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So, you've decided to play a Death Knight and now want to know how to level him or her to 80. Lucky for you Death Knights are probably one of the easiest classes to solo and level quickly. They come out of their starting zone fully equipped with blue quality equipment ready to cut through anything that opposes them. In fact, for the first 5 or 6 levels you will probably be laughing yourself silly at how easy and fast they are to level.

Leveling a Death Knight really starts at around level 58, since before then you are locked into a quest chain that teaches you what it is to be a Death Knight. The starting zone and chain is one of the coolest areas Blizzard has created for a single class. In it, you get to meet and be trained by the various bosses from Naxxramas and even meet the Lich King himself.

The initial quest chain is a great way for everyone to let loose, and express their evil side.  Hopefully you will even have some fun doing it. The quest chain walks you through learning your various spells, talents and acquiring talent points. Just when you are convinced that you will be locked into your evil ways for all eternity, you are reminded of the good in life, and repent your ways. By this time you will be level 58, have all your abilities, and are then thrown to the wolves in the Eastern Plaguelands. There is really no reason to stick around in the old world though. Instead head straight to the Outlands.

To solo as a Death Knight you really only have two choices, Blood or Unholy specced. While you could spec frost for survivability and the odd bit of tanking, it will really slow you down. Your only real choice is whether you want the amazing health regeneration and survivability of Blood, or the insane damage and AoE ability that Unholy offers. Unholy players will level faster if they are at all skilled and understand how to survive. If you are a newer player or just not into being careful then Blood will allow you to play more recklessly and die far less.

Presences

Death Knights have great abilities called Presences. These are self buff abilities that cost nothing to activate, and stay active until you die. Only one presence may be active at a time. Eventually you have three different presences to choose from as follows:

• Blood Presence - Increases damage by 15% and healing the Death Knight by 4% of the damage dealt. Only damage dealt to targets that grant experience or honour can trigger this heal. Gained at level 55.
• Frost Presence - Increases total health by 10%, armour contribution from items by 80%, and reducing spell damage taken by 15%. Increases threat generated. Gained at level 57.
• Unholy Presence - Increases attack speed by 15% and reducing the global cooldown on all abilities by 0.5 seconds. Gained at level 70.

While you have the three choices to work with, for the most part you will want to be using your Blood Presence while leveling. The extra damage and the healing make it the go to presence for almost any PvE situation.

When fighting casters that are giving you issues, or when you are fighting a difficult creature switching into frost may be able to save your life. This is especially true when fighting creatures for group quests where you are the one taking the hits. It is easy enough to become a poor mans tank for quick group quests by simply changing presences.

If / when you venture into any PvP situations, for example in Grizzly Hills, you may want to change up to Unholy as it allows you to react faster when being attacks. The extra speed and cooldown however do not help as much as you would expect in PvE as you will still be waiting on runes to cooldown to use abilities again.

Rotations

While soloing and leveling, the most important thing to do is get a solid handle on the Death Knight damage rotations. Unlike most classes that have very simple rotations of 2-3 spells, a Death Knight needs to manage runes, runic power, cooldowns and 5-8 spells. The sooner you get used to doing this the better off you will be.

Death Knight rotations are usually split into two sequences. This is done to ensure that you use all of your available runes each time they become available, keep diseases up, and burn off all of the runic power that you generate. The first cycle in a rotation ensures that you get diseases up on the target so that your special attacks do more damage. Your second cycle takes advantage of not having to cast diseases to do more damage. By the time the second cycle is over the diseases are falling off the target and you revert to cycle one. Realistically though, while leveling, if you get to the end of cycle 2 in a rotation and the target is not dead, you are doing something very wrong or are fighting something that is very likely too tough for you. Repeating rotations through both cycles is only likely to happen on instance bosses.

However, like they always say, a plan on a battle field never survives first contact, so it also happens that in combat it becomes very difficult to stick to the rotations. Don’t worry, deviate when you need to, but remember to come back to them as soon as possible.

Blood Rotation
Blood Leveling Build (56/0/15)



The first cycle in the Blood rotation uses its first two attacks to place your diseases on your target and burns off a frost and an unholy rune. Your next two attacks are Heart Strikes which do damage and burn off your two blood runes. You then do Death Strike, before dumping your runic power into one or more Death Coils.

The second cycle uses Heart Strikes early to ensure more damage while your diseases are still on the target. You then use a Death Strike for health regeneration and then more Heart Strikes to do more damage to max out your runic power so that you can do a sequence of Death Coils again.

Unholy Rotation
Unholy DPS Build (12/0/59)


The first cycle in the Unholy rotation starts off the same as Blood’s rotation as it uses its first two attacks to place your diseases on your target and burns off a frost and an unholy rune. It then changes to two Blood Strikes which do damage and burn off your two blood runes. You then do a Scourge Strike that uses up your last two runes, a frost and unholy. Once done you will then use Unholy Plague or Death Coil to dump your runic power. To decide which one to use think about the situation, if there is more than one creature around you or if the creature you are fighting is going to take a full 20 seconds to kill, then Unholy Plague will do more damage. If you are fighting a single target that you are likely to kill in the next few hits, then use a Death Coil instead.

The second cycle uses Scourge Strikes to max out your runic power so that you can do a sequence of Death Coils again. This second cycle starts as soon as you can cast Scourge Strike and due to your Reaping ability you should have death runes available allowing you to use it three times in a row. Once you have finished dumping your runic power you revert back to the first cycle in the rotation only if you do not have a Scourge Strike glyph or if the glyph did not refresh your diseases.

AoE Rotations

Death Knights can very easily adapt their rotations to AOE rotations by adding in Death and Decay at the start of a rotation. Then as soon as they have applied their diseases (Icy Touch and Plague Strike) they add in Pestilence and then Blood Boil before the diseases expire. This makes using your normal single target rotation difficult so expect to miss out on many of the attacks.

If you are fighting a large number of creatures all at once you should really switch to a dedicated AOE rotation such as this one.

AoE Cycle

• Icy Touch
• Plague Strike
• Pestilence
• Death and Decay
• Blood Boil
• Unholy Plague (if Unholy)

This rotation makes sure that you get your diseases onto a target and then spreads it to all other targets in the area using Pestilence. You then place your large AoE (Death and Decay) and then use Blood Boil to cause the diseases to cause additional damage to your targets. Lastly if you are Unholy you can add in an Unholy Plague to cause even more damage to those around you. This is a very powerful rotation any time you are caught with multiple creatures attacking you, and is very common in an instance or group situation.

Minions

While Death Knights don’t always have a minion available to them or up, they do have many different options. The first and probably most important minion that a Death Knight gets is their Ghoul. A ghoul is an essential part of a Death Knight and something that you should never underestimate. A Death Knight without a Ghoul up is kinda’ like eating Mac without Cheese. Sure, you can do it, by why would you?

Unholy Death Knights are able to keep a ghoul up all the time, while Blood and Frost can only keep one around for 2 minutes at a time, and then have to wait until they find another humanoid body and until the 5 minute cooldown is over. No matter what, any time you can have one up, you should. They raise your damage significantly and are another target for creatures to attack other than you.

Unholy Death Knights can summon a gargoyle to assist them every 5 minutes, and this is best used for AoE damage when you are being swarmed. Blood Death Knights have access to a Dancing Rune Weapon, and it should be used anytime you are in slightly over your head on a single creature. It adds a lot of damage over a short time and can really save your butt.

Who to Fight

As a Death Knight you are insanely powerful against almost any type of creature one on one. Death Knights while leveling can be thought of like a cartoon Tasmanian Devils, once they start to spin stay out of their way! Because of this you can really attack and kill anything you want. For the best results though you want to constantly be fighting creatures a level or two above your level. If possible you want to be fighting casters since they have such low health and armor, and you can cut them apart in seconds.

While attacking creatures you want to attack from the edges of groups and pull them back to a safe distance from others in the area, then kill them. Keep moving in from the edge of a group until you have wiped them out. Think of yourself as a lone wolf stalking its prey, except this lone wolf can take down the whole pack!

Special Pulls

Dealing with special pulls, like casters and runners, can be a real issue for most classes, however as Death Knights we have several great abilities that make dealing with them almost trivial.

Casters

Death Knights are all about casters. There is not a caster that a Death Knight does not like, as they are easy kill targets. Death Knights are all over casters, like trailer trash on a carton of Lucky Strikes. The hardest part for many classes is just getting a caster to come to you to fight so that you are not in the midst of other creatures, with a Death Knight this is never an issue, just use Death Grip and huzzah they are yanked right to you. A caster getting rest to hit you with a big damage spell, no problem, use one of your multiple anti magic abilities. You could use Mind Freeze to stop that spell, Strangulate to stop several, or even Anti-Magic Shell to just mitigate the damage. All this control over them, teamed up with your high damage output and their low damage mitigation spells dead caster.

Runners

Another type of creature that many classes have issues with are those that run away at low health. This usually happens in the middle of a group of other creatures, and before you know it the scene is almost as bad as the paparazzi swarming Brittney on a bad hair day. Death Knights have many ways to prevent this from happening, or if it does they can always just AoE the Press down, but that’s a different section.

Dealing with runners can be as simple as using Death Grip to yank them right back to you if they are almost dead anyway. If they have a little more health you could also use Chains of Ice to slow them down significantly to give you time to deal with them. If you are a frost build you can also try Hungering Cold if it is off cooldown. As Unholy you can get your ghoul to Gnaw the target and thereby stun them for 3 seconds.

Quests

Death Knights have numerous class based quests, all taking place in your starting zone. A Death Knight starts in an instanced starting zone that changes as you progress through the quest chain. Because there as so many quests in the chain we have a full guide to the Death Knight starting area here.

Where to level

Leveling as a Death Knight for either Horde or Alliance takes place in the same zones. As soon as you are done with the Death Knight starting zone you should make your way to the Blasted Lands and then through the Dark Portal and into Outland. Even though you will only be level 58 at this point, don’t worry, you will rock through the first several zones easily without even needing to upgrade your gear. From there you can work your way through the zones in Outland until you hit level 68 or 69 and then make your way to Northrend. This will likely mean skipping several areas in Outland, but don’t worry, you can easily hit 80 without running out of quests in Northrend even if you enter at 58. In fact most players will do so before even entering the zone of Icecrown.

Zones
Level Range	Zone Name	Continent		PvP Status
58-63	Hellfire Peninsula	Outlands		Contested
60-64	Zangarmarsh	Outlands		Contested
62-65	Terokkar Forest	Outlands		Contested
64-67	Nagrand	Outlands		Contested
65-68	Blade's Edge Mountains	Outlands		Contested
68-72	Borean Tundra	Northrend	Contested
68-72	Howling Fjord	Northrend	Contested
71-75	Dragonblight	Northrend	Contested
73-75	Grizzly Hills	Northrend	Contested
74-77	Zul'Drak	Northrend	Contested
76-78	Sholazar Basin	Northrend	Contested
77-80	Crystalsong Forest	Northrend	Contested
77-80	Storm Peaks	Northrend	Contested
77-80	Icecrown	Northrend	Contested