Death Knight: PowerLeveling And You

[Furrow]

So you want to Power your friends' character through an instance?

I'm sure most of you have heard of "Tapping." For those who haven't, it's simply where someone who isn't in your group attacks a mob first, and then you help kill it. The more damage the person who "tapped" the mob does, the more experience they get. They also receive all loot while you receive nothing.

So, how can we take advantage of this? With a death knight of course!

1: Talents
2: Gear
3: Method/Spells
4: Tips




1: To begin, let's look at talent points.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/deathknight/talents.html?tal=13550010032003100000000000030500351300300000000000000000352003200001000000000000 00000
^This is a base template I have designed.^
I started doing this at level 69 in Scarlet Monastery, Cathedral. I tested things out, and its completely doable with whatever spec you want to use, really. I just found this spec a LOT easier to manage damage, and thus faster.

If your sole purpose is to boost someone through instances for a while, then I suggest you spec something of this nature. Going down the trees in whichever order you see fit, but keep in mind we are building for surviving, preferably without having to attack.

The most notable talents we will be getting from trees are as follows: Blood/ Blade Barrier, Rune Tap, Improved Rune Tap, Veteran of the Third War, Mark of Blood. For Frost/ Toughness, Improved Icy Touch, Lichborne, Frigid Dreadplate. For Unholy/ Anticipation, Morbidity, Epidemic, Shadow of Death

I personally have 0 experience with the blood tree, so that's all theory for me. I figure rune tap will be nice for oh crap moments, Veteran of the Third War for increased over all health and Mark of Blood just to keep your health up while you're pulling - decreasing downtime.

Lichborne is GREAT for when you overpull, Morbidity - as Death and Decay is going to be your main attack, and Shadow of Death for the stam and just in case you kick the bucket, you still have a chance of saving your PL pal.


2: Basically for gear, you want to have anything for defense you got, and DUAL WIELD with two Rune of Swordbreaking. You get 4% extra parry, and if things really get hairy your 100% reduced disarm duration will help things along. Stamina is your friend when you're tanking, obviously. Not really much else to say in this section.

3: Okay so now for the method! Basically, you run around and aggro everything WITHOUT DAMAGING IT. This is CRUCIAL. Now you got so many mobs rounded up and you know you can take them beating on you - at least, for a little bit. The Glyph for Icebound Fortitude is nice here.
So you're standing there. Now what? Well hopefully you made this macro!

/uninvite Furrow
/invite Furrow

Obviously you'll replace my name with the name of your powerlevel friend.

Now for this to really work well, your PL friend needs to have an area of effect damaging spell. Works especially well with paladins/mages/warlocks.

So you hit your macro, and first thing you do is get your death and decay skill ready to fire! DO NOT cast it yet, just the little green circle is what we want. Now your PL friend does his aoe attack. The second you see his graphic for his attack go off, cast death and decay on the mob.

MAKE SURE HE REJOINS THE GROUP BEFORE GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE INSTANCE!!
Even if all the mobs are not dead yet, you can always make up lost experience. You can't make up lost time.

From here on out is smooth sailing. Your PL friend needs to do as much aoe damage as he can possibly do. At the same time, you can either let him just sit there and kill the mobs, or you can do your own aoe attacks.
While he will get more experience per mob if the first way is done, you can clear mobs much much faster if you do the second way, so I suggest it.

4: Icy Touch + Pestilence after you establish the pull can really save your health.
For boosting a mage, you can start out with simply Frost Nova. Keeps the mobs from completely owning the mage cause they are rooted. Also, Frostbite + Improved Blizzard makes things even easier.
For a paladin, Consecration + a bubble, really hard to lose the paladin with that combination.


Hope you all find my guide useful, I know it was a little bit lengthy.

Some may call it common sense. I call it Organized Common Sense.

[skelliton]

cool, sounds like it should work

[Imakepigsfly]

so is this PL a char using a DK or PL a DK using a char?

[wolfeater2010]

sounds really good gotta give it a try!

[tripleblade3]

Blizzard introduced a new Mob-tagging system in WotLK where you get the amount of experience equal to the amount of effort that you put in to kill the mob, therefore this probably won't work as good as some of you think it will.

Just my 2cents

[Furrow]

so is this PL a char using a DK or PL a DK using a char?

This is PLing any character using a high level death knight.

[Furrow]

the amount of experience equal to the amount of effort that you put in to kill the mob

Like I said in the strategy I use, the more damage the lower level does, the more experience they get.

Took a level 38 mage through SM cathedral using this method and was able to get him ~1 bubble a pull, about 8 or so pulls to the instance before reset. At the very least he got the same amount of experience that he would have got with me in the group, and with the amount of mobs we were killing in quick succession, it's still quite decent experience.

[AngshumanSSJV]

Will try after my final board exams. Thanks though

[gradu]

i thought it was called tagging =(

[Thidan]

And what if the one you're plvling get's a screen full of "Miss/Resist"?

[rinye]

And what if the one you're plvling get's a screen full of "Miss/Resist"?

Then he should level up :P
Or go into a lower lvl instance
:wave:

[Furrow]

And what if the one you're plvling get's a screen full of "Miss/Resist"?

Like the other user said, lower instance.

This method works plenty well enough, though. It's the same general idea of how the first person went from level 70-80 (in like 15 hours)