Having chosen to play as a Death Knight in Shadowlands, it was time to start levelling my Alliance DK and getting her prepped with gear in time for 8.3…
The levelling process for my DK was fast. And when I say fast, I mean ultra-fast. It took about 2 hours and 10 minutes to go from level 111 to hit 120…
I followed the same process as levelling my Monk that I’d run with previously, levelling purely in the Anniversary event version of Alterac Valley, Korrak’s Revenge. But where my monk took about 5-6 hours, my DK was able to just PLOUGH through levels.
This was mainly due to the fact that on my Monk, I was doing extraneous stuff to grind out the event Ram mount, whereas with the DK it was all purely getting rowdy and killing Horde 🙂
Towards the end of the levelling process, the final few levels were taking less than 15 minutes per level, which is definitely my kind of speed when it comes to levelling what turns out to be my 10th level 120 of BfA!
Ding!
After hitting 120 the process of gearing up begun in earnest. Sadly bed called me very shortly after hitting 120, so the following night I set about getting her fully Benthic geared as a starting point. After getting those sorted, I ran a few World Quests, opened up Nazjatar and got through the subsequent quests to get the bump up on the Heart of Azeroth to 35.
This brought her up to iLevel 380. By the end of the following day that had risen to 395, then over the past 2 days she’s gotten to just under 403 iLevel in Frost gear.
Currently as I write this she is now sitting at 417 iLevel, only 17 item levels behind my Hunter main, who has cleared half of Mythic Eternal Palace!
In terms of enjoyability of Death Knight, I’m having a lot of fun. More so than on the Monk.
Of the 120’s I have at this point, in terms of fun I’d rank them for me as follows:
Hunter x 2 / Death Knight
Paladin / Druid
Monk x 2
Warrior
Rogue
Warlock
As you can see, Monk’s actually down the pecking order a good bit, so I’m glad I changed my mind from my initial decision.
My mid-Legion main of Warlock didn’t really work out very well this expansion, and felt very workmanlike compared to how fun it was with the Artifact-driven gameplay style in Legion. Warrior is fun enough, but mainly because of Drum’s entire physicality in being a massive bruising Mag’har Orc. Rogue is decent, but not something I intend to play a lot of for the remainder of the expansion, only really used for transmog runs etc.
Then we get to the B-Tier classes: Paladin & Druid. Both fun for different reasons, but still loving both, but neither has been played since getting to work on the DK.
Hunter is obviously still my main Main at this point in time, but mainly due to gear reasons. If I can get my DK close before 8.3 in a month’s time, then I might be tempted to switch then, but I’d give that a 50:50 chance at the moment.
As for the DK herself, both Frost & Blood are insanely good fun to play. Mainly because I keep shocking myself at just how bloody hard it is to die as either spec. Many times I’ve taken on Elites with near 2/3/4 million health as Frost to find myself dipping SERIOUSLY low in health just to be able to get myself back to full health.
In fact I find myself playing with a tanking mindset when playing as Frost, so much so that I was pulling packs of mobs in Nazjatar that would kill my Druid in Guardian spec, and finding myself being able to spam Death Strike over and over to repeatedly save myself after my health repeatedly dropped to single figure percentages. Brings back memories of being a Prot Paladin back in Mists of Pandaria… 🙂
So yes, I’m currently having a great time with my DK. No great downsides to speak of, other than the usual having to regrind out essences & ranks, and Azerite Power for the umpteenth time this expansion…
In terms of Blood, its survivability is even more insane than Frost. Taking on elites they can’t whittle my health any faster than I can naturally recover it through a single Death Strike, so my health bar barely moves 😀
I’m still in the re-learning process with both specs, so it’ll probably benefit me to keep playing her as either my main or non-raiding main throughout 8.3, so that come Shadowlands release I can hit the ground running at level 50 😉
Hunter will then become my main alt, followed of course by my Paladin. After that? Who knows…
