Lichborne: New changes to your DPS choices in patch 4.2
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Jun 21st 2011 at 5:00PM
Patch 4.2 has been a surprisingly tumultuous time for death knights. We've received a veritable avalanche of nerfs, some of which were just hotfixed right into game after a few days on the PTR. Even as we enter the last few weeks of patch 4.1, Blizzard's thrown a couple more changes our way, as well as an explanation for the reasoning behind all the class changes.
Whether you agree with Blizzard's reasoning on them or not (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say I really don't), the death knight changes will definitely have impact on how you play and what you do as a DPS death knight in patch 4.2. Let's take a look at the latest changes and see what type of impact they may have on your play as a DPS death knight.
Frost dual wielding gets a hand up
While Might of the Frozen Wastes was nerfed in order to bring 2H frost in line with dual wield frost, dual wielders got one more buff at the last minute. Killing Machine once again procs off of off-hand attacks.
Tests from the PTR suggest that this definitely results in more procs, enough to boost dual wielding to 2H's level, if not slightly past it. Of course, dummy tests and sims always have a high chance of inaccuracy, so we may have to see how it fares in the game once more death knights have a chance to get their feet wet. Regardless, it is relatively safe to say that if you want to switch back to dual wielding with patch 4.2, you will probably be able to swing it. At the least, it should be more or less equal to 2H frost, and likely a slight bit better, enough that I'd almost expect (or hope for) Blizzard to reverse the Might of the Frozen Wastes nerf in a balance patch at some point before patch 4.3.
Unholy gets stronger, in theory
The long neglected unholy tree got a quick infusion of buff power as Unholy Might shifted from 5% to 20%. This would appear to buff it nicely in the short term. Preliminary tests suggest it will now be the best DPS spec as late as the normal tier 12 gear level, as strength works nicely to buff existing damage, including on the ghoul itself. That said, the buff also brings with it some sticky questions about long-term viability.
The first is surrounding the ghoul. A ghoul is already somewhere around 1/4th-1/3rd of a good unholy death knight's DPS. This Unholy Might buff will only increase that. Certainly, whether or not that's a problem depends somewhat on how you look at death knights. For some, the ghoul is a trusted sidekick, a signature part of the class. For others, it's just there, sort of a free mobile DOT. The biggest issue, of course, is the possibility of the ghoul dying. It's been argued that a death knight is not a pet class, so the fact that you can kill or crowd control a ghoul and immediately take away around 1/3rd of a death knight's DPS has been viewed as problematic.
The other question has to do with weapon damage. Strength simply doesn't scale well with weapon damage. It makes weapons hit harder, sure, but once we get to ilevel 391 weapons, it's looking very possible that frost's superior weapon damage will once again outperform unholy.
So while a quick press of one button has perhaps immediately fixed unholy such that a DPS death knight can take it without feeling complete shame, there are serious questions about long term viability. We'll see how the actual numbers work out as people attack the content, but it may be that Blizzard really does need to do some more tweaking.
A critical issue with tier 12 DPS trinkets
The tier 12 strength DPS trinket issue has also been generating a lot of buzz in the death knight community lately. The Vessel of Acceleration and Apparatus of Khaz'Goroth both grant a buff that triggers from your critical strikes. For frost, this isn't so bad in theory. As frost, you have Killing Machine to grant you automatic melee critical strikes, so you'll be more or less fine using the mechanic.
For unholy, it's a different matter. Not only do you not have a critical strike producer like Killing Machine, but critical strike rating doesn't even get picked up by pets like the ghoul. This means that critical strike is far from a priority for unholy death knights -- the buff from both items will build up to its maximum stack far too slowly. So far, tests from the PTR suggest that if you're a raiding unholy death knight, especially at the heroic level, you'll probably just want to hold on to your Heart of Rage and Crushing Weight.
Blizzard seemed to be making a pretty concentrated effort with ilevel 359 trinkets to avoid the problems with upgradability that occurred in the past, such as Darkmoon Cards being optimal for multiple tiers. Still, it seems they've made a bit of misstep here. It's probably a bit late to hope they'll switch these trinkets to chance on melee hit, or find some other way to buff them for melee specs that don't do many critical strikes, but hopefully it's a lesson they'll take to heart when designing tier 13 loot.
What comes next
While there's still obviously some issues (I will still maintain that the Hungering Cold nerf was undeserved and ham handed, especially when abilities such as Psychic Scream and Intimidating Shout still exist with no cast time), we can probably expect the current death knight DPS balance changes to come to live servers as-is around June 28. From there, we'll see how it all shakes out.
Current conventional wisdom suggests that unholy will dominate at first, but once you get into heroic-level gearing, frost will claw its way back to the top due to superior scaling with weapon damage. Either way, it should be interesting to see where we fall on the DPS meters. Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostwalker" Street claims the recent Obliterate and Howling Blast nerfs were because we trended too high on both PVE and PVP damage. Once we've had a few weeks with Firelands raids, we shall have to see whether the raiding community's performance agrees with his assessment.
Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
josh Jun 21st 2011 5:19PM
can i dw unholy now or 2h only? i used to 2h unholy then started dw frost since it was better dps. any idea
Sunaseni Jun 21st 2011 5:23PM
DW Unholy is dead and never coming back.
Ilmyrn Jun 21st 2011 5:26PM
It's dual wield Frost that was buffed, not dual wield Unholy. Dual wield Unholy is dead, dead, dead, and it doesn't matter how many times you cast raise Ally on it, it's never going to accept.
Bart Jun 21st 2011 5:27PM
UH is not meant for Dual wielding, it is a 2 hander tree.
Nashir Jun 21st 2011 5:29PM
Dual wield unholy will still be pants. The lack of Threat of Thassarian means that your strikes will hit like wet lettuces compared to 2h unholy.
If such a situation arrives that a weird gearing selection and play style makes dual wield unholy viable I think the devs will hotfix it out - they seem to be pretty clear that frost is the dual wield tree, not unholy.
Rodalpho Jun 21st 2011 5:24PM
You're a bit off, there. After the MOtFW nerf to 2H frost, DW frost beat it handily. With the buff to killing machine working in the off-hand, DW frost absolutely demolishes 2H frost. Even if the 2% total damage nerf was reverted, 2H frost would remain absolutely dead.
Sims predict that DW frost will even beat 2H unholy in 4.2, but frost always sims dramatically better than it performs. It's still up in the air which spec will win, but it's pretty clear that DW frost and 2H unholy will be competitive in 4.2, which is actually a pretty good situation to be in.
Moral to the story, try to get 2 one-handed strength weapons, if you can.
MichaelBerean Jun 21st 2011 5:50PM
My limited observations have also noted the recent strength of DW Frost.
Getting two strength one-handers to start out in 4.2 should be relatively painless. The Elementium-Edged Scalper will be fairly inexpensive to craft, especially if you get your mats *this* week. The only BoP item is 5 Chaos Orbs per weapon.
http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=70158
Rodalpho Jun 21st 2011 5:56PM
@MichaelBerean:
Before you can buy those plans, you need to finish both stage2 quests of the new dailies, which is 250 marks, then hand in 125 additional marks to unlock the vendor. So... not so much.
Tfish92 Jun 21st 2011 5:27PM
The hungering cold nerf was uncalled for. Seems the majority of their reasoning for nerfing it was because frost Dks were to good at kiting adds in raids.
How is it a problem that you made an encounter requiring off tanking by a dps class, and then a dps class was able to do it?
clayer Jun 21st 2011 6:18PM
its not because of pve at all it was because frost was way over powered damage wise in pvp and did not need one of the most powerful cc's in the game aswell. so they nerfed both a reasonable amount.
veil Jun 21st 2011 5:28PM
its so weird reading these articles nowadays as a former player. i seem to be MORE angry reading these changes (nerfs) than i did when it actually impacted my toon. or maybe reading them only serve to remind me how often i had to change my play-style to accommodate these seemingly monthly changes, and this in turn is what generates my dismay.
Malphurion Jun 21st 2011 5:34PM
Dw frost is ahead of 2h and has been by about 500 dps since cata launch. The km proc is a bug fix, nothing more. It is not a buff and it has been changed to auto attacks only and not melee hits. 4.2 will most likely consist of dw frost>2h unholy>2h frost.
Rodalpho Jun 21st 2011 5:44PM
DW and 2H frost are neck and neck in 4.1 with DW very slightly winning at the high end due to superior attack power scaling, but 2H frost allows several free talent points for utility, so it is the prevailing spec right now.
KM has been mainhand autoattacks only for a very long time. This was done deliberately, so DW and 2H had the same number of procs. It is not a bug fix, it is a buff.
As for 4.2 spec rankings, sims agree with your prediction, but again, frost sims much better than it performs. I wouldn't be surprised if 2H unholy is the prevailing spec in the end.
GhostWhoWalks Jun 21st 2011 6:30PM
I would certainly prefer that my Ghoul do a substantial amount of my damage; during most encounters, my DPS meter lists my top sources of damage as being Scourge Strike, Death Coil and my Ghoul, and considering those are the top three weapons characteristic of Unholy, that seems entirely appropriate to me.
The Death Knight is not a pet class...but Unholy is certainly a pet SPEC. It's the side of Death Knights that embraces their former role as commanders of the Scourge, when they led legions of the undead into battle. Wouldn't it make sense to emphasize that in their toolset? Sure, losing the Ghoul cuts down on our overall DPS, but then doesn't that encourage players to keep the Ghoul alive? Throw a few Death Coils in his direction, use his defensive cooldown, use Move Pet to move him out of the fire when he's in danger. The cooldown on summoning the Ghoul could certainly be reduced, since sometimes losing the Ghoul is unavoidable in PvP, but I don't think the answer is to make Unholy less reliant on our minions simply because losing them means we aren't as effective.
jordan Jun 21st 2011 8:15PM
This is true. If you don't like managing a pet, you really shouldn't have considered playing unholy in the first place.
bigberry51 Jun 24th 2011 9:49PM
couldnt agree with you more dont complain ab a squishy pet when you have a boatload of abilities to keep him up but fail to stop your mindless SS and DC spam to realize hes dying, thats the mark af a fail AoD Commander
vegetto375 Jun 21st 2011 8:57PM
While I cant say I'm all that happy that 2H frost will be trailing and maybe by alot in the next patch, since it's the closest thing us Blood DPS DK's have of our former spec. I am glad that blood has remain pretty consistant and mostly unchanged tru out cataclysm, however seeing as how even in wrath when we were DPS as well we didnt get much love and were always bottom on over all dps, good for bust dps but thats about all we could get.
fainda Jun 22nd 2011 12:20AM
Ghostwalker street huh?
Kalixtra Jun 22nd 2011 2:09AM
"Ghostwalker"? hahaha
No mention of the blue post about a possible glyph to make diseases last as long as the Outbreak cd?
vestrene Jun 22nd 2011 5:34AM
@the Hungering cold nerf comparison to psychic scream and intimidating shout:
The main difference is that with Death Grip, you can ensure on a, say, a 3v3 team with 1 healer and 2 melee dps, that you hit all 3 of them, every time. You cannot do that with any of the aoe fears. On top of that, it comes with a 1 minute cooldown. So yes, the nerf was highly needed.