Jan 10

Welcome to Part 3 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about death knight DPS.
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Death Knight DPS

The basic goal of any DPS character is always the same: to do the most damage possible without pulling aggro. With the proper spec (and we will discuss each in depth later), rotation, gear, and skill, a death knight is capable of putting out quite a bit of damage. So let’s jump right into it!

Gear and Attributes

As we discussed earlier, DPS death knights will want to focus on the following attributes, in order:

• Hit rating (until you reach the raid cap of 295, assuming a two-handed weapon)
• Strength/Attack Power (2 attack power per point of strength, strength scales w/ Blessing of Kings, etc.)
• Agility/Crit Rating

These are the most beneficial attributes for a DPS death knight. Armor penetration and haste, while better than nothing, are not that great for death knights.

Buff Food

There are several types of buff food that are very beneficial for a DPS death knight. Level cooking, or make friends with a cook!

• Attack Power Food: Mammoth Meal, Mega Mammoth Meal
• Hit Rating Food: Snapper Extreme
• Crit Rating Food: Wyrm Delight, Spiced Wyrm Burger

Diseases

Icy Touch and Plague Strike both apply a disease to the target (Frost Fever and Blood Plague). The unholy talent Crypt Fever (and Ebon Plaguebringer) apply a third disease to the target whenever either of the other two are active. Keeping targets diseased is important, as they cause damage over time and amplify the damage of your strikes when active on a target. Pestilence is a great spell for AoE situations, when you want to get your diseases on all targets in range quickly.

Give it a Shout! … Sorta.

Death knights have an ability similar to a warrior’s shout, but not a shout, per se: Horn of Winter. It buffs you and your party’s/raid’s strength and agility. Right now it costs runic power to use, after patch 3.0.8, it will instead generate runic power and have a 30 second cooldown.

Ghouls

Death knights have an ability called Raise Dead. This ability will change in patch 3.0.8, but first let’s look at how it works now.

Before Patch 3.0.8

First, if you target an NPC humanoid corpse, or you have Corpse Dust (sold by reagent vendors) in your inventory, you can summon a non-controllable pet called a ghoul. This “default” ghoul works much like a druid’s treants used to, using it’s sometimes unpredictable AI brain to help you kill stuff. The ghoul will stick around for two minutes, at which time he will despawn (or, more accurately, fall apart). Three minutes later, when the cooldown on Raise Dead is over, you can do it again.

Second, if you instead target a dead party member (say, who died in an instance, etc), you can use Raise Dead to raise that player as a ghoul. Your five-minute cooldown will still trigger, but this ghoul will be controllable by the player you targeted! As a ghoul, the player will have access to abilities that depend on energy, like a rogue, including some basic attacks, a stun, and a “self-destruct button” that causes them to explode and do AoE damage.

Finally, if you spec unholy and take the talent Master of Ghouls, any ghoul raised from the corpse of an NPC of via Corpse Dust will be given a pet bar, be under your direct control, and will not have a limited duration. (If he dies, you still have to wait for the cooldown on Raise Dead.) Unholy ghouls, as they are referred to, can be very beneficial in both PvE and PvP, and put out a decent amount of DPS. This is part of the reason unholy is such a popular leveling spec–but that’s for a later article.

After patch 3.0.8

This spell will be split into two spells: Raise Dead, which will raise a pet for you like normal, and Raise Ally, which will only raise a fallen player character and has no reagent cost and a 4-minute duration. The cooldowns will be separate.

DPS Rotations

Though we will cover specific rotations for different talent specs later in the series, the basic attack pattern is still the same:

1. Use Icy Touch or Plague Strike to get one disease on the target, then use the other to get the other disease up. This uses up a frost rune and an unholy rune:

2. Use your double-rune ability (Obliterate, Howling Blast, Death Strike or Scourge Strike, depending on talent spec). This ability uses one frost and unholy rune at the same time:

3. Do something with your blood runes. This depends heavily on talent spec, so for now we’ll stick with the basic Blood Strike (two of them in succession):

4. While waiting for your frost and unholy runes to come back, use one of your runic power dumps (we’ll stick with Death Coil here).

5. Once your runes are cooled down again…

…you will generally use your double-rune ability twice in a row (since your diseases are already on the target).

AoE Rotations

Death and Decay is one of the death knight’s strongest AoE spell–but be careful, it is also a high threat ability. Don’t pull aggro from the tank! We’ll talk about AoE strategies more in the talent spec articles, but take a look at the tanking article under “Tanking Rotations” to get a better idea of the abilities you’d use in an AoE situation (they are very similar).

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Unholy Tree
2. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking
3. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Blood Tree
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Basics