Aurdon’s Death Knight Outland Gear guide

Welcome to the beginnings of my Death Knight Outland gear guide.  This guide is to help you find the best upgrades for a Death Knight while leveling through Outland.  I’m making it a goal to get the gear as soon as you are high enough level for it so that you can continue laying waste to the countryside on your quest to Northrend.

Now lets be honest here, you’ve all at least thought of rolling a death knight.  Heck I’m still toying with making a Death Knight my main and first to level 80. If thats what I end up doing, I’m going to have to play catchup as fast as possibly to be able to raid with my guild.  And thats the real reason for this guide. I started this as a “Well if I do change my main, I want to get through Outland as fast as possible by grabbing the best gear possible”.  Hopefully that will show in this guide.  I really don’t feel like seeing any more of Outland then necessary and lucky for us Blizzard has decreased the amount of XP needed per level to reach 70 in patch 3.0.2.  This will likely take several posts.  How many?  I dunno.  I’m a crappy blogger.  If I were better I’d have all this thought out already…but if I don’t start posting soon, the planning phase will be over because 11/13 is right around the corner. So lets get started shall we?

Quick primer

Lets start out by stating a few givens and get them out of the way.

• The Death Knight needs little to no downtime!  Seriously…as long as you have HP (and he gets a lot returned through his dps) then you are good to go.  There is no mana/energy pool.  Runes take 10 seconds to replenish so by the time you engage your next mob, your abilities should be ready to go.  You are likely going to feel like a Rouge who can wear plate and has mondo life steal.
• We only need to hit 68 to get to Northrend.  Technically we only need to finish the Death Knight starting zone (which should be lvl 58) but you have to be level 68 before they give you any quests to do.  The gear in this guide is focused on levels 58-67 for this reason.
• Death Knights starting gear for outland isn’t 1/2 bad.  Really if you wanted to you could simply blow through everything and use it to 68 but you’d probably start to feel inadequate by then.  The Death Knight gear you walk into Outland with is item level 70.  The gear I searched for in this guide ends up being anywhere between ilvl 70 and 130.  You won’t walk into Northrend wearing all epic level 68 gear but you will have some nice upgrades from where you started.
• The data I pulled from came exclusively from my favorite wow database website: Wowhead.com.  I searched for DPS Plate gear available to a player between levels 58-67.  Weapons follow the same rules. 

Pick you leveling spec

So now you must decide on a leveling spec.  No I’m not talking about Blood, Frost, or Unholy.  I’m talking about your leveling play style.  My guide is going to break down the gear decisions based upon these three play styles.

• Buy my way - Buying your way through outland gear basically means you are already hunting on the AH for world drops and depending on crafted gear to make your way to level 68.  I won’t include crafted gear that is bind on pickup because I feel its rather unlikely you will get to outland and say to yourself: “Self! I think I’d like to grind blacksmithing to level 375!” So any crafted items should be bind on equip. The Advantage of buying your gear is you can equip the stuff the very second you ding.  The disadvantage is the gear you may be buying doesn’t always come cheap and doesn’t last very long.  There are also may “dry” spots where a good upgrade doesn’t come for awhile.  There are a few good items though that I’ll point out later.
• Instance my way - I know some people who feel the fastest way to level is to get a 5 man group together and do some good old fashion dungeon crawling.  This is a great idea if you plan to grind up the outland reputations on your Death Knight or you simply want to ensure you will have mobs to kill and don’t want to be fighting for quests spawns like the many other Death Knights trying to level fast by questing.  The downsides of this is having a solid 5 man group and at least one of those guys be a healer.  Sure you “can” do Hellfire Ramparts with 5 Death Knights…but do you really want to play run a pug with 4 other people who have been playing their class for only 4 hours?  Thought not.  You also will have to come to terms with the fact that boss drops are not guaranteed to be good for your class.  And with the abundance of Death Knights, you are likely going to have to fight for drops.
• Quest my way - I’m not sure I’ve seen it written anywhere on their website, but I’m pretty darn sure questing is the way Blizzard intends on their players leveling.  It has been proven the fastest method of leveling next to “cheat grinding” and it will provide you with some great gear along the way.  Most of these quests are easy to solo.  And being a Death Knight, I’m sure once get a feel for the power of the class, you can easily take on the quests that are meant for 2-3 people.

More then likely you will take a mix of the buying and questing your way with some short dabbling in running instances. Questing solo is the most dependable way because you can always find a group of one! Buying is a nice thing to do if you’ve already got a rich uncle who is level 70 and can invest in your outland escapades.

Tune in next time

The “plan” is to break this up into a couple of chunks.  Following posts will include:

• Aurdon’s Death Knight Outland Gear Guide
• Death Knight Outland Gear Guide: 58-59
• Death Knight Outland Gear Guide: 60-61
• Death Knight Outland Gear Guide: 62-63
• Death Knight Outland Gear Guide: 64-65
• Death Knight Outland Gear Guide: 66-67

**Bonus: Mainly because you need to start farming the AH right away, be on the look out for Boots of the Decimator and Gauntlets of the Skullsplitter.