June 3rd, 2010 by dace

With the ascension of armor pen available on ICC gear, it’s time to take a good look at how the MM hunter armor pen build works.

Historically I haven’t been a huge supporter of armor pen builds. While they certainly posted impressive numbers for skilled hunters in very specific endgame gear, the majority of hunters would not have seen those numbers from pursuing an ArP build. Every week I get emails from hunters who read about armor pen builds on EJ or elsewhere and start stacking armor pen gems in their ilvl 200 gear and can’t understand why their dps went down.

However, the gear situation has changed. With triumph gear now being the easy gear to obtain from grinding heroics, frost gear slowly attainable to the masses and the awesome ICC itemization, it’s now possible for the majority of hunters to pursue an armor pen build if they want to — you can even hardcap your armor pen!

As a final note before we get started: even if you have the gear, you may not see better dps from a hunter armor pen build. There’s more to it than just gathering the gear. Also, you can absolutely do competitive dps without an armor pen build, and MM does not need high armor pen or an armor pen build to do fantastic dps.

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June 1st, 2010 by dace

Blood, the Death Knight tanking spec, while other spec’s have been viable, Blizzard recently decided that Blood will be the only Death Knight tanking tree in Cataclysm. While this does mean that you’ll probably be able to tank with frost and unholy for a little bit longer, why would you want to tank with a spec that is going to soon die out? There are plenty of advantages of blood that will surely convince you to join us. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and play styles of blood.

Blood is a tree centered around physical damage, while other trees have spells based on magic attack, most of our attacks and damage is from heart strike, our 41 point talent. While we do throw out a couple death coils here and there, the bread and butter of blood is from Heart Strike. As a Blood Tank, we have a generally larger health pool than other Death Knight tanks due to Veteran of the Third War. Blood tanks are also one of  the highest single-target threat producers compared to other tanks. While Frost and Unholy generally have better AoE threat than Blood Tanks, the advantages of having higher single target threat, a higher health pool, and some nice cooldowns outweigh the small AoE threat issue.

Talents

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May 18th, 2010 by dace

Almost everyone has a DK. Whether you are level 80 or not, there’s always some PvP to be done and fun for everyone. This week we will take a look at their abilities and talents and help you get on track to start PvP’ing. The Death Knight is one of the most utility filled class out there, PvP wise at least. With all the tools they are given, a Death Knight when put in the hands of the right player is a powerful force. Lets take a look at some of the tools that you have as a death knight.

Death Grip – This ability allows you to grip a target enemy and bring them to you. A very powerful gap closer that can be used to bring ranged enemies to you or stop a fleeing enemy.

Chains of Ice – A very versatile ranged snare, this is one of your best abilities. This ability costs 1 frost rune and applies Frost Fever to your target, so it can be spammed to keep an enemy from running.

Mind Freeze – The generic kick, when used during a spell cast, it will lock out any healing from that school for 4 seconds. Very powerful when used correctly.

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May 17th, 2010 by dace

This time I’m going to discuss a rogue PVP Combat build that I use and explain why I believe it is a viable build in the current climate of World of Warcraft. The build I use is a killing spree/setup build (0/53/18).

PvP can be a touchy subject for a lot of players, so I would firstly just like to say that this is an interpretation of my ideal PvP Combat build. To be totally honest I have only recently started back doing 3v3 Arenas and I am definitely not saying that it is the best build for everybody or that it will work best in all Arena situations, just that I have found it quite effective working my way up the 3v3 Arena rankings. I’m sure rogue players will be making small alterations to this build in order to suit their playstyle. Also please note that this build is more focused on Arena usage, but world PvPers and Battleground enthusiasts should find this info useful aswell.

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April 30th, 2010 by dace

I’m not going to fill your head with numbers this time, flash a graph in your face and tell you that one spec is better than the other. Basically, When all three warlock talent trees dps for about 200-300 of each other, which spec you use is almost entirely dependent on which one your favor and which brings the raid buff you want to bring to the table. Prefer to be among the melee dps? Go demo. Lots of healers and/or need replenishment? Go Destro with soul leech. They all put up very competitive numbers, and I can’t imagine the jealously the weaker classes have over our beautifully balanced trees (dps wise of course). Honestly… It’s a very good time to be a warlock.

Of course it isn’t as simple as just choosing a tree and filling it with points. There are accepted builds for top dps, and they are as follows (In no particular order    )

(55/0/16)  Affliction

This spec’s strength is the Improved Lifetap which syncs very nicely with the new change to lifetap, and one point in Cataclysm.

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