Girls in Games

It has long fascinated me how the interaction between male and female players in WoW varies from guild to guild, and indeed from the parameters of social acceptance most of us use in real life. WoW is a haven for geeks who are probably rather lacking in the social skills department (don't worry, I'm not taking a soapbox, I'm one of them) and yet these people are thrown into a highly social situation and sometimes into the perils of leadership too.  This must be highly irregular - after all, how many non-gamers can claim that they spend Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights with 24 friends?

Leaving the other perils of social interaction for another day, let's take a look at the way the predominantly male culture of the game is completely turned upside down by throwing a few women into the mix. I have met a wide variety of female players during my time playing WoW and I believe you can fit them into these categories:

The Dog Whistle
I'm not afraid to say that this player is my pet hate. She goes around flirting with every man she can find, posting slutty webcam pics and often accepting free stuff and gold, and also pitting the men against each other for her own amusement. She probably sucks at playing her character, but usually gets picked for raids. She is called the Dog Whistle because the other girls in the guild can see through her two-faced act and despise her while the men are oblivious. Any attempt to say a bad word against her results in the men saying such things as "you're just jealous, she's a really nice person". I am happy to say there are no dog whistles in my current guild.

The Fireball
This girl is mostly fine but the slightest thing can cause her to explode in a huge ball of fiery rage and make you wish you never dared be born, let alone point out she is DPSing with a fishing rod. There is no way of predicting when fireballs will occur, and there is no acceptable apology if you are unlucky enough to trigger one.

The Mum
Aww, everyone loves the mum of the guild. She's the matriarchal figure who everyone likes but nobody fancies, so she is a steadfast and drama-free person to be around. She doesn't necessarily have to be old but you usually know you can go to her for help if you forgot to make your flasks or you didn't bring any food to the raid - after all cooking is what mums are for right?

The Nice Girl
The nice girl is just that - pleasant, keeps her head down, doesn't get involved in drama, but quietly sucks. You can't quite bring yourself to kick her because she's never caused any problems, yet she's always last on the meters. You kinda hope she leaves to have a baby or something so you can avoid having "the chat" about DPS.

The Woman Scorned
This girl is either dangerous or depressed, depending on which stage she is at. She had a 'thing' with one of your guild members and now it's over and she's out for revenge. If the cause of this was the Dog Whistle you have a big problem on your hands.

The GF
This girl's BF is in the guild and she can be very stable, depending on how the relationship is going at the time. She is probably accompanied by her rather forlorn looking BF, levelling night elves in the woods together. As soon as she logs off the BF will immediately search for something manly to do like PVP or a really tough raid.

The Lesbina
Not necessarily a lesbian, but for some reason she thinks that all men are out to get her and wants to prove she is just as good as a man - even though no one said she wasn't. If you criticise her play you will be accused of being a sexist pig who is picking on her just because she is a girl. She is probably quite a good player, but isn't very popular.

The Therapy Session
This girl wants to fix you. She knows you have a tough life and she wants to help you by chatting endlessly about your problems and offering advice. She mostly stands around in a city talking and then grumbles that she has no money or materials for anything. If you try to get away from her by joining an arena match/heroic/battleground she will get upset and blank you waiting for you to apologise. Sadly, you're a man so you won't notice.

The Strong Woman
This girl is a smart, strong woman who holds her own in the game but doesn't feel she is entitled to anything she hasn't earnt - she may even be the guild leader. People respect her because she knows her stuff, and she is usually a good 'people person'. She won't show it but she still doesn't like doing the tough stuff - kicking people and dishing out punishments make her feel bad.

I think it would be fair to say I'm a combination of the Fireball, the Lesbina, the Woman Scorned, the Therapy Session and the Strong Woman. Do you know any of these girls? Which one are you?

DK Battle res!

Don't have much time to write tonight but I just had to put this, stolen from MMO Champion...

Unholy

• Raise Ally has been revamped and is now a battle rez spell - Pours dark energy into a dead target, reuniting spirit and body to allow the target to reenter battle with 20% health and 20% mana. 30 yd range, 50 Runic Power, 10 min cooldown, Instant

Yeah!!

Raid Leader: BWD Magmaw 25 man

Since I'm an occasional raid leader (with Vanguard, The Sha'tar EU) I thought I would share some of the loser notes which are written in my "raid leader book"! When I read tactics I try to summarise them as succinctly as possible in order to get to the main points without having a load of waffle. So, here is what's in my book for Magmaw (hereafter referred to as 'M') 25 man, see if you can make any sense of it.

Before you start...
- Separate into three camps - tank (front of M), melee (left of M) and ranged/healers (in the brown bit on the floor)
- At the start, allocate three people to jump on Magmaw's head, and one person to call out on Mumble (Vent, TS, whatever) when to use chains
- Bloodlust on first time M's head goes down

Tanks (x2) - Hit M. When you get mangled, if you are not freed by the last ~5 seconds, use a strong CD. Then switch tank and repeat.

Melee - Hit M. Look out for pulling aggro around the time of tank switch - take a few steps back.

Ranged - Move out of red circle, nuke parasites. If you are infected, get out.

Healers - Move out with ranged. Extra heals on tank when he is being mangled. Heal through lava spew ranged missiles.

That's all....although if you're tanking this and leading you'll need to have eyes in the back of your head to see when to tell the ranged to move. I reccommend a quick camera twizzle.

MOTW #1: GTFO (aka don't stand in the crap)

Welcome to the first "Mod of the Week" (no, not Mark of the Wild...) section, where I will be reviewing various mods as a cheap attempt to do more blog posts an informative and interesting section.

This week's mod is GTFO, billed by its creators as:
"an audible alert when you're standing in something you're not supposed to be standing in. In some cases, you'll be warned before you start taking damage."

Hmm...sounds good, but is it? The slightly embarassing reason I originally downloaded this mod has a long, elaborate and frankly tedious story attached. But that's what blogs are for, right? :) At the start of Cataclysm I had been fiddling around with some of my graphics settings and somehow managed to turn off the setting for ground particle efffects. Note - do not do this! It means that you cannot see any ground AOE textures, thus meaning that all of your well meaning guildies on 5 man runs are reduced to exasperation and soul searching about how you can be so useless as to not avoid such obvious 'crap on the floor'. This setting was responsible for at least 5 wipes on the boss guy with two adds in Shadowfang Keep, I'll have you know, nowt to do with me!

So, with my reputation as a Death Knoob increasing and probably copious amounts of "dear god why did we let her switch to tank" threads in the officers forums, I decided to take the bull by the horns and download this mod. I'm so glad I did because it is excellent! The noises it makes range from a small "plink" (when you stand in one of the fire braziers in Orgrimmar) to a full on submarine siren when you're actually standing in crap you really shouldn't be in. It helps immensely when you are concentrating on numerous other things to be able to hear that you need to move, but if you prefer visuals you can also configure it with Power Auras to show a visual effect too. Healers in the guild have also said that this mod is excellent, again to help them out when they are staring at their bars, plus it is great to help you distinguish from friendly ground AOE heals/DnD and the hurty stuff.

Happily, several heroics after my first initial balls-up, the GM could not believe I was suddenly so shocking (I'm not that bad, folks!) and suggested checking my graphics settings. Now I can see the effects *and* have the benefit of honking sirens to direct me out of danger. I guess the only real bad point about this mod is the possibility for complacency in looking for things if you are too reliant on the siren, a good example being not moving the *boss* out of blue puddles on the Omnitron council encounter. Still, it's very helpful and I highly recommend it for all classes, not just DKs.

Starting a Death Knight tank

Welcome to my first post on Red Axe! This guide is intended to get you up and running with a DK from 55 to tanking Outland instances, for people who are just experimenting with the class and want a quick start guide. It should cover all of those annoying questions your guild mates ask you when they roll their DK, before they get bored 10 minutes later - just send them over here ;)

To start off you will need to sort out a few things to get you going as an Outland tank. Note that this is not a levelling guide, it is a guide to competently tanking your first runs at ~lv60, having already finished the starting quests. Although it is perfectly possible to level as Blood spec, unless you are chaining dungeons you will probably find it faster and easier to have a frost or unholy dual spec for questing purposes.

Abilities

At level 60 some of your best tanking abilities are not yet unlocked! Never fear, you can still tank an instance successfully at 60 with the following:

Blood Presence - This is crucial! Always ensure this is active for tanking, it is similar to a warrior stance in that you only need activate it once and it will remain active until you change it or respec.

Icy Touch - Use this as your ranged pull, but it also adds a disease to your target which reduces its attack speed which is helpful for survival.

Death Strike - (Otherwise known as "Red Axe"!) A really good ability to use, it heals you for 30% of the damage you took in the previous 5 seconds. Good for general use, really good after high damage abilities.

Heart Strike - Gained from the Blood talent specialisation, this is a core attack. It offers a 3 target cleave so be careful if there are CC'ed mobs about.

Death Coil - A ranged attack that uses Runic Power, use it if all of your runes are on CD or if you need to hit a mob that is not within melee range.

Death Grip - Don't waste this by using it to pull. It can be used for pulling non-moving caster mobs into melee range once the pull has happened, and a fact that a lot of people miss is that it also acts as a taunt which is great because you don't get your actual taunt until lv65.

Mind Freeze - Your standard interrupt, you may as well start learning to use it now. Have it on your bar or keybound to a convenient key. You also have Strangulate which has a 2 minute CD but is great for making irritating caster mobs run to you if your Death Grip is on CD.

Blood Boil - An AoE attack which is very useful for keeping control of multiple mobs. If you talent Scarlet Fever you can reduce the physical damage dealt by mobs by 10% too. You can break CC very easily with this so be careful.

Death and Decay - If you're reading this guide and you're not quite 60, you don't yet have this. It's great for a pull, place it on the ground in the way of oncoming mobs and it damages them and causes a lot of threat. You can obviously break CC with this accidentally too.

You also have a number of other abilities, but some are not particularly useful for tanking and others provide unnecessary complication in my opinion. Some people like to apply Plague Strike as well as Icy Touch and then use Pestilence to spread the diseases all around, I don't think it's worth bothering with these because the mobs are usually dead by the time you've done this, but you may wish to experiment. It's also worth saying that as soon as you get Rune Strike at 67 you should be using it as one of your core abilities.

Race

If you are intending becoming anything like serious with your DK tank, you should probably consider carefully which race to choose. Here is my opinion on order of usefulness:

Orc - a reduced stun duration, increased Axe expertise and two nice DPS racial boosts too.

Goblin- passive 1% increased attack speed, DPS CD.

Troll - passive 15% reduced duration of movement impairing effects, increased health regen, DPS CD.

Forsaken - Will of the Forsaken, 2min CD for charm/sleep/fear effects.

Blood Elf - You look pretty! Hmm...you also get an AoE interrupt but this is very situational.

Tauren - passive 5% increased base health (not very scaleable) and a pretty useless AoE stun. 

Human - increased Mace/Sword expertise, 2min movement impairing CD.

Draenei - passive 1%  increased hit, HoT CD.

Dwarf - Stoneform +10% armor CD, expertise with maces.

Worgen - 'Dash' increased movement speed CD, passive 1% crit for DPS.

Gnome - Escape Artist - get rid of movement speed/stun effects. Note that the expertise with 1H swords is useless for tanking.

Night Elf - You look pretty! Attackers have 2% reduced chance to hit you.

However, as you can see I completely ignored my own advice and went for the pretty option of Blood Elf. *sigh*

 

Talents

You should by now have gained your talent points from the starting DK quests, so here is a decent tanking build to start off with at level 60:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jcur0sMRuk 

Eventually you are aiming for something like this which is the endgame spec recommended by Elitist Jerks, so as you level you know where to spend the rest of your points:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jcGr0sMruszG0oZ0b:so0zkZz

Glyphs

You will only have two of each type of glyph slot available at this point, so my recommendations are:
Prime
Glyph of Heart Strike - essential
Glyph of Death and Decay - really helpful during BC/WOTLK as most pulls have no CC
(Your final glyph will be Glyph of Rune Strike but you don't have this ability yet.)

Major
Glyph of Blood Boil
Glyph of Rune Tap
(Your final glyph will be Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon but again you don't have this ability yet)

Minor
It really doesn't matter, you can use any of the minor glyphs.

Gear

You will already have your gear from the starting quests which is perfectly reasonable for tanking at 60. You may wish to purchase some of the new heirlooms if your guild has reached the appropriate level.

Your gear will come with Strength and Stamina as standard. As a very coarse rule, if an item (neck, back, ring etc.) has agility on it, you don't want it and there is a rogue somewhere laughing at you for rolling on it.

Essentially, you are looking for the following useful green stats:
Mastery
Dodge / Parry - in equal amounts
Expertise / Hit - but only if you are having trouble with threat

For tanking, you should always be using a two handed weapon. It also goes without saying that you should only opt for plate armour for the bonus which is non-optional.

Professions

Many guides will tell you that JC/ BS / LW / ENc / ENg are the best professions for an end-game Death Knight. However, for levelling purposes I would be inclined to take Herbalism and Mining for two reasons. One, you gain extra XP for picking/mining the nodes, which is helpful for levelling. Two, if you save all of the items you pick/mine on a bank character somewhere, you can use them to level up one of the aforementioned professions extremely quickly once you reach 85.

I hope this guide gets you up and running on your death knight as fast as possible, and playing competently in Outland dungeons. Please feel free to post any comments or criticisms, and check back soon for more DK talk!


- Tabseh