WoW: Death Knight Class Guide

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WoW: Death Knight Class Guide

Posted November 17th, 2009 by Xerin

Our complete Death Knight guide.

Death Knights are World of Warcraft's first Hero class. They were brought into the game with the release of the second expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King. They are an extremely powerful hybrid class that specializes in tanking and damage dealing through the use of both magic and melee with a strong emphasis on melee.

Need more flavor? See our in-depth description of the DK

Our Ten Ton Hammer Death Knight Guide is full of information to help Death Knights of all skill levels. It’s full of helpful information such as guides, tactics, walkthroughs, ability info, how to get through the starting zone, and more. It’s constantly evolving so check back often for changes and updates. We also have an active Death Knight forum available where you can come ask any questions not already answered by this guide or submit some ideas to help expand the guide further.

There are two ways to navigate this guide. The top menu (look up there) has a list of all of the current content while the bottom menu gives a good description of where stuff is at. Confused and just want to get started? Then start with the Death Knight Basics.

Death Knight Overview

Death Knight Overview

Hybrid Tank/DPS class. Can do DPS or tank with ease.
Uses a variety of melee abilities and close combat spells to fight. Unique playstyle.
Hero class that's unlocked whenever you get one character to level 55.

Death Knight Strengths

Starts at level 55 with a full set of gear and can earn a complete rare (blue) set of gear by the time they are 57.
Level extremely fast through the first Death Knight zone and quest chain and are re-leased into the Outlands where they continue to level quickly until the mid-sixties.
Very self reliant when soloing through Blood abilities that heal themselves as they deal damage.
Runes and Runic energy recharge quickly, meaning that you can adventure almost non-stop.
Death Knights are the best tank in the game when fighting casters with various spell-damage reduction and avoidance abilities.
Can switch between tanking and damage dealing very easily, and can do both decently in a single talent build.

Death Knight Weaknesses

In much the same way as Druids tank without a shield, so do Death Knights. This makes them take damage in a more erratic manner than Warriors or Paladins as they are subject to occasional strings of large unmitigated hits.
Death Knights are a very complicated class to play well. One must manage runes, runic power and cooldowns to play them well and stay alive. When they have none of these left they are as good as dead.

mage in epics

Armor: Plate
Races: All

Melee Hybrid DPS/Tank

Death Knights were once the soldiers of the Lich King, but have regained their freedom and allied with both the Horde and the Alliance.

Death Knight Guide Contents

Name	Description
Basics	All the basics to the Death Knight in one place. This is the best starting place in the guide.
Combat	Our "Playing a Death Knight" guide goes over basic battle techniques to make sure death and destruction is brought to your enemies.
Runes and Runic Power	Never used the Runes and Runic Power resource system before? This explains how combat works with runes.
Death Knight Starting Area	The Death Knight starting area guide that gets you through the starting area FAST.
Ebon Hold	What's the Ebon Hold? Find out here.
Death Knight Leveling Guide	What to do and how to level 55 through 80 quickly. Excellent guide to follow.
Glyphs	What glyphs should a Death Knight use? This guide answers all that.
PvP Basics	Death Knights and PvP? Well, it happens and this guide goes over Death Knights in PvP
Gearing Up a DK for Raiding	Are you ready to get into raiding? This guide goes into basic gear for new Death Knights.
U.I. Mods	What U.I. mods work well with Death Knights? This article tells all.
Raid Gear (Patch 3.1)	An excellent article on raid gear in patch 3.1.
Enhancements (Patch 3.1)	How to enchant/gem your Death Knight.
Talent Guide (Patch 3.1)	Our Death Knight talent guide for patch 3.1. Goes into detail about a lot of talents.
Death Knight Talent Discussion	Latest DK builds and our community to help with talent questions.

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Want to add something to our Death Knight guide? Do you have an article just waiting to leap out from your computer to the World Wide Web? We'll we can help you share your knowledge with other Death Knights out there!

Here is what needs to be done and some basic rules:

The article should be in doc, docx, rtf, or html format. Other formats can be accepted, but those are generally the easiest. No HTML formating is needed.
Spelling and grammar are not major concerns and the ar...

Nice solid guide, thanks for putting it together.

Here are a few thoughts as I read through it:

Would be nice to see some Tanking and 2H talent builds, I didn't look at the Blood build but both Frost & Unholy you had DW builds.

For racials, the biggest appeal for a Night Elf is Quickness, and for the min/maxer's out there this is the reason why NE's are the best Alliance tanking race over Dwarves.

Human racials

Hi, good guide, I just have to respectfully object to this:

Humans have the weakest set of racials, except when it comes to grinding for reputation.

That may have been true at one time, but nowadays, humans come with Sword Specialization (+3 expertise) and Every Man for Himself (free PVP trinket without using the trinket slot? yes please!). Add to that the aforementioned Diplomacy (+10% rep gains) and you have a solid basis to push all the way to 80.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hardyoyo

Xerin, I'll compile some DK builds for addition to the guide if you want. I know they're making changes at the moment for 3.1 so I might wait until those start to settle out a bit, but that would probably be helpful to people.

Daniel

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