Death Knight F.A.Q: Questions? Answers right here!

I’ve been browsing the forums and have made a few posts but I don’t think this requires a thread so here we go.
I’m the MT/OT for naxx25/10 and hoping to be able to raid Ulduar soon. I’ve read a lot about dks and I count myself fairly knowledgeable. But I’m stuck on these few points.
This is my spec (yes I dw, some say it’s bad but I like it) http://www.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?cid=6&tal=0050000000000000000000000000315 05350050033010300251003510352000000000000000000000 00000
I’m currently hitting 3.8k-4.5ktps (omen meter) and was wondering if that is marginal or average but also if I could improve my spec to increase my tps. I was hoping to get bladed armor but I don’t know where to get the talent points.
Also I have a crappy ui and was wondering if there was a good thread in TS that had some good tanking UIs.
Last I’m pretty bad at macros is there a good site to learn macros, but also what is the macro to have RS on all my abilities.
Thanks in advance
I seem to be missing to talent points but i cant get them cause of some glitch. I love payin 15 bucks a month for glitches lol.

mmmm Your post could go in 3-4 forums. But I'll throw out some brief tidbits that could help, and you'll want to take particular interests to those specific forums (UI/Macro forum, HALP Armory/Spec forum, and this forum is the place to discuss the aspects of rotations and talent values in detail).

1.) Your spec is missing 7 points, but Frost is a fine spec and much of the backbone was there. Check out this talent calculator: MMO-Champ. It's a solid setup and has glyph selectors. You're quite right, there are few talents that can boost your threat as a tank like Bladed Armor can. For a Naxx epic'd tank it's about 160 AP per point.

2.) I'm less interested in a threat average, than whether or not you can hold threat from your raid team. If you can then you're doing alright, if you're losing threat then you need to identify where and when. Beginning of the fight, on adds, are people riding your threat on longer boss fights?

3.) Beyond spec, seeing your gear will be helpful to identify places where you can improve your stats for survival and threat. Dual wielding is entirely functional, but in its current state you want to be careful how you use it particularly with regards to the quality of your gear and the level of your weapons. Tanking weapons can get you extra survival values, but it can also flatten your ability to burst threat when starting/needed.

4.) I am an addon fanatic, and I modify nearly every aspect of the default UI though Blizz has been making some great improvements. You have Omen, that's valuable as a tank to be able to track your threat performance relative to the group. I use Bartender4 for making smaller highly customizable action bars. I use ag_unitframes to make clean, visible, and configurable frames. SCT is a great value for handling floating combat text, though I know there are many people here who swear by Satrina's sweet addons. For a DK I won't leave home without RuneWatch. It has a great UI that tracks rune CDs, RP levels, and most importantly disease durations (last night it was glitching which made me sad, but that's the first time since Wrath launched). The last addon I'd recommend checking out is Power Auras. You can create on screen glow effects to let you subtly but visibly track procs, health states, buff/debuffs on you or your target, etc. It's very handy for being able to keep your eyes up without feeling like it's cluttering your screen horribly. I could go on and on, but those are some great elements for your core UI.

5.) For macro'ing RS into your other moves your macro should read like this:
#showtooltip SpellName
/cast SpellName
/cast Rune Strike

Names are case sensitive, but you can shift click them out of your spell book to make sure there are no typos. If there is no (Rank X) at the end of the spell name it automatically uses your max rank of the spell. As for sites, Blizz has an information page, but I'd imagine the macro forums here could offer just as much insight and with feedback.

eehhh i have no idea where this goes but its a short thing soo here i go. i am a lvl 74 DK
and this is my talent tree http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...0&version=9767
i dont have FS talented but i can use it like i use it during fights and what not. i have no clue what is wrong haha. any ideas?

The talent trees are pretty bugged out right now. You might of taken the talent and the tree no longer says you have it and yet you can still use the talent. This might cause you problems when it comes to getting more skills down the tree as it no longer sees you having Frost Strike and you might waste a point. I would suggest you try resetting your UI and if that fails, to delete your WTF and Interface folders from your WoW directory and see if that works. Failure of that fixing it, a message to a GM will fix things up I think.

I had the same problem on my druid and had to ask for a talent refurbish. So hopefully you fix yours or have to go through the insane skew of petitions that are going up to Blizzard at this time.

ahah thanks

this is my personal frost tank spec
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

ive seen some blood/unholy tanks, but imo they do not have enough damage reduction to tank the high end bosses

I suggest you dropping Butchery (as a tank you won't be doing Killing Blows), Runic Power Mastery (why you want to wait that long with dumping runic power?) and take Bladed Armor (600-700 Attack Power from this talent). All high end bosses have enrage timers, you want to build as much threat as possible so your DPS can go full out. And you want to make as much damage as possible as well.

Look at this spec. It will give you a good spec teach you the Frost tanking basics and give you room to build up your own spec.

That Tanks the Cake

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Coldtok

this is my personal frost tank spec
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

ive seen some blood/unholy tanks, but imo they do not have enough damage reduction to tank the high end bosses

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also, dude your glyphs dont make any sense, IBF glyph is for pvpers who dont have any def skill, you, on the other hand, are a tank, you have the def skill ><

also, Unbreakable armor isnt really as good as Rune Strike crit increase, it really helps with your threat.

on other things, you should look into getting icy talons and that whole chain, it really slows down a bosses attack speed. also as i realized recently that deathchill is a worthless point that is better spent elsewhere, the cooldown on it is just too long to be of any use in real situations. Hungering cold, also kinda useless against bosses. imo go back and re-read some of the talents and see what will help most. you need to really change your spec and it will definitely improve your tanking

Hello DKs! First time poster, and I couldn't quite find a place for this question, but I guess since it's related to mechanics, that is as good a place as any (and if this is the wrong place, feel free to destroy, delete and flame me into oblivion).

This is a question about the rune bar. My Death Knight is only level 75, so he's far from experienced. However, I'm starting to suspect I might be missing something important. I'm using a cooldown mod (OmniCC), and I find myself 100% watching button cooldowns. I'm going strictly by those and not even paying attention to the rune bar. Then I noticed on mod sites, there are a ton of mods out there to make the rune bar more visible, fancier, etc. That got me thinking "Wait, should I be looking at runes more?"

I do the basic rotations in the guide here, but when I see Icy Touch is on cooldown for 3 seconds.... that means 3 seconds. Why do I even need to look at the rune bar? I'm sure death runes have something to do with it, but even with that, I just need to know if I have them or not.

Could someone enlighten me to what I'm missing here? How do you high end raiding DK's work? What do you look at?

Thanks!

Well, there are lots of reasons you'll want to see runes, not the least of which being seeing more than single run related CDs (since, say, IT will show you when your next F rune will be up). This comes into play with your FU pair moves, DS, Oblit, HB, ScS, etc. It's also nice to be able to spot Death Runes. In your example, watching the abilities won't let you know specifically what rune is available to use the ability, only that there is one, and you may not want to use IT on a death rune when the pair will let you Oblit, etc.

Blizzard's rune gauge is pretty hard to use, certainly not easy to look at, but having that info more readily available can be very useful information. Personally, I've been using RuneWatch since the beta and I'm rather fond of the features. I know Deathknight.info has their own customizable one as well, and there are a couple other popular items you can find on WoWinterface or Curse.

A lot of this feeds from my own angles on casting intuitively instead of following stock rotations. I'd rather, at a side-glance, know what I can do and pick the best choice on the fly, than just stare at my bars as I wait for the next move I'm supposed to use come up. The clear displays also help you get your eyes off your bar a bit more to watch what's happening with and around your character (which becomes hugely important with raiding).

So I was doing some avoidance testing with a dk tank in my guild. I thought of something today and it made me curious how dk tanks view the issue.

So for Blizzard to make up for dk's lack of deflection they gave dk's parry rating from strength. This is subject to diminishing returns. So since this is the case will you suffer from DR faster than warriors or pallies.

I wanted to notice if anyone has noticed a substantial difference? I am sure I can do the math but I thought someone may have already.

Runewatch.

That's the one I use and it works great and it's movable. I plop it right under my character and it allows me to watch both myself and my runes with relative easy. Try it out.

Small adjustment in semantics, Tarigar, they didn't give us Forceful Deflection because they didn't (want to) give us Deflection, they simply didn't give us parry from talents like Pallies/Warriors.

They gave us a mechanic that actually scales with gear to give us improved parry chances to play on the DK's higher value retained from parrying. We're the parry tank, and it's fun. We also used to have a talent that gave us parry directly, without diminishing returns, but it went away. We also *can* get 4% parry from our self-only weapon runes.

For my, off the top of my head, Forceful Deflection is worth about 6-7% parry, not socketed for Strength, fully raid buffed, after diminishing returns. You're right it does move up our diminishing line on the curve, but it also helps us have far superior parry values to other tanks even though, and as a free feedback from improving our Strength.

Ok I read all the forumlas and equations etc on Avoidance but i did not see a definitive answer on the "cap" for dodge and parry for dk tankign in frost. Any solid numbers such as 30% dodge or 30% parry etc?

There isn't a "cap" it's a curve. You won't see distinctly different behavior from the stat taking any small step, like you would with hit (where after 8% you never miss with melee specials regardless of additional hit).

Seeking advise on an Unholy aoe tank build:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This is to try out on Thorim fight in the (pita) arena. On Sunday our pally tank was not feeling well so I stepped in as a Frost tank and did okay, but Unholy tanks are known to be better than frost tanks at aoe tanking and I'd like to try it out. The problem I had as frost tank was waiting for runes to become usable (had plenty of dr's up), it could be my rotation or my timing being off, but when there's constant stream of mobs rushing the healers I need something I can whammy the mobs with at a decent interval. It seemed that I had a couple of long breaks between ability use. That and Champions kept ww'ing healers (diff tank issue).

The linked build is the one I'm considering. I didn't like taking blood caked blade as I've read it's more for auto attacks (dual wield talent) and I use 2-hander, but I had trouble getting deeper into the tree, maybe I should get more pet talents for added dps?

Rotation I found:
D&D, IT, PS, Pest, BB, UB, SS, SS, BB

It seems there's less info out there on Unholy tanks and rotations that maximize rune use. I'm not sure how effective the above rotation is. I picked up Desolation but don't know where I'll be squeezing in blood strikes into rotation to take advantage of the proc. Is 4-5% dmg worth it?

I picked up corpse explosion, but I have to find a way to slip that into the rotation too if I want to take advantage of the dmg. If anyone has macro for it that would help.

Since Unholy is based on disease dmg, and it scales with ap I tried to pick talents focusing on those qualities.

I was wondering if the plague strike glyph works when you hit pestilence, I'm assuming it does but I don't know for sure if it only works on single target. Also does vicious strikes work when you hit pestilence? It was a choice between that and Death and Decay glyph.

This is not for single target tanking, it's with a specific purpose in mind but I will likely try it out in 5-mans b/f taking it to 25-man raid.

Thanks for the help,

Keza

Unless you plan on using your Blood Tap, your rotation won't work very well on the first part because you're going to use the blood rune to spread your diseases.

it would work if you switched your first BB with the UB.

D&D, IT, PS, Pest, UB
BB, BB, Blood Tap BB, SS, SS.

You could do that type of rotation every 30 seconds when Blood Tap is back up. Just follow the same rotation without the Blood Tapped BB in there.

As for your spec, there's something really weird about it that I can't put my fingers. An unfinished Bladed Armor and Desolation is just odd, and that one point in Improved Death Grip just isn't worth it. I'd put that point somewhere to finish one of the items you're missing. Prolly Bladed Armor for more AP which was your goal in the first place.

When you get up to blood caked blade, you have to stick 1 more point somewhere to continue down the tree so I stuck in dg.

Weird. Let me see if I can't hack something out for you.

EDIT: Well..to be honest, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't from what it looks like.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I prefer this for the extra Strength percentage as well as more AP from my armor, and I can live with the fact I only have two points in Outbreak and 4 in Black Ice. The reason is that Black Ice scales better at one point with BA, for a DPS DK. For a tanking DK, your stats are low to even consider using Black Ice over BA. BA at this point > BI. That's my thoughts anyway