Leveling your DK: 55-60 & miscellaneous considerations

So, given several requests for information on leveling DKs, I'll accelerate my plans to blog this topic and get started.

First, my qualifications to give suggestions on leveling DKs:
1. I leveled a DK 55-80 on the beta, which is when I decided DKs were for me. I tried all three main talent trees as I went.

Raiding gear: headset

I've heard of people that say they use the built in speakers and/or microphone while they raid.

I've also heard of huntards that raid without a pet, DK's that equip spellpower gear, and seen many a talent spec where the player evidently randomly assigned their points.

DON'T BE AN IDIOT.

Rogue Vanish fixed? 1357 days and $1 million short...

Vanish has never worked correctly, and they're just 'fixing' it now?

Could have been nice way back when I had a rogue main. Vanish is a lot of fun, but there's nothing quite so frustating in pvp or pve to hit that button in desperation and to watch the mob/player still hit you as if you were a warrior in leather.

Ah well, there's no going back for me. I took the red pill and my rogue will just have to wait. I'll test drive vanish maybe, but mostly Hiro (my rogue) will just have to sit in the garage and look pretty.

And My Niche Is..... It's a Tie???

Drumroll please...........

dum de dum de dum

Blood!

No, 2H Unholy!

No, Blood!

Damnit! :)

Theorycrafting aside, these two specs performed very well, and had definite advantages over DC spam - which, although fun, didn't quite provide the dps of the former two, and frost, which underperformed and I personally didn't enjoy.

So, which is it for Hinenuitepo in 3.2.2?

FMN: 2H Unholy and the Return of Scourge Strike

Hello Scourge Strike my Old Friend!
I've come to talk with you again! :)

It's a wrap (sort of): the final installment of my testing is done, for now. I tested the 16/0/55 spec that has emerged from the 3.2.2 changes to rebuff Scourge Strike. This spec is very similar to the old 17/0/54 spec that was rampantly popular at LK release, and the one I raided all of Naxx/T7 with. Changes are that epidemic and reaping are dropped and the rotation is shortened to 10 seconds. Instead of maximizing Scourge Strike spam, the attack is just part of the rotation which maximizes death coils using glyphed Icy Touch and ensures desolation stays up via more frequent Blood Strikes. Consider over at Elitist Jerks gives a very nice write up of the spec, how to do it, and why to choose unholy over frost or blood.

Finding My Niche: Here's Why (Theorycrafters Can Be Wrong).

In figuring out a bit of this blogging thing, I perhaps made one of the classic mistakes: I didn't write enough for my "audience" and wrote more from a personal perspective.

Finding My Niche is an ongoing personal journey about best performing my role as a DPS Death Knight and therefore the quintessential topic for my blog and entire WoW experience.

If you raid as a dps DK (or a tank for that matter), I'd imagine that would be your primary concern as well.

Now, you can spend a lot of time keeping up with the various theorycrafters, most famously found at Elitist Jerks - I certainly do. There's a lot of famous and smart people that post there and a lot of good tools.

So, why don't I just adopt the cookie cutter spec that the theorycrafters say is the best?  GC said it very well with some general comments about theorycrafting in general and dps specifically:

FMN: Blood

It's all about the Blood!












The third raid dps spec I tested for 3.2.2 was the big bad 2H Blood build. This is the classic Death Knight-with-a-big-two-hander-hits-hard spec. Late in the 3.1 Ulduar cycle it gained prominence as the top single target spec and became one of the two most popular dps specs overall (with 2H unholy pre-SS nerf). In 3.2, it remained very powerful. In 3.2.2, it received somewhat of a nerf by halving the damage done to the second target of Heart Strike, and with armor pen being weakened as well. I used the Fordragon Blades for the raid, the 232 version, so the weapon is comparable to the one-handers I used on the DW tests. So, will blood be my choice for now? Or will my niche be in the unholy tree?