This is a guest post by runeforgegossip who runs his own self titled blog regarding Death Knights and his adventures!

Death Knights can be a complicated class to raid with. As a DPS or tank, you need to be constantly aware of your 6 separate rune cooldowns in addition to monitoring runic power. The default user interface simply shows small icons for each rune. When you use a rune, it goes dark and slowly lights up, like skills on your action bar. As you can see in the picture below, the default rune interface simply attaches to your character frame, and runic power is displayed directly above the runes.

The functionality and visibility of the default rune interface is, in my opinion, pretty limited. Luckily there are a lot of other options out there, and I’m going to start off with my favourite, Magicrunes. Magicrunes (which comes with an option to hide the Blizzard rune panel) is an addon that can monitor your diseases, rune timers and runic power. It’s usable straight out of the box, but its best feature is its customizability. Below on the left is what it looks like freshly installed, and on the right is freshly installed Magicrunes in action.

The space at the top with the text "Runes" disappears when you lock the bars in place. There are many different ways you can change the look of Magicrunes. First off, there are a number of presets to choose from that come with the mod.

As an example I chose the option "Vertical animated icons." Since in the preset the runes are quite clumped together and as a result hard to understand, let’s look at the options available to change that. In this next image I made the icons smaller (lowered icon scaling) and raised the spacing between the bars.

Another popular runewatch mod is DeathKnight.info Runes. Where Magicrunes is the king of customization and efficiency in terms of screen real estate, DK.info Runes is a bit flashier and more colourful. This is what it looks like (disease and rune timers) with a fresh install.

There are are far fewer ways to customize DK.info Runes relative to Magicrunes. It’s a bit more attractive right out of the box but that’s really all you get with this mod. As you can see from the options menu, there’s not much you can fiddle with.

Last but not least of the popular rune mods is Runewatch:

While Runewatch only comes packaged with two presets, the default and a more compact version that wraps the runes around the circle in the above picture, it has a few advantages. First off, It has a timer for Horn of Winter seen above the rune mod, which neither DK.info Runes nor Magicrunes has. The options interface also comes with helpful explanations (that Magicrunes lacks) as well as an neat feature that allows the mod to fade out when out of combat. You can see the options for that below.

Of the three, I believe Magicrunes is the best option for a raider with limited space on screen for addons. It also takes a lot more work to configure Magicrunes the way you want as not all the options and menus are labelled in the most helpful manner possible. The other two addons can be a bit more visually interesting, depending on what kind of UI you have. Their downside is that they take up more room and are somewhat limited regarding customization.