Jan 10

Welcome to Part 4 of the “So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight” series. Today we will talk about death knight tanking.
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Death Knight Tanking

Tanking, at its most basic, has a basic goal (well, really two equally important goals combined into one): hold aggro of the mob(s) while staying alive. Like DPSing, these goals can be accomplished with an appropriate spec, gear, rotation, and some amount of skill.

Gear and Attributes

As mentioned earlier, tanking death knights will want to focus on several attributes.

• Defense Rating (until capped at 689, or 540 defense skill)
• Stamina, Armor, Dodge (and agility), and Parry (and strength)
• “DPS focused” attributes (for threat)

One thing to keep closely in mind while gearing up is that death knights do not use a shield. They are designed to tank with a two-handed weapon, and a higher-than-average amount of avoidance. For this reason, you will want to avoid items with stats such as block rating and block value, and concentrate instead on parry or dodge. Note that strength increases parry indirectly, as does agility dodge, and with the baseline death knight ability Forceful Deflection, death knights get extra parry from strength (this is strength calculated after talents and buffs, so it is very nice).

Dual-Wield Tanking

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not a fan of dual-wield tanking. A lot of people out there are bound and determined to make it work, and that’s fine, but don’t send me emails asking my opinion, because my outright answer will be that that’s not how the class was designed. Blue posters have gone so far as to literally say that they want both dual-wielding and two-handed weapon DPS specs to be viable, but are not designing the class to effectively tank by dual-wielding.

The main reason for this is the fact that, while dual-wielding, your hit chance goes through the floor. You have a much harder time hitting a boss mob, and many mobs have an increased swing speed after parrying an attack, meaning you take more damage more often. Making up your miss chance with hit rating means you’re spending your item points budget on hit rating instead of mitigation/avoidance attributes.

However, this topic leads us to our next point:

Two-Handed Tanking Weapons

Basically, there are none. By that, I mean there are no two-handed weapons in the game that focus on defense rating and stamina, except for this green quest reward. While it may be a decent weapon to hold you over until you can reach uncrittable by other armor alone, it will not hold out in the long run. Also keep in mind we can’t use a shield, making it even more difficult to reach the defense cap. These are things you should keep in mind while gearing up. (Being able to dual-wield two tanking weapons, which are all one-handed, is the primary reason for the idea of dual-wielding tanking in the first place.) In the meantime, try to find a nice weapon with good damage for threat, and as much stamina and other “tank-like attributes” as you can. PvP weapons may end up looking very good for death knight tanks, since resilience can effectively take the place of some defense rating for purposes of uncrittability.

Patch 3.0.8 was going to introduce two two-handed tanking weapons, but they were removed during the PTR testing phase.

Buff Food

As usual, there is some great buff food out there for tanks. The two I recommend are:

• Strength (for parry) and Stamina Food: Dragonfin Filet
• Expertise and Stamina Food: Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak (who came up with that recipe?)

Frost Presence and Threat

Don’t be a n00b–remember to switch into your high-threat, high-mitigation, high-health Frost Presence before you start tanking! (I only say it that way because I tanked a few group quests in Unholy Presence…)

It should be noted that death knights have only two abilities that deal bonus threat–that is, threat above and beyond the normal threat done by damage. These abilities are Death and Decay and Rune Strike. So, the majority of your threat will come from high-damage abilities, which is then amplified by the Frost Presence threat modifier of 45%.

Rune Strike is an ability that only “lights up” after you dodge or parry an attack. It does a high amount of damage, and also, as mentioned, extra threat. However, once patch 3.0.8 hits, this spell will do less damage and more threat, as it was created as a tanking tool, and instead PvP death knights are using it to mow down dual-wielding classes in PvP.

Rune Strike is a “next melee” ability, meaning once you use the ability, your next regular white attack will be replaced with the Rune Strike.

Bonus Mitigation

Death knights have a nice ability to hit to keep the damage down a bit (and even more depending on talent spec! Again, more on those later). Icebound Fortitude is the spell to which I am referring. After patch 3.0.8, this ability will be weaker but scale with defense skill, making it more like a Shield Wall for death knight tanks and less like a Divine Shield in PvP.

Get Over Here!

In addition to a normal taunt, death knights have an ability called Death Grip. It basically pulls a mob to you (note that most boss type mobs are immune!) and forces it to attack you for three seconds, much like a warrior’s Mocking Blow. Note that this is not a taunt! After the three seconds are up, the mob will go right back to the character with the highest threat against it.

Be careful with death grip. Don’t use it to pull all the time just because it’s fun; remember, if you pull a mob to you, it will immediately start hitting you in the face, causing the healer to have to heal you before you can build threat on the other mobs in the pull–making for an unhappy, and quite possibly dead, healer. Pull with Icy Touch or some other ranged attack in these cases.

There are, however, some advanced tactics you can use with Death Grip, especially if you have a good, non-laggy Internet connection. One I use with one of my favorite mages is to select skull, queue up Death and Decay (see below) and target it, but don’t cast it yet. The mage will start polymorphing his target, and just as he starts I’ll click to cast Death and Decay and and Death Grip the primary mob to me before the polymorph lands. Now, the mob is sheeped in place, my primary target is hitting me (where I can build threat and prepare to spread diseases), and although the healer is forced to heal me, all the mobs have to run through my Death and Decay to get to him or her, so I’ll get aggro anyway.

Be careful, as if you have casters in your group of mobs, this may not work 100%, but you can pick and choose which mobs to death grip and crowd control for best results.

Oh No!

Death knights receive a very fun “Oh crap!” button at level 80: Army of the Dead. While fully channeling the spell, this ability summons several non-controllable ghouls that will, at its most basic, run amok and taunt things. This can be a great way to buy time for your party to battle rez and heal up, etc.

Tanking Rotations

Tanking rotations, like DPS rotations, depend heavily on talent spec, so see the related articles later in the series for more details.

Let’s take a look at a typical multi-mob pull. This also works very well for an AoE DPS rotation (just make sure you’re not in frost presence, and hold off on your high threat abilities until the tank has aggro).

1. Death knights have only two “high amount of threat” abilities, and one of them is Death and Decay. This ability is a targeted AoE attack, and is often compared to a paladin’s consecration. You will often open with this ability, either right away, or after using another pulling ability. Let’s start out with DnD (notice its expensive 3-rune cost):

(Also, if for a split second you thought I was talking about the other DnD… well, you’re as geeky as me!)

2. On a pull with multiple mobs, such as this one, you will want to get your diseases down quickly with Icy Touch and Plague Strike (costing a frost and an unholy)…

…and then spread them around with Pestilence (one blood), once all mobs are in range (Glyph of Pestilence helps here):

3. To help build even more AoE threat, assuming health is not an issue, I usually use Blood Tap here to get an instant any-purpose rune (remember, death runes count as any rune you need)…

… and hit Blood Boil to explode my diseases on every mob in range (should be all of them!)

(Note that your death rune will immediately switch back to a blood rune.)

4. If you have the runic power, you can use a runic power dump, such as Death Coil, to build threat here. Remember to keep looking for your Rune Strike!

5. From this point out, you can follow the steps outlined in the DPS article and use one of your double-rune abilities:

6. Before long your remaining unholy rune will be cooled, and you can use your double rune ability again.

Related posts:

1. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
2. Tanking as an Unholy Death Knight
3. Two Runes Enter: Stoneskin Gargoyle vs. Swordshattering
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: DPS
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Frost Tree