panny

Maybe you haven't fought any good DKs.

 

Plea

Those are pretty looking numbers, on paper. However I never managed to pull that off, and never seen someone do it either. Actually I never heard someone complaining about that before either. At best I got a priest down to 50% in a stunlock. 50% of a player's hp in 5 seconds might have been a burst in 2007, but it's just mediocre dps right now; also healable by a single holy shock.

I must also mention that the prot warrior is pretty much worthless once the stun is on dr. So that "burst" you call is his only shot.

 

• Lanky

Look, I don't know what you qualify as a good DK, but I've basically got the best PvE and PvP gear in the game at the moment, and 1900 rating, and I would far rather fight a Fury Warrior than a prot warrior. Will a prot warrior ever kill me if I have a healer? No. But one on one, they are extremely good against DKs, rogues, other warriors, etc.

Do DKs burst harder? Yes, of course they do. 9 k Shield Slams is fishy, I'd want to see a screenshot / combatlog, and then I would want to check the warrior's armory, because frankly, 9k is harder than my Obliterate crits in Blood spec / Presence in PvP, so... I am really not sure I buy that.

 

Whatev

Sadly, I neglected to get a screenshot of it at the time, but I assure you that it was real. It was probably done with the benefit of shield block's double block value, and possibly the slam got my inner fire, which would've reduced my physical DR to around 10%. However, the 14k number I quoted was based on a much more conservative 7k shield slam. Surely, you admit that a 7k hit is plausible, yes?

I'm hardly complaining about it, nor am I asserting that all DKs should be replaced with prot warriors or anything absurd like that. What I DO claim is that rogues, hunters, and mages are all more threatening in burst than DKs are primarily because A) they don't have to slow down before they burst and B) they have more ability to disable the target simultaneously with the burst. This does not mean DKs are worse. DKs are exceedingly dangerous in terms of control and pressure. As a priest, I have a toolkit designed to handle this. I don't have a toolkit designed to handle stunlock.

Perhaps I haven't. Shadow priests are somewhat handicapped in that respect.

 

diotox

9k shield slams are absolutely possible, but require quite a bit of setup. I've broken 9k shield slams before in my half-ass block value set which has a LOT of room for possible upgrades. Basically you get sunders up, hit shield block, pop [Lavanthor's Talisman], pop recklessness, and time it like you're trying to gib someone the same way you would with a full rage sudden death proc (before the sudden death nerf, that is). That 9k figure though is on low armor, low resil targets, I'd expect something like 7k on a competitively geared player, and if they have high armor forget it.

That being said, while prot is definitely the best warrior spec for 1v1s, for other situations prot is just miserable and how hard you can make shield slam hit seems like a moot point to me.

 

Whatev

I'm pretty sure this person didn't have sunders or Lavanthor's or recklessness up, though, considering she spent the previous minute or so chasing me around a pillar.

 

Lithose

Why do you fight the protection warrior? Just ignore him and watch him become absolutely useless. Rage generation with a one hander vs resilience is an absolute joke. In order to get those numbers, to, he needs to stack block (And even then, 9k just isn't possible vs any kind of resilience based target.) so his "offensive" DPS ability will be low (Mostly because without damage stats, he can't build rage.).

This is the primary reason why that protection warriors just don't get very high, once you learn to ignore them, despite being annoying, they are harmless.





7k is plausible, but still very unlikely unless, as you said, he preped you for a long time (Full sunders, inner fire gone, the works) and even then, that number is pushing it (He would need to crap out his rage generation for block gear.)

Also, Rogues need to pool their energy for bursts, to. Overkill circumvents this, but any non-gib team rogue is going to have go light for a bit in order to ramp up. DK's need to do this to, but its hardly like their pressure drops to 0. The process of "pooling" for them actually applies pressure, just to set the death runes up, you need two blood strikes, not to mention in unholy your auto attacks alone are a huge source of high sustained damage.

Each DK tree has "quirks" that let you set some pretty massive combos up while still keeping up a ton of utility or pressure, for example, the Blood/Frost build will let you obliterate your death runes up until you have 2 death runes/2 blood (Your frost will still be used for snaring and the unholy for PS to remove hots.) and then you can heart strike 4 times, and with blood scaling, that is ridiculous in terms of pressure and it doesn't even really need diseases.

Frost has similar mechanics with being able to take the runic power talent and then building to 120 runic, then doing 1 Frost strike-->Obliterate (From death runes)--->3 Frost strikes (Which is probably some of the best burst in game, 85ish% weapon damage attack that ignores armor and can't be dodged/parried or blocked and has a 245% critical strike modifier, is insane and yes, you can do 4, just need the glyph..This is a game ender if you time it with silence)

No, DK's don't have the best burst, but its extremely high.

 

Whatev

I have 770 resilience, and STILL got hit for 9k with no sunders (which I know because I spent the last minute kiting her around a pillar), but you won't believe me since I forgot to take a screenshot. So we're at an impasse.

In Unholy your auto attack isn't doing jack unless you're burning frost runes to keep me in range. If you are, then you can't burst. With rogues, on the other hand, crippling gets applied automatically, they just stick to me and burst. The main limitation when fighting DKs is extremely poor mana regeneration as a PVP setup shadow priest. If I'm 1v1 against most DKs--and I only say most because I don't see that many Frost DKs and can't differentiate variants on Blood by sight yet--I'm not dying before I run out of mana, and I don't consider opponents against whom my primary limitation is mana to be bursty opponents.

 

• Lanky

In arenas I don't fight the prot warrior. Simple as that. If my healer somehow manages to die and I am left fighting a prot warrior, things are going to be tense. I've lost that 1v1 a few times.

 

Masq

I still don't understand why most DKs refuse to take rune tap, especially in 2v2. Is there something I'm missing? Having an on-demand heal for the cost of 2% damage seems like a fair trade to me.

http://www.aftermathlb.com

 

doogless

I think you're looking at his PvE spec.

 

Masq

Wasn't referring specifically to him, my own arena partner (Pal/DK) doesn't get Runetap either. Doesn't make much sense to me.

http://www.aftermathlb.com

 

• Lanky

Ummm, Rune tap is great but only if you are dedicated to Sub-spec blood, I use Shadowfrost to pvp at the moment, so I don't get Runetap. If you are majoring unholy, with a sub in blood then absolutely get it.

 

tarrek

9k shield slams are possible. On my prot warrior I've gotten 9-9.5k shield slam crits without any special buffs in the past, but only against clothies and the occasional poorly geared rogue, and with shield block up. That is with approx 1600 shield block value unbuffed and the 2-piece T7 bonus (+10% shield slam damage). I don't have Lavanthor's Talisman.

However, having one potentially hard-hitting move doesn't mean you have burst. I sacrifice quite a bit of AP in my gear, and unless I get really lucky with crits and/or have plenty of rage so I can dump several heroic strikes on the target I can't kill a healing class 1 vs 1. Death Knights with Rune Tap are a pain too.

 

Whatev

Oh, absolutely, but if DKs didn't have any self-heals, I don't think it would be that easy for them either. I usually kill DKs solo by bleeding them with DoTs and kiting them around until they get into combo range.

I think part of the issue here is that we don't really have an agreement on what the definition of "burst" is. The funny thing about the frost DK example that you mentioned is that in principle, if you start from the ideal situation of 130 runic and 2 death runes, and you're in blood presence, your "burst" can roll into a new set of runes: Obliterate, Frost Strike(98), Obliterate(113), Obliterate(128), Frost Strike(96), Frost Strike(64), Frost Strike(32)-Runes up-Obliterate(47), Frost Strike(15)-Runes up-Obliterate(30). If this happens, do you call it burst or sustained damage?

 

Emth.

It seems virtually every dps class/spec can do very high burst at the moment, making life as healer fairly dismal in comparison. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of double dps comps I've won against since wotlk, but this may be shaman specific.

It wouldn't be surprising to see people giving up pvp healing in favour of a more offensive/fun/less frustrating role - whatever you want to call it. I'm certainly considering it.

 

Dollar

You're not the only shaman having issues with double dps comps. Rogue/Mage completely and utterly power fucks almost any shaman 2s team (shaman/ret probably has the best chance). We simply don't have very many outs. Shaman still perform quite well in general against healer/dps teams but shaman/warrior is a thing of the past unless you want to queue dodge almost any team with a rogue on it.

Now the reason I'm in this thread is for some 3s advice. We run Ret/disc/resto shaman (yeah I know it seems weird and really shitty but we got 2k pretty easily and with a pretty decent win ratio for never having played together before). The strengths of this team are that we have two magic dispellers so it's pretty hard for anybody to get stuck in any kind of cc chain. We normally just outlive the other teams cooldowns and chain our cc to kill someone or (vs rmp for example) we have our priest play really offensively with mana burns.

I'm wondering if anyone has any advice for 2 different teams. The first is Boomkin/Holy Paladin/Rogue. The rogue and the boomkin just sit on our disc priest and the main problem is the druid. Even shocking/grounding every cyclone I can he still gets them off and this team has pretty insane burst. The closest we came to winning we managed to get the druid to oom but he still managed to rotate cyclones on all of us. If we could take the pressure off for a bit and let me and my priest get hex/fears off on the paladin we might be able to pull out a kill eventually. The other option I see is using freedom exclusively on the priest and have the pally actively dispelling poisons so I can easily keep the priest up and then the priest could spam burn the druid.

The other team we're having an issue with is Resto Shaman/Holy Paladin/Hunter. We actually haven't lost a single match to this comp except to the #1 on our BG. The hunter just completely controls our Ret Paladin and the shaman purges freedoms instantly and then the holy and the resto have free reign to do whatever they please. They just slowly run us oom and are pretty good at coordinating for example a hex on me and a hammer on the ret behind a pillar or something to get viper sting ticks. On ring of valor it just gets worse with unreliable LOS (ntm pin on the fire). Any tips on how to gain the upper hand would be nice as I feel like if we actually play a good one (not one that is getting carried by their comp) we don't have much of a chance.

"Oh he's a sad little man? He's thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?"

 

Whatev

So basically against that first comp I think you're always going to have problems because you need to pressure the boomkin and your comp isn't very good at that. I think your best shot is going to be to try to separate them... probably by pulling the rogue out of LOS and then using CC and interrupts to try to block out the casters for a few seconds as they correct positions.