It's mostly for rogues and ret pallys (with BOF up). When I hit rogues with COI the good ones stun my partner and go to town right then and there. The only way to peel rogues is with DG. The pally's of course proceed to ignore me and my pathetic attempts to save my partner when I try and peel with COI.

Protip: most pallies fall for this trick because they faceroll like robots:

1. Cast COI on them.
Response of most paladins: "Why I shalt BoF this infernal curse!"

2. Your response: Death Grip.
Paladin: I shalt run back towards mine faceroll taget.

<Blessing of Freedom Wears off>

3. You: Chains of Ice buddy!

yes paladins can dispel it, but with the new gloves bonus you can just sit there and spam it, similar to hamstring.

While all this is happening, it is extremely difficult for the paladin to stick to your partner, who is doing their level best to pillar hump about now.

This works on rogues too, because you COI, they stun, and THEN you pull them off with DG, in effect wasting their combo points assuming that you are fighting Rogue Priest and not rogue Mage.

I won't debate the value of 10 seconds off of DG, but I will debate the value of dropping too many points for it. I don't see it as essential to either peeling or to arena specs at the moment.

I noticed that on the PTR, Will of the Necropolis no longer says it reduces the cooldown of Anti-magic Shell. However, the anti-magic glyph no longer has the +15s cooldown drawback either now.

51 frost/20 blood (or 52/19) seems like it will be a strong build. I am assuming people are getting Acclimation+Frost Aura rather than Improved Icy Talons? What do you think of Toughness? It seems that most snares are constantly reapplied (even Slow, which seems to get away with a 15 second duration in PvP, is spammable). Given the change to Killing Machine to make it more appealing to 2H, it seems you could avoid Toughness entirely, and put the 3 points needed to advance down the tree into Killing Machine.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet but Glyph of Blood Boil on the PTR is now a -50% slow that is physical and lasts 5 seconds. Works great with pestilence and is handy when you would rather use FU runes on the harder hitting strikes as frost or unholy spec.

I have a question about spell pen. I was looking at the top DKs in 2s and they all had 130 spell pen. Now, Priests have that much resist buffed, druids have like 1/3 that much, and pallies will "never" use shadow aura. That said, why build your gear specifically around 1+ class? Obviously these guys know way more about it then I do, so can anyone shed some light on this for me please? Thanks.

Smart paladins will definitely use shadow aura against unholy DKs. It's a huge damage decrease to the great majority of our damage without spell pen. If you don't gem for spell pen, you will struggle to progress very high in your ladder.

You forgot arcane mages, also.

Has anyone done any comparisons between Veteran of the Third War and Tundra Stalker/Rage of Rivendare?

I'm finding that once 21 deep into blood, I'm forced to choose between the above talents. For each point in VotTW, we get 2% more stam (never bad in pvp) and 2% more strength...our #1 dps stat. How does that 2% strength stack up against 2% more damage from "spells and abilities" when a specific disease is up?

First off, I don't do many blood strikes as either frost/uholy hybrids. Half the time they're death runes, and when they are blood runes Pest & BB (esp with glyph) are as good or better.

As for Obliterate, Unholy will never do it. Assuming some kind of Blood/Frost hybrid post patch, would you ever choose to obliterate instead of howling blast?

To even consider obliterate over howling blast, you'd have to not have rime proc, not have KM proc, be in mele range and...?

All that together makes me consider 5/5 blade barrier over subversion.

TS > Vot3W for damage. 2% more ability damage is about 1.5% more total damage for deep Frost. From what I recall +2% Strength is something on the order of +1% DPS. If there is a Strength value where that's no longer true I'd be curious to see the exact math.

That being said, the extra Stamina and expertise make Vot3W the better PVP choice imo. TS' advantage is gone if FF cannot be up 100% of the time.

Few thoughts regarding hit rating... common wisdom has always been (as the gentleman a couple pages ago said) to get 5% and then focus on other stats. I'm running 183 hit atm (5.58% melee, 6.98% spell) and still seeing far too many CoI/IT misses for comfort. This is from a Frost/Blood perspective, ie no Virulence. As far as I know, the caps are:

Spell:

Base: 4% (105)

Draenei: +2% (158; Shadow only)
Undead: +2% (158; Shadow only)
Dwarf: +2% (158; Frost only)
BElf: +2% (158; geez why isn't this 6%, they used to have 5 all vs everyone else's 10 :p )

Moonkin: +4% (210)
Sub Rogue: +4% (210)
Ret Pally: +4% (210)

Melee (less of a concern but still worth mentioning)

Base: 5% (164)

Night Elf: +2% (230)

Frost DK: +0-3% (164-263)
Frost Mage: +5% (328)

164 gets you capped for most melee and most spells, but much like getting spell penetration to cover worst-case scenarios it seems like you could make use of as much as 263 for Dwarf/BElf Rets/Subs. Virulence effectively gets you most of the way there if you have it. While I wouldn't start gemming to get that much I am definitely looking forward to the Wintergrasp helm and boots to push a little higher... and hey, it won't be wasted for NEs and Frost Mages :P

Anyway just wanted to lay down the numbers. Reminds me of S4 Warriors going for Swift Skyfire and Surefooted even though they were over 79 hit in the base gear.

Spec im considering come patch: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000


DRW lasts upto 33 seconds now making it quite attractive for burst. With the unholy tree getting nerfed overall, I think we'll see more blood spec pvp dk's come patch.
Pacifist - Media

I'm not sure if it's fixed, but for a while on PTR DRW would cast twice off of Heart Strikes that hit two targets. I can't imagine this is intended as it recalls a slew of sweeping strikes tricks/bugs that got removed two years ago. Personally I'm having a hard time seeing blood as a strong candidate for replacing unholy as our go to pvp spec. Maybe I'm just being short sighted but with so much of your damage being physical you lose a great deal of your ability to pressure armored targets.

I doubt the COI bonus will go in unchanged - you shouldn't really plan around it.

Do you have a basis for this?

Or is it more of a "They shouldn't be able to cast their dispellable snare more than twice every 8 seconds." thing?

The latter - Serennia said the same thing too on the thread on AJ.

He also said that making the duration of AMZ 10 seconds and leaving it appearing at the feet of the DK is incredibly stupid and makes it almost unusable in most situations. Serennia is obviously not the final word in what happens to DKs in arena.

Against priest and paladin teams with half a brain, its almost like we dont have a snare right now because COI gets taken off immediately. I would trade COI for a non-dispellable, 10 second - 50% snare in a heartbeat. COI is overpowered against teams that can't dispell it and pretty shitty against teams that can.

If they were going to change it but keep the general mechanic it should be something like 70% snare to start and works down to 30% by the end of 10 seconds.....but it should not be dispellable. I think most DKs are going to have to burn a major glyph slot for the blood boil glyph if it remains a 50% snare, since it will be our only access to a reliable snare mechanic.

Probably more like "since the start of this snare is actually a root, and it has a 20 yard range, chaining it would effectively be a non-DR root"..Kind of thing.

I agree it should start at 70 and end at 30, but it is range, there are no physical range snares in the game, unless you count concussive shot. There is a reason all physical snares, even wing clip, require melee range and are 50%.

Perhaps though, making it a disease might be better? So it has coverage from the other DK diseases in terms of dispels per second on it.

It needs to either be somewhat spammable, or much harder to dispel. To be honest I'd rather have some significant dispel protection myself so we dont have to burn so many GCD's reapplying it. Like I said....against teams that can't dispel it there are times it is overpowered. But you have to balance that against the teams that can dispel it where the ability is going to be VERY weak after they remove its dispel protection.

Considering that on multiple occasions, I've burned 4 GCDs and 2000 mana trying to remove it, I'm going to have to disagree. With the benefit of Unholy Presence, you have a shorter global cooldown than either of the classes that can dispel, so as it stands you can spam it on as fast as it can be removed and still have time to hit the target with some other crap, too.

The only way it would be spammable is if the glove bonus meant it didn't cost a frost rune at all to cast. We still have to wait for rune cooldowns if we use them on CoI. If we land CoI, dispel, CoI, dispel, we can't do it for at least another 6-8seconds depending on when we used the rune, dispell spead etc.

I was just wondering what everyone thought would be a better trinket for arena, (i'm not sure how to link items, if someone would like to do that it'd be great), but the Mirror of Truth, and the Darkmoon card: Greatness were the two i am looking at. I currently have the Mirror of Truth and from testing it procs about once a min. Anyone know if as your crit chance goes up so does this proc rate? or is it most likely have it's own cooldown? If so which trinket would be better suited for arena matches?

[Darkmoon Card: Greatness] would be better than the mirror most likely, but once the patch comes out you will want the new resilience trinket [Anvil of Titans] from Wintergrasp. That Wowhead item link is wrong by the way, it is a [Mirror of Truth] where resilience has replaced the crit rating.