Death Knight Spec Reviews

3.1 Death Knight Spec Reviews
Now that I have gotten a bit of raid time in with the new content I am here to share with you my impressions of the specs I have tried.

Unholy dps

I have been enjoying this spec! At first I was not at all interested in having a permanent ghoul to rely on for dps, However with all the unholy talents buffing him, he stays up rather well. The short cooldown on army of the dead also really helps use it for multiple boss attempts. I think this spec is working well for my ilevel 200 gear and should only get better as I get more dps gear. I have not really been having any aggro issues (which is the reason some people prefer 12/0/59).

Tanking Specs & Ulduar

I must say I had high hopes for Frost tanking in 3.1. I knew it was getting a nerf but I thought it still looked strong. Well turns out the nerf really killed the playability of frost for me. This is the spec I took into Ulduar for our first attempts. We downed FL no problem and moved on to Ignis. If you haven't yet been, the trash before Ignis is harder than any boss in Naxx (imho). The bosses trashmobs were hitting me for 12k+ (in a 10 man!) All the extra avoidance and mitigation of frost didn't help me at all. When I had a bad string of avoidance I WOULD go down. In addition to this, my threat was not where it used to be. Maybe its the new rotation. I will admit I don't have the new frost rotation down nearly as well as I had the old one. Still, the whole time I felt fragile AND had aggro problems for the first time this expansion. On a positive note, Acclimation did stay stacked pretty much any time I needed it. The extra resists cause you to basically have 250+ resist in standard tank gear. I was resisting nearly 30% of all magic attacks. That's a big chunk of damage! We never did get any quality attempts at Ignis as things kept falling apart quickly. After probably 7 wipes we decide to move on. The real nail in this specs coffin for me came at Razorscale.

Razorscale as a fight is pretty much all about controlling the adds and avoiding raid damage. During the air phase adds continuously spawn from 3 locations (on the 10 man). So I have 2 spawn points to cover. Frost failed me here with the long cooldown on HB and the longer cooldown on DnD. It really made it hard to hold all the mobs I needed to while still picking up the new ones that spawned. We wiped quite a few times without ever getting Razorscale to the permanently grounded phase. When we finally get him grounded for good. I took a massive breath (and maybe stood in some fire...) and died.

We called the raid here and made another trip later in the week.

For our second trip into Ulduar I went with the blood tanking spec I had talked about. This seemed to work out much better. While I did seem to be taking more overall damage, It was all pretty steady and I did not seem to have as many OH S#%* moments as I did with frost. Blood also impressed me with the ability it has to aoe. It is no Unholy but I felt like a stronger aoe tank as blood than I did as Frost. Heart strike makes tanking two mobs just as easy as tanking one. Don't even have to change your rotation!. Also the blood spec isn't as talent bloated as frost and that allowed me to have the lowest cooldown possible on DnD. I don't know if it was the spec or what. but it only took 1 wipe to down him this time.

(on a somewhat related note: 47khp, thanks cooldowns!)


We moved on to the XT-002 Deconstructor. This so far has been my favorite fight in Ulduar. It really felt finely tuned. we had a few attempts wipe at very low percentage. When we finally killed him it felt like everyone really had to be on their game and work together perfectly.

Podcast!?!?

I have recently gotten into listining to WoW Podcasts (and podcasts in general). There are a few quality wow podcasts (Rawrcast, Warcraft Outsiders), But I really felt with the amount of poeple who play wow there is room for more. TheDoctor and I have been tossing around the idea of making a wtfspaghetti podcast! Is this something that would interest our readers? What type of topics would you most be interested in hearing about? Let us know in the comments section If you have any suggestions on topics or even if you think think its the worst idea you have ever heard of. Let us know!