Help with deathknight PVP

Need some tips. I got a fully geared in pvp blues DK as of yesterday finally. I was doing some arena skirmish and melee such as sub rogues, ww monks seem to destroy me. Sub rogue has cloak of shadows up and the sub rogue that whole duration of shadows is MELTING ME. WW monks I don’t even know what the hell to do vs them. Every game I am the kill target and I am getting shredded and end up having to spam death strike to try to live

I played more frost last night than Unholy. Thanks just trying to learn wow PVP

It’s really hard to learn how to play Unholy or Frost with no gear and no dedicated healer.

In general medallion into defensive sleet/asphyx on serenity seems good. You can also sort of kite them a bit with chains, especially around pillars, at least for the duration of their cds.

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You’re going to get destroyed in skirms. No self healing and no immunities. You won’t learn much from them. It’s basically just run in and pop as many CD’s as you can and hope you can kill someone fast.

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DK is not beginner friendly, nor is it in a good spot in pvp atm for pvp beginners. most dks are rolling other classes atm because the damage taken and selfhealing is broken atm.

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WW… no joke… keep chains of ice up… stun or blind fists and fury and keep running until they die from death coils… this isn’t a joke

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Unholy is fine.

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Measured by what?

Selfsustain? Non existant for DKs. Death Strike offers homeopathic healing.
AMS is consumed by an baby elephant fart in high dampening.
IBF baseline on 3 min feels like it does literally nothing. To keep us alive.

Mobility? Kiting meeles like WW and DH is borderline impossible while casters like Mage (all 3 specs) and Warlocks after the last tuning pass feel impossible to connect.

The original design concept of DK being a brawler to stay in the enemies face and not backing down is now pure irony with all of our defensives being PvP modified by -50%.

So no. DK is not fine.

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Petkick’s ability to climb the 3’s ladder.

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Performance in 2s, 3s and shuffle, although they only really tune around 3s

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Marla’s points are valid though, dps dk really isn’t in a good spot tuning wise due to its lack of defense, and the dev’s tuning around 3’s is really starting to break the rest of pvp, especially with marks hunters.

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Uhhh, Frost is in an awkward spot and reliant on certain structures to play, yeah, but Unholy is very solid. I think there’s a bit of an issue among melee dps in that they all assume they can just play like Fury.

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you mean play like dk was played for the last 5 expansions? how dare we act like melee

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Temporarily leaving melee and using chains/clawing/virulent/coil, etc, isn’t unacceptable. It’s one of the strengths of the specs to be a bit of a caster hybrid.

Although it has been strong enough that for the most part it can be played like Fury.

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hmmm…you need to get honor in the battlegrounds…get all the equipment, get into the SS and only then we can talk about DK builds, comps and defenses…

in random arenas and BGs, DKs are horrible, without a healer around, you can’t do much if you’re not very experienced.

Now…when you get full honor equipment to enter the SS…then the story can change because there will be healers to help you in every match.

If I’m not mistaken, you have to do BGs to get a full honor set and be able to enter SS…

In SS arenas, I’ll give my take on DK, although other DKs tend to disagree on some things that i say (because it’s my personnal opinion, OFC).

I know two builds : ROT and Bursting Wounds.

The burst wounds build consists of using the talents where your pet has a chance to put wounds on the target, talents where the generation of wounds is increased, the scourge strike gains distance (Clawing Shadows) - and its primary stat if I’m not mistaken is Haste , with a little mastery. You have to look at the top ranks who uses this build and take a look at the talents, but it’s easy to see how much Haste or Mastery they will have and pick those who use the bursting build (there are some tutorials too) - in this build, things occur more frequently and CDs are short.

The build I use and like is the ROT build.
Mastery has to be the main stat, it needs to be very high (there are 3 items that you can craft that helps in this - ring, legging and foot), use Defile (enemys need to staying on top of defile for the mastery buff), and to keep targets on top you need to use (personal taste here) the talent that puts them 90% of slow and decays with time. This talent serves both to control rogues and WWs for a while and to help friends who are in need of cover.
Defile has two charges, you need to calculate it well, because when using it you can run on top of it even preventing WW from getting close (eventually the kicks, dashs, rolls, whatever, end up… you have to take turns between your CCs, without using them all at once, ice chains + D.A…defile, Suffocate, etc…you can keep them away in small windows).

The talents needed in this ROT build are the scourge strike talent, which increases the frequency of all types of deseases by 100%, and the talent that increases the virulent plague’s damage by 15% in less time.
Note that in this case, you’ll have to get close to a rogue or WW to place 4 festering wounds and use apocalypse afterwards.

That’s why there is a need to master the defile with slow, ice chains at other times when defile is on CD (defile+ice chains don’t stack), D.A and always have your CCs in hand at times when they burst, because you will burst only in their vulnerable moment.

So here’s the tip:

In the burst:
-start only when the enemy has 10 death coil stacks;
-Assault - will automatically put 4 wounds on the target and increase Haste;
-Apocalypse - will burst 4 wounds at once dealing moderate damage and apply crypt fever;
-1 fastering strike to get two more wounds;
-outbreak;
-2 scourge strike to pop two more wounds and have 6 necrotic wounds;
-Blight, power up rune weapon, abom. limb, dark transform, defile, pull and Suffocate if the enemy manages to get out somehow…
dead coil all the time…with 10 stacks your damage will be very high (it’s good to always keep 10 stacks on your target regardless of the moment)
To master even more, you can use assault + 1 fastering and observe if you have 6 wounds on the target, then use apocalypse and 2 scourge strikes quickly, and start all the rest of the skills in sequence, and use death coil quickly… .Defile + 90% slow will help a lot for you to have time to handle all this.

Outside the burst:
You will always keep 3 diseases on the enemy and use 1 scourge strike (being necessary to get close for this) to make these diseases occur quickly, it really helps.
If possible, always have wounds on the target, so the scourge strike will cause more damage, so you move away and use death coil, if you have no runic, pull an enemy and try to get as much runic as you can, always staying safe. you can pull the healer, or other enemies that is not WW (if the WW is not focusing you then you can pull him, ofc…).

You will always need to have 1 defile available just to surround enemies or control their speed.

Only with diseases and 1x scourge strike, you will cause moderate damage. You will always need to keep in mind that there will be opportunities to pull someone, use deseases and 1 scourge strike and run away, if you see a WW rolling towards you just take a few steps to the side because they will be confused by the slow, your game in this case is to watch what they are doing and act accordingly.



OF COURSE there will always be a WW that will be able to understand your intention, and will know how to stay close to you regardless of the defile with slow, ice chains, D.A or whatever. They are rare but they exist.

NORMALLY, WWs are messed up when they are slowed down, they will roll forward, if you go ahead and dodge they will always be trying to get close until they give up, NORMALLY they get frustrated and change targets. Only very experienced WW understand what’s going on and use skills calmly…but that’s where the ROT build comes into question: it really does continuous damage, WW ends up being always vulnerable to you. You’ll just need to be very careful to not use your burst on top of their karma…and keep some CCs and slows skills up.

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the best tip to dk in pvp after the uh’s nerf is: reroll

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I completely disagree. Having to basically play like a SV hunter is a total joke. The Chain and Kite playstyle is horrible.

I get that its okay to play pillar and kite when needed but this is out of control. You literally have to kite melee cleaves almost the whole game. Its complete horse wang.

UHDK would be good if it had slightly better physical defensives. Death Strike needs to work better especially given it competes directly with Death Coil which has interactions with like HALF our talents lmao.

FDK. Everybody but the Devs seem to understand whats wrong. Needs to play like DH but doesn’t have the survivability/Mobility to unless you give up the last two rows of the class tree lol.

UH/BM or MM

UH/SP

WW/DK

All in very good spots