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Death Knight PVE guide
All Death Knight trees are viable for PvP DPS, PvE DPS and Tanking.
Some talents, however, are better for tanking than others. Each tree has solid early tanking talents, such as Blade Barrier, Anticipation, and Toughness. Depending on what tree you specialize in, pick up Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield, or Unbreakable Armor.
Death Knights are able to dual wield and use two-handed weapons.
Tanking, especially for frost speced tanks, 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.
As an extension of this you are most vulnerable during your initial pull when no opponents have Frost Fever up, especially with a druid healer who won't have all hits 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 Unbreakable Armor.
If you're going to tank as a Death Knight it is okay to dual wield while doing it, though unadvised, as the mob or boss has a higher chance to parry therefore increasing its attack speed for the next swing. This will therefore increase the mob's damage to you. Furthermore, dual-wielding isn't advised as a lot of abilities are Instant attacks that deal a percentage of weapon damage + x. When dual wielding, these abilities don't count both weapons for the "Weapon damage" variable, they only count your main hand weapon. The reason for dual-wielding would be higher avoidance granted by using two tanking weapons.
Frost Presence should ONLY be used if you are the tank, as it increases your threat generation significantly. Even if you are specced in Frost tree, use Blood Presence or Unholy Presence when you are DPS.
If you're tanking, Death Grip is great for pulling casters. Use it to pull the caster into your AoE and out from areas where he may agro 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
Death Grip is not always the best pulling method, especially against melee opponents. By using it you ensure a melee foe will be striking you immediately (without having to run to you) without the damage mitigation of Frost Fever while your trying to position the pull. 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 agro against the rest of the group that were still running towards you. In addition if the healer (or others) do get agro you will have one of your taunts already on cooldown.
consider using Icy Touch for melee groups. This gives you time to position the fight while they are running while your disease helps create a small initial agro on the main target. This also speeds the rate that Frost Fever is spread to the entire group, healers will appreciate the lowered damage output being applied sooner.
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 Blood 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.
Placing talent points in talents which create Death runes are advised to increase both Threat and DPS. The following talents can create Death runes: Death Rune Mastery from the Blood tree, Blood of the North from the Frost tree and Reaping from the Unholy tree.
Our skills scale off Attack Power, not Spell Power.
A Death Knight's hit cap is 9%, this with two-handed weapons at level 80 is 295.11. For our spells Death coil, Icy Touch and Howling Blast you will need a 17% hit or 445.91 hit rating. This can be decreased with Virulence a 2nd tier Unholy talent by 3% or 78.69 hit rating and again by Misery a Shadow Priest debuff by an additional 3%. Death knights choosing to dual wield have an additional penalty of 19% (16% with talent) to hit with both weapons but this does only affect auto-attack damage. Special attacks such as blood strike have the normal 9% cap. Raising hit over 9% is expensive thus ignoring the 19% miss and investing in other stats may be the correct strategy.
Block is useless to us as we don't use shields.
Strength is our priority stat as it increases our attack power and parry rating, 4 STR = 1 parry rating.
Rune based attacks generate Runic power. Attacks which require one rune generates 10 Runic power, 2 runes for 15 and 3 runes for 20.
Defense cap at level 80 is 540.
Expertise cap at level 80 for Death knights is 60 for tanks and 26 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.