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Death Knight Tanking Guide (Updated to 4.2)

This post can originally be found on the official WoW Death Knight forums. The original poster or original creator is Lichloathe. To see the original one on the official WoW forums please follow this link. All credit for this amazing guide goes to Lichloathe and anyone he or she thanks as well! =)

Posts in this FAQ:
1) How do I spec and glyph for tanking?
2) How do I gem, enchant and reforge?
3) What is my rotation?
4) Do I use Diseases?
5) CAN I DUEL[sic] WIELD?
6) Understanding Death Strike / Mastery (by Euliat)

1) How do I spec and glyph for tanking?

For only 5 mans

Goal is to maximize aoe threat potential. Now that more people have good gear, there are more situations you can get away with minimal CC, and DPS aoe is going to be higher anyway.

Raid progression

This spec has the highest survivability potential. When Lichborne is available, you can pool Runic Power and use it to heal yourself with Death Coil, which synergizes well when you pick the VB Glyph. With large stacks of Vengeance, Death Coil heals for massive amounts and you can machine gun up to 3 in a row. It does require some preparation and loss of Rune Strikes, however, after the initial pull Vengeance largely makes threat a non-issue as it is currently tuned. For more in depth analysis, it is best to refer to this post .

Talents you will want to avoid:

3/3 Scent of Blood - Has stacking issues, as the max stack is 3. Stacks are often lost when procs happen close together. This does, however, still increase RP generation marginally.

Abomination's Might - DPS classes can and will bring this and they do it better. The 2% Strength bonus that is not redundant is not worth the points you will spend on it.

Blood-Caked Blade - Has a value of less than 0.5% overall damage increase per talent point. Terrible.

Crimson Scourge - Blood Boil's damage is extremely low, so the boost this talent gives is negligible at best. The proc can screw Blade Barrier uptime if you are fishing for F/U procs by holding a full Blood Rune - using BB to consume it at the last second is best, as it will use the Rune even if it misses. A free BB, however, mucks this up.


Glyphs
Note: If a Glyph is not listed, it is not worth considering.

Prime Glyphs

Rune Strike / Heart Strike / Death Strike - Single target threat bonuses.
Death and Decay - AoE threat bonus.
Death Coil - Arguably mandatory. The only Prime Glyph which can assist with survivability, via a Lichborne spec.


Major Glyphs

Rune Tap - Very valuable for assisting healers with saving mana.
Vampiric Blood - Synergizes well with Lichborne specs. The 15% health bonus you lose is not likely to be noticeable outside of progression hard modes.
Anti-Magic Shell - Meh, but better than nothing.
Dancing Rune Weapon - Worth mentioning only to point out that it is poorly designed and not often valuable. Most of the time, the only time this threat bonus would be useful is at the start of a pull, the time you are least likely to have 60 RP. There are some limited situations where it can be helpful, though.

Minor Glyphs

Blood Tap - The only one that isn't awful.
Death Gate - YEAAAAAAAAAH

2) How do I gem, enchant and Reforge?

While Reforging has added an extra level of complexity, this decision is actually even easier now because of it. Use the following guidelines for all of your enchanting, gemming and Reforging needs:

- If it is possible to choose more Mastery, do that.
- If it is possible to choose more Stamina but not more Mastery, do that.
- If you are not at the Expertise cap (6.0/6.5%), Reforge Dodge or Parry as above until you are. Do not gem or enchant for it.
- You want a modicum of Hit (2-3% is fine for Heroics, more for Raids), but don't go out of your way for it. Reforge some Parry or Dodge if it's extremely low.

If you have any remaining pieces of gear that have not yet been Reforged:
- Reforge Dodge or Parry as above into Mastery

If you are above the Hit or Expertise cap:
- Reforge excess Hit or Expertise into Mastery

For your Meta, you want the Austere Shadowspirit Diamond.

Mastery is superior to Avoidance for damage prevention. While on a 1:1 rating basis they are roughly equivalent, Avoidance's value remains the same when Magic damage is added to a scenario, while Mastery's goes up. This is because Death Strike heals will include magic damage, even though Blood Shield will not mitigate it. The Blood Shields will therefore be larger.

Refer to this post for some additional data and discussion .

Being Hit and Expertise capped has been shown via simulation to have only a small effect on overall damage taken, and thus doing so is not exceedingly important. I recommend Expertise soft cap only as a quality of life measure. When simulations were run, what was found was that a missed/dodged/parried Death Strike was just as likely to shift the 5 second window to include more damage as it was to include less.

Small amounts of data on this are here.

3) What is my rotation?

There is no rotation. We now have a priority/logic system.

Single Target
1) Outbreak on cooldown
2) Death Strike
3) Rune Strike
4) Rune Tap on cooldown (if 90% health or less)
5) Horn of Winter
6) Heart Strike/Blood Boil

Functionally, DS has the highest priority, as it is our survivability mechanic. Outbreak is only higher because you never want it to be sitting off cooldown, since Diseases apply the Standard Tank Debuffs (STDs) and this does it for free. However, you generally want to avoid back to back Death Strikes, to avoid clipping when a melee hit between them is reduced by the existing Blood Shield.

HS is rarely used, despite that it is the signature ability of Blood. It brings virtually no advantage to the table in a world where Vengeance makes threat autopilot in the majority of situations. BB is far superior for consuming Blood Runes, which is explained in more detail below.

DRW is kind of a goofy cooldown. It is generally best to synchronize it with Outbreak or Bone Shield when you can, as the latter's average uptime will go up with increased avoidance, and DRW will dupe your diseases with the former.

Multi Target
1) Death and Decay
2) If Outbreak is up, use it. If not, it is generally safe to avoid Diseases in 5 mans, and in Raids another tank will provide the STDs.
3) Pestilence if you used Outbreak, otherwise ignore.
4) Death Strike
5) Rune Strike
6) Blood Boil / Heart Strike

If 4 or more targets, always choose Blood Boil over Heart Strike. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. If you are running the 5 man spec above, Death and Decay will take care of most of the threat you need anyway.

Gaming Runic Empowerment and Blade Barrier

At all times, you will want to hold on to one fully recharged Blood Rune so that RE will only pick a Frost or Unholy rune when it procs, giving you more DS.

In order to prevent Blade Barrier dropoff while doing this, consume the fully charged Blood Rune 1-2 seconds before the recharing one fills completely. BB is superior to HS for this purpose, as it will consume the Rune even if no targets are hit.

Using Blood Tap Effectively

To avoid losing a DS when casting Bone Shield, BT should be used to create a Death Rune for this purpose. This will occupy half of your BTs during a fight, as Bone Shield has a 1m cooldown and BT has 30s. The remainder should be used to cover Disease uptime as appropriate. Consult the "Should I use Diseases" question for more information on this.

4) Do I use Diseases?

At first glance this probably seems like a stupid question. Diseases are a core mechanic! you might say, Of course I want to keep them up at all times. But the answer is actually not that cut and dry.

For what purpose does a Blood tank keep up Diseases? What benefit do they potentially provide? Let's have a look.
1) They do damage
2) They cause Heart Strike to do more damage
3) Frost Fever slows attack speed, Blood Plague reduces damage by 10%

Now, why might a Blood tank not want to keep up Diseases? There's really only one reason. When you're not applying them via Outbreak, it costs one Frost and one Unholy Rune - The cost of a Death Strike that you just lost. So the question is this - Does the extra Death Strike you get every minute outweigh those 3 reasons above? Absolutely.

1/2) They do damage and buff Heart Strike's damage
Barely. Diseases, especially as Blood, are pretty terrible at dealing damage. They're just not that potent. As for Heart Strike, if you are playing optimally, you are almost never using it. Blood Boil is better for consuming Blood Runes to keep Blade Barrier up (since it will still consume the Rune even if it misses - Heart Strike will not) and threat is a non-issue thanks to Vengeance anyway.

3) Frost Fever slows attack speed, Blood Plague reduces damage by 10%
Sure. So do other tank debuffs that cost less to apply. No other tank trades their "block" to apply the Standard Tank Debuffs (STDs), so it is always better for a non-Death Knight to do so. In addition, if any DPS Death Knight is in the raid, this covers Frost Fever, and there is no reason for you to ever cast it. Both Frost and Unholy keep 100% Disease uptime as part of their normal rotation, without sacrificing anything.

But the more important issue is that, when applying Diseases without Outbreak, we lose one Death Strike. Losing one DS every minute may not seem like a big deal, but it actually is. It directly affects our survivability (obviously), and we already take more damage than other tanks by design with the intention that we can heal some back (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2140511400?page=2#21).

Current theorycrafting shows that having 50% uptime of Scarlet Fever or losing one Death Strike per minute result in damage taken that is within 1% of each other. What this means is that whichever you choose to do has almost no noticeable effect on your overall damage taken. What's important, however, is how the damage reduction happens.

Given the above, consider that in a one minute period, 30 seconds of Scarlet Fever and one Death Strike reduce your incoming damage by roughly the same amount. What's important about this is that a Death Strike covers (generally) about 8 seconds worth of incoming damage. What this means is that even though they reduce the same amount of damage, because of the time span difference, dropping the Death Strike results in a higher burst of incoming DPS, which places more stress on your healers.

All of this does not count the healing lost from that Death Strike, as well. In summary, to play optimally to reduce your incoming damage, you want to abide by the following rules:

1) Outbreak on cooldown
2) If there is no one to apply the attack speed debuff to your target, use Blood Tap->Icy Touch to keep up Frost Fever in periods not covered by Outbreak and only apply Blood Plague with Outbreak
3) If someone (another tank or DPS DK) is applying the attack speed debuff to your target, use Blood Tap->Plague Strike to keep up Blood Plague during periods not covered by Outbreak

5) CAN I DUEL[sic] WIELD?

Sure. Death Knights have the ability to use two one-handed weapons. Dual wielding as a tank, however, comes with the following stipulations:

- There is no situation in which dual wield will be equal to or better than using a two handed weapon.
- There is no support within our talent tree structure for dual wielding as Blood.
- There is little to no support within the WoW community for dual wielding as a tank, at best. More often, you will be insulted and vote kicked.

Dual wielding, therefore, is a deliberate underpowering of your character for the sake of style. Do it if you want to hold your group back, because this is the only thing you will accomplish

6) Understanding Death Strike / Mastery
What follows is an excellent post by Euliat that warrants attention, originally posted here.

Throughout reading posts on these forums, it has become evident that there are still a large number of players who don’t understand at all how Death Strike (and by extension, Blood Shield) actually works. While I don’t fully know every little answer myself, I hope this thread will clear up any misconceptions as well as serving to explain to current and future Blood tanks how Death Strike affects their rotation and survivability, as, after all, it is an integral part of their mastery. Ultimately, the survivability of the player boils down to their ability to use DS well.

Since I do not PvP often, the content of this post is limited to a PvE perspective, primarily in the context of Blood tanking at 85 and some of the recommendations may not be appropriate in heroic raids. I’ve yet to get far in that content, so I don’t know how accurate it remains there.

Here is a list of titles so you can quickly access the information you would like to read:

Starting off, I’ll address a few of the misconceptions (shown as quoted text) I have heard about Death Strike and Blood Shield so far:

Misconception #1: Death Strike is based on the damage you do.
Not true. It’s based on the damage you TAKE.
Misconception #2: Blood Shield’s size is subject to Mortal Strike or any effects of that nature, since that reduces/increases (VB*) the healing from DS.
Also not true. The shield is calculated independently from the heal size that you actually receive. +% heal effects and -% heal effects have zero impact whatsoever on the shield size (except Improved Death Strike).
Misconception #3: Overhealing with Death Strike reduces Blood Shield’s size.
Not true. Overhealing has zero impact on shield size. Whether you get 100% overheal or 0% overheal, you will not see a different shield size.
Misconception #4: Blood Shield absorbs magical damage.
Nope. Sorry, all. Just physical. Blood Shield's value is increased by magical damage, but it doesn't actually absorb magical damage. Frost mages can QQ about something else.
Misconception #5: Using Death Strike more often than someone else leads to better mitigation.
Maybe? It really depends. If you’re getting more Death Strikes off, but not timing a single one of them, you may not necessarily be better off. You’ll also be suffering from your previous Blood Shield reducing damage in your damage window if you’re doing them really quickly, too.
Misconception #6: You need diseases up on the target to get healing from Death Strike.
That was the case during most of Wrath. This is Cataclysm, so you don't need diseases up to get healing.
Misconception #7: Mastery stops at 100% (16 mastery).
It doesn’t. You can have more than 100% of something. 150% more candy is always nice.
Misconception #8: Blood shield stacks to 33% of your max HP, or, Blood Shield stacks infinitely.
Neither. It caps at 100% of your maximum HP. If you use an ability to increase your max HP temporarily, the Blood Shield cap temporarily increases as well. If your addon tells you your shield size is greater than your maximum HP, your addon is wrong.
Misconception #9: More stamina means larger Death Strike heals.

This one is partially true, but only if your heal is at the minimum value. If it isn’t, see #1.

*Unglyphed VB can increase the Blood Shield size only at the minimum value because it increases your max HP. Over this, or glyphed, it has no effect on shield size.

 

Death Strike

Firstly, here is the base tooltip for Death Strike:

Death Strike
1 Unholy, 1 Frost
A deadly attack that deals 150% weapon damage plus 495, healing you for 20% of the damage you have sustained during the preceding 5 sec (minimum of at least 7% of your maximum health).


For Blood tanks, this attack will be your primary strike, as it hits quite hard, heals you, and triggers your mastery. Even though this attack will give you 2 death runes, you should use those runes on another Death Strike instead of 2 Heart Strikes. You’re a tank—your first priority is living, not doing damage. Using 2 Heart Strikes instead costs a significant amount of mitigation, so if you are going to do it, there better be a good reason. Referring back to the tooltip, there is an extremely key part that will be important if you want to maximize your survivability:
healing you for 20% of the damage you have sustained during the preceding 5 sec


What this means is that timing is key. Don’t just blindly hit DS as soon as your F/U/D runes come up. You need to learn to wait to time it with incoming damage, or high spikes in damage (dragon breaths, massive AoEs, etc.). The Cataclysm rune system allows you to wait for a little bit without a penalty. You can only regenerate 1 of each rune at a time, so as long as you don’t wait until your next set of runes finishes cooling, it’s okay.

Another factor with timing is your current HP. If you’re at full HP, then your Death Strike isn’t going to do any effective healing at all. Although that means nothing for mastery, it is affecting your overall mitigation. So, on top of timing with damage, you need to keep an eye out on your HP to minimize overhealing as best as you can (but don’t stress on it, because some overheal is intended). In heroic 5 mans, you will probably have a high amount of overhealing because you aren’t taking a ton of damage. In normal raids, it probably won’t be all that high. In heroic raids, it will usually be high again because your healers can’t let you sit at low HP. Regardless of the overheal, once again, your shield size is not determined by overheal, so it will scale properly to accommodate.

I highly recommend downloading the addon “Blood Shield Tracker” to help you monitor an estimated heal size. While it is not 100% accurate due to latency, it will help you figure out when is the best time to use Death Strike.

To expand on the timing portion, a typical slowed boss swing timer is 1.8 seconds. That means in your 5 second window, you could potentially get up to 3 attacks (0.0s, 1.8s, 3.6s) going toward your Death Strike’s heal. It also means that there is a 1.4 second “gap” that you can use to your advantage by getting 3 swings into the damage window instead of 2, which means a larger heal. Try your best to time your Death Strike with damage sources, such as the boss’s swing timer (which you just have to “guess”). However, you need to be somewhat aware of avoidance’s effect on your heal size. Although avoiding an attack usually always leads to less damage taken overall, it’s going to affect your shield size because it has effectively eliminated a swing out of the window. This might lead to “spikiness.” You don’t need to be overly concerned about this, but just be aware that, for most content, it might be better to hold off a DS for a little bit if you’ve just avoided 2 attacks in a row. Blood Shield Tracker can help you out with this by reflecting your estimated heal size. If you already have a decently sized Blood Shield up, but you are avoiding a good deal, it’s probably better to get a lower Death Strike just to maintain the current shield so it doesn’t get lost.

Blood Shield

Similarly, here is the tooltip:

Blood Shield
Each time you heal yourself via Death Strike, you gain 50% of the amount healed as a damage absorption shield. Each point of Mastery increases the shield by an additional 6.25%.


Although the wording is vague, Blood Shield does not, in fact, absorb magical damage. However, Blood Shield’s size can be increased by magical damage, because the healing done by Death Strike doesn’t distinguish between physical and magical damage. Since Death Strike’s heal is the base of this shield, the power of your mastery lies completely in your use of Death Strike. This is why understanding and timing Death Strike is so important, because it’s intended to be your version of a block. Consequently, there’s not really much else to say about mastery like there is about Death Strike, except for two more parts.

One benefit to mastery is that it doesn’t suffer diminishing returns*, so every point of mastery is going to increase your shield size by 6.25%, even past 100%, which makes mastery a very appealing stat. Stacking shields can also be used to your benefit, but on typical raid bosses, it makes a small difference, but it is a gain nonetheless. Aiming to stack your shields by using Death Strike back to back is usually a loss, because your second Death Strike will probably overheal a good deal, which will negate the larger shield size. Not to mention, you’ll probably take a swing before you Death Strike again, which will get fully absorbed, which means it doesn’t count toward your next Death Strike’s heal. Unless you’re going to take a ton of damage in a short interval, it’s usually better to stagger Death Strikes by about 5 seconds. This will help smooth out your damage intake, while also avoiding your previous shields clipping into your next Death Strike’s damage window, by reducing the damage in the window, leading to better overall mitigation.

*Technically avoidance and previous shields can both diminish the effect of mastery by reducing subsequent shields. So in that sense, mastery does suffer diminishing returns.


4. Heal/Shield Calculations
As can be seen from the tooltip, Death Strike’s healing breaks down into one of two categories, minimum or not, which can cause some confusion for players. The method of calculation is the same, but the result differs. Since this is referring primarily to Blood tanks, these calculations include Improved Death Strike, because if you don’t have it as a tank, go respec. Improved Death Strike doesn’t increase the size of the minimum heal, but it reduces the amount of healing needed to cross the minimum heal from 35% of your max HP to 24.1% of your max HP, so, it technically does work, despite what you may believe.

Here is how your base heal size is calculated: