Overlord Theophany wrote:
idiggory wrote:
Quote:
Shadowfrost isn't melee-bound at all. In fact, I kite the sh*t out of frost/blood DKs.
I can put out more burst than a frost DK. Easily ~30k in less than 8 secs if I can get to 100 RP (which is easy).
Duh, lol, I completely forgot about the Garg. How exactly is your kiting superior to Frost though?
1) I don't have any melee attacks other than PS (and BS, which I only use rarely), where Frost has 3 (BS, PS, FS); Frost doesn't get Death runes from using Blood Boil to proc glyph of Blood Boil, and I do, giving me more ITs.
2) Glyph of Blood Boil gives me Death Runes, which allow me to use IT; starting with 100 RP, I can keep Garg up for full duration from range with the IT/BB glyphs.
3) Desecration puts a circle about as big as Frost Trap down which applies a 50% snare whenever I PS. If a melee gets close enough to me that I can PS, they're not going to stay close very long.
4) Frost needs to give up a lot of potential damage if they want to apply FF with CoI instead of IT. Rime procs, KM procs, etc.
5) Pet stun. My pet has a 5 sec stun on a 30 sec cooldown.
Frost is nowhere near Unholy, and never will be.
From a bit of playing around as Unholy, similar spec to Theo's, AND having played as frost for quite a bit I can say this is all true.
Shadowfrost:
I'm still getting the hang of it but I can see how it completely turns into plate wearing ranged dps with huge kiting ability and very difficult to kite. Blood boil being a ranged snare that produces death runes for IT spam is definitely hax. You can just straight spam Bloodboil and Icy Touch and dump runic power into Death Coils and Gargs. Against ranged classes melee works better for KM procs. You just have to remember that you're not beating melee in melee range (certainly not in the way a Frost would), but the only melee with the ability to force you into melee range is a Frost dk, which seem to be rarer than hen's teeth in PvP, so in terms of probability you might win the lottery a few times before being pwnt by a Frost.
The spec will definitely suffer with the garg talent being moved, the change to reaping and the change to the blood boil glyph. You're going to have to blood strike for the death runes and plague strike / chains for the snare. So it's going to become melee bound, to be able to beat heavy meleers like Frosts, Bloods, Ferals and Paladins you might need to toss in some melee abilities to it. If you're going to be heavy melee you might as well go Blood instead.
Apparently 3.1 wants to completely end the possibility of DKs that don't need to melee. I have to admit it's fair considering how much snaring and closing power the DK has with death grip and icy chains.
Frost:
Frost is like improved warrior with improved survivability on top of that. The necessity for so much icy chains means that you don't get so much ITs unless you're fighting a class that isn't attempting to kite, much of the damage comes from Blood Strikes and Frost Strikes instead, which is in melee range. Frost strikes are an anti melee attack since it can't be dodge/parry/blocked, while I was also stacking blade barrier with unbreakable armor for the brutal anti-melee defense. 1v1 against unholy I consistently pwnd them in melee followed by smashing their ghoul form for added pwn and/or also surviving the ghoul explosion in the end. The net DPS is relatively low so there's little to no chance to bursting down someone that is being healed, in BG you can just DG the healer and get him a few miles away from his group and let your teammates do the rest, or DG your targets miles away from their healer. The only class that kited me successfully was mages.
I can see now that my frost build was a very specialized build, it was an anti-melee specialist which somehow combined with the ability to force everyone except mages to be in melee range. Pretty much you can say that, if you want to play a warrior, you might as well just play a frost DK instead. (So much for bliz saying "we're not making your class obsolete" eh?)
Blood I haven't tried yet, I guess it's another melee dependent spec, I guess it hits DPS through the roof but I'm not sure it can snare as much as Frost.
Edited, Apr 4th 2009 7:43pm by xorq Edited, Apr 4th 2009 7:59pm by xorq