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Post by iarnaig on Jan 28, 2014 21:00:56 GMT -5
Wait.. what? Death knights? Yes, they're not part of the challenge, but I fancied a change so have just rolled one; there was a rules discussion a long time back, and I've gone with my own version of it - I am using the blue weapon you start out with (due to no other weapons being available in the starter zone, I will of course get rid of it if/when I reach the normal world!), but nothing else; which makes it very hard indeed, having no armor on, against yellow level mobs! I did skip the suggested deleting a lvl 55 of another class to make the deathknight though; I felt since it doesn't properly fit anyway, it'll do as a 55+ challenge (and frankly, so far the starter zone is tougher than 1-55 on a normal class...) Useful points so far: - The first quest where you have to fight a death knight initiate is HARD. I died the first time, even with the sword. Died the second time too, just about succeeded the third, then rerolled and thankfully got it first time on my 2nd deathknight. Use the room's layout to its max - if you drag the initiate up to the upper area and then jump down, he'll run all the way round by the stairs, and you can get a couple of ranged attacks in without taking damage; kiting is key here, since you will die if you just go toe-to-toe. - Once you've got through that, if you're using the sword, the regular mobs are ok, but take care not to get adds, and to keep your health up; they generally took me down to 50%. Spending a while farming the low lvl miners (low enough that they don't hurt you too much; they also don't aggro unless you attack them) in the cave will pay off - they mainly drop crap but selling said crap will help you get enough gold together for a piece of armor (even one piece makes a big difference!). They do drop a few low lvl greys, which are better than nothing, but don't expect much in that line. - The quest to duel deathknights is a fraction less tough than the initiate, but harder than regular mobs; save that till you've bought some armor. I've got 1k armor now and win with about 15-20% of my health left... there's no convenient ledges here and you forfeit the duel if you go too far from the flag, so kiting isn't an option. - Horseman's Challenge quest looks tough, mob has 7k health so I decided to grind normal mobs to level up and get enough gold for more armor. Although that's not so easy given most the gold I earn goes on food... So that's as far as I've got, almost lvl 56, will be interesting to see if I can get out of the starter zone! One question I'd like opinions on: Runeforging, yes or no? It's a class ability, like a rogue's poisons... but it results in a permanent enchant which shows on the armory, rather than a temporary one which doesn't. I had to do a runeforge on my weapon for a quest anyway (and can't see a way to remove it), but I'm wondering whether to runeforge future weapons (if I get out of the starter zone anyway). Edit: levelled to 56, tried horseman... nope, not happening yet, luckily you can just click off the shadow realm buff to drop combat! Death Strike makes a huge difference on regular mobs though, I'm now skipping dots and using my runes for selfhealing instead. Now time for some more farming... Edit 2; I am an idiot - just realised I got Raise Ghoul at 56, that solved my dps problem and made the horseman pretty easy. Problem solved!
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Asyluun
Iron Veterans
Drunk
Posts: 272
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Post by Asyluun on Jan 28, 2014 21:41:16 GMT -5
Um ok ....not seeing the point of doing a deathnight
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Post by Ironworgen on Jan 28, 2014 22:24:03 GMT -5
I don't understand why people seem to think that trying Ironman with a Death Knight doesn't make sense. All you need to do is change the starting level from ' Level 1' to ' The starting level for the class' and the rest is exactly the same. Everyone knows that you start at level 55. Anyways, no need to rehash all of those old arguments again. It certainly is possible to get out of the Death Knight starting area following all of the Ironman rules. There is no need to use the Blue weapon you start with, and the Initiate can be defeated without armor or weapons. It's not actually that hard, but does take a while to get comfortable with the kiting strategy required. And I'd say Runeforging is a definite yes since it is a class ability, like Rogue poisons. Here's a link to the WoW Forums about my Iron Death Knight experiences with Iroknightess about two years ago: us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4062876712?page=3Enjoy the challenge and your experience, and ignore the naysayers. I experienced a lot of negativity and venom during my attempt, but every class is different and Death Knights are certainly a different challenge worth trying. Enjoy
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Post by iarnaig on Jan 28, 2014 22:31:15 GMT -5
Dead at 57, oh well! I'll take a look at your thread tomorrow and see if that gives me any tips, died defending Koltira this time, suspect I should've saved my ghoul till the really hard mobs came in, but my health just went down so fast, ouch...
As for doing it without the weapon, I can just about see it with kiting the initiate, but how on earth did you kill anything else in the zone with no weapon? Afraid I'm not going to try that one, it's tough enough for me with a weapon, I'd have no chance with just my fists!
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Post by Ironworgen on Jan 28, 2014 22:36:46 GMT -5
After the Initiate, there are some quests you can do that don't require combat, but once you have access to the mines you can go farm the miners for gold to buy armor, and most likely a weapon will drop during the grind. I did add a Death Knight Addendum to my Chronicles of Iron thread on the WoW Forums to highlight any trouble spots: us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3941414946Enjoy
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Post by iarnaig on Jan 29, 2014 9:31:32 GMT -5
Only weapon I found in there had 3 dps lol... given I've been finding killing things tough going with a 65 dps weapon, hmmm... not too sure how well that'll work out May try it when I reroll but I'm not convinced I'm good enough! Going to finish the zone with my dead dk to get some practice in, if nothing else I need to figure how to not die while rescuing Koltira
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tanee
Iron Veterans
Posts: 396
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Post by tanee on Jan 29, 2014 10:02:45 GMT -5
dk zone difficulty is set at the gear a dk comes with, so really, in my humble opinion, it would be ok to keep the dk gear until u get out of the zone. You wont become op until u get out anyway.
I agree, starting at 55 is ok, after all, we old fogies have done 1-55 enough where it's pretty ez albeit time consuming. So go for it. I'm here to cheer u on.
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Post by iarnaig on Jan 29, 2014 11:08:59 GMT -5
Ok, Bloody breakout, nightmare of a quest but I got through it at the fourth attempt. You will need your ghoul to do enough dps to the elite guy, BUT, don't summon it till you've killed all the non-elites - it has a nice habit of running off upstairs after non-elites and aggroing extra crusaders, sigh Being a night elf is a big advantage for this zone, shadowmeld at least prevented any more deaths (the whole encounter resets if you shadowmeld). Btw, don't believe Koltira when he says he'll distract the mobs; he doesn't, and if you try to follow him directly, you get all the aggro... The battle at Light's Hope Chapel is easy enough, I helped out a bit but mainly left it to the NPCs, the big buff makes it easy. Retaking Acherus is tougher, corner pulling abominations is very handy if you don't want to be a pinball - they're immune to your death grip but you aren't immune to theirs Pulling Patchwerk is a bit of a headache, he brought about 5 adds with him, as they just respawn so fast you can't really clear a path, but the healing buff you get is so good that it doesn't matter, still survived fine. So, I'm ok with the zone with using the sword now, next try I will try without equipping it... wonder how many rerolls I'll need Edit, initiate successfully defeated with no weapon Kiting is a headache but I found a kind of figure of eight pattern worked best, start on the upper level (can click the locks from above which helps), wait for initiate to reach upper level, then jump down and run back round to the top from the other side of the circle to where the initiate is. It reset on me twice, till the last time I selected an initiate from the middle instead of one end, and that time worked. Phew! Now time for some heavy mine farming and hope for a weapon to drop...
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Post by Ironworgen on Jan 29, 2014 11:42:44 GMT -5
Only weapon I found in there had 3 dps lol... given I've been finding killing things tough going with a 65 dps weapon, hmmm... not too sure how well that'll work out May try it when I reroll but I'm not convinced I'm good enough! Going to finish the zone with my dead dk to get some practice in, if nothing else I need to figure how to not die while rescuing Koltira If you farm miners for enough gold to buy all of the armor I would expect a reasonable weapon to drop for you. dk zone difficulty is set at the gear a dk comes with, so really, in my humble opinion, it would be ok to keep the dk gear until u get out of the zone. You wont become op until u get out anyway. But that wouldn't be following the Ironman rules, which is the entire point. Farming miners for gold to buy the white armor from Master Siegesmith Corvus is easy enough. And once you are out of the starting zone, the challenge isn't much different than with other characters as the quests are all the same. The challenge to me was to see if the Death Knight starting zone could be completed following the Ironman rules, which it can. Bloody Breakout is by far the biggest challenge in my opinion, but it can be done. It was close for me and needed Shadowmeld on my first few attempts. Patchwerk wasn't much of a challenge as I recall as the guards seemed to be able to do a lot of the work.
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Post by Ironworgen on Jan 29, 2014 11:47:30 GMT -5
Edit, initiate successfully defeated with no weapon Kiting is a headache but I found a kind of figure of eight pattern worked best, start on the upper level (can click the locks from above which helps), wait for initiate to reach upper level, then jump down and run back round to the top from the other side of the circle to where the initiate is. It reset on me twice, till the last time I selected an initiate from the middle instead of one end, and that time worked. Phew! Now time for some heavy mine farming and hope for a weapon to drop... Woot! First challenge down, next challenge is High Inquisitor Valroth. Then it's off to Stormwind!
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Post by iarnaig on Jan 29, 2014 18:59:12 GMT -5
Well, I am now standing in Stormwind, alive and well All my practice at Valroth earlier paid off and I got him down first time, surprised me, I'd expected to need to shadowmeld! Starting with no weapon hurt bigtime, even the miners were tough with hardly any abilities that work without a weapon, but rather luckily a rubbish 1h axe dropped on my 3rd miner, phew! That was enough to make farming them alright until a 2h mace dropped, which I used for the rest of the zone. Farmed miners until I had bought everything except belt and bracers, did a couple of quests, bought those, then was left with duelling DKs and the dark horseman quests, neither of which I found that easy last time, so I decided to grind regular mobs till I hit 56 for Death Strike and ghoul. That was enough grinding to also be sure I'd hit 57 before rescuing Koltira, as Blood Presence and Mind Freeze make a big difference on that fight. Once that quest was done it was all relatively easy, the whole run took about 6 hours I think (I have 7 hours on /played but that included a bit of afk time and some time wandering round SW trying to find the right weapons vendor). Abilities so far are limited, but my opinions on what's worth using: Damagewise, Icy Touch and Plague Strike are better than Death Strike (uses same runes, so you have to pick one or the other). But, the selfhealing from Death Strike make it much better overall in my opinion - I often try to open with the diseases to get the increased dmg from Blood Strike (which I can use regardless as it's on different runes) and then use Death Strike from there onwards, but it varies with the fight really. The most painful thing with using Death Strike is you spend soooo long waiting for runes to come off cd, argh! Blood Presence seems much better than Frost Presence to me; the increased armour made a noticeable difference to me, between that and death strike, I went from the Scarlet crusaders taking me to 50% every mob at lvl 55 without either ability, to them only taking me to 90% at 57. Haven't got Unholy yet, the haste may be nice, but I'm inclined to think the dmg reduction will win out there. Ghoul is very useful extra dps, but beware his habit of running off; if you're in combat with more than one mob he doesn't always go for the one you're attacking, and is well capable of aggroing some extras (I think he was what got my first dk killed on the Valroth fight, suddenly there were two extra crusaders in the room and I was dead before I knew it...). Shadowmeld while he's out doesn't remove you from the fight but does drop aggro to him, which is handy if your health is low but you reckon you can win if you don't get hit for a few seconds.
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Post by iarnaig on Jan 31, 2014 18:45:43 GMT -5
Couple of small problems with death knights starting at 55... 1. No money. I'm lvl 60, with 90 gold - that's not going to buy me flying Even if I wasn't stubborn about not using the AH, I've had no drops that'd sell to get me that money, so... any DKs just have to put up with being on the ground a bit longer then! 2. No shoulders/cloak. Shoulders will drop eventually, not worried about those, but cloaks don't drop after 1-60. So I'm doing the max I can in Azeroth in the hope that one drops sometime, sure, it won't make a big difference overall, but every little helps and I just feel wrong with empty itemslots anyway! Anyways, so far Azeroth is a lot easier than the DK startzone was, not a great surprise there I've stepped down a level and gone to Winterspring, always love that zone so it's a nice comfortable runthrough with decent exp as it's on the edge of going grey. Mobs here are no trouble, it's very slow killing, when I don't have my ghoul up, but they hardly damage me, so slow but safe seems the general thing. Haven't visited Outland yet and won't until I'm done with Blasted Lands and Silithus; I want to maximise safer exp, since I know melee is tougher the higher you get. At present it doesn't feel tough at all, but we'll see how long that lasts! Btw, thinking back to the starterzone, I will be seriously impressed if any non-night elf ever makes it through with no gear. I try not to use shadowmeld all the time as it feels a bit cheesy but I reckon there were several times I'd have died without it - even if you take meticulous care with pulls, some of the citizens who normally cower in fear, will randomly enrage and start hitting you like a truck, no amount of care can avoid that, just pure luck!
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Post by iarnaig on Mar 10, 2014 20:24:03 GMT -5
So, in a classic example of "read the tooltip", I have just discovered Blood Boil... omg it's good. My best dmg ability (so I thought) was Death Strike, 500ish dmg for 2 runes, or Death Coil, 600ish dmg for 40 runic power (roughly using 4 runes on other abilities). Blood Boil does, with diseases up, 2000ish dmg aoe, for just one blood rune Now granted, you don't always want to aoe, but most of the time it's perfectly safe and oh wow, that dmg is incredible - by comparison my 90 warlock has nothing that hits for more than about 1.5k crit... admittedly, she has a pet tank while my dk doesn't, so the added dmg will be needed later on, but still, I feel stupidly overpowered right now
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Post by iarnaig on Apr 12, 2014 18:47:46 GMT -5
Been doing some theorycrafting (read: headscratching) over runeforging tonight, and I'm thinking that by blind luck I might have picked the right one! I know that iron DKs are pretty nonexistent, but maybe if someone here knows regular DKs well they might be able to give me some input? Basically what I have at present selfbuffed is: Strength 136 (attack power 502) Stamina 160 (health 5737) Armor 4419 Weapon dmg 103-157 And some ability dmg numbers for context: Blood Boil 1.8k-2.2k, 50% increase with a disease up Death Strike 705ish (weapon dmg element) plus 401 heal Death Coil 811 Icy touch 459 plus dot Plague Strike 364ish (weapon dmg element) plus dot Almost all runeforges work off a % so as to scale well, which means that although I expected Fallen Crusader to be the obvious choice (remembering how great regular Crusader is at appropriate levels), I think it's actually not so obvious as I thought. My possibly very dodgy maths leads me to the following for each runeforge: Cinderglacier: Chance on hit for 20% dmg to shadow/frost attacks (Blood Boil, Death Coil, Icy Touch all appear likely to benefit) Razorice: 2% weapon dmg and increase frost vulnerability. That's 2-3 dmg per hit, and increase to an ability I only open with, so won't benefit. Spellbreaking/shattering: 2%/4% spelldmg deflected, silence reduced 50%. Doesn't strike me as very useful. Swordbreaking/shattering: 2%/4% parry, disarm reduced 50%. 4% parry is kinda nice, I won't write that off at least. Lichbane: 2% weapon dmg per hit, 4% vs undead. That'll be 2-3 dmg per hit, 4-6 vs undead. Possibly useful in Northrend... Fallen Crusader: 3% heal and 15% strength. For me that's 172 health and 20 strength. Nerubian Carapace/Stoneskin Gargoyle: 2/4% armor and 1/2% sta. That's 88/176 armor and 16/32 sta. I think I'd forget Razorice (Lichbane too, outside Northrend) and spellbreaking straight away, the others are rather more interesting. I'm not convinced Stoneskin Gargoyle gives really enough benefit defensively, likewise 4% parry, seems kinda good, but a bit too luckbased. As to dmg, Fallen Crusader's 20 strength comes out fairly similar to the 46 attack power I gain from using Horn of Winter so I used that for comparison; it gives me about a 3% increase on Death Coil/Icy Touch (didn't write down numbers on Blood Boil, but the increase seemed even smaller). So, does FC proc often enough to benefit 7 times as many ability uses as CG? And does Lichbane's 4-6 dmg per hit vs undead compete with bigger increases but less often? Of course the heal comes into play as well, and there's the possibility of dual wielding to consider too (going from 103-157 dmg to 51-97) - that lowers Death Strike a little (by about 93 if my maths isn't too far out), but not Blood Boil or Death Coil, which are my two biggest hitting abilities. Dual wield and Fallen crusader = more heals (a wowhead comment suggests the 15% strength buff won't stack but will refresh?), although I'm not sure if proc rates will mean twice as often. At present, I don't take enough damage to need the heals, but perhaps later it could be useful? Or even a combination of one Fallen Crusader and one 2% parry or armor/sta buff, or FC/CG combination? I'm spoilt for choice! Right now I'm thinking Cinderglacier is best for dps though, which is a surprise, as it's the one I chose without having looked at the numbers! Anyone got any suggestions/better maths than me?
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Xaya
Community Moderators
Posts: 1,662
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Post by Xaya on Apr 13, 2014 5:34:47 GMT -5
I've never been good with those maths in WoW. I suggest yo get an add-on like Recount, and kill 20-30 mobs using different runeforge, resetting the counter between each set. The addon will do the math, and you'll be able to see if the heal is worth it
Xayaforsi lvl 90 pandaren hunter (alive) Wyrmrest Accord Xayadruide lvl 31 worgen druid Wyrmrest Accord
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