Once upon a time there was a Death Knight named Interest. She was a gnome who had escaped the Lich King’s thrall and made her way to Ironforge, where she set herself up as a businesswoman. Her contacts used her as a go between, to sell off the spoils of their adventures.
Day after day she’d handle Infinite Dust, Pyrite Ore, and Netherweave bags by the dozen. Every now and then she’d send a big pile of gold off to one of her contacts. Day after day she made the circuit between the Auction House, the bank, and the mailbox, her noble Deathcharger reduced to running the fifteen steps she was too lazy to walk. It wasn’t the most thrilling life, but it was a life, so there you go.
One day, one of her best customers came to talk. Invariant was a gnome like her, but a mage, and level 85 while Interest was a mere 58. But there’d always been a kind of kinship between them. They even looked similar. Interest wondered whether they had been distantly related, back when she was alive.
“So I just dug up this thing,” Invariant said. “I’m a mage, I don’t use two handed strength swords.”
Interest examined it. “If I could sell this, we could make a lot of money.”
“But we can’t,” Invariant pointed out. “And nobody else wants it…”
Interest thought about her other clients. Analogue couldn’t use a sword. Elucidate, another gnome friend, was a priest and this was useless to her. “What about Divergent?” She’d always admired that big Paladin. Paladins were shiny and clean and got respect. Not like Death Knights. Nobody actually likes Death Knights.
“She hit 85 and went Holy/Prot.” Invariant shrugged. “Said no way in hell is she going Ret. She’ll dual spec Holy first.”
So what, you want me to stash this away? I’m running out of space.”
“Silly!” Invariant grinned at her. “I want you to use it.”
“I can’t even equip it, I’m not high enough.”
“Right. So you’re going to have to level up.” With that, Invariant teleported away, off to whatever adventures she had these days. (Based on what she sent Interest to sell, Interest was pretty sure she spent most of her time in the city making Netherweave Bags, and the rest digging up old Night Elf underwear. Interest wasn’t entirely sure that Invariant was… normal.)
Just then Analogue stopped by. “Hey, I got these back from Divergent now that she’s done with them, and a couple more.” She tossed Interest a bag. “I heard you’re thinking of leveling. Ditch the bank guild and we’ll hook you up with some real guild perks, too. Gotta run. Raid in five. I’m still short one healer. Too bad you’re not one.”
Interest opened the bag. Inside… well, she didn’t know how Analogue had managed to get a sword that long into the bag. It looked far too big for her, but when she pulled it out, it felt just right. The breastplate fit beautifully – odd, that, considering it still had Divergent’s name written on the tag at the collar. How exactly does a gnome fit into a Draenei’s hand me downs? The helmet and back were entirely new. Analogue must have just bought them – for me! Interest thought excitedly. Ok! I can do this!
It had been so long since anyone noticed her. So long since she was anything but another banker. She summoned her Deathcharger, Pinky, who whinnied at her in excitement. “Let’s go,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get my talents redone.” They leapt through a Deathgate.
“You must choose your path,” her trainer announced when she reached him. “You must choose….”
“I’m going to be a tank,” Interest said confidently. “I want to be the center of attention. A whirling gnome of death, bringing vengeance on my enemies while protecting my friends. Also, I hear leveling in dungeons is fast and fun and the queue’s a lot shorter for a tank.”
The trainer eyed her. “Even shorter than you,” he confirmed. “Very well then. Now, we’ve made some changes to the tank trees since you came through here…”
“I know,” Interest said, and pulled out a note. “I want…. this spec. I found it on the internet. I’ll figure out what it does later.”
“Very well. Don’t forget to read Elitist Jerks.”
Thanks for indulging me. I don’t do fanfiction (anymore) (never did any for WoW anyway) but that was a fun little bit to write. But stripped of the fiction flourishes, last weekend I did have basically this happen. Dug up the troll sword BOA epic, had nothing to do with it, decided this required me to level my bank alt. I handed the bank guild over to one of Reversion’s alts and joined Crits. Fixed her up as a tank and queued for Hellfire.
Since I blog I can’t ever do a project without thinking of the blog. I remember Pugging Pally – those were always a great read – so I decided I’ll level Interest in pugs, as a tank, and tell what stories may come.
I’m not leveling her on a set schedule, or anything, but stay tuned for her adventures!
Quick aside that took me a while to figure out on my Dk. Mastery spec is very very gear dependant. As you gear up go avoidance and once you’re gear is up there then you have a choice between avoidance and mastery.
Cheers!
OMG. This might possibly be the most awesome thing I’ve ever read on here … and that’s saying a lot. I’m wiping tears of laughter out of my eyes.
I’m almost tempted to powerlevel my own bank alt 20 levels so he can join in the fun. But … rogue. Ugh. I soooo suck at rogue. Then again, if someone wants to help me transfer *his* bank guild to my hunter … I may just do it. After all, he’s the highest level alt I have left.
That was great 😀
Glad to know I’m not the only one that doesn’t RP but also generally prefers to have some kind of backstory for what’s going on with their characters. 🙂
You probably want to pick up DocsDebugRunes: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/docsdebugrunes.aspx
Doing anything effective with blood or frost relies on being able to effectively work with the runic empowerment system, which means being able to easily distinguish death runes from the other sorts, since you want to save them for your paired strikes- death strike for blood, yay healing and blood shield. Blizzard’s default UI sucks for that, but DDR is a very compact and distinct package for rune management, visible blood shield uptime, and disease tracking. I luuuuurves it for my DK.
Thanks a lot for that tip! I am a bit clueless as of yet and runes are definitely a mystery!
Yeah, DKs are easily the most complex tank to pick up in terms of what they should be doing, when.
Rules of thumb for runes goes:
blood rune = heart strike if enemy count is equal to or less than three, blood boil if greater.
frost rune = pair it with an unholy rune for death strike, or use the pair to refresh your diseases if they’re gone or about to be gone and you don’t need that death strike desperately.
unholy rune = see above. You also use unholy runes for bone shield and for death and decay, which can mess up your rotation by removing half the pair.
death rune = either wait until you have a pair for a free death strike, or use it to patch your rotation from bone shield refreshes and disease/DnD replenishment. Don’t use a death rune for blood-rune abilities.
You want blood runes on cooldown as much as possible to maintain blade barrier, and keep things cooling down in general to get more runic empowerment procs and more free stuff. When everything is on cooldown, that’s when you spend your runic power.
Not very intuitive, but once you master it the sense of control is very, very satisfying.
@LabRat – that’s an excellent quick summary of Blood DKing!
Once you get into it, DK tanking becomes quite… not rhythmic, exactly, but similar.
Once thing I found useful was to use Bartender and to put all my instant, no-cooldown abilities (death strike, heart strike etc.) on a separate bar, bound to easily accessible keys (1, 2, 3, 4, q, e, r, f, tab, plus Shifted versions of those), then to hide that bar completely. This forces you to rely solely on the rune/runic power display to know what abilities are available – you learn to read your rune patterns and know immediately what you can use.
I use MagicRunes for this, but using the Icon Display instead of bars for the runes – this lets me have a nice compact 3×2 grid of large circular icons like this:
F U B
F U B
It may just be because I’m used to it, but I find it more intuitive to read than a bar-based rune display. For runic power I use Magic Runes’ bar, and have made it quite large, with the actual amount of RP displayed prominently on it.
Awesome. THAT kind of RP gets me thinking about dusting off an alt or two.
Thanks for indulging US.
This was really fantastic. I love the mixture of “what I did this week in wow” with a storytelling approach.
This was such a fun read! I’ve been leveling my DK (I think she’s 65 or 66 now) but haven’t officially tried tanking an instance. The advice on how to play a blood tank are much appreciated!
Best line: Nobody actually likes Death Knights.
Think about it everyone, you know it’s true.
For me the best line was “Based on what she sent Interest to sell, Interest was pretty sure she spent most of her time in the city making Netherweave Bags, and the rest digging up old Night Elf underwear. Interest wasn’t entirely sure that Invariant was… normal.” I literally laughed out loud. XD
This whole post was made of awesome and win!
I often feel a bit sorry for banking toons, sitting around in cities while everyone else goes off on adventures. My Troll Shaman is my bank alt, but I’m thinking of leveling her and making a Goblin bank alt instead, since a Goblin would love nothing more than to handle transactions all day. Yes, I know it’s silly to treat toons as if they have feelings. LOL