The Shattering and a strange sort of leveling plan

Not much time left to go until the Shattering hits European servers, in fact tonight is the last play night. The big news from my DK is that Jessica Sellers won't be trading Ink of the Seas any more, so I need to hit Dalaran tonight and get my stocks of glyphs made up. Several gold blog posters are expecting another Glyphmas like 4.0.1 so I shall ensure I am prepared.

Meanwhile I shall be trying to flog a lot of Netherweave bags once 4.0.3a hits, as I suspect people will be rolling level 1 alts either to see the new quests, or try the new race/class combos out, or both. I hope this means an increase in demand for bags and also heirloom enchants, I am ready to go on both of these.

The DK is also just level 79 and one quarter, so I have a little over 2 weeks to get to 80 if I am to have any chance of playing with friends in Cataclysm. Unfortunately this does mean my plans to have a crack at tanking at level 80 will have to wait.

In fact, I have a strange sort of leveling plan, which is to do the quests with the DK and gain gear that way, maybe playing with friends in instances when they are around. On the other hand, I am toying with the idea of just grinding the Dungeon Finder hard on my Druid tank with guildies, trying to gear up and level up from dungeon XP and drops alone. Doing a whole lot of instances should make me very familiar with the pulls and bosses for level 85, but may be boring. Whereas questing to 85 will make me utterly unfamiliar and unpracticed with tanking the instances, but is likely to be more interesting.

I am somewhat concerned over the equation that you need gear to tank instances, but to get gear you need to run instances, or be lucky with quest rewards. The Dungeon Finder also puts you in an appropriate instance for your level, so with every ding you are getting pushed into harder instances, even though your gear may not have improved enough to actually tank them.

Without just picking quests to get good tanking rewards I can see randomly doing quests and instances will result in my death through not being geared enough. However, grinding instances may result in my death through boredom. So I am really hoping those Hyjal and Vashir quests give a good reward that I can use to try tanking up some normal mode instances with.

Cold Weather Flying!

Amazingly in 4.0.1 Cold Weather Flying is trainable for a mere 1000g, BUT at level 74 and likely lower. Now my questing in Northrend will get a big speed boost.

In other news there has been a lot of posts at pwnwear.com about DK tanking in 4.0.1, Satorri's guide is good reading.

Glyphage

So they did warn us the Inscription was changing. I took note and have been stockpiling all glyphs, getting up to a stack of 10 of each.

First day results are pretty encouraging, glyph prices went up to 50g each or more and I sold quite a few. I only wish I had been able to stockpile even more inks. Oh well. 15k in 5 hours of sales is nothing to be sniffed at, and should get me a decent war chest for the expansion. Now I just need to actually level the Death Knight...

DK tank build 4.0.1

Pwnwear.com have a DK tank build up for 4.0.1 linked here. Sadly I will have to also dual spec and take a DPS build as it seems the Blood tree won't be good for DPSing in at all come 4.0.1. This also means I'll have to learn a DPS priority and get some different gear maybe. Fun times.

I have a post up discussing DK tank builds in 4.0.6 too.

Gear upgrades

Did Azjol Nerub and UK with a level 73 Paladin tank who had 14k health and 17k armour. I armoried him later and he had some items from questing which look nice:

Tundra Pauldrons reward from The Nexus quest.
Expelling Gauntlets reward from Azjol-Nerub quest.
Boots of the Unbowed Protector reward from The Nexus quest.

Also Gauntlets of the Disturbed Giant reward from The Nexus quest.

Not tank items but lots of armour and stamina:
Vambraces of the Vengeance Bringer reward from UK quest.
Girdle of Forceful Annihilation reward from Dragonblight group quest.

So it seems the quest rewards from The Nexus are better for tanking than those from UK. I need to get into The Nexus with these 3 quests and get completing them.

Troubles in UK

I tried to tank UK normal last night, but it did not go well.

I had 11.3k health, 493 defense, 13.4k armour.

Was I taking crits? What is the minimum defense level for UK on normal? Crit immunity for a level 70 player against a raid boss (which is level 73) is 490 defense. The bosses in UK are level 72 and the mobs level 70. From Wowwiki a level 72 mob attacking a level 71 player has 5% + 0.2% chance to crit = 5.2%. I must lower my chance to be crit by 5.2%. Every point of defense beyond the base (of 71 * 5 = 355) lowers the crit chance by 0.04%, thus I need 5.2/0.04 = 130 defense points extra, thus my sheet total needs to be 355 + 130 = 485 defense skill. Thus I am over that by enough to not get critted.

We failed on Dalronn and Skarvald, with the DPS and healer getting owned a lot. Reflecting I think it was because the combination of shadow bolts from Dalronn and charges from Skarvald killed off the squishies - we killed Dalronn first or tried to kill them both at the same time, but his ghost was killing people. Perhaps next time kill them both at the same time, BUT interrupt Dalronn's shadow bolts otherwise he will kill people. Also I can tank Skarvald and only secondarily tank Dalronn as he doesn't seem to have an aggro table anyway.

I could maybe do with more health, on the successful run we did the tank had 20k but he was SWP geared. Still some leatherworking armor kits on 5 slots will increase stamina by 90, which means 11.4 * 90 health (for blood tank spec) = 1026 health. Or some normal Borean Leather kits (10g vs 80g) which give 60 stamina = 684 health, ie 60% of the health but for 12% of the cost. Hmm. Also my cloak and rings are pretty bad and I could maybe investigate some quest chains to get better ones with more stamina.

When there is no competition

gold is what happens, specifically I posted some glyphs at midday when the server was meant to be down until midnight, and without much competition managed to pull in three times what I would usually expect. Yummy.