Wowhead guides are written by Deance and Mabrito in the Blight Club discord. Half of your answers are in those guides; if you find errors, ask them about them in discord. You won't find "better" answers by bothering them but if you're looking for more advanced reasoning than is on Wowhead, make sure to lead conversations with that you've read the guide and your current understanding.
After you have simmed it, ask any follow up questions in #simming
Stat weights are a numerical comparison used to compare different stats like strength and crit to eachother and see how much each are worth. Stat weights are generally written as EP (equivalence points) with attack power set to 1 for melee as a comparison points. It's important to remember that stat weights will change depending on what stats you have already and every time your stats change (equipping a new item) your stat weights will change a little too. You can calculate your stat weights given any set of gear using the sim.
Not necessarily. Stats with caps can also be calculated as stat weights and compared that way, the only difference is that the value of the stat will change depending on if you're under or over its cap, and whether the cap is a hard or soft cap. A soft cap is one that eliminates some of the value of a stat but not all. Soft hit cap for example is when your special attacks wont miss anymore. Hard cap is the point at which a stat no longer provides additional value. The hit hard cap when dual wielding will be higher than the soft cap and is the point at which your auto attacks wont miss anymore. In practice this means that hit below the soft cap will have a higher stat weight than above the soft cap.
As frost dps you want to use high damage range (slow) weapons. As dual wield unholy dps you want to use the weapons with the most dps in either hand (if it's close sim it). "Top end" damage is not a relevant stat when comparing weapons.
Blood for DPS, Frost for tanking, Unholy for movement and snapshotting pets.
Blood DK has the highest single target threat per second of the tanks due to a cumulative 14x threat modifier on Icy Touch. They avoid physical damage well (largely by parrying) and Spell Deflection is the strongest passive magic avoidance mechanic of all the tanks. Army of the Dead is a niche but strong damage reduction spell that also works on incoming magic damage. Will of the Necropolis is a very strong damage reduction talent. In all, Blood DKs are the choice for threat and magic mitigation.
On alliance, if you do not have a Draenei in every party you should be a Draenei. Even if you can guarantee you will be in a group with one; you will see a higher personal DPS gain from a shorter kill time giving other groups a buff than going human in a Draenei group and leaving a party goatless. Human is ~+15 DPS in phase 1 due to expertise and by phase 3 you will no longer see any DPS gain from being human. For tanking, Dwarves have an armor CD and Night Elves have 2% unreduced avoid.
For horde, Blood Elf's AoE silence is subjectively strong when tanking for collecting casters. Orc is strong all around but Troll is far and away BiS for Unholy. Tauren's passive is base health in WotLK it is terrible.
Ultimately, all choices except for horde DPS between Orc and Troll are fairly negligible and subjective.
Engineering and Jewelcrafting. Sim it
Every raid wants one Unholy to spread Ebon Plague for % magic damage and 30% disease damage; the other two specs to bring % magic damage must manually cast it on each target and no other class brings % disease damage for spriest. Most raids want Improved Icy Talons from a DK as the shaman equivalent requires them to lose points in a DPS talent; double buff Blood tank or Frost DPS can bring this. After those are satisfied for your raid, the rest of the DPS should go whichever spec is better at the time for the goals of the raid. Conventionally, this is frost early for single target while Unholy scales better and is always better at AoE that lives long.
They have similar single target damage that skews towards Frost when fight lengths don't favor Unholy's 3m Gargoyle CD. The exact details of this will vary phase by phase with gear so sim the best sets of each spec each phase to keep updated.
Depends on your definition of viable. It can clear content; it is at least 10% worse than Frost/Unholy.
Depends on the relative difficulty of content. Frost tank is a really fun and solid choice for 10s and heroic dungeons but may struggle on 25 heroics and is certainly less preferable to Blood or a Paladin / Feral for raw mitigation in that context. It has strong AoE snap aggro by opening with Death and Decay -> Howling Blast -> Blood Boil especially with Glyph of Howling Blast. Ideally, you would Frost tank with the remaining points in Blood for imp tap, Bladed Armor, Blade Barrier, etc. Unholy tank is essentially just Unholy DPS in frost presence that death strikes but it works fine for normal dungeons and probably heroic dungeons.
Not much.
On Frost it is essentially the difference of swapping points from Chill of the Grave into Black Ice, so around 2% Ice and Shadow damage per point while staying runic positive; on both sub specs you theoretically may be able to get a little more damage out by Frost Striking more often but the specs are already GCD capped so that damage difference will be at the expense of other damage sources.
DPS predictions for Revitalize on DW Unholy get very weird. You're often capping runic in a single cycle to dump it when you have fillers and due to how the rotation inevitably drifts rune CDs you cannot move where these fillers are spent: you inevitably cap runic power and then dump it until empty in filler windows and can't move these windows. The only DPS gain you should see from revit is from whatever talent you move Dirge talent points to. Even then-- revit has a chance of not capping your runic before a filler window so you risk losing DPS; tldr for dw unholy is a druid revitalizing you is a very minor DPS gain which caps as long as your runic is full before a filler window.
Dual wield Unholy beats 2 handed Unholy early in WotLK. As of now, the sim projects it to stay that way until(/if) you are able to get Shadowmourne. Dual wield rotation is covered in the wowhead guide under "Morb".
Also totally fine. You drop points in 2h Mastery in blood tree for points in Scent; you take the DW talents in frost. This build feeds well into a double buff tanking build and is covered in the wowhead blood guide. Some answers to common follow up questions:
- 2h and DW get pretty much equal primary attributes the whole expansion
- Parry haste exists.
- Basically every single weapon in WotLK in contested so choose the spec that least contests your raid.
Guardian pets Ghoul without Master of Ghouls talent and Army of the Dead snapshot your stats on summon, so you want to already be lusted and have drank your DPS pot. Guardian's are not in your party so Bloodlust/Heroism after they are summoned will not affect them; they cannot receive Tricks or Unholy Frenzy; targeted buffs like paladin buffs must be manually applied.
Army of the Dead is not used in combat by Frost DPS spec as it has a long cast time that isn't worth the DPS loss; you may use something like an MCP to haste them before pull. Tanks may use Army for its converting physical avoid into DR to soak magic damage better. Unholy DPS specs want to use Army of the Dead in combat during Bloodlust and with other procs to snapshot the maximum effect.
Gargoyle snapshots hit and AP when summoned. Gargoyle gains the benefit of melee haste such as from Icy Talons and Improved Icy Talons or Windfury dynamically (every time it goes to cast it will check how much haste you have and scale its cast speed 1:1 with that value). The Gargoyle will take apprximately 2-3 seconds to spawn after it has been cast before it will start casting. This means that haste effects such as Potion of Speed and Hyperspeed Accelerators should not be used until approximately 3 seconds after it has been summoned so that it can recieve their full benefit while active and casting. It can crit but has either 0 base crit or a very low base crit chance and its crit chance can only be increased by crit debuffs on its target or buffs on itself like Focus Magic: it will ignore your crit from gear and buffs. Armor pen has no effect on it. Gargoyle doesnt snapshot or benefit dynamically from any targeted %dmg buffs such as blood presence, Tricks, or Unholy Frenzy, however it can benefit from such effects if they are provided by a ground effect (for example the Rune of Power during Iron Council, or the haste from Starlight during Hodir). Unholy Death Knights will focus on snap shotting AP/Str trinkets, and Fallen Crusader on their Gargoyle and then applying haste effects as Gargoyle becomes active.
Master of Ghouls' ghoul gets strength and not AP from the player. Its stats also dynamically update with the player as they get AP procs, Haste procs, etc... it receives group buffs like King with Rogues, and does not snapshot.
Blood worms suck: their iCD is longer than their summon so you can never have 2 sets up at the same time; a set caps at 4 and they do medicore damage and trivial healing.
Glyph of Howling Blast has very specific use cases, but is typically not recommended. The disease it applies does not affect the damage of that Howling Blast, as it comes after the initial damage of Howling Blast. Other Frost Death Knights will get the benefit of your Frost Fever after you've cast it, so it may be viable in certain situations, but your own first Howling Blast will not gain the increased damage.
For Frost you want to use Razorice main hand and Fallen Crusader offhand if you are not expertise capped. This is because if you Hit Obliterate, and it gets dodged the dodge happens only on the MAIN HAND part of the ability, which means that the OFF HAND part of the ability will HIT even though you have your runes replenished. This will always increase the hit count of your offhand weapon and give you more Fallen Crusader procs. If you are expertise capped then you would want to apply Fallen Crusader to whichever of your weapons is slowest and put Razorice on the other because PPM effects like Fallen Crusader are calculated based on weapon speed when calculating their chance to hit on instant attacks. This means that a slow weapon will have a higher chance to proc PPM effects with instant attacks.
For Unholy you generally want to use Fallen Crusader in both hands (if dual wielding, otherwise just Fallen Crusader on a 2h). You could use Fallen Crusader main hand and Black Magic offhand to snapshot your Gargoyle with the haste from Black Magic and then weapon swap back to a Fallen Crusader offhand, but it would need to be done around your swing timer and gcd so as not to clip either and lose dps from them.
The best options for tanking are Stoneskin Gargoyle and Nerubian Carapace due to their bonuses to stamina.
Using a rune in combat puts the rune on a 10 - rune grace cooldown. Rune grace is the time since the rune came off of cooldown, up to 2.5s. This means that as long as you spend your runes within 2.5s of them coming off CD, you will use each rune "on cooldown" and never drift its CD: it will be ready 10s after it was previously ready.
This is a background effect in blood and unholy but is actively used in Frost to spend Killing Machine procs sooner without drifting Oblit runes (called Oblit tricking).
Blood Tap is a weird spell with some unintuitive behaviors. It refreshes a blood rune and taps a blood rune into a death rune: these effects can occur on separate runes e.g. the case where your left death rune is on CD and your right rune is an active blood rune -> two active death runes.
Once a blood rune is tapped, it will stay a death rune regardless of what it is used for until the duration of the buff ends --meaning you can use it as a death rune multiple times. When Blood Tap fades, it will immediately change the death rune back into a blood rune regardless of whether the last spell casted triggered Blood of the North or Reaping.
/cancelaura Blood Tap will cancel this effect wholly and revert the death rune back into a blood rune.
Dark Command (our taunt) works on spell hitcap; you should not gear for spell hitcap though you will often accidentally end up nearly 1-3% away. The recommended course of action is to keep copies of the Glyph of Dark Command on hand and put them on for encounters where a taunt failure will wipe your raid.
Outside highly optimized raids, there is no reason a Blood death knight cannot main tank. For 2 tank fights without much taunting, however, Blood tanks have a far easier time chasing threat than rage tanks.
When I have lots of time I like to follow Matty Matheson's recipe, but it requires 3 bowls and separating eggs and lots of steps. When I'm lazier I just follow a simpler recipe.
Leeway is a classic feature that increases the range of actions depending on the source and targets movement. Pestilence, Blood Boil, and Death and Decay have +2 yards of range when cast while you are moving or jumping. Pestilence is also a bit weird in that it requires a melee target -but- is cast centered on you, the player, and not your target; this means that shifting yourself to the center of a pack before pestilencing and jumping while you cast can sometimes be the difference between several mobs being hit.
All damage from any hit that would bring you below 35% health will be reduced by 15%. If you had 10,000 hp and an ability would do 7,000 damage to you, it will instead do 5,950 damage. This is -not- how Paladin's Ardent Defender works.
Manual Crowd Pummeler is a level 34 item from Gnomeregan with an on use of 500 haste rating for 30 seconds. In WotLK this effect has unlimited charges but is on a 1 hour cooldown. MCP could be cast before Summon Gargoyle to snapshot the haste onto the Gargoyle in WotLK beta. However, in traditional unholy openers, Gargoyle is summoned before weapon procs to benefit from those buffs. MCP is too low level to have wotlk enchants or Fallen Crusader and incurs a large DPS loss trying to proc other items like Thundering Skyflare meta gem. As it stands, it is not a dps gain to use MCP in an unholy DK opener. Frost DKs may snapshot MCP out of combat on Army of the Dead; unholy would not do this as swapping back to their weapons is expected to put Black Magic (haste proc for Gargoyle) on iCD and Blood saves AoTD for turning parry/dodge into magic mitigation and damage smoothing.
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