WotLK Looking for Blood DK Tanking Guide (PVE)

[Khreesteinmi]

I know there's an existing tanking guide here somewhere. Can someone link it to me the complete guide for Tank DK .
I'm pretty new in using DK and i want to know the best talent build , glyphs, stats and caps , rotaion , macros (if any) and enchants. Thanks in advance.

[taralej]

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....ighlight=Guide

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....d-gt-by-Kiryuu

There are several variations of Blood tanking, so it basically depends on what you want, really. Glyphs are Rune Strike, Vampiric Blood and Dark Command. Glyph of Death Strike is also a nice aggro glyph comparable to Rune Strike when you use Death Strike exclusively without Heart Strike. Glyph of Dark Command can be skipped, but I do not advise you to do that. This is what I find the best Blood tanking spec, but I can name several people on these forums that will jump on the disagreement train immediately, so I'll explain why. I've played around with several different builds - full-Blood, Blood/Frost, Blood/Unholy - and I've come to the conclusion that this is the most balanced build, which benefits most from Blood's tanking philosophy.

Subversion and Butchery are purely DPS talents. 3 talent points for just 9% crit on your Heart Strike? No, thanks. Butchery is the weakest RP-generating talent for DKs and even so, you don't need that extra RP for anything. Scent of Blood is unnecessary as you don't use RP for anything else than Rune Strike, maybe one Death Coil every 2 rune cycles. I see a lot of people with SoB and I just have no idea why... Spell Deflection doesn't work vs boss spells. Vendetta is a leveling/PvP talent. Bloodworms don't work on the old realms and even if they did it's a horrible talent. Not as horrible as Improved Blood Presence though - this talent has literally no use for anything in the game. Sudden Doom is kinda decent, especially when you keep in mind that the "cleave" from Heart Strike can also proc it, but it's on the low end when it comes to threat talents in the Blood tree. Dancing Rune Weapon is an entity of its own and as such it will generate absolutely no aggro for you - only damage: this makes the talent useless from a tank point of view.

So why deep Blood instead of Blood/Frost? - Because it offers far more threat through Heart Strike, Might of Mograine, and Blood Gorged than Icy Talons' 20% haste. Sure, Rune Strike is your biggest TPS, but does that make Icy Talons better than a vastly improved Blood Strike, a flat 10% ArPen and 10% damage increase, and a 45% crit modifier? Is this really worth it only for an extra 3% miss from Frigid Dreadplate? No, sir. Also, if you decide to pick Blood/Frost, you'll have to drop Morbidity and Epidemic. Good luck tanking VDW or off-tanking LK without Morbidity. Not having Epidemic will make your diseases drop before the 2nd rune cycle is over, gimping your final Heart Strikes' damage or if you wanna use Death Strike - not allowing it to heal. You don't want that.

OK, so then why not Blood/Unholy? - Because You need to put 8 points into Toughness and Improved Icy Touch anyway. You won't be able to reach very deep in Unholy like that...

You can go hybrid and succeed just fine, and people will come to this thread soon enough claiming this. Like, "don't use Heart Strike because it's a DPS spell, don't pick Death Rune Mastery because you only use Death Strike, don't pick Mark of Blood because it's bad", bla-bla and other things like that from people who don't really find the value in those talents/abilities. But if you want to be a real Blood tank - follow my guidance.

Starting off with stats, as Blood there are only two stats that are important for you and these are the two stats which comprise EHP (or Effective Health Points). EHP is the amount of damage you can take before dying. EHP is a sum of your HEALTH, ARMOR, and RESISTANCE. (NB! - As most of the damage you take as a tank is physical and for the rare occasions of magic damage you can use Anti-Magic Shell, Resistance is generally not a stat which you're aiming for. Exceptions can be Sapphiron, Toravon, and Sindragosa, for which Frost Resistance gear can be used, although not necessary). Let's say you have 40k HP unbuffed and 65% physical damage reduction from armor. This means that you roughly have 66k EHP vs physical attacks. Now let's enter ICC. Your 40k HP is now 52k and your EHP is now 85.8k. We can go further by adding buffs, Will of the Necropolis, Vampiric Blood, your %maxHP heals from Rune Tap and Death Strike, Devotion Aura/Stoneskin Totem and more, but I think you can see why EHP is such a big deal now...

So what is the deal with EHP really? - EHP-tanking is one of the two ways of approaching tanking, the other one being Avoidance-tanking. Before WotLK, tanks were focusing mainly on avoidance - the reasons being bosses hitting too damn hard, and Crushing Blows. As you may know, a Crushing Blow is a hit for increased damage which a >+3lvls NPC can land on you instead of a normal hit. Reaching the def cap doesn't mean you won't get a Crushing Blow, so in order to avoid these, tanks had to gear for the so-called "unhittable" cap, or 104.6% avoidance (if memory serves). Warriors and Paladins would do this via block mainly (blocked attacks cannot be Crushing Blows), Druids couldn't reach this but they compensated with enormous HP and armor (EHP). EHP-tanking did exist before WotLK too, but it was simply losing grounds to Avoidance-tanking due to Crushing Blows "crushing" tanks. The point of EHP-tanking is surviving long enough for your healers to get you back up and that was just not very possible before WotLK. When WotLK came out, Crushing Blows by bosses were removed. Furthermore, avoidance was very scarce on tanking gear. Avoidance-tanking has one very big flaw when compared to EHP-tanking - as an avoidance-oriented tank, you generally cannot take 2-3 hits in a row without dying. So with the low avoidance gear on WotLK, Avoidance-tanking was ineffective on fights such as Patchwerk, Maexxna or Loatheb, where there are periods of time (all the time on Patchwerk) when you need to survive a massive damage spike. As an avoidance tank, once Maexxna web-wrapped you, you were dead; if Loatheb would get several lucky hits on you while you have the 0% healing aura, you would die; if your avoidance fails you for just 2-3 seconds on Patchwerk - you, the other tank, or random MDPS would die. All of these are pretty bad and we're not talking about just one "situational" fight or something like that. Avoidance-tanking was just not that good anymore.

Caps - When it comes to caps, there is only one cap which matters to you as a Blood tank and that's having 540 Defense. Everything else should be focused on increasing your EHP - stamina and armor. The 8% hit for special abilities (all of your X Strikes and Obliterate) and the 21 expertise are also worth mentioning as main aggro stats.

Gem & enchant for stamina, only stick to the socket bonus if it's stamina and if it requires only one non-blue gem.

Gearing & trinkets - Try to get trinkets that are focused on EHP rather than on avoidance. One of my favorites, which can stay with you well until ICC, is The Black Heart. This is pretty much the perfect EHP trinket in the game - it is sad that it is only 200ilvl though and other trinkets out-scale it. When it comes to gear, focus again on armor (the pieces with extra "green" armor are a perfect example) and on stamina.

Rotation - Now, here's the part where most people will disagree with me. The reason I use Death Rune Mastery and others don't. The reason I don't use Scent of Blood while others have it. The reason my talent build looks like this when other people blindly go for "better tanking talents", or so they think. Let's start with DRM. Why even bother picking it when you're gonna use your FFUU runes for Death Strike, right? Two reasons - first, because the Death Runes will allow you to use your other abilities (Rune Tap, Mark of Blood, Vampiric Blood) without breaking your rotation, and second, because this also allows a far more liberal use of Heart Strike (for more single-target TPS, when you don't need the healing) and Blood Boil (for more AoE threat). Bloody Strikes and Might of Mograine both boost Heart Strike and Blood Boil significantly, making them a favorable aggro choice. Two Heart Strikes generate more threat than a single Death Strike, simply put. Regarding Scent of Blood, while using Heart Strike and Blood Boil as fillers you simply won't have enough free GCDs to use Death Coil, first of all. As I mentioned before, maybe once every two rune cycles. Second, even if you're favoring Death Coil (talented 3/3 Sudden Doom, 3/3 Morbidity and Glyph of Dark Death), the spell still can't compete with Rune Strike. And seriously, what else are you going to use your RP for as Blood? So that's why SoB is an unnecessary talent.

Now, when it comes to macros as a DK, I can't really recall using any on mine. Keep your Blood Tap, Rune Tap, and Rune Strike bound close by and if you really really want macros so bad, you can make a macro for Blood Tap > Vampiric Blood > Runic Health Potion > Empower Rune Weapon > Rune Tap > Raise Dead > Death Pact > Death Strike. This will pretty much bring you from 1% to almost full HP.

I think that's it for now. I know my post got a bit messy, so if you have any further questions - just ask. :)

[angrylol]

I use this build, don't know if it good with lower gear, tough I don't recall any problems gearing up.
I use Glyphs of Disease, Vampiric Blood and Dark Command.
Obviously refresh diseases with Pestilence, use Death Strike as reactive heal after you take damage, but don't just stand there not using it when you don't take damage, runic power, threat generation is important(because you will use Icy Touch once/few times per combat, more on adds and stuff), point is to have Death Strike or Rune Tap ready to use after you take damage or healers have to move/dispel/etc.
1/3 in Scent of Blood is good in case you don't have runic power for Rune Strike, so your white hit will generate some. This talent will stack to 3 even with 1/3 because you will trigger it rarely with white hit(your whites will be Rune Strikes). Something like insurance talent.

About macros, I use very universal and wide use "modifier" macros, that is "Spell one" on just pressing it and "Spell two" Shift+pressing it.

/cast [nomod:shift] Anti-Magic Shell
/use [mod:shift] Sindragosa's Flawless Fang
#showtooltip

/cast [nomod:shift] icebound fortitude
/cast [mod:shift] blood tap
#showtooltip

/cast [nomod:shift] dark command
/cast [mod:shift] death grip

note: you can use other keys as modifier; "#showtooltip" is cosmetic, so you see spell when mouse over macro.
With these macros you can put all spells easy to reach, not 6,7,8,9,u,h etc buttons that you have to break fingers to reach.

Tanked all start-to end game content with this build without problems, more like felt immortal mofo.

Edit: I don't know how exactly talent Spell Deflection works and I'm too lazy to catch it proc or not proc, so you can use those 3 points in Bloody Strikes, bit more threat on Blood Strike and bit more AoE threat with Blood Boil, tough its usefulness is quite questionable. Well whatever, that us up for theorycrafting or something, I don't sweat it.

Edit II: I use 289 hit rating(11% spell hit chance) and Dark Command Glyph is still worth it as you will not have hit chance debuff on adds/opening with Icy Touch. As for expertise get AT LEAST that usual melee cap, but I don't feel a bit bad if its over cap, because Parried Death Strike in critical moment can mean wipe.

[taralej]

Yeah, so just to add to what angrylol said, using Death Strike reactively is key to increasing your effectiveness as Blood. While Frost has Acclimation and Frigid Dreadplate, and Unholy has Magic Suppression and Bone Shield, Blood's way of tackling tank damage is the self-heals. So basically if you're just spamming Death Strike with no regard to incoming damage, you're just a meat shield like a bear tank, but a lot weaker. You have to make optimal use of your self-heals to stand out as an accomplished Blood tank, saving the healers effort and mana.

So as you can see his build is the one with Icy Talons. He mentioned that if you're full HP this doesn't mean you shouldn't use abilities and he's right - you need to keep generating RP for your Rune Strike. In the perfect scenario all of your auto-attacks will be replaced with Rune Strike. So with my build you basically do that by using 2x Heart Strike when your HP is full and you don't need Death Strike. This ends up with a 2x10 RP with 2xHS instead of 1x15 with 1xDS, also resulting in higher TPS. I also don't use Pestilence for refreshing, but instead opt for IT+PS, again gaining 2x10 RP and a lot of threat especially from IT, over 1x10 with no threat from Pestilence. Worth noting is that his method of using Pestilence will allow more Death Strikes.

As I said in my post, different methods bring different results so it's up to what you want and what you think you need as a tank - more avoidance, more survivability, more selfheals, or more threat.

[Khreesteinmi]

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....ighlight=Guide

http://forum.warmane.com/showthread....d-gt-by-Kiryuu

There are several variations of Blood tanking, so it basically depends on what you want, really. Glyphs are Rune Strike, Vampiric Blood and Dark Command. Glyph of Death Strike is also a nice aggro glyph comparable to Rune Strike when you use Death Strike exclusively without Heart Strike. Glyph of Dark Command can be skipped, but I do not advise you to do that. This is what I find the best Blood tanking spec, but I can name several people on these forums that will jump on the disagreement train immediately, so I'll explain why. I've played around with several different builds - full-Blood, Blood/Frost, Blood/Unholy - and I've come to the conclusion that this is the most balanced build, which benefits most from Blood's tanking philosophy.

Subversion and Butchery are purely DPS talents. 3 talent points for just 9% crit on your Heart Strike? No, thanks. Butchery is the weakest RP-generating talent for DKs and even so, you don't need that extra RP for anything. Scent of Blood is unnecessary as you don't use RP for anything else than Rune Strike, maybe one Death Coil every 2 rune cycles. I see a lot of people with SoB and I just have no idea why... Spell Deflection doesn't work vs boss spells. Vendetta is a leveling/PvP talent. Bloodworms don't work on the old realms and even if they did it's a horrible talent. Not as horrible as Improved Blood Presence though - this talent has literally no use for anything in the game. Sudden Doom is kinda decent, especially when you keep in mind that the "cleave" from Heart Strike can also proc it, but it's on the low end when it comes to threat talents in the Blood tree. Dancing Rune Weapon is an entity of its own and as such it will generate absolutely no aggro for you - only damage: this makes the talent useless from a tank point of view.

So why deep Blood instead of Blood/Frost? - Because it offers far more threat through Heart Strike, Might of Mograine, and Blood Gorged than Icy Talons' 20% haste. Sure, Rune Strike is your biggest TPS, but does that make Icy Talons better than a vastly improved Blood Strike, a flat 10% ArPen and 10% damage increase, and a 45% crit modifier? Is this really worth it only for an extra 3% miss from Frigid Dreadplate? No, sir. Also, if you decide to pick Blood/Frost, you'll have to drop Morbidity and Epidemic. Good luck tanking VDW or off-tanking LK without Morbidity. Not having Epidemic will make your diseases drop before the 2nd rune cycle is over, gimping your final Heart Strikes' damage or if you wanna use Death Strike - not allowing it to heal. You don't want that.

OK, so then why not Blood/Unholy? - Because You need to put 8 points into Toughness and Improved Icy Touch anyway. You won't be able to reach very deep in Unholy like that...

You can go hybrid and succeed just fine, and people will come to this thread soon enough claiming this. Like, "don't use Heart Strike because it's a DPS spell, don't pick Death Rune Mastery because you only use Death Strike, don't pick Mark of Blood because it's bad", bla-bla and other things like that from people who don't really find the value in those talents/abilities. But if you want to be a real Blood tank - follow my guidance.

Starting off with stats, as Blood there are only two stats that are important for you and these are the two stats which comprise EHP (or Effective Health Points). EHP is the amount of damage you can take before dying. EHP is a sum of your HEALTH, ARMOR, and RESISTANCE. (NB! - As most of the damage you take as a tank is physical and for the rare occasions of magic damage you can use Anti-Magic Shell, Resistance is generally not a stat which you're aiming for. Exceptions can be Sapphiron, Toravon, and Sindragosa, for which Frost Resistance gear can be used, although not necessary). Let's say you have 40k HP unbuffed and 65% physical damage reduction from armor. This means that you roughly have 66k EHP vs physical attacks. Now let's enter ICC. Your 40k HP is now 52k and your EHP is now 85.8k. We can go further by adding buffs, Will of the Necropolis, Vampiric Blood, your %maxHP heals from Rune Tap and Death Strike, Devotion Aura/Stoneskin Totem and more, but I think you can see why EHP is such a big deal now...

So what is the deal with EHP really? - EHP-tanking is one of the two ways of approaching tanking, the other one being Avoidance-tanking. Before WotLK, tanks were focusing mainly on avoidance - the reasons being bosses hitting too damn hard, and Crushing Blows. As you may know, a Crushing Blow is a hit for increased damage which a >+3lvls NPC can land on you instead of a normal hit. Reaching the def cap doesn't mean you won't get a Crushing Blow, so in order to avoid these, tanks had to gear for the so-called "unhittable" cap, or 104.6% avoidance (if memory serves). Warriors and Paladins would do this via block mainly (blocked attacks cannot be Crushing Blows), Druids couldn't reach this but they compensated with enormous HP and armor (EHP). EHP-tanking did exist before WotLK too, but it was simply losing grounds to Avoidance-tanking due to Crushing Blows "crushing" tanks. The point of EHP-tanking is surviving long enough for your healers to get you back up and that was just not very possible before WotLK. When WotLK came out, Crushing Blows by bosses were removed. Furthermore, avoidance was very scarce on tanking gear. Avoidance-tanking has one very big flaw when compared to EHP-tanking - as an avoidance-oriented tank, you generally cannot take 2-3 hits in a row without dying. So with the low avoidance gear on WotLK, Avoidance-tanking was ineffective on fights such as Patchwerk, Maexxna or Loatheb, where there are periods of time (all the time on Patchwerk) when you need to survive a massive damage spike. As an avoidance tank, once Maexxna web-wrapped you, you were dead; if Loatheb would get several lucky hits on you while you have the 0% healing aura, you would die; if your avoidance fails you for just 2-3 seconds on Patchwerk - you, the other tank, or random MDPS would die. All of these are pretty bad and we're not talking about just one "situational" fight or something like that. Avoidance-tanking was just not that good anymore.

Caps - When it comes to caps, there is only one cap which matters to you as a Blood tank and that's having 540 Defense. Everything else should be focused on increasing your EHP - stamina and armor. The 8% hit for special abilities (all of your X Strikes and Obliterate) and the 21 expertise are also worth mentioning as main aggro stats.

Gem & enchant for stamina, only stick to the socket bonus if it's stamina and if it requires only one non-blue gem.

Gearing & trinkets - Try to get trinkets that are focused on EHP rather than on avoidance. One of my favorites, which can stay with you well until ICC, is The Black Heart. This is pretty much the perfect EHP trinket in the game - it is sad that it is only 200ilvl though and other trinkets out-scale it. When it comes to gear, focus again on armor (the pieces with extra "green" armor are a perfect example) and on stamina.

Rotation - Now, here's the part where most people will disagree with me. The reason I use Death Rune Mastery and others don't. The reason I don't use Scent of Blood while others have it. The reason my talent build looks like this when other people blindly go for "better tanking talents", or so they think. Let's start with DRM. Why even bother picking it when you're gonna use your FFUU runes for Death Strike, right? Two reasons - first, because the Death Runes will allow you to use your other abilities (Rune Tap, Mark of Blood, Vampiric Blood) without breaking your rotation, and second, because this also allows a far more liberal use of Heart Strike (for more single-target TPS, when you don't need the healing) and Blood Boil (for more AoE threat). Bloody Strikes and Might of Mograine both boost Heart Strike and Blood Boil significantly, making them a favorable aggro choice. Two Heart Strikes generate more threat than a single Death Strike, simply put. Regarding Scent of Blood, while using Heart Strike and Blood Boil as fillers you simply won't have enough free GCDs to use Death Coil, first of all. As I mentioned before, maybe once every two rune cycles. Second, even if you're favoring Death Coil (talented 3/3 Sudden Doom, 3/3 Morbidity and Glyph of Dark Death), the spell still can't compete with Rune Strike. And seriously, what else are you going to use your RP for as Blood? So that's why SoB is an unnecessary talent.

Now, when it comes to macros as a DK, I can't really recall using any on mine. Keep your Blood Tap, Rune Tap, and Rune Strike bound close by and if you really really want macros so bad, you can make a macro for Blood Tap > Vampiric Blood > Runic Health Potion > Empower Rune Weapon > Rune Tap > Raise Dead > Death Pact > Death Strike. This will pretty much bring you from 1% to almost full HP.

I think that's it for now. I know my post got a bit messy, so if you have any further questions - just ask. :)

Thanks for this . I'll take time to read this :)