Guide Dk 6.0 Transition Guide

[Sawadee]

Frost Changes

What does this mean?

For 2 handed frost: it doesn't seem to make a huge difference in the play style right now in the beta. I'm getting fewer killing machine procs than on live because of the lower haste, and there is a little bit less of a dps loss if you accidentally use a killing machine proc on frost strike instead of obliterate. but otherwise 2h frost is still playing exactly the same. It feels about the same as it did in early MoP when we had slower resource generation and sometimes had to sit on a couple GCD's before obliterating.
For DW Frost: Masterfrost is still better most of the time, but now obliterate is worth putting in the rotation again in your openers and when you have a lot of resources. In a purely single target situation with no opportunity for incidental cleave damage. obliterate is now hitting for about 30% more dps than howling blast, albeit for 2 runes instead of 1, but then you get the chance at the rime proc to make the math even more complex. so it will also depend on what your resources are looking like. 2 howling blasts are still better than 1 obliterate by straight number of resources spent per dps gained, but by number of GCD's used obliterate is better. I you're generating a lot of resources then it may be better to work in an obliterate occasionally. if you find your rune starved though, Masterfrost may still be the better choice

I should also note: my oblterate vs. Howling blast testing was in my masterfrost gear. It's possible that with more haste/crit gear, and gemming for strength that obliterate could just straight up be better than howling blast. I'll do some more testing with it. Right now though 2H frost is doing higher dps than DW anyways, so that is something else to consider for 6.0 if you're currently masterfrost.

Blood Changes

What does this mean?

There are a lot of massive changes to Blood DK's but none of it really drastically affects our "rotation" it's mostly changes in the "feel" of the class, how we're gearing, and how we scale for certain fights/situations. Self healing has been completely gutted, but in it's place our self shielding has been considerably buffed. If anything we will come out of this as stronger raid tanks for cutting edge progression, but it will be a lot more difficult to solo old content (or last tier raid bosses as some of us do to show off) and questing by pulling 20 mobs and aoe'ing them down,

• Rune strike is gone, so now our only RP spam is Death Coil. Death Coil costs more RP so you won't be able to spam it as often, but it's just a 1:1 ability swap so this isn't going to add anything drastically new or complex to your tank rotation.

• Heart Strike is also gone, but in it's place we'll basically just be spamming blood boil now. There is some utility that comes into play with the blood runes, as Soul Reaper, Rune Tap, and Strangulate also use blood runes. but most of the time we'll now be spamming blood boil. Both Blood Boil and Soul Reaper increase the healing of you next Death Strike by 20%.

• Avoidance has not been removed completely. 1% Critical Strike now gives DK's 1% Parry. In 5.4 we stacked parry to gain more crit. now if we want we can just stack crit to gain more parry. It's worth noting, I don't know at the moment how viable of an option this will be, but almost all of my avoidance tank gear turned into Crit/Mastery. and my rings/neck became either crit/armor or mastery/armor. So if you're avoidance stacking now, you'll be crit stacking when 6.0 drops.

• Self healing has been nerfed quite a bit, but shielding has been buffed to take its place. What this means is that in a party or raid setting, our relative survivability has not been greatly changed if there is a healer topping us off. however if you sometimes show up 10min early to raid to solo the trash, it's going to be a lot harder now. DK tanking is like a constant Malkorok fight now, you can keep loading up the shield, but it's a lot harder to heal your actual health pool.

• Death strike now scales with Attack power, but it also scales with 'Resolve'. If I deathstrike on a target dummy with 587 ilvl, I'm healing myself for about 11k. taking off just 3 pieces of gear I heal for 7k. so there is considerable scaling to the healing portion of death strike based on attack power.

• In addition to the above we have a new passive ability resolve. Death strike used to heal for 20% of the damage taken in the last 5 seconds. that has been removed and instead we have resolve. Resolve still increases based on the amount of damage we've taken in the last 5 seconds, and it gives a % increase to self heals and absorbs of all abilities. just pulling some random trash my reslove quickly scaled to almost 200%. however it's worth noting after killing the trash pack my HP had dropped about 20k (down to 115k from 135k) but I had about a 50k shield on me. So if you're doing things solo (lke questing), you're probably going to need to stop to eat occasionally.

• Finally, Rune Tap is now a purely defensive cooldown. it's a mini Ice Bound Fortitude. this is another huge blow to our solo'ing ability, but actually a buff to our raid tanking. DK's largely lacked strong pure damage mitigation CD's for some hard hitting fights, and this will help us in that regard. It's a 40 second cooldown that stores up to 2 charges, and reduces damage taken by 40% for 3 seconds.

Some notes about gemming/stats for blood:
Strength = More attack power = larger death strike base heals
Mastery = larger death strike shields
Crit = Parry
Versaility and Armor = % damage reduction
Multistrike: blood gets a 5% bonus to multistrike, but you won't find much of it right now.
So, just to recap: There are a TON of blood changes, but as long as you put death coil on your bar in place of rune strike, blood will still play exactly the same way, it's just going to feel very different. You're going to have a lot less self healing, a lot more shielding, and the scaling/ramp up time of your self shielding may feel different.

Unholy Changes

• ​Mastery is going to be your best stat for SoO, followed by crit. When you reach level 100 this will change to include more multistrike. With low gear your going to gear Mastery >= multistirke, then as you get higher gear in myuthic (and probably subsequent tiers) you will gear more to multistirke >= Mastery.
• Unholy frenzy has been removed.
• Pestilence has been removed and its effect has been rolled into Blood Boil
• Plaguebearer is a new talent to replace Roiling Blood becasue of the pestilence change. This talent now increase the duration of your diseases on your target when you use Death Coil.
• Unholy Pres now gives 20% haste instead of 10%.
• AMS now gives 90%~ less runic power from damage sources.
• Army of the Dead is now Instant
• Raise Dead is unholy only.
• Death Pact now heals you for 50% but absorbs 25% of max heath from incoming healing for 15s.
• Diseases no longer modify your ability damage (Scourge Strike)
• Diseases no longer snapshot and ar dynamic like other dots.
• Unholy Aura now increases haste by 5% and Versatility by 3%, instead of attack speed.
• Death coil is now 30 RP instead of 32
• Your Level 60 talents are now based on runic power use instead of ability use.
• Unholy Might now increases Strength by 10% (down from 35%)
• Necrosis is a new passive ability for Unholy Death Knights. Necrosis causes Multistrikes from Festering Strike, Pestilence, Plague Strike, Scourge Strike, and Soul Reaper to also deal a burst of Shadow damage. The amount of burst damage is based on Attack Power, not the damage from the triggering Multistrike.

--Contributed by Krazyito
In general feel and playstyle Unholy has not changed very much from what it currently is on live.

If you have any more feed back please comment below. I kind of threw this togetther with a friend of mine that I know. Edited October 11, 2014 by Amnesty