Death Knight Arena, 10/1/09

So for the first time in awhile, I dusted off the ol' plate mail and oiled my weapons and embarked into the 2v2 arena. Yes, it's been awhile since I did arena, so I know I'm obviously going to be a bit rusty, but man, was I surprised at the Death Knight nerfs, especially to unholy.

I've been unholy spec since the day Lich King dropped. I love it, pure and simple. But I found after 6 grueling arena matches, that unholy just wasn't cutting it anymore. Now my main spec is unholy, but towards the end of last season I dipped my extra talent points into frost for some of the talents there (Lichborne, the one that makes Chains of Ice cause frost fever, the one that lowers my spell interrupt to 0 runic power). Now I know that not going into the Blood tree, I lose the chance at some extra attack power and crit, but I thought the utility of the spells made up for it. And last season, they did.

So what happened? Why was the floor being wiped with us? I think, in part, it came from re-gemming a lot of my armor to stack more resilience. In doing so, I lost crit and attack power. Yes, I'm less likely to die, but I'm also doing less damage, so I'm going to mess around and try to put more strength and crit gems back in. The other thing is that I think the Unholy nerfs finally caught up. Even before this last patch Scourge Strike was all but worthless (another reason for the Frost tree-- the talent where Obliterate doesn't remove diseases. Nice one, that) but now bone shield only lasts one minute (with a one minute cd) so I was constantly forced to choose between burning a rune to cast it again, or continuing to do damage with said rune. There are other nerfs, but let's just let it be said that I left the first 6 matches quite unhappy.

My partner (and eternally patient healer) had to leave after 6 matches, so I decided to respec and spend some time on the target dummies. I was torn between a dual wield or 2 hand frost build, so I dropped themoney for glyphs and tested out each. AFter seeing the numbers, surprisingly, the dual wield one was putting out slightly more dps (they were actually fairly close, but the dw had more initial burst that then was sustained at slightly higher lvl than the 2h build). So, that being decided, the next night we ventured back into the arena to finish off our 10 games for the week (and theoretically do more).

Well, those more didn't happen. Why not? Once again we got facerolled.

Now again, I think I need to regem my armor so that I can have more damage coming out. But also, this is still early in the season and I think a lot of the teams with good gear are trying to get rated still, so perhaps we ran into them.

But either way, this is frustrating, and if the gemming doesn't help, I may have to find a new pvp class. I'm not giving up on pvp, and this isn't meant to be a QQ post. But there's something wrong if teams makeups that previously gave you no trouble whatsoever are dropping you in 15 seconds.