Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look into the bloody business of being a death knight. This week, said business is especially bloody as we take a look at the most popular death knight tree.

According to recent armory analysis, blood is the most popular death knight spec. It's not hard to see why, it's a simple yet robust tree that provides lots of power with a minimum of fuss. If you're interested in getting in the DPS side of the tree but aren't sure where to start, or if you're just looking to brush up on the basics of the tree, this is the Lichborne for you. While this guide doesn't necessarily cover some of the more advanced aspects of the tree, it does covers the basic ways to get the most out of your gear, rotation, and spec as a blood DPSer.

1. What is blood DPS?

Blood is the death knight tree that focuses the most on pure physical damage. It also has superior health regeneration. Like all three trees, it can be used for both tanking and DPS, but we'll focus on DPS for this guide.

2. Blood DPS Benefits

• Superior single target damage.
• Superior self healing and health stealing abilities mean you probably die less and can survive through a less than stellar healer or tank more consistently than many other DPS.
• Some very nice group and raid melee buffs in the form of Hysteria and Abomination's Might.

3. Blood DPS Drawbacks

• Not quite as much AoE potential as the other two trees.

4. Stats to look for

Weapon DPS: The number one thing you need to do blood effective is a massive two-handed weapon, one with a slow swing time and high end damage. Dual wielding doesn't work for blood since you need the high weapon damage in order to fire off high damage Heart Strikes and Death Strikes.

Hit Rating to 8% Hit Chance: At 8% hit rating, all your two-handed damage and weapon strikes will hit. Since that's where most of blood's damage comes from, it's pretty much imperative that you hit that 8%. You'll preferably want to hit it all from gear (IE, around 263 hit rating), since that will transfer more combat stats to your pets. While hit rating past that 8% will still technically benefit you, since it will give a better chance to hit to spell-like effects like Death Coil, the benefit will be so low that it will be far better if you get other stats instead.

[View Remaining 12 Paragraphs]