Death Knights

Some pages I've spent some time on watching, used 2 or 3 of their dps / tanking / pvp specs before.

Death Knight Builds

Also spent some time on this page

Death Knight Info


Will update more soon.

/zol

erase.

What i have researched about dk tanking:

WowHead wrote:

Defense - 540 to become uncrittable to raid bosses and below. It generally takes 5 defense rating to equal 1 defense skill (actually 4.9ish but you can't go wrong by overestimating). You can go above this number, but at this point Stamina should have greater weight and there is a debate whether it would be better to start stacking avoidance stats instead.

Stamina - The more health you have the more of a cushion your healer will have to heal you which makes for happy healers.

Dodge - Dodge is an avoidance stat. All it does is increase the chance your opponent won't hit you. No reset swing timers or anything. You may find that most tanking equipment adds dodge since it is a universal tanking stat to all classes. It also gives the most avoidance per rating of all the stats.

Expertise - The more expertise you have the less likely your attacks will be parried or dodged. 6.5% is what is needed to avoid dodges from raid bosses while what is needed to avoid parries is much higher at 15%. While the 15% mark may be rather difficult to attain, getting near 6.5% to push dodges off the table may not be easy at first, but as you progress through content it becomes easier to reach and your threat generation will be better because of it.

Hit Rating - You want to be able to hit your opponent with your melee attacks and spells. 8% is the melee hit goal with a two-handed weapon which you should strive for as a tank and is relatively easy to reach.

Strength - Not only does strength increase your AP, Death Knights also get a bonus to their parry based upon strength. While strength is needed to increase out threat output, almost all of our gear will have a good amount of strength on it already that we don’t necessarily need to gem/enchant for it over the above stats.

Parry - Parry also adds to your avoidance. The great thing about parry over dodge is that it resets your swing timer so you can get some more normal attacks in. However, parry gives the worst return per rating compared to dodge which is why it is weighted so much lower. It is highly recommended to not even gem for parry at all.

Attack Power - Death Knight abilities use an AP coefficient so the more AP you have the more damage you'll be doing which means more threat. However, it is better to stack AP through strength as you get added benefits that you don’t get through gemming for AP alone.

When you have enough defense to from gear you should imbue your weapon with SwordShattering, this gives you a parry icnrease of 4%.


Frost Spell rotation signle
Icy Touch -> Plauge Strike-> Blood Strike->OBliterate->Blood Strike->Frost Strike

if you have a talent called blood of the north, then you have a death rune (was a blood rune now becomes any rune you wish). This way the second half of the rotation can be:
OBliterate->OBliterate->OBliterate->Frost Strike and RECYCLE.


Multi-pull
Icy Touch ->Plauge Strike->Pest->Howling Blast->Blood Boil->Frost Strike
Again, by the end of this rotation, you can hit another FS or restart to keep the blood runes on cooldown.

If you have Death Runes available through Blood of the North then I alter my rotation a little bit:
Icy Touch->Plauge Strike->Pest->Howling Blast->Blood Strike ->Frost Strike
OBliterate->OBliteerate->Howling Blast->Frost Strike.


If you have Howling Blast glyphed, you can go into an even simpler aoe rotation:
HB->BB->BB->OB->FS

Never gem for parry.

There... New stats for my DK:

Health: 27.4k
Armor: 23.7k
Def: 539
Dodge: 22.95%
Parry: 19.91%

Hit: 6.4%
Crit: 5.37%
Expertise: 5%

/zol

Zoluzen wrote:

There... New stats for my DK:

Health: 27.4k
Armor: 23.7k
Def: 539
Dodge: 22.95%
Parry: 19.91%

Hit: 6.4%
Crit: 5.37%
Expertise: 5%

/zol

Well if Dks are avoidance tanks.

There gear is all about armour. At the moment you have 49.52% damage reducuction.

Need that 1 single point of defense to be uncritable mate.

so far if your dk hit table is:

Miss: 00.01 - 10.00 (10% nearly)
Dodge: 10.01 - 32.96 (22.95%)
Parry: 32.97 - 52.88 (19.98%)
Hit: 52.89 - 100.00 (41.11%)

Average healers can heal without going oom or stacking two healers on a single tank ( like the problem we had with zand) is 30% hit from the boss, so unless Dk's have a stat im missing or you have the parry enchant on your weapon you need to push 10% hit off the table by gemming for dodge or strength and getting more parry and dodge on it.

Icebound Fortitude - 20% damage reduction
Frost pres. reduces damage by 5/7% with the talent.
Unbreakable armour - generally reduces damage.
Blade barrier - 5% reduction

So even though your taking damage that would be normally 5k hits, you would in fact be taking around 22.52 - 42.52%, an average of 32.52 % damage, so you should be ok zol. Im just wondering about your runic power and threat build atm, because the whole thing with a frost spec is keeping frost fever on the mobs/bossm, this is your sunder armour.

The build I was looking at was: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#j0xMZGgx0A0IoczbuzAo0gG

The best thing that can be done accoridn to wowhead is:

WowHead wrote:

#
Defense - 540 to become uncrittable to raid bosses and below. It generally takes 5 defense rating to equal 1 defense skill (actually 4.9ish but you can't go wrong by overestimating). You can go above this number (especially after 3.2), but at this point Stamina should have greater weight and there is a debate whether it would be better to start stacking avoidance stats instead.
#
Stamina - The more health you have the more of a cushion your healer will have to heal you which makes for happy healers.
#
Hit Rating - You want to be able to hit your opponent with your melee attacks and spells. 8% is the melee hit goal with a two-handed weapon which you should strive for as a tank and is relatively easy to reach.
#
Dodge - Dodge is an avoidance stat. All it does is increase the chance your opponent won't hit you. No reset swing timers or anything. You may find that most tanking equipment adds dodge since it is a universal tanking stat to all classes. Probably the best avoidance stat in that it suffers the least from diminishing returns.
#
Expertise - The more expertise you have the less likely your attacks will be parried or dodged. 6.5% is what is needed to avoid dodges from raid bosses while what is needed to avoid parries is much higher at 15%. While the 15% mark may be rather difficult to attain, getting near 6.5% to push dodges off the table may not be easy at first, but as you progress through content it becomes easier to reach and your threat generation will be better because of it.

Note from typh: Since it is easier to find gear that increases health rather than avoidance this might be your best direction zol.

gogo zoly i can arrange some hc spam if u like on nonraiding days just keep bugging me

I'd like that very much. Would be sweet to get her up a little.

Still not happy bout the 80% armor contribute nerf down to 60% in frost presence...... no wonder dks are more squishy these days.

yeah but this does give the excuse to go full out on stamina in coming raids.

Many tanks (dk ones) are complaining now, my pov aboput this is why not go for the druid route, (since thats what they are left with, since the armour nerf).

So get uncritable, then gem everything for stam.

A death knight with 70 % dmg reduction with 50 k health will be so easy to heal.