All right guys and welcome to another video today i'm going to be giving you my death knight leveling guide for classic wrath of a lich king, as always we'll cover the five most important
topics, firstly we go through some very cheeky tips and tricks, the best talent building, glyphs, playstyle, weapon progression and then lastly we'll talk about your stat priority to
focus on while leveling, anyway let's not muck about let's jump straight in!
Tips & Tricks
So if you guys are worried about not being able to get good gear during the pre-patch phase of the game before you jump into leveling in wrath well don't worry because there's an extremely easy option to get the arcanite ripper, it's actually a great weapon that you can get from a pre-patch event and i've been reading wowhead comments from years and years ago and apparently it drops every single time and many people are going to be running that pre-patch event in karazhan so probably quite easy to get.
If you don't end up getting this over some other options in the weapon progression section of the video.
Now guys i'd recommend getting enough gold to afford dual spec before you jump into wrath of the lich king because it's really useful having blood off spec while leveling because it makes it much easier to solo certain elite quests.
The fastest build to leveling is actually unholy, we talk about that later but sometimes you
can't solo a particular elite quest because well blood is obviously much better for soloing and you're going to miss out on loads of xp if you cannot complete a certain elite quest because
obviously elite quests give cheeky cheering the top when it comes to experience.
Obviously i'd also recommend in that pre-patch phase of the game getting 25 quests ready to turn in, i actually have a really good list for the best 25 quests to get turned in if you subscribe to my channel and go to my channel page there will be a link in the description of my sub trailer video and that has a really good and fast 25 quest route that you can do if you do want to take a little bit further, members on my channel do also get access to a behemoth
quest list with over 1.7 million experience points.
Now this didn't work on private servers because you can actually use corpse explosion on your pet and it does ridiculous aoe damage, well it does while you're leveling anyway because of the damage is based on your ghouls health pool, this can be very useful to get a little bit of extra aoe damage i do actually use this quite often on big pulls because the damage is pretty mental.
I'd also recommend getting some cheap consumables for leveling if you have some extra gold because obviously i'd recommend saving gold for actual wrath of lich king content but if
you can afford it and get some good consumables. This can be stuff like food buffs, elixirs and weapon sharpening stones, just remember weapon sharpening stones are not useful on items over around about level 76.
Now I have a cheeky macro for you, the death pact macro, what it does is it when you don't already have your pet summoned it will summon your pet and then it will obviously death packed it which returns a lot of health to you, the trick to this macro though is you've got to spam it if your pet isn't already summoned you've got to spam it because you've got to wait for the pet to actually get out of the ground before you can sacrifice it, definitely much better than having two separate keybinds.
Though remember you can also use dark command which is obviously your taunt ability to pull mobs closer to you so you can get bigger mob pulls and obviously you can combine that with a death grip to just get some extra enemies in your pool of enemies that you're about to kill.
Another tip, this death and decay macro what it does is you'd use different decay instantly on
your cursor location so you don't even see the green reticle thing on the ground, it will just get your death and decay up much faster it can also change about from cursor to app player if you just want it to appear on your player's location so similar to the mages arcane explosion or a warrior's whirlwind.
Talents
Now let's run through the talents, first thing to talk about when it comes to talents is people argue so much about a certain point here or there when in reality it makes probably about
a hairline of difference, as long as you pick up the essential mandatory talents for leveling you're going to be good and there's not going to be nothing to worry about.
I'm going to show you what talents i prefer to go for if you prefer to go for something else
tell me in the comment section please do it respectfully and understand that people have different preferred play styles.
In tier one i'm gonna go for vicious strikes and virulence straight away, long story short extra crit and more hit chance.
From here we're definitely going to get epidemic, this extends our dot duration so it just perfectly fits into a mob pull and you also get an extra death strike off before you have to refresh your diseases, you definitely cannot go without that talent.
Mobility is also nice for these slight increased damage on death coil reduce cooldown and different decay allowing us to use death and decay pretty much every single pull, and then we also get three points of ravenous dead for the flat strength increase which is going to boost the power of strength gear and also our ghoul.
From here I would like to get corpse explosion if any gonna put points into necrosis, necrosis is all right some fairly decent passive damage it's not absolutely groundbreaking damage because it's not aoe damage, we really just put in points in necrosis to get us down the tree over here.
We're definitely definitely gonna get on a pale horse the most useful leveling talent in all of these trees to be honest because it's 20 increased movement speed in the long term, you know it's going to take about 30-40 hours of leveling in wrath of the lich king that's going to save you a lot of time.
Then we get night of the dead obviously to get a permanent ghoul, it's a nice thing to have for mainly, i'm mainly using my ghoul honestly for the corpse explosions because the corpse explosions are very fun on the pet, then we get a point in necrosis again just to get us down the tree.
We're going to max out impurity, this is 20 extra benefit from your attack power and it goes very very well with a talent over here called bladed armor that's going to increase our attack power per armor value, i also think surge is pretty essential since some bills that don't get dirt the map runic power you get from surge is really really nice because it's obviously gonna an extra five runic power on every single one of your death strikes.
you generate all that runic power up and even you can burn it on corpse explosions for more aoe damage, now here i think you definitely have options, you definitely have to get master of a ghoul, you can't go without having a permanent ghoul, you can get points in desecration.
Desecration is quite nice actually if you're taking too much damage and you're pulling loads and loads of enemies, you can use desecration to kite enemies, give a little bit of breathing room, wait for your death strike to come available and then go back into range and do your death strike.
I also like to go for ghoulfriends. You know, everyone likes to go ghoul frenzy but i think this is useful when i'm taking on elites it's a nice actual cooldown that's going to boost my damage by a little bit, i'm definitely going to get improved unholy presence.
One thing to know is an improved unholy presence will work before your level 70 so unlock unholy presence so you should be definitely getting it from here, i like to get unholy blight you don't really see the value of unholy black that much in your day-to-day life as a death knight it's more for when you're taking on elite enemies and considering you just have to put one point in this for quite well not a huge dps increase but considering it's one talent point it's a decent dps increase for one talent point especially as unholy bites blights do roll into each other so it's quite useful a game for when you're taking on elite enemies.
From here i like to just get one point in magic suppression, there's a lot of casting enemies in wrath of the lich king which are a pain in the backside so the extra boost to your anti-magic shell and obviously the flat two percent less damage from magic is it's not that bad i think it's the best option out of the others.
Some people like to max out desolation here but personally i never use blood strike so something can really be useful when the rare situation where i use blood strike on an elite enemy, personally not my preferred option but some people do prefer to go for that and from here bone shield crypt fever, bone shield is extremely nice because it protects you from 20 percent less damage it's very useful when you're running around pulling mobs because you're gonna get hit in the back a lot, stops you from taking too much damage before you actually get the clump enemies.
Clumped up in the first place fever just flat disease increasing, this is again a very very key talent that separates unholy from the other specs, you kill mobs so much faster on unholy
spec yeah you can probably pull more mobs in blood spec because you have a slightly increased survivability but since you kill them up so much faster in unholy definitely pulls ahead.
Then to get you down the tree you can put more points in necrosis if you wish i prefer putting some points in magic suppression because it is very useful in a number of situations, then from here i'm going to max out ebb and play bringer definitely wandering plague, these again so these three talents here it's like the holy trinity of why unholy is the giga charred spec for
leveling, increased disease damage even more increased disease damage and then now your diseases have a chance of an everyday tick to blow up and cause even more aoe damage.
I've been playing DKs on the beta quite a bit now and even with pretty bad gear because of these three talents mobs just totally melt i can't wait to get my real death knight geared up and then do leveling because yeah with these three talents i'm just gonna melt the whole of northrend then repair you're definitely going to max out rager riven there and summon gargoyle, you can pick up skirt strike if you want if you're leveling purely by dungeons or you just want it for the sake of it, personally i don't actually get it reason why i don't get it because i'm just death striking over time and i'm not actually going to use death strike but really it's up to you because the only time that i personally use blood strike over a death strike is when i'm on a dungeon boss.
Then from here i'm going to max out butchery when you combine butchery and dirge your runic power just goes through the roof actually becomes quite a challenge to run out of runic power you will always have enough runic power to use corpse explosion on cooldown and that's what we want.
Then i'm going to put three points in blade spec, if any reason why i do that's because i'm not using any of the abilities about the subversion talent benefits so there's just really not that much point of having it to be honest and i like to go for bladed armor blade damage goes very well with flight battalion.
I've mentioned earlier impurity and it scales when you get better and better gear as you level
up i've tested this against black ice blade armor just it just does more damage some people like to go for two weapon spec here i mean it's okay but i care more about increasing my aoe damage when i'm building a talent build for unholy dk while leveling so i honestly just i don't i don't go for it.
You may want to get it if you want but um i would prefer to get some survivability talents over slightly increased melee damage, runetap becomes very useful while leveling because i like to use it between pulls just to top my health up along with death pact event we're gonna max out that conviction well, we'll get three points in it and what four points in it and then i'll start
pointing points into improved room type the reason why i like that conviction over any of the other talents is because the extra increase of a chance of wandering plague procking.
Glyphs
Let me talk you about the glyphs, most people are going to go for glyph of icy touch and glyph of the ghoul, glyph of extra frost fever damage big increased aoe damage so yeah great for leveling glyph of the ghoul extra damage on your ghoul, your ghoul is always there most of the time and since corpse explosion damage is actually based on the ghouls total hp
and this glyph increases the ghoul's hp, therefore increases corpse explosion damage.
Now we would go for glyph of death and decay, if this was available pre-wrath of lich king but unfortunately it's not but if you're leveling in the future then get glyph or death decay and icy touch and the priority in my opinion probably is to get definite decay over icy touch because it's going to be a bigger increase to aoe damage and then get glyph of the ghoul last well actually won't be able to get that to level 80.
And you definitely have to get glyph of pestilence and glyph of corpse explosion, the increased range only seems small when you read it but it's bigger than it appears, these talents here help massively during your pulls and because i'm my personal playstyle has sacrificed my ghoul quite a lot so i'm definitely going to get glyph of raise dead so i don't have to stack my badge with loads and loads of corpse dust.
Stat Priority
And lastly let's talk about gear picking so you know what stats should you actually be focusing on while you're leveling, long story short what you want to do is focus on strength and pieces what we care about the most like i've said before is increasing aoe damage strength and crit increase our aoe damage more than anything, haste is a nice staten area everything increases the gargoyle damage increases our melee damage but we don't really care about that.
When we're doing raid bosses at end game what we care about is doing stupid damage with our wandering plague in our dots, now plate gear pieces are normally going to be better than agility pieces now agility pieces have you know sometimes great hit chance on them which by the way you do have to maintain at six percent that would be my recommendation, anyway because that gives you the hit cap on enemies two levels higher than you but normally they're going to be worse because first of all your pet doesn't scale off attack power with skills of strength so you're losing damage better.
You have talents like ravenous dead and other talents in the death knight talents that are going to give your character a percentage increase of your strength not your attack power so strength scales better when you equip it than attack power plus agility gear makes you more squishy so my advice honestly is to avoid agility gear as much as you can, i only tend to go for leather pieces first of all it's a ridiculous dps upgrade because i've been really been unlucky getting a good strength piece or it has hit chance on it and i need to get that six percent hit cap, other than that you should be going for plate pieces all the way because plate pieces give you way more armor which is gonna obviously reduce the damage you take you have a strength scaling like i mentioned.
Anyway guys that's where i'm going to end the video over my name is mindgoblin, to my next video!
