Mosg2's DK Manifesto

[Ualaa]

I look at it, like this...

A team has to be able to win against at least equal sized groups consistently. And if you can take out larger groups, that's a good sign.

Imagine the other faction has control of the Blacksmith, but sent 10+ people there to take it. You can hit BS with your team, and have a chance because of the AoE nature of Howling Blast. Even if you're going to die 9 times in 10, you'll put up decent pressure doing it. Meanwhile your team has 10 people elsewhere to take bases from 5 defenders.

When you go against masses of players, your Frost Runes are a priority. Every two Frost Strikes, is also a 90% chance of another Frost Rune. You might go Howling Blast, Howling Blast, Frost Strike, Frost Strike, Howling Blast, Blood Tap, Howling Blast... and then focus on a healer with Necrotic Strikes as the Frost Runes recharge.




When there aren't a lot of targets in one place, as a boxer we should destroy our opposition.
And most likely we will, most of the time.

But let's say you go to the Gold Mine, and they happen to have three healers there. That's a lot of healing output on whoever we focus fire.

Necrotic Strike, makes us far more likely to down a target in this situation than another team with similar or possibly even superior DPS. Burst is the only chance for most other teams in this situation; drop someone in a single GCD. Necrotic Strike, gets a very good chance of downing one of the targets despite the other two healers doing everything they can to keep that target up.




So good tools for both masses of opponents and for focusing on any given single target.

It might be worthwhile to build two castsequence (or DPS Mapped Keys). And have a toggle between them.

The first prioritizes Howling Strikes, exactly as shown in the Manifesto video. The second prioritizes Necrotic Strikes, in a similar fashion. And then have a toggle which switches the mode from one to the other.

Going with the priority system from the Manifesto video, possibly something like this:

Press:
Do Mapped Key - Melee IWT
Do Mapped Key A - Howling Blast (Keybind 1)
Do Mapped Key B - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 1)

Release:
Do Mapped Key C - Howling Blast (Keybind 2)
Do Mapped Key D - Howling Blast (Keybind 3)
Do Mapped Key E - Howling Blast (Keybind 4)
Do Mapped Key F - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 2)
Do Mapped Key G - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 3)
Do Mapped Key H - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 4)
Do Mapped Key I - Frost Strike (Keybind 1)
Do Mapped Key J - Frost Strike (Keybind 2)
Do Mapped Key K - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 2)
Do Mapped Key L - Necrotic Strike (Keybind 3)
Do Mapped Key M - Howling Blast (Keybind 2)
Do Mapped Key N - Howling Blast (Keybind 3)
Do Mapped Key O - Blood Strike (Keybind 1)

And then the toggle:
Step 1
- Enables Mapped Keys A, C, D, E, K, L.
- Disables Mapped Keys B, F, G, H, M, N.
Step 2
- Does the reverse.

As far as healers go... I would personally prefer all members of the same race.
As close to the same appearance as possible, which admittedly is a large boost for the Paladin camp.

Basically, so the opposition has a harder time focusing on the healer.

[Mercbeast]

Additionally, when you switch to single target DPS hungering cold comes into play which is an aoe incapacitate.

[Hivetyrant]

I played around some random dungeons with a terribly geared group of 4xDK 1xPally last night, driving from the healer and must say I found it quite enjoyable, granted the lack of range will probably hurt in some places, but the burst damage and CC is quite fun.

[Mosg2]

@Slats:

The problem with DW is that you need to be in Frost Presence to do better DPS than a 2h'er... And 2h'er is in Unholy Presence. This means that DW lose 15% run speed and base-1 second GCD's. The GCD thing is huge in my testing so far.

Also, after much waffling and talking to various people I've decided to stick with the Paladin for the following reasons:

The Paladin is a no-frills healer. You Beacon yourself and then just spam heals on whoever needs them. If you get targeted you Concentration Aura/Aura Mastery and keep spamming. If it gets worse you bubble. Either way the Paladin is a *terrible* target--If you attack me I'm healing myself and I get a Holy Power each time I do that--Which just builds how much healing I can put out. All the while my DK's are tearing you up. This forces people to target my DK's... And I can just sit there and spam heals unhindered. If it's just one person on me, the splashover I get from Beacon and Protector of the Innocent will keep me up until I run out of mana.

What does the Shaman do?

Well, after doing more testing they heal just the same that Paladins do. Earth Shield and Riptide are good heals, and I'd gladly trade Holy Shock for either, but their output is about the same that the Paladin's is... Except that amazingly enough the Paladins AoE is better than the Shaman. Chain Heal just took too big of a hit with the changes to talents and healing. Light of Dawn does have limitations, but the healing is solid on all the people I hit. Yes, the ramp up time is longer but the throughput is better. Mostly you're healing incidental damage with any group healing--Not as a primary way of healing direct damage. AoE healing in general is just not efficient enough nor does it have enough throughput.

So, single target? The Paladin does just as good as the Shaman. AoE? Everyone is weak as I see it. That leaves....

SURVIVABILITY!

And it's pretty obvious the Paladin is better at it than any of the other healers.

tl;dr:
Paladin wins.

[Shodokan]

@Slats:

The problem with DW is that you need to be in Frost Presence to do better DPS than a 2h'er... And 2h'er is in Unholy Presence. This means that DW lose 15% run speed and base-1 second GCD's. The GCD thing is huge in my testing so far.

Also, after much waffling and talking to various people I've decided to stick with the Paladin for the following reasons:

The Paladin is a no-frills healer. You Beacon yourself and then just spam heals on whoever needs them. If you get targeted you Concentration Aura/Aura Mastery and keep spamming. If it gets worse you bubble. Either way the Paladin is a *terrible* target--If you attack me I'm healing myself and I get a Holy Power each time I do that--Which just builds how much healing I can put out. All the while my DK's are tearing you up. This forces people to target my DK's... And I can just sit there and spam heals unhindered. If it's just one person on me, the splashover I get from Beacon and Protector of the Innocent will keep me up until I run out of mana.

What does the Shaman do?

Well, after doing more testing they heal just the same that Paladins do. Earth Shield and Riptide are good heals, and I'd gladly trade Holy Shock for either, but their output is about the same that the Paladin's is... Except that amazingly enough the Paladins AoE is better than the Shaman. Chain Heal just took too big of a hit with the changes to talents and healing. Light of Dawn does have limitations, but the healing is solid on all the people I hit. Yes, the ramp up time is longer but the throughput is better. Mostly you're healing incidental damage with any group healing--Not as a primary way of healing direct damage. AoE healing in general is just not efficient enough nor does it have enough throughput.

So, single target? The Paladin does just as good as the Shaman. AoE? Everyone is weak as I see it. That leaves....

SURVIVABILITY!

And it's pretty obvious the Paladin is better at it than any of the other healers.

tl;dr:
Paladin wins.

I'm not done arguing with you yet, get back on skype >=O i fixed my mic..

I have both healers... we'll see which is better in cata though.

[Mercbeast]

Honestly I think both will be good, and it will depend on play style and situation. I can think of situations where Shaman will be better and I can think of situations where Paladin will be better. Like you Shodokan I have shamans and paladins almost to 80 so I can decide after some experimentation which I prefer.

[BrothelMeister]

@Shodokan

The Ability to WRECK people every 2 minutes is EVERYTHING!! In arena, if you destroy 1 or 2 of the enemy team immediately, you pretty much win. The Rets have this from wings, and from Guardian of the Ancient Kings.

My other point has gone un-opposed that the healing on the DK+4Ret team is divided among 4 characters, which makes CCing the "healer" more difficult. The Healer+ 4DK team has 1 Healer, with little to no healing from the DKs, which means that when the healer gets locked down, the team is without healing,and Chain CCing 1 target is easy, as I'm sure we've all seen. The other Healing ability that the Ret's don't have yet but will is Holy Radiance, which will be very effective flow of healing for it's duration.

[Shodokan]

@Shodokan

The Ability to WRECK people every 2 minutes is EVERYTHING!! In arena, if you destroy 1 or 2 of the enemy team immediately, you pretty much win. The Rets have this from wings, and from Guardian of the Ancient Kings.

My other point has gone un-opposed that the healing on the DK+4Ret team is divided among 4 characters, which makes CCing the "healer" more difficult. The Healer+ 4DK team has 1 Healer, with little to no healing from the DKs, which means that when the healer gets locked down, the team is without healing,and Chain CCing 1 target is easy, as I'm sure we've all seen. The other Healing ability that the Ret's don't have yet but will is Holy Radiance, which will be very effective flow of healing for it's duration.

Holy radiance for ret really isn't that great, most people from the beta will tell you the same thing. So unless you blow all 4 at once it's not a stready stream of anything. If you blow all 4 the duration gets you to 40ish % life from 0. But also keep in mind it is a heal over time. It heals for 683 non crit baseline and 1024 crit... its like healing steam totem as ret, it really isn't that special as it can only heal for a max of 10240 per toon baseline, even if it could get to about 1/2 your health over 10 seconds it has a huge mana cost at 40% of your mana. Mana is an issue if you are using all of your tools when they need to be used. If you stagger them so that 40 seconds of every minuet you are getting heals then it isn't going to be as effective unless you forsee that the group is going to be taking little damage... and we all know that isn't the case.

Yes your healer can get chain CC'd, but with the paladin's healing if you are going to kill someone you need the damage from TV.

You seem to think that people are going to do 5's competitively in cata where blowing wings and killing a target is going to be the bees knees. Sure that is the case but the amount of arena wins it takes to get the same amount of points as in BGs is retarded. Also there are no longer any awards for being top rated arena teams from what i have read. So where does this really apply? It's the same thing with bubble... its once every 5 mins. Sure it is great when you have it but when you don't you are sitting ducks now that theres no more raid sac/bubble combo to keep the team alive. Also in how many situations did this team get obliterated when they were not getting constant FoL procs to heal themselves as they got AOE'd down? Especially now that divine storm is basically useless? Divine storm - School = Physical. So inquisition will not increase the damage of that either, meaning that the healing you get from it will still be negligible. If you are using divine storm every cooldown instead of crusader strike you lose out on a lot of damage... if inquisition buffed divine storm and the glyph for divine storm still existed i'd say there was a good chance it could work great but that's not the case.

Guardian SUCKS ASS, period. It does nearly no damage and basically only applies a STR buff. It explodes for less than mediocre damage as well.

Word of glory does not scale very well with ret unless you spec into increasing usefulness on other players, which only increases the healing of it by 50%. So your 6744 base turns into 10116 base meaning the crit goes to 15175. So this means that you are going to need to crit with all 4 and not get 50% of your life on a single character (plate blues is over 115k), at the sacrifice of a finishing move that does <= the damage of howling blast...and you only have the ability to use this ability when you know all of the rets have max holy power, and unless you get some macro or API/Addon to not allow the use of it unless it does have 3 holy power i don't think that it really is viable to rely on it with the inconsistency of gaining holy power from other things than crusader strike. Plus a healer can get someone 50k healing in less time than it takes to generate the holy power to do so. You're only going to heal for like 12k or so with single holy power, so is 1/10 of a single toon's life healing every few seconds really going to help all that much? So unless you are specing into protector of the innocent and getting 3-7k healing every time you use WoG for each toon as well... and then what is 3-7k in the long run? .025 to .05% of your total health.

With a leading frost DK you do have burst in the same means that 4x dks have (as in rotation wise), but keeping the entire team alive with less than mediocre heals isn't going to be easy or efficient.

With a paladin healer beaconed and the use of hand of sacrifice CC doesn't matter other than cyclone because it will be broken by the damage and immediately healed from healing your team or double healing from healing yourself due to beacon. So that point doesn't hold much ground if you play smart.

So to sum it up...

Paladin has inconsistent damage because it relies on healing most of the time with WoG. Relies on a 2 minuet cooldown to deal with equal members of the opposing faction and has crap for AOE damage and a 1 min cooldown to even make sure the team is being healed when it is actually going to use TV. The damage in comparison outside of wings is laughable at best especially in comparison to a frost DK. The ONLY saving grace paladins have is wings IMO and wings is not enough to make it better than a 4x dps + healer team.

If you wanna run the team, best of luck to you. But unless you have wings or bubble when you meet up with a 4x dk + healer... your entire team is dead by the time you kill a single target.

[Boylston]

Shodokan, for rated arenas, do you think Ele Shamans or Frost DKs will be the more effective team?

[remanz]

The trend I see is, if anything is OP, it will be nerfed. and nerfed very quickly. Stacking NS seems very OP to me. I felt 4DK and DK + 4 Rets are kinda on the same boat.

I like frost dk's burst and control. but they die hella fast. At least at level 80, they die like arm/fury warrior.The melee arena match, how long does it really last? More like 30seconds. The match total time is like 2mins. and minus the beginning and ending (clean up), the meaningful fighting time is like 30 seconds. Whatever you can come up in those 30 seconds matters. Wings and bubbles have their places. Death Grip and NS are also awesome. But they are all melees, and melees have similar problems.

Now if you get a friend the heal you, and you use 4 dks. That's a different story. that >>>> playing Dk + 4rets all by yourself, as far as effectiveness goes.