BS = Blood Strike
PS = Plague Strike
IT = Icy Touch
OB = Obliterate
DS = Death Strike
RS = Rune Strike
BB = Blood Boil
DnD = Death and Decay
DC = Death Coil
BP = Blood Plague
FF = Frost Fever
Pest = Pestilence
IBF = Icebound Fortitude
AMS = Anti-Magic Shell
AoD = Army of the Dead
RP = Runic Power
ERW = Empower Rune Weapon
HS = Heart Strike
SoB = Scent of Blood
Vot3W = Veteran of the 3rd War
MoM = Might of Mograine
WoN = Will of the Necropolis
B-G = Blood-gorged
HB = Howling Blast
FS = Frost Strike
HC = Hungering Cold
NoCS = Nerves of Cold Steel
CotG = Chill of the Grave
KM = Killing Machine
BoN = Blood of the North
ToT = Threat of Thassarian
GoG = Gift of Gorefiend
So first of I would like to start off with a disclaimer, because it seems most good guides have one?
Disclaimer:
There is no "Right Way" to DK tank. By following this guide there is no guarantee that you will be the most uber 1337 tank out there, but you will be competent. By no means is this the only way to run your death knight tank, this is simply what I found to work well and why. Feel free to ask questions.
Introduction
With that said there is definitely a wrong way to tank as a death knight. Before you decide a spec tanking is a game of balancing your stats. This guide is going to focus on blood and frost DK tanking because that is what I have tried and tested and I find it to be the most interesting in my opinion. The guide will also address the main goals of a tank. Both goals are equally important.
Goal #1: Survive
Goal #2: Protect the Raid
Stats
Death Knights needs the same stats as everyone else in the sense of...
- 540 Defense
- 26 expertise (Soft Cap for Dodge), 56 expertise (hard cap for parry)
- 264 Hit Rating (8%0 [27% if you're dual wielding]
As a tank every stat except spirit and intellect is effective. Strength, stamina, and armor are going to be some of the most appealing stats. Strength is an interesting stat for us. Every one strength gives us two attack power. Also 25% of strength is also counted towards parry rating. Many people will argue from a tank's perspective that the only effective stat to stack in any gem slot is stamina. This is referred to as soak tanking. From a tanking perspective soak tank is effective. However, You have go in depth to the first goal to see it completely though.
Stamina vs. Avoidance vs. Mitigation
Survival can be broken down into mitigating damage, avoiding damage, and enduring damage. Avoidance in this guide is classified as dodge, parry, and chance to be missed. Soaking deals with strictly enduring damage. From a tanking perspective increasing your effective hit points covers all of survivability.
Stamina stacking is an interesting subject. If you notice I keep saying, "From a tanking perspective..." that is because while soaking gives you the best return per itemization point it also puts more stress on the healer. Blizzard fixed the inconsistent healing stream by reducing avoidance, reducing the damage bosses do, and increases bosses' attack speed.
Mitigation is the be-all-end of tanking areas such as resistances and armor. It too has its draw backs, the amount of mitigation you have you stack to get a return out of it would gimp the other areas of you stats so much that it wouldn't be worth it overall. Although armor will never get touched by diminishing returns, it may give you a reduced % of reduction but X amount of armor always increases your time you survive by X amount of seconds. Armor.
Finally avoidance... Death Knights are avoidance tanks. The only problem with stacking pure avoidance is there is a chance to take damage. Which means it not 100% reliable. Death knights can easily achieve upwards of 60% avoidance (Dodge, Parry, Miss.) Even though ICC reduces your avoidance by 20% it does not mean to completely ignore it.
So the winner of stamina vs. avoidance vs. mitigation is no one. Its a tie, go figure?
Dual Wielding Vs. Two Hander
This is an area that commonly confuses death knights. The a great benefit that dual wielding gives is variety, the ability to put two different runeforges on your weapons, such as 2% parry and cinder glacier, or fallen crusader and 2% parry (enchants I commonly used). However, with the introduction of nerubian carapace runeforge, that is the tanking enchant. Which makes it equal with stoneskin gargoyle. The only problem that comes with dual wielding is you have to dump 6 talent points to make dual wielding equal to using a two handed weapon.
The other minor benefit dual wielding gives is it cranks your killing machine procs up from 5 per minute to 10 per minute. Killing Machine gets the best effect from being used on howling blast. You can only howling blast a target 7 times a minute. Refer to the forst section for more information
Nerves of Cold Steel takes 3 talent points. Threat of Thassarian takes 3 points. Niether of these talents increase anything, they just bring dual wielding up to par with using a two handed weapon. Why spend six talent points to make dual wielding equal to using a two handed weapon when you can just use a two handed weapon and save the six talent points? Two hander is what I would suggest here. If you go blood, two handed is your only choice
Idiggory wrote:
I'd say 2-hand, though not by enough that it would really matter if you wanted to DW.
The problem is that you basically end up with 2 deficits, but can only really fix one of them. These are incoming damage and outgoing damage (and thus threat).
Parry Hasting leads to 1-3% more damage taken, depending on the fight. But on some fights, it results in 0% more, as some bosses have this disabled. But it only affects Auto-Attacks. So, for example, it will lead to much more damage taken when fighting Garfrost, who has strong AAs, than against the Devourer of Souls, who does a lot of his damage through spells/abilities.
So, to combat this, you want to have defensive stats on your weapons. Using the best two available atm, you end up with less than 2% more avoidance than 2-hand. You'll have slightly more Stamina though.
But then we get to another problem. There are no slow tanking weapons. The slowest is 1.7 (for up-to-date weapons). Your strikes gain the most from slower weapons (literally 400-500 damage less without raid buffs). That's a LOT of lost threat on Rune Strike and Oblit. DW manages to make some of this up with higher Auto-Attack damage, when properly geared, but it doesn't get the threat modifier of RS and still produces less DpS.
You also need a LOT more hit for DW. If you don't make up for it, then you begin to lose your higher AA damage. So then you just end up putting out lower threat all around, which is bad.
But, if you go for DpS weapons to make up for the threat, then you will end up with *less* avoidance than a 2-handed tank (due to 25% Str -> Parry), on top of the increased damage from Parry Hasting.
Now add in the fact that the DW spec loses points making itself viable. 2-hand gets to invest in threat talents, and doesn't need to take ToT or DWS. And 2 points in 2-handed Spec is a better DpS boost than 3 in NoCS.
But I want to stress that this is NOT a big deal if you aren't doing hard modes. The overall difference is pretty low. 2-hand is pretty firmly on top, but not by much.
The problem is that you basically end up with 2 deficits, but can only really fix one of them. These are incoming damage and outgoing damage (and thus threat).
Parry Hasting leads to 1-3% more damage taken, depending on the fight. But on some fights, it results in 0% more, as some bosses have this disabled. But it only affects Auto-Attacks. So, for example, it will lead to much more damage taken when fighting Garfrost, who has strong AAs, than against the Devourer of Souls, who does a lot of his damage through spells/abilities.
So, to combat this, you want to have defensive stats on your weapons. Using the best two available atm, you end up with less than 2% more avoidance than 2-hand. You'll have slightly more Stamina though.
But then we get to another problem. There are no slow tanking weapons. The slowest is 1.7 (for up-to-date weapons). Your strikes gain the most from slower weapons (literally 400-500 damage less without raid buffs). That's a LOT of lost threat on Rune Strike and Oblit. DW manages to make some of this up with higher Auto-Attack damage, when properly geared, but it doesn't get the threat modifier of RS and still produces less DpS.
You also need a LOT more hit for DW. If you don't make up for it, then you begin to lose your higher AA damage. So then you just end up putting out lower threat all around, which is bad.
But, if you go for DpS weapons to make up for the threat, then you will end up with *less* avoidance than a 2-handed tank (due to 25% Str -> Parry), on top of the increased damage from Parry Hasting.
Now add in the fact that the DW spec loses points making itself viable. 2-hand gets to invest in threat talents, and doesn't need to take ToT or DWS. And 2 points in 2-handed Spec is a better DpS boost than 3 in NoCS.
But I want to stress that this is NOT a big deal if you aren't doing hard modes. The overall difference is pretty low. 2-hand is pretty firmly on top, but not by much.
Parry hasting is when an attack gets parried, the one that parried the attack get 40% increased attack speed to their next attack.
Edited, Jan 28th 2010 12:39am by potsoriginal
Edited, Jan 28th 2010 12:40am by potsoriginal