pwnwear

Updated tanking guide

Gravity — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 09:44:43 +0000

The guide is still being updated for the latest in tanking for 5.0.5 and onward, over here.

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DKIrunes updated

Gravity — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 04:26:08 +0000

Back in the day when I was mod at deathknight.info, a funny bloke named Futhark created this mod called DKIrunes. He’s gone walkabout, so Hanzo, who’s not so funny but can code like Neo, is updating it for Pandafication. Go check it out if you’re a fan.

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MoP DK Tank guide posted

Gravity — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 03:28:22 +0000

The community is already kickin’ butt and taking numbers, with a DK tank guide posted up over here.

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Get some panda

Gravity — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 03:19:27 +0000

Hey everyone,

Pandafication of the pwnwear forums is happening, so dive back on in.

- Gravity

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I’m blogging SW:TOR

Gravity — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:11:15 +0000

I’m now playing and blogging about Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it’s awesome.

My site is DarthJedi.com (it has RSS too). I’m doing theorycraft, of course, eventually, and will be playing a Bounty Hunter healer at least for the first year or so.

As before, pwnwear remains open and I pay for its upkeep, cleanse it of any spam, and DK tanks are still hanging out here. Personally though I’m focused on SW:TOR.

Report on other games, from Gamescom 2010

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Death Knight tank spec 4.1

Gravity — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:58:44 +0000

For DK tanks, it’s pretty simple.

battle rez instead of ghoul conversion. It is instant cast, but costs 50 Runic Power to use, and has a 10-minute cooldown. It shares the same global battle resurrection cap with Rebirth and Soulstone.
interrupts do not miss, so mind freeze for 10-man tanks is more viable than before. Thus, you can anticipate encounter designs to incorporate more interrupting by the tank.
Death Strike self-healing no longer generates threat. Not a big issue.

For these two reasons, I would tend to spec into endless winter with my free points.

Otherwise, not much change in 4.1 compared to 4.0.6 for the tanks. Chat about it over here.

Related useful changes:

A dead player can now be resurrected by targeting them using the Party or Raid Frame even if they have released. No more hunting for corpses.
Flask of Steelskin now grants 450 Stamina, up from 300. I’d now start using Flasks instead of stamina scroll and mastery elixir.
All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.
For PvP, a nice touch: several persistent ground effects now display different visuals for hostile and friendly players. The following spells have the same visual effects for friendly players, but new alternate visuals for hostile players: Ring of Frost, Consecration, Desecration, Wild Mushroom, Flare, Ice Trap, Power Word: Barrier, Smoke Bomb, and Hand of Gul’dan. As a general rule, the alternate effects have a red tint or hue indicating they are created by an enemy player.
Targets and focus targets now display on the mini-map.
Bonuses if you queue in LFD as a tank.
New tanking heirloom items.

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DK tank in 4.1

Gravity — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:34:37 +0000

Given the long delay between current content release and the pending 4.1, plus the onslaught of summer raiding difficulties, I’m wondering if anyone is mixing it up with 4.1? For DK, doesn’t look like significant changes really, except we can be relied on for interrupts because mind freeze will not be able to miss.

All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Shield Bash, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.

Some new content to smash will be nice.

You can chat about it all over here.

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Why I love my Kindle

Gravity — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:22:50 +0000

I bought an Amazon Kindle in January. Here’s why I think they’re awesome. Since January, I’ve read 17 books on the Kindle; it has been a long time since I have read this many books per month.

Why? I’m reading more because of the Kindle’s accessibility.

Last Argument Of Kings: The First Law: Book Three	Abercrombie, Joe	still to read
Before They Are Hanged	Abercrombie, Joe	still to read
Chronicles of the Black Company	Cook, Glen	March 14, 2011
The Wise Man’s Fear	Rothfuss, Patrick	March 7, 2011
Hero of Rome	Jackson, Douglas	February 26, 2011
God is Not Great	Hitchens, Christopher	March 28, 2011
The Blade Itself: The First Law: Book One	Abercrombie, Joe	February 22, 2011
The Name Of The Wind: The Kingkiller Chonicle: Book 1	Rothfuss, Patrick	February 22, 2011
Gardens Of The Moon	Erikson, Steven	February 17, 2011
Clash of Kings, A	Martin, George R. R.	February 4, 2011
Game of Thrones, A	Martin, George R. R.	January 30, 2011

The Complaints	Rankin, Ian	January 28, 2011
Exit Music	Rankin, Ian	January 25, 2011
Shining Ones, The	Eddings, David	January 13, 2011
Domes of Fire	Eddings, David	January 13, 2011
Sapphire Rose, The	Eddings, David	January 11, 2011
A Question of Blood	Rankin, Ian	January 9, 2011
Ruby Knight, The	Eddings, David	January 9, 2011

Display: the Kindle’s screen, if you have not seen it, is remarkable and a key selling feature in its own right. Unlike the iPad which uses a backlit LCD screen, the Kindle is dull and reflective like a real paper book. Thus, you can read at the beach or in bright light. At night, I read with a little torch built into the protective case I bought.

The Kindle e-ink display is very high resolution and a delight to read from.

Form factor: if it were made of paper, you can have trouble reading a very thick book with one hand, turning its pages and keeping your place. At the gym, for example, it’s awkward to keep the book open at your current page. This is not a problem for the Kindle, obviously.

Reading your own documents: this is lesser known. You can email your own Kindle any pdf or word document, and have it converted for free into the native Kindle format. Once native, features like varying its font size will work. PDFs are viewable unconverted, too, with their graphics shown as intended, but note this is not as enjoyable as on an iPad since you have no pinch-zoom.

However, for reading my University text book, which I convert, it’s superb. It has no graphics, it’s just text, and it is much more practical to carry the Kindle around than my very massive Uni text.

You can highlight sections of a text, and then later review those highlights through a single convenient view. I found this helpful.

Caveats: in Australia, and some other countries, the books you can buy from amazon’s store are a subset of those available in the USA or UK. You can try pretending you are based in those countries (they do not check your credit card address to verify) but they do check your GPS and only allow about six purchases while out of your nominated country. This is a bit annoying. That said, though, the range of available books is still quite massive.

Reading on many devices: you can read the same books on iPhone, Android, Mac and Kindle. You save which page you are up to on your Kindle by going to its ‘home’ page, which sends a mark up to the cloud. Then you can grab your iPhone and keep reading. Really neat.

In closing: it has great battery life. It can provide a plan B web browser, based on webkit, and play mp3 files if you want. I don’t use it for those functions. You can twitter highlighted sections of a book.

How to buy: You can get one from the affiliate store if you’d like to support the pwnwear site (USA | UK).

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Rawr, DK tank updated

Gravity — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:20:04 +0000

Update from Shazear: This latest release shifts TankDK status from “Mostly” supported to “Fully” supported. As you can see there are quite a few changes in this release. Please take a look, and let me know what you think. It was a significant effort with a metric ton of help from fellow Rawr Team dev: Jothay. I extend a huge thanks to all his work over the weekend and Friday.

Rawr 4.1.2:
- Fine Tuning base stats. More to do here.
- Implement Runic Empowerment.
- Fix Rotation report.
- Fix white swing hit chance to properly use WhiteHit rather than Yellow Hit.
- Cleanup VampiricBlood implmentation
- Add Rotation list null checks.
- Fix OnUse Trigger evaluation.
- Total refactor of the evalutation logic flow to provide more complete burst value.
- Implement Death Pact.
- Update Trigger handling in special effects for tanking related triggers.
- Parry Haste Completely removed from Rawr, including Parry Haste not generated by the Boss Handler
- Cleanup of the options tab.
- Revamped Options Pane for ease of use
- Tweaking some of the output values via code review.
- Updated the order, naming and colors of the SubPoints
- Changed the Threat Slider to a combobox selector as seen in Bear
- Fixed a bug with SetDefaults
- Rawr.Base: Fixed several stats that should have been in the InverseMultiplicative list. Had to adjust it’s usage across Rawr in all models.
- Updated Values for several DK Abilities
- Fixed Threat Multiplier
- Fixed some other minor bugs
- Changed how the Scores are reported to the user, now use the same scaling system that Bear does + Burst

Read more in our official thread, with Developer Shazear.

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Spike damage on DK tank

Gravity — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 02:41:22 +0000

My healers think I’m a bit squishy sometimes, and so this thread about that topic has a personal significance. Sconnell chimed in with a thoughtful contribution, the beginning of which I’ve quoted below.

As to whether DK tanks have “spike damage issues”, I’m not sure if there’s a consensus here that it’s a big problem. Countless threads on other forums does not mean there’s a legitimate problem, you can find countless threads on all sorts of things.

When people talk about “spike damage”, they’re usually talking about one of two different but connected things:
- a damage spike: a large amount of damage in a short time, such as from a string of unavoided hits, or
- spiky damage: incoming damage that is irregular and a mix of periods of low incoming damage and high incoming damage.

A damage spike is threatening because it is a sudden substantial reduction in a tank’s health, which can put the tank at risk of dying.
Spiky damage is generally undesirable for healers because they cannot easily regulate their mana usage to match incoming damage. Healers have to walk a fine line between overhauling and risking going oom, or being more reactive and careful with mana and risking tank death.

A further point is that healers will generally equate incoming damage with drops in a tank’s health pool. To most healers, a DK tank at 95% health who avoids an attack and stays at 95% damage is in the same position as one at 95% health who had a blood shield up which absorbs an attack. In general , for healers spiky damage is when the tank’s health jumps up and down unpredictable, and a damage spike is when a tank’s health drops substantially in a short period of time.

So, how do death strike, avoidance and mastery play into all of this?

Both avoidance and mastery have a role to play in decreasing the likelihood of damage spikes, but for both there is a big RNG element. Avoidance decreases the likelihood of a string of unavoided attacks in a row. Mastery shields decrease the amount of a hit which goes through to affect health. However, strings of unavoided attacks can and will happen even with high levels of avoidance, and mastery shields are applied regularly but semi-randomly. Mastery gives you no protection against damage spikes during the period after one blood shield is absorbed and the next one is applied. Avoidance is passive and provides constant potential protection, but no guaranteed actual protection.

Both avoidance and mastery contribute to the spikiness of damage:
On the whole, incoming damage is more predictable at either very high (near 100%) or very low (near 0%) levels of avoidance. At 50% avoidance, the probability that the next three attacks will be avoided is equal to the probability that they will connect. Avoidance also affects the value of death strikes and blood shields.
Turning to mastery, the occurrence of death strikes is regular but still affected by RNG(RE procs etc.) A death strike represents a spike in health, and also a decrease in damage over the next few seconds.

Generally speaking, focusing on mastery at the expense of avoidance means higher incoming damage, balanced out by bigger death strikes and bigger blood shields(both because death strikes are higher and because you have more mastery.)

Read the rest of this post over here.

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pwnwear

Updated tanking guide

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DKIrunes updated

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MoP DK Tank guide posted

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Get some panda

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I’m blogging SW:TOR

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Death Knight tank spec 4.1

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DK tank in 4.1

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Why I love my Kindle

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Rawr, DK tank updated

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Spike damage on DK tank

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