Mysterious Note: The following guide assumes you have basic knowledge of your Death Knight and know the basic priority and gearing/stat choices. If you are unfamiliar with basic DK knowledge this guide is not for you. I encourage you to read the following guides from Elitist Jerks, and Icy Veins before perusing my guide on how to maximize dps in PvE raid settings.
http://icy-veins.com/frost-death-kni...-pve-dps-guide
http://elitistjerks.com/f72/
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The following is the written portion of my guide. For a more specific and detailed guide including talent/glyph discussion please watch my video guide linked below.
This guide is presented in three different parts;
1. Cool Down Usage
- How to best manage your cool downs as a frost death knight
- Taking advantage of macros
2. Advanced Priority System
- Knowing what spell to use and when to use it
- Soul Reaper management tricks
3. Micro Managing
- Swing timer management
- Watching Procs
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Cool Down Usage
As for most classes, managing your cool downs is a major part in deciding whether you will do good damage or amazing damage especially for frost.
Frost Death Knights use a number of cool downs including Pillar of Frost, (racials), Empower Rune Weapon, Raises the Dead, and Army of the Dead with the most important being Pillar of Frost. Lining up your cool downs is very important because of the simple reason that the more cool downs up the more damage you will do. If you scatter your cool downs out individually you will do less damage because nothing is stacking. Now how do we go about making sure all our cool downs go off at the same time? Simply clicking each CD individuality is not only a waste of valuable GCDs which lower your dps but also makes you lose ticks of your other CDs you popped before the one you just popped.
The best way to take advantage of every millisecond of your CD is to make macros. The only important macro I will be covering in this guide is as follows.
#showtooltip
#show
/cast Pillar of Frost
/use 14
/cast Blood Fury
/Cast Raise Dead
Using this macro you will pop all of your major cool downs as well as trinkets and racials at the same time. /use 13 and /use 14 represent your trinkets which are the number of the slots in your character profile they represent. It is very important that your stat increasing CDs are casts before Raise the Dead. Your ghoul even in frost, gains a portion of all stats and buffs on you at the time you cast him; thus the more buffs and stat increasing things such as potions on you the more damage your ghoul will do as a result for the 1 minute duration he is out. Pillar of Frost is only a 1 minute CD which means you will be able to use it again before your 2 minute CDs come off CD thus meaning you should always use PoF as soon as it comes off CD. Save a rune if you see it is coming off cool down.
There are other useful macros DKs can use but most of them are not really dps released and will not be covered in this guide.
Advanced Priority System
Again, this assumes you have basic knowledge of the frost priority system. Frost Death Knights have a pretty simple priority but sometimes even for the most advanced DKs it can be hard to decide which ability to use when you are faced with weird situations.
As you know, we want to spend most of our time making sure we are hitting our hardest hitting ability which is Obliterate for 2H frost and FS for DW. Though this is not the case when we are faced with Rime procs and the sub 35% stage when we can start using Soul Reaper on the boss.
Even though OB is our hardest hitting ability Rime procs are always ahead in the priority for 2H frost. We want to make sure we spend that rime proc (free Howling Blast) first because if we hit obliterate we might overlap the Rime proc we already had thus not only losing an extra free damage dealer but also losing valuable regeneration time on our runes. Obliterate is a very limited skill already meaning we can only use it so many times before having to wait for runes to use it again. That is why it is crucial to make sure Rime goes ahead of OB. For DW frost is is a different story because OB is lower than FS on the priority due to the hidden benefits of the new Threat of the Tharssarian (which I talk about in the video).
Soul Reaper is not only our new 87 ability in MoP but is also a new execute ability which vastly out powers any other classes execute because of the time we get to start using it. Most classes get to use it at 20% as where we get to start using it at 35%. Though this may sound fun there are many bugs that still exist for Soul Reaper that have yet to be addressed in the current 5.1 patch notes.
Soul Reaper currently resets our swing timer which is actually a really big deal which I will talk about in the last part of this guide. It also drastically ruins the rotation and priority of 2H frost users though may still be ok for unholy and DW. For more detailed information about SR please visit my other thread.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...4340417?page=1
If you are 2H frost this next section about Soul Reaper is for you. Soul Reaper like I mentioned up above is kind of wonky for 2H frost users because OB relies on 1 unholy and 1 frost rune and in most cases you will find yourself low on runes especially towards the end of a fight. The result of using Soul Reaper will make you never having any runes to use on your hardest hitting ability which is Obliterate and sometimes even wasting Killing machines on FS because there not enough runes available. I strongly suggest in my opinion not to use Soul Reaper as 2H frost unless you can do 2 things because most of the time if not done correctly can actually result in a dps loss. The first thing being that if you can cast SR and still have runes up for OB then go ahead and use it. The second being if you see that Pillar of frost is coming off CD make sure to save a rune for PoF.
Micro Managing
To the contrary to what most people believe Death Knights are actually pretty hard to play and that is simply because they have a lot of micro managing they have to deal with. Another good example of this would be enhance shamans. Sure we may only have 2 and a half buttons to push but there are a lot of small things we have to consciously look for it we want to truly do good damage.
Lets start with our swing timer. Like I stated up above there is a current bug that makes SR reset our swing timer which is actually a huge deal for 2H frost Death Knights. We reply on our auto attacks which as you know has a chance to grant us a Killing Machine proc which gives a 100% chance to crit with our next OB or FS. Due to another delay bug a lot of the time we may find ourselves using KM procs on FS by mistake instead of OB. Because of this we have to compensate by installing a swing timer. Having a swing timer allows us to watch when our next auto attack is coming so that way we can make sure we can see if we get a KM proc first before we waste an OB which could of been a crit or use it on a FS which does considerably less damage in 2H.
Another important part of micro managing is watching your procs and debuffs on the boss. It is best to download an addon such as class timers or weak auras which will allow you to see when things such as trinkets or weapon enchants (Fallen Crusader) take effect on our character. When we are able to not only line up our procs with CDs but with other external cool downs such as blood lust or heroism we find ourselves doing a lot more damage than if we were to just let things go by 1 by 1.
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That is going to wrap up this guide guys. Remember to watch my full guide video for more detailed explanations and game play example including talent and glyph selections for optimizing dps.
Good Luck.
UPDATE: I made another video comparing plaque leech and unholy blight.