How are DK's today?

[Phurox]

After I scrapped my Rogue, I'm running in the wilderness, looking for my next class.

I have played my Hunter up the last 2 weeks from 65 to allmost 87, finding it fun. But I do miss the melee.

I have a Death Knights level 85. My only problem with him were, that he felt so incredibly slow. Shoot a few abilities, waiting for runes to recharge, auto hitting for some time.

How is he today? Can we cast more abilities, or do we still have to wait alot on the runes?

Also, both DW and 2 hander are viable in PvP and PvE right? It comes more down to your taste?

I'm sick of using daggers, want to get some shining big-ass weapons!

[schwank05]

I loved my DK back in wrath, i even played him as main through most of ICC and I leveled him to 85 first and played him through T11. Now he will sit at 85 until they either bring back Blood DPS or make it so Frost is more manageable. I hate UNholy and always have, I find that I fall in love with one spec on each of my characters and refuse to respec, my hunter for instance has been BM since lvl 70 and I refuse to play him again until BM is good.

Really up to you but for me at least I refuse to play my DK until Blood isn't the sole tanking spec.

[Ravendale]

Honestly, it is still the same way. Either RNG will hate you, or you have the most hands on resource management system of any class (blood tap). And without a decent chunk of haste it will still feel slow. (But with that same amount of haste you may feel overloaded with resources when RNG doesn't hate you.)

[Valyk]

DKs are in a good spot right now.

Frost is top right now, with DW and 2h so close that it doesn't matter which you choose. Unholy is not that far behind either and with the quality of life buffs that are supposedly in 5.2 I see a lot of optimistic Unholy DKs.

If you want a fast-paced spec, you'll find that in Frost. Either one is non-stop, DW actually is a little faster because you use 4 GCDs on Howling Blast instead of 2 GCDs with Obliterate, so despite Mastery stacking you have just more buttons to press.

I love Frost, right now I am 2h, because DW felt too fast, and because of weapon drops. My DPS is top in the guild, probably until our mage switches back from Fire to Arcane, and I won't ever give up my DK.

Here's a guide, if you have excessive downtime as Frost, you're doing it wrong, so just read up on how to play. -- http://www.icy-veins.com/frost-death...-pve-dps-guide

[Phurox]

I loved my DK back in wrath, i even played him as main through most of ICC and I leveled him to 85 first and played him through T11. Now he will sit at 85 until they either bring back Blood DPS or make it so Frost is more manageable. I hate UNholy and always have, I find that I fall in love with one spec on each of my characters and refuse to respec, my hunter for instance has been BM since lvl 70 and I refuse to play him again until BM is good.

Really up to you but for me at least I refuse to play my DK until Blood isn't the sole tanking spec.

You do know that BM is quite awesome now, right?

------------

So, as it is now, you might be lucky and be able to spam alot of abilities, or unlucky and auto attack for some amount of time?

---------- Post added 2013-02-04 at 04:36 PM ----------

DKs are in a good spot right now.

Frost is top right now, with DW and 2h so close that it doesn't matter which you choose. Unholy is not that far behind either and with the quality of life buffs that are supposedly in 5.2 I see a lot of optimistic Unholy DKs.

If you want a fast-paced spec, you'll find that in Frost. Either one is non-stop, DW actually is a little faster because you use 4 GCDs on Howling Blast instead of 2 GCDs with Obliterate, so despite Mastery stacking you have just more buttons to press.

I love Frost, right now I am 2h, because DW felt too fast, and because of weapon drops. My DPS is top in the guild, probably until our mage switches back from Fire to Arcane, and I won't ever give up my DK.

Here's a guide, if you have excessive downtime as Frost, you're doing it wrong, so just read up on how to play. -- http://www.icy-veins.com/frost-death...-pve-dps-guide

Well on 85 I did some DK, and had a lot of downtime with my abilities.

It sounds promising with what you're saying, but I will mostly play PvP. Are we also viable there?

[Deleted]

From the feedback a guildy gave when he was levelling his DK recently you get the slow, clunky, waiting for attacks feeling right up until the point when you hit the rune regen talents. Once you get those things seem to be a lot better.

I levelled in mop as unholy and play frost/blood now, we're in a pretty good place overall right now imo. The only thing that needs work is the comparison between frost and unholy but that's being sorted with 5.2.

[Phurox]

From the feedback a guildy gave when he was levelling his DK recently you get the slow, clunky, waiting for attacks feeling right up until the point when you hit the rune regen talents. Once you get those things seem to be a lot better.

I levelled in mop as unholy and play frost/blood now, we're in a pretty good place overall right now imo. The only thing that needs work is the comparison between frost and unholy but that's being sorted with 5.2.

So it is possible to spec out of the slow clunkyness? Sounds like I should give it a try

[Lachez]

Well DK's rune regen is built around them having one of the tier 75 talents. It isn't meant to work without one of them so all of the specs feel weird pre-75 because runes aren't regenning the way they're designed to yet. I can't speak for UH but frost has a fair amount of downtime until you start getting raid/lfr epics that have a high enough stat budget that you can reforge into enough haste to get your runes regenning faster for more attacks. I just switched mains to a dk recently and as I was gearing I noticed a distinct drop in my downtime as I got more gear. This is for pve frost though. I don't know much about pvp or unholy though.

tl;dr the downtime goes away with gear.

[Phurox]

Trying this spec:

http://www.noxxic.com/wow/pvp/death-...s-minor-glyphs

But god damn.. We have what? 20 abilities that we should actually use in combat. Thats alot :P

[Enosh]

imo it feels a bit slow until you get a decent amount of haste
so when you cap your character expect to deal with a bit of downtime until you gear up a bit

[Deleted]

As Lachez said it's really not about 'speccing' out of the slow clunkyness per se but more about rune regen. The resource mechanic is meant to be runes --> runic power --> runes but without the runic power --> runes conversion you're losing out on the cycle part of the mechanic. The l75 talents will be your first step towards that and then the end game gear will take you the rest of the way.

Personally I dislike the blood tap mechanic, technically (spec depending) it's the 'best' but I have been playing a DK since wrath and I would never go for anything other than RC with blood/unholy or RE for frost. Gaming runes is an important part of frost DW and RC makes rune matching simple for blood and clean for unholy.

For levelling I would suggest using Death's Advance as I personally found the run speed/sprint much more useful than slowing, obviously for pvp and some specific boss fights chillblains is king.

Finally, I don't know where you're getting the '20' number from for standard combat. While we have a lot of buttons to use in situations, I only really find myself hitting 5-6 tops with any regularity across all 3 specs.

[Phurox]

What addons do you guys use regarding procs? I find him surprisingly fun and not clunky at all (85 atm), but it feels abit of a pain to keep watching down on my action bar to see what procs when.

[nyc81991]

Dk's are one of the top melee dps. Only second to Fury warriors at the moment.

In Pvp they are still pretty good and they are getting some buffs in 5.2.

[Deleted]

For addons I can't recommend DDR (Doc's Debug Runes) enough. I've used it since early cata time iirc and it handles everything you need that's DK specific: diseases, runes, timmy empower (unholy) and some basic blood shield monitoring. For the standard CS/KM/SD procs I don't have any problem with the blizz default auras so I use them and for tanking I use Blood Shield Monitor to try and improve my death strike heal effectiveness.

Shameless plug but if you want to see my UI here's some boss kill vids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDHn1SCiM3I -frost
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwQKvMx25ek - blood

[Paladin885]

I loved my DK back in wrath, i even played him as main through most of ICC and I leveled him to 85 first and played him through T11. Now he will sit at 85 until they either bring back Blood DPS or make it so Frost is more manageable. I hate UNholy and always have, I find that I fall in love with one spec on each of my characters and refuse to respec, my hunter for instance has been BM since lvl 70 and I refuse to play him again until BM is good.

Really up to you but for me at least I refuse to play my DK until Blood isn't the sole tanking spec.

um, blood will not change, sorry.

and as for frost and BM.... they're kind of OP right now.



you can come out from under your rock now. :P

[Darsithis]

I refuse to play my DK until Blood isn't the sole tanking spec.

Good luck with that. Guess you won't be playing a DK ever again.

OT: DK's are perfectly fine right now. Not the top, not the bottom. The only gripe I have is we have a lot of downtime as 2H frost when your haste is below 8k or so.

[Lachez]

OT: DK's are perfectly fine right now. Not the top, not the bottom. The only gripe I have is we have a lot of downtime as 2H frost when your haste is below 8k or so.

I also don't really care for how 2H has to orphan a rune when using SR. Not really an issue with DW though, just takes the place of a HB.

[Deleted]

http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Imper...14/60/default/ - Have a look at the bosses in T14. We're pretty much a well rounded class with a few cases of WTFDKOP on a couple of bosses.

[Phurox]

Damn I keep switching between hunter and DK. I have a hard time what I should choose!

Hunter is fun, but DK looks coolest :P He is fun too ofc, but they are fun in each way.

I mostly play PvP

[Deleted]

I also don't really care for how 2H has to orphan a rune when using SR. Not really an issue with DW though, just takes the place of a HB.

That's why with 2h you should be using RE. It means less orphan runes full stop not to mention the supposed higher proc rate over RC (which I assume you're using because that's the only thing that could leave you with orphan rues).

As for the hunter/DK choice - if it's mostly pvp you play I see hunters as a better choice, I maybe a terribad pvp'er but I haven't felt capable (let alone strong) against decent ranged classes in quite a while.