Reconciling Deathknight

The Anger Phase

This morning I am feeling completely out of it.  I struggled to get to sleep last night, and ultimately wound up taking some melatonin against my better judgment.  For most of yesterday I’ve felt like I was coming down with something, and this morning my lungs feel lousy.  It might be the strange weather we have been having, or might be an extension of the emotional weekend I have had, but in any case I am just drained…  which is a pretty horrible way to start a day.  As such this morning is a morning where I am doubling up and having both coffee and an energy drink, hoping that ultimately one of the two will do the trick.  Right now I am playing this fun little game that is composing with my eyes closed at the keyboard.  As such I have no idea what sorts of typos will creep into this post.

I want to thank all of the people who took a moment out of their day yesterday to send me condolences.  It means a lot, and while I have not yet responded to each and every one…  they all were very helpful as the day went on.  For whatever reason I mostly felt angry yesterday, and lots of little things kept me in a perpetual state of grumpy.  In a strange turn of events, it feels like the cats have been a lot more chill with each other, or maybe it is just that they sense that something is wrong.  They have pretty much swarmed me, where I would either have no cats or all three cats at once.  I honestly feel like cats can sense distress in their owners and will try to comfort them in their own way.  I am still very much in distress but I guess it is getting better.  My wife and I remarked that this is the first time in literally years that we have not had a sick animal that we had to treat for something.  It is a really strange feeling, but is also guilty as I feel a bit of a relief.

Serious Piddling

One of my side projects, the last few times I have returned to World of Warcraft has been to slowly chip away at getting my paladin a set of Judgment gear.  I am one of those oh so cliché people that firmly believe that Judgment is quite possibly the best gear set that blizzard has created to date.  My paladin is old enough to have the Blue Judgment look alike set that came from the opening of Naxxramas 2.0 at the tail end of Burning Crusade, and I went through the trouble of farming up the Purple Judgment set from the BC era heroics on both my Paladin and my Deathknight.  The problem is that each time I went into BWL my paladin could not quite solo Razorgore, which in itself is a strange fight to solo anyway.  The equation has two components, firstly that you are geared enough to be able to survive the constant assault of the npcs attacking you as you control the orb, and secondly that your stats are good enough to pump up Razorgore to a point of surviving the assault that ultimately turns on him after you break the first channel.

Last expansion my tanking set was good enough on the Deathknight that I could accomplish this rather easily, but as far as the Paladin goes… my focus was on Retribution so I didn’t quite have the appropriate gear to pull it off.  At 92 however with my focus being leveling tanky…  it worked like a charm and I was able to get through all of the eggs while Razorgore was still at like 75% health.  This was the only real hurdle to soloing the raid, and with that now easy it became simple enough to push my way through.  Positive is that I got the last of my judgment drops from BWL… the negative is that I still need the pants from Molten Core.  When pushing my way through the core like I have so many times before… wouldn’t you know that a binding dropped.  The entire time my raid ran Molten Core we never saw a binding… and in all the hundreds of times I have solo’d the raid myself… I have never seen one either.  Now however I will be adding this to my weekly raid soloing rotation as I chase the OTHER binding from Garr.

Reconciling Deathknight

A huge part of my feelings about Warlords of Draenor as an expansion is how badly I did not like the feel of Blood Deathknights when I played them in alpha.  I could not quite put my finger on it, but they simply felt “wrong”.  To have the class I had been completely devoted to feel crappy going into an expansion, made me not really interested in the expansion at all.  While I have had this grand renaissance of playing a Warrior, I still miss my Deathknight, and with the need of his inscription abilities… I have started working my way through my issues with the class.  I guess at this point it is starting to finally feel “normal” again, and at this point I am staring down the barrel of 93.  There is still quite a bit of stuff that I need to wrap up in Shadowmoon Valley, and as such I am in no real rush to leave it.  I would really like to be able to hit 98 before sitting foot in the Spires of Arak allowing me to completely skip that zone, so I will be milking as much from the zones leading up to that as possible.

Granted at this point I have not tried to tank anything as a Deathknight, but instead just using it as a grossly overpowered leveling spec.  I started off trying to do two handed frost, but quickly decided I needed the survive that blood grants me.  Frost was awesome for bursting things down, but when it came to soloing elites… it struggled.  Blood on the other hand has allowed me to power through pretty much anything I come up against just like blood always has.  I am still getting used to the strangeness of blood boil being part of my normal rotation instead of an ability that I used whenever to spread my diseases.  Also still getting used to the loss of Rune Strike, and using Deathcoil as my runic power dump.  It still gives the Deathknight more of a casterly feel than I really care for, but like I said it is starting to feel “normal” again.  I guess I just needed to spend some time powering through the frustration.