World of Warcraft Death Knights

Death Knights are a powerful new class that are played by using two resources, Runes, and Runic Power generated via the usage of Runes.

As you move through the introductory quests you'll find that your Death Knight has an optimal strategy or rotation for maximizing your damage.

For single targets:
Generally you'll want to place your two disease applying powers on a target first (Icy Touch and Plague Strike, their order depending on talents and range). After which a multi-rune ability (obliterate, howling blast, scourge strike) or blood/heart strike X2. This series of abilities generates enough runic power for a single runic power usage, a death coil or a frost strike. With the right glyphs and talents additional runic power may be generated allowing for more advanced powers.

Multi-Target:
Almost always drop Death and Decay as soon as possible (either after a tank has initiated his own threat powers, or if solo when the targets are close to be in range). Then apply your disease abilities (Icy Touch/Plague strike), and Pestilence. This will use up your characters Runes.

Specific frost talent specs may find icy touch, pestilence, blood tap, howling blast to be an incredible aoe damage tool. After using runic power the runic power usage varies on talent spec, i.e for Unholy specs, Unholy Blight and/or Corpse Explosion (after patch 3.04).

So you want to level a Death Knight from 55 to 80 in an enjoyable yet efficient manner. First let's go over the talent spec.

Any talent spec with a Death Knight will probably be fairly easy and fun. My suggested talent spec for leveling is one that best fits your tastes as a player. While Blood focused talents are strong at self healing, Unholy has the advantage of a permanent pet (the Ghoul), and Frost has strong aoe/crowd control and most importantly +20% mounted movement from On a Pale Horse. Traveling is one of the most time consuming aspects of leveling in WoW, and increased speed translates into saving time.

The Unholy spec @55 0/0/24
Frost @55 0/24/0
Blood @55 24/0/0

Much has changed for Death Knights over the past year. For the latest talent specs I recommend visiting the official DeathKnight forums and experimenting with a talent builder combined with play testing the feel of the spec.

The quest helper addons are now superfluous as they're functionality is for the most part built into the base UI.
Recount as a damage meter.
BigWigs deadly boss mod for alerts and special encounters.

So you've made the journey to level 80 with your Death Knight and raring to upgrade the quest/instance green (uncommon) and blue (rare) items.

You'll most likely want to focus on once character role concentration at a time (and for raiding this helps distribute items to characters preferred role, for a Death Knight this is dps (damage per second, aka offense) or tank (the shield of the party, although they use no shield ;). I prefer dps so I geared up primarily with damage boosting items (more detail later), while picking up off spec tank pieces and getting generous gifts from a crafter friend.

The following methods bypass arena rating/honor. Although the latter is achieved with time spent in BGs, world pvp, and Wintergrasp (pvp zone) arguably entertaining activities, many players are uninterested in arena so I avoided rating required gear.

If you've saved up enough resources from questing, or are inheriting a large supply of a wow gold from a previous character (or friend), the crafted epics are a wonderful immediate character force boost.

Another method for getting excellent upgrades rapidly is to develop character reputation. This can be accomplished either by questing, or by championing (running lvl 80 or any heroic 5 man dungeons while wearing a tabard representing that faction).

Another common method of upgrading gear at level 80 is to run heroic dungeons/instances. For each boss successfully overcome, you are rewarded with one Emblem of Heroism. You can purchase items from a vendor in Dalaran near your factions inn. Additionally Emblems of Valor may be obtained from 25 man raid instances, and can be exchanged for slightly more potent items.

Last but not least, excellent items drop from level 80 or any heroic dungeons. Although these can be the most time consuming to track down, they can also be achieved on your first attempt of an instance. Unfortunately this gambling psychology for item drops has often made me question the distinction between fun and profit for WoW and MMOs in general.

Your best bet is to track down a strong weapon(s) first.

Crafted DPS pieces:
Titansteel Destroyer
Spiked Titansteel
(if your character is a skilled engineer)
Charged Titanium Specs

Reputation pieces
Death-Inured Sabatons
Legplates of Bloody Reprisal
Spaulders of the Giant Lords

Emblems of Heroism
Verdungo's Barbarian Cord
Pendant of the Outcast Hero
Mirror of Truth

Dungeon drops
Cloak of Bloodied Waters
Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood
Incisor Fragment
Dual wielders sub-section of dungeon drops (more +hit on epic 1-handers please)
Torment of the Banished mainhand
Hatestrike offhand
Staggering Legplates Nothing personal Ingvar, but I've been hunting these for a bit - resorted to offspec tanking it (my poor healer friends) -> I'll update # of attempts when I get the pants (last update 16 attempts, never seen the pants drop)
Shoulderplates of Bloodshed epic +hit shoulders from 10man Naxx
Bracers of Lost Sentiments +hit and expertise, woohoo

For Tanking:
Be careful to optimize for defense first, make sure your defense rating is 540+ to avoid suffering critical hits by a raid boss, slightly lower for heroic bosses 536?)

Crafted Tank pieces
Tempered Titansteel
Tempered Saronite

Reputation pieces
Fireproven Gauntlets
Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions

Emblems of Heroism
Waistguard of Living Iron
Chained Military Gorget
Valor Medal of the First War

Dungeon drops
Seal of the Pantheon an excellent drop to push your defense value over the uncrittable level
Repelling Charge

Here's the test server patch notes.

Here's the historical patch info for what has gone live.

Talent specs and guides will be updated after it goes live.">

Although I leveled my DK pretty much solely using a strong 2-Handed weapon (sword,axe or mace), I'm in the process of reviewing the potential of doing increased single target DPS (damage per second) by dual wielding one handed weapons (see the 14/31/26 talent spec above).

One of the major stats you'll want to work on first is "hit rating".

Spells are treated differently from melee attacks. Spells require 17% hit (445.91 rating @ 26.23 rating per point) to never miss, there's a talent the unholy tree which gives 3% hit with our spells lowering this requirement to 14% or 367.22 rating. The presence of a shadow priest can reduce this further by 3% from their misery talent to 11% or 288.53 rating.

Melee hit is treated differently. In order to never miss with a single one handed weapon, or a 2-Handed weapon (we'll review dodges in a moment) a raid boss you'll want 9% total to hit. At level 80 that's 295.11 rating (1% to hit is achieved with 32.79hit rating from gear). Snapper Extreme is a great way to get 40 hit rating.

Special melee attacks (such as Blood strike, Plague strike, heart strike, scourge strike, frost strike) all have the base 9% to hit cap requirement whether dual wielding or using a 2-Handed weapon.

A large portion of the gear you will get at level 80 has hit included in the item, but you may have to gem/enchant for additional hit, especially if you choose to dual wield.

If you choose to dual wield you'll need 25% hit for your white damage to never miss a raid boss (as long as you take the +3% hit with one handed weapons talent from the Frost talent tree). That ends up being 819.75 hit rating (oh boy). Don't despair, you're special melee attacks require the base 9% to hit only.

After you remove (or minimize) the chance to miss, there's still a chance that a target will dodge your attack (or parry which can only be done from a targets front for more info see wowwiki's parry page). The good news is that this will only affect strikes (plague strike, bloodstrike, obliterate, etc) not your spell based attacks (Icy touch, death coil, howling blast, etc.), those are affected solely by hit rating.

Expertise rating can lower a targets parry or dodge. To reduce a raid bosses dodge to 0% you'll need to reduce it by about 6.5% or 213.135 rating. For most 2-Handed talent specs you get some automatic expertise from the talent tree (from 5-11 Expertise = 1.25-2.75% parry/dodge reduction). The "optimal" dps dual wield specs are usually unable to get these late tree talents, so they'll require near the full rating if you wish to minimize enemy dodging/parrying.

Detailed Reference Pages:
Spell Hit
Physical Hit
Excellent DK pve guide
Expertise

(fractal from JuliaFractal.jpg)

I'm a long time gamer, and have played World of Warcraft off and on since it's initial launch in November, 2004. Recently, I started up a blood elf Death Knight on Wrath of the Lich King launch day just a little after midnight. I proceeded to chain quest with light instancing after finishing the Death Knight introductory quest line. In just a few days played I was adventuring in the new Northrend content and achieved Loremaster of Northrend (met all quest requirements for all the new zones) in late November 2008.

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