DK Tanking Part One

This will probably be a multi-part blog as I've been running a lot of dungeons on my Death Knight lately. We've been using the T6 geared druid OT from my raid to tank, which is generally better as his defenses are about 10x greater than mine. Last night he wanted to try out his hunter so I offered to tank Utgarde.

The 10 Second Rule
All Death Knight rotations are based off the 10 second rule. 10 seconds is the length of time it takes a rune to activate once used. I will refer to the 10 second rule a lot.

Talents
First things first, spec. While Blood has long been a favourite of mine it got hit with a bit of a nurf in the last patch. Jayde, one of the forerunner's for DK testing, posted some videos of frost which got me excited. For starters, most of the talents that modified Howling Blast were not working prior to the patch. Now that they are the Frost tree is a lot more complete. At 75 this is the spec I used, however this is the spec I should have used.

A few notes on the spec...
The whole highlight of a Frost spec is Howling Blast. Due to it's FU rune consumption (ignore the WoWHead tooltips, some are out of date) Obliterate becomes pretty much useless which is why there was no need to pick up Annihilation, or Subversion. Icy Talons and Imp Icy Talons are fantastic, but eat up too many talents for me at 75. They would likely be part of a tank build at 80 however. Morbidity is almost a must to get your Death and Decay cooldown down to 15 seconds. DnD is also one of the *only* DK talents that actually has a threat modifier on it, however it also has a BFU rune requirement. So off the bat, you've used up half your rune resources.

Threat
Threat was awkward for me at times. I'll take this with a grain of salt as we were all friends in the group and we were just there to have fun. The T6 geared Elemental Shaman pretty much just went to town on everything and DKs do not currently have a short duration taunt so it could be a bit frustrating.

Single Target
Threat on single targets was pretty amazing. I wish there was a working Omen to get real numbers, but I don't think anyone in the group was even close to pulling at any time.

Standard Single Target Rotation
Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Howling Blast > Blood Strike > Blood Strike > Frost Strike > Rune Strike into
Icy Touch > Plague Strike > Howling Blast > Howling Blast > Frost Strike > Rune Strike

Blood of the North will turn your Blood runes from Blood Strike into Death Runes so on your next rotation you can go for a second Howling Blast instead. Pending Runic Power at the end of the rotation, I would use another Frost Strike over Rune Strike.

Multiple Target
Threat on multiple targets is good, but putting it into practice can go about a few different methods depending on resources available at the time.

If you really want to blow all your resources right away you could open with Hungering Cold, drop a Death and Decay, and then hit them all with a Howling Blast. HC is normally reserved for CC, but in this case it's used to put Frost Fever up on all the targets so that your HB will do double damage. Of course, at this point you're left with 1 Blood Rune and you're only 3 seconds into your 10 second rotation. Now you'll have to rely on any Runic Power leftover for Frost Strikes or Rune Strikes.

Another, but slower, method is to get your Icy Touch and Plague Strike diseases up right away. Use Pestilence to spread the diseases around to 3 more targets, and then into Howling Blast, and Blood Boil. This was the method I was attempting to use for most of the dungeon until I noticed the DnD threat change. Hopefully I'll get to tank some more stuff this week and test out more stuff.

Mitigation and Avoidance
Mitigation and Avoidance at low levels is not so great and DK's rely heavily on standard cooldowns from Icebound Fortitude, and Anti-Magic Shell. There are also a number of talented cooldowns available such as Lichborne, Unbreakable Armour, Vampiric Blood, and Bone Shield among others. You can't have all of these at the same time mind you. The best combination is going to be Lichborne and either Unbreakable Armour/Vampiric Blood/Bone Shield.

At 75 in the 6 piece Colbat set (I don't have the level 75 Blue set yet) I was only running about 10% dodge, and 10% parry. Defence was around 465 (at work, can't check), and health was around 11500. Ouch. The stats aren't very good at all, but there have been Blue posts saying you shouldn't need tank gear to tank the 5mans. Technically, you don't. If you manage your cooldowns and have a competant healer you should be fine. But even with cooldowns and a good healer I've definitely exploded a few times.

That's all I've got for now. I need to get in and tank more so I should have another post in a week or so.