Death Knight Setup Going Into WotLK Classic

Here I’m sharing my death knight setup going into the launch of WotLK Classic. It’ll include my UI, macros, and WeakAura. I’ll also go over my talents and general rotation, coming from the perspective of leveling in the open world or fast dungeon kills rather than the standards posted for endgame raiding.

Unholy | Frost | Macros | WeakAura

Unholy Death Knight Setup In WotLK Classic

For my death knight setup in WotLK Classic pre-patch and leveling to 80, I’m going with an unholy death knight with a two-handed weapon.

Weapons

For unholy DPS below level 80, you want to use a two-handed weapon. Dual wielding with unholy is not viable until level 80, as you lack sufficient talent points.

A two-handed weapon with the highest DPS you can get.
Put Rune of the Fallen Crusader on it.
Weapon types to favor based on your character’s race:
- Human = Swords or Maces
- Dwarf = Maces
- Orcs = Axes

Talents

Unholy DPS Leveling Build

This is my planned talent setup at level 70 when WotLK Classic launches. As with most builds, there is room to adjust it to your liking. And remember this is for leveling, not endgame raiding with a hardcore guild. You want something both efficient and fun/engaging for yourself.

Instead of Scourge Strike use Death Strike for your big hit. You’ll find you won’t get a lot of big hits off before enemies die to your opening and diseases. And keeping your health topped off lets you chain pull longer.
Pull a point out of Desecration if you find you’re doing little to no kitting and aren’t having problems catching runaways.
You can also pull the point out of Bone Shield. I might end up doing this myself. It is a great talent when someone else is tanking, but constantly having to refresh both it and Horn of Winter gets old when soloing.
Any pulled points should go into Icy Reach (longer pull range).
When you level up put points into Black Ice (more damage) and Icy Talons (less damage to you, faster attacks against your enemies).

Glyphs

With your glyphs remember some are not available until after WotLK Classic launches because they require either Northrend herbs or training books. Those new glyphs will be low supply and expensive during the first week of leveling, so I suggest sticking with glyphs available during the pre-patch. Then redo your glyphs as needed at level 80.

Major: Icy Touch & Ghoul

Minor: Pestilence, Raise Dead, and either Horn of Winter or Blood Tap

The Horn of Winter glyph has the unfortunate side effect of preventing other death knights in your group from using their HoW ability to gain runic power if you have the glyph and they don’t. It has caused some debate among the community, with some guilds even banning the glyph. For solo leveling, I find it nice to increase the uptime of the buff, as I don’t often get far enough into a rotation to use HoW as a filler. But if you want to avoid any conflict in a group setting then go for Blood Tap instead. For dungeon trash, I like to include BLood Tap to get an extra Blood Boil in early.

Rotation for Non-Boss Pulls

In my experience with this death knight setup in WotLK Classic pre-patch, non-elite mobs die fast when solo pulled. And a bit slower when pulling groups, but I also blow through my runes within a few seconds and everything just dies. These are the rotations I’ve found work well outside of a boss-pull situation.

Solo Pull

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Blood Strike -> Blood Strike -> Death Coil

Get your diseases up, then Blood Strike to get Desolation’s buff up for harder hits. The mob is usually mostly dead at this point, so I use a second Blood Strike and/or Death Coil to finish them off. This keeps a frost and unholy rune ready for any immediate new pull.

As needed you can use Death Strike after the first Blood Strike. Or just do regular melee damage and between you and your ghoul, most non-elites will be dead within seconds.

Group Pulls

Get your mobs gathered up before you start spending a lot of runes. Ideally round them up on your mount, and feel free to pull in any stragglers with Death Grip. Using Icy Touch to pull can slow down your AoE opening.

Death and Decay -> Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Pestilence -> Corpse Explosion -> Blood Boil -> Blood Boil

In a lot of cases, you won’t make it to the second Blood Boil. You can also use Blood Tap to get a death rune instantly up, then apply Blood Boil. I especially like doing this with large dungeon trash pulls.

Other Abilities

Icebound Fortitude & Anti-Magic Shell – Don’t forget about these defensive abilities. You’ll mostly only use them when pulling elites, but if you forget to heal up before a big pull they can save your life.

Chains of Ice – Good if you need to kite something, but I wouldn’t expect to use it on anything but a strong elite. When kiting you want to hit them with everything you have, run out and kit, then go back in when all your runes are back up.

Mind Freeze & Strangulate – Keep in mind these are separate interrupt abilities with different uses. Mind Freeze is great when in melee range, as runic power is less important for DPS. Strangulate is better for interrupting at range. I tend to use it if Death Grip is on cooldown to get a caster to move closer to me. Speaking of Death Grip, it will also interrupt anything it can pull.

Frost Death Knight Setup In WotLK Classic

If you prefer to go frost that is also a great option for leveling up.

Weapons

For frost DPS you need to be dual wielding, otherwise, you are hampering your DPS.

Two slow weapons, with the higher DPS in your main hand.
Put Rune of Razorice on your main hand.
Put Rune of the Fallen Crusader on your off-hand.
Weapon types to favor based on your character’s race:
- Human = Swords or Maces
- Dwarf = Maces
- Orcs = Axes

Talents

Frost DPS Leveling Build

This is my recommended talent setup at level 70 when WotLK Classic launches. As with most builds, there is room to adjust it to your liking. And remember this is for leveling, not endgame raiding with a hardcore guild. You want something both efficient and fun/engaging for yourself.

You can pull the point out of Hungering Cold and put it elsewhere. Icy Reach is nice if there is lots of competition for tagging mobs. Black Ice or Ravenous Dead are safe spots if you don’t have another preference.
When you level up you can go further into the unholy tree or move into the blood tree. Unholy will increase your auto attack damage. Blood will increase runic power, attack power, and reduce threat (for groups).
- Unholy: Ravenous Dead -> Necrosis -> Blood-Caked Blade
- Blood: Subversion -> Butchery -> Bladed Armor
- You can also fill back in Black Ice for more frost damage

Glyphs

Major: Icy Touch & Disease

Frost Strike over Disease is an option while leveling. It mostly comes down to do you need to refresh diseases or not.

Minor: Pestilence, Raise Dead, and either Horn of Winter or Blood Tap

Blood Tap is usually the favored option for frost death knights. One, they use HoW for runic power generation more as they have a better runic power dump ability in Frost Strike. Two, the Horn of Winter glyph has the unfortunate side effect of preventing other death knights in your group from using their HoW ability to gain runic power if you have the glyph and they don’t. It has caused some debate among the community, with some guilds even banning the glyph. For solo leveling, I find it nice to increase the uptime of the buff if I’m not using runic power constantly. But if you want to avoid any conflict in a group setting then go for Blood Tap instead.

Rotation for Non-Boss Pulls

In my experience with this death knight setup in WotLK Classic pre-patch, non-elite mobs die fast when solo pulled. And a bit slower when pulling groups, but I also blow through my runs within a few seconds and everything just dies. These are the rotations I’ve found work well outside of a boss-pull situation.

Solo Pull

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Obliterate/Howling Blast -> Frost Strike

Get your diseases up, and then hit them hard. Without Glyph of Obliterate (which will be rare/expensive during the first week of WotLK Classic), there is an argument to just use Howling Blast, even on single targets. It can hit as hard or harder and can’t be parried or dodged. But if you want to practice your raid rotation while leveling then you’ll be using Obliterate more later on for single target.

For longer fights (elites, dungeon bosses) you’ll also want to use two Blood Strikes to turn your blood runes into death runes, allowing for more Obliterates in the next cycle.

Group Pulls

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Pestilence -> Howling Blast -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate

Frost AoE rotation is situationally based and requires you to keep up with active procs, runes, and targets to get the most out of it. You may even want to open with Howling Blast if they are nicely grouped up. Always prioritize Howling Blast over Obliterate with 2+ targets. But you will Obliterate some on longer fights given Howling Blast’s cooldown.

Rime & Killing Machine

When you get a Rime proc (Freezing Fog on your buff bar) you always prioritize Howling Blast. It is free DPS at that point.

Killing Machine procs during solo pulls should mostly be used on Frost Strikes. For AoE pulls they are nice when used with Howling Blast, but not worth waiting for and waste rune cooldowns.

Other Abilities

Thanks to Havel <Onyxia’s Bakery> Pagle-Alliance for lending his frost expertise.

Macros for Death Knight

There aren’t many key death knight macros. As melee, all death knights will want to add auto attack and Rune Strike to several abilities. Unholy should have a Summon Gargoyle macro (for level 80) and a ghoul retreat macro. Unholy will also want to mix in some pet commands with your regular abilities.

Otherwise, most of my macros are for my personal preference when it comes to key bindings. I have Control and Shift bound to my mouse’s side buttons and make heavy use of mod macros to keep my keybindings neat.

My action bars without modifiers

Summon Gargoyle

Every unholy death knight raiding at level 80 should have this macro. It activates all of your possible buffs, creating a stronger snapshot of your gargoyle.

#showtooltip Summon Gargoyle /use 10 /use 13 /use 14 /use Potion of Speed /cast Summon Gargoyle

In order, this will activate Hyperspeed Accelerators on your gloves (engineering), both trinket slots (if they have an on-use action), take Potion of Speed, and then summons your gary.

Ghoul

I have a few macros specific to my ghoul pet.

#showtooltip /cast [nopet] Raise Dead;Death Pact

This summons the ghoul if missing and if present uses Death Pact to sacrifice the ghoul to save me.

#showtooltip /cast [@focus, exists, nodead] []Leap /cast [@focus, exists, nodead] []Gnaw

I turn off auto Gnaw (ghoul’s stun ability) and have it in a macro. This gives me a potential stun/interrupt on a focus target I’m not near. If there is no focus target then it will stun my current target. You can use this while your character is stunned, much to the shock of a few rogues in AV.

#showtooltip /cast [target=NAME] Leap /petstay

For NAME put in a healer’s name and this will get your ghoul out of AoE damage and to what should be a safe space.

Unholy DPS

You should create macros of your main abilities and include these lines to make sure they are always running.

/cast Rune Strike /startattack /petattack

Add that to macros you create for Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Scourge Strike, and Blood Strike. Pushing any of those buttons will then use Rune Strike if available (great for solo, shouldn’t come up in a group setting), enables auto attack so you do damage on a new target even if your runes are down, and tells your pet to attack your current target.

You should also add this line to your Scourge Strike and Blood Strike macros.

/cast Claw

This forces the ghoul to use its main energy damage ability. If left alone the ghoul will use it, but not as often as it can. With it in a few macros, it’ll use it more and increase your total DPS. I keep it out of Icy Touch and Plague Strike for group aggro reasons. Remember you can always hit these abilities with runes on CD to trigger another claw attack.

Frost DPS

Same as with unholy above, create macros of your main abilities and include these lines. It’ll run Rune Strike when you’re solo and turn on the auto attack even if you have no runes avilable.

/cast Rune Strike /startattack

Combo Macros

My action bars with modifiers

The rest of my death knight’s macros are to combine two attacks into one button. The nomod is my primary and the mod goes off when I hold down the side button of my mouse. I use 1 through = and F1 through F12 for my abilities. And I prefer to keep as many key abilities within the first four or five of those as possible. Any of the nomod/mod combos you saw above are for the same reason.

#showtooltip /castsequence [nomod] reset=34 Death Grip, Strangulate /castsequence [mod, target=focus] reset=34 Death Grip, Strangulate

In addition to being a combo (I mostly Strangulate to pull casters) this also gives me a focus option. Normal use will Death Grip my target, then Strangulate if Death Grip is on cooldown. The mod version will do the same to a focus target, in case I need to help interrupt a mob I’m not attacking.

#showtooltip /use [nomod, nocombat] Honey-Spiced Lichen /use [nomod, combat] Super Healing Potion /use [mod] Heavy Netherweave Bandage

My self-heal macro. Eats my main food out of combat, uses a health potion in combat, and bandages in either case with a modifier key,

#showtooltip /cast [nocombat] Fishing /castsequence [combat] reset=10 Mind Freeze, Strangulate

I keep both fishing (out of combat) and my interrupt on a key bound to a mouse thumb button. In combat,t it will Mind Freeze first (preferred) and Strangulate it needed again within a few seconds.

#showtooltip /cast [nomod] Pestilence /cast [mod] Blood Boil

I like to keep abilities using the same rune type together.

WeakAura for My Death Knight Setup

If you want a big, all-inclusive WEakAura setup for your death knight then you should check out the popular options at Wago.io. I prefer a smaller approach, mostly using WeakAuras to track buffs and diseases rather than all my cooldown. I track cooldowns just fine on my action bars with OmniCC installed.

My death knight WeakAura in action as unholy

My Death Knight WearAura Setup for WotLK Classic

Text file. Copy text and import it into WeakAura in-game.

For my WeakAura setup, I pulled and copied specific elements out of some of the more popular packages and rearranged things to my liking. I have three sets of WeakAuras for my death knight:

Reminders – Visual reminders to keep important buffs active.

Horn of Winter – Only activates if neither HoW nor Strength of Earth is active on me.
Bone Shield – Only activates if I have the talent, in a group (I find it annoying to use soloing), and is missing.
Pet – Big reminder if my ghoul is missing when I enter combat.
Presence – Big reminder if I’m not in any presence, most often after swapping specs.

Debuffs – Track my diseases and other big debuffs on my current target.

Frost Fever
Blood Plague
Chains of Ice
Mark of Blood (tanking spec)

Buffs – Track specific buffs on me to get the best snapshot on my gargoyle as possible.

Desolation (loads if unholy)
Unholy Strength (loads if unholy)
Freezing Fog aka Rime proc (loads if frost)
Killing Machine (loads if frost)
Heroism/Lust
Unholy Frenzy
Hyperspeed Acceleration
Potion of Speed

My death knight WeakAura in the menu panel

I expect to add more buffs at level 80, especially if using a weapon with its own proc ability. Both the debuffs and buffs WeakAuras are set up so I can duplicate one, set it for a new ability, and it’ll line up with the others neatly. I’ve kept credits and URLs for the individual components I pulled and tweaked from other authors under the Information tab.