Army Scharmy!

Howdy! And welcome to another edition of RoaDK! I loved that movie and I felt the picture fit this article so I posted it. I have one or two project posts in the works, but I came across something this past week or two that started to irk me, especially with this new LFG system in effect on Live servers.

It was the Death Knight use of Army of the Dead.

Now, honestly, I love this talent. I love being able to once every 10 minutes (6 if your spec'd) summon vast powers of unholy energy and rip the undead from their graves and command them to do my bidding. Complete awesome sauce! Until someone pops it in a dungeon with a lot of mobs such as Pit of Saron. And this army went nuts! This DPS DK pops Army and soon most of the front half of the instance is aggro'd.

Unfortunately, this can be a problematic talent in the hands of the untrained. The one problem with this, is that the 8 Ghouls that you raise from their grave are pissed! They want to kill anything and everything, meaning they taunt and poke fun at things until the mobs, bosses, evil NPCs are attacking them and only them. Such as my last run in Heroic Pit of Saron. And this army went nuts! This DPS DK pops Army and soon most of the front half of the instance is aggro'd. Boy was everyone pissed. then the DK had the gall to yell at me for not controlling the adds he pulled.

In a lot of boss fights where mob or add control is very important, this is very bad.
The one example I ran into was during an Ulduar run on Ignis. Now he is just a basic tank and spank while kiting fight. Pretty simple, except that he calls forth stone statues to do his bidding. Thus the off-tank (OT) has to kite these thru fires and then the water and then one massive crit later they go BOOM!

Now throw in an angry undead army and we have problems. The statue will not stay on the OT but instead gets ticked off at the undead army making fun of him and goes careening off. Fortunately on Ignis, this a recoverable affair.

Now lets chose another boss then. Say, Emalon the Storm Watcher and his angry posse of Revenants. Your MT is in there handling the adds, since he has better AE threat and your OT is handling Emalon since he is able to stay in and eat the Nova. Then you hear, 'Pop ur Armies, DKs'. At that point my instant reaction is , OMGWTH!!! Pop Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, and run for the exit. This is a wipe.

Why? you ask.

For one simple reason. The Revenant adds in Emalon's room are tauntable by pets. So for 30 seconds or until Ghoul death, the adds cannot be controlled by the MT handling the adds.
Well, why not just wait it out and then have the MT pick all the adds back up?

Now you see, that's the problem. Once Army has the adds they run all over the place, and in those 30 seconds, an Overcharge will appear on 1 mob and since everything is helter skelter, the add can't get mowed down in time and BOOM!, raid wipe. All because someone said, 'DKs, pop ur armies!' and that DK(s) listened.

This should prompt a little note in someone's head saying, research boss fights! Why? Because it's simple and easy. You don't want to wipe! Knowing your boss fights or at the least, anything in the boss fight is tauntable by pets should be noted and stored away in your noggin' for future reference.

Now in this situation, there are 2, count them, 2 people who need to learn about the DK abilities.

Number 1: The raid leader (supposing that the raid leader was the one that called out for Army). It is always the responsibility of the raid leader to know the fights and what and what not to do during said fight. Hence have some basic understanding of every class.

Number 2: The DK!! Yes, that's right, especially the DK. When the DK hears something like that, he should have in mind already if he is going to pop Army or not on this particular boss fight. He should know which bosses he can and cannot have Army out on. Why? He is the DK, he should know what his abilities do and what they don't do.

Now sometimes there are uses for the Army taunts during boss fights, say Heroic Pit of Saron on Scourgelord Tyrannus.

Your running through Heroic Pit one day as a DK and your tank is a Warrior or some other class tank. You get to Scourgelord and for some reason halfway through the fight your tank's screen freezes and can't pop defensive cooldowns or he's taking to much damage for the healer or your little rag tag party to compensate for. This fight doesn't have addition adds to control and it's simple to get Scourgelord back on the tank, so pop your Army!! You just gave your tank and healer a 15 to 30 second breathing window. You just saved the raid! Cheers!

Now not all Bosses, heroic or otherwise, are tauntable. So to all you DKs out there, learn your abilities. Learn your fights. Learn to place on the back burner those abilities that could hender(Yes, this especially applies to all you DPS DKs and your love of Death grip. Wanna use the Grip, then you are the tank my friend.). Run through scenarios and find out which of those abilities will help. Don't just go around popping your Army when you feel like it.

Well my rant is through and maybe sometime this week I will post one of my projects up.

/grrr

Shadows of Red

Every WoW blooger has done it, including my bud, Matheo, with his 'Meet the Fam' blog post, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon and am here to tell you about my toons.

First, it all started with my cousin. I was on the phone with him one day and he said," Hey have you ever tried Warcraft?"

"No," I replied, "doesn't look all that good." (I know, I know, "Blasphemy!")

"Well, you should try the 10-day trial, but trust me, you will love it," he said.

"Okay, okay, I'll try it," I said.

After 5 minutes of account info input and 34 hours of download later ( I know, my net speed sucks, I fixed that, trust me) there I was at the login screen. I thought to myself, "I hope my computer can handle this." I type in my account info and begin logging in. I pick my cousin's server, Azuremyst. Then the character screen pops up. OMG! so many choices! Which one do I pick? Dang, I never found out if my cousin was Alliance or Horde. A phone call later and I was choosing Alliance. So do I pick human, gnome, dwarf or night elf.

Human. Clicky.

Warrior, Priest, Paladin, Mage, Warlock, Rogue?

Rogues sound cool. Clicky.

Hair and skin styles follow. Manly face, with black hair tied in a pony-tail and a duelist goatee.

Awesome.

Name? Wow, I get to name him? Sweet! Spiders are cool. I'll name him Spyder. Nah, too simple. How bout Redyps? Nice works for me.

Meet Redyps.

So I have my toon, I login and phone my cuz. I get with him, I play a few lvls to like 5 and am estatic. I buy the game the next day. Login my CD key, get in game and was invited to my cousin's guild which is my first guild, Reservoir Dogs. So far I'm having fun. I get my rogue to level 19 and was thinking that I suck at being a rogue. So I decide to reroll. I leave my rogue way out in Lakeshire just stealthed somewhere by the lake and log.

Character screen:

um Human! Clicky.

um Warlock, sounds good. Clicky.

Name? um....well everyone calls me Red short for Redyps.....so Red-something....

Warlocks, magic, fires.....Red-fire! No.....Redfyre. Little did I know that warlocks do mostly shadow damage and boy wouldn't it be sweet for him to have green fire spells.

Meet Redfyre.

My second toon. I level him to 40 or so and then my cousin tells me to meet him in Shat. 'I'm like why?' 'So you can set your hearth and get to all the major cities.' 'Okay, where is Shat?'

'Outlands.' 'There's no Outlands on my map!' 'It's another planet.' 'There are other planets!!' 'Um Yeah.' 'You did get the Burning Crusade expansion?' 'Um No.' Next day I buy the BC edition.

Get to Outlands and set my hearth. Well, I get Redfyre up to level 70 and start running Heroics and Kara and the such. its was fun leveling up my lock. Going through all those quest chains to get my demons, my mounts and my Soul Harvester, which I still have in my bank with a Fiery chant on it, mostly because I have the entire Midsummer fire costume from the achievements. With the staff, the costume and a little Noggenfoggers, I become the Tiny Fiery Dancing Skeleton of Soul Harvesting! A lot of gold was involved but I have great guildies. I read up on Warlocks on the online blogs and such and learned to play my lock really well and was always fighting for the top DPS spot with my Affliction spec. Also turns out I was one of the best Fear kiters out there. Oh what fun it is to Fear Kite! I took up Enchanting and Tailoring. Now those are some slave driving professions. But with the cool chants that only I could have and the gear that only I could wear, they have become my best friends. So here I was on my main toon, having the time of my WoW life, when something happened. Throughout leveling up, I found out about Battlegrounds. Oh what fun! Kill the HORDE!! But then IT happened. At level 70, I kept getting ganked by rogues!

I finally started watching how Alliance rogues worked, moved, stabbed, ganked. And I was like, 'I can do that!' I placed my rogue on the shelf because I had no idea what I was doing with him. Time to break him out and get him up to level 70 so I can gank in the BGs.

Welcome to World of Warcraft.

[Redyps] is now online.

'Cough, Cough, Hack, Cough.' /shake Redridge dust off body

/stretch Let's give this a whirl. A total of 16 playing days later (about 2 1/2 weeks in RL time)

70 DING!

Through the leveling, my rogue had Herbalism and Skinning. At level 70, he dropped Herbs and picked up Leatherworking.

Since my lock and rogue are one of the few pure DPS toons, I switched them through Kara, ZA and other raid runs and eventually geared my rogue up. And I start owning in the BGs on both my lock and my rogue.

Lich King expansion hits and I have a choice. Which toon do I level first? Redyps was my first toon made, but Redfyre was the first to 70. Well I headed to Borean Tundra with my lock. I get there and the place is full of ninjas!

[Redfyre] has gone offline.

Human. Clicky.

Death knight. Clicky.

Name? TheRedDeath........I like reading Poe, if you haven't noticed. Since my guild had a tank shortage, the DK became my tank and my main. My DK currently carries the professions Jewelcrafting and Mining. Jewelcrafting was majorly needed in my guild. ResDogs was small and no one else in guild had that profession.

Shorty after getting my DK some epics my rogue finally made it to level 80 and shortly after that my Warlock hit 80. Right now Blizz seems to be against Warlocks. Just about everything in Northrend was made to be warlock unfriendly. Everything is Undead and unable to be feared. /pout

When I need to hide or get away from Northrend for a while I have a level 40 Night elf Hunter named Redblud and his four pets: the spider Spitz(my current favorite), the wolf Vargr, the kitty Blackblud and the bear Corduroy. I also have a level 36 Night elf Druid named Redwulf that I hang out on. I also have a few other toons scattered out on a couple PvP servers and maybe even 1 or 3 toons on the Horde side somewhere but my passion is the Alliance.

Well, there you have it.

My unstoppable Tank and DPSer, the DK named TheRedDeath.

'My services go to the highest bidder but kill all Hordies' rogue named Redyps.

My fear kiter and all round Demon enslaver, the warlock named Redfyre.

My hunter, Redblud and my druid Redwulf.

All them have become the Shadows of Red.

The Ruins have Returned!

Thought you would like to watch and/or listen to that while you read.

So, boy, have I been gone or what? Here I was reading my bud's blog, the purple-hatted druid, when I look down and see that I made it onto his Worthy Blogs spot. Then I noticed I hadn't written anything for 6 months! Well color me a fool. I better try to keep that spot!

So I think I'm going to try to write something at least once a day, to get myself into the habit. I will keep it WoW-related though I promise. I might even keep it Death Knight related but we'll see.

Well I know I have been gone a while so let me catch you up with me and what I have been doing.

Current spread from Wowarmory: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Azuremyst&n=Thereddeath

Yep, that's right. I am still Blood Tank. It's awesome. Now you'll probably notice that I have a 2nd spec that is no longer for DPS but a tank spec in the Frost tree.

Yes thats right, in the Frost tree. Since 3.3 PTR and Live, I have been playing with mitigation stats and increased threat, not to mention the fact that it would be awesome and totally sweet to be a great Dual Wielding tank. So I'm working that out. But to me Blood will always be my primary tank spec.

I believe the last time I posted I was still in Reservoir Dogs. Currently I am now in Band of Misfits. ResDogs had always been a small guild but we had a few people go off and create their own guild. That left ResDogs really small, like only the GL, her hubby, and 2 officers (myself and my wife). Well we starting raiding with Band of Misfits over the summer and turns out they liked us and offered us guild invites. After much thinking and minimal discussion we decided to place ResDogs in control on the GL alt and us 4 join the ranks of Band of Misfits. Awesome guild and the people there are great. This also gave us access to end raid content due to how many people they had and our skills as a team.

Due the raiding we do I have been able to completely overhaul my tanking set since last time I posted and have a DPS set in my bags plus several weapons to switch between, with Justicebringer being my favorite (at least until I get my DK's hands on Shadowmourne).

I will keep this site updated as much as I can!