World of Warcraft

By Redestium
in PC Gaming

 Share

Recommended Posts

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

I had to prepare my DK for tanking this weekend so here are my notes from the patch. There hasn't been a lot of theory crafting or testing of mechanics because level 80/4.0 raiding is all basically pointless. If you skim over the typical resources (ej, pwnwear, etc) this is the summary of the situation.

For spec you can basically just copy mine. She's setup to tank 5-mans/trash right now. I only really play her for a couple of hours a week on our Saturday afternoon alt run - still, her gear, stats, spec, and glyphs are pretty much cookie-cutter for any DK tank in 4.0.

For spec there aren't many optional points:

  • You can take blood caked blade or will of the necropolis, IMO the extra threat from BCB is better than WotN
  • You can take points out of blood parasites or scent of blood for abomination's might. Because the buff is so common I didn't bother with it: the extra threat/healing from the other two talents are more useful.
  • Some combination of the above (ie: don't take blood parasites or blood caked blade and get abomination's might and will of the necropolis). I think that's a bad idea for the same reasons.

If you want to tank then you have really limited weapon choices:

  • Heroic Pit of Sauron for Tyrannical Beheader (5-man, fairly high drop rate)

The only upgrades worth going for after (in order of "ease of acquisition"):

  • ICC-10 man for Oxheart or Ramaladni's Blade of Culling (The later is easily available to pugs, the former is less of a sure thing)
  • Shadows edge (crafted but requires 2 pieces from ICC25, most pugs can kill the bosses that drop them so it's basically a sure thing).
  • ICC-25 for Bloodfall or Cryptmaker (most pugs can't kill blood prince council so these aren't good goals unless you have friends willing to bring you along)

All of your other slots can and should be filled either by the justice point vendor (for item level 245 or higher in any given slot) or the honor vendor. The only thing not on a vendor worth farming is "The Black Heart" an ilevel 200 trinket with 128 stam from normal mode 5-man Trial of the Champion. It's very good, but not really game breaking so the 245 +armor trinket is a good alternative. If you wanted to buy the 245 crafted bracers from the AH they should be fairly cheap. 264 crafted boots and pants would be better than the honor boots + tier 10 pants, but they're also fairly costly (2-3k i'd guess) and probably not worth the gold this close to cataclysm. There is a 264 BOE ring (and maybe a neck) that would also be good but probably not worth the gold this late in the expansion. You'll be looking for boots/bracers/ring/neck from the honor vendor and everything else form the justice points vendor.

For stats: Get hit capped (8% or 246 hit rating total) then expertise soft-capped (26 expertise total), then gem for stamina. Expertise remains valuable all the way to the hard cap of 52 but most tanks stop actively stacking it once they're dodge capped (the only fight where hitting the hard cap is a good idea is heroic Halion)

Avoiding parry isn't advantageous any more - it has the same value as crit for Dk tanks. Prefer gear that has haste to crit as it makes your runes regenerate more quickly which helps build threat. If you're over hit/expertise caps reforge for mastery.

For glyphs:

  • Prime: Heart Strike, Death Strike, and Death and Decay are the obvious choices for 5-man dungeons (swap DnD for single-target tanking of bosses in raids)
  • Major: Bloodboil, Pestilence, and Dancing Rune Weapon are the best 5-man choices. IMO it makes sense to swap bloodboil for single-target tanking.
  • Minor: Resilient grip is mandatory (bosses are immune to the 'come over here' part, but the 'taunt' will still apply. This glyph basically gives you a no cooldown single-target taunt for boss mobs). Blood tap is worth having because it's used on cooldown. The other doesn't really matter but I'm using Horn of Winter because there's some really annoying behavior with +strength buffs (if another dk has glyphed HOW and you don't then your will fail to cast, the same happens with battle shout) for now just use the glyph to save your sanity. When it's fixed then raise ally will probably be the better choice.

Rotation is pretty obvious - the only tip I'd offer is that you don't want to deathstrike whenever you the runes for it.

Deathstrike heals you for 30% of the damage you've taken in the last 5 seconds so you'll want to keep it available for when bosses use "big hits".

Obviously you'll still use it as part of your rotation but if you know a 'deep breath' or similar ability is coming then you'll want to hold back for a couple of seconds.

Spamming icy touch is no longer a viable way to hold threat: they removed the giant +threat component from it.

You'll want to keep rune strike macro'd into your main abilities (heart strike, death strike, icy touch, plague strike) for now. Its supposed to work how frost strike but it's bugged at the moment and still has the old "overpower for DKs" behaviour.

DK tanks are pretty good right now. it's not as easy as it was in 3.3.5 but they've faired pretty well this patch and they'll be very strong at 85.

Grand Master

Elliott

Posted
Posted

Heads to those that want some more heirloom items before Cata drops. Champion's Purse now gives 1 champion seal and 10g everytime now. So that's an additional 4 seals per day. May or may not be faster to farm seals for heirlooms than JP.

That makes using Champion's Seals a lot quicker (or at least a lot less work). The JP prices on heirlooms are ridiculously high.

Thanks for the heads up!

Proficient

iKenndac

Posted
Posted

Finally!!!

After nearly a week of trick or treating on a nearly hourly basis every single damn day, I finally got my Hallow's End meta. I got 70 tooth picks, three Hallowed Helms and finally, just now, my Sinister Squashling. Oh, and a crapload of other stuff:

post-330164-12878264345177.png

Mentor

Tharp Daddy

Posted
Posted

Well i started playing my rogue today and i'm now level 17. I must say i'm quite enjoying the play style of the rogue, it's a nice change of pace after the "in your face" type of other classes. Plus - can't go wrong with 700 damage crits at level 15, one shotting elites has never been so fun.

Grand Master

Slane

Posted
Posted

Anyone care to give a few thoughts: http://forums.worldo...397543609&sid=1 ?

Please, bump it if you can too.

No. The whole idea is no, and by reading the thread nothing is going to change your mind, so it's not worth discussing any further. Simply no.

Grand Master

Eric Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

I'd be there, but I'm still having to sign on to WoW on an hourly basis to try and get this stupid Sinister Squashling. :crazy:

Oh, and I'm in Sweden. Hooray Virtual Ticket! :D

I got a Squashling and a Hallowed Helm out of the same bag... It was a treat bag from an innkeeper!

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

It's been kind of slow since patch 4.0. I had some time tonight to run with the "common follk" and took a trip to ToC10.

My UI is back to 100% awesome, save for updating my target/focus SBF filters to show only "stuff I can purge" on hostiles,

"Stuff i can cleanse" on friends" and "encounter specific mechanics (like mortal wound)" on both.

The only change I'd like to make is to make my top right buffs filter a little more carefully. Row 1 should be things like

flasks, auras, raid buffs (MoTW, Fortitude,etc) and row 2 should be "short" buffs like rejuvenate, BoSanc, etc.

Now that the foreground FPS sliders are easy to set I capped mine at 35 so that my graphic card/cpu fans never have to

spin up.

Grand Master

Slane

Posted
Posted

Love WoW, but at this point I'm more interested in hearing about the MMO. Maybe my mind will change when Cata is released, but I dunno.

@evn: What addon does the text based mail and etc. next to minimap and what's the addon showing Anub health underneath Bloodlust buff?

Grand Master

Elliott

Posted
Posted

@evn: What addon does the text based mail and etc. next to minimap and what's the addon showing Anub health underneath Bloodlust buff?

Not sure about the Anub health thing, but I'm pretty sure the indicators to the left of the minimap are from StatBlockCore displaying various LibDataBroker addons.

Grand Master

the evn show

Posted
Posted

@evn: What addon does the text based mail and etc. next to minimap and what's the addon showing Anub health underneath Bloodlust buff?

Health bar is provided by DXE a replacement for deadly boss mods, bigwigs, etc.

Mail etc is Stat blocks. Think of it like a replacement for Fubar

but you're allowed to position your little modules anywhere on the screen. The are plugins for things like dungeon finder, mail, calendar, DPS, etc. that

you can add.

Both are available from curse.

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Posts

    • Millions of users to benefit from Windows 11's new performance boost on Adobe Photoshop

      By thartist · Posted

      This sounds like underneath the nice marketing spin, either someone at Adobe got tired of their lazy devs and asked Microsoft to train them to help sort Adobe's old spaghetti code to make it go faster, or Microsoft wanted Adobe's crap to run better on Windows to make it look better against Apple, so they offered to intervene. Either way, GOOD.
    • My favorite file manager for Windows 11 finally gets a long-requested feature

      By TarasBuria · Posted

      My favorite file manager for Windows 11 finally gets a long-requested feature by Taras Buria Files is among the best File Explorer alternatives for Windows 10 and 11. This free app is packed with all sorts of features and conveniences, but there is one crucial feature that is still missing—Tree View. Fortunately, the latest update in the Preview channel finally delivers it. With version 4.1.4, which is now available for download in the Preview channel, developers implemented Tree View, a new mode that displays folders in an expandable hierarchy. Windows 11's stock File Explorer always had this feature, but it was nowhere to be found in Files until now. Starting with the latest preview update, you can expand each drive and its nested folders without leaving the current location and then open the folder you need in the main view. To try Tree View in Files, update the app to the latest preview version, then click the small arrow next to a drive to expand its content. The developers say they are rolling out Tree View in Preview first to gather feedback from users and improve the feature before bringing it to all in the stable channel. In addition to Tree View, Files 4.1.14 improves the Windows Fonts folder. You can now preview each font directly in Files with no need to open the built-in font viewer. For now, these two features are only available in the Preview channel. For those using the stable release, developers recently released version 4.1.3, with improvements for the built-in tag system, on-demand folder size calculation, and plenty of various fixes. You can check out the full release notes here. You can download Files from the Microsoft Store (paid version) or its official website (free).
    • Report: Microsoft to use AWS to help GitHub deal with a major surge in demand

      By +LightEco · Posted

      Who is paying for this 30x scale-up? Its sounds expensive.
    • Millions of users to benefit from Windows 11's new performance boost on Adobe Photoshop

      By hellowalkman · Posted

      Millions of users to benefit from Windows 11's new performance boost on Adobe Photoshop by Sayan Sen Despite the advent of AI-generated imagery, Adobe's Photoshop remains one of the most popular tools on this planet. Adobe does not have a publicly reported total user count but it's probably not wrong to assume there are millions. As of 2025, Adobe Creative Cloud has had approximately 41 million paid subscribers, many of whom likely use Photoshop. In addition, more than 166,000 companies worldwide are apparently also using the app. These figures are according to a very recent report by SQ Magazine. Out of them, it is fair to assume that many are probably running Windows. As such, there is good news for these users as Microsoft has announced Photoshop is getting a big 20% performance boost on x86-64 (AMD64) systems and a 13% bump-up on Arm devices. This is definitely great news for them as many have complained about the slow performance and general sluggishness of Photoshop on Windows 11 ever since the advent of the latter back in 2021. If you are wondering how Microsoft managed to do this, the answer lies in a combination of compiler-level optimizations and a technology called Sample Profile Guided Optimization (SPGO). According to Microsoft, Adobe worked closely with the company’s Visual C++ team and adopted the latest MSVC toolchain enhancements together with SPGO to squeeze more performance out of Photoshop’s CPU-bound workloads. Unlike traditional Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), which requires developers to create special instrumented builds and run lengthy training workloads, SPGO gathers performance data directly from optimized release binaries. This means Adobe could collect real-world usage information which gives a major advantage to this technique, as companies could leverage data collected from actual customer workloads rather than only relying on synthetic benchmark runs. In theory, this should allow optimizations to better reflect how users interact with software in the real world. Thanks to this, there are improvements to code layout, function inlining, hot-and-cold code separation, and other low-level tweaks that help processors execute instructions more efficiently. Essentially the compiler is better able to identify “hot” code paths, those which are most frequently executed, and optimize them accordingly.
    • The 2TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD hits lowest price in over three months

      By fernan99 · Posted

      "The 2TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD hits lowest price in over three months¨ I'd prefer to see the lowest price in over a year

  • Recent Achievements

    • First Post
      Jocimo earned a badge
      First Post
    • Week One Done
      suprememobiles48 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Windows Guy earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Month Later
      Prasann earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Prasann earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      521
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      174
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      90
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      81
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      70
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!