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[WoW] Death Knights: Yes, you can has Arthas
Septus
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Got to spread Jim's pic around a bit more:
Death Knight Class Information
Death Knights are heroes, totally awesome heroes that do heroic things. The first heroic class in the game, and they are available to play once you have a lvl 55 character. You may only create your Death Knight on that server, for now, until some point in the future when Blizzard forgets that it likes money, and allows you to generate a lvl 55 starting Death Knight on any server that you choose.
Class Roles
The Death Knight is both a dps and tank class. As DPS, they should be tuned to roughly the same dps as every other class and spec in the game, though they have a noticeable boon to the group/raid, in the ability to tank fairly well at the drop of a hat. This is because Death Knight tanking abilities or rotations are virtually identical to dps rotations, and the gear overlaps to a significant degree.
Combat Mechanics
Both roles require a lot of active management to perform optimally. Death Knights have not one, but two resources to manage:
Runes, which are divided into two each of unholy, blood, and frost, regenerate at a constant rate of 10 seconds per rune, in a similar fashion to energy. If you do not use your regenerated rune as soon as it comes up, it will activate a timer (up to 2 seconds, is the current theory) which will count as the Rune being used. So if you have two runes refresh at the same time, and you use them back to back, they will both refresh 10 seconds after the first rune is used, instead of 2 seconds apart. It should also be noted that when an ability that uses runes misses, the rune is not burned.
Runic power, is generated in static amounts, through the successful use of abilities. 1-rune abilities generate 10 RP, 2-rune abilities generate 15, and 3-rune abilities also generate 15. This can be improved through glyph of icy touch, or talents within each tree.
Aside from the two resources, Death Knights must also manage their diseases, and their mitigation cooldowns when tanking. Diseases are important for any and all specs, to varying degrees. Unholy spec has you using 3 diseases, one of which is automatically applied, Frost and Blood use two, although there are some frost specs that eschew the use of one disease, Blood Plague, and have seen a dps increase by doing so. The number of diseases on a target affects the damage of our primary strikes, and the healing from Death Strike.
Death Knights have an innate 20% threat reduction modifier, untalented, when in blood or unholy presences. They can get an additional 24% reduction in those two presences with the subversion blood talent. This generally provides enough threat reduction to cover you for most tanks that don't suck, or even liberal usage of Death and Decay on aoe packs if the tank knows how to hold aoe aggro well.
Crap that you wear
Equipment:
Death Knights wear platemail, and generally wield 2 handers, for both tanking and dpsing. There are specs that can optimize the use of dual-wielding, which at this point appear to deal the highest dps, though Blizzard is making changes to reign that in.
Itemization:
Strength is your most important stat, it funnels into everything. All the spell damage that Death Knights deal, is boosted by AP, which is converted from Strength at a 2 to 1 ratio.
Hit rating can be viewed as a slightly subordinate stat, or roughly equal, or slightly better than strength, depending on the spec. However, it's only important that you obtain 8% hit to reach the melee cap. The spell cap for some of the other Death Knights abilities is 17%, but the return on acquiring hit rating for that will be much worse in comparison to
other stats.
Expertise rating is valuable but not to the degree that it is for rogues or warriors, because much of Death Knights' damage comes from sources that can not be dodged or parried. Tanks will want expertise not only for the increase in threat generation, but also for survival as it will reduce the chance for the enemy to parry and as a result, increase the speed of their auto-attacks.
Crit rating is something that you'll just have to accept taking, but it is not terribly important for the class. 1 rating point will be roughly half as valuable as 1 point of strength.
Defense is needed to be uncrittable, when tanking. At level 80, the defense cap would be 535 defense rating for +2 level bosses in heroics, and 540 for +3 bosses in raids. If you're short on defense, the rune of the stoneskin gargoyle is an excellent choice, as is the new sigil bought with badges, which provides 53 defense rating upon casting Icy Touch. If your gear is such that you can wear optimal itemlevel gear and not greatly sacrifice socket bonuses, and still reach uncrittability without the stoneskin rune, swordshattering would be preferable is it provides a better total item budget than stoneskin.
Talent Trees
- Blood: Focuses on keeping yourself healed, and has a higher focus on physical weapon-based damage, and uses Death Coil for its runic power dump.
- Frost: Focuses on dealing frost-based damage, has a higher amount of damage available at range, and is generally the tree most invested in by dual-wield builds. It uses frost strike as its runic power dump. This tree tends to provide the best tanking mitigation, at lower levels of avoidance.
- Unholy: Focuses on dealing damage through diseases, which provides significant aoe opportunities, controlling a semi-permanent ghoul pet(has a cooldown on summoning), and largely deals shadow-based damage. The primary runic power dump tends to be unholy blight, mixed in with Death Coil. This tree has the highest physical-based tanking mitigation with large levels of avoidance.
Specs(taken from Elitist Jerks)
Blood DPS
51/13/7:
This tends to be the lowest of the 2 hand dps builds.
Frost DPS
21/50/0: Unlike blood, there is primarily only one DPS spec used for deep Frost builds. There are some points which can be shifted around as desired, but for the most part you will see a build that resembles this. A lot of the damage from this spec comes from Frost Strike, as well as Killing Machine and Rime procs for Icy Touch and Howling Blast.
Unholy DPS
17/0/54: This is the widely accepted standard build, with possible movement of the 1 point in virulence and in corpse explosion.
Frost Tanking
10/51/10
Unholy Tanking
10/5/56
Night of the Dead, Ravenous Dead, and Master of Ghouls here could be very easily replaced, and perhaps should, if you're raid tanking. I like having the ghoul for 5 mans, and ghoul survivability should be improved soon.
51/13/7:
This tends to be the lowest of the 2 hand dps builds.
Frost DPS
21/50/0: Unlike blood, there is primarily only one DPS spec used for deep Frost builds. There are some points which can be shifted around as desired, but for the most part you will see a build that resembles this. A lot of the damage from this spec comes from Frost Strike, as well as Killing Machine and Rime procs for Icy Touch and Howling Blast.
Unholy DPS
17/0/54: This is the widely accepted standard build, with possible movement of the 1 point in virulence and in corpse explosion.
Frost Tanking
10/51/10
Unholy Tanking
10/5/56
Night of the Dead, Ravenous Dead, and Master of Ghouls here could be very easily replaced, and perhaps should, if you're raid tanking. I like having the ghoul for 5 mans, and ghoul survivability should be improved soon.
9/11/51
While the former is probably better for normal 5 mans, or some of the easier heroics, and will generate more threat/dps, this one has lichborne, so you'll have an extra mitigation cooldown to burn.
PSN: Kurahoshi1
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Common Abbreviations:
SD Sudden Doom
BS Blood Strike
PS Plague Strike
HS Heart Strike
HB Howling Blast
FS Frost Strike
SS Scourge Strike
DS Death Strike
OB Obliterate
HC Hungering Cold
DRW Dancing Rune Weapon
CE Corpse Explosion
IBF Icebound Fortitude
CF Crypt Fever
BT Blood Tap
AMS Anti-Magic Shell
AMZ Anti-Magic Zone
UB Unholy Blight
ERW Empower Rune Weapon
DC Death Coil
BB Blood Boil
FF Frost Fever
BCB Blood-Caked Blade
BP Blood Plague
AoD Army of the Dead
DG Death Grip
DnD/D&D Death and Decay
Common Misconceptions and/or Debates:
Unholy vs. Frost Tanking-Both specs should be sufficient to handle aoe threat with aoe dps that isn't dumb. Unholy has more aoe dps, but frost's should be sufficient and will have slightly better snap aggro at the start of a pull, through the use of howling blast. Unholy may also have a separate advantage of threat against single targets because of Death Strike. The healing portion of Death Strike does cause threat, which is divided against all mobs(or not, against a boss) and halved. So a 900 damage Death Strike should do 2250 healing for unholy(1800 for frost), and a combined threat total of 2025, versus 1800 for frost, before frost presence modifier.
As for mitigation comparisons, frost has an overall advantage at lower gear levels due to frigid dreadplate and guile of gorefiend primarily, and it also has the highest potential magic damage reduction, through acclimation. This does not mean that unholy mitigation, at lower gear levels, will be insufficient. I've seen no testimonials that unholy causes noticeably more trouble in heroics than frost.
Dual-Wielding as a tank-There's still a lot of discussion going on over this and the relative benefits of using a 2 hander or not. Dual-wielding confers the benefit of using two tanking weapons and the stat advantages that would bring. This should mostly be an issue for reaching the defense cap, when wearing epic gear. However, there is a very cheap flask that should be able to make up the defense difference that you need, and Blizzard is going to address the lack of defense issue at some point anyway. Meanwhile you lose damage and threat by dual-wielding, you spend effort trying to get two one-handers that won't be as useful when not tanking, and you will cause enemies to parry you more often. Additional mob parries means you take more auto-attacks in quick succession. This isn't a huge deal anymore with crushing blows being gone, but more incoming damage is still a disadvantage that weighs against the advantages of having more tanking stats on your weapons.
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=35&factionid=-1&minlevel=71&maxlevel=80&servertypeid=-1
There's more death knights from 71-80 then there are Hunters, Priests, Rogues, Shaman, and Locks.
Edit: In fact horde side, they are the third most populous class in that level range O.o
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Anyone know if improved rune tap along with the glyph of rune tap can be used as a threat generator? Or does rune tap not generate threat?
For a second I thought you were saying there were more DKs than Hunters, Priests, Rogues, Shaman, and Locks combined.
Just third most populous? Meh, I don't think that would be a big deal. Ravenholdt is a bit better, with more hunters, pallies, rogues, and warriors, and DKs are dead even with druids.
The thing is, this is not even a month in. I can see the pop inbalance getting worse, with DK's being the dominant class by a large margin.
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It could also go the other way with people going back to their previous mains or army of alts. There were lots of new Shamans running around Alliance side when TBC came out, which eventually died down once many people had their fun.
Of course, judging by what I've seen I'm not too concerned with an overpopulation of the class given that I seem to be one of the few that is willing to tank (for stuff I have the gear for anyway). Most seem to be the equivalent of feral druids that only do catform.
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What you guys think of this?
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=jbEZ0xZfgGh0bkMeoossut
Typical first encounter:
DK uses death grip, proceeds to unload his full PvE attack chain on the focus target mob. Does nothing to the adds, doesn't even spread disease to them. Nothing.
I wait patiently for his health to get low, knowing full well that he has *NO* threat on anything other than that single target.
I shield him (I'm hybrid spec, my shield has spikes) and Renew him.
All mobs with the exception of the one mob he is actually tanking make a beeline for me. Bouncing aggro for the rest of the fight.
:^:
WTG DKS!
Yah you'd think that, wouldn't you? I can't even drop a Renew on these jokers when their health gets down to about half without pulling all the adds. I had one today tell me that I was expecting too much, and that only Paladins can tank more than one mob at a time. :x
-edit-
I mean, is it really too much for me to expect that a tank should realize that he may actually need to manually switch between targets and take swings at various mobs - if that's what it takes to hold aggro?
My tank in CoH does that all the fucking time, and there I'm switching between 7+ mobs at times.
My roommate plays a warrior tank, and does that all the time. I've watched him keep aggro on three or four mobs while they were being AoE'd to death.
Of course, he's also a pretty damned good tank.
Edit: Also, what is it like tanking on a death knight? I'm not opposed to the idea, but I've always been a bit wary of tanking since I first tried it on a lowbie warrior and got yelled at for not holding aggro well enough. Didn't really help that I wasn't enjoying myself too terribly much.
Regardless I don't think I need to worry too much, as the thing my guild needs most is dps. Too many tanks/healers.
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Maybe my paranoia is a good thing. I'm constantly looking at the theory craft and crunching numbers. Partially because tanking is extremely interesting, and partially because I'm a huge nerd.
Most of my runs I don't need to switch but my last Azjol Nerub run the healer kept drawing aggro. I was a bit baffled as it was never an issue before and had to tab between some mobs. He wasn't specced to heal. Would that at all influence a mob to run off and smash his face in? I guess using too many heals early in the pull which was usually when it would run off.
Healing too early, prior to the tank establishing aggro will definitely get you the attention of all the mobs that the tank hasn't face-stabbed. This is why it's critical that a tank has enough armor and hp to survive the early part of the pull, because if he requires too much healing, too soon, then he won't have a chance to establish enough threat to keep the mobs away from the healer for the rest of the fight.
There's nothing in the priestly talent tree that will compensate for healing before the tank has established any aggro. All you can do at that point is fade and be more careful. Now, if the tank has no intentions of establishing aggro on anything other than the mob he is trying to DPS to death, then nothing the healer does will keep aggro off of him (except for simply not healing at all, which will ensure a wipe).
Much better IMO to heal, die, and then get the party screaming at the tank than to withhold healing, let the tank die, let everyone else die, and then commence to screaming at the healer.
It only ever bugged me when people were being retards and stuff was running all over the place. Once the mobs are solidly on me and standing still, it's not that hard to click nameplates.
Just make sure the dps isn't using you as assist, or they'll constantly be hitting the wrong target.
What are the casters supposed to do if the tank only bothers to hold aggro on a single mob and just let everything else trash the party?
One particular mob in the group might strike you as "most dangerous" but I assure you, each and every one of them is capable of smashing in my fragile-yet-ruggedly-handsome face in about 6 seconds.
Well yes, that's what I expect them to do is gather up the mobs we're fighting and focus the attention on him. Once he's done that I have plenty of tricks in my pocket protector to keep him and the rest of the party alive without drawing aggro.
My experience with DK "tanks" is that they play it just like solo PvE: Bang on one thing until it dies, move on to next thing, bang on it till dead etc.
Obviously that plan doesn't work the moment you join a team.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
D&D->IT->PS->Pest and you should have no issue with aggro.
You will note that many DKs say that if you are only fighting one mob at a time solo, you're doing it wrong.
I haven't done all that much tanking in instances, but when I do I use a similar rotation to AoE grinding. Two AoEs (I have Unholy Blight) and 2 dots on each mob mean I haven't had to switch targets to build up aggro on all of them. Add Wandering Plague going off as well, and the mobs view me like that warlock that dots your entire team in an arena.
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No rune strike, no ice bound fortitude, no anti magic shell, no . . . well, I'm sure you get the idea.
Paladins are a pain to deal with one on one though.
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Those solo PVE DKs must suck then.
Also I got into an instance group with a 67 prot paladin who was tanking so I switched to blood pres. to DPS. Halfway through the instance it was clear they didn't have any idea how to keep agro on more than one mob at once (Never once saw a consecrate hit the ground) so I just switched to Frost Pres, and whispered the healer that I'd be tanking now as well, cause I was tired of everything running all over the place killing all the clothies, while the paladin judged rightousness on their 1 target, or whatever it was they were doing.
After that things went smoothly.
If I don't feel like gathering mobs up I will just kill them as they come to me, either one at a time unless aggroing that one also pulls over 1 or more buddies. It lets me double Heartstrike rather then use a Blood Rune for Pestilence and/or Death and Decay. But I also know how to deal with more then one mob at a time.
My only 60 Frost DK isn't exactly mowing down entire camps by himself, but I am finding myself getting very ballsy by pulling 3 or 4 guys at a time just for fun.
Also, in Zul'Drak, I was able to solo the elite mob in the quest line involving the gods. The one where the leopard god runs up to help you out. I thought that was ridiculous, since it was a 78 quest, I was 77, and it suggested a group of 3.
Any spot that has quick spawns is a lot of fun.. void fields in hellfire, scripted spawn locations in wolk.. it's fun to see how long you can go. Usually it's your fingers that give out before your health bar.