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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 April 30th, 2010 | 5 comments |
 From: Death Knight tanking specifically, General chat, choose spec |  Tags: 5-man, blood, dual spec, frost, heroic, raid, spec, tank, unholy 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 April 19th, 2010 | 7 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: 3.3.3, blood, talent, tooltips 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 April 19th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: blood, glyph of rune tap, hard mode, healers, lich king, Rune Tap, sindragosa, tank 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 April 9th, 2010 | Leave a comment |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.33, aoe, blood, Cataclysm speculation before Beta, choices, gravity's grid, single target, spec, st, threat 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 April 7th, 2010 | One comment - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: blood, Cataclysm speculation before Beta 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 March 21st, 2010 | 21 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.33, blood, frost, patch, ptr, spec, tank, unholy Significant changes for DK tanks. Probably help dps too, but I don’t write about that as much, like DW Frost dps might be viable (instead of lame). Awesome, [Will of the Necropolis] is now an unconditional effective-health boost. Fantastic. Unless a strike leapfrogs you into death (with massive overkill) it means Blood tanks have more EH than before. It’s not possible to model it mathematically because the value of WotN is a function of the damage you incur February 20th, 2010 | 8 comments |
From: News discussion | Tags: 3.3.3, 3.33, blood, patch, tank, will of the necropolis In order:
I used to be a pally tank too, so I know what I’m missing when I do Halls of Reflection: no gaps in the AOE threat and reflective AOE threat. Rhidach enjoyed himself in Plagueworks last night, with a sidenote on the AOE awesomeness that is Paladin. Over the last week, I ran the Blood tank spec for 5-mans (includes death and decay glyph and corpse January 7th, 2010 | 23 comments |
From: Tanking in general | Tags: aoe, blood, frost, halls of reflection, maintankadin, paladin, threat 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 January 1st, 2010 | 16 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: 3.3, blood, comparison, kahorie, minmax, sim, spec, survival, tank, threat 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 December 24th, 2009 | 21 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, Tanking, choose spec | Tags: 3.3, blood, comparison, frost, spec, talents, tank, threat, tps, unholy 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 December 9th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: 3.3, best, blood, frost, raid, spec, tank, unholy 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 specMain raid spec: Blood 54-8-10
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. December 9th, 2009 | 32 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: 3.3, blood, heroic, raid, spec, tank, threat 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 November 11th, 2009 | 18 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose spec | Tags: blood, frost, leadership, lego, tank, tps, unholy, warrior A poster on dk.info was wondering about this hybrid spec, probably best called Dreadplate Blood, 21/41/5. It takes a lot of Frost talents, but then goes into blood for some nice survival options (rune tap and Vot3W). I was curious to see how it stacked up in threat, because in theory it should be fairly weak. Simulation confirms Dreadplate Blood is low in threat:
October 25th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.22, blood, dreadplate, frost, hybrid, kahorie, Simulation, spec, tank, unholy Blood tanks have so many variations in spec. You can grab talents to emphasise raid buffs or single-target threat or AOE threat. There’s even Will of the Necropolis, which is like a Plan B talent I like, but some others don’t. I thought to help people understand the choices, I’d try a diagram. If you take my 54-8-9 blood spec from my ‘3.2 tank specs’ post‘ as the starting point, you can shift a few talents about as shown October 13th, 2009 | 25 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.22, blood, spec, tank I’ve updated all key posts (including my main post) on the three DK tank talents for 3.2.2. You can refer to my 3.22 index post to find them all. In 3.22, glyphed bone shield will have eight charges over two minutes, whereas in 3.2 it has six. I really like that change. Update: patch 3.22 is downloading for me for USA server now. This index post helps readers find my posts on the 3.22 changes for DK tanking. I had it stickied to front page for a while. Find everything else on pwnwear through my new index September 12th, 2009 | 4 comments |
From: News discussion | Tags: 3.22, blood, frost, ptr, tank, unholy 3.22 is now live, check my index post. My tank builds and levelling specs have been updated. These changes mean:
Sept 12 update:
September 10th, 2009 | 5 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, News discussion | Tags: 3.22, blood, frost, obliterate, tank, unholy Dec 18th: updated for 3.3, using latest calculations from the simulator, and adjusted for ICC avoidance aura. Jan 4th: dual-wield frost updated. DPS Death Knights are really into Equivalance Points (“EP”) to help them decide between one piece of gear and another. Since I’m a tank, DPS is TPS and it’s not the most important thing. I usually have enough threat. That said, it can be useful to understand which stats are going to contribute more to threat if September 8th, 2009 | 8 comments |
From: Gear and stats, choose equipment | Tags: 3.22, blood, ep, equivalence points, frost, gear, kahorie, Simulation, stats, tank, tps, unholy, weapons Some news and posts that caught my eye this morning. A solid article on the history of Warcraft from IGN. Satorri has written an epic essay on blood tanking. Plus Cold Comfort is producing more great articles on leadership and WoW. ps. I enabled user-ratings for these posts and for comments on my site. I’m also going to do a few polls (first one is on guild income, in the sidebar). Hi all, I had a few readers tell me they had no troubles as Blood tank heroics, so I went and tested it more thoroughly. Result is I’ve changed my view, and now think it’s quite viable. I’ve updated this post and include a screenshot with the corpse explosion damage, which is one of the two key things you need for it to work. Frost or Unholy still beat it hands-down, but Blood doesn’t suck. I even succeeded in August 13th, 2009 | Leave a comment |
From: General chat, Heroic 5-mans | Tags: blood, heroics, spec Verified for 3.22 and 3.3. See my 3.3 Blood spec page. 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 choices. Choosing a blood spec can give you an anxiety disorder. My previous post on tank specs gave this one spec as a maintank template for 25-mans. Here are some alternatives:
I also have a diagram showing where talents can be moved.
Attack speed reductionThe specs keep Improved Icy Touch (giving 20% melee and ranged attack speed reduction) since it can be applied so easily by a DK. I put it even on a ‘threat oriented’ spec, becauses it reduces incoming damage and that’s more important than tps. Read on why this is important, plus about corpse explosion in heroics. August 11th, 2009 | 21 comments |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: 3.22, blood, heroics, Necrosis, raid, Rune Strike, Rune Tap, spec, tank Overview of blood, unholy and frost recommended tank specs. August 6th, 2009 | 42 comments - (Visit our forum to comment) |
From: Death Knight tanking specifically, Out of date posts | Tags: blood, frost, HB, heroics, kahorie, raid, Simulation, spec, tank, unholy |
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