DnD is a strong aoe spell, and Blood Boil is a weak one, but cheap. They are both only useful in AoE situations, as is Death and Decay. You could seriously just grind to 80 on single-targe mobs playing this way, if talents didn't have to appear and muck everything up.Īt base, your other B rune abilities are Pestilence and Blood Boil.
Once diseases are up, unload your runes in Strikes, then use Death Coil when all runes are on cooldown. Such is life as a DK: in general, you want to open with IT and PS to get your diseases up at the beginning of every fight. Your Blood Strike and FU moves (like Death Strike) get stronger if your target already has the two diseases on them. IT and PS each place a different disease on your target: Frost Fever and Blood Plague, respectively. There are no abilities that costs two of the same color rune, and the only two-rune ability costs FU, and no B. When you start, the game gives you just enough skills to get by: Icy Touch (F), Plague Strike (U), Blood Strike (B), Death Strike (FU), and Death Coil (40 RP)Īlready, you can see something interesting. Now let's build on that by talking about skills. You should generally wait to "dump" your RP until either a) all of your runes are on cooldown because you were a good little DK and used them all up just as fast as you could! or b) you are about to cap out RP, which would make any further RP generation go to waste. Since using a rune puts it on cooldown, the sooner you use it the sooner you can use it again. There are other ways to get RP through talents, but let's not complicate things with that just yet. Pretty much any ability that doesn't cost RP generates it. Death and Decay, which costs 3 runes, gives you 20 RP. If the ability you used takes 1 rune, you gain 10 RP. You also have an RP bar (not to be confused with a place to get a drink and meet people named Drzzzztz or Seferothh with Dark Pasts), which normally goes to 100. This keeps you from spamming the same button over and over. Once you use a rune, it goes on a 10-second cooldown, then you can use it again. Going forward, I will use B, F, and U as shorthand for the runes. You cannot change this, you will always have two of each. You have 6 runes: 2 Blood (red), 2 Frost (blue), and 2 Unholy (green). But for now, I'm going to try to boil DK mechanics into the simplest form I possibly can.įirst, the basics of how Runes and Runic Power (RP) work. Hopefully in the future I'll find the time to wax poetic about what a design triumph DKs are as a class.
Now he or she is sitting in the Thrallmar Inn with a free talent reset and you have some free time between Ulduar raids, so it's time to pick that baby back up! Some abilities cost one rune, but some cost 2 or three of different colors, and some cost runic power, but it's not clear how you get runic power, and some cost a kitten and sixpence, which is way more than a bushel.īy this point, many of you have tried a DK, but most lay abandoned in Hellfire Peninsula after you experienced that completely epic starting area and haphazardly spent all those free talent points in whatever looked cool. Why not put all 61 points in the blood tree?! Plus, their runic resource system is totally different from that time-tested blue bar you're used to. Plus, you have all those talents that you don't know what they do. Death Knights: everyone can roll one at 55 now, and even though the abilities are parceled out pretty slowly as you level, it can still be overwhelming to pile on all those abilities so fast as you rocket through Outlands.