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Lichborne: Ruby Sanctum loot for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class. With the state of pretty much every class on beta in limbo thanks to the forthcoming talent revamp, we're taking a break from beta stuff to ransack the Ruby Sanctum. Hopefully, we'll see the new trees on beta in the next week or so, so we have more to work with than speculating on exactly what "signature abilities" everyone will get. In the meantime, we have shiny new loot and a new boss to tackle in the here and now. The Ruby Sanctum is ostensibly the last major raid of the Wrath expansion, and as such, ostensibly your last chance to get a few extra pieces of gear and uber yourself out before Cataclysm comes along and replaces everything with level 81 quest rewards. There are definitely some pretty prime upgrades to be had here, including a few straight-up best in slot drops, so let's get going and check out what you can grab. As with previous gear guides, try to keep your stat weights in mind, and when it comes to the heroic versions of these drops, unless otherwise noted, it's usually safe to say the same stuff about the heroic version, except even more so. Also, comparisons here are normal to normal, or heroic to heroic. Heroic versions of ICC loot are, for the most part, probably still going edge out normal Ruby Sanctum loot.
Lichborne: Unholy DPS in Wrath of the Lich King
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the ins and outs of the death knight class. With the last announced content patch of Wrath of the Lich King released, and the devs stating that they don't plan to make any major class changes until patch 4.0 and the Cataclysm expansion, It's a good time to start taking a look at how our trees have fared this expansion. Yes, I know that death knights were technically introduced this expansion. Certainly this means there's a comparative breadth to what we have experienced, but Wrath was a time of great change and turmoil for all of our mechanics and trees as well. Let's start our look back with Unholy, specifically by looking at two of its most volatile abilities: Unholy Blight and Scourge Strike.
Lichborne: Advice on Army of the Dead
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at the death knight class. In addition to Death Grip, which we discussed last week, there's another major death knight signature skill that requires a bit of a subtle hand to use correctly, and that has cause much angst and hatred on the part of non-death knights over improper or misunderstood usage. This spell is, of course, Army of the Dead. Army of the Dead is another one of those spells that is unique enough that it really doesn't have much of a place in a common rotation, but is powerful enough that it's worth learning to use well. This week, we'll take a look at the mechanics and proper usage of Army of the Dead
Lichborne: Demystifying Death Grip
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for tips, news, guides and opinions on the death knight class. So recently, as I've been working on trying to get the Loremaster title before Cataclysm hits, I've rediscovered the joy of queuing for the random dungeon as DPS. The 10- to 20-minute queue times offer a perfect little window of opportunity to finish up a good chunk of questing while I wait to get back on the emblem treadmill and allows me to take a break from tanking to get in a little bit of good old hacking and slashing. Of course, all this dungeon queuing has given me a good opportunity to see both some of my fellow death knights in action and to see how other people react to having a death knight DPSer in their group. Between that and observations from browsing the web and even simply from reading comments on past issues of Lichborne, I've noticed that one skill seems to be the most misunderstood and reviled by non-death knights: Death Grip. Thus, I figured that this week, we'd take a quick look at this much-maligned skill, so that you can understand the best practices to get the most out of this undeservedly hated and unique death knight ability. These tips will mostly apply for 5-man dungeons, but you'll probably find a lot of the basic principles will also apply to PvP and raiding.
Lichborne: Basic PvP tips and tricks for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look into the world of the death knight class. With Wrath more or less winding down and only the Ruby Sanctum before us at some nebulous point in the future, a lot of us are wandering around with full PvE gear and currency tabs full of emblems looking for a place to go. One easy place to let off some of that steam is with PvP. Be it arena, battlegrounds or (admittedly pretty rare these days) world PvP, this article will give you some basic tips to get yourself squared away with the gear and spec you need to start off on the right foot. This is by no means a complete guide to absolutely every aspect of death knight PvP. This'll help you get your feet wet and get properly geared, but there's always more to learn, especially in the dynamic, ever-changing world of PvP combat strategy and tactics. Still, nothing gives you a better start on the road to skill than a good foundation in stats and speccing, so let's start this up.
Lichborne: Unholy tanking 101
Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly death knight column. This week, we're refusing to say goodbye to a dying friend. Unholy tanking is both a unique and endangered form of tanking in WoW. Unique, because of Bone Shield, which makes unholy uniquely suited to be an avoidance tank, and endangered, because it's going to go away in Cataclysm. That said, there's still reasons to be an unholy tank, whether it's one last hurrah for your favorite playstyle, wanting to try the playstyle before it goes away or wanting to get used to Bone Shield before it moves over to blood to become a core tanking talent for all tank death knights. Whatever your reason, read on. This guide is meant to provide you with the basic talenting, glyphing and technique for starting out as an unholy tank.
Lichborne: Gearing for new level 80 DPS death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at death knight news, guides, tips and tricks. So you've just dinged level 80. Now what? If you're lucky, you've saved up a few Emblems of Triumph from random dungeon finder runs -- but for now, you're new, you're only halfway geared and you want to start running the dungeon finder as soon as possible so you can see the Lich King die before Cataclysm hits. How do you do that? Let's give you a few tips and a list of gear to shoot for to get you in top pre-raid shape.
Lichborne: Icecrown 5-man gear for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly look into the world of the death knight. This week, we're mostly waiting for the cold front to come in, but we got some other stuff we can talk about for sure. While we've all been waiting for Patch 3.3.3 to drop so we can decide if we're respeccing frost or not, It's become a pretty slow time in the death knight world. Debates continue on the best frost specs, whether Will of the Necropolis is worth getting now or even makes Blood the best tank spec, and so on and so forth, of course, so it's not completely quiet, but I've said my two cents on most of that before. It occurs to me, though, that I haven't really taken a good look at the Icecrown 5-mans for loot and opportunities for death knights. So for all my more casual and upcoming death knight friends, this one's for you.
Lichborne: Rune cooldowns, tank mastery, and Cataclysm
The devs have been speaking a little a bit about the new mastery system coming with Cataclysm, and while they've kept most of the specific numbers vague, there's been a surprising amount of information one can read between the lines about death knights. Of course, it started with the frost death knight stats. The stats were solidly DPS oriented, providing damage, haste, and runic power generation. This lead to two major concerns: What would frost tanks do for mastery? And for that matter, even DPS don't need runic power generation that much, considering we can only use so many frost strikes (or death coils for other specs) before we need to spend our runes anyway. The Blues actually gave answers to these questions, answers that managed to both answer the question and provide a whole new level of speculation and questioning. On the question of the new runic power bonus, Ghostcrawler and Eyonix revealed that death knights would find their rotation less constrained by the global cool down and rune cool downs, and that changes such as that would make the runic power generation more desirable. On the tank front, they're actually being deliberately coy about what they have planned for death knight tanks, but they at least seem to know the issue's on the table. This week, I figure it might fun to take a look at these statements and mull over some possible ways they might implement them.
Lichborne: Buttons more death knights should push
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly death knight column. Daniel Whitcomb sort of wanted to call this week's column "Neener neener, I can stand in the fire and you can't," but the editors weren't too enthused with it. One of the most important things you can do to become a good death knight is to solidify your damage (or threat) rotation or priority system so that you can consistently keep your runes on cool down and your damage high. That said, it's far from the only thing that marks a good DPS or tank. Another thing is flexibility. Death Knights have a wide variety of tools and tricks that can turn the tide of a battle. These tricks can be hard to weave into your existing system without giving up your rotation, but there are tricks to making it easier, and sometimes the benefit outweighs having to mess up your rotation for a few seconds. Let's take a look at 5 specific buttons that more death knight should be pushing.
Lichborne: Frostwing and Lich King loot for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly death knight discussion center. This week, your host is playing it cool in more ways than one, what with the test server shakeups to frost DPS. Before we start into this week's column, I do want to assure any prospective frost DPSers that I fully plan to write a frost DPS 101 guide. In fact, up until a few days ago, I had every intention of writing that as today's column. Then I sat down at the computer on Friday, and we had a nice shiny new PTR with a whole mess of frost DPS buffs. It's probably going to take a bit for us to sort through those buffs, see how they affect speccing and gearing, and whether or not they'll make it live, so for now, we're going to focus on some other topics. This week, the subject is the loot in the final section of Icecrown Citadel, the Frostwing Halls. There's only a few bosses here, but you'll find some great off-spec pieces, a few best in slots items, and some interesting weapon choices. I'll offer my usual disclaimer here and recommend that you go back and review the opening paragraphs of our Lower Spire loot guide, since it lists some basic stat rundowns and philosophies that you should keep in mind as you read these guides. You may also want to review the stat weights discussed in blood DPS 101 and unholy DPS 101 as you pick out your DPS gear from these pages.
Lichborne: Unholy DPS 101
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek at the world of the death knight. This week, we're looking at what may be the most volatile, versatile, finicky, and powerful of the death knight dps specs. 1. What is unholy DPS? Unholy DPS is one of the biggest roller coasters you can step on as a death knight DPSer, in that almost every major patch has bought huge changes to the tree, sometimes making it totally overpowered, sometimes slamming it down into the dirt, sometimes making a basic unholy spec look like a convoluted Escherian nightmare. In Patch 3.3, it's leveled off into a solid, dominant powerhouse that combines stronger diseases and physical damage with the added bonuses of a cool pet and a very powerful magical debuff. It's essentially the choice for any death knight DPSer who wants to maximize their DPS.
Lichborne: Crimson Hall loot for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, wow.com's weekly death knight column. This week, we continue our breakneck tour of the fabulous Ice Crown Citadel, premiere vacation getaway of the dead, rich, and infamous. Our look at ICC death knight loot continues this week with the Crimson Hall. Prepare for corny twilight jokes to go with your raiding (trust me, I know they're coming, and I will be making many of them). There's only 2 boss battles in this wing, but there's still plenty of loot to discuss. As before, I'd suggest you check out the introduction to the Lower Spire loot guide, as it does include some basic stat rundowns and philosophies that you should keep in mind as you read these guides. There's also a few wrenches in the gears (but good wrenches, since they involve buffs) for your loot selections as of Patch 3.3.2, which I'd expect will be live by the time you read this. We'll be getting an Ashen Verdict strength ring and a slight stat adjustment on tier 10 tank armor, so keep those in mind as you read. In short, you'll probably be keeping the Ashen Verdict strength ring as one of your main rings, and tier 10 tank gear looks a lot sexier now, at least for physical-based fights.
Lichborne: Plagueworks loot for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly death knight column. This week, your host, Daniel Whitcomb, is busy applying for a slot as one of Arthas' pall bearers. Do you think I should wear the Ebon Blade Tabard or the Argent Crusade Tabard for that? Good News Everyone! With the Deathbringer down, you don't have to wait for some gnome in a frying pan. The Plagueworks are open, and you can go right in. Before we take a look at the Plagueworks boss loot, you might want to go back and read the opening paragraphs of last week's Lower Spire loot guide. It outlines the basic parameters and stat considerations we death knights use in picking out our best loot. Once you've done that, read on for a look at death knight loot from the Plagueworks wing of Icecrown Citadel.
Lichborne: Icecrown Citadel - Lower Spire loot for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, where your host is still figuring out the perfect roleplay celebration macro for when he downs the Lich King -- when he's not writing about death knights, of course. With Icecrown Citadel now properly breached, hopefully even some of the less uber among us are making our way into the breach to say hello to the father of all death knights, the Lich King himself. Of course, as we start upon the final leg of the journey that started so long ago at Light's Hope Chapel, as we trudge ever closer to our destiny to the fight that will bring our story full circle, that may lead to our damnation or to a brighter new destiny, there's certainly a question that's on everyone's minds: What about the loot? It's a good question. Let's take a look at the loot from the first few bosses up in the citadel. Before we do, though, it's a good idea to take a quicker refresher course in why we choose what we choose:
Lichborne: Emblem of Frost gear for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight column. This week, Daniel Whitcomb is really regretting turning on his boombox in Acherus at the new year's party. By now, I assume a good portion of you have managed to get on your daily heroics at least a couple times a week, maybe even have an ICC raid or three under your belt. If so, you're starting to amass enough Emblems of Frost to maybe possibly think about buying a piece of gear. Of course, the problem with Emblem of Frost gear is that it's a little bit more expensive than, say, Emblem of Triumph gear. You're not going to get away with gearing up quite as fast, at least not until all of ICC is open and you have a good group for the place. No 25-emblem tier gear here. So that also makes it important, especially for the more casual player, to pick what you buy carefully. Let's take a look at the various options.
Lichborne: 2009 in review for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, where Daniel Whitcomb has decided that Boom Boom Pow is our class anthem for the new year, if only because those chickens are totally jackin' our style. So here we are, at the end of 2009. This marks the first full year of the Death Knight class, and it's definitely been an eventful year as Blizzard's balanced and rebalanced our class to help us fit into the ranks of the more established classes. We've been called flavor of the month and overpowered. I dislike the former label on philosophical grounds but grudgingly admit that the latter label has probably been correctly applied at certain points in time. Still, overall we've definitely had the ride of our lives over the last year as the devs have worked on a patch by patch basis to get us all figured out and settled in. Lets look at each tree and look back at the highlights and lowlights.
Lichborne: The whys and hows of PuGs and death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the Death Knights. Your host, Daniel Whitcomb, is pretty decent at alliteration but could use some work on cliches. Luckily, his Scourge Strike still hits hard, so it's all good. So with Patch 3.3 out and running, the biggest thing taking the WoW world by storm is definitely the Dungeon Finder tool. If you're like me, you've made pretty good use of it already, and are probably within a few more runs of your very own cute as a button pug pet in the bargain. If not, you should probably consider getting on that, seriously. Since running random dungeons is pretty much the in-thing to do right now, I figured I should devote a column to helping you brush up on your grouping skills. It never hurts to cover the basics, and if you're grouping with 1-4 complete strangers, it helps to be on your A game so that you can work with them and be easy to work with. Before we get into the basics though, let's set some goals for all that random dungeon running.
Lichborne: Patch 3.3 Roundup for Death Knights
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly Death Knight column, where your host, Daniel Whitcomb, continues to be caught in a bad romance with Unholy DPS. So we're back on the scene after a lazy and luxurious extended Thanksgiving holiday, and just in time for patch 3.3. Death Knights got their fair share of changes, some minor bug fixes and some rather large adjustments, including, of course, the obligatory complete rebalancing of unholy DPS. That said, with 3.3 the last major patch before Cataclysm, we can hope for some normalcy with the whole issue. Or we can expect Patch 3.3.1, either way. Regardless, since we're just starting out on patch 3.3, now's a good time to run down what patch 3.3 means for us, including a postmortem on the latest unholy DPS changes, and some advice on what to do with yourself in patch 3.3. Read on.
Lichborne: Death Knight tips for Trial of the Crusader, Part I
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly foray into the news, strategy, and zen of being a Death Knight, with your host, Daniel Whitcomb. So. You've conquered Ulduar and Naxxramas. Or maybe you've just collected a lot of badges and got some nice shiny gear. Either way, you're ready to go humor that old codger Fordring and fight and die in his silly little Arena. Even if the whole thing is obviously a waste of good time that could be spent killing the Scourge, the Ebon Blade's agreed to cooperate, so you'd better be ready too, death knight. So today, we'll give you a few tips about surviving the first few bosses of the Trial of the Crusader the death knight way.
