DK Starting Guide

[Rook ZJ]

Greetings all! I did a search looking for a Death Knight starter guide and didn't find anything so I figured I'd make an effort to contribute. (Long time reader, first time making my own post)

Just as a disclaimer I'm by no means a Death Knight Guru, but I did do my homework, and I found this information to be quite useful.

Its a guide from a Horde perspective, with PvP being the endgame. I never have done more PvE than I needed to, and prefer to gear myself towards PvP anyways.

Its my first time trying, so be gentle, hehe... also lemme know if there's something I could do to clean things up a bit to make it more managable. For the record this is essentially an e-mail I sent to a friend who had come back from a year+ break so I added a lot of stuff most of you who read these forums may know... anyways:



For the love of god I hope you selected undead. Its the best race for a PvP DK, although there are votes for either Orc or Tauren. Orc is hands down the best PvE DK class for the horde side (attack power racial and +axes and pets), and Tauren is good for both (health bonus and war stomp).

Trolls and BE DKs are a joke and are made to make people laugh at them. If you NEED to pick a DK based on what you think it will look like then so be it, whatever you need.

I leveled unholy, here's the build I'd use:

At 60: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
At 70: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
At 80: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Your glyphs are: Minor - Pestilence, Horn of Winter, Deaths Embrace
Major - Death Strike (could be wrong, this has changed a lot since I levelled, but its still good), Ghoul, Scourge Strike.

The basic premise is you have a lot of really good Area of Effect damage, so you're capable of pulling 4-10 mobs from levels 60-73 or so. After 73 it gets harder to pull lots of mobs but you can still successfully pull 3-5 mobs at a time. In addition, with this build, I was capable of doing ALL of the TBC 2 and 3 man group quests with the exception of 1 quest that you do in a cave in the SW portion of Hellfire, and the Giant spider quest in terrokar... everything else you can solo if you play it properly, and you can even do some 5 man group quests along the way...

You play in Blood Presence for the heals and extra damage. You should not PvE in unholy presence ever really. Frost is your tanking presence.

General rule of thumb - all of your multi rune abilities (ones which use a unholy rune and a frost rune) are more effective the more diseases you have on your target.

Your pet - Learn to use its Gnaw ability. Its on a 30s cooldown stun and it really helps you close the gap in PvP. I never used it until I got to 80 and I felt stupid for it. Now that I got it down I don't know how I ever got along without it.

Make sure that mobs you are fighting stay over the Desecration area... that will make sure they're taking the extra damage from the buff. You'll be spending 5 points on that talent so make use of it.

Your basic attack structure involves pulling a bunch of mobs to you, casting Plague Strike ---> Icy Touch ---> Pestilence ---> Unholy Blight when you have the RP for it, then you are using your blood runes for either Blood Boils or Blood Strikes to convert your Blood Runes to Death Runes (wildcard runes given from the Reaping Talent, they can be used as any type of rune). Your multi rune ability while pulling is Death Strike to heal you while you're fighting mobs... you make sure to refresh Diseases before they run out with a pestilence, and keep unholy blight up... rinse and repeat. You should know that I completely grinded the levels of 60, 61, and 62 in the Castle in the southern portion of HFP with all of the undead knights. If you find the proper loop, you can infinitely pull packs of 6-12 mobs and AoE them down, and come out of it 100% health... Took me about 2-3 hours a level for 60 61 and 62.

For single target, you cast Icy Touch --> Plague Strike --> Blood Strike --> Blood Strike --> Scourge Strike (your big damage talented ability)... when runes refresh you just hit scourge strike a few times, or death strike based upon your health... its rare that mobs make it past a 2nd scourge strike unless they're elite.

Whenever you have all runes on cooldown, you're safe to spit out a few Death Coils as a runic power dump until it comes back up again (or refresh unholy blight)

Playing around with your rotations is something that you will only get with practice, but they pretty much distinguish how good a DK you are. Its about rune management and runic power management. The system is odd until you really start to get the hang of it, then it becomes 2nd nature... you'll have most of it down by the time you hit 70, at which point the class changes somewhat:

Death Knights are a cooldown class. They have a myriad of abilities on 1 minute cooldowns that keep them alive: bone shield (20% damage reduction), Icebound fortitude (gotten at 68 or 70) which makes you immune to stun and increases your defense, Gargoyle (3m cooldown RP dump that does a load of damage on single targets), Strangulate (2m silence), Anti-magic shell (75% spell reduction and prevents new spell effects from being put on you for its duration). Amongst others that pop up when you have different specs. My advise to you is to mess around with these abilities as you get them, but I really didn't master them or start using them at the best times until I was 80... it was the hardest part for me to pick up, but they're all on short cooldowns (typically 1 minute or less) and learning them can be critical to your success... take your time with them and learn DPS rotations and such first.


After you're done with your starter quests, you should probably go to HFP and do quests till you hit 60, then you can either keep questing through or do what I did and just AoE grind for a day or two. I was averaging a level for about 2-3 hours of playtime while AoE grinding, plus I was getting a load of greens and other gold from the grind. Take your pick.

I did all the quests in HFP, Zangarmarsh, Terrokar, and Nagrand. By the time I finished nagrand I was half way through 70 and went to Northrend. Northrend gives a load of exp compared to TBC, that is TBC quests give aroudn 10k, while northrend ones give around 20k... so make the transition whenever you feel right, lots do it at 68, I preferred to stick it out in outland to 70, either works...


The class is pretty complex at first, but becomes quite easy once you get the hang of it. Before I throw out links to you, I'll cover gearing up and such:

Your primary stat is Strength. 1 strength gives 2 atp just like warriors, and it also gives you parry and such. Agility, however, is not the same as warriors. Agility gives a warrior a lot more stats, a DK ONLY gets +Crit and Armor from Agility, making it much less desirable overall as a statistic. Generally, when faced between picking up something with agility or crit rating, crit rating usually gives better return, but its subject to testing from you.

Haste & Armor Penetration are trash stats for a DK. Haste only really helps out your autoattacks, and Armor Penetration is worthless unless you level blood, and even then its only a marginal change...

MOST of your primary attacks are spell based attacks, not physical... As unholy, Blood Strike, Plague strike, Death Strike are your only physical attacks besides autoattack. Scourge Strike and Icy Touch are magical based attacks, thus Armor Pen doesn't do anything for them. Please, Please, Please note, that even though they're magic based attacks, they are NOT Modded by +Spell Power... they are all increased by your attack power. If you're a DK and you're wearing +Spell Power gear, you need to kill yourself in the face. +attack power is your boy, not spell power...

In short, gear in this order: Strength, Crit, Stamina, +attack power, then all the rest.

Professions: Personal choice... the ones you get the best returns on at 80 for a PvP perspective are: Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, Enchanting in that order. Enchanting offers ring enchants, Blacksmithing offers an extra socket on gloves and bracers, and Jewelcrafting offers JC only gems. JC/BS is what the top Arena DK's do...

Pick whatever Professions you want, but JC/BS/Ench are the best from a PvP standpoint.

Useful things to know when you're preparing for 80:
You can actively replace all of your equipment and start of with a really solid set as soon as you hit level 80.

At level 78, this set becomes available to you, the Savage Saronite Set:
savage saronite - Wowhead Search

Its a craftable set and you can actually wear it at level 78. Its 8 piece and gives you applicable DPS stats along with 350 or so resilience. it will hold you over until you replace them all with PvP Pieces or whatever you use.

For a weapon, the titansteel destroyer is the choice:
Titansteel Destroyer - Item - World of Warcraft

Its a bit more expensive to craft, but if you actively farm the mats for it or at least save some gold for it you should be fine. The most expensive part is the Titansteel bars, which are on a 1 day cooldown and run around 25 or 30g a cooldown if you farm the mats. Eternals come really easily after you hit 80 and start doing Wintersgrasp since the quests there make you kill elementals.

Titaium Impact Band is a good ring to craft:
Titanium Impact Band - Item - World of Warcraft
I still use it myself.

I wouldn't worry too much about the Titansteel Destroyer or the ring until you hit 80, but if you plan it right you can give yourself that Saronite set at 78 and help out your last two levels tremendously.

FYI, I did no instancing for leveling, nor did I do any instancing for my gear... you can get by without it, but if you want to, you can research that yourself.

Last but not least Useful Links:


Wowhead: LF1M -- You! - This is the new thottbot, its way better, faster and more organized... never go to thottbot again.

Elitist Jerks
Death Knights - Elitist Jerks (the death knight forum)

Eliteist Jerks is THE premier theorycrafting and number crunching PvE website for World of Warcraft. They have a plethora of information there. People cruch numbers and show the results. I don't visit the site that often cuz I don't care about PvE that much, but I highly recommend you checking out the first two pages of the DK thread since there's a lot of info in there, and the last few pages too...

All in all Eliteist Jerks is a great resource, but their structure of their forums blows IMO - instead of making a "DK Forum" and having lots of specific threads, they just make a "DK Thread" which tends to have like 100 pages of information not organized. Reading all that shit would makes my head spin, but the first few pages have a great breakdown of the class, its abilities, and ways to maximize your dps.

You can always check Arena Junkies, but its hardly the site it used to be - lots of people post trash there now, and the info is somewhat skewed... I don't check it anywhere near as often as I used to.

Make sure you download and install the Quest Helper addon. It makes leveling trivial and easy, which is exactly what we're looking for.


Hope it helped! Cheers!

[lama362]

Fail imo

- learn to research

-kthnxbei

[Ginchy]

alright guide, nothing you cant learn from just reading the DK forums though