DK tank: choice of spe

[lirael]

Hi
my guild is currently running ulduar and we started on EDC 25. We are a group a casual players enjoying a slowish progression through high end content.
We currenly have an army of paladins in the guild, including 3 palatanks (my main is currently one of them). The tanking group is basically 3 paladins and 3 warriors. We lost our only bear to a packed IRL schedule.

I am strongly considering dumping my paladin for a DK tank (currently level 74), to bring some variety to my raid group (we only have 1 DK in the whole raid and he is very rarely present).
I have been reading around and the general feeling is that DK are by far inferior to paladins. I, however, have enjoyed playing the DK until now.

I have a number of questions:
- If I manage to play my CDs correctly, will my healers moan about how much damage i take?

- Of blood and DW frost, which is the best adapted to high end raiding?
(is DW frost a bad option if i don't have slow 1 handers?)

- How essential are the hit and expertise cap? As a paladin i never really cared about them (was expertise capped without thinking about it)

- Will i be able to hold aggro? We tried a DK tank who had a slow building aggro and couldn't hold off our DPS despite have a similar level of gear.

thanks for all the answers and advice.

[Satorri]

I have yet to see a way in which my DK is vastly inferior to a Paladin. It's apples and oranges, we fill the same role but we do it very differently, and bring different abilities and methods to the mix. If your group has a lot of paladins, it might not be a bad idea, though catching your DK up sounds like quite a task to go from 74 to t9-ready.

If I manage to play my CDs correctly, will my healers moan about how much damage i take?

Your healers may moan but that doesn't require you to actually take more damage. If you try to tank with lesser gear than your paladin, that difference will be evident. In general though, there should be little perceivable difference between the two classes when equally geared and equally well-played.

Of blood and DW frost, which is the best adapted to high end raiding?
(is DW frost a bad option if i don't have slow 1 handers?)

Either works, and both are extensively done. If you're going for raid balance, you may actually consider more what buffs you can offer. Do you have a Hunter or Enhance Shaman offering the +10% AP buff? Do you have someone providing the +13% spell damage buff (Unholy is a perfectly valid choice as well)? Pick the one that suits you and practice hard. The DK class benefits a long way from continual improvement with the particular style you choose.

As for dual wielding, you can be fine without slow weapons, though if you're using fast weapons it should be because you're getting survival stats out of them (i.e. tanking weapons). Fast dps weapons should always be your last choice, and in t9 content, you shouldn't be making do.

How essential are the hit and expertise cap? As a paladin i never really cared about them (was expertise capped without thinking about it)

They are little more important than they are as a Paladin, though for the sake of feel it can be preferable to be nearer to those caps. As a DK you use runes, right? The runes will regen faster if you miss or are dodged/parried, but it can really mess with the feel of your rotation/method as you play.

In general the same rules apply to stats, really.

Will i be able to hold aggro? We tried a DK tank who had a slow building aggro and couldn't hold off our DPS despite have a similar level of gear.

If your gear is on par the only reason you would lose threat is a simple matter of player skill. There are some things to be said for smart spec, gem, and enchant choices, but provided you aren't doing something *really* wonky, there's no one to blame but the player.

The class is fully sufficient to tank anything you throw at it.

[lirael]

HI Satorri
thanks for the reply.
You wrote the kind of thing i was hoping for.

You are right that it will take me some time to gear up but i am patient and my guild is very helpful.

I still need to decide which spe to go for... that's gonna be a tricky one

[Synapse]

All three trees offer a different style of tanking. Try each a couple times and see what you like more.
Blood is about self healing and spreading blood attacks. Frost is about a nasty frost fever and high burst aoe damage. Unholy is about very nasty diseases, reduced magic damage intake...
The first can offer an ap raid buff. The other can provide a swing speed% raid buff. The last can give every magic damage in the raid a +13% damage buff(this includes your own diseases).

It's really about style.

[Grifieth]

I personally have set my dk tank down to try out other tanks, but pretty much what i think ur wanting to know is basically...frost->great fro heroics or boss with multiple adds and raid trash, blood-> great for raid bosses. i was duel spec both frost/blood tank specs, i just ran frost when it was a bunch of adds and blood when it was close to one on one. frost will get threat fast on multiple adds where as blood will get threat quickly against one target. i dunno if thta helped ya any.

[lirael]

Thanks guys for the insight
my raid doesn't have a chamy amelio for the 10% attack power.
I have played blood from the start so i'll spec into blood to start with.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

i will specc into corpse explosion (with minor glyph) in my gearing phase when i'll be running heroics. I also plan to glyph disease and pestilence.

when i am raid ready i'll move to this.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

please let me know if they are reasonnable specs to start with.

[Satorri]

The specs look ok, though one big thing jumps out about the first set of glyphs. Glyph of Dark Death will be pretty under-utilized there, I'd really recommend Death Strike instead. It stays pretty consistent scaling pretty well as you gear up.

Rune Strike *may* be a match or better once you get higher avoidance on your gear, depending on how you use your abilities.

I'd give the same advice for the second spec and add further, I'm not sure if Glyph of Rune Tap is really worth dropping Disease for. Rune Tap is a good ability that is useful once you are used to using it, but the glyph, in raids, tends to make for more complication to its use, and a lot of overhealing (though to be fair, I did enjoy it in Naxx a lot when I got my gear to the point where I needed a lot less healing, I would put healers in my group and pop it to save them from Frost Tombing). I think again, Death Strike, Rune Strike, and Disease are the best choices for the two slots other than Vamp Blood.

[Ulosthegame]

Hit and Expertise are probably the last thing you'll need to worry about. I'm sitting at 90 hit rating and 6 expertise and still pumping out 7 to 8 thousand TPS.

I personally play blood, and one thing I've noticed is that you've not taken SoB, which is perfectly fine, but I find that even with it, I'm RP starved from Rune strikes. As for corpse explosion, I'm fairly sure there are better ways to spend RP. Mark of Blood, personally has never seen much use, and I feel isn't that good of a cooldown.

I personally spec like this. (glyphs included)

Blood: 53/8/10

[GravityDK]

That said, expertise, if threat was a problem, is particularly valuable.

[Soinse4]

I have a lvl 80 bear, dk, and pal that I've tanked with. I guess I need to get my warrior up there too.

I love DK, but they simply do not match a pal. It's just not close. Single threat is better, aoe threat is better, and they can survive better. On top of all that they are easier to play. I don't why Blizzard chose to design them this way, but they did.

However, that's not to say you can't get the job done as a DK. They certainly can. I prefer Frost. Dual wield is more fun for both dps and tanking. Howling Blast is probably one of the most enjoyable attacks in the game.

I never had aggro trouble on my DK unless a better geared dps went crazy 0.5 seconds into the fight, but you can't slack like you can on a pal.

[KnThrak]

If I had to sum it up briefly, I'd go:

Blood: Self-healing, with practice the ability to smooth out the worst spikes in your damage intake yourself before they even arrive on your healer's UIs.

Frost: Less damage taken, and superior AE pickup. The best "nominal" tanking power between stats and abilities.

Unholy: An extra lifesaver (AMZ), and not necessarily only for you. I also consistently do 10%-25% more damage output than a Blood or Frost tank (never quite understood that).

[lirael]

I have and still am tremendously enjoying my palatank. I started tanking when people were still frowning at the idea of a palaMT.
Now, they are very much accepted and loved.

Dk were awesome tanking beast (or so i have read) and are now adequate tank options. The one think DK have over paladin is a more personnalisable (if that's not an english word, you should get the meaning of it). At the end of the day, to be a high end palatank you can play around 2-3 points in your talent tree.

As DK you have 4 possible "standard" specialisation (blood, frost, frost DW and unholy). Even these are very higly personnalisable and i am not talking about some survival orientated specs (although i am not sure about their real use). Plus i always enjoyed playing the underdog

My guild is very open minded, as long as i can get the job done they won't push me away.