Alright this is mostly a rant post based on their current iteration on the PTR.
Death Knights have been nerfed to the ground and as a result I will likely be switching characters in MoP. This post will go over their current skills and how they must seemingly be used in PVP.
Rune system
Our tier 75 for talents is fucking retarded. They removed blood tap and added it into rune tap which makes getting reliable strangulates/asphyxiates impossible without rune management (which we cannot do on a boxing team unless we are using runic corruption at the moment unless you want to pray for death runes)
Necrotic strike now costs a death rune and has been nerfed
This forces us to basically take death pact unless we do not wish to have any anti-healing (which for 3v3 is one of the reasons dks are any decent what soever). This forces us also to use plague strike once again or remove howling blast (will need rhyme proc management) and use obliterate instead which does less damage than it does now on live.
Also now only reduced cast by 25%
Soul Reaper
Again... death rune specific usage... more management of resources (fun!) Though this ability is really over powered.
Removal of hungering cold
We now get remorseless winter which is alright but it requires uptime on a target and if you pop it at the wrong time vs say a mage then you're going to have it be a useless talent. Will be good in 5's staggering it though.
If you get CC'd during this time you are screwed and your CD gets wasted... honestly looking like desecrated ground might be the best as it is a secondary get out of jail free card. Will have to test though.
Dual-Wield is not viable for PVP anymore
Plain and simple the runic power generation in comparison is terrible and 2h frost with frost presence has far too much RP and too few GCD to use it all and your abilities at a decent pace putting 2h frost back into UH presence (which doesn't matter ultimately since we use that now and will get more RP overall than before)
Not that I used DW other than for funzies...
Only thing dks really get... that is an improvement
Glyph of Icy Touch
Buffed howling blast's AP coefficient by .2 and range by 10 yards
More frost strikes because every AA gives 15 RP to make up for rune abilities giving less base RP because there is no talent.
How can we get around this?
It seem that the only means to playing them as we currently do would be to change to a FULL DAMAGE usage opposed to necrotic spam even when necessary (necrotic spam would mean only 4 stacks of it per DK now which is hardly worth it seemingly vs a 300k+ health pool. Your AP goes up by about 2x. So your NS only will take about 19k (anti-healing) off fully geared (t2) and do your white damage (dunno what that will be)
So our new rotation will look something like
Option 1:
Soul Reaper > Howling blast > plague strike
Random rune usage: icy touch, strangulate
Option 2: Soul reaper > necrotic strike > howling blast > plague strike
Option 3: Soul reaper > necrotic strike > Oblit > rime
Option 4: Necrotic strike > Howling blast > plague strike (80k heal absorb isn't terrible)
Option 5: Necro/Soul macro > HB > PS
Option 6: Necro/Soul macro > oblit > rime
The saving grace of this comp is the... 200k damage execute if something is below 35% (if the stars align) which is more than 2/3 of someone's HP
Personally I don't see dks being that great. Necrotic strike being on a rune that can be used by ANYTHING screws up how we use our rotations currently.
Survivability in general goes down as well but we get more anti-stuns with glyphed icebound
Might add more to this... tired as hell.
