Death knight PvE guide

Death knight PvE abilites and raid utility

 * Death knights have 6 runes: 2 blood, 2 frost, and 2 unholy. Each has its own 10-second cooldown.
 * Death knights provide several buffs or debuffs to a raid:
 * All death knights provide Horn of Winter, a straight buff to strength and agility.
 * All death knights debuff mobs with Frost Fever, reducing attacking speed by 20%.
 * Blood death knights may give Abomination's Might, increasingly raidwide attack power by 10%.
 * Unholy death knights provide Ebon Plaguebringer, increasing all magic damage done to the affected targets by 8%.
 * DPS frost death knights provide Improved Icy Talons, increasing all melee and ranged haste by 10%.

Death knight PvE guide
Death knights are able to dual wield and use two-handed weapons.

Death knight skills scale off Attack Power, not Spell Power.

Blood Presence should ONLY be used if you are the tank. Use Frost Presence or Unholy Presence when you are DPS.
 * If, however, the tank dies, a DPS DK who switches to Blood Presence and gains aggro on mobs might save the group.


 * Do not Death Grip or Death and Decay in an instance while DPSing unless you know what you are doing. Generally if you're in Frost Presence and the tank has sufficient AOE aggro it should be safe to use Death and Decay, but be cautious because it causes extra threat. Death Grip taunts enemies, which isn't usually a good idea unless the alternative is a clothie taking the hits. Using Death Grip on mobs that primarily use ranged attacks during a pull where the tank is having difficulty rounding the mobs up will probably earn you a word of thanks, but be especially careful about doing this in Cataclysm Heroic dungeons; you need to make sure you can take the hit while the tank gets the mob off you. If you are Death Gripping in this way, once the mob is within the Tank's range, make sure you switch to another mob that is being tanked, as any action on the gripped mob will further increase your already high level of threat against it.

Tanking
Blood is the Death Knight's tanking tree; all the important tanking talents are located in this tree. Blood Presence is essential for tanking, as it increases your threat generation.

Tanking relies on Frost Fever being on an entire group. Try not to let it wear off on the group for a long time period. A healer will not be prepared for an unanticipated increase of 15-20% extra damage from a melee group in the middle of a fight. This could lead to them wasting a cooldown or even letting you die if happening at a bad moment. You are most vulnerable during your initial pull when no opponents have Frost Fever, especially with a druid healer who won't have all their HoT's active on you yet. For a difficult fight this is generally the best time to use defensive abilities like Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield, or Icebound Fortitude.

Death Grip is great for pulling casters. Use it to pull the caster into your AoE and out from areas where he may aggro a patrol, but be sure to use Line of Sight to pull the rest of the casters, too. Strangulate is another great means of pulling casters when up. Most bosses are immune to the 'grab' effect of Death Grip, but not to the taunt effect.

Death Grip is not always the best pulling method, however, against melee opponents. Death Grip will cause the melee foe to begin attacking immediately (without having to run to you), without the damage mitigation of Frost Fever. In harder instances this added damage can force a healer to heal sooner then they would like, possible before you have had a chance to build much aggro against the rest of the group that were still running towards you. In addition if the healer (or others) do get aggro you will have one of your taunts already on cooldown. Icy Touch is a convenient ranged alternative for pulling.

One thing to keep in mind is that Death Grip has a slightly longer range (by 5 yards) than Dark Command; unless you have Saronite Bombs or similar Engineering devices, it is the longest-range pulling ability you have. In situations where stepping forward a little too much could expose your group to cleave or cone attacks, for example, when tanking Shambling Horrors and picking up Drudge Ghouls, use Death Grip instead of Dark Command.

Stats
A death knight's hit cap is 8%. With two-handed weapons at level 80, this is a hit rating of 262. At level 85, the Hit cap remains at 8%, but requires much more hit rating to achieve this - 960 for non-Draenei and 840 for Draenei. Death Knight spell abilities(Death Coil, Icy Touch, etc) are no longer subject to additional miss penalties as the old Virulence talent(9% spell hit) has been made baseline. Death knights choosing to dual wield have an additional penalty of 19% (16% with talent) to hit with both weapons, but this only affects auto-attack damage. Special attacks such as Blood Strike have the normal 8% cap. Raising hit over 8% is expensive, so ignoring the 19% miss and investing in other stats is the correct strategy.

Block is useless to death knights as they lack the ability to use shields.

Strength is a death knight's priority stat for DPS, and the key threat stat for tanking, as it increases attack power and parry rating. 3.7 STR = 1 parry rating since Cataclysm, as the base contribution to parry rating from Strength has been increased to 27%. Although their item budget cost is the same, one point of strength is preferable to two points of attack power because several buffs and talents increase strength directly by a percentage.

Stamina provides 15 additional health per point, and is thus the key stat for tanking. Blood Presence and several talents and buffs further increase stamina.

Rune-based attacks generate Runic power. Runic Power is generated at 10 RP per rune consumed. Chill of the Grave makse specific attacks generate additional runic power.

Defense skill no longer exists as of 4.0.1, so you'll need 2 talent points in Improved Blood Presence to become uncrittable by mobs.

Dodge and Parry are important for tanking. Because of Diminishing returns, Death Knights should try to maintain similar levels of buffed dodge and parry ratings.

Expertise cap at level 80 for Death knights is 60 or 15% for tanks and 26 or 6.5% for DPS.

Expertise Conversion
 * At lv60: 2.5 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise
 * At lv70: 3.92 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise
 * At lv80: 8.195 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise
 * 1 Expertise = 0.25% chance that your attack will not be dodged/parried.

Note that tanks should not aim for the expertise cap over other stats as it is unreasonably high. Rune Strike cannot be dodged or parried anyway.

Agility boosts melee critical strike chance and (slightly) dodge chance. It is not an efficient way of achieving either of these things, but not useless either.

Intellect, spirit, spellpower, MP5, HP5 and spell penetration are absolutely worthless.

Mage
Mages are squishy like all cloth wearers. You can help them out the most by keeping the mobs away from them, by using Death Grip, Chains of Ice, or even by taking aggro off the mage using Dark Command if necessary. Frost Death Knights can make use of frost mages spells to increase DPS. Remember your Hungering Cold is one of the few non-mage spells that a frost mages shatter will work with. Cordinating use of this ability can help you to CC adds while doing heavy burst damage on the target shattered opponent.

Rogue
Rogues are the premier melee damage dealers and they excel in forms of crowd control. Unlike you, however, he only has leather armor to protect him from damage. Because of this, you should take the aggro and allow him to go all out on his damage. Allow him to sap/blind/gouge to take care of any unwanted extra attention from mobs.

Hunter
As a death knight, you have several abilities that can compliment a hunter's ranged attacks well. Using Death Grip will keep runners away from the hunter and allow them to DPS more consistently, as well as Chains of Ice as a way to slow mobs. As a plate wearer, you can easily be a strong tank and thus be ideal for keeping pace with a Hunter's purely ranged attacks.

When specced Unholy, the Master of Ghouls capabilities allows you to have a constant pet just like a hunter, making a formidable combination. While specced frost, you can take advantage of the Hunter's freezing trap to freeze targets, empowering your spells like Howling Blast. Overall, a death knight is an excellent partner to a Hunter.

Paladin
Both of you are very durable classes with plate armor, great burst and sustained damage abilities, and you have some abilities to heal yourself, whereas the paladin's healing abilities greatly surpass yours. Be sure to get Blessing of Might from him at all times, as it will increase your melee damage.

Overall, you are both very similar; heavily armored melee attackers with lots of utility. The single largest difference is that the paladin has only one ranged attack unless he is speced deep Protection or Holy.

Warrior
A plate-wearing class much like yourself, warriors are DPS/tanking hybrids. If they are Protection specced, allow them to take aggro as you both break down your foes. If he is specced Arms or Fury, you may be the better tank depending on your talents. Let whoever has a more tanking-oriented spec take the damage.

Alternatively, against a powerful foe you, can share the damage. You tank first with Frost Presence until your health gets down to 20%, then have the warrior switch to Defensive Stance and taunt. While the warrior is tanking, you can switch to Blood Presence and use your healing abilities to regenerate some health so that you're ready to take aggro back when the warrior's health drops too low.

Warlock
Warlocks are much like Mages, in that they have the least armor available of all classes, being cloth only wearers. To make up for this however, they come with awesome damage and their own pocket pet to either contribute to their damage, assist in crowd control, or to be their personal tank. Regardless, you should never allow a mob to directly hit the warlock, you or his pet should have aggro at all times.

Priest
Priests are also squashies, and as such you should keep mobs off them as much as possible. Priests come in 2 varieties: healing oriented (a Holy build) or dps/pvp build (Discipline or Shadow). Shadow priests deal damage much like yourself, and Discipline has talents more focused on pvp utility and survivability. Hold aggro as much as possible and have the priest heal you when necessary.

Druid
Druids have a large range of squishiness, depending on their shapeshift form. For simplicity, you should probably consider everything except Bear Form somewhat squishy. You'll want to keep mobs away from caster druids, and allow melee druids (cat and bear) to stay on the mob.

Shaman
The shaman will be wondering which totems he should drop. If you have Icy Talons, make sure to tell him not to bother with Windfury. If you're tanking and the shaman is healing, he probably has Earth Shield which is a reactive healing shield that he can put on you. Remember to speak to the Shaman about not placing Strength of Earth Totem as you will be using Horn of Winter as both of these provide the same buff and can not stack. It is better they place a different Earth totem such as Stoneskin or Earthbind.