Levelling Specs

There are two options when levelling your Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK), here follows a guide for both:

Speccing Blood allows you to have nearly zero down time. What we mean by this is that the talents in the Blood tree allow you to heal yourself enough on single mob pulls so that you do not need to stop to eat or bandage between each mob.

Blood leveling spec

The second option is speccing Unholy. By speccing Unholy you gain a lot of power for aoe (area of effect) attacks, which allows you to pull a number of enemies and kill them at the same time. The down side is that after each large pull you will have to stop to eat or bandage.

Unholy leveling spec

The choice between the two is really one of your prefered play style. Do you prefer to chain pull single mobs without having to stop and wait, or would you rather pull groups of mobs (killing them at the same time) with down time between each pull. The speed of levelling is roughly the same between the two, so it is very much a matter of personal style of play... or maybe there is a specific ability you lust after in one of the trees.

DPS Specs

Blood DPS Spec

If you spec your talents in the Blood tree, your style of play will have two defining features. The first is that your main attack uses only one rune, resulting in you doing more attacks albeit less strong. The second is that, in comparison to the other trees, a large amount of your damage is physical and not magical.

When speccing Blood you have just one clear choice.

In the rotation just below, Dancing Rune Weapon is not included in the rotation. When ever it is off cooldown you would use it to replace Death Coil in your rotation, while maintaining the rest of the rotation. Whenever you reach the Death Coil part of the cycle, it is intended that you use Death Coil until all your Runic Power is expended, or is less than 40 Runic Power (the cost of a Death Coil). Dancing Rune Weapon is a Runic Power drain spell, so don't worry if you have Runic Power left after casting it (using all available Runic Power applies only to Death Coil). As Blood dps, you will want a very slow 2H weapon and to put Rune of the Fallen Crusader on it.

51/0/20 : This spec uses Dancing Rune Weapon. The spell rotation is very effective, but it should be noted that because Heart Strike uses only one rune, you will have a lot of buttons to press per rotation. Death Strike replaces Obliterate in your standard cycle as well. Make sure you glyph for Death Strike also!

Frost DPS Spec - Dual Wield

Since Patch 3.2, the Frost tree has become the tree for dual wield dps (and of course it is still a tanking tree if you pick the tanking talents). An advantage of specing frost is that a reasonable amount of damage that is done is spell damage. This spell damage has the advantage over physical attacks of by-passing armor mitigation (Unholy does even more of its damage as spell damage). If you are after large numbers, Frost is for you as it has the big hit abilities, though this is averaged out over the abilities to ensure that overall the damage is in line with other specs. If you intend on speccing Frost for dps, make sure you pick up two slow 1H weapons - fast 1H weapons are very poor for Frost dps Death Knights. With Runeforging, you will want (with all specs) to have Rune of the Fallen Crusader on your main hand and Razorice in your offhand. Each spec will need specific glyphs, all of which are listed on the talent tree links for each spec.

0/53/18 : If you decide to spec Frost for dps, this is the current top frost dual wield dps spec. It pours the talent points in to the Frost tree, picking up all the necessary talents while saving enough to pick up those talents in the Unholy tree that are proven to scale well when dual wielding.

In this rotation Frost Strike becomes your Runic Power dump instead of Death Coil, so when you hit this part of the rotation keep on using Frost Strike until your Runic Power is no longer high enough to cast another. However, Howling Blast will not replace Obliterate in your rotation. Obliterate is a superior attack to Howling Blast, so Obliterate will be part of your base rotation. The advantage of having Howling Blast comes in when Killing Machine and Rime proc. A free attack that consumes no runes and can crit for a very large amount is where Howling Blast shines. Your free Howling Blast is best used in combination with your Killing Machine proc. This is where it gets slightly complicated. If both Rime and Killing Machine are up, Howling Blast should be cast immediately - make sure you don't use your Killing Machine on a Frost Strike if you can cast a Howling Blast with Rime as Howling Blast benefits much more from a guaranteed crit than Frost Strike. If only Killing Machine is up (and not Rime), then just continue with your normal rotation and it will be consume by Frost Strike. Just remember to use your Rime procs to cast Howling Blast immediately each time that it is up, then return to where you left off in your rotation. Your two blood runes will come back as death runes after you cast Blood Strike, allowing you to cast Obliterate every second time they are up.

3/51/7 : This is the selfish Frost dps spec. All the talent points are spent on increasing your personal dps. As such, you will skip over the raid buffing aspect of Icy Touch in your talents. The second main point is that it exploits a glyph to modify the rotation for maximum damage. Instead of having to reapply the two diseases with Icy Touch and Plague Strike, the much less important Blood Strike is sacrificed in the rotation to cast Pestilence, which with the glyph will refresh the diseases, leaving the Unholy rune and Frost rune from Icy Touch and Plague Strike free to cast an extra Obliterate.

In this rotation you will apply your diseases only once in your opening rotation. After that, you will not need to use Icy Touch nor Plague Strike, as Pestilence will refresh the diseases. You will need to refresh your diseases every second rotation, which is when you use your two Blood runes on one Blood Strike and one Pestilence. Howling Blast is much like it is in the above spec. Only use it when you get a free cast from Rime. Make sure you have the correct glyphs for this spec (listed on the talent page link for this spec). The main problem with this spec is that the rotation is extremely tight. You will only have around a one second window to cast Pestilence each time the Blood rune comes off cooldown. In a laggy evironment or when there is a lot of movement involved in the fight, it will be very difficult to hold to the rotation. If you find yourself having to often reapply diseases with Icy Touch and Plague Strike, it is best to use the first Frost spec listed as it is much more forgiving with lag and movement in fights.

Once, then:

3/51/7 : This is a very standard and solid spec. It is much like the first Frost spec listed here, but instead of investing heavily in the Unholy tree, it picks up three points in the Blood tree. If you have threat issues (mainly due to poor tanks) then this will be a very good spec for you due to the threat reducing talents tat are picked up.

The rotation is exactly the same as the first Frost spec listed, the talents have changed, just not the rotation. In this rotation Frost Strike becomes your Runic Power dump instead of Death Coil, so when you hit this part of the rotation keep on using Frost Strike until your Runic Power is no longer high enough to cast another. However, Howling Blast will not replace Obliterate in your rotation. Obliterate is a superior attack to Howling Blast, so Obliterate will be part of your base rotation. The advantage of having Howling Blast comes in when Killing Machine and Rime proc. A free attack that consumes no runes and can crit for a very large amount is where Howling Blast shines. Your free Howling Blast is best used in combination with your Killing Machine proc. This is where it gets slightly complicated. If both Rime and Killing Machine are up, Howling Blast should be cast immediately - make sure you don't use your Killing Machine on a Frost Strike if you can cast a Howling Blast with Rime as Howling Blast benefits much more from a guaranteed crit than Frost Strike. If only Killing Machine is up (and not Rime), then just continue with your normal rotation and it will be consume by Frost Strike. Just remember to use your Rime procs to cast Howling Blast immediately each time that it is up, then return to where you left off in your rotation. Your two blood runes will come back as death runes after you cast Blood Strike, allowing you to cast Obliterate every second time they are up.

Unholy DPS Spec

Unholy has one defining feature as DPS. Unholy, out of the three talent trees, has the highest percentage of damage as spell damage. Unholy Death Knights will thus find that they have a distinct advantage on any fights against mobs with high armor. Out of all the specs, it also seems to be the most forgiving when it comes to gear. If you are undergeared, this is probably the best option. The spec also scales very well since patch 3.3, meaning it is good for both beginners and well geared Death Knights. As Unholy dps, you will want a very slow 2H weapon and to put Rune of the Fallen Crusader on it.

17/0/54 : There are no optional talents here, no talent points to shift around. The required glyphs are listed in the link and are not optional.

As with the other specs, when you reach the Death Coil portion of the rotation you will need to use Death Coil as much as you can in order to consume as much of your Runic Power as possible However, always use your runes the moment they are up, even if it means sitting on full Runic Power. Use you Gargoyle as often as possible and try to time using it just after you get any buffs (such as from use-trinkets and chance on hit procs). The rotation has two parts to it. Initial application of diseases, then the rotation that you will repeat - this part of the rotation will keep your diseases refreshed.

Initial application of diseases (do only once, only repeat if diseases fall off target):

Rotation continues as follows, using Pestilence will keep your diseases up. If diseases fall off target, repeat your initial application, then continue with this rotation again:

Tanking Specs

Core Abilities

All Death Knights have available to them core abilities, regardless of spec. These are both passive abilities and also on use abilities. These form a valuable set of abilities for tanking:

Low Tier Talents

All of the three talent trees are viable for tanking, provided you pick up the tanking talents along the way. Each tree has a slight advantage depending upon the fight taking place, but this is marginal in almost all cases. In all three trees, there is a tier one talent for tanking. Regardless of which tree you will spec in to, you must pick up all three tier one talents (one from each tree). These are your first tanking talents (that all specs must have):

Mid Tier/Mid Value Talents

There are also many mid tier talents of varying levels of usefulness when tanking:

Mid Tier Blood Talents:

Mid Tier Frost Talents:

Mid Tier Unholy Talents:

High Tier/High Value Talents

At this point the three talent trees become mutually exclusive in terms of tanking talents. Each tree has one high level talent that due to it being so deep in its respective tree makes it impossible to pick a second one of these. These are some of the best defensive tanking abilities a Death Knight has.

All of these tanking abilities can be broken up in to two categories. The first group is those abilities that are always active, such as Frost Presence. The second group is the active use abilities, which you will need to place in a handy position on your spell bar (or ideally key bound). These are the ones you use when you are taking a lot of damage - a good idea is to use these sooner rather than later as once you are already on very low health there may be no recovery.