Michelle did a great job of the vocals, and I enjoyed her singing. I think she managed to nail a WoW-version of Richie’s singing, which is a pretty interesting trick to have pulled off. The video was fine for this level of work. It doesn’t have a lot of flash-bang, but mostly exists to complement the lyrics of the song.

Overall, this was a fun video to watch. I hope Michelle gets enough feedback that she continues grow a repertoire. If not, then I hope she at least enjoyed dipping her toe in the waters of machinima creation.

Calco of <Rotten Luck> on The Scryers writes, “I was leveling my warlock the other day and I finally got to Icecrown and started doing the Argent Crusade quest line. You know what I realized? The Lich King is right there, in Scourgeholme. I figured, “Who needs a raid? Who needs to wait another couple of weeks for the last wing of ICC to open? I’m a Warlock, I’ve got a Proto-Drake, I’ll take down the Lich King and save Azeroth right here and now … or not.” Thanks for the screenshot, Calco, and go Vikings!

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

How to Punt a Gnome has several great touches. I like the general animation style, of course, and it shows that Bloodvein has decent notions about how to accomplish machinima. For an old gamer like me, though, the Mortal Kombat sequence is probably the finest part of this video. While I was always a die-hard Scorpion fan, any Fatality is a good Fatality.

My only significant criticism of the video regards the undead’s voice. I had to crank the volume up very high and listen to the soundtrack many times to make out what that character was saying. That could be a YouTube issue, maybe, but it was definitely distracting from the overall movie.

Reader comments — ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Tomorrow’s the Big Day for one of WoW.com’s own. Join us in congratulating Michael Gray and his bride Katherine on their marriage. It seems that this couple has been treading on geeky ground from the very start. Now, Michael has given us permission to share excerpts from the ceremony with the gang at [1.Local] here today. We’ve tucked in the wedding benediction at the end of this week’s column … Best wishes to the happy couple!

And now, on to the week’s comment highlights.

	Is it Warcraft, or is it Avatar? Discussion about plans for the upcoming Warcraft movie inevitably turned back to movie behemoth Avatar. Aldarion: Nay, Avatar was — at least story-wise — a rip-off off Pocahontas (just think about it, you’ll see). But yeah, those blue boys and girls sure have a touch of Draenei in them … Sans cranial plates or whatever. subtotal: Nah, not spacegoat. IMO, the aliens in Avatar were much closer to night Nlves. That’s not just looks, that’s also philosophy, outlook, and the scene where the heroine was riding that tiger-lizard thing. ash: I can see it already. A young misbegotten squire is magically transformed into a wild and feral Orc to learn their ways and make way for the conquering Human nations. But this transformed Human/Orc falls under the sway of the noble yet savage Orcs and through perseverance and courage makes a name for himself as Dances With Worgs. Dances With Worgs’ heroism wins the heart of the fierce and wild princess Fiona and together they rally the Orcs to fight off the Humans and preserve their lands and sacred shamanistic ways. Kvothe: 1. Floating mountains with waterfalls pouring off. 2. Giant bioluminescent mushrooms. 3. Blue, tailed people. 4. Rideable flying dragon creatures. 5. Fiery invaders from another world come to wreak destruction. 6. Fauna with altogether unnecessary and improbable evolutionary adaptations. I just got confused … Am I describing Pandora or Outland? snowleopard233: Floating landmasses? Dragons you can ride on? Mushrooms of improbable size covering the world? Exotic plant-life? Indigenous animal people that want to kill humans? Did you just describe Pandora or Super Mario World? Helloo, it’s-a meee …
	Drop chance probability We’ve all read our share of posts, threads, debates and downright brawlfests over drop rates and probability. Finally, fresh news for the grinder. This just in from the Department of Things Many Players Didn’t Seem to Know: Barinthos: I wish the percentage would actually increase per X number of kills for quest drops. For instance, Barrens quests that require the ever-elusive Zhevra hoof. Even though they have four hooves, it is not a 100% chance … But anyway. Say the chance to drop is 2% on the first kill. Every three/four/five kills, the actual percentage goes up a certain amount, therefore reducing the time it takes to complete gopher/completion quests. I mean, if Blizzard is all gung-ho about minimizing the “grind” to 80, then why not do this? I can’t remember the amount of times I had to kill countless mobs just to get that last damn quest item that clearly should be 100% from the start. Sagretti: In fact, I believe Blizzard did implement such an increasing chance, at least with Northrend quests. It’s why you see so few Northrend quests receive the infamy for drop rates that vanilla and Burning Crusade quests had. And you read it here first! (And second, too!)
	Nerf versus convenience Players continue to be of divided opinion over the changing face of five-mans. Do the updates to scripted events and introductions, trash pulls and other mechanics represent nerfs, conveniences – or both? curtisrutland: Does anyone remember when these Heroics were real prerequisites to raids? Not (just) for their badges, but for the loot that they dropped? I remember running several of these heroics daily, hoping for a specific piece of loot, even after I joined a raiding guild and started raiding Naxx and OS. Remember how we cleared them just fine? Back when 2k DPS was overkill for Heroics? Back when it was ok if your tank only had 23k HP? Back when iLevel 226 was the very best available, only obtainable from Maly and Kel’Thuzzad? Before there was five pieces of tier 9 loot available just from running these Heroics, not counting trinkets, rings, and sigils/librams/thrown? I’m not complaining about the badge gear, not at all. I have lots of alts that are benefiting greatly from this. What I am complaining about is that we managed just fine, before nerfs, in much lower gear. We did just fine. And yet, somehow, with the abundance of practically free high level TIER gear, these instances are now too hard and must be nerfed? I guess it doesn’t hurt me, other than making them more boring than before, but it saddens me that the community as a whole seems to need these nerfs. Northrend Heroics were never overly challenging compared to BC. But it seems like we’re going backwards rather than forwards. Like I said, all it does is give me my frost badges quicker, but I just can’t understand how these dungeons were ok when they were the second best thing around, and now that they’re bottom of the barrel, they’re too hard. MightyMuffin: From article: “He (Zarhym) stressed that these changes are not meant to make the dungeon easier, but rather to make it a slightly quicker run, more in line with other Heroics.” It looks like they aren’t “nerfs.” We live in a different era of WoW. Pre-3.3, we had to summon to instances, fly all the way to UK/UP and Nex/OC (both of which were the complete eyesore for anyone to fly to), did not have a chance to repeat said instance, and finding a PUG was dependent on your server’s PUG community. Now, the PUG communities we live in are larger, and they move quicker. We now have a 15-minute debuff that disallows us to go into another random. Beforehand, the gear and emblems were what mattered. Now, only emblems matter, with ToC and ICC 5-mans being the gear hotspots. Blizzard just doesn’t want people dropping groups all the time, because they know DPS wait in God-forbidden queues while healers and tanks go in all the time. Because of this, if tanks and healers just leave to increase their emblem count, then the DPS suffer. It’s an attempt to try and make people do the random, get done with it, so that everyone doesn’t get affected. The mechanics of the fight just made them so they didn’t last as long. Everyone is still killing them, everyone is doing enough DPS, healing is still good, tanking is still good, but the gimmicks that made the fights interesting in early Wrath are now just time constraints, when everyone knows the boss is dying. These aren’t “nerfs” but updating old instances to new standards of play. They would be nerfs if it said “Bosses now deal no damage and hand out Frost emblems and ilvl 9000 gear, then shower the group with bunnies to make everyone feel happy.” That isn’t ever going to happen. The no damage, Frost emblems, ilvl gear, or the bunnies…*tear* No bunnies… And yes, some what I said and you said are “QQ look what we did in the past, things weren’t hard then, why are people QQing?” But, again, new era of WoW. They’re adjusting old Heroics for new era. chevykidferlife: Since the newer iLvl bloat has hit, I can get careless with pulls when tanking Heroics and not worry about turning ghost … Kinda takes the thrill out of it all. I spent a whole day chaining Heroics and got my entire gear set for my off-spec from fast and hard chain pulls. I do enjoy CoS and Nexus, especially since they drop five emblems, but OK is one that I would normally skip at least one boss. I really don’t think they should change anything in there. If they do make these changes, then I probably can just tank everything with my eyes closed and run around being a n00b, which does not make me better as a tank. Where’s the skill/tactics? Warcloud: It was a big mistake to make the badge items better than the actual drops in the Heroics. That’s just backwards game design. We’re now seeing the result. Are you enjoying quicker runs, or do you think the updates are going too far?
	Required reading for PUGgers The approval rating was unanimous for this must-read post on group tactics in five-mans. Gasman: THIS SHOULD BE STICKIED TO EVERY DPS’S FOREHEAD! Shivåya: I wish this were required reading for DPS. Everything mentioned is something I have to deal with daily … pcj: This post = so much win. dcostantini: Bestest post evah. Behold: Go read, be useful and PUGgify …

True geek love

Congratulations and best wishes to WoW.com’s Michael Gray and his bride Katherine, to be joined in marriage tomorrow. It took several pages’ worth of chat in the WoW.com batcave to sort through each and every geeky reference hidden away within the couple’s benediction. See if you can spot them all.

Friends, fellows, dear ones,
Love is what brings us together today.
But what is love?
Love cares not what point we are spawned from.
Nor what guilds we belong to,
what alliances we have,
what hordes we run with.
Love is there when we have all the gold in the world,
or fish,
and when we have none.

Once, a beleaguered captain sought safe haven with an old friend and holy man.
In trying to figure out what to do next and how he’d get through his troubles,
he asked the holy man for advice.
The holy man told him the one thing that would see him through
was belief.
When the captain expresses certain agnostic doubts,
the holy man asked, “When I talk about belief, why do you always
assume I’m talking about god?”

Love is one of those things we can all believe in,
that is greater than ourselves.
It shepherds us through the hard times.
It increases our gladness in the joyous times.
Of all the pure forces in the world
that have motivated us since before we told stories,
love is purely and truly one of the better ones,
if not the best.
In love, we gain the will to find hope, compassion,
kindness, honor and decency,
no matter how much rage, fear or greed we may encounter.
Love is powerful and no power in the universe can stop it.

So we are brought here together today,
because of love,
to see the joining of two dear people.
And I ask you now,
in your support and joy of this union,
to affirm these two
by saying the following:
Ding! Grats!

DING! Grats, indeed!

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. “Closer! Come closer… and burn!” ~ Keli’dan the Breaker

Once again Blood Pact turns its gaze towards those up-and-coming warlocks; those who are learning the craft, battling foes to hone their skills and sharpen their minds. I’ve said before that leveling a warlock is great fun and part of this is due to the diverse ways in which you can go about it. By the time you start getting a decent pile of talent points to spend you can shape your lock in many and varied forms. There’s the unstoppable train of death that is the affliction lock, cursing and corrupting all around it as it passes smoothly through the world. The demonologist, pouring their power into their minion and pushing them into the fore while sitting back and calmly picking off their foes. And of course, the destruction warlock, blazing a trail of raw power in an explosive display of mental prowess over physical frailty.

Let’s see how these locks in training are getting on.

As I said in the last leveling guide, it’s not Blood Pact’s job to teach you how to level. The gathering of experience through quests and the like is very important and following a guide can be very handy, but this is not that guide. This is about being a warlock for the time between level 40 and 60. If you do want some help in questing then I linked a couple of very good addons in that last article, these can help a lot, as can many others.

I’m also not going to focus too heavily on our minions or skills that are general to the class through all the levels. Regular readers of Blood Pact will know that this is being covered in the ‘meet the minions’ series. This has covered such important topics as imps and the control of minions, voidwalkers and threat, the succubus and crowd control and the felhunter and mage-hate (as well as a look at the infernal and doomguard).

Talents

As I said in the 10-40 guide, you can place your talents all over the place and still have a lot of fun. This is certainly true if you focus on one tree in particular. The tree we focused on in that article was affliction, the reason being that it is considered the quickest leveling build until around the 50+ mark. We left you with this build as an example of something to work to at level 40, this can be continued to level 49 with this setup:

Example level 49 affliction build.

This is very much an example and you can move a lot of the points about as you see fit to work with your play-style and preference. At level 50 you have a choice to make. Do you want to carry on with affliction or swap over to demonology and get a felguard?

If you decide to stay with affliction then you can learn Unstable Affliction which is another DoT and a really nice spell. When I say ‘nice’ I’m referring to how I think it’s a very warlock-y spell, especially with its dispel mechanic. It also is a requirement for Pandemic, which is also a great talent.

Moving over to demonology and getting yourself another pet is the ’standard form’ though some suggest waiting until you can support the build with talents from another tree (to boost your own damage). Personally I don’t think that’s necessary. You may be a little nerfed but since you have just swapped spec it’s probably a good idea to spend some time cleaning up some green quests while you learn the new setup.

The felguard will be the subject of a meet the minions article before long but briefly, for those who have never had one before, he does more damage than any of your other minions (only exception is the doomguard but you have to wait till 60 for him), generates more threat than a voidwalker and is almost as hard to kill. This makes him a great front-man to your background machinations. I was uncertain about the guy to begin with but after a very short time I came to really enjoy having him around; both for solo and party/raid work.

If you do want to swap to demonology at 50 here’s an example build that will make your new demon nice and strong.

Example level 50 demonology build.

For those of you going with destruction at this point you will have found that you can now reach Shadowfury. There are those that love this spell and while I agree that it is great fun to use and opens up a number of cool tricks, it’s generally too much bother for me to worry about. If you enjoy it then go for your life, it’s very cool, but I wouldn’t worry if you find yourself under-whelmed by it.

Spells

What happened to all the new spells? Between levels 11 and 40 you gain 25 brand new spells to cast, but between 41 and 60 there are 5. You do get a lot of spell upgrades however, so it’s still worth going back to the trainer often. I’ll add the spells from talents below as well.

• Level 42 – Death Coil – Sometimes referred to as ‘Skill Coil’ by those who look on it as a warlock ‘I WIN’ button. This is pretty unfair as most classes have something that takes their opponent out of the game for a short time and many have more than us locks. That said, it’s a great panic button with a ‘run-away’ effect that is short enough to use in tight spaces without calling down the fury of every mob in the area.
• Level 48 – Soul Fire – Without Decimation this is a spell that tends to get dusty in the back of the spell book. With Decimation, it covers the execute phase with great big fiery balls of crit.
• Level 50 – Inferno – You fight not just this warlock alone but the legions he commands! Summon forth meteors from the heavens to smite your enemy and raise up rock-demons terrify the populous. Well, that’s what it’s like in my head but you can read the last Blood Pact for what it’s really like.
• Level 50 minimum – Unstable Affliction – An awesome extra DoT with a sting in its tail.
• Level 50 minimum – Summon Felguard – New and hugely powerful minion to play with.
• Level 50 minimum – Shadowfury – AoE, ranged and damaging stun. A lot of fun if a little novelty/situational.
• Level 60 – Ritual of Doom – Summon the most powerful demon available to players; but only if you have been on a long and arduous quest, have four other people with you and remembered to go to the shops beforehand. Great spell, sadly too much hassle for too little gain. Also a topic of last week’s Blood Pact.
• Level 60 – Curse of Doom – The spell that does the highest damage in a single strike and has the best damage-per-execute-time as well. Unfortunately your enemies have time to make tea and buttered crumpets between cast and damage. So unless this fight is going to take some time you don’t need this spell.

Gear

No real change in the gear during this phase in leveling as it’s still almost all Old-world stuff. Check out the last piece for a bit more detail. When you reach level 58 you are eligible for the Outland quests which will start throwing massive (though somewhat ugly) upgrades at you; so don’t go investing in anything expensive in the latter half of the 50s.

Instances

Scarlet Monastery is probably getting a bit old for you now so Zul’Farrak, Maraudon and Sunken Temple should do you through the 40s with Blackrock Depths, Dire maul, Blackrock Spire (lower first, then maybe upper later), Scholomance and Stratholme through the 50s. Don’t feel you have to go into these places if you like to play solo but they can get some nice upgrades, complete some nice quests and also teach some important warlock skills.

PvP / Balltlegrounds

If you like. I wouldn’t, but don’t let that stop you. Apparently there are lots of mages there that you can kill, so can’t be all bad.

Final note

While playing about on Wowhead for this article I stumbled across a poem about the felguard that seems to be written by a disgruntled DPS warrior. Worth a read if you have the time.

First off, yes, I’m leaving Totem Talk. It’s been a good ride, and no, I’m not quitting the shaman class nor WoW.com. You’ll still see me around on Know Your Lore and The Care and Feeding of Warriors for the foreseeable future, and I’ll be writing Totem Talks until we have a replacement. The reason I’m leaving Totem Talk is simple: I don’t think I’m giving enough coverage to all the different specs and playstyles anymore, and frankly I don’t want to have to try and respec every few days to catch up on spec mechanics for roles I don’t want to play. For some classes I play, this isn’t an issue, but I’m straight up never ever going to like elemental as a spec or a playstyle. I’m not a ranged DPS player, I never was, I never will be. There’s a big difference between personal preference and a spec not being good, mind you. I don’t dislike elemental, I simply don’t like standing in the back and casting as my DPS role.

So I’m out, and we’ll have new people come in and cover the class. I’ll still be playing my shaman, healing and stormstriking my way through content. I still love the class, and I’m always going to play one as long as I’m playing WoW.

Before I go on to talk about the highlights of my two plus years of covering shamans for WoW.com (and WoW Insider before that), I do want to say that the Tier 10 bug that causes a seven day lockout just floors me. It’s the kind of bug you’d almost expect to see on elemental shaman gear, frankly. If I were an egomaniac (well, more of one) I’d almost think this was done for me as a fitting tribute as I depart. Here’s hoping it gets fixed soon.

And now, my favorite Totem Talk moments.
5: Shaman Itemization resists a clever title

Admittedly this was a recent piece, but I don’t think the concerns it addresses have really gone out of style. Along with the gear consolidation post, I thought (and still think) it will benefit the shaman class as a whole when elemental and resto don’t end up so far apart in terms of what stats they want and how they are designed via talents to go about gathering those stats. This is definitely an aspect of the class’ hybridization that should be of interest as the class moves forward into Cataclysm.

I would call the increased variability in enhancement a triumph of making mail gear work for a shaman spec, and it’s one of the success stories for Wrath. Now I’m hopeful we’ll see a similar success story for elemental in Cataclysm helping revitalize it in similar fashion. Mastery is where I’m pinning my hopes.

4: 3.0.8, The Rise of Shamanism

Setting the stage for the redesigns of patch 3.1 and 3.2 came this talent, aimed at introducing a scaling element to elemental combat. The patch had other changes, of course: the reduction in AoE totem threat, the switch in positions between Static Shock and Mental Quickness, an attempt to improve Healing Way… but it was Shamanism that was the big star of patch 3.0.8 and harbinger for pretty much all that was to come. Frankly, I was thrilled to see it come into the game. Shamanism has been buffed to work with Chain Lightning and to apply more of a bonus to both CL and Lighting Bolt since it was introduced, and I think (along with the Fire Nova changes) this was one of Blizzard’s better calls all told.

3: The Elusive Shaman Tank

Picking up the thread of an older post about shaman tanking, I honestly had a surprising amount of fun writing about this topic. Not only did I get to go back in my memory to when I first rolled my orc shaman and ended up tanking lowbie instances on him (SFK was a particular favorite, as was Wailing Caverns) but I got to detail how the changes to the game with the launch of first Burning Crusade (letting Horde have Pallies and Alliance Shammies, thus freeing each class from trying to mirror the other) and Wrath of the Lich King (new talents, new spells, some abilities changed or even mostly abandoned) helped alter and eventual spelled the effective end of shamans as tanks in World of Warcraft.

My one regret in writing about the subject is that I’m afraid I may have sounded too negative or too much like I rejected the players trying it when I rejected the idea. For the record, I think shamans are never going to be progression tanks, but I admire the heck out of the players working to test the class and its limits to the utmost. This is how fun discoveries get made! This is how people learn the tolerances and thresholds of their talents and spells.

Shaman tanking may not be a viable concept, but the players trying to do it anyway make me smile every time. It’s the ultimate refusal to accept the prevailing wisdom, and it’s awesome.

2: On the edge of change

Wrath dropping was one of the most exciting times to be writing about shamans. We didn’t yet have the benefit of hindsight showing us how 2009 would be the year of shaman redesign, we had Hex, Thunderstorm, Maelstrom Weapon, Spirit Wolves, Riptide to look forward to. Everything was new and exciting again. I loved playing my shaman in the Wrath beta and talking about it with you all was just the delicious icing on an already awesome cake.

I also got to complain about losing downranking, but in retrospect my reliance on downranking was probably a sign that I make a better DPS than a healer as a shaman. I tend to take people dying when I’m healing fairly to heart, which may be why I’m a better tank, where that kind of stress actually seems beneficial. I felt like I learned how to do it pretty well, mind you, but I never really felt as comfortable with it as I should have.

1: Sentry Totem

This is the best thing I have ever written, about the best ability any class has every had. It was Sentry Totem, and writing about said totem, that made me love being Totem Talk’s writer for these past years. People didn’t think I could write a serious column about it, and yet, here we are, and here it is. Watching. Always watching. Until it gets one shot by a stealthed rogue in the flag room, anyway. And while it’s not actually in this column, the passage that caused me to write it has always stuck with me: It’s also stuck with the totem’s description on WoWhead.

I’ll miss you most of all, Sentry Totem.

I’m still going to be writing Totem Talk until a new writer is found, of course, but I owed you guys a proper sendoff, and here it is. It’s been an amazing experience working on this column with you all. Thank you for reading it.

The first of Tokyopop’s class-themed manga hit the shelves early in December. World of Warcraft: Death Knight written by Dan Jolley and illustrated by Rocio Zucchi, the manga is a self-contained 166-page story detailing the life of a notable Death Knight, Thassarian, the first of the Lich King’s rune-wielding champions to join the Alliance. I’m a huge fan of Tokyopop’s comics made for the Warcraft universe and think that the Warcraft Legends series contain some of the best stories told about the Blizzard franchise.

The Death Knight manga kicks off a new direction in Tokyopop’s Warcraft manga series, taking a break from short story compilations and focusing on a lore character representative of a specific class. The story of Thassarian, as previewed in October last year, explores the World of Warcraft in-depth through a biographical story that follows the hero’s origins as a soldier of Lordaeron who falls and is raised as one of Arthas’ minions. To make things simple, I’ll give my thoughts on the book right before the break and explain it afterward — it’s a wonderful, well-written and beautifully illustrated comic that I highly recommend to any fan of Warcraft comics. It’s good. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive into the meat of the manga after the break.

The conundrum

One of the chief complaints about World of Warcraft comics, or any media outside of the game, for that matter, is that they introduce elements that later make it into the game that players who don’t have access to such media would find confusing. Take for example the human-formed Anveena Teague, who was patched into the game with Sunwell Plateau. For most players, there really isn’t much sense to the human female inside a strange orb in Sunwell Plateau. Who is she? What does she have to do with the Sunwell?

Of course, readers of the Sunwell Trilogy, a Tokyopop manga series written by Richard Knaak and drawn by Kim Jae-Hwan, would know that Anveena is the Sunwell, or what remains of it. The problem is that the events leading up to this revelation or this particular character information are never revealed in-game but rather explored in another medium, the comic books. The same criticism was levied at Wildstorm’s World of Warcraft comics which were used to bring back Varian Wrynn, who was simply re-introduced to the game world through a patch, and the story between The Missing Diplomat questline and the return of the king of Stormwind was all handled out-of-game through the comics.

Personally, I’m not so averse to the use of other media to tell the World of Warcraft’s story. I love the comics. I collect and devour them simply because they represent two of my great passions — Warcraft and comics. Others aren’t so enthused. Most of the game’s ten million players and change don’t read or buy the comic books, which means that any developments done through the comics and introduced into the game will lack depth for those players. Beyond looking totally badass, not too many players will know the lore behind Varian’s return and fail to grasp the depth of his character.

In many ways it becomes necessary to access other media to tell the story of World of Warcraft. Blizzard can only do so much to tell the story through in-game events, making novels and comics a great way to expand the lore of the game world. On the other hand, when it comes to introducing important characters such as Varian Wrynn, many players felt it was a little bit cheated that Blizzard chose to resolve one of the most intriguing Alliance quest lines outside of the game.

Furthermore, the World of Warcraft comics committed something of an insult to players by effectively retconning the game world by having Varian Wrynn slay Onyxia single-handedly. I know that game lore and canon are sometimes hard to reconcile, but the fact that Onyxia, that black dragon whom many players took great pride in bringing down — with the display of a dragon head in the capital cities being one of the great events back in vanilla WoW — wasn’t actually killed by players but by Varian Wrynn himself was a bit of a disservice to the playing community.

A movie in comic form

World of Warcraft: Death Knight triumphs in that it doesn’t meddle with game lore at all, except for one instance at the end of the book but is completely within the context of the story and doesn’t feel too much like it takes away player accomplishments. In fact, I would go so far as to say that reading the manga isn’t vital at all to the playing experience. Instead, it enriches it. Dan Jolley’s finely crafted script merely delves into a story that players would otherwise not have known about a notable NPC but isn’t as critical to appreciating the game.

The manga is essentially a behind-the-scenes look at what’s already in the game. No critical developments happen because of it. Everything is there — the characters, the basic plot… it’s integrated so much into the game that one is inclined to think that Jolley was saddled with writing a script to fit quest lines and NPCs that Blizzard’s developers handed over. Even so, Jolley does a fine job and gives a cool but otherwise flat NPC some depth.

One of my favorite things about Jolley’s writing is the way he transitions between scenes in a deliberately visual, cinematic fashion. As shown in BlizzPlanet’s preview, the transition used to jump from the last panel in Page 6 to the flashback first panel in Page 7 is a trick borrowed from cinema. It’s a device that can’t be pulled off — or at least not as easily or smoothly — using mere words as in a novel. This demonstrates Jolley’s deep understanding of the comic medium and uses this kind of visual juxtaposition several times throughout the book to indicate a jump to a flashback.

That Jolley and Zucchi are able to pull this off without the use of a narration box noting the timeline and using only the standard black and white of Tokyopop’s manga is impressive. The jump from Page 18 to 19, for example, where Thassarian has a flashback involving his father is accomplished through a simple angle shift and the words, “That’s right, son,” is clear and reminiscent of filmmaking transitions. One gets the feeling that Jolley wrote this as a movie in his head, and Zucchi delivers each panel with a bit of cinematic framing.

For the final give away of WoW.com’s 12 Days of Winter Veil contests we thought we’d end big. How big? With a pack of four Steelseries gaming accessories worth $275. It includes one of each:

• World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse
• World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Mousepad
• World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lick King Z-board
• Steelseries Siberia v2 Full Size Headset

The contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), and everyone who enters must be 18 or older. To enter, leave a comment on this post before 11:59pm ET Sunday, January 3, 2010. Please be sure to use a real email that you check often to enter, so we can contact you should you be the winner. You may enter only once and one winner will be selected randomly. That winner will receive 1 World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse, 1 World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Mousepad, 1 World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lick King Z-board and 1 Steelseries Siberia v2 Full Size Headset with a retail value of US$275. Click here to read the official contest rules.

Welcome to Lichborne, where Daniel Whitcomb has decided that Boom Boom Pow is our class anthem for the new year, if only because those chickens are totally jackin’ our style.

So here we are, at the end of 2009. This marks the first full year of the Death Knight class, and it’s definitely been an eventful year as Blizzard’s balanced and rebalanced our class to help us fit into the ranks of the more established classes. We’ve been called flavor of the month and overpowered. I dislike the former label on philosophical grounds but grudgingly admit that the latter label has probably been correctly applied at certain points in time. Still, overall we’ve definitely had the ride of our lives over the last year as the devs have worked on a patch by patch basis to get us all figured out and settled in. Lets look at each tree and look back at the highlights and lowlights.
Blood

In a lot of ways, Blood is a very underrated tree. While Unholy is flashier and Frost coasts on that whole “tank spec” myth and the dual wield thing, Blood has been a solid workhorse that many non-death knights and even many death knights don’t notice.

What really crippled early early Blood DPS was the problem with the dichotomy of 21 point Summon Gargoyle beating out combined with the need to pick up Annihilation to use Obliterate effectively, combined with the problem with the early frost tree containing far too many frost-only skills, such as Glacier Rot, which was a first tier spell despite primarily buffing late tree frost talents.

This lead to some enterprising Death Knights testing out a diseaseless Blood build, and finding out it worked surprisingly well. The extra disease damage on strikes was negligible, and since diseaseless blood was almost completely physical damage, it interacted very well with all the expertise and armor penetration provided by both Blood talents and DPS gear.

Still, Blizzard’s been pretty quick about squelching “alternate” play styles for the DK (Or rather, has been quick at making sure one can make full use of one’s abilities and trees as a death knight), so they almost immediately started making adjustments. in patch 3.1 and following, they started making adjustments. Improved Death Strike accompanied a shift in all strikes to add more damage to the disease end and less to the initial damage end. This allowed Death Strike to take the place of Obliterate and freed up on Blood Death Knights to choose either the Blood or Unholy tree for their secondary tree. While Heart Strike lost its haste removal, it got a cleave effect (one that would later be nerfed), which allowed Blood a bit of much needed AE DPS.

This lead to an incredibly solid Blood tree that did more than respectable DPS. In fact, for much of this year, it’s been the quiet powerhouse of Death Knight DPS, helped along by the fact that it does so much physical damage that it makes very good use of all the expertise and armor penetration that Unholy especially has very little use for. It’s also a good choice for PuG DPSers in the new Dungeon Finder, since all the self-healing (less than it used to be, but still a formidable amount) from the spec just might help offset healers who have tunnel vision or tanks who can’t keep the mobs off you.

That said, don’t underestimate Blood tanking either. In 3.0.8, the Vampiric Blood tanking cool down received a hefty nerf, but in return, Blood Presence and the now defunct Blood Aura (now Improved Blood Presence) got a slight healing buff. Combine this with other choice tanking talents like Spell Deflection and Will of the Deflection, and Blood Tanks soon found themselves at the forefront of raid tanking, even being the arguable best choice for 3-drake Sartharion back when it was the pinnacle of raiding. Later nerfs have bought Blood tanking a bit closer to earth, but it’s still more than solid.

Unholy

The big story of Unholy DPS has of course been Scourge Strike. When it was first established, it essentially rocketed Unholy DPS up the charts, as the shadow damage completely bypassed armor. Super stacking shadow damage bonuses (such as Black Ice) bought Scourge Strike up to incredible heights. A few nerfs by Blizzard bought it down to earth – and sent it crashing through the floor. As more raid dungeons came out and people got more and more armor penetration, suddenly Obliterate rocketed past a freshly nerfed Scourge Strike with a pittance of armor penetration that you could easily pull out of 5-man ToC. In response Blizzard bumped up Scourge Strike damage a bit, but not enough. While Scourge Strike was once again worth using, it still wasn’t as good as, say, two Blood Strikes. This, among other things, lead to a rotation that completely eschewed two cornerstones of the Unholy play style, Reaping and Epidemic. It became a better idea, at least for a raid geared death knight, to simply reapply their diseases and two blood strikes every 10 seconds, because Scourge Strike was just that weak.

That bring us to Patch 3.3, in which they’ve introduced a new Scourge Strike which does physical damage with an added shadow damage component in an attempt to keep things balanced. As it is, Scourge Strike remained volatile even so, with the shadow damage receiving a quick hot fix nerf soon after Patch 3.3 went live. The nerf, which prevented it from critting, is considered serious enough that some Death Knights advocate returning back to the no-reaping builds of yore, but for the most part we’ve remained stable enough, and our DPS is at least respectable.

Of course, Scourge Strike isn’t the only example of Unholy growing pains from the past year. Gargoyle and Unholy Blight also got their share of tweaks. Unholy Blight, in it’s original form, was a very handy AE runic power dump that pretty much guaranteed, along with Pestilence (especially before they removed the damage component at the beginning of the year) and Morbidity that Unholy death knights would always reach the top of the charts. Gargoyle has been and remains Gargoyle. It was originally a 21-point talent, but one so powerful that Blood death knights were ignoring their own 51 point talent to grab it. This resulted in a switch up to the 51 point talent, with Unholy Blight coming down to 21. Gargoyle’s otherwise remained mostly unchanged, beyond being put in melee range and being set to 60 base runic power. Unholy Blight, thought, has seen more than its share of change. First it was nerfed, then changed completely to a 30% extra damage DoT applied on Death Coil. That 30% was eventually nerfed to 10%,

I have to admit, I understand why they nerfed Unholy Blight, but I still miss it pretty hardcore. It was a nice bit of flavor.

On the tanking edge, Unholy tanking has done alright for itself despite repeated Bone Shield nerfs and the Unholy Blight change, which took away a good chunk of AE threat (Not that Death and Decay isn’t more than up for the task anyway). Other than that, Unholy has remained a pretty solid tank tree, all told.

Frost

Frost is probably the least known and least understood tree. Many people still call it the tanking tree based on some preliminary Death Knight concepts that were dropped before the Wrath beta even got started. Certainly, Frost is hardly a bad tanking tree, but it isn’t the only one, as many a Death Knight Blood or Unholy tank has explained in vain as they’re kicked out of a PuG for a “bad” tanking spec.

Of course, Frost can DPS too, and has had its own share of issues, mostly with the struggle between 2-handed and dual wielding styles. 2-handed style managed to carve out a small niche for itself in the deep Frost tree for the first part of the year, but the focus with Frost was pretty much dual wielding.

Strangely, Frost dual wielding started out as much in the Unholy tree as anywhere else. The point of the Frost tree was essentially to grab the massive Frost damage of Howling Blast (which was then only the 31 point talent), then spent the other 39 points in Unholy to grab Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade. Necrosis, back then, counted auto-attack damage done by the off-hand, and since dual wielding did tons of off-hand damage, Necrosis was perfect. In addition, Killing Machine was not yet on a proc-per-minute basis, meaning you could not only do good weapon damage, enough to make up for the weaker main-hand-only strikes, but you could do some amazing AE damage by churning out critical strike Howling Blasts at your leisure.

Blizzard quickly moved to prevent dual wielding from overtaking two-handed DPS by not only moving Howling Blast down to the 51 point talent, but nerfing its damage output. They also tried putting Killing Machine on PPM and nerfing Blood Caked Blade in various ways, including normalizing its weapon damage and adding an internal cool down. Dual wielding enthusiasts tried various new specs and ways to DPS, including retreating almost completely to Unholy, before Blizzard finally found their happy medium in the form of Threat of Thassarian, which provided dual-weapon weapon strikes, but adjusted downward slightly to avoid outshining two-handed DPS. So far, it seems to be working, as dual wielders can at least go forth and DPS without being laughed out of their raids.

To the Future

But seriously, if I discussed every major change to the class since January 1st of 2009, we’d be here til 2011, I’m pretty sure. There’s been so many buffs and nerfs, both specific and general, whole abilities and talents have disappeared (I still think they should have just given the aura buffs to more classes instead of removing them, and I really hope we get a flashier Unholy Blight back eventually), and so on and so forth.

So for now, I’ll focus on where we are now and where we’re going. In Patch 3.3, it seems we’ve shed most of the vestiges of overpoweredness, but we aren’t really too underpowered anyway. We’ll see what comes up as ICC opens more and more, but for now, we really do appear to be alright. We still have those who call us overpowered, but we’ll likely always have those.

But with Cataclysm on the horizon, things will change again. Between new levels, talents, and even more important, changes in some of the most basic ways that stats and game mechanics actually work, 2010 is promising to be nearly as wild a ride as 2009. Luckily, we’ll still be with here at Lichborne every step of the way. Stay tuned.

Two Bosses Enter … but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com’s series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to what’s nearly the end of the current round of the five-man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let’s get ready to rumble!

It’s no surprise, really, that Anub’arak took control of this week’s Two Bosses deathmatch with a 73% pounding of the Tribunal of Ages. We’re not sure that voters really considered any realistic scenario when casting their votes, but we did get a few interesting setups from spectators. The quality of the floor, in particular, seemed to be a sticking point for many.

Tyr: Wouldn’t Brann fall through the floor if Anub keeps burrowing holes in it? I mean, I’m sure that in Azjol-Nerub, his own kingdom, he has enough escape holes pre-burrowed to hide in, but an old titan complex just waiting to be condemned? Brann’ll be lucky if the ceiling doesn’t collapse and crush him on his way down.

snowleopard233: I see everyone saying Anub can tunnel, but are we really thinking about the terrain presented here? This isn’t some underground cavern; this is a Titan fortress he’s digging through. Even if Anub were able to scratch through the layers of titansteel and bronze, who knows where he’d end up?

He could burrow straight down into the second level bathroom of Ulduar, where a showering Freya will scream and start slamming him with a washbrush. Anub will then, completely embarrassed, cover his head and apologize profusely, run into some furniture on the way out and make a complete ass out of himself. Tribunal wins!

Outis: The fight’s in neutral territory, friends. Besides, he’s an unholy undead fiend of impossible strength. Some metal isn’t really that much of a hindrance; solid rock isn’t.

PocketFox: After some thought, I do have to give the vote to Anub’arak, but I think a lot of people misunderstand something. Most of the votes for Anub’arak seem to be based partly on the fact that he can burrow underground to avoid the various Tribunal attacks. Well, I have to side with the commenter that pointed out that this is not Azjol’Nerub. This is not dirt or even rock. This is the (probably) TITANIUM floor of an ancient Titan fortress. Anub would need a backhoe and some good ol’ goblin explosives to get through there. So. No burrowing for Anub. But still he’s smart and crafty, plus with plenty of little helpers to distract the Iron Dwarves and keep them busy, as well as to soak various lasers and such. I think he’d be able to outlast and out-maneuver the Tribunal in the end.

Stone_Rhino: “… or perhaps the Tribunal has been transplanted to the Two Bosses Thunderdome…” You failed to even read the article before posting. It is assumed that the fight takes place in neutral territory, as with all TBE fights, where he would be able to burrow. >8< Spider Pride

PocketFox: And I would argue that it isn’t just the three faces that were transplanted. The entire room is the “Tribunal of Ages,” that is, the massive computer that holds the information Brann was after. The faces are simply the defense mechanism for the computer. For there to be an event for the defense mechanism to activate (i.e., someone hacking the computer), the entire room would have to be present. The computer’s “monitor” is the very floor of the room. Of course, if the floor is glass, then it’d be child’s play for Anub’arak to shatter it and use his burrow.

geveldion: … For those who say Anub cannot burrow through the Titan complex, you might be right. Except that we’ve seem the place being mined in the Halls of Stone itself. So obviously, it’s not indestructible. Otherwise, Yogg-Saron would never have broken out, or XT wouldn’t have malfunctioned, etc. Anub’s strength was enough drive his spikes up through solid rock and burrow with them like a shark. Azjol’Nerub is still standing for the most part even after a war and what appears to be no upkeep, and Anub has no trouble there. And we also see bits of rubble and broken parts in the halls of stone. Maybe the main complex is tough, but I see nothing saying the halls of stone are the same.