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Lichborne: Death knight group utility in Mists of 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. Death knights are not always the first class you think of when you think group utility. They don't have a long-term crowd control method, they can't summon food or Healthstones, and they don't have one of those long term castable stat buffs like Mark of the Wild or Power Word: Fortitude. That said, you shouldn't sell them short. We have a lot of little things we contribute to a group in a ways people may not think of. This week, we're going to look at some of the buffs, debuffs, and group utility moves death knights contribute, with an emphasis on things that or new or significantly changed in Mists of Pandaria. Bringing the Buffs Horn of Winter has long been a valuable buff that you should never neglect, and it's changed in some interesting ways in Mists. Instead of a flat buff to strength and agility, it now adds 10% attack power to you and your group. This ends up being pretty handy since it should scale as gear levels increase.
Lichborne: Why the death knight blood tree needs tweaks
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. Patch 4.2 will likely be on live servers by the time you read this, but I figure we've talked enough about the patch 4.2 in past columns. If you read those, you probably have a good idea of where everything is for death knights. This week, I've decided it would be a good idea to take a break and talk about something that didn't get much attention in patch 4.2: the plight of the death knight tank. It's been sort of an undercurrent in the death knight community since the beginning of Cataclysm. The death knight blood tanking tree is just sort of gummed up. It's not that we're underpowered, per se. No, a well played death knight tank is pretty dominant in heroic dungeons and even normal raiding. You only start really falling behind in heroic raids, where the problem becomes really evident: You're doing twice as much work for the same results, more or less. Most of the issues are centered around Death Strike and how it interacts with our resource system. The quirks of said resource system are so demanding that you end up staring at your rune bar more than the battle in front of you, trying to game the system just right to squeeze out one last Death Strike.
