Awshlia

I'm a resto druid and run with a DK- we have a bit of trouble with this comp as well. I do the same as your druid- get in tree, hot up, get abolish up, and hope the rogue starts to tickle me. Our strat is to put my DK on the mage and just prevent as much of his damage as he can- I can handle a single DPS on me without an issue, and the rogue will take a LOT of dmg from thorns very quickly. Between strangulate, claw (my DK is unholy), mind freeze, death grip, and his bublble, my DK can usually keep the mage from polymorphing him- that does one of two things:

1) on a 'bad' team, the rogue will have popped his CD's, so once the mage is finally able to get on me, the rogue does minimal damage and I can LOS the mage enough to stay alive.
2) the rogue will vanish and get on the DK. I make my DK stay in frost just in case this happens- I simply hot him up as much as I can and toss on DOTS to the mage / rogue with extra globals. Once the rogue hits 20% HP, my DK changes from trying to LOS the mage to full on smacking the rogue, leaving me to CC the mage.

The strat has worked for us a few times, but we're only at 1750, so at 2k+ the teams may be more used to beating the healer / plate DPS combo. Let me know what works for you though- I'm interested.

 

zenos

Versus mage/rogue, you're obviously the poly/blind/sap target. The sure thing is to blow lichborne to buy time to get in combat. This defeats sap, but obviously opens you to polys once it's on cooldown. Timing blood boils as you close with the mage gives you a good opportunity to pull the rogue out of stealth, but that requires great timing and an awareness of where the rogue will approach you. Death and decay, bloodboil, ghoul frenzy, rune tap, blood boil, horn of winter, ub as you approach the mage has a high rate of pulling the rogue from stealth, but you get to the mage with not much left

** I note that you specified frost dk, if frost dk pvp spec doesn't include ub please ignore the last suggestion.

 

Nescioo

Hello, I’m playing 3v3 with setup mutirogue, discpriest and me, frostdk. Our goal is simply burst enemy fast down, while cc’ing with sap+blind+HC. I’ve been using basic 13/51/7 build which has been working out pretty well. Now I would like to get your opinions for this new build that I’ve been working on (Haven’t tested yet, but I will)

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (23/48/0)

pros:
Mark of Blood
Rune Tap (improved)
Blood’s Damage-boosting talents such as Veteran of the Third War, Dark Conviction
20% melee haste

cons:
No Howling Blast/rime
No Chillbains
No imp. Death Grip

It’s is based on basic deep frost pvp (13/51/7) ,but instead of HB and chilblains you get imp. (and glyphed) Blood Tap and MoB from blood that are useful against another burstcombos.
Chillbains doesn’t work with CoI, and isn't anyways that needed when you just need to burst your focus target down as fast as possible. I wouldn’t say either HB is that useful in 3v3, Rime proc is still quite rare+it can mess up with rogue’s blind.
MoB + rune tap is especially good against melee teams, when opponents are not used to face dk:s with 21+ points in blood (so there won’t be immediate dispel). Also, let’s say in 2min match, if you use Rune Tap 3-4 times, healing you for 6-7k and your team mates for 2-3k --> 30-40k healing, around 300 hps, which really helps priest to keep your enemy’s focus alive.
Like I said I haven’t tested this out yet, but I would say healing+burst talents from blood are bit better than Ghoul with some 44/27 variation.

Comments, suggestions please!

 

Awshlia

If this is your goal, I would put all of your talents towards reaching it. Mark of blood is a wasted point, in my opinion, since you have a healer to heal you and your goal is to burst down quickly, not outsurvive the other team (a survival team may receive much more benefit from mark of blood). The same holds true for rune tap, especially since you're paired with a rogue. Most teams will target the rogue first, and even if they target you first, you won't take a huge amount of damage if you're in frost (allowing your rogue the freedom to do whatever he wants). In order to compensate for the lack of healing that you would put out, just concenrate on a dps- this will keep at least one dps locked down and off your priest, leaving your priest to either heal himself through a single dps on him (something that should be very easy) or healing your rogue through one dps (another easy scenario). If your priest is left on his own, mana burning the other team will only make it easier.

That's my impression, but I don't pvp much on my DK so you definitely need to try it out and see what works for you and your team. If the extra healing done by mark of blood keeps your rogue alive, then keep it- better to 3v3 with a bit less damage than 2v3.

 

durienjr

Just got my deathknight to 80 and Being ranged dps in arenas in the past i am at a huge disadvantage. I am looking for a good pvp spec that i can test out. Also looking for some good glyphs and attack rotations. I know arenas are fairly situational but i need to know where to even start. I see alot of good information but seen nothing in the terms of talent spec. I am definetly leaning towards an unholy build with some blood added not really sure where to even start.

 

Awshlia

I think a popular starting build is a bit of frost then unholy. I think the frost strike pvp build is much more gear dependent, but I use an unholy one on my dk (my gear is pretty poor, unenchantd and cheap gems) but it's still fun.

 

Nescioo

Hm yeah i tried out my build yesterday, and I was a bit disappointment:p Mainly because almost in every fight opponent's healer was awake and dispelled MoB :/ Also Rune Tap was ok, it allowed me to use little more dps gear, but party healing (glyph) wasn't that useful that I tought it would be. Also, taking Rune Tap glyph made me to leave one glyph out (obli, HC or frost strike) which really lowered my burst damage

Conclusion: 13/51/7 or 17/51/3 (if you think you don't need imp grip) builds are good. Going deeper to blood in pvp is waste.

 

Valios

 

MatsT

I don't see why you couldn't have both of them if you want. There are lots of other talents in the unholy tree that provides a 0.5-1% dmg increase and nothing else that you could skip if you wanted to include Unholy Blight. UB is not terribly useful in 2on2 though. There are not many situations where you want such a slow aoe, and the damage increase over Death Coil on single target is marginal at best and because of kiting/burst issues not really an increase at all. Some people use it as a tool against stealth teams since it can be very hard to approach a DK with UB active without getting hit by it.

Concerning your specc in general, if you have little experience I'd recommend that you simply copy the specc from a high rated DK. Look around on the top of the ladders and see how people are specced. There are some small differences depending on personal preference or setups, but most people will be specced roughly the same and that is the same builds you would get from people here.

 

twicedead

This is my current spec and Im having alot of fun with it atm.

The World of Warcraft Armory

I will tweak it a bit anyway to pull a bit more damage, like droping epidemic and UB in favor of 2 points in necrosis and 1 point in impurity giving me 8% more on shadow damage and 4% on all damage.

I dont feel that epidemic gives me a huge benefit because we keep changing targets all the time and all encounters are too fast. Maybe in arena but I havent tried it yet with this char.

This build has been my starting point in pvp, have tried some frost and unholy full dps builds but ended up returning to this one which gives me more fun playing.

 

Aezoc

I don't really think it's better, no. From my experience, using UB to destealth people is very overrated. You rarely have the RP to power it at the start of a match, when stealthed rogues are the biggest concern, and a DK probably isn't their target anyways. If you can afford to sit on your healer, great, but I'm not sure how often that's the case. It's not great DPS considering how frequently you're in and out of range in a lot of matches, and having to cancel it to avoid breaking shackles is annoying.

 

Kupo24z

Has anyone had good results with blood cleaving in 5v5 or 3v3? Was thinking of changing to blood now that 2's are useless.

Also, how do I keep my diseases on the target? Any good healer can just spam cleanse and nullify my damage

 

Chimp1422

DK's need more ways of doing anything without a melee weapon come 3.2.

Disarm is no fun.

 

• Darkside

Are you fucking stupid? We're lucky we can do anything while disarmed. Most melee classes get completely screwed any time they get dismantled; we can still use our major CC's and peel for healers through CoI, Grip and HC.

Disarm mechanics are there as a soft-CC to melee classes, in the same way that Silences CC casters. Allowing a class to continue to function through this type of CC would make them incredibly overpowered (more so than we already are).

[e]: Yeah, I'll probably get an infraction.

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

Chimp1422

My, you're a pleasant prick.

Being disarmed is crap, chain disarmed is even worse. Im well aware of what we can do while it happens, to peel for healers, but best i can do when they are going for me is chain, run, and hope, or prey i get a pet stun... Which is lame, should be more that can be done about it, like adding an anti disarm to LB or IF. Weapon chains and sword shattering runes are far too situational to accept the dps loss for 50% less uptime. Would be nicer to have a better way to deal with it, pre-empt it, or hell give it too us too, even if it only works when disarmed ourselves.

And theres no need to be so fucking rude, is there?

 

◊ forostie

I'm 134% with Darkside here, down to each word.

Disarm is barely a kick in the nuts for DKs, compared to the complete neutering it is for a Warrior/Rogue. Thankfully (or on the flipside, painfully), we can still use our magical abilities which are plentiful.

EJ Discourages experimentation with unique play-styles/specs/glyphs

Farstrider: "Of course you can fucking pronounce it. It's L-rigaton-may, you wanker."

 

• Darkside

Look, disarm is SUPPOSED to screw you; that's the intent of it. It's no different than a caster getting chain-silenced or you getting chain poly'd/feared/blinded. Furthermore, getting disarmed hardly affects your survivability at all. You are no more vulnerable without a weapon than you are with one. You can still use all your defensive cooldowns and peels, hell you can even still interrupt, which is a hell of a lot more than Warriors can do. That's the primary reason why we don't have a -disarmduration talent. Just wait our the disarm and then continue to apply pressure.

[e]: Fair enough on the parry point, but if the lack of parry is what's getting you killed you have far bigger problems than just the disarm.

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

◊ forostie

Not true, you can't parry - but that is really a minor point.

EJ Discourages experimentation with unique play-styles/specs/glyphs

Farstrider: "Of course you can fucking pronounce it. It's L-rigaton-may, you wanker."

 

Aezoc

Any frost DKs have tips on how to deal with shaman? The cleansing totem is rapidly becoming the bane of my existence.

• I have fewer diseases than unholy, and can't apply two per GCD
• I lose more damage when my important disease drops
• I don't have a controllable pet to kill totems with, and frequently wind up spending a frost rune on IT if the totem's out of melee range (I'm running frost/rogue, so partner killing it is often infeasible too), just so the shaman can redrop it a second later.

Frost PvP is a lot more fun for me than unholy was, and the huge burst helps against a lot of comps. But we're doing noticeably worse vs. X/shaman (and to a lesser extent X/priest now), solely because of how much harder it is for me to keep diseases up.

 

• Darkside

You'll probably have to move the shaman out of his totems with a grip and position him next to his partner. HC both of them and go for a kill on whomever you think will be easier to bring down. If the other person trinkets the HC, have the rogue blind them.

<XI|> if your dog barks do you debate the philosophical reason behind him barking
<XI|> no
<XI|> you say shut up idiot

 

Nemantopia

Speaking as someone who plays a Mage, a Warrior, and a Death Knight, I'm more worried as a DK about being silenced than disarmed. Part of that is a function of being predominantly Frost, which between Howling Blast and talents focuses a bit heavily on the magic side of things, but running through Wintergrasp and Battlegrounds as Unholy I found I wasn't any happier about getting silenced. Getting disarmed means you can't use strikes, but you can still use two of your six runes meaningfully while disarmed, two more without wasting cooldowns, Death Grip, use nearly all of your cooldowns. Getting disarmed isn't fun, sure, but it's nothing like being a rouge or warrior that gets disarmed. Getting silenced isn't the end of the world either, but I'd say it's worse since beinging limited to strikes makes you very kitable while gagged and removes all of your options for closing the distance, including your abilities to silence, slow, and pull. Death Knights often underestimate the effectiveness of using Strangulate on another Death Knight, and most Mages or Priests wouldn't think to use Silence or Improved Counterspell on a Death Knight even in a caster-less comp or duel. Rune of Swordshattering/Swordbreaking isn't damage increasing, obviously, but it's not hard to set up a macro with a secondary weapon with it [or a weapon chain] to swap out when expecting disarm effects. Not perfect, but helpful.

This is not the signature you're looking for. You are free to move along.

-Curse you, Raglu!
Generation 28:
The first time you see this, copy it into your signature on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social experiment.

 

Aezoc

The worst part about silence is that it locks out most (all?*) of your defensive cooldowns. Silencing a DK right before a target switch and burst is a good idea, although it sucks to be on the receiving end of it. At any rate, it's definitely worse than a disarm - a disarm removes a good chunk of your damage, but a silence costs you a somewhat smaller chunk of DPS, but also all of your utility.

*I'm not 100% sure whether the talented cooldowns (VB, UA, and BS) are locked out when silenced. I would assume yes, for consistency's sake.

 

◊ forostie

Sure, a silence is a pain. As is a disarm. It doesn't change the fact that unless you get both silenced and disarmed at the same time you're not rendered next to uselss like pure melee or pure caster classes are for their respective lockouts. That is the crux of this. You'll always have offensive abilities to use, and some defensive abilities - making either only a minor hindrance.

EJ Discourages experimentation with unique play-styles/specs/glyphs

Farstrider: "Of course you can fucking pronounce it. It's L-rigaton-may, you wanker."

 

Jiggs

oh wow there aren't a lot of good pvpers on these forums haha. Did you just say "pray i get a pet stun"? Take your pet stun off auto cast and bind it.

Why would a DK ever use a weapon chain? Put sword shattering on a second weapon and switch it in and out against disarm teams. Adding anti disarm to LB or ibf is ridiculous

 

DarkNuke

I'm new to DKs just rerolled from warrior. I'm looking for a spec that would be suited for BGs. I hear blood is good because of the self heals. Although thats a bonus I will be sporting a heal bot through almost of them. Just looking for a spec that would excel in BGs with a personal healer.

If you could please highlight the key points of the spec because of like i said im very new to the DK playstyle.