My guilty pleasure
It makes me feel a little dirty, this guilty pleasure of mine. I…like to raid DPS. Yes, I have said it. I’ve had a lot of playtime on my Deathknight lately, and oh boy, does she kick ass. If I could change one thing about her, I would make her an orc, but other than that, she’s mighty fine. Now, I shouldn’t exaggerate, I have only been on two raids with her, but I kicked butt, I did. 
My best fights were Loatheb with 3.900 DPS and Patchwerk with 3.700. Not bad at all!
DKs are a very peculiar class. You either see real DPS monsters annihilating the meters or you see mediocrity. Which should make it obvious that yes, you can faceroll your way through life and still do decent DPS, but if you learn and understand how to not faceroll, then you can really shine. Which is just the way it is with all classes, I suppose, but none makes it so apparent as the DK class. I originally rolled Hélle to figure out how not to be a faceroller, not just for myself, but fellow guildies.
I sprang some gold on her to grab dual-specs to test all DPS specs on her. Here’s my personal rundown:
Blood DPS:
I leveled as blood for the survivability. I was disappointed that while leveling I was not able to solo most elite quests, unlike on Kadomi, but I am likely just spoiled. When I hit 80, I tweaked her spec to dump some of the survivability aspects (like Bloodworms) and grabbed some DPS boosts from the unholy tree. Blood DPS plays like old-school prot warrior. A very very set rotation that is all about proper execution. If you are blindly poking buttons, you are losing a lot of DPS here.
My rotation:
Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Heart Strikex2-Death Strike-Death Coilx2 or Raise Dead/Dancing Rune Weapon
Death Strike-Heart Strikex4-Death Coilx2, rinse and repeat.
I am looking forward to the DRW change in the next patch. Not having to wait for a full Runic Power bar will be a great help, it means you can always use it within the first cycle already. At the moment I have to wait at times if the RP bar is not full. Common issues that I see from fellow blood DKs is that they do not Heart Strike enough or sit on their RP. Make sure to dump RP in every break while you wait for runes to refresh! Don’t forget to get a ghoul for a temporary DPS boost and use DRW with full RP bar every single cooldown. It’s a fun spec and does great DPS.
Frost DPS:
Aaaaah. The spec I would love to use as main spec. So much fun. I really enjoy the heck out of it whenever I switch to it, but unfortunately I found it does not do competitive DPS compared to blood on bosses. I have talked to my friend at work who has cleared Ulduar-25 as frost DK and he said at my gear level it’s just not feasible to expect it to do more DPS than blood. Like all DK specs, you have a very set rotation, but much like prot warriors and arms warriors you have to watch your procs. It is important to watch them, and I set up several Power Auras triggers to help me not miss any procs. First proc to watch out for is Killing Machine, and Rime procs. KM procs a lot! This can make for some bursty moments as Frost Strike hits hard (at least now, before it gets its 10% nerf). Rime doesn’t proc as much, but free Howling Blasts are cool. Frost feels a lot more dynamic than the other two specs.
My Rotation:
I went for the Howling Blast glyph instead of Icy Touch, and thus went with this 1-disease rotation:
Howling Blast-Obliterate-Blood Strikex2-Frost Strike RP dump
Obliteratex3-Frost Strike RP dump
I had a harder time tracking when Frost Fever falls off, when it does, you need to replace Obliterate with Howling Blast to refresh the disease. Like all specs you do not want your diseases to fall off ever. As this is very dependent on watching procs, you need to add extra Frost Strikes for every KM proc, plus Rime usage. I will admit to not having fully figured out the best use of Rime yet. Always HB when it comes off cooldown? Hold on to them and Obliterate instead? I’ll let you know when I have had more experience with it. I’ll definitely try to improve on it.
Unholy DPS:
This is the spec that I liked the least of all. I know that everyone and their brother runs around with a perma-ghoul, but I just couldn’t hack it. I tried to like it, I tested it in many heroics, and yet always switched back to blood in frustration. My major issue is that it requires too much micro-management. As melee class I had a harder time controlling the ghoul. I think it’s easier as warlock or hunter to see what the pet is doing but in melee range it was just frustrating. The only way I could stand to play was with the ghoul on defensive, and that is problematic at times. Then you constantly have to refresh Bone Shield to keep the damage buff up, also no fun. Nevertheless, it did have its DPS moments and is solid, but it’s just not for me. Like all DK specs, you have a very set rotation, no procs to watch for, but a pet to control.
My Rotation:
Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Blood Strikex2-Scourge Strike-Unholy Blight-Death Coil
Scourge Strikex3-Runic Power Dump
AoE rotation: Icy Touch-Plague Strike-Pestilence-Death&Decay-Unholy Blight
This is bound to change with the next patch as they’re nerfing Unholy AoE capabilities, including changing Unholy Blight completely.
I definitely recommend playing around with all three trees. Every tree feels very different, subtle tweaks for a different experience.
Some great references if you also want to stop button-mashing:
- Skeleton Jack (yo, Bronzebeard represent!)
- Elitist Jerks as ultimate, theorycraft-heavy reference
- DK Wowhead forums
The more I hear people talking about DK’s from the perspective someone who knows how to play the class, the more tempted I am give the class one more shot.
My problem is, they’re just too easy to faceroll. You can literally just run your fingers across your action bar at random and things will die. I did it all the way through Outlands before I deleted mine from complete lack of challenge.
I’d really like to see somebody break down the rotation talking about why certain abilities are used. Why does one spell show up before another, why should I use that one instead of this one, etc. In some cases it’s fairly obvious why one is used or why it’s used where it is, but other times it’s not.
I’ve found some great sources for general information, but none yet on specifics.
.-= Psynister´s last blog ..New Page Added: Psynister Support =-.
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admin Reply:
July 8th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
The reason for just about any proper rotation is the rune system of DKs. Every ability costs runes. As example, the blood rotation relies heavily on the use of blood runes. In the first rotation cycle you use Icy Touch, Plague Strike, 2 Heart Strikes, Death Strike, using up all of your runes. As you have a talent that will bring back Unholy and Frost runes as Death runes (basically a joker rune), this means you actually have four blood runes available in the next rotation set, allowing four hard-hitting Heart Strikes.
You dump Runic Power in the breaks where you have absolutely no runes available, then wait for them to pop back and start the rotations again. My example was for blood, but it applies to all specs (they all have talents bringing stuff back as death runes instead). Hope that makes sense!
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My DK just hit 80–yes, she’s a female orc, and female orc DKs look fantastic with their animations.
I’ve got her Blood right now (53/2/16) and like you I will probably have to drop some of the fun stuff like Bloodworms to push her DPS a bit. It’s a ridiculously easy class to level and do reasonable DPS with–you really can just slam your face against the keyboard and stuff drops dead in front of you–but if you want to push toward the endgame and optimize your DPS, it’s harder than it looks at first glance. I did not do terribly well, or at least not as well as I thought I should have, her first few heroics because I never really learned how to do a good rotation on multiple mobs. Then again, multiple-mob DPS is not what blood spec is good at anyway.
.-= Linedan´s last blog ..Dramatis Personae: Moktor =-.
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My warlock hit 80 last week. It really is a different world on the other side of the boss (DPS), and I’m using it to get some appreciate for the times when stuff gets “dealt with”, that I’ve never actually seen happen.
.-= Yakra´s last blog ..Keeping Positive =-.
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Strangely enough, Bloodworms actually makes it into most Blood DPS raiding builds, simply due to the lack of anything useful to put talent points into. All 51 point Blood builds have to waste at least one point, and it usually ends up in (out of preference) Mark of Blood, Rune Tap or Vampiric Blood. I took Vamp. Blood because I’ve never really had the ability before and it’s nice to use when taking a lot of raid damage.
Also, Frost DPS is helped a lot by having the sigil from XT in Ulduar25. It boosts FS damage by a significant amount. In addition, the HB spec is not as good (in my experience) as the IT spec, which basically spams IT in order to spam FS. It also runs in Unholy Presence, which is fun and very different from any other DPS spec for DKs. If you’re interested in trying it, here’s a primer for the rotation/spec I use for Frost that I wrote a while ago. Last night I got about 10k DPS on Hodir with it.
http://runeforgegossip.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/itx6-revisited/
.-= shopshopshop´s last blog ..When You’re Not Raiding… =-.
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admin Reply:
July 9th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Aaah, the IT-Machine Gun spec. That was on my list to try. I will definitely give it a shot, though I will likely never see that sigil. Will swap HB glyph for IT. Looking forward to trying.
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Only 70 here with an Unholy Undead male, but I like the facerolling
Taking on 4 mobs of +1/+2 my level at once, only 12 deaths since 58 and stuff drops like when doing Argent Dailies on my T7+ Rogue.
You could say it’s ridiculously easy, so I’m trying to break my leveling time record, whatever
At 80 they’re not that overpowered, but still I think a decent player who rerolled from another class can have a slight advantage.
.-= Armagon´s last blog ..Armagon: Played Anno1503 again, after… many years =-.
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