New layout now, new era later

So after taking a break and seeing how Death Goddess changed her layout, it prompted me to redesign my own layout and try something new. It's not as dark as it was but I think it still represents the coldness of a Death Knight. I'm going to be working on getting a new banner image as well as the current one doesn't really fit anymore.

Best estimates are putting Cataclysm on the horizon, hopefully before Christmas like WOTLK was. Lots and lots of changes have been put out there since the Beta started. Some have been met with praise, others...not so much. Overall, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. This represents a new era to Warcraft overall. It will be interesting to see how the story plays out throughout this expansion. But more so right now, the focus is on the mechanics changes.

******SPOILERS AHEAD******

The biggest change is the talent trees. Talent trees are now 31-point trees and you will be locked into your chosen tree until you have spent 31 points in that tree, after which you can spend your remaining 10 in another tree for a total of 41. Needless to say, this severely limits your options for specs.
Taking a look at the newest version of the DK talents (which can be found here), the trees are vastly different already.

I had a post going for the new talent changes but as I just noticed, Wowhead has updated to the newest talent trees which is missing some of the talents I had outlined in this post. So I'll start over. You'll never notice anything different as I hadn't posted the original yet.

One thing I do like about the redesigned talent trees for all classes is how you receive 3 abilities that define that spec as soon as you make that your chosen talen tree. I'll detail each of the DK given abilities at the start of each section.

==Blood==
Blood receives Heart Strike, Vengeance, Veteran of the Third War and Death Rune Mastery right from the start. On a side note, Vengeance will be an ability given to all tanks, be it Druid, Warrior, Paladin or Death Knight.
I'm still having problems coming up with a spec on this one. There are so many great talents in the Blood tree that it limits options from the others. I'm still on the fence about Blood Parasite. I'm just still not convinced this is a useful talent for tanks. I like the change to the talen but just not convinced of it's utility.
I'm very happy that we now have Bone Shield though I wish/hope for Anti-Magic Zone though I can understand why they wouldn't give it to us. It would benefit the tank more than it would a group taking damage. With a DK in melee range, it would be useful for a DK to be able to fall back into a group of ranged and shield them or throw it down for the melee, keeping the tank from needing to move around.
A lot of other talents are mostly unchanged, though where they appear in the tree has changed. Blood Tap is now in Tier 5, for example.
Blood Presence is now the tanking presence, just thought I'd mention quickly for clarity sake.

==Frost==
Frost will receive Frost Strike, Icy Talons, and Blood of the North.
There's a load of great changes to this tree. I'll admit it now, I'm very biased towards Frost pretty heavily. I highly enjoy dual wielding and the Frost based damage. One of the biggest changes I noticed with this round was the removal of the Runic Empowerment talent. I'm somewhat pleased that this was removed as it was a source of confusion for me. It wasn't very clear how useful it was going to be and if other specs were going to want it as well. As I'm not currently in the beta, I'm not sure if it was useful at all or not. In it's place, they have moved Nerves of Cold Steel into the first tier. While this change technically will allow for other specs to allow a degree of dual wielding, it's probably not recommended without Threat of Thassarian.
Improved Icy Talons no longer has additional talent requirements, it now resides in the 4th Tier.
Speaking of the 4th tier, there are two new talents of Pillar of Frost and Brittle Bones. Pillar of Frost seems to have replaced Unbreakable Armor completely but retains the instant +20% Strength while Brittle Bones provides a permanent increase of 4% to Strength as well as increasing damage taken by your victims of Frost Fever by 4%.
Interestingly, there is a talent called Might of the Frozen Wastes now that allows upto a 45% chance to generate 100 RP when wielding a two-handed weapon. How useful this is remains to be seen. In the current spec I have generated for Frost, there's already going to be an abundance of RP being generated. If it continues with the trend from Wrath, generating this much RP is almost wasteful as it can't be dumped fast enough without missing rotation on other abilities.
Lastly, Frost Presence has taken up the main DPS presence for DKs unless haste proves to finally be very useful to Death Knights, in which Unholy Presence may be the winner.

==Unholy==
Unholy receives Scourge Strike, Master of Ghouls, Reaping and Impurity.
I'll admit it, I don't know a lot about Unholy DPS. I leveled in it only briefly and was not impressed. I just can't get a hang of the pet mechanic. To me, if I wanted to play a hunter or a warlock, I would.
Anyway, one of the new talents is Resilient Infection (which is not yet implemented. This seems to be a more PVP based ability as there isn't much in PVE that actually dispels debuffs from a PVE target.
Unholy Frenzy is a new talent to Unholy but looks to be the replacement for Hysteria.
Corrupting Strikes is also new, increasing damage from Plague Strike and Scourge
Strike by 30%, which is a pretty significant amount.
Sudden Doom has also been moved over from Blood.
Overall, Unholy doesn't seem to have changed a lot other than these changes detailed here. As always, if I've left something out, please do tell me about it in the comments.

All in all, I'm pleased with the changes over the past couple weeks to the DK trees. I feel like the Blood tree could be cleaned up a bit more really but would figure out something to do if not. I am very pleased with the way they have went with the Frost tree and looking forward to being able to have a tank spec and a DPS spec again instead of two tank specs. I hope that the changes continue to improve over the coming months and look forward to Day 1 of Cataclysm.

Goodbye....for now

While I did not start the blog with the hopes of becoming the next Wow.com or even to the readership level of fellow DK blogger Death Goddess, I've come to face that no one reads this blog. The fact of it is really that I feel the DK blogging community is rather extensive and perhaps over saturated. I'm not bitter about it. It's a fact of playing the new class for an expansion. I'm not sure but I would be willing to venture that during The Burning Crusade content, the amount of Blood Elf Paladin blogs were high. Same for Draenei Shamans.

In the amount of time since I've starting writing here, I've seen many changes come about for Valoren and his state in the world. The biggest one being the departure from the Razorbacks, joining AWOL, and becoming the main tank for the Friday night ICC10. Now, even that has changed. Not only will I be the MT for this run (which is moving to Thursdays to allow for a continuation on Fridays), I will also be the Raid Leader. This is due to the fact that we have a large military presence in the guild and there is a deployment of some of them to Afghanistan. One of the non military guild leaders has approached me and asked me to lead this run, at least until they return. This will be at least a year. The main reason I decided to start this blog was for a writing outlet for me. It's often said "Write what you know", and I know World of Warcraft, so why not write about it? I've enjoyed writing and doing research for my posts. I digress...

I've come to realize that no one reads my blog. Perhaps it's because I don't market it really. I'm new to this and don't really know how to do that. Maybe my writing is boring. Maybe I'm adding further saturation to an already large pool of DK blogs. Whatever the case is, I'm shutting down this blog until at least Cataclysm. The reason for this is because Death Knights will be getting a large overhaul in our tanking mechanics with the reevaluation of the Rune system as well as the consolidation of tanking to the Blood tree. Cataclysm represents a rebirth of Azeroth and a wave of changes to the game as a whole. When this happens, you can bet that I'll be in the thick of it, tanking and figuring it all out again and posting my results.

Until the world is wrought with destruction and anarchy with the reemergence of Deathwing, I bid you all farewell. Keep up the good fight.

Verdict on Blood Tanking

As my last post noted, Blood will be the dedicated tanking tree come Cataclysm. At first, this news bothered me a great deal. I worked hard to get to the point with dual wield tanking that it was viable and rather capable. Up until 3.3.3, my main problem was not enough threat generation. That was mostly resolved with changes to the class as well as me switching to two slow 1h weapons rather than 2 fast 1h tanking weapons.

However, after my initial outrage subsided, I figured that I should give Blood tanking another chance. I had tried it out back last summer and didn't care for it. I couldn't do enough AOE and I was hard to heal. Partly because of my gear, partly because Blood doesn't lend to AOE very well. Also, I was doing mostly heroic 5mans so it just wasn't viable. Now that I have considerably better gear, and a nice 2h sword from ICC10 (Citadel Enforcer's Claymore), I figured it would be a good time to try Blood again and get used to it before Cataclysm.

I did research over the span of 2 or 3 days, for the best spec. I finally settled on a 56/8/7 build. I dropped my beloved Frost DPS spec to try this out. I wanted to keep my Frost spec ready in case things went badly in an instance with Blood so I could switch. I tried it out in a heroic 5man and things went well enough but it wasn't enough of a real test to see how it would do.

Going into ICC10 on this past Friday (which was the day that I decided to test all of this, forgot to mention that), I let our raid leader know what I was doing that way he didn't give me any hassle if I was sucking and could let me know if things were turning south. We got in and I kept with the Frost spec for trash, mostly because of the AOE threat generation. Trash up to Marrowgar was same as always. Engaged the boss after switching to Blood spec. Things some what went south during this fight and we had some bad moments but we recovered and brought him down. I still was unsure about the spec overall but I had noticed that my threat generation was through the roof compared to Frost, which I had expected and was very pleased with.

Moving on to Deathwhisper, we had some issues with having enough time between waves of adds to burst the mana shield. We managed to get it off and I picked her up first. We had an issue with the off-tank but he was new and still learning the fights. I was pretty pleased with my survivability at this point, starting to notice that my Death Strikes were healing me decently and Rune Tap was doing a great job when I was getting low for a quick save.

Loot boat went off decently. We had an issue with bringing the Horde boat down quickly like we usually do but still got through it. I was being healed from one of our healers but honestly, I think I would've been alright without it. The few times that Saurfang was able to hit me, I was able to heal myself through it.

Deathbringer Saurfang was where we stumbled. We, quite honestly, sucked really bad at this on Friday. We usually are able to get him down. Our raid leader and some other guild officials attributed it to the amount of new people we had, including my off-tank. I attributed it to we weren't paying attention. Our off-tank had never done the fight and was accidentally hitting the Blood Beasts when they spawned, despite repeated attempts telling him to stop doing it. He got better but we still were unable to down him. I, on the other hand, felt great about my own performance during Saurfang. There were a few times where I didn't taunt him as quickly as I usually do but I was somewhat watching the off-tank to make sure he was doing as he should (had an issue with taunts). However, I felt that Blood was doing a great job on this fight. I was receiving a pretty constant stream of healing from our healers but was also noticing that my own self heals were keeping me topped off and I actually had to stop attacking Saurfang when it was time for my off-tank to taunt so he could grab aggro from me.

Despite getting no upgrades in gear (tank gear never drops in the run I do on Fridays) and having several new people, I'm disappointed in the run but very pleased with Blood as a tanking spec. I would like to see them give a threat bonus to Blood Boil in the new tanking Blood tree in Cataclysm to lend us a hand with AOE threat. I'm sure Blizzard has things covered on this though. Blood tanking represents a whole new style of tanking which is a welcome change. Druids can tank without shields but only DKs tank without shields and use self healing as a mechanic to keep themselves alive rather than massive amounts of mitigation/avoidance like a Druid or shields like Warriors/Paladins.

My verdict: I'll be sticking with a dual spec Blood tank/Frost tank for some time now, mostly likely until Cataclysm.

Cataclysm: Cold winds of change

As of late, I've been extremely happy with the changes to Death Knights. Being a big fan of the Frost tree, I love the recent changes. When I was playing my Warrior before my hiatus pre-Wrath, I was dual wield Fury spec. When I learned that Death Knights would be able to dual wield, have having known they would be a tanking class already, my first thought was dual wield tanking.

When Wrath launched, and the months thereafter, it was quickly learned that dual wielding was terrible. It required perfect balance of stats and even then was mediocre. After a while, I (like every other DK at some point or another) gave it a try. I really liked it but it just was not viable for DPS, let alone tanking. Then, 3.2 dropped and it was like a light from the heavens for all Death Knights who wished to dual wield. 3.2 gave us the Threat of Thassarian talent deep into the Frost tree. While dual wielding was still a way off from being great, it was getting better. A while later, 3.3 dropped and added Icecrown raids and dungeons. More importantly, Rune of the Nerubian Carapace was added, giving us a 1h version of the Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Suddenly, dual wield tanking was viable. Not only was it viable, it did pretty well provided you could generate enough threat.

3.3.3 changed dual wield tanks even farther and Death Knight tanks in general with the addition of the high threat mechanic of Icy Touch. Off-hand damage was also increased by changes to Nerves of Cold Steel. Changes to Icy Talons made a constant raid wide haste buff possible, removing the need to constantly hit Icy Touch within a rotation and bringing back Pestilence rotations. 3.3.3 was very good to us Frost tanks, especially the dual wielders. I've even heard that dual wield tanking is now the preferred tanking spec of Frost tanks, though I can't remember where I read it at.

Now, dear reader, you may be wondering what I have to be upset about. As far as Wrath, I have nothing to be upset about. What I am upset about is the recent from Ghostcrawler that in the massive changes coming to classes in Cataclysm, Death Knights will no longer be able to use each talent tree to tank with. You may be thinking that it's not a big deal and you'd be right. The community has asked for a unified tanking tree and Blizzard has granted that. All tanking will be done by one specific tree, the same as how Druids, Warriors and Paladins all have. The difference lies in the name of that tree. Frost, right?

Wrong.

The sole tanking tree for Cataclysm will be Blood. Some do not regard this as a big deal. The fact that it will be a unified tanking tree is a welcome change. All tanking abilities will be united under Blood. According to GC, it's because Blood already has strong self-healing and defensive abilities. However, most of the community seems to agree that Frost tanking has better mitigation and actual passive defensive abilities. Call me petty, but this isn't even what I'm upset about. What I am most upset about is the loss of dual wield tanking. Some call it a gimmick and mostly just for fun. I, however, run it as my main spec. I main tank a weekly ICC10 run while dual wielding. It is extremely satisfying for me to be able to have Killing Machine proc as often as it does while dual wielding, allowing for Frost Strike to hit from both hands and guarantee a crit, hitting for usually 3k a piece.

Dual wield tanking is part of the reason I play my DK. I don't DPS with him very often. Granted, when I do, it's (again) dual wielding and I've noticed a big jump in my numbers. In Vanilla, I was a main raid healer. In BC, I was main raid DPS. Wrath, I've been a tank for most of the time. Out of the three, I love tanking. I love being in the thick of it and being the main line of defense between the boss and it eating healers. Part of this passion for it is the fact that I don't wear a shield. I have a weapon in each hand. The animations for tanking while holding 2 weapons is awesome for me.

There will be a lot of change before Cataclysm goes live. Hopefully this is something that Blizzard will reconsider.

333 - The Number of the Death Knight

Last night was my first night being able to login since 3.3.3 went live. I had been doing a lot of reading about the changes and how they were working out. I had nearly pulled my hair out trying to come up with a new spec (mostly one that could include IIT plus Annihilation (not in my current spec) AND Rime (is in my current spec...fail).
After giving up on it until the more dedicated people had crunched the numbers for me (Gravity over at pwnwear, you do amazing work) and worked out new Frost tanking specs, I went at it with my current spec. The only change that I made was switching out my Main Hand Rimefang's Claw for my Ghoulslicer and changing the rune configuration to Rune of the Fallen Crusader on the Main Hand and Rune of the Nerubian Carapace on the Off.
Going into a Random (Forge of Souls), I had no issues with threat, except on larger AOE pulls and even that could be cured by making sure diseases were spread and Howling Blast/Blood Boil was used at every opportunity (especially after a Killing Machine proc). At one point, I was well over 300k threat according to Omen and at almost 1 million on the first boss.
Clearly, the changes made to Frost in this patch have benefited Valoren as much as I had hoped and then some. The very minor changes I made to my weapons and their configuration surely helped but the over all damage increases coupled with the threat generated from Icy Touch have made tanking a lot easier for me, as least in 5mans. How this will translate into ICC is still up in the air but will be seen tonight.

My guild was also doing TOC10 last night and wanted to bring me in as DPS, since tanks were already taken. I was spec'd Blood for the rare occasion I would DPS but didn't do this very often as I need a new 2h weapon, which was bringing my DPS down considerably. I took the chance, since I already was in Ebon Hold re-runing (if that's even a word) my weapons, to respec back to Frost for DPS as well. Death Goddess had already spoken of how the changes had helped her raid's Frost DK with his DPS and I had worked out a DPS spec in my head earlier in the day. We ended up not doing TOC10 because Zul'jin crashed and most of our raid D/C'd. I was able to get back in later and ran the aforementioned Forge of Souls then afterwards, sticking with the Warrior (who tanked the next run in Gundrak), was able to pull out a solid 3100 overall for the run. Trash was hard to get a good rotation off and maximize my DPS since everything was being AOE'd down but I was able to top the charts with around 3800-4k on each boss.
I was extremely pleased with these results. One being because I've never been able to break 3200 (fully raid buffed no less) with Blood. Not sure why, honestly. Our main DPS DK in AWOL couldn't figure it out either. Regardless, my DPS went up considerably and this was taking in account that I wasn't using clean rotations and using Unbreakable Armor every 2 minutes. I was being sloppy with my DPS and was still pulling out in front.

Nice job Blizz. You have made for one happy DK.

Can there be too much WoW?

After reading a fellow Death Knight's blog on the same topic, I thought I should share my take on all this as well.
This is a topic that most WoW players have heard at least once in their time on Azeroth. How much is too much? Ultimately, I believe it depends on the person. Some people are totally happy with only being able to play a few hours a week (thought I tend to believe some are throwing their money away if they're not logging in for days at a time but who am I to judge!), others want to devote every waking hour to the game. I've had friends that have done this. Hell, I've done this. I've already given my story on my character's up to current so here's the side on the other side of the PC:

I started WoW during the Public Beta. I had been waiting for a long time to try it out and when the Public Beta sign-up went up, I threw my name in ASAP. I got in and started playing my Dwarf Paladin 2-3 days a week. Not a lot but the servers were incredibly unstable and constantly going down so I played whenever I could. When the game went live, I bought my copy on the night of release. I continued playing 2-3 nights a week on top of whatever else I was playing at the time (no MMOs). My girlfriend at the time didn't seem to mind. I still hung out with friends, went to work, spent time with her, etc. Slowly I started ramping up my play time. We moved to a different apartment together (a 2 bedroom) where I was able to have a room to myself for my computer, TV, game consoles, collectables, etc.

Around this time, we began to have problems in our relationship. I withdrew into the game even more and as I had recently hit 60 (game is still Vanilla at this point), I wanted to experience all the end game had to offer. I was running 2-3 5 mans a night with a group of friends and totally ignoring our relationship until it went bust and we split. I moved into a place of my own and continued my long hours of WoW.
Soon afterwards, due to financial reasons, I had to move in with my mother. I was holding 2 jobs, working 12 hour days Saturday-Monday and then 3rd shift Tuesday & Wednesday. Whenever I was at home, I was usually playing Wow. I took some time on Wednesday afternoons to get up and go ride BMX with a couple friends (we all needed the exercise) until I flipped my bike and broke a toe but this was about the only outside interaction I had for most of that summer.

I entered into another relationship and tried to limit my playtime to spend with her, which I think I was mostly successful at. We moved in together about 6 months into our relationship and I got back into a pretty extensive play schedule. About 2 months into living together, and me raiding 3 nights a week, we learned she was pregnant. Then I lost my primary job. I went to working 5 nights a week, 3rd shift. We started having problems in our relationship (not related to Wow this time) and I eventually decided (April before Wrath dropped) to stop playing. I was sitting at my desk one morning and was frustrated that I was bored. I didn't want another alt (thought none of them were 70), didn't want to play the ones I had, didn't want to do any professions and I was starting to tire of raiding. So I quit on a spur of the moment decision. I cancelled and vowed that I was done, I wouldn't be back. I felt that I owed it to myself, my unborn child and my girlfriend to stop playing and devote more time to real life. I still gamed but nothing that required vast amounts of time.

I tried to stay away from Wow and Wow related news but being a gamer, I still read about it from time to time. I had no bad feelings towards the game but felt my time in Azeroth was over. September of that year, pre-Wrath release, I got a new job. Several people I worked with played, including one of my managers. I was still working 2 jobs at this time and was at work the night Wrath dropped. I managed to get a Collector's Edition (oh the perks of being an employee at a 24hr store when a game comes out). I went home in the morning, installed all of Wow plus Wrath and loaded back into Mannoroth, telling myself that I was not going to get sucked back into raiding again.

I ended up leaving Mannoroth for Zul'jin and joining my manager's guild. It was a very casual guild, mostly a friends and family type. I promised my girlfriend that my days of hardcore casual were over and for the most part, they are. I usually play 2-3 nights a week with Fridays guaranteed (I Main Tank the run, kinda need to be there). So far, it strikes a good balance of family and Azeroth life.

Are you someone who want to devote every waking moment or are you someone who enjoys a few casual hours a day/week?

Cataclysm Stat Changes

As I usually spend a while browsing through Wow.com, I just came across a special little post about the upcoming gear stat changes for Cataclysm. As of writing this, I haven't even finished reading the post and have already found the need to write about it. The stat that's changing that has prompted me to stop dead in my reading tracks and come furiously write about is Parry.
Parry has two upcoming changes (as of current, as we all know Blizz likes to change things on the fly sometimes so this also may change). The first change is that you will no longer be able to can 100% avoidance from Parry. This isn't a big deal because I don't know many who can claim that they have 100% avoidance from Parry.
The second, and most exciting for me as a Dual Wielding Frost Tank, is that Parry will no longer speed up an attack. In short, parry hasting is gone in Cataclysm!
As a Dual Wield Frost Tank, parry hasting is bad. Like LeBron James sweatsocks wrapped around Limburger cheese in the middle of July bad. For those who don't know, Parry hasting is what happens when a boss parries your attack, causing their next attack to come faster. This can cause what is known as a Parry gib, or a fast attack you're not ready for that kills you. Typically this only happens if you're low on health. Otherwise you just take another hit quicker and causes a bit more stress on your healer(s).
Instead, a parried attack as well as it's next attack will hit for 50% damage, should they land at all (they can still be dodged, absorbed, etc).
With the removal of this mechanic, this makes the lives of a Dual Wield Frost tank a lot easier.
Other stat changes are as follows:
Stamina - Non-plate wearing classes will see a lot more, bringing health pools a bit closer together for all classes
Spirit - Nnly on healing gear now. Other mana based specs and classes will have other systems put into place to regen mana. Elemental Shaman and Balance Druid are having special systems designed for them. Buffs that provide spirit will boost primary stats along with likely changes to 5 Second Rule and other regen mechanics being redesigned
Intellect - once again (for those Vanilla Wow vets) grants Spell Power but will provide less mana than current levels
MP5 - Gone with classes that utilize it being redesigned for Spirit usage
Spell Power - Now only on weapons and just to distinguish them as caster weapons
Attack power - Removed from most items but will still be a game mechanic through the appropriate gains with Strength and Agility
Parry - see above
Resilience - Changed to affect only player damage and player crit damage.
Block Value - Gone. All shields now give a 30% passive block value but could still be modified from talents and other effects. Effectively becomes Block Rating
Weapon skill - Gone. All classes will start with maxed weapon skills.
Gem colors - Few stats will be changing. Hit rating may become blue instead of yellow.
Defense - Gone. Tanks will become uncrittable through use of Bear Form, Frost Presence, Defensive Stance or Righteous Fury
Haste - Haste will be changed to allow resource recovery to happen faster. The intention is to "do stuff more often".
Mastery - A new stat that allows players to be better at whatever makes their main talent tree powerful or unique. It will apparently be tied directly to talents so whatever you gain from improving this is directly related to your class and spec. More details will come on this as Cataclysm draws near.
Armor - Being rebalanced to reflect the armor changes in Cataclysm. Bonus armor will go down a bit overall. Mitigation difference will change so that plate isn't a huge jump over all others.
Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Experise and Crit Rating - No real changes to these stats other than ones listen within other stats. They will still appear on gear and function the same though caps (such as for Hit Rating) are likely to change
Armor Penetration - Gone from gear, still present in talents and abilities
Spell Ranks - Gone. All spells will have one rank that scales with level. Some new spells will be introduced to fill in the gaps.

Combat ratings (hit rating, for example) will obviously raise. Apparently, all ratings will be harder to cap.

Reforging is an interesting concept. In theory, Blizz is making it to where if you have an abundance of a certain stat (again, using hit rating as the example), you can "reforge" your items to convert 50% of that stat into another stat. Some conversions will be forbidden (Stamina -> Strength, as noted by Wow.com).

Melee DPS classes will be seeing more stamina, more strength (plate wearers)/agility (leather/mail, attack power becoming agility and stamina, armor penetration becomes Haste and Crit.

I won't go into the changes for healers and caster DPS as they're a bit beyond the scope of this blog, even though I'd already detailed some of their changes with other stats.
I'm looking forward to a lot of the changes, as well as the changes to the talents themselves. I can only hope that they continue to improve Dual Wielding for Frost and make it bigger and better!

Raining Blood

I haven't done any posts in a while. I've been busy with work and home life. And raiding! It's been a refreshing change to be in a raiding guild again. Especially one that recognizes a limited play schedule.
However, that is not the topic of this particular post. Hopefully "Blood" gives it away. If not...well I don't know what to tell you.

-=Talents for Blood DPS=-
The most important part of any play style is the talent build. If you left all your talents unused, you'd still be doing damage but not getting far. Think of it as leaving your car in neutral and stomping the gas pedal. Originally, I thought about breaking down each talent individually but that would take a lot of time and be rather dry reading. I'll highlight some key talents and provide builds.

Two-Handed Weapon Specialization: Hopefully this one is obvious. Blood is just not viable as a dual wield spec so that leaves 2-handed weapons.

Death Rune Mastery: This is usually pretty crucial as in a PVE situation, you'll need those Death Runes. They'll allow for some Heart Strikes later on.

Veteran of the Third War: Increases 2 key stats for aspiring Blood DPS Death Knights - expertise and, more importantly, strength. Strength = phenomenal cosmic power!

Abomination's Might: One of 2 talents that actually provides raid utility. Increases the whole part/raid's attack power by 10% and your own strength by 2%. Physical DPS will love you, especially if an Enhancement Shaman isn't around.

Bloodworms: They only provide a small amount of DPS and a small bit of self-healing you but it adds up. The tool tip says only a 9% chance but they're out pretty often.

Hysteria: Increases physical damage by 20% for 30 seconds. This can be cast on yourself or others. It's usually recommended that it go to a high DPS warrior or rogue but if you're pulling out some good numbers, cast it on yourself with this macro

/cast [target=player] Hysteria

.

Sudden Doom: 15% chance at a free Death Coil, procing off Blood Strikes and Death Strikes. Free DPS is the best kind.

Heart Strike: This will be your main attack for Blood DPS. It works similar to a Warrior's Cleave ability but works better than Blood Strike for even a single mob.

Dancing Rune Weapon: The uber 51st point talent. Every tree for every class has one. This is on a 1min cooldown and should be used as often as possible to maximize your DPS output. Make sure you use everything you can (trinkets, Hysteria, pots, etc) before activating this ability to make sure that your dps output is at it's max.

-=Unholy talents=-
You'll have several points left over from getting things in Blood. Unholy has talents that go with Blood like chocolate with milk.

Virulence: Increases chance to hit with spells by 3%. This reduces the amount of hit you need for spells only, such has Icy Touch, Death Coil, etc.

Ravenous Dead: Another strength increasing talent, this time by 3%.

Morbidity: Increases the damage of Death Coil by 15% and lowers the cooldown on Death and Decay by 15 sec. The increase in Death Coil is definitely worth it.

Epidemic: Increases the the duration of Frost Fever and Blood Plague by 6sec. More time on the mob = more damage.

Necrosis: Adds 20% shadow damage to all auto attacks (white damage). Do I need to explain this?

Blood-caked Blade: Despite sounding wicked, this is a very powerful talent. 30% chance to cause Blood-caked Strike which hits for 25% of weapon damage plus 12.5% for each disease on the target.

This all leads to the build I'm current using: Valoren's Blood DPS build.

-=Rotation=-
The current rotation that I'm using is:

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Death Coil (as many as possible) -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike

Rinse and Repeat.

To maximize your DPS, use Dancing Rune Weapon whenever possible. If you have trinkets, Hysteria, or other temporary increases of damage output, pop these before casting DRW as it takes a snapshot of your current stats and bases it's damage from that.

For the highest possible DPS, try this for your opening rotation:

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Raise Dead -> Wait for Frost Rune to recover -> Pop all trinkets and Hysteria -> Dancing Rune Weapon -> Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Death Coil (as many as possible) -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Death Strike

Then fall back into the first rotation listed above.

-=Gear=-
I won't go into detail about gear because there is way too much gear to list for a single post. I will talk about a couple pieces of endgame gear that are excellent for their slots but I won't provide any "Best in slot" information. I will provide gear that is relatively easy to obtain.

Head - Helm of Thunderous Rampage
This helm is ranked 6th highest for Blood DPS as according to MaxDPS.com. This helm offers better stats than the T9 DPS helm.
75 Emblems of Triumph

Definitely do get at least two pieces of T9 gear as the T9 2-piece set bonus is rather nice.

Sigil - Sigil of Virulence
Chance to grant 200 strength for 20 seconds upon use of Death Strike, Obliterate or Scourge Strike. It procs often, trust me.

Weapon - Tyrannical Beheader
The highest max damage weapon in the game pre-raid, excluding the Quel'Delar. It's big. It's slow. It hits like a Mack truck. On a related note, always always always put Rune of the Fallen Crusader on your weapons. The benefits outweigh the downsides by far. Also on this note, you should be looking for the slowest 2h weapon you can find with the largest max damage you can find.

-=Stats=-
Finally, let's look at stats. To keep it simple, get hit capped as soon as possible, which is 263 hit rating or 8%. The less you're missing with attacks, the more DPS you're putting out. Having more than this will not hurt but do not focus on it past 8%.
Strength is your bread and butter stat. It directly increases your damage, period. This being said, all gems you put into gear should be +strength gems, minus the meta gem for helms and a couple gems to meet it's requirements and a +10 all stats gem somewhere. EVERYTHING else should be strength gems.
Crit rating is something that we can never have too much of but shouldn't but a huge focal point. Most of the time, it will come naturally with other pieces of gear.
Armor Penetration is a stat that you will find on a lot of end game plate DPS gear. Since a lot of Blood's damage is physical damage, armor penetration comes in handy for increasing damage.
Haste, unfortunately, never has really done a lot of Death Knights in general. Unholy DPS used to be able to use some of it to make sure their entire rotation could fit in before diseases expired but recent changes to Unholy had eliminated this need. It is most likely unavoidable that you will pick some up somewhere but it's not a stat that we should be seeking at all.
Expertise is something nice to have. At 26 expertise, bosses will not be able to dodge your attacks. Since you should be behind the bosses anyway, parry is not an issue here.
Agility doesn't benefit us very much. It does give us crit rating but why stack agility for crit when can stack (drum roll, please) crit rating?
Armor = more attack power from Bladed Armor but the amount is not nearly as beneficial as straight Strength. You should be wearing plate armor so you'll be gaining from this anyway.
Attack power, I hope, is obvious what it does. However, it's not as good for us as pure Strength.
Stamina gives more health and in turn, allows you live longer to keep hitting. You'll get plenty from your gear so don't go looking for it.

-=Gems=-
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond
This is what I'm using as a meta right now. Requirements for 2 blue gems are somewhat nasty considering most of our gems should be reds but it can be done.
Nightmare Tear
Sbould be placed somewhere and will count towards your meta socket requirements.
Other than these few exceptions, everything else should be Bold Cardinal Rubies.

-=Glyphs=-
The 3 I would recomment for Major Glyphs are:
Glyph of Death Strike
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon
Glyph of Dark Death

It is also possible to drop the Dark Death glyph for Glyph of Disease. This will allow you to refresh your diseases by using only Pestilence but you lose out on some DPS from Death Coils, which you'll be using a lot of. It allows for more Heart Strikes but honestly is a complicated rotation and fails completely if you let your diseases drop off. Not recommended for the faint of heart and should not be attempted by anyone who is not a trained professional.

As for minors, there's not a lot of choice for PVE at all really. Glyph of Horn of Winter should be on every Death Knight.
Glyph of Raise Dead is a good one to have handy. It removes the reagent requirement for Raise Dead. Your new minion can be used as some extra DPS and then, by using Death Pact, can be sacrificed for some health.
The last slot is up to you.

By no means is this the definitive guide for Blood DPS. There are tons more resources out there and a lot of different play styles. Ultimately, everything rests on the level of commitment the player wants to have with their Death Knight. This is meant more as a primer for someone who is new to Blood DPS and/or the class in general.

Next time I'll take a look at Frost DPS and dual wielding. For now, walk tall and carry the biggest friggin' 2-hander you can find!

The time has come

Though the decision had mostly been made in my mind some time ago, tonight it will be official. I will be a Razorback no more. Bryu (my mage buddy) and myself have both decided that it is our time to separate from the Razors. Bryu has been there for most of life on Azeroth and I've been there about a year. In this time, we've had some good times but at the same time, we've had some major disappointments. We've seen raid attendance drop to the point where we couldn't do them at all anymore. We saw the rise of a stigma against us, though we're a very small guild. Somehow we managed to get seen as real jerks to a lot of people on our server and no one wants to join a guild of jerks. This had nothing to do with our departure however.
We have decided to answer the call of the raids. We have spent many hours discussing what we wanted out of the game and both of us agreed that we wanted to see the endgame. We both tried several times to jump start raiding in the Razorbacks. We both failed several times. Eventually we figured that it most likely wouldn't happen for this round of endgame with the Razorbacks. So, we're moving on.
We actually had a guild drop into our laps that was already an established raiding guild on Zul'jin, AWOL. Bryu had ran Ulduar with them a few weeks ago and they offered an open invite then. We ran some Randoms with them on Friday night and they liked me as well, opening an invite to TOC25 on Sunday. I went to that, which was my first time there. I came in as DPS and ended up laying somewhere dead more often than not (due to a new UI interface, new people, new instance, etc) but it was a blast. Talking with the raid leader afterwards, he issued an open invite to join them as well.
Bryu and myself spoke with the Razorbacks GM, whom we work with, and told him the scoop. He understood and was alright with it, saying that we always had a home in the Razors if we wanted it. We will obviously remain in contact with the Razors, leaving alts in the guild and providing insight as former Mage and DK Class Leaders. In to the future as AWOL!

Slash and Dash Episode II: Attack of the Death Knight

As of last night, I still had no gear. I had made some gains in the Auction House and spent the majority of the night running around Thousand Needles, swinging my Mining Pick or in Ironforge swinging my Blacksmith's Hammer. By the end of the night, I had made some good gains on both Mining and Blacksmithing and ended up logging out with 19 silver and some change to my name.
I get up this morning to go and pick up my daughter and, as always, check my Blackberry for texts and emails. I see that I have 11 new emails. Figuring on about half or more to be spam, as usual, I found that all 11 were from Blizzard. They had restored my characters! I start reading through the emails, finding that they had restored each character on every realm that was hit by the asshat that had ransacked my account.
I logged in after getting home and found that, while I hadn't been restored in the same way that my boss had (all items and gear, plus 75 Emblems of Triumph, 15 Emblems of Frost and 2500g to each level 80), I had been restored to exactly as I was Sunday evening and was more than happy to get it.
I still hold malice for the jackass that did this to my account and would delight in giving him a swift punch in the nose should I ever meet him. However, my week was brightened with seeing Valoren restored to his usual glory.

Slash and dash

This past Friday, our GM decided to trim the fat from our guild. He had made a calendar invite in-game with everyone in the guild invited to it. If you didn't respond to the invite, you were kicked from the guild. We lost one relatively active player due to this but he knew the consequences of not responding. Everyone else was players that show up every once in a while, or not at all.
This has trimmed our guild down to 40-something members, including alts. Has this helped recruiting efforts? Not really. Not at all actually. It seems to have rededicated several of our members to showing up more often than once a month or so. The slashing part of the title definitely holds to this action but alas, is not the topic of this post.
Monday morning, my account was hacked.
I usually get up for work about 7am, which gives me about an hour to get some play time in. Usually poke around the Auction House for a bit after doing my daily random dungeon for my 2 Emblems of Frost. I woke up to my alarm clock and cell phone both going crazy. I checked my phone and saw I had a text from my guild mate and coworker who does the same thing I do every morning, except he does his about an hour and a half before I get up. The text said "Your wow account has been hacked. Guild bank cleaned out. Watched it happen but couldn't kick you". In case you're wondering, he couldn't kick me because we both rank the same in the guild as officers.
I threw my clothes on, ran downstairs and tried to login (not really sure why) and found it wouldn't accept my password. The bastard had changed my password too. I get some more details from my friend. He said the guy spoke Chinese (he translated what he said. Came out roughly to "My mom eats shit") and was logging in and out of my toons rapidly. He managed to kick my two alts in the guild but the damage was done. I assessed the damage from the Armory online. He had stripped me clean.
I finally logged in last night and found that, indeed, I was bare. The only thing he had left me was gear that was unable to be sold to vendors and my quest items. He threw my quest items in the bank, cleared out what he wanted from there (Saronite and Titansteel bars), sold anything and everything he could from not only my main, but my alts and the guildbank. He also hit my characters from Mannoroth and sold anything and everything he could from there as well.
I had known people who had experienced an account compromise like this and they ended up getting everything back from the GMs, just takes a few days. Before I left for work on Monday, I had already filed my ticket for restoration and our guild bank was requested for restore Monday evening. What I had not counted on was the feelings of fear that it had implanted in me. I ran complete system scans on my PC for any trojans/keylogger software that may have been hiding and zipped a file that I suspected may have led to the compromise before changing my password and adding an authenticator back to my account.
I still am somewhat afraid to sign in to my accounts, for whatever reason. I honestly can't find a good reason. I'm always careful with my passwords and now that I have an authenticator, it shouldn't be an issue anymore, just as it has for the past 5 years.
If you don't already have an authenticator, I just became an advocate for them. I urge you to pick one up and use it and save yourself this stress.
And for the bastard that decided to do this to me: I hope you enjoyed the first and last time you saw the inside of my account. Enjoy living under your desk where your slave-driving, gold farmer boss keeps you. Despite you causing me some unneeded stress in my life, I'll continue to enjoy time with my family, drive my Swedish convertible, live in my townhouse and sleep in my Ikea bed. Things you'll never hope to have. Eat shit, asshat.

Raid night failure

Raid night for our guild came and went. I logged in early to make some preparations. At 8:50, there was still only 3 of us. At 9pm, there were 4 of us. One person's phone was turned off. Another was having internet issues. Our guild leader's new work schedule prevented him from making it. We waited until about 9:10 and no one else showed up. Ulduar was a failure. Razorbacks raid night was a failure.
We managed to PUG into an Onyxia 10 run. Originally I was to main tank until it was learned that my supposed off tank was barely hitting 25k health raid buffed and was eaten alive by the whelps. I threw down a Death and Decay after I felt he had enough time to grab them up and immediately pulled them off of him. We booted him, which he understood why. We brought in a Pally tank with about 10k more health than me. I was put into OT role while he MT'd. Long story short, we spent the next hour and half wiping. Partly my fault as I couldn't seem to get my ass out of the Deep Breaths. We ended up getting her down to 0.6% and wiping. The raid leader called it.
We were exhausted, frustrated and for a couple of us, our egos bruised. Myself, I was not only frustrated at myself for not moving from the Deep Breaths but also rather disappointed in my guild. Most people had not even bothered to answer yes or no to the invitation.
This has spurred our GM to trim the fat from our guild. He has decided that any inactive members will be booted from the guild as of 1-15-10. He's tired of being a parking lot for alts and inactive members. He has decided that we are going to be an active, casual raiding guild, which is fine by me.

New year part deux

So here we are in the year 2010. New challenges in the real world and in Azeroth. While our guild isn't quite ready for ICC10, unfortunately, we are making our guild debut in Ulduar this Friday. Sure, we're only 9 months late and there's probably not a whole lot of gear that could benefit our core group of mains from there. Most of us are mostly T9 geared. Gear isn't the point of going.
Part of us going is the weekly raid quest is for Flame Leviathan. Last week the raid was XT-002 Deconstructor. Since Flame Leviathan has to be cleared out before you can get to Deconstructor, those of us that have done the fights know the basic idea of what to do on these two bosses.
This leads to the second part of why we're going into Ulduar. While we may have the gear to probably go into Trial of the Crusader, we don't have the raiding experience together. We all usually join in on raids where we can since we don't usually have the numbers to form our own. Many of us want to raid and we've decided that since 3.3 and changes to the way PUGs can be formed, it's a lot easier to pull in extras for raids and as such, we should do so.
We were rather apprehensive as to if we could actually ever do Ulduar but seeing as how these two bosses were rather simple, even for a PUG group, we have decided to give our first raiding venture in about 6 months up to Ulduar. We anticipate needing to pick up a couple players here and there to fill out our ranks, probably healers. However, we also are anticipating the possibility of being able to field all Razorback 10man raids again on a regular basis. We have had several members return from hiatus and one of our lower level recruits is nearing 80 on her DPS DK.
The time seems right for the Razors to come back into raiding, even if it is on content that's over 6 months old and no one is really concerned with anymore.

Comments left below!

New year, new spec

Happy 2010 to all, hoping that the the holidays have treated everyone well and have recovered from the festivities of December 31st/January 1st.
2010 is sure to some big changes for Azeroth. Icecrown Citadel is hinted at opening a new wing tomorrow (1/5/10, wow.com), the rest to follow within the coming months. After Arthas has been dethroned, another major content patch will be readied and setting the events leading into Cataclysm into motion.
As for myself, the new year has brought my family outside the game a bit closer and resolved some issues there. Inside the game, it's brought me to 3 new pieces of gear (neck from Heroic Halls of Reflection, T9 tanking helm and tanking sigil from Emblems of Frost), my first venture into Ulduar and as of this morning, a new tanking spec.
I have left the frozen realm of the Frost tree for the warm crimson pools of death in the Blood tree. Shocking I know.
I've been noticing when I compare DK tanks on my server of Zul'jin, there is a large majority that are Blood tanks. I know that all 3 trees were capable of tanking but how well Blood actually did seemed to be lost on me. Being as I've not really raided in almost 2 years, I've not been exposed to enough DK tanks to know. Most of the DK tanks I've been with have been Unholy or Frost. Now it seems that Unholy has fallen out of favor as a tanking tree and Blood may be in line to take it's place and form a larger user base. Frost still holds ground as a good all around tanking tree and I think it may always do so. It seems that Frost will possibly be in favor of DKs just starting out tanking due to the strong threat and strong damage reductions.
Blood on the other hand offers strong threat but not as much in terms of damage reductions. Instead, Blood relies on self-healing and beating the snot out of the mob you have. There are some damage reducing talents but not as strong or as many as there are for Frost. While the tank will actually be taking more damage, the amount of healing coming in from attacks and properly executed Rune Taps make for some very nice heals. I used Rune Tap in my Unholy build when I played with it and it makes for some really nice heals.
I haven't been able to try out the spec yet and most likely won't get to until tomorrow morning but we'll see how it works out.

Happy 2010 to all! Leave comments and questions if you have any!