Specs
There are 3 talent trees: Blood, Frost, Unholy. I will discuss the pros and cons of each spec with regards to PvP and PvE. In beta I played as Frost and on live I leveled as Frost all the way till 80 trying to be anti-conformist to the sea of Unholy Death Knights. Finally I gave in and had to see what Unholy offered that the other 2 trees didn’t and I was quite shocked at the results. So I will share my experience to the best of my knowledge about Frost and Unholy…I only dabbled a little in Blood because this tree still needs and will get worked on in the future patches.

Read the full article for specs and more tips

BLOOD
PVE SPEC: Click Here to view talent tree
PVP SPEC: Click Here to view talent tree
PVP SPEC (alternative): Click Here to view talent tree

HINT: I usually add in the 1 pointers because sometimes utility>dps. Being able to break a fear or help heal yourself up helps the group as a whole.

In this spec we can see the synergy between the blood tree and frost. Blood is very much like an arms warrior in that in relies mostly on physical DPS. The reason why I got bladed armor instead of Scent of Blood was to synergize with Toughness in the frost tree. Toughness also reduces movement impairing duration. Hate getting knocked back with thunderclap? Wasting 5 seconds trying to walk back in the range of the bosses hit box? So high end DPS classes, every second counts, that is why range has such a huge advantages thus far. While melee spends 50% of the time moving around and moving back repositioning itself to DPS, for the most part the range DPS can just stand there firing away.

For the second tree I went down frost instead of unholy because Necrosis is horrible. Plus hitting faster gives you more white hits and overall damage. In blood spec, your main source of DPS is melee, Heartstrike, and Death Coil. Yes you can argue “why not get Morbidity? That’s 15% more DC damage” but that amount is insignificant. So far Heartstrike can crit for around 4-5k? Depending on DR but the effect is going to change into a cleave like effect in which it will hit 2 targets instead of the old haste removal effect…which is now out of the game. I got Annihilation so when you spam Obliterates you don’t eat up diseases…because diseases boost up you damage on Heartstrike. Sometimes I combo IT>PS>OB>HS>HS and repeat. Or if you are really aggressive for PvP you can do OB>OB>HS>HS>HS>HS>HS>HS…since all 4 runes will convert into death runes this will allow to you chain spam HS and try to burst someone down. I believe the 2nd combo and empower runic weapon>OB>OB>HS>HS>HS>HS while dancing runeblade is up…will result into some impressive sustained burst on any target.

Preferred stance: Blood presence. –this allows more heavy strikes

Advanced stance: Unholy presence. –this allows fast chained strikes, sometimes better because you can beat everyone GCD… 0.5 seconds off GCD is huge…basically blood lust status…well 50% of the blood lust haste effect.

I’m not a SUPER Blood expert, but this is what information I have gathered thus far from my experience and observation and a gaming scientist.

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