Greetings, denizens of domination, your resident Death Knight is here to discuss with you some beginning tips and tricks for all of you bloodthirsty (pun intended) DK’s.

So, say you’ve hit 80, or are close, and are despairing because you have no idea how to spec for raiding and taking down Arthas and the rest of his crew. Now this article is dedicated to those of you who love to get down and dirty, tear your opponent’s heart out, show it to them and start munching on it; it spewing the last remnants of its lifeblood onto… Well, you get the point. So here is the skinny on Blood spec:

Speccing:

Now, there are many choices out there for talents in terms of DPS, but for the sake of the beginners out there, we’ll start by just advising a general cookie-cutter (aka DELICIOUS) build.

Blood Spec for Death Knights = 51/13/7:

Now this is just a general, physical, dps focused build, which offers some mild buffs to your raid (through Abomination’s Might and Mark of Blood) and a whole boatload of pain to whatever mob is unfortunate enough to step in front of your beatstick.  Now there is some leeway with this build, but this is my personal favorite for balance. Here are some talents you can consider changing up, for personal taste.

Blood Aura/Rune Tap vs. Bloodworms: Now, these three points should be carefully considered, taking into account what you find yourself doing most often. For those who solo quite a bit more on the side, you may want to consider taking Bloodworms, a 9% proc for 4-5 worms that deal 50 base damage on a 2.0 speed attack which also heal for about 80-100 per worm per hit.

Now, I chose to go the Rune Tap/Blood Aura route, because the 2% heal through damage goes for your entire raid, and Rune Tap is used when taking random damage.  You can also get a scribe to make you a glyph which makes the Rune Tap heal also apply to your entire raid.  Considering the sheer number of DK’s out there competing for raid spots, any little thing that can make you a more popular death knight among millions is a good thing.

Toughness (Frost) vs. Glacier Rot/Imp. Icy Touch: At first, Toughness may seem like a talent reserved for those mindless brutes taking the brunt of your raid’s damage to the dome (Concussions much DK Tanks?), but combined with Blade Barrier, it looks appealing. With a general heroic-entry set of blue gear, I have around 11000 armor, which translates into just about 305 extra attack power.  15 percent extra armor may seem like a great thing, but going through the math, at this point, you only gain a little bit less than 40 attack power for five points. Now, since it seems to scale nicely, it COULD be a consideration as gear levels increase, but I find that slowing mob attack speed down helps the tank, and the extra damage on Icy Touch is killer for your rotation.  (More on this later)

Now in general, this is a very high-dps build with some nice kick added to it, focused on the second dps rotation, where you have 2 extra death runes to be able to execute 4 Heart Strikes. But simply put, this build is absolutely Dominating for PVE.  Next lesson, we’ll cover this build more in-depth, with stat priority, rotation, and all of that good stuff you theorycrafters will drool over. That installment is coming soon, provided I can interrupt the constant rending of souls taking place here on Fenris to get you the latest in DK news.  So until next time, this is Dr. DK signing off.