Damned Forever

So yeah, my bold experiment with Frost lasted about a week...

Trying out Frost in heroics, I was pulling about 80% of the DPS I'd normally do as Unholy. Ok, I thought, at least I'm giving some more DPS to the Rogues.

And then I got a Battered Hilt...

I went through the (awesome) Quel'Delar questline, determined to get my hands on a Cunning of the Shadows to be my new main-hander. In the end however, with egging on from my guildies, I decided to get Might of the Faithful and return to my Unholy build.

I can rationalise this as follows: Apart from myself, we usually only have one other meleer in raids, so the Improved Icy Talons buff is really only helping one other person, and maybe the tanks. Meanwhile, the ability to spread Ebon Plague to every mob in Pestilence range will boost our damage in AoE fights. It's also one GCD our Warlocks don't have to use.

And whilst it's true I already had Ramalandi's Blade of Culling, in terms of itemization, the Might of the Faithful is clearly a better Unholy weapon...

Well ok, maybe I am a loot whore...

But still, you have to admit, it's very shiney!

Back to Frost

I don't seem to be able to make my mind up about DPS specs, do I? Then again, the thing I love about Death Knights is the fact that whilst most hybrids have one or two DPS specs to pick from, we have one in each tree, each with it's own feel and each close enough to the others that you're not losing out.

Case in point, after downing Heroic Anub'Arak last night, he dropped two lovely one-handers. The Rogue didn't want them, so rather than see them sharded, I decided to go back to Frost Dual-Wield, that being my original spec when I reactivated Graysun. To be honest, I'd been getting some schtick from the meleers about me not giving them buffs ever since I went to Unholy, so this felt like I was "giving something back" (not that the lazy bastards ever gave me anything!).

I ended up going with a 0/54/17 spec that included Improved Icy Talons for the melee haste buff. I tried it out in heroics afterwards. I miss the big numbers from a 2-hander build (my best crit was something like 5k), I also miss the AP buff from Bladed Armor and the lack of threat reduction from Subtlety means I'll never pug an instance as DPS again, but it should be pretty nice for our meleers. Plus it's always nice to play with new toys!

3.3 and Unholy

The other, more personal side of 3.3 is I may well turn Graysun to full-time Unholy DPS and not look back.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on Unholy, I'm not a fan of DPS builds that exist soley to fuel Death Coils. It's ended up that way because of the relative wimpiness of Scourge Strike.

I also have a big problem with Unholy's reliance on summoned pets, since they currently lack any sort of Avoidance ability to save them from any splash AoE the bosses deal. I tried Unholy last night on a few Firefighter attempts and I couldn't keep my Ghoul and Gargoyle alive through Shock Blasts and Laser Barrages.

Thusfar, I tend to switch to Unholy for lolAoE content (Heroics and Naxx runs for a Guildy who wants to do The Undying), or for Anub'Arak 10, where I want to limit my self-healing.

Happily however, both these problems are fixed for Unholy DKs in 3.3. Scourge Strike now does decent damage compared to the other FU attacks (and it scales better with Armor Penetration) and DK pets get 45/90% AoE reduction from the Night of the Dead talent. The rotation looks a little nicer as well, with more big strikes and less of a boring 10-second rotation. I'll play with the numbers in 3.3, but it might be enough to persuade me to stay.

Unholy Pacts

I've been experimenting with Unholy DPS recently on farm raids. Blood's still my first love, and I've collected an ungodly amount of Armor Penetration gear to support it, but people have convinced me I should have a back-up plan for Anub'Arak Heroic Mode, where Blood's self-healing becomes a detriment. Besides, Ebon Plague's a nice buff to have if you don't have a Warlock or Moonkin handy.

To this end, I've swapped my heroic-tanking offspec to a rather cookie-cutterish 16/0/55 Unholy 2H build.

Overall, I don't think I like it. The rotation's a rather mechanical 10-second "push something every global cooldown" deal, the only variation being when I have to refresh Bone Armor every minute. The whole rotation is basically geared towards generating Runic Power to cast Death Coils, which are one of your biggest damage sources.
The single-target DPS is comparable to Blood, and in AoE situations I kick arse, simply because my diseases do around twice the damage they normally do, and have a chance to crit thanks to T9.

That said, I don't get the 12k crits I get from Blood, and so whilst my damage is undoubtedly comparable, it just doesn't feel as fun. And I really hate Death Coil DPS builds. To me Death Coil is something you use when you're out of runes, or if the boss is out of melee range, it shouldn't be your rotation's raison d'être.

Still, if it helps us get Anub down, I'll persevere with it on some fights and hope the buffed Scourge Strike in 3.3 makes it a more fun spec.

We Must Have Blood!

Blood is, and always has been my favorite Death Knight tree. Focussing on massive physical damage with a 2-hander and self-healing, it first attracted me as the "mirror universe" version of the Retribution Paladin.

When I first made Graysun my main raiding toon, Smart Casual had two Retribution Paladins, a Fury Warrior and another Death Knight all rolling on 2-handers, we also had no Rogues and one Restoration Shaman with an Enhancement off-spec rolling on 1-handers. With that in mind, I decided to make Graysun a dual-wielder rather than queue up with the other 2-hander users for those oh-so-rare weapon drops.

Since that time, all of the 2-hander users have quit the guild or been fired and we've recruited two Rogues. This meant I could return to my first love and start hitting things again with a large 2-hander. And by 2-hander, I mean Aesir's Muthalovin' Edge!

This is Graysun's current Blood Spec. It does great DPS by itself, but what's really nice is that it possesses two strong DPS-boosting cooldowns in Dancing Rune Weapon and Hysteria, both really help with pulling ahead in DPS races, or if there's a target that needs to be burst DPS down.

The other nice thing, which I mentioned in my last post, is that I can actually get excited by gear with Armor Penetration on it. Whilst the stat may well be going the way of the Dodo in the Cataclysm expansion, it's very prevailent on Melee Plate right now, and Blood's reliance on physical damage means it gets a lot of benefit from it.