Death Knight General FAQ

[Air]

**Still being worked on, some parts are in disarray **

QUESTS
Q: I am STUCK on a HORSE! How do I turn it in?
A: Press 1.

ABILITIES
Q: What is a rotation?
A: A rotation is an ability sequence that uses a full set of runes.

The most basic rotation is:
Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Blood Strike -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate

All six runes are used up, and you wait for the runes to cooldown so you can begin the rotation again.

Some sequences require two or more rotations to complete, an example for Unholy:

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Scourge Strike -> Blood Boil/Pestilence -> Blood Boil -> Scourge Strike -> Scourge Strike -> Scourge Strike

The first rotation allows 2 death runes to be formed for the second rotation which enables the Unholy Death Knight to use Scourge Strike three times in a row.

Q: What's a death rune?
A: A death rune is a rune that can be used as either unholy, frost or blood. It has lower priority than your other runes, meaning that if you have a Frost rune and a Death Rune available and cast Icy Touch, it will choose your Frost Rune first.

Q: What presences do I want to use and when?
A: Generally speaking you'll want to be in Blood for PVE DPS, Frost for PVE tanking, and Unholy for PVP: the run speed lets you stay on your targets better, and the lower GCD lets you unload more attacks on them in the limited time you are in melee range. Your spec does not affect these, Blood, Unholy, and Frost Death Knights should all still tank in Frost and PVP in Unholy.

Q: Why doesn't Bladed Armor work with Frost Presence?
A: Bladed Armor has a 30-second pulse that it uses to periodically check armor changes. Wait a little bit and it will kick in.

TALENTS
Q: OK, I made a new Death Knight and I don't have any talent points! Where are they?
A: You initially start out with 0 talent points and as you complete quests in the starting area you are awarded them along with money/items. By the time you finish the Scarlet Enclave you will have the correct amount of talent points for your level.

Q: Why doesn't Bladed Armor work with Frost Presence?
A: Bladed Armor has a 30-second pulse that it uses to periodically check armor changes. Wait a little bit and it will kick in.

Q: I got some talents that seem the same as abilities that I started with! What's up with that?
A: The way the Death Knight talent trees work is that you will gain abilities that are improvements over other abilities that you start with. These are meant to replace the starting abilities completely. For the Blood tree you gain Heart Strike which replaces Blood Strike. Frost gains Howling Blast which replaces Obliterate and Frost Strike which replaces Death Coil. Unholy gains Scourge Strike which replaces Obliterate and Unholy Blight which, some can argue, replaces Death Coil.

Q: What is the difference's between each talent tree?
A:
Blood:
Blood specs are mostly physical damage based. They mirror the retribution paladin tree fairly reasonably. A blood spec also excels at keeping him or herself high health, and is pretty much a grinding machine. They scale well with other physical DPS classes, and gain the most from physical damage debuffs like sunder armor, armor penetration, blood frenzy, etc. A blood spec typically provides Abomination's Rage to the group, granting +10% to attack power.

Frost:
Frost spec is the 'burst' spec. They play like a sort of hybrid to the unholy and blood styles. Unholy is much more heavily DoT based, and Blood is just about hitting hard and very little DoT at all. Frost is about finesse, setting up Frost Fever on your targets, and then hitting them much harder once you set it up. Frost also has the best mitigation talents, and is the dubious dual wield spec of choice. A frost spec will usually bring Improved Icy Talons, granting the team +20% to haste.

Unholy:
Unholy spec is the area effect spec. There are more pet options in the unholy tree, but it is not a pet spec. Unholy is best at getting a lot of diseases on a lot of creatures, and eating away at them. They have less burst than frost, since they only have one really heavy-hitting attack (Scourge Strike), but their DoT abilities and AE effectiveness makes up for it. An unholy DK is probably the most casterish of the three, bringing +13% to magic damage to the group on any enemy she drops a disease on.

Q: What group buffs do death knights give?
A: Blood: provides Abomination’s Might â€" increases the attack power by 10% of raid members within 45 for 10 sec.
Frost: Improved Icy Talons â€" increases the melee attack speed of your entire group or raid by 20% for the next 20 sec.
Unholy: Ebon Plaguebringer â€" increases vulnerability to magic by 13%.

GEAR
Q: What stats do I need to look to?
A: DKs are like arms warriors. You want to focus on +Str, +Crit and +AP the most. ALL of your abilities gain damage from Attack Power (yes, spells included). You gain 2 AP for every point of Strength. Agility gives you dodge/armor and crit. Based on this you should focus on the following stats:

Strength
Crit
AP
Hit Rating (until capped for 2handers)
Expertise

Other Stats:
Agility â€" only Provides melee crit, Spell Crit will not be affected. No AP gains.
Intellect â€" Worthless
Spell Power â€" Useless for DKs

Q: How is Dual Wielding?
A: Works for some builds, it probably won't get much better than it currently is due to how attack power scales with white damage and yellow damage. There are a lot of divided thoughts on this. Do what you like.

Q: Why do people knock haste for DKs?
A: Haste isn't useless, but it isn't as useful as other stats we could be getting. Haste will increase our swing speed, meaning our autoattack (white) damage will go up. This will benefit certain talents like Killing Machine, Blood-Caked Blade and Necrosis, which do better with more attacks. However, it will not affect things like Blood Plague, Icy Touch, Scourge Strike, Obliterate, Unholy Blight, Howling Blast, Frost Strike, Heart Strike, etc. which make up the larger portion of our damage. Haste also does not affect the global cooldown for us, or our rune refresh rate. Since most DK autoattack damage seems to come in at around 20-30%, haste would not really have as much of a solid benefit as a stat that takes all of our abilities into account (Attack Power, Hit rating, etc.)

Important Numbers:

Special Melee Attack hit cap: 9% (Strikes)
Two-hander melee hit cap vs. a boss: 9%
Dual wield melee hit cap vs. a boss: 28%
Spell hit cap vs. a boss: 17%

Hit rating for 1%: 25.4
Melee: 32.79
Spell: 26.23

This means that if you get 9% hit to ensure all of your melee attacks land you will still need 5.75% more hit or 151 more hit rating to reach the spell hit cap. If you are 2H capped and have Virulence, and a 3% hit debuff on the boss (Such as Misery or Imp. Faerie Fire) you will be spell hit capped as well.

Our melee attacks and spells have a critical damage bonus of 100%.

Hit rating does NOT increase the amount of critical strikes you will have on a target. It reduces the number of times that you will miss the boss.

It takes 45.91 critical strike rating to generate 1% melee or spell critical strike. The reason that hit is such a good stat until capped is because it is so much cheaper to hit 1% hit rating wise than 1% crit. Once you hit the two hander hit cap hit is no longer worth gemming or enchanting.

Haste rating does not reduce our GCD. Our GCD is only affected by Unholy Presence.

Our abilities scale with AP. Spell damage does nothing for us.

Runic Power Generation:

10 RP is generated per rune used

Any ability that consumes a single rune = 10 RP
2 rune ability = 20 RP
3 rune ability = 30 RP

Death Knight Terminology:
AMS - Anti-magic Shell
AMZ - Anti-magic Zone
AotD - Army of the Dead
B - Blood rune (1B = one blood rune, etc.)
BB - Blood Boil
BCB - Blood Caked Blade
BP - Blood Plague
BS - Blood Strike
BT - Blood Tap
CE - Corpse Explosion
CF - Crypt Fever
CoI - Chains of Ice
DnD - Death and Decay
DC - Death Coil
DK - Death Knight
DRM - Death Rune Mastery
DRW - Dancing Rune Weapon
EP - Ebon Plague, Ebon Plaguebringer
ERW - Empower Rune Weapon
F - Frost rune (1F = one frost rune, etc.)
FF - Frost Fever
FS - Frost Strike
FU - Rune combination that generally results in a strong rune attack.
GoG - Guile of Gorefiend
HB - Howling Blast
HC - Hungering Cold
HoW - Horn of Winter
HS - Heart Strike
IBF - Icebound Fortitude
IIT - Improved Icy Talons
IT - Icy Touch / Icy Talons (IT is usually icy touch when used in rotation layouts)
LB - Lichborne
MoB - Mark of Blood
MoM - Might of Mograine
OB - Obliterate
PS - Plague Strike
RoR - Rage of Rivendare
RP - Runic Power
RPM - Runic Power Mastery
RS - Rune Strike
RT - Rune Tap
SS/ScS - Scourge Strike (not to be confused with Sinister Strike, or Steady Shot)
U - Unholy rune (1U = one unholy rune, etc.)
UA - Unbreakable Armor
UB - Unholy Blight
VB - Vampiric Blood

[Soronus]

Awesome info. THanks!