Posts with tag dual-wielding

With 4.1 on the PTR, I've been hearing the usual grumbling. Why should we raid anymore? We'll just wait for the next tier of raiding and get all new good stuff. This argument always sort of strikes me as a little bit off, but it definitely doesn't apply to this patch. Not only is patch 4.1 heroic gear only going to be item level 353, but we won't get a new raiding tier until patch 4.2. That means you probably have multiple months left in which the best gear still comes from raiding tier 11 content.

With that in mind, this week we'll look at all the item level 359 gear available in game and figure out what's best for the up-and-coming DPS death knight. This guide will primarily cover raid gear and valor point purchases, with BoE world drops and crafting and reputation purchases where they seem to fit well into the hierarchy of what to wear.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights.

Now that we've had a bit of time with patch 4.0.1, hopefully you've settled in to a decent rotation and spec and have begun to feel your way around the new system. Now that you've done that, there's one more step to take: figuring out the best way to reforge and regem your gear. Reforging can be done through certain NPCs in major cities and is a process whereby you take one secondary stat (the ones in green text) and reforge part of it into another stat. This process can be very useful for getting rid of extra stats past the soft cap or just plain getting rid of stats that aren't important for your class or spec. You can't reforge a stat into another stat that's already on the item, but otherwise, your possibilities are endless.

Gemming remains more or less how it always has. The one big, new curveball we've been thrown is the fact that hit gems are now blue. This is probably overall a win for DPS death knights, as it gives us a few more options to aim for gear bonuses without handicapping ourselves as much.

To understand how, when and if to regem and reforge your gear, you'll need to understand stat weights. While it's still pretty early in the 4.0.1 game (and therefore, it's not completely clear what stat weights are for every spec), the death knight community has still done enough math that we're relatively certain of the general order. With that in mind, let's look at every spec and figure out the best ways to regem and reforge.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With this week's Lichborne, I was hoping to have run a few heroic Cataclysm dungeons so I could report back to you on how death knights play through them -- but alas, it was not to be, as my beta client refuses to log in to the game without crashing. Luckily, there are plenty of things to discuss apart from that. This week, I'd like to discuss our talent trees as they currently are in the beta and where things are headed for us as the release date draws nearer.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

Our adventures in beta continue, as promised, with a new zone and a new spec. With Hyjal behind us, the next logical zone to head to is Deepholm, and such is where I headed, after a suitably epic breadcrumb quest sequence. My spec was dual wield frost.

Just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from with this testing, I should note that I have been equipping quest rewards if they're itemized for death knight usage, even if they're downgrades, in order to get an idea of how much survivability and damage potential your average casual death knight will have.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

While paladins got some of the biggest bombshells in last week's big developer Twitter chat, there was still quite a bit of juicy information for death knights. Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious we're getting some major tree revamps, especially in the frost tree, what with On a Pale Horse being added and Runic Empowerment being made baseline. The answers also bought some interesting insights into some of the various decisions being made as our class takes shape in Cataclysm. A few of the answers definitely merit some deeper discussion, so let's get to it.

Welcome to Lichborne, where we're taking a break from all the Cataclysm info and analysis to focus on the here and now in death knight issues.

One of Patch 3.3.3's biggest focuses was adjusting frost DPS to be viable at the end game. The changes proved to be mostly successful, and as a result, dual-wield frost DPS is back on the map and may have an outside chance of not getting you laughed out of a raid. With that in mind, it's a perfect time to take a look at the spec.

This guide will give you a rundown of the basic stuff you need to know to break into the ground floor of the spec. The goal is to make speccing, gemming, glyphing and doing damage as simple to understand and implement as possible, making it easier for you to break into the playstyle and start using it on your own character. In some cases, this means "cutting corners," and in other places it means making judgment calls on gemming and glyphing options that are still a bit more nebulous once you get to the really heady theorycrafting stuff. This article is meant to make being moderately success at frost an easier task. Without further ado, then, let's begin!

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at the world of the death knight.

With Patch 3.3.3 on the PTR and looking closer and closer to going live, the buzz around death knights is just about where you'd expect it to be, squarely on the frost talent tree. This is especially true of frost DPS. While it once reigned supreme as a cornerstone of the famous 39/32 builds, it's fallen out of favor, and even Threat of Thassarian hasn't been enough to keep it from being consigned to the status of third rate, a pariah from any raid that already has a shaman to provide Windfury.

Blizzard's obviously dedicated to getting the tree properly buffed in Patch 3.3.3, but have they succeeded? Let's take a look at the frost tree thus far, and what we may be doing with our own builds and talents in a few weeks' time.

WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class, raiding, and PvP guides we take a look at exactly what changes and how the changes will affect your playing.

With the arrival of Patch 3.2, let's take stock of what's going on with Death Knights and how things have turned out for us. The Patch 3.2 PTR's been the testing grounds for a few major changes to various trees and play styles, and now it'll be interesting to see how things play out on the live server. You can see the basic size of the Death Knight changes in this original analysis of the patch changes, but some things have changed since then, as we will note below.

Tanking

We do get a couple hits to tanking this patch. Frost Presence will be switching from a health buff to a stamina buff, and Veteran of the Third War will be nerfed to only a 3% stamina gain at the top level. Toughness is also dropping from 15% to 10% armor buffed at its top level. Honestly, I don't think these changes alone will be so bad as to drop us too low on the tanking totem pole, especially since we've been up at the top so long.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

The video I've included in today's edition of The Queue is... something. It is certainly a thing. A thing that is entirely unrelated to WoW. I know the music is produced by Justice, but the video? Well. It's a video. Enjoy?

corwin asked...

"Is anything more going to be done with the Grizzly Hills Venture Bay PVP areas? It seems like it has a lot of potential and isn't paid any attention."

Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight column, with your host, Daniel Whitcomb.

On my first read-through of the Patch 3.2 Death Knight patch notes, I had to chuckle a bit. If the theme of the Retribution overhauls was making Retribution DPS a bit more complicated, it was definitely very much about the simplification for Death Knights. Simplification is a relative term, of course, given that rune rotations are still in full effect, but there has been some streamlining of techniques and adjustment of cooldowns that will lead many of us to do some tuning up on our rotations. Let's take a deep look at the changes and see what they'll mean for us going forward into Patch 3.2.

Good news to all you Dual Wield Death Knight Diehards: Ghostcrawler recently popped up on the forums with a simple answer to your woes: "Next Major Patch."

Apparently, the next major patch (I'm guess it will be patch 3.2) will be seeing more tweaks to Death Knights, at the least to get dual wielding viable again. There's no word on what form this tweaking will take, which is to be expected. Balancing Dual Wielding and Two handed weapons has always been a tricky to near-impossible for other classes, so the skeptical part of me still wonders if it's possible.

Of course, it could also be the two-handed weapon partisan in me speaking as well. Any basic solution such as creating a two-weapon strike seems like it could leave two-handed Death Knights out in the cold, at least for DPS. Still, we have that earlier mention of possible dual-wield dedicated tree, so who knows how extensively they'll revamp whichever one they choose to allow dual wield optimization. We do already have some 3.2 feature announcements, though, so who knows, maybe class change information is up next. We'll keep you posted.

Welcome to Lichborne, where Daniel Whitcomb is ready to help you roll with the punches (and Death Knight changes) coming from the PTR.

We had a new build hit the PTR this week, and with a week gone by, now's a good time to take a deep, focused look at the changes and see how they're shaking down. They're mostly pretty solid nerfs, and a lot of Death Knights aren't too happy about them. Still, beyond people concern about the fact that they are nerfs, the question remains: Were they merited, and where do they leave us? Let's discuss.

The problem with writing a Death Knight column at the moment is that there's so much that's changing in 3.1 - So much that will change, on the test servers at least, sometime in the next few days. With a promise that Unholy, especially, will probably be nerfed significantly, almost any advice I give right now could be outdated in very short order. That said, after some thought, I figured I might as well take a look at nerfs. Namely, I'd like to take a look at a few popular Death Knight builds, how we already know they'll change, and what other changes may be coming to them.

Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly class column for Warcraft's newest class, the Death Knight.

Ok, I know I've been focusing on tank quite a lot lately, but I'm here to say that I swear I haven't forgotten about the DPS. To prove it to you, this week's edition of Lichborne is all about gearing up to hit 10-man Naxxramas as a DPS.

For the most part, your gearing choices as a DPSer are going to be more or less the same no matter what your spec. For the most part, I'm going to be following the statistical information I outlined in the Death Knight statistics primer, which means the gear I pick out will follow this basic rule for stat choice: Hit rating to the 8% cap > strength/attack power > critical strike rating > expertise > everything else.

Welcome to Lichborne. Your host is inflicted with the space plague this week, but has done his best to write for you people anyway, so be grateful, you hear?

We've covered 3.0.8 pretty extensively, between Mike Sacco's coverage of the initial round of changes and our week before last discussion, but the devs weren't done yet. With 3.0.8 likely to make it to live servers in the next week or two, this is probably a good time to discuss the Death Knight tweaks that have gone in the last few PTR updates.