Filed under: (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Death knight beta diaries, part 3: Blood leveling in Vashj'ir

by Daniel Whitcomb Aug 24th 2010 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

As things currently stand in Cataclysm, much of the death knight's famous ability to take tons of punishment and get health back, even in DPS mode, has been removed with the removal of health stealing from the main DPS presence. Unholy and frost death knights will find themselves resorting to using the less damaging (for them) Death Strike while leveling to stay alive and lessen downtime.

Of course, there is one spec that still maintains much of the health-stealing power of our Wrath heyday: blood.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm

Lichborne: Death knight masteries and other Cataclysm beta tweaks

by Daniel Whitcomb Aug 17th 2010 at 5:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With the latest build having just hit the Cataclysm beta test servers, this seems like a pretty good time to take a quick inventory of the changes, maybe say a few things about the direction that the class is heading thus far in beta. I can tell you right now that some of the latest changes are either confusing or just plain silly, and while some things are looking cool enough, we really are long overdue for another major change patch. However, before we get too hardcore into that discussion, let's look at the latest changes.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm

Lichborne: The death knight beta diaries, part 2: Dual wielding in Deepholm

by Daniel Whitcomb Aug 10th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

Our adventures in beta continue, as promised, with a new zone and a new spec. With Hyjal behind us, the next logical zone to head to is Deepholm, and such is where I headed, after a suitably epic breadcrumb quest sequence. My spec was dual wield frost.

Just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from with this testing, I should note that I have been equipping quest rewards if they're itemized for death knight usage, even if they're downgrades, in order to get an idea of how much survivability and damage potential your average casual death knight will have.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm

Lichborne: The death knight beta diaries, part 1: Unholy in Hyjal

by Daniel Whitcomb Aug 3rd 2010 at 2:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With the Cataclysm beta well under way, the death knight class does still have some bugs and glitches to work out and maybe even a bit of balancing work needed. But for now, the beta is definitely where the action is, as we work out some of the major changes to our rune systems and trees and figure out where the future of the class is headed. With that in my mind, I'll be playing through the beta for the new few weeks using various builds and heading to various zones and dungeons, getting a feel for how a death knight plays in Cataclysm. This week, we're headed for Mount Hyjal as a freshly copied-over level 80 unholy DPS death knight.

Note that for the most part, I plan to discuss only specific items and death knight mechanics and will do my best to keep out actual zone and quest plot line spoilers, but if you're afraid of spoilers from item names or discussion of quest mechanics, some of them may appear in this column.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm

Lichborne: Festering Strike and other beta news

by Daniel Whitcomb Jul 27th 2010 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With the latest beta build, death knights have seen yet another series of small adjustments to their talent trees, but the biggest news is the addition of a solution to those hanging frost runes in unholy's rotation: Festering Strike. What's really surprisingly unique about Festering Strike though, is the rune setup: It uses one frost and one blood rune, the first attack to do so. In this week's column, we'll discuss how Festering Strike is fitting in, as well as looking at other talent tree issues and bugs on beta.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Notes from the Twitter developer chat

by Daniel Whitcomb Jul 20th 2010 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

While paladins got some of the biggest bombshells in last week's big developer Twitter chat, there was still quite a bit of juicy information for death knights. Reading between the lines, it's pretty obvious we're getting some major tree revamps, especially in the frost tree, what with On a Pale Horse being added and Runic Empowerment being made baseline. The answers also bought some interesting insights into some of the various decisions being made as our class takes shape in Cataclysm. A few of the answers definitely merit some deeper discussion, so let's get to it.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm

Lichborne: Ruby Sanctum loot for death knights

by Daniel Whitcomb Jul 13th 2010 at 5:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class.

With the state of pretty much every class on beta in limbo thanks to the forthcoming talent revamp, we're taking a break from beta stuff to ransack the Ruby Sanctum. Hopefully, we'll see the new trees on beta in the next week or so, so we have more to work with than speculating on exactly what "signature abilities" everyone will get. In the meantime, we have shiny new loot and a new boss to tackle in the here and now.

The Ruby Sanctum is ostensibly the last major raid of the Wrath expansion, and as such, ostensibly your last chance to get a few extra pieces of gear and uber yourself out before Cataclysm comes along and replaces everything with level 81 quest rewards. There are definitely some pretty prime upgrades to be had here, including a few straight-up best in slot drops, so let's get going and check out what you can grab.

As with previous gear guides, try to keep your stat weights in mind, and when it comes to the heroic versions of these drops, unless otherwise noted, it's usually safe to say the same stuff about the heroic version, except even more so. Also, comparisons here are normal to normal, or heroic to heroic. Heroic versions of ICC loot are, for the most part, probably still going edge out normal Ruby Sanctum loot.

Filed under: Raiding, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: The new blood tree in Cataclysm

by Daniel Whitcomb Jul 6th 2010 at 5:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly death knight column for the class undergoing some pretty cataclysmic changes to its setup and philosophy in the new expansion.

With the Cataclysm beta out of NDA, we've had a chance to take a look at some of the new death knight changes coming our way. I'm pretty sure (and hopeful) that they're not complete yet, but there's enough of it done that we have a relatively good chance of figuring out where it's going. We'll start our more in depth look into the new sole tanking tree of the death knight class, blood. Blood is shaping up to a very interesting tanking tree. If there's one way I can sum it up, it's this: For all that Blizzard's said they want to move away from the "AoE everything down" model, it's interesting that they've done a lot of work to shore up blood's AoE talents.

Let's take a look at some of the ways blood is changing in Cataclysm.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Unholy DPS in Wrath of the Lich King

by Daniel Whitcomb Jun 29th 2010 at 5:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the ins and outs of the death knight class.

With the last announced content patch of Wrath of the Lich King released, and the devs stating that they don't plan to make any major class changes until patch 4.0 and the Cataclysm expansion, It's a good time to start taking a look at how our trees have fared this expansion. Yes, I know that death knights were technically introduced this expansion. Certainly this means there's a comparative breadth to what we have experienced, but Wrath was a time of great change and turmoil for all of our mechanics and trees as well. Let's start our look back with Unholy, specifically by looking at two of its most volatile abilities: Unholy Blight and Scourge Strike.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Advice on Army of the Dead

by Daniel Whitcomb Jun 22nd 2010 at 9:30PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at the death knight class.

In addition to Death Grip, which we discussed last week, there's another major death knight signature skill that requires a bit of a subtle hand to use correctly, and that has cause much angst and hatred on the part of non-death knights over improper or misunderstood usage. This spell is, of course, Army of the Dead. Army of the Dead is another one of those spells that is unique enough that it really doesn't have much of a place in a common rotation, but is powerful enough that it's worth learning to use well. This week, we'll take a look at the mechanics and proper usage of Army of the Dead

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Demystifying Death Grip

by Daniel Whitcomb Jun 15th 2010 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for tips, news, guides and opinions on the death knight class.

So recently, as I've been working on trying to get the Loremaster title before Cataclysm hits, I've rediscovered the joy of queuing for the random dungeon as DPS. The 10- to 20-minute queue times offer a perfect little window of opportunity to finish up a good chunk of questing while I wait to get back on the emblem treadmill and allows me to take a break from tanking to get in a little bit of good old hacking and slashing. Of course, all this dungeon queuing has given me a good opportunity to see both some of my fellow death knights in action and to see how other people react to having a death knight DPSer in their group.

Between that and observations from browsing the web and even simply from reading comments on past issues of Lichborne, I've noticed that one skill seems to be the most misunderstood and reviled by non-death knights: Death Grip. Thus, I figured that this week, we'd take a quick look at this much-maligned skill, so that you can understand the best practices to get the most out of this undeservedly hated and unique death knight ability. These tips will mostly apply for 5-man dungeons, but you'll probably find a lot of the basic principles will also apply to PvP and raiding.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Basic PvP tips and tricks for death knights

by Daniel Whitcomb Jun 8th 2010 at 7:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look into the world of the death knight class.

With Wrath more or less winding down and only the Ruby Sanctum before us at some nebulous point in the future, a lot of us are wandering around with full PvE gear and currency tabs full of emblems looking for a place to go. One easy place to let off some of that steam is with PvP. Be it arena, battlegrounds or (admittedly pretty rare these days) world PvP, this article will give you some basic tips to get yourself squared away with the gear and spec you need to start off on the right foot.

This is by no means a complete guide to absolutely every aspect of death knight PvP. This'll help you get your feet wet and get properly geared, but there's always more to learn, especially in the dynamic, ever-changing world of PvP combat strategy and tactics. Still, nothing gives you a better start on the road to skill than a good foundation in stats and speccing, so let's start this up.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Gearing for new level 80 tank death knights

by Daniel Whitcomb Jun 1st 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for tips, tricks, guides and discussion for the death knight class.

So you've just dinged level 80, and you're ready and willing to take on one of the toughest jobs at the end game, that of the tank. But how do you get prepared and geared so that you have a decent chance of grabbing a slot in a 10- or 25-man ICC raid so that you can see the Lich King die before Cataclysm? Let's give you a few tips and a list of gear to shoot for to get you in top pre-raid shape.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Frost tanking 101

by Daniel Whitcomb May 25th 2010 at 11:00AM

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly death knight column.

This week on Lichborne, we're looking at yet another endangered death knight play style: frost tanking. Frost tanking is one of those strangely misunderstood specs in that many players consider it to be the only tanking spec, or at least the only viable one. This is based on the old pre-beta outline of the death knight class that dedicated frost as the tank tree. Blizzard decided to allow all three trees to tank well before even the alpha was over, but the myth of frost tanking supremacy persisted. Now, there really will be only one tank tree, but instead of frost, it's going to be blood. That means that if you want to experience the original death knight tanking tree, you only have a few more months max to do it. That's why we have this guide.

This a 101 guide, so the usual disclaimers apply. This is meant to get people well on their way to being a viable frost tank, but it's not a be all, end all guide, so there are additional tricks and talenting tweaks experienced tanks will know and pick up. These are just the basics.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Unholy tanking 101

by Daniel Whitcomb May 18th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly death knight column. This week, we're refusing to say goodbye to a dying friend.

Unholy tanking is both a unique and endangered form of tanking in WoW. Unique, because of Bone Shield, which makes unholy uniquely suited to be an avoidance tank, and endangered, because it's going to go away in Cataclysm. That said, there's still reasons to be an unholy tank, whether it's one last hurrah for your favorite playstyle, wanting to try the playstyle before it goes away or wanting to get used to Bone Shield before it moves over to blood to become a core tanking talent for all tank death knights. Whatever your reason, read on. This guide is meant to provide you with the basic talenting, glyphing and technique for starting out as an unholy tank.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

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