deathknights! ZOMG so much fun to play! My team is feral druid 3 blood spec death knights, and i've found a bunch of useful and fun stuff about this setup.

I'm reluctant to drop my druid and level up 2 more dk's to 80 as i've already got my druid and the other 3 geared up somewhat, so my basis isn't a full box team experience but i do have some pointers for you guys out there

First off, i DO NOT use a round robin macro for deathgrip, i much rather prefer an on demand modifier for each alt ie lets say caps lock is my D.G. caps on my main toon, ctrl caps shift caps alt caps takes up the other 3... this way i can on demand if someone pops a trinket to grab them back without worrying about the macro firing, its a little harder to remember whose is on cooldown but its also a lot easier than round robin and with a ZERO miss percentage unless you forget to watch/time it

lots of people say that unholy is the way to go, i however prefer blood spec, and quite a bit lately i've added and found a few new tricks. Unholy is pretty good atm for a few reasons tho, i'll rant mroe about that at the end of the post after my Blood spec goodies.
First- Almost everyone here that's playing deathknights knows about the runetap skill, improved runetap, and the runetap glyph.... what you might not know is if you glyph for vampiric blood AND runetap, when you pop vampiric blood and then 3 runetaps thats about a 98 % heal for the whole party... ie vamp heals 3 % (glyph) runetap heals self for 20%(improved) and then each of those heals is increased by vampiric bloods ability, on top of the other 2 dks (if you only pop 3 at a time) for another 20 + vampiric blood modifier, in pvp this oh shit button is rediculously overpowered. Couple this with antimagic shell, icebound fortitude, licheborne if you go frost some for anhillation(spelling), Deathstrike for even more healing, 3-5 blood auras if you go that route for even more stacking healing.... i can go on and on, retarded utility survivability is what i'm getting at. I think the only thing lacking in blood will be fixed by the patch 3.08 (lack of aoe ability vs the other specs) and (more healing via blood aura doubled, and deathstrike's healing doubled)

Okay nuff said bout the healing bit, it seems a lot like theory craft when written down on paper, but trust me when i say you REALLY should try it out =)

Another crazy fun useful thing i've found in the blood tree is dancing rune weapon. While it seems a kind of lackluster "bleh" cooldown, there ARE some fun things about it. First things first it mimics EVERYTHING you do only a little less powered..... everything except for rune tap from what i've tested... these abilities that i've found most useful/frigging amazing are listed below:
1. Death and Decay - it gets doubled from the sword... ie the drw drops its own death and decay when you do
2. Summon Ghoul - if you summon your ghoul while drw is up, it will summon its own ghoul!
3. any powerful weapon strike - when you disease strike(icy/plague) it does it too, heart strikes obliterates.... LOTS of dps here its kinda silly (note***not sure if it heals you when it hits with deathstrike, i may do some solo dk play to test this)
4. The best and the beautiful of the lvl 80 dk skill..... some of you have yet to hit level 80, but tbh its worth it just to do this on some poor unsuspecting fools on the alliance/horde side of your choosing doom. First you've gotta save up some runic power via dpsing other stuff, once you have 100 drop your dancing rune weapon, army of the dead, summon ghoul, death and decay and watch... as all of your assailants SHIT themselves with what happens next..... each of your deathknights will summon two sets of 8 army of the dead**one per deathknight, and one per deathknights dancing rune weapon** 2 ghouls per dk and then death and decay(abuse the death and decay glyph while you can! )

If you've not yet seen army of the dead on its own then you may not understand, but seeing 2 sets of it off a blood spec deathknight is just amazingly fun and funny... you LITERALLY have a small army (lets say you only 4 box 4 dk's) thats about ...oh 72 if you get the full army and ghouls off

Chains of ice any poor slob in your way and run away spamming /lol! :thumbsup: pure win

as for a damage rotation i usually follow elitistjerks info on their dk dps compendium
for blood spec its something like this on a 20 second rotation: first 10 seconds should go icy touch, plague strike, heart strike, heart strike, obliterate and death coil till you cant anymore... your runes should be coming back up now, so the next 10 seconds should go like this icy touch plague strike, heart strike heart strike heart strike obliterate obliterate deathcoil till the end then repeat step one. Throw in pestilence somewhere in there for aoe pulls, blood boil is kinda low dmg unless you load up all the enemys with diseases, death and decay is a little meh for placement cuz i software box and dont like to use it for the clumsy mousing over windows approach but it's useful for aoe.

for aoe pulls i pick the biggest beefiest mob i can and load it up with icytouch plaguestrikes and pestilence to spread the diseases, then heartstrikes to try to get the runes to cooldown as death runes. If they do, my next move is to spam blood boil and try to pestilence to keep up the diseases on everything i can so that you can maximize bloodboil aoe dmg>


UNHOLY hmm unholy spec i've not tried much, one reason is because i like the healing and utility of the blood tree, the other reason being that ebon plague doesn't stack, so one of your deathknights will ALWAYS be doing more dmg than the others... thats not a bad thing really, but its not good either This isnt saying that the unholy tree doesn't have utility... far from it, so lets discuss a bit what it has for goodies.
1. the big thing i think, is the permanent pet ghoul... oh how many times i'd wish i had him to help me out as blood spec. From what i've seen with the right spec/glyphs, these lil bad boys can do some decent work! Keeping them alive with deathcoil every now and then tho, seems like a pain in the azz, way too much micro management with targeting and what not... more macros, more keybinds to memorize, bleh!
2. unholy aoe abilities... wandering plague, the other aoe abilities that slow enemies... in pvp this seems just too good, instancing would also benefit i think because unholy really can dish out some decent aoe moreso than blood spec, and there are PLENTY of aoe fights all over wotlk to take advantage
3. anti magic ZONEoftotallawesomeness - I've seen a couple posts but yet to try it, but theoretically, with all of your deathknights as unholy with antimagic zone, you can keep it up pretty much 100 % of the time round robin style ... in pvp this can be very useful, as it will be very hard to burst the bubble, if they do, pop another lol deathgrip them in to a glyphed death and decay and watch as they cower in fear and die... in fights like halls of stone or halls of lightning where the bosses do some heavy spell dmg you can pretty much zone through the whole fight, and if the zone pops you can pop your antimagic shell and prevent whatever you can till the next zone goes up.

I believe i've been ranting long enough, and i wish i could cover unholy dps rotations, and frost spec information, but alas i'm not well versed in those areas, tho i'm going to try them eventually... good luck guys, if anyone would liek to see the spec i use let me know here on this thread and i'll do what i can to help out with an talent spec calculator link :thumbup:

good luck!