It was over 10 years ago but I remember everybody having a marco for their deathknight that said"get over here #Playername"and it would spamed so much in AV.
@@FragbiteOeXistenz so if you compare them from S5 (beginning of wotlk) yes they sucked but them sucking still made them stronger than ever melee in pve and pvp haha.
Wille: "Were Death Knights any good in WotLK?" Me: *vietnam flashbacks to finishing my mage's leveling alongside the wave of new Death Knights on a PvP server*
those were the days i was apart of a "guild"(more of a group of friends from other guilds) that attmempted to clear every raid in WOTLK with only Dk's so it ended up being alot of blood spec we did everything but icc before cata dropped
@@Vaxilion More like going to an IHOP expecting some delicious waffles, and they bring you out a bowl of uncooked white rice instead, then stand over you the whole time telling you how great it is. What do you mean, salty? I'm not salty! You're salty...!
I think it’s a big IQ move to be talking about Wrath while everyone else is making more or less the same videos as TBC news drops. Though if you’re without a surplus of ideas, maybe a “Was it Any Better Though?” for each class, comparing how exceptional it was in Vanilla versus TBC
I hope WilliE makes a video about wrath content releases and nerfs. Nobody (except like staysafe mentioning it) is talking about how tier 4 raids got nerfed by 30% during the lifespan of TBC, and how badge drops were changed to help people gear up faster during later TBC patches. If blizzard makes classic TBC and especially wrath, there needs to be changes. A patch system rather than just releasing content phases with content BALANCE being the way it was in the last patch. For example emblems of conquest / triumph dropping from every single heroic dungeon boss and naxx bosses plus emblems from normal daily dungeon quests after patch 3.2. Not to mention random dungeon finder with its rewards. Also if they're stopping at wrath and not going into cataclysm classic, then the release of the icc wings and ruby sanctum need to be slowed down significantly. All of this and certainly with cross realm RDF, wrath will definitely stagnate way faster than vanilla classic or TBC classic
@@ayylmao578 you could run outlands dungeons with 5 dks, the spec didn't even matter, you just killed everything too fast and we're either too tanky or too much sustain to need healers
I was on a Horde dominated server in LK, and Alliance always had the “tenacity” buff stacks in Wintergrasp. I still have Vietnam flashbacks of Druid bears with 150k HP and arcane mages one shorting everybody with arcane barrage, my god.
proVider181 Yes, it was WotLK. If you didn’t play back then you don’t know what the “tenacity” buff is I guess (actually the buff was called “Ténacité” in French, I just translated it, idk if it was called the same in English).
Love the WotLK content you're doing. WotLK was my favourite expansion, and also my best moments of WoW was in WotLK. So being reminded of this expansion brings back good memories! Ohhh... Making a death knight... Leveling through Dragonblight (I loved that zone), doing my first heroics (Didn't do heroics in BC), and at long last, defeating the Lich King. This expansion was like an long, but epic movie you got to take part in, and no expansion afterwards didn't come close to it for me.
I remember one time having a duel with a ret pally who was quite a bit more geared than me. A shaman runs up and yeets the pally off the cliff mid fight. So I death gripped him back onto the ledge, let him solo the shaman, then started the duel back up again and barely lost. Shaman yelled at me with his fingers after that, but I didn't care.
Those were some of the most fun dungeon runs I ever did in WoW. Mob packs were rarely larger than 5 and each DK could easily tank an elite by themselves and I dont remember bosses ever being a problem.Iit was just pure destruction from start to finish.
Yes, when WotLK dropped my brother was still playing and i had quit during TBC so when i came back and didn't want to play my shaman but also didn't want to start a new char at lvl 1 after the expansion just launched i started a DK and played that DK till I quit at the end of Cata. Any decent DK with a blood heavy spec while leveling could self heal through elite/group quest fights like no other. Unholy could put out more damage while leveling but blood just had so much self heal between blood tap and vamp blood cooldown all while granting ap based on your armor, giving free stam/expertise (veteran of the 3rd war or something the talent was called). I never solo'd ring of blood but I solo'd basically every elite/group tbc quest in hellfire, zang, terrokar, and nagrand as a leveling DK and even solo'd a lot of the "group" quests once i got to northrend. I think DKs were purposely overtuned for leveling because devs knew that every other class was going to be leveling 70-80 while you start at 55 and try to catch up. So DKs needed to be able to quickly solo their way through tbc (other than grouping 5 DKs to do a few tbc dungeons for easy exp from the quests).
@@illiji915 yeah still remember 5 DK groups. As well the later builds of mixed blood/Unholy where you basically became immortal because of self healing from multiple dots on all enemies around you.
Some NPCs were bugged vs DK's magic dmg. Example I remember the most is those Golem mobs near the end of BRD just past the Grim Guzzler, for some reason Icy Touch did x10 the dmg it was supposed to vs them
1 thing bliz missed out on with the DK, was that rather than only being available at lvl 55, DK would instead be the only ''class change'' available, and that the ''sacrificed'' character is the one that became the DK.
@aids Yeah, while I would have been fine with this as the lore benefit would be pretty spicy, I'm sure the majority of players either just don't care about the lore that much, or would resent being forced to essentially delete a class they've put at least a couple weeks (discounting optimal speed-leveling) of effort into by that point.
That was going to be the way to unlock it originally. I don't remember if it was for every class but I remember the very first video showing the Paladin specifically and when you chose to become a Death Knight it would convert that character. They decided against it since there was no way to go back after choosing.
Nah its better the way it is. My main on classic is a mage and a gnome because of the 5% int racial. I wouldn't want a gnome DK though so would then need to level something else up just to get the race i wanted. Anyway, from a lore perspective it doesn't make sense either. Think about it, you start at lvl 1 and you do vanilla content, so storywise you raided naxx, killed KT, then you do tbc content and go through dark portal and kill illidan, kill kil'jaeden. Now after all this, at lvl 70 somehow you are killed (and we don't see this happen either) lich king raises you as a DK despite him being in Northrend (he only came back to the plagelands aboard Archerus but you had already been raised at this point) so did you die in northrend? How did your char get there? Why when you are raised do you lose power and drop from 70 to 55? Usually DK are stronger than their when they were alive. In the case of my gnome mage, why does he become a DK? He has no experience as a melee fighter, why wouldn't he come back as a lich instead like KT? Can gnomes become liches? Do they become mini floating skeletons? See there is too much wrong with this chain of events. What makes more sense is you getting to play as this new DK once hes broken away from the lich kings grasp, before that point you couldn't control him as he belonged to the lich king. As for why draenei can be DK for example well their were DK raised by the horde back in warcraft 1 on draenor. Terron Gorefiend is an example of one of these pre lich king, draenor based death knights.
@Henonaga It would be a huge mistake for blizzard to not make WOTLK classic especially with tbc classic now out. No other expansion was ever as successful as wotlk as is evidenced by private servers too.
Seeing the DK walk around in Relentless in the intro hit the nostalgia button so hard. Was one of the few world PvP focused players on my server during Wrath (as it was clearly sub-optimal honor gain wise), and I remember the absolute struggle pugging Raids or loaning myself out to the bigger PvE guilds to farm for this set, since I had no love for the arena. RIP Bad mannered 28-blood spec, you served me well. RIP Hybrid specs in general, you are fondly remembered. RIP WotLK, you were the absolute height of this game, and the magic will likely never come back.
Unfortunately 2-handed Frost was still sub-optimal in WotLK. I mean, you should totally go 2-handed frost with an ICC 10m drop over paired ICC 5 man / ToC drops almost certainly but apples to apples boo.
"DEATH KNIGHT in WotLK: Was it Any Good Though?" all I have to say is... /startattack /castrandom Howling Blast, Obliterate, Blood strike, Blood strike, Frost Strike, Frost Strike, Frost Strike /cast rune strike 1 button spam to 2.2k rating with healer :P
Lol.. with my dk i made a macro with like 12 abilities. Most of them instant cast, it was CRAZY.. included in there were things like shell, fortitude, pet sacrifice, and that other skill that makes melee miss you a lot. It was funny, cause the other team would get me low on health, in kill range, then i'd spam my button and Boom! A bit wasteful though, cause not all 12 abilities were needed for every situation.
This vid made me sad. It reminds me that Blizz use to be something I thought highly of. DK became my main from LK until BFA. I would tank/dps in blood. I remember stacking armor pen after str reached a certain level, cant remember the number tho. I had SOOOO much fun with him. In fact I didnt even play another class in LK.
Dammit.. you just reminded me that Blood DPS was one of the most enjoyable speccs for me in Wrath - and just how devestated I was when I learned that Blood was to become the defacto tank specc in Cata. Sleep my sweet prince.
Short answer: YES Long answer: Unholy DPS was some of the most solid dps for the hardest bosses in the game (Lich King, Halion). Unholy also grants a unique +30% disease damage increase. Frost was great on fights with less AOE focus. Blood hybrid tanks have arguably the highest threat of all the tanks, while having the most active mitigation. Death grip was great for repositioning trash and unique to the class.
@@evans7665 Warrior threat was great in wotlk due to how much damage everything they had did. Their single target threat was great and so was their aoe. You would also have infinite taunts on a 0 second CD due to vigilance and vigilance itself would also reduce the threat of whoever had it on him. On top of that, you had intervene which also reduced the person threat just like a paladin's salvation. Their mitigation wasn't the greatest but the damage they did and the threat they produced was insane.
Dk enthusiast here and i appreciated this video even though it reminded me how blizzard removed unholy presence which i will never forgive them for. The reduced 0.5 GCD made me fall inlove with the class, it enabled a faster play style and potential of reacting to things. Dueling was so much fun in 3.3.5 since you were no longer stupidly overpowered so you had to learn how to handle each class (excluding warlock and Spriest because you just hard countered them no matter what) and when you did, you could beat anyone and it was so satisfying. Generally the hardest match ups were frost mage and elemental shaman, you really had to be ontop of your shit against good ones to beat them consistently. I'll honorably mention ret paladins too because i've had multiple 1+ hour duels against a few
By the end of the expansion I had a pretty easy time with dks as a feral(except for geared blood tanks cause my dps output didn’t cut it). But yes, they eventually found their place in pvp and were strong, but better balanced. Very cool class
@@boboa7463 Yeah ferals had mad pressure which i see how most dks wouldn't know how to deal with. In my experience, i just had to survive berserk and they lose. Though i do admit i had a bit of an easier time than other dks because i had figured out that cookie cutter unholy build is suboptimal . wotlk.evowow.com/?talent#jbyRocZGMhzZfMGhzbdrfdzbuM . This was my build for both duels and arenas in which you can see how i have more survivalability than most. Not having gargoyle seems weird but at higher arena ranks, people just never let it do anything in one way or another so i didn't keep it just to cheese duels.
Creightos Multifarious Yeah man the gargoyle only had a couple defensive uses in 2k+ arena. I remember seeing a lot of good arena dks with similar specs. I was always impressed with cooldown and rune management good dks had. Good great times, hoping for a wotlk legacy by blizzard sometime in my lifetime
Actually no. In 3.3.5 with the best gear dks get wrecked hard by spriests and warlocks. You can't do nothing against them as they out heal and out damage you pretty easily. In fact dks don't beat almost any class in 1v1s. The only class you maybe have a chance against are warrior and even then pve prot warriors destroy you if they get crits in a row. And against retri Palas if he doesn't know how to burst the dk the matches last long enough for him to make a mistake and you win but if he wears pve gear they can beat you in 10 seconds Max lmao. Dks are really not that good in pvp, especially 1v1s.
lol thats not what it originally meant. they were ultra op. they were meant to be an ascension from your old life as a normal wow class. the story in the game confirms this. the hero class cuz they start at 55 was blizzards change after the imbalance started to make wotlk flop cuz people still loved other classes and wanted viability. After the quick changes wotlk went on to be another great expansion despite lfd ruining world pvp
Oh yeah, my main during WOTLK was a Death Knight. A tank with frost spec, then blood spec. Blood spec was and is sure still amazing. I agree, it was an absolute blast to play DK.
I remember how insane blood dps could be when done right my wife was a monster at it. After they redid the specs she never really enjoyed raiding on her dk as much.
Yeah the class spec balance was so out of wack that I was convinced Frost was the tank spec. Which I suppose technically it was, since DK's were so broken you could tank in any spec while still pumping damage and never dying unless you were REALLY not paying attention.
most fun i had with my DK at the very beginning, when the blood specc was still considered the main dmg specc. i had just so much fun during lvling, pulling groups of mobs any other class would have struggled with because i knew,the more dmg i deal,the more i would heal up at the same time. entering a fight with 15 or 20% hp, pulling 3+ mobs and then coming out of combat with 100% hp was not uncommon. used it for raiding later on too,quite successful. i miss those times.. when blizz patched the blood tree to death, aka making it the go-to tank specc, i died. i hated it so much that i went back to my old main, a warlock.
I loved playing dual wield frost tank. It did so much dps, back then even as today people can't appreciate a tank that does as much damage as a dps spec. "tanks aren't supposed to do dps" sound pretty snotty from down there in 4th place on the damage meter billy.
I ended up with having my DK being my main. Not because the other classes weren't fun but due to the lack of tanks and the speed of which you get to do to a dungeon as a tank. Before LFG was announced I could use 40-60+ minuttes just getting a group together and lots of time having to disband group due to the lack of a tank/healer. Leveling as a DK I had instant access to all dungeons throughout the levelexperience and also ended up being the guilds main tank through ICC.
Blood DK was at it's peak in Cataclysm, that's when Blizz tweaked DK only a little bit but the stats and health was an enormous difference lvl 85, Blood DK in Unholy Presence with Zin'Rokh from Archaeology was CRAZY, unstoppable.
I remember running 5-man heroic with 4 dpsers, a paly, a melee shammy, a warrior and hunter, then the tanker was a blood dk, because between my paly's normal rotation heal, shammy proc heal and the dk absurd sustain, we didn't need a dedicated healer, the warrior would heal off my divine storm and sometimes, I would get a proc to instant cast a single target heal and the shammy proc could aoe heal. I loved that. Wish more games had stuff like that.
I remember during Wrath after I completed the questline in Eastern Plaguelands, my DK finaly left the control of the LK, so as a final quest I had to go to Orgrimmar to talk with some big boss (don't remember who it was). And as I walked inside the gate, all the NPC where booing, some throwing rocks on me, others yelling "murderer". I think now they removed that.
@@ashenmedia5816 Really? I remember seeing a video on youtube from someone who was to level a new DK in Legion, and in the final quest... he walked inside Orgrimmar and nothing of what I wrote happened.
I used to main Belf DK, but never experiencing this scenario untill replay again last year. Back in AMPM server, you can get all skill and stuff just by talking to LK, the script still screwed untill late stage of WoTLK. As a first gen DK, I can't even get buff to run faster in Acherus. And then after get all the stuffs we had to go to Silithus.
I started playing around Ulduar, on a pvp server, and let me tell you by the time I made it to Lv55 I hated Death Knights so much I would sooner swan-dive into the Twisting Nether than become one. The class' cheap and easy dominant power ignited my rebellious side and made me one of the tomato throwers in Orgrimmar. Even today I think their disease-laden gameplay is pretty digusting, but when you've had a mob of death knights jerking you back and forth with Death Grip while fighting over who gets to gank the Lv24 newbie, it definitely... makes you want to kill the Lich King.
_"I hated Death Knights so much I would sooner swan-dive into the Twisting Nether than become one. The class' cheap and easy dominant power ignited my rebellious side"_ Lmao man, as someone who counts themselves as a member of the fringe minority of "RP-PvP" _(personal tragedy too since I'm boycotting blizzard and good luck finding private rppvp servers lol, so I just try to bring a bit of fun lighthearted RP-PvP to any PvP server I play on instead, but I digress!)_ that's so relatable for me that I suppose it's the sole reason as to why my fav expansion is TBC, followed by Cata - and also why I never once finished DK starting zone despite trying a few times. I'm definitely gonna do it some day for the lore curiosity, but other than that I have no intention to ever play DK as anything more than a profession alt that conveniently starts a little bit boosted :^)
I would personally love to see you do a video on monk and DH, I really like these look backs on classes! I started playing in WoD but I always heard people tell stories of how crazy DKs were on launch
Actually, Teron Gorefiend was turned into a Death Knight by Gul'dan, not Ner'zhul. This was during the Second War, before Ner'zhul was turned into the Lich King by the Burning Legion.
Update me on the new lore. Death Knights were originally fallen Necrophytes placed into the body of a dead knight. They were strict magic users. I know the Death Knights of WOW are the fallen Paladins of Warcraft 3 Death Knights but I am curious as to how that change affected the look, and feel of the named hero Gorefiend.
I remember when I was a kid I had a main paladin and I thougth that the way death knights were created was that you convert your lvl 55 character into a Death Knight, like because of the lore that would be the most logical path to becoming a death knight, offering your self as a character to the lich king to become a servant, so when I hit lvl 55 with my paladin I just got rid of everything, armour, weapons, etc. and finally I went on to create the Death Knight and suddenly I realize that it was a different character but by that time my Pala was completely naked lol
this video was so awesome! I would definitely enjoy monk, because even though they are class videos, we get to remember all the raiding and pvp aspects of their respective expansions.
@@cryptfire3158 to me blood always sounded like the tank spec, unholy always felt like pure DPS, and frost was...well just frost. Thats how I interpreted as a kid anyway when I was too much of a dumbass to read spell tooltips lol
@@drafman1 I don't really think this matters, but i'll continue conversation. Anyway, ins't ice defensive in most games? Probably typically ice is more an offense thing for freezing opponents, not usually as high damage as fire. Ice is hard. Blood is usually more connected to life steal or what vampires do.
Yeah kinda sad he glossed over it here as "a tank spec" even though untill the cata prepatch it was very competitive. Insane 2 target damage thanks to heart strike as well. I was so dissapointed when the prepatch hit and I was required to respec unholy. Still remember accidentally pulling aggro because they switched the precences around and blood suddenly generated more threat
18:40 As someone who has mained a DK throughout all my years since launch, I have never enjoyed a class more, I think this episode was spot on with most of the content that you had talked about, beside how when you said they had changed things from frost tanking to Blood being a main tank spec, yes they may have changed for Blood to be more tank friendly, frost at the time was still the go too spec that you would go since you got the 8% threat from the presence, and the single target damage beside from howling wind which would go up to 4 or 5 targets depending on the pack.
I really loved DK tanking in WotLK. I remember well how awesome it was to just nail the timing on bosses in raids etc. I was kinda sad when they removed dual wield tanking and kinda forced you into blood spec, but it was still fun. I still love the look of the Titansteel Destroyer, which was my main tanking weapon for a good while... Ahh fond memories :)
I’m a little conflicted about whether I like how simple WoW has become or not. On one hand, it makes having the optimal build and play style less tedious, but on the other hand, it leaves less room for creativity and individuality
agreed my first ICC clear with my guild i was dual wield frost tanking...ill never forget how terrible the ranged were and couldnt kill the spirits during the lich king and i figured out i can howling blast aggro them all pop my cds and basically group them all up on me so they could actually kill them....did that on the fly because i was mad and blown away the fire mages saying they cant kill em fast enough.....and man that was a good feeling that we killed him that pull
I miss tanking hard mode Ulduar as frost. Timing my cds on the assembly of iron. Steelbreaker would hit do damn hard and suffered through so many wipes getting my timing right.
Ah sheeeit, this brings back good memories. My favourite ever WoW character, my unholy/frost DK at the start of WotLK. The meta was to go blood/unholy for dps with 2handers, but I found dual wielding with frost instead of blood was secretly insane and would out dps just about any class except some very well geared warriors. Wish I could experience those times again.
I remember tanking in Unholy until 80, then tanking in Frost for most of the expansion, now and then experimenting with Blood, then going 1h Frost to dps in icc.
I really enjoyed Blood DPS back in WotLK. You had a cleave built into your core DPS rotation with Heart Strike, and the talents set you up to be extremely self-sufficient with plenty of health regen baked into their kit via Death Strike and similar skills.
I would really like to see more tool tips on-screen in these overviews when looking at the talents. IDK about other viewers, but when you start listing off decade-old talent names it makes me feel like to know what you mean I either have to do my own research or accept I cant understand an important stretch of the video. A list of the direct names of talents that made an impact to the spec aren't as helpful as saying "they was thicc bois" if I dont know what any of those talents bring. Maybe include tooltips of the mentioned talents if you want to read them off, or just include a sentence like "Frost benefited from many damage increases such as attack speed, frost dmg bonuses, and various damage ramp mechanics" (just an example, idk if this is accurate). Just a friendly suggestion. Thanks for the content.
DPS: Frost was a great single target spec that gave a melee haste to your raid. You'd gear armor pen and use two 1h weapons. Unholy was an amazing dps spec especially when it came to aoeing things down (Lich King, Halion's adds). It would also give a crit and a elemental damage buff to your raid. You'd gear for crit/haste and use a 2h weapon. Blood dps should have been the best single target spec out of the three but it never worked properly so it was meh in terms of damage since your "pets" and spells wouldn't snapshots things properly. You'd gear for armor pen and use a 2h. Tank: Unholy was good on paper but wasn't really useful anywhere. The extra dodge in concept was nice but it became useless in ICC due to the dodge debuff you'd get. Frost was great at low gearscore due to how much armor you would get from the talent tree. Once you were 5,5-6k gs (toc/onyxia/ICC 10 gear) you'd switch to blood. Blood tank was by far the best of the expansion (especially once in ICC) since it gave you the best overall mitigation for both physical and magical damage on top of having crazy amount of self sustain. Not only could they give the melee haste buff from the frost tree if they would spec properly, they could also give hysteria every 3 minutes for 30 seconds to anyone they wanted to. All and all you'd always see 2-4 dks in every 25 raid groups.
@@Silcaria Thanks, that's a very nice and digestible breakdown. This is the kind of language I wish he'd used more of or just shown the talents he mentioned onscreen for viewing clarity.
The main tank of a guild I once raided Ulduar with was a death knight. That guy was pretty good at what he did. One of the few who knew how to work the class.
Q: How to balance Death Knights in PVP? A: Simple, spawn them with lvl higher than the maximum permissible by given bracket. Example: DKs are balanced in the 40-49 bracket of Warsong Gulch.
Pretty good presentation of the class. It was indeed owerpowered by a huge margin at launch. The only "minor" downside for dks when they came out was gearing IMO. I remember having troubles reaching the caps for tanking in the first raid tier, which was mainly due to the fact that we had to use only weapons and couldn't use shields.
My memories about builds as I was MT DK in our guild. First it was Blood for DPS and Tanking. Then Blood for Tanking and frost for DPS. Then Frost for tanking and Blood for DPS. Then frost tanking, unholy dps. Then unholy tanking, frost dps. Then blood tanking, frost DPS. Pre cata was AMAZING, when blood was undying tanks and unholy did 50% of all raid damage alone. E. Z.
Btw, still I oftentimes was "against the rules" and prefered hybrid builds of blood for being both tank and dps in one build. Right use of healing from rune-catch and deat strike gives all the survivability on their own and clone-weapon of full x2 dmg was lit.
Oh. And about PvP. Nothing is more pathetic than a mage trying to run from DK. You just cant. And even if you could - you can't damage DK until they recharge death grip and asphyxia. It was funny for me to go solo vs 4-5 men as BDK and kill 2-3 of them under all my procs. Tis a shame that eventually they started to just run from me instead of 5 minute fjghting... How great was anti-magic on DK? 1 - you had spell copy. You could mark an enemy and copy his next spell with no cast time and gkd. What it meant? You could copy pyroblast and reverse one-shot a fire mage dealing like 60% of health in an instant. With second weapon it's one-shot. 2 - AA shield and big AA field. Second was cool for large fights and gave 50% spell resist in aoe. YEAH. But first, oh man. 100% spell reflection. 100% spell resist. You could attack Syndragosa full fight without moving back to "ice walls" cause you could literally ignore full boss mechanic with it. My record was to deal 70% of our 10 men raid dmg.
Got my raid killed on Thaddius with my dancing runic weapon, it some how received a negative charge and had some extremely weird name in the combat log.. sorry boys!
Yeah.... wanna see monks. When they came out in MoP everyone was sleeping on them it seemed, but I absolutely LOVED those first versions of the class. Everything took a lot of skill to pull off, and the specs were never as unique as they were when they first came out. It seems like since then all the specs have been dumbed down a bit. =/
@Swooz , I agree with this. The interesting thing is the buff made plus heirlooms made it REALLY quick to level up from level 1 (so turned out to be not much of an issue). Also, watching the feature trailer doesn't show you ANYTHING about the class. I mean, it isn't as flashy as some of the other classes, but even showing flying serpent kick would have gotten some hype.
@@july5345 , I agree the mastery (you are talking about WW, right?) wasn't good, there were some abilities that were clunky or not needed (remember how Spinning Fire Blossom worked? haha).... however, I disagree that the class sucked ass. It wasn't easy to play well, and especially the MW was one of the most unique healers introduced into the game (only surpassed by the rework of disc). Hell, they even had a different stance that made you a melee/healer hybrid! I liked MW more before they tried to make it closer to how every other healer works, and I liked BM before they became gimmicky with Guard in WoD. WW especially went from tricky and challenging to feeling braindead to play. Sure, it was rough around the edges and needed some cleaning up... but I would take something closer to the MoP iterations any day of the week. =D Even Spinning Fire Blossom I mentioned had its use... in PvP I could use it to kite melee and do damage with Crackling Jade Lightning... kind of like how Enhance during the xpac was able to kite melee with frost shock root and hurl lightning at them to wear them down and give room to heal up.
@@july5345 , they had the White Tiger, which was an offensive CD. They also had Tiger's Eye Brew (a 60% increase in damage at 10 stacks). This is the only thing that made the mastery worth taking (makes a big difference to line up damage in PvP), but it was boring AF lol. If you are simply talking about performance in PvE, you could use Touch of Karma and your taunt (still had it as WW) right as a boss is about to do a damaging attack and do HUGE damage. Oh, and they also had touch of death, which was very powerful if you used it as often as you could. You had to be very creative... sure, it feels like you had to "work" a bit harder for damage, but it was a nice challenge for those who knew how to get the full potential out of the spec. For PvP, I would argue they are a class that doesn't need huge burst since 1) They do steady single target damage (more about pressure) and have fantastic mobility and defensive/CC CDs to reduce damage taken and 2) You are a spec that sets up damage, and have many tools to do this. You want to have brews stacked, have Tiger off CD, etc. and then you can use things like Touch of Karma, Fists of Fury, and Leg Sweep. It's all about keeping pressure up to get them to drop CDs (keeping yourself alive until then), setting everything up, and then using your stuns to give you the window to kill... kind of like a cross between how Rogues use stuns to set up kills with the set up of a Shadow Priest. Probably the best dueling class in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. Also, maybe Shadow Priests are a bad example (since in MoP single target damage was garbage) but pre Legion they are a class that has never had an offensive CD and did just fine. Wrath is probably the best example since they did both good single target damage in PvE and were viable in PvP. At any rate, they remind me of WW since they are a class that does steady damage and has to "line up" kills... in PvP you could use Spectral Guise to set up a Psychic Horror on everyone, and then silence the healer once that wears off. It is more about creating an opening that buys time than anything else. Does that make sense as a comparison? I mean, something like Touch of Karma creates a huge opening where you could wail on someone for 10 sec. and if their team can't really do much about it. At first glance, it doesn't seem like as big a deal as doing a truck load of damage... but if you set everything up for that moment it can be devastating to the enemy. =)
@@ydin9 I remember actually winning an arena game playing a ghoul, I was playing ret dk with friend, it was a joke.. and that fear from death & decay.
@@badrrharri I know I won some dueling 2v3 situations in BGs with ghouling, it had a stun or something and a good ally could crutch. I dont remember if it was even working on Arenas, it was patched out atleast...
@Berserker not even then. dks destroyed warriors until arpen started becoming a thing, regardless of skill lvl. for not to mention that warriors were absolute trash the same seasons that dks were busted, so ure left with s7 and s8, where the amount of arpen determines if the warrior would be able to do jackshit. and even then, if the dk had any form of skill, he would still win against a better warrior
@Zero Maverick 3 things : -70 was the level we had in burning crusade. -As a "Duellist Rank" warrior, who happened to like to duel a shit lot in front of stormwind and sometimes going to orgrimmar for some duels too, i can say i was pretty decent and i can tell you, it was IMPOSSIBLE to duel a DK who is half decent, even with a mix of starting blue pvp stuff and purple battleground pvp stuff. He could outtank/outsustain us very fucking hard. And even tho, i was a warrior able to beat frost mages & paladins in duel (not all the times but at my best i could pull it off often, and almost every time against bad ones), you just couldn't do shit vs a decent DK. -So why are you lying ? You don't even remember the max level of WOTLK. And if you're not lying, you were just slaying unstuff low level DK since you weren't max level yourself lol
I remember tanking back in Wrath. I was a Dual-wield Frost tank and absolutely loved it. Sure I didn't have the self-healing of blood, but I had enough dodge and parry that I didn't get hurt that much. (plus flipping and spinning around as a gnome with two big maces was fun)
My DK was top of the DPS meters in Wotlk. I miss it. I stopped playing when the last raid was seige of orgrimmar for over a year. Tried coming back and the magic just wasnt there for me anymore. :/
This is the class that got me in to the game but sadly playing solo is boring as hell , played around 6 months on/off but got bored no one is talking city`s are almost empty ... pretty sad , i didn`t get the opportunity to play when i was a kid , great vid !
I switched to a DK when they came out, and whenever I return to WoW after several year long gaps it's always the one I go back to. I recall doing PVP as a blood knight and basically out healing nearly any damage that was put on me. I recall they also used to be able to parry spells, I miss being able to slap a pyroblast out of the air with my sword.
The reason there were so many dual-wielding and defensive focused abilities and talents for Frost back in Wrath was because Blizz originally intended going deep Frost to be the tanking spec, and for Blood and Unholy to be DPS. This is why there's so many more Armor increasing abilities and talents related to Frost. Wrath still had tanking stats like Dodge and Parry on gear, and as far as tanking weapons were concerned these stats only showed up on one-hand weapons. Wrath was when they stopped using main-hand and off-hand for one-hand weapons, mainly to allow DKs to dual wield one-handed weapons with tanking stats. Blizz doesn't like having to design items for only a single class/spec, so they went with keeping tanking stats on one-handed weapons so they could still be used by Prot Warriors and Prot Paladins. Yes, any DK setup could do anything, but that was mostly thanks to them being massively over-tuned for practically the whole of Wrath. Yes, Blood eventually became the Tank spec and Frost became DPS, but I'm talking about the original intent Blizz had with the class and its specs, especially in early Wrath.
I loved dks on release, I thought them being extremely versatile to be able to tank or dps in any spec was one of the coolest things they ever did. I'm so tired of them forcing every spec into 1 playstyle. I had a great time dpsing as blood, was really sad when they changed that.
I swapped main from warrior to DK as Blood DPS, Blizz changed blood-dps and then I came back as a warrior again. That was the beginning of the end for me.
Please make a vid about demon hunters, too ! This was very enjoyable to watch and a great reminder of the gameplay of DKs. Never played Legion, so extremely curious for the demon hunter !
Unholy AoE was just insane. I leveled a Duel-wield Unholy/Frost Tank DK. 2 hours after hitting level cap, and still wearing quest/dungeon blues/greens, I got pulled into a OS25 raid, to fill a damage slot. In the Boss fight, my dps was massively exceeding everyone else in the raid (including other DKs), except one Mage, who was a major leap even over me. My single target (or small groups) damage was pretty low, comparatively to everyone else though. None of my gear was max level, and I definitely wasn't geared for dps specifically, but tanking, so that was pretty insane.
What can i say about playing my DK? It was a blast. I am not sure when i came into wotlk world, but i am gunna guess after the DK was toned down. However, i still remember memeing ppl a lot. I got my DK to 60, and mini twinked her. Gave her blade of misfortune, did hellfire ramparts for the socket armor, researched what 60 gear i could grab. And jumped into the 60 alterac valley. And that’s pretty much all i did for months was login, and do AV all day. I played as blood only. I liked the sustainability of it, blood boil.. rune tap? Dark grasp or whatever it was.. it was probably the most fun i ever had playing this game.
One thing you forgot to mention was how OP Popping Lichborne then death coiling yourself to heal since it would turn you into an undead. It was beautiful
Blood DK tank on release. Go mostly Blood with extras going into frost. Glyph of disease, glyph of pestilence. Pop Frost presence, and tell group you’ll pull aggro. Run at enemies, put diseases on one target, use pestilence to put dots on everything faster than any other class, heart strike using all your death runes, use pestilence twice to refresh main targets diseases then re-spread dots to mobs. Boss time, pop all your buffs and become unkillable. What a fun time to play WoW.
Nothing will ever let me forget the terror that was the min/maxed 100% Armor pen dual wielding DK in ICC not being allowed to DPS for the first 15 seconds of a fight because their threat was way to high.
watching this, it is how I remembered DKs to be. Funny how it all went out the window with WotLK classic came out and Unholy was hands down the best Single target DPS because of Gargoyle.
For some reason I still see plenty of people online claiming frost was "the" tanking spec in WOTLK. I always prefered blood tbh, and best geared tanks I saw were actually experimenting with some weird blood/frost mashups, hitting 50+k hp in WOTLK gear (without ICC buff). Good times. Also, arpen capped blood with shadowmourne...
All three were capable of tanking, I did it as unholy. It was one of the more interesting aspects of the class, really. SO...of course that couldn't last.
