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Lichborne: One more round of Death Knight changes in 3.0.8
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.
Lichborne: Of Cabbages and Kings
Welcome to Lichborne, where each weekend, Daniel Whitcomb helps you keep pace with the ever-changing Death Knight class. This week, While Death Knight tweaks continue, there's no big piece of news that really stands out. We got a nice bump in damage to our base weapon strikes, Death Coil, and the abilities that mimic them in the talent trees in the latest build. Unfortunately, poor Plague Strike still sits at a sort of dismal 30% weapon damage, meaning it still doesn't feel like it scales as well as it should. But preliminary reports are still that it's a noticeable DPS increase. At the same time, our PvP utility and survivability was nerfed, but not in completely unexpected ways. Chains of Ice is dispellable again, as the devs felt that between it and Death Grip, it was far too hard to get away from a Death Knight. Again, this nerf is somewhat expected, if not needed, although some argue the nerf is unfair in the face of other classes that have similar abilities to ensnare and entrap opponents. I have to admit that I'm hoping we see, at the least, Chains of Ice getting put on Virulence. If nothing else, that Glyph of Blood Boil is looking a lot nicer. Still, none of the news really jumps out and grabs me, and with the beta patches coming fast and furious, it's hard to write with any authority on something that may be changed next week. With that in mind, I've decided this week to post on a potpourri of odds and ends from around the World of Warcraft as they relate to Death Knights, both stuff that refers back to previous columns and new observations. Read on:
The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing up your Retadin for Karazhan part I
So you're finally 70. Welcome to the select order of masochistic players who endured the tedious grind (or, if you leveled as Protection, the happy AoE grind) to max level with a class sometimes considered to be a WoW developer's afterthought. The Paladin class, popular as it is, has traditionally had a slow development cycle. That said, one can choose to see it as a blessing (pardon the pun) rather than a curse, in the hopes that developers will build Paladin talents adaptively and from the lessons provided by other classes. Don't hold your breath.Anyway, so you're Level 70. You're now ready to enter Karazhan. Well, ok, not really. Right about now is when you should be gearing up for Karazhan, The Burning Crusade's entry level and most popular raid instance. With the removal of the attunement process in Patch 2.4, you won't even need to have The Master's Key, but you'll need to have a friend who can open the gate for you. More than a few Holy Paladins will have an easy time getting into a group for Karazhan because let's face it, everybody loves a healer. Then there are the Paladin tanks who'll get that loving invite to visit Deadwind Pass because, again, everybody loves a tank. But you, the vindictive 2-hander-wielding, Judgement-spamming, Crusader Striking champion of truth and justice... well, nobody loves you.
