Filed under: Death Knight

Boubouille over at MMO-Champion uncovered two new recolors of the stock deathcharger mount in Patch 3.3.2; one red one, one blue one. There's a summon spell for one of them, the Crimson Deathcharger, corresponding to the red recolored Crimson Deathcharger creature, and while there isn't a spell for the blue one, the files also contain an Azure Deathcharger creature.

There's little information on where these come from, and judging from the state of the various spells involved, it's likely that they're simply not fully implemented yet. We can speculate, though! BB notes that Blizzard has said that there'll be at least one more patch before 4.0, and these could be a faction- or quest-based reward involving Icecrown or the Ashen Verdict.

I got a little antsy about making the iconic death knight amount available to the general public, if that's even happening, but then my brain turned on and I remembered that the forsaken, human, dwarf, tauren, night elf, blood elf, and troll mounts have been available to other races in one way for a very long time. Of course, no other class can get the paladin charger model, for example, so maybe I'm approaching it all wrong.

Either way. We'll likely see these bony ponies pop up again at a later date, and we'll keep you posted.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look into the bloody business of being a death knight. This week, said business is especially bloody as we take a look at the most popular death knight tree.

According to recent armory analysis, blood is the most popular death knight spec. It's not hard to see why, it's a simple yet robust tree that provides lots of power with a minimum of fuss. If you're interested in getting in the DPS side of the tree but aren't sure where to start, or if you're just looking to brush up on the basics of the tree, this is the Lichborne for you. While this guide doesn't necessarily cover some of the more advanced aspects of the tree, it does covers the basic ways to get the most out of your gear, rotation, and spec as a blood DPSer.

1. What is blood DPS?

Blood is the death knight tree that focuses the most on pure physical damage. It also has superior health regeneration. Like all three trees, it can be used for both tanking and DPS, but we'll focus on DPS for this guide.

2. Blood DPS Benefits

• Superior single target damage.
• Superior self healing and health stealing abilities mean you probably die less and can survive through a less than stellar healer or tank more consistently than many other DPS.
• Some very nice group and raid melee buffs in the form of Hysteria and Abomination's Might.

3. Blood DPS Drawbacks

• Not quite as much AoE potential as the other two trees.

A recent hotfix has reduced the health on tanking paladins. Meanwhile, devastate is being hotfixed as well to do 20% more total damage rather than 20% more weapon damage (from 100% to 120% total weapon damage presently). There are also some scattered reports that DK tanks have gotten buffs to their Frost Presence as well, but no confirmation from Blizzard on that yet. Ghostcrawler posted that the change to Paladin health was intentional and that an announcement will be soon, and in the warrior thread said that they can't confirm when the hotfix for devastate will drop.

The culprit for the paladin health reduction seems to be the paladin talent Sacred Duty, although this has, at this time, not been confirmed by Blizzard so far as I can find. As soon as there's an announcement we at WoW.com will of course bring it to you.

Edited to include this link to the official forum post explaining the change. Thanks to ummeiko for the fast catch.

Welcome to Lichborne, wow.com's weekly death knight column. This week, we continue our breakneck tour of the fabulous Ice Crown Citadel, premiere vacation getaway of the dead, rich, and infamous.

Our look at ICC death knight loot continues this week with the Crimson Hall. Prepare for corny twilight jokes to go with your raiding (trust me, I know they're coming, and I will be making many of them). There's only 2 boss battles in this wing, but there's still plenty of loot to discuss. As before, I'd suggest you check out the introduction to the Lower Spire loot guide, as it does include some basic stat rundowns and philosophies that you should keep in mind as you read these guides.

There's also a few wrenches in the gears (but good wrenches, since they involve buffs) for your loot selections as of Patch 3.3.2, which I'd expect will be live by the time you read this. We'll be getting an Ashen Verdict strength ring and a slight stat adjustment on tier 10 tank armor, so keep those in mind as you read. In short, you'll probably be keeping the Ashen Verdict strength ring as one of your main rings, and tier 10 tank gear looks a lot sexier now, at least for physical-based fights.

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DKs are OP -- there, we said it. Now then, we can move on with our discussion of ... well, of an OP death knight. This particular DK, however, brings more to the plate than the sheer muscle of his class. Raegwyn of EU Zuluhed-H brings a wealth of raiding experience, class skill and game savvy to bear in his continuing campaign to conquer as many bosses and instances of WoW as possible, completely solo.

We get a lot of "check me out soloing X" videos submitted here at WoW.com, but Raegwyn caught our eye with his video of a solo kill of Al'ar from Burning Crusade's 25-man Tempest Keep instance The Eye. He's made masterful headway in heroic Pit of Saron and most recently polished off an instance that still catches level-appropriate groups off guard: heroic Ahn'Kahet. We talked to this Austrian death machine about why gear is nice but timing is everything when it comes to taking down bosses on your own.

I'm going to assume that if you're still reading this past the title, you're interested in talking about tank gearing for your level 80 and that you've presumably used the Dungeon Finder to level him or her as a tank, but you're certainly not rocking full T9 yet. It's generally accepted that you'll be saving up emblems for that, and of course filling the gaps for rings and trinkets and such as you can. You also may be a DPS player who wants to switch over to tanking but don't have the gear yet.

First off, please, don't pass on tanking gear just because it's blue or dropped in a normal or heroic. Just because it's not iLevel 232+ doesn't mean it's not good. You should be collecting and using upgrades as they drop, even if they won't immediately put you at 35K health. Please remember also that a lot of people ran these instances and heroics back when Wrath first released with 22k or so health: despite what speed obsessed or hyper geared players will tell you, it is indeed possible to tank all the original Wrath heroics in blues.

Take the Nerubian Shield Ring, for example. If this drops and you don't have better, roll need on it. Don't worry that people will lose their shard, don't let people give you grief on gear not being up to some ridiculous standard, just take the ring. It has armor, defense and stamina. If you're there as DPS but you want to build a tank set? Roll need if you don't have better. Just ignore people who give you grief over it, clearly they don't understand how important every possible upgrade is while building a tanking set.

No, it's not just a case of the obvious being stated. In a discussion of DK design in arenas, Dr. Street comments to clarify the intended role of death knights in arena and other factors. He also makes a good point about the forums in general that bears repeating for emphasis.

"We don't intend for these forums to be the primary way the team communicates our vision for the game and upcoming changes to the community. You'll get a little of that on a few select subjects through the forums and sadly that's all you're ever going to get. It's not that we don't care. It's that forums are not a great medium for that kind of mass communication. I wish sometimes you guys could be satisfied with the fact that we used to not communicate at all and now are able to communicate a little."

Moving on to the specific issue at hand in this thread, the discussion is the old shadow/frost spec that turned the death knight into a much more ranged caster, generating runic power quickly and then converting that runic power into Death Coils at range. It wasn't intended for the class. They have no problem with Death Coil itself being a popular attack, as long as the death knight has to put an effort into staying in melee with its attendant disadvantages to do so.

"The DK that runs around and does nothing but Icy Touch or Howling Blast or Death Coil feels like a rogue who forgoes combo points and openers and everything just to spam Fan of Knives and nothing else."

It's interesting to see players managing to find ways to bend the class out of the original design intent and how Blizzard responds to that: specs like shadow/frost or diseaseless blood DPS were adjusted quickly to put the class back to where Blizzard intended it.

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly death knight column. This week, your host, Daniel Whitcomb, is busy applying for a slot as one of Arthas' pall bearers. Do you think I should wear the Ebon Blade Tabard or the Argent Crusade Tabard for that?

Good News Everyone! With the Deathbringer down, you don't have to wait for some gnome in a frying pan. The Plagueworks are open, and you can go right in. Before we take a look at the Plagueworks boss loot, you might want to go back and read the opening paragraphs of last week's Lower Spire loot guide. It outlines the basic parameters and stat considerations we death knights use in picking out our best loot. Once you've done that, read on for a look at death knight loot from the Plagueworks wing of Icecrown Citadel.

If you like tanking (sure, we all do) you may be interest in this update to yesterday's post about tier 10 tanking gear: the dodge on gloves and defense on chests is being removed and the armor is being increased to bring them in line with the off-set tanking pieces due to the popularity of higher armor in Icecrown Citadel, and we now finally have hard numbers. So far, it looks as if the armor increases are pretty significant (882 armor on iLevel 251 gloves, 1064 armor on iLevel 251 set chestplates) and should make up for the dodge or defense lost, especially as armor has increased in popularity due to the Chill of the Throne debuff in ICC. We're told that the armor increase scales with iLevel so the iLevel 264 and 277 versions will also have proportionate armor increases. This is a patch 3.3.2 change so don't panic if your gear doesn't have the armor yet.

This makes me even more happy that I chose to focus on my tier set over offset pieces to get the four piece bonus as soon as possible. It makes these pieces far more attractive when compared to the high armor offset Cataclysm Chestguard and Gauntlers of the Kraken. (the Sanctified 264 versions should have exactly the same armor). I'd like to have seen a little more armor on the pieces, myself, but it's still pretty solid.

"We recognize that many plate tanks are making their gear choices based on the amount of armor they're provided, as this is currently the most preferred stat. In order to make the tier-10 plate tanking sets more desirable, we will be adjusting the stats on the gloves and chest pieces in order to inflate the amount of armor they provide in the next minor patch. This will apply to all item levels of the tier-10 death knight, warrior, and paladin tanking gloves and chest pieces."

He also noted that Emblem gear will continue to be comparable to the tier gear in terms of stats and, for those concerned about Feral tanks, they'll be keeping an eye on gear scaling on druid tank gear as well.

In a follow up to the thread we discussed recently, Ghostcrawler discusses where the buff to protection warrior DPS will come from (sorry, guys, but it sounds like a buff to Devastate to me, yay for spamming) and a whole lot more. The discussion indicates that while they're interested in single target DPS increases over AoE increases that they don't think tank DPS is that big a factor in boss fights (and to be fair, he's right, it isn't a major factor although the fact that players will overreact to minor factors and stress out their tanks over their DPS, that is) and moves on from there.

The discussion about Devastate (that it's an easy ability to adjust) is fair enough but ignores the even easier solution of simply reducing the defensive stance penalty. To be honest I'd like to hear why there's still a penalty there when abilities like Righteous Fury and Frost Presence suffer none. I find the idea that buffing defensive stance would cause big problems for PvP balance kind of absurd. Battle stance grants 15% ArP and Zerker grants 3% crit, at most people would pop into d stance when focused, like they do now anyway. But we're likely to see buffs to Devastate, so just get used to it. My suggestion? While we're buffing Devastate, also have it queue Heroic Strike for us so that's one less button to spam and I can retire my macro.

Zach is a PvP nut who is excited at the prospect of more meaningful Battlegrounds play. He is about as unfunny as Jay Leno but has a slightly smaller chin.

Last week we kicked off a PvP series on how to deal with specific classes starting with the druid. We featured those slippery shapeshifters mostly because I'm a doofus who thought they were first on the alphabetical list -- cut me some slack, though, since druids were first on the list for years before those upstart death knights came along. Of course, when the game's first hero class was introduced with Wrath of the Lich King, it was no coincidence that their popularity was directly proportional to their being completely imbalanced and overpowered. It was so broken that Arena Season 5 was dominated by death dnights and even unskilled keyboard turners and clickers could sometimes achieve gaudy rankings using the class.

While the class has been tuned down somewhat, this hasn't diminished their popularity and death knights remain formidable opponents in the Battlegrounds and world PvP. Today we'll take a look at the dreaded death knight and try to outline a few key points to remember when facing one. Just as with the first installment of this series, these articles are by no means an exhaustive and complete guide to fighting a particular class. PvP depends greatly on context, in part determined by your own class, your environment, your opponent's spec, and player skill among other things. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's take a quick overview of death knights just to give players a general idea of what to expect.

Reader UnstØppable writes in with a question I thought would benefit others: "Does the Bladestorm aggro problem ever get better? What I mean is, I've seen it countless times, the arms warrior enters the dungeon, the tank lets out a sigh (sometimes it's me), we pull the first group and everything goes fine, until he hits that Bladestorm button. That's when somehow he manages to pull aggro from every mob and their mom and makes both the healer's and the tank's lives hell or usually ends up dying within seconds."

Part of the problem here is that certain classes/specs have no aggro dump or reduction ability and as a result their big DPS moves generate a lot of threat. Arms warriors, most DPS death knights (at least the blood and unholy specs I've used) and retribution paladins have limited aggro reduction at best (pallies at least have Hand of Salvation but that's a band aid at best) and while tanking threat (especially AoE tanking threat) requires ramp up time, it's very easy to hit the Divine Storm, Death and Decay, Pestilence, Whirlwind or Bladestorm buttons. (Enhancement shamans with Spirit Weapons seem to be okay, I rarely pull aggro even when I go nuts with Fire Nova.)

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

We're taking out the mop and bucket at the WoW Rookie Guide this week, scrubbing down outdated articles and polishing up pieces that cover recently updated features. We think you'll like the new section we're creating within the guide specifically for brand new level 80s. By no stretch of the imagination will WoW Rookie end up expanding to the point of becoming a virtual WoW 101 ... But we will keep a corner devoted to players who've just hit 80 for the first time.

So while we're madly cooking and cleaning behind the scenes this week, we've rounded up a few new and old favorites for you to poke through. Or hop on over to the WoW Rookie Guide itself for even more -- but if you should spy a pink-haired gnome in a maid's outfit or (heaven forbid!) encounter an undead harridan wielding a rolling pin, please keep in mind that housekeeping is still in progress.

Welcome to Lichborne, where your host is still figuring out the perfect roleplay celebration macro for when he downs the Lich King -- when he's not writing about death knights, of course.

With Icecrown Citadel now properly breached, hopefully even some of the less uber among us are making our way into the breach to say hello to the father of all death knights, the Lich King himself. Of course, as we start upon the final leg of the journey that started so long ago at Light's Hope Chapel, as we trudge ever closer to our destiny to the fight that will bring our story full circle, that may lead to our damnation or to a brighter new destiny, there's certainly a question that's on everyone's minds: What about the loot?

It's a good question. Let's take a look at the loot from the first few bosses up in the citadel. Before we do, though, it's a good idea to take a quicker refresher course in why we choose what we choose: