Death Knights: Gear?

[7F]LarryBoy

[7F]LarryBoy

New Member
So I'm scratching my head here, wondering what I should focus on for gear. My spec favors Frost spells and Obliterate, so should I be picking up Ret Pally gear? Are there Death Knight-flavored rewards in Northrend? What about Outlands?
 
As a death Knight, you want:

Blood: +AP and +crit. Increasing your health is good too because some of your heals are % based. Basically, you'll be working with Fury warrior gear.
Frost: Frost uses a relatively high number of spells and doesn't have any +spellpower talents, so you may need to stack both +AP and +spellpower. Frost does have a number of abilities that allow it to force crits, so +crit is less important. Of course, +int is perfectly useless, so you'll have difficulty choosing between Fury and Ret gear.
Unholy: Unholy has talents that increase its spellpower when you get more AP, so this means you can focus on more strength as you can get it. This is particularly true when you consider that your Gargoyles and Ghouls power up with your strength, and that although Scourge Strike does Shadow Damage, it is based on your weapon damage... strength all the way, with crit. Fury gear again.
 
The big problem with Ret gear is that it's going to have INT on it, which is wasted stat points on a DK, aside from very slightly increasing spell crit (unless they changed that). Still, Ret gear is probably the way to go for Frost.
 
John,

Are you sure Spellpower affects anything for DK's? I had read, and there was a HUGE discussion in General yesterday, that spell damage for a DK is ONLY affected by AP. I do not know this for sure, just wondering if you had seen reliable sources on this.

There was also a related discussion, that DK mechanics are the main reason CRIT is now universal. Since they don't need Spellpower, but they do use spell crit, which are not on the same equipment, Blizz universally changed crit so the mechanics would work. Again, theory's at the moment, I don't have a reliable source.
 
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I too have heard lately (and I admit I have to check) that all DK "spells" involve your weapon damage as a coefficient base, which means that spellpower is out.

I'm under the impression from blue posters that the CRIT == universal was to un-nerf Ret pally/ enh shammy performance in raids, because both of those classes were tasked with stacking both +hit and +spell hit if they wanted to get hit capped, while having both crit bonuses and spell crit bonuses, which meant they either had to miss a lot, never crit (thus wasting a lot of talents,) have zero baseline DPS (which happened more times than it should have, esp. for ret,) or focus on either white DPS or yellow DPS to the exclusion of the other. All these alternatives lead to a nerfing of overall DPS.

I'm not sure DKs would fall into that category as well.
 
I poasted this in another thread, but it would really answer a lot of gear questions, so I'll repoast here: http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t36303-dps_compendium/

All Emoknight abilities are AP-based, +spelldamage does nothing for us. Hit rating seems to be pretty important to, because a lot of our damage is disease-based, if you miss reapplying a disease, it's a fair amount of lost dps. This paragraph from the guide says it well:

Death Knights are based around a four resource system: Runes, Runic Power, Diseases, and Time. Each of these resources changes differently based on a miss. A miss of a Rune does not cost that Rune (it regenerates in less than the minimum possible GCD). A miss of a Runic Power does cost that RP however. A miss of a Disease can not only cost that disease, but cost an additional amount as diseases are required, most of the time, for effective dps. Finally, a loss of the time to cast the spell, as well as additional time recasting. Because rotations are often times dense and diseases can run out, this loss of time can have a heavy impact on the Death Knight.
Click to expand...

EDIT: Look at section 6 in that guide for recommendations on which stats to go for.
 
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That looks like a good start for a research for a college writing class.

I am gonna try the frost build 17/54/0 on my DK on Stonemaul. I wonder if this will work to tank in tank gear...
 
skvsr said:
That looks like a good start for a research for a college writing class.

I am gonna try the frost build 17/54/0 on my DK on Stonemaul. I wonder if this will work to tank in tank gear...
Click to expand...

For tanking, you need to pick up Blade Barrier, Toughness, and Anticipation at a bare minimum.

I'd suggest something like this 10/54/7, but I'm no expert on Frost Tanking.
 
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