Death Knights Don't Heal

I guess I would be amiss as a DK blogger to not talk about the change to our class that has driven a surprising portion of the community into an uproar. In patch 4.1, one of our least-used spells “Raise Ally” has been re-designed as a battle-rez. To quote the latest patch notes:

“Raise Ally has been redesigned to be a battle resurrection, analogous to Rebirth. It is instant cast, but costs 50 Runic Power to use, and has a 10-minute cooldown. It shares the same global battle resurrection cap with Rebirth and Soulstone.”

This little change to the way we can use ghouls certainly did not go unnoticed throughout the community. Moodyloner over at Death Grip My Heart wrote a post about DK utility wherein she said: 

“I just can’t get my head around gaining the ability to bring others back to life.”

And across the WoW DK community, be it in or out of game, there have been comments on the change to the class basically amounting to the fact that Death Knights are a class focused on dealing damage, spreading disease and being basically the polar opposite of healers for all intents and purposes. The concept of giving us a battle rez, seems just wrong.

The keyword is “Death”

I disagree with these sentiments wholeheartedly. Death Knights are all about Death, sure, and healing is definitely wrong for us (I'm not counting self-heals here, I mean full-out raid healing etc.). BUT, this change doesn't make us healers. It makes us ressurectors (no – it's not a word. Go with it).

Death Knights will have the ability to quickly bring back a dead player as a ghoul. Is this a big deal? No. In fact – I think this is how the ability should always have worked. Resurrecting a player as a ghoul gimps a lot of their utility in raids, and makes them much less useful than they were alive, so the move still acts as a last-ditch effort, and the other standard b-rezes are definitely superior.

But what's wrong with grabbing a little bit of extra dps out of a corpse once the druid has popped rebirth? We're masters of Death. Reanimating someone as a ghoul doesn't seem to be all that big a stretch to me.

PvP Usefulness?

In keeping with the theme of this blog... does the change really even impact PvP at all? Not really. I could see a few very niche situations where it might be worthwhile to make a dead ally a ghoul instead of having them wait to rez. For instance, in a BG like AB or BfG, you could bring back a corpse as a ghoul to give yourself that teeny extra bit of dps to hold the flag while you wait for re-enforcements.

But, all in all this is a change to the raiding universe. It doesn't grossly impact my life when it comes to melting face and taking names. But it is certainly a very interesting change.

Conclusion

I think I've more or less made my point already. The ability to resurrect someone as a ghoul does not contradict our class foundations. It's a completely natural evolution of the ability. After all, we can already reach into the ground and conveniently find a skeleton to make into a ghoulish minion anywhere in the world with Raise Dead, and Army of the Dead pulls out even more. Unholy DKs can summon a GARGOYLE, and I don't see people complaining that we brought the gargoyle to life for 30 seconds so it goes against the class' design.

Making your dead buddy a ghoul is a completely reasonable thing, and let's be fair, it's all kinds of awesome to boot. Even if it doesn't last all that long, who could resist the ability to make their GM their minion for a little while? It seems like a blast to me.

So. Death Knights of the world. Do not despair. Blizzard is not taking away the basis of your class. You're not going to be called upon to heal that stupid rogue who's standing in the fire again. You will not have to anti-kill the main tank while you dps. But if the stupid rogue dies for the thousandth time, why not put his body to good use?

After all – he's not a whole lot of use dead.

That's it for today folks, count on the rest of my catching up tomorrow morning, then a return to your regular programming.

Practice safe Death!

~Onike

Playing Catch-Up

So, I did say that the only thing that was likely to prevent me from posting regularly here was RL issues, and I had a mountain of them last week, thus the radio silence from me.  HOWEVER!  Do not despair, I'm going to get myself all caught up on posts ASAP.  That's going to mean a mountain of blogging activity over the weekend, and then the resumption of my normal schedule with my Tuesday post next week. 

I apologize for the inconsistency, but I just don't like the idea of being "behind" with my posts, so I'm getting caught up.  In other words, you'll be getting at least one, if not two posts a day for the next 2-3 days while I inundate the world with the posts I missed.  So, enjoy a little bit of Onike overdose, and happy reading!

Practice safe Death!

~Onike

Maintenance Day Musings - What are Death Knights?

The first of many of my Tuesday editorials is here, and I'm starting the habit of this blogging schedule, plan, theory, thing, with a look back at my roots.

Recently, on a random, somewhat nostalgic whim, and hopped over to a random server where I had parked some cute level 1-6 alts, and rolled a Death Knight. This was born largely out of a desire to see the starting zone again. Back in Wrath, when everyone and their uncle was rolling a Death Knight, there was a good reason for it. The starting zone. At the time, it was the best questing zone in the game (don't try and tell me Northrend was better – it wasn't. At least not in my opinion).

Although a lot of time has gone by, and Cataclysm has been released (with it, all-new starting zones, which are all excellent as well), this zone still stands up. I'll always have a special place in my heart for that starting zone, the place where everything began. I fondly remember when I finally got my druid to 55. I immediately ran up and started a Death Knight (Theloral, my current main). And I was transported to a sort of immersion I'd never really experienced in WoW before – especially having never played anything past Old World (remember, my druid had only just hit 55).

“A hero, that's what you once were.” Those words started me off on one of the coolest quest chains in the history of WoW, or certainly in the time I've been playing (basically since late BC – early Wrath). It was epic, engaging, and one hell of a good time. Playing through as a slave to the Lich King, eventually breaking free... it was everything I'd hoped for the from the zone, and then some. And that zone is, really, what initially hooked me on the class.

The Not-So Humble Beginnings

Back in the day, when DKs were first released, there was a huge uproar in the community. The introduction of a “Hero Class” had totally unbalanced the game. A massive stream of newly created Death Knights flooded the realms, basking in complete, and utterly overpowered facerolling. New DKs didn't have to be “good” at the their class. They had to know how to mash buttons, and how to pwn. The result was that the class got an extremely bad reputation.

The Hero Class didn't mean veteran players were taking in the rewards of all their toils. It didn't mean the best players from BC had converted (though presumably, plenty did). It meant that anyone with the time to level to 55 (yours truly included) could hop into the game, and be almost indestructible.

Blizzard quickly learnt the lesson that WoW's first Hero Class had been, to put it gently – a mistake. It wasn't fair to set one class apart from the others, in terms of in-game power, and making Death Knights stronger than everybody else, was just plain dumb. Soon, DKs were nerfed into the ground (it was sad, but it needed to be done), and those early pioneers of the class were left playing just a normal class, like everyone else. In fact, since that initial wave of being completely OP, Death Knights as a whole have been on the lower end of the spectrum.

Even when I finally hit 80, during the end of Ulduar, I frequently got told by players “Wow, you play a DK. They're OP. You're a noob.” It was a ridiculous statement because, by that point certainly, DKs really weren't OP anymore. I would generally gently point to the paladins sitting in a corner, cackling madly while they facerolled everything and everyone, but that's really a story for another time.

Without our status as a “Hero Class” (the name remained yes, but for all intents and purpose, DKs became just a normal class), many players wondered back their old mains, and the DK populations diminished. They became just as common as any other class, and the die-hard DKs that stuck around may have felt a little bit confused, as to the identity of their class.

Class Identity

Since the dawn of fantasy gaming, there have always been certain understood principles. The big warrior guy in heavy armour protects the little gnome wizard shooting fireballs at the baddies from behind his back. The cleric/priest/whatever heals the big, armoured guy, and keeps everyone alive. Behind the baddie, there's also probably a rogue knifing him in the back, and maybe a couple other general groups of character standing around hitting the bad guy as well. It's a standard concept, and it's always worked in the past. The priest heals, the warrior tanks, the rogue knifes people in the back.

Having an idea of what your class is is extremely important to a game like WoW. Players want to feel unique. They want to be able to do something really cool, that no one else can do, and to stand proudly back and say “Yeah, bitch, I just dropped a totem on your ass. Cause I'm a shaman. Suck it.” They want to be able to turn into bears, cats, and demented sea lions and then rub in the faces of the other lowly non-druids who are always stuck looking the same. They want to be able to stand in the middle of the line of fire of some giant's fist, and take because they're warriors. You get the picture.

Necromancer type classes have been common in fantasy RPGs since the beginning, and most people were thrilled to see them coming to WoW. But after the initial nerf bat hit the class, many players questioned what exactly they were supposed to be doing. What exactly was the point of Death Knights.

The Point

Death Knights might not be the most overpowered class in the game, anymore. We might just be average schmucks off the street, but despite the lack of pure power, DKs are still unique. Sure, popping army of the dead won't wipe a raid of the opposite faction's players. And yeah, maybe the sky doesn't rupture every time we swing our axes.

But, we're still the only class in the game who can reanimate players. We're still the only class in the game who get to bust out ghouls. We're still the only glass in the game to get to use swirling bones as shields. Nobody else can pull a hunter across the map to themselves, then pin him to the ground with some ice, and proceed to beat his face in. And, last time I checked, no one else can summon an undead army just for kicks.

Death Knights are tanks. We're melee dps. We're PvPers, and we're badass. Can lots of other classes say that? Yes, and especially so in a world where class homogenization is becoming more and more part of the game. But no one else can say it the same way we can.

We're Death Knights. We control zombies, and we smash face. We take hits, and wear a lot of skulls as fashion statements. And can mister tree-hugging druid over there say the same thing?

I don't think so.

Missing Out?

So before jumping into this post, I want to apologize.  I realize this is a DK PvP blog, and very little of my content lately has been class, or even PvP information.  But with the expansion so close, there just really isn't much in the way of news, on either front.  However, let me explain how things are going to work following the expansion's release.  First, there's gonna be a ton of DK content, while I'm leveling/thinking about specs, and then you can count on some serious PvP info once Season 9 goes live, and I have a chance to jump in there.  *Real* content is coming.  Just let me ask you to sit through a few more editorials while we wait for Cataclysm to go live.

Anyways, random preface aside, let me get into the meat of this post.

The New World

If the above image or Orgrimmar doesn't mean anything to you, then I'd suggest you're either playing the wrong side (*cough* I mean the other side *coughs*), or you've been out of the game for a very long time.  The world is very, very new, as everyone is now acutely aware.

But with Cataclysm coming, a lot of people are beginning to drop the whole "Wow, a new world, this is really cool" routine, and just focus on the good old min-max we're all so familiar with.  A good in-game friend of mine told me today that she had a group of players she'll be leveling with in Cata.  Their plan is to band together, take time off work, then shoot for the Realm First:  <class> to 85 achievements.

Sure, this is a completely valid idea, and should be lots of fun.  After all, it's a group of them, and they'll have fun leveling together.  But I can't help but question how much of the world they'll be missing out on by doing that.

Lore

I know, I know.  You're all gonna tell me the same thing.  "But Onike!  No one reads that silly quest text.  It's a waste of time.  You could already be halfway through the quest."  True.  And in the old game of "Go get me 10 boar tusks", this made a lot of sense.  The lore behind fetching 10 boar tusks doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things.  But it hasn't taken long for me to find that this simply isn't the same game it used to be.

If you haven't go roll a new character of your favourite race.  You'll find all the old quests that used to bore you totally gone.  Better than that, the content has done more than just change. 

It got good.

I've found myself actually fully enjoying the process of leveling, which is something I used to HATE with a passion.  Leveling was a boring, pointless grind, just serving the purpose of taking me to the endgame, where I could play the real game.  That is just not the case any more.  The content they're putting in with Cataclysm is a whole lot more interesting.

Remember how awesome Wrathgate was?  Remember thinking "Man, if only Blizzard could do this with all the quests."  And how everyone just thought, well then it wouldn't be special?  Well think again.  I won't say every quest has an epic cut scene, but there's a lot of them.  Zones have some serious continuity.  There's more than just level to level, ding to ding, happening here.  There's a story.  And it`s good.

The New, New World

So, if Blizzard has content that good from levels 1-10, simply designed to grab attention of new players, imagine what's in store for the primary content of the expansion?  You can count on the content being beyond good.  Which brings me to the point.

Do you want to miss out on all that?

Sure, if you power-level you'll have a chance to see the cutscenes.  They won't go away.  But they'll be nuisances, distracting you from the real goal of filling that experience bar.  And without the understanding of 'why' you're sneaking into a worgen meeting, seeing two of them argue, then kill a Forsaken spy wouldn't make much sense would it?  You'd only really have a chance to say "Oh.  Cool."  Then on with the next quest.

Now I'm sure you can take an alt through later, and experience all that content at a nice, slow pace.  Read that silly quest text and everything.  After all, that Realm First achievement only goes out once.  But you know what?  Powering through the content is going to spoil it, at least for me.  The new zones will only be really new once.  And racing for that Realm First, which will only really be impressive for a few weeks of your life, is not worth wasting some of the best leveling content to date.

I think we're all too focused on constant achievements.  Maybe, if some of these gogogogogonow player types took some time and smelt the roses, they'd find themselves enjoying the game a whole lot more.

As for me?  I'm not in any rush.  I'm going to level at my own pace.  I'm going to read the quest text, and I'm going to really enjoy the game.  After all, in my opinion, that's the point.

The Shattering, and the Eve of Cataclysm

Well, it's here.  The moment everyone has been waiting for since Cataclysm was first announced over a year ago.  Besides the actual release of the expansion, this is by far the most exciting cataclysm-related change we've seen to date.  Elementals?  Cool.  Doomsday cult?  Also cool.  Blizzard has done a great job, though, of leading up to what is beyond a doubt the most exciting, world-breaking, jaw-dropping event predating the launch of Cataclysm.

Org got quite a facelift.

The Shattering.

Unless you've been living under a rock... actually wait.  If you've been living under a rock you're probably dead because said rock is now a few hundred feet underwater, or it melted, or it's now underneath a volcano... etc., etc.  Let's just say I'm assuming you know what the Shattering is.

And it's pretty freakin' amazing.

I have a couple regrets, sure.  I'm a little sad I never saw Azshara before the Shattering.  It was on my list to-explore before my computer died, and now I'm back online, it seems that I missed out.  But those regrets are minor.  The coolest thing is that the world as we knew it will never be the same.  And if that means the Plaguelands from which my blog got their header get a little greener... I'm okay with that.

Due to a combination of lag and installing WoW troubles, I haven't seen much of the new content.  Just Orgrimmar, Durotar, and the Northern Barrens (yes, if you didn't know the barrens is now TWO zones, not one).  But I intend to begin exploring the new world as soon as time permits.  It's an extremely exciting prospect.

I guess Thrall finally got tired of talking.

What now?

With the biggest pre-cata experience now behind us, the question is now- what do we do with ourselves?  We've got two weeks to kill before we can really jump into content and start leveling to the new endgame, but the endgame as we know it now is basically at a standstill.  Sure, I'll run around and do my Pilgrim's Bounty meta (because I'm cheap and don't want to pay for 310% flying), and yeah, I'll probably run some dailies and a few random BGs... but that's about it.

So, what can a player do?  The answer is, really, not much.  You can raid, of course.  Instances are still open.  But most titles and achievements worth chasing have been removed.  You're probably not too concerned with gear now, either.  After all, it won't matter in 13 very short days.  And unless you really like that content, I don't see raiding, or much PvP, on the horizon right now.

But if the endgame is stale, there's something calling to you that isn't.  The world.  Of Warcraft.  Remember it?

My recommendation?  Explore.  Take some time and smell the roses.  Roll a new alt, experience some of the early content.  Or, if you're like me and HATE leveling with a passion (I'll check out the new quests... just very slowly, and in my own time)- just run around.  Your level 80 might not be able to fly in the Old World for a fortnight, but you've still got that land mount.  Take a look around.

When I first logged in after 4.0.3 dropped, I saw someone ask something in trade chat which was oddly insightful.  "Does anyone else feel like a noob again?"  And I realized that was exactly what I felt like.  And you know what?  I liked it.

The Magic is Back.

The fact is, people have been saying for a long time that Cataclysm is make or break time for Blizzard.  They have an MMO that has outlived all life-expectancies normally tied into such a game.  WoW was slowly fading.  The only way to stop this trend was to create something so amazing, it made players at home again.

And by making me feel like a noob again, that's exactly what they did. 

Don't misunderstand me here.  That's not a bad thing, in my opinion.  In fact, it's a very, very good thing.  Sure, what got me 'hooked' on WoW was the people.  What kept me coming back was the incredible end-game Blizzard has to offer.  But what was the coolest thing about the game?  That magical feeling where you discover something for the first time.

Nuking the world has brought that back for me.  I can go somewhere, and have absolutely no idea what to expect.  In a way, I feel kinda sorry for people in the beat.  Because they've already seen all this, and some of that magic won't be there for them.

There's a whole world waiting out there, guys.  Go grab it.

Water in Durotar.  Yeah.  Didn't see that one coming.

Conclusion?

Well, what was meant to be a quick little update regarding my thoughts on the Shattering has turned into something pretty huge.  I guess in retrospect, it is a pretty huge topic.  But let me wrap this one up for you guys.

We're in a weird period of transition.  People have been blogging about it really for several months now, often saying things like "This is the twilight of Wrath" (no reference to vampires intended.  I'm actually talking about time of day).  But if we've been in the twilight of the current expansion for months, I think it's safe to say we've left twilight behind and we're into the dawn of a new day.  It's still dark out, but you can just barely see the sun starting to poke its head over the horizon.  And somehow you just know.

It's going to be a good day.

Onike's Triumphant Return

I'm back.  Yes, you can all cheer wild praises of joy at the prospect.  It's been an interesting week and a half - I never realized how dependant I was on having regular access to a computer until I was without one.  My laptop has officially bit the bullet, and it was replaced with a shiny new i5 acer aspire desktop which I got on sale, along with a beautiful 24" monitor which I also got on sale.  Very exciting stuff.  I'm still not really sure what to do with all that screen space.

I am currently remembering why I hate switching computers - a full install of WoW takes forever.  I'm about halfway after leaving my computer on all night.  It's very upsetting.  So I haven't been able to actually hop into the game for a proper look around at the game, or a chance to really mess around with any new DK specs, etc. etc., YET.  That stuff will be coming as soon as I get everything up to speed.

Since I'm sort of unable to blog about anything directly related with the live version of the game (and since I never got into the beta), I'm going to talk about something else, which just happens to be the only piece of DK news that I became aware of on my forced break from the game.

Tier 11.

Wow.

That is seriously probably some of the coolest armor I've ever seen in WoW.  I'm SERIOUSLY stoked about this new set.  Like to the point that I'm almost certainly going to raid in Cataclysm, if ONLY to pick up tier 11.  I still maintain that our Season 9 set looks okay, but tier 11 is just so much more awesome.

But looking at the amount of effort that has clearly gone into our newest raid set, I have to question just how it can look so amazingly detailed, while our PvP set seems like an afterthought.  Not to say I'm not stoked for our Season 9 gear, because it looks AWESOME.  It's better than any other PvP set we've had through Wrath, in my opinion.  But look at that raid set.

Now I know that the vast majority of players raid.  It's probably the biggest chunk of the endgame for a lot of people.  And even people that don't consider themselves 'raiders' probably consider PvE to be their main source of killing stuff.  The percentage of the player base that PvPs and doesn't raid on top of that is comparatively small.  But I'd really like to see Blizzard put the time and effort that they put into their raids and their raid sets into PvP, and our gear.

I'm not the first player to complain about this, I'm sure.  And forgive me if you think I'm being deliberately inflammatory by blogging about something like this while I can't talk about much else.  But it's been bugging me for a while, and I felt the need to rant about it.

/rant off

Death Knights are looking better than ever moving into Cataclysm.  With more stable spec designs, a whole whack of epic looking armor on both sides of the divide, and a probably a whole lot more awesome to come with December 7th, everyone in the class right now, whether they kill bosses or players, has something to be seriously pumped about.

That's going to do it for me for now.  I can't wait to be back in the thick of it soon!  Look for some more DK-oriented posts coming up early next week.  Then after that... it's pretty much the release of Cataclysm!

Very exciting time all around,

Practice safe Death!

~Onike

Radio Silence

Ironically, just a few days after I wrote a lengthy post about the importance of hardware to your PvP, my computer decided to die.  It's in the shop being fixed (or at least to be given a time of death) right now, the general consensus seems to be a fried hard drive.  Which basically means a new computer for me.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I've been running WoW on a fairly small laptop, so if I invest in a newer, better computer my performance should go way up.  This is, however, a lot of money to have to drop, so needless to say I'm not thrilled about my predicament.

Basically, I've just managed to grab a public computer to post this, and I'm just checking in, to make sure that everything is still in one piece in the blog-o-sphere.  What me having no computer essentially means for you, my readers, is that I will be more or less unable to post until the situation is resolved.

So I'm asking you to please put up with a little bit of radio silence over the next little while.  I'm going to be largely absent without a computer, but once I get back, I assure you all, I will make it known.

Looks like this has been a month of new hardware all around for me.  Let's hope that doesn't happen again for a long while.

Until next time!

Practice safe Death,

~Onike