I think there is a good amount of anticipation for this patch which will be releasing the new boss Halion into the Ruby Sanctum. It will also be the end of AVR in it’s current form as well as the addition of Battle.net Real ID. There will not be any major changes to the classes however, which I’m sure some were wishing upon a star for. Let’s take a look at what we are getting.

Halion is a Twilight Dragon and will have the same basic abilities we see from the stereotypical “Dragon” bosses: cleave, tail lash and frontal cone spell attack. It’s a 3 phase fight that is going to test raids with a  “don’t stand in fire” awareness check. Halion drops iLevel 258 items in the 10 player normal mode and iLevel 271 in the 25 player normal mode. I think Halion will be a nice booster shot for raiders that have been banging away at ICC since December. Happy hunting!

Battle.net Real ID is Blizzard’s new chat system that allows players to talk cross-realm and cross-game to each other. You will be able to send chat messages (whispers) to friends that you have accepted as well as update your status with a Twitter like feature. You can read more about this feature at Blizzard’s site by clicking on the link above.

AVR

Next we have the end of AVR in it’s current form. I say in it’s current form because there are smart people out there continually thinking of new ways to add modifications to your UI. There is already a mod giving similar radius life features called “HudMap” that you can find on Curse. For some the changes Blizzard has made to disallow drawing in the world will be a bummer, for some it will be met with great cheer.

There are quite a few other small changes like the dungeon vote-kick system, please see Blizzard’s official patch notes for all the details.

-MK

Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha
The Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha just started.

Important: The Friends & Family Alpha is restricted to employee’s friends and family, the only way to enter this phase of the alpha is to have a Blizzard employee request a key for you personally. Any mail you receive about a potential Cataclysm beta is a scam.

Not the greatest illustration, I’m not the best at Gimp/Photoshop but this should give a rough idea.

Instead of the 200% example that GC was giving, it’s better to think of the strikes as taking 50% of our rune pool. It’s going to be hard to differentiate between Runic Power used for Frost Strike/Death Coil and the “Rune Power” or “Rune Energy” in the new rune system. Maybe a name will catch on somewhere…

Basically, we will have 3 runes now in theory. We will still actually have 6 runes, but to understand how it works, and to put GC’s description into illustration, it looks like this:

After you use an Obliterate, which used to take 1 UH and 1 FR, it now takes 50% UH and 50% FR. This leaves your Rune “Energy” now at 50%.

Now the UH and FR rune energy is regenerating, much like our old rune system did.

So our “Rune Energy” for Unholy and Frost is now 60%. If we Obliterate again, which takes 50% (of the full pool) we are left with 10%.

To discuss the system in more detail, please follow this link to the forums.

Here is an additional visual aid created by wooshiewoo at mmo-champion forums. This gives an actual breakdown of what we’ll see the runes doing in Cataclysm, according to what was released in the preview.

Related Posts

So you want to Frost Strike?

Blizz released their DK preview for Cataclysm yesterday and there are some pretty interesting changes. It’s still far to early to make any conclusions about the class and reactions have been both good and bad. We already know they are making blood the “tank” tree, but they gave some properties of the frost and unholy trees that will be pretty interesting.

Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation

Unholy
Melee damage
Melee and spell critical damage
Disease Damage

They also released the plans behind the new rune system. Personally I liked the “always busy” and “tight” rotations of DK’s, but I obviously haven’t tried the new rune system yet so the jury is still out. It should make playability easier and be more forgiving. For players already well skilled in the current rune system, the good news for you is this means on movement fights when you aren’t in range, it will take longer before you are wasting your rune time. So that should be a small cheer.

They also plan to bring back 2h frost which will make some players very excited, I can think of a couple DKi members that are probably doing back flips! So there should be 3 distinctly different playstyles available for dps: 2H Frost, DW Frost, and Unholy. They haven’t mentioned anything about a DW Unholy so we’ll keep an eye out for any hints in the possibility.

They’ve also added 2 new strikes and an “Outbreak” ability. The outbreak ability should help us out a great deal on trash, when stuff dies to quick to put up diseases. It should also help on boss fights where diseases drop off, either due to movement or air phases or however. Our ramp time should be diminished, allowing us to dig right into the damage.

To read the full Blizzard release and discuss the DK future with more members, please head to this post.

Blizz has announced that the three trees will no longer be both dps and tank. Instead, the Blood tree is becoming the tank tree while Frost and Unholy are the dps trees. They will be releasing more details tomorrow so stay tuned.

Read more.

Source

We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we’d go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

According to Blizzard, they will begin releasing information about the classes this week.

“Beginning Wednesday, April 7 we will begin releasing class previews containing an overview of some of the changes currently being planned for each of the 10 World of Warcraft classes. The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the new spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we’re currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes.”

Death Knights will get a preview of their cataclysm changes on April 8. Stay tooned…err tuned!

(source)

Death Knights

-  Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat
while the death knight is in Frost Presence.
-  Chains of Ice: The ability now innately applies Frost Fever to a
target.
-  Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability
instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed
to 100%.

Talents
Blood
- Abomination’s Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a
proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10%
attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.
-  Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the
frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this
ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5%
of your health.

Frost
- Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains
of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength.
-  Icy Talons: The personal haste benefit provided by this talent is no
longer exclusive with other sources of melee haste. This will allow
death knights to always swing 4/8/12/16/20% faster when Frost Fever
is applied. Windfury Totem and the party/raid component of Improved
Icy Talons still do not stack.
- Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a
proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.
- Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up
from 5/10/15%.
- Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up
from 10%.

Unholy
- Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical
damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight’s diseases
on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no
diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to
the target should stay the same.
- Unholy Blight: In addition to its previous effects, this talent now
also prevents diseases from being dispelled from victims afflicted
by Unholy Blight.

Bug Fixes

- Blood Plague: Applying this disease can no longer separately trigger
effects from weapons.
- Bloodworms now correctly gain the death knight’s hit rating.
- Death Pact: Fixed a bug where Death Pact would not kill the ghoul
while under the effects of Cyclone.
- Frost Fever: Applying this disease can no longer separately trigger
effects from weapons.
- Frost Presence: Tooltip corrected to indicate the ability increases
stamina by 8%.
- Hysteria: The buff from this ability is now properly considered an
Enrage for the purposes of warriors using such abilities as Enraged
Regeneration.
- Icebound Fortitude: Tooltip corrected to indicate it reduces damage
by a minimum of 30%.
- Improved Frost Presence: This talent now grants 4/8% stamina when
the death knight is in Unholy and Blood Presences to match the 8%
from Frost Presence.
- Raise Dead: It is no longer possible when this ability is used in
conjunction with temporary pets from quests for the ability to get
permanently stuck on cooldown.
- Rime: Dual wielding will no longer grant two chances to proc this
effect from Obliterate.
- Rune Strike: This ability can now proc Necrosis and Blood-Caked
Blade.
- Wandering Plague: No longer damages secondary targets affected by
Repentance.

Related Posts

So you want to Frost Strike?

Building upon the regular gear guides, and the forum post for BiS for 3.2 by Futhark; here is a set of gear lists for items added in patch 3.3.

Updated list of the gear available from emblems, adding Frost emblem items for both PvE DPS and Tanking. Below is a complete table, organised by Emblem and slot.

Note: The searches are very easy to custom create using WoWHead’s item filtering. By way of example, this is is all items usable by a DK which are purchasable with Emblems of Frost.

TyphoonAndrew

Greetings everyone! Today, I will be covering Anubarak (25man HM) for dps. Guilds have been struggling on this guy, doing over 100 attempts on this guy. This encounter is by far one of the most hardest blizzard has came up with. People will say Yogg or Algalon are the hardest. I think the only reason Algalon is hard due to the fact that its only one hour a week. Yogg with the keepers up is easy once you get things done. I will admit though Yogg with 0 keepers is pretty hard. What I am writing about today is some tips and tricks to playing a Dk during this encounter. I am not saying I have the best tips or the best, but it works. Also I am gonna outline the fight for ya.

Basic Information

When you get to the boss, he is chilling in his UFC ring waiting. Its important to Flask/food up and make sure you switch to your AoE spec/w glyphs. I used this spec with glyphs. Unholy really rocks in this fight. The Death and Decay damage is nice.  Anubarak is pretty much a AoE fight with some single target DPS. The single target DPS comes from when you get adds down quick and have about 5-8 secs of just DPSing the boss. Make sure your ghoul spell doesn’t get locked out either. A couple of times I couldnt summon my ghoul from falling down into the water and had to leave the instance to be able to summon.

The Fight: Part I

Pretty much when the tank starts, the boss comes to him around middlefield. 6 Permafrost spawn and I always brought the first one down, followed by another DK bringing his down. I used a macro on this. /tar Frost Sphere. Just a simple macro, nothing fancy. The main reason why I dont put a Deathgrip command in is, I want to line up the Frost Sphere with my tank. Positioning is important. I always stand right on his back right leg and then bring it down for the raid. It’s important to have other people help out by dpsing the sphere. A time here or a time there when you bring it down, it might not be in melee range. It will then float away and might not be in a great position. Anyways, once I deathgrip it I like using Icy Touch on it first to throw some kind of Dot on it. I always found even in not in melee range, that I only have about 10% of its health remaining and then Deathcoil it. I know there is other ways but I like my way. So, the second DK bring his frost sphere down and then the adds will come out shortly after. The MT gets the boss in a position and the add tanks puts the addons on the perma frost. The offtanks can’t let the adds stack or let them burrow in the ground. This stuff causes wipes. All the tanks grab aggro on the adds and you pretty much AoE everything until Anubarak burrows in the ground.

The Fight: Part II

When you goes into the ground, bugs will start spawning and you need to kill them fast. Reason why is that they stack some nasty poisons on your raid members. Very Bad! Alright, when he goes into the ground, he will choose someone in the raid and go after them. Let’s say he targets me. I run to the web where you came in at and wait for a paladin to Blessing of Protection me when Anubarak gets to me. I then run into the perma frost and he gets stuck in it. Now, one of the most important things about this part is WATCH THE CORNERS! Let’s say I took him to the perma frost on the left(west perma frost). He chooses a warlock in your guild, only one problem your warlock is to the right on the right perma frost(east perma frost). Anubarak has a chance to start chasing him and crash into the other perma frost. Now he get a 3rd member who has to kite him around for like 30 secs. It’s alot of confusion. We are gonna say the warlock does him job right and brings Anubarak to the perma frost. He will choose a 3rd target. Important part to this is the 3rd target only has him for like 15 secs which is just another run to the web. During this time, I am breaking off from killing bugs to bring down the first perma frost. *Important you do this, due to the fact the perma frost does roam around alot. You might not have a chance to bring it in a good spot if you wait until the last second. My GM always makes our members come to him where he is at the way left side(if your looking at the web) away from me. The boss pops up and the other DK brings down the other frost sphere. Part I begins again.

The Fight: Part III

After part I of the fight is over, it goes to part II. Only difference is your kiting him to the UFC ring and bringing down the frost sphere there.  Part I of the fight begins. Around 33% I or DBM clicks off my Fort buffs and then at 30% Anubarak does his main move: Leeching Swarm. Pretty much is leeches a % of your current health, which is way you remove your fort buff. During this phase its important to pop a Frost Potion to help out the healers. One other debuff he puts on you is Penetrating Cold. It deals frost damage to your every 3 secs and thats alot considering you dont get healed very much during this phase. Just AoE the adds and try to stay alive by popping CDs.

Tips and Tricks

1. Make sure you keep your disease up at times.

2. Make sure you Death and Decay on the adds as soon as possible.

3. Remember, Glyphs are Ghoul, Dark Death and Death and Decay.

4. Pop CDs during Phase III of the fight to help out.

5. Pop Gargoyle during Phase I and after 30%.

6. Make sure you put your perma frost in a great position to AoE all adds.

7. Make sure your death and decay hits all adds.

Hope this little guide helps out. Good luck with the boss. Until next time, Tomorrow is another day.

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So you want to Frost Strike?

Cataclysm Alpha testing begins!