You will need both, one for PVE [Tank] and one for PVP [DPS]
You will need to be Tank as your main role in pve.
Believe me, there will be more DK’s dps than grains of sand in the desert.
No, that title belongs to BM hunters, lol.
If you don’t want to help, just don’t comment.
Part of the beauty of tanking with a DK was being able to choose whatever spec you wanted, taking the tankiest things you could, popping frost presence and just tanking (with appropriate gear). Level 80 raids though, down the stretch, DK’s ended up as Frost tanks because they were all around better - more armor, and had an AOE with howling blast that worked wonders for aggro.
1 Like
Or don’t DPS in frost presence lol DPS all the way thru wrath as blood near the top of damage meters and never ripped threat in blood presence or unholy…
2 Likes
People are basing their predictions on four things:
- WoTLK Private servers
- Original WoTLK
- Beta
- Mathematics
The only reliable metric is 4) but this is based on assumptions from 1-3.
So, we don’t actually know yet what will be or won’t be competitive or viable. In some cases we can derive a pretty good idea but there are a lot of what ifs and edge cases.
Blood maaay do okay - we don’t know yet. Seems unlikely that it will be competitive - it may - but it could well be viable.
Locking in the meta now and throwing away the key seems a bit silly. For all we know Blizzard may introduce bugged code that makes one meme spec super OP ;p.
Sorry, you need 16 billion dps single target and 16 billion dps aoe, you also need to heal 50 billion health and tank all at once.
true, but you’re 70, tuned for 80… wait for Lv.80 content, its going to be a different. I personally would like to stay blood over UH.
I’ve been enjoying dpsing as Blood and may troll my guild by making it my main. It’s a motivational spec; don’t let the Blood DK outdps you. Keeps people from afking on trash and stuff.
2 Likes
The end game set gear in general forced the builds. Not so much that the talent tree’s can’t support a blood dps, as much as the set gear frowned upon doing X or Y instead of your Z. Basically, gears boosted a “howling blast” or a “death coil”, not any blood attacks, etc.
On top of that - You must not have known good “arms” warriors. 
I knew quite a few that knew how to game.
Best reply I’ve seen in a while. Thank you for this.
Lord people are so wrong or highly optimistic.
In the current raiding meta, blood will be low to low mid tier, Unholy will be very strong 100% of the time through every tier on short fights, and frost will hold its own close to unholy or even beat it on consistently long fights with high uptime.
If youre in a casual guild i dont think they care, blood will still be OK, but if you are missing out on a damage check of any kind by 2–3k dps you are probably the reason you cant kill a boss (alot of guilds couldnt kill KJ so… it will happen)
Unholy also isnt going to be played 2h much, so… the burst is actually higher DW than it is 2h simply because of fast autos, Gary, DND. Except Thad but who cares about naxx. Unholy has strong CD’s, does very high burst dps, and sustains wells. Always has.
Frost will be played the same as it was back then, not much to change it. (except 2h frost from ulduar rip), sub 35% frost starts climbing, but doesnt have as high of burst outside of Cleave or AOE during a boss fight. Unholy also has ALOT of cleave, just takes some ramp time.
Blood has by far the weakest dps tool kit. HS and DS hit less than SS, OB with DS being the closest. Runestrike only procs if you dodge or parry so unless youre tanking or in 5 mans you wont use it much. Thus making DC its weakest ability and its giga weak. DRW is a weak CD, Hysteria (yes i will still call it that get over it.) is good but as a dk you arent 100% phys. So any guild with a brain will give it to a feral or MM or later on a Warr. With ArP blood will be OK definitely better but still OK compared to the other two specs. Its just worse and thats a fact.
But like i said if you are in a guild that could care less about how much dps you do. (but you seem to care thus you are wrong) then play what you want. Blood dps doesnt have a huge play in todays raiding meta…
Source for right now in pre patch is Warcraftlogs… sry its parsing but its data on the 3 specs. Frost and unholy are just better.
play what you want tho. just dont complain and try and cope when someone or your guild questions why you are blood.
I’m seeing this sort of talk and I think I need to comment as a defacto Blood DPS by saying please stop.
A big part of what you’re reading from ‘back then’ is when patches were still coming out I.E. when Wrath first launched and through Ulduar Blood DPS was yes very meta Dieaseless Blood in particular and also pre-nerf DRW glyph made it do an absolute absurd amount of damage.
Stuff like this began getting nerfed to ground post-Ulduar as Blizz wanted to try and force Blood as a tank after Ulduar which… Didn’t work out as the Tree is not well-designed for a Tanking tree it’s why most Blood Tanks end up spreading a fair amount of talents in Frost (I won’t be surprised if Frost Tank ends up emerging as something of a meta as warcraft logs does have it performing better at times which may just be a huge killing blow to Blood in terms of any play in general if the damage difference is enough.)
However back on topic by 3.3.5 Bloods talent tree had been tweaked in such a way that while yes you can absolutely DPS with Blood it had been gutted for that in prep for the Cata changes which would force Frost down to being a Pure-DPS spec and Blood into obligatory Tank spec forever killing the appeal that players found with Wrath DKs (It’s why DK player numbers dropped significantly after Wrath the changes weren’t liked that much but that can be said for a lot of Cata’s talent trees.)
3.3.5 Blood Dps is a mediocre DPS that is low-C tier and maybe gets to mid to high C-tier by ICC you can clear just about anything but you are net negative if you are trying to raid at some major meta-level. The only thing you’re right on is that Blood’s ‘Numbers’ that some people think it is based on Pserver data is right DRW and Bloodworms along with Bloodgorging are all terribly programed on most Wrath Servers the numbers on those servers are also botched to hell.
Once you get some ARM PEN its good. But it’s not the point to be top of the meters when you’re blood. Blood is super versatile. I can do good damage, I can swap to frost pres and off tank, I can make people rage in pvp, solo mobs that require groups… I will be swapping into UH or frost for early wrath, but I’ll be going blood once I have the armor pen to support it. 100%
1 Like
Technically, they didn’t initially intend for blood to be the tank spec. It was a viable dps spec too once you reached a high level of armor penetration. That was the major thing that held it back in wrath was the need for an insane degree of armor pen to make it viable dps.
1 Like
No
/10char
Yes Blood is a tank spec. Yes Blood can technically DPS but it will start falling behind heavily once you hit 80 and people start gearing up.
As someone who was a blood dk all throughout WotLK (and I mean even up to Cata pre-patch where they made it a tank spec), yes, blood dps is viable. I had no problems back in original getting invites to dungeons or ICC (heroic or normal) and beat out unholy dps on bosses.
1 Like
It’s patch after ICC. The final patch prior to the garbage cata brought. Dual wield frost > unholy. Period. That is, if they haven’t buffed or nerfed anything within.
That being said, who knows what will be, as we don’t know what sneaky things they may have done to buff/nerf after launch.