Unholy DK Getting Started

[Araxthos]

Hey guys, my main is a Blood DK and i would like to start doing some PvP, focusing on bgs and 2v2 arenas with a Resto Druid, as Unholy. I have PvPed in the past with a Retri Paladin during wrath, but that was soooo long ago, and Lots of things have changed.
So I would like to ask for some guidance as from where to start and what should i do to be competitive, something like a mini-guide, cause i haven't found something recent enough.

P.S. Here is the armory link: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...nalyn/advanced

[pkm]

Go blood presence

Proceed to /lol as you wittle down their health while they cant do shit to ya...

[Rorke]

Since nobody has responded to this, I feel like I should at least post something. The OP probably gave up on this site that offers basically nothing in pvp, but I'll still post despite that and the scrutiny I'm about to receive from all of the self proclaimed professional DK's that haven't even bothered to post anything yet.

Unholy DK in pvp is all about getting/saving as many Death Runes as possible and using them on Necrotic Strike as much as you can. The spec is complete shit outside of "the set up" which is basically pooling all of your death runes through blood tap, Empower Ghoul and Summon Gargoyle/Unholy Frenzy, chain stun the kill target with Asphyxiate and Gnaw, then mash Necrotic Strike 4 times, another 2 from the blood taps, another 2 from Plague Leech and then using Plague Strike, Runic Empowerment + Two festering Strikes.

What I wrote above is something that is never going to happen. The "set up" is an impossible rotation because always something will go wrong. But its something that you should always strive to get even though its never going to happen. It doesn't happen because inevitably have to keep constant pressure which will force you not to be able to pool every single necrotic Strike. You also be forced to use Ice of Chains which will fuck up your frost rune/death rune conversion management.

What is ideal is that you should always be converting your Blood Runes and Frost Runes into Death Runes as much as you can. Fail DK's use Festering Strike to do this. The optimal thing to do is to use Pestilence/Blood Boil for Blood Runes and Icy Touch for Frost Runes. Why? Well Icy Touch is a purge and Blood Boil is spread damage, something that you actually want because the spec is a damage bot. The more damage you do, the better DK player you are. And since Chains of Ice doesn't convert Frost Runes into Death Runes, you want to try and limit its use as much as you can or else you'll be constantly sitting with only two Death Runes open instead of four. This is the main reason fail DK's complain about not having enough Death Runes to use Necrotic Strike as often.

Blood Tap is meant to be pooled up to 12, but in a realistic situation you'll likely be using it every time you have 5 or 7. As I said before, you're going to be forced to keep constant pressure which means its not going to be possible to pool every single Death Rune because you'll be actively using Necrotic Strike or even Icy Touch to purge. Most new DK's think that the spec is all about pooling everything and get their head wrapped around in doing that. In reality the spec is much simpler than they realize. Just keep everything simple and you'll do fine.

New DK's also waste time with Dark Sim because they think it needs to be used at the right time, 100% of the time and used 100% effectively. In reality, most of its use is luck and experience. You have to predict what people are going to do based on experience but no matter how much experience you have, there's a luck factor involved. I recommend using it based on when you think the time is right but don't dwell on the fact that you fucked it up. It's something that in most cases won't make or break a situation. Waste time in dealing mindless damage because that's what the entire class is about.

These talents are all mandatory or else you're bad.

Plague Leech is tier one talent because it essentially gives you two free Death Runes at the cost of losing plagues which can instantly be re applied with either Plague Strike or Outbreak. There is essentially no cost from this amazing talent that for some reason everyone hates using. This is also my favorite talent in the entire game. If you see any idiot DK using Unholy Blight, fucking destroy them. It's the equivalent of the idiot bg hero Warrior who thinks Staggering Shout in conjunction with Blood Bath and Bladestorm is good.

Lichborne is tier two talent. It's basically a Fear,Charm break and you can heal yourself with Death Coil while its active. The Death Coil healing used to be retardely amazing pre MoP, but it sucks now. Don't worry about pooling Death Coil before using it if you're in serious trouble. In most cases you won't survive cleave damage if you wait.

Asphyxiate is tier three talent. This ability is an overpowered 5 second ranged stun that is required if you actually want to kill anything. It today's game, Gnaw alone just isn't good enough to land a kill. You need as many stuns as possible to stop the amount of defensive bullshit in this game. It's sad, because Deaths Advance is actually really fun to play with and you won't move like a turtle, but its just not viable in arena.

Conversion is tier four talent. It's a shitty ability that makes you overpowered in duels or 2's, but sucks in 3's because its a sustained heal. It's essentially the reason DK's are terrible defensibly against cleave damage. They won't buff Icebound Fortitude defensively because Conversion exists. Death Pact is supposed to be the answer to cleave damage but its shit because of battle fatigue and mortal strike effects. I also think Conversion just makes DK's less fun to play because you have to waste runic power on it while in boring ass blood presence. I almost wish that out of everything in this tier, only Death Siphon is viable. Death Siphon being viable would actually raise the skill cap a little bit.

Blood Tap is tier 5 talent. It lets you control your death runes. Use it.

Desecrated Ground is tier 6 talent. It's a free trinket outside of snare effects. This talent, with Trinket, with Icebound Fortitude, with Lichborne, makes DK's one of the hardest classes to CC, but still the shittiest class defensively against cleave damage.

Glyphs you should use are the Icy Touch one, the Dark Sim one, Shifting Presences or anti magic shell. Everything else is crap. No seriously everything else is shit. This class has no options at all.

Gem wise I literally go Strength as much as possible. For yellow and blue, make sure strength is a apart of the gem. Choosing between Haste, Mastery, Crit doesn't matter as much as people make it out to be because of the high item level gear. At 550 level, you'll essentially have enough secondary stats where the choice of which one is better is devalued. I don't know shit about stats, so you're better off asking someone else. I'm still using haste like a scrub, but its probably mastery or crit now.

General Tips:

Scourge Strike is useless. Your Unholy Runes are better off spent on Plague Strike, Death and Decay and Dark Transformation.

Festering Strike is not entirely useless, but its still shit after the Icy Touch buff.

Blood Presence isn't mandatory 100% of the time. You lose a shit ton of damage from sitting in it despite what all these other DK's say. You also lose movement speed and move at the base 100% lol Warrior speed. I always switch to Unholy Presence when I'm going in for a kill or want to sustain pressure. I don't give a shit about incoming damage because in most cases I'll live. If they hard swap, fuck them and keep going for that kill. Be mindless, don't think and don't stop. Your team should be good enough to carry you.

You can use all of those CC breaks offensively too. Don't just use them defensively. This obviously requires some experience, but you'll eventually know when to use it at the right time.

Don't be a bitch and constantly waste runic power on Conversion. This is another reason why trash DK's claim to deal no damage or never have enough death runes. They waste their time using Conversion which drains the amount of Death Coils they get. Keep an eye on your runic power. Use Conversion either when you're getting the dick or you have more than enough runic power 80+.

Speaking of Death Coil, you want as many as possible. More Death Coils means more Blood Taps, which means more Death Runes which means more pressure. This also means you want to use Unholy Presence as much as possible because you don't get the sudden doom benefit from Blood Presence. Don't be a pussy and waste resources on surviving for no reason other than to just feel invincible. The class is brought in for damage, nothing else.

Plague Leech should almost always be used off cool down. It's fucking amazing and I love it. I don't care what other people say, it basically makes Necrotic Strike feel like it costs an Unholy Rune again.

Death Grip is not only for a gap closer but is great for peeling and interrupting. You can use it twice which means you can grip two people. It's powerful and annoying for the people on the receiving end of it.

The pet doesn't need to be managed 100% of the time despite what all of these "pro DK's" say. Keep everything simple for a simple class. I have separate binds and macro's for Attack, Follow, Move to but I macro main abilities like Death Coil with Pet attack to not have to deal with using pet attack every single time i want to swap a target. It's supposedly not optimal to do this, but I've never had a problem with it. As long as the Pet is on passive and you have all of its abilities bound in some fashion, you should be good.

Using anti magic shell to pool runic power for Lichborne heals isn't as good as it was before. Don't waste time with it if you're in trouble.

The Gargoyle should be used during a kill in conjunction with Unholy Frenzy. Both are on shitty long ass three minute cool downs, so don't use them like a dumbass. Despite what some Dk's say, it is powerful because its more damage on top of what is already retarded damage.

There's a bunch of Pet Macro's and general class macro's out there that I'm not going to list because I'm too lazy too. If you're stupid enough to come here, you'll probably get smarter and find a site or twitch multi glad hero who has all of them. I'm sure arena junkies is the right place to go. Don't waste money on the scam that is skillcapped. You don't improve by wasting your time and money on people who intentionally keep knowledge away from you to keep you in your place.

Another thing to do is to not just take my advice, but to read what other people write all over the web. There's a shit ton of information out there with varying ideas and experiences. What you need to do is you condense all of the ideas and see what works for you. You decide on what to use that will make you a better player, not me or anyone else.

I hope the five people that read this entirely liked it.

[Drenan]

http://www.arenajunkies.com/topic/24...oly-547-guide/

[Deleted]

Keybinds = OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!

Great post by Ryan, although I don´t agree with all of it.. Plague leech is good in arena, but in RBG roiling blood is better for node defending, group pressure etc.

For easy use of BT you can macro it to your NS

[Deleted]

Scourge strike isnt useless tbh you say it should be used on D+D which is only good for breaking stealthies cos its damage is crap u can glyph it to slow but thats a waste of a glyph although i am new to unholy myself i do know that alot of your stuff ryan is situational, i play rated bg's so i find scourge strike useful

[Deleted]

Scourge strike isnt useless tbh you say it should be used on D+D which is only good for breaking stealthies cos its damage is crap u can glyph it to slow but thats a waste of a glyph although i am new to unholy myself i do know that alot of your stuff ryan is situational, i play rated bg's so i find scourge strike useful

It certainly is, also for landing kills.

[Deleted]

Go blood presence

Proceed to /lol as you wittle down their health while they cant do shit to ya...

Blood pres isn't that good now everyone's damage has scaled up. DKs tend to get burst down for this reason.

[Drenan]

If you do random bgs or rbgs Def go with roiling blood. I guess I'm bad because I find using festering strike to gain death runes is most optimal. In arena Plague strike (unholy), 2 festering strikes (2 blood, 2 frost), scourge strike (unholy), then plague leech/ Outbreak and here come your death runes. Try to run up on your target mounted so you don't have to chain of ice and mess up your starting rotation (when possible).

[Illiterate]

A good way to learn is to watch streams of high rated players, I know chimpoe is one of the few dks that streams.

[Deleted]

Plague leech is also definently not a must. Top ranked UH DK´s don´t use it.

For Conversion you can double the healing it gives with a simple macro (also doubles the cost), but will now tick for 6% health every second, that´s a damn good heal when you learn to keep it up for a while

#showtooltip Conversion
/cast !Conversion

[Tyrean]

Plague leech is also definently not a must. Top ranked UH DK´s don´t use it.

For Conversion you can double the healing it gives with a simple macro (also doubles the cost), but will now tick for 6% health every second, that´s a damn good heal when you learn to keep it up for a while

#showtooltip Conversion
/cast !Conversion

Sigh, that is sad. Just because top ranked players don't use it is not a reason to make a blanket statement like that. PL is optimal over roiling blood in arena mostly because of how easy it is to apply diseases. Roiling Blood is optimal in BGs because you have more targets to apply to and pestilence, plague and outbreak can't keep up with the demand of targets.

Also, that macro is fine, but you should also make sure that people know when they choose to use this macro that they cannot do anything else but this. The big advantage to conversion is that it takes one GCD to apply then you can do other stuff, like damage or defensives, etc. If you spam that macro, that is all you do with each GCD.

Ryan is pretty much spot on about a lot of things. As was said earlier you can macro tap to necro and it will be fine. The only real skill that comes into play with a DK are these points:

1.) Is my positioning going to get me fucked? Cause I can die in a swap 5 second stun.
2.) Do I have diseases ticking on all the targets that should?
3.) Don't spend resources as they come, pool them up for bigger returns. Using one death rune on necro does basically nothing. Using 4 death runes on necro is a much scarier scenario.
4.) Finally, is my stun off CD? Use it.