FS does indeed crit for 100%, the numbers have been confirmed higher in this thread.

Erm, if killing machine is the only thing dual wield has to go for it, then its really not going to be that significant.

The talent killing machine 5/5 reads

"After landing a melee crit strike, there is a 100% chance your next icy touch, mind freeze, or howling blast spell will be a critical strike:

Take note that frost strike is NOT inside that. In a raid environment, probably the only reliable spell you will be casting on a melee crit to take advantage of that is icy touch. I have looked at screen shots of all the dmg done by all the abilities plus their existing formulas. Icy touch is one of the weakest spells or abilities in the DK Arsenal.

This makes sense because icy touch has lots of snaring and even potential freeze abilities attatched to it if talented.

Furthermore, with a 4 second cooldown, within a 10 second cycle, you can only use icy touch twice. Plus because its a spell, a crit by icy touch will do only 150% damage and chill of the grave does NOT increase this. One talented blood strike crit is going to do 250% damage in comparision.

And how are you playing your DK? Are you using frost stirkes at every opportunity, or are you mixing in icy touches to gain the benefit of killing machine. If you mix in icy touches, that's 2 frost runes each cycle. (for 2 icy touch). That leaves you with maybe two frost runes or at max 3 frost runes left to use on frost strikes in a 10 sec cycle.

Honestly, any increase in damage from killing machine isn't going to make that big a difference. They put it in as a relatively low tier talent for a reason. Its not quite as powerful as it seems. Certainly, not powerful enough such that it warrants people having to go dual wield just to try and make it happen a bit more often.

Again, back to the rune system constraints. DK only has 6 runes to use in a 10 second cycle. One of them will be unholy. One of them will be blood, unless you want to stay in frost presence through out the entire instance. That leaves 4 frost runes for the more practical setups.

You can only do so much with 4 frost runes within a 10 second cycle. Its going to be some sort of mix of icy touches and frost strikes. Once you mix in one or two icy touches into the picture, you are looking at 2, maybe max 3 frost strikes in a 10 second cycle. So, given the preciousness of your strikes, you want them to hit as hard as possible when you use them. Hence why if you are talking about damage, two hander is just better for strikes. Even frost strike, because it converts your melee damage to frost, bypassing armour. So, you will still want it to hit big.

You have to look at the entire picture of how DK is being played. Runes are precious to a death knight. When WOTLK hits, I bet there will be detailed theorycraft about how to maximise the damage from how best to utilise your runes for which abilities within a 10 second cycle. Deathknight abilities are not spammable at will.

I mean, sure you could go 6 frost runes. But after a while, I bet you will go back to a much more sane set up with at least one of each type of rune minimum. You just lose too many abilities otherwise. Right now, a deep frost DK with 4 frost, 1 unholy and 1 blood rune can go two hander and still utilise the max out of icy touches and frost strikes (2 each).

So there is no discernable benefit to going dual wield, while there is a lot lost in terms of strike damage not to mention you may get parry gibbed by the boss that much more often using dual wield.

For pve DPS, a blood knight will NOT go dual wield. Stuff like Blood strikes and obliterate, plague strike will be at least 60% of a blood knight's damage. These are all similar to mortal stirke, they are not fury type strikes or abilities. They are arms! So, it will be two hander all the way for blood DPS.

Even for PVE tanking, as mentioned above, there is no discernable advantage gained from dual wield other than possibly some increase in white damage (which is not the major part of a DK's damage). But a much higher chance of getting parry gibbed goes with it.

Until blizzard decides to put in more talents supporting dual wield, right now, there just isn't that much going for it. +3% chance for dual wield to hit is NOT a big advantage. Not when dual wield already suffers such a big draw back in +hit inherently to begin with. Sorry, but I remain sceptical about Dual Wielding for deathknights.

Instead of repeating yourself can you please address the reasons people have brought up a number of times. Killing machine is not that only thing. (Briefly: Weapons speeds, damage, mastrey, runic power, the fact that this is all indicated but not necessarily there right now)

We currently do not know what will be required to change runes for a DK. I am very confident it will not be anywhere near as annoying as changing talents, due to the basic mechanics. I expect they will allow it to be changed outside combat, or will change it to that once they realise anything else it just stupid.

Not really. Blood Strike scales most with the number of diseases, not the 60% weapon damage. Plague Strike scales with weapon damage but has a DoT element that has nothing to do with weapon damage also. Obliterate does even more with weapon damage, but again, diseases: being able to get up a lot of diseases quickly will improve your obliterate dps more than a bigger 2Her. If you can get up a disease from unholy faster through DWing it may very well offset the weapon damage difference.

Also, we should try to clean up one point of confusion here. Blood/Frost/Unholy Spec doesn't mean you have to:

a) Use Blood/Unholy/Frost presence.
b) Use Blood/Unholy/Frost runes.
c) Use Blood/Unholy/Frost abilities.

An unholy spec might go Plague/Degen/Degen/Degen/Obliterate with blood caked blade in Blood presence.
A frost spec might go ic/frost/frost/frost/frost/ic/frost in Unholy presence.

Obviously there will be some strong relationship in most parts, but there will be variation.

DW in blood/unholy would gain if it keeps blood vengeange up more. It would help if blood gorged applies to white damage only. It would not loose from blood strike if you were using more diseases. If blood rune mastrey procs off any hit then DW would be strongly advantaged. Who knows how dancing rune weapon will work?

There are a lot of things we don't know at this point, certain things we have indications on only, and many things that will undoubtedly change. Attempting to be definative at this point isn't possible.

It would be nice in the future if you want to make statements like "x will be 60% of their DPS" that you back it up with some calculations. Anyone can just make up numbers to try and prove a point. Lets make the numbers we use in this thread be grounded in reality, or lets not use them with such confidence.

Very well. I will use numbers though I loath to do so at this stage when so many numbers could be subject to change.

Deep blood knight DPS. with rune set up you can only stack 2 diseases. From plague strike and degenerate. If you can stack more than 2. You are not deep blood. For practical builds, I will go with 3 blood rune, 1 frost,2 unholy.

Assumptions: for such a blood knight: 52 blood, 19 unholy with dirge.

Average weapon damage from two hander: 600
AP: 2500

10 second cycle routine is as follows:

1 plague strike, 1 degenerate, 1 blood strike, 1 icy, 1 more blood strike once cooldown is up, then one death coil with 70 runic power.

White damage: 3 swings of two hander:
With zero crits = 3064.
With call mele crits = 6129

Yellow damage fronm stirkes and spells based on above routine.
With zero crits = 10,162
With all crits = 20713

Total DPS, zero crits = 13226/10 seconds = 1323 DPS
Total DPS, all crits = 26842/10 seconds = 2684 DPS

Proportion of total white damage to total Damage within 10 seconds = 3064/13226 = 23%
Proportion of total white damage to total damage within 10 seconds (all crits) = 6129/26842 = 23%

Ok, I have put up my numbers. These could change very quickly since everything is in alpha. And we don't know how some of the talents stack together.

Now you show me your numbers that support that dual wield will be so much more powerful just because it supposedly is going to add 10 or 20% to white damage. (Which I now show is just 23% of total damage based on the assumptions above).

There's no way DW with zero hit from talents (frost tree one is inaccessable for dps builds) and zero increased OH damage is going to do more damage considering all the specials are % weapon damage +. I thought most people were proponents of DW for tanking...

Regardless, it seems kinda silly for them to add DW to DK. Their entire lore is focused on and all the special characters wield 2h melee weapons (4h, arthas, rivendare, ??). Not to mention the fact that Pallies, Warriors, Rogues, possibly even hunters would use some tank weapons, especially if they move more towards the [Dragonscale-Encrusted Longblade] type of agressive, threat itemization which also works for dps. Meanwhile one arms and one retadin would use most 2hers for raiding. Honestly, I somehow feel like Blizzard is forcing DKs to DW tank out of ... spite? Personally, having played a warrior for prebc raiding, I was really excited over actually using a 2h now that I'm going DK. DW always seems less agressive, more roguey tickling rather than the agressive undead army commander DK feel. Meh, so close to perfection.

You've shown that Blood does good DPS and favors 2Hers. That... doesn't particularly have anything to do with what we were talking about, which was that Frost favors DW for threat while tanking. I was already reasonably convinced that both PvE and PvP DK DPS build setups will favor a big chunky two-hander. I see enough attempts at DW-favoring in the frost tree to make me think they'll get some real buffs in there once they figure out how the hell the class plays, and I have no reason to expect any other portion of the class to really support DW setups.

I put up the numbers I arrived at for Deep Blood spec because some seem to be convinced that even for DPS, dual wield is going to be so much better.

If the only focus is on tanking. Then damage isn't as big a priority right? Its more about being able to survive big hits from the bosses, and being able to tank well. In that case, why would dual wield be so much better? (ignoring any possible DPS contribution because I don't think anyone would be under the idea that a frost knight tanking in frost prescence is going to be topping damage meters).

Pros for frost knight tank dual wield

1) Can freeze more - iffy. At this stage, most bosses are immune to being frozen or being snared or being chilled.

2) Can proc great combos on frozen - see point 1. If they can't be frozen, these combos won't work.

3) More runic power? - runic power is not generated by swings. Only abilities and stirkes generate runic power. Whether you are dual wield or two hander, you will be using all your runes over 10 seconds.

4) Weapon speed? damage? If you are there to tank, the important thing is to not die. to tank! You are not there to do damage. Does any of these really matter if we are really talking about a frost knight trying to tank?

5) Specific talent like kiling machine - I addressed this in detail in a post above. This doesn't apply to frost strikes even.

Disadvantages of dual wield.

1) And this is the biggest - you raise the changes of being parry gibbed a lot more. This directly decreases your ability to tank.

2) You may lose more damage from your strikes than you will gain from increase in white damage. Sure, my example is that of a blood knight. But as it stand, even for a blood knight with melee enhancing talents, and blood presence, his white damage will be 3000 to 6000(all crits). (based on the example above). That by itself works out to just 300 to 600 DPS. A frost knight is going to do even less because he doesn't have as much melee enhancing talents.

Let's just take 400 DPS (I am being generous). Increase that by 20% by the supposed benefits of dual wield and you have incraese that by just 80 DPS to 480 DPS. Even top DPS nowadays can do 2k DPS easily. You are going to have to make up a lot of that with specials. Your frost strikes, your icy touch, your deathcoil. So, in the end, even for frost knights, such special abilities will contribute a big part of your damage.

You just can't convince me that a frost knight will magically have his white damage contribute to 80% of his damage and his specials do only 20%. The concept of deathknights for all three trees is not so radically different.

So, all the pros for dual wield as a DK even in deep frost are iffy, based on whether boss immunity to being frozen remains. And there are significant cons to dual wield, chief of which you may get parry gibbed that much more often.

I am sorry, but I just don't see enough support in the talent trees or the current deathknight mechanics for dual wield tanking or dual wield DPS. And until it is shown otherwise, I remain unconvinced. Ultimately, you will be a lousier, die more often tank if you dual wield, so who cares if you do a bit more damage (which by itself is debatable at this point also).

I don't want to see DKs dual wielding. I don't want to tank DW or DPS DW. I'm not aware of anyone that is in favour of it. However it might be too late for that.

Alvira your numbers would be easier to compare if you brake down the damage per strike, and according to Weapon %, DoT/Bonus and the like. I'll try and do as much later on (deep blood with either 2H or DW) when I get the time and post it here.

Sure.

All these are based on deep blood talented knight in blood presence with the assumptions I put in. So melee stirke crits are 250% of damage while spell crits are 150% damage.

Blood strike normal 1530, crit 3826 (based on two disease stack, 164 dmg per disease)

Plague strike normal 2994, crit 6430 (I add the full DOT, but for crit, I don't magnify the DOT portion)

Degenerate normal 1306, crit 2430 (Same treatment as plague strike)

Icy touch normal 1160, crit 1741

Death coil based on 70 runic power - 1641, crit 2461

I am iffy about how all the blood prescence and blood talents stack together. But what I apply to the stirkes, I apply similar threatment to white damage. So, the proportionate increase to both is the same. Being that things in alpha at this stage, a lot of things may change.

i've read sentiments like this before, but i just don't really see anything even coming close to a favoring of dual wielding. Just lookign at the talents the only things that clearly benefit dw over 2h is nerves of cold steel and killign machine. the latter im not sure by how much, given that it may still be better to use that rune on a frost strike. And speaking of frost strike, it will definatly favor the 2her even if only by a small-medium amount.


Also, i havent seen any talk about the lack of abilities like heroic strike and searign pain that generate more than a 1:1 threat:damage ratio. Maybe that's just because there's no information about it. From my viewing there has to be something, otherwise the 25% threat on the frost presence doesn't seem like it will be enough. Although after some quick information gathering, it seems druids get by with even less. It just seems like your damage would have to be way too high, or maybe i'm way more tired than i think i am and overthinking this.

The entire point of DK tanking is that your DPS is high enough that you won't need any other inflated-threat abilities aside from Frost Presence.

It also looks like there's not a whole large difference between DW and 2H DPS/Tanking, either. 2H seems to be stronger for Blood/Unholy, though a case can still be made about Frost DWing. We still don't know how Frozen Runeblade's vulnerability effect will work, and if it's a significant debuff, we'll probably see offhand weapons imbued with it to allow for the proc and still have Windfury.

From a coolness point of view, I simply can't wrap my mind around tanking in dual wield. In a sword fight with an equal size opponent, maybe. But against all those bosses which are 3 to 4 times or more bigger than us?

Errr. I can imagine a warrior raising his big solid shield to block a dragon's incoming claw.

I can imagine a druid turning into a big furry angry bear and being able to take that dragon's claw with a flinch.

I can imagine a deathknight with a huge two hander (which is like a big piece of metal as well) being able to block that dragon's claw with a good parry. Yeah.

But, tell me to imagine that same deathknight with two considerably smaller swords in his hand, raising one or even both of them to parry that big dragon's claw... It's... it's just that much harder to swallow.

So, erm, I would much rather two hander be the way to go for deathknights too. That's just my opinion of course.

I feel an odd mix of sadness and confusion when we start arguing for or against a character's mechanics based on how we like to think of their large, hard, (insert more homosexual metaphors), steel sword as the perfect manly tool to block the invading armies of...

Jeeeezus, am I the only one who wants DW purely because it thins out the loot table and makes life easier for everyone, rather than having the 1h tank weapon drop when the DK, bear & tankadin is in the raid, or the 2h tank weapon drop when the tankadin, bear and warrior are in the raid, or the tanking staff when... you get the picture. There's already two types of tank weapon (this being especially relevant seeing as tanks are the smallest sub-group of the raid), mercifully, palas share tanking weapons with dps casters. Let's keep it down to two for everyone's loot-rot sake.

Most likely it'll evolve like enh shamans did, where DW by and large are for PvE and 2h PvP.

Can you further explain these numbers? My understanding was that Blood strike would likely scale as follows:

Blood Strike Weapon Damage %(Weapon Damage+(Normalization Speed * Attack Power / 14))+164*Number of Diseases*1.3

Of course it becomes confusing as to whether or not the Imp. Blood Strike applies to the whole thing or just the disease bonus and if the disease bonus scales with AP? But making the assumptions I have (only applies to disease bonus, doesn't scale) then:

0.6(600+3.3*2500/14)+(164*2)

Which would give us 714 damage + 328 from the disease damage.

Then with 15% from bloody vengeance and 15% from blood presense we have: 1354 total damage, with 3385 crits. (5 diseases gives us 1993 and 4984 crits)

Plague Strike would be:

(671+3.3*2500/14)+704(shadow)

With the other bonuses mentioned we'd get: 2553 (915 is a DoT) total damage and 5011 (915 is a DoT) from a crit.

Be interested to know what formula you used for yours.

e: Using current game weapons (ilvl 154) has 2H at 925dps DW 816dps (2BS, 1PS, 1D not county icy as it's same for both). Even if you had icy talons and blood gorged that only applies to white damage the diff would be 1009/908. The only thing that would make up that gap is Mastrey (if Mastrey procs from white hits), which I have at 67% chance to proc every 10 sec for DW and 25% for 2H. If we give that last rune to another blood strike for the sake of it we have ~65 dps more for DW and ~45 for 2H. (If we give it to heartstrike we have 201 for DW 99 for 2H).

It looks like DW is slightly behind at the moment by ~7%. CBF calculating dancing rune blade into this if it only copies white damage, it won't close the gap that much. But then, my numbers are dodgy and it could be anything (I havn't included crits, which advantages 2Hs it seems).

Blizzard has shown clear signs of changing parrygib and freeze mechanics? Why would there ever be those mechanics in DKs trees in the first place?
DW / 2h tanking arguing seems to be based on everyone's own views how they want it to be rather than how it could be.

Point me to a single person who says they want DW?

DW comes from the DW stuff in the frost tree. No one even considered it before as far as I'm aware. DKs have nearly always been 2H users and we assumed that would continue for the player class.

Easier?? Being back to the days of "This is totally a hunter weapon!" is what you call easy? No thanks, I've had enough of high-DPS bows and gunz given to rogues instead of my hunter getting them to fall for that.
I'd rather never again have to fight morons in PuGs for loot, and the fact that no other class will ever want to have a tanking 2Her soothes my heart.

explaining to random people that this loot Im rolling on is useless to them is not how I want to spend the next two years after the release of WotLK.

There will always be people who want gear that doesn't make any sense for them to have. [Archaic Defender] anyone? (Yes, I've seen people pay silly amounts of money for that.)

I don't think the "DW is good because they'll only share tanking weapons with warriors" argument makes sense. It sounds like Death Knight threat will be very similar to paladin threat--that is, it will be a multiplier of damage done, instead of specific high-threat abilities like Sunder, Revenge, Shield Slam, etc. If that's the case, Death Knights will very probably choose tanking weapons in exactly the manner paladins do. They get all their armor and mitigation stats, and maybe a small amount of threat stats, from their armor, and evaluate weapons almost exclusively on their threat generation. Given that, they will be competing directly not with prot warriors, but with rogues, enhancement shamans, fury warriors, and hunters. Of course, applying the same logic to 2h tanking, they'd be competing with arms warriors, ret paladins, and hunters, but that set tends to make up a relatively smaller population of both raids and 5-mans.

Blizzard has directly said that Death Knights will be a DW-capable class, precedents notwithstanding. Given that, and that they're already moving heavily towards gear homogenization (removing healing, what?), Frost tanking looks to be the most DW-favored of anything right now, and the most likely to be buffed with more DW talents. Most of you still aren't looking at this as the alpha build it is. You see two or three talents and a mechanical aspect, none of which are very powerful and one of which is currently useless, and see that as grounds for dismissal of the release-state viability. I look at the talent trees, and try to ignore everything but the intent, and I see Frost having a concentration of DW talents that, while light, is greater than the zero talents in the other trees combined.

Frost Strike does not currently favor either two-handers or dual-wield. Two-handers currently get more out of the frost-damage conversion because of the higher single-strike damage, but a dual-wield setup also gets a 19% hit bonus on the one swing. Considering that two-handers have 20% more base damage (as already discussed), this is a wash, on average (assuming tanking DKs will not gear hit past hitcapped specials).

Blizzard has reduced + hit talents accross the board and introduced very little + hit in the DK trees. I see this as indicating 1 of 2 things both of which have the same result for this discussion.

Option 1: There will be large mounts of + hit on gear. Look for it early and often in WotLK.

Option 2: The hit caps are being greatly reduced. I prefer this idea as a 29% miss rate for DW and 17% resist rate on spells seem to me to be a little bit excessive.

Either way, indications are that + hit will not be as big/difficult a part of gearing as it has been.

DK stuff from the latest patch:

51769 Emblazon Runeblade Forges the battle-worn sword into a runebladed sword. Must be used near a runeforge.

Early quest?

51734 Ebon Plague Your Crypt Fever morphs into Ebon Plague, which increases vulnerability to magic by $s1% in addition to reducing attributes by $s2%. Ebon Plague lasts for $d and can stack up to 3 times.

One less debuff slot and probably a nerf? (3 ranks)


51465 Necrosis Rank 5 Your normal melee swings have a $h% chance to deal an additional $51460s1% Shadow damage.
51689 Prey on the Weak Rank 5 Your normal melee critical strike damage is increased by $s1% when the target has less health than you (as a percentage of total health).
51684 Stay of Execution Rank 3 When you have less than 35% health, all damage taken is reduced by $s1% and you are treated as if you are at full health.

Warrior? DK? Rogue?

e: Lack of sleep = a big mess.

Headless Horseman is a haloween event. Spell Deflection is already a DK talent, where "less" is 30%.
In general, abilities that have any static damage componenet (ie not X% weapond damage or X% of AP) have a rank, or are mob spells. The first rank that you gain from a talent may be an exception to this. Ice Slash and Frost Cleave are likely to be mob spells (not that there couldn't also be DK versions).
The school-specific reflects look very much like chromatic-style mob spells to me, not player spells.
Ebon Plague looks to combine the old Ebon Plague with Vindication... since we never really knew what crypt fever was beyond just a disease debuff, this may be a buff.