Wow Gold -- Leveling Blood

Leveling is a huge difference between raiding, so you know that standard 51/13/7 blood spec? Throw it out the window. It's useless but the raid spec can be used for leveling, but it won't be as efficient as a leveling spec. What is the difference between these two specs?

51/13/7 raiding takes into account that this is a raid which means that you will have healing and won't need to watch yourself as much as when we're out soloing. Therefore, Mr. Rune Tap is gone. The same goes for Vedetta. We still have our basic Death Rune Mastery, Hysteria, Blood Aura and of course, Abomination's Might as well as our Bloody Vengeance. That will still toss out the necessary buff-age for melee and keep one healed well.

But for leveling, talents change. Keeping those same twenty points where they are in our frost and unholy trees, a 51/13/7 spec is still developed. But there are major changes. This was the build for leveling. At first, you can fill out the blood tree, the frost tree and unholy at last.

What is the difference between these two specs? Of course the latter won't be putting out as much DPS, but there is one more thing the spec has that the raiding spec does not have: extra survivability.

Icebound fortitude helps in damage reduction, helping the other heals pop in. Mark of Blood causes whatever have that debuff heal you. Blood tap is to make sure the other marks get up (assuming you keep a couple death runes flying at most times - move that down or up in the sequence as needed), followed by one good Rune Tap: your main heal. If you need extra workings during that, add in Death Strike or switch out Obliterate for Death Strike for a while in rotations to heal up. We suggest slapping on a Glyph of Blood Tap for this. It's not much, but it's a cheap one and could save one's butt once or twice.

So, since the rotation idea came up, what is it? The rotation does not change much between the raid spec and the soloing spec. Here is what we want to do Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence, Heart Strike, Heart Strike, Obliterate, and Death Coil until we loose our Runic Power. Why Icy touch first? If we go into switching out those two points in Toughness in the frost tree for Glacier Rot and hitting Plague Strike first we get more damage, but we are not talking about damage. We want survivability here. If you want to get into a good conversation, explain why we have Glyph of Plague Strike.

The rotations work out really well if we keep death runes flying. Still we get asked by higher level death knights "what the heck are death runes?" To put it at the simplest point: think of them as that Wild Card in Uno. It can be anything you will...Blood Death Knights do not use as much of the frost or unholy runes as other specs. Blood is the freaking king of single-rune DPS. So if we obliterate here and there, we snag a death rune (or two, to be technically speaking). Those death runes in turn can be used as blood runes for more heart strikes or more of heals.

But there is lots of information about the raiding, but not enough about the leveling. Let's face the facts: the class is meant to level however you want to level and you can do it well.