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The Queue: The patoot edition

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



Hey, everyone! How did you all hold up over the last week? A whole week with Adam? Did you miss your ray of sunshine? No? Oh... well, that's okay. I'm back anyway! If you don't read Ask a Lore Nerd, I was more or less out of the office the last week moving into my swank new apartment, so that's why I haven't been around. It's all good now though, so Adam and I are back on our rotating schedule.

We also have a cool little guest appearance from our resident Death Knight Daniel Whitcomb, so that'll be a treat! Hopefully!

Cholestria asked...

Are there any titles I can achieve with my level 1 bank alt? She has an outfit from the Brewfest and usually participates in any of the holiday she can, but all the titles seem to require some leveling. Is there any title she could get without leveling?



I think that Explorer is the only one you can realistically get your hands on at level 1. It'll take a whole load of time, and you'll level up a few times from exploration XP, but it can be done at a really low level. You don't need to kill anything, just run around the entire world. If you have a friend with a Hog or a Traveler's Mammoth, they can be a big help with it, just by letting you sit in the passenger's seat.

I can't think of many other titles you can get your hands on at level 1 right now. Back in the day, it was possible to earn Private at extremely low levels, but the PvP ranks aren't something you can earn anymore. Michael Gray pointed out that, in theory, you can get "of the Alliance" or "of the Horde" which requires 100,000 HKs. That's possible at level one, but do you want to do that? Do you really?

Jessica wrote in to ask...


I have a 66 Nelf DK and I'm currently in love with her. I have a question about my personal talent build and if it's worth it. Generally speaking, I'm an unholy DK but I've skipped most of the noteworthy/popular unholy talents. I don't have a perma-ghoul, I don't turn into a ghoul when I die; I can't summon a gargoyle and I don't have any intention of summoning a cloud of angry insects. My claim to fame is maxing out both Death Rune Mastery of the Blood tree and Reaping of the Unholy tree. What it does? I have Death Runes at the end of every fight and at least 6 during. As far as I know, unless I'm completely misunderstanding how Death Runes work, Death Runes are magical do-all runes and therefore, most of my abilities will be available as long as I have my 6 Death Runes up, once my GCD is up as well. My current talent spread is 19/0/38. This is me. I really really enjoy playing this character and I don't really have any intentions of respeccing until I hit 80. I just really am curious if it's actually doing anything and if it's worth it.

Daniel Whitcomb responds...

Hi Jessica,

I honestly have to say that having 2 Death Rune talents probably isn't going to be the most efficient use of your runes. The point of Death Runes isn't necessarily to give you extra "utility" runes, but rather to convert runes into a form you can use for your most damaging attacks. For example, Death Rune Mastery converts Frost and Unholy Runes to Death Runes so you can use them for more Heart Strikes, whereas Reaping converts Blood Runes to Death Runes so you can use them for more Scourge Strikes. That means that as Unholy with Scourge Strike, you won't need your frost and unholy runes to become death runes because you'll be using them with Scourge Strike anyway, and as Blood with Heart Strike, you won't need your blood runes to become death runes because you'll be using them to Heart Strike anyway. Converting all your runes to Death Runes may give you slightly more flexibility, but I don't think that makes up for the stuff you could be getting with those extra points. To be completely honest, since you don't seem to like most of the really unique stuff about the Unholy tree, namely the pets and the blight, I'm thinking you might find the most fun and success with a straight up Blood build.

Of course, I'm a fan of using whatever build works for you, at least in solo or small group content, but I honestly believe you'd be better off dropping one of those Death Rune talents. Thanks for sending in your question and reading WoW Insider!

Jesse asked...

It seems that even Wow Insider has fallen onto the DK prejudice bandwagon. I wanted to take a look at the Build Shop and see about a new DPS spec for the weekdays when I'm not tanking Naxx. Zero Build Shop articles for DKs. Why does Wow Insider hate us so?


You're just not looking in the right places. While there's a good chance Build Shop will be returning, the last post to that column was written six months ago due to its retirement. Death Knights didn't even exist on live realms yet. If you're looking for Death Knight specs, the place you should be looking is our weekly Death Knight column, Lichborne, written by Daniel Whitcomb, the guy that answered the previous question. Right when Wrath of the Lich King launched he wrote about a series of good DPS/leveling/grinding specs, one for each Death Knight tree. He's also written about gearing up for DPS, a little about Death Knight Dual Specs, and a whole load more. It's one of our more popular columns, and you'll see it either on Sunday nights or Monday mornings, depending on how hard the WoW Insider HQ was partying that weekend.

Prejudice my patoot.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!