What was it like to play DK in WOTLK?

[Neuroticaine]

Like frost which was tanking, blood was dps and such. What was that like?

As much as I have tons of nostalgia for Blood DPS, DKs in WotLK were kind of boring. They followed largely static rotations.

[Niwes]

Like frost which was tanking, blood was dps and such. What was that like?

In one simple word ? Better.

[Monster Hunter]

Like frost which was tanking, blood was dps and such. What was that like?

I was only an alt dk. My main was the main healer so didn't get much chance to flex, but of what I did I can say it definatly was the culmination of everything lernt when making all the other class's under the old talent system. It was good fun and yes it was OP as hell at periods. But then so we're a few class's during that time. Ret pala being one of the most feared in pvp was hilarious after years of being seen as the meme class/spec

[Puupi]

As much as I have tons of nostalgia for Blood DPS, DKs in WotLK were kind of boring. They followed largely static rotations.

Everyone did.

[psyquest]

Mained a DK then, best times as a DK ever.

Presences offered raid buffs.
You could tank or dps with any spec.

AND

AND

There was blood armor penetration dps spec.... the best spec ever.

[Oakshana]

from 55 to 80 and before raids, you could tank or dps as all 3 specs, use dual wield with all 3 specs if you wanted to, they were really strong

Actually... Blood, to the best of my recollection, never worked that well as a DW spec. You really wanted a slow 2H. Frost, of course with it's talents, was king of DW. But there was a brief period of time where there was a 31 Unholy/20 Frost DW spec that was just spectacularly overpowered and a lot of fun to play. Until Blizz reshuffled the Frost tree to make the talents you needed to make it work really well deep enough into the tree you could no longer get them for 20 points.

That was a sad, sad day. Because prior to that, you were an unholy chain saw.

[Neuroticaine]

Everyone did.

Eh, out of all the classes I played, my Blood DK was the only one where I could effectively macro the entire rotation to a single button (got bored after one night and stopped using it, though). Everything else I played followed a (admittedly pretty simple) priority system instead.

[Puupi]

Eh, out of all the classes I played, my Blood DK was the only one where I could effectively macro the entire rotation to a single button (got bored after one night and stopped using it, though). Everything else I played followed a (admittedly pretty simple) priority system instead.

Haste affecting ability cooldowns and rotation changing procs were pretty much non-existent back then.

[Tronski]

Blood dps with shadowmourne, dw frost with armorpenetration was tight, it was a fairytail

Dw frost tanking was even better. Most fun and cool-looking tankspec to date.

[Ausr]

As a person who beta played one and then realm first'd one in Wrath till they defined Blood/Frost/Unholy during Ulduar until a guild split had me abandon it, it was a helluva fun ride.

1) As one of the first people who got a DK to 80 in like short period along with the rest of the guild who pretty much all got realm firsts of their classes, tired as fuck, and then to go in and clear Naxx to gear up was amazing. I loved Blood as my dps spec till the changes.

2) PvP was fucking hilarious because no one knew how to handle you. You just wailed on these people as they ran or you just negated all their shit.

3) This one is more for fun, but going for the lowest arena rating possible as a nigh unkillable class in a motorcycle that had it's own healthbar made those 30 min+ arena matches fun.

[javierdsv]

Blood dps was the best experience I ever had in WoW...

[Neuroticaine]

Haste affecting ability cooldowns and rotation changing procs were pretty much non-existent back then.

Yeah, I was fairly certain that Elemental Shaman atleast had their Lava Burst procs back then, but after having a gander at the old talent calculator, nope. But I mostly played Shadow Priest and Affliction lock back then, so it was a matter of keep dots up, cast 1 spell on cooldown, and fill the rest with another spell. Doesn't feel quite as static with DoTs having varying different durations that don't always line up with your other spells, but yeah, no procs or anything. Well Affliction could have the occasional instant shadow bolt but that's it.

- - - Updated - - -

Dw frost tanking was even better. Most fun and cool-looking tankspec to date.

DW Frost tanking was a nightmare for stats if I remember correctly, with all the extra necessary hit on top of your usual tanking stats.

[Helander]

In PvP you were good, but with some glaring weaknesses as well.

Yes "weaknesses" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIXYMY4dOmI

[thunterman]

I preferred frost tanking, but the whole expertise issue was an oversight.

After a parry, the swingtimer would be reset (or atleast it did back then unsure if this is still a thing or not tbh) this applied to players and NPC's so the DK would get extra autoattacks after a parry (which was their primary defence) but so would the boss you were tanking. If you tanked a boss without being expertise capped, you'd get hit upto 25% more during a fight, which in MANY scenarios is the difference between life and death. Literally killing yourself because the boss parried you... WTF Blizz?

In retrospect, this was poor design, because trying to get close to the hard cap for expertise kinda felt bad.

The whole combat philosophy has changed since back then, right now, I can't think of a single spec that had a better feel, but blood tanking is kinda meh, you just roll around healing yourself willy nilly and nothing can hurt you, not exciting as it used to be in that regard, but the rotations and flow of all 3 specs are SOOOOOO much better now.

[Fantomen]

If you tanked a boss without being expertise capped, you'd get hit upto 25% more during a fight, which in MANY scenarios is the difference between life and death. Literally killing yourself because the boss parried you... WTF Blizz?

It called riposte in a swordfight. If you make a correct parry it usually it leve you in a superior postion, that allow you a "easy" strike agenst the opponent who is in a inferior postion.

[Greengrim]

Single word: AWESOME!

[Tehterokkar]

Yes "weaknesses" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIXYMY4dOmI

CastRandom was removed in 3.2

[Acherus01]

At some point during the DEHTA quest chain in Borean Tundra, there is an elite mob with a mammoth that we have to kill. A human or a vrykul.. or something.

Anyway, I remember almost one-shotting that elite mob with a Rune Strike crit as blood spec and it blew my mind. Elite mobs in TBC was massively dangerous to attack alone, especially as a warrior scrub.

Just after popping all of my cd's (hysteria etc) and spending all runes/runic power, he was at 70-80% hp - and I parried or dodged an attack and pressed rune strike, and at the next auto-hit he died.

So, yeah. Dk's were pretty strong at release.

[kukkamies]

Levelling was fun, dks everywhere. Remember doing few TBC instances with 5 dk groups. You could also 2v1 other classes since dk was that strong.

[Monteverdi]

Playing DK in WOTLK was awesome. It was so long ago that it's honestly hard to remember some of the details!

The biggest thing was that no one spec was defined tank or DPS. They each were meant to fill each role.

I remember tanking was in a weird spot. In Naxx, it seemed like the FotM was unholy (unholy was almost a specialist anti-magic tank back then), then in Ulduar Frost started coming into favor (there were some cheesy dual-wield frost tank builds too, so that was fun. Keep in mind back then all 3 specs could dual wield). Blood was popular for tanking 5-mans but not so much in raids.

Actually, when we were progression ICC my main tanking spec was frost, and my main DPS spec was blood. Blood had an amazing DPS cooldown in its talent tree, called Hysteria IIRC, that if I remember correctly caused the target (yes this was an external DPS CD) to get a big haste buff but also start taking damage over time. It was a lot of fun.