Lichborne: PVPing as a blood death knight
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Sep 20th 2011 at 6:00PM
Last week, we talked about the basics of PVP, focusing mostly on frost and unholy PVP methods. This is primarily because frost and unholy have the type of tools that one needs to not only survive but to lock down your enemies and control the field of battle in a PVP environment. That said, playing WoW is about fun, and if you have more fun playing blood, well, why not give it a try?
While blood probably won't get you quite as high of a rating as unholy or frost will, it's still a relatively viable thing to use in the Battlegrounds. This week, we'll take a quick look at some the ins and outs of blood PVP.
Strength in the blood
Blood's PVE role is also its PVP strength: A blood death knight is damned hard to kill. Of course, generally in PVP being hard to kill is great, but you need to be able to kill people too. Luckily (in Battlegrounds, especially), there are things you can do to leverage the survivability of blood without worrying as much about whether you personally are killing someone.
Battlegrounds with PVE components, such as Alterac Valley and the Isle of Conquest, are one place where a blood death knight can shine. the NPC generals and captains in these Battlegrounds aren't necessarily raid-boss level in tactics, but they still hit hard. If you, as a blood death knight, tank them just like you would in PVE, you will be a hero for sure. There've certainly been AV weekends when I have, for lack of any alts to level, queued on my death knight as blood, just to tank the bosses. Don't worry too much if you're paranoid about enemy players coming in and dive bombing the raid; you can tank in PVP gear if you think that'll be an issue.
Flag-running Battlegrounds like Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks can also be a good place for a blood death knight to shine. This is a little more up to debate, though. Other classes such as druids, mages, and rogues are going to have more ways to shed debuffs and snares and speed buffs to pull ahead of the pack when flag carrying, so they are, in theory, possibly even a better choice than blood death knights for flag carrying. That said, if you have a backup healer or two, your advantage is going to be that you cannot die. Got half the enemy team beating on you? No problem. Vampiric Blood, Icebound Fortitude, and your other defensive cooldowns can take care of that well enough, especially if you can get off a few Death Strikes on your pursuers as well.
Base defense battlegrounds such as a Arathi Basin and Battle For Gilneas do pose a little more of a problem for death knights since, mostly you need to kill the other side before they can capture your bases or kill them so you can capture their bases. That said, a blood death knight can still find a decent niche here, too. Since these Battlegrounds generally require you to click on the flag and channel a bit before you can capture it, all you need to do is stay alive and keep damaging the enemy while you alert the rest of your team. You probably won't be able to take down those two or three Horde by yourself, but if you can use your cooldowns and Death Strike to stay alive until reinforcements come, you can still save the day. Of course, if you're in a PUG, there's no guarantee that anyone will come -- but hey, it's still a pretty huge rush to hold off multiple enemies longer than anyone should have a right to. Eat your heart out, Spartans.
Compensating for weaknesses
Of course, even if you're tank-specced, don't think you're out of options for offense. Even in their base state, Chains of Ice, Death Grip, Mind Freeze, and Strangulate, among others, are amazing control tools even in their base forms. On the flip side, though, Necrotic Strike is going to be a lot harder to use. The easiest place to use it is after your Death Strike has converted your non-blood runes to death runes, but then you'll be giving up on the self-heal and Blood Shield from Death Strike. It's definitely a hurdle to overcome, but you'll still want to hone your offensive skills.
On the gear side, you'll still want PVP gear, of course, and the PVP gearing tips we talked about last week still apply to blood. Resilience is king, and resilience will protect you even better than tank gear, especially against casters, who can completely ignore all that parry and dodge rating. For your secondary stat, focus on mastery. Survivability is the best reason to play blood PVP, and mastery remains our best survivability stat, especially in PVP.
The talented blood PVPer
If you're PVPing blood, I'm generally going to assume you're using your PVE spec. That's definitely fine, of course. There's enough solid power in a PVE tank spec to get you going. That said, if you want to do some tweaking of your spec for PVP purposes, here are a few suggestions. Frost is likely going to be your better secondary tree, since you can pick up Lichborne, Endless Winter, and Icy Reach, which are all incredibly nice PVP talents. Of course, your PVE spec may have already grabbed these for the PVE benefits as well. You may also wish to save two talent points for Unholy Command over in the unholy tree.
In the blood tree, you may want to consider picking up Hand of Doom, allowing you the ability to keep casters locked down slightly more often. The other thing you can do is reglyph a bit for PVP. There's unfortunately not many specifically PVP-focused blood glyphs, but you may want to find some room for Glyph of Strangulate, at least, and you may find that Glyph of Death Grip helps you wrangle in fleeing flag carriers or healers trying to dodge behind pillars that much easier. Glyph of Rune Tap can endear you to a party if you run with a pack of PVPers.
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: PvP, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Nyold Sep 20th 2011 6:10PM
I know this is not a PVP question per se, but I'm finally returning to WoW after a few months hiatus. One of the new things I find is that the recent threat buff means that I won't have that much problems tanking 5 mans.
The question then is, should I still gear and gem for hit or reforge them all to dodge / parry? How much hit do you recommend for tanking 5 mans? I know that hit affects Death Strike and thus it is a survivability stat, but I think missing a couple DS is not going to wipe the group. Not to mention that hitcapping is VERY expensive in terms of hit rating.
Luke Sep 20th 2011 6:16PM
You should be fine with 8% hit as this will ensure that your special attacks and spells land. As a tank your auto attacks are less important. You definitely want to focus on mitigation rather than stacking stamina or any other stat, (and by mitigation this includes mastery, in the case of Blood this is our shield, as well as dodge/parry).
Daniel Whitcomb Sep 20th 2011 6:18PM
Don't worry too much about hit. At the 5-man level, you can afford to miss a Death Strike or two. Also, in patch 4.3, they're planning to make Death Strike provide a self-heal and blood shield even if it doesn't hit, so as long as that goes through, it should be fine.
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 7:09PM
i run about 1% hit and i tank 5-mans JUST fine.
hit is one of the really useless stats. dump your points into dodge/parry and mastery. balance your dodge/parry as best you can and put the rest into mastery. learn to breathe and love your deathstrike and use your self-heals often.
threat has NEVER been a problem for me once i got geared to survive.
Tom Sep 20th 2011 8:36PM
I disagree with Daniel and djsuursoo.
Here's how Heroics often work these days. Due to the threat buffs, the DPSers assume that the tank has an auto-hit taunt aura or something, and the tank eschews Hit and Expertise since they're not useful to raiding tanks. The tank pulls and misses one of the mobs, causing the mob to attack someone else. Someone says "how tank fail at threat lol" and Jesus kills a kitten. Optionally, the tank may also assume that they have an auto-hit taunt aura and either not notice or notice and ignore the errant mob, at which point Buddha kills a puppy.
If you're the type of tank who can quickly recover, then by all means reforge and gem as such. If, however, you might slip up from time to time and don't enjoy telling idiots to STFU, then I would suggest a reforging priority of perhaps Mastery>Hit>Expertise.
Think of the puppies and the kittens - gem and reforge for the content you're doing, not the content you aren't doing.
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 9:13PM
oo, expertise. forgot about that one. yeah, mine's at 24, just because.
hit's not important, since special attacks connect something like 99% of the time but getting parried blows.
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 9:14PM
on hit-capping.
8% is your hit-cap as a blood DK nowadays. remember, you're two-handed tanking.
much easier to hit the hit rating, though you don't need it.
Luke Sep 20th 2011 6:13PM
Well said.
The tanking specs really do shine as great utility in PvP if you ask me. It's much like Frost Mages. The control and survivability is awesome even if the sustained damage isn't there. But that doesn't mean these specs don't have teeth.
Some of my favorite battles have been against other Death Knights and Paladins and in those situations Blood has always shined, and really lends itself to memorable sparring offs. I typically prefer Frost but now that I can no longer tank in that spec I've found myself playing Blood far more and it's loads of fun.
rapsam2003 Sep 20th 2011 6:26PM
I'm so disappointed with Lichborne lately. I get that some people pvp heavily on their DKs. However, you really are lacking on pve content here. It's like you guys don't know what DKs should do in FL, so you've not written the articles on it. (I don't think that actually is the case, but PLEASE give us some pve stuff, even though you're REALLY late for FL.) But why not focus more heavily on the pve aspects of DKs?
Luke Sep 20th 2011 7:00PM
@Rapsam2003
What do you hope to accomplish by saying, "It's like you guys don't know what DKs should do in FL, so you've not written the articles on it..."?
It's as though you are trying to insult the authors and editors because you don't know how to voice your concerns without being a douche. (I don't think this is actually the case... wait... no... actually I do.)
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 7:26PM
"But why not focus more heavily on the pve aspects of DKs?"
probably because there hasn't been any significant change to how they work.
if you're after a 'how to do this, where to stand, what to pop when and how to whine at everyone for not doing it exactly as the guide says' sort of content i think tankspot has you covered.
that said, yeah, the PvE side of lichborne has been a little thin, but that's mostly due to there's nothing significant that hasn't been covered already. sure, we could go explore the idea of soloing old raids for profit and enjoyment, but money is all you get unless you take swings at northrend content, which usually requires at LEAST a pair, preferably a trio unless you have plenty of time.
DeathPaladin Sep 20th 2011 7:58PM
I do not PvP, but I find PvP articles for the classes I play much more interesting than yet another gear column.
lsprof4 Sep 20th 2011 9:33PM
I realize PvP is not everyone's brand of fun, but I really think it helps prepare you for raiding by providing an environment to learn to react to the unexpected and solve problems on the fly as well as helping create a better awareness of your surroundings, all skills that seem pretty important in raids. I think doing some amount of PvP, in turn, can't help but make you a better raider, even if you have to put up with the occasional abuse from 10 year olds.
rapsam2003 Sep 20th 2011 10:26PM
@Isprof4
That is why my DK has a pvp set. (That and the fact that I got bored of dpsing for a bit. I'm a tank through & through.) But it doesn't have to be "stand here". Just something besides 3 weeks of pvp.
Matthew Sep 20th 2011 7:03PM
I was in an arena with my buddy, a frost DK, and I was the resto shammy. I got the enemy DK (ok my buddy did) down to 1% and he would - NOT - DIE!.
I asked my DK buddy 'why can't you survive like that?'
He said "I'm not Blood"
QED
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 7:09PM
I run a lot of battlegrounds with my DK, in blood spec. i tried DW frost once. it was fun, popping unholy presence and going tasmanian devil on people. but dying constantly was irritating.
then one time i tried blood-specc'd pvp.
i WOULD. NOT. DIE.
that was at 2400(approx) resilience.
i'm at 3500-something now. being able to go toe to toe with most all melee, or even 2v1 against pairs is a lot of fun. i won't kill you quick, but i CAN kill you.
odd note: BGs are, so far, the only place i've seen vengance max out. a critical strike with max vengance is one of the most impressive things i've ever seen. two-shotting clothies at lvl 85 is kind of hilarious.
of course you have to be near death in the middle of a crowd of enemies to manage that... but being able to walk into AoE hell and kill someone is pretty rewarding, and you can break up and scatter a defense though sheer refusal to die, and unnerving the other team.
Dragoniel Sep 21st 2011 5:39AM
There is one problem with Blood PvP.
As long as you are fighting melee, you are godmode. Then comes along a stray caster... and then you are dead. Blood Death Knights are among easiest targets for a mage.
Sure, frost may die more often in a zerg, but when it comes to 1v1 it can kill anything. Blood - not so much.
djsuursoo Sep 21st 2011 11:49AM
Dragoniel:
50/50 for me. if he's a competent mage, yeah, i can get nailed. if he doesn't use the full set of tools he's got, i can usually pound him into the ground or close to it.
but a lot of mages will go down to me unless they ambush me, or wail on me from somewhere that i can't reach them.
i've learned to counter mages/casters in general by making use of the toolbox. there's not much that throws a mage off his game like the DK gobbling up a polymorph and spitting it right back.
generally after that i just move on to someone new and let the fellow sit and stew. it tends to make them angry.
djsuursoo Sep 20th 2011 7:17PM
and if i may say: tank on tank duels are epic(though exhausting).
had a warsong fight grind to a complete halt as a BElf pally and i wailed on each other for nearly nine minutes in the center-field. i couldn't get through his armor/heals, he couldn't out-damage my resistances and cooldowns.
it was brutal, i was sweating at the end, but the timer ran out before we killed each other.
best. fight. ever.
DeathPaladin Sep 20th 2011 8:06PM
Back in Wrath when I was Blood DPS, I ended up fighting a Protection Warrior 1 on 1 who was camping someone outside Caverns of Time. After popping Army and blindsiding his healer, the two of us wailed ineffectually at each other for a while until the rest of my party showed up. He couldn't do enough damage to counter my healing, and my damage was slowed down because I was his only opponent, so he could focus his entire bag of tricks on me.