Thursday, October 04, 2012

More on Challenge Dungeons

We're starting to get to the point where we're capped on gear and want to give challenge dungeons a spin. My server still has no times listed for any dungeon so just going in and doing adequately will get our names in the lights for a brief period of time at least! As of last night I didn't have any enchants/reforging done on my gear and didn't really know what I was doing as far as a DPS plan. I just hit some buttons! I decided to do some reading to see what I could be doing differently...

I ended up spending a couple hours reading threads about death knights on elitist jerks. Stat weightings were the primary reason I was there (haste is awesome) but there were some neat tips and tricks I hadn't thought of. In particular it turns out dancing rune weapon has a 30 yard range so a blood DK can use it as an extra ranged interrupt! I don't think it's always been that way but if it has I didn't know about it!

DPS-wise I've been pretty much doing what I need to be doing. The exception is making proper use of the new execute ability. I'm not sure it's really viable in heroics but maybe challenge mode mobs will have enough health that I can start reliably timing 5 seconds before they get into the 35-0% range.

I got home from work today and saw an interview on mmo-champion with one of the guys who currently has gold times in every challenge dungeon (on another server, obviously) and it was very interesting. In order to kill things faster they ran without a healer! They used splash healing from a shadow priest, self healing from a DK tank, and copious raid cooldowns. Generally tanks get really bitter when a DK pops army of the dead but these guys were using it AS their tank a lot of the time! They don't need healing and do tons of damage themselves! The group ran two DKs and a shaman (with earth elemental totem) for lots of 'pet' tanking. They were also all engineers which I suspected might be good. It turns out engineering is the best profession for a frost DK when it comes to damage and isn't terrible for tanking either. So, I'll probably switch to engineering from mining soon. It's a shame Robb has a lot of my ore on his inactive account. 8P

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