DK Hardcore Solo Guide

[ominouswanderer]

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/stream.php?id=96375&stream=&h=5e6920e8994def097051bb77073b52b2


Figured I would start off with something exciting! In the above video you'll find a Death Knight- Mionelol soloing Karazhan. Mionelol has solo'd nearly all pre-WotLK content and has also been known to be able to solo several heroic dungeons in WotLK.

Essentially what I hope to capture in this guide is to encompass a basic guide on how you can solo pretty much anything depending on your gear level. I will start off with a table of contents to organize the details a bit better and then off we will go!

Table of Contents:
1. Spec
2. Gear
3. Glyphs
4. Rotation/Techniques

1.Spec
[
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is THE best spec for soloing any content. I will state although this is not the best tank build this is the best build that will provide suvivability with the ability to heal yourself enough to get through most content. I will attempt to address a couple issues people may have here beforehand to clear up why this is the overall best spec.

If you know the Death Knight class you know that Bloodworms are a great way to heal yourself and do a little bit of extra damage. You may also be wondering why this spec doesn't include Dancing Rune Weapon as it is only one extra point.

***Bloodworms***
Many bosses such as Hakkar in Zul'gurub have mechanics that are obviously tuned for multiple people in the raid. When you have Bloodworms active the game recognizes this and treats the fight as if it there were more than one person active. In the example of Hakkar when your Bloodworms become active you will get mind controlled and the fight will reset. If you know before hand that the fights that you will be doing have no such mechanisms then the spec may actually be better with bloodworms.

Blood worms were buffed in the 3.1 patch making them something that I decided to pick up in the new spec.


Any questions on this spec I will be sure to answer but after testing this vs multiple specs I guarantee there is no better spec for soloing content.

2. Gear

The first thing you need to focus on like any good tank is defense. If your defense is lower than 540 at level 80 then you need more defense. This amount of defense will allow you to become uncrittable against raid bosses. Keep in mind that even though you are fighting in lower level instances and the trash mobs do not need this amount of defense that all raid bosses regardless of your level are 3 levels higher than you.

The next thing to gear for actually depends on where you are at gear wise. To be successful you need to balance Stamina and Hit Rating. You will want to have enough HP for big rune taps and you need to have enough hit rating to ensure that you are not missing your death strikes. Missing a death strike can be horridly detrimental. Expertise can also be very important, if you are finding that the bosses are dodging or parrying your death strikes often then you may need more expertise.

3. Glyphs

Hopefully to any experienced Death Knight these will sound like obvious choices for glyphs for this spec but I will explain more in detail for these choices.

Major

Glyph of Rune Tap- Your Rune Tap heals yourself for an additional 10% of the effect, and also heals your party for 10% of their maximum health.

You will want this for obvious reasons, this will allow you to heal yourself for 10% more each time you use Rune Tap.

Glyph of Death Strike- Increases your Death Strike's damage by 2% for every 2 runic power you currently have (up to a maximum of 25%). The runic power is not consumed by this effect.

There is some controversy with this as the tooltip for the glyph is incorrect. What I have listed IS the correct effect that the glyph applies. This will allow you to do much more damage with your Death Strike, hence more healing with it.

Glyph of Vampiric Blood-- Increases the duration of your Vampiric Blood by 10 sec.

More uptime equals more healing, fairly self explanatory.


Minor

Glyph of Pestilence- Increases the radius of your Pestilence effect by 5 yards.

This is more or less a filler glyph. Helps to make sure that when you are soloing trash that everything has diseases up.

Glyph of Horn of Winter- Increases the duration of your Horn of Winter ability by 1 min.

More or less a filler glyph but is great because you will want Horn of Winter up at all times.

Glyph of Raise Dead- Your Raise Dead spell no longer requires a reagent.

This is great as it allows you to sacrifice your ghoul without the cost of a reagent.


4. Rotations/Techniques

You will want to be Frost Presence at all times- the extra armor is too much to lose. Due to the added armor you will gain more attack power through Bladed Armor so the dps loss is not extremely high and you will gain the healing effects through Blood Aura. Some fights where melee damage is not an issue or you need to do more damage blood presence will be needed. With the new improved Blood Presence you will have 10% more healing which will help to mitigate some of the damage.

I want to point out the importance of both Icebound Fortitude and Anti-Magic Shell. These skills are very important and can mitigate a ton of damage. When they need to be used varies per fight but any time you anticipate heavy damage use the appropriate skill.

As a Death Knight I am sure you are very similar with rotations to optimize the aspect of play. Soloing content is no exception and has a fairly easy rotation to follow.

Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Heart Strike, Heart Strike, Death Strike

This is the basic rotation that you will want to follow. The majority of your damage will come from the Heart Strikes and the majority of your heals will come from Death Strike. With th

Essentially the idea behind the build is you need to keep up Frost Fever and Blood Plague BEFORE you Death Strike. Death Strike was recently changed in the patch and the way it now works is it does 5% healing for each disease that is on the target. Having Frost Fever and Blood Plague up will allow for 10% heals with each death strike.


Along with Death Strike you will want to use Rune Tap pretty much every cooldown provided that you have less than 80% health as it will heal you for 20% of your maximum HP.

"OH Crap / Low Health Techniques"
This build has a LOT of room for you to easily be able to heal yourself... Below I will explain some of the basics.

Raise Dead/Death Pact- Ensure that you have 40RP or more Raise a Ghoul and immediately use Death Pact on it. The following macro can be very useful

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=300 Raise Dead, Death Pact

The macro will show the raise dead tooltip. When you use it, it will switch to the death pact icon and tooltip for 300 seconds (the cooldown of Raise Dead), and then switch back to raise dead skill and tooltip.

Mark of Blood- Place a Mark of Blood on an enemy. Whenever the marked enemy deals damage to a target, that target is healed for 4% of its maximum health. Lasts for 20 sec or up to 20 hits. You will want to place this on the fastest attacking target if you have multiple targets on you as more attacks equals more heals.

Vampiric Blood- Temporarily grants the Death Knight 15% of maximum health and increases the amount of health generated through spells and effects by 35% for 20 sec. After the effect expires, the health is lost. You will want to use this when you are extremely low on HP and need health quick and fast. Adding 35% through spells and effects is tremendous.







Please keep in mind this guide is a work in progress. I welcome any comments, concerns, or suggestions and hope to get some great positive feedback. Hopefully when editing this I managed to scrub all incorrect data and fill in everything... If anyone sees anything that I missed or that looks out of place let me know so I can modify it.

Thanks to MaxMackey for some small edits.

Updated 04/26/2009 patch 3.1.1

[Earthshaper]

This spec as well as the idea of soloing content is not about doing damage, it is about the ability to keep yourself alive essentially forever. Two reasons why Dancing Rune Weapon is not used is one you will want to have 100 Runic Power at all times due to the Death Rune Glyph as well as you will need all the points in the frost and unholy trees.

Glyph of the Ghoul- Your Ghoul receives an additional 40% of your Strength and 40% of your Stamina.

This is a glyph people may wonder about and wonder why you would use with a blood spec as it is mostly used for unholy. I want to reiterate that for most fights you will not want to have your ghoul out. The ghoul is mainly used as a sacrifice to heal yourself via Death Pact. This glyph will allow you to heal for more as your ghoul will have substantially more health. for blood, this is amazing, as the dk can use vamp blood, rune tap, wait 10sec, slap this, and instantly get 80% health in 10 sec with just blood runes.

The first is a spelling error, just make it death strike.
The second, that glyph has no effect on the total healing. Death Pact is player Hp based, and doesn't go off of ghoul HP.

I'd recommend deleting it and throwing Glyph of Vampiric Blood in there for 10seconds more up time.
+Rep

[ominouswanderer]

Thanks for the corrections, I wrote this guide mostly from memory so I appreciate the input! I spent some time on this guide so hopefully people find it helpful!

[Cenimap]

Gr8 guide! +rep

[Akrolodoxis]

Great Guide and well explained. I´ll +Rep you.

Ahh well

Due to the added armor you will gain more attack power through Bladed Armor so the dps loss is not extremely high and you will gain the healing effects through Blood Aura.

Bladed Armor is only based on the fix armor Value you wear.. the talents Thoughness won´t increase it and you wont gain more ap when you switch from Blood/unholy to Frost.

Hope you know what i mean.. my english isn´t very well so i hope u guess what i was trying to say.

Just my twocents

[magnajohn622]

Great Guide and well explained. I´ll +Rep you.

Ahh well


Bladed Armor is only based on the fix armor Value you wear.. the talents Thoughness won´t increase it and you wont gain more ap when you switch from Blood/unholy to Frost.

Hope you know what i mean.. my english isn´t very well so i hope u guess what i was trying to say.

Just my twocents

Actually the armor from frost presence does affect it, but the talent only checks your armor value every minute or so. Unless it's changed since release.

To the OP, this is an incredible guide! I don't have an 80 DK to try it with but it's still great!

[ominouswanderer]

Glad to see some people appreciate the guide, I spent a lot of time on it. Magnajohn is correct- Bladed Armor is most definitely effected by anything that increases your armor but it checks it on a pulse roughly every 30 seconds. If you are sitting in Frost Presence (which you should be when soloing instances) you will benefit from the attack power bonus the entire time.

[gfour]

http://www.elitep vpers.de/forum/wow...olo-guide.html

total copy+pasta or?

[SuperChickenofDoom]

Not a very good guide at all.

You basically made an epic fail wannabe tank spec, you missed subversion which is incredibly important; you didn't get 2 hand spec. You actually got Spell Deflection and Blood Aura.

I give you a 2/5

[cpowroks]

Not a very good guide at all.

You basically made an epic fail wannabe tank spec, you missed subversion which is incredibly important; you didn't get 2 hand spec. You actually got Spell Deflection and Blood Aura.

I give you a 2/5

No, ! would have to say you have never played a Death knight before.

First off this is not a "Tank" spec it is a "Solo old content" Spec so thus Spell Deflection and Blood Aura would be good talents to grab.

Second, I've soloed Kara with a spec similar to this.

Third... AMG WTB GARR BINDING TO DROP #$^@$$$

[KTTnVST]

[quote=ominouswanderer;

Please keep in mind this guide is a work in progress. I welcome any comments, concerns, or suggestions and hope to get some great positive feedback. I will try to keep this guide updated especially considering that with patch 3.1 a few things will change as Death Strike is getting some considerable buffs.

Thanks to MaxMackey for some small edits.[/quote]



rofl im sure its a work in progress. Here lets go to
DK Hardcore Solo Guide | FREE Worlf of Warcraft Guides and see if they're copying u or did u copy them.
Copy and Paste and didnt even give credit to them

[ominouswanderer]

Holy shit I can't believe that they stole my guide...

Haha just noticed... at the bottom they atleast gave me credit for it... please do some research before trying to tell me I copy and paste... In the process of updating this for 3.1 should be just a few and it will be ready.

[ominouswanderer]

Updated for 3.1...

To address some things...

NO this was NOT copy and pasted. I posted this on the mmowned boards only and give NO PERMISSION to post elsewhere. If you notice on the copied paste they did give me credit for it which I appreciate but still wish that it would stay on these boards.

SuperChickenofDoom I'm sorry that you didn't find my guide helpful but you need to keep in mind this is not a tank spec and typically speaking this is not for end game content. This is simply a guide to solo nearly any content that is deemed soloable.

With the updated 3.1 changes to test things out I just soloed The Nexus and Utgarde Keep fully and was clearing some trash in heroic Nexus.

Hopefully people find this helpful and if you do please give me some feedback- I worked hard on this and a simple thanks would be well appreciated!

[personinquestion]

how nifty!

[nam3tak3n]

Glyph of Death Strike- Increases your Death Strike's damage by 2% for every 2 runic power you currently have (up to a maximum of 25%). The runic power is not consumed by this effect.

There is some controversy with this as the tooltip for the glyph is incorrect. What I have listed IS the correct effect that the glyph applies. This will allow you to do much more damage with your Death Strike, hence more healing with it.

The healing from Death Strike is no longer modified by damage. It is a static amount per number of diseases on the target. Not to say that the glyph is worthless, it's still a good damage boost.