Death Knight DW - Unholy Presence>Blood Presence?

Ecnailla · Post by **Ecnailla** » Mon Feb 02, 2009 3:57 pm

What do you think? Stolen from a EJ thread:

First, i see a lot of rotations that have a lot of specials in them. While there is the built in buffer on Rune recharges, there is still the limit on GCD's. In a 20sec rotation you can at most get off 13 specials without clipping your next 20sec rotation. If you have a lot more specials in 20sec than this, Unholy Presence might actually come out ahead. I only see this being the case with DW builds.

The tri-spec build and rotation seems to be violating some basic rules. That is, it doesn't maximise use of your hardest hitting abilities and convert Blood to Death runes to do more of the above. That means speccing into either Reaping or Blood of the North and getting off extra HBs and ITs every other 10secs. This will also produce a lot of rune power to use on more specials. With Rime procs, the power improving talents, and the IT glyph you can easily hit 200+ rune power and 17-18 specials in a 20sec period. This may very well be enough to make up for the 15% hit to special dmg from being in Unholy Presence. In fact, your rune strikes will need to be broken up with runic power abilities or you will cap your runic power.

Use Gargoyle when appropriate. During gargoyle you will mostly only be using rune abilities, so no need for all the extra cooldowns, so it will probably be better to switch to Blood Presence during Gargoyle and back to Unholy after it is over. Uses a couple runes but the 15% damage over a minute (or 36+ rune abilities) will probably offset the loss of two specials.

I edited it down some to the part that intrests me.

Ecnailla · Post by **Ecnailla** » Mon Feb 02, 2009 4:00 pm

Oh, as a side note- if you are leveling blood- swich to unholy aura and give it a try - you kill things faster as long as you kill the mob in one rotation, if you have to wait for runes to cooldown you should swich back to blood aura - Spamming 4 heart strikes with .5 off your global is sexy.

Ceydan · Post by **Ceydan** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:36 am

did you mean switch to unholy aura? or respec unholy?

Ecnailla · Post by **Ecnailla** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 8:04 am

Gnomerman · Post by **Gnomerman** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 8:12 am

all this talk of dk... it almost makes me want to try it

Ecnailla · Post by **Ecnailla** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:17 am

I fixed my post, didn't realize I said spec, not aura.

Edit: Hell, its presence, not aura - whatever, you get my point.

Post by **Elvenbane** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:18 pm

Fixed Ekn's post title cuz he's a noob.

Ceydan · Post by **Ceydan** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 2:27 pm

well in that case, i tend to agree with that. when fighting mobs that only need one rotation, unholy is better. any kind of sustained damage, then naturally blood is better.

Ecnailla · Post by **Ecnailla** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 3:23 pm

Well... if you go with what the guy I quoted is saying, that might not always be true. Depends on what you can fit into a rotation- unholy might be better even on boss fights, but I'd still be suprized if that is the case. It would be interesting to see some actual theorycraft put to it.