SwagVault MMO Blog

Death Knight Tanking

November 19, 2008 – 3:52 am
Posted by: gmaxwell

Welcome to the first post-Wrath installment of Lichborne, the weekly Death Knight column. Join Daniel Whitcomb on the bleeding edge of a new and untried class.

So Wrath is upon us, and we can finally start leveling our Death Knights on the live servers. That’s right, this time it’s for keeps. I’m pretty excited about that. One thing, though, that I haven’t gotten to do yet on live servers is tank a dungeon. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that 98% of the people leveling through Outland right now are Death Knights, so finding a healer is a bit difficult. Still, I did my fair share of tanking on Beta servers, and I played a Druid tank for years, and I’m figuring I’ll do my fair share of tanking again at 80. Thus, I decided that this week is the perfect time to start getting ready to tank, even if Utgarde may be the first instance most Death Knights will get a group for.

Let’s get down to the basics:

Preparing to Tank

First, If you haven’t read Allison’s Open Letter to Death Knight Tanks, you should now. There are some very solid basic rules about pulling and keeping aggro that any serious tank should be familiar with. Once you’re back from that, we’ll continue.

The first thing to wrap your mind around is that every tree can tank, at least to the 5-man Heroic level. Blood, Unholy, and Frost are all viable choices to stand up against a big bad boss or a group of elite mooks. That said, you still need to specialize if you’re serious about tanking. Essentially, each tree has some solid early tree tanking talents, such as Blade Barrier, Anticipation, and Toughness, which almost every build should probably pick up. Then, the tree you specialize in has late tree talents such as Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield, and Unbreakable Armor.

The final thing you need to consider is your gear. As awesome as it looks, the newbie Death Knight quest gear is not for tanking. You need stuff with more AC, more Stamina, and maybe a bit of defense before you can get seriously about tanking. Your healers will thank you, and your repair bill will thank you.

You can start gathering tanking greens as early as Hellfire Peninsula, with quest rewards such as Flintlocke’s Piloting Pants and the Underworld Helm. Of course, by the time you’re ready to tank Utgarde, you’ll hopefully have found more solid gear. I myself saved a selection of “Of The Champion” greens from my pre-BC dailies, and there should be a few good solid tanking quest rewards from Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra you can grab, such as the Blacksoul Protector, Amberplate Leggings, the Rigid Tuskring, or the Cragthumper.

And yes, I’m still recommending that you grab a 2-handed weapon for tanking, no matter how tempting it might be to grab a Sword of Heartwrenching Slaughter and a Blade of the Empty Void. Any extra defense or parry skills you pick up will still be negated by the extra attacks the mobs get in when they parry you.

Admittedly, it’s going to be hard to compete for a tank slot against old tank characters who have had time to build up a set of tier 6 tanking armor that breaks 20k health and already have enough defense to make them uncrittable. Still, you should be able to find enough odds and ends that you can pull through a dungeon and not be too much of a pain to heal.

So once you have a good set of high-stamina, high-AC tanking gear, and once you’ve learned how to pull, where do you go from there? Let’s look at Death Knight tanking in action, then check out a few talent builds.

Using your Skills and Talents

So once you’re in a dungeon, how do you handle tanking? First of all, make sure you’re using Frost Presence. Not only is the extra armor helpful, but the threat boost is pretty much required to tank effectively. After all, your only specific “high threat” ability is Death and Decay, and your taunts have relatively restrictive cooldowns. You’ll be putting out the damage to try to stay on top of things, and you’ll need that extra threat.

So as you might expect, your basic damage rotation in tank mode is probably not going to be too different from DPS mode. In the most basic, you’ll be gathering a bunch of trash mobs, throwing out Death and Decay, apply Frost Fever and Blood Plague, and use Pestilence and Blood Boil to spread the damage love around, adding in runic power dumps where needed and finishing things up with an Obliterate or its talented equivalent.

Of course, you’ll want to keep on top of threat, and when a monster gets loose and goes for the healer, be able to make a quick judgment as whether to use Dark Command or Death Grip. While Death Grip is nice in that it will pull the mob to you, it also isn’t a true taunt. Once those 3 seconds are up, the mob will go back to attacking whoever is on the top of its threat list. If that isn’t you, you’re back to square one, threatwise. Dark Command, on the other hand, will put you right back at the top of the mob’s aggro list.

The other thing to manage as a Death Knight skill user is your triggered defensive skills. Every Death Knight will have Icebound Fortitude and Anti-Magic Shell. Frost Death Knights will have Lichborne and Unbreakable Armor, Unholy Death Knights will have Bone Shield, and Blood Death Knights will have Vampiric Blood.

Essentially, you probably aren’t going to get away with spamming the defensive key. That means you have to get a feel for when you’re going to see the damage spikes and learn to save your abilities for those. If you know your target enrages, perhaps save at least one of your triggered skills for an enrage. You should also make yourself familiar with Empower Rune Weapon. If your defensive abilities are on cooldown at a crucial moment, being able to use Empower Rune Weapon to refresh them could save your group a wipe. With Anti-Magic Shell, you’ll need to watch the enemy’s spellbar like a hawk, activating Anti-Magic Shell only just as the spell has finished casting to make sure it’s up to absorb the damage.

Talented TankingNow that we have a general idea of how to prepare to tank and what you do once you’re in a group, let’s look at some more specific tanking builds. You may notice that most of my builds try to grab Virulence on the second tier of Unholy. This is because, especially if AE tanking, you’ll be casting a lot of spell-like effects. I find having that extra +hit is imminently helpful in making sure I do my damage and grab my threat. Likewise, Blade Barrier finds its way into all my tanking builds. 10% parry on a first tier talent definitely isn’t too shabby, but you have to spend the blood runes to activate it, whether that be a couple Blood Strikes on a single target, or a Pestilence/Blood Boil combo for an AE attack.

 

Tanking Talents: FrostFrost ends up being a tree with high mitigation and lots of very nice defensive tools. Acclimation and Frost Aura will provide excellent anti-magic support. Lichborne and Unbreakable Armor give you some extra buttons to push to weather the real storms, while Guile of Gorefiend also provides a nice buff to the baseline Icebound Fortitude for even more protection. Howling Blast and Hungering Cold should work their way into your damage rotation, bringing the freezing power that should keep the mobs glued to you.

 

Here’s a level 80 build for Frost, while this 70 build should get you through a few Nexus or Utgarde Keep runs if you so desire.Unholy’s advantages come in the form of Bone Shield and Anti-Magic Shell, as well as a whole plethora of extra AE skills such as Wandering Plague, Desecration, and Unholy Blight that should allow you to keep aggro in AE situations almost without trying. If you don’t mind essentially wasting an extra 5 points in Frost, Lichborne is also a good compliment to an Unholy tank build to fill in the gaps when Bone Shield is down.

Tanking Talents: Unholy

 

A level 80 build might look something like this, while a level 70 build could work out like this.

Tanking Talents: Blood

Blood actually doesn’t have quite as many unique bells and whistles for tanking as the other two trees, it seems, or rather, the form they take is a bit more passive. Spell Deflection, Will of the Necropolis, and Blade Barrier both provide nice, easy to trigger random bonuses that should go off often enough that you won’t feel like winning a battle is luck based.

As far as triggered things go, Rune Tap and Mark of Blood will probably start feeling a bit low powered on boss battles, but Vampiric Blood should still hold up. On aggro holding, though, you’re essentially on your own with the baseline talents, although they should be enough in theory. Grabbing Morbidity from the Unholy Tree should definitely help there.

Here’s a Blood build at level 80 that grabs Lichborne from the Frost tree for some extra protection, and here’s a slimmed down level 70 version for attacking Utgarde.

Go forth and Conquer

As always, my Death Knight advice comes with a disclaimer: We’re still working on it. We need years to catch up to other classes in terms of knowing what we can do and what talents work best for us. It may be that once we’ve had some time in the upper raid content, we’ll understand better what talents really do work for raiding, or what type of weapon is best for raid tanking, for small group tanking, and so on and so forth. Until then, welcome to the frontier, pioneers. We’re charged with making sure the great tank shortage of Burning Crusade is not repeated, and so far, it looks like we’ll be able to pitch in and do our part.