Beginning a Talented Endgame

Greetings.

This blog is an effort to journalise my efforts in actually achieving the hallowed state of actually becoming "good" at battleground PvP in the World of Warcraft. I offer it as a blog on the off chance that it helps others in finding their own path to PvP p0wnage.

Some background info. I've PvPed on and off with my Balance Druid for a while. I really enjoyed leveling my Death Knight though, and have decided to give PvP a whirl with him instead, wondering what PvP in plate felt like. After a recently interesting session of "mockery" by a fellow Death Knight as we stood for way too long defending a bunker in Alterac Valley, I decided that I wanted to actually learn what it meant to do Battleground PvP well in WoW.

Note that I have no real interest in arenas. My personal life, involving a very energetic toddler means that my play times are just plain chaos. Also, the grander scale feel of the battlegrounds suits me more.

So let us begin with my first serious content contribution. The mockery by my unintentional benefactor was in terms of my talent build. It was a variant of blood, heavy on talents that return heals. Leveling, it was great. With PvP, however, I sacrifice way too much DPS for it. I've finally settled on the following talents (as at WoW 3.2):


Now.. I've learned that Unholy is THE tree for PvP arenas. BGs, however are not the place to expect healing from others. Be thankful yes, but expectation is a little like pissing into the wind. Also, I just like blood, even if it's isn't l33t (says the Moonkin junkie back when they really REALLY did suck)!

This talent spec is based on an interesting one listed out at arena junkies tweaked a little more to my liking. I've minimised healing out of the blood tree in favour of nice things mostly in frost, with just a smidgen of unholy. To get Dancing Rune Weapon, however, I've been forced to take up more blood healing than I'd have preferred. Again, for a pure BG focus, the extra healing is something I can live with.

Key aspects to the build choices are:

• Lichborne - For those times when I have lots of runic power, and finding I want a health bar topup via a self-casting of death coil
• Dancing Rune Weapon + Hysteria combo for brief, but huge DPS output.
• Icy Talons for loving the melee types
• Improved Icy Touch for slowing down incoming damage.
  
• Virulence to give my plagues sticking power, which makes for chunkier Blood Strikes all round.
• Improved Death Strike for the chunky DPS and returning heals. It's also a signature talent for Blood so I just gots ta haves it.
• Various talents that keep the Runic Power output up. I tend to rely heavily on it between rune cooldowns, and for doing range damage things when I can't get close otherwise.
  

Ok. That's it for this post. Later.