World of Warcraft Death Knight Guide   

The Death Knight is the only class in World of Warcraft to be released after the actual launch. Because of this it is somewhat of an advanced class and as such this World of Warcraft Death Knight Guide should help you smoothen your game play as you unleash your unholy powers upon Azeroth. 

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Here you will find help with every aspect of your death knight to improve your leveling speed while a thorough quest and gold guide gives you a smooth ride through the levels. Anyway, let’s get back to my World of Warcraft Death Knight Guide. 

Getting Started 

The Death Knight is the only class in World of Warcraft that can choose from all the races. As such one should put a little bit more thought into picking a race. That is unless you care more about min maxing than being focused on how your character looks. As looks are personal preference I will of course stick to making a decision based on racials! 

Alliance 

Dwarf – A fair choice, mainly granting you the ability to remove poison, bleed and disease effects once every 2 minutes while also granting an expertise bonus when using maces and two handed maces allowing you to go for different stats on your items. 

Gnome- An excellent choice for players mainly interested in player versus player (PvP) combat as you get a racial that allows you to get out of any root or snare effects instantly. This onto the often underestimated 15 bonus engineering passive allows you to build an excellent PvP character. 

Human-They get a racial which acts as a PvP trinket. Basically a PvP trinket is a must have in Player versus player allowing you to free up that trinket slot for your personal preferences. On top of that they get a small detection boost against stealth users and an expertise boost when using one- and two-handed maces and swords. 

Night Elf- Not particularly useful although the rooted stealth from shadow meld can come in handy. Plus if you die a lot for whatever reason you get 75% faster movement speed in ghost form! 

Draenei- You get a scaling self heal over time and a group based aura that increases everybody’s chance to hit by 1% with both spells and attacks. Draenei is always a solid choice for a raider as the aura is quite desired. 

Horde 

Orc- Arguably the most powerful race for a Death Knight as you benefit from all racials. You get an ability to give you extra attack power for 15 seconds, a 15% duration reduction on stuns used on you, a 5% increase to your pet damage and a bonus to expertise when using one and two handed axes. 

Tauren- You get the always popular war stomp to stun everybody but unfortunately that’s about it as well. 

Trolls- Berserking gives you a 20% attack speed bonus for 10 seconds every 3 minutes and a passive 15% snare duration reduction. Not a bad choice at all. 

Forsaken- Mainly you gain will of the forsaken, allowing you to break any charm, fear or sleep effect on you once every 2 minutes. Very powerful in player versus player combat. Cannibalize allows you to heal yourself on humanoid and undead corpses. It’s a great leveling racial for most classes but the death knight already has plenty of ways to keep going and as such it’s quite redundant. 

Blood Elf-Arcane torrent gives you a 2 second silence in a small radius around you while also granting you 15 runic power (which use will be discussed later). On top of a 2% bonus to spell evasion definitely a worthy choice for player versus player. If you wish to level enchanting on your death knight you also get a +10 bonus as a blood elf which can make leveling it up considerably cheaper. 

The Death Knight Roles 

Damage – In the current state of the game you can chose to deal damage in 2 the 3 talent trees available to you. You can choose between either frost or unholy. Which one you choose will depend on your prefered playstyle. If you like to dual wield and find dealing frost damage more interesting than doing so through diseases you'll most likely prefer the frost tree. On the other hand, the unholy tree deals damage through diseases, their 2 handed weapon attacks and their permanent or temporary pets that they can summon. 

Tanking-The other role you can take on is being the meat shield or tank for your group. As of the patch introducing the cataclysm talent changes to World of Warcraft the only tanking tree left is now the blood tree. The advantage of this is that all the good stuff from every tree related to tanking was pretty much moved to the blood tree. The death knight tanking revolves around a lot of self healing and in the proces applying shields which will absorb damage.

The Death Knight mechanics 

Rune mechanic- The way a death knight deals damage is that they use abilities which consume a specific rune, being blood frost or unholy, which then gets put on a 10 second cooldown. When you just enter the game you will have plague strike and blood strike. plague strike requires an unholy rune and blood strike a blood rune. Since you get 2 runes of each type and both of these strikes require only 1 of the respective runes you could use 2 plague strikes and 2 blood strikes before you would have to wait for the cooldown on the runes. As you gain more abilities you will find skills using between one, two or even all three runes. This is where you have to plan out how to most efficiently use your runes to do as much damage as possible. 

Runic Power- Using most death knight abilities will grant you a secondary resource called Runic Power. Runic Power is used differently by every tree. As such blood specced death knights will use an ability to called death coil to clear their runic power, frost uses the talented frost strike while unholy uses it to summon their temporary gargoyle pet and the rest on death coils. Beyond all this there are certain other abilities which all death knights use that also require runic power.  

Rune Forging- Unlike other classes the Death Knights get their own weapon enchantments. The only cost is having to travel back to their starting area (which you get a portal ability to) and standing next to the runeforge. These weapon enchantments vary from buffs which have a chance to greatly increase your strength, or more defensive buffs granting you more health and defensive capabilities. 

If you wish to continue reading this World of Warcraft Death Knight Guide you can find page 2 here, WoW Death Knight Guide

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