[Seeking Opinion] Early Blood DK Talents, for PvP Frost DK's

[Ualaa]

Thinking of trying Scent of Blood a bit.
Two questions...

A) 2/3 Blade Barrier & 3/3 Bladed Armor or 3/3 Blade Barrier and 2/3 Bladed Armor.
B) 3/3 Scent of Blood or 2/3 Scent of Blood & 1/2 On a Pale Horse

I like the 1/2 Pale Horse, as it puts the DK's very close in mounted speed (5% slower) than the Pally, so I can lead with the Pally in BG's and basically run half the map before a DK drops follow.

[Tim]

Ualaa, wouldn't your pally mounted speed solve the problem since it is raid-wide, or do you find yourself running more often than mounted?

Then again, that talent is just mounted, right? So yea, why not just have the mount speed aura up at all times?

[Ualaa]

The DK's are in Unholy Presence, which gets them 15% ground speed at all times.
The Pally has Pursuit of Justice, gaining 15% ground speed which is also faster than the speed enchant to boots.
The extra movement, when not mounted is a rather large advantage.

The Paladin gets 15% mounted speed also, from the Pursuit of Justice.
Unholy Presence does not touch mounted speed at all.
On a Pale Horse, grants 10%/20% mounted speed increase, and reduces some effects which don't really matter that much because of Death Grip.
So really the point in On a Pale Horse, is for convenience in BG's.

If I use Crusader Aura, everyone moves at 20% mounted speed.
Leading with any DK, the group stays together.
Leading with the Pally, and I will eventually lose all of the DK's, but they usually fall of one at a time.

Ideally I want to lead with the Pally, as that character is not swarming via IWT.
With the stationary character, it is easy to pick the next kill target, or select someone to be Death Gripped, etc.
I can just manually change the Aura, but it is a lot easier to leave it on Concentration Aura or Resistance Aura and not manage it.



Blade Barrier is a 4% or 6% (2 or 3 points) reduction in damage taken, when Blood (Death) runes are on cooldown.

Bladed Armor is +4 or +6 (2 or 3 points) per 180 armor the DK's have.

So the choice is a straight defensive boost or a scaling offensive boost.

The Scent of Blood is extra Runic Power, a 15% chance after dodging, parrying or taking damage to gain 10 extra runic power on the next (1/2/3) melee hits.
Every 32 Runic Power is an extra Frost Strike, which is significant damage.
Especially from all of the cleave type casters or melee, who will be hitting all four DK's quite often.

[Tim]

Leading with the Pally, and I will eventually lose all of the DK's, but they usually fall of one at a time.

That part has me puzzled. I've never lost my guys when my Pally has lead them. Not even once. Is there any potential that something else is causing this issue? Just double checking, but are your other WoW running a minimum 14fps, prefer 20fps (in the event a dip to 14 occurs)? Through a little digging I've discovered that /follow can break when <14fps occurs, possibly the speed on the pally impacts that.

[Ualaa]

If the lead toon has the Crusader Aura, follow will sometimes break.
Because the toon gets a little further ahead than follow allows.

It is probably because of the number of players in an area.
Prior to the i7 920, this was easy to do in Dalaran with ground mounts and 150 players in an area.
After getting the i7, it is utterly impossible to break follow in an unpopulated area even with 310% flyers and Crusader Aura.

In a BG with 50-60 odd players (40-man IoC/AV) in one area battling, follow can break with Crusader Aura leading.
And I primarily run AV, as my battleground of choice.
Follow doesn't break often, it depends on the distance.
Going out from the starting gate with 40 players, it won't break on the run to Galv which is half of the map.
But it might break running across the Field of Strife, say from Stonehearth Graveyard to Iceblood Graveyard, which is half the distance... particularly if there is a lot of fighting going on around me.

My slave windows are capped at 30 FPS, the main window is capped at 60 FPS.
My slave windows have very minimal graphical effects, except for medium view distance; this dynamically changes, so the current master always has 3/4 levels of eye-candy and max view distance.
If I uncap the main window, Warcraft reports an average of 150 FPS in most areas and usually 100+ in cities or BG's, so I doubt its because of a lack of resources.

I don't run nearly as many addons as I used to.
All of the auction related addons only run on the auction toon.
Besides, 12GB of ram... and only five clients, doubt that could be an issue.

[Tim]

Ualaa,

I'm near 100% positive your follow is breaking because one of your alt windows is hitting low FPS periods of sub 14fps. This makes even more sense when you talk about populated areas causing this to happen. So if your FPS is maxed at 30, it can still dip down if there is populated areas, lots of stuff happening, etc.

If there is a way you can get a huge ass FPS real-time counter for your alt-windows, that made an alarm if it ever hit lets say 15, if even for 1 second, I bet you would find it happening around the same time follow mode breaks.

My 5x Shaman for example were all epic flying, and they broke follow mode when I had 1x GTX 295, but never again when I got my new 2xGTX 480.

[Ualaa]

Well my GTX275 is in the slow process of dying.
But I am on a fixed budget, until my seasonal work starts up... so haven't replaced it yet.
Could easily be the video card, it is by far the most dated piece.

I'll upgrade over the summer, to something a bit better.
Leading towards a GTX 570.