My information structure for EJ DK Tank OP

I have posted the below on Elitist Jerks, which is the final version of the information structure I have been sharing for input (page 3).

I’ve worked out what I’d like to put into the new EJ OP for DK tanks, and what I will exclude. I’m happy to take suggestions. I’ll start the new tank thread when the Beta changes have settled to a point where we can fruitfully write about raid tanking, which should be when we’re close

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Ruby Sanctum loot list

The new Ruby Sanctum encounter has two tank items, which have been added to the tank gear list maintained by Kuren. That is a list, based on iLevel, of all the useful tank gear you can get.

Halion drops two new items, with a few versions of each.

Trinket Boots 10-man normal – [Scion's Treads]  i258 10-man heroic – [Scion's Treads] i271 25-man normal [Petrified Twilight Scale] [Treads of Impending Resurrection] i271 25-man heroic [Petrified Twilight Scale] [Treads of

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Do not parrygib your Sindragosa tank

We had a simple question today, about a heroic mode tank who got parry-gibbed by Sindragosa.

Melee dps need to remember that whilst parry-haste is mostly off in ICC, which I wrote about in February, it is on for Sindragosa and Deathwhisper, but it’s really Cindy for whom this risk is real due to her melee damage hurting.

Here’s a diagram to help your dps.

Shadowmourne for the tank

I know two tanks who wield [Shadowmourne], so if I know two there must be a few more. Khaas and Splug.

Let me hit it in the face: it should not be minmaxed to the highest dpser, it could equally go to a tank. Because this is a legendary, it takes a guild effort and guild decision to grant it to someone, and that investment must be done wisely.

People can leave

There are many stories of this and

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The term off-tank

I have raided as a maintank and as an off-tank. I don’t really mind, as long as the encounter is interesting.

Some people don’t like the term “off-tank” or think it’s out-of-date. Others don’t want to think of themselves as an off-tank because it implies you are of secondary importance.

I like the term, because everyone knows it means “the tank who is not on or is the secondary tank for the big boss”.

Offtank specs for the Lich King

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

My respec for Lich King off-tank

We’ve got Lich King tomorrow. I’ve just changed my spec to suit my role as off-tank.

I handle the dredge ghouls and shambler, then taunt for soul reaper, and try to get chains of ice onto the Valkyrie.

For that specific role, I’ve changed my spec slightly from what I was using to this.

The new features are:

  • 25 second death and decay, which makes picking up all the ghouls a guarantee on the final wave before

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How does Bryntoll drain life effect threat?

In my 3.3 tank weapons list, organised in rank order, I have [Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter] listed as equal fourth. Note that list was written before we knew about no parry-haste in ICC, and therefore I gave expertise a higher weighting since it reduced damage and generated threat.

Kuren has investigated the question, how does its drain life (self-heal) generate threat?

That’s just geek cool.

Update: had typo in title, it’s not toll but troll.

Choosing your second tank spec

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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My favourite keybinding

I have the skull bound to a mouse button.

One side button is skull or shift-click for X, the other is Ventrilo push-to-talk.

It makes 5-mans really smooth because I can mark up a skull so quickly, the DPS see it before I engage. This can help if you’re tanking in Blood spec and want to establish threat with its weaker AOE. DPSers generally follow markings.

I need a new fancy gaming mouse, will get one

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Tooltip-enabled talent tree, explains Blood

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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Glyph of Rune Tap

For the general non-hard mode tanking population, glyph of rune tap is a bad glyph.

A few readers noticed (and one commented on other forums, in fact in their guild application as a DK tank) that in my grid of Blood specs, the hard-mode specialised AOE spec includes this glyph.

Firstly, how’s its maths work?

Your Rune Tap heals yourself for an additional 10% of the effect, and also heals your party for 10% of their maximum health.

This

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Death Knight tank Cataclysm class review

The details have just been published, here’s the complete text.

Major changes to the rune and runic power resource system.

The matrix of Blood specs

Here is an useful way to show various talent spec choices against a matrix of survival, threat and utility indicated as a third factor. I thought I’d call it Gravity’s Grid! This can help you understand the purpose of a spec. » continue reading

You will tank in Blood, Cataclysm DK

Read it from The Man. One tank tree. Copied below in full.

On this topic, I’m going to push discussion into the forums, not here, so we can just have a single conversation. Registration is really easy and doesn’t require email activation.

This is not even the complete preview; it’s just one part! Here’s the Blood news. I like it!

We’re doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked

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TankadinTPS tweak for Icy Touch threat

TankadinTPS is the mis-named addon which gives you fantastic in-game threat analysis, by ability. It knows DK threat.

Tiima posted results of some testing whilst discussing [Glyph of Disease]. Tiima makes the point the glyph of disease gives more choice to the tank: do I need more threat or self-healing?

Kuren gives the change required to the addon to correct Icy Touch is to paste this into the ttpsDeathknight.lua file around line 54:

-- Icy Touch
 [49909] = 7,

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DK tank 3.3.3 Icy Touch spam

Quite a few tanks really don’t like the idea of an Icy Touch spam build. At its most extreme, this kind of spec involves skipping any talent which helps you do strikes like [Obliterate] in favour of those which help you slam Icy Touch. The playstyle is then use death runes for icy touch.

Many tanks do not like it out of principle, and strongly argue against using it, because Blizzard have said they will nerf it if they

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DK tank doing solo raid content

Death Knights are particularly well suited to handling raid content by themselves, solo, alone, like a one-man army, because of the self-healing and extreme levels of awesomeness we DK tanks have osmotically imbued into our Blood talent tree.

It’s been something many have tried. I solo’d most of ZG on my first Gravity, tried farming the cool mounts there for a while. It gets a bit dull after a while.

One DK I know, Dywolf, has been doing it for a long while. Dywolf is a private chap, not one to talk about his achievements at all and a man who prefers short sentences. I asked if he could tell us what he’s done, how he does it and for any little tips for those who want to try solo raid content too. Here’s his story.

Persistence

Gravity: How long have you been into doing solo content?

It started with soloing Onyxia on my pal in late TBC (still pre buff). Then I tried ZG cause I never stopped wanting those mounts (none have dropped for our guild, ever). So when I got my DK up to snuff, I started going for the ZG mounts again. And then I was bored with just those two fights, so I started working on clearing all the bosses. After getting Hakkar down, I set my eyes on the other 20m, AQ. Took a bit to get Ossirian down, even when we were raiding it we didnt often get him down. And then I realized how much money theese bosses were dropping….so I kept doing it. when they nerfed the cash, so I went back to just the 2 bosses for the mounts since I had the achievements. Then I turned into an achievement whore (up to 7200, including my Loremaster title), and saw someone post about soloing MC on dkinfo. His gear was far above mine, but I decided to try anyway, and learned very quickly that I still hate Gehennas. But with a bit of luck, and the shadow resist gear from Black Temple (royal pain to track down a BS with those recipes still) I proved he could be soloed….and then after the 3rd time I started bring a mage friend just to make it easier. Raggy turned out to be a pain too. My gear wasnt sufficient so I once again turned to TBC resist gear, and he went down shortly after. On that first run Garr dropped some bindings….and that started my quest for the legendaries.

So to date I’ve solo cleared: ZG, AQ20, MC, Kara, all TBC heroics. Did AQ40 trash long enough to get the tank mounts, but Skeram is a toughy so I never went further in.

Background

Could you provide a little background on yourself including armory link, and how seriously you raid in 10 or 25s.

I like being low key so I’ll keep the armory to myself for now. I play a tauren dps DK and my name used to be funny til it got reported. Strangulate and a few others always seemed like Star Wars powers to me, so I went with that meme. Tradeskills are Alchemy and JC. I prefer frost spec still, specifically 2h frost, but Ghostcrawler says its never coming back, so I’ve made my peace with dw frost. Though there’s just something about a massive frosty cow DK with a big slow 2h that hits like a truck (old Frost strike). But Unholy is the way to go currently, and we need the debuff, so I raid that now.

But I’ve been playing since vanilla beta. Coming from EQ and a ranger/beastlord character set made a hunter. Raided with it into BWL, but got bored with it, and leveled a enh shaman for TBC. Raided with that for a bit, then took a break, came back, switched to a ret pal in Black Temple (pre-super buffs). WOTLK came out, jumped on the DK bandwagon instantly. Been in the same guild, a fairly easy going but small one, since hunter days. We’re up to Putricide in the 10m group I’m in (couldnt tell ya where the other 10m is, but its farther along). In 25 we’ve got Saurfang, but thats it cause of the dps requirements for Fester (re: small guild). Trying to get a 2nd raid night going, but as it is our one night is the only free night for some of our people. ICC going slower for us cause we lost a couple people too.

Hard bosses?

Of those bosses, which were really tricky and what did you do to overcome them?

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The third factor: utility

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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Unholy tank spec in 3.33

A kind of odd spec showed up as top for threat in Unholy tanking, with no [Reaping], no [Epidemic] and [Ravenous Dead]. This is in simulations only, no in-game testing. I haven’t had any corroboration yet, so watch this space.

That old chestnut of [Death and Decay] single-target rotation does even better, if you want to use it glyphed with T10 bonus. Its playstyle just feels weird to me though.

On this basis, Unholy’s threat is comparable to DW Frost, about

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Possible no-epidemic spec for Frost tank in 3.33

Just a quick note to point out a spec worth investigating further, no epidemic Frost, both DW and 2H. Read my post and discuss in forums over here.

By the way, on the website blog you’ll see “(Comments are closed)” on some blog posts, when it’s not actually true, most comments are open. It’s a bug I’m trying to fix.

DK tank in 3.33

I have given most of the lead posts a once-over where they relate to tank specs, checking for 3.33 accuracy. Largely done, and there isn’t much change in 3.33 tank specs anyhow.

The most significant change to specs is [Improved Icy Talons] which I talked about the other day. Generally Blood tanks will have already spec’d into [Will of the Necropolis], but if not, you should seriously think about it. I consider it mandatory for raiding, and optional if

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Death Knight tank spec 3.33

We’ll probably see 3.33 this week. There are a few important changes we all know about: [Icy Touch] gives loads of threat, [Will of the Necropolis] is always available and [Improved Icy Talons] stacks with itself (45% melee haste); the last being confirmed by Ghostcrawler. Other Frost changes to talents in 3.33 are not so tank-oriented but will help give us a small threat boost.

Icy Slam

Icy Touch will hit like shield slam. In Frost Presence, it will

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Is threat fun?

Blizzard, in the developer chat, has asked the tank community for some discussion and feedback on whether threat is fun.

Q. You talk a lot about changing how we heal tanks, but will aggro ever come back as a challenging part of the game?

A. Not sure. This is something we discuss a lot. I even had a meeting on it this week! On the one hand, some tanks really felt like the way to

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The taunt game

Tanks do a lot of taunting off one another. Last week I was reflecting on a post from Chev about taunting. He has tabulated the number of debuffs your fellow tank should have before you taunt.

What’s remarkable is that a standard table, without many footnotes or explanatory exceptions, is able to capture this taunt dynamic. That’s because there usually isn’t much more to it than simply “at x debuffs, do the tank switch”.

On some fights, you could

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