Jame's Game Guides

Here we go again. A new series of parses to check what's the best talent spec for leveling. This time I've done things a little differently:

• No ability with a cooldown of 1 minute or higher was used. This was to reflect more accurately a leveling situation. You don't use your cooldowns on every monster when you level up, you generally save them for elites or big fights, so that's why I didn't use them to run those tests
• Consequently, I only used the ghoul for the Unholy spec. However, I didn't use Unholy Blight, because in a real leveling situtation, you don't use it that often.
• A level 61 Death Knight with the full blue set from the starting zones was used for all 3 tests.
• The tests were done on a level 58 Servant of Sevine in the Blasted Lands and were each 10 minute long.

Anyway, let's see those numbers!

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Talent spec used: Unholy lvl 61 Leveling Spec


Total: 629 DPS

Observations: Unholy is still very strong. Stronger than in the previous patch. The Death Knight's DPS alone is 517 and that's without even using Unholy Blight. This is due to the fact that Death Coil is now much stronger and easily makes up for the loss of dps from not casting Unholy Blight. This is good news because when leveling, we don't use Unholy Blight that much.

We must also remember that this was done on a single target. Unholy's DPS goes up the roof when taking on 2, 3 or 4 targets, which happens quite often when leveling, especially if you use the DK's ability to gather mobs quickly (Death's Grip and Strangulate for casters, ghoul / icy touch / death coil for the rest).

So in my opinion, Unholy is even better than before for leveling.
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Blood

• Blade Barrier - Now activates when your 2 Blood runes are on cooldown (Old: All 6 runes needed to be on cooldown)

A very nice change, this basically means that now you'll have +10% parry 99% of the time if you take this talent, which is quite amazing for just 5 talent points.

• Heart Strike - Damage increased!
• New: Rank 6 60% weapon damage +220.8, and an additional +110.4 per disease
• Old: Rank 6 50% weapon damage +184.0, and an additional +92.0 per disease

About time! I'm eager to see how Blood DPS will improve from this.

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Frost

• Frost Presence - Armor contribution from items increased to 60%. (Old 45%)

That's a pretty big boost and a much needed one, tanking instances while leveling should be easier now, no matter what your spec is, and that's great.

• Frost Strike - Now cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried.

Great for tanking and great for improving frost DPS, which was very lacking.

• Black Ice - Damage bonus has been doubled but only affects frost damage now (used to be Frost AND Shadow damage).
  
• Now: Rank 5 = +30% Frost
  
• Old: Rank 5 = +15% Frost & +15% Shadow
  

Wow, frost is going to be pretty good now. Frost Strike and Howling Blast should do substantial damage. Too bad they removed the shadow damage boost, it would have had very nice synergy with the Unholy Tree, but probably would have been too powerful anyway, so this is a good change.

• Tundra Stalker: Icy Touch Damage bonus lowered, but expertise bonus doubled.
  
• Old Rank 5: +100% Icy Touch Damage and +5 Expertise
• New: Rank 5: +25% Icy Touch Damage and +10 Expertise

A logical change, Icy Touch was simply doing too much damage with the previous version and it would have been ridiculous now with the changes to Black Ice.
It's still a slight nerf, but the Expertise bonus is a nice addition and consolidates the Frost Tree as the tanking tree.

• Rune Strike - now strikes the target for 200% weapon damage plus 20% of Attack Power. Only usable after an attack is dodged or parried and can't be dodged, blocked, or parried. (Old version was only 65% weapon damage).

A very big boost to this ability which will translate into more DPS for all 3 talent trees. This was a needed change because the old version was so bad it wasn't even worth using it.

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Unholy

• Blood-Caked Blade - Chance to proc doubled.
• New: Rank 3 = 30% chance to proc
• Old: Rank 3 = 15% chance to proc

I guess this talent really can't be avoided now and should compensate a little for the nerf of Scourge Strike.

• Scourge Strike - Damage lowered.
  
• New: Rank 4 = 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage +190.5, and an additional +95.25 per disease
• Old: Rank 4 = 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage +226.8, and an additional +113.4 per disease

A slight nerf and not a surprising one. Scourge Strike was doing too much damage mostly because of the bonus from diseases. It should still do pretty good damage, but more on par with the Blood Tree equivalent (Heart Strike).

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Conclusion

It seems like they're finally getting there in terms of balancing the 3 trees. Frost is becoming more and more the proper tree for tanking, while still gaining more DPS. Blood's DPS is finally getting close to the one of Unholy.

I'll run some tests and post the results tomorrow, and we'll see how those changes really affected the talent trees. So stay tuned!

Northrend leveling is different from Outland and Azeroth leveling. The zones are bigger, much bigger. There are also no long quest chains taking you from one zone to another, besides a couple of transition quests, which are actually optional.

That's why my Northrend Leveling Guides will also be different from what you're used to, and I'm sure you'll like the changes. Here's the list so far.

1 Zone = 1 Chapter

Instead of seperating my guides in two chapters (70-75) and (75-80) as I had initially planned, I will be seperating them into zones. For example, for the Horde it will be like this:

1. Jame's Horde Leveling Guide - Borean Tundra (70-72)
2. Jame's Horde Leveling Guide - Dragonblight (72-74)
3. Jame's Horde Leveling Guide - Grizzly Hills (74-75)

And so on so forth. This was necessary and brings a lot of advantages. Necessary because a guide encompassing all the quests from 70 to 75 would have been way too big and would be pretty painful for people to load or to print. As I said in a previous article, each level is a massive amount of quests, images and text, so one zone per chapter will be already be big enough. The Borean Tundra chapter alone accounts for 134 images and over 50 pages in a word document, as it stands currently.

This change also brings the following advantages:

• People can jump in my guide easily now, they just have to pick a zone and start there.
• The guide will also be useful to level 80's who haven't followed my guide and wish to go back to a zone to finish the quests they haven't done and get the achievement for it.
  
• When I get feedback from you guys, the comments will be directly targeted at one zone in particular, making it easier for me to find and fix the errors.

Achievements included

• Some achievements will be automatically included in my Northrend Leveling Guides, simply by following the quest circuits.
• Some other achievements will require just one little extra step to be completed and will also be included in the guide. I will be using a special color code for those achievements, making it easy to find them or to skip them.
• Other achievements which deviate a lot from our main objective (getting very high XP/hour rates) will be mentioned but won't be incorporated in my guide. Instead, I will simply give a link to a corresponding achievement guide.

Every quest taken or turned in will be mentioned

This was sometimes a problem in my old guides. I would just say "Go back to Booty Bay and turn in all quests, get all follow ups" for example, and people missed a few quests here and there. This won't be a problem anymore, you just have to look for the quest color code and you won't miss any quest, even if you try to read through my guide as fast as possible, because for each quest turned in and each follow up taken, the full quest name will be mentioned.

Shorter maps

Most circuit maps will only contain 5 steps or less, this will make it easy to follow the maps without having to scroll up and down a lot. Whenever there are steps including a lot of text or big images, I've tried to shrink that number even further down. In other words, my circuit maps should be even easier to follow from now on.

That's all I remember from the top of my head, but there will be more changes and I will constantly try to improve the quality of my leveling guides to make them as easy and enjoyable to follow as possible. If there's any other feature you'd like me to introduce in my guides, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to include it, as long as it's reasonable and worth the effort.

I've been thinking about it. Should I try to include as many achievements as I can in my leveling guides or should I not?

Before we even start to debate it, it must be said that certain achievements will be automatically included in my leveling guides, without it being intentional. For example:

Horde Achievement - 150 Quests completed in Borean Tundra. That one popped on my screen as I was writing the first chapter of my Northrend leveling guide, and I still had a few quests to finish.

Alliance Achievement - 130 Quests completed in Howling Fjord. Just the same as above, I've easily reached the quota while doing the Howling Fjord section of my guide.

Both - Complete all the quests at the D.E.H.T.A Encampment. Also automatically included in my guides.

No problem so far, right? But what about the following achievements:

Friend or Fowl?
Higher Learning
Going down?
To All The Squirrels I've Loved Before

They could be included in my leveling guides, and I know exactly at which point they could be added without interfering with our xp circuits. However, wouldn't I end up overloading my guides with information, making them too big and too long to read? Also, some people probably prefer doing those achievements on their own, for fun, or worse, they've already done those achievements and don't care much for that kind of information.

Should I try to include such achievements in my guide or should I just make seperate guides for achievements?

Blood

• Bloody Vengeance - No longer increases frost and shadow damage.
  

• Dancing Rune Weapon - Cooldown increased to 3 min. (old: 2 min)
  

• Bladed Armor - Now increases attack power by 1/2/3/4/5 for every 180 armor value. (Old 1/2/3/4/5 strength for every 400 armor)
  

Frost

• Obliterate Damage lowered. Now Rank 1 - 100% weapon damage plus 124, and an additional 62 bonus damage per disease. (Old Rank 1 - 100% weapon damage plus 167, and an additional 83.5 bonus damage per disease.)


• Tundra Stalker - Now also increases the damage of Icy Touch by 20% per rank. (20/40/60/80/100%)


• Guile of Gorefiend - No longer gives bonus to Rune Strike critical damage, but gives it to Howling Blast instead.
  


• Howling Blast - Damage increased on all ranks. (Now Rank 5 - 259 to 281) (Old Rank 5 - 192 to 208)


• Runic Focus - Description changed to : “Unlike most casters, a Death Knight’s spells cause double damage on critical hits.”

Unholy

• Death and Decay - Damage Increased (Now Rank 4 - 62 Damage) (Old Rank 4 - 52 Damage)


• Blood-Caked Blade - Damage increased to 25% of weapon damage. (Old 20% of weapon damage.)


• Blood Plague - Chance to remove a Heal over Time effect reduced to 25% (Old 50%)


• Reaping - Pestilence replaced by Blood Strike
  

Observations

The Good: They boosted Frost a little here and there. And that's good because frost definitely needed a boost (and still does after this patch I'm sure).

The Bad:

Frost - They actually nerfed Obliterate? Obliterate is mostly used in Frost builds and frost is by far the weakest of all 3 talent trees, so why nerf it?

Blood - Several nerfs to the blood tree, and I don't get why. Blood was behind Unholy on all aspects, as has been shown in some of my previous articles and by many other beta testers. The change that boggles me the most is the increased cooldown on Dancing Rune Weapon. As the numbers have shown, DRW is really not that powerful for an ultimate talent, it's about the same damage as Summon Gargoyle from the Unholy Tree, besides... it's an ultimate talent and should be more powerful than Summon Gargoyle. Well now, not only is it not more powerful, but it also got the same cooldown. Sounds fair to you?

Unholy - The most puzzling part of those changes, they boosted Unholy, which was already the strongest of all 3 trees, in all aspects of the game. The change to reaping will allow Unholy DKs to replace Bloodboil with Bloodstrike in their rotation and this will increase their single target damage (which was already the highest). This is however a good change, because reaping is an important talent mechanic and it was wrong to have it only work when using AoE abilities, like pestilence and blood boil. However, the side effect is that it's still going to increase Unholy single target dps.
They also gave +5% damage to Blood-Caked Blade, sure, why not, it's not a big improvement but still, did the unholy tree need it?


Conclusion

Stop boosting Unholy, boost the other two trees. For now, I sure as hell am sticking to Unholy. :P