5.0.4 and revisiting forgotten toons

I'm still loving the new patch and all of the little quality of life changes it has brought (AOE looting in dungeons rocks!). The big dilemma has been who to play, which essentially means who am I going to relearn to play. As excited as I was to look for improvements in the feral druid, now that the patch is here I haven't been so motivated to play her, or my hunter. So who else on my roster is at a decently high level, with the potential to reach level cap by the time Mists drops?

Let's try frost DK again! I had previously been frustrated by the DK rotation, but 5.0.4 provides a good opportunity to try again. I'm glad I did, as I'm finally, finally feeling the death knight love this time! Above is how poor Nachtmystium looked when I brought her out of storage. Mismatched BC gear, wrong shoulder heirlooms (bought the tanking ones by mistake), still wearing the belt from the starter zone. Clearly, she would need some work!

I did some reading on rotation, and moved the appropriate skills to her action bars. For all of my various toons, I've come up with a placement schematic on my Razer Naga mouse that groups skills by type. This helps enormously when switching among all of my alts. So from 1-12, DoTs go first (diseases for DK), then the remainder of her damage dealing skills. Number 9 is always a cooldown- Pillar of Frost. 10 is an interrupt (Mind Freeze), 11 is an "extra" or a panic button (DKs don't panic, so 11 is Death Strike that she uses whenever none of her other strikes are up), and 12 is a ranged pull (Death Grip).

On to talents! For Tier 1, I tried Unholy Blight first but found it unnecessary, as she can spread her diseases easily enough with Pestilence. So I switched to Plague Leech, which allows me to draw diseases off a target in exchange for a regenerated rune. This is much more helpful, I use it during long fights whenever I have that dead space where nothing is off of cooldown.

For Tier 2, I tried Lichborne, but again found that I wasn't really using it. I never seem to have enough runic power to use Death Coil on myself, which is possible once I hit Lichborne. Also, I have a way better self-heal coming up at Tier 4! Anyway, I eventually chose Purgatory, which is a DK Cauterize. It's come in handy in a couple of dungeons already.

For Tier 3 I chose Chilblains, as slowing things down makes it easier for me to get where I need to be to smack things around. As I've mentioned, I'm a bit slow and uncoordinated so I need all the help I can get.

Ah Tier 4. I love, love, love Death Siphon. Totally OP while questing. Hit the mob for about 50% of its HP, in return healing me for about 50% of my HP. Death Knights shouldn't need to eat food to gain HP; with this talent, if I'm getting low on HP I just have to hit something with Death Siphon and I'm doing fine. This talent also fits nicely with the DK lore in which DKs survive off of dealing pain. Oh yes!

Nachtmystium made level 77 yesterday, and at 75 chose Runic Empowerment as her next talent, to improve her ability to regenerate runes during fights. I'll admit I chose this primarily on the basis of what I have been reading in the DK forums.

So once I had Nacht's talents and skills laid out, I wanted to do a lot of killing so I could get used to the rotation. She was at level for Nagrand, and the Nesingwary quests there provided an excellent opportunity for wholesale slaughter in the name of learning to DK. Since then, I've done my usual combination questing and dungeoning, and have become comfortable playing a DK for the first time.

A couple of side notes- Nagrand is such a beautiful zone, I also took the opportunity to pose for pictures on my new Albino Drake, which showed up in my collection after reaching 50 mounts with account-wide mounts.

So glad to be flying around on the DK mount again, too! So here's to patch 5.0.4 and resurrecting (undead) toons!