Lichborne: The state of the patch 4.2 death knight
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Jul 26th 2011 at 1:00PM
Now that patch 4.2 has been out for a few weeks, it's a good time to look at the fruits of our nerfs. Patch 4.2 saw a surprising amount of death knight changes, from the nerfing of Obliterate to the last-minute buffing of Unholy Might. Nearly as conspicuous was the near complete lack of blood tanking changes.
With all of this in play, we definitely expected some shakeups when patch 4.2 went live; now, it's time to take a look at how those shakeups have played out. Most stuff went more or less as expected, but there have been a few surprising twists. We'll tackle it all after the break.
Blood gets deadlier
Blood tanks got no major changes in the patch, and yet their issues come up often enough in forum threads and blue posts. We've even discussed them here. Essentially, the whole "active block" principle of Death Strike, while intriguing in theory, has lead to a rather frustrating style of play in which you must maximize your used of Death Strikes by any means possible, eschewing the use of your runes for abilities that might give you better threat, damage, or utility.
This style of play is still going strong in patch 4.2, but at the same time, tank death knights have received the one major death knight-oriented hot fix of the patch so far, as Improved Death Strike got a huge boost to damage output potential. This is because death knight tank single-target damage was just too low for certain Firelands fights, such as Alysrazor. Believe it or not, the amount of damage you put out as a tank is pretty important. It not only provides better threat, but it means you get the boss down faster. Death knights have been at the low end of that totem pole in raid boss situations for a while, in part because we're using our runes on Death Strike instead of Heart Strike.
This change has caused a bit of grumbling among some in the death knight tanking community. There's concern that the fact that Blizzard buffed Death Strike means the devs have given up on us, that they've thrown in the towel and just decided to let Death Strike be the primary strike, buffed as needed to keep us competitive. I'd argue it does nothing of the sort. What it does tell us is that Blizzard is aware of what Death Strike is for us right now. The devs can't really rebalance the whole spec in a hotfix, so they're doing the realistic thing and buffing the strike we feel compelled to use. If they had buffed Heart Strike instead, it would have been a sign they don't know what they're doing.
But with the buff to Death Strike, it's a pragmatic nod to the fact that it is what we need to use -- and, I'd wager, a herald for possible changes in patch 4.3, if not a theoretical patch 4.2.1. This hotfix proves that Blizzard is aware of what is going on, and with any luck, the devs'll make changes to fix it in a proper patch, when they have more time to test out the balance quirks.
Frost still freezes out unholy
It seemed as if everyone expected some pretty quick hotfixes to death knight DPS once patch 4.2 went live and we figured out how to break things. Instead, Blizzard has left well enough alone, and we're all learning to get used to the new DPS normal (at least until the next big balance patch). As expected, dual wielding is the order of the day for the frost death knight. Thanks to the MOTFW nerf and the Killing Machine buff, as long as you can get two weapons of the right ilevel, you will beat out 2H frost in just about every arena. The two most surprising things about frost are that even after the nerfs, dual wield frost can still come awfully close to patch 4.1 2H frost DPS levels, and it still beats out unholy.
Unholy mostly suffers from bad scaling and bad itemization. The best trinkets for an unholy death knight continue to be last tier's heroic trinkets, as the current strength DPS trinkets for Firelands rely way too much on critical strikes. That said, unholy has certainly seen a DPS jump in the patch and is viable. It's just going to be lower than frost. Patch 4.3 will probably still need to see some buffs to actual strikes (in order to facilitate better scaling with weapon damage) and possibly the use of critical strike chance by the ghoul pet to make that stat more desirable.
Since I have seen a lot of confusion from some commenters on the state of expertise for unholy DPS, I thought I should clear that up here as well. Expertise is, in fact, undesirable for unholy death knights. While it is slightly better than critical strike rating up to the 26 expertise soft cap, haste and mastery rating will almost always work better. You should reforge any expertise you get to the 8% hit cap first, then haste, then mastery. This is because unholy does a great amount of its damage with Death Coil, diseases, the ghoul, and Death and Decay. All of these abilities do not use expertise at all. Even your ghoul will gain what expertise it needs based on your hit chance. Therefore, with such a small proportion of your damage based on any sort of attack that uses expertise, it's better to reforge it to other stats and just deal with the occasional dodged Scourge Strike.
One other DPS question I've seen a lot is the usefulness of our two-piece tier 12 bonus. A little bit of extra runic power on Horn of Winter does seem at first glance to be a little underwhelming, but surprisingly, it works. Don't be afraid to break your four-piece tier 11 bonus to grab it. Initial parses have shown it to be a relatively adequate boost, in addition to the extra strength and other stats on the armor itself. It's still not as awesome as say, burning imps or flaming arrows, but I guess not everyone can have completely cool tier bonuses.
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 1)
krislen Jul 26th 2011 1:15PM
currently the differences between dw frost and unholy are extremely minimal and is pretty dead even with frost, plus unholy offers the extra utility of a raid cooldown now that it appears AMZ has finally been fixed (unreportedly so to my knowledge) which means my healers now love me on fights like beth domo and rag where there is predictable raidwide magic damage.
and for our sake i hope the next patch does bring some major changes or we will be near unviable as tanks next tier if they continue with their current design scheme
krislen Jul 26th 2011 1:18PM
edit: meant to type unholy is pretty much dead even to frost 2h WTB EDIT BUTTON
Izzy Jul 26th 2011 1:37PM
I was about to say... Regardless suboptimal is suboptimal. The big issue as pointed out above, is that Unholy scales horribly, even with the STR buff. The gap continues to widen the higher your ilvl is.
krislen Jul 26th 2011 1:57PM
except its not even really suboptimal, geared properly the difference is lower than 3%, our dps specs are pretty solidly balanced atm though yes unholy scales slightly worse and unholy more than makes up for it in utility. You brought aoe slows into this, you can also spec into desecration as unholy and unholy's aoe is far from subpar itself, and it brings a raid wide damage reduction CD strong enough for our raid leader (paladin healer) to ban me from going frost (not that i mind i only use frost for alysrazor if im flying nowadays) on domo so we can push scorpion phase longer. what it really lacks is burst which is useful for Rag burning the transition adds
Izzy Jul 26th 2011 2:09PM
For the most part desecration is worthless, there's not many adds worth slowing that someone else, including a Frost DK can do better and at range. As a side point I didn't really bring AOE slows into this. AMZ is nice and all if they actually buffed it, but last I checked it was barely worth the button press - I haven't seen anyone else claim they buffed it. Regardless my point was simply that suboptimal is suboptimal, and Unholy scales very very poorly, even in this tier that 3% quickly becomes 7%+ in heroic gear. Although yes for the majority of the player base, it's not really an issue and the two are much closer than they have been in awhile, which is nice.
Izzy Jul 26th 2011 2:26PM
I take it back, it looks like they did essentially buff AMZ, it's pretty amazing for some fights now.
krislen Jul 26th 2011 2:39PM
it wasnt really a buff more of a fix, its said it was "raidwide" for a long ass time but up until recently it has only counted as partywide and even if it jumps to the 7% i personally would still pick unholy for the raid CD and extra survivability i just think doing slightly less dps (which its still a lower margin than most other classes with seperate dps specs) is a good tradeoff
Joe Jul 26th 2011 1:17PM
Frost is great right now, but I would argue, for Firelands at least, Unholy comes out on top. There are very few bosses in Firelands where the DK is just sitting on one boss wacking at him. Movement is still a huge detriment to Frost DK's and it's proven that to me many times. On bosses like Rag P1, my DPS as frost jumps, but high movement fights like Shannox and Beth, seem to favor Unholy. I think this is because with the massive strength buff Unholy got, the pet is crazy good, so good that considering it's always going to be on a target, even if the DK is running around avoiding mechanics, the DK doesn't lose too much DPS at all. This is all just from my personal experience, I'm not sure if anybody else has noticed this. Pretty much just based on my guildie DK who prefers Unholy, and myself, who prefers Frost.
Izzy Jul 26th 2011 1:36PM
If you're not on Shannox full time as melee your group is doing it wrong and simply wasting DPS. Frost is awesome for Beth for chillblains and howling blast - DPS isn't all a DPS does, but regardless you should be putting out great AOE damage, which Frost is solid at. Although as far as high-movement goes, there really shouldn't be much difference if you know what you're doing as frost. There's no reason not to toss out some HB's while you're away from the target.
Joe Jul 26th 2011 4:51PM
Very true, I never said Frost was terrible at movement fights, just simply less convenient than having a constant ghoul on something.
Amaxe Jul 26th 2011 1:27PM
In spite of my earlier bitching about the Dark Succor nerf, I'd have to say my DW Frost Dk has probably become my most powerful and most survivable character in PvE and also seems to spend more time killing than dying in PvP in TB (given I have a sat connection, that's amazing).
I was surprised, after taking a two week hiatus from him to level some lower level characters, to do the TB dailies and see how fast everything was dying under his twin Gurabashi Punishers.
I guess sometimes you have to walk away for a bit to notice the changes.
leggomymuoio Jul 26th 2011 2:14PM
For what it's worth, Flaming Arrow isn't as awesome as it sounds and really isn't that big of a dps boost.
Ilmyrn Jul 26th 2011 3:16PM
Maybe not, but it's certainly much COOLER than energy regen.
Sqtsquish Jul 26th 2011 3:14PM
Me likey hearing that Blizz probably is aware of Blood issues.
jfofla Jul 26th 2011 3:51PM
I am leveling a DW Frost DK, when I hit 85, do I want fast or slow weapons?
Daniel Whitcomb Jul 26th 2011 5:05PM
Go for slow weapons, jfofla. Frost still uses Obliterate for quick a bit of its damage, and you will need slow, high damage weapons to take full advantage of that. Also, try to get weapons with strength on them.
DeathPaladin Jul 26th 2011 5:05PM
It's not as much of a factor now since most 1H weapons that DKs can use are the same speed (usually 2.6). If the choice comes up, you generally want slow. Given two weapons of equal item level, the slower one will do more damage per hit, and Frost's two main attacks (Obliterate and Frost Strike) scale with weapon damage.
Mirmil Jul 27th 2011 4:00AM
With such huge boost to Death strike, is Blood now THE PVP spec? I've seen blood DK in arenas absolutely unkillable by anything that couldn't kite them. Frost while still working pretty well lots quite a bit of its burst (which is not such bad thing, since it was far to OP)
TiaMaster Jul 28th 2011 9:38AM
We must not forget the sudden , experimental viability of ShadowFrost 2.0
I myself have not tried it, but my sad Oblit hits are making me contemplate it.