Death Knight Tanking

[Vultus]

With all the arguing about Death Knight tanking I thought I'd throw my two cents in. I'll explain talents, glyphing, rotations, stat priorities and gear. Now obviously everything is up for debate, if you disagree feel free to comment and share your thoughts my only request is to be respectful. Yes I am new, that doesn't mean you can use that as an argument of why this information is false. It's a very long guide so grab a pepsi and get started. Without further procrastination let's begin.

Talents and Glyphs:
For talents most decisions are pretty straightforward. Abomination's Might isn't really that important as other classes can supply the buff allowing you to use those talent points in a more necessary area. You'll want Sanguine Fortitude for sure, during heavy damage areas in fights popping Bone Shield and Icebound Fortitude (even like on the trash before magmaw right as the mobs are switching between you and another tank use them both to mitigate damage and afterwards pop as many death strikes as possible as that's when you'll get max self heals). We have Lichborne for self healing (see macro section) Endless Winter is great in 10 man's to help out with interrupts and we put the rest of our points in Epidemic.

As for glyphs, those are simply what I recommend. Always keep some dust with you to switch out if necessary. The only glyph you absolutely should have is Vampiric Blood. I usually say to keep Rune Tap on as well, it's especially great in the Chimaeron fight. But if you have other glyphs you'd prefer it's not a big deal, but you should keep Vampiric Blood and Rune Tap on.

Rotations:
So now we have the tanking rotation. We have two rotations here, Boss/Single target and Trash.

Single Target -
Outbreak
Death Strike
Heart Strike
Death Strike

Trash -
Death And Decay
Outbreak if it's up, else Icy Touch then Plague Strike


Now you'll notice these are fairly short rotations. That's because those are simply how you should open up. After, you begin having a priority system. Meaning there's a list of spells you want to use first and if you can't or don't need to then you continue down the list until there is one. Here's the priority,

1. Diseases - Outbreak if it's up, else IT and PS, if trash Pest.
2. Death Strike - If appropriate, use a Death Strike. Only if you still have runes for another when you'll need to max self healing and mitigation.
3. Heart Strike/Blood Boil - If trash Blood Boil, if Single Target Heart Strike

And that's about it for spells.

Stat Priorities:
Stat priorities is where things get into the grey area, people have different ideas about what's better but I'll try to explain myself.

1. Mastery
2. Dodge
3. Parry
4. Hit
5. Expertise
6. Stamina
7. Strength
8. Crit

So we have mastery as the most important. It really is, if you can learn to time your death strikes and control your runes just right it will be your biggest damage mitigation. Next up is Dodge, it's higher then Parry because Death Knight's get a lot of parry through talents and abilities. Due to diminishing returns, dodge is wanted more then Parry. After parry is hit. Most people say you should be hit capped, but I am far from it and never have threat issues. If you are having threat issues, perhaps you may want to grab some extra hit. Expertise follows because it's extremely easy to hit the soft cap which is really all you need. The soft cap is when there is a 0% chance for a boss (level 88 is raid boss) to dodge you. This is 50 expertise rating for most people, unless you are an orc with a fist weapon or axe, dwarf with a mace, or human with a sword or mace then it is only 47. 120.1088 expertise points from gear gives you 1 expertise rating at level 85. Keep in mind of your talents etc. the best way to tell is look at you character selection screen and see how far you are from being capped. Stamina > Strength but you don't necessarily want to stack it. Strength is > Crit (which you should have any of, I figured the newer players it might help).

Gear:
Here is, in my opinion, the best gear set for regular raiding. It's what I personally am going for.

Main Hand
Akirus the Worm-Breaker - Magmaw, Blackwing Descent

Ranged
Relic of Khaz'goroth - Valor Points

Head
Daybreaker Helm - Valiona, Bastion of Twilight

Neck
Ironstar Amulet - Atramedes, Blackwing Descent

Shoulder
Magma Plated Shoulderguards - Cho'gall

Back
Wrap of the Great Turtle - Guardians of Hyjal

Chest
Magma Plated Chestguard - Valor Points

Wrist
Bracers of Impossible Strength - Halfus Wyrmbreaker, Bastion of Twilight

Hands
Magma Plated Handguards - Valor Points

Waist
Hardened Elementium Girdle - Blacksmithing

Legs
Magmaw Plated Lagguards - Valor Points

Feet
Boots of Sullen Rock - Dragonmaw Clan

Ring 1
Ring of the Battle Anthem - Valor Points

Ring 2
Bile-O-Tron Nut - Chimaeron, Blackwing Descent

Trinket 1
Vial of Stolen Memories - Valiona, Bastion of Twilight

Trinket 2
Symbiotic Worm - Magmaw, Blackwing Descent

If you disagree with a choice please state below what you would choose.
As for reforging, gemming and enchanting, you shouldn't need too much reforging, any excess expertise/hit perhaps you can put into mastery or if the gear has mastery then dodge or parry but that's about it, it's pretty much up to what you think you need more in that circumstance. Gemming you should have an Austere Shadowspirit Diamond in your meta socket, a Retaliating Demonseye in any red socket, and for blue, yellow and prismatic sockets put a Puissant Dream Emerald. Enchants are honestly the least important thing as the stats are extremely great on them to make you an amazing tank, but that isn't to say you shouldn't get them. Just look around at enchanters for what you see usefull, don't waste your gold getting the best enchants because the best enchants aren't going to be that much worth the gold you might have to pay for it. On my server Maelstorm Crystals are around 1k a piece. No use paying that much plus the dust and other things for 50 mastery points. But if you get it for cheap definitely enchant your gear, just don't worry about it too much. If you really want the best enchants, look your character up on wow-heroes and it'll recommend some for you.

That concludes my guide to a blood Death Knight. Blood DK's are in my opinion the most fun tanking class. Good luck and have fun!

[Maisteri]

Diseases - Outbreak if it's up, else IT and PS, if trash Pest.

No point using IT AND PS if you're going to use blood boil on trash because blood boil only needs 1 disease on the target to get increased damage. You shouldnt also be using IT and PS if some other class can give the debuffs on boss. (Attackspeed slow and damage reduce). Outbreak you want to use everytime it's up because it's free threat.

1. Mastery
2. Dodge
3. Parry
4. Hit

I would actually put Stamina on the 4th spot because you need it to get bigger death strike heals. Im agreeing with you on the stacking part though. You dont want to gem all slots for stamina like in wotlk. Also I personally have 0% hit and no problems with threat.

Due to diminishing returns, dodge is wanted more then Parry.

Actually they have exactly same value. You want to keep dodge and parry as even as possible. So instead of 29% dodge 1% parry you would want to have 15% dodge and 15% parry.

Waist
Hardened Elementium Girdle - Blacksmithing

I would go for Thunder Wall Belt of the Rockslab or of the Bedrock depending do you have more parry or dodge.

+380 Stamina, +232 Strength, +160 Mastery Rating, +160 Dodge Rating or Parry beats +233 Strength, +380 Stamina, 169 Dodge, 149 Mastery in my opinion especially when mastery is our #1 stat.

[vampy]

Actually they have exactly same value. You want to keep dodge and parry as even as possible. So instead of 29% dodge 1% parry you would want to have 15% dodge and 15% parry.

It doesnt matter if you have 29%dogdge and 1% parry or 15%+15% cause thats alsways 30% avoidance . I think what you meant is dodge and parry rating should be equal (raidbuffed).

[Stige]

Dodge and Parry have diminishing returns the more you have them, that is why you want to balance them out if you got more of one than the other.

[Maisteri]

It doesnt matter if you have 29%dogdge and 1% parry or 15%+15% cause thats alsways 30% avoidance . I think what you meant is dodge and parry rating should be equal (raidbuffed).

You get 1% of dodge or parry from 176.7189 dodge or parry rating. >_________>

[Anonie]

At what point does DR really come into play? I read somewhere during WotLK that around 35% each DR becomes noticeable. And with reforging, would it be better to reforge to mastery or to hit/exp if that piece of gear already has mastery on it?

Edit: Does this DR cap apply for druids/pallys/warriors as well?

Oh, and OP totally forgot to mention about haste. Haste is the worst stat for tanks right now. It's like spirit for boomkins/ele shams/spriests. It is there, gives benefits (faster rune regeneration), but TRY TO AVOID.

[Maisteri]

You can read about DR at Combat Ratings at level 85 (Cataclysm) - Elitist Jerks

[Bearshark]

No point using IT AND PS if you're going to use blood boil on trash because blood boil only needs 1 disease on the target to get increased damage. You shouldnt also be using IT and PS if some other class can give the debuffs on boss. (Attackspeed slow and damage reduce). Outbreak you want to use everytime it's up because it's free threat.



I would actually put Stamina on the 4th spot because you need it to get bigger death strike heals. Im agreeing with you on the stacking part though. You dont want to gem all slots for stamina like in wotlk. Also I personally have 0% hit and no problems with threat.



Actually they have exactly same value. You want to keep dodge and parry as even as possible. So instead of 29% dodge 1% parry you would want to have 15% dodge and 15% parry.



I would go for Thunder Wall Belt of the Rockslab or of the Bedrock depending do you have more parry or dodge.

+380 Stamina, +232 Strength, +160 Mastery Rating, +160 Dodge Rating or Parry beats +233 Strength, +380 Stamina, 169 Dodge, 149 Mastery in my opinion especially when mastery is our #1 stat.

On trash all diseases up is important just because it does decent damage, as well as some slightly needed threat.

Stamina > Mastery he didnt put stamina in the Mastery > Dodge > Parry > Hit because he is talking about reforging and general gear choice. In gemming, all you want to do is fill the socket. If you have double avoidance trinkets use stamina + Filler gem, double stam gems use FIller + Mastery. But I would say expertise does more to help with threat because taunts cant resist anymore.

Dk's have tons of parry because of the str -> parry, so our Parry will be much higher and hit DR faster than a warrior tank. So getting Dodge > Parry just helps to make sure you dont go over board.

Thunder Wall belt is slightly better, because crafter and world drops will have slighty less stats than raid loot, but Girdle is 100 times easier to acquire than Rockslab.


*Filler is if you need a red gem socket, use parry, yellow gem mastery, and so forth

[Anonie]

You can read about DR at Combat Ratings at level 85 (Cataclysm) - Elitist Jerks

EJ is useful, but that doesn't have any visual graph or the soft cap number that I'm wondering about. Only thing that is of use is the armor cap at 75% which will only be improved by higher ilvl gear and not via any real way of stacking or reforging like it is possible with parry/dodge/mastery. I'd have to plot all the numbers myself on excel to get it.

[Sensisativa]

Seems like this guide could use some work. You talk about the Lichborne spec and to see the macro section for how to use it, but you do not include a macro section(either you forgot, or lifted parts of the guide from elsewhere). Here is the macro:

#showtooltip Lichborne
/cast Lichborne;
/cast [@player] Death Coil

You tell people to use the Lichborne spec yet you don't have the Death Coil glyph? drop D & D glyph for it.

You can also take hit & expertise off the stat priority list due to them being not needed as a dk tank. If you miss, the the rune is refunded and you just hit the ability again. This has been proven on ej's and many other tanking thread.

Diseases should only be applied with Outbreak and Plague Strike/Icy Touch for the debuffs they provide and if you have another dk in the raid, you can forgo them completely. The threat gained from them is not very high over all, and the time to apply them without Outbreak would give you more threat using Rune Strike(depending on the amount of mobs).

As for the amount of dodge/parry to have, it's pretty easy to figure out. Take off all buffs except Horn of Winter and you should have 300 more dodge than parry.

You state that mastery is the best stat for a dk tank, and you don't even mention that an avoidance tank is on par as a mastery tank. It all come down to different play styles, if you don't manage your death strikes well, avoidance tanking would be the way to go.

Another thing you don't mention is that you always want to keep 1 blood rune on cd at all times so that and use the second one 1 second or two before the other is back up so that all(most) runic empowerment procs are unholy/frost. Also keeping your blood runes on cd keeps you're blade barrier up for 6% less incoming damage.

You make no mention anywhere of Rune Strike use, which is quite important for runic empowerment procs.

Last but not least, telling people that enchants are not that important cause they only add a little stats and cost a lot is pretty fail, people should be trying to do the best they can for their characters. You suggest people spend the gold on the BS waist, but not on enchants?

I'd suggest going over this guide, adding links to everything, maybe some color and try formatting it so you don't have big walls of text.

EJ is useful, but that doesn't have any visual graph or the soft cap number that I'm wondering about. Only thing that is of use is the armor cap at 75% which will only be improved by higher ilvl gear and not via any real way of stacking or reforging like it is possible with parry/dodge/mastery. I'd have to plot all the numbers myself on excel to get it.

Each 1% more of avoidance is worth more than the 1% before, even after diminishing returns. Extreme example: At 98%, +1% cuts the damage taken in half (50%). This old thread elaborates: http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...ally.&p=232117
DR doesn't decrease the value of avoidance, it prevents it from becoming too powerful. So there isn't a point where you stop adding avoidance because DR is killing it.

[ot4ku1992]

You get 1% of dodge or parry from 176.7189 dodge or parry rating. >_________>

Yes. But his statement is right. Even if you have exactly the same rating you won't have the same %-chance.
Thats because of talents and the values of strength and agility giving parry and dodge. And not rating.
You want to get the ratings of both nearly equal to achieve the biggest benefit.

@ Anonie: the DR applies to all tank specs. So you want to even out your ratings. However warriors want more parry then dodge and druids obviously won't get anything from parry so they stack dodge.
And the DR isn't really this noticeable. Maybe 0,05 - 0,1%

"Oh, and OP totally forgot to mention about haste. Haste is the worst stat for tanks right now. It's like spirit for boomkins/ele shams/spriests. It is there, gives benefits (faster rune regeneration), but TRY TO AVOID."
I hope you aren't serious here because if you are you should check the leather / mail caster gear and look for some pieces with hit on it... Spirit = Hit and hit is for these classes the best secondary stat... So this is bullshit, sorry. However haste is crap for tanks, yes.

@ OP:
Your stat priority is quite messed up.
Mastery / Stamina (depending on the encounter)
Dodge / Parry
Agi
Strength
Hit
Expertise
useless crap like crit etc.

Ok lets start. If you go into hardmode raiding you need some amount of stamina. Try to get ~20 mastery, that is enough. Depends on the specific encounter what you prefer.
Try to get the same rating with parry / dodge, this will yield the best avoid results because of DR.
(Agi > Strength. Yes! This is no joke. You gain more dodge through agility then parry through strength. If you are only doing normal modes consider taking the mastery neck from V&T if you don't have the one from Nef.) -> I'm not 100% sure about this part, need to look it up ^^
I rated Hit higher then Expertise because there are some bosses with a lot of interupts. However with 4.1 hit will be lower then expertise.
You shouldn't focus on expertise nor hit. Take some of it and reforge everything you can into mastery / dodge / parry.
Crit and Haste aren't worth to mention because threat generation isn't a big problem in Cata. And not even noticable as a DK.

I rated Mastery higher then Dodge / Parry because imo you will get more benefit from it until you reach ~20%. But it's not like you should really reforge either dodge nor parry into mastery but rather things like expertise and hit.

[vampy]

However warriors want more parry then dodge

Don't play a warri so can someone explain me why parry is prefered over dodge? Didn't warry have the same talent that convert strenght into parry?

[xHearts]

Don't play a warri so can someone explain me why parry is prefered over dodge? Didn't warry have the same talent that convert strenght into parry?

There is a talent that increases crit chance and crit block by 10% when you parry so it's more desirable than dodge.

[e] I want to add some more info because there's a lot of misinformation in the OP.

For ex, gemming. Should be Fractured Amberjewel (Chimera's Eye for JC when applicable) for yellows, Puissant Dream Emerald for blues, and Fine Ember Topaz for reds.

Reforging should always go towards Mastery if it's not on the gear, then 99% of the time you will be reforging dodge to parry or vice versa to even out the avoidance ratings.

Enchants are below. You would replace slots with your specific profession bonuses (LW, Inscription, Tailoring, w/e)
Head - Earthen Ring rep enchant
Shoulder - Therazane rep enchant
Cloak - +250 armor
Chest - +55/75 stam or +15/20 stats (might be a choice in 4.1 when we lose our ridiculous healing threat from DS?)
Bracers - +50 dodge, +40 stam (WotLK enchant)
Gloves - +50/65 mastery
Belt - Ebonsteel Belt Buckle with Fractured Amberjewel
Leg - +145 stam/+45 agility (Charscale)
Feet - Earthen Vitality/Lavawalker. Super important if you didn't glyph Bone Shield because movespeed = skillz
Weapon - SSG for leveling/gearing up, swap to Swordshattering after you're roughly geared in heroic loots (Important: Ignore the 4% parry from your calculations when you're trying to even out avoidance ratings because this gives you a flat percentage instead of +parry rating)

Glyphs:
Death Coil - extra healing from Lichborne self-heals
Heart Strike - extra damagez.
Rune Strike - moar damagez.
Death Strike glyph is bad because the only time you should be pooling RP is for Lichborne healing/using DRW.
Death and Decay - if you aren't a manly enough tank and are forced to tank adds you can use this glyph. Never really found a use for it though. Replace with HS/RS.

AMS - For magic heavy fights.
Bone Shield - AWW YEAH +15% MOVESPEED
DRW - Very very sexy for when you're picking up a newly spawned add.
Dark Succor - A big maybe for fights with tank swaps, don't be a moron and forget to switch back to Blood Presence when you taunt.
Pestilence - Never found a situation where I wished I had it.
Rune Tap - good for some fights.
Vampiric Blood - probably the only mandatory one since it increases healing taken. Very nice for heavy damage phases and you need more DS heals.

Path of Frost - you should be killing people with this so obviously the worst minor glyph available (j/k. Very nice for situations when someone gets thrown up.)
Death's Embrace - pretty shit now that it doesn't work on you. Used to be mandatory.
Horn of Winter - not bad to have since I forget to use it during "don't have anything to do" moments in a fight.
Blood Tap - probably the only one that will have a nice effect. Blood Tap barely hurts you but everything counts, right?

Sorry for wall of text :<

[Anonie]

I hope you aren't serious here because if you are you should check the leather / mail caster gear and look for some pieces with hit on it... Spirit = Hit and hit is for these classes the best secondary stat... So this is bullshit, sorry. However haste is crap for tanks, yes.

You obviously don't have a clothy toon that is both heals and caster dps. Spirit stacks up so fast that you will get hit capped without any effort at all. Like I said, IT IS THERE, IT GIVES BENEFITS, BUT TRY TO AVOID.

But still leaves the question "what point does DR even start to be come more noticeable?" Yes, obviously druids can't parry so stack dodge. but does that mean at the same % of DR, or double that % or at 25% more, you want to reforge for mastery?

and how much more % of parry would warriors prefer parry over dodge?

This thread is lacking hard numbers or graphs to show clearly how much dodge/parry degrades over time.

If you're gonna make the claim "agil is more benefit over str" say why. Like 430 agil gives 1% dodge. 100 str gives 25 parry rating, idk what % that is. But you're also missing out on AP. You get about 1 str = 2 AP and you don't usually start a pull with vengeance up, so your ap at the start of a pull will be lower than a tank with str tanking gear.
Agil gear has: mastery/expertise/hit/crit/haste.
Str tank gear has: mastery/dodge/parry/expertise/hit/crit/haste.
Judging by ot4ku1992's stats priority, agil gear can only have mastery and no other mitigation stats. So probably better to stick with str gear b/c str gear can have dodge/parry/mastery mitigation AND you get a threat boost from the AP from having str.

EDIT: just want to emphasize the hit bit is more towards spriest gear selection.