Clandestine

No, just no, keep leveling related clutter out of this thread. If you've ever played World of Warcraft before, you already know how to level, and playing a Death Knight is only very slightly more complicated than any other class. I'm sure you're bright enough to figure the rest out on your own.

 

Hidden

I just noticed something, 3200 DPS raid buffed in Naxx gear? That looks very low to me, are you sure that you don't have a typo in your AP or something? May I get a copy of the spreadsheet you're using, please?

Edit: I just saw it saying base stats, what weapon are you using? A good part of the level 80 base stats is included in the weapon DPS that doesn't start at zero even when using a grey weapon. I'd also rather get the stat values for full Naxx10 gear or something like that, naked you'll always have AP/spellpower/Strength coming out as the very best stat.

 

Leaflock

This thread is a fantastic resource so far of collected theory, but after reading through it I feel that it needs an explanation early on for the basics of what you should be doing while DPSing. Something like this will anticipate questions from new DKs and hopefully clear some things up before seemingly obvious questions get asked. Here's my suggestion for a section to appear early on in the compendium, based on some of the things I talked about in the old thread. I thought I'd post it here first for comments/suggestions.

How to DPS as a DK: Priorities

While you'll find a number of "cookie-cutter" or standard rotations here for each spec, it's important to keep in mind that these rotations are theoretical-- they're what most people find to be the best for a fight under ideal conditions (i.e., Patchwerk-type dps tests). The key to maximizing your dps as a Death Knight is understanding what contributes most significantly to your dps, and what priorities you should follow when your circumstances deviate from the ideal. Whether it's a mobile encounter, or you miss an attack, or you need to refresh Horn of Winter, or your timing just gets off over the duration of a fight-- it will happen. Here's a suggested priority list for single target dps:

1) Don't die.

2) Keep your diseases (Blood Plague, Frost Fever) up 100% of the time. These boost your primary damage attacks significantly, and add a non-trivial amount to your dps themselves. Use a mod to track their remaining time (I use Elkano's Buff Bars, but there are lots of mods that can accomplish the same thing-- fill in some more here if you like).

3) Use your highest damage-per-rune attack as much as possible, whenever it is available. Blood: Heart Strike, Frost 2h: Obliterate, Unholy: Scourge Strike.

4) Spend your runic power before it hits the maximum. There's a common misconception that runic power is a secondary resource to runes. Your core RP abilities (Death Coil, Frost Strike, Unholy Blight) all do significant amounts of damage, and it's just as worthwhile to use an available global cooldown on one of these abilities as on a rune ability. Managing these can be tricky, especially in Blood spec when you have Sudden Doom procs to contend with also. Use the rune latency coding to your advantage-- there's an extra GCD in there after a rune becomes available (see: Rune Mechanics). When in doubt: as long as you are still not violating any of the previous three rules, dumping runic power will maximize your dps.

5) Use your spec's secondary strikes, talented appropriately, to convert off-spec runes into Death Runes. (Blood: Obliterate, Frost and Unholy: Blood Strike). This is in support of rule #3.

6) Use your dps cooldowns appropriately to maximize their uptime. Know your rotations and how long the fight is, and judge accordingly. Note that cooldown use is an exception to rule #4: You'll want maximum runic power before using Gargoyle or Dancing Rune Weapon, for example.

7) Do anything necessary to increase your raid's dps. While seeing big numbers fly by is fun, we have some abilities that may benefit the raid's overall damage more than a selfish buff to ourselves. Remember, the boss falling down is the ultimate goal. Use your discretion as to who in your raid might benefit most from Hysteria, a pure physical damage boost. Similarly, see the explanation of how Unholy Aura can benefit the raid significantly. If you're in charge of providing Abomination's Might (AP raid buff) or Imp. Icy Talons (haste raid buff), make sure they stay up.

 

• Zurm

I think you misunderstand how gargoyle works. Gargoyle doesn't just take the cost at the beginning. It costs 50 rp, then DRAINS 8 RP every second until you run out of RP or a minute has passed. Hence, you wont be able to keep up the required RP generation needed to maintain the gargoyle for a full minute (at least, I wasn't able to) when compared to a blood or unholy spec.

And leaflock, excellent points. It is very true that the existing rotations are theoretical maximum and not always practical. Some basic understanding to how they were designed is great would help a lot of newcomers out a lot.

 

Torrential

Well I've got the IT glyph, Dirge, and Chill of the Grave. If you stop DCing that's seems like plenty of RP generation to me.

 

methods

Sorry I missed that. The weapon was a modest 180dps 3.6 speed

 

Buanna

There's currently an unresolved argument that Scourge Strike doesn't outdamage 2 Blood Strikes.

Boni and Bonii are not words.
Bonuses is.

 

Hidden

Could you get some data for an actual gearset anyway? It doesn't need to be exact, just some rounded stats. Ratings should have higher values then.

 

Avilister

Does Desecration affect all damage done by the DK? For example, if the DK applies diseases while Desecration is up, do those diseases tick for more damage? Does it affect Gargoyle, the Ghoul (not really for raiding, I know, but useful for other PvE), and Death Coil? I assume it increases strike damage and white damage by the 5% listed, but I'm curious about the others.

 

Torrential

It's a buff on you when you stand in it. It effects everything you do. Not the ghoul and not gargoyle.

 

Arkasi

While I agree completely I see this as a Catch-22. Making a thread on how to level is hardly necessary for DK's, it's just 25 levels, not the full 80 for others. There wouldn't be enough information to put in there to warrant a seperate thread and most of the information amounts to get over it do the work, get "on a pale horse" if you really want to max it out.

However without it we get a hundred requests for how to level. Maybe a quick link to the section of posts in the original thread that discussed this would be the best approach.

It's probably going to be up to mod discretion on these posts and will likely be met with the simple remark "read the thread".

 

Daedalix

It seems that people are overlooking (or haven't mentioned) Night Elves' Shadowmeld as a worthy DPS ability. It now essentially vanishes you from combat and drops all aggro. It can't really compete numbers-wise with Expertise or +1% hit, but it will uncap you from threat unlike any warrior or non-NE DK can do.

Am I incorrect in this ability's function in a raid-dps situation? Perhaps threat wasn't an issue in Beta but they've made it clear that threat will once again be an issue in higher-end raiding. I'm always a healer and haven't had the opportunity to use it as a dpser. Between our propensity for extra-large crits, melee range, and AoE damage, I imagine threat being a significant issue for us.

I still plan on going Human, can't stand NEs having played one for the past year and a dwarf for the previous 3. The human Rep benefits are also pretty substantial.

 

Davia

When you come out of Shadowmeld, you regain any previous threat you had. So yes, it could save your ass if you pull aggro, as you can stay Shadowmelded until the tank gets a healthy threat lead again, but it's not going to reset your threat and let you go all out if couldn't before.

 

Daedalix

I see, thanks for the clarification. I had only previously used it to drop aggro and get out of combat.

 

Sydane

Actually right now, it is bugged and not returning your aggro once you come out of it. One would assume that will eventually get fixed, but for the time being it is tremendously powerful.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Davia

Ah, thanks, I was unaware of that. Still, not a good idea to pick a race based on a currently bugged racial ability.

 

Erzsebet

I agree that this thread may well be buried by requests for leveling tips; perhaps the description of the link to the WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities thread should be amended to stop those unable to use the search function from polluting this thread and bothering the admins unduly.

Daedalix: As of now it is certainly bugged but assuming it gets fixed I wouldn't consider it a dps bonus - NE will remain superior Alliance tanks but inferior dps.

 

Flamingcloud

Personally I think it not dropping aggro is even more broken as it allows for some really insane tank switching / cooldown rotations. I kinda hope they just leave it as dropping aggro, aggro isn't a big deal at the moment anyways.

 

Fugazor

About point 8.3.2 and unholy talent spec there:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Unholy Aura is personal preference - fine.

1) Is Virulence really that good? Is it worth to take 3 talent points just to buff two spells? Or does it affect something else? Like diseases or UB? I mean you can put those 3 talents into Impurity for example.
2) You could move one point from Desecration to Impurity, based on point 8.3.5 it gives more damage per point.
3) You could take 2 points from Bladed Armor and put them into Desecration and Impurity, that will be better investment I suppose?

Overall 8.3.2 and 8.3.5 does not fit each other. Based on 8.3.5 it should rather look something like this:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
With last two point being spent into Unholy Aura, Bladed Armor or Virulence.

 

Pyros

There is a thread called Leveling specs discussion on the general board, I believe it should be used for people who for some reason feel like leveling specs require a discussion. If you care about pure efficiency while leveling, then you should simply use a raid DPS build, and remove the least rated points for leveling oriented points, if any. The thing with DK leveling is, there's really no necessary skill that's also not a good DPS skill. Pale horse is the only one that comes to mind, and you simply remove 2 points from the worst unholy talents into it. The unholy part of the initial post says Outbreak is the worst talent you have when DPSing. Arguably, it's good for leveling because it affects AEing, so then you simply take the next in the list, Ravenous Dead. Here you go, Unholy leveling build.

I believe all the leveling spec things should be left outside the thread, if only to prevent random people popping in and asking to rate their leveling build or whatever, which will bloat the thread and be obsolete in a month.

Now as a side note, has anyone bothered checking a ghoul played by a player DPS? I'm thinking, let's say you're on a progress hard fight, would it be worth it for the unholy DK to spec Night of the Dead and ghoul everyone who die(or try to at least). Assuming you don't have a lot of druids and it's a DPS race. Or is the player ghoul DPS similar to a NPC ghoul, and as such you're not actually gaining any dps by removing your pet to "rez" someone.

 

Nethris

1) The only place points from Virulence can go profitably is necrosis, a minor gain (the points are needed to get past the 4th row of talents) - however, that gain has to be balanced against being able to hit cap your spells in a raid setting without needing to stack more hit than you need for melee specials. Having IT resisted is going to screw up your rotation for example, as not applying FF is a major dps loss, so I'd think that's down to a matter of taste, as consistency may well be worth a loss of 0.5% average dps.

2) Non-maxed desecration would make it unreliable to use as a snare for utility purposes - and perhaps more critically, that table assumes linear contribution per point in the talent, and it's not clear to me that this is the case with desecration when not having that last point introduces downtime. However, the table does suggest that dropping desecration entirely for 2 points in impurity, 2 points in virulence or necrosis, and a point elsewhere (1/3 imp icy touch? or rune tap for utility I guess) would be pretty close to dps neutral, which seems at odds with the general consensus that even if you're willing to deal with a priority rotation where disease refreshes will move around, that desecration > SS glyph and fewer IT/PS uses.

3) Bladed armor is quite likely to be a rather high return per point with how well DKs scale with AP, so without using a spreadsheet that isn't a clear win to me either - and dark conviction may actually be worth less per point, would need to check that.


P.S. - your linked build isn't using its final 2 points, which would either be in unholy aura or bladed armor I assume.

 

Frostx

Regarding the tri-spec, wouldn't shifting 1 point from Deathchill and 2 from Epidemic to Virulence be bettwer? Considering that the rotation is PS->IT->BS->BS->X->DC you're refreshing diseases every rotation, making epidemic pretty much worthless.

Also, if that is true and we're now at 20 points unholy, would it be a dps gain to shift 5/5 Darc Conviction to 5/5 Impurity? 5% crit affects all white attacks, all abilities less diseases, and leads to a slight increase in Killing Machine procs. Impurity provides 25% more AP to IT, HB, DC and the 2 diseases.

 

Katsira

I'm quite aware that this is the DPS compendium, however there are many situations where an AoE pull could go wrong and you need to grab something off a healer or overzealous caster and kite it over to the tank. Also useful in Naxx/OS 10 where some DPS tanking is required.

(Dark Command taunt)

#showtooltip Dark Command
/cast [target=mouseover, exists, harm][nodead, harm][target=targettarget, nodead, harm] Dark Command

 

Unlimiter

Dps it pretty much comes down to frost for runic power management.
12/52/7 Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Reasoning for the build it has all the necessity's, a similar build is the 14/50/7 but it lacks some of the fundamentals of a frost build you really need 3/3 rp mastery. As the build has a 15+ carryover of rp, which can easily get up to 35 with a rime proc.

Geared Dk's @ 80 will be pulling on average 15k armor. with bladed this nets about 415ap so Unbreakable Armor nets 105 ap + 10% str which is damn nice for a 1 min cd. I don't understand why people skip it.

As for rotations here they are.

IT25- PS35- BS45- BS55- OB75- FS35

OB55 - OB75 - OB95 - FS55 - FS15

IT =25
PS =10
BS =10
BS =10
OB =20
FS =40

4pc t7 changes this to

IT25 - PS35 - BS45 - BS55 - OB85 - FS45

OB75 - FS35 - OB65 - FS25 - OB55 -FS15

IT =25
PS =10
BS =10
BS =10
OB =30
FS =40


The only real variables to the rotation are dodges(same as every build), and rime procs 15% chance once per cycle of some extra damage and runic power. Seeing as HB is bugged and gives 15 per target hit +5 rp. Its a nice little boost of damage.

As for gearing your DK its very simple.
1. Get hit capped
2. Get exp capped
3. Avoid haste

 

Oxylos

Does getting that 105 ap and 10% str for one rotation make up for having one less frost rune/obliterate that rotation?