Heya guys!!  I’ve been so short on time, I have not had internet time to find pics for you guys!!  But on the upside, I have a HUGE POT of home made red beans and rice!!  /yum

What? *sees everyone’s covetous eyes*  It’s MY red beans!!  Bad readers!!  BAD!!!  heh

So I’ve been working on tying down some Frost specs and basically I realized a massive error I’ve made.  Being so new to DK’s I looked at this from the perspective of a raider.  Which spec will you be and what is useful.  I forgot a lot of the basics of Arena.  Dispels, positioning, kiting, etc…

So lets talk about some basic misconceptions I helped propogate that are very easily believed.

Talents

• Mark of Blood - This is a magic debuff and can be dispelled.  The only use for this is in a 2v2 Arena team with double dps.  Outside of that team/makeup, this ability will only be useful in teams under 1700 rating.  This will be easily dealt with when playing against higher ranked teams.
• Unholy Aura - This is probably something that can be skipped in any 2v2 double dps Arena team, however if you spec Unholy this is probably a paramount talent for your team.  Quite possibly even still for a double dps 2’s to avoid kiting.  It’s just like raiding, skipping it is really stupid.
• Epidemic - Not taking this equates to gimped diseases.  You want your diseases always ticking away at the health of your targets.  It’s more time for possible burst, it’s more time for healers to be tempted to decurse, and it’s more potential burst FF dmg.
• Virulence - -30% chance on dispels may not sound like much, but every time it works is a GCD that a healer has wasted not healing.  And with RNG it’s possible that a healer could waste multiple GCD’s on dispels instead of healing, etc.  This is a *major* talent for PvP.
• Dark Command - This ability is a closer, a spell interupt, a disorient, etc…  Death Grip can stop spell casting, drag people out of good position, disorient them (real life disorientation), etc…  The more often this is available the better.
• Anti-Magic Zone – At an investment of 6 points when you’re already short on points would you really want this?  I promoted it, however outside of a 5v5 it’s useless against a upper rated team except possibly versus a double dps team with a caster in 2s.  So yeah, if you fight a double dps team and the person you’re not FF on is a caster and you can keep the target in the AMZ, it’s awesome…  >.<  And as a melee, can you always be in range of the person who needs the AMZ when they are being FF’d?    Not really.  Your team’s FF target and their team’s FF target are rarely ever close to each other.

So you can see here how some of the suggestions I made are either reinforced, or are debunked.  As always, I will try to give you guys the best and most up to date information possible.  However, especially in PvP Arena, sometimes conceptions can be shattered in little more than a day of matches by specific comps.

The spec’s that I have listed to date so far will still do well in Arenas even if they are not the most optimal possible.  I am reworking some builds atm and trying to give you the best possible specs per Arena size.  Realistically, specs are about compostions and team size.  They are not about the tree itself.  This is making things take a bit longer, because this is a serious piece of work.  But don’t worry it’s incoming.  And, I will likely put up some preliminary builds as I finalize things here.

Tags: PvP