A hack that can bypass your authenticator!

There was a report of a user who suddenly had a memory error in WoW. After it crashed, he tried to log in again and had been hacked.

The answer has [ more...]

Parry-haste confirmed to be mostly off in Icecrown Citadel

Posting here on parry-haste, the proc nerf and following me on Twitter.

The other day I posted about preliminary findings which show ICC has parry-haste mostly turned off for the raid [ more...]

Enjoying your tanking

Sure, Unholy’s fairly weak for tanking, but does it matter?

The usual argument I hear, a flawed one at that, is “you pay your $15, you choose your spec”. That is [ more...]

PvP weapons for tanking

The new season PvP weapons are awesome. If you can get into an arena team for points and enough rating, man the rewards are sweet.

If you’re only a 10-man raider [ more...]

Tanking weapons in 3.3

I thought it might be useful to review the tank weapon choices for Death Knights, and provide a rank order.

Officers distributing loot could consider this a priority table: I would suggest [ more...]

Which abilities require the GCD or facing opponent

I set out to tabulate those abilities Death Knights have which require the global cooldown, or trigger it, and which require you are facing the opponent, or can have your [ more...]

Guides to Icecrown Citadel

Instead of writing my own guide, I’ll compile references to those already written.

I have an index of the guides from those sites most people use, plus have tried to include [ more...]

Best gems for tanking, socket bonus considered

What gems do you use for tanking? This should be fairly well-known, but it might be an interesting discussion if we have any avoidance advocates out there who don’t like [ more...]

Tanking to be less squishy

DK tanks can feel squishy compared to block-tanks in 5-mans. You can offset a lot of this through skill. We have a pretty impressive arsenal to use.

Here are some important [ more...]

Dual-wield, weapon speed and expertise

Frost dual-wield tanking is very popular now. Six months ago, many people were violently against the idea. A year ago, it was so bad I put up a sticky on [ more...]

Unholy, not so bad?

Just wanted you to know, I checked Unholy vs Frost and Blood in Kahorie’s sim, and the TPS gap I’d seen in earlier simulations has been closed somewhat. This is [ more...]

On Improved Icy Talons: melee haste buff

Improved Icy Talons

This is a really important buff, providing melee haste like a talented windfury totem. Either you provide it or a shaman does. In a 25-man raid, you should [ more...]

Frost talents by the point

For Frost tanks, what threat values do some of these talents provide?

chill of the grave: +1.6% with Icecrown dodge-nerf radiance, 1.8% outside it (tested by going from 1 to 2 points)
scent [ more...]

Two blood tank extremes

Blood is so flexible. You can spec into survival, single or AOE threat. What’s the threat you gain from a heavy threat build compared to one for survival?

Survival

Here’s a really [ more...]

DK spec threat comparison

I have verified some of the threat comparisons using the latest version of Kahorie’s sim. It’s had a few tweaks so I wanted to see if that refinement had led [ more...]

New tank gear in 3.3

List of new 3.3 BoP plate tank gear from 5-mans and emblem of frost rewards, by slot. You earn Frost emblems from raiding, or from the daily/weekly quests.

For gear from [ more...]

Best tank spec in 3.3

For raids, I’d go with blood or frost.

Here are my posts with much more detail.

Patch
Blood
Frost
Unholy

3.3
blood 3.3
Frost 3.3 spec here or dual-wield
Unholy tanking 3.3

Feb 22, 2010 update: Unholy should not be [ more...]

Blood tank spec in 3.3

Blood remains the best single-target raid tank spec.

For blood, nothing changed in 3.3 from 3.22, so you don’t really need to respec. You might go into will of the [ more...]

The new EH: beyond physical damage

I’d hope you’ve seen this thread on maintankadin, it’s been fairly regularly mentioned around the blogosphere and twitter.

Theck has worked out a new formula for effective health which accounts for [ more...]

Pro-tip: plan ahead

There’s a maturity cycle that tanks progress through. One of the marks of a mature, experienced tank is they know the encounters and they plan ahead. Newer tanks are usually [ more...]

Jewelcrafting: Profit!

Here’s a debut post from Tykot. – Gravity

Across all the guides and strategies I read, not to mention peeking at Ensidia’s armory profiles, Jewelcrafting stands out as the obvious #1 profession.  Not [ more...]

Frost tank spec in 3.3

Frost tanking has always been and will remain in 3.3 a very solid choice. You can tank with either dual-wield or a two-handed weapon and both are viable. DW is [ more...]

Warriors from the swiss army, DKs from lego

I like warrior tanks, they have so many abilities really they deserve to be called the swiss army knife of tanks. Warriors can intercept and charge, interrupt/silence many ways, cancel [ more...]

Keybinding, do it

A lot has been written about why you should not keyboard turn (it’s too slow), and that you should keybind. I wrote about how PvP improves your raiding too. I’m [ more...]

What is the frost, unholy or blood rotation?

I get a lot of questions like “what’s the rotation for that spec?” Rotation is like Death Knight basics, and since I write on more advanced tanking questions, it’s not [ more...]