First weeks of arena with 4x Frost DK's.

Hey guys,

Just want to tell how my team is doing in arena, maybe it helps someone out :)

I dinged 85 with my Deathknights 3 weeks ago. The first week i started right away with my deathknights, getting like 5 wins 25 losses. I just wanted to get 5 wins for the 1300 conquest points on my toons. I already had a 5v5 team on 1100 rating from my shamans, so i used it. The first weeks weren't good and bad either. Back then i used a frost PvP spec without obliterate. I setted up my keybindings like in Mosg's DK setup, and it was decent. I experienced that ring of frost isn't that much of a problem comparing to my shamans. Later that week i've upgraded my gear to the BoE crafted set, and had like 1200 resillience. Wow what a difference did this make.

The second week with my upgraded gear I went from 5-25 to about 5-11. I also grinded my first piece of the Bloodthirsty set. Did dailies of TB to get exalted asap (still grinding though, need about 10 more days). And i got a second piece of Bloodthirsty.

I noticed that not having a healer in BG's was a pain, and i could do a lot less damage because of my characters dying. Also i found Strand of the Ancients a really nice BG as DK's (hated it with my shamans), because you can slow all those tanks really nice and just chop everyone up as defender.

Yesterday i did some more arena's when i got back from work, and it went super! I got 5-1 win ratio. And had no problem nuking people down with like 135k HP. I also got the two-handed axe (iLVL 359). This made a huge difference aswell. It was a great upgrade from my iLVL 333 quest sword.

So far i'm loving my DK's and tuned my macro's. I tried Frost spec with and without obliterate/unholy or frost aura, and checked what the most damage did. I have a 2 step macro (Pressed and on Release), and instead of using Howling Blast on key up i now use Obliterate instead. I use Obliterate whenever i can, and usually spend my 100% crit on Frost Strike.

I made a second DPS key that uses Blood Tap, Rune cooldown remover and pestillence to spread diseases. I also use hungering cold in that macro on round-robin. So when i start nuking in arena, after around 10 seconds i clear up all the rune cooldowns and instantly Obliterate twice with my first DPS macro.

I use my Ghouls around 5 seconds before the gate open and i rush in. I love it that i'm able to be the first attacker and pick a target instead of playing defensive with my shamans and waiting for my opponents to attack.

I tried the Unholy spec but i did a lot less damage because the spec is priority based, and not spammable like Frost is.


If anyone has any questions or suggestions/tips, i love to hear them.

Kind regards,

Negativ1337

Thanks for the interesting read, looking forward to arena with my DK's. However your subject says 4 x Frost - are you running 4/5 dks? what's the other char.

My first couple weeks went just like yours. My season stats are around a 1 to 2 win Loss over all, but I play most of my games lately with a pally that heals for me lol. When those few healers aren't logged on I do a few with my pally, but I find I do much better with outside heals.

I've pretty much given up on the pve grind, as gearing for both tends to make me sick, so no real leaps and bounds from a heroic dungeon clear status.

I've also found that obliterate spam is kinda the way to go for ultra pressure, get going with the howling blast spamming and the necro strikes at first, then swap targets and obliterate spam the swap back to howling blast again makes their healers freak out and usually gets me a kill or two.


I finally got my 359 weps too, and wow what a difference from the 316 weapons I was using lol. Haven't had a chance yet to go arena after I got them but tonight I just can't wait!

I'm using a resto druid and resto shaman from my guild to heal me. Usually grind BG's with a random healer/healer from my guild when they're up for it.

Yeah the new weapon rocks. I lost against one team because my dps wasnt high enough (the 5-1 wins/losses) and then i won a battle, got my weapons, queued up again and killed the team i lost to real hard hehe.

You can get 359 weapons now from conquest points (no rating needed) and thats really nice, but on the other hand reaching 1800 now doesn't really give you anything. Too bad on the other side because if you want cool stuff now you need to get like 2000+ rating first. Though getting more conquest points per week rocks.

Yea gearing up faster also means more rating. Like mosg said, I see this team comp going to 2k very easily once you get the gear :)

Dear god I hope the frost changes go live, be the craziest arenas ever!

lol omg yes can you imagine? Obliterate spam just got that much better... howling blast destruction is that much more frostier!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ghonosyph

I've pretty much given up on the pve grind, as gearing for both tends to make me sick, so no real leaps and bounds from a heroic dungeon clear status.

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I don't have a DK team myself since I'm primarily PvE focused, However, I noted something very interesting on the last page of Mosg's DK Manifesto Thread 2.0. Noids posted that he had taken his team into HEROIC HoO and Lost City and owned both on his first attempt. He set up all his DKs as blood.

I haven't even attempted those heroics on my caster teams which are epic geared b/c they seem like they would be such a pita. I'm pretty certain I could eventually get them down, but I think it would involve lots of wiping and there are very few upgrades in there for me anyway.

But if I had a team combo that someone else had waltzed into these heroics with and owned stuff, I'd definitley try that out. If you do the same, please update us on how it goes.

Heck, if a playy/4xDK team can easily do heroics, I may just level up a team for more PvE fun - and even dip my toe in the PvP content!

This is cool to see as in Wrath i started to lvl 2 more DKs as i totaly loved the one i got then. Since they have so huge burst with grip and aoe CC they are such'a easy class/specc to use in a burst setup like that. GL with them, ever tryed to go 3s with them? I think that should work out fine aswell if you play aggresive and butst down 1 and out play the others.

Ohh and btw, DW gives alittle bit more dps as frost. You might want to switch into that later when you get some more points or T2 weps :P Also looks cool with like 8 swords :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mercurio

I don't have a DK team myself since I'm primarily PvE focused, However, I noted something very interesting on the last page of Mosg's DK Manifesto Thread 2.0. Noids posted that he had taken his team into HEROIC HoO and Lost City and owned both on his first attempt. He set up all his DKs as blood.

I haven't even attempted those heroics on my caster teams which are epic geared b/c they seem like they would be such a pita. I'm pretty certain I could eventually get them down, but I think it would involve lots of wiping and there are very few upgrades in there for me anyway.

But if I had a team combo that someone else had waltzed into these heroics with and owned stuff, I'd definitley try that out. If you do the same, please update us on how it goes.

Heck, if a playy/4xDK team can easily do heroics, I may just level up a team for more PvE fun - and even dip my toe in the PvP content!

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Ya I thought about trying this with my team, but Im too lazy to macro up a blood spec in IS =(

i actually have a blood spec setup in bartender buttons with keybinds via mosg's frost setup... it works great as i can just switch talents and all the keys and keybinds are the same for dps spam ;) albeit more time consuming to setup on the user end, but it works wonders, and its not as hard as you would think :D


So far not really making an effort into pve, but i have killed a couple of bosses as 4blood+ pally heals with just wearing my pvp gear. I need to start farming my normal dungeon run every day so i can get more justice points and start gearing up pve ! >.<

i tried it with blood specc, no way, i think atm is unholy the best ( but i dont like unholy ;) ) and so i play frost, its really great with some nice CC and only 1 min strangulate

The main thing this comp lacks for heroics is CC. I initially tried heroics with a 3 frost, 1 blood setup but found the frosties pulling agro in 4-5 pulls and dying very quickly. When they didn't and my PvP geared tank received 4-5 x focus, my PvP geared priest just could not heal him through it.

So I switched to blood in patch 4.0.6 for heroics with the buff to death strike and heart strike and lovely rune strike spam. I use exactly the same ISboxer setup for my blood spec, but my dps bar just contains death strike, heart strike, rune strike, instead of howling blast, necrotic strike, frost strike etc.

What I get from this is 4 guys who do 6-7k single target dps, going up to 10-12k dps when pulling groups. The self healing is absolutely insane. The first time I did heroic Rajh, my priest died to the charge thing at about 95% but between AMS, IBF and the self heals, the 4 DKs downed him without dying. Admittedly this was due to a fairly lucky run of casts from Rajh without a charge at the group but it still shows the potential. They all ended up without about 150k of healing each from memory.

Now I haven't attempted all heroics with these guys, but I can't imagine trash giving me a problem. The only place that was slightly annoying was Vortex where I ran into a few dual healer pulls at the end. Once I worked out these guys had virtually endless mana and 200k heals though, a couple of well timed strangulates did the trick.

The two places I have failed (stopping me from trying the rest of the instance :P) were first boss in Grim Batol and second boss in BRC. In GB my heartstrike spam would eventually kill the purple guy and I was only able to keep the team up until about 800k left before dying. Replacing heart strike with blood strike reduced my dps to 5k on the boss which just wasn't enough to kill him before the damage from adds etc. became overwhelming.

BRC was really just me not being setup to block the rays well. I thought I could waltz in and just kill the boss through 3 enrages. When I tried blocking with the priest I mistimed it and got transformed and decided to call it quits.

Haven't played much the last fortnight, getting my shaman team set up to PvE a bit more instead as I feel that Blizz will continue to make the CC part of instances necessary throughout the whole expansion. This is what cripples all DK teams in reality, the only thing that lets Bloods get through it is their insane survivability.

Am 78 and i can not wait to get my Dk;s to join in the fun

just working so much atm i had to update my pc for the group :D