 Every attempt I did on the Lich King fight I played as offtank. This was my choice because I wanted to be really good at that role, and in reverse for the other two tanks in our corp to be really good MTs. By focusing on a role, I didn’t have to learn a different tanking rhythm or positioning. If I was rostered off on a night, then obviously one of the other tanks (Garant warrior or Ishkar DK) would need to play offtank, but I’m fairly sure it was always Ishkar OT and Garant MT.
I have absolutely no ego issue about whether I am tanking the named boss, or if I’m handling the off-tank duties. I am man enough to know I matter, whether I was MT or OT.
Anyhow, the point is not which class is optimal (since a DK has an easier time as MT with both [Anti-Magic Shell] and [Will of the Necropolis], optimal would be a DK MT) but that I have had enough experience as OT to write about how to spec for that role. Secondly, with the 20% buff, “optimal” on non-heroic is not a logical concept, since a warrior’s health pool is so huge plus he can use his glyphed cooldowns to solo-tank 3/4 soul reapers anyhow, then just call out for an external cooldown on the fourth. It’s not that hard. Garant used a single-target warrior spec I mentioned the other day.
Bear in mind, this is all from the perspective of a 10-man raider. I’ve not seen him on 25-man, so you might need to make some consideration for that. » continue reading
I have two tank specs, and most tanks who will never dps can do the same. It’s a nice situation.
When I first joined my guild, on trial, I sometimes played as a dps before securing my spot in our tank corp. At another time in the past, I had a tank spec and pvp dps spec.
This post is written for those tanks who can carry two tank specs. I’m not talking to those top 300 tanks who
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I put together a nifty talent tree, with tooltips I wrote to explain each Blood talent. I explain each talent, saying if its mandatory or not, how good it is for threat.
It looks like this, embedded it in the forum version of my blood tank 3.3.3 post. Click to go through.
I intend to use this tooltip technique to provide insight when we see the Cataclysm beta talent trees, too. I’ve provided the codes needed
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I am guilty of focusing on threat a lot in my analysis. I do value survival more highly, though, but perhaps it takes up less of my theorycrafting because there aren’t so many variables to consider.
Threat and survival are usually disparate goals, and you need to choose a mix of tank talents which lands you somewhere on the spectrum between them.
If you think graphically, the choices are often like this:
If you want more survival talents, those
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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 because of improvement in the sim’s accuracy of Unholy.
Full spec and details on Unholy are in my original 3.3 post.
I updated my test comparisons in i245 gear, assuming ICC aura:
- 2H Frost did ~3.7% more threat than the Unholy spec,
- Blood did between 1.6% and 3.4%
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Improved Icy Talons
3.33: updated with some notes and strikethroughs, March 23rd 2010.
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 ensure someone brings it. In a 10-man, it’s a really nice benefit but not mandatory. Buff management depends on how progression-oriented your raid is. Normally I assume the buff is up in all my sims. DK and talented Shaman version are the same: 20% melee haste to the raid.
It costs 6 talent points though, so you have some trade-off to get it. Yet if another class brings the buff, 5 of those points are wasted in redundancy and the 6th gives you its par of 1% extra damage. Any Shaman can lay an untalented windfury (16% haste) but generally they’ve got better uses for that element if they’re not enhancement.
Key point in 3.3: if your 6 points are redundant due to a shammy, the 25% melee haste you personally gain are not as good an investment as spending the points in merciless combat and other talents.
In 3.33 the stacking has changed , so your IIT and your personal melee haste stack, giving 45% haste. More commentary in my 3.33 post.
In 3.3, if you did not have a shammy, the 6 points were better than alternative uses of the talents. I’m not sure this assertion in 3.33 yet.
How it procs
The raid buff procs when a target is hit by frost fever disease, which can be applied by glyphed howling blast or icy touch. It is procd by pestilence (I just tested it on dummies) contrary to many people’s reports. I’m not sure if rime proc’d HB or talented chains of ice do it (didn’t test).
It is fairly easy to keep up for its 20 second duration, since any frost tank will cast IT or glyphed HB every 20s unless they’re moving around or something.
Range of effect
The wowhead spell detail says 20 yards… of what, the disease? Totems have 30 yards. I’ll research, but perhaps one of my genius readers will tell us in comments.
Haste’s interaction with rune strike
Haste has a positive interaction with [Rune Strike]. There are a few variables to how often you can hit with RS: (a) how often you dodge (b) how often you have a melee attack (c) how much runic power you have.
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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 of blood: 1.1% with Icecrown radiance, and 1.4% outside it
- subversion: 0.9%
- dark conviction: 0.6%
- runic power mastery: 0.4%, which is a tiny gain, but you take the talent for quality-of-life so it’s easier to keep 20 RP
I like taking the [Icy Reach] talent,
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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 survival-heavy tank build for 25-mans.
Regarding spell damage: Some tanks might poo-poo the spec since it has [Spell Deflection] (which is fairly weak, as not many fights actually include direct damage magic attacks) but put that aside for the purpose of this discussion. If you really hate
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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 to much change in the comparative threat of DK tank specs.
I have also itemised the threat per talent of various blood alternatives.
Blood vs Unholy
I tested a mainstream Blood tank, with a survival bias in its spec, against an Unholy high-threat tank spec.
Blood was 6.4% more
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For raids, I’d go with blood or frost.
Here are my posts with much more detail.
Patch Blood Frost Unholy 3.33 blood 3.3
Gravity’s Grid of Blood specs 3.3.3
Interactive talent tree to explain each talent Frost 3.3 spec here or dual-wield Unholy tanking 3.3
March 23, 2010 update: 3.33 does not change your spec much, if at all. Read my full analysis, or visit the forums to see what others have to say.
Unholy should not be used
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Blood remains the best single-target raid tank spec.
April 8th, 2010: I have just posted a grid showing the specs against dimensions of threat, survival and utility. You may find it an easier way to choose a spec or understand them.
Patch 3.3.3 buffed WotN, and also Dancing Rune Weapon now gives threat, so consider dropping 1 from Necrosis and move it to DRW. This is a raid-tanking damage talent, not so useful for 5-mans.
Raid spec
Main raid spec: Blood 54-8-10
- The template above is a strong raid-MT oriented build, with a few points you can move around
- Has the most user-choice, with many raid buffs and different ways to spec.
- This in fact makes blood fun in a way; you can personalise it quite a lot more than the other trees. You can spec into raid buffs, or single-target threat, or survivability.
- I have a diagram showing where you could move talents to
- Blood AOE in this spec is good. This spec is for maintanking in 25-mans and this version includes many raid buffs with 3/3 morbidity.
- Powerful tanking cooldowns (Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis).
- Optionally spec for a bonus cooldown of Mark of Blood; acts like a mini shield block.
- Includes 2/2 Abominations Might, but optionally 1 of 2 Abomination’s Might will give you about 75%+ uptime on a single-target fight due to probability
There are so many possible and valid variations on a Blood maintank spec, I thought it’d be useful for me to outline a few additional specs. Choosing a blood spec can give you an anxiety disorder.
April 2010: I put a grid together across survival and threat, putting specs into it for context, see Gravity’s Grid.
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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 slightly higher threat at the moment yet is best suited to a character with 30+ expertise skill.
For dual-wield frost, I have a full post you should read.
3.3.3
For 3.3.3 highest-threat 2H spec, see this forum post here. It shows that whilst the Icy Touch buff, predictably makes [Black Ice] talent more valuable than before, 5/5 Killing Machine is better plus that you should spec into IIT.
Original post continues:
Here I’ll talk about two-handed frost tanking.
Frost tank spec templates:
A very balanced tree. Has the best snap-agro for AOE, excellent single-target threat and a mix of damage reduction talents. Formidable in Heroics and can MT raids too with the same spec, so deserves to be a very popular tree.
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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 fear, actively protect raid members, and more. That left me wondering, what’s the analogy for a DK? We’re pretty flexible too.
Lego!
 the Death Knight tank We can build up a DK tank to suit a variety of tank scenarios, but unlike the swiss army knife which can use its variety of tools any old time, the DK needs to be rebuilt from lego into different shapes.
Death Knight tanks are like lego.
You can spec into three different tank types, and within each tree there’s a further bit of construction.
Tank leaders or officers should be aware of the various construction their lego tanks can take. A good DK tank should be humble and flexible enough to do what’s best for the raid, too.
I’ll chat a bit about the tree trees. » continue reading
What is the best Death Knight Unholy tank spec in 3.3? I set out to simulate the various talent choices to find the highest threat unholy DK tank build. Below is a comprehensive analysis. Updated Jan 11, 2010.
In patch 3.33, there are no changes which significantly effect Unholy, so the below remains correct.
Changes in 3.3
Firstly, some background on the 3.3 changes. The writer Consider of EJ has a very well structured OP on Unholy DPS, with notes on 3.3.
Scourge strike will change to a 50/50 physical and magical attack, from its current 100% shadow damage in 3.22. This means unholy scales with physical raid buffs in the same way as warriors and the other DK tank trees; the net effect is it scales much better in 3.3 than 3.22. Hits about 60% harder.
Update: Reaping (to create death runes) is great for flexibility but, at an i245 gear level, is a slight loss of threat because those 3 points could be spent elsewhere. You gain about 1.8% threat by using no-reaping.
Differences between DPS and Tank
One thing I found is the tank spec has different weightings on the talents, to a greater degree than usual. Most notably, in the 3.3 DPS spec you skip Necrosis, but for tanks it is still the best choice for that talent tier. We use different glyphs too.
Changes from 3.22
Epidemic is definitely back; for tanks basically we’re going to the traditional deep unholy spec. Reaping is optional.
The 3.3 Unholy tank spec
The best yet balanced threat spec I found, after pretty extensive testing is 12/8/50, with one point free.
Alternatively, with no reaping, you spec like this 13/8/50. It’s about 1.8% more threat. I put the last point into SoB.
This linked spec already has one point in wandering plague for AOE, which for ST threat isn’t as good as one in Necrosis; move it if you’re solely emphasising ST threat.
Necrosis, for ST threat is better than Desolation, for a tank, but since Desolation also helps you in AOE too, I weight it more highly.
You can put that final point into a few spots:
- rune tap (self-healing),
- corpse explosion (AOE and entertainment),
- wandering plague (AOE and 0.7% more ST threat)
- scent of blood (ST threat, about 1% but not sure)
- necrosis (ST threat with 1.1% per talent point).
I tested the spec in two gear levels, and it won in both, and talents scaled about linear in both too. My Kahorie download page has those character xml files; one’s Coliseum level (Bluedragon), the other Ulduar 10/25 (Gravity).
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