Howdy, folks!  Well, it’s been a busy few days, running heroics with the team, getting new toys crafted (Titansteel Destroyer, anyone?) and perfecting  DK strategies for the masses.

So. You find yourself becoming accustomed to the sight of the Spirit healer, memorizing routes to make it back to the instance from the graveyard. Groups curse at you for your sub-par DPS, you cringe at the thought of a damage meter being posted. You may be asking yourself, “Well, gee. I followed Exxer’s spec advice to a T, why am I pulling 300 DPS? Is my 450 haste rating not good enough?” Well, today we’re going to cover a big checklist for all you DK’s to glean some knowledge about what to do.

Stat Priority:

1. Hit rating: Up until you hit the rating cap, this is by far your biggest priority in gearing. This little stat is the reason why two-handed trumps dual wielding.  

• For two-handers, you need 9%, or 296 hit rating, to cover the miss rate for both white and yellow attacks. (Of course, there’s always a 0.1% miss rate on all attacks, but you cannot get rid of that.)
• To cover the miss rate of your spells, you need 15%, or 525 hit rating, to cap your spell hit. This of course is optional, because the breakdown of damage for a DK is less spell dependent, even moreso for blood. However, reaching spell cap through a combination of raid buffs, and talents in the unholy tree, it becomes easier to close that gap between 9 and 15 percent.
• Next, a whopping 24% hit is needed to cover the dual wield hit penalty (5% miss rate, 19% dual wield penalty). That’s speaking in terms of equal level mobs.
• For bosses, an additional 4% is needed for bosses, which totals to a whopping 917 hit rating. For that reason alone, DK dps as DW becomes extremely hard, and usually sub-par.

2. Strength: Our bread and butter DPS stat. This becomes top priority after reaching hit cap, as Death Knights receive 2 Attack Power per 1 strength. (Not to mention 0.25 parry rating per strength.) Combined with Rune of the Fallen Crusader, strength becomes an amazing bolster to your AP.  Not to mention, strength scales with Blessing of Kings, which places it far above straight AP.

3. Expertise: Similar to hit rating, expertise rating reduces a mob’s chance to dodge any given attack. Now for bosses, the dodge rate is roughly 6.5% (6.1 for a mace-wielding dwarf, an axe-wielding orc, and 6.25 for a human wielding a mace or sword). Each point of expertise rating gives 8.1 expertise skill. And to reduce a mob’s dodge by 1%, you need 4 expertise skill (32.4 expertise skill). So this means that the cap for a race without racials, is 211 expertise rating. Don’t panic, as expertise is relatively easier to get than hit rating.

4. Crit Rating: This stat is lower on the list, for the sole fact that the three above are far more important. Not only that, but 45.91 crit rating is required for 1% crit at 80. So unless a stat has an immense amount of crit, the damage increase from crit rating is not nearly as high from the other three stats.

5. Raw AP: This is an inferior stat to Strength, as it does not scale with the Rune of the Fallen Crusader, or Blessing of Kings.  But if the AP value on an item is higher than Bladed armor and strength, by all means pick it up.

6. Armor Penetration: Quite a lackluster stat, though it can be a nice bonus. I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it specifically.

7. Agility: It may seem like a strong stat, increasing crit and armor, but the sheer amount needed to increase both is just insane. Not really worth it. Skip over items with Agility.

8. Haste: Haste is extremely bad for DK’s. Doesn’t reduce our GCD, and only a smallish portion of our damage is white damage, which haste exclusively buffs. Don’t even look or think about this stat. Garbage.

Rotation:

This is relatively basic, but it focuses on buffing the second round of the rotation.

Plague Strike>Icy Touch>Heart Strike>Heart Strike>Obliterate> Runic Power dump (2-3 Death coils, depending on SD procs)

This will get you to about 10-12 seconds, when you do your second round.

Obliterate>Heart Strike>Heart Strike>Heart Strike>Heart Strike>Runic power dump.

For now, that was a quite basic look at the rotation, and if you have any questions about anything death knight, post them in the thread and I would be much obliged to provide you with information. Starting next article, we can start looking into Unholy DPS or frost tanking.

That’s it for our latest lesson. Class will resume when Dr. DK’s fingers get a mind of their own and type another article. Keep it classy until our next meeting, and remember: Domination as a Death Knight comes easy with some effort.

-Exxer

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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.

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