To download the song or become a fan please visit my reverbnation profile at the following link: http://www.reverbnation.com/simonskinner

June the 5th 2010 was possibly the longest day I have had in my life since some time back in 1997. Some time around 3:30am I received an alert that my webserver had gone down. This is a very rare occurrence that I have never had to worry about being hosted 'in the cloud' but unfortunately every now and again things do go wrong. I have full control over my cloud servers and usually can stop, start, reboot, re-install and restore in a matter of minutes but a problem with the SAN (Storage Area Network) at the same time as me trying to solve the problem caused conflicts and a lot of hair pulling.

Needless to say with a lot of help from the tech Guru's at vps.net we managed to identify the conflicts, restore from backups and get everything up and running again. I am looking into steps needed to, if not solve but, negate issues like this in the future!

My apologies to all people affected and thank you for your patience while we got this all sorted!

It's been a while coming and I've released a couple of screenshots on twitter in the past, but, here are a collection of screenshots from version 2.0, just to let everyone know what they can expect from the next version!

Push Notifications

Faster Comics

Favourites

Loading Screen

Comic View

Share Menu

I'm now in the process of downloading SDK 4 so I can start work on Dark Legacy upgrades! Version 2.0.0 of DLCapp should be arriving in the next couple of weeks so hopefully 2.5.0 should be ready just in time for the release of OS4 to the general public.

Finally, the game centre app looks like it could be interesting and if anyone out there is using the beta please add me! Username: vultuk

Whilst tanking a heroic or two on my DK I was approached by a fellow Death Knight asking how I was able to hold up 4k+ dps on a single target boss whilst tanking so I thought I would post up some information on here that took me a long time to collate and some I've had to figure out myself.

Well, first off you need to stick to your decent tanking rules, the aim is to help the party as much as possible not stress the healers whilst making the run as fast as possible. A lot of tanks seem just to throw on dps gear and go crazy but adding 2k+ to your dps is bad if the healer is having to spam heal to compensate for all the crits personally I like my healer to be able to dps as well, makes thing so much more interesting for everyone.

So what are these rules?

You need to stay un-crittable. To be un-crittable in a heroic you need to have 5.4% crit reduction. This can come from Defense, Resilience or a mixture of both. A mixture of both is what your really aiming for.If you have defense then there's a really good chance you'll have some reasonable avoidance as well it also implies that you'll have a reasonable amount or stamina which leads me to my next point.

Health. If you're look at this then I'm presuming that you're probably not just a tank starting out and that you will therefore have access to a reasonable amount of gear. I personally would aim to have around 31-33k health unbuffed, in no way am I saying that this is what you need to tank heroics just purely for the aim here that is what you should have.

Finally mitigation and avoidance. Frost Presence gives us a nice modifier to our armor and I'm a big Effective Health fanatic, therefore I'm going to suggest to keep a good amount of armor. I like to have at least 26.5k unbuffed armor and this means that I always run with 1 dps trinket and Glyph of Indomitability. You should still be wearing some tanking gear and thus should be able to keep a reasonable amount of avoidance, I run with around 19% dodge and 16% parry. This gives me lots of Rune strikes as well as reduced damage (obviously)

So this is what I mean by sticking to tanking rules.

What spec should I use?

I'm blood. I have been blood since Ulduar patch when they nerfed my old Frost-Blood hybrid spec (Veteran of the Third War + Howling Blast was a lovely fun spec) and to be honest I love it. It's what I imagine from a Death Knight, swinging a mahoosive weapon and not being such a baby about it that I have to wear a shield or apply fur to my armor. Therefore, blood is the spec that I will be suggesting. I use the following spec for both raid tanking and heroics...

Clicky Link to Spec

Depending on your gear setup, weapons and personal choice you could move the points in Virulence to Improved Icy Touch or to anywhere you want, I just like to be fully hit capped for melee and spells for raiding. If you were making an offspec just for heroic tanking again you could definitely move the points in Virulence into another place, again either IIT or some extra DPS talents.

What are the caps?

OK, there's a number of caps that it would be helpful to know for heroic dps tanking. These would be as follows.

Uncrittable Cap: 5.4%
Melee Hit Cap: 6%
Spell Hit Cap: 6%
Expertise Cap: 21 expertise for both Parry AND dodge.

If you can balance your gear around this then you're good to go!

What gear should I look at getting?

This is all up the air for me at the moment, as my Death Knight is only an alt I do not have access to all the best gear in game. I will be compiling what I feel is a Best in Slot list at a later date but till now I will say the following.. Look at the cap section and get as close as possible to those caps, look at the standard tanking rules section and get as close as possible to them and then for anything else chuck dps items in those slots.

As I don't pvp much I am currently using Furious Shoulders, Cloak, Belt and Legs as my resilience gear. The 2pc bonus is exceptional for this tanking and the belt had more stamina and sockets than my actual tanking belt so it wasn't much of a decision to choose that. Standard tanking gear is in my Neck, Chest, Bracers, and 1 ring slot. The other slots are all dps items. I'm sure I will be able to optimize these items at a later date and when I do I will update this blog.

For a weapon I'm using Citadel Enforcer's Claymore with Rune of the Fallen Crusader and for my Sigil I'm using Sigil of Haunted Dreams. The crit from this is just too good to use and although the +200 str from the 245 sigil would be nice I like seeing big crits and Heart Strike is probably my most used attack. This could change at a later date, we'll see.

What about a rotation?

Just a standard Blood Tanking rotation will do nicely.

IT, PS, DS, HS, HS - dump - HS, HS, HS, HS, DS - dump

is pretty much what I use. Depending on the healer though I may use DS at different points if I need to keep myself up. Or, for example, if I'm playing with my pocket heroic healer he likes to dps on bosses as well so I use DS a lot more liberally so he doesn't have to heal me as much. When you're tanking mobs just before a boss try to keep your runic power ready, this way you can run into a boss, pop Hysteria and Dancing Rune Weapon straight away for some amazing DPS and Stupid Threat Per Second.

Anything else I should know?

I like to have a good supply of Fort, Wild and Kings scrolls/drums with me. This means a) You can buff yourself if those classes aren't there and b) If you have 1 paladin you can beg for a Blessing of Might and buff 8% Kings (I actually have /p %t, can you buff BoM / BoW please and I'll buff 8% BoK macro'd   target the pally press the macro) and this will give you yet more stupid dps!

Army of the Dead - Is not a dps buff. Somewhere around 30%+ of my damage comes from stupidly high Rune Strike Crits. If the boss is hitting your army (s)he's not letting you dodge or parry him/her/it. So I'd really suggest not using it!

The end

I've chucked up a couple of screen shots of DPS (ranging from 3.8k to 4.7k) that I've done in heroics in case you want to see!

When I discovered that the mod Power Auras now makes it possible to add custom sound effects when something specific happens I decided to test out my dps on a target dummy with some custom sounds set up telling me what to do. I managed to pull a respectable 7732dps so I thought I'd post up the video here just for a laugh!

After posting this on youtube I got a few request for the actual sound files used for Starfire and Wrath so I've put them here...

Starfire
Wrath

Right click, Save Target As and then place them in /World Of Warcraft/Interface/Addons/Power Auras/Sounds/

Well, after almost a year of soloing content on my Death Knight I finally beat my nemesis which was Romulo and Julianne in Karazhan. The fact that Romulo has a poison debuff that reduces maximum health made this encounter particularly tricky. But with a gear upgrade and some correctly placed interrupts and shields I finally managed to solo the event.

To view this video on youtube : Click Here

Well, after a week of waiting and implementing changes I finally got my first Application in the iTunes App Store. I started work on the application on Monday 8th of Feb. Had it all finished and first submission by the Thursday, after one rejection and a hefty "In Review" stage of my re-submission the Application made it into the App Store on Wednesday 17th of Feb. Needless to say I'm rather happy!

What is it?

Well, it's a comic reader for the Warcraft based series "Dark Legacy Comics" something I've been reading and loved for a long time now. I chose this because it could implement a lot of different technologies in the future yet remain rather simple as a learning tool. But also so that I could have constant access to the comics without having to just use Safari.

What's planned for the future?

Of this application I almost have version 1.1 ready to go live with Facebook integration. I'm also working on twitter integration for a version later down the line. In the future I intend to implement Push messaging to alert you of new comics also rating and comment facilities.

What does it look like?

Here's a few screen shots of the app in action!

Where can I get it?

You can either do a search on the iTunes App Store for "Dark Legacy" or even easier go to the following address!

http://blog.dk101.net/iphone-applications/dark-legacy-comics/

To celebrate my triumphant return to the world of soloing with my Death Knight I am pleased to bring you the first in the "Khed Solos" videos. So here it is, straight to the point...

Khed Solos Halls of Lightning

[podcast format="video"]http://dk101.net/podcast/SoloHallsOfLightning%20-%20Computer.m4v[/podcast]

Click here to see the video on my youtube channel!