Comprehensive Guide to Death Knight Tanking

[GravityDK]

Darthdingo, your colleague is wrong. I found Blood to be good once I had 4%+ expertise, which is attainable quite early on. Below that, your threat really suffers.
It's just incorrect to say you need i277 gear, in fact that's laughable. You can do it fine in i213s.

[Satorri]

I asked my #1 Guild Death Tanker, and he said Frost or Unholy only for a DK Tank, he said Blood sucks so bad, unless your uber geared full Tier 10, 277 highest items from ICC 25man, then Blood is great, but no gear below 277 is good for Blood he said.

Take it from me then. You've confirmed your supposed authority really doesn't know what he's been talking about. I've been Blood since I was progressing through Ulduar and it has been the strongest spec for me and my raids. I've done repeated testing to compare, and if you were to go on the perception of survival from healers and user, then generally pre-ICC the reaction was Blood was about on par with Unholy, and Frost felt a little squishier (purely anecdotal perception testing). Blood scales extremely well, and it will be at its best in high level ICC gear, sure, but that doesn't make it any less before then.

The *real* issue in DK tanking is the player using it. so, if your primo DK tank says "blood is no good" you can generally translate that to, "I am not good with Blood." Follow your tastes. You want to be Blood, spec Blood and go do it. With time and practice you can prove him wrong, or at least disagree with him and understand why.

[Miste]

I have been playing as Frost tank while I gear up. So far just have 2 pcs of Tier 9 gear, and misc item level 200 +Def gear. I asked my #1 Guild Death Tanker, and he said Frost or Unholy only for a DK Tank, he said Blood sucks so bad, unless your uber geared full Tier 10, 277 highest items from ICC 25man, then Blood is great, but no gear below 277 is good for Blood he said.

I was very interested in trying out Blood Tanking too once I had the full 5pcs Tier 9 gear...oh well

Before the 3.1 buff that made Blood uber, Blood tanking was substandard. I hung on to it as long as I could in Naxx, but finally had to switch to Frost because 10-man Maexxna ate my lunch.

That was then. This is now. Blood is a fine tanking spec for any raid level. It's a little more difficult in heroics because AoE threat is less than optimal. Morbidity and Glyph of DnD will take care of that issue though.

So, what I'm really trying to say is Blood tanking is fine. Tell your uber guild death tanker to visit us for more information.

[Proletaria]

Blood was sub-par to Unholy pre-3.1. Frost has never been a top spec for much of anything outside of 5m content where Howling Blast really shines. Blood took over after unholy and there has been no looking back since then with VERY little change in talent point allocation to boot.

[Sunderwhere]

tl;dr





Just kidding!

Proofreading time! I didn't see anywhere that I could add any significant info, nor do I have any questions that weren't answered, so I decided to go with my other strength. Being a Grammar Nazi. I hope the following is fairly straight-forward and easy to follow, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll be happy to elaborate.

Rotations, Methods, and Priorities
I feel that rotations are a clutch(crutch is what I think you're looking for), a means to be lazy in the long term and potentially to not make smart use of your abilities. It is a valuable tool while learning to play, but in the interest o f(space between the "o" and "f") becoming...
Mark of Blood
Against Anub’rhekan(Anub'Arak) in Trial of the Crusader...
General Frost Style
If we take a tank with 5k AP, 0% haste from gear, and the standard 23% melee haste raid buff. Then(should read: buff, then) the average hit size and speed for each weapon will be roughly...
Frost Threat Styles
While it won’t compare with RS for the threat per RP ratio, it will still be well worth to fit into rotation well.(This is more of a personal flow choice, I think, but I believe it would sound better if written: well worth to fit into a rotation well. or well worth it to fit it into a rotation well)
Empowered Rune Weapon
In addition to that, the bonus RP can be very adventitious(advantageous) to support or maintain your Unholy Blight.

[zaubade]

I have been playing as Frost tank while I gear up. So far just have 2 pcs of Tier 9 gear, and misc item level 200 +Def gear. I asked my #1 Guild Death Tanker, and he said Frost or Unholy only for a DK Tank, he said Blood sucks so bad, unless your uber geared full Tier 10, 277 highest items from ICC 25man, then Blood is great, but no gear below 277 is good for Blood he said.

I was very interested in trying out Blood Tanking too once I had the full 5pcs Tier 9 gear...oh well

Ignore your under-informed guildy. Furthermore tell him to read this guide... many times


And furthermore... Blood has always been fine.. a bit harder then some specs at times .. but you just had to work harder.. pre 3.1

[Satorri]

Blood's weakness pre-3.1 had a lot more to do with it's sub-par AoE tools (they added BB support). The patch also brought Imp DS so that you could play deep Blood without having to spec to Annihilation for supportable FU spam. In general it just made Blood tanking feel better.


Also, thanks for the proofing Sunder, I'm glad you found so little. I wrote this over the course of about 2 months, writing, re-writing. Then I spent 4 days proofing it, but after you've read it so many times it's hard to push yourself to really read it and not let your brain just shortcut as it remembers what it said.

[Sunderwhere]

Always a pleasure, Satorri. I was also surprised that I found so little. Excellent job on your own proofreading skills .

[mysteryhordetank]

I am thoroughly impressed, and inexpressively thankful for the depth and substance found in this guide. Hours upon hours ago i was reinstalling wow and figured I'd take a look around for some tips. Instead what i found was an absolute marvel of unbaised opinion and effort put forward by satorri-sensei in a post that i will forever be recommending to all the tanks of my faction on my server.

You, sir, are an amazing author and educator. I look forward to whatever it is you post next. Thank you for the guide, and best of luck to you in your future endeavors.

[mysteryhordetank]

btw , one quick question as i can't seem to find anything online about it;

do you know if the "uptime" of Rune Strike (how long it stays illuminated and thus triggerable for use on the next melee swing) varies based on weapon speed? I'm really not sure if it was just my personal reaction/distraction factor at first or the fact that i macro-ed it to most everything, but shortly after switching to dual wielding it seemed that the amount of time it remained available for after dodging/parrying an attack seemed shorter. Any thoughts/conclusive evidence?

btw: my raid seemed to think it made sense that the availability of it would be shorter based off a faster wep speed, perhaps subconsciously attamepting to avoid remaining confused and ignorant about this topic.

[Satorri]

Honestly, I've never tested it as I've never had cause to not press it within a second or two of it proc'ing.

I *can* tell you that it doesn't stay active indefinitely. If I had to guess, I'd imagine it will be on the order of 5-10 seconds, but I will do a test tonight and see what I find. It may be a little tricky as I'll need to find somewhere where I won't avoid more than once in the duration of its availability.

[Kagenote]

I think you may have answered your own question. Your weapon swings with one-handers will generally come a second or more faster than a two-hander. So if you're procing, auto-triggering, and swinging faster then it wont appear to be available as long because you are consuming it faster. To build on this topic though, would RS be consumed by an off-hand melee swing? I could probably parse some combat logs...if I weren't at work.

ed: Nevermind. I misread what you were asking. I am still curious about the OH swings consuming RS.

[mysteryhordetank]

well, kage, see, this was the issue;

it'd appear, i had a rune to use to maintain a solid rotation (newby-style ), and as i'd go to click runee strike it it would dissapear. very "wth" every time
when using a 2-hander it seemed to stay up way longer, like 3-5 secs, so i dunno. i'll have to try it again once i get my wow back up in a few minutes.
this whole thing is no longer a factor with my macro-ing, as it always gets pressed in under a second of appearing. Still it made me curious.

btw, impressed again at your fast reaction timee, keep up the good work, sensei

[Kagenote]

I think I see what you're saying, Mystery. I can't test anything out right now, but I'd just double check all the basics. Make sure there isn't anything funky happening with your RP generation and consumption, and make sure the way you have RS macro'd in includes the '!' so you aren't toggling it off by accident (as in: /cast !Rune Strike).

I hadn't even considered how complicated it would be to find a situation where you would only dodge/parry once. Maybe let a low lvl mob swing at you and then kill it before it swings again? I'm not even sure if that would work. Haha.

[mysteryhordetank]

is used to happen alot when i started offtanking in level 200 gear, trying to build up emblems of conquest to improve my gear sets. can it still be toggled off? ... i think my wow is done, rehab over :S

[Satorri]

I did some testing. It appears that a non-refreshed RS proc will last for 8 seconds but any additional dodge/parries will refresh the cooldown.

The takeaway message, though, is that you will not likely lose your proc if you don't use it immediately since you will rarely go 8 seconds without avoiding anything even in ICC (so long as you're actually being attacked), but to a degree you may be wasting procs if you aren't quick to use them (as mitigated by swing speed, reaction time, and your personal style of triggering it).

For those interested in how I tested it, I went out and used my trusty Pustulent Horrors (on the ICC ramparts). As soon as I got a proc I spun around and put my back to the target so I couldn't dodge/parry to refresh the proc. I had a few timers running so I could watch.


Also, you cannot toggle the ability off. The only way I know of to stop an on-next-swing move from firing once it's been pressed is by hitting a different on-next-swing move (which works for Warriors though probably not in any helpful fashion, but we don't have any others as DKs).

[Kagenote]

Wow, I didn't realize how grossly misinformed I was. Looks like I get to fix all my macros, lol.

[mysteryhordetank]

satorri-sensei, you got a link to some info about dpsing in the different trees?

[leethaxor]

And that would be a helpful macro, I'm sure people would appreciate the semi-automated version of the standard use. Also very good for pugs. My design was specifically to *avoid* having to target the person, and it was/is intended for fixed or anticipated raid groups. At least it is very easy to copy the macro at the beginning of the raid and put in the name of the person you want to favor.

Not requiring targeting is what makes this very very easy to use while tanking as I don't have to stop what I'm doing even for a moment.

sorry about late reply I completely understand I was just offering my 2 cents

[mysteryhordetank]

i'm pretty much new to being a dk, and to most of the game, overall