[Innocence]

How can you make an informed decision about your spec without researching the websites you never check?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chill of the grave + Scent of blood would allow a bit more Frost strikes and rune strikes. as a tank you're pouring most of your runic power into Rune strikes, so its hard to make use of frost strike, plus ontop of that you need to try and keep 40 incase you need to pop Icebound fortitude and/or Antimagic shell.

Also, I'm pretty sure we aren't recruiting any deathknights, the three we have are pretty solid about showing up. Thanks for applying though.

[Drickzy]

Innocence, on Apr 20 2009, 09:09 AM, said:

How can you make an informed decision about your spec without researching the websites you never check?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chill of the grave + Scent of blood would allow a bit more Frost strikes and rune strikes. as a tank you're pouring most of your runic power into Rune strikes, so its hard to make use of frost strike, plus ontop of that you need to try and keep 40 incase you need to pop Icebound fortitude and/or Antimagic shell.

Also, I'm pretty sure we aren't recruiting any deathknights, the three we have are pretty solid about showing up. Thanks for applying though.

In my experience... I play with my talents until I find a build that works for me... I hardly EVER research talents at all. The only thing I look up are things like 'hit cap' etc. If he happens to have cleared Sarth 3D (lol achievements), then he probably knows what hes doing (at least in my experience you can't really carry people through that).

He could be a very skilled player, and understand what talents are needed... on the other hand, I could be wrong about being carried too.

[Sobeyet]

The benefit of research is that you're taking advantage of the existing knowledgebase of players. Of course good data can be hard to come by, but most classes have at least one or two reliable sources to refer to. There's nothing wrong with independent testing (I highly encourage it) but you'd have to defend your choices with logic and statistics, not anectodal evidence like "I got more TPS in this pug Archavon" or "I think this is better, so it must be true."

Using hunters as an example, most people don't spend hours on the target dummy shooting thousands of shots for testing out rotations, so simulations are very useful in this regard. Getting good raid data is difficult when a new instance is released (and having an optimal spec is actually the most important during progression, not when everything is on farm and you're looking for your last 2 BiS pieces) so research can help you find a good approximation of where you should be. If nothing else you can always compare it to what your own ideas are.

Another benefit is finding bugs in your abilities and talents. If a talent is bugged and not working properly, it's not worth taking at all. If you didn't pick this up in your testing, you're not as optimized as you can be. Going back to hunters, there are at least 4 major bugs that are effecting dps atm that haven't been fixed since the PTR - I learned about this without having to do any personal testing and was able to adjust accordingly. In Naxx Cryptfiend's Bite had a bug where instead of giving 200 ranged AP, it only gave 20 - things like that are very easy to miss and can make a significant difference in your performance.

Lifeindeath, on Apr 20 2009, 07:28 AM, said:

I never look on forums or websites to tell me how to spec as I have been playing this game a very long time and have always designed my own spec. Most times it ends up being the "cookie cutter" spec that most people use anyways.

How do you know what the cookie cutter specs are if you never look on forums or websites?

[Innocence]

Drickzy, on Apr 20 2009, 10:59 AM, said:

In my experience... I play with my talents until I find a build that works for me... I hardly EVER research talents at all. The only thing I look up are things like 'hit cap' etc. If he happens to have cleared Sarth 3D (lol achievements), then he probably knows what hes doing (at least in my experience you can't really carry people through that).

He could be a very skilled player, and understand what talents are needed... on the other hand, I could be wrong about being carried too.

Well you can carry people through Sarth 3D

Sobe died in the first 15 seconds once on a sarth 3D kill.

i think one attempt we had 5 dps with over a million damage done and the rest has less than 500k because they all died very early on in the fight.

so yes its possible to get carried through sarth 3D



I can understand filling out talents and experimenting, but those communities that i refered to(Wiki, speciality websites like deathknight.info, elitest jerks) come together to talk about what works and what doesn't, and its important to check them for things that you might not have otherwise thought of, Diseaseless, DW spec, etc wouldn't have ever made light without those communities.

Is it good to lean on those sights?

No..

but it is good to reference them.



Honestly i'm not a death knight tank, i only do it when its needed, i'm a death knight dps primarily and i'm not ragging on him, i'm just curious.

[Len]

Innocence, on Apr 20 2009, 09:09 AM, said:

Also, I'm pretty sure we aren't recruiting any deathknights, the three we have are pretty solid about showing up. Thanks for applying though.

Inno pretty much nailed it here. We really don't have room for another DK, and we won't bring someone on board unless there is a spot available for them.

Sorry.