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Lichborne: The top death knight DPS gear of patch 4.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. I will be honest: I am still not impressed with our tier 13 set. The whole bone motif just isn't working for me. The set bonuses are also a little iffy for me, what with half of them being sort of OK and half sort of lackluster. It all leaves a bit of a lukewarm feeling. That said, I'm not too disappointed with the final tier of Cataclysm, because we have definitely received some pretty nice surprises from the itemization team. Every tier should have those one or two items that make you stop and look again, items that, more than their superior stats, have a look or feel that just makes you feel warm and fuzzy and makes you want to get it no matter what the cost. We'll look at some of those items from the Dragon Soul raid today, starting with everyone's favorite sword that summons horrible visions from the depths of the earth, Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps.
Lichborne: The death knight beta diaries, part 2: Dual wielding in Deepholm
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly source for news, guides, tips and opinions on the death knight class. Our adventures in beta continue, as promised, with a new zone and a new spec. With Hyjal behind us, the next logical zone to head to is Deepholm, and such is where I headed, after a suitably epic breadcrumb quest sequence. My spec was dual wield frost. Just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from with this testing, I should note that I have been equipping quest rewards if they're itemized for death knight usage, even if they're downgrades, in order to get an idea of how much survivability and damage potential your average casual death knight will have.
Lichborne: Emblem of Frost gear for death knights
Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight column. This week, Daniel Whitcomb is really regretting turning on his boombox in Acherus at the new year's party. By now, I assume a good portion of you have managed to get on your daily heroics at least a couple times a week, maybe even have an ICC raid or three under your belt. If so, you're starting to amass enough Emblems of Frost to maybe possibly think about buying a piece of gear. Of course, the problem with Emblem of Frost gear is that it's a little bit more expensive than, say, Emblem of Triumph gear. You're not going to get away with gearing up quite as fast, at least not until all of ICC is open and you have a good group for the place. No 25-emblem tier gear here. So that also makes it important, especially for the more casual player, to pick what you buy carefully. Let's take a look at the various options.
Lichborne: A PTR preview of 5-man Crusader's Coliseum DPS loot for Death Knights
Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly Death Knight column, with your host Daniel Whitcomb. The patch 3.2 PTR continues on apace, and with the background downloader now delivering content to the live servers, we can only hope that the release date is creeping closer. With that in mind, I am continuing our preview of the loot of the new 5-man Crusader's Coliseum loot, which is all epic all the time, and perfect for any Death Knight who just hasn't quite managed to break into the raid game. Admittedly, this loot is a bit less outright spectacular than that tank loot, if only because it has a lot of haste and armor penetration, which are less desirable for certain specs of Death Knights since we do so much of our damage with instant abilities or with frost and shadow magic which bypasses armor penetration altogether. Then again, if your rotation is heavy on Blood or Heart Strikes and Obliterates or Death Strikes, you'll still get some nice use out of the armor penetration, and as I mentioned a few weeks ago, with enough armor penetration (Although more than the amount that you'll get from this gear), armor penetration can even make Obliterate surpass Scourge Strike. So yeah. armor penetration isn't so bad unless you're losing a lot of strength to get it, but haste is sort of pretty far down on the useful scale. There's also a lack of hit rating on a lot of this gear, so you may find yourself frantically re-gemming or passing up an upgrade to keep yourself at the soft cap as well.And regardless, this is all epic gear, so the stats are all high enough that a bit of less desirable haste won't be that bad to deal with. Let's check it out.
