srsbusiness

The Sleeper has Awakened
Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. In my slumber I’ve noted changes, performed experiments (for science), all the while building up more assets. In the process I’ve also been clearing out my storage as noted in last weeks post (this goes hand in hand with my building of assets), for example the Druid on my second account is an enchanter.

Wait isn’t Khaas an Enchanter? Why do I need a second?

Simply put, it’s much more expedient to craft items with my alts and store them in my guildbank, then grab and DE them with an alt. Since I’m dual boxing my gold now it’s perfectly possible for my to toss items in there with my main account and DE them on another screen while crafting another large batch of de fodder. It’s all about the best use of my time. And it offers the me the freedom to drop enchanting on Khaas should I feel the urge to in the future (which I doubt).

But while we’re on the subject of enchanting I would like to bring attention to something I’ve found quite interesting, old world enchanting mats are selling well. While grinding my Leatherworking skill up on my Rogue I was disenchanting and grinding enchanting on my second account as suggested above, the excess was then listed in the AH. Some of these old world enchanting mats were pretty poor on the return, but there were definitely a few notable exceptions Greater Eternal Essences were particularly profitable.

The things have been moving like mad, and I’ve been playing around with the best ways to generate piles of them. Expect to see a post on this sometime in the near future…

The Spice Must Flow
Another interesting development. See, most of the time when something “odd” happens on the Auction House happens, I get blamed for it. And there is definitely precedent for that, but there are times when I had nothing to do with it, for example: this week Saronite Bar prices went berserk. No, I’m not talking double “normal prices” I’m talking as much as 5 times what people expect to see in the AH. There’s several possible reasons for this, one Blizzard released Warden 2.0 which means a lot of botters are in hiding, which means less cheap Bars available…

Another possibility is that someone else is trying my scorched earth technique, trying to limit material goods needed for a variety of items. Either way, what kind of Goblin would I be if I didn’t profit from someone else’s work? I’m not going to go full disclosure on this one (just yet), but rest assured this should prove interesting.

Here’s a recent scan of Ore and Bars:

In the interest of brevity, let me just say that I’m back in business. I don’t expect to be showing any real positive numbers just yet as I’m still reinvesting into the empire. But, it’s only a matter of time before I run out of characters to power level professions on. Also, I have a new side project that I will be talking about at length soon, let me just say that I’ve started working a third account. This time however I’m playing on the Alliance side of Bloodscalp (No, I’m not rerolling, Horde is my home) but there’s a big disparity between horde and alliance populations on Bloodscalp, and I want to see what I can do there without cross faction trading. Also, I want to play with friends of mine in Draconic Savant when able. As for Face on Fire? We’re still recruiting, still killing bosses and despite a few setbacks, we’re doing well. So, if you want to raid Tues and Thurs, give us a look.

Anyhow, that’s it for this week. Thanks for reading…

There Will Be Blood
With the announcement that Blood would be the only tanking tree for Death Knights in Cataclysm I’ve decided to revise my tanking guide, the new version is much more detailed with extensive information and theorycrafting about Blood tanking, as well as a few more bells and whistles. Work is progressing, so well in fact that I thought I’d share a sneak peak with you guys. Enjoy!

THE BASICS OF THE BLOOD ROTATION
Sets – For the purposes of this conversation when I mention a set, I’m, refering to a complete set of six runes. It’s also important to note that here I am assuming a full 3 points in Death Rune Mastery, so each alternate set will have 2 Blood and 4 Death Runes.

» Set 1 ( IT – PS – HS – HS – DS )

» Set 2 ( IT – IT – HS – HS – IT – IT )

This rotation is for maximum threat, with the threat coefficient attached to Icy Touch you should be generating massive amounts of threat. The alternative would be a more DPS oriented rotation as shown below…

» Set 1 ( IT – PS – HS – HS – DS )

» Set 2 ( HS – HS – HS – HS – HS – HS )

A QUICK NOTE ON DEATH RUNES
In both of the rotations listed above you have a little wiggle room, specifically in each Set 2 where you have 2 BR and 4 DR available. The biggest reason to have these four abilities separately instead of in a castsequence macro is to offer versatility. Depending on your situation you may opt to use Death Runes to cast for survival abilities (Rune Tap, Death Strike, or Vampiric Blood, and in Cataclysm for Bone Shield). Knowing when and what to use in these situations can mean the difference between a wipe and loot, this will be covered in greater detail in the Survival Section of the guide later.

Remember always, healing yourself is absolutely not a waste of resources… live tanks are doing their jobs, dead tanks are not.

WHEN AND WHY?
When tanking bosses you’ll want to lead off with the threat rotation, this will establish an early threat lead (especially when combined with Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade), you can then switch to the DPS rotation. However, it is important to keep tabs on your threat relative to that of the other raiders, as well as allowing for fight mechanics – though rare threat resets during a fight are not unheard of.

RUNIC POWER AND YOUR ROTATION
As in life, when you are tanking… sometimes you just have to take a dump. Each of the abilities listed in the rotations above generates Runic Power. Some of your other abilities require this resource to function as well, so depending on the fight you will want to adjust the amount of RP you have on reserve. The general rule of thumb however is that if you have 60+ RP you should dump with Death Coil. The main consumer of RP however will be Rune Strike, and should be used anytime that it lights up. Both of these abilities will add threat as well as damage, but due to their nature they are not “technically” a part of your rotation.

TLDR VERSION: If left with the choice, use RS over DC. And you may want to keep enough RP around to cast Icebound Fortitude of Mind Freeze (depending on the situation).

*SPOILER ALERT* (Cataclysm Info): It should be noted that Rune Strike will be losing it’s “on next swing” nature and become simply an instant attack. Likewise it appears that Mind Freeze is moving to a Frost Rune to cast rather than 20 RP. In the future you may be less likely to want to waste a FR on an interrupt…

MANAGING COOLDOWNS
Both Blood Tap and Empowered Rune Weapon are powerful tools in your arsenal, here I will discus the practical application of each.

» Blood Tap (hereafter referred to as BT) – Supplies a quick Death Rune, this I consider mainly for use with Defensive abilities which we will cover in the next section. But the primary reason for this, is it keeps your rotation in tact while allowing you to use abilities like Vampiric Blood or Rune Tap.

» Empowered Rune Weapon (hereafter referred to as ERW) – This ability finishes the cooldown on all of your runes, it has a five minute cooldown itself though. Which may cause you to want to save it, myself I tend to blow it after set one at the beginning of the fight for a quick burst of early threat. Typically it’s available again before the boss is dead, and generally toward the end of the fight when I might want to blow everything to survive.

MACROS
I use four basic macros in my rotation, each is set up to que Rune Strike, turn on auto attack (in the event I don’t have any runes), and to clear any errors associated with mashing the macros. Likewise, I’ve added some modifiers to two of these macros to save me some action bar real estate.

Icy Touch + Death Coil
/cast [nomod] Icy Touch
/cast [mod:alt] Death Coil
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Pressing the button will cast Icy Touch, and if conditions are right will que up Rune Strike for your next white swing. If you hold down Alt while pressing the key you will cast Death Coil instead of Icy Touch.

Plague Strike
/cast Plague Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Very simply casts Plague Strike and ques up Rune Strike for your next white swing, assuming conditions are met.

Heart Strike + Blood Strike
/cast [nomod] Heart Strike
/cast [mod:alt] Blood Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Pressing this key will cast Heart Strike, holding Alt while pressing the key will cast Blood Strike instead.

Death Strike
/cast Death Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

And finally Death Strike with the usual Rune Strike addition.

STATS
I will be covering this in greater detail in a later section, but I wanted to mention briefly my general rule for threat stats – when gearing I typically aim for a 220 hit (260 after food) and a 26 Expertise. With parry haste being a non issue I don’t recommend going beyond the Expertise soft cap.

That does it for this installment, I hope it was informative. And I hope that you enjoyed reading, expect the completely revised tanking guide in the next couple of weeks. And thanks for reading…

The Non Sequitur of QQ
Where do you fit on the line, are you ruled by fear or love? Recently I’ve gotten some nods from other bloggers, Warcraft Econ liked my use of a master list to explain what items and their quantities I made/sold to get the gold cap. And Gravity over at Pwnwear made a post about tanks using Shadowmourne, there are a few of us. And there still seems to be an odd mix of feelings on the subject.

[2. Trade] [Trollah] A tank with Shadowmourne, UNPOSSIBLE!
Now, I’ve gotten my fair share of comments as a result of having the thing, in fact I can’t log on now without seeing some comment. I have to say though, response has been overwhelmingly positive. Linking my axe with it’s three Stamina gems and tanking enchant has become troll bait however, and the victims of such trolling tend to be very loud and pissy.

Something interesting happens when I get whispers though, some are incredibly positive and at times downright funny. A few though go to weird places. A common complaint is, “I wish you were DPS, please respec DPS for me. It’s such a waste having that on a tank.” First of all, it’s not a waste. It’s a fantastic tanking weapon as well as a fantastic DPS weapon. If you have a problem with it being used to tank, take it up with Blizzard they are the ones that designed the class to TANK with DPS WEAPONS. Second, and this is really funny. When we’re talking about wasting gear… what about all of that tanking gear I’m wearing. I mean I have 5pc T10 Tanking gear, I have Heroic tanking gear. If I specced DPS for one item that I have, what about the waste of all of that tanking gear? Oh, and the more glaring issue… why should I do anything for this random person, when they’re not the one who got me this amazing weapon? Which cuts to the heart of the matter, it was my guild mates who decided I should get it, and it was my guild mates who made it happen. Hell, they put in overtime to make it happen.

So, I think their opinion matters just a little bit more. Another interesting argument is that from a clinical min/max perspective, it should always go to DPS. However, much like the Love VS Fear chart in the movie Donnie Darko, this ignores a whole range of factors. Like the fact that there are living breathing people in the raid. The problem is, the reason given is often “you need all of the DPS you can get for 25 LK Heroic” well, I’m not fighting him… and by the time we do get to H LK, our few 2H DPS should have Shadowmourne (assuming they actually do the Infusions). The point is though, the right decision for your guild is not the right decision for my guild, and vice versa. But all of these arguments are really a non issue, because at the end of the day no matter who “wins the argument” I’ve still got my Axe, and I’m not getting rid of it to make anyone feel better. And I’m definitely not going to apologize for having it…

Getting Down to Business
Now that we got that out of the way, it’s time to talk business and that’s the real reason you’re here. I’ve been doing some Spring Cleaning. I have four guild banks currently with 6 tabs each, my main of course being SRS Business, the other three banks are for excess storage. Sometimes I find deals that are just too good to pass up, for instance I found Titanium Ore for 80g per stack one night, I bought them out and sent them to storage. Waiting for the price to go up, now that it’s back up to 200 per stack it’s time to cash in.

I see these extra guild banks as warehouses basically, and right now it’s time to make room. See, I’ve decided to start stockpiling appreciable goods, that is to say items that I’m reasonably certain will be able to turn a profit when Cataclysm launches. Likewise, I’m building up my army of alts I finished off Alchemy and Leathworking on my Rogue yesterday, which means I’ve got 9 Transmute Alchemists on my main account and every other profession is covered. So it’s time to turn my attention to my second account. There I’ve been working on enchanting with my Druid, as I level professions like Leatherworking and Tailoring on my little army I DE anything I can to get his skill up, make scrolls with what’s left and sell the excess on the AH.

I’m still working out what specifically I want to horde in preparation for Cataclysm, and I’m not entirely sure I’ll give full disclosure here before the expansion drops. But I will be talking a bit about it as time goes on. Suffice it to say, I expect to profit from the end of the world.

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading…

It should be noted that information here was taken from this week’s press event, and is in no way “leaked” info or NDA breaking data. The original post can be found on World of Raids [here] I have however weeded out the info pertinent to DK tanks and posted it here for ease of access, along with my own comments. Enjoy…

ABILITIES
» Blood Presence – The new Tanking Presence, functions as Frost Presence does currently.
» Rune Strike – As expected RS is no longer an “on next swing” attack, but an instant. It still requires a Dodge or Parry to use.
» Death and Decay – Cost reduced to one Unholy Rune (down from 1 BR, 1 FR, 1UR). This one is huge for multi-mob tanking…

TALENTS
+ Blood
» Subversion – Removed. The crit will be missed…
» Blood-Caked Blade – Moved over from Unholy and is now a tier-3 talent. This should be a definite must for any threat spec…
» Bone Shield – Moved from Unholy to Blood, and is now a tier 3 talent. A new tool for Blood to work with, should be interesting to see how it works alongside the other tanking cooldowns…
» Toughness – Moved over from Frost and is now a tier-4 talent. A welcome change, and pretty predictable.
» (NEW) Hemorrhagic Fever – New tier-5 talent that causes Blood Boil to reduce physical damage dealt by 10%.Very interesting, we get a version of Demo Shout. I like this.
» Improved Blood Presence – Now causes you to become crit immune at 2/2. As stated previously all tanks will become crit immune through talents, so this was expected.
» Will of the Necropolis – Now also generates a Blood Rune and resets the cooldown on Rune Tap when it triggers. I think I just came, seriously…
» (NEW) Blood Parasite – Tier-8 talent, chance to spawn a Bloodworm with attacks. It will attack a target until it explodes, healing nearby allies. On the fence with this one, depends on the AI of these little bastards.
» (NEW) Sanguine Fortitude – Tier-8 talent, 3 ranks, improves Icebound Fortitude reduction by 10% per rank(?) and at max rank makes it cost no runic power(?). Kinda a big deal, I can’t tell you how pissed I was when they nerfed the IBF glyph and this brings back freebie IBF, Viva la Cataclysm!
» Heart Strike – Now hits 3 targets. Let’s just call it Heart Swipe now… Don’t misunderstand me though, I think this a positive change.

» (NEW) Blood Swarm – Tier-10 talent, when you use Plague Strike on targets with Blood Plague it has a chance to make Blood Boil not cost a rune.More AE Threat Potential, and “proc” based. Interesting…
» Dancing Rune Weapon – Now also increases parry chance by 20% while it’s active. Not gonna lie, this one caught me off guard (sorry for the parry pun) but in all seriousness I had somewhat expected this to swap with Howling Blast, then again I think that was mostly wishful thinking on my part.

+ Frost
» Unbreakable Armor – Removed. Annoyed that it didn’t make it to the new blood tree, but not overly surprised.
» (NEW) Runic Empowerment – Tier-1 talent, 5 ranks, has an 8/16/24/32/40% chance to active a random fully depleted rune whenever you use Death Coil, Frost Strike or Rune Strike. Though not a tank specific talent, it offers some utility and flexibility. And with the changes to rune mechanics this one might become a necessity for many builds.

+ Unholy
» Morbidity – Moved from tier-2 to tier-4. I’ll be honest, knee jerk reaction – this kinda pisses me off. Blood really isn’t big in the AE threat department, we don’t get an AE taunt. So BB and DND are our bread and butter (typically). Now, with some of the other changes we may not need to rely on DND as much, but for now I remain reservedly pissy till I get a chance to play around with the new talents first hand.

CURRENT THOUGHTS
I’m still not sure how this whole change to the rune and runic power mechanics is going to work, and of course we still don’t have a complete set of talent trees to look at, but overall I’m happy. The changes appear to be mostly positive and they look as though they will be enjoyable. I still have concerns of course and I definitely still don’t like the level of homogenization we’re seeing, but I can live with it (so far). Either way, I’m as excited about the expansion as ever after reading about these changes.

I’ll have more news as it develops…

XOXO
Khaas the Insane

gasp, two posts in one day! If you’re looking for the weeks gold report look at the Altocaust Edition posted earlier.

The Quest for a Worthy Weapon
When I first started playing Khaas, I had hoped (as I’m sure many other Death Knights did) that there would be a legendary two-hander from the Lich King. In fact, there was little doubt in my mind, though whether we would get to wield Frostmourne or not was always somewhat questionable. But one cannot simply make a Death Knight and get a Legendary weapon, one has to progress. And as a tank, that progression has been somewhat difficult since unlike a warrior or Paladin I often times have quite a few toes to step on to get something suitable for smacking baddies. For me it started with the Hellreaver from Hellfire Ramparts, then the quest line weapons in Nagarand, Borean Tundra, and Zul’Drak. Finally, I hit eighty and it was time to equip the epic Titansteel Destroyer. I paid a pretty penny to be one of the first on Bloodscalp to swing the thing, and I got my monies worth.

I didn’t upgrade the Destroyer till we were farming Ulduar 10 Hard Modes some six months after I first got the mace. I got Aesir’s Edge off of XT, now this was a superior weapon. It looked great, had sockets. And it hit like a truck. Then it was off to the Trials of the Crusader to prepare for the inevitable assault on the stronghold of the Lich King himself, here I claimed Mor’kosh, the Blood Reaver from our first Tribute run.

By the time of the release of Icecrown Citadel we had grown strong as a twenty five man guild, and so the officers deliberated. And it was decided that I would receive the guild’s first Shadowmourne. So, the long quest began. I wrote my walk-through as I progressed along the chain until I reached the final grind. I quickly estimated it would take about ten weeks to complete Shadowmourne from that point. (For those curious about the drops, out of 11 bosses it was as follows 4,7, 7, 5, 5, 4, 5, 8, 5)

This makes me one of the few (maybe the first for all I know) tanks using this in the world, definitely the only one on Bloodscalp.

It is done.
Last night was rough for the guild, the attendance boss hit us full force. Yet, we overcame the adversity and in the end an overwhelming majority of those in attendance opted to stay late to clear the last wing in the hopes of getting my last shard. Their dedication was rewarded, as at approximately midnight (Central Standard Time) we killed Professor Putricide and I received my 50th shard. After handing out loot we made way for the entrance for the turn in, inevitable RP from the quest giver and a few screenshots.

It is difficult to adequately express my thanks to my guild mates, last night was a frustrating night of raiding. But when the crunch came, you guys stepped up. You supported me when I needed you, and for that I am truly thankful. So today I offer a drink in recognition to my guild and those others who came along (yes we even had pugs).

Finally, while I definitely want to thank my friends at Face on Fire and Draconic Savant for their support throughout this endeavor, I would specifically like to thank those that hung in there (all 23 of them) for “just one more wing”.

Martei
Sharpobject
Threedrakez
Zelthas
Disarmonia
Maleth
Zurs
Aahz
Charnos
Cytyzent
Demonarc
Pearski
Evasive
Fistycuffs
Fletch
Frostvein
Somniphobia
Deltazero
Duflax
Jidaigeki
Urik
Ysosrs

Thanks again guys!