What if that isn’t for you though? What else could you do?

Well, the next batch of professions being covered are for those death knights who seem to have a problem with smashing things on a funda-metal level. Using herbs and plants found using the herbalism skill, these professions create mysterious glyphs and powerful potions and flasks which are very, very important for raiders everywhere.

Be warned: these professions are costly to level.  If you have herbalism as your other profession, you will have a much easier time leveling these professions, and a ready supply of herbs whenever you need them.  If you don’t, be prepared to sink thousands of gold pieces into leveling your chosen profession.

Alchemy

The closest thing the World of Warcraft has to a chemistry type profession, Alchemy is a powerful profession with many benefits, including a large potential for money making and potent bonuses from passive skills learned by the profession and the signature alchemist stones.

Although Death Knights aren’t the only class to benefit from Alchemy, they certainly benefit from it a great deal.  Alchemist stones can provide a large boost to your survivability or DPS, while also providing a bonus to hit point gain when drinking a potion.  Unfortunately, alchemist stones cannot be sold on the auction house.

What can be sold however are the Flasks and potions that are so famously important for raiders everywhere.  Alchemy provides some very powerful buffs through flasks and potions, which not only can benefit you a great deal but can be sold on the auction house for a great deal of money.

Inscription

For those Death Knights who really took well to Rune Forging and can actually write (a small percentage of you, I’m sure), it might be wise to become a scribe.

Inscription is a powerful profession for 3 reasons: first, it is the only profession that can alter abilities.  Scribes can create glyphs that improve already existing parts of a spell (Glyph of Horn of Winter), remove negative parts of a spell (Glyph of the Ghoul, or even add something completely new to the spell (Glyph of Howling Blast).  Obviously this is in high demand, so you can sell glyphs for a fair amount of money on the auction house.

Second, you can create the best shoulder enhancements in the game.  The shoulder enchants you can create as a scribe are better than the shoulder enchants you can buy from the Sons of Hodir at exalted, which makes your job that much easier.  Unfortunately, these can’t be sold.

Lastly, it is the only profession with the ability to make the Darkmoon Cards.  Darkmoon cards are normally pretty useless, but are still in high demand; why? Because if you can combine all the cards in a suit(i.e all the nobles cards from Ace to King) then you can combine them to make some of the most powerful trinkets in the game, the Darkmoon Decks.  As a result, even the cards can sell for almost 1,000 gold pieces each depending on the card and the deck.

Crafting A Better Death Knight

Crafting professions are notably harder to pick than the Gathering professions.  Both of the professions I’ve explained here are good for Death Knights of any kind, and I heartily recommend both of them.  The choice is really up to you, dear reader.

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Gathering Professions
2. Death Knight Professions: Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing & Engineering
3. Getting Acquainted With Death Knight Glyphs

We’re going to be looking at the jobs that force you to work with metals and stones in an effort to create and construct powerful weapons, durable armor, useful gadgets, or stunning jewelry.

Beware: unless these are supported by a gathering profession, crafting professions can be a very expensive venture, costing many thousands of gold to maximize your skill in your chosen profession.  

For the professions we are talking about today, mining is the most closely related crafting profession and will save you a great deal of money when practicing any of the crafting professions we’re talking about today.

Jewelcrafting

Death Knights delight in death and destruction, slaughtering and maiming all those in their wake; but once in awhile, don’t you wish you could wear something pretty?

Jewelcrafting is a powerful profession: it has a great potential for making money and provides many unique benefits and bonuses.  The cost of having the (arguably) most powerful profession is a slow leveling process and expensive materials.

Although Death Knights aren’t the type to work with delicate and beautiful things, jewelcrafting is an excellent profession for any Death Knight.  Higher level gear comes with slots for gems that you can create, and everyone is going to need those gems! Since you’re a jewelcrafter, you have access to gems that only you can use that are much more powerful than the gems that non-jewelcrafters can use.

Being a jewelcrafter also allows you to create trinkets that only you can use.  There are trinkets for every occasion that allow Death Knights an easier time tanking or dealing damage from the start.

Beyond these trinkets, a jewelcrafter can create neck pieces and rings that not only can you use, but they can be sold on the auction house for a hefty sum.

Blacksmithing

For those Death Knights who can’t stand the frivolities of jewels, but still want to work with rocks by smacking them into nice shapes, blacksmithing might be your profession.

Blacksmithing is a welcome profession on all servers.  It has potential to make money, and can create powerful weapons and armors that are normally better than the gear found in heroic dungeons.  Blacksmithing has areas of specialization, but since Wrath of the Lich King came out there hasn’t been any improvement to these specializations, and they are now an archaic reminder of what once was.

The cons to having this profession are as follows: there are multiple materials that can’t be found through mining alone that will likely have to be bought to increase your skill in blacksmithing, it’s a slow process, and it can be very expensive.

Despite the aforementioned issues, Blacksmithing is a powerful profession with a great potential for money and great gear whether you’re a tank or a DPSer! You’ll always be in demand, and not only that…

You get to smack things repeatedly with a hammer!

Engineering

Are the rest of your Death Knight brethren completely stupid? Do you have “gud mathz”? Do you delight in explosions, fire, and explosions? Then maybe engineering is for you!

Engineering is a powerful profession that, thanks to all the gadgets you can make, makes your death knight feel very different from playing a normal Death Knight.  From Nitro boots and mote extractors to grenades and jumper cables, Engineering gives your death knight a little bit of everything from every other class!

Engineering allows you to create explosives and gadgets that, although they do backfire from time to time, allow you to have significant advantages over non-engineers in the same situation.  The sheer number of unique little gadgets you can make can be overwhelming, and are way too many to list allof them.

There are specializations for engineering, and they are still important in Wrath of the Lich King.  Gnomish and Goblin engineering has a different feel for each, with gnomish engineering leading the weird but fun engineering (such as the shrink ray) and the goblin engineering leading the explosive but dangerous front (such as sapper charges).

The most famous engineering items can only be used by engineers, making engineering a very selfish profession.  Engineers can add gadgets to pieces of gear to create Rocket launching gloves, EMP belts, or parachute capes.  These tinkers often come with other passive bonuses such as crit rating, stats, and better stealth detection.  They also create grenades and explosives that can stun adversaries or cause siege damage in an area on top of doing fire damage.

Another thing that engineers are famous for are their goggles.  The goggles in TBC used to be some of the most powerful gear in the game, although that has been changed to force engineers to get different headpieces.  The goggles are the signature of an engineer, and there are goggles for every kind of death knight.  They also create the best guns you can get before you enter a raiding environment for Hunters, Rogues, and Warriors; this has the potential to make money sometimes, depending on your server.  They can create items that can help revive players, repair items, access your mail, fly helicopters, make motorcycles, escape things, chase things, find things, stall things…

Engineering is a profession based on completely changing the feel of your class.  It’s not a profession, it’s a lifestyle.

The cons to engineering are proportionate to the pros.  Because of all the extra stuff engineers get, they do not have a high potential to make money.  In addition, engineering is very slow to level, requires many materials outside of mining to maximize your engineering skill, and has lower head on benefits (such as stats) than other professions such as jewelcrafting.

In short, engineers are eccentric, funny, full of surprises, and flat out broke more often than not.

Crafting a path is your job

The Crafting professions are notably harder than the Gathering professions.  All three of the professions I’ve explained here are good for Death Knights of any kind, and I heartily recommend all of them.  The choice is really up to you, dear reader.

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Gathering Professions
2. Working On My Death Knight
3. The Three Original Death Knight Trinkets

If I learned anything on my journey to my third Level 80 character it was this: I’m awful with melee classes. I’m pretty sure that even through 20+ levels of quests that I still have no idea what I’m doing with my Death Knight. I rolled with my own Blood build and rotation the entire way but last night I did some research and figured out what the general consensus on the “right” way to play a Death Knight really is. You can check him out on the Armory to see if I’m doing it right or not. Any help in the comments of this post would be greatly appreciated.

Shortly after hitting 80, I rushed into Wintergrasp to do the weeklies and build up some Honor points for the Hateful Gladiator Dreadplate Shoulders. I was a bit short so I had to spend an hour or so in Battlegrounds to get over the hump. Then I built myself a Spiked Titansteel Helm and a pair of Spiked Titansteel Treads. I called it a night by blowing a small fortune on Titansteel Bars so I could make a Titansteel Destroyer.

When it was all said and done my Hit Rating came in at 288. That’s still too high from what I understand (Skeleton Jack says the Hit Cap for a Death Knight is 265, and that’s what I’m going off of) so I’m going to have to make some adjustments with gems or something.

I asked above but I want to reiterate again: if you have any thoughts or comments on playing a DPS Death Knight at Level 80 please leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight
2. Death Knight Macros
3. Getting Acquainted With Death Knight Glyphs

But you don’t have a job, do you?

Not to worry! Death Knights have a variety of professions they can pick from, so I’ll give you a breakdown of which ones to look at so that your plutonium wielding, rune illiterate Death Knight can actually do something other than kill people.

For starters, let’s look at the manual labour positions.

GATHERING PROFESSIONS

Mining
Mining is (on most servers) the gathering profession that gives the most money.  Not only that, but it gives a stamina bonus to your character when your mining skill reaches a certain level.  The stamina bonus is actually pretty hefty: 50 stamina once your skill reaches 450.  This makes mining a powerful profession for tanking and PvP Death Knights.  Even if you’re a damage dealing (DPS) Death Knight you might want to pick this up as it gives a huge revenue.

Skinning
Skinning can be used to make money, although you’re going to have to kill a lot of beasts to make as much money as a miner.  Not that any of you Death Knights have a problem with that, right?

The fun part of being a Skinner is the increased Critical Strike rating it gives based on your skill level, much like the Mining stamina bonus.  It currently gives 32 critical strike rating, which isn’t a terrible amount at all.  For DPS and PvP Death Knights, this bonus can be very beneficial to you.  Tanking Death Knights won’t see as much output from Skinning so they might want to pass.

Herbalism
Herbalism is for you Death Knights who are a bit more… passive.  Instead of smashing rocks and mashing animals, you daintily pick up flowers.  Despite just how un-Death Knightlike the profession is, it’s normally a big money maker.  This is especially true on servers where a large number of raiders are present: Potions, Flasks, and glyphs don’t make themselves you know.  Herbs are needed in 2 very important raiding professions, so if you know your server has a lot of raiders, this profession might be for you.

Like the other two gathering professions, Herbalism has a bonus.  Unlike the other two, the bonus is an activated spell called Lifeblood.  Lifeblood can be used whenever you like, and is a self targeted Heal over Time (HoT) spell that becomes more powerful the higher your Herbalism skill is.  With 450 Herbalism, Lifeblood heals 2,000 hit points.  For PvP and Tanking Death Knights, this bonus is a very welcome one.  DPS Death Knights won’t see as much use out of it, but it’s still nice to have.

So Which Is Right For You?

Like most of this game, all of this depends on what you want to do.  Do you want to make boatloads of money, or do you want to deal the most damage you possibly can?

One way to help make this choice is to decide what kind of Death Knight you’re going to be.  As an example, say you want to be a DPS Death Knight.  The obvious way to make your Death Knight do more damage is to pick up skinning.  What a tanking Death Knight? Mining would be a great way to go since it gives a great stamina bonus, or herbalism for the extra heal.

By knowing in advance what type of Death Knight you’re going to be, choosing a gathering profession can be very simple.  It’s also a great way to make money, since all 3 professions gather the materials the crafting professions need.

Next time, I’ll talk about the crafting professions for the job seeking, death dealing, and disease ridden Death Knight.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight
2. Death Knight Addons
3. The Three Original Death Knight Trinkets

Why Use Macros

Well, during your normal realm quests macros can be used for food, water, or anything else in your bag. However, if you plan on playing in the PvP world, heading to Battlegrounds, or even taking a shot at the Arenas and Tournaments, these could make all the difference. Keep in mind these are the essential areas where having that extra ability in your macro is essential. There are 36 slots in all so make sure you take advantage of them all.

Why They are Important for Death Knights

One of the biggest things DKs continue to gain throughout the game is Trinkets. Since you can’t keep all of them in your bags or trinket slots (2), having them all on macros can be helpful. This will come in handy when you don’t want to read over each one and see which works best for your current situation. Especially if you need something like the Insignia of the Scourge and it’s not equipped at the moment.

If you’re still confused let us try it another way. Since your macros can work for positions in your bag, you can make an icon for a Trinket in one of your slots. Since you have to click on some of them (Insignia of the Scourge) you will be able to access it quicker. Basically this means you won’t have to open your character stats during battle. Instead you can simply click the Death Knight macro icon you created and make it work.

Open Slots for the Action Bar

If you are someone who uses all the action amenities (every location including two right bars), you will soon realize it takes forever to fill them up as a Death Knight. While this may be true, you probably have several macros you want to place there that can be both fun and important to your game play. We recommend putting party and raid chat macros on the right hand side.

The Best Death Knight Macros

If we had to choose three of the best macros for Death Knights they would be:

Runner Stopper
#showtooltip Death Grip
/castsequence reset=25 Death Grip, Chains of Ice

This macro helps you contain an enemy if another spell is on cool down.

All-In-One Spell Interrupt
#showtooltip Strangulate
/cast Strangulate
/cast Mind Freeze

This one stops the casting of one spell if you didn’t realize it’s on cool down and switches to a different one.

Frost Death Coil + Lichborne
#showtooltip Death Coil
/cast [button:2] Lichborne
/cast [button:2, target=player] Death Coil; Death Coil

With a left-click, this macro casts Death Coil on your current target and with a right-click it casts Lichborne and then Death Coil on yourself.

What’s Your Favorite

Even though we can throw out a little information to you, there will come a time when someone like yourself will find something better. The whole idea here is to spend some time playing around with your Death Knight macros and see what works best. Then again, you might just want to have a few entertaining ones to give others something to talk about (Ghoul Explosion, which can make your pet explode). In the end it all depends on you.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight
2. Getting Acquainted With Death Knight Glyphs
3. Death Knight Addons

Soul Harvester’s Charm
Listen, we’ve created six different Death Knights and each one is equipped with the Soul Harvester’s Charm trinket. First off, it improves your critical strike rating by 20. Since your Death Knight will be geared towards gaining DPS stats, this is essential during your gaming. While the critical strike is nice, you will also gain a huge parry increase (90) for ten seconds. Keep in mind this only happens once an enemies melee attack knocks your health down to under thirty-five percent.

Signet of the Dark Brotherhood
If you want additional parry rating, then you’ll want to add another 20 points with this trinket. Since your Death Knight is basically a tank, having the chance to gain 120 strength to your totals may be needed. Granted this all depends on what you plan on doing with your Death Knight’s stats, but it’s nice to know if you block an attack this could occur. Just remember this is only a possibility and not a guarantee.

Insignia of the Scourge
One of the first trinkets you’ll receive is the Insignia of the Scourge. This takes away all effects that happen by spells or melee attacks. It doesn’t matter if you are stunned, get mind controlled, get hit by a concussive shot, or anything else that will impair your movement. While this is great for when you are taking on other players and enemies in instances, you really won’t need it much during your Lich King quests.

The Advantage of Keeping Them All

When the Wrath of the Lich King first came out, getting new gear was exciting. The only problem is most people (like us) feel that once we find something better, it’s time to get rid of the old and keep the new. However, we recommend keeping them all when it comes to the Death Knight class. One of the biggest reasons is you never know when you’re going to need them. In fact, since there are only three originals you might as well keep the third in your bags.

Upcoming Trinkets

As your Death Knight increases levels you will have the opportunity to gain many other Death Knight trinkets along the way. Names like Darkmoon cards, Seal of the Pantheon, Bandit’s Insignia, Fury of Five Flights, Mark of Norgannon, and the Mirror of Truth. These are only a small part of the many trinkets out there. All of them could help you become a better Death Knight over time. The only thing you have to do now is find them.

Related posts:

1. Getting Acquainted With Death Knight Glyphs
2. Working On My Death Knight
3. Pre-Raiding Hunter Trinkets

The Short List

We understand part of the hysteria around World of Warcraft is not knowing what is going to come next. This being said, we’re going to give you a short list of Death Knight glyphs available to help your game. Since we have no way of knowing if you utilize Blood, Frost, or Unholy the most, we’ll mix it up a little bit. Hopefuly you’ll be able to use several of these and test them out until you get the best combination available.

Glyph of Death & Decay (Major) – If you use the DD spell religiously, then you will enjoy adding this glyph to your repertoire. It will allow you to gain an additional 20% damage when used.

Glyph of Chains of Ice (Major) – One of our favorites, the Chains of Ice will gain 144 to 156 damage. This will be increased by your attack power so it’s important to have your AP at the highest level.

Glyph of Bone Shield (Major) – This is a must ability to use, but the glyph itself isn’t very potent. The thing it does is give you two additional charges. Granted, if this is something you constantly use it may help, but not a necessary glyph for everyone.

Glyph of Blood Strike (Major) – We definitely recommend starting out with something like the Blood Strike Glyph. Almost everyone uses this during battle. Adding the glyph will give your Death Knight twenty percent more damage than normal to snared targets.

Glyph of Blood Tap (Minor) – Normally when you use the Blood Tap it will cause damage to your Death Knight. However, if you add this minor glyph to your list, you won’t incur any damage from it again.

Glyph of Death Grip (Major) – Probably our favorite in this short list, the Death Grip has to be the most popular Death Knight ability. When you place this in your glyph area, you can kill anyone that gives honor or experience and replenish this ability. This means there won’t be a cool down period.

Glyph of Blood Boil (Major) – When you need to slow one of your enemies down, you might want to have the extra help from the BB glyph. Having the extra 5 seconds it slows them will help in tight situations.

Glyph of Frost Strike (Major) – The only way we can see someone using this is if you constantly use the Frost Strike ability. If so, then the glyph will reduce your Death Knight’s Runic Power by eight.

Looking for Elite Glyphs?

Even though the list above is short, they are the most talked about in the World of Warcraft community in the beginning. However, as your Death Knight progresses, so will the use of various other Death Knight glyphs in the game. Whether it’s the Raise Dead glyph (no more reagent), Pestilence, Obliterate, or even the Horn of Winter ability (increases time by 1 minute), you will know what you need. In the end, most of these will make your Death Knight much better.

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Addons
2. Working On My Death Knight
3. Interview with Grimtorn of Me and My Ghoul

The Rotate Addon
Even though many of you prefer to use your own spells during game play, there are times when everyone could use a little help. The Rotate addon is a nice little tool for Death Knights who aren’t sure what they should use next to take out an opponent. While it won’t be something you use all the time, it helps to know a suggestion can be made to you in case you aren’t sure how to beat an enemy.

Loracks DK Optimizer
Even though the Rotate addon can help in the early stages of a Death Knight, the Loracks DK Optimizer will be used from levels 55-80 and beyond. Like the previous one, this addon will not only give you a rotation suggestion, but it will also help figure out how to raise DPS. Then of course give you an advantage to gaining more health regeneration. Great for PvP, but even better once they upgrade to help with talent points.

Tank Warnings
No one really appreciates the Tank Warnings addon until they have it while in a Dungeon or Raid. It gives you the opportunity to see whether or not certain spells and abilities are effective against different enemies. Also, if you have it set up the right way you can have the messages sent to a log. However, we recommend having them go to either your Party or chat boxes. This way you know what is going on right now.

Ackis Recipe List
Out of all the Death Knight addons available, the Ackis recipe list is the most intriguing. It used to only work for professions, but after the Death Knight Hero Class was invented, they added Runeforging to this list. So now when you’re missing a specific recipe, the ARL will allow you to figure out what is missing. It’s already set up to be printable, which should save you a substantial amount of time when trying to find them by yourself.

Face Smasher
Last but not least is the Face Smasher addon. Many players enjoy the fact that this will measure and analyze all of your Death Knight’s runic traits. Everything from spells and DPS to AOEs will be able to get better stats from having this addon. Well, it will offer you the tools to figure out what is needed, but the rest of the work is up to you. In all you will get up to 5 suggestions at one time.

More Available

Even though we gave you five different Death Knight addons that many people use, there are plenty more available. Overall you can find almost 40 different addons for the Death Knight class. When searching for the ones that work best for you most people come back to these five. Then again, you may be trying something different. If so, we recommend looking at each of them to see if there is anything better.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight

Before creating Grimtorn had you ever had any prior tanking experience? For everyone, like myself, with Death Knights and an itch to tank, do you recommend a Death Knight as a first tanking character?

Prior to Grim, I had no tanking experience. It was a lot of trial by fire, several “oh sh*t” moments (had one of those last night, even), and a lot of reading around the web (particularly on healer-oriented sites) to try and understand how I could be the best tank I could possibly be. I still have a lot of trouble with adds in raid-level instances – I have a hard time gathering up and keeping them on me while laying down threat. That usually seems to be an either/or proposition, and high threat AOErs can really do me in.

Death Knights *can* be a good first tanking character IF the player is going to take the time and effort to learn how to tank. There’s a reason that the “Death Noob” label already exists – it’s people assuming that just because they’re specc’d Frost, that they can tank a 25 man. While I suppose that can be true of any class (people not knowing how to play their characters), it’s going to be especially true in a class like DKs, where one doesn’t have to toil in the lower levels learning how to actually play properly before they reach end-game.

You’re currently specced Unholy but you also have a heavy dose of the Blood tree as well. Is that a viable setup for tanking only or could that also double-up as a decent spec for someone interested in solo survivability as well?

The setup Grim has now is definitely a viable tanking build. I’m not sure if it’s ideal for soloing, but I’ve never had any problems questing and/or farming with it. As it is, I’m still throwing around respeccing once more to remove AMZ, since 3.0.8. took away a lot of the usefulness of that spell.

What Heroics have caused the most trouble for you as a Death Knight tank? My experience with Heroics is entirely with PUGs and I’ve seen a lot of Death Knight tanks have some trouble in tougher runs like Utgarde Pinnacle.

That…is harder to answer then it might seem. We haven’t run as many heroics as I might like (and I’m not a fan of pugs), and I was pretty poorly geared still the last time we tried (a few weeks ago!). I can say that Grim has handled regular UP just fine when we ran it the other night. Only wipe was in the gauntlet, a DPS who got out of LOS of the healer.

What are your thoughts on the heavy nerf to Beast Mastery? It’s forced a spec switch to Marksmanship for my main but I see you’re still keeping the faith with your Hunter character Malanior.

I’m not really a fan of the nerfbat to BM Hunters, but if it hasn’t already been made clear by my previous answers, I’m not a hardcore raider. We raid for fun (and what I jokingly call “teamship”). With regards to Mal though, it definitely lessened my desire to play him more. There was a strong point when I was having trouble producing an acceptable amount of DPS on him, and to hear that I was going to lose even more of that was disheartening at best. But again, if the guild was more hardcore raiding, I’d probably have been told to respec Survivial or MM – but the raid lead said it best last night -”It’ll be a cold day in hell before I can convince you to spec away from BM!”

What do you think about Wrath now that it’s been out for over two months? What have you liked the most and the least about the expansion?

Wrath was the first expansion I got to experience live (yes, I’m a relative WoW noob – only been playing for a year or so now), so by and large I’ve enjoyed most everything I’ve encountered. I was kind of indifferent to Borean Tundra, but really started to enjoy myself in Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills. Wrathgate, by far, has got to be my favorite ‘encounter’ in Wrath, and it still gives a lore-geek like me chills to think of what I got to participate in there. If theres something I haven’t enjoyed, it’s how only some professions have quests/special currency to buy new recipes. I look at Grim and his blacksmithing and feel like he got screwed there. Surely they could have added a special currency ore that could have been traded in for new recipes!

Check Out Me and My Ghoul

I want to thank Grimtorn for taking the time out of her day to answer my questions. If you haven’t been to Me and My Ghoul yet I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a good look at someone experiencing Death Knight tanking in Wrath.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight

The problem I’m experiencing at the moment is a total lack of desire to run Outland quests again. I could barely stomach most of them the first time around so the idea of doing some of them again is pretty nauseating to me. My solution is to take breaks between chunks of quests and taking what I learned by power-leveling mining earlier on my Hunter and applying it to this Death Knight. As I work on his mining skill I’m also pushing through with blacksmithing.

I’m a pretty big fan of the Death Knight game mechanics but my initial choice for a primary alternate character was my Troll Priest. Unfortunately, given my distain for Outland as mentioned above, I thought solo leveling a Priest through that content would be even more awful than it has been for my Death Knight. Maybe later in the year, if I feel worn out by my Hunter and Death Knight, I’ll give the Priest another try but for now he’ll have to sit idle at level 60.