Lichborne The basics of leveling your death knight

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Find out why playing World of Warcraft's first hero class is every bit as heroic as you might imagine.
With the land now shattered and Deathwing looming large in the sky, we're rushing inevitably toward the Cataclysm,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and with it, new content and new levels to surmount. I know that many of us are probably working on our troll druid and gnome priest alts for the moment, but I am also certain that most of us will be headed right back to our death knights on Dec. 7. With that in mind, this week we'll take a quick look at the basic stuff you'll need to know to make it through the leveling process.
Choosing your leveling spec
For a leveling spec, you'll probably want to go for either frost or blood. This isn't to say that unholy is an inferior tree, but the main reason I would tend to eschew it for solo leveling is simple: It's very hard to weave Death Strikes into the basic unholy rotation. On the other hand, blood uses Death Strikes as a matter of course,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and frost allows you to replace your Obliterates with Death Strikes when needed without causing a horrible break in your rotation. Cataclysm mobs hit very hard,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and you will want some self-healing to make it through. With the removal of the automatic health drain that formerly belonged to the old version of Blood Presence, Death Strike is our most reliable method of self-healing.
The other world of warcraft gold benefits of leveling frost are essentially two-fold: First, you get easy access to On a Pale Horse. That 20 percent speed boost will help you get everywhere faster, and, if you're racing for a server first, could make the difference [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] between you getting it and someone else getting it. Second, Howling Blast remains an AoE leveling powerhouse. Don't get me wrong, unless you're in heroic ICC gear, chances are you aren't going to have much luck trying to AoE large groups of mobs. That said, if you do get caught with four or five mobs, Howling Blast will give you a better chance of survival through superior firepower for sure.
Here's a basic two-handed frost leveling build,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], including some recommended glyphs. If you want to try leveling dual wielding, it should be pretty intuitive which points to swap out. You'll notice that I chose to spec in Unholy Command and use a Death Grip glyph. You shouldn't underestimate the usefulness of Death Grip in leveling content. The faster you can pull in mobs, the faster you can level and complete those quests. As you level, you can use those last five points to fill out the blood tree.
Blood, on the other hand, is a beast at survival. You won't kill stuff quite as fast as you did as frost, but you'll be able to weather more thanks to more ways to heal, which is something you can't underestimate in Cataclysm. Stuff hits hard, folks, and leveling is going to be a challenge for a lot of players. If you're looking to level a bit more casually, I'd suggest leveling as blood so that you don't have to deal with dying quite as often, even if you do kill stuff slightly slower.
You can probably use a basic wow gold blood tank build with a few tweaks here and there. If you aren't planning to tank, you can in theory swap out Toughness and Blade Barrier for other talents,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but since the whole point of leveling blood is to survive, you may find those two talents worth keeping after all. If you follow the blood build linked above, you may find it useful to fill out Unholy Command and Scent of Blood as you level. There's one more caution to give here: Don't DPS dungeons as blood. If you want to DPS a couple dungeons to fill out your leveling experience, make sure you have a frost or unholy secondary spec ready to go for those situations. Dual talent specs now only cost 10 gold, so you have few excuses not to do this.
Solo rotations