Monday, March 15, 2010

DK dings 80. Adventures!

So my DK hit 80. I've been mostly having a field day with her. She's undergeared enough where things are dangerous, and she doesn't have enhancements "spirit wolves of might as well be invincible for the next 45 seconds". I can't heal myself whenever I want, so I can't piss off healers for no reason, not that I ever do, but the OPTION to is closed, so that's sad.

I started by buying a few tank pieces until it let me queue as a DPS. I do love that blizzard doesn't care if your gear actually functions well. Dungeon popped and my frost DPS journey began.

Loading screen. Oculus. Oh boy. Two drop right off. Healer says "Neither of you are geared enough for this place" and drops too. Tank and I chuckle about peoples attitudes. We get 3 more. The two dps have never been here, the healer is "undergeared" like us. Ragtag, my style. Tank cleans up garbage while I give a brief summery of how the dragons work. No big problems. It's an incredibly slow run mostly due to the seemingly random nature of how they designed the place. I tried to make the most direct route so people don't get lost. Pretty much works except on occasion where we all dismounted while a dragon was eating our faces, and wiped us.
Long story short, another wipe at Eregos mostly having to due with 2 newbies, but we tried it again and preformed beautifully. (Ps: I was ruby dragon. So easy.)

I mostly kept queuing as DPS and continually getting the "you're not geared enough" spiel over and over. I don't think I ever did less damage than the tank in any run and on a few WONDERFUL occasions i out-preformed geared guy reliably throughout the instance. Why this is fantastic is because I'm literally in worse gear than blizzard approves of. I'm not enchanted almost at all (I managed to get sons of hodir rep completely done since I had a stack of about 300 relics in my bank so I had pretty awful weapons I could actually runeforge). But sure ret pali guy. 4000 gs and 1.5k dps is necessary to participate. Lord forbid I go in with 2400gs and 1.5k dps! Oh wait...

I did eventually pick up enough from heroics to tank (although I'd really love a 2h weapon, so I could runeforge some defense and get some flexibility). I got a few glyphs and ran a few regulars with an encore performance of the oculus incident down to the "you're not geared enough" comment. Yes, not geared enough for regular oculus, when I'm rocking 540 defense. Ok jack.

Playing as an unholy tank feels very satisfying. I've played each tank briefly at mid levels just to get a feel for it. Warrior is frantic and versatile. Paladin is solid and autopilot. Bear is swipe and maul. Unholy feels very niche-y, which it is, but it's a good niche. I feel like a tank, instead of "that guy with more health than everyone" Preventing possible wipes by tossing up anti-magic zone is AMAZING. I really wish I had more talent points though, I can't seem to go for what I want.

This is what I'm rocking currently. Although it's only from experience in regular instances, my necrosis does literally nothing, clocking in at a typical 0.3% of my overall damage. Sure its only 1 talent point but I'm considerably constrained in other ways. I want points in dirge,unholy blight and virulence. Potentially I could shed points from necrosis, black ice, and 2 handed weapon mastery, but I'd never get to max desolation, and that's a full 1% dps increase I'd be missing. I tried the glyph of scourges strike but I really didn't like the uneven diseases, and diseases off my main target falling off (tabbing could work, but the more stuff there is, the more annoying it becomes). I do need to learn to refresh disease around the 3 second mark though. Refreshing before the last tick is a pretty huge dps loss when you consider how often you might do it.

Anyone have a internal dot ticker so I could determine when would be the best time to pestilence for a refresh?

Anyways, I wish bone shield lasted longer, it was off the GCD and didn't cost an unholy. Cmon blizzard add a talent called "improved bone shield" which increases the internal cool down by 1 seconds at 5 talent points! PvPers aren't going to like that huge investment, and tanks will eat faces for it.

Still, I consider AMZ so tree defining. Role defining. Wish it was on a SLIGHTLY shorter cool down, it doesn't exactly prevent a ton of damage. Feels good to soak up an entire blizzard with it, or just generally pretend as if a spell didn't occur. Man, I'd kill for a glyph for AMZ that lowered the cool down, or raised the damage it could take. I don't think a duration increase would do tanks any good; the 10 second window is pretty much perfect.

Ah well. Experiments!