Death Knight DPS Stats

Todays post is on, you guessed it, stats you'll need as a DPS death knight. Enjoy.

Hit Rating: Hit Rating can be thought of as to DPS what defence is to tanking. It is the one stat that is absolutely crucial as a DPS, up to a certain level. The way hit works is the more you have the less likely you are to miss your target and so it is a huge dps increase. The 'hit cap' when using 2handed weapons is 9% and so you need 290 hit rating to ensure you never miss. Though this may seem a lot at first it can easily be increased by eating certain foods / elixirs that increase your hit rating for a set amount of time.

The 'hit cap' for spells such as howling blast and death coil is 17% but I wouldn't really worry about this too much as almost all of your dps will come from physical strikes as a death knight.

Lastly, the 'hit cap' for the few remaining dual wielders out there is, I believe, around 27% and so I would not bother going this far with hit rating as it will handicap the rest of your stats so just try and get as much hit as you can on your gear other than going for the cap.

Strength: The most imortant stat as a DPS once you reach your required 'hit cap' is strength in short strength can be summed up like this. 1 Strength = 2 Attack Power, More Attack Power = more damage dealt. Therefore, you should always try and stack as much strength as possible.

Crit Rating: Is not a stat that you will really want to gem into because as a death knight it is not really required. Blood specs will require some crit rating but this should be sufficient on the gear you get. Frost does benefit most from crit due to its high burst damage and so stacking crit is a possible option. Unholy however gets a lot of its damage from DoTs (damage over time) and so crit is not as valuable.

Agility: Those used to playing rogues might cry for hearing this but I think its fair to say that for Death Knights at least Agility Sucks. All that agility gives you is a fairly small increase in critical strike chance (62.5 Agility is 1% increased crit chance). The only other benefit is a slight increase in armour (2 armour per ponint of agility) and if you are specced for Bladed Armour this will increase your attack power by 1 for every 18 points of agility. Even if specced this way however 36 points of agility will only be equal to about 1 strength and 25 points of Crit Rating.

Expertise: Expertise is a relatively new stat as even though it first appeared in TBC (The Burning Crusade) it was not really viable to stack it until this expansion. What expertise does is that it lowers the chance for your attacks to be dodged or parried this is not that important for Death Knights however as many of our attacks (Frost Strike, Death Coil, Unholy Blight, Howling Blast, etc) can be neither dodged nor parried. It is however a bit more important for Blood specced death knights as most of their attacks can be dodged and parried.

Armour Penetration: This stat is a bit more complicated than others as what it does is that it reduces your targets armour and so increases your overall damage, every 15.39 rating of armour penetration you have reduces your targets by 1%. Armour Penetration is another stat that really depends on which way you’re specced. Frost and Unholy death knights won’t really see much gain from it but blood death knights will as the majority of their damage comes from physical attacks.

Haste: The final stat to look at as a DPS death knight is haste it increases your weapon speed and so 1% of haste increases your ‘white weapon damage’ (auto-attack hits) by 1%. Therefore, it is not very viable for those who use 2 handed weapons but it can be quite effective for dual wielders.

That’s it for now but let me know if there’s something specific you want me to write about.