Dragynslayer
Veteran
Edit: The Write up is up now!
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20 Twink Solo Death Knight Classic Dungeonmaster Run completed!
- Thread starter Dragynslayer
- Start date
Edit: The Write up is up now!
Dragynslayer
Veteran
The Write Up!
Main Spec: Blood.
Main Gear: TBC Gem Gear, Ghost Iron Dragonling, Classic off-sets as I won them. I used a Legion artifact (lvl30) as a main weapon. I also have Baron Rivendare's blade on this character, which was fun to use but didn't make a difference overall in completing the challenge. I built several sets for this run: A standard all around set, a high armor/high stam set, and a dps set. I built variations using off-gear as is my style to overcome various encounters. I farmed Orb of Torment on this character, which made life significantly easier for me, and was necessary to pass this class's greatest wall(s), as well as Pit Fighter.
Gems: Combination of Steady Talasite (4 armor, 6 stam), and Sparkling Empyrean Sapphire, + 3 Versatility for my main set.
Enchants: I used Crusader, and Rune of the Fallen Crusader as my main enchantments. I experimented with other runes, but nothing proved to be worthwhile in the end compared to these two. Eventually Crusader became the only enchant I needed. Crusader is currently bugged, instead of listing it's value of 40 Strength and 40 healing on PROC it yields 100. This is amazing b/c the heal is essentially about 2.5-2.8% healing when it goes off. This is not as good as RotFC's 6%, but the trade off is immense, because you get the push right where you need it: Strength. Essentially When this goes off your DMG of course increases tremendously, and you really need this to fire off b/c some fights are just too tight. You can't build the survivability you need to withstand something and whittle it down. You need to last just long enough to down the boss. This is where Crusader's 100 Strength PROC is the king. Additionally, it increases your survivability. You gain an extra 70 armor (roughly an extra 12.5% physical mitigation, 8% or so when you are near the top of your flat range), and an additional 5% Parry. RotFC yields a 15% Strength bonus which is nice, but will generally only net you about 20% of the other bonuses that Crusader PROCS. As a note, I found Crusader PROCS to be very active during all of my run, sometimes going off anywhere from 4-6 times per minute (100% uptime!) on rare occasions. The normal PROC rate I witnessed was about 2PPM. All other enchants are standard fare, I opted for Mastery in most cases, and primary stats/Strength where possible.
Off-set Gear: As always, I recommend building a nice collection of off-set gear. For this run I used heavy Versatility, therefore Arm's Masters Locket and Electrocutioner's Lagnut were fantastic, later I swapped in off-sets that had had Versatility/ X Stat.
Stat Priority: Armor, Stamina, Strength, Versatility, Mastery = Haste, Critical. Main stats are not arguable, you need a minimum of 3300 health to get through the dungeons without too many deaths, and I recommend 3600 or more for the harder bosses. You will end up with around 130ish strength, which is highly important. Recent adjustments to the class finally made this run more doable due to Marrowrend's Armor bonus being increased from 50% to 70% of your Strength. I want to take a moment here and point out I finished this run with primarily Versatility as my big secondary stat, and mastery. I would have liked to really push a Haste/Mastery set more, but I began this run before I started any of my other characters and it was walled by Rammstein and a few other minor bosses, and was pretty burnt out on active farming for an entirely new set of side gear.
Stat Weights: 5.6 Armor = 1% Physical mitigation as an average. At lower levels it's about 4:1, and at higher levels was hitting around 7:1 so I offer this number as an average based on my gameplay and gearing. Critical & Haste are about 4:1. Versatility is 4.5:1 for damage improvements, and 9:1 for damage reduction. Mastery is about 2:1 for Attack power gains, and almost 1:1 on Blood Shield gains.
Armor Threshold - I recommend shooting for an absolute minimum of 35% damage mitigation from armor for most medium level fights. You can get a bit higher and I highly suggest it. Strive for at 40% or more for Rammstein. If you push your versatility, you can climb into the 13% mitigation realm (you can reach higher with intense farming, or by sacrificing a lot of talasites, which I don't recommend). As a note Armor is worth around 5.6 or so for 1% mitigation. This value slides up and down based on how much armor you have, so I arrived at this average value based on maximum attainable armor over the course of my toons career. You can determine what you want for yourself based on your own threshold. In the end with Marrowrend up it was not uncommon for me to have 60-65% Damage mitigation vs physical.
Avoidance - Nothing fancy here, I wound up with about 18% based on gear.
Stamina Threshold - My survivability threshold was set for around 3,300-3,800 Health. I would have preferred, and even built a set that reached 5k Hp, and insane armor, but damage values fell too much for hard timer fights.
Strength Threshold - I recommend at least 125-135, which should be easily attainable. This will net you depending on buffs around 95-100 Armor. If you are already around 40%-44% mitigation from armor this will bring you up (after DR) to around 48%-52% when you use Marrowrend. It also gives you more parry, the rate should be about 20:1 for Strength needed to increase Parry by 1%.
Haste Threshold - I have a lot to say about Haste which I was not able to build around during this run. I will in the distant future probably attempt to put a haste set together. Haste is a key stat b/c it increases both your damage, and your healing per second. I really wanted to have more of this, but didn't arrive at this conclusion until much later. While this is a no-brainer for PVP and PVE dps, the value of haste is actually much more important for solo PVE than in group PVE, it doesn't hold the same weight due to differences in dynamics. I personally feel this statistic is incredibly important, especially when paired with the other big stat...
Mastery - During initial testing I found this secondary to be lackluster. However this was partially due to previous PvP bias and Level 60 Bias, as well as not having enough. After dispensing of said biases and reassessing the statistic with enough of it, I found it to be amazing. Mastery for Blood DK's generates a noticeable difference in Dmg. You receive a 2:1 Mastery to Attack Power trade. The other effect is much more interesting, however. Essentially you have a near 1:1 trade on Mastery for blood shield improvements. Normally(especially at high levels) blood shield is terrible. Ever since the nerf bat was taken to DK, blood has struggled much more immensely. Due to our scaling at level 20, a proper stack up of Mastery can yield powerful blood shields, essentially potentially doubling your Deathstrike's recuperative power. As an example I typically ran around with 35% mastery, and gained an additional 40 (for blood shield conversion) whenever Pit Fighter went off. This literally made my blood shield value move from (3700+ hp base) 100 up to just over 200. The average (medium level) boss will typically hit you for around 125-200 damage low end to high end. This means that DS not only returned (300HP) more than 2 hits worth of damage at all times, but also negated an additional 2 hits worth of damage. Even with a subpar set stacking Mastery, I was able to stack up 100% blood shields as a test. Hail to the king, baby!
All this being said, it is quite difficult to put together a lot of passive use Mastery. It can certainly be done but will require an immense farming effort. I attempted to put the near 100% set together, but the investment of time was too much for me at this point.
Versatility - Versatility is the main stat I settled on. I found it to be the easiest secondary stat to acquire, and also the easiest way to increase my survivability despite hard trade of 9:1 for mitigation thanks to the ease of acquisition. If I knew what I know now I would probably farm up my array differently initially, but it's hard to go wrong with this stat. This stat has a key component that is overlooked during normal gameplay, but became quickly evident to me during the run. Versatility improves the amount of healing you get from both the Spinal Injector, Potions, and Blood Boil health leeching. Also for the Runeblade of Baron Rivendare, it increases the passive healing. Extra healing is always good for the class. It does not effect Death Strike's healing, which is terribly sad. The trade for damage is 4.5:1 which is good. You need big damage with the class while gaining or maintaining surivability and mitigation. This stat is a key stat imo. I do suggest giving it lower priority in the end build of a 20 solo PVE DK, but it's also the easiest stat to initially gear, so the choice is yours here.
Critical - Critical is pure damage and is nice for trash, light mode bosses, and increasing your expedience for clears. I recommend it through side pieces for a trash/easy boss set, but not for main sets. The trade is 4:1. The normal gear you farm for a 20 twink includes a lot of passive crit, so you don't have to chase it much.
Dodge/Parry - I recommend a fair amount of Dodge, I ended up with around 8% during battle. It's hard to fit this statistic in without losing too much from other stats. The conversion factor is good however, at 4:1. I tend to think of Avoidance in terms of break points. For example 20% total avoidance means 1:5 hits will be avoided. 25% avoidance means 1:4 hits will be avoided, and so on. I don't really recommend anything in between most of the time. I do not recommend chasing Parry. Whatever you get from gear and procs is what you get. The trade off is very poor, iirc it somewhere around 8 or 9:1 for Blood DK at lvl 20.
Trinkets: I ran several trinkets. Ghost Iron Dragonling socketed for Mastery, Verse, and Haste (the trinity of your secondary's
). I also ran Pit Fighter, which was generally awesome. It has a 20 second uptime of +40 Mastery at lvl 20, so it is very noticeable when it goes off. I used a simple +7 Strength/+10 Haste Trinket for clearing trash and medium or easy bosses (name escapes me, will have to look up after maintenance), and last but certainly not least: Orb of Torment. I ended up farming this trinket due to Rammstein and a few other bosses. I am not sure that without a lot of RNG or perhaps my theoretical haste=mastery, versatility set, that you can actually do this challenge without it. It has some clunkiness to it, due to Blood being clunky. You want to maximize it's healing when it goes off, I highly recommend making sure you have Blood Drinker on Cooldown when you use it, and of course just pumping damage out. If you Crusader procs, it's amazing. Do not wait too long to use this however.Talent: I experimented with all the talents, and they are all pretty good. Tombstone can be really good when you are still gearing, and can't get a nice damage/healing value off of Blood Drinker, but once you are geared, use Blood Drinker. Essentially, it's damage, it's healing, you can use it while using defensive CD's, it can critically hit/heal, and it's ranged and doesn't require Line of Sight once started, both of which are handy in some fights.
Professions: Engineering which I primarily used this for the Potion Injector, the potion injection belt is essentially a mini-cd, and very important to this class for this challenge. I went with Embosses from LW & Jewel Crafting for the Northrend Trinkets with 2 sockets. They proved to be useful for a lot of gameplay. I will note I do not think you need Jewel Crafting to complete the challenge.
Consumables: I went with the +5 Mastery food as my main food. Dense Weightstone for +3 weapon damage. I used +5 Armor elixirs (1% mitigation) as well, and Lesser Sage Elixir for +7 Versatility. I also used Drums of Haste on key fights, which is not surprising. As usual Dense Weightstone was very important. I used a variety of potions but the basic potion this time around was Wildvine Potion or Iron Horde Potion.
Quality of Life: I used mount shoes (20% speed boost when mounted), Goblin Glider, and Water Walking Potions. +2 Mastery and +10% movement on boots. I did not have much other Quality of Life, however we do have the portal to Acherus, which was very nice. I would set my hearth to the main hub of dungeons I was doing, and use the Death Gate to portal to Dal/SW, etc.
DPS and Damage Set: Players of Death Knight are going to be very happy to know that Unholy Spec is quite viable! I was able to clear most packs of trash that didn't have too many elites with it, and clear all easy bosses, spellcaster bosses, and medium difficulty bosses with it. It was not viable versus hard hitting top level bosses or massive elite packs. I highly recommend All Will Serve as your Talent. The extra buddy helps negate some boss mechanics, and helps improve your own damage and survivability output by being another body on the field. As mentioned earlier I put together a more damage oriented set for clearing trash, this set was more geared towards Critical and Haste, with Versatility following. Mastery was not an active part of the set, although it was present. On average I was looking at 150 DPS single target to about 200 sometimes. I'd say about 175-180 on average.
How did Death Knight stack up compared to Paladin & Druid?:
Death Knight has active anti-caster abilities that are amazing. You get Mind Freeze, Anti-Magic Shield, and in a pinch for some mobs and weak bosses, Death Grip to interrupt, shield, or negate a caster effect or spell cast. Death Knight also excels at controlled pulls. You can cherry pick mobs that are pathing without pulling big packs, or nab a runner with Death Grip. You can also snare with Chains of Ice pre-emptively when a mob is getting low in case it's a runner. Death Knights Area Damage is excellent as well due to Blood Boil and Death and Decay PROCS. Essentially DK is excellent at controlling mobs, better than Paladin or Druid at 20 overall.
DK enjoys the temporary presence of a pet ghoul for blood, or permanent skeleton and extra buddies for unholy. Proper timing of using these pets can allow you to circumvent some boss mechanics, and clear content more quickly than normal. As a blood player you should use your Ghoul pretty much every CD, especially when there are a large amount of elite mobs to handle.
Death Knight also enjoys some self-healing powers that you must cycle to stay alive. This is where the trouble begins however, as even compared to druid with it's one healing spell as Guardian, the class really struggles with Healing Per Second. On light hitting mobs the healing threshold is fair, however you will find when paired up against tough mobs and hard hitting bosses, you cannot actually keep yourself topped off and will begin to spiral towards defeat. This creates a damage race feel to the class. You are constantly trying to keep your head above water with the class on anything challenging. This will force you to supplement both your damage and your heals in any way possible, which is why I farmed Orb of Torment, made a Spinal Injector, etc. Without certain off-items like those, I do not think this class can pull off a solo Classic Dungeon Master without great luck.
DK does not maintain at this level anyway to remove effects like Poison, Disease, Curses or Magic effects. You can preempt Magic and Curses however with Ant-Magic Field, which is important. If you want to handle some of these effects you will have to resort to using consumable effects. As I discovered during these runs, not all the consumables work against certain bosses and their effects, which makes this aspect quite frustrating. I will say you can do the run without needing them, but I chose to play Dwarf (basic) for the extra damage reduction and removal effects in clutch.
DK at level 20 does not enjoy any class mechanics that break crowd control effects. You are always at the mercy of stuns, and roots etc. This isn't completely terrible, but it's not a good place to be. Stuns got me killed on Ramstein very frequently. The class also has at this level no movement or speed altering effects, making it extremely slow to move around and get through dungeons with in terms of mobility.
Other
Some notes here. I made a few interesting discoveries that might help you out if you attempt this challenge. I will list them for quick reference.
Deathstrike actually heals for 8% health minimum, compared to the 7% listed in the tooltip.
Rune of Hysteria (sent via a higher level DK heirloom), when used in Blood Spec only, can grant you up to 135 Runic Power. When you switch the blade out after a while, it will decrease to 115 or 120, usually 115, until you log out, sometimes the bug persists even when you log in again.
Versatility Impacts the Spinal Injector and Healing Potions, which I did not notice before. I thought any buffs to their effect came from + Primary stat. I did notice the healing effect via Blood Boil prior.
Marrowrend was buffed a few weeks ago as of the time of this writing, and is a key component to this class becoming partially viable now. Remember, it's not always the player, but the class itself sometimes that determines your success and failure.
Rammstein ignores Free Action Potion. Do not attempt to use it against him, he will still stun you.
Final Thoughts:
Death Knight is by far the hardest of these 3 classes that I completed the challenge with. I am going to be very up front here and say that it is bottom tier viable. I started and discontinued this challenge twice. The class will throw you b/c you can breeze through some content and some bosses without an issue, and then the next thing you know you are hard walled by a certain boss or two. My initial wall was Hogger when I first made this character. His 5% health lost per hit debuff would just overwhelm my DK's HPS, and I didn't have enough mitigation and damage output to whether the other hits/kill him at the time, especially after he enraged. Sounds silly right? But I couldn't defeat the mechanic until after a set of updates to the class. I was already versatility stacked for that fight. Later I continued to clear content with ease, until I met Rammstein. Rammstein became my paladin's Jammal'an. I literally couldn't keep pace with the damage. He was hitting me for an average of 300, and sometimes would burst me for 1k-1.2k within 4 seconds. I went back to the board and farmed more gear. I brought his damage down to the mid 200's, and he was still insane. It became apparent I needed the Orb of Torment. When a class becomes dependent on one or two particular items to determine viability, that class is not in a good place. I did not need the orb with paladin or druid at all. While I did not require the orb for every boss fight or encounter, I did need it for other boss fights that are known to be difficult, like Roogug, Wyrmthalak, Immol'thar, etc. The saving grace of this class was 1 shotting Baroness and 2 shotting Jammal'an, both a new record for me.
My final thought is, the class is barely viable for solo play. If you compare it to paladin, they're not even in the same league. It's definitely doable, I managed to do it after about a month and doing 2 other challenges in between b/c I was stuck. Just be prepared to work your butt off to do it.
I hope you all enjoyed this read! I am continuing a few more challenges with other classes, and am planning on building a solo Classic Dungeonmaster Guide for the community, that I hope to have done in the next month by the communities request. In the guide I am going to share how to prepare and defeat common roadblocks, what to expect, and some other sweeping game bugs I found that may impact your success on your solo challenges.
In the meantime, God bless, Good luck, and Happy Gaming guys!
PS. I want to once again give a shout out to my friend Optimus, crafter extraordinaire. He keeps me stocked up on consumables and gems, making these challenges more palatable and less time consuming. I also want to thank some of the other fellow twinks on this server for sharing in some farming runs whenever I am gearing a new toon for my next challenge, you guys rock!
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Dragynslayer
Veteran
Hey guys, I finished the write up! I hope you enjoy and gain some insights from it
Dragynslayer
Veteran
Congratulations to the three-time classic dungeonmaster world champion!
Do you think you'll try another class, or are you going to start working on that other project you have planned?
Haha thanks so much man! I have a few more classes lined up yet. I am very interested in seeing if I can get a few of them through the challenge, or if it's just not possible right now. My other project will soon follow once I'm done with the Classic Dungeon runs project. How is your new project coming, have any other things in the work friend?
Vyvenem
Veteran
Well I'm taking a break from trying WoD/Legion dungeons because of their slightly ramped up difficulty. I know I could probably push higher damage with things like Drums of Fury and some enchants I'm still missing, but I'm content with my dungeon progress for now. Maybe in the summer, I'll pick it back up.
I've been working on a lot of fishing and cooking achievements recently. I feel like a large chunk of both are perfectly doable as a F2P. I really want to get back into Mining also so I can max out every engineering level. I randomly looted ALL the Jeeves schematics while I was getting explorer achievements and would love to craft that for future dungeoneering.
Dragynslayer
Veteran
Understandable. I'm sure you will conquer them in the future though! That is sick, engi is so fun, I can't believe you looted ALL the Jeeves! That's rockin
.Dragynslayer
Veteran
Paladin is godly, but it was so much fun to have the enhanced movement and stealth with druid. The Quality of Life of just being a druid is awesome
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Zemmix
A.B.C.
Agreed, on druid for best QOL class.Paladin is godly, but it was so much fun to have the enhanced movement and stealth with druid. The Quality of Life of just being a druid is awesome
What do you plan to try next?
Blackberryy
TBC Classic
Congratulations, you may not have seen the achievement on your screen but in our twink community it’s always a fantastic achievement to all of us for your hard work! Keep it up
Dragynslayer
Veteran
<3 Thanks man!
brettqpublic
Member
Awesome job! Thank you for the inspiration. I have tomorrow off of work and plan to get my hunter up to 20 to start "Baby's First Solo Run".
Dragynslayer
Veteran
@brettqpublic Awesome man! Can't wait to see your posts
Dragynslayer
Veteran
Hey @MardyVain thanks! Sure, I will offer you a quick insight on Jammal'an, that SOB haha. Switch to Unholy. Make sure you pick the talent to have the permanent skeleton buddy, try to keep him alive with deathcoil. Make sure you use Ghost Iron, Apocalypse, and Summon Ghoul. If you get the curse on you activate any of those and run far away(not too far away), and when you hulk out you should attack some of your buddies but still have some left.
He's very difficult, but Jammal is actually easy with a DK. I managed to 2shot (ie was MC once and fight reset). If you have any more questions let me know. Also, you can use Anti-Magic shield to pre-empt "join me" which will render you immune to it when he throws it once per minute.
He's very difficult, but Jammal is actually easy with a DK. I managed to 2shot (ie was MC once and fight reset). If you have any more questions let me know. Also, you can use Anti-Magic shield to pre-empt "join me" which will render you immune to it when he throws it once per minute.
MardyVain
New Member
Thank you for your answer! I was trying to complete sunken temple with a windwalker monk, and without any reliable way to summon pet/companions it is impossible for me to finish the fight. I saw you completed the dungeon also with a paladin and a druid, how did you manage to avoid the mc?
Also, I don't know why but jammal'an casts 'join us' like every 20 seconds when I fight him!
My second pg is a dk, so prolly I will try to fight him as you suggested in unholy and with lots of ghouls.
Again, congratulation for your achievement, truly impressive!
Dragynslayer
Veteran
@Gronou Deja Stats my friend , one of the few addons I use.
@MardyVain Yes, everything you described is normal for the fight with Jammal'an. Since you looked at my other posts you would see that it took me 65 tries to down him on my Paladin for eg.... ugh. The mechanics of the fight can be handled differently by different classes, so non-pet slow moving classes are the worst, you just have to get the timing of his sequencing down. Keep in mind he's a dirty cheater though and will occasionally insta-curse you and break his patterns, so you have to be prepared to see that happen as well . I really hate him. lol!
, one of the few addons I use.@MardyVain Yes, everything you described is normal for the fight with Jammal'an. Since you looked at my other posts you would see that it took me 65 tries to down him on my Paladin for eg.... ugh. The mechanics of the fight can be handled differently by different classes, so non-pet slow moving classes are the worst, you just have to get the timing of his sequencing down. Keep in mind he's a dirty cheater though and will occasionally insta-curse you and break his patterns, so you have to be prepared to see that happen as well
. I really hate him. lol!