Death Knights
GHOULS
One of the most exciting aspects of your Death Knight is ghouls. Here is a handy ghoul guide to get you started.
At level 56 your Death Knight will learn the Raise Dead spell. This spell will allow you to summon your own ghoul.
The ghoul that you summon will remain active for 1min (if it doesn't die sooner from damage) and acts like other summoned guardians, rather than pets. This means that they are unlike warlock and hunter pets in that they are not always able to be summoned and they are not under your direct control. The cooldown on summoning your ghouls is 3mins, so you will be without it for the majority of the time.
You are able however, to make certain investments to improve your ghoul with your talents (all ghoul related talents are in the Unholy tree). Master of Ghouls will transform your ghoul from a guardian in to a real pet. By committing to the Unholy talent tree, you will automatically pick this up. It is only with this that you will gain a pet spell bar and full control over your ghoul and its abilities. Also, it will remain indefinately active as long as it does not die. The only draw back here is if your ghoul does indeed die and the cool down on Raise Dead is not yet up, though the cooldown is reduced to 2mins as part of Master of Ghouls. In the actual Unholy tree itself, you are able to pick up two closely related talents that both benefit your ghouls, namely Shadow Infusion and Dark Transformation. Both of these talents are serious buffs to the amount of damage that your ghouls will do. Indeed, Death Coil will play a greater role in your play style as a result. Dark Transformation is the ultimate goal here. You will want to get up your stacks of Shadow Infusion as fast as possible, then transform your ghouls straight away. While your ghouls is transformed, you cannot begin the next round of 5 stacks of Shadow Infusion until your ghouls transforms back to normal once the 30secs of Dark Transformation is over. This means your ghoul will be swapping in and out of Dark Transformation.
If you are Blood (though as a tank it won't be your highest priority) or Frost you will want to summon as soon as it is off cooldown to keep your ghoul out and doing damage for as long as possible. Your ghoul will benefit though, from any procs that are buffing you, so on the opening pull you may want to save your first summon for around 10secs; which is usually long enough for the most frequent procs to go off and buff you. As unholy, the goal in to have him in Dark Transformation as much as you can and don't forget to have him out already during raid buffs.
Currently there is only only one glyph that you can obtain to improve your ghoul. Glyph of Raise Dead will further increase your ghoul's damage and increase his survivability dramatically. This glyph is only useful if you are going Unholy as the ghoul does a large share of the damage for unholy Death Knights, while as Blood and Frost your ghouls is very much marginalized.
Your ghoul's abilties, which come under your control through talents, have a lot of utility built in to them. Controlling your ghoul is by means of an extra spell bar of abilties. As you can see, performing Dark Transformation will also alter the abilities of your ghouls somewhat, increasing his damage considerably.
Ghoul
Dark Transformation
© 2009-2011 deathknight.nl All Rights Reserved