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