T10 chest also provides you with 0 defense rating. Defense is a must at lower end gear imo.
Your job is not to mitigate damage but to control the situation to the best of your abilities while staying alive. You need to balance mitigation with threat and even DPS in some scenarios as well as healing on some encounters.
I made this guide keeping in mind that you will be raiding / doing dungeons with a lot of pick-up groups meaning that you cannot always fully rely on your healers / your tanking partner and/or your DPSes to do their job properly. As a tank you can do so much more than just make sure the mob is hitting your face instead of the healer's and that's the message i tried to deliver. A good tank can carry bad healers and DPSes by themselves in most situations. This guide was also made to obtain gear quickly so you keep having the feeling that you are progressing your character (which is one of the best feelings while playing this game for me) and that includes also working around the notorious addon Gearscore. Which most pugs use. So i sometimes give the worse choice in defensive capabilities but instead the choice that would boost your "gearscore" the most so you can get into higher end raids and keep progressing your character.
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Probably my viewpoint is not best at this, I don't even have "giearescuoore" addon and I join the pugs just for lols.
All I know for sure is
Carrying healers or whatever, that is very situational, you shouldn't base you gear or play around that. New DK tanks have to learn to recognize moments where they should self heal, where they shouldn't, when to use or not to use CD's. If you have gear and skills to adapt to such "bad healer" situation, that is very good, but new tanks should learn first things first - that is be a tank and let healers do their part.
It should look like this:
"oh, I will use vamp blood plus DS right after this "Breath" and heals will top me quick, Will reset stacks with AMS, next breath I will blood tap+rune tap+DS, and for next breath I will icebound because my stacks will be high by then, I still have trinket and AMS will be off CD when next thing comes" and so on and on, to create circle of CD's, DS using only when you NEED, not because you can, putting healers to sleep is never a good thing... damn if I could just self heal and not worry about threat, damn, I wouldn't even need healer on most bosses.
I don't know, just my thought on tanking... don't invest time and effort in unnecessary things.
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Hence i gravitate towards such a mentality more towards the end of the guide where i am certain that the people following my guide should be familiar with the base concepts of tanking. The first thing i suggested new tanks try was to go into The Nexus and start smashing through that place to the best of their capabilities, that was for a reason. Nexus might not seem like much but you can learn almost all the basics of tanking there (i listed most of them in the guide), you are there alone - so you're not ruining a dungeon group in any way. And being alone also means you don't get struck down by the community badmouthing you for your pace of tanking (newer tanks are usually slower). Honestly i have seen way too many tanks who had extremely high potentional get ruined by the community bashing on them for not being able to perfectly tank a heroic on their very first try making a lot of players quit their tanks and become feared of the role.
On a side note: A little story. I was basically in the same boat. When i first got to tank (in vanilla with a warrior) my guild master asked me to become our guild's new off-tank due to our current one receiving a baby so she couldn't continue tanking (yes our OT was a she). I would be so scared to log every day into WoW just because i knew i had no idea about tanking... but i ended up learning from my old guild master / main tank of the guild Enryuu. In my opinion one of the greatest tanks of all time. It's thanks to him that i am capable of tanking anything without the slightest fear of me failing and getting trash-talked for it. So in this guide, i guess, i try to be somewhat like him to try to motivate players to roll tanks. I would make a general tanking guide that would cover all classes but that guide would be too long so i tried to stick with one class and only the basics.
Back on topic though. Being able to carry your healers is not unneccessary. Even if it means working harder for your goals and you might fail at it and then feel bad for not being able to do it, when you manage to do it thought... it's the best feeling in the world, and that's a feeling that's essential to tanking to keep your mentality high.
Having a "ehh i'll tank and hope healers can heal me inb4 i get rekt" mentality will destroy your interest for tanking.
Having a "I'LL CARRY ALL THESE GUYS AND WE'LL FINALLY FINISH THIS RAID ALL OF US IMPROVING AND GETTING BETTER GEAR" mentality will keep your interest in tanking for way longer.
But i do see where your point of view comes from and i do agree to it to a certain extent. It's not good to overwhelm newer players and/or have too high expectations from them. After all they're still just learning.Edited: July 26, 2016
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Pretty nice guide for new players to blood tanking.
Although I don't agree completely on your defensive stats over threat stats, I think people have pointed it out enough.
The only thing that hit my eye was the parry gemming. One problem with parry is that it might cause parry haste. Also, the math has been done in the past that dodge scales much better, because parry receives huge diminishing returns. So imo a good gemming would be pure stamina for blue sockets, and stam+dodge in red sockets.
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Pretty good job with the guide. It is very good for players looking to gear their dks/even other tanks. Help with setting-up addons will also come in handy.
Parry hasting yourself isn't a big deal imho, it gives you basically just more threat which is not a bad thing. (well it might cause boss to parry haste also, but thats pretty low probability) Getting parried on the other hand may cause boss to parry haste (only dragon bosses fortunately - there is not that many of those)
+1
Gemming parry shows that you have no idea how icc debuff works - it takes flat 20% of dodge regardless of your chance (you go from 22% dodge to 2% and from 62% to 42%) dodge ratting just gives more avoidance than parry ratting, because of softer diminishing returns. That is especially true for a dk who gets big amounts of parry out of STR - that's why I would recommend getting 10 dodge + 15 stam (avoidance) or 10 agi + 15 stam gems in reds (EHP option).
I don't understand your choice of legs.. I would go either for set legs and hit head to have threat stats covered or armor legs to get more EHP. But that can be just a thing of preference.
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Legs are mainly a thing of preference. BiS lists are never set-in-stone and there are a bunch of setups that work, listing them all would be a waste of time as you mainly adjust your gear to your playstyle. If you never wanna miss a DS / IT you stack hit/exp. If you wanna be bulkier you go for parry/dodge > hit/exp. That's just me, so yeah you were spot on with the preference.
As i've already mentioned a lot earlier - i mainly made the gems/enchants/bis list with my own experience and my own preferences. At this point, honestly, most tanks should have an idea on how their class works and look for what best suits them. The lists there are just an example. Nothing more nothing less.
Thanks for the good feedback though, seems like the responses have been getting more and more constructive lately!
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Thanks for the feedback!
As i mentioned already - having a different opinion is okay (and i respect your opinion) but badmouthing someone for having a different opinion is not okay. It's always nice to see that other players play differently than me which means for me that players are actively seeking new ways of tanking / setting up their tanks instead of google "mlg420noscope tank build" and roll with the first talent tree.
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I thought that your preference in parry/dodge is based on idea that parry > dodge in icc, which is simply not true. Dodge gives almost always (and for dk always) more avoidance than parry (including with icc debuff). - It doesn't cope with your intentions that I understand from rest of the guide - you value getting more avoidance a lot, why do you opt for less when it comes to gems?
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Honestly i have no idea. I feel like i'm taking less overall damage when i use parry gems over dodge gems. I've tanked a 10n alt run for my fellow guildies (a few months ago) quite a lot and i used to have dodge gems > parry gems for quite a while, when i switched over to parry gems i usually had like 50k less damage taken at the end of a fight on recount. It might be because it was 10n and we mostly bursted through the bosses with some overgeared people but i'm not 100% sure on that. That's the main reason i never switched back to dodge.
Edited: July 27, 2016
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you poeple are tripping out in technicalities. blood dk tanks i have seen in icc are full of stamina **** other thing, other stats come from the items and enchants, gems is full stamina everywhere. maybe for icc heroic will be slighty different but at the end of the day is all about the stamina, the other stats come alone.
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Wind of Northrend
My god... where do you guys even dig these kind of posts from???
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