Unholy wasn’t changed all that much in the last patch. Scourge Strike has been altered so that it now deals 70% weapon damage plus 12% physical damage dealt as shadow damage, per disease on the target. According to the notes, this change was made to allow Scourge Strike to hit a little harder in Pvp. Also, now Unholy Blight prevents diseases from being dispelled. This change is intended to make Unholy a more attractive Pvp option.

Unholy spec focuses on disease damage, with strikes as a backup. These mechanics make Unholy the ultimate AoE spec; but a little less ideal for single-target battles. The primary specs are these:

Unholy AoE [17/0/54]

Glyphs: Death and Decay, Icy Touch, Disease

Rotation Openner:       

Rotation 1:     Dump(   )

Rotation 2:      

Unholy Single-Target [14/0/57]

Glyphs: Dark Death, Ghoul, Icy Touch

Rotation 1:        

Rotation 2:     Dump(   )

As soon as 3.3.3 hit, all the wowhead.com spec links died. I’m really not happy with that. As I’m sure my readers aren’t. I usually use those links to go back and revise my specs. I couldn’t even do that this time around. So, for the future, we’ll be using Mmo-Champ talent calculator links.

Of the three trees, Blood saw the least changes, from a dps view. The biggest change that comes to mind is that the Abomination’s Might raid buff is now passive instead of being triggered by strikes. What this means to you is that the order of Heart Strike and Death Strikes in your rotation will in no way affect your Abom’s Might uptime. Those of you who like to group the six Heart Strikes together can do so without affecting your buffs (I’m talking to you Cappadocian).

The other large change to Blood was an alteration to Will of the Necropolis, which is a tanking-only talent. The change got rid of the internal cooldown placed on the ability back in the Naxx days.

The bread and butter of this spec is still alternating Heart and Death Strikes and still centers around proc timing to pull off the best possible Dancing Rune Weapon. Make sure to continue to keep your speed pots around to improve your damage.

My advice to the Blood devotees out there is to live it up while you can. If you’re unhappy with these changes, feel free to let Blizzard know about that in a constructive non-QQ way.

Blood Single-Target DPS [51/0/20]

Glyphs: Dark Death, Dancing Rune Weapon, Death Strike

Rotation 1:       

Rotation 2:      Dump(   )

Frost has received the most changes in 3.3.3. These changes make Frost Death Knights both attractive and powerful. You’ll notice there’s been a nice bump in the amount of high-end Death Knights that have chosen to raid as frost. I really enjoy frost because the style suits me. Its been my favorite spec since the beginning.

Raid Utility

Frost will enjoy improved raid utility now that he raid buff Improved Icy Talons is now a passive ability as of this patch, instead of having its uptime linked to an ability. The upside to these changes is that it now provides even more haste to the you. With Improved Icy Talons, you now have a permanent passive haste buff of 25%. When you use Icy Talons, you gain an additional 20% for a total of 45% haste buff. However, the finally 20% in raids still does not stack with Windfury. This is still an additional 20% haste that you didn’t have before. For more specifics, see this post where I explain the changes more thoroughly.

This puts Frost Death Knights in an attractive raiding position because you now provide similar buffs to an enhancement shaman, but those buffs are passive and not dependent on attacks or uptime.

Talent Changes

The talent Endless Winter was mostly pvp-centric. It has been redesigned and is now part of the standard Frost build. It used to be “Your Chains of Ice has a 100% chance to cause Frost Fever and the cost of your Mind Freeze is reduced to no runic power”, but is now “Your strength is increased by 4% and your Mind Freeze no longer costs runic power” … yes plz.

Nerves of Cold Steel has been buffed. It previously granted 5/10/15% off-hand damage. That increase has been raised to 8/16/25%.

Ability Changes

Icy Touch now causes a very high amount of threat while in Frost Presence. I’ve heard a lot of people say that this really isn’t that super, but it’s an improvement. This change will help Death Knights tanks to retain a little more threat on the pull. Also, Chains of Ice now innately applies Frost Fever instead of merely being a talented effect. This makes a useless ability a little more worthwhile (I’m not a Pvp’er, maybe this change means a little more to you guys than me).

Another notable change is that the effect of the Rune of Razorice has been changed so that it applies its full effect faster and its chance is now 100%. Instead of applying 10 1% stacks of Frost Vulnerability, it now applies 5 2% stacks.

What does this all mean?

These changes are good news for Frost which has been lacking some punch in ICC. The priority list on your abilities pretty much stays the same as well, so you’re not going to have to alter your playing style.

Spec: [0/53/18]

Glyphs: Obliterate, Frost Strike, Disease (ugg, I hate this one, but it’s recommended)

Stats: Hit (till capped 164 rating with full Nerves of Cold Steel), Expertise (till capped 172.2 with full Tundra Stalker), Strength, Crit Rating, Armor Pen.

Ability Priority

Killing Machine -> Frost Strike
Keep Frost Fever up
Keep Blood Plague up
Obliterate
Blood Strike
Frost Strike
Rime
Horn of Winter

Greetings Deathlings and Deathnooblettes. We have a lot of chatter about Death Knights on our favorite news sites this week. The two biggest items to cover are the buffs to Icy Talons and Will of the Necropolis.

Frost DK’s will be happy to hear that Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons are getting buffed. This new change will add approximately 20% extra melee haste to your attacks. I’ll let Ghostcrawler tell it like it is:

You put 5 points in Icy Talons. While fighting (and applying Frost Fever), you swing 20% faster. If you have talented Windfury Totem on you, you swing a total of 40% faster.

You now put a 6th point in Improved Icy Talons as well. You have a passive personal 25% haste at all times. When you engage in combat and apply Frost Fever, you now have 45% melee haste. If you have Windfury also, you still only have 45% haste since Windfury and Improved Icy Talons are exclusive.

This is basically a 20% haste buff to any DK who has Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons.

  -  Ghostcrawler ( Source )

What this means to you is that if you have 5 points in Icy Talons, you gain 20% melee haste, and this haste now stacks with Windfury Totem, providing a total of40% melee haste as long as Frost Fever is up and active.

Now, when you add a point to Improve Icy Talons, the effect of that talent is now passive, apply a passive personal melee haste of 25% at all times. So when your frost fever is up, Improved Icy Talons provides a total of 45% melee haste, 20% of which is debuff dependent; 25% which is passive and always up.

Unfortunately, the passive effects of Improved Icy Talons does not stack with Windfury because the two are mutually exclusive, however, as a Frost Death Knight with Improved Icy Talons, you are assured of having 45% melee haste.

You all got that? It’s a little complicated to think about. What it means for you is that we get more melee haste, essentially a 20% buff. This is awesome, especially if you don’t have a shaman backing you up (my guild really doesn’t). Some things to think about are this. There’s some buzz right now on the Death Knight forums that there’s a concern that the haste buff will cause problems with unused Killing Machine procs. The theorycrafters over at EJ’s are suggesting that the standard spec drop a point from Killing Machine as a result. After that, we need to free up a few points to put those into Endless Winter, which has been redesigned to increase strength.

PTR Spec:0/53/18

My blog is primarily about damage, but I’m going to take a second to talk about Will of the Necropolis. With this new patch, they’re removing the internal cooldown on the Will of the Necropolis effect. This is a significant buff to Blood Tanking. Many abilities in Wow have what is known as an internal cooldown. That is, that at most, there is a limit on the number of times within a given period that an effect can occur. For WotN, that internal cooldown was 15 seconds. This means that once Will of the Necropolis is triggered, it can’t be triggered again for another 15 seconds.

The cooldown was meant to counter specific fights were Will of the Necropolis gave Death Knights a singular advantage. Examples are melee-intensive fights like Patchwerk (in-fact, the cooldown was put in place because of Patchwerk). Because most fights are now designed with WotN as a factor, the designers felt that the internal cooldown was now unnecessary and confusing to players. As of 3.3.3, this cooldown has been removed, and the designers feel that this change won’t have an impact on the class of tanks that guilds choose to use on high-end content and heroic modes.

I dabble in the tanking a little bit. When I choose to tank, I usually use Blood or Frost, so I’m a fan of this, and we’ll see how this impacts those abilities.

Also, I plan to spend some time on the PTR. I hope to have some hard numbers to digest on Frost DPS performance.

After you’ve killed Pestergut, your next target is Rotface (well, technically, you can do either first). Rotface is a “Do Your DPSers Suck” check. While healing and tanking are important, I think the fight relies more on situational awareness than tanking and healing savy or gear.

The main gimmicks of the fight are Rotface, the Big and Small Oozes, and the Ooze Flood. You want to tank Rotface in the center of the room, and have a zone around the boss set aside for your ranged dps. Healers can float in the middle because you’ll be using your second tank for Ooze Kite duty. In a way, this fight is a lot like Grobbulus, but with some fresh gimmicks.

The first major problem is the Ooze Flood. It lasts for 20 seconds and covers about 20% of the area on one side of the room. The flood causes around 4500 damage every second to those standing in it, as well as reducing movement speed by 25%. Stay the f out.

Secondly, Rotface will occasionally target a player, turn, and cast his Slime Spray. It hits for about 5,600 a second for 5 seconds. It’s easy to avoid by not standing in front of while while he’s casting. Stay awake and it’s not really a big problem.

Lastly, a player will get targeted by Mutated Infection. It causes a small amount of damage, and reduces healing, but when the infection is cleansed or ticks off, a Small Ooze will be spawned. The infected player needs to kite his ooze to the outer ring where the Ooze Tank will be standing by.

If this is the first Ooze, the dps’er will need to hang with the Ooze Tank until another Ooze is brought over. The two Oozes will merge, forming a Big Ooze, and the dps’er can return to the boss. The Ooze Tank kites the Big Ooze around the room until the Big Ooze absorbs 5 additional Small Oozes. When this happens, Unstable Ooze Explosion is triggered. This fires off several Ooze missiles which deal quite a bit of damage (around 10k nature damage to an area). So you’ll want to be aware of where those are heading and avoid them.

The biggest problems in this fight are remaining situationally aware while dpsing away. The key to the fight is doing this as tight as possible, and reducing damage taken by the raid via Ooze Fields, Slime Sprays, kiting your Small Ooze out asap, and staying the f away from Unstable Ooze Missiles.

Frost DPS is my favorite spec, I guess I just like the style. It suits me.

Following Naxxramas, Blizzard pretty much killed Frost-based Dual-Wielding specs (and Unholy-Based Dual-Wielding specs). The problem was that these specs relied on Icy Touch spam to make ridiculously consistent Killing Machine procs. At the time, Killing Machine wasn’t really normalized, so the faster your weapons were, the more procs you could get, essentially buffing your crit percentages to insanely high numbers at the time.

In response to this, Blizzard nerfed Icy Touch, and some Sigils that took advantage of it. They also normalized Killing Machine to a procs-per-minute setup. The damage of Dual-Wielding specs was slaughtered, pushing most dps Death Knights to Unholy and Blood.

Popular demand forced Blizzard to redesign the Frost tree and make Dual-Wielding a viable option again. Nerves of Cold Steel, Threat of Thassarian, and changes to Obliterate were added to essential turn Frost into the Dual-Wielding tree. Frost is an iconic path for Death Knights in Wow Lore, while Dual-Wielding is a play-style that many players are drawn to. Part of it is rebellion against the norm and being different, part of it I believe is just personal preference.

The frost tree has always been more magic damage than melee. While Blood fills the melee-based roll, and Unholy is traditionally for AoE, Frost fills a spot in between. In a fight like Lady Deathwhisper a Death Knight can help kill those mobs that your Warriors, Paladins, or Hunters would be otherwise unable to kill effectively.

Strengths
* Frost excels at single-target damage, while still retaining competitive AoE damage via Howling Blast.
* Frost relies more heavily on magic damage than Blood.
* Frost provides raid utility in the form of Imp. Icy Talons, a haste buff similar to Windfury.
* Enhanced damage and survival via Unbreakable Armor.

Weaknesses
* Other classes can provide similar raid buffs.
* Weaker AoE damage performance.
* Weaker defensive capabilities, lacking the avoidance and mitigation of Blood or Unholy.
* At this time Blood or Unholy have a slight dps advantage.

Weapon Speed and Frost DPS

In previous incarnations, Dual-Wielding relied on Fast\Fast weapons or Slow\Fast weapons to achieve maximum dps. Since Killing Machine, one of Frost’s best procs is now based on procs per minute, slower weapon speeds are best. Get yourself a good 2.60 swords or axes (or maces if you’re a dorf) and you’ll achieve maximum dps. For best effect, you should use Fallen Crusader on your MH and Razorice on your OH.

Glyphs

Glyph of Icy Touch
Glyph of Obliterate
Glyph of Frost Strike

0/54/17 Rotation

Rotations for Frost are based on a priority system. Which will look kinda like this: Frost Strike (Killing Machine) > Diseases (IT, PS) > Howling Blast (if Rime and Killing Machine are up) > Obliterate > Blood Strike > Frost Strike. A priority system means that the priority queue is evaluated when deciding which ability to use; instead of following a set rotation. Please keep this in mind as you consider the rotation below.

General Frost rotations will look something like this.

Rotation 1
     Dump(  )

Rotation 2
    Dump(  )

NOTE: This ability list is prone to change based on your Killing Machine and Rime procs. For instance, when you have a Killing Machine and Rime proc, you should use Howling Blast. When you have a Killing Machine proc, you should use KM prior to hitting Icy Touch again. Also, I'm still trying to find some good stat weights for Frost.

Yesterday, we looked at an Unholy AoE DPS build. Today, we’re going to delve into Blood DPS. Blood is awesome because it’s old-school melee dps. This spec offers the highest theoretical Single-Target damage.

Strengths
At the moment, Unholy Single-Target specs appear to have a slight dps lead, but that is subject to change.
High Single-Target DPS – Highest possible theoretical single-target dps of all Death Knight builds.
Scales well with two or three targets
Raid Utility – Raid utility in the form of Abomination’s Might and Hysteria.
Improved Survivability – You gain improved survivability thanks to Improved Blood Presence, enhanced Death Strike, and Blood Worms.

Weaknesses
Raid buffs are duplicable; they aren’t specific to the Death Knight.
Works best with excellent connectivity, lag results in missed GCD’s and diseases can fall off
Weak AoE performance, Blood, at least this build, focuses more on Single-Target DPS.

A Note On DRW

Dancing Rune Weapon is your premium Runic Power Dump for Blood spec. Remember that DRW gains damage based on the buffs that you have at the time. You want to maximize your temporary buffs when using DRW. First, make sure that your diseases are up and at their peak duration. Secondly, make sure that Hysteria is up, and that you are ready to use your Trinkets. Most importantly, make sure that you are at maximum RP. Sometimes, you can’t coordinate all of these while keeping with your current rotation, or Hysteria may not be up because it has a longer cooldown, but try to meet as many of these conditions as you can to maximize your damage.

51/0/20 Rotation

Rotation 1
     Dump(   )

Rotation 2
     Dump(   )

Glyphs

Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon
Glyph of Death Strike
Glyph of Dark Death

Stat Weights

For information on what these stat weights mean, please see my BiS post

Weapon DPS 9.89
Strength 2.89
Armor Penetration 2.75
Hit Rating (to cap) 2.51
Haste Rating 1.5
Expertise Rating 2.47
Crit Rating 1.56
Agility 1.37
Attack Power 1

Stat Weights via ElitistJerks

I tried out Unholy in ICC this past week. I was really impressed with the results. Keep in mind that my 2-hander is pretty crappy. Despite having the worst 2-hander in the guild, I was still very competitive on dps, hitting as high as #2 on bosses.

To raid, I chose a heavy AoE build which favors multi-targetting over single-target damage. I expected it to fare well on trash, but not so well on bosses. My previous DW-Frost build did exactly the opposite. My hope was that this spec would make me at least competitive with the consecrate-batteries on the trash packs.

You will notice that this build does not take Reaping, so you will not get Death Runes. At this point, especially with lower gear level (I don’t really have much from ICC) Reaping is not recommended.

Strengths
High, Sustained AoE Damage, the highest possible for a Death Knight, doesn’t rely on procs.
Raid Utility – Ebon Plague provides great raid utility and a nearly unduplicated raid buff.
Perma-Ghoul, Bone Shield – Enhanced survivability and damage

Weaknesses
This spec suffers some in Single-target dps. While competitive, it won’t get you the highest possible numbers because the spec is geared specifically toward AoE damage. It might be a good idea to set a decent single-target spec as your alternate spec.

17/0/54 Rotation

Multiple Target AoE – Opening Rotation ONLY
     

Rotation 1
    Dump(   )

Rotation 2
    

Single Target

Rotation 1
       

Rotation 2
    Dump(   )

Glyphs

Glyph of Disease
Glyph of Icy Touch
Glyph of Death and Decay

Stat Weights

Stat weights are how you compare the benefit of one stat over another for a given spec. Stat weights are different from spec to spec, so if you are not unholy, these stat weights will not apply to you and will be different for your spec. So after getting 8% melee hit (also called "Hit Capped") your best stats are Strength > Crit Rating > Armor Penetration. Strength has a stat weight of 3.02, while Armor Pen has a stat weight of 2.01. This means that Strength is just about 50% better for you, per point than Armor Pen. For a more detailed explanation of how to work with stat weights, please see my BiS (Best in Slot) post.

Please be aware that as you start getting more ICC gear especially Tier 10 Armor Pen starts to scale more than Crit Rating. Keep this in mind as you get better gear from Icecrown Citadel.

The current stat weights for Unholy are:


WeaponDPS: 6.67
MeleeHit (<8%): 3.62
Strength: 3.06
Crit Rating: 2.16
ArP Rating: 2.01
Haste Rating: 1.75
Expertise Rating: 1.63
Agility: 1.55
Attack Power: 1
Armor: 0.028

Stat Weights via ElitistJerks

First order of business, been having some server issues. It’s makes things a bit difficult to get more people to the site when things don’t work. It’s Vmware’s fault, and I’m trying to get it settled. If you’ve had issues getting on; I’m sorry about that. If you haven’t, forget this first paragraph. I’m a one man show here, I designed the site, I host the site, and I write content; sometimes the gnomes tinker with my hardware.

First bit of news is a big “I told you so”. According to Blizz, rogues are getting nerfed. They expect a 7% damage decrease to Assassination and a 2% decrease to Combat. Taking into account the meters from ICC, I’m not surprised at all. Take away 7% of our rogue’s damage and she’s still ahead, but not by quite so much compared to everyone else. We have good people with about equivalent gear and skill, if someone’s THAT far ahead, something is wrong with the class. This is the same argument other people used against Death Knights back in Naxx. The buff nerf game is part of the class-mechanics merrygoround that the devs use to keep everyone interested; deal with it. As expected some wonderful people of the WoW community have taken the news waaaay too far. Check out this read from Ghostcrawler on the forums:

It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is.

In your eagerness to find a gotcha I think you misinterpreted me. You guys (the community) theorycrafted the nerf to be about 7% for Mutilate. For you guys (the community) to then complain that it's a massive nerf that will cost you a raid spot seems disingenuous. Either you don't believe those estimates, in which case I advise you to address those players who made them, or you're just being melodramatic.

We know how much we wanted to lower rogue damage, but we typically don't share our numbers. What happens is if we said "Rogue target damage is 7.5K dps" then every time players did less than that or saw other classes do more, they'd try and argue that we need to make changes instead of them trying to do better.

- Ghostcrawler (Source)

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to say that Rogues DESERVE to be nerfed, or that they shouldn’t be a little bit higher on the meters than a DK. What I am trying to say is that an equally geared and equally skilled rogue should not be topping the meters by as high of a margin as they are (or maybe were) currently. That turns into a class balance issue, and guilds start stacking rogues as they have stacked other classes in the past, and an overpowered class becomes a crutch.

As promised, I did a little comparison between blood and frost. These meters were taken on the same raid with the same raid members. I used my normal frost DW spec (0/53/18) and the top 2-hand blood dps spec (51/0/20). I think that the damage ended up being relatively the same. Blood scored a little less, but I chalk this up to less familiarity with the rotation. I was able to come up top on one of our attempts against Saurfang.

Blood	Frost	Frost

We killed Saurfang again, but we had to slightly modify our strategy. We had a hunter and a balance druid for ranged dps. We had the ranged, and one of our DK’s on permanent flesh duty, while myself, Kaali, and the rest of the melee dps focused totally on the boss. We were able to get to Frenzy just as Saurfang was using the first MoB. The strain on the healers was a lot less. Even though we had less overall dps, we still rolled the encounter. If we hadn’t made that change, we would have failed. So, if you’re raid is low dps-wise, you may want to consider a similar strategy.

That was it for the night unfortunately, we had some people bail before we could try the new wing, and then Yuriken and Kilios’ dad was rushed to the hospital, killing our raid night this week.

Got something you want me to talk about, feel free to drop me a line. Also, if you have a screen shot of someone being a Deathnoob, feel free to email it to me for our mutual amusement and their humiliation.