DW is for unholy really, Necrosis + Blood Caked Blade.
It's a shame there's so little DW support though. Blizzard have said they intended 2H to be used for tanking, but if people really want to DW they might change it.
Rami on
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Some people are worried that dual wielding will be the way to go for tanking at higher gear levels, I think parry gib is being overstated with the elimination of crushing blows and already not being crit.
As long as dual wielding isn't better in 5 man/heroic gear, or maybe at early 10 man levels, I'm ok with it.
That dual wield talent in the frost tree being only 3 points at the second tier makes it really easy for a Blood or Unholy DK to take it.
It's pretty useless for blood though. Blood, far more than the other 2, is focused on 2 handers. Frost could give a dick what weapon it uses, most of it's damage is coming from spells. Unholy focuses on strikes, but it has just enough oddball talents (necrosis, bcb, wandering plague) where dual wielding could probably win out in the end. But blood? Blood is basically heart strike spam with no incentives to dual wield.
Frost wants 2H for obliterate as well, I'd say unholy is really the only tree where DW is useful.
Obliterate, meh. The way I see it, you've got two rotation options as frost.
icy > plague > blood > blood > obliterate, icy > icy > oblit > oblit for a frost/unholy
or
blood > blood > oblit > oblit, icy > icy > icy > icy > icy > icy for a frost/blood (yes I am aware of the redundancy of 2h weapon spec and nerves of cold steel, this build is purely for dps testing the concept with a 2h and then dual-wielding, and since the redundant points don't really have anywhere they can go to contribute to dps, meh).
Either way, there isn't enough oblit in there to make using a 2h to get big oblits seem like a good trade for the better dps of 1h's.
Soon as I can copy a damn dk over and do some testing, I'll see if my crazy hackneyed theories can work. Only now do I regret not skilling up my 1 handers on the dk I levelled, fuck if I'm going to run off and do that shit on the damn test server. This will still have some issues though, mostly that the pvp dk template doesn't come with the exact weapons I'd prefer to use, and to a certain degree the blood/frost build hinges on a sub 1.0 attack speed with both weapons to maximize killing machine during the second rotation.
I'd say most of frost's damage is coming from your weapon. You're probably not using howling blast in a standard single target duration(at least not as of about a week ago), Icy Touch's damage was brought back down, and you've got a very high focus on obliterate and frost strike which can't be avoided.
I would think that the second of two rotations for Frost, if you have epidemic, is three obliterates, and no icy touches.
I'd say most of frost's damage is coming from your weapon. You're probably not using howling blast in a standard single target duration(at least not as of about a week ago), Icy Touch's damage was brought back down, and you've got a very high focus on obliterate and frost strike which can't be avoided.
Uhh, Howling Blast, by far, hits the hardest of all my spells as Frost.
I'd say most of frost's damage is coming from your weapon. You're probably not using howling blast in a standard single target duration(at least not as of about a week ago), Icy Touch's damage was brought back down, and you've got a very high focus on obliterate and frost strike which can't be avoided.
Uhh, Howling Blast, by far, hits the hardest of all my spells as Frost.
Last time I checked out new runs of the numbers on Elitist Jerks, like, a week or a week and a half ago, I think it still wasn't worth using on a single target.
But more importantly, I think that Blizzard wants a frost DK using obliterate instead of HB against one enemy.
I'd say most of frost's damage is coming from your weapon. You're probably not using howling blast in a standard single target duration(at least not as of about a week ago), Icy Touch's damage was brought back down, and you've got a very high focus on obliterate and frost strike which can't be avoided.
Uhh, Howling Blast, by far, hits the hardest of all my spells as Frost.
Last time I checked out new runs of the numbers on Elitist Jerks, like, a week or a week and a half ago, it still wasn't worth using on a single target.
But more importantly, I think that Blizzard wants a frost DK using obliterate instead of HB against one enemy.
It gets huge modifiers from all your talents and then there's Cinderglacier procs to factor in. Obliterate crits for 3k Howling blast crits for 4k before Cinderglacier or Curse of Elements. There has been nothing where they said they want Oblit to do more dmg than Howling Blast vs one target.
Also thinking about it Killing Machine really isn't worth it for tanking with the new Rune Strike, since it only procs on auto-attacks you're really not going to be getting many procs.
I'd say most of frost's damage is coming from your weapon. You're probably not using howling blast in a standard single target duration(at least not as of about a week ago), Icy Touch's damage was brought back down, and you've got a very high focus on obliterate and frost strike which can't be avoided.
I would think that the second of two rotations for Frost, if you have epidemic, is three obliterates, and no icy touches.
Man, oops. I shouldn't post when it's late. Got my death runes all jumbled up but you're right. You could triple oblit in the unholy build. You could also (in theory) triple oblit with the blood in the second rotation too, but I don't think that would wind up as the best dps route as frost/blood. Icy touch may have been nerfed, but it still hits decently hard. 2 icy touches were better than 1 obliterate with a 2h, for me anyway. Plus, if you can dual wield at a sub 1.0 speeds, you get 2 white hits in between each icy touch, which is 2 chances to get killing machine. Also, all those icy touches make rime procs pretty common, and you want to proc rime because howling blast, as mgcw said, does the most damage out of any of our abilities.
Edit: my 77 dk was doing 750 icy, 1kish oblits and 1500 howlings, just as a point of reference.
Arkady on
LoL: failboattootoot
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GrathI'm a much happier person these daysRegistered User, ClubPAregular
If your faction has Halaa, the overpowered level 66 green two-handed sword you can buy there will be a nice option for going from 66 to 68. I know it's called the Arcadian Claymore for one faction.
The itemization isn't messed up. The BoM is better than the hellreaver because its a rare random world drop while the hellreaver has like a 1 in 6 chance to drop.
It appears you have much to learn about itemization and the item budget, my son.
When BC came out World drop blues and epics were always better than items of the same item level. This is to make up for the fact that they are considered to be so rare.
DW is for unholy really, Necrosis + Blood Caked Blade.
It's a shame there's so little DW support though. Blizzard have said they intended 2H to be used for tanking, but if people really want to DW they might change it.
Fuck DW.
The problem is, DW scales better then 2H. Always. They are essentially unbalancable. If DW is just as good as 2H, then it will be better soon, and everyone will have to switch over. And many people don't want to.
If your faction has Halaa, the overpowered level 66 green two-handed sword you can buy there will be a nice option for going from 66 to 68. I know it's called the Arcadian Claymore for one faction.
The itemization isn't messed up. The BoM is better than the hellreaver because its a rare random world drop while the hellreaver has like a 1 in 6 chance to drop.
It appears you have much to learn about itemization and the item budget, my son.
When BC came out World drop blues and epics were always better than items of the same item level. This is to make up for the fact that they are considered to be so rare.
So, how many of you can see yourselves speccing blood over frost or unholy for tanking? I'm having a hard time coming up with a blood spec that compares, considering Vampiric Blood seems alot weaker than Unbreakable Armor or Bone Shield.
815165 on
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited October 2008
Blood looks like a fun leveling spec and offtank spec, but really, bloodgorged sucks compared to its clones in the other two trees for tanking and blood simply lacks the mitigation that frost brings or the damage of unholy.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
The truth (since you didn't tell him) is that the color of an item affects how many actual item points it has. So an epic i200 item has effectively more points than a blue i200 after the calculation's all said and done.
Man Unholy better not be a "DW" spec, I've been looking forward to DK's for a long fucking time, finally having a really fun, interesting class to play, that focused on two handed weapons. Furthermore, I've been completely enthralled with Unholy, and if it's only good DW, then fuck that shit. I will just be a horrible Unholy DK, using two handers.
EWom on
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
Man Unholy better not be a "DW" spec, I've been looking forward to DK's for a long fucking time, finally having a really fun, interesting class to play, that focused on two handed weapons. Furthermore, I've been completely enthralled with Unholy, and if it's only good DW, then fuck that shit. I will just be a horrible Unholy DK, using two handers.
The only tree that even looks at dual wielding is Frost, and that is at 6 to 8 points in the tree. You can choose to dual wield and take that single 3 point talent or you can pound things with a two hander.
edit: and honestly I think any Death Knight who chooses to dual wield will be hurting themself more then helping. So many of the skills are damage based on a percentage of the damage the weapon does +a bit more. So it would be like a Mortal Strike Warrior dual wielding.
The blood/frost build using a blood blood oblit oblit, icy x6 rotation in unholy presence (1,890 dps).
Same build and presence, changed to a bloodx2 > HB > oblit, icyx3 > plaguestrike > icyx2. The plaguestrike is in the middle due to that being the time it takes for the lone plague rune to come off of cooldown (2,222 dps)
The frost/unholy build doing plague > icy > bloodx2 > hungering, oblitx2 > hungering in blood presence (2,089).
The blood/frost using plague > icy > hungering > blood > blood, then however many oblits I can fit in before the diseases drop, at which point I started over in blood presence (2,452 dps).
The numbers are a bit flawed though, to be honest. I was testing on the dummies up in Acherus, which was a pretty big disadvantage to the heavy icy spam build in which I wasn't using howling blast. The unholy build was also at a disadvantage, as necrosis doesn't overkill, so all the necrosis hits were for 1 point of damage. However, a reasonable extrapolation would be to take the white damage, subtract 270, and then multiply it by .25 to get the necrosis damage total, which would be 103,458 which is roughly on par with the amount of damage dealt by blood strike. All tests were done for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes and (unfortunately) all done with 2 handers, because getting quality 1 handers is god damn impossible on murmur.
That said, I think a dual wield oriented icy touch spam frost build could very well be competitive, if not win out the dps war as frost. The trick that I am wondering is about is, would it better to sub blood to get more crit and more death runes, plus some AP? Or sub unholy to get necrosis, BCB and virulence. plus a decent chunk of strength?
Arkady on
LoL: failboattootoot
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GrathI'm a much happier person these daysRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The truth (since you didn't tell him) is that the color of an item affects how many actual item points it has. So an epic i200 item has effectively more points than a blue i200 after the calculation's all said and done.
The truth (since you didn't tell him) is that the color of an item affects how many actual item points it has. So an epic i200 item has effectively more points than a blue i200 after the calculation's all said and done.
Except both items in question are blues.
It's important to note that one item does not a trend make.
forty on
Officially the unluckiest CCG player ever.
0
GrathI'm a much happier person these daysRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The truth (since you didn't tell him) is that the color of an item affects how many actual item points it has. So an epic i200 item has effectively more points than a blue i200 after the calculation's all said and done.
Except both items in question are blues.
It's important to note that one item does not a trend make.
After doing a bit of research ( cant at work) I realize yeah you're right I am wrong. This sword is just a fluke. I had justified it to myself that the reason it was better was because it was more rare.
Its almost as if they meant for the BoM to actually be an epic item not a blue.
Edit: that being said I still have the Bom for my DK and when he hits 70 I have a Khorium destroyer.
I figure why not get him stuff since I can't really do much else right now.
Jesus christ you guys are throwing some insane DPS around. I hope to god that's level 80.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't consider 1.5k to be insane. My warlock in a mix of welfare pvp, and kara/za/badge gear can hit 1k when I try (single target, not AE, with fire based destruction build). So I'd expect at 80 1.5k to be pretty standard in decent gear if the rumors are true that blizzard is trying to get every DPS class to be the same.
Now if it was 70, in greens, that'd be a different story, and pretty insane. But isn't that what ret pallies are seeing with their scaling anyways? Insane DPS at 70, that scales down as they go up in level, to match everyone else?
EWom on
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
Edit: that being said I still have the Bom for my DK and when he hits 70 I have a Khorium destroyer.
I figure why not get him stuff since I can't really do much else right now.
IMDO, getting a BoM to twink a death knight is a solid plan (and upgrading to a Halaa sword at 66 if possible). I'm curious how a Khorium Destroyer compares to the initial Northrend weapons, though.
forty on
Officially the unluckiest CCG player ever.
0
GrathI'm a much happier person these daysRegistered User, ClubPAregular
edited October 2008
Talking to my friend who i trust when it comes to gear he says that the gear doesn't have a huge jump like vanilla wow -> bc and if you have an epic weapon it should last a while.
My warrior is a blacksmith and my pally is an alchemist so its not too tough to get the mats.
Posts
No. Parry Gib would probably fuck you up anyway.
There's a few DW talents in the trees to please the freaks who want to DW though.
OTHO, DW means more Killing Machine uptime which means more threat.
Steam: pazython
It's a shame there's so little DW support though. Blizzard have said they intended 2H to be used for tanking, but if people really want to DW they might change it.
As long as dual wielding isn't better in 5 man/heroic gear, or maybe at early 10 man levels, I'm ok with it.
It's pretty useless for blood though. Blood, far more than the other 2, is focused on 2 handers. Frost could give a dick what weapon it uses, most of it's damage is coming from spells. Unholy focuses on strikes, but it has just enough oddball talents (necrosis, bcb, wandering plague) where dual wielding could probably win out in the end. But blood? Blood is basically heart strike spam with no incentives to dual wield.
LoL: failboattootoot
Obliterate, meh. The way I see it, you've got two rotation options as frost.
icy > plague > blood > blood > obliterate, icy > icy > oblit > oblit for a frost/unholy
or
blood > blood > oblit > oblit, icy > icy > icy > icy > icy > icy for a frost/blood (yes I am aware of the redundancy of 2h weapon spec and nerves of cold steel, this build is purely for dps testing the concept with a 2h and then dual-wielding, and since the redundant points don't really have anywhere they can go to contribute to dps, meh).
Either way, there isn't enough oblit in there to make using a 2h to get big oblits seem like a good trade for the better dps of 1h's.
Soon as I can copy a damn dk over and do some testing, I'll see if my crazy hackneyed theories can work. Only now do I regret not skilling up my 1 handers on the dk I levelled, fuck if I'm going to run off and do that shit on the damn test server. This will still have some issues though, mostly that the pvp dk template doesn't come with the exact weapons I'd prefer to use, and to a certain degree the blood/frost build hinges on a sub 1.0 attack speed with both weapons to maximize killing machine during the second rotation.
LoL: failboattootoot
I would think that the second of two rotations for Frost, if you have epidemic, is three obliterates, and no icy touches.
Uhh, Howling Blast, by far, hits the hardest of all my spells as Frost.
Last time I checked out new runs of the numbers on Elitist Jerks, like, a week or a week and a half ago, I think it still wasn't worth using on a single target.
But more importantly, I think that Blizzard wants a frost DK using obliterate instead of HB against one enemy.
It gets huge modifiers from all your talents and then there's Cinderglacier procs to factor in. Obliterate crits for 3k Howling blast crits for 4k before Cinderglacier or Curse of Elements. There has been nothing where they said they want Oblit to do more dmg than Howling Blast vs one target.
Also thinking about it Killing Machine really isn't worth it for tanking with the new Rune Strike, since it only procs on auto-attacks you're really not going to be getting many procs.
Man, oops. I shouldn't post when it's late. Got my death runes all jumbled up but you're right. You could triple oblit in the unholy build. You could also (in theory) triple oblit with the blood in the second rotation too, but I don't think that would wind up as the best dps route as frost/blood. Icy touch may have been nerfed, but it still hits decently hard. 2 icy touches were better than 1 obliterate with a 2h, for me anyway. Plus, if you can dual wield at a sub 1.0 speeds, you get 2 white hits in between each icy touch, which is 2 chances to get killing machine. Also, all those icy touches make rime procs pretty common, and you want to proc rime because howling blast, as mgcw said, does the most damage out of any of our abilities.
Edit: my 77 dk was doing 750 icy, 1kish oblits and 1500 howlings, just as a point of reference.
LoL: failboattootoot
When BC came out World drop blues and epics were always better than items of the same item level. This is to make up for the fact that they are considered to be so rare.
Fuck DW.
The problem is, DW scales better then 2H. Always. They are essentially unbalancable. If DW is just as good as 2H, then it will be better soon, and everyone will have to switch over. And many people don't want to.
Plus, DW Death Knight just looks wrong.
Holy shit, WoWhead has been overrun with Thottbot style comments.
The only tree that even looks at dual wielding is Frost, and that is at 6 to 8 points in the tree. You can choose to dual wield and take that single 3 point talent or you can pound things with a two hander.
edit: and honestly I think any Death Knight who chooses to dual wield will be hurting themself more then helping. So many of the skills are damage based on a percentage of the damage the weapon does +a bit more. So it would be like a Mortal Strike Warrior dual wielding.
Well, there's 1 DW talent and a few talents that benefit DW more then 2H.
Nerves of Cold Steel (obviously)
And then:
Blood Caked Blade
Killing Machine
Necrosis? (maybe?)
Necrosis deffinitely does, since the primary benefit of DW is more white damage, which means more necrosis.
LoL: failboattootoot
The Frost/unholy build I used
The blood/frost build using a blood blood oblit oblit, icy x6 rotation in unholy presence (1,890 dps).
Same build and presence, changed to a bloodx2 > HB > oblit, icyx3 > plaguestrike > icyx2. The plaguestrike is in the middle due to that being the time it takes for the lone plague rune to come off of cooldown (2,222 dps)
The frost/unholy build doing plague > icy > bloodx2 > hungering, oblitx2 > hungering in blood presence (2,089).
The blood/frost using plague > icy > hungering > blood > blood, then however many oblits I can fit in before the diseases drop, at which point I started over in blood presence (2,452 dps).
The numbers are a bit flawed though, to be honest. I was testing on the dummies up in Acherus, which was a pretty big disadvantage to the heavy icy spam build in which I wasn't using howling blast. The unholy build was also at a disadvantage, as necrosis doesn't overkill, so all the necrosis hits were for 1 point of damage. However, a reasonable extrapolation would be to take the white damage, subtract 270, and then multiply it by .25 to get the necrosis damage total, which would be 103,458 which is roughly on par with the amount of damage dealt by blood strike. All tests were done for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes and (unfortunately) all done with 2 handers, because getting quality 1 handers is god damn impossible on murmur.
That said, I think a dual wield oriented icy touch spam frost build could very well be competitive, if not win out the dps war as frost. The trick that I am wondering is about is, would it better to sub blood to get more crit and more death runes, plus some AP? Or sub unholy to get necrosis, BCB and virulence. plus a decent chunk of strength?
LoL: failboattootoot
Except both items in question are blues.
Despite I still can't break 1.5k since the rotations I'm still getting use to.
After doing a bit of research ( cant at work) I realize yeah you're right I am wrong. This sword is just a fluke. I had justified it to myself that the reason it was better was because it was more rare.
Its almost as if they meant for the BoM to actually be an epic item not a blue.
Edit: that being said I still have the Bom for my DK and when he hits 70 I have a Khorium destroyer.
I figure why not get him stuff since I can't really do much else right now.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't consider 1.5k to be insane. My warlock in a mix of welfare pvp, and kara/za/badge gear can hit 1k when I try (single target, not AE, with fire based destruction build). So I'd expect at 80 1.5k to be pretty standard in decent gear if the rumors are true that blizzard is trying to get every DPS class to be the same.
Now if it was 70, in greens, that'd be a different story, and pretty insane. But isn't that what ret pallies are seeing with their scaling anyways? Insane DPS at 70, that scales down as they go up in level, to match everyone else?
My warrior is a blacksmith and my pally is an alchemist so its not too tough to get the mats.