Shamelessly copied from the Deathknight.Info's Forum:

(Source, last post on the page, by Liquidwulfe)
Thoughts? I haven't had much time to think about it, but it seems like a good idea to me. The weakness of course is that you can't fully rely on the SS glyph to keep FF up, but it will certainly minimize the amount Desecration downtime if you pay attention.

I like the rotation for the most part, the biggest benefit in my opinion of the rotation is that all rotations are 4 abilities leaving you with lots of globals instead of doing 5 globals one time and 3 the next.

I did not find that the ghoul did 53% of his hp when he explodes, I tested it just last night at araj and he did closer to 20%, a gap that is not explainable. Unless of course he means the shadow of death ghoul, I did find that one did over 50% of my hp.

So is the consensus right now that DK tanking as Unholy is superior to frost due to the scalability of Bone Shield?

Do you guys think the Anti Magic Zone 6 point commitment is worth it?

It's early so maybe I'm being dense, but where does a RP filler go in this rotation? In between phase 1 and 2? Assuming yes, what would be the best RP filler based on the rate of RP return from a 4/4 rotation?

Who said this? For a raiding MT, I would personally prefer deep frost over deep unholy. The clear distinction is that unholy is better at magic damage fights, and frost is better at physical mitigation. Personally, I find that Hungering Cold + HB is an amazing AoE trash pull/aggro mechanic, and puts Frost ahead in terms of overall raid viability. As frost you'll still have AMS, AMZ is just gravy.

At the end of each rotation group, since you're waiting on runes.

Well, the opening rotation should net 60 RP (plus whatever little bit from Butchery), so would Unholy Blight makes sense for the first RP dump? Subsequent rotations would net 50-55 RP each, so fill two with Death Coils then Blight again before rotation 4 if whatever you're fighting is still alive.

Yea, that's probably what I would do.

I think you misunderstood why I linked that post. I knew right away that there were flaws with it, but I posted it because it offered a new perspective. The intention was not "ZOMG EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT UNHOLY DPS IS WRONG" but rather "What, if anything, can we learn from this to improve on our existing knowledge". I personally am not a huge fan of the idea because it expects you to use a Glyph (Scourge Strike) which isn't reliable enough for use in rotations. I'm not sure if most DKs would be able to watch their rune cooldowns, RP, anything the boss battle might require attention to, AND the remaining duration on FF. But perhaps there's some tweak we can make to improve what we do right now.

Edit: When I had CE (I don't bother with it anymore) it did about 3k dmg when used on my ghoul at 80. Definitely more than any PS will do even with full raid buffs.

How come ? I read everywhere that the only weapon the DK (same for warriors) can't use is the wand... (the official site specify that DK can use staff too ! :/ ) Are you sure ?

I admit that the aggro would maybe be a problem (actually I'm not sure), but well, the stats are pretty good on feral staff. (at least that's a sustainable option if I'm too much reluctant to axes, swords and maces)

The rotation itself seems reasonably sound, and a good deal simpler for people who didn't play an EQ bard or play piano I'll certainly give it a try until my fingers get used to dancing across my n52 in the correct patterns.

As far as Corpse Explosion/Night of the Dead, those seem like tacked on additions where I personally would use the talent points elsewhere. They also serve to complicate the rotation, negating the benefit of its simplicity when compared to other, more complex rotations.

edit: And Zurm's correct, it does rely on a Glyph. The real question is whether or not the Glyph works well enough to make the rotation favorable, and more importantly whether the benefits outweigh the advantages of other Glyphs.

Ferals staffs only give ap while in cat/bear form.

DK's cannot use:

-Wands
-Daggers
-Fist weapons
-Staves

We *can* use:

-Polearms
-Axes
-Swords
-Maces

It is pretty much proven fact that unholy is the best tanking spec when bone armor averages over 20 seconds there is no way at any level of avoidance you could guarantee this on every fight however. So I will probably just dual spec both tanking specs and swap back and forth on fights where bone shield is op. At low gear levels there will be no fights where bone armor lasts > 20 seconds, so starting as frost is superior in my opinion.

AMZ is worth the 6 for tanking in my opinion, not for anything else.

I agree for the most part. I think the really important thing to notice about the post is the advantage of breaking up your even rotations. Most even rotations try and use 3 2-rune abilities which may not be optimal for Frost and Unholy even though it seems like it would be. I could see the same being true in frost where the use of an icy touch to try and catch a rime proc. Also for tanking having a rune avaliable for your Mitigation talents has obvious benefits.

There are flaws, but then every rotation strategy is going to have them. The fact that Deathknight's have this quality is amazing, there are hundreds of possible strategies all with their pros and cons and all being surprisingly close. Deathknights are months if not years away from theorycrafting on the level of the other classes and the end result might simply be "Depends" which is a tremendous triumph of the player over mechanics. Also the class is a wonderful marriage of mindbending strategy with reactive tactics, ignoring either aspect will make you an incredibly ineffective player.

And this is why those with low-end computers or bad connections need not apply to the DK class, at least in a PvE raiding situation. Moreso than any other class, DKs require a very precise timing in dps rotations or you will either be forced to wait for your runes to reset or deal with messed up cycles the rest of the fight.

Don't remind me. I've been putting off an upgrade for a while now but I keep finding myself checking Newegg more or and more often. I'm sure I'll cave by next week.

I havent got o play the DK as much as I wanted to due to time constraints, but the time I have got to play with a DK has been very interesting and also overwhelming.

I know everyone is looking for that perfect " Cookie cutter " Spec for a DK, but honestly from the playing I have done so far with them, I cant really find one. I have read peoples feedback on different websites of different builds, and it doesnt matter what build someone has, they all seem pretty good.

I know from playing Blood tree has been nice for single target DPS as well and keeping the DK alive from Worms, and Rune tapping, vampiric blood ect ect .. This was a nice spec to play for survival.

Unholy tree was fun as well, because i could gather up a group of enemies and mass kill them, now the draw back was is you have to be careful not to kill your primary target by putting all your diseases up before you can get a Pestilence off so all your diseases spread to other targets. I cant tell you how many times I do my rotation of getting my diseases all on Main target, and its dead before I hit pestilence. Other then that, I think it would be a great spec for tanking and keeping agro on multiple Mobs because of being able to mass disease your pull.. of course tossing Frost spec in with that unholy.. in a nice mixture of both..

I havent got to play with Frost alot, but Its one of those specs that seem to fair just as nice as the others for dps and survival.

I seen ghostcrawler talking on beta forums about wishing more people would try Hybrid tri-spec builds.

I got to thinking would that really be an effecient build ? Are the 51 point talents worth getting ? I read alot of feedback on beta forums of people saying that the 51 point talents are ok, but not great like your other classes and their 51 point talents.

Example Unholy blight was or is a decent spell, but is it worth going that deep ? If it was still counted as a disease maybe, but even your pretty committed to most of the unholy build.
Or maybe if Unholy blight also added some very high resistance to your diseases being dispelled. That would make the tree really worth tapping for that 51 talent.

Lets look at frost. Hungering cold.. your freezing targets all around you with in 10 yards ( which isnt really that far ) and hold them there for 10 seconds and infecting them with frost fever. Now i will say this is nice for a tanking spec because if you pull, and get those 5 mob pulls, you can freeze them all in place, and it gives your other CC classes time to do whatever.. But other then that I dont see much use for it.. Even in PVP it wouldnt be so great ( BG pvp ) because you can never really cc anything, people are doing all kinds of damage to whatever is around. I mean you can find some specific or situational times you can use it, but it doesnt really seem worth tapping that far down either.

Blood tree 51 point talent dancing rune blade, now this does seem pretty nice. You have a extra attack from your flying weapon, its doing the same exact thing your doing, so its like double the power for 10 seconds plus how much ever runic power you got saved up. Now This 51 point talent would be really nice if you pair it with Runic Power Mastery in the frost tree , that gives you 30 more runic power.. So you can have your blade out for quite some time. Great damage.

So thats my view on 51 points, i dont think frost and unholy really hold a lot of interest for me to go that far down.


Now my view on Strikes

After seeing ghostcrawlers comment about tri-specs, I thought maybe it would be nice to try one.
Look you already get to Strikes regardless, Deathstrike, blood stike, plague strike .. which 2 of those death and blood their DPS comes from how many diseases you have apllied..
If you look at Bloods heart Strike which is pretty deep its damage is similiar to your already Untalented strikes. Its based off of how many diseases are applied although it does do more damage over all for how many diseases are applied. So it really is a more powerful strike, but would it be worth going down that far to get it.

Frost Strike just does its 60 % weapon dmg, but it cant be blocked parried dodged so its a for sure hit, but it doesnt benefit from diseases. So i wouldnt go that far down for it.

Scourge strike is pretty much like heart strike benefits from each disease applied and also does extra damage for each disease. But you got 3 untalented strikes already .

Of course you have runic strike which is just like a warriors overpower.. but that once again is a situational strike, so i dont really count that as anything for now..

So why not look at all those other talents that are close to the beginning to half way down.. Im talking about talents that increase Attack power, crit chance, crit damage, annihalition so you can do that nice big Obliterate hit with out losing all your diseases. Get those talents that really beef up your attacks over all.

Would that make you a balanced powerful all the time, instead of being burst powerful or situational powerful some of the time ( becuase your waiting for cool downs and runes to come up )

We should look for talents that compliment each other.. Examples would be Bladed armor which increases your attack power by how much armor you have , so toughness ( increase armor value by 15 %) would compliment this.
I think reaping and death rune mastery compliment each other too, because your going to be changing alot of runes into Death runes, so you can use just about any ability whenever you want

Something along this line

23/18/30



Now mind you this is a very very rough idea. I was looking for talents that benefit a lot from each other, you still have plenty of Strikes with out having to tap deep into any tree to get an extra strike.. and also to avoid getting 51 point talents that are too situational and on cool downs..

Im looking for this spec to be a DK that is going to be 100 % all the time. he may lack in that burst dps, he may not have that CC, or extra survival from alot of the blood talents farther down. But instead he is getting good crit % crit damage, nice attack power, a pet, and a gargoyle if you want.. i mean a lot of this can be changed around.. but I think people can see my point here of thinking out side of the box of always having to have a class where you need to go for that 51 point talent..

Your alls thoughts ?

It's definitely interesting, though I'm not sure about better. He's definitely outside the box on the odd rune usage (i.e. not in the standard pairs). But I think his reasoning for why it should be better is a bit flawed.

1) He assumes 2000 dps in a raid environment, which seems pretty low. DKs in Naxx gear can do 4000 or more. But the larger point is that doing napkin math with just a flat dps value overlooks what's actually going on, since dps is just an average of the amount of damage we're doing. Those 8 seconds with no Desecration aren't a 5% damage loss overall-- they're basically 5% off of 2 Scourge Strikes, and maybe a Death Coil. Not insignificant, but also not the same. Disease damage is based on your stats and buffs at the time you apply them, and doesn't change as your buffs change through its duration. Debuffs on the target of course can make ticks variable, but Desecration is a self buff. This would need a more careful comparison to actually determine which is better.

2) The rotation depends on the Scourge Strike glyph, which as we've already discussed is not your friend. Across 4 Scourge Strikes you have a 32% chance for the glyph to not proc. In other words, 1 in three rotations will have to use IT anyway, and gain no net Desecration uptime (in fact, might even lose some). The trickier part is that when it does proc, your diseases are both refreshed to their full duration, but you're normally staggering them-- having one at half duration when the other starts. If the diseases drop after a proc (again, 1 in 3 chance of this over the next 20 seconds), you could actually lose disease uptime depending on the timing. Blood Plague will be continually refreshed anyway, but Frost Fever would require constant babysitting and could lose you dps through inadvertant downtime.

3) And of course, we already discussed the practical pros and cons of managing Desecration uptime on boss fights. It's really more of a situational thing.

I think that across most of the specs, you'll actually see more dps from the rotations you're able to consistently execute no matter the circumstances. The standard one might be seemingly complicated, but there's a benefit to always knowing what you need to use next. Refreshing diseases at the same time every rotation makes it a variable you don't have to worry so much about, and yet you're still getting the maximum output from it. This is also why I like Epidemic for any spec-- there's no substitute for the "Set it and Forget it" style of disease management.

Tri-specs walk a very fine line. They must make up DPS that deep specs get from their 40 and 45 point talents, which is significant in every tree. The tri-spec I've personally been looking at and testing is 15/37/19. One of the biggest weaknesses of this spec is also that there is no death rune generating talents, meaning rotations would likely be PS->IT->BS->BS->HB->(DC to dump RP and HB's from Rime Procs). However, from my initial tests it's actually fairly powerful.

Firstly, due to a lack of death rune talents, you dont ever have to worry about letting one death rune sit active while another is coming off cooldown. Since you are dual wielding, HB is far more efficient than obliterate... and with an appropriately fast offhand Killing Machine will almost guarantee a crit IT and HB each use. BCB procs will be higher as well, with 5% personal haste.

Again however, there is a fine line you walk when running a spec like this.

Wouldnt Reaping from Unholy, and Death rune mastery from blood give you that death rune conversion your wanting ?

Also I didnt think too much about Dual wielding because I wasnt for sure if dual dps was going to be greater then 2 hander dps.

As you're not using Oblit with that spec would Virulence maybe be the better spot for 3 points over Annihilation? All Annihilation is giving you is 3% crit on your melee specials. Considering you're adding another spell (HB) I would think getting the extra +hit would be the better investment.

Once you've done that you could remove the 2 points from Epidemic (you're re-upping your diseases every rotation anyway) and if you wanted could put them back towards Annihilation.


Disclaimer: Everything I know about DKs comes from the last 10 or so pages of this thread and reading skill/talent tooltips on Wowhead so forgive me please if I'm just off the wall wrong.

First, I definitely agree that there isn't a clear cookie cutter spec most of the time-- as you can see from many pages of this thread, the merits of different talents are debatable. But I do think there's a reason why the hybrid tri-spec doesn't come up very often. All three trees have essentially spec-defining abilities and talents in the last few tiers. Sure, the 51-point talents might be more situational now. UB is no longer essential, but still decent; Hungering Cold is situational; DRW seems the best now in that it's a powerful dps cooldown you'd use most of the time.

But it's the tiers right before that make the difference. 10% bonus to damage and 5 straight expertise, for one. You need 50 points in the tree to use those. Might of Mograine/Guile of Gorefiend are also significant buffs, and you'd want one or the other. In Unholy, Wandering Plague and Crypt Fever/Ebon Plaguebringer make up the difference there.

Then, each tree has a spec-defining strike. You're saying that each spec already has untalented strikes, but lets take a look at what the three actually do:

Heart Strike: A better version of Blood Strike. Your primary damage ability in Blood Spec, does the most damage. Triggers Sudden Doom, Abomination's Might, etc.

Frost Strike: A superior Runic Power ability (compared to the usual Death Coil). Scales with weapon damage. Benefits from Black Ice, Killing Machine, etc. In single-target situations ranks high in your list of damage abilities.

Scourge Strike: A better Obliterate, and it ignores armor. Your primary damage ability in Unholy spec, does the most damage. Leaves your diseases up without Annihilation. Benefits from an additional disease earlier in the tree.

Considered on their own, you might make arguments why you can do without them, but when you're a certain depth in the tree, you're also looking at what you'd be trading them off for. Additionally, some of the strikes you list as untalented (Death Strike, Plague Strike) come nowhere close to the damage achievable with these.

I can maybe see a tri-spec dual wield type build, but it seems like one of the big benefits of dual wield is the Killing Machine procs, which you wouldn't be able to take sufficient advantage of without a deeper investment in frost for at least Howling Blast.

Since Howling Blast has a 6 sec cooldown, you would likely still use the occasional Obliterate. You also want Epidemic, because it enables you to use an additional Howling Blast/Oblit every rotation:

PS - IT - HB - BS - BS - HB - BS - BS - HB

The HB vs OB would be flexible there depending on your cooldown, and you'd weave in Death Coils as well.

Besides that, hit/spell hit is often somewhat overvalued in terms of actual dps contributions. As you'll see repeated time and again in the rogue threads, the hit cap isn't a magic number to aim for. If crit is actually worth more dps overall than hit, there is no reason to first go for hit. I'd think 3% crit to melee abilities vs. 3% spell hit might be a push with this spec.

Edit: whoops, got too used to having Death Runes to use.

To be honest I got quite excited when i first saw this rotation because I have been looking for a way to do a less wasteful desecration rotation. Unfortunately, I don't see how this could be any better than just using:
PS->IT->BS->BS->SS->RPdump->PS->IT->SS->SS->RPdump
I've found the above rotation to out dps the 20 second 3xSS rotation too. Yes, it's more than 20 seconds but with the latency bubble for runes I strongly doubt it will be anything but an increase when considering all the factors involved.


The key has always been the same for my calculations: Disease up-time as close to 100% or go home! Even with this admittedly clever rotation there is still a lack of at least 1 tick per rotation per disease (if not more with bad SS glyph procs even with reactive/proactive timing).

As for more global cooldowns to work with? Unholy isn't exactly starved in the first place.

Is desecration worth it? It's situational but it's good (absolutely a dps increase) when it works. The more up-time the better.

Is the SS glyph worth it in pve? I'm going to say no due to the dps lost on random refreshes when they are not needed.

(Just to remind you, this is ALL Theorycraft and really nothing more until Nov. release for me at least)