Tank Hard!

I see a lot of Death Knight’s wondering the same things I did when I first started tanking, so I decided I would try and help you out without having to sift through a ton of useless information.

RUNEFORGING – There is really only 2 options here for tanking, Swordbreaker or Stoneskin. Swordbreaker gives 4% parry to a 2H weapon, while Stoneskin gives 25 defense (skill, not rating) and a 2% stamina boost. 25 defense skill translates into about 2% dodge, while the 2% stamina increase will vary how much hp it gives you depending on your gear.

When you first hit 80 and you are still gearing up to tank heroics and raids, you will want to use stoneskin. This makes hitting 535 defense (the heroic defense cap) and then 540 defense (the raid defense cap) that much easier to obtain as well as giving the extra hp boost. Once you have geared up and are at 565 defense you will have the option to change to swordbreaking. You will then have to consider what your current overall avoidance is (parry + dodge = overall avoidance) and your max hp raid buffed. Do you need more hp from the 2% stamina increase, or do you need 2% more avoidance.

I personally chose to keep stoneskin, as my unbuffed avoidance is at 47% but my max hp is only at 30k. In a melee encounter you will generally want to have more avoidance, but when tanking bosses like Hodir and Stormcaller Brundir who put out a lot of magic damage, you will need the highest hp pool you can get. This leads me into my next subject… Avoidance or HP?

AVOIDANCE Vs. HP – Both are equally important. It really depends on the encounter. Are you fighting Patchwerk or are you fighting Hodir? With Patch, you will want avoidance as you only need to have about 30k raid buffed hp and as long as healers keep you topped off, you will be ok. With Hodir, you will want the highest hp pool you can get.

This can be accomplished by swapping trinkets. You should have 2 stamina trinkets, and 2 avoidance trinkets, to maximize your flexability as a tank. You should still balance out your hp and your avoidance regardless. I wouldn’t recommend gemming all stamina, and I wouldn’t recommend gemming all avoidance either.

Another quick thing to remember: Our single target threat generation is based off our avoidance through “Rune Strike”. The less avoidance you have, the less threat you will be able to generate due to lack of Rune Strike’s.

SPEC- Well, this is everyone’s biggest question. Most DK’s will grab a cookie cutter frost tank spec and stick with it until something changes and they just grab another tanking cookie cutter spec. I tanked as Frost for awhile, and I have recently switched over to Blood to test it out. I’ll go over some of the strengths of each school right now.

Unholy- The only thing of value for tanking when you go deep into Unholy is Bone armor. I would not consider this a viable tanking spec in any way shape or form. Anticipation is a tier 1 talent and is a must for any tank spec.

Frost- Well, I would consider Frost spec the best AE tanking spec for DK’s. Frigid Dreadplate is another 3% dodge. As well as gaining Unbreakable Armor as another CD to reduce incoming damage. You also get Howling Blast which is amazing for maintaining AE aggro. Toughness is essential for any Tank spec as well.

Blood- Blade Barrier is awesome, and is a must for any tank spec. Bladed armor is also great. More AP = More DMG = More threat. Deeper in you get Vampric Blood and Mark of Blood. Both are amazing talents. You will have to be careful with what you use Mark of Blood on though, some bosses its more effective than others. AE’s take 1 charge per person it hits so bosses that AE a lot are going to each through you mark in about 10 seconds. For other fights such as “The Iron Council” in Ulduar, where you are required to tank Steelbreaker, it can be quite useful. Veteran of the Third war is also amazing, giving a 6% increase to both strength and stamina.

I am sure there are things I missed out on along the way, but there will be more to come. I hope I was able to answer some of the questions for Death Knights that were wondering some of the same things I did when I started tanking. Thank you.
Budlitenite

With all this new content to explore and explain, would I even think about making a new post about Vanilla WoW content?  Well, yes indeed I am!

Today I logged in to do my Argent Crusade, Fishing, Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies but somehow got sidetracked by an old friend…. Onyxia.  I haven’t seen Onyxia in … well, years …  so I thought I would pay the old broad a visit.

I had heard whisperings of all sorts of folks soloing Onyxia, so I started to ponder if a prot warrior could solo Onyxia.  I knew that some sort of healing would be required, so I started tinkering with builds that included Bloodthirst.

I ended up going with this build.  I slapped in a Glyph of Bloodthirst, threw on my old 4 piece epic Illidan Fire Resist gear and headed out to Onyxia’s Lair to give it a whirl.  I had about 500 defense, 25k hp, and 200 fire resist.
Well, long story short, about 30ish minutes later, Onyxia lay dead at my feet, and I was clearing bag space for all the phat lewt.  In the end, it was was not all that challenging.  I never had any close calls, never got below 50% health, and only used enraged regeneration once during the transition from phase 2 to phase 3.  Next time around, I’ll likely drop some of the FR gear in favor of more DPS gear to make the fight shorter, assuming I actually ever do go solo Onyxia again!

The hardest part of the encounter was chasing Onyxia around during Phase 2 and meleeing her down.  For the most part, other than the intial group of whelps, I just ignored the whelps and let Thunder Clap kill them off when I had accumulated a few.

In the end, it was a bit of fun and an interesting diversion.  I will admit, it is a bit saddening to be able to take down a once end game boss with such ease.  Such is the way the game goes!

Onyxia Down!

Ulduar and 3.1 have finally hit, and I know many of you are wondering how this is affecting the tanking abilities of death knights. One really good peice of news is that Unholy Blight and Gargolye have now switched places! This is good news for you non-unholy tanks because now you can have this amazing talent too. Another awesome change is that Blood Boil no longer requires diseases (however does bonus damage to diseased targets). This is great for when your Death and Decay is on cooldown. The biggest and most prominent change for myself is the new glyph. Glyph of Disease now refreshes ALL diseases on you target(s) when you use Pestilience!!!!!! This is a blessing from Blizzard. On the downside most of your tanking cooldowns have been increased by a minute. This is only a minor setback however, because your trinkets will more than compensate for this. The future looks bright for all you Death Knight tanks out there. Keep on being a meatshield and keep those squishies safe! And as always, tank hard or go home!

-Deathsmarch

So 3.1 is finally here and dual specs are all the rage!

To start out with, I took a full survival spec for Ulduar (5/14/52), and also took a UA spec (37/0/34) to try out. The servers were too unstable last night to try out either in a raid setting, but I’ll be looking forward to using both soon enough.

One thing I did do is head outside Orgrimmar to try out the UA spec in PVP. Let’s just say that UA >>>>>> melee. The UA spec made it almost trivial to utterly smash melee’s face into the ground. The absence of the mobility talents really hurt vs. casters. In the end, I didn’t take UA for PVP, I was just tinkering.

Nobody had the Glyph of Last Stand or Glyph of Vigilance as of yet, but I can’t wait to get my hands on them.
So what did you use as your secondary spec?

I’ll confess.

Lately I’ve had a bit of class envy developing. I’ve watched as a couple of the folks in our guild re-roll Death Knights and gear up along side me as we do our weekly raiding routine. I embraced my new tanking brothers and was happy to have some new blood in the tanking ranks.

But then I saw something else happening. I saw those same DK’s, who started raiding weeks behind me, quickly catch up. When checking who should tank what, I would ask, what’s your armor up to now? Your avoidance? I could see that their hitpoints were quickly matching and then surpassing my own. As well as their armor quickly caught up with, and also passed. And then I see that the avoidance as well? Wait a minute, what’s going on here?

I’ll admit that when DK’s originally came out, I did not give them much of a second glance when it came to tanking. I fully expected DK’s to be OP in the DPS department, but I was not prepared for what they might be capable of in the tanking department too.

Now, as the raid leader, I always strive to put the people who are most suited for the job in the position to ensure our best chance of success. More and more, I am having to cope with my view that in most circumstances DK’s are better equipped to tank those bosses that I was so intimate with. More armor, more avoidance, more health, better DPS, better ability uptime… Why wouldn’t I put those guys as the front man?

I realize that patch 3.1 is bringing DK’s down a bit, but I begin to wonder if I’ll be spending more and more time in my upcoming secondary spec as DPS rather than up front face smashing as a tank.