Belated Update!

The blog has, admittedly, been neglected over the past two weeks due to WotLK. So, without further ado, time for some updates as to how Woe has been doing:

1. Hit 80, second in the guild.

2. Began tanking regular and heroic instances to gear up before the guild hits Naxxramas.

3. Leveled up both Inscription and Blacksmithing; created the boe epics from smithing.

4. Well over crit immune currently, with only three tanking items remaining to purchase from the badge vendor.

5. Very, very, very quickly replacing all gear with epics again.

That's about it! Depending on leveling, we'll likely be start Naxxramas this coming week once a few healers (finally) finish leveling.

Can't wait. :)

It's alive!

As of 25 minutes ago, Wrath of the Lich King debuted on the live World of Warcraft servers.

To quote a great man:

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.....and then they rolled Death Knights."

Woooooooooooooooooooo.

TankSpot for Death Knights

The well-known tanking site www.tankspot.com, has finally begun to show signs of Death Knight interest in their forums. Over the past few days, several Death Knight-oriented threads have popped up, with some pretty encouraging results.

Much of the Warcraft community still harbors some serious misconceptions about the viability of Death Knight tanks in a raid setting. Here's hoping this kind of thing will change the false assumptions out there.

Some of the threads still hold some inaccuracies, as their authors haven't even stepped foot into beta, let alone played a Death Knight to 80, however the intent is still pure. A few threads of note:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/40409-death-knight-tanking-stats.html

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/40685-death-knight-f-q-questions-answers-right-here.html

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/40694-death-knight-aoe-spec-mt-spec-rotations.html

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/41265-dk-tanking-thoughts.html

58-60 Speed Leveling Information

Dhannek from the Deathknight.info forums has recently published the finalized version of his popular Death Knight Speed Leveling guide.

It provides a guideline for those death knights fresh out of Ebon Hold to take prior to entering Outland. The guide gives walkthrough lists for both Horde and Alliance Death Knights; including the must-have quest and tradeskill items needed to streamline the first few levels before hitting the Burning Crusade content.

If interested, head over to the Deathknight.info forums at the following link:

http://deathknight.info/forum/index.php?topic=3696.0

Racial Woes

Forgive the pun in the title, but it's pretty apropos in this case.

I'm stuck on the race issue again. In spite of my penchant for rolling gnomes, I decided on the human for the race of my death knight. The human was the tank race of choice in the alliance due to their expertise bonuses to maces and swords. The other racial bonuses were nice as well, but the main draw was, again, their expertise. Add in the new "Every Man For Himself" racial which essentially duplicates the effect of the pvp trinket, and it all but locked the choice for me.

And then I made the mistake of reading about the viability of the night elf "Quickness" racial, which increases the death knight's chance to be missed by 2%. This minor trait scales very well with avoidance (the basis behind death knight tanking), and is another form of damage mitigation completely immune to diminishing returns.

As it stands now, the night elf is the race of choice for any min/max'ing tank it seems..... and since I'm rolling the character to do nothing but tank, it would stand to reason this would be the best choice.

But I'd have to play as a night elf, along with the unwashed huntar(d) masses.