WoW Patch 3.2: Unholy, Dual-Wielding Death Knight was a Mistake
Posted on : 08-05-2009 | By : Molsan | In : Death Knight
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I was really enjoying my Death Knight prior to patch 3.2. He was a Blood-spec, two-handed axe smashing fool. My last run was a 4-man regular Violet Hold, where I was doing 1300+ DPS at level 77. Our tank was a Death Knight, and one of the other DPS was a Death Knight. They were each doing around 780 DPS. I thought I really had something special going: the correct build, properly itemized gear, and a tight rotation.
The Death Knight rumor casting a cloud over this patch was that my spec would be “dead.” That’s a silly way to describe a Death Knight spec, but I bought into it, and replaced my build with a dual-wield Unholy build. I really like the look and feel of a melee player dual-wielding big weapons. What I didn’t like was that I had a hard time breaking 750 DPS in Sholazar Basin! I think the rhinos and tigers were laughing at me, wondering what I was doing out there slapping them around.
The Build: 0/18/53
I decided on this build after sifting through a 34-page thread on the Elitist Jerks forums. Skeleton Jack confirmed this build on his site, but stated that “the Frost tree is officially the ‘Dual Wield Tree’ as of 3.2 for PvE DPS.” I understand that, but what attracted me to Unholy was some of the soloing utility, including Master of Ghouls and Summon Gargoyle.
After going back and reading more about this spec, it seems that this is more suited for raiding. You maximize your output by stacking Armor Penetration, which is really only available from well-itemized Ulduar-level gear. So is it back to the drawing board already? Probably.
The “New” Build: 0/53/18
I refuse to give up on a dual-wield spec, and will try again going deeper into the Frost tree. This also requires me to manage two rotations, as opposed to the one rotation I used with Blood. In order to maximize this spec, you need to manage a “setup” rotation and a “main” rotation. This idea was explained in detail by Skeleton Jack in a comment, and I will spell it out even more clearly here.
The Setup Rotation
Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Pestilence -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate -> Frost Strike -> Frost Strike -> Obliterate -> Obliterate -> Obliterate -> Frost Strike
The Main Rotation
Obliterate -> Pestilence -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate -> Frost Strike -> Frost Strike -> Obliterate -> Obliterate -> Obliterate -> Frost Strike -> Frost Strike
The Frost Strikes in both rotations act as your runic power dump. I will try out this build and rotations at some point and report back on my findings. Thanks to Elitist Jerks and Skeleton Jack for the information and explanations.
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Heya!!
The DW specs do favor APen, but not like say a Blood spec. A Blood spec would value Apen at like a 2.7 APE value, whereas DW would value it at like a 1.7-2.0 APE value.
The DW Unholy build is totally viable and works btw. It’s very close to Frost. Don’t forget to use your Rime procs to fire off HB’s with Frost!! Thanks for the linkback.
-SJ
Hi. I recently ran VH at 77 with dual crafted blue swords – dual wield unholy – and around 215 hit rating. When stacking hit, you will need to sacrifice other stats, but talents can help with crit. Scourge Strike gets about 15% extra crit rating purely from talents now.
I was pleasantly surprised when I whipped the other two DKs in my party on the final boss dps, with about 1550 dps for Cyaginosa, and that was with some rotation screwups. This was using Improved Unholy Presence, which reduces cooldowns of runes by 10%.
The spec I’m using looks something like this:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#BT2RVgBW4ffxiPZ,,10482
Weapon damage isn’t that significant for Scourge Strike, since a large portion of your bonus damage is made up of diseases. Unholy’s melee damage benefits a great deal from haste. This spec is probably much more effective with raid buffs such as Earth and Moon, Icy Talons or Windfury Totem, and obviously Attack Power buffs.
I’m seeing inordinately long CD’s on both of your rotations. if you use setup first, then try to use main, I have found that Runic power is exhausted before Main has a chance to complete..