Death Knight

Figured this one should be added so I'll take the liberty.

This is a new class and unlike a lot of other classes a lot of the theory hasn't been worked out yet. I'm compiling some information for myself right now and will update this thread with that information when I have it in a readable format.

Death Knights
I do not guarantee the accuracy of any of this. I'm a rogue, I know my class well but my understanding of other classes is fairly limited and I've had no more experience with Death Knights than anyone else.

Basic Play
Death Knights have a few mechanics that make them unique. I like to think of them as a hybrid of all classes because so many of their mechanics share similarities with other classes. In their role they are very similar to a warrior in that they can either tank or DPS. As such, Blizzard considers them a hybrid class (and all the stuff that goes along with that).

Runes
Death Knights have six runes, two each of Blood, Frost and Unholy. You can use these runes to perform attacks. For instance, Plague Strike costs 1 Unholy rune. Once spent, runes regenerate over time. Some Death Knights have the ability through talents to regenerate or turn some runes as 'Death' runes. These runes are prismatic in that they can be used for any attack that requires a rune.

Runic Power
After spending runes on abilities, the attacks generate runic power. Similar to a warriors rage, this runic power can be used for other attacks. Horn of Winter is a good example of this as is Death Coil.

Between runes and runic power, Death Knights have limited 'juice'. Hitting harder with your spells generates more runic power but runes themselves aren't falling from the sky.

If you're going to play a Death Knight, get an addon to help you. There's a lot more going on with this class than most others and to maximize your effectiveness you need to be aware of 3 types of rune cooldowns, ~3-4 standard attack cooldowns (tied to those runes), 2-3 diseases on your target (and their stack level), your runic power level, 3-4 special attack cooldowns (usable at certain levels of runes and runic power), potentially your pet ghoul, and at least one other thing that I'm forgetting. Sounds like a heroic class to me.

Like all WoW classes, you can faceroll and get the job done but to excel takes time, practice and in-depth knowledge of the class.

Presence
Death Knight have three 'presences'. The descriptions are pretty self explanatory for what they're used for.
Blood Presence DPS'ing
Frost Presence Tanking
Unholy Presence DPS'ing (PvP?)

Runeforging
No Death Knight should ever get their weapon enchanted. The get a special ability to 'attach' runes to their weapon. These are really just enchants that are self only; you can only perform runeforging at a runeforge (duh). Runeforging will overwrite enchants, don't try it. Generally speaking, runeforging will provide scaling enchants better than what you can get otherwise. You'll know all the runeforges you'll ever get by the time you leave the starting zone.

Gear
If Paladins are the 'holy warrior', Death Knights are the 'unholy warrior'. If it works for a warrior, it will work for you, tanking or DPS. FYI, you can't carry shields; leave those for paladins and warriors.


Tanking
Death Knights are 2hand or dual wield tanks. They have the lowest armor of any tanking class but do have abilities such as Bone Shield which are meant to be used when bosses have a temporary frenzy effect, etc.

All three trees can tank and have abilities in there that allow for that. Similar to the Druid feral tree though, taking tanking abilities hurts your DPS and taking the DPS abilities hurts your survivability.

That said current data shows that over the course of a long fight, a Death Knight tank will take far less total damage than any other tanking class... by a wide margin. This is done with very high avoidance. Here's the basic data, first set is with T7 gear, second set is just to show scaling (T9?), the first columns of data assume your blowing cooldowns and the second is just raw:

seconds till death - avoidance / seconds till death - raw
Paladin
15.5 / 5.9
Warrior
15.5 / 6.0
Death Knight
26.0 / 5.6
Druid
18.4 / 9.9

If you scale gear up 30%

Paladin
25.6 / 7.9
Warrior
26.2 / 8.0
Death Knight
45.2 / 7.9
Druid
25.1 / 12.4

The basic idea is that without healing a T9 Death Knight can tank a T9 boss for around 45 seconds on average before eating dirt, the closest to that is the Warrior with just over 26. That's great, all tanks should now re-roll Death Knights... Well, no, not really.

See that's the thing, Death Knight tanking isn't for those who the RNG is unkind to. Through high avoidance you take a lot less damage, but without a shield or the armor bonus of a bear well, when you do get hit, it's going to knock around 60-80% of your health off. Avoidance is high enough that you shouldn't be gib'd immediately after that but your healers better be on the ball and get you to 100% fast. A good analogy would be a Rogue evasion tanking Gurtogg Bloodboil, he can avoid most of it but when he gets hit you can see the health plummet and you need to get him back up ASAP in time for the next hit.

Death Knight tanking abilities are amazing, but like all tanks there are some situations where they excel and some where they, well, tank.

Damage Dealing (DPS)
There's a lot going on in all three trees. I could go through talents and talk about them all but you're all smart people... well, most of you.

Blood
This tree emphasizes healing, well stealing life. Very dependent on having a good 2hander (this tree has the 2hander spec). Much like the warrior arms tree, the weapon makes this tree. I'd use this for leveling myself because it has very little downtime with all the self-healing your damage does. This is the tree with the single target buff that everyone wants, Hysteria! (The mechanics of Hysteria also make the target immune to many types of CC.)

Frost
This tree is all about control much like the Mage frost tree. This tree has the dual wield spec. Most people see this as the tanking tree simply because the Frost Presence shares the name but this isn't true, any spec can potentially tank provided they turn on Frost Presence. The DPS is very good and it brings a nice raid buff with Improved Icy Talons (for melee).

Unholy
This tree is all about your pet. I mentioned 2hander and dual wield specs in the other areas but they are low enough in those trees that you can get either easily. I recommend 2handers for all Death Knights though. Right now most people see this as the highest raid DPS spec although that may have more to do with its recent popularity while is was way OP. This one has the debuff for raid spellcasters with Ebon Plaguebringer.

Here you go childrens, fresh from EJ. This isn't it's final form but a rough compilation of Death Knight mechanics for DPS.

Death Knight DPS Compendium

A separate TTT for tanking is in the works but there's no ETA on that yet. If you're planning on rolling a Death Knight as an alt or maybe even as a new main I strongly suggest you read this very carefully and try to understand every bit of it. As I said before, Death Knights have many abilities that are very similar to other classes but the playstyle is much different.

The class is strong enough that you can faceroll your way through leveling and be just fine but in a raid setting you'd better know your stuff or you'll be sucking hind tit. All three trees are very strong in a raid setting for DPS and should be within a few percent of each other so as long as you talent correctly the thought is that you can raid as any of them.

Thanks for the info, tin! I'm really looking forward to rolling one of these, they just seem like they'd be one of those diffucult classes that's also fun to play, and I think the rune system is neat.

I'm -almost- excited enough to level one before Mlu!

Is DK tanking survivability going to stay like that (abnormally low mitigation, abnormally high avoidance)? Is there a blue post that confirms that is intentional, not something they are tuning?

It just sounds wierd, but idk.

Nope, that's the way it's going to be. The talent trees reinforce the idea. Frost Presence does give some bonus armor, at level 80 armor levels this will be about the same as wearing a decent level 70 shield; basically enough to prevent being 1-2 shot.

High avoidance coupled with the flat % magic damage reduction (more with Anti-Magic Shell as well as Unholy's Anti-Magic Zone) is how it's going to be done. (Trivializing things like Kael's Pyroblast even without a shield.)

Instead of a 'shield wall', Death knights get talents to push themselves to >100% avoidance on a similar cooldown. Chain your 'oh shit' buttons properly and that explains why they can stay up without healing so long... if the RNG is kind.

Death Knight tanking; when should Death Knights tank?

I'll try to summarize a lot of what I've read and use it to compare Death Knights to Warriors/Paladins/Druids. As always, this class is new and highly experimental; a lot of this is speculation on the part of both me and other players.

Death Knight vs Warrior
Clearly the Warrior wins. Death Knight tanking is very subject to the RNG and besides all that, it's very new. The Warrior is a well understood class with a long history. Warriors have much higher armor, comparable health and both the 'bag of tricks' and tradition behind them. If we're talking magic damage, it depends on where it's coming from, if it's single target the warrior can spell reflect for threat and damage; single target and AoE the Death Knight simply mitigates.

In terms of threat generation the Death Knight wins; when spec'd properly, Death Knights have the highest threat gen of all the classes on single targets. However, Warrior/Paladin/Druid tanks will be generating between 1-1.5K TPS more than they need at level 80 anyway so this is a moot point.

For pulls, the Death Knight has the edge but only slightly; Death Grip is awesome for pulling casters but bosses are immune.

Death Knight vs Paladin
This one isn't quite a clear but I'm going with the Paladin. Death Knights come in at number two behind Paladins in AoE threat generation. It's good but they're no Paladin, nobody is. What they do have over the Paladin though is in their secondary tanking. Paladins that aren't the mobs target have a much harder time generating threat. It's not as bad as it was in BC but it's still an issue. Death Knights don't suffer from this at all and are more similar to Warriors/Druids in their ability to generate threat as a secondary.

Now that Avengers Shield is instant cast, it's the best pulling tool any tank has. Death Knights have similar tools but must have Runic Power built up so while it's good for regaining agro after a drop, it's not usually available for pulling.

Death Knight vs Druid
Druid all the way. Even with the nerf to bear armor and the diminishing returns on dodge from gear, the Druid is still a beast and just soaking up damage; bears will have (comparatively) much higher health and as much as twice the armor. Crushing blows are gone and bears will taking smaller amounts of predictable damage at fairly regular intervals in contrast the the Death Knights 'sporadic' damage.

So if Death Knights aren't he best tank, when do we use them?
Death Knights make the best secondary tanks. If you have a boss with a 'hurtful strike' mechanic like Gruul; the Death Knight is the best choice. Well timed abilities ensure the Death Knight never gets hit by it while still being able to stay number two on threat.

Death Knights makes great tanks for bosses that continually cast. When spec'd, Death Knights can mitigate massive amounts of both direct and AoE magical damage.

Death Knights have lower/stranger requirements for resistance gear. A Death Knight wouldn't need the gear for a fight like Hydross but would need the gear for flame duty on Illidan. That is to say, in fights where you don't need to be capped, you don't need any of the gear; if you do need to be capped, you need all of the gear.

Death Knights have the fastest threat generation. On bosses that continually drop agro the Death Knight is able to build threat fast enough that DPS downtime isn't needed.

So when do we not use them?
Well, all the tanking classes should be able to main tank now without much problem but they all have weaknesses. Death Knights are susceptible to:

Bosses with a random 'smack'. Timed abilities that hit really hard are avoidable. Random specials that hit combined with normal hits are lethal. The RNG is the god of Death Knights and when big, random abilities are thrown into the mix it's a recipe for disaster.

Fights with lots of AoE damage. Death Knights take very sporadic damage; their assigned healers will be spending a lot of time outside the 5SR which means they will be very tempted to DPS or raid heal, especially on farm content. This takes their focus off the Death Knight and that's not good.

Fights where the boss gives an armor debuff. Death Knights don't have much armor to begin with; take that armor away and they can be one-shot if a hit gets through. In a fight like Brutallus, they can use cooldowns to avoid damage while stomped until the next taunt but it's still quite risky.

About DK tanks as well.
In early Beta... I was putting out.. meh.. 700-800 dps while warrior tanking, in epic gear. I specced dps for a few instances... had a green/blue geared DK tank in my group. 1800 dps while tanking. Not sure if it's been toned down or not since then, but its pretty nuts.

Death Knight tanking DPS is probably going to be pretty high compared to other classes (hence faster threat) but it's not going to be off the charts high like that. Death Knights got a lot of nerfs over the course of the beta.

For example, Unholy Blight was completely rewritten no less that six times now.

"Fights with lots of AoE damage. Death Knights take very sporadic damage; their assigned healers will be spending a lot of time outside the 5SR which means they will be very tempted to DPS or raid heal, especially on farm content. This takes their focus off the Death Knight and that's not good."

I don't think that's a big issue honestly. And I hope it's not an issue at all.

This has come up in guild chat quite a bit and I thought I should say something here.

Death Knights should not dual wield to tank. Dual wielding is for procs and DKs are already subject to enough RNG while tanking; inviting more chance is suicide. It's actually a better PvP idea (though not great there either).

Remember, any extra stats you pick up from dual wielding will get you nothing as you will miss 19% more and be subject to twice as many parries (which results in extra chances to be hit over the course of the fight). 1handers don't have defense on them anymore anyway, just stam, expertise and AP as a general rule.

The 2handers in WotLK are loading with gobs of strength and stam which will benefit DKs greatly. Runeforge a high stam weapon to tank with (some WotLK starting zone green quest reward 2handers have upwards of 100+ stam); runeforge a high DPS weapon to DPS with.

I was thinking about DK tanking specs and came up with something.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=j0xZGx0zZfghu00kxeoRcsut

I went Unholy for the added anti magic versatility of imp. anti-magic shield, anti-magic zone, and that bone shield doesn't lose charges from aoe attacks. Also, the improved spell damage adds into the effectiveness of aoe tanking large groups with pestilence-> blood boil and DnD. Unholy Aura will add raid mobility on any moving fights of which there are many in Naxx.

As far as speccing frost to tank instead, Unbreakable armor is a great cooldown and would be missed. Frost Aura is less than spectacular given that imp mark is 72 resist all at max rank as opposed to the 80 resist all that I've read is the value at 80 for Frost Aura. There is also 3% more avoidance in frost, but given that the MT role will most likely be a non-DK, I didn't think it was a big issue.

Lastly, ebon plague bringer would be up 100% of the time freeing up aff locks to cast CoA or CoD in the absence of a moonkin. We usually don't lack shaman for the other two tree's main raid buffs (icy talons = windfury, abomination's might = unleashed rage/TSA)

Thoughts?

If this is purely a tanking build you can drop Shadow of Death, Master of Ghouls, and Gargoyle; they're not going to help you're tanking much at all and those points can be better spent elsewhere. Corpse Explosion for some nice AoE Threat/Damage is a good spot and putting another two points in Outbreak will help with single target (Plague Strike) and AoE threat (Pestilence) as well.

Well, shadow of death is +2% str and stam for 1 point, that's pretty sweet.

Master of Ghouls I took because the ghoul is actually a pretty decent source of single target dps and blue has said tanking dps will be a part of enrage timers. I took the gargoyle for the same reason.

Corpse Explosion is crap imo due to the fact that it's an unholy rune and I have absolutely no use for 1 frost run in my rotation of

PS-> IT-> pestilence -> blood boil -> SS
or
PS -> IT -> pestilence -> DnD

if I'm AoEing. They should totally move it to RP to make it usable.

I can see your way on Shadow of Death. 2% str/stam is great for a single point. I tend to think of Unholy as a AoE focused tanking build and gravitate towards AoE talents like Corpse Explosion. I've only looked at Blood and Frost Rotations so far so the lack of a free Unholy/Death Rune would present a problem.

As for the Master of Ghouls I have to disagree, unlike Hunters or Warlocks, DKs have no way to heal your pet outside of DC which is a very weak heal and you should be using the RP for DPS/threat. As good as the DPS might be, it's still not as much DPS as a hunter pet and I'm very skeptical of how well the ghoul would survive when it has to rely on player healers to keep it up now that hunter and warlock pets are more prevalent in raids. As for DK tanking DPS, it's already the highest of any of the tanking classes, you shouldn't feel you have to sacrifice tanking abilities to gain increases in DPS (that provide no threat to you).

Gargoyle is a great DPS RP dump but as important as Pestilence/Blood Boil is to Unholy DK tanking I still think Outbreak deserves as many points as you can spare. I picked Gargoyle to drop points from simply because it's pure DPS that provides no threat to you. To keep Gargoyle it might be easier to drop points from Unholy Aura which would give you something like this. Unholy Aura is very nice to have when you don't have a 'charge' ability (only Death Grip) but it's not strictly necessary.