Lemmings of the Light

Tanking as a Death Knight

First of all, you clicked on this link because you're curious about DK tanking. That's good. Even if you're not planning on playing one, i hope this post will give you some information about what to expect from a DK tank.

First of all like every other class the DK has 3 talent trees:

• Blood - giving some passive bonuses and some very nice self healing abilities.
• Frost - giving some great defensive capabilities and snaring abilities.
• Unholy - giving the DK a more powerful minion (the ghoul) and some nice AOE capabilities.

The good thing is, every tree can be used in either a DPS or a Tank spec so the DK can switch around fairly easily. This because every talent tree has a related presence (like a warrior stance or a paladin aura, but only for the DK himself) and can swith them anytime. Though you will still need to spec the right talents in order to be capable of DK tanking, this will obviously result in lower DPS when switching to that role.

The 3 presences are:

• Blood Presence: Increases damage done by 15% and heals the Death Knight by 2% of damage dealt. Only damage dealt to targets that grant experience or honor can trigger this heal.
• Frost Presence: Increases armor by 60%, increases health by 10%, reduces spell damage taken by 5%, and increases threat generated by 45%.
• Unholy Presence: Increases attack speed by 15%, increases movement speed by 15%, and reduces the global cooldown on all Death Knight abilities by 0.5 sec.

Like i said earlier, any talent tree is good for tanking although blood tanking might become a bit difficult once raiding. Most sites recommend a Frost build for raid tanking (single target, perhaps MT) or Unholy tanking (AOE tanking and spellcaster tanking, perhaps OT).

Death Knight 101:
To understand how DK tanking works you need to understand the basics of a DK. Unlike a warrior or a Paladin who use Rage and Mana for their abilities a DK has runes and runic power. Most of the abilities of the DK require either of these two. Runes are split up into 4 categories, Blood, Frost, Unholy and Death. Skills require you to use any combination of the first three, the death rune is a kind of wild card, it can be used instead of any other rune. Every rune has a 10 sec cooldown and the DK has 2 runes of every type except Death which he can only get with the help of talents. So the DK has 6 runes. This means he can't spam most abilities. If the rotation of the DK is bad, he can 'waste' his runes and do nothing but auto-attack for a couple of seconds. Luckily runes aren't the only things that a DK can use to fire off abilities. Some other abilites require Runic Power instead of Runes. Runic Power is acquired by using abilities, most abilites grant 10 runic power and the max a DK can have is 100. Both can be increased with talents. With runic power the DK can fire off some powerfull abilities like Summon Gargoyle for example. But again, with the wrong rotations, things can go horribly wrong with a DK tank.

Alright so far for the basics, now for the tanking:

Talents

First of all you need to prepare yourself for tanking, most talent trees offer some tanking talents early in the tree, such as Blade Barrier, Anticipation, and Toughness, which almost every DK tank should pick up. Deeper in each tree there are some more tanking talents which you should pick up if you go deep into that tree. These talents are Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor, and Bone Shield. I won't post entire specs here, because there are too many and there is a forum topic for that.

Gear
First of all one mayor important thing. Death Knights can't (or they refuse to, pick one) use shields! They rely on defense, parry and dodge to negate the incoming damage. This will result in the following: For example, we take a Warrior tank, thanks to all the plate armor and the shield he is using, he will get hit quite often but he will take less damage. So let's say he takes 50% damage 100% of the time. Of course this not entirely true, but for the sake of easy math let's just pretend . The Death Knight doesn't use a shield, he uses a two handed sword for tanking (yes, you can use 2 weapons, but you will get parried more often which results in more monster attacks!). So no shield but a huge sword (or axe or mace, but let's just say sword) and alot of parry and dodge. This means the DK will get hit 50% of the time for 100% of the damage. Of course these numbers aren't true, but what i mean to say is that the DK will get hit often less frequent, but when he does get hit, he will take more damage than the warrior. This means healers need to pay more attention to HP of the DK. Be aware of this!

So i covered the usage of a 2 handed weapon vs dual wielding 2 one handed weapons. If you don't believe me there are numerous sites that back that up. Of course i don't say you can't tank while dual wielding, i'm saying wielding a 2 hander is better.

Of course i can list alot of items here that qualify as good DK tanking items, but that would be a waste of space since we're not raiding yet. Instead just look for plate items that grant strength, agility and stamina and defense, parry and dodge. It is as simple as that. If you do want more information about DK tanking gear there are some nice sites with good information about this in the link section of the site (or soon will be because im still sorting them out). Or just go to: Death Knight easy to get pre Naxx tanking gear.

The tanking process
Right, now you've got the build and the gear, how do i use my skills to tank as good as possible?
First of all, make sure that whenever you tank, be in Frost Presence. If you're not you can wipe if you're party isn't overgeared and you're likely to loose aggro alot.

Your skill rotation will look alot like that when playing solo or when dps'ing. You're most likely to pull a bunch of mobs. You should start off with Death and Decay followed by applying your diseases on skull (Frost Fever and Blood Plague) and than use Pestilence and Blood Boil. This should get your aggro high enough on the mob(s). Of course you can throw in some runic power skills or some disease finishers like Obliterate if necessary.

Of course, pulls can go wrong and you can loose aggro to that trigger happy mage, warlock or moonkin . Are DK's helpless in this situation? No. They've got 2 skill to solve this problem: Dark Command and Death Grip. Which one should you use? Personally i favor Dark Command above Death Grip because the latter isn't a true taunt, so after the initial 3 seconds, if you haven't established any additional aggro on the runner, you could loose him again. Personally i think it's best to use Death Grip when pulling. For example you see a group of mobs and one of those mobs has a scary blue bar underneath his health. He must be a caster! I most situations this target is most likely to be skull. So how to pull him? Ofcourse you can use the line of sight trick, but you can also face pull the group and then use Death Grip on the caster just when you see him casting his first spell. You will get all melee on you and the caster will also be right in front of you. Win-win situation for the DK.

Of course tanking as a DK isn't only about using offensive skills. DK's also have defensive skills like Icebound fortitude and Anti-magic shell. Of course depending on your tree you will have one of the skills i mentioned in the talents part. The problem is, you can't spam these skills. They all have a cooldown. So you need to learn when to use them in a fight. Luckily most boss fights already have some tactics descriptions on the web so you probably can find out during what part of the fight you can use these abilities or if needed you can use them as an emergency button. And if all runes are on cooldown and you're out of options you can always hit Empore Rune Weapon to refresh the runes and generate some runic power.

For some more talent tree specific tanking info i would like to point out the following site

I hope this helps you tanking or understanding tanking as a DK!