mists-of-pandaria-death-knight-changes
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Lichborne: Leveling tips for death knights in Pandaria
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. By the time you read this, Mists of Pandaria should be out and playable in Europe (coming soon to the US), and there's probably even a few of you who will have hit level 86 or 87. With the new talent and specialization system, I expect figuring out how to level will be easier than ever, if only because it's a lot more difficult to go wrong. Still, there's a few recommendations to make that may help you hit level 90 just a bit faster, and we'll go ahead and dispense some of that advice today. Note that all advice here is for leveling only, and may not apply to end game dungeon running or raiding. Choosing your leveling spec I would recommend you choose either two-handed frost or blood as your leveling spec. Blood is strong enough and has enough self-healing and emergency defense tools that will probably never die. That said, your DPS won't be as high as you might like. Frost will allow you to kill things faster but still gives you some decent survivability options in the form of Death Strike and, if you talent in to it, the Lichborne heal trick. If you do level as blood, make sure you are either queuing for dungeons as a tank, or have a secondary frost or unholy spec ready to switch to when you DPS a dungeon. Blood is still not great DPS, and your dungeon group will need better than what you can put out as blood.
Lichborne: The latest Mists of Pandaria beta updates for death knights
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. Since the last time we talked, we have seen a couple of new updates to the Mists of Pandaria beta. There haven't been many earth-shattering changes for death knights, but some of the changes have been significant enough that it's worth talking about both what they mean for the class and what they may imply about future updates. It's difficult to say where Blizzard is going with our class in Mists, if only because they haven't said much. They've started talking on the beta forums, but they haven't directed anything at the death knight class yet. This isn't completely surprising. Our class is not in a horrible place right now, and the beta's young. Chances are we'll get our turn eventually. That said, having developer feedback is useful for figuring out how to mold your own feedback. Knowing what a developer intends with a certain change can help us test that change with a better understanding of how it fits in to a larger vision. In absence of that, however, we can still look at the implications of these changes to see what we come up with.
Lichborne: The effect of the new stat changes on death knights
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. We're still a couple of weeks away from the dam burst that is the Mists of Pandaria press event, but in the meantime, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a new Dev Watercooler. He listed some stat changes coming in Mists that, while ostensibly not as complicated as those in Wrath, still hold some interesting and possibly major implications for class balance in the coming expansion. Let's dive right in and see what they mean for death knights. Blocking takes a week While it doesn't directly affect us, the blocking changes will certainly shake up the tanking hierarchy that we're a part of, so it's worth pointing out that the usual single roll combat table for dodging, parrying, or blocking a hit is gone. Instead, the chance to block will be calculated only after the dodge and parry chance is calculated. This essentially means that being unhittable is gone. You can't just stack to 102.4%. Of course, death knights and druids have never been able to do this, but they will now be joined by the shield tanks.
