Special Abilities And Pet Management

In this installment we’ll cover the little things that are important to know while playing your DK, some are common sense and some you might already know, but a quick recap never hurt anyone.

Keep in mind: your DK is a 2-Hand weapon specialist. Gearing up will be our next part of the series so I won’t go into details here.

What other skills will I need to use?  

Pestilence:

Is very useful for multi-mob as it puts your PS and IT on all causing damage to every mob. If you’re soloing, it works out just fine but in a group it can cause problems. In a group (5-10-25 man), the tank gets aggro on the first mob and you hit the main target right after. The tank in the meantime is making sure he has aggro on all the mobs in the group. If you hit Pestilence before he does get aggro on the group you could pull threat off the tank … and that is not good. Timing is very important. While you heal yourself for the most part, if you get aggro you will not be able to heal yourself fast enough causing your healer to start healing you as well as the tank. FYI If the healer has to make a choice between healing a Silly DK who pulled threat and the Tank that will keep the rest of the group alive, do you want to guess who’s getting the heal?

For the most part you should be able to keep yourself healed up without any help and sometimes….you get a healer that refuses to heal DK’s and up-time is critical for the success of any group.

Death and Decay:

D&D is not one of your very useful skills for a Blood build but it does have its uses.

Trash mobs! Now in Culling of Strath there are a few times to use it on the little turned humans being sure to get all your runes back up and ready for the next fight. Again this takes practice and there are a few dungeons you can use it but not many. It works alright when soloing a bit but again it’s not a skill used much for this build.

Chains of Ice:

Chains of Ice is mostly used as Crowd Control in PVP and does have its uses while soloing but rarely will you ever use it in a dungeon. All bosses are immune to CC and you want the tanks to keep the trash mobs busy. While soloing, you could be questing along just fine and fighting solo mobs that tend to run away when one gets away and brings back his friends en mass. OOPS!! This is about the only time it’s a very useful thing to use. It’s nice to have be be aware of it’s limitations: CC

The Pet:

Your Pet Ghoul (summoned from Raise Dead ability) and your Dancing Rune Weapon. These guys can boost your DPS quite a bit to the point of amazement. There are a few tricks however to using them that will help you get the most out of them you can:

• Make sure your Ghoul is ready for every boss. Summoning him is on a 3 minute cool-down and your Dancing Rune Weapon has a 1- ½ minutes. So this also takes practice and timing. Make sure both are off CD for every boss, (ie. Don’t click “Ready” on the ready check if you’re not ready!)

• Whatever you do, make sure you have your pet out on every fight and Keep control of your pet at all times. It should be attacking the same target you are. It won’t change target unless the target it’s attacking is dead. If it isn’t, command it to do so using the Gnaw ability or  Ctrl-1 to force your pet to attack a new target.

• If you control your pet in this way there is absolutely no reason to ever take your pet off of Passive mode, that way it can attack the Boss while you’re kiting some trash (Gluth fight).
• Keeping your pet on passive will allow him to attack a target that you death grip much faster. Otherwise your pet jumps 20 yds. to your target and is stuck running back to you at a leisurely pace, by which time your target is most likely dead anyway.

• If the pet is low on health, you can ask your healers to throw a little love(Heals) it’s way. Certainly not at the expense of the tanks, of course, but you can remind your healers that pets need health too.

• When all else fails and your health is really low, remember that you can sack your pet for the health benefit of Death Pact. Yet another “Oh, $H1T!” button at your disposal.

• Unless you’re Tanking yourself, don’t use the Dark Command ability (Taunt), every tank will be grateful, and so will you. The days of Crowd Control seem to have gone the way of the dinosaur with Wrath but thankfully, Blizzard has specifically stated they were bring it back “in the near future”, whatever that means.

Maybe by then the DKs will have to learn to use their pets again and so will Hunters. CC some mobs, protect the healer, even back-up tank (Yes, Hunter Pets used to be quasi-acceptable tanks back in the day). Until that day, focus on what you do best: DPS.

So there it is, mass destruction is a Death Knights purpose and it is key that when you’re playing one in DPS that you should do just that. Enjoy your Death Knight and remember practice and timing are your best friends.

The next, final, installment of the DK series will cover Gear.

… To be continued.