NOTE TO ALL!!!
As it stands now, I am officially "retiring" myself from WoW. I just simply am not having any fun with the game. I will continue to keep an eye on some changes and offer my best advice when it comes to certain things but at this time, 3.2.2. will be the patch that has the most recent updates with my knowledge, personally, of the skills and rotations in hand. I apologize to all who followed the guide for so long but I simply do not have the will to play WoW anymore. Thank you for all the good notes you have left me and for those who still are having fun, keep at it! You're better than I am right now 
PATCHES AND CHANGES:
Version 3.2.2
Death Knight DPS rotations and Item Evaluations:
So, you want to be a Death Knight who’s wielding a massive two hander and kicking ass at the same time on the charts? Maybe you rather be an unstoppable, dual wielding damage dealing monster. Well I’ll be giving pointers for Blood, Frost and Unholy DPS as well as dual wielding information..
However, let’s first analyze stat priority for DKs.
DKs are very similar to Ret Paladins and Warriors as to gear selection. Here’s the general break down of what stats you’re going for, in priority from first to last.
1- Hit Rating (Yellow Cap)
Aaaah hit rating, the bastard child that no one likes (Sorry for the analogy, a lot of people really dislike having to make their hit rating as high as it needs to be so it works). Hit rating directly affects every single swing you do. To the exception of Icy Touch, Death Coil, Unholy Blight and Howling Blast, every other skill used is directly affected by melee hit. Now, as of 3.0.1, all hit has been rolled into one, and confusion has come from it. Here is the breakdown for Yellow and White hit caps, as well as magic caps:
You need 8%, or 263 hit rating to cap both yellow and white damage with a two handed weapon on a boss.
This is the optimum number any dps wants to achieve as this guarantees you won’t miss (remember there’s always a 0.1% chance of missing. You’ll never remove this number so don’t even try)
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You need 23% or 754 hit rating or to cap your white damage with dual wielding. Yes, you need that much. (5% natural miss chance, 18% penalty when dual wielding) But wait, is that all you need? Nope. That’s against a level 80 mob.
You need a further 4% (27%) to be able to not miss on bosses, or a grand total of 886 hit rating. Yikes. O.O I pity the rogues.
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Spell wise, you need 17%, or 446 hit rating to not miss with your spells. Virulence as well as raid buffs should hopefully cover you for the hit rating when it comes to spells as a DK. Unholy will find it easier to cap their spells, blood a bit harder due to not being able to access Unholy talents in that fashion (Although, Blood relies far less on Disease damage than Frost and much less than unholy, therefore capping this is not one of your highest priorities.)
2 – Strength
The prime stat for DPS, t
his is a 2:1 conversion for DKs. (Which means for every STR you have, you get 2 ap. Nice!) Also, this benefits from Blessing of Kings, which further ups your AP once you get the buff. The big kicker here is your Runeblade enchant: Runeblade of the Fallen Crusader.
When this procs, this acts like a Crusader on crack: 30% extra strength and it heals you. This alone makes strength such a powerful stat for DKs that it should first be regarded over any other stat except hit.
2.5 – Expertise
No matter how much strength you will have, if a mob dodges you while you’re swinging at it, that registers as a flat 0 dps for that swing. Not good. Expertise covers this part. Now, expertise is a little bit trickier. There are two things you need to know about Expertise:
-Expertise rating: this is what most items will give you when raising expertise. You need 8.1 expertise rating to give you 1 point of expertise which lowers the mob’s dodge rate by 0.25% -Expertise number: This is the number you have after your expertise rating calculated. You know those shiny expertise number you get from talents and racial abilities? This is where those go. And these give a flat 8.1 points right away to you. So as human, you get 24.3 expertise rating alone, and as a dwarf or orc, you get 40.5 expertise rating.
Now, to cap this, you need to get the boss’s dodge rating lowered, which is calculated to be at 6.1% (If you're a dwarf using a mace or an orc using an axe), or 6.25% (If you're a human using swords or maces), or 6.5% (All other races)
So, you need 4 expertise to get 1%, or 32.4 expertise rating. x6 brings that number to 196, 203 or 211 respectively expertise rating to be capped. In short, the number you're looking for, on the spreadsheet, should be 26, talents included.
No matter what, expertise is a huge number that you really should look into capping. It’s not as hard to cap as hit rating and should be looked at as much as strength should be until capped.
An interesting point to note: Depending on the spec in which you choose to raid, Expertise loses it's value. Unholy builds focus more on magic strikes and damage over time mechanics which cannot be dodged or parried. With this in mind, the only thing that could miss would be Plague Strike and Blood Strike, which are very low in the damage section. Frost has the same thing, looking mostly towards attacks that cannot be dodged or parried (Frost Strike). Obliterate is a great damage dealing part which does get affected by Expertise so the value goes up. Blood however, really needs Expertise. A significant chunk of your damage are pure physical strikes. Dodging or parrying even one attack really drops your DPS.
4 – Crit Rating
To beef up your damage, it’s always great to have a good crit rating to an item. More crits mean higher damage.
Crit rating requires a whopping 45.91 points for 1% extra crit so don’t expect yourself to be insanely high in crit rating unless some items have that. In this retrospect, crit rating isn’t as important as the above stats because a) You really need a lot for it to make up for damage you could get out of the three other stats.
5– Armor Penetration
ArP is a debated stat. On one hand, anything that allows you to ignore armor is always a great item to have. On another hand..due to the changes which were done, ArP looks, at first, to be quite lackluster. In terms of DK DPS, ArP ain’t bad, but it’s not your greatest stat. If the item has ArP on it, it’s more of a bonus for you than anything else. It’s not the greatest crime if it doesn’t, however.
Since 3.1.1's change to ArP, Death Knights now get around 25% extra benefit from it. This does boost it's importance and it's utility towards a Blood Spec'ed Death Knight. Frost also can benefit from this. However, it ends there. Unholy is mostly a magic damage dealing strike dealing the most of it's damage, including the damage of it's DoTs. Frost also has Magic damage in the form of Howling Blast and Icy Touch. Blood relies on it's physical strike however it still has both Death Coil and Icy Touch to worry about in it's rotation. With that in mind, ArP doesn't become stronger than Strength in most situations, including Blood. So long as you keep an attack which will do Magic Damage in your rotation, ArP loses it's utility and Strength will simply be better as it increases damage from ALL attacks and not any physical strikes.
One can argue that the damage that Blood still does is 75% physical as the DoTs don't make much damage nor does Death Coil, but consider this: Sudden Doom can proc off of your Heart Strikes. The Vengeful Heart Sigil also increases Death Coil damage. Finally, your Tier 8 bonus set will boost Death Coil damage. All and all, it's still a decent chunk of your dps. 25% is being generous but you can see with the mechanics the Blood tree has, ArP loses it's power with some of your attacks.
In short: Death Knights stacking Strength > Death Knights stacking ArP, for most if not all specs. (Of course, this is open to debate. If someone wants to adequately test a full Strength versus a full ArP set, by all means do.)
This is NO WAY stating that ArP should never be looked at. If it's got Strength and ArP, by all means go. Heck, it sure as hell beats Haste!
Stat conversions are as follows:
For 1% armor ignore, you need 12.31 ArP against mobs.
About 7 ArP on an item will equal to 1 ArP Rating. This means if you had 1000 ArP from selected items, you would have 142.8 ArP rating, or 9.2% armor reduction on creatures.
6 – Raw AP
Attack power is always nice but the problem with attack power is that it only scales with abilities. It also isn’t affected by BoK so you’re really looking at a one way ticket here. In Blood, Abom’s might really is a nice option that opens up some AP damage due to it increasing your ap by 10% but really, Strength just beats it for the simple case of your runeblade proc. However, there’s some times that the leather piece that no one wants has more ap than your strength + Bladed Armor ability will give you. Whatever gives you more AP, go nuts on it. But make sure it’s at least a decent upgrade. Strength’s still going to be the better stat over this.
7 – Agility
Agility is tricky. On one hand, it increases your armor AND your crit rating, but the numbers to do so is a little far fetched.
You need anywhere between 52 and 62.5 points of agility for 1% of crit, which makes it less favorable of a stat over raw crit rating. Also, every point of agility increases your armor by 2. So, an item that has 45 agility will increase your armor by 90. That’s half of what you really need to even get 5 points from bladed armor. This makes raw AP better. All and all, Agility is a really mediocre stat.
8 – Haste
With 3.1, Haste was given I believe a 25% increase, just like ArP. However, this does not improve anything but your white attacks. We are on a rune system that has a regeneration that is set to 10 seconds. Each rune takes 10 seconds to reactivate after use, and haste does absolutely nothing. What Haste does do, is that it allows you to lower your global cooldown with the more you have. Also, in most situations, haste will always increase your white damage by a significant portion. But being Death Knights, we are bound, in our best situation, by the rune cooldown and haste has nothing to do with this. This leaves Haste once more the least likely stat to increase, even under Agility.
A note for you all however: Potions of Speed make for a nice pot to use. There is no Strength pot to be had in the game at all therefore these Speed Pots will make your attacks go much faster. It's something to use during some phases like Heroism to add more damage output. May as well use what you can.
And that’s pretty much it for stats.
BLOOD DEATH KNIGHT:
Let’s get one thing straight with Blood: It is a very gear demanding spec. This is not a spec you want to try with the minimum amount of gear. Furthermore, I wouldn’t suggest anyone attempt to keep up with the two other trees damage wise until you’re at least fully cleared Naxx and have gotten the two and four tier pieces as well as purchased the Sigil of Awareness. (Or if you got lucky on Heigan like I did, it dropped!)
I rather not be too optimistic about numbers and this guide is more simple about requirements for builds. In the end, most builds will work fine and dandy, just quite suboptimal compared to other builds depending on when you decide to use the spec. Blood is definitely the one spec in our trees that requires a fair amount of minimum gear level to pull off the damage from this spec. My suggestion: Don’t bother unless you’re with 4 piece Tier 7 (MINIMUM) and with the Sigil of Awareness. Frost and Unholy will whip the snot out of this build with the lower amount of gearset you have. Be warned.
SPEC:
Traditionally, you would want to go 51/13/7 pre 3.1. However Blizzard has decided that Death Strike is going to be the main FU choice for Blood Death Knights, which is great as your FU is a self sustaining attack that could keep you out of a bind depending on some fights (AoE from Deconstructor is a great example for this!). With that in mind, there is little to no reason to go down Frost anymore to get Annihilation. You may as well stick with Death Strike as the synergies in the Blood Tree with Death Strike will only make this skill go higher in damage. (Yes, Obliterate could potentially do more damage however there are little to no Synergies with Obliterate in the talent tree anymore for Obliterate so you’re not doing yourself any good. Love Obliterate so much? Go Frost. That’s where it’s at.)
With this in mind, this allows us to go further into the Unholy tree to get some spiffy talents! The build turns into a 51/0/20 build (More will be discussed about my choice of Dancing Rune Weapon over Unholy Blight.
http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=6&tal=2305020530003313201223101351000 00000000000000000000000000230110305003200000000000 0000000
With that, you’re pretty much getting the essentials in Blood. Now some may question my decision on Blood Aura and Mark of Blood. Here are the reasons.
a)Blood Aura: No matter what, there will be some fights where you’re going to get hit by some AoE and it’s going to hurt. And your healers will have to heal you. So why not lower the need of healing you twice when healing you once will give you that potential 10% extra! Furthermore…guess what other attacks you have in your skills. That’s right! Death Strike is affected by this heal, therefore you’re getting 10% more efficiency from it to boot. This might be one of the bigger reasons why we’re getting such overpowered heals. (Record of around 32k heal from a 24k Death Strike). Now this is not a set in stone and I may not be reading the skill right however any healing done to you is increased by 10%. Death Strike hits and heals you. Put 2 and 2 together and that will show you my argument.
b)Mark of Blood: Ever have one of those times where you know the MT’s gonna take a lot of damage? And you wanna help out? There’s why you have Mark of Blood. Use one of your Death or Blood runes to pop that on the Boss to help your MT and your Healers. Remember, part of being good at your class is knowing when you can help and benefit your raid. If the MT dies, you’re gonna die next most likely and you may as well keep your MT quite happy.
Of course, there are other things you could look at: Could always put 3 points in Bloodworms and have their DPS increase your total dps (Which is true, it would probably raise your DPS because the worms do damage.) however I find that if you have to use Bloodworms, they tend to die a lot. And with Ulduar going on right now, I’ve seen a lot of AoE situations where those lil things just would not survive at all. Would be nice if you would have to target the worms like Totems to destroy them however a lot of people would probably QQ about that one so let’s just leave it at a ‘wish list’
ROTATION:
Alright, let’s get into the jist of it: Rotations are always key to good dps, however, KNOW WHEN TO PRIORITIZE YOUR SKILLS! If you know something’s gonna be big and you have Empowered Rune Weapon ready to be used, you might want to consider using two Death Strikes instead of 4 Heart Strikes to keep your health up. Or maybe you want to consider using Blood Boil to hit those extra targets to drop them down. (The Deconstructor adds come into mind when they come too close to him). Sunni, a Death Knight back in the day of testing, said to prioritize first over rotate, and in this case you have to keep that in mind. Be a smart raider: know when it will benefit you to do something else than a rotation. Rotations are meant to be the best possible way to pump out DPS on an ideal setting.
Blood’s Rotation doesn’t change much from Pre 3.1 unless you did the silly Diseaseless build that shouldn’t of ever been put into the game because it was using bad mechanics of a class. Face it: We have diseases that are empowering our attacks. In that manner, we should NEVER need to forfeit those diseases for more damage.
And with that in mind, here is the rotation:
IT, PS, HSx2, DS, DC dump.
Followed by:
DS, HSx4 DC dump.
The reason why we’re putting HS before DS is that we’ll have the Glyph of DS on as one of our three Major Glyphs and to get the most Umph out of our DS, we’ll want to have as much RP as possible in our Runic Power tank.
WHEN TO USE HYSTERIA/DRW:
What’s nice is that they lowered the CD of Dancing Rune Weapon to 1.5 minutes, which coincides nicely with Hysteria. At first, always wait till you have 100 RP. This may not happen on your first rotation, but it’s bound to happen on the second, and if it doesn’t, you have Horn of Winter to help you out there as well. At that point, Hit Hysteria, ensure that all your buffs are up, and hit DRW. This will make all your attacks hit harder while DRW is up which will, in turn, make it hit for the most damage possible that it can, cut down by 50% of your own damage.
At this point, DRW will come back off it’s CD before Hysteria. Don’t forget to use it again! It’s a way to keep sustained DPS up because we don’t have a spiffy ghoul to rely on nor do we have constant damage going like Frost does. Once 3 minutes are up, your Hysteria may come off the CD earlier than DRW but not by much. Wait till both are back, then rinse and repeat.
Note: It’s always best to wait till you have a Heroism up but don’t rely on it. It’s on a 1.5 minute cooldown for a reason: use it when it can be used.
THE DEBATE BETWEEN UNHOLY BLIGHT AND DANCING RUNE WEAPON:
There’s been some talk about dropping the 51 point talent for the 21 point talent in Unholy: Unholy Blight. Unholy Blight is a simple DoT that is stackable which shows up every time you Death Coil. This should lead to a better single target damage dealing ability right? Not...quite.
1) Unholy Blight is a magical damage attack. Keep that in mind. We don’t go far enough in the Unholy tree to truly give Unholy Blight it’s damage possibility. The talents I can think up right now is Ebon Plaguebringer and Impurity, both which increase magical damage which affects UB. That alone weakens UB’s standpoint as a viable attack.
2) Everything that we have in our Blood talent tree focuses solely on physical damage dealing attacks. Unholy Blight's magic damage just doesn't have the right feel to this type of play.
Those two points alone make me hesitant about Unholy Blight being superior to Dancing Rune Weapon, even with the nerfs that it has suffered. I like my Dancing Rune Weapon even though he can be dumb and go in front of the boss and Parry some of his attacks. My statement stands: Go with DRW.
GLYPHS:
The Following Glyphs are used in this build:
Glyph of Death Strike: Although we don’t use Death Strike for anything else but rotate our FU glyphs to Death Runes, we may as well give the attack a good chunk more damage than it does now. Also, more damage: bigger heals which is always nice.
Glyph of Dark Death: This glyph not only empowers your dump attack, but it also empowers that one attack that may proc due to having so many Heart Strikes in your rotation! With the way that things are going as well with the Tier sets empowering Death Coil, this is a sure way to get the most out of your attacks
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon: You might as well get more damage out of it so an extra 5 seconds out is always a great way to go.
The Glyph of Plague Strike also deserves a nice nod considering the changes done to the skill. I was hitting a solid 4k crit with Plague Strike which is always nice to see. If DRW isn’t something you’re too concerned about, this is another good rune to have in it’s place.
WHAT DOES A BLOOD DEATH KNIGHT BRING?
Well for starters, he brings Abom’s Might, which is 10% extra attack power to the raid. This lets Hunters not worry about going Beastmaster which from what I understand, has been lacking in the DPS section. (Could be wrong, I don’t pay attention to Hunters) Furthermore, you are bringing a DPS that can watch his own health rather effectively and provide some interesting buffs: Mark of Blood being the big one to help out with your Main Tanks. This gives this Death Knight an added advantage to not only be a class that can DPS with the best of them, but moreso to push to the limit and not worry about dying so much due to the amazing tools the class has to keep themselves alive. Remember, a dead DPS is 0 DPS, and in that manner, the Blood Death Knight brings his own constant health regeneration.
END NOTES:
Blood changes from pre 3.1 to now have been moreso for the good. At this point, stat priorities may change a bit, giving ArP a more solid nod than usual. This will probably be better than Haste and about as high as Crit. The rest stay the relative same.
Death Strike being the FU of choice is a great way to work the Blood build. It has a much better feel of belonging there and it just simply makes the tree fit nicely. The change from Obliterate to Death Strike was a good one, especially with the addition of the attacks in our Tier 7 as well as the Sigil of Awareness.
If there is one critique of Blood, it’s that it’s actually somewhat difficult to get RP for this build. This is a very short RP build that doesn’t pump out the same RP numbers as most would think. It is essential in that manner to use your RP wisely as it becomes more of a decision making situation than any other: Should I use my RP to hit a death coil when DRW is nearly off it’s CD? Is Death Strike the next attack and if it is, should I use a Death Coil, possibly lowering Death Strike’s damage? These are all things a Blood Death Knight now has to watch and evaluate when DPSing. And it does make a difference. Play smart and a Blood Death Knight in the right hands will make a welcome addition to the party.
FROST DEATH KNIGHT: FROST DEATH KNIGHT:
Frost 3.2 has surely changed the mechanics of the Frost world right? ...well not really. To you Frost two handed enthusiastic, the mechanics of Frost are going to be the same to be honest. However, you will be focusing moreso on getting rid of your two hander for the much preferred dual wielding method. The reason behind is would be lain upon solely the Threat of Thassarian talent. This talent allows your offhand to do half of the damage your mainhand attack does. With the talent in mind, this pretty much gives your attacks the same amount of oomph as a two hander, however you can empower it far more with dual wielding capabilities and talents such as Necrosis and Blood Caked Blade, which no longer is normalized. The weapon suggestion for this build is slow/slow, unlike the Unholy counterpart of dual wielding, and focuses mostly on Obliterates being your strongest damage dealing ability in your rotation. Many people will be opting to go back to their Sigil of Awareness found in Naxxramas 25 or bought with 25 badges from the Valor vendor. However other than this change, your rotation system stays the same.
SPEC:
When first starting to raid, one would think they’d want to go down through the blood tree to get stat altering builds, right? Well, unfortunately, a lot of the Blood skills are not as needed as most would think. In fact, it is commonly agreed upon that past Subversion, Blood really doesn’t give much help. You are much better off branching in Unholy immediately. Some die hard Blood fans will not listen though, so I offer this build to start off. Note that I would not recommend this to even start with, but if you sincerely think your stats are far too low to actually matter, then by all means:
12/51/8:
The World of Warcraft Armory
As you can see, we take Bladed Armor and Dark Conviction to boost up our AP and Crit rating. However Crit rating is not as needed as many people see. If you go down the Frost tree, you will see that we have a lot more focus on skills that will proc and make our next attack either free or a critical strike. This skill would be Killing Machine. With Killing Machine, crits come around far more often than most other builds and it is with that skill that makes crit slightly less essential.
That’s as much as I will touch about Blood. The next two builds will focus more on Unholy branches.
3/53/15
The World of Warcraft Armory
This build focuses on getting Subversion for not only the threat reducing talent (You will find the dual wielding build causes a lot of threat) but for the extra 9% extra crit strike chance on Obliterate as well. In a tree where there are a lot of abilities that cause your attacks to crit, it isn’t as noteworthy to think about, however Obliterate is your main source of damage and to crit more often is always a good idea. If you believe your crit is a bit low and you seem to be pulling too much aggro, this build could work for you.
0/53/18
The World of Warcraft Armory
This would be my personal favorite build, as well as the one I’m running with at this time. With this build, you grab a full 3/3 Blood Caked Blade, which is point per point slightly better than Subversion in damage potential. The idea is that with BCB now not normalized, slow weapons that you will have will make the skill hit harder, which is always nice. Combined with the feel of how the Frost dual wielding tree works, it’s only fitting to have the BCB skill in your arsenal.
ROTATION:
There are two rotations in which I will present here. One will focus on having the first build mentioned in the guide, and the other will have the rotation for the two other builds. All the rotations are done in Blood Presence for the 15% extra damage done with attacks instead of Unholy. There are some people who will swear that Unholy is much better for the 53/18 build due to the amount of RP in which you get through rotations. Testings are still being done to find out which one would be better, so stay tuned, this part may change.
First rotation possibility:
PS, IT, BSx2, OB, FS dump
PS, IT, OBx2, FS dump.
This rotation focuses on refreshing your diseases all the time. You can use this rotation with the standard 17/51/3 spec as Epidemic is not part of the rotation and to do as much damage as possible with Frost Strike and Obliterate, you want both diseases up (Frost Fever only for Frost Strike). This rotation really loses it’s power as you change your spec as Epidemic is meant not to refresh your diseases. This is where your rotation can change slightly once you begin changing your spec:
PS, IT, BSx2, OB, FS dump
OBx3, FS dump
You would use the PS/IT portion of your second rotation and use it as another Obliterate for more damage. Also, the use of PS will make those obliterates hit that much harder.
At one time, Frost Strike was your bread and butter attack for Frost. No longer is this the case. Due to the nerf on our Sigil of the Vengeful Heart, Obliterate is definitely the better attack at this point for dual wielding. This is because both attacks have the ability to do a lot of damage and take even more bonus out of ArP, a stat which at the most was shrugged, at the worst ignored pre 3.2. ArP now becomes a decent to solid stat choice to empower your Obliterates even more. Coupled by both Plague Strike and Blood Strike, Frost is now a pretty strong physical attack tree. Gear accordingly. Frost Strike still is a strong third damage dealing ability, but it’s power starts to lose steam once you start gearing towards making Obliterate hit harder.
HB, OB, BSx2, FS
OBx3, FS.
This build was used back in the 3.1 days of simply using one disease and dropping Plague Strike so you can simply Howling Blast everything and put up your one disease. As this is no longer the case due to the focus of Obliterate, this build is simply here for those people who wish to keep pushing with a Howling Blast rotation instead. Your Obliterates will hit for smaller damage in the long run, however HB will cut through armor and give you a decent first burst of damage. This could be used during an AoE intensive pull such as trash to pad the meters, or be used for those individuals that absolutely do not want to dual wield and stay as a two hander. The reason here is that this build focuses more on Frost Strike dumping and Frost Strike, although nerfed damage wise, still does better with a two hander, in my opinion.
WHEN TO DEATHCHILL, RIME, KILLING MACHINE, AND UNBREAKABLE ARMOR:
Deathchill: Use this for a guaranteed crit with either Icy Touch, Howling Blast, Obliterate or Frost Strike. Preferably, you would use this with Obliterate on a single target as it will be your bread and butter in damage, however if there are AoE situations, a solid crit buff for Howling Blast while in an AoE position will definitely be your strongest DPS increase. Try not to use this when Killing Machine is up, it’d be counter productive. Know your situation and use it accordingly.
Rime/Killing Machine: Gone are the days where you would wait for Frost Strike to be able to dump Killing Machine, and simply Rime at the end of the rotation, the best way to use these abilities are now during Rime activations. In short, wait till Rime procs, wait till Killing Machine procs, and let her rip. You no longer really want Frost Strike to eat the charge as Frost Strike is no longer the damage dealing powerhouse as it used to be. HB will get more damage out of it than your Frost Strike will. If KM goes off and Rime still hasn’t gone off, simply dump it with a Frost Strike as it’s not the worst thing in the world. The skills are secondary, and more of an added DPS boost form time to time than a solid attack to rely on.
Unbreakable Armor: I still have not figured a right way to do this skill in a rotation to benefit me. I have been thinking of attaching it with Blood Tap and using it every time it’s up. I just haven’t figured out when would be the best time to do so without messing your rotation up too badly. Unbreakable Armor increases your strength by a whopping 25%. This is a great buff and gives you a decent amount of AP to boot. Let’s analyze:
With 1000 Strength, using Unbreakable Armor will give you 250 strength or a whopping 500 AP bonus. And that’s just with ONE talent point. The more strength you get, the higher this goes. I’m sitting at around 1300 Strength unbuffed, which means 325 strength or 650 Attack Power. That’s as good as a Trinket Proc. Now you can see why I’m trying to figure a way to put this skill in our rotations. The best time to do it I think would be at the end of the second rotation to empower your Frost Strikes and have it at your cooldown. A macro would be useful here to use both Blood Tap and Unbreakable Armor at the same time.
Some individuals love this ability and will get rid of one point in Killing Machine to get Unbreakable Armor. Whichever you feel like doing is entirely up to you, as both work just fine.
GLYPHS:
The Following Glyphs are used in this build:
Glyph of Frost Strike: This lowers Frost Strike’s RP cost to 32 RP. This allows for a third Frost Strike to go through on a 100 RP scenario. Always nice to have, but can become a pain to dump if you don’t have enough time to dump it all. I’m still on the fence about this due to that and the fact that you have 130 RP as your maximum makes this even more painful to dump at a lower cost. The extra Frost damage is key to this build but you cannot neglect your rotation too much otherwise you could potentially be hitting your Frost Strikes without Frost Fever up and that’s a no no.
Glyph of Icy Touch: 10 Extra RP for an attack you use once. It’s nothing fancy but it gives you more RP to play with. Use it if you are planning on using the first two rotations.
Glyph of Howling Blast: This makes Howling Blast apply Frost Fever when used. This becomes the reason why you use the third rotation over the first two if you glyph it. This removes the need to have IT used in your rotation, and focuses more on one disease rotations to get more time/frost strikes before your runes come off CD.
Glyph of Obliterate: 20% extra damage to your FU is always a nice choice to have and a great tool to use. One of the must have glyphs with dual wielding at this point.
WHAT DOES A FROST DEATH KNIGHT BRING?
Frost Death Knights bring melee enhancing speed attacks to the raid. This is especially nice to have for any melee, as Haste benefits every class…except the Death Knight. It’s ironic that we have a talent which really only increases our white damage…and that’s about it. Rogues get more chances to proc poisons, Warriors get more rage with more white attack swings, Rets get the ability to smack things faster with their two handed (Not sure how else that benefits them) And Enhance shamans get the fun time of having more WFs proc with faster attacks. Death Knights? White damage only! Woo! -.-;
Frost also brings a very strong AoE damage dealer. Frost’s power and rotation changes slightly when it comes to AoE by using Howling Blast over Obliterate. This alone makes for a great damage dealing ability. Who can complain about an attack that can crit every target around his focused target? AoE packs tend to really get hurt.
Bring a Frost Death Knight if you require a speed buff or if you want a strong AoE presence. They can hold their own in single target DPS too.
END NOTES:
Frost has overcome some drastic changes to make things look rather interesting for a little while. The introduction of Frost Dual Wield gives another angle to play the class. The tree no longer looks at powerful burst as it’s key but like all dual wielding builds, looks to push on sustainability. You won’t win big burst fights such as XT where bursting the heart with cooldowns is always a great thing, however you will be always one of the higher DPS thanks to sustainability and the ability to keep constant damage pouring out.
The major problem I have with Frost is unlike Blood and Unholy, we do not have a cooldown to use on command for extra burst. I suppose due to how the tree works, the on crit attacks are our on demand damage, however this is a control we do not have and is solely reliant on PPMs and other random factors that come into play. In short, Frost suffers from having no cooldowns to really push numbers hard and fast. I wrote up my thoughts about Frost versus Blood dps but you could easily put Unholy in Blood’s position and get the same thoughts about it. You can read this here, at Tankspot:
Blood vs. Frost Dual Wielding.
UNHOLY DEATH KNIGHT:
Unholy Death Knights: Masters of Magic and DoTs. They are the tree in which focuses mainly on awesome DoT upkeep as well as strong magical damage. Unholy Death Knight are by far the most gear friendly of the trees in the manner that really, the only big thing you want to focus on here is AP and getting your spells to do more damage. AP will solely boost this tree’s damage and as such, relies less on specific gear setup. I would firmly suggest any new DK willing to push themselves to the limit on DPS to choose this tree.
However, saying this comes at a cost: Unholy is considered one of the harder trees to learn. The reason is quite simple to be honest: you have to watch your DoTs as they are key to great DPS. As such, you are sorely pushed upon to get a timer of sorts to watch your diseases. Master this, and with the help of a certain glyph, and Unholy is definitely one of our strongest trees. It’s single target however is slightly lower than the two other trees. It’s main FU strike, Scourge Strike, is a magical damage attack that deals shadow damage and as such, slices through armor. However compared to the two other FUs, it scales poorly as you get better gear.
SPEC:
There are three specs that we will look at for Unholy. The pros and cons of every spec will be listed. First off, let us see what the traditional spec to start raiding should be.
When starting with fresh level 80 gear, it is essential to boost up any and all stats through talents as your gear cannot support the removal of these skills. As such, one will look into a 17/0/54 as their first choice of a spec.
The World of Warcraft Armory
As you can see, you go down Blood and grab stat enhancing abilities such as Dark Conviction for Crit strike damage. As your crit strike will be relatively low at starting gear levels, this is a great way to boost it up to a comfortable level. However, you sacrifice talents in the Unholy tree that can truly boost up your dps. The good thing about this spec is the fact that it’s a great starter to push needed stats up to a comfort level acceptable to raid at. The problem with this build: It really has horrible scaling with your gear. It is the weakest of the three builds while you scale and as you get better gear, you will be switching out to this next build, the 12/0/59:
The World of Warcraft Armory
In this build, you are removing Dark Conviction as it really doesn’t scale at all. It is simply a 5% increase in critical strike damage that your gear at that point should be able to cover. With those five points, one point is removed from Dirge and allows for a six point placement: Three in Outbreak to increase Scourge Strike and Plague Strike damage and 3 in Morbidity to increase Death Coil damage. The bonus of this build is that it will scale much better than the first build. The downside is that there’s a little stronger build than this, but it really requires you to have the gear to pull this off; the 0/10/61 build.
The World of Warcraft Armory
As you can see, we removed all the points from Blood. This means you’re losing a hefty amount of AP, as well as the increased damage of Two Handed Weapon Specialization and finally the runic power in which you get from Butchery. Subversion is a wasted point filler in the blood tree and as such will be missed. What you gain however, is 10% extra Shadow and Frost damage, which goes a very long way to helping out your Scourge Strike damage as well as your Death Coil Damage and finally your Icy Touch damage. You gain Runic Power Mastery in which will allow you to get more Death Coils to throw out, as well as gain more Runic Power through your skills with Dirge now fully accessible. This is to pretty much maximize the amount of Death Coils to throw out as well as to maximize the amount of damage in which you will do with your attacks. The best side to this build is that it’s probably the strongest two handed Unholy build out there right now. The downside? It requires a lot of gear to pull this off. You need to have enough to offset the loss of AP and Damage you lose out of Blood, and as well have the gear that will benefit the use of your extra RP. Suggested thoughts when it comes to switching to this build is no sooner than getting the 4 Piece tier 7 bonus and the Sigil of Awareness for maximum DPS output.
Caveat: Unholy 2H Obliterate spec (ArP intensive)
A new build has shown itself to be as potent if not more than using Scourge Strike and this simply dips into Frost a bit more to get Annihilation and replaces Scourge Strike with Obliterate. This build usually does it's best damage when you become loaded with ArP, most agree around 18.5% is a good number. You can still use the build at the start of it all and do decent, however ScS point per point should be on par if not a bit better than Obliterate until the ArP minimum:
The World of Warcraft Armory
Note that this build may be subject to change on the sole purpose that it pretty much alienates Scourge Strike from your build. Most people from Blizzard don't like that idea and hopefully they fix Scourge Strike to be the FU of choice yet again for an Unholy build.
Replace Scourge Strike with Obliterate in your rotation, and simply use the Obliterate Glyph.
ROTATION:
The rotation becomes fairly tricky for Unholy. Due to the fact that Scourge Strike benefits greatly from extra attack, and Ebon Plaguebringer gives us a powerful third disease (The disease itself may not be as strong as some think but the benefits in which it does to your damage are astounding. Read up on Scourge Strike to find out why!), the upkeep of DoTs is paramount to all. Now, with that in mind, we will have a glyph that will help us. This is the only time I will speak of a glyph that’s not in the Glyph section of this tree talent analysis as it’s key to great DPS: Glyph of Scourge Strike.
What does this do? Simply put: it has a 25% chance of refreshing your diseases anytime you Scourge Strike. This means you wanna Scourge Strike and Scourge Strike often. The reason why we took two points in Epidemic is to allow the maximum upkeep of our diseases so we can proc our glyph with the best chances possible.
The rotation is as follows:
IT, PS, BSx2, ScS, (DC if you have the RP for it)
ScSx3, DC dump.
At this point, you must look at the second rotation very closely as this is where you will want to watch and see if your Glyph of Scourge Strike goes off.
IF your glyph does refresh the diseases as you are doing the ScSx3 combination, you will not need to refresh your diseases in the first rotation and add an extra Scourge Strike:
ScS, BSx2, ScS, (DC if you have the RP for it)
IF the glyph does not proc, you continue with the original rotation. If you don’t understand how important having your diseases up for Unholy is, please once more reread your Scourge Strike attack (hint: try ScS’ing without diseases up.)
Now, I’ll put it in a lingo that some computer geeks will understand. Hopefully you can follow the same way:
IT, PS, BSx2, ScS, (DC if you have the RP for it)
*ScSx3, DC dump.
*IF ScS Glyph Procs, THEN
ScS, BSx2, ScS.
ELSE
IT, PS, BSx2, ScS, (DC if you have the RP for it)
ScSx3, DC dump.
REPEAT
Like I said, it’s a complicated rotation and one that you definitely need to sit down on a dummy and test out and get used to. But once you get used to it, you will only need to watch your diseases during your second rotation which will alleviate the stress of DoT watching.
WHEN TO USE BONE ARMOR/GARGOYLE:
We get two abilities that will help our damage.
Bone Armor: This armor will give us a bit more damage to our attacks (2%). Although it doesn’t sound like much, this is a passive shield that stays around you until the charges are used up. Which means it’s a Fire and Forget button. It also is a five minute buff therefore it really isn’t hard to keep track of. Proper use would be to use outside of battle and refresh when necessary through your rotation (Try using Blood Tap/Bone Armor after you have used a Blood rune rotation, preferably after the second Blood Strike in your first rotation).
Gargoyle: Every 3 minutes, we get to summon a flying ugly mongrel called a Gargoyle. He loves to flap around and cough out some giant balls of goo at your enemies...or are they Shadowbolts? Meh, they do damage! Now the trick with the Gargoyle is this: With 3.2's changes to the bugger, he now no longer saps your RP while he's out which means you're going to get a full 30 seconds of him blasting your enemies to bits for 60 RP. It's a nice change as it means you no longer lose 80 RP just to keep him up. That's two extra DCs you can toss at your enemies as well.
How he works is fairly simple. Picture a snapshot of your character screen showing statistics and whatnot. Well look at the AP section. The moment you activate your Gargoyle, whatever your AP is at, is what he’s going to attack with. Therefore the best time would be to use it when Trinkets as well as any speed enhancing abilities are fully functional. This means a good time would be during Heroism as he will get the speed buff for the full 30 seconds he’s flapping away.
The downside of this is that he’s not very sturdy. He’ll easily get shot down if there’s any sort of AoE so you have to watch and gauge when to use him. If it’s a high intensive fight where there is constant AoE, you are better off not using him and sticking to a Death Coil rotation. It’s a sad fact but he won’t help you.
THE GHOUL, A FRIENDLY PET!
The great thing about Unholy is that down at the 25 talent tree mark, we get a spiffy ability that makes our Ghoul a pet. He gets some spiffy lil abilities and gets Strength and Stamina based on whatever you have. Ravenous Dead will give even him even more benefits to boot, and Night of the Dead, it’s needed talent before being able to access the Master of Ghouls talent, increases it’s AoE survivability by 75% by avoiding it. Adding a certain Glyph of the Ghoul, you will pretty much give him an increase of 100% of your Strength and Stamina. That’s pretty much double your stats that the lil bugger will have. That’s a pretty potent ally to have as a pet! Go on, try it with both, watch him nearly double your strength and you sit and cry because your undead corpse dropping follower is stronger than you and losing limbs while he hits people. (He doesn’t but you get the point.)
The ghoul is an invaluable pet to the Unholy DK that adds a significant amount of DPS to your character. As such, keep him alive as much as you can and get acquainted with the follow command it has. There are some AoE attacks that will wipe him out in a shot and as such, you must control your pet well enough. Otherwise you have to wait 4 minutes for another one and that’s a drop in DPS for that little bit.
He also gets a nice ability further down the tree that allows you to use an Unholy rune to activate called Ghoul Frenzy. Now, you must ask yourself again: When do I use it? Remember my idea about refreshing Bone Armor? Well this is where it comes in handy. After using your first rotation, immediately pop Rune Tap and then Ghoul Frenzy. This will not stagger your Blood rune too much due to it’s immediate use and it will allow you to give your ghoul some nice haste bonus to boot and heal it. Gotta keep the lil bugger happy, right?
Proper Ghoul management will up your DPS by a significant portion. As an Unholy Death Knight, use the power of Unholy creation to your advantage: keep him alive and healthy.
GLYPHS:
Unholy Death Knights have a range of glyphs that they can use that are actually quite beneficial to them. Choosing 3 will be up to the Death Knight. The following Glyphs are used in the builds:
Glyph of the Ghoul: 40% Strength and Stamina to the Ghoul. That’s a 100% increase of whatever your stats are. This gives your ghoul a nice boost and gives you in the end a boost in DPS. Nothing wrong with that, I would say.
Glyph of Scourge Strike: THIS GLYPH IS A MUST. And I cannot stress this enough. The key to excellent DPS with a Unholy Death Knight is not having to refresh your diseases in favor of a hard hitting Scourge Strike instead. Get this. Now. What are you doing? Why are you still reading this!? GET IT NAOUGH!
Glyph of Dark Death: Empowering your Death Coils is a great way for a DPS boost as a dump. A strong choice if you want to get more dps out of your dump.
Glyph of Unholy Blight: This glyph adds 40% to your Unholy Blight damage done. It's a nice addition to the DoT damage that will only scale as you get better gear as well. A sound investment.
Glyph of Bone Armor: Some people will debate this one but nothing wrong with extra Bone Shield charges to keep your Bone Armor up longer. Remember that Bone Armor now has a 2 minute Cooldown so if it goes down during that time and it’s on CD, you gotta wait for it.
WHAT DOES AN UNHOLY DEATH KNIGHT BRING?
Unholy brings extra diseases to the board. I know for some classes, the more diseases upon your targets, the more damage it does. This alone makes it very worthwhile to have. Furthermore, Unholy Death Knights bring a flat 13% increased Magic damage to your raid. If your raid is caster heavy, this is a godsend to them. This tree does also bring some nice burst damage in the form of the Gargoyle and the lowered time on Army of the Dead which allows players to masterfully use their dead minions at the proper time for an increased amount of damage.
END NOTES:
Unholy has always been one of the tougher trees to play. However if you play an Unholy Death Knight properly, they are the strongest of our trees. Many people including myself do not like the idea of dealing with a Proc for damage and as such, this tree is not for everyone. This is also one of the hardest trees in our repertoire to learn how to properly dps. It requires constant DoT upkeep as well as ghoul management, and when to properly activate certain cooldowns such as Ghoul Frenzy and the Gargoyle.
If you cannot keep your eyes on any cooldowns and just want to be able to keep a rotation going and that’s it, you may want to avoid this build. This build is not for the faint of heart and requires a very good steady lookout for many things.
If you like a challenge and a great reward for doing that challenge well, then the Unholy Death Knight can certainly be the class for you. The DPS this tree can pull of is sickening and is considered one if not the best damage dealing builds in the game for Death Knights alone.
Caveat: Unholy DW DPS:
I'm going to insert the dual wielding unholy mini-guide section here. However this build is not as familiar to me as most of the other builds so I would truly suggest you speak or find a guide made by Fargom, Errta or any other of the dual wielding gurus we have on the WoW forums. They have done a lot of theorycrafting on dual wield and can give a much better answer to your needs than I will. But here's the jist.
DW Unholy focuses on using Death Coil as your damage dealing ability. It also focuses on dishing out single target rune attacks to get the most runic power out of your rotations to fire off death coils consistently. The weapons desired are usually Slow/Best DPS possible. DW Unholy also incorporates the use of Ghoul Frenzy in your rotation to make your ghoul hit harder/faster. You also are DPSing in Unholy presence as this is a very cooldown-intensive build that requires you to fire off a lot of attacks in the spam of 20 seconds. This isn't for those with bad wrists, for sure!
The style is a fast pace and very enjoyable build that keeps you on your toes and is making you consistently doing an attack every cooldown. It also is a very friendly spec that allows you to get back into your rotation very easily if you need to move. This build easily keeps up with Frost's Dual Wield if well played and is an intriguing option for those who find Dual Wielding Frost as dull.
0/17/54
The World of Warcraft Armory
I'd like to presume that this is one of the better builds for this as it takes up Dirge and Chill of the Grave to get the maximum amount of RP out of your skills. Glyphs would turn out to be Dark Death, Icy Touch and Ghoul to maximize yet again more RP. I guess Dirge and Desolation could be swapped for the full 5/5. Again, this is me just looking at the smartest way to do it. There could be another build out there I'm not looking at.
Rotation would look something like this:
PS > IT > BS > DC > GF > IT > BS > DC
PS > IT > IT > DC > PS > IT > IT > DC dump
Something in that range. The point of the rotation is that you actually dump once you hit 40 RP. It's just so you can get the most damage possible out of your Death Coils. Naturally this build would work great with the Vengeful Heart Sigil. Keep that in mind.
GEMMING:
Gemming follows a similar path that a Warrior would on the most basic of situations. Presume Blood is similar to Arms and Frost and Unholy more like Fury:
META GEMS:
Chaotic Skyflare Diamond:
This Meta Gem adds 21 crit rating which is always nice for any Death Knight looking to help out. The key to this meta, however is the 3% extra critical strike damage. Which means ANY critical strike you do will be 3% stronger. This is where the magic works for your meta gem folks, and is considered our best.
Relentless Earthsiege Diamond:
This Meta Gem adds 21 agility which is not as strong for a Death Knight as pure crit rating would be. Seeing how we need a high number of agility to really pull off 1%, the crit rating gem usually is superior. The counter argument to this is that with 21 agility as a statistic, the gem can scale much better with Kings which is a buff most of you should have in your raid. Again, this gem has the 3% increase in critical strike damage which makes it a solid second choice if you can't find the first one to cut.
Red/Yellow/Blue Gem selection:
At this point, it's silly to list every gem combination possible in the game and give you the pros and cons. However here's the jist of it.
Red gem slot:
Bold Cardinal Ruby = 20 Strength (34 for a Bold Dragon's Eye for JCs if possible)
Yellow Gem slot:
Inscribed Ametrine = 10 Strength and 10 Critical Strike Rating
Blue:
Sovereign Dreadstone = 10 Strength and 15 Stamina
Now, those selections are Best in Slot selections and will give you the MAXIMUM amount of DPS. There are two things that I want people to understand when it comes to gemming:
1) In no way let your primary stats suffer because of a BiS gem. If you're missing 20 Hit, you can either regear yourself to get that hit or just shove a 20 hit gem in there. Hit and Expertise are pretty damn paramount in the build so if you don't have those capped, don't be afraid to gem. It isn't the greatest way to go DPS wise, however you're better off capping those primary statistics before buffing your strength.
2) 90% of the time, unless the socket bonus is equal to 10 Strength, you're going to be using the Bold Cardinal Ruby. It is by far the greatest upgrade for you (You're looking at a flat 40 AP raise, excluding Kings helping this.). The only time you should ever really worry about socketing your gear for a bonus is for 10+ strength. Why? Because it will allow you to get the same amount of strength through the socket as well as the gem (10+10=20) and you will give a secondary stat a boost (Crit or Stamina in this case.)
* Jewelcrafters: Ensure you have 3 +34 Strength gems somewhere in your gear! *
Adding jewels will benefit your statistics and your DPS, however be smart about it: gem successfully!
END NOTES:
This is still a work in progress. I fully accept people critiquing as well as giving advice about this class when it comes to DPS.
In the end however, it comes to this: Play the Death Knight class the way you want to. All three specs are very powerful in their own way and it takes skill and effort to get all three to their maximum input. Of all things, this Compendium showed me more about how I play my class than any other has. You have a few options to play with:
- A single target Power House that self heals to sustain himself and potentially his group and raid members
- A dual wielding, sustaining, hard striking individual that focuses on hasting the party's damage output and striking through defenses with frost and physicality.
- A master of DoTs, letting the damage accumulate through it's magic effects and giving casters more oomph to their damage.
Enjoy yourselves, this class is a new class and a very enjoyable one.
Death Knight Raid DPS Compendium (FR/BL/UH)
