ultimate target, the general holed up in the enemy keep.

There are five points of interest on the Isle of Conquest for the factions to battle over. Each one offers its own benefits and strategic value. Which one will you claim for your side, and will it be enough to ensure victory?

Capture Locations

Consider your options before storming out of your keep to confront the enemy head-on. Spread throughout the Isle of Conquest are several capturable locations (as seen on the map), each granting a unique strategic advantage to your team.

The Oil Derrick: Located on the northwestern end of the island, this smudge in the Frozen Sea produces enough black gold to run a thousand siege engines. Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

The Cobalt Mine: This snow-covered assembly, located on the southeastern end of the island, hides untapped supplies that must be harvested. Taking this resource grants reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it.

The Docks: The western shore’s docks will further expand your selection of siege weapons with the devastating new Glaive Thrower and the Catapult. Unleash the destruction of the Glaive Thrower upon the walls of the keep, or launch your invading party over the walls to assault the keep from within.

The Airship Hangar: This sturdy steel structure stands on the peak of Mt. Conquest overlooking the eastern side of the island, allowing players to board the airship docked there. This devastating weapon of war is capable of raining death upon the heads of your enemies and destroying enemy defenses. Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above.

The Siege Workshop: Situated right between the Alliance base and the Horde base, this siege workshop occupies a strategic hot spot. Seizing it grants the controlling party the ability to utilize an arsenal of siege vehicles perfectly suited to reducing the enemy keep’s walls to dust and ashes.

Graveyards: There are five graveyards in the Isle of Conquest that are attached to different points of interest on the map: the Horde base, the Alliance base, an oil spill island in the center of the map (attached to the siege workshop), the northeast corner (attached to the airship hangar), and the southwest corner (attached to the docks).

Main Objectives

The Keeps: The Horde and Alliance keeps sit at opposite ends of the island. These citadels host four easily accessible defensive cannons set on the ramparts, capable of unleashing hot fury onto oncoming attackers. Additional explosives sit safely stowed in the base of the keep along the back wall. At least, they’re safe as long as they don’t fall into enemy hands. If they do, though, they can be employed to bring the stone walls down from within.

The General: Holed up behind the keeps’ massive walls, the generals command their forces from a position of relative safety. Should the keep fall and the general be slain, the Isle of Conquest will fall to the victor.

Reinforcements: Isle of Conquest uses a reinforcements system similar to that of Alterac Valley. The clock is ticking and every individual counts. If too many of your comrades fall to the enemy the battle will end in defeat. Killing enemy players will reduce their reinforcements by one for each kill, Once your faction’s reinforcements reach their limit, so too does your bid for control of the island and the wealth of resources you’ve fought so hard over.

An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. A test of strength. A chance to prove your might, to crush your enemies, to make a difference, a chance for endless glory and conquest.

Will you seize it?

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

Honestly with the new changes they’re putting into Dancing Rune Weapon as well…

• Dancing Rune Weapon: Damage done by this pet is reduced by 50%, but the cooldown is reduced to 90 seconds.

Great change for PvE DPS since it should increase overall DPS since it’ll be available on pretty much every pull and should remain the same for long boss fights. However, blood seems to be less and less of a viable PvP build anymore. Last PTR build had DRW doing 50% damage but lasting twice as long, a shorter cooldown instead makes it horrible for PvP in my opinion. Sure, 50% more damage still is some burst but also considering Plague Strike will no longer remove HoTs (Heal over Time) anymore our burst is nil against HoT heavy healers (Shamans and Druids). Hopefully though the Plague Strike change should encourage a revival of Resto Druids, curious how the once most popular arena classes (Warrior and Resto Druid) are now the the most neglected.

What baffles me is that it almost seems Blizzard is biased towards Unholy, which I have nothing against, it’s a cool talent tree and I am currently using it for PvP due to it’s sheer utility… but this seems to go against their latest agenda to allow all talent trees be PvP viable. A cool idea on paper but a herculean task to accomplish in an MMO which frankly I can see it being possible for hybrid classes but not for core classes like Warrior or Priest (Prot/Holy PvP? Seriously?)

I personally think it’d be cool if they could pull it off, more diversity please, I’m tired of the same Arena match-ups (yeah I play a Holy/Unholy 2v2 comp setup as well). I recently dinged 80 with my little twink project priest and am going to try Disc/Enhancement Shaman just to spice things up and actually try a challenging comp.

Well considering these latest changes it seems Frost may be the 2nd viable PvP tree (Unholy will still be popular nonetheless) since it’s shaping up to have nice control and burst as well as survivability. Time to erase our whiteboards and theory-craft again.

In patch 3.1.0 (that is unless it gets changed) instead of getting auras Death Knights will have those talents replaced by talents to improve upon the presence. Personally I think it’s a nice step in the right direction since Unholy Aura is unarguably the best aura to have, whether it be PvP or PvE. Blood Aura’s 4% heal is too little to make a difference and Frost Aura only gives 80 resistance to all which is made moot by Paladin Auras, Hunter Aspect, Shaman Totems which all give 130 resistance to one school (which is all that is needed in most fights anyway). Unholy Aura is widely accepted as the best one since the 15% movement speed buff is just huge for raid DPS and especially handy in Arena. Removing the auras will allow for more diversity as DKs won’t feel like they have to specc Unholy to be useful.

Alright enough of my rambling, the new talents are still in tier 7 and replace the old aura talents:

• Improved Blood Presence – While in Frost Presence or Unholy Presence, you retain 4% healing from Blood Presence, and healing done to you is increased by 10% in Blood Presence.
• Improved Frost Presence – While in Blood Presence or Unholy Presence, you retain 10% health from Frost Presence, and damage done to you is decreased by an additional 2% in Frost Presence.
• Improved Unholy Presence – While in Blood Presence or Frost Presence, you retain 15% increased movement speed from Unholy Presence, and your runes finish their cooldowns 10% faster in Unholy Presence.

Out of the 3 the one that seems weakest to me is Improved Blood Presence because 4% healing from damage done is still weak regardless of what presence you’re in, I can see this being nice for tanks. The extra 10% healing received while in Blood Presence would be great as a tank but as DPS you don’t need that much healing and in PvP where it could have some use Unholy Presence provides much better burst. I’d have to try it out and see but it might be a viable alternative for PvP specced Blood Death Knights to stay in Blood Presence instead of Frost when being focused on in PvP.

Improved Frost Presence sounds intriguing for PvP (not much use for the extra health for PvE DPS and the extra 2% less damage is just icing on the cake for tanks) since often times we find ourselves in Frost Presence in order to survive focus fire attacks. With this talent a Frost specced Death Knight could stay in Unholy Presence the whole time for the added burst benefit without sacrificing total survivability. Perhaps we might actually start to see something besides Unholy in Arena.

As before the Unholy version is still quite attractive but it no longer gives a movement bonus to the rest of the group/raid. Even moreso than the Frost Version this one seems to be purely made for PvP as you can still chase down your prey while in Frost Presence. The added bonus of your runes finishing 10% faster while in Unholy Presence, essentially reducing their cooldown to 9 seconds instead of 10, should help burst even further in PvP. What’s got me thinking though is if this could also be used to DPS with, would reduced cooldowns compensate for the lack of our DoTs doing 15% extra damage while in Blood Presence? I haven’t done the math on this yet but I’m willing to bet that in the long run Blood Presence would still be top dog in DPS although I could see this talent being useful for short fights.

So, what’s the deal with Presences? When should I use Blood, Frost, or Unholy?

I’ve been asked this quite a few times so I thought I’d give a shot at clearing it up. Unlike warrior stances, using presences is a lot simpler for two reasons: (1) regardless of the presence you’re in you can use all of your abilities and (2) there is very little need to “presence” dance. So which presences do you use and when? To answer this we have to look at what roles a DK has, DPS, Tanking, and PvP…

Simply put:

• DPS = Blood normally, Frost if you have to Off-Tank in a pinch, Unholy when you use DRW if you’re Blood specc
• Tanking = Frost – That’s it
• PvP = Unholy normally, Frost if you get focus fired

Now to explain my reasoning. Testing shows that Blood is the best for consistent DPS situations because 15% more damage outweighs 15% increased attack/movement speed because our DoTs (Damage over Time) aren’t affected by attack speed. This is the same reasoning why it’s argued Crit > Haste for Death Knights because our spells and abilities simply gain more benefit from crit than they do from haste. The switch to Unholy presence to use DRW is from personal experience, since you only get 10-22 (28 with Runic Power Mastery) the amount of attacks you get in is greater than the damage they do since the weapon copies your moves.

In PvP it should be obvious why Unholy is king. The main reason is the 0.5 second global cooldown reduction, this allows 7 abilities to be used in the time span of 6 seconds while in Blood you would only be able to use 5. To explain it simply let’s assume all our abilities do 100 damage (this isn’t realistic but the math is the same if applied on a larger scale), now in the time frame of 6 seconds we get the following:

The ticks from our DoTs isn’t taken into account here but our burst damage is superior. IF enemy players were to stand still and let us simply whack at them then Blood would be the ideal choice but anyone who’s stepped foot in arena knows that PvP is all about chasing column huggers and line-of-sight monkeys. So when we do get the chance to close into melee range (Unholy presence also helps us do this by providing the 15% movement buff) we need to deal as many attacks as possible.

Since Patch 3.1.0 is changing our presence specialization talents I’ll tackle this in my next post.

Patch 3.1.O-Rama at WoWHead

The boys over at WoWHead.com have recently released a calculator with all the Patch 3.1 changes done so far on the PTR realms. Some of the classes have been changed very little others (such as Death Knights) have had trees rearranged almost completely. Frost has been turned upside-down practically and as I feared the 0/32/39 Dual Wield specc for Death Knights will be gone forever. Paladins lost their Blessing of Kings in protection as it is becoming a base ability and are left with a very naked Tier 1 in their Protection Tree.

I’m still fiddling around with the calculator trying to figure out what the next best dual wield specc will be and to be honest from the looks of it, it can be any of the trees since all the key DW abilities except for Nerves of Cold Steel have been changed to favor Dual Wielding less and be equally as good for Two-Handers. At first I was thinking of trying out deep frost for PvP and PvE but after the changes done to Blood and Unholy I’m leaning towards using a modified Blood Specc for PvP and Deep Frost for PvE. I still haven’t done the math or any testing though.

For PvP i’ve grown fond of using Blood despite the overwhelming popularity Unholy speccs enjoy and with the new patch Blood will have even more utility. I’m currently torn between two:

1. 51-2-18 possibly putting points into Morbidity and Epidemic instead of Necrosis although I think Necrosis will give better burst results overwall with the use of DRW (Dancing Rune Weapon)
2. 51-17-3 which gives up having a zombie pet in exchange for more survivability and Obliterate not consuming diseases.

Considering diseases get dispelled all the time in PvP regardless of Virulence making the disease removing disadvantage of Obliterate moot I’m leaning more towards 51-2-18. Having a pet would provide me with another interrupt and stun I could use to ensure I’m positioned correctly to use DRW to full advantage. Both of these speccs have 2 points in the new Runic Power Mastery (down from 3 points) which if at full runic power (130) will allow DRW to last 6 seconds longer. I believe almost all speccs will be investing into this talent now due to it’s easy accessibility and usefulness, Unholy Gargoyles will be easier to maintain if used with 130 runic power for example.

As for my warrior I don’t see talents changing since her specc still seems solid and I’m still leveling my priest so I’ll theory craft that later since I haven’t decided whether what specc(s) I want to be at 80 anyway.

So what are you waiting for? Get down to the new talent calculator and start theory crafting away! Tell me what you think would be good speccs for PvE/PvP for your class after the patch.

]]> http://wow.60-fps.com/2009/03/06/310-talent-calculator-available-at-wowhead/feed/ 2 http://wow.60-fps.com/2009/03/04/movie-of-the-week-hysteria-unorthodox-pvp/ http://wow.60-fps.com/2009/03/04/movie-of-the-week-hysteria-unorthodox-pvp/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:57:54 +0000 Yiedra http://wow.60-fps.com/?p=496

The video for this week is made by another Blood Elf but instead of a Paladin the next most overpowered class, a Death Knight from Tortheldrin-USA. It’s short and has no instructional use to it other than perhaps to show how Blood Specced Death Knights can exploit a talent they have called Hysteria. I personally don’t think it’s download worthy but you can find download links for it here.

What can I say the video itself isn’t by any means a work of art but it got a couple laughs out of me watching players at low life after dueling die from having Hysteria applied. It’s cheap, it’s lame, it’s DK, but it’s funny. I won’t downrate it for not being an amazing video since it does it’s job at getting it’s point across quickly: Hysteria is Hysterical! However it has very little editing done to after the first minute to further exagerrate the joke. LOL at those who got upset and whispered complaints back to the author “Reported”. 3 out of 5 Stars

(Insert Doctor Who or Twilight Zone music here)

For all of you who haven’t checked out the 3.1.0 patch notes that Blizzard has revealed, please do so now. There are quite a few upcoming class changes that are very easily going to turn the PvE and especially the PvP scenes upside down. I’m not going to get into all the nitty gritty details in this post because like all test realm patch notes they’re not definitive yet but I feel the need to discuss the changes that have been going on and what will happen to Death Knights, Blizzard’s experimental monstrosity.

As always my main class, Warrior, is the one less affected by the upcoming patch changes which makes me believe that Warriors truely are the center piece of the World of Warcraft classes. What I mean by this is that they tend to be the one class that all other classes are balanced around instead of the latter. Blizzard is content  with the design and mechanics that warriors are currently at so they change everyone else (drastically at times) to achieve WoW nirvana. Despite QQ done by warriors as a warrior myself I have to admit the class is very solid and no where near broken or in nead of ‘something’.

Death Knights on the other hand… this class has gone through some INSANE changes since their first appearence in WotLK 3.0.2. They’ve been molded and morphed in only a few months what the other 9 classes have gone through in the past 4 years. I honestly feel like my Death Knight is a pile of clay, easily moldable and plyable into any form, and no I don’t mean this because of their versatile and dynamic talent trees (although this is true). From the nerfs done to Unholy to the changing of Heart Strike and most importantly the changes done to our zombies I can’t say I feel like I’m playing the same class I was months ago.

After this next patch it will be even worst, it’s no wonder that there aren’t any real solid cookie cutter builds. Sure there are a few but if you look at the builds people have in general you see a bit of everything except perhaps the basic 17/0/54 Unholy Death Knights running around in PvP and PvE which remained popular even after the nerfs to Unholy in 3.0.8. With the switching of Unholy Blight and Gargoyle it’s dubious if this specc will still be the most popular. Other builds that have arisen in PvP inolve points in Frost to get Lichborne to help compensate for the drop in survivability from the Unholy nerf in the last patch.

The changes are too many to list here so I’ll detail the most important ones that’ll change the way we play our Death Knights or fight with/against them (Next to each I’ll write PvE and/or PvP to indicate what it will affect the most, my comments are in italics/underlined):

• Blood Plague: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented. Frost Fever: Now lasts 15 seconds untalented. PvE The change to BP and FF will render current rune cycles moot and we’ll have to come up with new ones
• Death Pact: This heal cannot be a critical. PvP/PvE
• Plague Strike and Blood Plague no longer remove hots. Plague Strike’s damage increased quite a bit to compensate. PvP/PvE Druids will no crumble as quickly before our mighty visage and Resto Shamans will be even more impossible to kill (
• Raise Ally now has a cooldown greater than 15 min and can no longer be used in Arenas. PvP
• Rune of Razorfrost now affects Frost damage done by the DK only, but stacks up to 10%. PvE

Talents

• Blood
  • Blood-Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise. PvP/PvE This should increase Blood DPS considerably since it relies heavily on melee damage
  • Bloody Strikes now increases Blood Boil damage instead of Pestilence. PvE This along with the changes to Blood Boil should help Blood DKs compete with Frost/Unholy AoE.
  • Sudden Doom now procs a free Death Coil instead of requiring you to push the button. Ranks reduced from 5 to 3. PvP/PvE More burst in PvP and no more worrying about throwing off rune cycles by using another global cooldown
• Frost
  • The following talents have moved in the Frost tree: Runic Power Mastery, Glacier Rot, Killing Machine, Chilblains, and Endless Winter. PvP/PvE This is going to be HUGE since up until now Frost has been the least mutilated tree. Hopefully this will increase it’s viability as a main specc and secondary tree
  • Black Ice: Frost Damage bonus lowered to 4/8/12/16/20% PvE Considering the buff to Rune of Razorfrost it almost equals out but still equates to a 5% nerf, the curren 0/32/39 Dual Wield speccs will have to change post patch
  • Blood of the North: Now also increases damage dealt by Frost Strike by 15%. PvP/PvE The earlier tier nerfs may be justified by this change, testing will have to be done to see if this talent is DW worthy
  • Chillblains: Now a 15/30/50% movement speed debuff (up from 30%). PvP Pure 100% awesome, enough said
  • Frost Aura: Replaced with Improved Frost Presence. Allows the deathknight to keep the health bonus of Frost Presence in any presence, and decreases magic damage taken while in Frost Presence. PvP This will easily make Frost a force to be reckoned with in PvP since they can maintain Frost Presence survivability while in Unholy Presence. Is needed considering Frost has the least survivability in PvP out of the 3 trees
  • Howling Blast: Swapped positions with Hungering Cold in the talent tree, and damage bonus to targets afflicted by Frost Fever reduced from 100% to 50%. PvE/PvP Goodbye 0/32/39 forever! Hello new PvP toy
• Unholy
  • Blood-caked Blade: Now has a 3 second cooldown on the effect. PvP/PvE This seems to make the talent favor 2H builds over Dual Wielding
  • Desecration: This talent now has a 100% chance to be triggered. Additional points in the talent increase the damage bonus and snare magnitude instead of increasing the chance. PvE/PvP The player can now choose how much bonus damage/snare they want without having to worry about procc values. This should free up some possible talent points to put elsewhere.
  • Magic Suppression: Now has 3 ranks (down from 5) for 2/4/6% magic damage reduction. PvE/PvP Slight nerf for tanks and Unholy PvP but also frees up 2 talent points for those who invested in Magic Suppression to get Anti-Magic Zone
  • Necrosis: Can now only be triggered by main hand attacks. PvE Obvious nerf to Dual Wield speccs, it seems Blizzard wants to rip 0/32/39′s heart out and gloat over it’s death
  • Scourge Strike: Damage increased.
  • Unholy Aura: Replaced with Improved Unholy Presence. Allows the Deathknight to keep the movement speed bonus of Unholy Presence in any presence, and increases rune regeneration rate while in Unholy Presence. PvE/PvP Interesting… honestly I’m not sure what to think of this yet
  • Unholy Blight and Gargoyle have swapped places in the Unholy tree. Gargoyle is the new Unholy 51 talent. PvE Will give Blood/Frost builds access to a nice AoE ability, PvP isn’t affected as Unholy DKs who PvP already go this far down the tree. This is however the final nail on the coffin for 0/32/39.

So there you have it, my analysis of the current PTR patch notes for us followers of the dark faith clad in plate. Overall to sum this up for all you TLDR folks out there:

• 0/32/39 will be DEAD, gone forever into the abyss (Think HARP 2.3.2)
• Frost will be PvP/PvE viable
• Unholy will still be popular, it isn’t the specc it’s the concept people love
• Frost will be the new ‘flavor tree’ for Blood and Unholy PvP DKs to dip into (even moreso than before)
• Blood will be a force to be reckoned with in PvP and PvE equal  to Unholy and the newly revamped Frost
• Blood Worms will stuck suck a big can of jagons

WoW Census Data for classes at level 80 as of 22-02-2009

Months ago when Wrath of the Lich King first came out I made a post about the insane amount of Death Knights running amouk in Azeroth. After more than 3 months of the new expansion being out it’s safe to assume everyone who can, HAS made a Death Knight on their server or some other unfortunate server. The first week during WotLK Death Knight populations where ridiculous, anywhere between 20-25% of the overall population. Just like any new species brought into an ecosystem though nature finds a way to balance things out.My first predictions long ago was that the majority of Death Knights created would only reach level 60+ and not advance to end game. Turns out I was right but regardless of predicting the turn out rate of who kept a level 80 Death Knight there still are a ton of them.

It seems that they’re currently the most popular class along with Paladins. Could it be because they are ridicuously overpowered and make good arena partners? Maybe, according to SK-gaming it’s the most successful pair with Survival Hunter/Resto Shaman in second. (I never expected that pairing to take off considering it was horrible in previous seasons, Hex FTW!) Personally it’s just because they are plate classes, the majority of players like to see their avatars clad in heavy armor and not die in 2 hits to say the least. Considering Warriors are the third most popular class only further validates my theory.

Race Composition of Death Knights at level 80

One of my spanish friends at my workplace was telling me how hard it is for him right now to find a group leveling up in Northrend (he’s currently level 73). Most groups already have a Death Knight or two and a Paladin to boot so chances are slim at plate gear. Honestly it is ludricrous at times, the other day for example I was in an Archavon (25) raid that had 5 Death Knights and 4 Paladins in it! That’s almost half of the damn raid!

So will I stop playing Death Knight just because there are a many of them? Will I reroll my Death Knight just because the majority are Humans? No way, I love the class and how it plays and if you play it well people will invite you into groups once they’re done wading through the sea of nooby DKs running around.

Thank God, I don’t think I’d be able to take seeing a 25% Death Knight population although I’m sure there are servers out there with a higher and lower percentages of Death Knights. Maybe Blizzard will have to start doing Death Knight (and Paladin) only server transfers. Personally I think the solution lies in the next Hero Class(es) needing to be something like a Melee Cloth wearer or perhaps another Leather wearing Healer, regardless of its role it’s going to have to be a cool class that people will jump on and hopefully plate loot tables won’t be so viciously competed for anymore. Demon Hunter comes to mind P

Below are two screenshots of my WoW Census mod (Shattered Hand-EU) which clearly show that about half of the huge Death Knight inflation that plagued Outland months ago never made it to Northrend.

16/01/2009

22/01/2009