I've always loved theorizing with gear and dps options on my lock. I spent countless hours comparing gear and stat choices. And the best tool for that is a Warlock DPS Spreadsheet developed by Leulier. The link to his site is - http://www.leulier.com. This amazing spreadsheet along with the Lootrank.com and the ElitistJerks forums are the best tools for maximizing your DPS and gear choices.

But I digress. The reason I love to play wit this spreadsheet so much is because it is so convenient and comprehensive. You can input you gear and talent builds and then you can play around with all the different option as far as buffs, changing talents changing gear etc. And as soon as you make a change you get a DPS number update. So it is an amazing tool to see how much dps you will get if you make a gear or talent choice. For example, on the ElitistJerks forum there is a great post for Affliction Warlocks - Dots and You. And it has great high level gear upgrades. However, how do these upgrades relate to you?

When it comes to upgrades that drop in the raid and few others want, there is no brainer, you take them and you use them. But what if you decide if you should get some piece of gear with your hard earned badges or PVP honor points. Will the upgrade be worth it? It seems that the item you going to get is better then the one you have now, but how much DPS will you get out of it. Well use the spreadsheet, and boom if it's only 10 points of extra dps them maybe you should save badges and wait for a better drop, but if it's 60 or 80 dps upgrade, then maybe you should buy that piece.

You can also keep a lot of the higher level gear and then compare different combination. Maybe a piece that before only gave you a small upgrade because you needed more hit, and another piece gave you a lot of hit in that place. Well now you got plenty of hit, and this piece you saved can actually give you more dps. This is also a great tool to see how re-gemming will change your dps and stats. So use and abuse this spreadsheet!

One more quick note, the spreadsheet now has amazing feature to pull your talent build and gear right from armory. This is a recent update that makes this spreadsheet better then ever!

I finally completed the starting zone for Death Knights and have my freshly minted Death Knight ready to hit the Outlands.

I do have to say that the quests in the starting zone are excellent. They are fun, give you lore, teach you how to play your new toon and give you awesome gear as rewards.

In fact I see now why so many people created and play with the Death Knights. You get a character who is ready to hit Outlands in full blue level gear with trinkets and sigil complete. Compare that to starting anouther character class, and drudging through 58 levels, scrapping for gear and time, it's no brainier.

My paladin which is also now in Outlands, had really hard time getting any decent gear until he went to outlands. I did not level blacksmithing on him untill the last few levels before outlands, and thus most of hte gear he had was quest gear and maybe some other stuff I found on AH.

All in all, I enjoyed playing with the death knight. A very fun and strong class. I crated my DK on a different server from the rest of my Horde characters. I wanted to have a high level Allies toon, so I made my DK a Drieni. I think she looks pretty cool :). If I like her too much I may just stick to playing with her instead of my paladin :). Or I may create anouther deathknight for the Horde on my regular server.

Well I keep wanting to write something and post a pic of my characters, but as usual i don't write at home where my pics are, and I don't have pics at work where I usually write my posts.  So pics can wait I guess.

My paladin is now 61, and happily questing in Outland.  I kept him protection, and I love it to no extent.  The new spell that is just awesome is Hammer of the Righteous. Armed with that, and the gear upgrades that you get from some of the first quests in Outland, I can take on 5-7 mobs on a time, and they all dead in seconds.  If mobs are undead or demons - of which there are plenty here - things go down even faster.  So in shorts questing and leveling here for a protection pally is quick, painless and fun.

I've also slowed down and actually read all the quests.  Originally, when I level my lock through Outland I felt it was too quick, and I would rarely read quests completely.  With my pally there is no rush.  I will quests as quickly and efficiently as possible, but I will also take my time to read quest, and perhaps complete some of the quest lines to the end.

Anouther big achievement is getting my Blacksmithing to 300.  That was quite a quest.  The amount of materials you need to squeeze the last 40 levels of Balcksmithing is amazing.  On top of it the fact that ore is now so scarse!  It seems all the newly minted Death Knights are all doing something related to ore - black smithing, engineering or jewelcrafting.  The places where I would usually be able to mine Thorium and Mithril are now swamped with death knights running around and ninjaing your nodes right from under your nose.

Here are some extra tips I've learned in blacksmithing.  When it gets really expencive to make things to get points, make things that are orange.  Because it realy sucks when you make something that is yellow skillup color and it reaquired a bit of mats, and it gives you no points.  So what's the risk there?  Well at some point I was really upset because i crated 8 mithrill pants and got no skill up!  That was about 100 mithril bars!  So from then on I started to make things that were orange, even if they were alot more mats, at least I knew exactly how much it's going to cost me to make things for each point.

Well, 3.08 patch is upon us.  Besides some of the tweaks in the patch that's going to make my warlock life more enjoyable (can someone say a summoning stone for those lazy guildies?),  and make my tailoring a bit cheaper, there was waiting for the WIntergrasp Gear. Sad part is that Wintergrasp itself got a bug in the patch :(

You see, I've spotted this gear on www.lootrank.com a long time ago.  There was a helm and boots that were really nice.  It's just they were not available in the game yet.  The data was from the Test realms.  Meanwhile I've been saving my marks from Wintergrasp and crossing my fingers.

The two pieces that caught my eye, the boots and the head pieces come in two varieties - one has hit  and the other has haste.  Here are the Cloth pieces:

Titan-forged Slippers of Dominance

Titan-forged Slippers of Salvation

Titan-forged Hood of Salvation

Titan-forged Hood of Dominance

The head piece costs 40 winterspring marks, which is pricey.  On the other hand boots are only 15 marks.  And I badly needed to upgrade my Leiah's Footpads.

I took the boots with the hit Titan-forged Slippers of Dominance, put a nice hit gem into them and I'm now happy about my boot gear.  My next prize is the head piece.

I really like these pieces and the fact that you get them with just the Marks from Wintergrasp.  I always try to participate in the battle because i find it fun.  This reward, which I picked up for my raiding gear, will stay for a while with me as my PVP pices even when I get better boots in raids.  So it's something that will go a long way.

Here is a link to the all of the Titan-Forged gear on wowhead:

http://www.wowhead.com/?search=titan+forged#items:0+12+1

To my readers, I am planning to complete the getting my lock to raid at 80 series and will create the part 3 with all the trinkets, rings and etc.

Meanwhile I've been raiding a bit with my guild in Nax, although I've been so far very unlucky with drops. I know that this will change! :)