Jame's Game Guides

I was asked a while ago what were my thoughts on Death Knights DW. My answer was that I couldn't fathom how someone would even want to Dual-Wield two poke sticks instead of one big shiny 2-Hander. Just from an aesthetics point of view.

Moreover, since most DK abilities are instant and based on weapon damage, it was quite natural to think that 2-Handers were the logical choice for maximum DPS.

Well, things have changed, and my asumptions were crushed by a few parses posted on the Elitist Jerks boards:


Ariastrasza is a Death Knight specced 0/33/38

His DPS is actually not 5751, but 6558. Because WWS doesn't take into account Ghoul and Army of the Dead damage.

This fight is not a fluke, he actually gets numbers just as impressive on pretty much any fight and even on trash clearing. And yes, he dual wields.

Gear needed

1. Reach 8% hit rating (or close to that).
   
2. Go for STR. As much as you can. All your gems should be STR, besides the two blue gems you need for the meta gem activation. Your meta gem should be Chaotic Skyflare Diamond.
   
3. Weapons: go for two fast weapons. Below 2.00 speed if possible. The faster the better. Something like 2x Fang of Truth is a great way to start and easy to acquire.
   
4. Sigil: Use Sigil of the Dark Rider
5. Glyphs: Use Glyph of Icy Touch, Glyph of the Ghoul, Glyph of Bone Shield.

How to play this spec

1. Use Blood Presence. Don't let anyone tell you that Unholy Presence is better for DPS. It's not.
2. Summon Gargoyle AFTER your +STR/AP boosts proc. (Unholy Strength, Mirror of Truth if you have it). You get the point, your gargoyle's power is determined the moment it is summoned, according to your stats at THAT moment, that's why you have to try to summon it when all your procs are active.
   
3. DPS Rotations:

• IT > PS> Howling Blast> Bloodstrike> Bloodstrike> Death Coil
• IT > PS> Howling Blast> Icy Touch> Icy Touch> Death Coil
• Try to use Howling Blast whenever you get a Killing Machine proc.
• Try to squish in additional Death Coils whenever possible.

That's about it. It's a very easy to play spec and it's a lot of fun, especially when you get to do those 8K AoE crits with Howling Blast, and that Howling Blast cost you nothing because you had a Rime proc ;)

There are other Dual-Wield Builds which are just about as effective, but I thought I'd share this one with you, because it's my personal favorite.

Don't expect to reach those kind of numbers easily though. This WWS parse was taken from a player with top notch gear, in a 25-man raid with optimized class buff synergies. But still, try it and you'll love it.

Currently, Dual-Wield builds actually OUTPERFORM 2-Handed builds, believe it or not. However, that probably won't last for long, because blizzard already has plans to nerf it in the next patch. We can't say for sure how hard they will nerf it.

So, enjoy it while you can ;)

Once the patch hits, I'll make a new blog entry with an updated version of this. I believe that Dual Wielding will still be a viable spec, it will just need a few adjustments.

I'll also be covering 2-Hand builds in the future on this blog, for all talent trees.
And finally I'll also share my experiences about Death Knight tanking.

Stay tuned!

Hey Jame,

Just want to thank you for your work on the 55-61 Deathknight guides and the Horde Howling/Borean/Dragonblight guides. Without them I wouldn't have had the headstart in the Death Knight race.

Just a lil' something for the eye:



I dinged 80 at around 20:30 CET on the 16th of November. No, I didn't play the beta at all. Basically the only preparation I had was from your guides.

Using the Dragonblight guide + playing in the off hours was probably one of the most important things that contributed to my "victory".

One of the most interesting points in my journey was when I rushed away from my competitors in the 55-60 race in WPL/EPL, while the others went directly to Outlands, which led to a headstart of up to 2 levels.

I never doubted your choice of specc, whilst the most part of the Death Knights went for blood stating: "Unholy can't heal :(((". Well the top5 DKs worldwide were all unholy. Thumbs up!

I would've dinged ALOT sooner if I had the chance to read your upcoming guides for Grizzly Hill and more.

When asked for tips n' tricks I start of with wow-pro, then of course the various performance enhancers like red bull, fast carbs and loud music.

Worth noticing is that Frostmane is one of the most overcrowded servers in Europe, in the same line of the good ol' notorious Dragonmaw.

Cheers,

Blacktony - Level 80 Death Knight - Frostmane-EU

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This makes me feel really proud.

Next expansion, I'll work even harder and try to have guides ready until max level (which will probably be level 90). Who knows, maybe someone using my guides will get the world first 90 then, and without mob tagging powerleveling ;)


PS: If you followed my guide and you believe that they were a factor in helping you getting Realm First, please contact me. Send me an e-mail at jame.wow.pro.blog@gmail.com or post a comment here.

I'd like to add your name on this blog entry to have a list of people who owned it up with my guide ^^

So I thought I'd also let you guys know how it went for my Death Knight, following my 55-61 Death Knight Leveling Guide (horde version).

It went really great actually, despite being slowed down quite a lot in the starting area due to overcrowding, the leveling speed was amazing, it's almost twice as fast as what you can get in Hellfire Penninsula, so this just confirms what I've been preaching for months:

• The Plaguelands are an amazing place to level now, especially for Death Knights thanks to Death Gate.
• Going to Outland at 58 is a mistake - it won't make you level faster, all the opposite.

This screenshot was taken at the end of the leveling guide, right after I turned in the quest Glyphed Oaken Branch in Thunderbluff.

From level 55 to level 61.5 in 10h 55min.

Keep in mind this was done under the following circumstances:

• Zero Rested XP
• A lot of overcrowding in the starting area
• Many alt-tabbings to correct mistakes I found as I followed my guide
  
• I only used the starting area gear, no Blade of Misfortune or anything fancy
• No consumables
  

This means my guide can probably be done under 10hours in normal circumstances, and 55-61.5 under 10 hours is pretty damn good, I'm sure nobody can pull that off if they go to HFP at level 58.

Anyway, I'll keep on following my Outland guides now with my Death Knight and keep you guys updated as I go ;)

If you've been checking my Death Knight Shopping List, you probably saw that it's shaping up nicely. I'm putting a lot of effort into it, and recently I had to make a decision and I can't decide myself, so I could use some input on this.

I have to choose between 4 blue BoE Items (getting pricier by the day) or 4 cheap crafted greens, from the Fel Iron Plate set.
I've been leaning towards the Fel Iron Plate, because it's much cheaper, easier to get, and you can actually equip them at earlier levels. Also if you do the math, it's pretty close:

Girdle of Siege
Boots of the Decimator
Gauntlets of the Skullsplitter
Nagascale Legplates of the Beast

Armor: 2549 | Str: 124 | Sta: 77 | Agi: 44 | Hit Rating: 12 | Crit Rating: 18
Total Cost (avg.): ~200g (probably a lot more now, due to high demand)

Fel Iron Plate Belt
Fel Iron Plate Boots
Fel Iron Plate Gloves
Fel Iron Plate Legs

Armor: 2386 | Str: 122 | Sta: 114 | Agi: 0 | Hit Rating: 15 | Crit Rating: 0
Total Cost (avg.): ~31g

Armor and str are almost identical. Fel Iron Plate has a lot more stamina, a little more hit rating, but about -3% crit.

However, they are much cheaper, much easier to obtain (Blacksmiths craft a lot of those while leveling up smithing) and they also can be equipped earlier.

Or better, you can simply buy the fel iron ore / bars and ask a blacksmith friend to craft them for you.

So my question is: should I even bother adding the blues to the optional list? The difference is so small and the price so big, but I like to give people options. However, is it even a good option, considering everything?

Updated with latest build - 8th November

Just a quick post to tell you guys that I've been doing another series of tests since the Unholy Blight nerf (in case you missed it, Unholy Blight no longer counts as a disease now).

For leveling, this nerf doesn't change much, for several reasons:

1. When leveling, you don't use Unholy Blight that often, because you fight a lot of single targets.
2. Unholy Blight still is very useful for AoE'ing

Basically, Scourge Strike does a little less damage now and Death Strike heals for a little less. On single targets, Unholy is very very close to Blood now, so if our only criteria was chain killing single targets, there would be no favorite, I'd recommend choosing either Blood or Unholy, without any preference.

However, Unholy still has an edge over Blood for leveling, because:

1. It is a much better spec to AoE things. I just went back to those buzzards with my level 62 DK to see if I could still AoE 6+ packs non-stop and the answer is yes, I noticed no difference at all. Killed packs of 5, 6 or 7 buzzards and finished the fights nearly full HP.
2. On a pale horse is still an awesome time saver, all the way to level 77 (and that's only if you got the money to unlock flying mounts in Northrend).

Conclusion

I still recommend to spend your talent points in Unholy while leveling.

Level 62 Talent Spec: 0/0/53
Level 80 Talent Spec: 16/0/55

This should max out your killing speed, both on single targets and multiple targets.
This is also a great talent spec for farming and questing at level 80.
It is also perfectly fine for tanking normal instances, just switch to Frost Presence and you're good to go.

WotLK is nearing. My Death Knight Leveling Guides are ready, but there's one part I haven't done yet: the shopping list.

What I'd like to do this time is to write together a comprehensive list of items people can buy before even creating their Death Knight, to help them level it as fast and easy as possible.

This list should contain:

• BoE Items - These need to be significant upgrades to the Death Knight Starting Blue Set and we must also make sure that there's no easily acquired quest reward equivalent for the same slot at the same level range. For example, Blade of Misfortune would be quite a nice upgrade to Greatsword of the Ebon Blade and would remain useful at least up to level 65, when we can upgrade it to a Honed Voidaxe from the Ring of Blood chain in Nagrand
• Items for Quest turn ins - Luckily here, Dhannek already made a nice list for those in his 58-60 Death Knight Speed Leveling Guide
• Glyph List - I already got that list covered, so no worries here
• Consumables - Pots for faster leveling (Health Pots and Elixirs which boost DPS)
  

Of course, all of this will be optional and will depend on how much gold you have at your disposal, so don't worry about it.

Why am I writing all this? Because I need your help! :P
Right now, I don't have the time to make the research myself, so it would be great if we could put this list together as a joint effort. What really needs work is the BoE items list.

So please make suggestions on BoE items for each slot. Keep in mind the criterias mentioned above:

1. Item must be a significant upgrade over the previous one
2. Item must not have an equivalent easily acquired from a quest at this level range
3. If possible, item must be cheap :P
   

If you got a suggestion, please post it under my Death Knight Shopping List Guide. If it's more convenient for you, you can also post it here and I'll take care of the rest.

In case you missed my previous video on How to AoE with a Death Knight, go watch it first.

For this new video I couldn't use my usual Death Knight (Jame), he's too high level now. However, I've got a sexy replacement, a level 62 Human DK called Yuumei.

Yuumei is wearing the DK starting area full blue set and is specced Unholy: 0/0/53

She has no glyphs sadly. With only a Glyph of Death Strike she would do much better, so what you'll see in the video is just a glimpse of what you can do with a Death Knight at this level already. After you watch the video, try to imagine what I could have done with slightly better equipment and full glyphs (and no lag :P).

Anyway, please watch the video and if you like it, go to Dailymotion and give it a good rating :)

Here's the video, I highly recommend watching it in High Quality (simply click on the HQ button):



Conclusion

Death Knights can really AoE like crazy. However, I wouldn't use this as a main source of leveling. There are a lot of external factors which could make it much worse than what you saw in the video (Other players fighting with you for spawns, possible deaths if you get unlucky or screw up, etc).

Instead, I'd follow the quest circuits of my leveling guides and whenever the opportunity arises, have some AoE Fun!

As you know, I'll be doing class specific guides in the future and the first one will be for the Death Knight class. I've decided to make tutorial videos to help illustrate my guides, and here's the first one.

It's nothing special of course, I just made it quickly to give you guys an example on how to AoE stuff as an Unholy DK. The video quality is low on purpose because it's only a temporary video, the real one will be in high quality and I'll spend more time on it as well to make it all nice and shiny.

This probably won't be useful to expert DK players, but who knows, you might learn a thing or two, or you might just like the song! Anyway, watch it and tell me what you think.

This is done with a level 61 Death Knight wearing the DK starter blue set, no enchants, no glyphs.
Talent spec is Unholy: 0/0/52

ps: This was done on sunday evening on the European Server during peak time, a.k.a lag fiesta, so don't be surprised if my reflexes seem slow at times. It still gets the job done though.
Also, I forgot to write that you have to use Blood Boil again as soon as your blood runes are up again. This wasn't really needed in this video though, as you can see they die like flies already :p

Here's the video, please watch it in High Quality (simply click on the HQ button):

Many have been asking, so here they are - Death Knight Rotations to do the most possible DPS. Please keep in mind these are calculated with talent specs tailored for leveling, starting at level 61. Once you switch to a raiding spec, things will probably be different.

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Here we go again. A new series of parses to check what's the best talent spec for leveling. This time I've done things a little differently:

• No ability with a cooldown of 1 minute or higher was used. This was to reflect more accurately a leveling situation. You don't use your cooldowns on every monster when you level up, you generally save them for elites or big fights, so that's why I didn't use them to run those tests
• Consequently, I only used the ghoul for the Unholy spec. However, I didn't use Unholy Blight, because in a real leveling situtation, you don't use it that often.
• A level 61 Death Knight with the full blue set from the starting zones was used for all 3 tests.
• The tests were done on a level 58 Servant of Sevine in the Blasted Lands and were each 10 minute long.

Anyway, let's see those numbers!

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Talent spec used: Unholy lvl 61 Leveling Spec


Total: 629 DPS

Observations: Unholy is still very strong. Stronger than in the previous patch. The Death Knight's DPS alone is 517 and that's without even using Unholy Blight. This is due to the fact that Death Coil is now much stronger and easily makes up for the loss of dps from not casting Unholy Blight. This is good news because when leveling, we don't use Unholy Blight that much.

We must also remember that this was done on a single target. Unholy's DPS goes up the roof when taking on 2, 3 or 4 targets, which happens quite often when leveling, especially if you use the DK's ability to gather mobs quickly (Death's Grip and Strangulate for casters, ghoul / icy touch / death coil for the rest).

So in my opinion, Unholy is even better than before for leveling.
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Blood

• Blade Barrier - Now activates when your 2 Blood runes are on cooldown (Old: All 6 runes needed to be on cooldown)

A very nice change, this basically means that now you'll have +10% parry 99% of the time if you take this talent, which is quite amazing for just 5 talent points.

• Heart Strike - Damage increased!
• New: Rank 6 60% weapon damage +220.8, and an additional +110.4 per disease
• Old: Rank 6 50% weapon damage +184.0, and an additional +92.0 per disease

About time! I'm eager to see how Blood DPS will improve from this.

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Frost

• Frost Presence - Armor contribution from items increased to 60%. (Old 45%)

That's a pretty big boost and a much needed one, tanking instances while leveling should be easier now, no matter what your spec is, and that's great.

• Frost Strike - Now cannot be dodged, blocked, or parried.

Great for tanking and great for improving frost DPS, which was very lacking.

• Black Ice - Damage bonus has been doubled but only affects frost damage now (used to be Frost AND Shadow damage).
  
• Now: Rank 5 = +30% Frost
  
• Old: Rank 5 = +15% Frost & +15% Shadow
  

Wow, frost is going to be pretty good now. Frost Strike and Howling Blast should do substantial damage. Too bad they removed the shadow damage boost, it would have had very nice synergy with the Unholy Tree, but probably would have been too powerful anyway, so this is a good change.

• Tundra Stalker: Icy Touch Damage bonus lowered, but expertise bonus doubled.
  
• Old Rank 5: +100% Icy Touch Damage and +5 Expertise
• New: Rank 5: +25% Icy Touch Damage and +10 Expertise

A logical change, Icy Touch was simply doing too much damage with the previous version and it would have been ridiculous now with the changes to Black Ice.
It's still a slight nerf, but the Expertise bonus is a nice addition and consolidates the Frost Tree as the tanking tree.

• Rune Strike - now strikes the target for 200% weapon damage plus 20% of Attack Power. Only usable after an attack is dodged or parried and can't be dodged, blocked, or parried. (Old version was only 65% weapon damage).

A very big boost to this ability which will translate into more DPS for all 3 talent trees. This was a needed change because the old version was so bad it wasn't even worth using it.

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Unholy

• Blood-Caked Blade - Chance to proc doubled.
• New: Rank 3 = 30% chance to proc
• Old: Rank 3 = 15% chance to proc

I guess this talent really can't be avoided now and should compensate a little for the nerf of Scourge Strike.

• Scourge Strike - Damage lowered.
  
• New: Rank 4 = 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage +190.5, and an additional +95.25 per disease
• Old: Rank 4 = 60% of weapon damage as Shadow damage +226.8, and an additional +113.4 per disease

A slight nerf and not a surprising one. Scourge Strike was doing too much damage mostly because of the bonus from diseases. It should still do pretty good damage, but more on par with the Blood Tree equivalent (Heart Strike).

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Conclusion

It seems like they're finally getting there in terms of balancing the 3 trees. Frost is becoming more and more the proper tree for tanking, while still gaining more DPS. Blood's DPS is finally getting close to the one of Unholy.

I'll run some tests and post the results tomorrow, and we'll see how those changes really affected the talent trees. So stay tuned!

Blood

• Bloody Vengeance - No longer increases frost and shadow damage.
  

• Dancing Rune Weapon - Cooldown increased to 3 min. (old: 2 min)
  

• Bladed Armor - Now increases attack power by 1/2/3/4/5 for every 180 armor value. (Old 1/2/3/4/5 strength for every 400 armor)
  

Frost

• Obliterate Damage lowered. Now Rank 1 - 100% weapon damage plus 124, and an additional 62 bonus damage per disease. (Old Rank 1 - 100% weapon damage plus 167, and an additional 83.5 bonus damage per disease.)


• Tundra Stalker - Now also increases the damage of Icy Touch by 20% per rank. (20/40/60/80/100%)


• Guile of Gorefiend - No longer gives bonus to Rune Strike critical damage, but gives it to Howling Blast instead.
  


• Howling Blast - Damage increased on all ranks. (Now Rank 5 - 259 to 281) (Old Rank 5 - 192 to 208)


• Runic Focus - Description changed to : “Unlike most casters, a Death Knight’s spells cause double damage on critical hits.”

Unholy

• Death and Decay - Damage Increased (Now Rank 4 - 62 Damage) (Old Rank 4 - 52 Damage)


• Blood-Caked Blade - Damage increased to 25% of weapon damage. (Old 20% of weapon damage.)


• Blood Plague - Chance to remove a Heal over Time effect reduced to 25% (Old 50%)


• Reaping - Pestilence replaced by Blood Strike
  

Observations

The Good: They boosted Frost a little here and there. And that's good because frost definitely needed a boost (and still does after this patch I'm sure).

The Bad:

Frost - They actually nerfed Obliterate? Obliterate is mostly used in Frost builds and frost is by far the weakest of all 3 talent trees, so why nerf it?

Blood - Several nerfs to the blood tree, and I don't get why. Blood was behind Unholy on all aspects, as has been shown in some of my previous articles and by many other beta testers. The change that boggles me the most is the increased cooldown on Dancing Rune Weapon. As the numbers have shown, DRW is really not that powerful for an ultimate talent, it's about the same damage as Summon Gargoyle from the Unholy Tree, besides... it's an ultimate talent and should be more powerful than Summon Gargoyle. Well now, not only is it not more powerful, but it also got the same cooldown. Sounds fair to you?

Unholy - The most puzzling part of those changes, they boosted Unholy, which was already the strongest of all 3 trees, in all aspects of the game. The change to reaping will allow Unholy DKs to replace Bloodboil with Bloodstrike in their rotation and this will increase their single target damage (which was already the highest). This is however a good change, because reaping is an important talent mechanic and it was wrong to have it only work when using AoE abilities, like pestilence and blood boil. However, the side effect is that it's still going to increase Unholy single target dps.
They also gave +5% damage to Blood-Caked Blade, sure, why not, it's not a big improvement but still, did the unholy tree need it?


Conclusion

Stop boosting Unholy, boost the other two trees. For now, I sure as hell am sticking to Unholy. :P

Quotes from Ghostcrawler, blizzard poster:

We have been doing some more tests on DK tanking, this time especially on raid bosses. We think the DK design has some limitations, which weren’t showing up as much on tanking 5-player dungeons.

Specifically, as many people suspected, the death knight really suffers when attacks fail to land, especially opening attacks. Having a Plague Strike dodged or parried can throw off an entire rotation, eventually leading to bad Obliterates because both diseases weren’t up at the same time. Missing attacks is a fact of life for all tanks since it’s hard to stack hit and expertise along with mitigation stats. However, existing tank classes have mechanics to let them “burn off rage” (or mana) to make up for those bad strings. The DK plays more like a rogue who can’t get enough combo points in play. This had a deadly effect on DK threat generation, which just didn’t compete with that of other tanks.

We didn’t want to just solve this with more free expertise because A) that has major PvP ramifications, and B) the death knights would start to hate expertise on their gear.

Instead we are making some fairly big changes:

1) Blade Barrier now procs when your Blood Runes are inactive. While the initial implementation of this ability was fun, as we added Death Rune mechanics it became harder to use, and the fast recharge on missed attacks made it even harder. Now it should be up almost all the time.

2) We also found a bug where a naked, untalented death knight only had 2.5% dodge instead of 5% like warriors and paladins. With these two avoidance changes, death knight survivability should be very close to the other tanks, recognizing that avoidance is more dangerous than mitigation for a tank. As an aside, death knights, warriors and paladins currently mitigate a similar amount of damage, and druids may very well be mitigating too much.

3) Frost Strike can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried. Frost death knights were losing too much potential damage and threat when Frost Strike failed to connect, putting Frost tanks in the awkward position of wanting to skip Frost Strike and just use Death Coil.

4) We changed Rune Strike completely. It is now mostly a tanking ability meant to dish out high damage (and therefore threat). Rune Strike can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack. It affects the next swing, so it doesn’t compete with global cooldowns and can be spammed to some extent. It hits for 200% weapon damage (remember 100% of that is the white swing you lost) plus a percentage of AP. It cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, and costs 10 runic power (for now). Think Heroic Overrevenge. :)

5) I think we already announced these changes, but just to get them all in one place: Bladed Armor went back to attack power. It was changed only to match the warrior talent, which we changed back. Death and Decay got a decent threat boost to get it closer to the realm of Consecration and the new Thunder Clap.

Observations

• Rune Strike is going to be great now while leveling, this will be nice boost for all specs. It was high time they took this ability off the global cooldown, because seriously, extra global cooldowns is something Death Knights just don't have :P
  


• The change to blade barrier makes it even better now, to the point where I think this talent should be taken no matter what spec you go for. It's basically a guaranteed +10% Parry for only 5 points now, it's hard to pass up on that.


• I also like the Frost Strike change, it's a step in the right direction to make the frost tree useful, at least for tanking.

For those who were interested, here are the numbers I got for this Frost Spec at level 61.

Rotation used was: Icy Touch --> Plague Strike --> Blood Strike --> Blood Strike --> Obliterate --> Frost Strike --> Obliterate --> Icy Touch --> Plague Strike --> Obliterate --> Frost Strike --> Obliterate --> Frost Strike --> Obliterate --> Restart cycle

Note: Replace Obliterate with Death Strike whenever healing is needed.


If you add the ghoul's damage to that, it would be a total 525 DPS.

This is way below the other two specs, as I expected. Also, this spec provides less healing than the other two, so it's definitely not an option for leveling at this point.

I tried a different Blood spec today, to see if I could do more damage with blood.

Here is the spec: Level 61 Blood Spec with Death Rune Mastery

The point of this build is to convert to Frost/Unholy runes to Death Runes, allowing for more Heart Strikes.

DPS Cycle used

1. Icy Touch --> Plague Strike --> Death Strike (creates 2 death runes) --> Heart Strike --> Heart Strike --> Death Coil --> Obliterate
2. Icy Touch --> Plague Strike --> Heart Strike --> Heart Strike --> Heart Strike --> Heart Strike --> Death Coil --> Obliterate --> Death Coil

Death Strike was used instead of Obliterate whenever I needed healing to keep myself about 75% HP because of Blood Gorged.

Dancing Rune Weapon was used 5 times
Hysteria was used 5 times
Raise Dead was used 2 times

Here we go again. I went to do some parsing in the Blasted Lands, because it's impossible to do it in the Ebon Hold with dozens of people bashing the Training Dummies 24/7 and messing up my results with their extra diseases :P

Note: Both tests are done with a level 61 Death Knight, equipped with the starting area set.

Anyway, here is the first test. 5 Minutes of single target damage with this Unholy Spec. The Gargoyle was summoned twice and lasted full duration each time.


Total combined DPS: 702 DPS

Conclusion: We're doing a bit less damage than before, overall. However, our personal damage went way up. Scourge Strike is even better now, had some 2100+ crits with the Cinderglacier buff on. Death Coil is finally useful and does decent damage.

On the other hand, the ghoul got seriously nerfed to oblivion. Barely half the DPS it used to do. I think it will work out at high level though, with good gear and a lot of STR, the ghoul's dps will be more acceptable.

All in all, I like this new Unholy DK more than the old one, because even though it was fun to have an imba pet, our personal damage was pathetic, and this needed fixing. But this raises the question now, with this big nerf on the ghoul's DPS and all the boosts made to the Blood tree, is Unholy still the best leveling spec?

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Blood DPS Parsing results

Here we go. Same time same place. 5 minutes of single target DPS on a Servant in the Blasted Lands with this Blood Spec.

Ghoul was summoned once and fought for 2 minutes. Dancing Rune Weapon was summoned 3 times and fought for its max duration everytime. Hysteria was used 3 times as well.


Total DPS: 654 DPS

Conclusion: Quite close, as you can see. The blood tree definitely got some nice improvements, and I think I can do better with a different build involving Death Rune Mastery (for more Heart Strikes, because Heart Strike is a lot better now, as you can see). What also impressed me was the damage coming from Death Coil. It has become quite significant, enough to take talents such as Butchery and Scent of Blood.

The Unholy Build still comes ahead. However, it's not that simple. When you're leveling, you generally fight one mob at a time, sometimes two, rarely more. Even if you're trying to AoE grind as a Death Knight, it means you have to spend extra time gathering mobs, which will sometime just slow you down.
The reason why the Unholy Build comes ahead on a single target fight, is that it's a 5 minute non-stop fight, on the same target, which means you always have your 4 diseases up and running, increasing your DPS a lot.
This wouldn't be possible in a normal leveling siutation, because Unholy Blight costs 60 runic power and lasts only 20 seconds, which means it's a waste to use it unless you're fighting an elite or a big pack of mobs. So effectively, while leveling up and killing solo mobs, the Unholy Build would have a lower DPS, because you'd have to substract the damage lost from not using Unholy Blight on most fights..
Moreover, if you compare the two builds, you'll see that the Blood spec has much more survivability with +10% Parry, Vampiric Blood, Mark of Blood and Bloodworms.

I've got one complaint though, and I hope blizzard will change this. Dancing Rune Weapon. I mean, it's the ultimate talent for the Blood Tree, and it's not even as good as Summon Gargoyle, which is in the middle of the Unholy Tree. They definitely need to increase the duration of Dancing Rune Weapon by a lot, or do something to make it more powerful, because right now, it's really lackluster for an ultimate.

So at this point, I'm back to wondering what I'll recommend as talent spec for my leveling guide. The above samples were too short to draw a final conclusion, so tomorrow, I'll be back in the Blasted Lands and will run thorough tests.

After that, I think I'll be able to determine what will be my final leveling build for my Death Knight Guide. Till tomorrow then!

I'm currently downloading the latest BETA build and reading the changes to Death Knights. So far it looks good, almost all of our offensive abilities got a boost and some of our defensive abilities got a nerf, especially anti-magic shell, which isn't surprising because we were just stomping over casters with way too much ease until this patch. What does this mean?

Well it means we're gonna kill things even faster and have an even easier time leveling! That's great, however what's not great is that I'm gonna have to do tests again to compare all 3 talent trees, and I might have to re-work my guides again :P

Oh, and not only did we get upgraded, but our class specific flying mount also got a facelift! It used to look like a goofy plucked chicken, now it finally looks badass and fits with the Death Knight class ;)

As promised yesterday, you can now see the preview of my first class specific guide here.

It's just snippets though, so if it doesn't make much sense, it's normal :P

Also, if you wonder why some of the text is purple, it's also normal, that's my new color of choice for class specific things I write. That way, if someone follows my Death Knight guide but already knows how to play his class well (or just wants to use a different talent build), I've made it easy for them to skip it!

Enjoy, and if you have any questions or suggestions, ask here :)

Short news, don't worry I'm still there, just working hard on the guides. I'm pretty much done with the Death Knight leveling guide for Alliance, and tomorrow I'll give you guys a preview of it. Make sure to visit my blog tomorrow ;)

Short article today, I'm really busy with the Northrend guides so I'll make this quick.

I wrote a Death Knight FAQ, it's mostly for beginners who don't know much about the Death Knight class, but it should answer all the essential questions, here is the link:

Death Knight FAQ

I also put together a list of the gear Death Knights start with, including screenshots of how the equipment looks. You can view it here:

Death Knight Starting Gear