Thursday, July 22, 2010

DK For Dummies - Abilities & Rotations

Let’s talk about abilities and rotations.

The DK class have 3 types of abilities:

1. Disease(s)
2. Strikes
3. Filler (or some people call it runic power dump)

That’s it. This is true of all 3 of our specs. There might be some little variation and ‘fun’ things from each of the specs but these 3 are the core abilities of our class mechanic. These 3 abilities are intertwined and affect how and when to use them. We'll take a closer look of each tree later to talk about these 'fun' things that make each tree unique.

So let’s try to build us a ‘rotation’ by looking at any of the ability that has the word ‘strike’ in them.

These are Blood Strike, Death Strike, Heart Strike, Scourge Strike

Depending on the tree that you choose to level/dps/tank with, you’ll probably have some of the above ‘strike’ ability. In either case, they are available as you start the Hellfire Peninsula zone in outland.

Let’s look at the tool tips for these strikes.

Blood Strike:
Instantly strike the enemy, causing 40% weapon damage plus , total damage increased by 12.5% for each of your diseases on the target.

Death Strike:
A deadly attack that deals 75% weapon damage plus 84 and heals the Death Knight for 5% of his/her maximum health for each of his/her diseases on the target.

Heart Strike:
Instantly strike the target and his nearest ally, causing 50% weapon damage plus on the primary target, and 25% weapon damage plus on the secondary target. Each target takes 10% additional damage for each of your diseases active on that target.

Scourge Strike:
An unholy strike that deals 70% of weapon damage as Physical damage plus 238. In addition, for each of your diseases on your target, you deal an additional 12% of the Physical damage done as Shadow damage.


See the pattern there?

‘for each of your diseases on the target’ your strikes gets more potent. It will hit harder than if you do not have any disease active on your target.

So just by reading the tool tips we can built a starter DK rotation and it goes something like this:

1. Put diseases on target
2. Strike the target.

Pretty simple right? Yup.

But wait that’s not all. What about that runic power we’re gaining as we start our rotation?

Next we will talk about the dump phase. It’s like taking a dump, but better.

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