New dk, which spec for best DPS D:Follow

Levelling

unholy, on a pale horse helps a lot w/ levelling


low gear levels, unholy

midrange, 2h blood or frost

very good gear, unholy or dw frost.

subjective opinion but i think many people will agree.

I'm blood for leveling. Here's my current build. End every fight with full health or almost full health. Pick you up glyph of raise dead and you can summon your ghoul with no reagants needed. :D Right now I'm in Tyr's hand grinding for rune cloth. Make sure to cover all area's of azenoth to get explores achievement. http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jfVMqu0Icf0xzAo

Hope that helps. Good luck!

Unholy beats blood when it comes to speed.

Increased mounted speed is priceless before reaching level 76.
The ghoul pet packs quite a punch (when not doing it's crazy mob dance).
The diseases are strong enough to provide sufficient self-healing.

IMO Unholy is for DKs what Beastmastery is for hunters. Quite literally even with the controllable pet.

don't DnD on less than 3 targets.

for aoe pulls you will want to DnD->IT->PS->Pest->UB to start.

For single targets, IT -> PS -> SS -> BS*2 -> DC -> 3XSS -> DC

If you have the scourge strike glyph watch your diseases as they may refresh (which owns).

With the buffs to blood, especially Heart Strike's cleave, blood is now the current top DPS spec slightly surpassing a strong DW build.

After exploring all the options, I will have to say that Blood is best for leveling, Unholy is best for DPS end-game with mediocre gear and Blood for very high quality gear. I've explored with Frost for DPS and find that it's only successful for PVP or tanking.

Unholy > Blood for leveling. Keep exploring.

frost is actually somewhat fun to play as frost now thanks to the changes. its still a tad behind blood for single target dps but it definitely is much more competitive than it used to be.

Best DPS depends on the player. Skill is the most important "stat" of all. Any scrub can follow a gear guide and copy builds (I'm the perfect example) but if you're really pushing yourself to do better every time and avoid silly mistakes you will put out hot numbers.

For leveling I found Unholy very efficient and generally preferred it, but the difference between the three trees isn't so great that it matters all that much in my experience (both beta and live). I found a lot of comfort in Blood (just felt "safer" somehow) and loved Unholy's pet and mechanics (standing on unholy ground the first time made me giggle... a lot). But in the end leveling is leveling: Play what you like. Well, unless you're in a rush to fill a raid spot or something.

For end-game raiding I prefer Frost. At least so far.

Why? It's efficient, has compact cycles and deals good damage in both AoE and single-target situations. It's not always ideal of course but it does well in a wider variety of fights than the deep Blood, Unholy or hybrid builds I've tried so far. Of course for some fights I wish I had a bit more of Bloods' single-target damage, for others the unrivaled AoE mastery of Unholy would be great. But Frost, for me, does both admirably well and provides some nice utility (Icy Talons frees up a shammy totem, Unbreakable Armor is a great boost, etc...).

It's also very convenient for me to switch to a Frost tanking build and not have to swap out most of my macros. But that's only a nod to my own laziness.

Side note: Did Sartharion (3d) as Blood (51/13/7) last night and the new buffs to it are really, really nice for that fight. The new cleave mechanic is great for the stacked drakes and the single-target DPS was definitely better. Ticking DoTs on the adds at certain points was helpful but disappointing compared to Howling Blast or Unholy's awesomeness. All in all it's a very good choice for that fight in my opinion and DKs running that fight should consider it. Sadly I was subbed out for an off-tank before they downed him... maybe 2 TV titles is too much to ask? =) Eh.... next week.

Just my opinions of course. There is a decent discussion on this specific topic on Elitist Jerks (here) but the people there are in serious progression guilds mostly and not all of the viewpoints there are reasonable for heroic/entry-level raiders. So... grain of salt.

Good luck out there.

Edited, Jan 27th 2009 3:04am by TherionSaysWhat

I'm sorry but you're wrong. you are being subjective with an opinion. give some facts.
Here are a few about unholy.
The bottom line is you shouldnt have hp issues as unholy, therefore the self healing from blood is crap.
At the same time, a large portion of your damage is not very dependent on gear/weapon, so you can enjoy higher kill times w/out needing the best gear.
Unholy focuses at AoE combat. I think 75% of the pulls i made solo levelling as unholy were at least 4 mobs or more with almost no downtime (maybe half a bandage on the ghoul since i used him to aoe pull for me).
Even assuming that all specs kill reasonably well and have similar mob kill times, the bottleneck of levelling is moving around. on a pale horse's 20% is massive towards reducing your levelling time.

You can tell me i'm wrong, but you're just showing your ignorance. Or maybe you just like the easymode of levelling w/out skill and getting free hp the whole way.
Oh and 80 since november, same here. O wait I was 80 in august when i had my beta key....because skill is a function of time right? /sarcasm

True, and what you should have said.

Not always true, gear dependent, and it is very easy to aoe pull while you grind and massively increase your xp returns.


Edited, Jan 27th 2009 8:56am by EnthalpyTheBurninator

WTH? He said the self-healing isn't worth much because other specs can heal themselves just fine.

Get the stick out of your rear. Subjectiveness is subjective. Blood is fine and good, as are other specs played right. Blood and tri-spec are currently neck-and-neck at high-end. Just because YOU don't play a different spec doesn't make them less valid... except for in your personal anecdotes.

Personally I have one unholy and one blood spec for leveling (2 chars). I think I like Blood better, but that's just my playstyle. I couldn't stand leveling a Prot pally either; had to go Ret. Unholy works well for those who love to AoE stuff to level.

Those high end raid DKs? Yeah they're already 80. We're talking about leveling here.






Fact: There are a lot of 'Kill X amount of mobs' and 'Gather X amount of drops'.

Unholy AOE takes advantage of that fact.



Again we're talking about leveling. Travel time is a huge factor in this. That 20% makes a huge difference over time while leveling. You can't ignore that fact.






You've been 80 since november? That doesn't mean ****. Again I'm talking about leveling.

The differences between unholy and blood make unholy a superior leveling build. End level is a whole different game. It's the same thing with other classes. There are talents that are great for soloing and crap for group/raids. Level with efficiency and then respec for end game. Of course priority over that is personal preference to playstyle. I don't care if someone wants to level blood or frost, they're both great specs. The DK is a great class. But unholy just plain beats them for leveling. Self healing from blood spec isn't necessary for leveling. Leveling unholy I could self heal to 100% without a problem. I was actually surprised and expected I'd have downtime eating and regenerating. That wasn't the case blood or unholy or frost. Guess what that means? It means those self healing aspects of blood are inferior to dps talents.

I too tried all three specs. So don't go prancing around with your condescending biased opinion and making claims that anything anyone else says is just biased because it's not your view. You also know that the game has changed since November? How many DKs and specs have you leveled?