Death Knight Cataclysm (85) PvP Guide (In Progress)

Post by DarkOpeth

Disclaimer: This guide is written with the intention of being an overview. The opinions, suggestions and conjectures contained herein are based on my experience ONLY. Treat it as such, I am not an expert.

Our class board suffers from a lack of stickies, with the exception of Alcotraz's fantastic tanking guide. Many, many people frequently ask questions about DK PvP with regards to spec, skills, rotation, gear, etc. I will attempt to provide an overview for the most current patch.

Our class: A formidable class, Death Knights are by design a melee class with access to more spells, range damage and distanced attacks then the other melee classes, balancing traditional melee damage with diseases and frost and shadow spells. A well played Death Knight can be nigh unbeatable 1v1, and a powerful combatant in larger groups.

Guide Table of Contents

Gear

Stats

Gems/Sockets/Enchants (IN PROGRESS)

Talent Specialization (IN PROGRESS)

Mechanics, Tactics, and other considerations (IN PROGRESS)

---GEAR---:

Gear will be one of main determining factors in your overall combat performance. Unlike PvE, where there are often conflicting choices with differing stats, and different options for choosing gear, in PvP, selection is narrowed down a lot more.

PvP items, particularly the Gladiator sets upgrade linearly. This means that if the Bloodthirsty Leggings give haste, their direct upgrade, Vicious Leggings will give haste as well. The stats the lowest form of the item comes with are the stats they keep. Socket colors are also linear. Superseding item sets from upcoming seasons will follow this trend as well.

For white stats, our gear gives only strength and stamina. Equip: stats include haste, mastery, crit, hit and expertise.
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For starters, Blacksmiths can craft a Bloodied Pyrium set, ilvl 339, than can help replace quest greens as you prepare to enter PvP at 85. The set includes:

Offset peices: Belt, Bracers, Boots,
Main Pieces: Helm, Chest, Shoulders, Gloves and Leggings

To craft this set, you will require Elementium Bar x97 and Volatile Fire x80. These materials can be bought out from the auction house, or easily obtained by miners. If you are not inclined to have this set crafted, you can buy these pieces from the Auction House outright.

The next step in gearing up are actual sets. Bloodied Gladiator's is the blue (ilvl 352) set obtainable via honor, and Vicious Gladiator's is the season 11 epic (ilvl 365) set obtainable through arena combat (via conquest points gained through winning,) or as a drop from Pit Lord Argaloth in Baradin Hold, the Cataclysm equivalent of Vault of Archavon in Wintergrasp.

Bloodthirsty Set Related offset pieces: Bra .cer, Be .lt, Boo .ts, Ca .pe, Ne .ck, Ri .ngs, Relic
Vicious Set also has equivalent offset pieces, with the same stat budget

Cost:
Rings, neck, and cape are 1250 Honor/CP
Belt, Boots, and Trinkets and smaller Mainset Pieces (gloves, shoulders) are 1600 Honor/CP
Major Mainset Pieces (Chest, Legs, Helm,) are 2200 Honor/CP

Weapons: The only PvP weapons available are Epic Vicious weapons. They cost 3400 CP for 2h, and 2100 CP for 1h weapons. Ilvl346 weapons for heroics will do as a substitute. Consider getting:

Foe Reaper- from Heroic Deadmines
Whitefin Axe- in Heroic Throne of Tides
SotBP from Heroic Stonecore

There are many other options available, such as Arced War Axe from H SFK, Wild Hammer from H Grim Batol, or even Blade of the Fearless from Tol Barad daily quests.

Because a large majority of our attacks calculate a part of their damage from a % of wep. dmg, the type of weapon you have can significantly impact your ability to deal damage in PvP. Damage is paramount to success, so I would advise getting an epic PvP weapon like Vicious Gladiator's Bonegrinder or its sword of axe variant ASAP. Spend your first CP points on that.
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There are two types of PvP related points: (you will need both of these to purchase PvP items!)

Honor Points: The lower of the two, gained by killing opponents in Battlegrounds and throughout the world. The opponent must be green to you or higher, and typically one kill will award 5 points. Winning and losing Battlegrounds will award an honor point bonus, completing objectives while inside the battlegrounds such as capturing nodes, turning in flags and holding locations will award points as well. These points are necessary to buy the most basic PvP gear, and are relatively easy to obtain. There is no limit to how many points you can earn a week, although you can hold only 4000 points at a time.

Conquest Points: The higher-level points obtained through winning ranked Arena matches, and Rated Battlegrounds. There is a weekly limit to how many you can earn a week, starting at 1343. This cap can be increased however by improving your personal and team rating in arena. Winning your first daily random battleground will award 25 conquest points as well.
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---STATS---

There are 5 primary attributes, and several secondary attributes used for combat. As a melee class, we deal with only a handful of them. Because the topic is PvP, and because we are required to wear certain items and gear, our itemization and stat focus options are much more limited than for PvE DK's, so stat deviation is not so much of a PvP problem.

Regardless, there are stats that are completely useless. They should not be looked for nor ever used. This includes: Intellect, Spirit, Parry, Dodge, Spell Hit, and of course, Spell Power, a favorite of starter DK's.

Stats that MATTER:

Strength: The number one stat. This is the most important. The bread to your butter. Useful, and desirable. Increases your attack power, melee damage, spell damage, disease ticks, simply everything you put out.

Agility: provides modest armor and crit. Because of item constraints, the only place this will appear is from your Horn of Winter Should never be socketed for.

Stamina: more stam = more health, and when covered with resilience and armor, makes you exceedingly harder to kill. Our PvP gear already provides this stat generously, and other player's buffs will add even more. Should never be socketed for.

Critical Strike Rating: Self explanatory. Provides a greater chance for you abilities, including disease ticks to crit. You need a lot more rating for the same increase effect in comparison to WotLK.

Haste Rating: Increases swing speed, rune regeneration speed. You will find some on your items. Very desirable for 2h Frost, not so much for Frost DW or Unholy 2h.

Mastery: Spec dependent, currently good for Frost, not so good for Unholy. (Unholy Mastery is being reworked for next patch to make it more attractive.)

Resilience: The big kahuna. The #1 PvP stat. For Cataclysm, resilience is fairly evened out. 1000 resilience = about 10% damage reduction. Resilience no longer protects against dots/drains, crit damage or crit chance, only reducing damage by a flat amount. A full set of armor (including off-pieces) will leave you between 2.7-3.2k resilience, depending on trinket choice.

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Cap Stats: You need to immediately achieve the cap in these stats for MOST effective combat performance.
As mentioned by others, realistically, expertise is of no use to you against casters, because they have very low dodge, and cannot parry at all. However, these are just guidelines so that you are on a level playing field no matter who you come up against. Falling below the hit or expertise cap by a few tenths of a percentage point is not a huge deal, but be aware that doing so may work against you because you can now miss, and be otherwise defended from by your opponents. This will be less and less of an issue as you improve your gear and as the expansion progresses, because better items naturally have more stats, so achieving and maintaining these caps will become gradually easier.

Hit and Expertise: Increases the chance for you to hit your enemies. Hit reduces chances for a "Miss", and Expertise reduces the chance for your opponent to "Dodge" or "Parry".

Because you will only be fighting players equal or lower to your level, getting capped is significantly easier for PvP then for PvE because you don't need rating to make up for 3 levels. You need to get enough rating for 5% hit, and 20 expertise. You can mouse over the stats in your Character pane, and you will see a breakdown of your hit chances with regards to your, and four levels above. We are focused only on level 85.

Spell Penetration: This stat reduces your enemies' resistance to your spell attacks. This is a way for you to surpass the resistances granted by spells like Blessing of Kings, Mark of the Wild, Prayer of Shadow Protection and innate passive racials. talents and spells. Because both Unholy and Frost specs draw a significant portion of their damage from spells, this stat is very important.

For example, lets' say that you are unholy. You are in arena facing a mage, and his priest buddy. The mage has mage armor on and has the priest's shadow protection. That gives him almost 200 shadow resistance. Because of your spec, your diseases, main strike, deathcoil (which can be up to 70% of your damage) are shadow damage. Without spell penetration the effect that would have on your damage would be devastating, when coupled with his resilience, and would drastically impair your ability to meaningfully deal damage, especially if there is a healer present. Because many classes have shielding, absorption, resistance, and resilience all working together, it is imperative that you increase the damage you deal to them in any way you can to overcome all those effects.

That is where Spell Penetration comes in. It works on a 1:1 ratio, 1 penetration reduces resistance by one. A good number to shoot for is 170, sometimes even 220. This can be achieved through gems and enchants, which will be discussed below. Spell penetration is of very minor significance to blood.

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Post by DarkOpeth

---GEMS, SOCKETS, ENCHANTS---

Assuming you bought all the pieces, you should now have 3 red, 3 yellow, and 3 blue sockets, as well as a meta socket, and a prismatic socket.

Plenty of room for gems. Socket bonuses are much larger and far more robust, and as such it is now worth matching them. The days of throwing strength into every socket are over. If all socket bonuses are attained, you will gain 80 resilience and 30 strength. To match sockets we will have to split gems. There are some options, Blacksmiths gain 2 extra sockets, and everyone can get a bonus socket from the Ebonsteel Belt Buckle.

To attain the required spell pen cap I would advise putting Stormy Ocean Sapphire into the 3 blue sockets. All three of those requirements are met, and you are on your way to spell pen cap. Alternatively, you can put some of the blue gems into the prismatic socket, belt buckle socket, or blacksmithing socket, and leave the blue ones open for split gems.

There are two main paths to take. Offensive gemming, and Defensive gemming. Some people have suggested that stacking resilience is a good option at the moment.

For red sockets, go with good ol' strength. Bold Inferno Ruby
For yellow, you could consider plain resilience, but I think the Resilience gained through gear is sufficient.

Offensive: The most common way to gem. This is to benefit your burst and overall damage capabilities.

Red Sockets: http://www.wowhead.com/item=52206. Will improve all your damage, and you automatically get the socket bonus.

Blue Sockets: Stormy Ocean Sapphire to attain spell-pen cap, and you automatically get the socket bonus.

Yellow sockets: To get the socket bonus we will have to split gems here.
Skillful Ember Topaz,
Fierce Ember Topaz, or
Inscribed Ember Topaz may work well here.

Defensive: (this will not help your damage in any way, and is designed to max out resilience while matching sockets)

Red sockets: Resplendent Ember Topaz

Blue sockets:Stormy Ocean Sapphire

Yellow sockets: Mystic Amberjewel

Keep in mind that Unholy and Frost benefit from these stats in different ways, so what is good for one spec may not be so good for another. For example, 2h Frost wants Haste, while unholy does not.

Meta Gems:

Your job in arena and battlegrounds is damage. Damage output is vital for victory. The best metagems are ones that will enhance your damage output:

Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond is the best bet here. 3% crit dmg helps provide some additional output to counter resilience.

(In the next patch, Blizzard is adding Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond, which will become a viable option as well.)

Matching them should be no problem, because we have plenty of sockets in place. For arena and battlegrounds, there are often a lot of spells flying around. I use

Destructive Shadowspirit Diamond

Some alternatives: (These are defensively oriented, and will do nothing for your burst, so I would not recommend using them unless the type of PvP you do means you get focused heavily, all the time. Stick with Chaotic Shadowspirit, generally.)

Impassive Shadowspirit Diamond
Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond
Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond
Enigmatic Shadowspirit Diamond
Powerful Shadowspirit Diamond

The reductions to snare, fear, stun and root do not stack with talents. Neither does the run speed increase. This means that for some specs, the effects will be overwritten, and therefore of no use, so make sure to pick a metagem that will fully benefit your talent tree. Some conflicting effects: Unholy Presence,, OaPH, etc...
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Enchants:

Non-player:

Shoulder:
Lesser Inscription of Jagged Stone - Honored with Therazane
Greater Inscription of Jagged Stone - Exalted with Therazane

(There are PvP Shoulder Enchants coming with the next patch.)

Head:
Arcanum of the Dragonmaw / Arcanum of the Wildhammer - Exalted with Dragonmaw/Wildhammer (Horde/Alliance respectively)

(There are PvP Head Enchants with resilience coming in the next patch)

Player:

Cloak: -Required-
Lesser Power -70 spell pen that will, along with your gems, cap you out. You should now surpass any enemy resistances.

Chest:
Mighty Armor or Peerless Stats if you can afford it.

Wrist:
Precision or Greater Haste if you need help getting capped, otherwise get Greater Critical Strike or Greater Speed

Hands: Preference based. Depends on what stats you are focusing on.
Greater Mastery or
Mighty Strength or
Haste or if you're still not capped: Greater Haste

Legs: Crafted LW armors.
Charscale Leg Armor or Charscale Leg Armor or their cheaper, blue variants.

Feet:
Precision for help getting capped, otherwise
Mastery or Haste

Weapons: Even with all the new enchants, no matter how cool the glow looks, our runes are still superior.
For 2h, Rune of the Fallen Crusader
For DW, RotFC on mainhand, Razorice on offhand. (If you prefer RotFC on both weapons, that will work as well.)
Once I have time, I will put names for the links to make it look neater.
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---TALENTS---

The Rune and Runic Power system is, in my opinion, superior to mana, rage, energy and focus. Mana runs out, and while Rogues and Warriors can heal, DK's have abilities that can be used to generate health for an infinite duration. As long as someone is keeping you up, or you can manage self-healing by yourself, you can go until you pass out at the keyboard. Other classes can't say the same, because either their resource runs out, or they cannot regenerate a sufficient amount of health at a sufficient rate. 4% recuperate? Please.

For mainstream PvP and Arena, the most common specializations are 2h Unholy, and 2h Frost. I will attempt to discuss each spec and any related weapon selections individually below. Blood Specialization is mentioned as well.

======Unholy======

Strengths:

-Fantastic Disease damage, and a third disease.
-A pet with Stun, and decent damage output.
-With tools like slowing and Gargoyle, the ability to put great pressure on a target.
-Between a permanent pet, gargoyle, diseases, and desecration, the ability to throw a lot
of unpleasant crap out there very quickly for your enemies to deal with.

Weaknesses:

-Very one-sided when it comes to damage, relying almost exclusively on Shadow
-Somewhat dependent on pets and cooldowns for most effective performance
-Healing is moderate at best, and requires a drop in dps.

Unholy is a disease, shadow-damage spec focused on wearing the opponent down. Diseases are one of the main contributors and amplifiers to your damage, so it is important to apply them immediately, spread them, and keep them refreshed on your target.

While Dual-Wielding Unohly is an option at the moment, and is used for raid DPS, I strongly recommend against using it, because you cannot benefit from Threat of Thassarian, and it forces you to redirect points into Frost instead of Blood where they would be of more use.

Go with a solid two-hander. A sample spec: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#j0hZZbGfdfIkzfo
This spec comes with 3 spare points to place wherever you would like.

or: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jZG0oZbGfdfIkzfo:skZZz with Lichborne, so you can target yourself, and self-heal with Deathcoil. Pretty useful.

Key talents:

Desecration - Your slowing/snaring mechanic. Every time you strike with Plague or scourge strike a lime-green + gray ring will expand from where you stood when you used one of the attacks. This can spread into a whole area when chasing an opponent, and will immediately slow anyone trapped within. From experience, during a arena match, this will be everywhere, and your enemies will pay the price.

Resilient Infection and Unholy Blight - Protections for your diseases. These are very important, because disease damage is a significant portion of your overall DPS, and they are amplifiers for you main Strikes as well. Unholy Blight will give an opponent an "error" if he tries to remove your diseases. This is refreshed with every deathcoil, and should be up 100% of the time.

Resilient Infection is a stop-gap measure should UB fail. This can happen if an opponent bubbles or iceblocks, or if an enemy dispells before you can get a coil off to apply UB. It will instantly refund your runes, so you can reapply right away, and prevent the enemy from messing up your opener/combat rotation.

Shadow Infusion and Dark Transformation - SI increases your ghouls' damage by 10% with every death coil you use, and upon reaching 5 stacks, you can transform your ghoul into a super-ghoul with much greater damage output. His claw attack will be a three person cleave, his gnaw will cause about 5k damage in addition to his stun, and his overall damage output will increase. This skill is best used in conjunction with Gargoyle, any DPS trinkets or buffs your partner(s) can give you. It will result in significantly increased pressure on your target.

The rest of the talents are either % damage modifiers for your strikes, spells, or improvements to existing abilities like Death Grip or Anti-Magic shell.

Ideally, you would want to open with Outbreak, it puts all three of your diseases on in one GCD, then follow up with two blood strikes, followed by a coil. Then you move onto your main damage sequence and use Scourge Strike as often as possible. remember to keep your diseases refreshed and spread amongst your targets for maximum damage.

PS > IT (or Outbreak) > BS > BS > Coil > SS > SS, followed by SS and Coil (superzombie + gargoyle pressure sequence too!) when available. This may of course be interrupted at any moment by other players, or by you having to use defensive abilities.

Glyphs:
Prime:
Charred Glyph - common sense damage upgrade.
Glyph of Foul Menagerie - common sense damage upgrade.
Charred Glyph - makes your ghoul hit harder and last longer

Major:
Charred Glyph - makes a good cooldown better.
Charred Glyph - 7 second silence? Yes please!
Charred Glyph or Charred Glyph based on preference.

Minor:
Charred Glyph - for self healing with Lichborne
Charred Glyph - wont put you grip on CD if you accidentally grip a bubble or iceblock.
Charred Glyph or Glyph of the Geist based on preference.

This guide is NOT YET COMPLETE. Your comments and constructive criticism are welcomed wholeheartedly. If there are any errors, omisions or alternative options that are not including in the information above, please do leave a comment and share! Thanks for reading.

Post by DarkOpeth

Reserved.

Post by 118035

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by Victarious

Awesome guide, Dark. I have a total noobsauce question after reading it. I had heard once not to worry about expertise since dodge and parry chance can vary from player to player and class to class. Does getting to 20 expertise function similarly to PvE, or is it just a good general number to get to?

Post by minad

Seems liek a good guide.

Post by 249915

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by 697185

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by DarkOpeth

Question about your runeforging. Wouldn't it be better to put RI on MH and RotFC on OH for DW frost? Let me explain, your MH should always be the stronger of the two (and will always be the stronger because of the way DW works) so an extra 2% in frost damage on that one seems to be more beneficial than something that is most likely going to proc anyway. Also, when RotFC procs it procs for everything because strength applies to pretty much everything we do therefore it doesn't care which hand it is on but Razorice does. Unless I'm missing something completely with the way our runes work.

The actual frost damage done by RI is so minor (under 100 per swing), it would not make a difference. RI is used mainly for the vulnerability debuff. Additionally, RotFC is on mainhand because ot procs more often that way. Placement of runes isnt terribly important, user preference comes first.

Awesome guide, Dark. I have a total noobsauce question after reading it. I had heard once not to worry about expertise since dodge and parry chance can vary from player to player and class to class. Does getting to 20 expertise function similarly to PvE, or is it just a good general number to get to?

While everyone can dodge, caster classes can't parry at all, but its best to be on a level playing field for everyone you go against. This is because there is already so much damage reduction going on in PvP you wouldn't want the enemy preventing any more damage. Besides, the cap is really easy to reach.

And yes, 20 is the cap, equivalent to 25 for PvE. Its lower because your are fighting things your level, and don't need rating to make up for the 3 levels a (?) boss would hold against you.

Post by 354743

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by apocalypsa

Expertise isnt needed for unholy, even in pve. Your biggest damage sources are your ghoul and DC, and those(and diseases, but they suck) dont benefit from expertise. This also goes for frost to a lesser extend, but because of the reduced value of expertise in pvp in general (if dpsing a kill target you want to be attacking from behind and no one can dodge/parry then, half the classes cant parry anyway) so while its not bad, there are many secondary stats that are better.

Also, I'd add specs asap as thats the most asked question atm :)

Nice work though

Post by DarkOpeth

TBH you should remove rockslicer from the weapons list since it has agi, not str. Taking a 333 str weapon would be better than taking the upgrade with agil on it. DK's used to get decent benefits from it, but blizz wanted easy weapon distinction for classes and made it practically worthless in cata.

Edit: And it wouldn't be that difficult to say the unholy should take str/haste gems where available and 2H frost should take haste/str/mastery. DW frost should take mastery/str

Another edit: Did they change RotFC to where it doesn't share cooldowns/ppm? If not then having 2x RotFC would be a loss in damage, as it wouldn't give hardly any uptime increase.

I'm expecting help from you and couple of others with cleaning this &*!@ up, (because I'm secretly a nub) ;)

Expertise isnt needed for unholy, even in pve. Your biggest damage sources are your ghoul and DC, and those(and diseases, but they suck) dont benefit from expertise. This also goes for frost to a lesser extend, but because of the reduced value of expertise in pvp in general (if dpsing a kill target you want to be attacking from behind and no one can dodge/parry then, half the classes cant parry anyway) so while its not bad, there are many secondary stats that are better.

Also, I'd add specs asap as thats the most asked question atm :)

Nice work though

and help from you too

Post by apocalypsa

Post by DarkOpeth

Also, I'd clear up the gem section a little. Dont give people choices, theres only one right way(and that is, gem for str and get all socket bonuses!). Use wordlinks, not just a copy pasted link(makes it look smoother). And agility plain sucks, theres no other explanation :)

%^&*, I'm giving commands like im super pro now. Imagine a "You should" or "maybe its a better idea to" in front of each of those sentences :)

I specifically emphasized in several places that its necessary to match socket bonuses always.

In the stats section i talked about agility, horn of winter, and how agi should NEVER be socketed for.

Also, I still need to write up a frost spec, discuss blood PvP and do some tactics and other stuff.... this is a work in progress.

Post by apocalypsa

Post by DarkOpeth

What I ment to say about gems was that such an enormous list of gems is rather unclear, and some of the ones you listed just dont apply(unholy and mastery?). But you just have a different writing style, and apperently I have a hard time accepting that "if you get agi, go die in a fire" isnt always the right way to bring it :/

Unholy mastery is being redone. Set to drop with the next patch. But you make a good point, these (and especially for the gems) are just suggestions, i was listing what is available. But now that I think about it, the green gems are downright terrible, I shall remove them.

Post by 249915

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by DarkOpeth

It would be good if we could get this cleared up, because it seems like there are conflicting opinions. I would like to make these changes to the Gems section ASAP. Input is appreciated.

Death Knight Cataclysm (85) PvP Guide (In Progress)

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