Yes, I’m done maintaining the EJ posts. I won’t go into the many reasons why – most of them have been stated here or elsewhere, and the rest are probably easy enough to infer or guess at. At any rate, I apologize if this lets anyone down, but if I were to continue writing my guides, the quality would have inevitably dropped. Sure, modesty aside, the posts would have still been superior to most of the equivalents of other classes, no matter how much I let my work slip, but it would have fallen below my personal standards, and that’s what’s most important. Thus, I figured it best to step down sooner rather than later.

Although I won’t go into too much at the moment, there is one question I’ve seen asked a couple of times, and I wanted to go ahead and address it: Will I continue blogging here about DKs?

I really can’t give a simple “yes” or “no” to that, unfortunately. As long as I play the game I will, of course, be theorycrafting for my own use – figuring out what spec is best, how to gear, and all that jazz. That’s something I couldn’t imagine not doing at this point, and I find it enjoyable anyways. Whether or not I need to say anything publicly all depends…

If whatever individual(s) who takes up my place at EJ is lackluster at the job (inaccurate information and/or slow updating and/or missing essentials, and those sort of faults), then sure, I’ll inevitably blog here so people aren’t left in the dark or, worse yet, misled into playing in a suboptimal manner. If they’re doing an absolutely abysmal job that I just can’t stand idle knowing I could do better, then I might do new guides, although it would be a different format (starting from scratch… oh the possibilities there would be!), and it would probably be located here, not there. I’m not saying “suck, and I’ll return!”, but if there is one thing I can’t stand is watching someone (for lack of a more polite term) suck at something, and causing others to suffer, while knowing I could do far better.

If there’s a particularly interesting change to the class or to the game, then yeah, I’ll almost certainly blog about it. After all, I am still playing the game, so if I find something particularly thought-provoking, I’m sure I would love to ramble about it.

If someone really, really wants my two cents on a subject (and if the subject is deep enough for me to write an entry about), and they email/tweet/comment here about it, then I might come out of the woodwork and talk a bit. Who knows!

If there’s interest, I might do some write ups on RIFT. I am playing it (although, to be clear, that fact has absolutely nothing to do with my EJ decision or current feelings about WoW), and there’s no limit to the number of topics I could discuss in regards to the game. It’s just a matter of whether anyone here would be interesting in reading such talk, and whether the game ends up lasting.

So, yes, I suppose I will still be blogging about DKs. The real question is how much and how often, and that is what depends on those three above factors. Time will tell, as it always does.

Anyways, I tried to keep this short, but I do want to take a quick second (as opposed to a slow second?) to thank everyone for their gratitude and such posted here and elsewhere. It truly is appreciated.

It hasn’t been a matter of laziness so much as utter disinterest.

As of late, the game has just been terribly bland for me. It’s not that the current content is any better or worse than previous tiers (it has its upsides and it has its downsides), nor that this expansion in general has been any more or less than what was promised or expected. It’s just that, well… it’s precisely that, actually! It’s that the current content and the expansion as a whole haven’t been notably changed from the past. It’s the same formula Blizzard has used for the last six years, and although the formula may be brilliant, and although they may regularly stumble upon improvements to it, it’s still what it’s always been when you come down to it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, in some ways, the game is better than ever. Classes are more balanced (although certainly not close to completely so). Rotations are more dynamic (although still rather simple at the core). Raiding is more open (although have fun if you’re too good for normals but not good enough for hards, especially on 10 man). Fixes are faster (although most could still be avoided in beta/PTR, as always). So on and so forth.

By almost any objective measurement, the game has never been stronger. And, even as I write this, I agree wholeheartedly: The game as a whole is at the best it has ever been over its six year lifespan.

And therein lies the issue; as a whole.

If there’s one aspect of the game Blizzard has failed to improve upon in those six years, it’s end game. Don’t get me wrong, as I already said, the raiding is fine. The PvP is, I assume, equally acceptable. But outside those two? What do you have? What do you have that isn’t utterly boring and repetitive, not to mention relatively pointless after a time? What do you do when your guild isn’t raiding? Let me rephrase that: what do you do when your guild isn’t raiding that you actually enjoy?

Dailies? Fun and productive for a time, perhaps, but they grow old quick, and you’ll quickly be rid of the need for their rep/gold/tokens/whatever.

Professions? Once you get to 525, little to do with them aside from make money, and although some enjoy the gold game, I can’t say I do. Professions have probably changed less than any other part of WoW; simply different names to the items/nodes/whatever.

Alts? Enjoyability varies from person to person, but even this process is super fast these days.

Walking around in Stormwind or Ogrimmar? Let’s be honest; for most raiders, this is probably what you spend most of your time outside of instances doing!

Blizzard has failed to provide any meaningful (and, by that, meaning fun) content outside of raiding/arena that you can do more than once and that isn’t the same thing each time you do it. As long as the raiding/arena are good, it’s something most will overlook, but one notices it and tires of it all after a time.

The game is now boring for me because there’s nothing to do. Raid or PvP. Woo hoo.

At any rate, I’ve rambled much more than intended. No, this isn’t an “I’m quitting” post. Most certainly not! I’ll still be playing the game, although all there’s nothing outside of raiding, and even that, I only partake in for the social aspects these days. This is simply my explanation for my lack of postings here and slower-than-usual updates to the EJ threads, and why that trend is likely to continue.

That said, I will try to be better than I have been this patch month or so, though. But posts will be less common than they used to be, and you may notice me being a bit less enthused about it all.

On a couple other notes, which I don’t currently have the time to give their own entry on:

• Yeah, Unholy got hit again. It should still be slightly ahead of Frost in actual play, although on paper, it might be just about equal. It’s performance relative to other classes is what’s really changed, but there’s nothing one can do about that, and it’s not like the spec is the bottom of the barrel, at any rate.
• I try not to jump into the EJ threads too often, as I prefer people to figure stuff out for themselves (and as it’s not an “Ask Consider” thread anyways), but try to stay intelligent with the discussions! For your sake as well as mine. Many lackluster posts of late. Bringing up an idea (“get as much hit as possible, yeah!”) is all well and good, and we all know that some of the oddest ideas (Obliterate Unholy? Reapingless? Epidemicless?) have turned out to be the class’s most optimal playstyles. But there’s right ways and wrong ways to go about theories which differ from the accepted norm, and anecdotal evidence (“I seem to have done more dps doing this” or “I was sixth on recount and now I’m one!”) aren’t the way to go. Math. Numbers. Logic. They are your friends. Use them!
• For those who notice my twitter and have asked: yes, I will be playing Rift. Not 100% sure on the calling yet. I might write up a review of the game during the lull between the open beta and headstart (meaning sometime between tomorrow and Thursday), if there’s interest, be it from others or simply from myself. Many familiar with the game should understand after raiding this post why I’m so attracted to it and find it such a breath of fresh air. Although I don’t expect it to last, say, six years for me as WoW has, as long as I enjoy it for a few months, why not? And, without delving too deeply into the subject: yes, it takes a lot from WoW, and WoW has a lot of good to be taken. And, yes, WoW is probably the better game overall. WoW, however, is also six years old, and thus whatever better aspects it may have one who has been at it from the start will have long grown tired of.

Anyways, I bid you all a good evening!

The mastery change, however, is rather huge. It can change how we play, and it can change how we gear. Or it can’t. It all depends on just how potent the stat is, and that’s a subject which has received much debate.

There’s dozens and dozens of ways to calculate stat weights, but for the purpose of this post, I’m only going to go through two different methods: the simulator and parse dps. These two aren’t any more or less accurate than the alternatives, they’re simply the easiest for people to comprehend, and the cleanest to show in a blog post format. If so desired, I can go over the other ways one can calculate weights, but it would simply echo the results herein contained. Interesting topic for another day.

[Simulator]

This is probably method which everyone is most familiar with. All you have to do is plug in your gear or stats, choose your spec and rotation, alter raid buffs or consumables as necessary… and press one little button. It’s easy (if you know what you’re doing), it’s accurate (if there’s not any bugs floating about at the time) and, most of all, it’s accessible/usable by everyone. You can have the math skills of an elementary school kid, and still be able to calculate weights! Fantastic, really.

Unfortunately, the sim is going by the present PTR, and thus doesn’t have the shadow portion of Scourge Strike being affected by mastery. I would be very, very surprised if this is intentional by Blizzard, and it should come as no surprise that if this does end up being the case, there’s no question – mastery rating is horrible.

At most, you’ll get maybe 0.45 as your weight, which is obviously below any other stat. Really, though, as it currently stands, I wouldn’t rely on the sim until it either has mastery affecting the shadow portion of SS, or we know that such behavior isn’t intended (in which case, consider me boggled).

Thus, one must turn to alternative methods of stat weights.

[Parse Damage]

This can be done with any combat log: for purpose of this post, I will be using this one. DK I’m familiar with and who knows his stuff (although, he does make a mistake or two here, coughnodoublepotcough!), and Argaloth is an almost perfect boss for us to test our single target dps on; it’s essentially stationary, it has regular points at which you can soak magic damage for AMS RP, there’s no adds, there’s nothing to pull you off the boss, and so on. The only fault is that it’s relatively quick, which will likely invalidate its usefullness as people gear up, but for now, it still lasts long enough.

Anyways, this method is surprisingly easy, the flaw being RNG and specific fight factors can lead to misleading results, whereas the sim eliminates those two aspects. As long as your getting all your weights from the same specific parse, and said parse is as unremarkable as possible a fight, it works moderately well when the simulator isn’t an option and you don’t have the math expertise to start from scratch with the formulas.

Getting to it, you start by adding up all the damage affected by the specific stat in question. In this case, that means DC (612245), SS shadow (385857), BP (175109), and UB (48839). Because the patch obviously hasn’t gone live yet, you have to multiple all of these numbers by their various nerfs and buffs: DC (612245*0.9=551021), SS shadow  (385857 *0.938*1.22=441559), BP (175109*0.93=162851), and UB (48839*0.9=43955). Remember, even though, yes, we have 8 base mastery for 20% shadow damage, you don’t want to factor that in here, as additional mastery isn’t multiplicative with that amount (i.e, you would do X * 1.21, not X * 1.2 * 1.01). Adding those numbers up, you get (551021 + 441559 + 162851 + 43955=) 1199386 damage. Thus an additional point of mastery rating would add you (1199386 * 0.025 * (1/180)=) 167 damage. Over the course of a 174 second fight, that’s 0.96 dps, and thus your weight.

Pretty good, right? Better than haste even!

The issue, however, is the length of the fight in question, which leads to higher than average Heroism/trinket/potion uptime, and thus is going to inflate any weight calculated from the parse in question. For true accuracy, you would have to repeat the process for each other stat – for purposes of this post, however, one is mainly concerned with how mastery faces up against crit. After all, if it’s worse, nothing else matters – we ignore the stat just as much as usual. If it’s better, then you would proceed to compare to the rest, but one thing at a time.

Crit is, of course, a trickier stat to calculate in such a manner. The simplest way to look at it would be to add up all the crittable damage in the parse which didn’t crit, multiply out any patch buff/nerfs (including the mastery one, in this case), then times by (parse crit rate per ability + 1/parse crit rate per ability/100), adding it all up, multiply by the crit meta (which we will, of course, be using),  finished off by simply dividing by 180 and the fight duration. Fun, I know.

So: SS (497771 * .938 * .0110), DC (399609 * .9 * 1.2 * .0105), auto-attack (246555*0.0107), SS shadow (385857 * .73 * .938 * 1.22 * 1.2 * .0110), FeS (183772 * .938 * .0109), BP (141268 * .93 * 1.2 * .0108), FF (148985 * .93 * .0118), UB (48839 * .47 * .9 * 1.2 * 0.0105). Do note, that for SS shadow and UB, you have to multiply by the proportion of SS/DC’s non-crit to crit damage, as they’re not split. Anyways, adding this all up, you get 22037 * 1.03 = 22698. Divide by 180, and then divide by 174, and you wind up with 0.73 dps as your weight!

Now, of course, I did gloss over some factors. I ignored the UM nerf (as it would affect the two near equally, and it would greatly complicate things here). I assumed that the shadow part of SS is, indeed, intended to be affected by mastery, and that the ghoul still doesn’t scale with crit. I didn’t delve into the RC change, as it primarily affects ghoul damage (which doesn’t matter when using this method). Overall though, based off what we currently know, this is roughly accurate.

So, yes, Mastery does appear to be desirable – superior to crit/expertise, without a question, although it still falls short of haste (more on that at another time), and hence the title of the post! Yes, I was mistaken in my previous writing, and am more than happy to admit it. I have my own, personal spreadsheet I use to quickly test new changes and what have you, and I accidentally still had a part tweaked which was leading to the ghoul benefiting from crit rating (which would let it edge out mastery, for the record, but that’s neither here nor there, now). Hence my initial mis-estimation of the stat.

At any rate, this will heavily change how we gear and reforge. Expertise/crit will be all but ignored, with hit/haste/mastery being the three pinnacles of success, such as it will be. Once the PTR is more ironed out – we know for certain that the shadow SS is intended to be affected, for example, among other matters – I’ll develop new BiS lists and the like.

Anyways, off I go. I’ll probably write about 2H Frost in the coming days. Maybe. Not a ton to say on the subject beyond the fact that it’s not as bad as it was, it’s still not competitive with the other two specs, but it has very similar gearing to 2H Unholy, and thus is an excellent dual-spec option for AoE heavy fights.

• DW Unholy is undoubtedly dead. No question, and hopefully no explanation needed.

• DnD is still a fundamental part of our Unholy single target rotation; in fact, it’s a larger dps gain than ever. Mastery and Rage of Rivendare see to it. Speaking of…

• Unholy mastery is still bad. As bad as it was? No, of course not, but worse than crit/expertise, which is all that matters – it means we’ll avoid it as much as ever. The core issue is the ghoul; if, theoretically, it affected him, or if, theoretically, our ghoul didn’t exist,  the stat would be perfectly desirable. As is, it isn’t… not to mention the DC/RoR nerfs coinciding at the same time don’t really help.

• Our Frost AoE dps got nerfed, precisely how it needed to be done – with no affect on single target performance. A+.

• Our 2H Frost single-target dps got a huge buff; enough to make it worth looking into, although I think it should still fall a percent or two behind the other specs… a minor gap, in the scheme of things, but enough for min-maxers to ignore it all the same.

• Our Unholy AoE dps is more or less unchanged. The new mastery plus Virulence basically balance out the loss of the old mastery and the reduction in ghoul dps.

• Our Unholy single-target DPS got hit, and rather hard at that. DC nerfed by 10%, SI/DT nerfed by 20%, RoR nerfed by 20%, Unholy Might nerfed by 50%, disease damage nerfed by ~10%, the Magic Suppression nerf, and so on… yeah. The new mastery and the Runic Corruption buff don’t even begin to outweigh all of that. There’s much to be said about this, but I would argue Blizzard slightly overdid it, and will support that position with some maths, as promised, later. Did we need a slight nerf? Yeah, definitely. UM, SI, and DT would have probably been sufficient on their own. The DC and RoR changes on top of it was just unnecessary, and pushes the pendulum of balance to the other end of the spectrum.

• Magic Suppression 3/3 is essentially a must now… which really, really sucks, since with the RC change, we would actually like a point in RPM. Perhaps it will be worth drawing from IBT, but I’m not certain yet. Whatever else, say hello to 0 choice in our spec once again, beyond that one point floating in t1/2! Would have loved to see the PvE applications of Death’s Advance as well. Alas.

Anyways, off to crash, but just some minor things I wished to address.

Blood

• Blood Strike damage is increased by 12.5% for each of your diseases on the target, up from 10%.
• Heart Strike now deals 120% weapon damage, up from 100%.
• Blood Boil base damage increased by 20%, from 297 to 357.
• Blood Presence now increases armor contribution by 30%, down from 60%.
• Death Strike now heals for 15% of the damage sustained, down from 25%.
• Crimson Scourge now has a 5/10% chance to proc from melee attacks on a target infected with your Blood Plague. (Old – 50/100% chance to proc from Plague Strike)
• Will of the Necropolis no longer regenerates a Blood Rune but makes your next Rune Tap free instead.

Frost

• Runic Empowerment wording changed to add “successfully” use Death Coil, Frost Strike, or Rune Strike.
• Rune Strike now deals 180% weapon damage, up from 150%.
• Might of the Frozen Wastes now also has a 4/8/12% chance to proc from your melee attacks. 15/30/45% chance to proc from auto attacks remain the same.
• Killing Machine no longer affects Icy Touch.

Unholy

• Scourge Strike now deals an additional 18% Physical damage done as Shadow Damage for each disease on your target. Up from 12%.
• Unholy Might now increases your Strength by 5%, down from 10%.
• Desecration now also affects Necrotic Strikes.

Suffice is to say… wow. Some of these changes are great, some are horrible. Some are justified, some less so. There is a lot here to take in for all three specs, although it’s obvious this is only the tip of the iceberg (as evinced most clearly by the lack of any sort of Howling Blast tweak, Unholy mastery change, and so forth). Unfortunately, this came out at a bad time of day for me, and I have to leave for work shortly, so I can only offer my initial thoughts and commentary to it all; math and more in-depth analysis will come later, of course!

Although I won’t delve into it too deeply, as tanking isn’t the main interest here and as there’s likely something missing (there really has to be), but the Death Strike nerf is way over the top, and just plain illogical. It solidly puts mastery below avoidance (and stamina, but it was already there, in my opinion, and with one being a primary stat and the other being secondary, they’re often not in direct competition), essentially killing the stat. It means our damage taken, even if you assume 0% overhealing and near-perfect DS usage, is higher than any of the other three tanks… while also require more attention due to being active instead of passive. Even if DS was too strong by whatever metric, a 25% nerf to the ability is more than was necessary.

As to the other Blood changes, they’re nice enough. Our damage was below that of other tanks and it’s nice to see it being addressed. Yes, threat may not be a problem, but a dps discrepancy in tanks is still very important – when you’re trying to hit an enrage timer, if one tank does 1k more dps than another, that’s just as remarkable as one dpser doing 1k more dps than another… and the gaps are currently equal to or greater than that number between the specs. Crimson Scourge is somewhat decent now, although it still boggles my mind how that got through all of beta without being touched. The Blood Presence change is simply a tooltip correction. So forth.

Anyways, moving on to what really matters: the dps specs!

Frost DW was untouched, aside from the meaningless Killing Machine change. As said, however, these patch notes appear very incomplete, and I would expect much more to come. If anything, the removal of IT from KM likely signifies something to come causing us to actually use IT instead of Howling Blast, but time will tell.

Frost 2H received a decent buff: basically, on top of the 45% chance per auto-attack, Might of the Frozen Wastes now has a 12% chance to proc per yellow (melee) attack, which should significantly improve the talent, and thus the spec’s overall dps. Will it be enough to make the playstyle viable? Only math will tell, and I will certainly get to that this evening. What I will say is that it makes Frost 2H have a hilarious feedback loop through all of its talents and, especially, haste. More white attacks feed more MotFW procs which feed more FS which feeds more MotFW procs (which feeds more FS which feeds more MotFW which feeds… so on). On top of that, more FS feeds more RE procs which means more Oblits which feeds more MotFW procs which feeds more FS… and so on. And haste improves both the number of white and yellow attacks, and so feeds into it as well. A flow chart of it all would be quite amusing! The actual numbers will be interesting although if I had to guess, no, this won’t prop the spec up enough to compete with, say, Frost DW, let alone Unholy. It’s a start, though, if a curiously, unnecessarily complex one.

Unholy DW takes a double hit from the Scourge Strike buff and the Unholy Might nerf, which I can tell just by doing the numbers in my head will put the spec on the back burner, at least for this tier. Without Sudden Doom and/or Nerves of Cold Steel being touched, I still wouldn’t right off the build making a comeback in later content, but that’s another problem for another day, and it may not arise, anyways.

Unholy 2H does take a hit; the SS buff doesn’t quite outweigh the UM nerf, by my quick estimation, but it’s not very noticeable, and nothing much to worry about. What the changes do do to the spec is get rid of DnD from our single target rotation, so that’s a huge plus. Nothing else otherwise.

Blood’s survivability got a large hit, while the dps/threat got a nice, needed boost. Frost DW was untouched, while Frost 2H was buffed, although probably not by enough to make the two even, and HB went unaddressed. Unholy DW is out of the way for now, and Unholy 2H got the lightest of nerfs to its damage.  All in all, very interesting stuff, although not half as interesting as what we’ll likely see come to the PTR in the coming weeks.

As I said, expect a more through look at this all later in the night.

The DK relevant info is as follows:

[General]

• For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.
• We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.

[Frost]

• Frost is likely overperforming on multiple targets.

[Unholy]

• Unholy is likely overperforming on single targets.
• We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.
• Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.
• Blightcaller simply isn’t working; we’re looking to redesign it to make it similar to Druid’s Symbiosis, where DK attacks do more damage to diseased targets.

My overall impression is that everything is spot on; Blizzard understands the issues (GC doesn’t touch upon all of them, of course, but those he does hit, he responds to correctly and in a promising manner) and they have a good feel for the current balance of the specs. Although it might be a bit early to claim this, they seem to be focusing more on number tweaks then overhauling entire abilities, which hopefully should prevent a lot of the turmoil the Death Knight class (and Unholy spec, specifically) underwent in Wrath due to the constant, radical changes to core spells and strikes. We’ll have to change how we gear – that’s inevitable with almost any change of decent magnitude – but we won’t have to be relearning our rotation, redoing our spec, and compeltely modifying the way we play, which should allow theorycrafting to focus on more important matters, then always having to play catch up to the latest whims of the devs!

As to the specifics?

Death Strike being too weak for dps is a given, and something which was discussed (among the playerbase) heavily during the end of beta. That, Death Pact, and Fallen Crusader are all the dps specs have left for self-healing, and with Death Pact having a lengthy CD and Fallen Crusader being weak/uncontrollable, DS is what we rely on when we want to heal ourselves up. The fact that it has a heavy damage cost is inevitable; at least let the heal be noticeable. As it is, it doesn’t even equal a health potion! Reassuring to know that they admit the problem, and are looking to tackle it. Of course, it would have been nicer to have a fix in place before we all had to level, but hey, better late than never!

PvP mobility… pass. Not something I’m knowledgeable enough to speak on.

There is no question that Frost is overperforming on AoE. This was seen months ago, and talked about to death during the beta process. Howling Blast is simply too strong; there’s no denying it, and a look at any parse of, say, Magmaw, with a Frost DK, will prove it clear as day. I’m glad to see they’re addressing it, but I’m still concerned that they’ll merely nerf HB and call it a day. HB is integral to Frost’s single target dps, and simply lowering it’s damage would just cause the another equal, but opposite imbalance. I discussed the matter months ago; it suffices to say that Blizzard has plenty of options to nerf the AoE aspect without hurting the single target.

That Unholy is overperforming on single-target is true, and I would argue it’s primarily due to the ghoul. It simply does too much dps while being immune to fight mechanics which force us (and others) to move.  Were I a dev, I would nerf Dark Transformation to 75% damage (instead of 100%), and then allow the Ghoul to scale with our crit and our mastery. This would be just enough to do the trick to our overall damage, while also having the side benefit of making our ghoul a smaller fraction of our dps (overall), making all the secondary stats almost equally desirable, and making our Ghoul scale with more than just pure strength (which it scales with ridiculously well). If it still did too much damage overall, nerf the Glyph; change it to 20% strength, or who knows. Many ways it could be tackled, and likely something I’ll discuss in more depths sometime over the coming weeks.

Unholy DW dying is likely for the best, I suppose. Not much to say on the subject, besides being curious as to how they plan to accomplish it. Moving NotCS and/or nerfing/changing SD are the likely means, but who knows. Blizzard could always surprise us.

Necrotic Strike, as with all PvP matters, isn’t something I have the expertise to analyze, but I will say that the change seems very common sense based, and generally speaking, balancing decisions based off common sense are almost always for the best!

Oh, Blightcaller. Good riddance. The new version of the mastery sounds rather uninteresting, but whatever – it will be a million times easier to make attractive, and everyone likes bigger numbers, anyways. Unfortunately, however, without knowing the specific details, it’s hard to delve too far into the subject. Will it be all of our damage, or only our yellow damage? If our yellow damage, will it be all of our yellow damage, or just our strike damage? Will it affect the ghoul? If it affects the ghoul, will it affect all of his damage, or just his yellow damage? What percent will it be? Will Scourge Strike double dip into it? Those questions are just the first to come to mind, but there’s surely dozens more. Whatever they do, it’s unlikely – impossible, really – that the new mastery could be any more boring and any more impotent then the current one, so they can only go up! A side benefit of a buff in this department is that switching from Frost to Unholy or viceversa won’t require totally different gear sets.

Like I said, in general, I’m pleased with… well, all of the above. Not a single thing posted this evening troubles me. Sure, most of these issues could have been (and/or were) foreseen in beta, but whatever; better late than never, to be sure.

Anyways, I’ll leave it there for the evening. Once again, I’m sorry for the extended gap between blogging, but hopefully things should be normal-ish after this week. Much to discuss, I’m sure.

At any rate, to the matter at hand: I’ve been wondering if anyone would see any value or benefit in me making one or two guides for the official forums and/or mmo-champion forums. These wouldn’t merely be truncated versions of my EJ ones, but done from scratch entirely, and although it would inevitably contain much of the same information, it would skew more towards that “explaining” end of the spectrum, whereas EJ already leans slight more to the “details” side, and likely could afford to go a bit farther down that route, especially if I did this.

There would be several benefits to be gained: reaching a wider audience (not just on the posted locations, but it would also likely draw more people to the threads on EJ, or even here), helping those who probably need it most (let’s be honest, the sort of person who visits the official forums but isn’t familiar with EJ likely is newer and less knowledgeble of the game), making the official DK forums a somewhat more intelligent place (not that I’m deluded enough to think it would stop even half the stupid threads there, even if it prevented one a week, that’s something), and so on.

To be clear, I’m not asking if any of you readers would use such a thing. Odds are, if you’re here, you’re familiar with EJ and not the sort who needs this sort of thing anyways, although you might still be interested in why certain things are as they are and what have you. I’m asking if you think it would be a good idea, in general, for the DK community and player-base.

I’m very interested in feedback on this subject, so if you wouldn’t mind spending a couple seconds voting and/or commenting, I would be quite grateful! I have mixed feelings, myself, and can’t quite make up my mind.

To an extent, it doesn’t particularly matter. Leveling isn’t intended to be so difficult that if you’re trying to do it with anything less than the optimal spec, you’re essentially screwing yourself over. Nor is it meant to be all that long, with 80 to 85 taking far less playtime than 70 to 80 ever did. Even if neither of those were true and leveling did require any sort of min-maxing in your build, the fact of the matter is: it just couldn’t be done! The number of variables one would have to take into account would be way too long to list, let alone actually attempt to calculate.

So why does a leveling spec matter so much if the content isn’t challenging or lengthy enough to demand anything even remotely resembling your absolute best?

Because unlike raiding and unlike arena, leveling is the one thing every single player in the game goes through. Because unlike any other aspect of the expansion, leveling is likely going to be one of the very first parts you experience on launch day. Because the fact that a section of the game doesn’t require you to do your absolute best doesn’t mean that a certain kind of person would be able to enjoy it to the fullest otherwise… which, for what it’s worth, is why most people also min-max in other areas.

It suffices to say that, yes, a leveling spec does indeed matter.

Fortunately for us, the answer is obvious: Frost 2H is the way to go.

Now, of course, I say this with some obvious disclaimers: As stated, one can’t really math out leveling specs, and so a lot of this is a mixture of opinion, personal experience, and common sense. Although that last one should be equally valid from person to person, the first two will obviously differ, and thus you may very well disagree with me on this subject… and be perfectly right while doing so! That is unlike, say, disagreeing on the best raid spec at 85. That’s a matter of objective numbers and math; it is what it is. This, on the other hand, is far more subjective, and there’s no way to really prove anything, so take it for what you will.

Going back to the matter at hand, why does Frost 2H reign supreme here, even when it lags terribly behind in actual raiding?

• Increased run speed.
  • Run speed is vital. Each second shaved from running from mob to mob, quest item to quest item, npc to npc, is a second saved. People often underestimate the value of run speed because it occurs in little chunks – you never run from one zone to the next, after all – but it adds up pretty substantially over time. And, although it may sound mean-spirited, one also has to remember that there’s a high amount of competition for mobs at the beginning of an expansion – the faster you can get within casting range of the mob, the faster you can tag it!
  • Unholy shares this benefit, but it’s rather difficult for Frost DW to make use of.
• Increased mount speed.
  • Likely as important as run speed, if not more so these days. Whatever time you aren’t running on foot, you’re likely spending mounted, and having that time go by 20% faster… huge increase. A lot of the zones require you to travel a rather decent distance from one quest hub to another – Deepholm, especially – and OaPH significantly decreases the time it takes.
  • Frost DW shares this, but Unholy can’t get it until 82 at the earliest.
• Unholy Command.
  • Underrated, but rather valuable. It can’t be stressed enough; the less time it takes you to get from point A to point B, the faster you level, and UC let’s you bring point B (i.e, mobs) to you! One can certainly live without, but a decent boon. Think of it this way: if you save one second on each mob because of this talent, and you kill a mere 200 mobs a level, you’ll have saved over 15 minutes from 80 to 85. That’s pretty good when you think about it; with leveling taking as little as ~9 hours, that’s a ~3% reduction in total time required.
  • Frost DW and Unholy share this, but the latter has to deal with unreliable procs due to the ghoul stealing killing blows.
• Not reliant on diseases.
  • Huge. Having to spend two runes and two GCDs of laughable damage is just horrible, and the worst aspect of leveling as a DK. Frost (2H and DW) can easily glyph HB – which is a hard hitter anyways, and thus no sacrifice to use – and ignore the use of PS altogether, what with FS not needing either and Obliterate being a small fraction of your leveling damage (as I’ll get to).
  • Unholy… Unholy hurts in this area. Badly.
• Not reliant on runes.
  • With the new rune system, this is pretty important. Between the just discussed GoHB, Butchery, and MotFW, Frost 2H can essentially get away with casting HB, then spamming FS until the mob is dead, with absolutely zero downtime and while doing dps equal or plain superior to any of the other specs. Whatever minor gaps you have can easily be covered by an Obliterate. No, this rotation/playstyle wouldn’t be sustainable, but you don’t need it to be when mobs only live for a small handful of GCDs, not to mention when Butchery is helping to inflate your RP generation. This is one of the most underrated perks of Frost 2H for leveling, and it becomes especially important/noticeable as you level up and your haste takes a nose dive.
  • Frost DW and Unholy both lack MotFW, while Unholy also has to go without Butchery until 84 (if they’re getting OaPH first, which they would).
• Not reliant on ghoul.
  • Not having to deal with your pet taking its sweet time getting up from the ground after dismounting? Not having to deal with a dps loss should you have to Death Pact? Not having to worry about maintaining SI stacks?  Not having to suffer if your pet manages to get itself oneshot/depsawned? For leveling purposes, the ghoul is a huge pain. It will inevitably slow you down, hurt your survivability, and will never give even close to its full damage potential.
  • Likely the largest factor behind why Unholy fails when leveling.
• Access to two of the best “oh shit” abilities.
  • Lichborne + DC spam = full heal, while HC buys you plenty of time to run far enough to leash the mob and then mount up. Although the damage increase of mobs in Cataclysm isn’t that staggering, it’s substantial enough that you can get yourself killed if you accidentally pull a whole pack, or get respawns on top of you at an inopportune moment.
  • Frost DW shares both, while Unholy can only get the first, and even then, not until 81 (83 if you prioritize OaPH).

Need I go on?

The fact of the matter is that unlike Frost DW or Unholy, Frost 2H gets every single possible leveling talent, and lacks any single possible leveling handicap.

Some may question why I don’t suggest Blood. After all, the mobs do certainly hit harder, and we did lose a large chunk of our self-healing. With Rune Strike no longer being tied to avoidance and Blood Presence granting 20% increased rune regen, Blood’s dps is actually pretty decent, at least for solo purposes. The two main abilities of the spec – Death Strike and Rune Strike – don’t need diseases to do max damage. All in all, Blood should be pretty good, right?

It would be… if it didn’t lack both increased run speed and increased movement speed, probably the two biggest boosts one can get for leveling! In fairness, it can get the latter, but not until 82, and the former is locked to UP, and thus unreachable without sacrificing mass RS usage. Ultimately the greater survivability of the spec – which, honestly, just isn’t needed – doesn’t outweigh the loss in dps (relatively slight, but undoubtedly there) and the sizable increase in travel time.

As I said, simply my two cents. Feel free to disagree, but I can assure you this is what I’ll be on the 7th, and what I would strongly advise any DK attemping the realm first to use.

Update: I forgot to mention it, but such a spec would use DnD on cooldown on a single target, and would replace the SS glyph with the DnD glyph. Even without doing either of these – never DnDing on a sole mob sticking with GoSS - the spec still pulls away. This just widens the lead.

Once Kahorie has all the new enchants/gems/set bonuses into the sim, I’ll do an actual full-fledged entry with numbers and explanations and all that (on this subject and on several related ones), but for now, based on initial simming and math, I’ll just say this:

Unholy DW at 85…

Looking viable?
Yes.

Looking optimal?
Yes.

Looking at Blizzard in amusement while attempting to refrain from laughter?
Yes.

As I said, I’ll go more indepth into this shortly, but I don’t expect the trend I’m seeing to shift; although I’ll be the first to admit my mistake if these findings prove wrong. Even if they do, the spec would still be very competitive as the gap would have to be incredibly minor. Amusingly, even were things to reverse themselves and this playstyle were to go back to being behind, Unholy DW and Unholy 2H would still be closer to one another than Frost DW and Frost 2H, not to mention Unholy DW would be closer to Frost DW than Frost 2H will be to Unholy 2H.

Rather ironic, really.

To clear up the matter for Death Knights:

• Unholy will never use it, unless your gear set up somehow has less than ~5 gem sockets total, assuming a random distribution of colors/bonuses. Even in an unrealistic set-up with nothing but a dozen blue sockets, unless at least half of those blue sockets give a strength bonus, you still wouldn’t bother with CSD! Questing or raiding gear, Chaotic is out.
• Frost DW and Frost 2H won’t use it, unless their gear has less than ~9 gem sockets total, assuming a random distribution of colors/bonuses. Basically, you’ll use it when you first hit 85, but ditch it once the majority of your gear is from heroics (or better).

That’s all.

All three specs will likely end up using Destructive Shadowspirit Diamond; yeah, the 1% spell reflect is worthless, but you don’t have to sacrifice any strength via orange/purple gems to activate it, which is the real charm of the meta. The only real alternatives are Enigmatic Shadowspirit Diamond and Impassive Shadowspirit Diamond; if you happen to be socketing at least one orange and one purple anyways, you may as well proceed to use either of those two; or if any raid fights happen to utilize snares/fears, then of course the respective gem would pull ahead and be worth the sacrifice.

One may wonder why I don’t point out Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond as a possibility for Frost DW; although it depends on the specific socket bonuses available to your individual set of gear, generally speaking it’s a smaller sacrifice to pick up run speed from your boot enchant then it is from the meta, even considering the passive bonus a mastery meta has over a crit meta.

Anyways, just one of several little matters to clear up before 85!