[Discussion] The future of DPS DK, 6.1 style

[Silverkane 0]

Hi everyone,

 

I would like to know how do you think the DPS DK will evolve in the 6.1 patch ?

 

What spec ? What gear ?

 

I heard the T17 bonus from other classes (like Warlock) is pretty insane and i would like to know if our dps will fall down.

 

Thanks for your concern.

 

 

P.S : Sorry if my english is bad, i'm french and our english education sucks .

Edited February 3, 2015 by Silverkane

[demonardvark 556]

I see in general a mixed bag, some general changes, but nothing huge. 2/3 set bonuses are good not amazing, and 1 really has potential.

 

Blood DK's:

From the patch notes I've seen and looking at the tier set, I don't see much happening here. There is a lot of play on vampiric embrace and making a bigger part of the rotation (based off tier sets). This isn't staggering to me as I mostly use vampiric as an emergency cooldown. The 4 piece from memory however does leave us with a semi permanent blood shield which is actually pretty cool but doesn't seem outstanding. I don't see blood dk's changing up much.

 

tldr, not much changing

 

Unholy DK's.

With the buff to necrotic plague, I see the necroblight game style for unholy being the main competitive one, necrotic plague hits like a double freight train because of the buffs. The tier set is interesting, it basically leads to a 100% uptime on dark transformation when you enter soul reaper phase, and some extra runes in the soul reaper phase once we hit 4 piece. It's nice for extra runes and perma transformed Timmy, but again nothing staggeringly different. Necrotic hits a lot harder which is great but no big rotational changes really

 

tldr, minor changes, mostly extra viability and slightly more resources

 

Frost DK's

Things get really interesting to me here. As of late i've been playing with a necrobliterate play style, give frost necrotic plague and for 2h this is surprisingly very effective. The boost to necrotic will help compensate for the lack of 100% uptime. However, what really has my attention is the 4 piece set for frost. Basically pool resources for pillar of frost, burn everything, and at the end do extra damage based on how many attacks you fired off, amazing. Combine this with the fact pillar lasts 20 seconds which is glorious AND that we can pop empowered runic. 2h Frost is going to get some seriously stupid burst. As much as I love unholy, frost is really grabbing my attention next patch. Even now, necrobliterate is getting me higher numbers on many fights than my unholy dk.

 

tldr, impressive, lots of promise, crazy 4 piece bonus. I think frost may be the go to dps spec

 

 

So across the board I see a lot of quality of life changes for DK's. The only two really big things that jump out at me (atm) are the boost to necrotic and the insane 4 piece for frost. I think DK's were already in a pretty good place and I see the changes filling in gaps for blood and unholy, and opening new viability for frost. 

Edited February 3, 2015 by demonardvark

[ChaiNspliT 5]

Unholy DK's.

With the buff to necrotic plague, I see the necroblight game style for unholy being the main competitive one, necrotic plague hits like a double freight train because of the buffs. The tier set is interesting, it basically leads to a 100% uptime on dark transformation when you enter soul reaper phase, and some extra runes in the soul reaper phase once we hit 4 piece. It's nice for extra runes and perma transformed Timmy, but again nothing staggeringly different. Necrotic hits a lot harder which is great but no big rotational changes really

 

tldr, minor changes, mostly extra viability and slightly more resources

 

 

I'm not sure if it completely went over your head or you straight up ignored it, but the 2p for Unholy has been buffed to be a lot more competitive. (That's now known for like 1-2 weeks.)

Source: http://ptr.wowdb.com/spells/165575-item-death-knight-t17-unholy-2p-bonus#19533-19551

 

This is already on live, but the tooltip won't reflect that, until the patch. Since our pet already does 10% of our damage, this buff is quite huge and will add up a lot of damage over the fight. It now is actually better than the Frost set.

 

 

 

Frost DK's

Things get really interesting to me here. As of late i've been playing with a necrobliterate play style, give frost necrotic plague and for 2h this is surprisingly very effective. The boost to necrotic will help compensate for the lack of 100% uptime. However, what really has my attention is the 4 piece set for frost. Basically pool resources for pillar of frost, burn everything, and at the end do extra damage based on how many attacks you fired off, amazing. Combine this with the fact pillar lasts 20 seconds which is glorious AND that we can pop empowered runic. 2h Frost is going to get some seriously stupid burst. As much as I love unholy, frost is really grabbing my attention next patch. Even now, necrobliterate is getting me higher numbers on many fights than my unholy dk.

 

tldr, impressive, lots of promise, crazy 4 piece bonus. I think frost may be the go to dps spec

 

 

You would have noticed, that the 2p and 4p is below average in comparison to other sets, if you had compared them at all.

Frost, aswell as pretty much every other spec in the game, is viable. But by no means competitive or optimal. As much as I like 2h Frost, it will perform bad in BrF (all fights are Cleave, except Gruul). The 4p won't change anything about this.

Edited February 3, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[demonardvark 556]

I'm not sure if it completely went over your head or you straight up ignored it, but the 2p for Unholy has been buffed to be a lot more competitive. (That's now known for like 1-2 weeks.)

Source: http://ptr.wowdb.com/spells/165575-item-death-knight-t17-unholy-2p-bonus#19533-19551

 

This is already on live, but the tooltip won't reflect that, until the patch. Since our pet already does 10% of our damage, this buff is quite huge and will add up a lot of damage over the fight. It now is actually better than the Frost set.

 

 

 

 

 

You would have noticed, that the 2p and 4p is below average in comparison to other sets, if you had compared them at all.

Frost, aswell as pretty much every other spec in the game, is viable. But by no means competitive or optimal. As much as I like 2h Frost, it will perform bad in BrF (all fights are Cleave, except Gruul). The 4p won't change anything about this.

 

Timmy doing more damage impacts our rotation how? What big changes does that make to how we play? That's a 4% passive boost to dps if you keep him transformed 100% of the time (no excuse not too now but hey). Its a nice boost but offers no big rotational changes.

 

By all means do explain what about the frost bonus you find not competitive? The 2 piece bonus gives you 30 free runic power and harmonizes beautifully with the 4 piece. Every attack you do during pillar gets you a free 30% weapon damage per hit once it expires. Looking up a crude 2 hand from black rock we see 1800 weapon damage, thats 540 bonus damage per hit. That's a free 11k damage every 60 seconds. That means you passively do an extra 50k over a 5 minute fight. This means it behooves one to pool resources pre pillar coming off CD. This leads to a change in rotation and gives a very nice burst addition to frost. Plus there is a lot of room for that to get crazy. Does each tick of defile register as a special attack? How about multistrikes? 

Edited February 3, 2015 by demonardvark

[ChaiNspliT 5]

Timmy doing more damage impacts our rotation how? What big changes does that make to how we play? That's a 4% passive boost to dps if you keep him transformed 100% of the time (no excuse not too now but hey). Its a nice boost but offers no big rotational changes.

 

It indeed doesn't change our rotation, but the buff is very well noticeable and rised the entirety of our set to a more average level, instead of the garbage we had before. In fact, UH now has the best DPS set between DW, 2H and UH, as somewhere mentioned (in regards of damage increase in %).

 

 

By all means do explain what about the frost bonus you find not competitive? The 2 piece bonus gives you 30 free runic power and harmonizes beautifully with the 4 piece. Every attack you do during pillar gets you a free 30% weapon damage per hit once it expires.

 

Thing is, and this is coming from a 2H DK for quite a while now, the 2p set is garbage for us. It actually is contra-productive, since it increases the odds of us wasting KM procs on FS, instead of Obliterate. So it basically is a burden with near no noticeable DPS increase. The 4p set in comparison does indeed a lot better damage... but it's still not as good as you think.

 

Here, take a look for yourself and embrace the glory you think the 4p set is:

http://i.imgur.com/YJ4XHKJ.png

 

The Frost set is below average, pretty much belong the worst. DW's situation looks better, but is still average at the best. I hope you understand my point.

Edited February 3, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[demonardvark 556]

It indeed doesn't change our rotation, but the buff is very well noticeable and rised the entirety of our set to a more average level, instead of the garbage we had before. In fact, UH now has the best DPS set between DW, 2H and UH, as somewhere mentioned (in regards of damage increase in %).

 

 

 

Thing is, and this is coming from a 2H DK for quite a while now, the 2p set is garbage for us. It actually is contra-productive, since it increases the odds of us wasting KM procs on FS, instead of Obliterate. So it basically is a burden with near no noticeable DPS increase. The 4p set in comparison does indeed a lot better damage... but it's still not as good as you think.

 

Here, take a look for yourself and embrace the glory you think the 4p set is:

http://i.imgur.com/YJ4XHKJ.png

 

The Frost set is below average, pretty much belong the worst. DW's situation looks better, but is still average at the best. I hope you understand my point.

 

Jawesome chart, me gusta. 

 

looking at the tier 17 set in regard to just dks i'm pretty happy, comparing it to some of the other classes though i can see your point XD i particularly like already powerful class/specs getting huge boosts XD 

 

But yeah optimizing frost and looking at 1h it appears the max difference the piece gets is 5%, not spectacular at all :(  well maybe when the souls are shot back out there will be a neat animation..... itsss somethign

[Lewie4 2]

Jawesome chart, me gusta.

looking at the tier 17 set in regard to just dks i'm pretty happy, comparing it to some of the other classes though i can see your point XD i particularly like already powerful class/specs getting huge boosts XD

But yeah optimizing frost and looking at 1h it appears the max difference the piece gets is 5%, not spectacular at all :( well maybe when the souls are shot back out there will be a neat animation..... itsss somethign

Pretty sure that spreadsheet was made before the 2p UH buff. Don't think it changed anything for frost but now the UH 2p is around 4% increase if I'm not mistaken. Edited February 4, 2015 by Lewie4

[demonardvark 556]

Pretty sure that spreadsheet was made before the 2p UH buff. Don't think it changed anything for frost but now the UH 2p is around 4% increase if I'm not mistaken

Timmy doing more damage impacts our rotation how? What big changes does that make to how we play? That's a 4% passive boost to dps if you keep him transformed 100% of the time (no excuse not too now but hey). Its a nice boost but offers no big rotational changes.

 

yup 4%

[Maeylor 0]

With all of this coming about, I guess I'm curious as to something. 
When do you all feel you should switch, if you should? 
Looking at sims, my performance on 2h Frost versus Unholy with NP + PL is a matter of 2k, barely. My gear isn't particularly prioritized for unholy, as I'm very heavy in Haste (1614,) with Multistrike being my next highest stat (1042,) versus my mastery (256.) 

 

 

[Impurex 5]

With all of this coming about, I guess I'm curious as to something. 

When do you all feel you should switch, if you should? 

Looking at sims, my performance on 2h Frost versus Unholy with NP + PL is a matter of 2k, barely. My gear isn't particularly prioritized for unholy, as I'm very heavy in Haste (1614,) with Multistrike being my next highest stat (1042,) versus my mastery (256.) 

 

Try NP+UB as well. I believe that's actually the better spec in theory. For me Unholy NP+UB actually outperforms frost with defile + PL because we have very active tanks lowering my defile uptime. I have something like 1200 haste, 800 mastery, 800 multistrike atm. Can't check. 

 

Even if it's a 2k difference you might want to at least get some playing hours in for Unholy as 6.1 will make you outperform frost with the 33% buff and Necrotic Plague being at least 30% of our damage.

[ChaiNspliT 5]

Even if it's a 2k difference you might want to at least get some playing hours in for Unholy as 6.1 will make you outperform frost with the 33% buff and Necrotic Plague being at least 30% of our damage.

 

With the buff in 6.1, which is actually 32%, the fix to BB and the increased importance of Mastery, Unholy will outperform Frost in every single aspect (considering the adds last long enough, which can be a problem in NHC).

 

NP does actually (atleast for me) do 50% of my damage. That's just huge. And as logs have shown, our pet does 10% of our damage, so the 40% buff to it is quite noticeable aswell. Frost simply can't keep up and will be the inferior choice, as reluctantly as I want to say this.

[Maeylor 0]

With the buff in 6.1, which is actually 32%, the fix to BB and the increased importance of Mastery, Unholy will outperform Frost in every single aspect (considering the adds last long enough, which can be a problem in NHC).

 

NP does actually (atleast for me) do 50% of my damage. That's just huge. And as logs have shown, our pet does 10% of our damage, so the 40% buff to it is quite noticeable aswell. Frost simply can't keep up and will be the inferior choice, as reluctantly as I want to say this.

 

How do your stats reflect, in relation to that much damage though? I suppose that may be where some are curious. If it's worth it to switch now and play it, or just wait until 6.1, which we don't really have a timeframe on yet. 

[ChaiNspliT 5]

How do your stats reflect, in relation to that much damage though? I suppose that may be where some are curious. If it's worth it to switch now and play it, or just wait until 6.1, which we don't really have a timeframe on yet. 

 

My Armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/garrosh/M%C3%A1dara/advanced

 

At the moment I'm still geared towards 2H Frost, but tested Necroblight in my guild run, aswell as in a random pug and the difference was surprising. Both were on normal.

 

Guild run:

 

2h Frost (PL+Defile): ~34k (Defile+Obliterate used as first priority and then HB procs)

Unholy (UB+NP): 31-33k

 

Random pug:

 

2h Frost (PL+Defile): /

Unholy (UB+NP): 37-39k

 

The only difference between these runs were the length of which the adds lived. My IRL friend (Ret pala) and another player (Fury warrior) did a lot (~40k each) of AoE damage and prevented my NP to tick for any substantial time. In the random pug things looked  different, I was top DPS by a great margin, I imagine their AoE wasn't very strong. Therefore it allowed NP to tick a lot longer.

 

TL;DR: Necroblight is already equal/superior in comparison to Frost on certain bosses (Darmac, Thogar, Kromog, Blast Furnace, Iron Maiden and Flamebender), especially if you're already geared for Unholy. But you need to let NP tick for a certain amount of time (can't give you any concrete answer on this matter).

Once 6.1 drops, Necroblight (+BB for 3 or more targets) will simply crush Frost with all its brute and be the superior choice for every encounter. That's the (atleast for Frost players) frustrating truth. UB+NP will be ecual-to-superior in ST in comparison to 2H Frost, aswell.

Edited February 8, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[Maeylor 0]

I'm trying it out now. Currently progressing on Kromog heroic. 
On pulls, I'm averaging 33-35k before fists. That's more than I was doing on Normal as Frost2h. Heroic may be different, but it's going well so far. 

[ChaiNspliT 5]

I'm trying it out now. Currently progressing on Kromog heroic. 

On pulls, I'm averaging 33-35k before fists. That's more than I was doing on Normal as Frost2h. Heroic may be different, but it's going well so far. 

 

UB+NP is a valid choice here, I'd love to add. You've got to position yourself in a way, that you're in the middle of all hands. Then you proceed to spread NP through your own hand and BB once.

[Anfauglith 6]

I think it might be a bug, but Kromog doesn't get hit by Defile, making NP mandatory on this fight.

As for the NP buff, I read somewhere on the blizzard forums that the buff is going to be changed to 18.5%.

Edited February 8, 2015 by Anfauglith

[ChaiNspliT 5]

As for the NP buff, I read somewhere on the blizzard forums that the buff is going to be changed to 18.5%.

 

Either you prove that rumour with a source or feel free to shove it back up your throat.

Edited February 8, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[demonardvark 556]

Frankly its a moot point. If the amount is lowered to 20% buff that's still a huge buff to necrotic further solidifying its place in the unholy rotation. As noted by me months ago it was likely already the best talent in realistic gameplay and a 18.5% boost or a 27% boost further show that. 

[Anfauglith 6]

Finally found a proof to the NP buff. Here's a post (a bit long, but couldn't find the exact PTR build they are talking about): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/16284268873

[ChaiNspliT 5]

Finally found a proof to the NP buff. Here's a post (a bit long, but couldn't find the exact PTR build they are talking about): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/16284268873

 

And where exactly is his proof? He was even beeing corrected later on, it's 3,2%, as we all already know. It's not, again, not 1,8%.

 

Jesus, there's NO WHERE anything about such a major nerf... stop believing everything, without any source. There's nothing about it on mmopchamp, anyway.

Edited February 13, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[Anfauglith 6]

If we're nitpicking, here's the exact proof :http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/?page=2. Scroll over to half the page, you'll see this : "Necrotic Plague: Damage over time per stack decreased from 3.7% of AP to 3.2% of AP."

[ChaiNspliT 5]

As for the NP buff, I read somewhere on the blizzard forums that the buff is going to be changed to 18.5%.

 

You are aware that I'm talking about this completely false rumour of yours? We all already know that it's 32% and not 37%.

 

Are you even trying to understand, what I'm writing?

Edited February 13, 2015 by ChaiNspliT

[drumsmani 47]

If NP ticks for 2.7% of AP on live, then the change to make it tick for 3.2% is an 18.5% buff. The change to 3.7% of AP would have been a 37% buff.

[Gazooten 6]

At any rate (coming from a former warlock main) a buff is a buff is a buff no matter how you get it. Whether it's 37% or 32% or 1.5% IT"S STILL A BUFF. It also still means NP + UB is going to be the choice for Unholy DK. So why exactly is everyone splitting hairs??

Edited February 13, 2015 by Gazooten

[ChaiNspliT 5]

If NP ticks for 2.7% of AP on live, then the change to make it tick for 3.2% is an 18.5% buff. The change to 3.7% of AP would have been a 37% buff.

 

I stand corrected then, I missunderstood him.