PVE DK + Pala

[dancook]

I've been playing my DK x 4 in bg whilst levelling up, occasional bit of questing / boosting.

Even though I made this group for PVP BG/Arena. I'm toying with the idea of PVE instances.

Does anyone have any successful healer driven dk+pala groups?

What talent trees would you run? Blood w/shield + 3 x 2h? Unholy? 4 x Blood (with/without shield?)?

I've always been tank driven for instances, I'm just thinking it would be so much of a change jumping from pvp to pve and back. (ie. read, lazy option?)

[dancook]

I just read... "As of Cataclysm, Blood will be the only death knight tank tree". I also understand that they can take without a shield..

They are currently all howling blasts PVP kings at the moment. So wondering how I should shake things up for PVE dungeons - eventually heroics would be nice.

[dancook]

Ok, well I'll just update you to how I got on.

I specced one as a blood tank and put him in the blood 'stance', since I had been using MOSG's concept of choosing spells for pvp, I kept it for the tank.

I have two bars, one has AOE abilities and a few cooldowns. The other has single target abilities and a few cooldowns.

One key spams the AOE abilities and one key the single target. These are the same keys that spam AOE, howling blast etc on the 3 other frost DK, and then single target including freezing all other enemy with 10 yards - nice for crowd control.

the frost are dw, the blood 2h. They are specced out in level 70 PVP epic gear, so health pools are 12k+ ~ lvl 70 and damage is nice.

Originally I took them through with my paladin@85 dressed in mostly tank gear trying to heal. The paladin didn't have a good mana pool but I got through Utguard keep easily enough.

I decided to get a PUG healer from dungeon finder, I was a bit worried to start with - I didn't want to fk up and ruin their dungeon. But in reality the loved it! pretty easy to heal, with no need for mana breaks. We did Nexus together, and thought it'd be nice to do more in future... however I soon learnt dungeon finder is cross server, and you can't choose to reparty with people on different servers.

Later on I played with another pug healer, who seemed a bit distracted at first - but was impressed by me and my 'bots' and wanted to play more afterwards.

@ lvl 85 I will spec the dps Holy 2H.

[Ualaa]

PvE...

You could run them all as Blood.
Kills won't be terribly fast, but you will have massive survivability.
Basically not care who has threat, as long as it isn't the healer.
Lots of passive heals from the Blood Worms, Rune Tap, Death Strike..

You could go with the holy trinity.
Spec one Blood, that's your tank.
You have a healer type.
And then go 3x Frost, as that is probably more DPS then 3x Unholy.
But Unholy will work, if you prefer it.

[dancook]

PvE...

You could run them all as Blood.
Kills won't be terribly fast, but you will have massive survivability.
Basically not care who has threat, as long as it isn't the healer.
Lots of passive heals from the Blood Worms, Rune Tap, Death Strike..

You could go with the holy trinity.
Spec one Blood, that's your tank.
You have a healer type.
And then go 3x Frost, as that is probably more DPS then 3x Unholy.
But Unholy will work, if you prefer it.

I'm using 3 x Frost at the moment, but I've read that unholy is better @ 85? I don't know personally.

I like the idea of all blood, and if at any point I start to struggle with keeping the frosties alive I might do it. So far so good though.

[ghonosyph]

For arena... for us, frost is pretty much the only way to go. Your dmg as unholy relys pretty heavily on keeping diseases and scourge striking a lot. Getting diseases dispelled randomly means its harder to manage via key spam for optimal rune usage and such.

That being said, unholy is VERY strong in bgs

[dancook]

I ran UT a few times last night @ lvl 70 with a pug healer.

Output on the Frosties was ~1400 DPS
Output on blood tank was ~1050 DPS

AOE is strong in the group.

Mostly none of the healers needed any mana breaks and we were able to go from one mob to another almost seamlessly.

It might be, because it's 'new' but I'm having more fun with my dks than shaman.

[Mamut]

Blood tank with 3 frosties is a fast and easy way to clear instances. I use that 80% of the time or more clearing the level 85 5 mans and heroics. I run a pally healer and 4 DK's. For tougher fights i spec all 4 DK's blood but only one is the tank in blood presence. The other 3 are in unholy presence and rocking the new Death Strike glyph (glyph of Dark Succor).

Yeah the dps isn't the greatest but the massive heals they produce make some of the harder pulls/bosses doable. With the glyph they heal themselves for around 18k as well as getting the blood shield.

I generally drive the team using my Holy pally but i also run the 4 DK's with healer friends and have had some success doing 5 man stuff that way.

Good luck and i hope you keep enjoying the DK's as much as i have been!

[dancook]

Blood tank with 3 frosties is a fast and easy way to clear instances. I use that 80% of the time or more clearing the level 85 5 mans and heroics. I run a pally healer and 4 DK's. For tougher fights i spec all 4 DK's blood but only one is the tank in blood presence. The other 3 are in unholy presence and rocking the new Death Strike glyph (glyph of Dark Succor).

Yeah the dps isn't the greatest but the massive heals they produce make some of the harder pulls/bosses doable. With the glyph they heal themselves for around 18k as well as getting the blood shield.

I generally drive the team using my Holy pally but i also run the 4 DK's with healer friends and have had some success doing 5 man stuff that way.

Good luck and i hope you keep enjoying the DK's as much as i have been!

That's great to hear! I'll look forward to trying them out in heroics.

Have you got armory links?

cheers