Death Knight Leveling

If you've been thinking like I have of leveling a Death Knight, WoW Insider now has a nice article on possible DK leveling builds.

As is usually the case with this things I tend to take the advice as a set of helpful guidelines and not an exact guide to how to play. So from looking at the talent descriptions and after reading the article, I think I'll start my level 55 DK with this spec, continue at 60 with this one, at 70 with this spec and at finish at 80 with this one (59/0/12).

Why a blood heavy build and how is it different from the WoW Insider blood build? Well for leveling I love two things - survivability, and little to no downtime. For a melee class this means self healing and the build I chose, especially the changes vs. the one recommended by the article, reflect this. Rune Tap (modified by Improved Rune Tap), Vendetta, Blood Aura, and Vampiric Blood should all decrease my downtime significantly. Will of the Necropolis will increase my survivabilty when things get tight.

It's possible of course that I've taken too many self healing talents, leading to lower DPS (I wasn't in the beta so I have no idea how the class will play). If I start off and see that e.g. (improved) Rune Tap is really enough to keep me up (and a 20% self heal once every 30sec does sound very impressive), I'll simply respec the other points back into more damage-increasing talents, in either the frost or unholy trees.

I'll finish this post with a couple of blood DK beta videos, one showing the blood spec used to good effect killing mob after mob in HFP and the other showing some AoE grinding in Zangarmarsh. I was impressed by how little the life of those DKs went down in most fights - exactly what I was looking for.

This is going to be fun :)