Frost Spec

PvP: Click here for talent tree

After much debate and respec’ing…I felt the most comfortable build for PvP is this one…This gives me the most control and allows me to obtain up to 6 death runes. 6 death runes means that you can spam plenty of Chains of Ice(CoI) and Icy touches(IT). The extra 10 yards is amazing and makes it feel as if you are a mage in plate, even if people blink or intercept away, you are still able to hit them with you spells and kite them. It was really hard for me to decide whether I should get Chilbains vs Death Rune Mastery. After a bit of testing I concluded that the 30% wasn’t worth it…it was like half a daze…I’d rather be able to spam CoI on someone than have a ghetto 30% slow.

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Another reason is that I like playing frost spec in Unholy Presence which allows me to chase people like a ret paly with 15% movespeed. In arena the DK will most likely be paired up with another toon that has better snare or slows so overlapping move impairment effects is not effective/needed. With multiple death runes up you can spam IT back to back resulting in massive DPS. IT can crit for 2k+ and spamming 6 in a row in 6 seconds can result in over 12k damage. While your GCD is much faster, your move speed and ASPD (attack speed) is also faster by 15% bringing your total aspd to 40% haste! I remember seeing my 3.5aspd 2h at around 2.6 or basically like a rogue weapon…faster attacks means more white hits and more white hits means more proc chances for Killing Machine(KM). Howling Blast(HB) itself does crappy damage if there is no Frost Fever disease on the target. Endless Winter allows CoI to give the debuff so you don’t need to cast IT and can go straight for HB. The reason why HB is so powerful is because of the multiplier from the talents. Glacial Rot (10%) + Black Ice (30%) + [if target is under 35% then Merciless Combat for 12%] + Guile of Gorefiend (45%)[if crit] + Tundra Stalker (10%) = 142% more damage + 200% damage from Runic Focus, which is a passive ability that gives DK spells a 2X multiplier instead of the 1.5X that casters receive. In my early stages of 80 (ghetto blues) I’ve crit up to 5k-6k. Another strong point of frost is that Frost Strike cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried. This is a major rogue killer effectively nullifying approximately 30-35% of a rogue’s mitigation. And what’s more awesome is that it counts as FROST damage…basically ignores armor much like scourge strike. Crits vary between 4-6k. A helpful macro for a defensive move/escape would be:

/cast Icebound Fortitude

/cast Unbreakable Armor

I keep Lichborne off for PvP purposes, there is a Lichborne macro so if you press it the 2nd time it will cancel the effect…why you ask? So you don’t eat anti-undead spells, but rather you used it effectively as a fear break.

an offensive macro I personally use as frost is:

/cast Howling Blast

/cast Rune Strike

This free’s up a button since HB is on a 6 second CD you can press this for RS. Usually you would want to press HB whenever it’s up so sometimes you can combo HB and RS in an instant.

Hungering cold is a powerful CC. Its like an AoE freeze trap

Not only do your disease do damage in the ice, and the target is considered frozen. I believe that even when blizzard tried to nerf the synergy between mage and DK they still left some room for some synergy. For example: Poly switch. When the mages target trinkets the poly the DK can unleash HB (assuming both targets are close or at least close to the target that trinketed) and attack the other one. Once the target is frozen allow the mage to charge up a Frostbolt/Ice Lance shatter combo on the target and then let the DK continually barrage on the target.

PvE: Click here for talent tree

The rotation should be quite simple: IT>PS>OB>BS>BS and the next round will set yourself up with 4 death runes and 2 frost OB(if frost fever is still applied on the target)>IT>HB>IT>IT>IT>IT>HB or slight variations off that. Blood Strike should only be used the convert blood runes into death runes.

This was an interesting bit…theory crafting with dual wield. Currently I believe that 2h’s benefit the DK a great amount due to the amount of instant strike abilities. But I’ve theory crafted with others that think that this spec could be viable:

PvE: (Dual Wield) Click here for talent tree | Click here for alternative talent tree

for more crit damage and RP dump

Notice how I didn’t go down past the 31 talents. When I spec’d to Unholy I couldn’t believe how much impurity mattered…it is great for spells…especially when you ride in over 3k AP self buffed easy. Much of the AP is converted to SP…25%!! And on top of that the blood tree for the bladed armor also offers around 360AP ish? 13,000/180X5=360~ And 25% of that gets converted into more SP = ~90 sp. Around 100~ if you were wearing all plate, I have a few pieces of hunter gear…(REVENGE! Haha jk) So a decently geared DK for example: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Executus&n=pudge (yum so sexy)

Can run around with over 1k SP not including the base ap=>sp conversions that the DK itself receives. I heard most of the damage is from spells and not of white damage, whereas other specs is the other way around.

Another reason for dual wield is because of the increased quantity of white attacks from both weapons, you will naturally have more crit procs in a fight whereas you would receive less crit procs from a 2h. Here is where it gets interesting, Killing Machine(KM) will proc frequently and most of your HB or IT will crit. Remember spell damage does not directly correlate with weapon damage at all. An interesting debunk is that +SP items/enchants don’t benefit the DK at all. I’m not to sure if this is entirely true because the amount of SP gear that a DK receives would be too little to gather a good amount of data…plus you will miss out a lot on raw AP from str/AP and crit/agi.

Specs
There are 3 talent trees: Blood, Frost, Unholy. I will discuss the pros and cons of each spec with regards to PvP and PvE. In beta I played as Frost and on live I leveled as Frost all the way till 80 trying to be anti-conformist to the sea of Unholy Death Knights. Finally I gave in and had to see what Unholy offered that the other 2 trees didn’t and I was quite shocked at the results. So I will share my experience to the best of my knowledge about Frost and Unholy…I only dabbled a little in Blood because this tree still needs and will get worked on in the future patches.

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BLOOD
PVE SPEC: Click Here to view talent tree
PVP SPEC: Click Here to view talent tree
PVP SPEC (alternative): Click Here to view talent tree

HINT: I usually add in the 1 pointers because sometimes utility>dps. Being able to break a fear or help heal yourself up helps the group as a whole.

In this spec we can see the synergy between the blood tree and frost. Blood is very much like an arms warrior in that in relies mostly on physical DPS. The reason why I got bladed armor instead of Scent of Blood was to synergize with Toughness in the frost tree. Toughness also reduces movement impairing duration. Hate getting knocked back with thunderclap? Wasting 5 seconds trying to walk back in the range of the bosses hit box? So high end DPS classes, every second counts, that is why range has such a huge advantages thus far. While melee spends 50% of the time moving around and moving back repositioning itself to DPS, for the most part the range DPS can just stand there firing away.

For the second tree I went down frost instead of unholy because Necrosis is horrible. Plus hitting faster gives you more white hits and overall damage. In blood spec, your main source of DPS is melee, Heartstrike, and Death Coil. Yes you can argue “why not get Morbidity? That’s 15% more DC damage” but that amount is insignificant. So far Heartstrike can crit for around 4-5k? Depending on DR but the effect is going to change into a cleave like effect in which it will hit 2 targets instead of the old haste removal effect…which is now out of the game. I got Annihilation so when you spam Obliterates you don’t eat up diseases…because diseases boost up you damage on Heartstrike. Sometimes I combo IT>PS>OB>HS>HS and repeat. Or if you are really aggressive for PvP you can do OB>OB>HS>HS>HS>HS>HS>HS…since all 4 runes will convert into death runes this will allow to you chain spam HS and try to burst someone down. I believe the 2nd combo and empower runic weapon>OB>OB>HS>HS>HS>HS while dancing runeblade is up…will result into some impressive sustained burst on any target.

Preferred stance: Blood presence. –this allows more heavy strikes

Advanced stance: Unholy presence. –this allows fast chained strikes, sometimes better because you can beat everyone GCD… 0.5 seconds off GCD is huge…basically blood lust status…well 50% of the blood lust haste effect.

I’m not a SUPER Blood expert, but this is what information I have gathered thus far from my experience and observation and a gaming scientist.