How to counter a Death Knight in PvP Combat.

If there is one aspect of game play that Death Knights are truly dominating it is player versus player combat, a fact that is mostly due to players not being used to a Death Knights capabilities and counters; while those who play Death Knights themselves know much more about the class and how to counter all other classes in the game.

But for all the outbursts of the term “overpowered” that are thrown around by many players, Death Knights have weaknesses aplenty when you learn more about them. In general there are two types of Death Knights you will encounter in PvP; Unholy and Blood. Frost spec Death Knights are quite rare in PvP due to the fact that without the support of a healer they are exceptionally fragile in comparison to the other two specs.

The primary weakness of a Death Knight is their susceptibility to snare and root effects; they have no means of escaping crowd control such as a Paladins hand of Freedom or a Druids shape shifting and must rely instead upon either Death Grip to close the distance gap or their own snare Chains of Ice.

Due to this weakness it is very easy to keep your distance from a Death Knight as a ranged class if you simply save your main escape tools such as disengage, blink, fade etc. until after the use of Death Grip.

For melee classes this snare vulnerability can be exploited by employing hit and run tactics; feral druids and rogues can dump an entire energy bar of attacks onto a death knight before dancing out of range again with impunity while their energy regenerates. This “Lancing” tactic is even more effective when used in combination with stuns and disarm effects to prevent reprisal attacks.

The second main weakness of a Death Knight is their reliance upon cool downs for their defense; abilities such as Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield provide significant increases to their defense but are easily surmountable when you take their weakness to snares into account. After a Death Knight utilizes a strong cool down, simply back off and wait for it to expire before re-engaging. In the case of Bone Shield which lasts until it runs out of charges simply kite while throwing the odd ranged attack to steadily remove the buff.

Once these defensive cool downs have been used, a Death Knight is actually rather fragile and vulnerable to burst damage.

As their final main weakness, Death Knights are exceptionally disease dependent for their damage with between a quarter and a third of their strike damage coming from them; these diseases can be removed by any healer in the game except Druids. By combining kiting with disease removal it becomes exceptionally hard for a Death Knight to kill a good healer without assistance or a lot of skill, especially when you factor in that Death Knights have no healing reduction debuff and their only stun comes from their fragile pet and is of a short duration.

By keeping these three simple weaknesses in mind it becomes a lot simpler to fight and win against Death Knights; it is key to remember that for a smooth kill you will require patience and timing, there is no speedy way to dominate a Death Knight in the same way traditional classes were doing in The Burning Crusade.