Marcus McCurdy's Blog

Last night, I wanted to see if I could solo Boglash in Zanagermarsh on my Death Knight and I decided to record it. Well, I soloed him very easily as you can see in the video. I don’t think my HP dropped below 75%. Sorry for the poor quality of the video I dropped my resolution down because I didn’t realize Fraps increased its max recording resolution. Anyway, I’ll record and post some more videos later.

Sign Up

Google Analytics is a great resource for anyone who runs a website. It is free to use and the statistics that it provides you with are very eye opening. The first step is signing up and it is totally free just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to sign up if you already have a gmail account it will add analytics to your Google account.

Continue Reading

Sorry to update so long after my last post, but after the beta client finished downloading I had to download about 5 patches with some of them being in the 500 MB range. Anyway, I did finally get a chance to play and I dove right into the new Death Knight class. I was contemplating how Blizzard would handle the creation of a new Death Knight because they start at level 55. I had many questions about equipment, talents, and professions. I was pleasantly surprised by how Blizzard handle it.

New starting zone

Upon creation of your Death Knight you enter an all new zone filled with Death Knight specific quests. You initial start out with 0 talent points. However, each Death Knight specific quest that you complete will award you experience points, gold, a (useful) blue item, and 1 or more bonus talent points. The quests take you from 55 to level 58 and are actually quite fun. I’m glad Blizzard did this set of introductory quests because I was dreading trudging through old content to level up my new Death Knight. You also start with a high level of first aid which is very cool.

New Quest types

There are two quests in the new zone that really caught my eye. In one of them, you sneak aboard a ship in the harbor and then control the cannons on the ship and turn them against the Argent Dawn. In the other quest Arthas has you climb aboard a Frost Wyrm and slaughter Argent Dawn troops. This was similar to a bombing quest except you completely control the dragon and have to dodge flaming arrows from archers and ballistas on the ground.

Interface changes

One of the biggest interface changes I noticed is the addition of a calendar right next to the mini-map. It shows all the upcoming Blizzard events and I would imagine it would be integrated with your guild although I haven’t been able to confirm this since I don’t have a guild in the beta. The options menu has been completely revamped as well, which I think is a great improvement. I also noticed an additional panel called glyphs that is attached to the spell book, but I’m not sure what that is about yet.

Death Knight

In PvE the Death Knight feels very over powered to me. I haven’t been involved in any PvP yet, but in nearly all my PvE encounters I end the battle with full health and slaughter pretty much everything I come across. It is nice not having to worry about mana or rage. Play style feels a little bit like a warrior or pally. However, unlike a warrior who starts out with zero rage you have your runes to start so you can frontload quite a bit of damage.

I choose to go down the blood talent tree as it seemed to be the best for PvE leveling. It seems pretty good so far, but I haven’t played enough with it to know for sure. I also haven’t done any analyitics on talents or skill rotations to see what kind of DPS the DK is really putting out.

I’ll be sure to post more updates as I get some more play time in. I didn’t get much time to play last night because a new 600+ MB patch was released that took quite a while to download and then install.

I expected to get presents today since it is my birthday, but I got one present that was totally unexpected. As you can probably guess from the title of my post I received an invite to the WotLK beta from Blizzard. Currently, my download of the client is 98% so I’ll post some more info about the Death Knight as soon as I have the beta client installed.

Hahahahahahaha