Frost DK's, Test 4.1

[Ualaa]

World of Warcraft PTR Client Patch 4.1.0 - Wowhead



Death Knight

• Dark Simulacrum now works on numerous additional spells in dungeon encounters.
• Raise Ally has been redesigned to be a battle resurrection, analogous to Rebirth. It is instant cast, but costs 50 Runic Power to use, and has a 10-minute cooldown. It shares the same global battle resurrection cap with Rebirth and Soulstone.
• Talent Specializations
  • Blood
    • Blood Shield now only works while in Blood Presence.
    • Death Strike self-healing no longer generates threat.
  • Frost
    • Blood of the North (passive) now permanently converts both Blood Runes into Death Runes. There is no longer any proc interaction with Blood Strike required to activate Death Runes.
    • Frost Strike now deals 130% of weapon damage, up from 110%.
    • Howling Blast damage has been increased by 20%. To compensate, the area-of-effect splash now does 50% of the single-target damage, down from 60%. The net result of this change leaves the area-of-effect damage roughly the same as 4.0.6 numbers.
• Glyphs
  • Glyph of Raise Ally is now Glyph of Death Gate, and makes Death Gate cast 60% faster.

With permanent Death Runes, via Blood of the North, we can do an extra Obliterate, or any two of Necrotic Strike/Howling Blast. That means we can take Blood Strike and Blood Tap right out of the rotation, and cast our best spells more often.

Then Frost Strike, which is a very large portion of our damage... is going to hit a little harder then it does already.

And Howling Blast gets a little stronger on the main target.

No complaints with those changes, but Frost doesn't really need anything; I'll gladly take those buffs of course.

[Tim]

This is making me REALLY want to see what it is like to multibox DKs. I really, REALLY, want to see this in action.

Could you go into some detail about how this would impact the self-healing of DKs, lets say 3 of them, in a group please?

[Ualaa]

Self healing is pretty much Blood spec.

Rune Tap is 10% of your health.
Glyphed, it is also 5% of your parties health.
With four DK's, that is 25% healing every 30 seconds.
Also it refreshes (and uses no rune) when you're below 30% health, but only once every 45 seconds.

Blood Worms are fairly substantial small heals, especially if you run 4x Blood DK's.
Have each of them dual-wield, for additional blood worms.

You can also pop Lichborne (Frost Talent).
This makes you undead for 10 seconds, every 2 minutes.
While undead, you're immune to Fear, Charm and Sleep effects, plus can be healed by Death Coil.
If you're Frost, Frost Strike makes up a large portion of your DPS, and also uses Runic Power.

The big healing is Death Strike.
This is one Unholy and one Frost Rune.
With Dark Succor (Major Glyph), you're healed for a minimum of 15% of your maximum health, or somewhere in the 15-20k range.
Blood Shield (Blood Spec), will then provide a shield against damage slightly larger than the heal hit for.



So far this expansion, 4x Frost DK's + 1x Healer has been the most dominant composition for PvP.
The top healers are Paladin then Priest for Arena play.
Or Priest, Shaman and Paladin (pretty even) for Battlegrounds.
Pally gets you bubble and a disincentive to be attacked because of it.
Priest is more fragile initially, but can Mass Dispel immunity effects, and can heal a guaranteed period (after dying).

When no one had any gear, 5x DK's was as strong as 4x DK's and a Healer who would drop almost immediately.
Now that we can run with 3k+ resilience, a healer is easily better than a fifth DK.
People have cleared most of the heroics with both 4x Blood or 1x Blood & 3x Frost DK's, and 1x Healer keeping them up.

[Ualaa]

Standard stuff for DK's + Healer.


Your defensive cooldowns provide immunity to all status effects. Anti-magic shell, is 7 seconds out of 45, with immunity to anything that gives a debuff icon. Pillar of Frost is knockback immunity. Lichborne is fear, charm, sleep immunity. Icebound Fortitude is Stun immunity.

Death Grip with both glyphs and the talents, is faster and longer reach. Plus, anytime it fails or your toon kills someone it refreshes. With four on round-robin, you basically never -- not have it available. This is immunity to any snare/root effect, because you pull the target in, and don't have to move to get to them. Close to 100% uptime on a target.

Howling Blast is a ranged AoE (30yard range, 10 yard aoe) that applies Frost Fever, which snares and reduces casting speed. The single target DPS is strong, the splash softens secondary targets. And it mindlessly reduces the other teams movement to as slow as they will snare us, so no one escapes from melee range.

Necrotic Strike is fairly strong DPS too. It applies an anti-healing debuff, which with two Unholy Runes per DK per 10 seconds, averages 4 applications every 5 seconds (and they stack). With talents, this is another snare, centered on the target.

You can go with Obliterate in the place of Howling Blast/Necrotic Strike. This hits much harder, but is single target and uses two runes. Combine this with a Hungering Cold round-robin effect, to CC anyone in melee as you focus fire whoever.

The switch between HB/NS or Obliterate is a good mix it up, against an opposing healer.

At the moment, Blood Strike is in the rotation; this is much less damage than the other moves. With the proposed changes on test, we'll forsake our lower DPS move, and have the runes (as Death Runes) for our stronger toys immediately and always.

Frost Strike remains a very large portion of our damage.