It’ll be interesting to see how this changes over time  – lots of these players are interested in the newest thing, obviously, since they’ve switched their mains to a new class at the first chance, but as things settle down and more people head back to get new alts, maybe we’ll see a different crowd coming out of Acherus.So according to this little survey (and we’ll remind you that this is 500 people, so there are plenty of exceptions out there), the average Death Knight is male, chooses whatever race is most familiar to them, and wants to go kill and do damage rather than worry about socializing or achieving. In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins.

Our friends at Massively and GamerDNA are at it again — they’re digging into their database of players, this time to determine some Death Knight demographics. They want to know what kinds of players are picking up the new Hero class. Unfortunately, their sample size is super small — only 500, according to Sanya Weathers, which seems way too tiny to determine anything about the Death Knight class at large. But we’ll go with it anyway, and see what we can get.

As you can see above, Blood Elves and Humans dominate the race choice in our little group, which seems about right, considering that those are the two most popular races overall.Death Knight players in this study generally tend to have reported themselves as male in real life. And GamerDNA also lays their Death Knights up against the Bartle test and while WoW players trend pretty well to the norm, Death Knights go way more towards the “Killer” and to a lesser extent the “Explorer” end of the scales.

Those days are probably over. Not only was the Gargoyle given a slight nerf to its base damage on the PTR, but its duration was sliced in half, to 30 seconds. I’ve yet to see enough parses to give a final verdict as to whether it’s underpowered now, but it’s a harsh nerf, regardless. With 3.0.8 likely to make it to live servers in the next week or two, this is probably a good time to discuss the Death Knight tweaks that have gone in the last few PTR updates.

Gargoyle

Yeah, Gargoyle got nerfed. I think everyone knew it was coming at some level. It was an amazing source of DPS, so much so that Blood Death Knights found their DPS was better if they dropped Dancing Rune Weapon and picked up Gargoyle instead.

It may also end up being another facet of the 2hand versus dual wield debate, despite being unrelated to weaponry. Unholy is considered the only spec where a 2-handed Death Knight has a chance to keep up against Dual Wielding, and that was in large part because of the Gargoyle. Overall, there’s some concern that nerfing the Gargoyle may have knocked one more 2-handed spec further down the ladder, widening dual wield’s lead in the DPS meters.

Still, if the Gargoyle — one talent — was what we 2-handed disciples needed to pull even to dual wielding, that certain wasn’t the optimal situation either. There’s other adjustments that should be made to bring 2-handers in line with dual wielding, and those adjustments should certainly apply to at least Blood 2-handing as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Now here comes the next question: Will we see a Warlock walking around with Thunderfury just for the heck of it soon? And will we see the class restrictions come off of Illidan’s Warglaives? This certainly would seem to open the door to just that. I have to admit, a pair of those might look cool too. But I’ll still laugh at you if you try to roleplay a Death Knight Demon Hunter.

But of course, there’s a pretty big question that’s simple enough: Death Knights can get Thunderfury? Yes, the bindings are now usable by all classes. German CM Rynundu confirmed this, and added that a future patch will get rid of the class restrictions on the tooltip. I have to admit, I may be a 2-hander diehard, but I’d have to reconsider dual wielding if one of those weapons was the Thunderfury. The DPS is nothing to write home about anymore, but damn if it doesn’t have style.

The first Death Knight with a Thunderfury! Night Elf Death Knight Dragoth of Frostmane-EU grabbed the legendary sword a couple weeks back, and has the achievement to prove it (It’s under the Feats of Strength category). Certainly, this was no small task in and of itself. Sure, you can probably do most of the questline with four or five people now, but you’ll still find yourself in Molten Core begging for the bindings to drop for at least a few weeks, and that doesn’t even count the elementium.

Highlights of World of Warcraft Death Knight guide. No longer servants of the Lich King, they begin their new calling as experienced, formidable adversaries, heavily armed and armored and possessing an arsenal of deadly and forbidden magic learned in the Lich King’s thrall.

• Bombard enemies with critical blows and carry out powerful attacks with proven WoW Death Knight PvE strategies for DPS and tanking
• Experience the thrills of challenging and killing your enemies over and over again using insider’s PvP tactics and item setups employed by elite gamers
• Learn how the class really works and what the many different statistics are worth to a Death Knight. Find out which buffs and debuffs you will benefit from the most.
• Master all the Death Knight skills and spell augmentations to stop losing unnecessarily in PvP matches with the descriptive list offered in the guide.
• Complete quests rapidly with the step-by-step quest walkthroughs for Death Knights featured in this class guide
• A surefire speed-leveling guide for WoW Death Knights to reach level 80 in a matter of days
• The top 5 Death Knight builds that outperform every other setup
• Cutting-edge equipment from head-to-toe for your Death Knight and where to find it at every level
• Get everything right from the start and avoid painful mistakes with the character creation guidelines for Death Knights.
• Discover the proven class-specific strategies that fully prepare your Death Knight for every encounter - from the right equipment to high level battle strategies

Here is an introduction, subject to change, of some of the death knight’s core gameplay mechanics and abilities: Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to get to know the besr race for Death Knight, you can continue reading to see how each race’s abilities benefit the Death Knight most in PvE and PvP.
A great PvP talent to allow Death Knights an extra silence in their attack sequence with Strangulate and Mind Freeze and also gives them 15 runic power which can be inserted at crucial points to complete certain combos, almost like how rogues use energy.
This ability will make Blood Elfs the best magic tanks in the game for min/maxers. This ability already plays up to the Death Knights advantage in mitigating magic damage and the guilds that will want to use a Death Knight to take on really tough end game magic bosses will definitely want a magic tank who has a +2% chance to mitigate even more magic damage.As end-game main tanks, Blizzard has clearly stated that Death Knight won’t take place of Warrior, they’re certainlu viable as a tank, and more efficient at dealing with caster bosses then any of the other tanks with abilities like Anti-Magic Zone and Anti-Magic Shell. Read the rest of this entry »

Night Elf Racials:
Shadowmeld - Not crucial, very minor PvP application for death knights. Some PvE application for DPS death knights.
Quickness - Solid for PvP and PvE.
Wisp Spirit - Pointless, do not choose your race based on this.
Nature Resistance - Solid for PvP and PvE.
No useable racials, quite frankly pretty bad. Quickness and Nature resistance are nice additions, but considering they are really more situational uses at best…these are pretty bad.

Draenei Racials:
Gift of the Naaru - Excellent ability for PvP and solid for PvE as well, especially now that it scales with AP / spell power.
Heroic Presence - Solid 1%, nothing major but certainly a nice addition.
Gemcutting - non-combat, do not choose your race based on this.
Shadow Resistance - Of all the resistances shadow is the one to have, especially since it’s a 2% compared to the undead’s 1%.
Overall, draenie is pretty solid. The gift of the naaru is pretty huge in my opinion, you toss some nice passive resistance and +hit on top of that you’ve got a pretty solid package. Read the rest of this entry »

1. DWARF

Key Factors: Stoneform

The addition of Deathknights and disease-based gameplay has given a little buff to the dwarf racial, which removes all poison/bleed/disease and grants immunity for 8 seconds.  On top of the diseases, Blizzard has tried to buff poisons for rogues and bleed effects in general in WotLK, so this one will definitely come in handy.  It won’t be useful in every matchup, but you’ll still get some wins from this ability.  A little less flexible than the Human racial, so we rate it lower, but not by a ton.

2. GNOME

Key Factors: Escape Artist

Unpopular among lore lovers, the Gnome Deathknight is my choice for the best on Alliance.  Escape Artist, as a root/snare remover, is one of those active-use abilities like WotF that can completely turn the tables and win a game for you if used at the right time.  Death Knights do have a few ranged skills, but they are still basically a melee class and kiting is their biggest enemy; an extra root/snare breaker is fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

Our reason for most of these changes should be obvious, but some common themes are:
– Chill out some of the defensive capabilities all DKs have in PvP.
– Avoid having to use Death and Decay as an out-of-combat runic power generator.

– Making tanking still rely on cooldowns, but rely on them a little less.
– Make Blood a more attractive spec, and particularly for tanking.

Blood
The healing of Blood Aura, Blood Presence and Death Pact has been doubled.
Heart Strike – we overhauled this ability. It no longer has a haste debuff but will now be able to strike two targets like a cleave. It still hits for more than Blood Strike, but you can still use Blood Strike if e.g. you don’t want to break CC.
Bloody Strikes – the bonus damage from Pestilence has been moved here to help Blood AE slightly.
Pestilence — no longer has a 10 sec cooldown.
Vampiric Blood — in addition to its current effects, also adds 20% health temporarily.
Will of the Necropolis — now reduces the damage of any attack that takes the DK below 35% health by 5 /10/15% instead of boosting armor when wounded
Dancing Rune Weapon – cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power. Read the rest of this entry »

To a certain extent, we already covered a number of possibilities for death knight characters about 6 months ago. However, while most of those possibilities are still valid, there was so much we didn’t know about the player-character death knight lore at that time, and there are definitely some points that need updating.Originally I had planned to write about death knights only after I had written about all the other classes, as a way of wrapping up and rounding out this whole series of articles about the lore behind the playable races and classes of World of Warcraft.

But then ZuWho posted a comment on my last article specifically requesting me for my thoughts on death knights — and even used the word “pleeeaase!” So of course I’m always a sucker for such polite requests, especially comments like this with really insightful questions. Today we’ll look specifically at these questions and see what possible answers come to mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

Death Grip, when chained by a few Death Knights, can even be used as crowd control.I’ve seen it used in a few other wild ways, too — it works great as an interrupt, and when combined with a Hunter trap, it’s finally a reliable way to trap ranged attackers and casters. And most of the Death Knights I’ve seen use it for pulling — they suck the caster in from a group, and the rest of the mobs come with, and group right up for AoE. I haven’t played a Death Knight on the live realms yet (I leveled one through the starting experience during the beta, and am only 79 so far on my main), but I have grouped with quite a few of them now, and the ability that real stands out to me and others seems to be Death Grip.

 A lot of the other Death Knight abilities are just new versions of other classes’ spells, but Death Grip is a pretty new mechanic — instead of charging or jumping away from a mob, you’re bringing the mob to you. And with all new mechanics, players have found new ways to play with them.