Demise of the pvp DK ???Follow

Well, to put it simple;

PvP since WOTLK hit follows this line of play:

Burst healing is overpowered, therefore to get a kill you need
A) ********* of Burst damage
or
B) ********* of CC

At the start of the expansion, either A or a combination of A and B were the ways to go. Some classes, like the Death Knight, had little to no CC and relied entirely on nuking their enemy down in seconds. Some classes, like the rogue, had plenty of CC *and* good burst damage and were able to use both to get a kill. Then Blizzard buffed resilience. And again. And again. And again. And in between, Blizzard nerfed burst damage from several classes (including the Death Knight) somewhat.

See where I'm going? Death Knights never had B, and A has been nerfed to the ground, baby. Which leaves us to be, say, the mosquito among the killer bees. We sting, but we don't hurt. We've more or less lost our place in competitive arena because we have no way to kill somebody before his healer can save his ***, and we do not have any CC to lock down the healer long enough to actually kill our target.


That said, I realize this sounds a little bit melodramatic. While it's the cause for DK's being absent from the high-ranking arena ladders, that doesn't make them "sub-par in PvP" as a whole. You can still achieve decent ratings with them and the class isn't so underpowered that you can't make a difference in battlegrounds. If you really plan on getting a serious 2K+ rating, you're probably better off rerolling. If you just want to do some semi-casual PvP, you're still cool with Death Knights. We can still hold our own in BG's and Cataclysm will come soon enough and change everything.

DKs at higher levels were just icy chains spammers, it's about all you did. As Moz said, we don't have enough burst to kill stuff, and don't have enough CC to keep someone completely tied down. Sure there are some really good PvP DKs out there, but the top PvPers seem to have moved on and play other classes.

Doesn't bother me though, I'm a PvE DK.

Rememeber that health pools are going to be WAY higher than they are now, relatively*, so burst is going to be less important. Not UNimportant, no. But less so--sustained damage will have higher value at least.

*meaning that if we considered it as a linear increase from 80 to 85, the pools at 85 will be much higher than we'd expect them to be.

Yeah, you can see that trend everywhere--fewer DKs in PvP and in PvE. It's actually becoming fairly rare to get a DK in my random groups. Even tanks are rare--I see way more Pallies and Warriors than DK tanks.

Well, this friday starts av weekend. I will probably run my dk all weekend. Which classes now are the easiest for a dk to solo? Warrior? Rogue? Back in the day, shamans were the easiest for me to take down quickly

I haven't done Arena on my DK in a bit, but I used to play blood with a paladin healer, which worked pretty decently when we did it. We never played too intensively, but got to 1100 rating with something like 17 wins and 3 losses. I wouldn't recommend it for hardcore competitive arena, but it's quite fun if you get the gear and all. If you want to go blood, you've basically got three spec options; option 1 focuses on burst and isn't horrible against mages, option 2 is worse vs mages but better for random BGing otherwise and also slightly more effective against rogues, and option 3 gives up Dancing Rune Weapon for the new Unholy Blight - it is probably the more effective one for pure arenaing. Regardless of your spec, you're going to need 5% hit, around 600-700 resilience and waste the rest of your itemization/gems on armor penetration. You might want some spell penetration too. I've played all three options myself and am currently using option 1.

If you don't want to go blood...


You can probably drop the points in Scent of Blood for points in Dark Conviction. This also frees you up a point to throw in Blood-Caked Blade, Dirge or Wandering Plague (if you intend to do 3s). Get rid of Anticipation and get Virulence and Vicious Strikes. Also, drop Improved Unholy Presence for even more points. In the end your spec can look something like this, assuming you don't want to dump those other points into frost.

Good luck =)

I'm currently running as:

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Turalyon&cn=Poked&group=1

Currently I mainly play 2's, and I agree with everyone who feel abit underdoggy in that bracket, due to the low amount of burst we have.

But as someone said setting up the kill is the only way to win, you can't tunnel as much as a DK as a Warrior can, your overall pressure is just not high enough, you need to use all your CD's on someone who ain't HoT'ed up, and such to get some pressure out.

I think one talent that most DK's forget about is Corpse Explosion - It is really the best burst DK's have, and while it is pretty buggy, and you need to time it rather well for it to do anything it's really a good ability (To use on your pet if anyone is confused)

In 3's DK's are pretty strong, the role we play is slightly boring if you compare us to the Haste/ArP machines out there, who can burst people down in no time.

PHD, DKLD and TSG are all pretty strong combos, but to be succesful you do need to run one of these, so the choices are not many, and you can't really spec Blood or Frost and the choices change - At higher rating Unholy is really the only viable spec to play.



Edited, Jul 27th 2010 11:58am by PokedTheDK