Unholy>BloodFollow

I'm lvl 67 unholy spec with a few points in blood, and am doing well solo with perma ghoul, damage is great no down time, but have heard good things about blood, what i'm wondering is will there be a reduction in damage if i go blood without no pet?

I will go blood anyway when i do raids

DW is inferior to 2-handed for dk's in every single spec.
So whatever you do, dont use 1-handed weapons.

not likely. the ghoul is a pretty big part of unholy dps. while you can actively not spec for the ghoul, that would require taking some points in less-than-stellar talents (like impurity...yes, impurity sucks in its current incarnation).

as for blood, i like the burst potential with a dancing rune weapon up. once i get empowered rune weapon ill really be able to drop a lot of hurt with DRW, and i can survive an ungodly amount of mobs or players attacking me if i do things right. mark of blood, vampiric blood and rune tap all give great survivability, and using a glyph of death strike with full runic power + death strike means ill heal back up to 30% of my life on a crit death strike with VB up. in terms of leveling power and general world pvp asshattery, id have a hard time justifying going with unholy now, especially since i havent met an unholy DK who i cant destroy utterly.

"DW is inferior to 2-handed for dk's in every single spec.
So whatever you do, dont use 1-handed weapons."

Dual Grunt's Waraxes have higher AP than the 2h I got from the DK qs (it was the sword but the name escapes me, possibly Ebon Greatsword or something similar), and the DPS of the MH Waraxe was close to the 2h, so my reasoning was another half (well a bit more due to talents) would increase my DPS (I don't like too much bursty damage on auto-attack, can't decide when to use abilities or not =P)

In answer to the original post. I am Blood(closing in on 70) with some points in Frost up to annihalation(changed from Unholy) and I love it. The deal was, unholy was great for AoE, but leveling up, i was generaly flying through quests and found the most mobs I was AoE'ing was around 4 or so. I switched to Blood, and I can still AoE those same 4 or so mobs so I didn't see much difference in that area. The problem I had in unholy were the final quest chain bosses, they were tough as my ghoul only lasted so long tanking. With Blood, I am consistently slicing through elites 3 levels above me, no problems yet. So to answer your question, I see no decrease in my killing speed. AoE is very similar to a certain point(as mob #'s go up, unholy gets better).
What you need to do is sit back and decide on your playstyle. If you like the AoE of unholy and you find yourself doing that alot, then stay with it. If you find yourself in more 1 on 1 or 1 on 2 situations, then roll Blood. The Criticals and 2 handed #'s I am putting up are godly, to say nothing of the life I gain back. And just because you roll blood DOES NOT mean you can't use a ghoul(just not perma ghoul). For bosses and tough quests, I use my ghoul.

Here's my armory for reference. It's a leveling build for now. See the end of post for level 80 build. I am also wearing my dps/crit gear. I have a seperate set of gear I wear for tanking with increased stam and parry/dodge.

Alessan


I have run Unholy the entire time. I've tanked every instance up to my level (Ramps, BF, SP, and UB)
I haven't lost in overall damage ever, regardless of I am tanking or not and I've only lost in overall average dps once or twice and they were to people 3-4 levels above me. Now granted, I've only played with 40-50 different DK's in instances, so it's a small number to compare to, but Unholy is crazy. I showed my build/rotation to a blood spec'd DK yesterday and he almost shat himself and whispered the hell out of me of how easy it was, 2 seconds on a single target and it was down.

Single target I'm still doing about 530-550dps on every mob, Multiple targets I've hit 725 on some pulls.

My rotation

Single target = Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Blood Strike x2 > Scourge Strike (at this point they are dead, unless it's a boss, then I usually Unholy Blight, then repeat. (throw in a Death coil from time to time after UB for RP dump)

Multi target = Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Pestilence > Blood Boil > Unholy Blight > switch to next kill target and repeat. (Throw in a Death Coil from time to time after UB for RP dump)

Unless someone is attacking out of kill order, I've never had a problem holding aggro ever, and the beauty is if we pull adds, I can just Pestilence and Blood Boil to pick them us as they come close.

Here is my proposed Unholy tanking build at 80. Alessan

Edited for sig...



Edited, Nov 24th 2008 9:11am by Galenmoon

just another reason to level blood.

incidentally, i havent met an unholy DK im scared of late game either. ive fought a fair share of 80 DK's, and many of them were unholy. while scourge strike hit pretty hard, and desecration can be annoying, i havent had too much trouble countering them. the best part comes after theyre dead and my priest friend and i spend nearly a minute alternating between snare kiting and shackling the ghouled DK.

havent met any frosts yet, but i think theyll be the big problem as a warrior. three armor-ignoring frost strikes plus a howling blast are much more dangerous than the rather long rotation it takes to get a solid scourge strike going in pvp. scourge strike is also more reliant on disease than frost strike is, and you can tell the difference. thats the biggest problem with unholy that i see; it takes too many things being just so to get the most out of the spec. youve gotta have both diseases up, two FU runes available and ideally another pair of deaths either at the ready or almost cooled down in order to get the big burst you need to kill someone. youve gotta put a lot of effort into that, and its very easy for something to get messed up along the way.

PVP experience while leveling are spotty at best.

It's often 1v1 or Xv1 (which isn't what pvp is about) or in another way unfair. Even when you do bump in an equal opponent who's at full health/mana, the fact that one person will get 'the drop', usually makes a huge difference (lots of people panic even when the attack is obviously coming).

That being said, I found that Blood Knight do beat me fairly often as Unholy. I do a lot of damage to them... but not enough to kill them, and then they 'hulk up' and finish me off while getting their health back. >_>

Doesn't mean Blood will be 'the arena' spec tho, but it does seem to be better at dealing with melee class (and DK are a melee class) than unholy. Unholy has a lot of fun with casters tho.

'specially for blood where your DPS is based mostly off strikes (Heart strike: 60% WEAPON DAMAGE)

/headbang
/headbang
/headbang

You've piqued my interest Quor (Glad to see some droods over here :P)

I've been crushing pretty much every class I've faced as Unholy in every BG I've tried. After reading your post I realize I really haven't faced many warriors. I crush rogues, hunters, boomkins, priests, druids of every form. I annihilate shamans, mages and warlocks.

I guess I'm gonna have to go out of my way to face more warriors and see if you're just that uber or they just suck that much....or maybe warriors still > DK's.

I tried posting my armory, but for some reason it's giving me errors on this computer, but look for the 67 DK on Tho Bro named Alessan if you need a reference to my gear. I think I logged out in my tank set, but not sure.

pvp wise i have issues with GOOD shadow priests and mages.
i havent done a lot of pvp to know yet, but i know those two classes seem to **** me off.

on a side note, the ghoul is very nice, even though you have to turn off claw and manually use their stun attack. that stun helps a lot especially against warriors. i get them to charge then i chains them, move away, let them intercept, and i ghoul stun the moment they intercept. now their stuns are all on DR, and they didnt get any free hits in.

SS was great in pvp for me. this T6 druid was jumping into bear form every time i came by, and on my rogue i would have had a hell of a time on that armor. it still took a while but i was blowing through him on dk.

gargoyle was nice in the few world pvp situations i used it. its not great for everything, but if you have the rp to pop him out for ~15 seconds the couple thousand damage he provides really gets people who arent paying attention.

my view of things is a little biased i think. in pvp im almost always running with at least one priest, sometimes two. hence, i usually have shadow protection up. that extra resist is enough to make scourge strike less painful, and proper application of disarming and kiting really screws up an unholy DK's rotation, slowing down or in some cases negating the scourge strike threat.

blood on the other hand is a bit less susceptible to disarm as heart strike is a single rune skill that doesnt use a disease rune, meaning a well-timed disarm does less to ***** up the pattern than it does for an unholy (and frost to a lesser degree). if a blood dk wants too, he can toss out an oblit or death strike right out of the box to get those death runes coming, then load up the diseases right before opening up on an opponent with three or four heart strikes.

dont get me wrong, i like unholy, i just think it requires too much setup to pull off correctly compared to blood or even frost. in the pvp ive done (admittedly rather large scale stuff, not anything like an arena match) unholy has its perks, but it seems to just fall behind, especially compared to frost. unholy DK's seem quite easy to control, and my friends and i have made it a game to torture unholy DK's that have gone ghoul on us by seeing if we can kite/shackle them until the timer for shadow of death wears off. we make it a little contest; if we can keep the DK from killing anyone and blowing him/herself up before the timer ends, we win!

in arena, with people supporting and covering for the DK while diseases are being applied and the big burst is being built up, i can see unholy doing a lot better.

now, for pve dps, ive seen a couple of unholy DK's put out some crazy numbers in level 80 raid instances. an enhanced gargoyle is insane damage on a raid boss. one DK i ran archvaron with recently topped the damage meters by a good 200 dps thanks to a couple of trinkets and his gargoyle (in addition to his normal dps cycle of course). but for pvp, i think its a bit too early to call any spec as "the" spec so to speak. as great as scourge strike is for instance, frost strike will hit about as hard, cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried, and up to three of them can be tossed out in as little as three seconds. im more scared of that and an 18 second IBF than i am of scourge strike.