Macro Madness

I've embraced the dark side, and rolled a Tauren Death Knight on Barthilas. His name is... Vonmalefic. *shrug*

I'm taking a bit of a different approach this time. I'm not going with the macro madness that I did with A-Von. Still, here are some notes on what I did, just in case I ever want to go back to the macro madness approach.

First off, here is an example showcasing the general form:

#show
#showtooltip
#/cast [nomod:shift] Death Strike; [mod:shift] Obliterate

Generally, I try to put the more likely to be used ability as the "nomod" one, and pair up abilities that are somehow similar. Here's the current list (heavily weighted around the blood talent tree):

• Death Strike/Obliterate (both cost one unholy and 1 frost rune)
  
  
• Heart Strike/Blood Strike (Both cost 1 blood rune. Being single-target, Blood Strike would seem to be a good PvP choice, but even with glyph buffs, Heart Strike comes out on top in DPS output, regardless. Thanks for the heads-up Reubs!)
  
  
• Death and Decay/Blood Boil (differing rune costs, but both AoE, with D&D putting out more damage, and needing to be "placed", which makes it unattractive when also using a shift modifier)
  
  
• Empower Rune Weapon/Blood Tap (ERW is more useful, but they both serve to get me a little more bang for buck WRT rune cooldowns).
  
  
• Raise Dead/Army of the Dead (both call ghoul(s), but RD has a smaller cooldown, making it more frequently reusable)
  

So what am I doing instead? Taking advantage of Bartender 4's paging mechanism. In my naive reasoning, macros probably require more client-side CPU cycles to crunch. Ok, I admit it... it's more just trying to go deeper with BT4.

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.