Death Knight - The Complete Breakdown

[prowlerz]

The new "Hero class " , what is it all about ? Is it better ? Is it worst ?

All those question and all the small things you were wondering about the class I've tried to break down as much as possible .

Since my general writing skills suck and i'm simply unable to write a step -to - step breakdown i'll make the basic stuff a bit brief and concentrate on the issues that you want to read for all those who are leveling a DK just for fun or for serious raiding and even a bit of pvp ( this bit i havnt tried myself atleast in arenas so untill resillence is added there is no point ) .

Resourse System : mana? rage? runic? wtf !!!

DK use a special resource system called "runic power", now there is a lot of confusion about how exactly this works , well it wouldn't be entirely wrong to compare it to rage but there is a twist to this, unlike rage you dont generate runic power when getting hit .

The only way to generate it would be to attack both white hits and special , there are a few talents you can spec into to generate runic while in combat
http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=49483

Now all attacks made by the DK use runes along with runic power , there are only 3 types of runes Blood, frost and Unholy two of each with a cooldown .

Presence :

This works similar to a warrior's stance , there are 3 stances namely blood . frost and unholy each with its own advantages.

Blood : While in this stance the DK does +15% more damage while healing for 2% of total damage done ( applies only to targets that grant xp or honor). This is the DK dps stance the simple fact of added bonus dmg that applies all meelee and diseases is too good to swap for other presence unless ofc it is needed for specific reasons.

Frost : Contribution from armor values increaed by 60% total health by 10% , recduced spell damage taken by 5% , increased threat generated from all abilities ( now i must point out the tps is a lot ,so much that there is real effort needed to generate high TPS ) This will the tanking stance no second options to this period.

Unholy : This increases the haste by 15% of all abilities and reduces the GCD by 0.5 seconds and increases moment speed by 15% , this is godsent half the GCD is a wet dream for most classes by there is the joke its only good when you have a lot of instant spells/attacks which we dont. Also all abilities use runes so even with the haste and lower GCD with the runes on CD it isnt much good as opposed
This is primarly considered a pvp presence for obvious reasons.

Talent Spec :

Blood :

Naturally most of the skills in the blood tree use blood runes this doesn't mean it isnt needed for other trees sometimes you need a combination of all 3 runes to use certain abilities .

Raid utility :
Blood brings a lot of nice buffs in a raid environment that increases both personal and other class dps , i'm not goin to go into much detail into each attack in the tree just pointing out a few things ,

Abomination's might is an awsome buff that is trigger by heart strike this gives a temp boost of AP similar to a shaman's unleashed rage , for just 2 points in the tree its a must have .

Hysteria is a nice talent with a 3 min cd it enrages the target and buffs to cause 30% more damage for 30 seconds at the cost of loosing 1% health every second ( which isnt too bad can be topped up in a raid enviroment)

Blood aura , for 2 points it provides an aura that heals the entire raid for 2 % of dmg done this is usefull in fights with heavy AoE dmg even the small heals goes a long way and helps to remove strain on the healers a bit.

Talent choices :

Now i must make this clear there is no such thing as a cookie cutter kickass spec and "You need to spec that to pwn" moments here , the whole class is new and everyone is experimenting with different specs to zero in on one that has the most damage output ,

With that said these are some choices put forth by folk who do the math and know all that rubbish calculation that we as a casual gamer cant be arsed to do .

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/deathknight/talents.html?tal=2305021530003313201250013500000000000000000000000000000230230303003110000000000000000

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/deathknight/talents.html?tal=2305021530003313201250013510000000000000000000000000000230210305003100000000000000000

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Frost :

There is a lot of misconceptions about this tree as being just for tanking , while it is true that most talents in the tree are focused on skills to reduce damage taken to provide more survivability (typical tanking traits), It also carries with some nice damage and burst abilities , again not goin into much detail just pointing out some nice things.

Icy talons is a must have skill with 20% increased haste and with points into imp icy talons that makes it raidwide +5% haste .

Litchborne which makes the DK temperarly an undead and reduces dmg taken its on of those "oh shit" buttons along with unbreakable armor and icebound fortitude ( learned skill)

Frost aura , again for 2 point it provides an aura that gives 80 + resist to all schools of magic , since a lot of content in Wotlk somhow have a lot of magic dmg a DK with this aura is every useful therefore reducing the need to heavy +resist items to be worn in encounters like naxx

Talent choices :

This is a tough one , there is much argument over the perfect frost tanking build over things such as some abilities bein better over others , personally it depends on the enconter , the nice thing about DK is that we can fine tune our spec to any particular encounter ( this makes us a bit usless when faced with another type of boss ) eg : when u spec to tank a caster boss and suddenly faced with a heavy meelee boss things might go wrong .

Either way here are some frost DPS specs

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/deathknight/talents.html?tal=2305020500000000000000000003202505133502112301005101350000000000000000000000000000000


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Unholy :

This is by far one of more complex specs to play as a DK simply because of the sheer number of attacks / abilities available and the limited resouce available to use them all , unholy damage is based on mass AoE in the form of diseases combined with meelee attacks and .. ofc a personal ghoul , now all DK can summon one but its not considered a pet nor have a pet bar with points in shadow of death and master of ghould u get to control a ghoul till it is destroyed , now this cant be compared to a hunter's pet as the damage difference between them is too great , none the les it puts out some nice damage keeps mobs off u incase of overpull , to sacrifice it to recover hp and ofc for pvp . In addition to that u can spec into and summon a gargoyle which is a nice way to dump runic power when you have your runes on CD. Disease damage is incresed proportionate to Attack power

Raid Utility :

Two words "Ebon Plague" , people simply fail to see the effectiveness of this buff with crypt fever built in this is an amazing buff to have in an raid situation with + 30% increased disease dmg done by DKs and 13% dmg increase on infected targets and increased crit chance by 3% to the whole raid is too good to pass up .

Sure locks and moonkins can bring the similar buffs but what makes the death knight special is that we are not bound to number of targets and infect infinite mobs and the speed at which it can be done its miles ahead compared to other classes

Unholy aura , again this a tough one people argue over the usefullness of this aura while the speed increase is nice it no something that you cant do with it cant be compared to bringing a shaman without imp totems as it does nothing directly affect personal or raid dps compared to other things you can spec into to it makes one question how worth it really is .

Some talent choices

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/deathknight/talents.html?tal=2305020500000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000230200333003115203150003133151

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2 handed weapon vs Dual wield :

I saw a lot of people make wild arguements and suggestions on this issue , there are some arguements how usefull is dual wield , couple of things i noticed is that you have to spec into imp DW (frost tree) to produce significant dps , some agree DW tanking really helps as u have 2 one handed wepons means more stats such as +defence and avoidance , increased parry chance now the downside is the hit rating / expertise required to pull this off meaning sacrificing more stats to achieve that , while this might be ok when u are lvling and tanking normals and heroics it becomes more of an issue tanking 25 mans not hit capped .

One must understand the class is designed to dps with a 2 handed weapon and i personally havnt seen a WWS report to prove DW outperforming by a large margin to make it a more viable spec.

The Hit Cap for 2handed wepons as a DK at 80 is 295 or 9%

Trispecs :

Some nice DW spec i found that utilizes all 3 specs ( again i havnt tried this myself )

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talents/deathknight/talents.html?tal=2305000500000000000000000003200535130502112301000000000230200305003100000000000000000

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Comming Soon :

Rotations : For each spec for max dps

Glyphs : The ones to use to increase damage and provide nice extras

Macros : How to make macros to make the most of the DPS uptime and some PvP

Stats : Modifier for strength , agility , crit rating , armor pen etc