Shay Shays Stupid DK Guide

I'm completely rewriting my stupid DK guide because now I actually have an 80 DK, and I can say what I actually do. Ill mention a little about leveling, but you could level just about any character with any spec you want. Its just personal preference. I'm going to talk mostly about PVE at 80 as a blood DK.

1) Gear...
You want a 2h. Case closed. You rely on big wtfpwn strikes to hit your targets. Maxing out hit rating to 8% and expertise to i think it's 21, is probably a good idea (and what is what I did). That way no matter where I am I know i'll always hit. Now your runes dont actually go on cooldown if you dont hit, but still, avoiding interrupting your rotation is always beneficial to consistant dps. After that, Attack power (or strength since it scales with Blessing of Kings) is clutch. Right after that, crit is also very nice. Critting on 2 targets with heart strike with diseases on them with half way decent gear is almost 10k damage. So in my experience, heres the breakdown:

1) Hit/Expertise
2) AP/Strength
3) Crit
4) Agility
5) Whatever

2) Rotation

As with most classes, proper spell rotation is where you make or break your dps. The weird thing about death knights is after the initial opening attacks, glyph cooldowns get so untimed that a normal rinse-wash-repeat pattern becomes impossible. So ill show my opening move, then teach you rules for continuing dps.

Opening Moves
-Icy Touch (while you are running in from range)
-Plague Strike (You now have both your diseases ticking)
-Death Strike (gets your death runes cooling down)
-Heart Strike X2 (Now all of your runes will be on cooldown)
-Deathcoil X1 (x2 if you have the RP, but unless you have some leftover from somthing, you can only get in 1)
-Blood Tap -> Heart Strike (Use right after eachother)
-Deathcoil

At this point, a lot of your runes should be cooled down and ready to use. This is where rotations go out the window and you have to start watching your rune bar and dot timers. There is a heirarchy of abilities you want to use, so here's how it works.

1) Make sure you have diseases up. If you are dumping RP through death coil its not essential for the moment since it's not modified by diseases, but for Heart/Death Strikes, always have them up.

2) Whenever you have blood/death runes up, dump them on Heart Strike. The expception to this is if you need to use them to reapply diseases, do so.

3) Death Coil whenever you have about 75-80 RP. This way if you hit a death strike or something you wont be capped out and wasting RP. Generally this should be your 2nd or 3rd most damaging ability in dps.

4) Death Strike should be used when blood runes are on cooldown, but you dont need to refresh diseases yet. It has many benefits, most notably it gives you death runes that you can dump into Heart Strike. It also heals you, has added crit chance from talents, and is modified by current RP pool (if glyphed)

5) Pestilence isn't necessarily something you have to use in every rotation, but if you ever are in the middle of AOE packs, make sure your diseases stay up. You can use a cool trick to reapply diseases to your main target. Pestilance your main target, and it will spread diseases to ihis friends. Then swap targets real fast, hit pestilence again, and it will spread refreshed diseases back to your main target. This uses a blood rune instead of a frost and unholy, so you can conserve your frost/unholy runes for a death strike or something else.

6) Blood Tap again isnt something you will always need, but if you find yourself in a situation where everything is on cooldown, no RP etc, blood tap and Heart Strike. Not only does that keep you from dropping abilites in your rotation, but you then have a nice death rune for the next 20 seconds to spend on whatever you want.

Using this spell priority, I easily put out about 2500 dps, with pretty crappy gear. I'd link you my armory page, but atm I'm tank built. But I basically have an epic weapon, gloves and belt. The rest is crappy blues, some of which are left over from leveling.

In my opinion, blood can rival any dps spec by death knights. On big aoe pulls, howling blast may do higher damage because its aoe, but as we all know, aoe doesn't really count. If it did, we would hold Moonkin and Hunters to a 7000dps standard. Blood is also the most fun in my opinion with its rawrsmash mode type dps. Give it a shot!

More to come