Mosg's DK Manifesto Version 2.0

[Ualaa]

Unholy would prioritize Unholy runes, the same as Frost prioritizes Howling Blast + Frost Strike.
Death Coil is likely your best runic power dump, with Rune Strike being your other option.

You would want to ensure your Unholy runes are constantly used if possible.
So you always have maximum benefit from Death's Advance.

Chance are, Blood runes would still be Blood Strike.
Your Frost runes would likely be Icy Touch for the application of Frost Fever.
Unholy is largely Diseases + Pet.

Not sure if you'd want Necrotic Strike or Plague Strike more.
Anti-healing vs greater raw damage.
Look at it from the point of view of amount of healing required to completely heal the target.

[dancook]

nvm

[Vociferate]

http://www.justin.tv/mosg2/b/278353687

First post of the thread.

Watch all of the videos, in my opinion. There is a lot of vital and amazing information.

[cmeche]

It would be nice to get the major points that Mosg2 makes in each of his vids in writing. There is sooo much info in the vid that it is hard to go back and pinpoint specific topics....like macros, isboxer setting. Even his nice Unholy macros are mixed in this thread somewhere.

[Vociferate]

In Mosg2's defense, it is a lot of work just to do the videos. Add a post that needs to be updated frequently, that starts cutting into a lot more time being devoted.

As for the video(s), I would simply download them and watch them at my own pace. And while watching them I made notes of times and macro's so I can go back with an index of sorts to find the relevant information. Worked great for me, and I had some notes on paper to refer back too and go over when setting everything up.

[Darm]

Unholy would prioritize Unholy runes, the same as Frost prioritizes Howling Blast + Frost Strike.
Death Coil is likely your best runic power dump, with Rune Strike being your other option.

OK, what about spec -- 0/8/33 ? I think you have to make some hard choices in Unholy, but I think those might be necessary to get the zero runic power Mind Freeze.

I'm just theorycrafting here, but I guess I'm not completely sold on how awesome Death's Advance is. Don't get me wrong, for a solo DK, I am convinced that it is awesome. But, in a 4 DK set up with 4 deathgrips, and with Howling Blast appplying a ranged snare, was the target running away really that big of a problem?

The other problem that I'm a little worried about is -- if your target is out of range, how are you going to activate those Unholy runes to activate Death's Advance. It's not an unsolvable problem, but I can see situations where your target is just out of range, your Unholy rune refreshes and bang, you're stuck. Of course, you still have 4 death grips. So maybe it is more of a wash.

An additional concern is keeping diseases up on the target, because that's important for Unholy DPS, without refreshing them too often which would result in a net DPS decrease. I think that's a trickier problem for Unholy than it is for Frost.

On the other hand, Unholy Frenzy looks like a very interesting talent and potentially a very good way to increase frontloaded damage.

I'm really curious to hear if anyone has a good solution to an Unholy DPS macro/priority system that would be workable with IS.

[Ualaa]

If you take the talents for Mind Freeze to be no runes and no runic power.
Then treat Mind Freeze as if you were still Frost.

Create a four step mapped key.
Step 1
-- Keystroke Action > Mind Freeze Keybind > DK #1
-- Do Not Advance for 2.5 Seconds.
Step 2
-- Keystroke Action > Mind Freeze Keybind > DK #2
-- Do Not Advance for 2.5 Seconds.
Step 3
-- Keystroke Acton > Mind Freeze Keybind > DK #3
-- Do Not Advance for 2.5 Seconds.
Step 4
-- Keystroke Action > Mind Freeze Keybind > DK #4
-- Do Not Advance for 2.5 Seconds.



Then imbed that, into your spam DPS key.

Hotkey: 'x'
Step 1
-- Do Mapped Key > FTL Assist Me > Current Window
-- Do Mapped Key > Mind Freeze > Current Window
-- Keystroke Action > Warcraft Keybind for Main Ability
Step 2
-- Keystroke Action > Main Ability
-- Keystroke Action > Other Ability
-- Keystroke Action > Other Ability
-- Keystroke Action > Other Ability
-- Keystroke Action > Other Ability
-- Keystroke Action > Other Ability

[Darm]

]Ualas does a lot of work here.

Gosh, Ualaa, I'm sorry I didn't mean to create a lot of extra work for you like that. I appreciate the help with the mechanics. Here is what I'm driving at though.

There are, I think, about 3ish reasonable approaches to take as far as settling on the Unholy DPS rotation. All three of course would use Death Coil to proc Dark Transformation and as a way to dump runic power. Mind Freeze also would be on round robin.

Approach #1

- Icy Touch when Frost Runes are available
- Blood Strike when Blood Runes are available
- Scourge Strike when Unholy Runes are available.

Advantage: All the attacks are single rune abilities.Just like Mosg's Frost rotation, this is pretty simple to implement such that it performs reliably in IS.

Disadvantage: No use of Plague Strike or Necrotic Strike, so it will do less DPS and no healing debuff is placed.

Approach #2

- Same as above, but use of priority system so that a small percentage of Unholy runes are used to cast Plague Strike instead of Scourge Strike.

You'd only want to do this every 20-21 seconds, ideally. I think this is really the tricky part, because if you are casting Plague Strike too often then you depriving yourself of DPS. Done poorly, your DPS might even beworse than Approach #1 where Plague Strike is ignored entirely.

I think it's tricky because Mosg's system is good for abilities where an ability's preference is to use every time when available ,or where the preference is 1:2 or 1:3 or even 1:4 in terms of frequency the ability is used, for plague strike I think the ratio is going to be something like 1:9 or 1:10. I'm uncertain whether Mosg's system can be pushed that far with reliable results and not ending up with plague strike being cast far more frequently than you'd like.

Approach #3

- Same as #1 above, but Necrotic Strike is inserted to use a significant portion of Unholy Runes. The whole point of Necrotic strike is the healing debuff, so you're going to want to be casting it more often than Plague Strike is cast in Approach #2. Yet, you still want to be casting Scourge Strike often. Just to put a number on things, we'll just say splitting the Unholy Runes 50/50 between Scourge Strike and Necrotic Strike is optimal, but that number is a just a wild guess.

- That sort of priority or weighting can be done in IS so it happens fairly reliably as well I think, just modifying Mosg's setup a tiny bit.

- The lingering question remains, even if this approach is possible, is it actually worth doing it from an efficacy stand point. I can't answer that question just yet.

Approach #4

- Same as #1 but with placement of both Plague Strike, Necrotic Strike in the rotation (as well as Scourge Strike).

- I'm real skeptical this could be done without substantially underutilizing Scourge Strike, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

[Noids]

Scan through the first manifesto thread and somewhere towards the end Mosg quotes his unholy setup. Rather than just a simple priority setup, it is actually a priority setup of castsequence macros.

I haven't worried about using necrotic strike at all in my setup as I have found that even taking the healing debuff into account as 100% damage, scourge strike does more. On top of this, I haven't been able to find whether the healing debuff portion can crit or not, but if not, more reason again to SS instead.

So that covers unholy runes, now for frost and blood. For PvP I like to outbreak then chains of ice and pestilence. This will have your diseases up, spread them to any poor buggers in range and snare your first target ready for beating. Once I'm throuhg this initial sequence, I am hitting plague strike, festering strike and death coil. Festering is great because it hits hard and gives death runes which can then be used for more SS goodness. I have a castsequence for the runic power abilities which does 5 DCs, then DT, then gargoyle.

I tested it out on PTR and it was a nice setup. Didn't quite have the control of frost with regards to snares and roots were annoying, but there seemed to be masses of damage and all the pets running around added massively to the confusion. Getting onto live and with the subsequent, secondary nerf, it doesn't feel as good as frost.

Mosg's setup with hungering cold and single target dps is gold and something that unholy can't help to replicate. Good 5s teams have a combination of good healing, good targetting dps focus and good CC. This is CC without effort which is something that boxing teams have always lacked in PvP. So whilst unholy is fun with all the pets running around and not being snared, it doesn't measure up to frost for control.

I haven't noticed the HB nerf at all really and my single target burst is higher than what I was able to achieve with unholy anyway. Add the buffs that frost got of getting Chains of Ice root back (which I incorporate into my DG macro) and the free snares from desecration, I am finding frost even better than pre patch.

On top of this, my priest feels so much stronger with a big shield which negates any snares on me as well as giving a 60% sprint for 4 seconds. It now takes a good 30s for the priest to go down in arenas and then a further 12s of healing. This converts to a strong win ratio in the open maps and at least even in the others for me.

Btw I have got a list of timestamps for different topics for this latest video, just need to put them in order and post it.

[Noids]

Jumped on mmo today and see that death's advance has been nerfed to 75% max now anyway, so I really can't see a good argument to box unholy DKs over frost any more.