1) How to survive against melees and? 2) Do you even use DS?

[Dracculia-kazzak (Dracculia)]

1. If I go into lobby with sin rogue and arms warr its goodbye for me. I had successful games when there’s guys who actualy go for some other target, but give it a day or two, DK will be main target for any melee.
   I try kite, no chance. I try using death strike (go 2) for that)…
   Meta is so fast in solo shuffle and if you dont do big and fast damage, you will just lose - atleast at my rating (1500-1750). So basicly I just go and do dmg - we are good at that.
   So… how do you survive, other than being completely reliable on healer?

2. After each game yesterday I’ve scanned my details to look for DS heals.
   They “unnerfed” improved ds and ye, I was hoping for something, since I do support the idea that spellwarding should be nerfed and DS buffed. It gives us more reactive survavibility and the playstyle is better - plus (hypothetically) it gives us more survivability against melees - which was problem.
   …buuuuut, to put it mildly, DS is terrible atm.
   With talent put into “improved ds”, and in 419 pvp item lvl overall, I did 22k heals average. My health pool atm, in pvp scenario, is 431 k hp. That is 5,1% of my hp.
   So the question is, is it worth?

To summ everything up, these are my question marks and I would like to have an insight from someone more experienced than me.
From my pov, I think a lil boost to DS would benefit us greatly and we would be in a very good position. Literally everything else is fine, just give us DS buff.

Btw, lost 200+ rating in two days

[Strifé-tarren-mill]

I think DS is good atm… for me its doing 40 - 50k heals per strike, I dont think they’ll adjust it further because we have blood draw (horrific), Necro wounds heal (okayish) but also access to Death Pact / Sacrificial pact.
Personally looking at your talents I would drop proliferating chill / Enfeeble and take SacPac and Death Pact, Sac Pac is decent if you got the ghoul CD to spare and Death Pact is a fat 50% with a 30% absorb trade off. I try to spam DS until I have only 20 RP left, then sac pac. If I am still dying, I will death pact if my healer has nothing else (its a total last resort).

Cause your playing pet spec your pvp talents are set in stone and are all important but if your against a spellcleave perhaps taking Spellwarden over Strangulate would give you some extra living time.

You can only kite so much even with chain spam, and if your not already, using your pets charge (while empowered) to root a target for a moment. A final desperate point would be to spread your wounds across two targets, DnD, then cleave to pop as many wounds as you can (for necro wound healing absorb later), but thats giga scuff.

[Bubasparks-magtheridon (Bubasparks)]

Honestly when I press DS on FDK I dont even feel that it healed anything…

[Zenøbia-blackrock (Zenøbia)]

Kill them faster, kill or be killed!

Sry, for the bad news, but such situations are completely zug zug burst.

The good part is, your pets can still do dmg when you are locked down as unholy, imagine beeing frost and disarmed, too, no DS and no DMG, but maybe you can kite them better with icy death that gives chains a root effect, something like blind + 2x CoI, just a thought never tried frost dk in SS so far.

I think i had once a 60K DS heal in SS before the buff and without improved DS.

I am not yet feeling the difference, i’d say DS is overrated anyways, give back death siphon it has a 40y range and heals for more than current DS does.

And there is still high dampening in SS and MS effects, further reducing healing, when its important, of course when you look into the overheals of NW, its usually heals when you are not focused and got no MS debuff on you.

Most classes come with very high mobility, very high absorbs and stuff like bubble/iceblock.

Those things work much better to mitigate burst dmg, once focused a hunter down to like 5% hp and he instantly sneaked behind a pillar and healed up to full with a healer waiting for him same with DH. Mobility alone can save you from melee burst, eventuelly their burst go is mitigated by running after you.

Wraith walk feels too slow in comparission to the teleports and flying going on, maybe blackgate should teleport you around the arena corners at this point.