4.0 Death Knight DPS - *bangs head into wall*

I'm reposting this from my personal blog back on Oct. 13th, right after patch 4.0 went live.  This sort of dissatisfaction played a pretty big part in me abandoning Chill of the Grave for a while.  I've gotten over a lot of it, not because I figured out some magic combination to make everything wonderful but because I just came to terms with it.  I'll have more technical posts on the changes in the near future, as well as on Blizzard's upcoming changes and my dabblings in Unholy, but for now, here's some ranting.

I'm not ready to give up on Dariahn yet, but I'm not getting along with the changes to Frost DPS.  The old rotation had a rhythm to it that clicked perfectly with me on, at risk of sounding really dippy, a deep, visceral level.  Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Obliterate, Pestilence, Blood Strike, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, Obliterate, Obliterate, Obliterate, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, Obliterate, Obliterate, Pestilence, Blood Strike, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, throw in a Howling Blast when Rime procs to keep me from zoning out too much...  The mathematical grace of the old rotation was dead-on perfect.  I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I managed to get through, say, Koralon without having to reapply my diseases because everything clicked at just the right moment.  Nothing went to waste.  Yes, fights like Putricide that were nothing but waste were frustrating, but not every class can be good at every fight.

It was certainly no reason to make waste the default.

What, praytell, is the point of Festering Strike?  [Okay, I know now the point is to spam it in Unholy, but still.]  The cost of refreshing diseases - refreshing them for a whole 8 seconds out of their now-30-second duration - has gone from 1 Blood rune to 1 Blood rune, 1 Frost rune, and 1 now-useless Unholy rune.  Likewise, what was the point to reducing the cost of Howling Blast to 1 Frost rune?  If there was also an attack that used a single Unholy rune it would be forgivable.  In a Frost rotation, Blood Strike existed to use up those Blood runes that you weren't spending on anything else so they were not sitting there wasted.  It also turned them into nice useful Death runes.  Nothing serves that function for the Unholy rune left behind by Festering Strike or Howling Blast.  It sits there on my pretty little DKI Runes UI, a testament to the wastefulness of the new DK playstyle.  It mocks me.  I hate it.

I was also bothered by how often I found myself standing there for several seconds auto-attacking the training dummy because I was out of resources.  Yes, there were times in my old rotation when I might be out of resources for possibly two whole seconds if Rime didn't proc, but this was noticeably worse.  Despite what one might see in the occasional PuG or from that DK who is clearly only in the raid because they know people, Death Knights aren't supposed to just stand there auto-attacking.  This just isn't acceptable.

Maybe I'm wrong.  I'm willing to work on it, to concede that this is just growing pains from having to l2p all over again, to hope that once I get a proper new rotation hammered out everything will smooth out and I'll look back on this post with amusement.  Right now, though, I feel like my favorite class has lost its groove.

Changing Gears

Things have been a bit busy for me of late and I haven't had much time to mull over post ideas, but I promise I'll have something with some meat on it soon, likely in more of a beginner's vein than most of my posts to date. There are a lot of basics that I still see people on assorted communities ask about, and while they're laid out elsewhere I know I'm the sort of person who prefers to know why something is over being told that it simply is. I'm sure that kind of approach to a tutorial would be helpful for others just starting out with the class.

I'm currently in the process of getting out of the RP guild-running business and moving to an RP-friendly friends-and-family raiding guild, and the distraction of that decision has been part of the reason for the dry spell. There are different flavors of casual, and I'm the sort who doesn't like to commit her whole week but who is serious when it comes time to get things done. This new guild seems to fit that mentality well. Hopefully it will give me even more material and ideas for posts here. Stay tuned! I'll be back to posting with an excessively verbose vengeance soon enough.

Welcome to Chill of the Grave!

I know, there are already so many WoW blogs out there, why start another one? Well, for one thing, because my boyfriend was getting tired of me keeping him up all night debating to myself the relative merits of Glyph of Death and Decay and Glyph of Obliterate. I'm a writer deep down in my bones, and a chatty one too, so this is largely a place for me to talk about things.

It's also a place to provide information for people who want to actually learn to play this class, though I'm more interested in debate than simply saying "This is how you have to do things or you fail". While there are definitely things you have to follow, there's plenty that is open to your own personal playstyle, and I believe all valid ways of playing the game are, well, valid. I prefer debating the advantages and disadvantages of one thing vs another to outright declaring that one is the only way to do things. I personally prefer to play as DW Frost, both in my Tanking and DPS roles, and that's the view I'm going to bring to this blog, but I don't think other specs are wrong. In fact, if this blog catches on, I'll look into getting Blood and Unholy columnists, too. I'm planning to approach things more in the fashion of sites like Mania's Arcania than Elitist Jerks. So expect that to be the attitude of the blog going forward: Informing and discussing decisions, not making them for you.

I'm also planning to do something most class sites don't: Discuss the lore of the class. I'm a creative type and an RPer at heart, and part of what made me so certain I would love playing a Death Knight from the start is the compelling lore around which the class is based. Expect to see discussions of lore and write-ups/reviews of things like the Death Knight manga in between posts about PvE mechanics and tanking.

And just who am I? My main is Dariahn of Thorium Brotherhood, Forsaken Death Knight of the RP guild Hand of the Blightcaller. I don't do much in the way of progression at the moment because of time limitations, but I do weekly 10-mans, roflstomp Heroics, and stay abreast of everything going on with the class. I was raid-tanking in Burning Crusade as a Forsaken Prot warrior, and I knew from the announcement of the Death Knight class that the combination of tanking capability and Forsaken-esque lore was going to make me love them. Since before I could roll one I was determined to learn to play the class well, and I like to think I've done a pretty good job of it.

So check back every so often! I hope to update at least once a week, ideally more, with assorted thoughts and opinions on WoW's most misunderstood class, and always feel free to comment!