#0 - Nov. 21, 2008, 1:57 p.m.
Tip 1: Presences. Unholy presence is your presence of choice for pvp. The movement bonus as well as the reduced global cool down to help you spam up diseases and skills quickly is incredibly useful, don't under estimate it. There are moments when you will want to use frost presence to protect yourself, which are similar moments to when a dps warrior will swap to defensive stance and whack on his shield and one hand. Blood presence will mostly not be used ever in pvp. Blood is your pve dps presence for the most part and so won't be used in pvp very much if at all.
Tip 2: Rune and runic power management. One major problem can be not having the right skill available at the right time because you blew all your runes too quickly. Rune management is very important part of dk pvp. I often wait till my runic power bar is near full before using any skill that uses some, so I have some in reserve for when it matters. This goes the same with runes. Use some runes and then wait till the ones you used are near off cool down before using more. This is so you have runes open and available for key skills such as strangulate when you need them.
Tip 3: Never ever use death grip as an opener. This may seem like a really obvious thing to say, like telling a warrior not to use intercept as their opener but the amount of times I’ve seen other dk's use it only to have the class they just pulled to use some of their cc to get away almost immediately is quite often. Of course there are always certain situations were doing it is a good idea sometime needed, but in the majority of pvp encounters you should try avoid doing it from the get go, and wait till after the class uses their escape cc.
Short example: Hunter attacks me in grizzly hills near the boats while I was doing the pvp dailies. Instead of immediately death gripping the hunter, I ran out of LOS onto the boat, which I had fortunately just cleared. Hunter runs after me to get los instead waiting for me to come out. I was on 50% at the time having just beaten up the elite captain on the boat a moment before the hunter attacked. So he probably thought he had the advantage. He gets too close trying to get LOS again, I close the gap, use plague strike which triggers desecrated ground slowing effect and icy touch and beginning to spam death strike on him. He uses disengage. I immediately use death grip to pull him back, he's still slowed and not BM spec so can't get away, uses feign death but I immediately retarget and he eventually dies, and I end up with more hp then I had before. Of course that fight could have gone differently, if he uses scatter shot or was BM spec, but this is just an example of when it’s a good idea to use death grip.
Tip 4: Spec's. In my experience of playing a death knight at 80 on live and beta, unholy and frost are the 2 best specs for pvp, with frost maybe doing slightly better for cc control. Blood just doesn't have the extra slow abilities or useful talents that unholy and frost have.
Death runes are also extremely useful. All 3 trees have talents for when you use an ability to turn the rune it costs to a death rune. Death runes are good because they count as any rune and simply give you more options of what to use. At the moment I'm trying a 20 blood 51 unholy build, which gives me the opportunity, and quite often I might add, to have 6 death runes up at one time. Spamming icy chains 6 times in a row is a sure way to ensure your enemy can't get away even with an over zealous shape changing druid.
Why Frost: One of the major advantages of frost is a counter to one of the death knight’s weaknesses, namely kiting. The death knight only real weakness is to kiting and learning or spec’ing to prevent that early on is key to being a good death knight in pvp. Frost spec lets your icy touch slow and your icy chains apply your frost disease. This means that you can slow and get your disease up with a single rune as frost spec. Having more slows to spam is very useful, making it very difficult for all but druids spamming shape changes allot to get away from you. Another advantage is the ranged attack howling blast, which has a 30 yard range talented. Why is this good over icy touch spam? Because it does double damage to any target with frost fever disease up and it simply does more damage, and can hit multiple targets. Frost also has hungering cold, which is an aoe melee range version of a hunters ice trap. It’s a very useful cc. trying it on the beta there were moments were I have had 3+ people beating on me only to freeze them all and get away. It also makes great cc to stop your enemy getting away, and a plus at costing runic power rather then a frost rune. The only down side is the 1 minute cool down. There are of course other good talents in frost, but these are just the key talents that are really required for any frost pvp build.
Why unholy: Unholy is good because it does a fair amount of magic damage, mostly scourge strike which counts as shadow damage and so isn't mitigated by armour, and can rip through high armour targets such as holy pallys or feral druids doing full damage. Also very useful is the talent desecrated ground. This acts very similar to a hunters slowing trap when plague strike is used slowing every one in its area and increasing your damage. Another benefit of unholy for pvp is bone armour. This stacked with icebound fortitude and frost presence makes for some serious damage mitigation when your on low health, giving your healer time to get you back up to full hp and can be used once a minute. Unholy also has the ability to make your ghouls a permanent pet and increase its strength by a large amount. The ghouls itself has a leap/feral charge/shadow step style ability along it a 3 second stun which is very useful. It also has a defensive ability to reduce the damage it takes when players decide they want to take down the pet first. Though a down side to this is it can't attack while channelling this spell and the cool down is longer then the duration it lasts. The ghoul also has no damage mitigation from aoe attacks like hunter pets and warlock demons have. Anti magic zone has it uses too. This can mostly be used as a tool to protect others from magic damage. However it has a 5 point pre talent requirement, and it usually comes down to you picking this or desecrated ground to advance up the tree and not going over 51 points. Desecrated ground is simply a better and more useful talent then this. Get multiple friendly targets under this and you will see it disappear very quickly. But that’s not to say it is bad, it’s still good. It absorbs 10k damage plus your attack powerX2. My death knight at the moment has about 2400 ish attack power at 80, which is only going to increase with gear. Well geared I can see death knights getting to 3k ap, which means that’s 6k extra damage absorbed for a total of 16k spell damage being absorbed, which isn’t something to be taken lightly. That’s a lot of damage even at 80 and can make the difference between life and death.
Tip 5: Useful tools. Any death knight even remotely serious about pvp will spec 11 points into frost for Lichborne, and if you haven’t already I recommend you do it. Lichborne turns you from humanoid to undead while its active, making you immune to fear and charm effect. It also breaks any fear or charm effect your currently under, making it an extremely buffed up version of WOTF. There are however some draw backs too it. When the buff is active you are vulnerable to any cc that effects undead, such as turn evil from paladins and shackle from priests. The buff how ever can be clicked off, or you can make a macro to use it to break fear or charm and then instantly remove the buff. But this is something to consider if your going against a warlock and paladin. Also if priest just used its psychic scream and you used lichborne to break the fear, if the priest is good its likely a shackle will follow soon after, so remove the buff.
Anti magic shell is also a great tool, letting you take a lot less spell damage or none talented. It also prevents the application of harmful spells while its up. On the beta while it was up it would stop sheep and fear having an effect on you, but I’m not sure if this is still the case live. But needless to say with lichborne, pvp trinkets and silences should stop you from being locked out in fear any time soon.
Tip 6: Team play. One of the many things to learn is what skill to use, when and on who. An example of a bad death knight is some one who death grips an arms warrior into the healers in Alterac Valley, who then proceeds to use blade storm and kill most of your healers. Using death grip wisely is something to learn. For example using it on a enemy healer, squishy class or flag runner to pull them into your melee group. It can also be used when people have the advantage of terrain such as being in a bunker or tower and pulling them out of that. Death grip can also be used creatively in arena. Such an example can be to pull a healer or the healers target round a pillar out of LOS and preventing a key heal, which can lead to a win in a match. That’s just a basic example of how useful death grip can be in arena.
sorry for grammer mistakes.
Reached the word limit :/ please read the rest of the thread for further tips from other players.
