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

Managing your Runes is probably the most important part of playing a Death Knight well. Once you’ve got that down, with whatever mod you’ve chosen to use, the next step is to find a good addon for tracking your diseases. Many of these addons include timers for your cooldowns or can be customized to do so. There are many out there, some Death Knight-specific and some work for any class. Often unit frame mods (such as X-Perl) come packaged with a way to see your DoTs on your target. I’m going to try to look at a diverse bunch of addons, all of which can be used for disease timers and some of which have other bonus features.

First up is ForteXorcist, originally a Warlock addon but with features for every class. When you first load it up, it looks quite daunting, with a lot of weird Warlock-related things popping up on your screen. To get rid of them (or modify the options of any other bar) the default way to bring up the options menu is simply to right click on the bar on your screen. Here’s what the disease timers look like, with a handy cooldown bar underneath (which functions as a rune timer in addition to tracking other cooldowns). ForteXorcist also tracks your buffs, which is useful when using things like Dancing Rune Weapon. It can also track debuffs on multiple targets at once.

One of the neat features of the disease timers is that you can see when the next tick of damage will occur. This is indicated by the highlighted lines in the bar (see where the red arrow points to). The options menu in ForteXorcist is probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. Here are the options relevant to the disease timers. At the bottom of the menu are buttons that take you to other sections of the options menu, which is startlingly large and covers almost everything you could want to fiddle with. For an all-in-one kind of addon, ForteXorcist is fantastic, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes playing around with settings to get something working perfectly.

If you’re looking for something a bit simpler and much easier to set up, you can use the built-in debuff timers in X-Perl Unit Frames. With one simple step, as shown here (under the “Target” menu):

you can see a visible countdown of your diseases/other debuffs over the target’s unit frame. The downside of using X-Perl to track diseases is that I find a countdown on an icon harder to keep track of compared to a bar that shrinks as the disease runs out. If you’re a more casual player, or have limited screen space for bulkier timer addons, then this might be the way to go.

Next I’m going to look at Classtimers, another addon that works for any class. It can track buffs and debuffs on your target, focus and character. Classtimers is easy to configure – as soon as you log in it detects your class and sets up a number of default timers. For Death Knights this includes diseases, Lichborne, Horn of Winter, and a number of others. You can add as many buffs and debuffs as you want (except Power Word: Shield, which it doesn’t like for some reason – I’m guessing the colon makes it angry). Here’s a look at what you can configure the bars to look like (you can change things like scale, width, height, colour) along with my testing Tauren, Addonsyay:

A well-known but often underused mod that can track diseases is Power Auras Classic. It can be a bit time consuming to set up, but it has the benefit of being able to produce very visible indicators and timers as well as adding sounds to individual timers. Here’s what the options menu looks like (can be accessed through the /powa command) with all the options needed to see an icon when diseases are up on your target ticked.

After you’ve got this part set up, the rest is fairly self explanatory. You can choose from a list of images (there’s also the option to input text and use that) and sounds as well as being able to change the size, colour and position of the images. Here’s what the finished product looked like, with Blood Plague on the left and Frost Fever on the right. Power Auras can also be used to track cooldowns, buffs, basically anything that you need a timer mod to check. My one gripe with Power Auras is the time it takes to set up each individual timers – it doesn’t detect your class and put in some basic settings to begin with like Classtimers and ForteXorcist do.

The last mod I want to look at in detail is DoTimer. It works right out of the box (if you want to change anything, the options menu can be accessed by the /dotimer command), and like ForteXorcist, it can detect DoTs on more than just your target and focus. Here’s what it looks like with two mobs, both of which have diseases ticking on them. DoTimer also includes a cooldown timer, which looks like another set of bars just like the one below.

While the multiple-target tracking can be useful, it can also be a problem and a waste of space. For example, if you Pestilence two diseases during Freya’s Detonating Lasher phase, your screen would explode with frames for each mob and it wouldn’t be very helpful at all. This functionality is more suited to classes like Warlocks and Mages, who are unlikely to be able to DoT enough mobs to create a problem with screen space. DoTimer, however, has the advantage of functioning very well right out of the box.

I want to give an honorable mention to Quartz, which is not only my favourite casting bar addon but also has the ability to track debuffs, buffs, and other miscellaneous things like the amount of time you have left to accept a summon.