Resetting ROM Talent Points

Runes of Magic got a new patch today that included a significant skill/spell balancing pass.  (Inexplicably, the US official forum post only offers the patch notes in the form of a text attachment; the EU forum mods somehow managed to paste the text into a post like normal people.)  The initial reaction has been ugly, as practically all spells that previously cost a fixed amount of mana now also cost a percentage of your mana pool (less of an issue for my Druid/Rogue, whose nukes are powered by energy rather than mana), but this is as good an occasion as any to talk about the game's talent point system.

Unlike talents in WoW, TP in ROM are a sort of currency used to pay for upgrades to skills.  You get 10% of any exp you earn as TP, with an extra bundle each time you level up.  The cost to train each upgrade goes up with each level, so you can afford to max a few key skills, keep a larger number within a rank or two, or keep just about everything within half a dozen levels of the top.  Each of your two classes has a separate TP pool and you're free to pursue different strategies with each of them.

Given the full refund, I took the opportunity to divert TP from less used spells - my Druid now maxes three key DPS spells and spends the rest of the TP on keeping some heals up to par, while the Rogue has a more complicated rotation that includes half a dozen attacks and a variety of useful passive bonuses.  Apparently you can continue to gain TP after hitting the level cap, offering a form of alternate advancement and eventually getting all the upgrades to all the skills.  Though there are cash store items to gain more TP and/or reset your current choices (it is a free to play game after all), none of the choices are really irreversible since you can eventually gain more.

Overall, though I can see the potential for grind, it is also an interesting system.  The other thing that I like about it is that it avoids some of the advance study that goes into planning out a spec in other games, because you can upgrade your spells as you use them.  You might, as I did, end up with a few points sunk in spells that you don't end up using, or without the points to fully upgade a new ability at the level you receive it.  In the long run, though, it's much less of a learning curve than we see with alternate advancement systems in other games, where you need prebuilt builds from the forums or extended reseach before you start to make sure you don't make ineffective choices.

Early Impressions of Runes of Magic Classes

As is somewhat traditional, I've spent my first few days of investigating Runes of Magic on trying out all of the various character classes.  This takes on special significance in ROM because each character gets to pick TWO of the game's eight classes.  You can switch out which class is your primary class in town, and your secondary class offers some of its own abilities as well as some unique variations on your primary class themes. 

Without further ado, here are my initial gut reactions having taken each class through to level 10 (a bit over an hour).  The list is arranged in approximately the order in which I enjoyed the classes, take that for what you will.

Warden
The Warden primary is ROM's pet class.  They can also use some mana-based melee attacks (these are available to your other class when Warden is your secondary).  Because the Warden is an elf-only class, it cannot be combined with the human-only Priest or Knight.

Unfortunately, this class left me feeling like my job was to serve a support role for my NPC pet.  The pet's autoattacks do more damage than my Warden melee abilities, and it was actually more time efficient for me to act like a ninja looter and go loot corpses and quest items while the pet did the fighting.  I paired this with the scout and found myself leaning almost exclusively on the Scout's cross-class abilities for personal DPS over the Warden's own attacks.  (Perhaps a second melee class would have been a better choice.)

Scout
The Scout is an archer ranged dps class, with abilities powered by a "focus" bar (starts full, drains and refills rapidly, like a WoW rogue's energy bar).  As a secondary, this class confers the ability to equip bows and use some of the Scout's attacks.

Unlike your typical MMO archer, this class is perfectly happy to continue shooting arrow attacks while mobs are in melee range.  I'd thought that the Warden melee abilities would be useful while waiting for focus to regenerate, but I found that they did too little damage to be worth using.  Supposedly this class also gets some good synergy with the healing classes via higher level elite skills.

Warrior
This class is a melee DPS, powered by a rage bar that builds up while dealing or receiving damage.  You have a variety of one and two handed combo attacks, where one ability chains into another for greater impact. 

I was very underwhelmed with the way that the rage bar works in ROM.  It feels like you both gain and lose rage very quickly, and end up either watching autoattacks while waiting on rage or suddenly staring at a full bar just as the mob dies.  I think I'd like this class better paired with another class that offers melee attacks (Rogue, Warden, Knight) so that I'd be able to use the resource bar for the other class while waiting on the rage bar. 

Priest
This class is the human racial take on healing.  It's also a popular secondary choice because it grants access to healing abilities.  (In particular, Warriors, Scouts, and Rogues don't use mana for any of their class abilities, so that mana bar is fully available for low downtime self-healing while solo.)  This class is human-only, and therefore cannot mix with Warden or Druid. 

I had a lot of trouble playing this class, which was the only class where I died repeatedly.  Like the mage, you're completely dependent on your mana pool.  Unlike the mage, your spells don't do a ton of damage, so you can simply end up screwed if you get into trouble with a low mana bar.  Many players pair the mage with the priest (or the druid) because the two are pure casters that offer each other good passive bonuses to their primary roles.  The issue is that this also exacerbates the weakness of being mana-dependent. 

If I ever try this class again, it'll be paired with a non-mana-user.  Even then, I might end up dreading the time I have to spend leveling the priest side of the character. 

Rogue
ROM rogues need to wait for higher levels to get the abilities to stealth and dual wield, but otherwise will be familiar to anyone who has seen WoW's take on the class. 


I don't really have much to add to that.  The Rogue melees well, and is powered by a rapidly regenerating energy bar that leaves your mana bar (if applicable) available for whatever your other class does.  Works as advertised.  

Mage
This is your caster DPS class, offering some utility spells as a secondary.

As Yeebo told me a year ago, this class is comically overpowered at low levels, killing foes in one or two shots.  It is mana-dependent, but that matters less when you only need to scrape together enough MP for one or two spells to make it through a fight. I might be inclined to pair it with the knight for additional durability (and also for the Knight's own sake), because a caster really isn't going to be set up to take advantage of melee/archery when they need a fallback plan. 


Knight
This is a heavily-armored mana-based tanking-focused class, with holy damage and a variety of aggro management skills. As a secondary, it offers boosts to survivability and healing.  It's also the other human-only class, so it cannot be combined with Warden or Druid. 

This was probably the biggest surprise of the eight classes for me.  I looked at the spell list and was mostly ready to write the whole thing off.  The crucial thing I missed was that the class has not one but two combo point mechanics, one of which passively regenerates mana.  This means that you can spam attacks until you're running low, switch into pure regen mode for a mob or so, and then jump back into the action with a full mana bar.  Assuming you're not paired with a priest, you have no inherent means of regenerating health, but you're designed to tank, so you can mow through a bunch of mobs on one health bar. 

Though the priest is a tempting combo - with self heals, you go fully zero-downtime while soloing, and the priest secondary does offer a token ranged spell for pulling - I'm thinking mage as a pairing for this class.  The two complement each other very well - the mage gets durability and a holy-based nuke, while the knight can actually afford to USE the more costly mage utility spells. 

Druid
The druid is the elves answer to the Priest.  Druids have many more offensive spell options and slightly fewer healing options.  There's also a "nature's power" combo mechanic that is built up by casting certain basic spells and spent on more powerful abilities (most or all of which are high level).  Can't be paired with Priest or Knight. 

This was my overall favorite.  The spell casting power level feels about right in a niche between the mage and the priest.  As a secondary, I have a melee accuracy buff and a nice heal+regen spell that will make a melee character very happy.  Since I can't pair it with Knight, I paired this with the Rogue, and found that I was satisfied with both sides of the pairing.

The combinations
Overall, it's an interesting system.  If I was going to play four characters covering all eight classes, they would be:
1. Druid/Rogue (my probable main, at least for now)
2. Knight/Mage
3. Priest/Scout
4. Warrior/Warden (my two least favorites in the pairings I tried them in, but they actually might play well together, since you could open combat with the Warden's mana-based attacks and switch over to Warrior rage attacks later)

That said, there are subtle or not-so-subtle advantages to other pairings that could shake up the experience without having a system that is so wide open that it takes forever to find a good spec.

WoW To Replace 10 Classes With 30 Subclasses

World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion is quietly shaping up to be almost more of a sequel than a traditional expansion.  We already knew that they would be replacing the existing game world with a new one set six years in the future from the game's original launch.  Earlier this week, in a story that no one on my blogroll has commented on because of the uproar over RealID, they announced a change that may have equally major implications - a complete overhaul of the game's talent system.


Under the new system, Blizzard is essentially replacing WoW's 10 classes with 30 sub-classes. 


The state of the trees
The modern WoW talent system gives players one point for every level starting at 10, for a total of 71 points by level 80.  These points are divided amongst three trees that are unique to each class.  The final point in each tree requires 50 points spent, so typical builds take 51 or more points in a single tree and split the remainder amongst the low hanging fruit of other trees.

Philosophically, talents are about specialization, rather than alternate advancement (as seen in EQ2's AA system or LOTRO's traits).  Every character of a given level has the same amount of talent points, which are granted automatically upon leveling.  The cost of spending 51 points in a tree is not getting the abilities that cost 21+ in the other two.  This approach creates two issues.

The first is that tree-defining talents must be placed deep in each tree.  Anything in the first 20 points can be obtained by other specs.  For example, melee Enhancement Shamen currently cannot get the ability to dual wield until their 31 point talent at level 40, because the other two specs of Shaman are spell casters.  No other caster can dual wield, and it is not worth the bother of balancing around exactly one spec combination of one class (e.g. Elemental caster Shamen who happen to have taken Enhancement with their leftover points) carrying around two spell power weapons.

The consequence is that a leveling enhancement Shaman needs to use a 2-handed weapon for their first 39 levels.  Many classes need to wait as long 60 levels to obtain 51-point talent abilities that will be the core of their damage rotations at level 80.  If you care about new and low level players, which everyone does these days, that's way too long to make players wait to actually play their class.

The second issue is one of balance.  The addition of even a single talent point allows specs to reach previously unattainable 21-point talents in their off-trees.  Worse, each tier has to be more powerful and more defining than the previous tier if Blizzard does not want players to start going with hybrid 2-3 tree specs.  It's hard enough for Blizzard to balance a role for each of the existing 30 trees without worrying about the prospect that some obscure 41/30 spec will turn into an overpowered/broken combo.

What is changing
Under the new system, players will effectively choose a sub-class - one of their existing talent trees - before spending their first talent point at level 10.  Choosing the subclass will immediately grant a previously exclusive talent ability that will not be purchaseable by the other subclasses for any amount of points, even if the next expansion adds a thousand of them.  For example, the melee Enhancement Shaman will immediately receive the dual wielding ability, along with a previously 36-point off-hand attack. 

Speaking of points, there will be way fewer of them.  No tree will go further than 31 points (down from the current 51), and players will receive only 41 points by the new level cap (down from the current 71).  To further constrain things, players will not be allowed to spend a single point outside their chosen tree until they have spent 31 points in the main tree.  Effectively, players will have a mere 10 discretionary points to divide between the two off-trees and/or additional points in their main tree.

The end result is a dramatic reduction in the range of customization options at players' disposal.  The variations between specs of a subclass will be much more akin to the variations on a theme in EQ2 subclass AA trees.  The theory is that, in exchange, each subclass can be more unique and better balanced against the other 30 subclasses. 

Why and How
All these problems were well known, but Blizzard's initial plan was to ignore them and blaze ahead with five more talent points for the five new levels.  To be honest, I didn't think they had the nerve to mess with something so fundamental.  Perhaps they didn't until they actually tried the traditional tree revamp and were unsatisfied with the results.  Apparently reaction to an initial preview of the new trees was enough to steel their resolve to burn the system down and rebuild it from scratch.

In the short term, this will be a mess.  We are probably no more than four months from the retail launch of the expansion, in a public, no-NDA closed beta.  It is almost certain that the system will need some work at launch, and I'd imagine that Ghostcrawler and his team won't be getting much sleep during that time.  In the long term, though, this change could have a huge positive impact on the game.

The fact is that a wide open system means that most of the options will be bad, and the few unexpected gems may be in line for balance nerfs.  In exchange for that limited freedom, the developers can improve the experience for the subclasses that are left.  The new system will also do a better job of scaling with future expansions, which might only add 2-3 additional points.  Either way, this is one change that looks to live up to the Cataclysm name.

Frostfire Niche Fail

Apparently, there is a perceived lack of quality WoW mage bloggery. I can't really fix that personally, since WoW is one of four MMORPG's I'm currently playing, and I don't even spend all of my time on my mage anymore. However, I have had a bit of time to respec the mage yet again (currently arcane for PVP and random instances, frost for soloing dungeons from the previous expansion), and that got me thinking about niches.

History of a new toy
The big shiny toy for mages in the current expansion was Frostfire bolt. Mages traditionally throw balls of either frost, fire, or arcane energy. Blizzard decided to shake things up in the new expansion with the "Frostfire" ball, a snowball that someone light on fire. Frostfire bolts are simultaneously frost and fire spells, which meant that they would benefit from talent enhancements to BOTH schools of magic. This put the spell in an awkward position where it would either be too good, or not good enough.

At Wrath's launch, the scale had swung too far in the "too good" direction. Fire-based Frostfire specs delivered almost as much damage as pure Fires specs, while offering greatly improved mana efficiency and solo capacity. (Remember, dual specs did not arrive with Wrath's launch, so this was actually a non-zero issue for the pure fire spec in the days before gear inflation broke the difficulty curve.) No one used Frost-based Frostfire specs because Frost's damage was already low. This was a very good thing for mages in the longterm, because Frosty-fire delivered even more control than a pure Frost spec, and something besides impact would have gotten nerfed if it had been more popular.

Anyway, it didn't make sense for one spell to obsolete both of its parent specs, so changes were made. Pure Fire specs got better mana regeneration and more damage, rendering Fire-based Frostfire obsolete. Pure Frost got more damage and a new replenishment ability that specifies that it only works on frostbolt. Today, the main highlight of getting Frostfire Bolt at level 75 is that it turns your Brain Freeze fireball procs blue.

Failing to find a niche
I've actually spent some time with all six possible primary tree + off tree combinations during the Wrath era, and Frostfire specs always feel like they're competing with the pure elemental specs. Pure frost has a niche in controlling foes. Fire has a niche in raw damage. Arcane has a niche in speed and efficiency when burning through encounters quickly. There isn't really room for a Frostfire niche, and, indeed, it's not entirely clear what the developers intended for one.

This type of challenge is not at all unique to WoW - take, for example, EQ2's struggle to find niches for six tanking classes when raids don't need that many tanks (and certainly not the sub-optimal ones). It just raises an interesting challenge. Someone had a creative, if perhaps slightly unusual idea and turned it into a spell, but it doesn't seem to have anywhere to go from there. Maybe the spell will get reworked from a primary nuke into something more situational in the future. For now, though, it appears to be a solution to the non-existent problem of what to do when facing an enemy that is immune to your preferred element.

Fury-well to Arms Spec

Several commenters suggested that I try switching my budding Warrior alt from Fury to Arms for a different experience. As it happened, I'd just finished saving up enough gold to pay for dual spec (with 1000G in the bank for cold weather flying when I need it), so I figured that there wouldn't be any harm in taking the other DPS spec for a spin before using the second slot on a tanking spec (presuming that I decide I'm brave enough to try tanking).

Superficially, the two specs have a bit in common. Arms Warriors get the famous Mortal Strike skill instead of the Fury self-healing Bloodthirst attack. Instead of waiting on a talent to proc instant-cast Slam attacks, Arms gets talents that proc instant Overpower and/or Execute attacks. Because these abilities require Battle Stance, I don't get to use Whirlwind (a staple of the Fury rotation), but I get additional tools including Thunderclap, Sweeping Strikes, Retaliation, and Bladestorm to deal with additional foes.

Regardless of how different the two are on paper, though, I find that I greatly prefer the feel of the Arms spec. The results may be similar, but it feels more interactive to be making a choice that now I want to hit multiple targets or now I want to do something that refills my health bar. With Bloodthirst and Whirlwind in the standard Fury rotation, both situations all but take care of themselves for solo content. Arms might be less effective (especially against casters, for lack of convenient access to pummel), but it feels more fun - perhaps the decreased efficiency even helps raise the difficulty from trivial to "need to pay some attention".

P.S. Also, there's nothing that I've done on any of my characters that quite compares to Bladestorm. In solo content, clicking that button makes four mobs die in the next seven seconds. The thing is on a cooldown (90 seconds, 75 with a glyph), but you shouldn't need to pull four mobs at once more often than that, and you've always got Retaliation in your back pocket if there's still mobs standing when you're done spinning around.

Requiem for a Blood Spec

Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that they would be gutting and overhauling the Death Knight tanking talents. The class was originally designed with three talent trees (same as the other classes), but each tree contained both melee DPS AND tanking talents. This predicament was not entirely unique - Feral druids also use one tree for both tanking and DPS - but I can see how it is a balance challenge that will only increase as Cataclysm allows more cross-tree points.

As a result, the Death Knight blood tree will become a dedicated tanking tree in the expansion. I'm a bit puzzled about why DPS blood, as opposed to frost, was chosen to get the boot, when the DK frost stance is used for tanking. (WoW.com claims that DPS blood had drifted closer to DPS unholy, which is as good an idea as any.) I'll also admit to a bit of nostalgia.

The blood spec I knew and abused in the Wrath beta is long since gone - at varying points it the beta, it was possible to spawn half a dozen blood worms and solo just about anything that couldn't one-shot you. I ultimately opted to reincarnate Cheerydeth as a rogue rather than suffer the disappointment of playing the Death Knight in a state that actually resembles balanced. Even so, I'm a bit sad to see the option of revisiting the minion horde go away.

In related news, Klep quips that shaman tanking will be the next spec overhaul. The new spec that has me really excited, only a week late for April Fools Day, is the new Frost Mage kiting/tanking setup. The Frost mage taunt will be a skill called "got your nose" that only works on frostbitten foes, and forces them to chase the mage until they can get in melee range. The ability also applies a debuff called "to spite your face" that reflects any non-melee damage the afflicted mob might otherwise be tempted to send the mage's direction.

Specs and Character Customization

Suicidal Zebra made a post a week or so back about Ret Pally Specs in patch 3.2. He comments:

"...this isn't rocket science. There's still only 59 talents which increase your DPS, and taking all the essentials (including JotW) only requires an investment of 62"

There are effectively three things that affect character performance in an MMORPG:
- Out-of-game player skill (i.e. a world-class raider could sit down at my keyboard and get better DPS on my character with all of my other in-game choices intact)
- In-game choices that the player has limited control over (e.g. I won't have access to loot from bosses I have not killed)
- In-game choices that the player has full control over, such as talent specs

On paper, the point of talents, AA's, etc, is to allow for customization of characters. When you're done, you've created real differences between different characters of the same class. The cost of taking a specific spec is not being able to take a different spec. That cost is eliminated if there is no reason to ever use a different spec, because there is one clear winner.

Whether you've got the 9 talent points that the Zebra says Ret Pallies have to play with or the 2-3 that most mage specs get, the fact is that it's not rocket science to pare down most WoW talent trees to a core set of essentials. In fact, Blizzard has been systematically working to make this easier, by reducing "bloat" in trees over the years. I can look at the talent tree for a class that I've barely ever played and make a relatively good guess at what its raiding spec will look like. The same is somewhat true in EQ2 and LOTRO, with the caveat that those games' talent equivalents are not obtained automatically, so the player has to unlock options before being allowed to take them.

Perhaps stats that affect performance aren't a good place to put character customization. If the effects are too small, the choices won't be meaningful because they won't be noticeable. If the changes are large enough to make a real impact, there's always going to be a "best" option for the bulk of your points. In either case, it almost seems like the point of these systems have been lost.

Players technically still have the option to try off-the-wall specs (last expansion, I was using some very unusual specs on both of my high level WoW characters); occasionally, you might even find some unexpected gem that lets you solo raid bosses until the devs hotfix it. In general, though, powerful top tier class-defining options dictate how players should spend ever increasing proportions of their customization points. Without options, the choice isn't really much of a choice at all.

Does WoW Have All The Classes It Needs?

I was skimming through Stropp's blog, when his post on Blizzard's Cataclysm trademark reminded me that I never got around to commenting on that whole somewhat overblown kerflaffle. As he notes, Cataclysm sounds more like the name of an expansion than a new product, and the next WoW expansion is almost certain to be announced in a month at Blizzcon.

I actually took a crack at predicting the expansion's contents, just prior to the Wrath launch. At the time, I accepted Tobold's unexciting prediction that the expansion would contain a healing-based hero class. After all, healers and tanks are the two hard roles to fill, and this expansion added a tank. It appears that we may have been incorrect.

More Niches Than Classes?
The former WoW Insider links to an interesting interview with WoW (the game, not the now confusingly-named news site) Producer Tom Chilton. Though he confirms nothing, in true Blizzard fashion, he does state:

"...we don't feel that we can support the pace of adding a new class with every single expansion."

Looking back, this makes a fair amount of sense. WoW now has four tanking-capable classes, four healing-capable classes, and four classes that cannot do anything besides DPS. (Those numbers add up to twelve instead of ten because Pallies and Druids can both tank AND heal.) Breaking it down by talent trees, we have five healing trees, six tanking trees, and twenty three trees that can be used for dps (including feral druids and the three DK specs, which can also be used for tanking, for a total of 34 instead of 30.) Carving out a niche for each of those variations is a tall order that Blizzard is struggling with at the moment.

Eight months ago, I thought that the need for more people willing to heal outweighed those difficulties. Now, I'm less convinced.

Do more healing classes mean more healers?
Blizzard made a decision to design the Death Knight with three trees that could BOTH tank AND DPS, in the hopes that this flexibility would encourage them to tank as needed. In practice, the way the game is set up strongly favors players making up their minds which role they intend to pursue and sticking with it. As I noted at the time, you can get players to roll as a new tanking capable class by making a shiny new class, but that does not necessarily convince them to become tanks. The hypothetical Arch-Druid/Warden healer hero class, with three trees that can both DPS and heal, would have suffered largely the same fate.

Instead, Blizzard decided to go with dual specs so that current players of healing-capable classes could learn to do so. Though I don't have statistics to back this up, it does seem like finding a healer for a PUG (if not necessarily a great healer) has gotten much easier since patch 3.1. This solution is not necessarily ideal, as it blurs character identity. Then again, as Spinks observes, adding more and more tanking class options don't necessarily help find the tanks raid slots. That may be just as important a factor as the actual merit of the classes in question.

So What's Left for the Cataclysm?
The Chilton interview claims that there is a fair amount of ground left to cover, but chooses to mention only the two long-time front runners - the South Seas Islands with the Maelstrom, and the Emerald Dream. He also notes that they feel that new playable races should be races that have been seen in WoW before, rather than dropping Draenai in with no warning from Outer Space. Though he does suggest that BWL Drakenoids would be a cool player race - which would fit nicely with my Clash of the Dragonflights idea for an expansion - I'm not sure that making those guys playable would actually seem any less out of left field.

Perhaps Blizzard still would favor new races, with the opportunity to add in some new scattered content settlements in the 20-60 range to flesh out the new backstory. Or perhaps we're looking at a new expansion with neither new races (Blizzard does not seem inclined to use neutral races, so they would have to add two at once) nor new classes. If that's true, though, there will be extra pressure on Blizzard to deliver something that really makes players sit up and notice, if they don't want their expansion announcement - 10 new levels and what else? - to be a big disappointment.

Mage solo approaches

A friend of mine asked for advice on good solo specs for level 80 mages. It doesn't seem like there's much discussion of this question, perhaps in part because daily quests are more focused on travel time than actually killing anything. I don't think my raiding Frostfire spec is very good at soloing, but it's somewhat of a moot point when you consider that, fully raid buffed (including a flask), I have a 40% crit rate and will one-shot many daily quest mobs on a crit. So why am I less than fond of the spec for soloing?

(Note: If you're not familiar with mage specs, I did a bit of a rundown of the major mage specs in my discussion of the new dual spec feature last month.)

Balancing Mana, Health, and Time
When a frost mage is soloing and ends up with more mana than health, the frost mage can turn that excess mana into HP quickly and efficiently by casting Ice Barrier. Indeed, I used to make a point of NOT casting ice barrier to conserve mana by taking damage while solo farming/questing. Recovering from half empty health and mana is much faster than recovering from full health and no mana because the current mage foods regenerate both at once.

When an arcane mage ends up with more mana than health, they might use mana shield, though this is very inefficient, or they might simply break out the big guns. The Arcane Blast combo mechanic, paired with missile barrage, gives the spec the ability to convert mana into damage very quickly, which kills the mob and thus indirectly causes the mage to take less damage. Meanwhile, Arcane mages will have a 2-minute cooldown on evocation, which makes the [Glyph of Evocation] a substantial source of healing. Again, this gives very efficient use of downtime, if you even need any between evocation breaks.

By contrast, the fire mage's mana sink, the talent Hot Streak, triggers only when the mage gets two consecutive critical hits. The very situation in which you would WANT access to extra burst damage - because a mob is hitting you - is precisely the one where you will generally NOT have access to Hot Streak. Maybe this factor is less pronounced with Fireballs than Frostfire bolts, but most solo enemies aren't going to SURVIVE two consecutive crits in the first place (i.e. either it doesn't proc, or it does but the mob is already dead).

(The tables turn in group content, where you will be nuking a large target repeatedly enough to count on using your hot streak proc. Meanwhile, keeping the mage healed in a group is someone else's job, so it's the frost mage's ice barrier that becomes irrelevant.)

Creating the impression of downtime
The frost mage avoids damage through a variety of snares and freezing effects, and by having a pet up 50% of the time. You really don't have to take much damage.

The arcane mage also has several damage avoidance tools, including Slow and access to a wider variety of spells that can be cast while kiting a slowed foe.

The fire mage, by contrast, doesn't have either a snare or the impressive combo between the old form of Impact and Molten armor. Spells like Dragon's Breath, Blast Wave, and the new Impact+Fire Blast buy the mage barely more time than the global cooldown for casting them. Though mobs will occasionally get burnt to a crisp by a single massive crit, I feel like I'm taking more damage. Without either ice barrier or 2-min glyphed evocation, recovering from that damage means sitting and drinking more.

Maybe I'm still killing faster in the aggregate, but it FEELS like more downtime. This is especially true by comparison to the arcane spec, since that short evocation cooldown will count off while you're en route to your next destination.

Considerations for future content
As I discussed in my dual spec post, players in WoW no longer need to choose between a spec that works much more efficiently in a group (such as the Fire and Frostfire specs I avoided for so long) and a spec that is better for some combination of solo and PVP.

On the other hand, it does seem odd that, relatively early in the expansion cycle, it doesn't really seem to matter that much which spec I'm using. If I forget to swap out of raid mode and decided to kill a few mobs using my Frostfire spec, they still die pretty quickly. Perhaps my memories of the TBC era were colored by not having raided, but I really don't remember the combat portion of daily quests getting so trivial so quickly.

I guess this may have been part of the impetus to go to a vehicle interface for the Argent tournament quests. The current quests are equally difficult no matter how good the player's gear is. Still, it will be a bit disappointing if the only solo tasks for my mage to tackle for the next year til the next expansion are little more than fed ex runs, with the occasional stop to loot.

Harnessing Dual Spec DPS Potential

Back before dual specs went live, I speculated on their impact. I figured that they would make a big difference for classes than can spec into tanking and healing, but didn't think the effects would be as dramatic on DPS classes. Now that I've had a chance to play around with dual specs on my mage, I've been impressed with the added options and diversity the specs add to the class.

Major Options
Mages have a number of options available to them. The more common ones:

- Fire PVE: There are two main variations on fire specs (either one uses 53ish points in Fire) depending on which main nuke you prefer. The Fireball version takes 18 points in Arcane (to get Torment the Weak), offering the most raw damage potential at the expense of mana efficiency (and the need to take more hit rating gear, as you cannot get any hit from talents).

The Frostfire version, which I'm using as my raiding spec in one of my two slots, takes points in Frost to beef up Frostfire bolt, offering substantially more mana efficiency at the cost of some raw damage potential. I pulled down 3.4K DPS on Archavon (no flask) this afternoon, which is a huge step up from my old Frost-based Frostfire spec (low 2Kish DPS). Raid buffed with the right procs, I've seen my Frostfire Bolts crit for nearly 12K.

- Arcane PVE: Uses the new Arcane Blast combo point-like mechanic (stack 1-3 Arcane Blasts followed by either a Arcane Barrage or a Missile Barrage), combined with frost for Icy Veins. (There's also a variant that gets the improved scorch buff if your raid needs it.) My understanding is that it's less sustained damage than the Fireball spam build, but with better burst damage via cooldowns, better ability to burn excess mana for damage, and sometimes better damage for fights that require movement due to Arcane Barrage. You are somewhat dependent on being able to safely channel all 8 seconds of evocation to avoid going OOM.

- Arcane PVP: A more traditional version of this build focuses on picking up survival talents like improved blink, instant cast invisibility, and lots of instant cast burst damage. I'm using an Arcane Barrage/Impact build that takes my favorites from the survival talents (invisibility, counterspell, magic absorption) with as many of the damage talents as I could afford and the revised impact. Serious PVP'ers don't use Molten Armor (in part because PVP gear doesn't typically have much spirit on it), but the armor combined with lots of instant cast spell options is enough to make my fire blasts a nigh guaranteed stun. I'd probably get slaughtered in the arenas, but it's fine for Wintergrasp, and the arcane combo mechanic is much more fun than Frostfire for farming and daily quests. Also, I love having the Glyph of Evocation (adds major HP regen) in a build with a 2 minute Evocation cooldown, it basically eliminates all downtime while farming.

- Frost PVE: The good news is that you get to provide Replenishment and the raid spell crit buff with your primary nuke. The bad news is that you're doing much less damage than the other options. The other bad news is that you need to avoid taking all of the ranks of your replenishment talent because having a 100% proc rate refreshes the replenishment effect too frequently, causing your entire group to get less mana regeneration than they should (even if there is a less ineffective version of replenishment in the raid).

- Frost PVP: Here you get even better survival than Arcane offers, thanks to ice barrier and more frequent ice blocks. The water elemental shatter combo lets you pull off decent burst damage, and Deep Freeze (Frost's effectively PVP only 51 point talent, since most meaningful PVE mobs are immune to stuns) can mess with someone's day.

- Niche options: Fire PVP is sadly a mess, and the crab says he doesn't know how to fix it without stepping on the other two trees' toes (much like Frost PVE remains an issue). Frost-based Frostfire builds aren't really good for much of anything, though one could imagine a Focus Magic/Master of Elements/Water Elemental tri-spec build that really taps the maximum potential of Blizzard AOE spam. Some people have brainstormed hybrid Arcane/Frost builds to try and squeeze all the survival talents out of both builds for Arenas (at the cost of damage potential).

Freedom to Experiment
Greenwiz carried some form of Frost spec for the better part of three years. It wasn't the best option, just the most versatile in terms of covering solo, PVP, and raid content (albeit poorly) in a single build. Now that I have a second option, it's okay that my Frostfire build does tons of damage in group setting and is not very fun to play in other settings. It's okay that I've optimized my off-spec arcane build for non-raid content, as I'm no longer leaving nearly a third of my DPS potential on the table come raid time.

I do think that some things have been lost in this switch. I used to describe Green as a Frost mage, and now he's either Fire (with a minor in frost) or Arcane (with a minor in fire) depending on what I'm doing. In some ways, the system even favors using the two specs for two completely separate roles; there's no way that I'm going to fail to notice that I'm in the wrong spec for the situation (in the way that, for example, I fail to notice that I'm wearing PVP or farming gear instead of spell hit). Removing the cost of specializing allows diversity, but it also removes some of the consequences of bad (or at least highly situational) decisions when you can have a cookie cutter spec available at the push of a button.

Still, I have to say that I view the feature as a much bigger success than I expected. There really are differences in playstyle between the various specs, and being able to swap back and forth has made the character feel more versatile and powerful without actually increasing his power level at any given moment. This particular persistent virtual world is still first and foremost a game, and I'm willing to put up with some cost in terms of virtual world identity in exchange for a more interesting gameplay experience.

Update on Level 80 Priorities

After I hit 80 on my mage, I wrote up priorities for what I'd be working on at 80. I've spent a bit of time since working on a two part Gear Guide, and I even formalized a set of New Year's Resolutions on the topic.

So, a month or so after the fact (longer on the calendar, but I was out of town for a week in there), how is it going?

Reputations and Daily Quests
Through the combined modern miracles of daily quests and tabards, Green is now exalted with Wyrmrest, the Kirin Tor, and the Argent Crusade. He's a day away from exalted with the Oracles, and was already exalted wih the Kalu'ak when he hit 80.

I deliberately chose to put off the Hodir and Ebon Blade reps to help ward off daily quest burnout. I'll go as far as I can on the Ebon Blade front via dungeon rep, because I find most of the dailies are on the tedious side. Hodir I will have to bite the bullet on, but I'm going to wait for the oft-delayed patch 3.0.8 to see how the new repeatable quest for [Relic of Ulduar]. There's also the matter of the Argent Vanguard - I'm not even sure off-line where my rep is on that front because it's a meta-faction not reported in the armory. Either way, I'm getting pretty close to finished with reps.

Unfinished Quests
I'm pretty sure I've managed to gear up beyond the level of any remaining non-repeatable quests in Northrend, but I do still want to finish enough quests in Icecrown to finish up Icecrown: The Final Goal so I can get Loremaster and craft my own [Deathchill Cloak].

Wintergrasp and PVP
I actually obtained my first heirloom item, and am well on my way to a second. The bad news is that, in my view, Wintergrasp is nigh impossible to defend. We'll see how the poll turns out, but the current stats have definitely dampened the enthusiasm I had for the zone a month ago.

Dungeons
Though I said at the time that I was not not all that interested in PUG'ging dungeons, I have wound up doing PUG Heroics for the excellent rewards. I'm halfway through my newly revised goal of finishing all twelve heroic dungeons.

Crafting
On hold til patch 3.0.8 due to pending material cuts.

Alts
I'm considering taking my rogue for a spin once I get the 80ish shards I need to get her a heirloom dagger (an unusually big deal for a Rogue because they have dagger-required attacks, and it's irritating to choose between sticking with an out-dated dagger and losing several key skills). How far that project goes will depend on whether the novelty of literally burning through levels outweighs the fact that I've done all the old content multiple times. Not feeling much interest in taking the Ret Pally through Northrend just yet.

Misc Achievements and Cash
The cash is piling up as a result of day to day activities, and I haven't decided if I want to save it, spend it on misc projects (e.g. dropping Tailoring and powerleveling Jewelcutting, etc), buy raid BOE's (I'm never fond of that much money for incremental upgrades, but I suppose I'd reconsider if a best-in-slot BOE came along for a price I can afford), or burn the cash on fluff money sinks (e.g. mounts, pets). I do still want a motorcycle for my Hunter, but that is NOT something I'm going to be making a top priority out of.

As to misc achievements, those are getting closer to the top of my list because I'm running out of other stuff. We'll see how far I decide to go on that front.

Newish item: Gearing up
Since I wrote my gear guide, I've actually obtained a good 10 items off my shopping list. Right now, the major holes remaining in my gear are the hat (solved with 3.0.8), the pants (Heroic Loken or Archavon), and maybe a wand (Heroic Azjol Nerub?). I will also need to juggle some items to stay at the hit cap on my hit set, and to meet meta gem requirements, and there are a few slots with some minor upgrades, but, at the moment, nearly half my gear is what I consider best-in-slot for my status as a non-raider.

New item: Experimenting with specs?
I'm currently running with an unconventional Water Elemental/Critical Mass Frostfire build. I wasn't very interested in Deep Freeze at the bottom of the Frost tree, and I REALLY wasn't interested in removing the snare from my main nuke with the [Glyph of Frostbolt]. Meanwhile, going with a 24 point investment in the Fire tree gets me Impact, Burning Soul (works on Frostfire Bolt), and some other goodies. The catch is that it's very clear in group settings that I'm doing significantly less damage than I should be based on the quality of my gear, while often literally being unable to spend my mana fast enough.

The real question is where to go from there. I tried the cookie cutter Fire/Frost Frostfire build back when I first got the spell but it felt like being a Frost mage without two of my key frost tools (Ice Barrier and the Elemental). Euripedes has a 2-part post up on the Arcane Barrage + Shatter Arcane/Frost build. I find this intriguing for PVP (lots of burst damage and instant casts), but I'm not looking to formally adopt a PVP-focused build until dual specs come out.

One alternative I'm considering is the currently less-than-common Fire spec that actually still casts Fireball over Frostfire Bolt. (Broadly speaking, it's something like this build, though apparently Molten Fury and Torment the Weak are currently incompatible due to a bug). This appeals to me because I dislike total cookie cutter builds. The big major catch is that there's no room in that build for 8 points in the Frost tree, which means that I would lose 3% hit rating from Elemental Precision. I haven't decided how much this bothers me - I'm still near 6% in my everyday gear, which means I can hit cap 5-mans without it, but it could be a problem for my raid boss hit numbers. Then again, this build may be good for more than a 500+ DPS upgrade over my current numbers, so a little hit rating may be the least of my concerns.

Either way, I'm probably keeping my 50% uptime Elemental til I finish those Icecrown quests, but, after that, it may be time to experiment.

How is the length of the expansion doing?
As I predicted/feared, I'm getting pretty close to done with all of the non-raid things I can do in the game that will advance my main's gear after a month at 80. That's the same boat everyone is in, raider and non-raider alike, but it's unfortunate. Unless there's some treasure trove of stuff I haven't done and never knew I wanted to, odds are good that I may be playing a second game on the side (most likely EQ2) by the time I hit 2 months at 80.

We Didn't Start the Frostfire

When I first heard about Frostfire Bolt, I was not impressed. Don't get me wrong, my Fire-specced friends would have killed for a spell that deals frost damage to fire-immune mobs when we were raiding Molten Core back in 2005. The spell comes with a weird compromise of Fireball's base range (but NOT range extension from talents), a 3 second cast (talented fireball casts at 3s, while talented frostbolt casts at 2.5s), and BOTH Frostbolt's useful chill effect and Fireball's detrimental damage over time effect (rarely enough damage to make a difference in the fight, but just enough that you can't resheep your target if you get your targeting backwards).

Little did I realize the full destructive power that can be had by conjuring up a little water, freezing it into a large snowball, setting it ON FIRE, and hurling it at one's enemies.



The Numbers
My mage just hit 75, so I'm working with rank 1 of the spell (the level 80 version does about 100 more damage). Sitting at around 1100 spell damage with an appropriate 48 fire/18 frost build, it's good for about 2K per hit and somewhere around 4500-5000 for a crit. (By comparison, I was doing about 1800 regular/3600 crit on regular frostbolts as a deep frost spec.) What makes this spell fun is that it benefits from talents that enhance BOTH Fire AND Frost spells. At level 75, you can cherry pick the best of both worlds.

On the downside, you don't have either a water elemental (which I do like immensely), or ice barrier (which is nice because the frost build is pretty mana efficient, and having a PW:S equivalent means not having to take damage either). What do you get for giving up some goodies? Well, I decided to take a real fire build for a spin for the first time ever to give it a shot.

Crispy Fried Eagle


The victim that I found was a hapless eagle in the Grizzly Hills. What the massive chunk of combat log spam I've posted above doesn't convey is the sense of time. Let's break it down.

t=0: I cast frost nova to freeze the soon to be crispy fried bird, and incidentally dealing 636 damage. Under ideal circumstances, the bird might be frozen in some other way, such as via Frostbite, but that's the start of the combo.
t=1.5s: Global cooldown is over, I used the time to back out of melee range and promptly start casting Frostfire Bolt.
t=4.5s: As this time approaches, I start mashing the button for the instant cast fireblast, thus the note in the log that I failed to cast the spell a second time because it had already gone off.
t=4.50001s (or whatever): The Frostfire Bolt has a travel time and the Fire Blast arrives instantly, so both hit our hapless frozen bird. Enter Shatter. I'm looking at a 24% base fire spell crit rate (haven't been stacking crit rating, and the stuff I have has been degrading as I leveled), plus an extra 50% because the bird is frozen. The Fire Blast crits for 2357 damage, while the Frostfire Bolt crits for 4417.
t=4.50002s (or whatever): Now my talent procs kick in. The bird is set on fire with ignite, so he should be in store for another 40% of that 6.7K pair of crits over 8 seconds. I get a lucky impact proc, which is a 10% chance on any spellcast (not just fire anymore, it's great for Frost mages too these days), so he's also stunned for 2 seconds. He's also re-frozen by Frostbite (the crits broke the original freeze) for 5 seconds. And, to add insult to injury, I get back 30% of the base mana cost of each spell from Master of Elements (even though I probably got a discount off of that base number via talents), AND a [Mark of Defiance] mana proc for good measure.
t=4.50003s: As if all that weren't bad enough, I just got two consecutive crits with qualifying Fire spells, which means it's time for Hot Streak to proc.
t=6s: I cast an instant cast Pyroblast for 2.5K damage courtesy of Hot Streak. (The pyroblast failed to crit even though the bird was frozen via frostbite, since 74% chance to crit frozen targets is still more than 1 in 4 of failing to crit.)

The hapless bird has now taken almost precisely 10K damage over a 1.5 second window (which took me a total of 6 seconds to set up). He's also ON FIRE in as many as four different ways (DOT components of the Frostfire Bolt and Pyroblast along with the two ignites). Unfortunately for Mr. Bird, what he's already taken was 569 more HP than he had.

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
This all may sound impressive, but it gets better. The Hot Streak proc itself only lasts for 10 seconds after the second crit, but you appear to have a nigh unlimited time between the first and second crits. This means that you can wait for frost nova to cool down if your previous fight ends with a crit. You'll also note that I have, but didn't use, Combustion in this example).

The point being, these procs aren't a certain thing, but they're sure enough. I ran the Violet Hold with some guildies and had no trouble at all burning down the elite ads (which, like our friend the hapless eagle, have about 10K HP). I certainly take more damage and have slightly more downtime solo, but it's not a bad deal, especially in a group setting with a quality tank and healer. Turns out that Frostfire bolt is more interesting than I thought.

Finding the perfect class/spec

MMORPG blogger with a focus on incentive structures in games and a preference for solo play seeks class with which to explore the latest new release. Cool looks not essential, but must not have an overly annoying voice/sound effects.

We don't post personal ads while looking for the class that suits us best in an MMORPG, but perhaps we should. It's a decision that has a big impact on basically everything we experience in the game from then forward. Choosing correctly (or incorrectly) can have a huge impact on whether or not we enjoy the game. And, perhaps most alarmingly to someone like myself who spends a lot of time out-of-game analyzing things, sometimes our best guesses on what we want in a class are wrong.

For example, my frost mage. The other specs do more damage, but nothing quite compares to having mobs freeze left and right and dying before they even reach me. The same is true of the Prot Pally; it's fun to pull a crowd of mobs and watch them disappear in a flurry of yellow numbers, to the point where I'm okay with the fact that I would have leveled faster as a Ret spec. Likewise, the Fury spec was what really got me interested in my Warrior, and the Champion was the class that really held my attention in LOTRO.

Trying out the classes of Warhammer
The reason why this topic is on my mind at the moment is because I'm trying to pick a class in Warhammer. I tried the White Lion, but I found the cat annoying. I tried the engineer and enjoyed it a bit more, but didn't like the limited survivability. Tried the Rune Priest, figuring that, if I was going to heal, I might as well try the pure healer, and I liked it somewhat, but I was constantly dying under focus fire. Went to the opposite extreme and tried the Iron Breaker and that didn't work out either; I lived longer but didn't really feel like I was accomplishing much, since no one would voluntarily attack me, but I wasn't really doing much damage to them either. Tried the Shadow Warrior, but I got tired of the sit and snipe aspect of the class.

Then I tried the Witch Hunter. I liked the Rune Priest, but I'm really liking the Witch Hunter. It's not that I'm necessarily more durable if I come under fire, but I guess I'm somehow more okay with being mobbed down because I'm harassing an enemy healer (or, if I'm lucky and the other side is foolish, actually taking out the enemy healer) than I am with being slaughtered as soon as anyone notices me. It feels more like a choice to me; I'm choosing to risk my character's neck to disrupt the enemy support, rather than being involuntarily singled out as a priority target.

Maybe I will try to give the Rune Priest a bit more patience, since I realize that they're much more in demand than yet another melee DPS, but I was really beginning to worry that there wasn't a single class in Warhammer that I really loved. It's interesting how a class that was so far down my list of things I thought I would like may turn out to be my favorite of the bunch. Guess that shows what I know. :)

Level 75 Death Knight Update

Well, the beta servers appear to be down for the day (hopefully for a new build, the current one has been giving both my computer and the server a lot of problems), so I suppose that means it's time for a beta update, starring Cheerydeth!

How much content should we need to level through?


My perception of the level 73-75 range may be skewed by the changing beta Exp curve. When last I updated Cheery's exploits, Blizzard had just ramped up the exp gain dramatically to see how that would work. The answer was not so well, so they ramped it back down a notch. I would easily be level 76 by now, perhaps even approaching level 77, had exp been at its "current" (perhaps soon to be changed again) level.

I wound up completing many of the solo quests remaining in the Dragonblight, both in the neighborhood of the re-located citadel of Naxxramus, and Wyrmrest temple (home to the dragon aspects). After that, I did basically the entire zone of the Grizzly Hills (which left me halfway from 75 to 76 as I entered Zul'Drak). I did abandon some of the later Dragonblight quests (since I outleveled them while doing both starting zones), along with most/all of the group and instance quests in both zones. I also didn't mess with the unfinished World PVP daily quests in the Grizzly Hills. Still, there is very little left in Northrend for under-75 characters that I have not done.

I suppose the good news is that you will get to see all of the cool content on your first pass through Northrend. The bad news is that there will be very little room to branch out into when leveling alts. Worse, Zul'Drak appears to be entirely neutral faction quest-givers, which means that you won't get to see different content if you level both an Alliance and a Horde character. In fairness, I don't typically skip entire major quest hubs in TBC content either (though Cherry never set foot in Nagrand, the Netherstorm, or Shadowmoon Valley, except to buy her flying mount training), but it's nice to have the option to blow off quests that have mediocre rewards or are otherwise a pain in the tail.


Quest variety is good

This is not what it looks like, I can totally explain.... no, no I can't.

If you're going to have to repeat all the quests on every character, at least the quests are good. I'm constantly discovering new things I didn't know were added to the game. In one example, there are a pair of warring tribes of Furbolgs in the vicinity of one quest location, and you can temporarily keep one of them off your back by killing the other tribe. In another, you can now individually target mobs and their mounts (see the unfortunate-looking screenshot). There's also a village that goes from friendly to hostile with you as you complete a questline, and some misc vehicles and guest appearences by lore characters.

It's also worth noting (if you don't get this from the screenshots) that there is actually a lot of varying scenery in Northrend. From Tundra to forest to icy wasteland (hopefully this one won't dominate everything you see at level 80) to jungle, Blizzard has done a good job making sure you don't get bored. My personal favorite is a ruined Iron Dwarf city (below), which takes the layout of Ironforge and covers it with overgrowth and ancient technology. Really, all of the art is head and shoulders above the stuff in the old parts of Azeroth.




Death Knight Talent Updates
The most recent build finally nerfed the overpowered bloodworms, this time making them so weak as to make them relatively useless. This was good for me, though, because it encouraged me to try out Unholy and Frost.

The Frost tree has a good core AoE talent spell that hits for double damage on targets affected by Frost Fever (a DK disease that you can spread around relatively easily) and is a guaranteed crit after any autoattack crit. Froststrike, the 41 point talent, does frost damage instead of physical (bypassing armor), and is also a guaranteed crit after autoattack crits. Both remind me a lot of my frost mage; you have the potential for some HUGE damage numbers with the right procs (though there may be a few bugs in the accounting, I probably shouldn't be critting for 4.5K damage on everything in a 10 yard radius).

The Unholy tree may actually be the new Blood tree in terms of healing efficiency. Death Knights have two baseline disease debuffs that they can apply to enemies, and Unholy specs get access to two more. The amount of healing you get out of Death Strike scales with the number of diseases you've got up, and I've gotten up to a whopping 3.2K self-heal crit with all four diseases going. (This may or may not also be bugged.) It's also hard to overstate the survival bonus of having a controllable pet out. Overall, I do about the same damage as Blood or Unholy, but the pet's damage makes stuff die faster (so I take less damage), and he can off-tank adds if I get multiple mobs. Bugs in the current build are keeping Unholy DK's from detonating their ghouls or sacrificing them for health, so this tree is only going to get better. In some ways, I'm fine with that; the melee pet class angle isn't really one that WoW has explored much.


The Perils of being a Beta Tester

I wouldn't trade the time I've spent in beta for anything in the World (of Warcraft). That said, playing through all this content in beta is definitely decreasing my anticipation for the expansion's actual launch. Don't get me wrong, the solo questing is as good or better than ever, it's just that I'm already going to have done most of it by the time the expansion goes live. I'm also concerned that the experience may ruin Death Knights for me. I love Cheery dearly, but it seems like she's always benefiting from one bug or another. Somehow, I think that playing the finished product may be disappointing, because it'll be weaker than what I'm used to.

I don't really say this to make y'all feel sorry for me or anything, but perhaps this will make those of you who didn't get beta keys feel a bit better. :)

DK Spec Update

Well, there's a new beta build in town, and that means time to mess around with some new specs on the Death Knight. The timing works out well anyway, as Blizzard is currently attempting to tune the exp curve. It was previously possible to outlevel more of the continent than Blizzard could have intended, so they decided to increase everything by 80%. I think something in the 30-50% range will probably be the final answer, but I guess it doesn't hurt to experiment. Anyway, I decided I might as well backtrack to Borean Tundra (where the content is actually just below my level) to test out some of the new specs.

Bloodworms, version 3.0
So the Bloodworms got redone again. The first iteration had a 30% to spawn 3-5 worms when you killed a diseased target. This was inconsistent, but almost certain to win you the fight when it happened. The second edition healed for slightly less, but you had a 60% chance to spawn 3-5 worms off Death Strike, which you can spam twice per 10 seconds. That was way way too consistent, and it was possible to heal through insane amounts of damage by letting the worms heal away.

Version 3.0 gives the worms a 12% chance to spawn when you attack stuff, and the number of worms has been reduced to 2-4. There may or may not be an internal cooldown, or it may only work off of your main hand attack, I'm not sure, but I rarely if ever had more than one batch of worms up. Unfortunately, this version is still very strong. Death Knights can dual wield, have a 20% bonus to attack speed in the Frost tree, and there is plenty of haste rating to go around in Northrend. You can't collect 10+ worms anymore, but it's possible to keep the 2-4 worms out nearly continuously, which is still a very nice chunk of healing. I was actually running with a build that included points in all three trees; 33 points in Blood for the worms, 18ish in Frost for the DW-related talents, and a few in Unholy for improved disease durations. I'd really like them to keep this very unique talent around, but I fear there may need to be a fourth version.

Night of the Dead: Don't leave home without your Ghoul
Night of the Dead is a new 35-point Unholy talent (it was in the previous build, but wasn't working) that has a novel mechanic; it refreshes the cooldown on your ghoul-summoning spell (which has a 5-minute cooldown) by a minute each time you apply Plague/Scourge Strike. This means you can summon a fresh ghoul every 30 seconds or so if you aren't using your Unholy Runes for anything else. This has implications for two spells; detonate, which blows up the ghoul for AoE damage, and Death Pact, which sacrifices the ghoul to heal the Death Knight for 20% of their health (though the spell doesn't work at all at the moment due to a bug of some sort).

The bad news is that it makes very little sense to stop at 37 points in the Unholy tree (though you technically could, at level 79, and be able to get both Night of the Dead and the Blood Worms with a point to spare). Even a single additional point in Unholy grants you Crypt Fever, a third disease debuff (which is a big deal because many of the best DK abilities scale depending on the number of diseases you have inflicted on the target). Another point gets you Bone Shield, a buff that reduces a few damage for you and gives you a small passive DPS buff, all for the cost of a single Unholy rune (great for tough pulls, because you can cast it and wait the 10 seconds for the rune to refresh). If you make it to 41 points, you get Scourge Strike (an upgraded version of Plague Strike that does SHADOW damage instead of physical, bypassing armor mitigation), and for 45 points in Unholy, Crypt Fever morphs into Ebon Plague, increasing disease damage by 60% and magic vulnerability by 13%. My point being, this talent really only makes sense if you're going 40+ unholy, because you're too close to too many goodies to stop there.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. Death Strike heals for a lot when you have three diseases on your target (I may even go for Unholy Blight, which adds a fourth debuff). Combine that with regular use of Death Pact and we may finally have a spec that rivals blood in terms of self-healing. Don't get me wrong, I've liked my experiments with Unholy and Frost, I've just always felt like I was worse off than I would have been if I'd just stayed with at least 33 points in Blood for the Bloodworms. Now I'm even toying with the idea of an Unholy/Frost spec with zero points in Blood in order to improve Obliterate (which would allow me to use it to trigger Desecration, a flashy AoE snare effect that also boosts my damage by 10% for 7 seconds).

To sum up, this is the cool part about beta that makes all the server crashes (it crashes a LOT, especially in prime time) and bugs worthwhile. Before my eyes, Blizzard has taken a class that needed a lot of work and made some pretty big improvements. I think Frost still lags behind the other two trees for lack of a good healing bonus, but either way, it's a lot of fun to see the class evolving as the beta unfolds.

Death Knight talents in action

It's hard to offer good commentary on talents during a beta, simply because they're likely to change, sometimes repeatedly. Still, I love messing around with specs, Death Knights have a portal that leads straight to their trainers, and respecs cost a single copper to facilitate testing. As a result, I've taken most of the major talents for a spin, even if they're likely to change over time.

As I noted when I wrote up my first reactions to the class, Death Knights are required to use all three of their spell schools due to the rune system; you can swear off Frost if you really want to, but you'll be sitting on your tail waiting for your other runes to regenerate. This encourages a greater degree of hybrid specs than you might see in other classes. If you're going to have to use all your abilities, it makes sense to improve all of them. This is especially true with many abilities depending on the number of disease debuffs you've inflicted upon your target (often from a tree other than your main spec.

Here's what the trees have in them right now:

Blood: Heals. Lots and lots of heals. Blood spells also represent your bread and butter damage attacks if you're Unholy or Blood speced.
- Butchery, Rune Tap, and Vendetta: I group these talents together since they're all under 20 points and therefore available even if you're going pretty far down one of the other trees. Butchery generates runic power when you kill stuff and lets you passively earn more runic power while in combat. Rune Tap lets you use a blood rune to heal yourself for about 10% of your health, which is great for reducing downtime. Vendetta heals you when you kill stuff (which, in turn, stacks with other heals) and thus reduces your downtime even further. With apologies to Unholy Frost builds (if any), these talents are nigh essential for leveling.
-Abomination Strength: Gives you a moderately lengthy boost to strength every time you use Obliterate, a Frost attack that consumes all your diseases to do massive damage (but see the Frost tree below). It's a long enough buff to be usable in a pure blood build (i.e. you're probably finishing off the mob, but the buff will last through the next fight), but it really shines in a hybrid build with Frost.
-Bloodworms: This 3-point 30 point talent is the current pinacle of Blood tree healing. In its current form, it has a 30% chance to proc 3-5 worms each time you kill a diseased mob. This is hideously overpowered when it procs (and it can proc multiple times, I've had 8 worms up). The worms strike for 100-200 damage each every 2 seconds or so, and heal you for 100% of the damage they do. If you're fighting more than one mob, the worms will immediately spring into action and heal you to near full. Blizzard is changing this talent to be highly likely to produce a single worm from your Death Strike ability. This change will be interesting because it will let the DK choose between using those Unholy runes for more damage or for a reasonably good chance at self-heals.
- Heart Strike: No commentary on this one for now, because it's changing from the form it was in when last I tested it.
- Dancing Rune Weapon: You get a dancing rune weapon that greatly improves your damage... if you're fighting a stationary target that doesn't die. I'm sure this thing will be impressive in raids, but I didn't find much use for it solo; I kill stuff fast enough as is most times. Also, be warned that this thing will attack mobs you're not in combat with.


Frost: Crowd control. Frost has a lot of combo abilities that do additional damage to foes already afflicted with frost debuffs (like a frost mage).
-Annihilation: This talent effectively removes the major cost of the frost attack Obliterate. Untalented, the attack removes all your diseases from the target in exchange for large damage. Talented, the attack has a 90% chance not to remove the diseases, letting you spam it (and proc Abomination Strength, if you've got it, from the Blood Tree). This is a lot of damage, and even moreso if you use Deathchill, the 21 point frost ability, for a guaranteed crit. If you want to dual wield, you will be going this far down the frost tree anyway, so this is a no-brainer.
-Howling Blast: This is an AoE attack that currently does massive damage to frozen targets. Frost currently has 2 controllable freeze abilities (one a 51 point talent) and one proc, but the mechanic is being reworked down the line. This ability was a lot of fun the last time I took it for a spin, so I hope it remains so.
-Frost strike: The current 41 point frost talent does a small amount of damage that becomes large against frozen targets, but didn't impress me much since I already had Howling Blast for that. The new version will do more damage and not depend on frozen debuffs, which I think will be an improvement. Note, however, that at 41 points, this talent rules out the Bloodworms, and even Vendetta will not be available until the late 60's.
-Hungering Cold: I didn't test this thing much because sinking 51 points into Frost (and thus having almost none for Blood) made leveling painful. The spell is like an AOE hunter freezing trap, which made a lot of sense when Howling Blast and Frost Strike procced off of frozen targets and less sense now (it will still affect Howling Blast). I'm sure there are situations where this thing kicks some serious tail (if nothing else, at 100 runic power it lets you run ;)), but I don't see it being worth sinking this many points in the tree, especially now that frozen status doesn't matter for DK's.


Unholy: Pets and debuffs. If you go this route, you'll be inflicting more diseases on your foes and using the other two trees to take advantage of the additional diseases.
-Epidemic: This is a first tier talent that's moving down to tier two, and quite possibly a must-have. It extends the duration of your diseases, which means that you don't have to reapply them as often. That lets you focus your efforts on doing more damage.
-Corpse Explosion: Diablo II necromancers, rejoice. :) In its current form, Corpse Explosion consumes a lot of runic power (and, obviously, requires that your foes be standing near a corpse). The new form will consume an unholy rune, and will IMO be more usable as a result.
-Shadow of Death: This is possibly the most unique talent in the game. When you die, you come back as a ghoul for a limited time. You've got the ghoul's attacks instead of your own, but still, there's an amusement value for raising yourself from the dead. You will still get quest credit for anything you kill, but you'll need to make the corpse run to loot any quest items. (If you win the fight and want to start the corpse run now instead of waiting 30 seconds, click off the buff, or push the "explode" button.)
-Ravenous Dead, Ferocious Dead, and Master of Ghouls: I've grouped these talents together because they collectively all buff your raise dead spell. When the deed is done, the duration on your ghoul will be longer and the cooldown on the spell will be shorter, ensuring that you can always have a ghoul up at any given time (in fact, you can have two up at once for 90 seconds or so). Oh, and you get a freaking pet bar. That's right, this turns your ghoul from an uncontrollable DPS dump into a real live pet that does your bidding. He's got a spell interrupt, a stun, and another disease to boost the damage of Obliterate. This talent literally changes you into a melee pet class, and, at 26 points (27 if you also want Unholy Rune Mastery, which you might as well get for a single point), it's available with one of the other two 41-point talents.
-Summon Gargoyle: I didn't use this thing much when it sat at 41 points. At 21, it should become a nice fire-and-forget runic power dump. As always, beware of it going off to grab more enemies.
-Unholy Blight: An AoE disease generator. As with Hungering Cold, this limits your options, especially at lower levels, but I hear that there will be a substantial payoff for getting all of your diseases on a target at once.


If you haven't been able to tell, my favorite talents as of now are Bloodworms (31-33 Blood), Master of Ghouls (26 Unholy), and Howling Blast (31 Frost). The worms are a huge buff to healing, fully controllable ghouls are very very useful (and gives you the feeling of fighting side by side with your pet, slightly expendable though they may be), and the frost synergy reminds me of my Frost mage. Notice something in common? They're all low enough in their respective trees that you can have two of them at once before you hit Northrend. A level 80 characters can even have Howling Blast, Master of Ghouls AND still have enough points to make it as far down the blood tree as Rune Tap. If that's not a sign that Death Knights were meant to at least consider multi-tree specs, I don't know what is.


Cheerydeth, accompanied by a pair of ghouls, a netherwhelp, and an escort NPC. I actually felt bad for the groups of 2-3 mobs that spawned to try and stop us.

Fun Specs

Probably the most frequently asked question on most WoW class forums is what spec is "best". Generally the player asking the question doesn't want the honest answer - namely that they need gear and skill, not merely a cookie cutter talent spec, before they can expect to win at PVP or get accepted to top raiding guilds. That said, they often leave out the most crucial piece of information - what do they want to DO with said spec?

For better or worse, WoW is a game with increasingly many numbers under the hood - even the pure DPS classes can no longer rely on a single spec regardless of what they're actually doing, and this situation is going to get even more pronounced with 10 more talent points and new 41-51 point talents in the coming expansion. Most classes in WoW don't get many new abilities past level 40 (my Fury Warrior projects to get only 5 new abilities the rest of the way to 70 - a 41 point talent and the four new TBC abilities in the 62-70 stretch), so the allocation of those precious talent points is becoming a bigger and bigger portion of a character's power, which means less and less room for experimentation and fun builds. The tyranny of the 21/31/41 point talents doesn't help matters either - the cost of spreading out your talent choices across two (or, Elune forbid, all three) talent trees can be monumental when it means you can't get class defining abilities like the Water Elemental.

That said, both of my level 70's are retired from group content, and that's given me the freedom to mess around with specs that wouldn't fly in a group setting. And that's the unfortunate part: both of these specs are FUN and interesting, and they'd both be laughed off of the class forums. Which is too bad, cause really, fun specs are fun. The offending setups:

Water Elemental/Master of Elements (0/18/43): My mage used to be a relatively cookie cutter 51 point Water Elemental build with 10 Arcane for Clearcasting. Clearcasting is boring. Then, as I was getting done with my PVP gear grind in patch 2.3, I realized that I was sitting on a 27% frostbolt crit rating. That makes full Master of Elements worth an 8% mana refund, arguably worth more than Clearcasting's 10% since clearcasting has a habit of proccing when the mob dies and the next one isn't in sight. Now the question was what a Frost Spec can spend 15 points in Fire on to unlock MoE, and what I'd have to give up to get there. I'm actually very happy with the results. As I discussed last time out, I've long maintained that impact is under-rated, and that was BEFORE it could proc off Molten Armor. I avoided Ignite for crowd control reasons, but with Burning Soul, the 1.5s cast time on Scorch is nigh un-interruptible, for those times when something almost dead is beating on you and you've already used Fire Blast. With gear, I'm still just above the hit cap for level 71 mobs, though I'll concede that elemental precision and frost channeling are the two big things that I just didn't have room for.

Holy Shield/Sanctity Aura (0/33/28): So my Pally's build is a bit more unusual. Real Tankadins don't have room for that many points in Ret, cause they need to stack over 41 points in Prot. Pallies who want to swing a 2-hander usually go full Ret. Thing is, I don't like Ret much. Sure, stuff dies very fast, but in full ret gear you've got no mana pool, no spell damage (which means crappy heals), and not much in the way of defenses or crowd control. I play this build stacked with Spell Damage and Defense gear, a combo you'd never ever see on anything other than a main tank in a raid group. In my normal gear, I'm almost immune to crits by level 71 mobs (I can get up to immunity vs level 72 and 73 mobs relatively easily if I actually want to tank), I have over 33% pure avoidance while swinging a 2-hander, I'm a weapon switch macro away from 600 +healing, and I'm another weapon switch away from being able to cast Holy Shield (around 500 spell damage, which is more than plenty with Sanctity Aura to boost it) if I get a bunch of adds and need more durability - I am my own crowd control. With Sanctified Judgement, I don't find myself drinking every few mobs if I'm judging Vengeance, Righteousness, etc. (Yes, I'm a level 70 Pally and I use a 2-handed weapon with Seal of Righteousness as my primary offense.) It's a big improvement in DPS over the pure tankadin build without giving up much survivability, and I could probably still tank anything up to heroics (if I actually knew how).


Meanwhile, my leveling characters are stuck with boring cookie cutter builds, because they're trying to unlock their key talents first and foremost. I wonder what Blizzard is going to do about Death Knight talents, with DK's starting somewhere below level 70 (but previously stated to be above 55). I can't imagine starting a brand new character and immediately being presented with the choice of how to assign 50+ talent points, but I can't imagine how they'll be able to differentiate the DK's class roles sufficiently without the full 71 talent points. But that is another story.