Death Knight tanking

As most of you know I'm fast tracking a Death Knight to give us an extra Tank when we need one since we have loads of dps but only a couple of over-worked tanks to spread around.

My DK is now at 68 and in Northrend doing the intro quests to gear-up. I've now got to the point where I need to start training my tank skills so I need some willing and patient assistance to learn how to do what our excellent tanks do everyday - get agro and keep it away from you dps agro-monkey nutters!

Also, I need to decide which way to go for tanking spec... Now for those of you who haven't read anything about the DK's so far, there is no tanking tree, the DK can tank (in theory) using any of the 3 trees they simply do it slightly differently and there's the problem... what do we need most...

Please give this some consideration.. all of the trees are fun to play so this isn't as simple as 'choose the one you like best' this is a question on how best to take advantage of unique skills.

Having read everything I could find out about the class so far (there is still very little information available) I believe the following are the strongest advantages:

Blood -
Has a number of self heal talents that mitigate damage and in theory make the healers life a little easier - raid wide buff that heals individuals for a percentage of their damage - about a 10% AP buff to raid

Frost -
Good multi target control in the form of cc and provides a 20% haste buff to raid
(I'm not keen on this one, I don't think there is enough uniqueness here compared to Pali and Warrior tanks to give us situational advantages)

Unholy -
AOE tanking which provides decent armor mitigation - pets - Buffs raid for +13% caster damage and provides 75% (I have read 100% so need to confirm this) magic resistance in the form of 'Anti-Magic' bubble that the raid can stand in

I'm leaning towards Unholy since it provides something that no other tank can, but since I'm building this char to be a raid resource I'd like some feedback on what you guys want, doesn't mean I will go that way but if you have an opinion, nows your chance to let me know..

Nice work!! I'll help you in any way I can. We're off to Disneyland shortly so I'll look into the trees later on and see what you have there. Basically, what you want as a tank is: armor, mitigation, either talents which improve damage or innate threat. Mitigation is for progress content, and that means any talent that lowers the damage taken in any sort of way. Warriors and paladin have had armor increasing talents, maybe you got some too.

That's basically it. Then you need to think about your rotations. From experience the talents with the longest cooldowns have had the most innate threat. Use that as often as possible and fill the others in while waiting for the major talent's CD to count down.

If you got a stun or similar cc, use it when you need to dual tank (or more), to control the ones you need to tank while building threat on them. If you are an aoe tonk, try to get as many as you can. My guess is that you depend on it to tank well if you are, just like a paladin. Warriors have only been dependand on damage, whilst not being able to handle the same amount of enemies, you wanted as much cc as you could get.

Pulling is often key, but you have seen Naras. He's one of few who charges into anything that isn't a group that fears or anything like that. Try and see what works best for you.

My tanking has always been based on cc and aggression. I've ignored the rarely used mitigation talents for talents which give me more tanking fuel, i.e. rage. It's a flavor balance, more threat equals shorter fights since dps can go wild, and maybe that also equals lower damage taken. It's a chosen thruth for me, and it's more fun.

As the healer in the Utgarde run (until we were sadly disrupted by the world server crash), I'm pretty happy with the mitigation side of things. Concentrate on getting uncrittable, everything else looks to be fine.

I'd say that all of our healers will find it easy to keep you up. For the moment at least you need to concentrate on getting that aggro. Once we all hit 80, and your DPS starts to get all "heroic", you'll be looking more at how to mitigate raid boss damage, but while levelling it's aggro all the way.

In the Utgarde run the dps was 3-5 levels above you, so I couldn't get a clear picture of how well the build might hold aggro with level parity.

There seems to be a pattern to WotLK where we don't have huge packs of trash (cc seems entirely unnecessary so far) but a lot of non-elite-add-spawning bosses/minibosses, and all this seems designed to test the aoe-aggro generation of tanks. This may be a factor in the build you choose. So far I'm getting away with an untalented swipe, but the dps seem to be catching on and wanting to play with all their shiny new aoe toys, so I'll probably be talenting swipe as I level.

In summary, AoE is the new order of the day, both for tank threat generation and dps. I'd go with the build that can handle that best.

netty/runcible

Netty,

Thanks for the feedback! I'm encouraged by your comments, last night I was quite depressed by the experience!

I obviously need to make more training runs but perhaps with guild members as much as possible, I found the tanking last night to be a panic inducing nightmare. Considering the dps difference between our dps and the warrior who was trying SO hard to catch-up / be the the top he managed to over agro just about every pull.

To try and get an idea of how well I had done I looked at recounts 'Damage Received' data and found that the warrior was about 1% off of what I got and assumed that was basically due to a very poor job on my part.

The build I am using is supposed to be very good for AOE threat generation so this may be a good choice from what you have seen so-far and your deductions for future content. I suspect one of the biggest differences compared to Warriors and Prot Pali tanks is the rapid build of initial threat. From what I have seen Warriors can pretty much run in and use a sort of AOE shock attack to build immediate threat, Pali's can of course consecrate and Judge as long as they have mana. The DK has a sort of consecrate effect which will generate immediate area threat and within the limitations of the available runes not on cool-down (this is a major limitation) then builds threat over the next few seconds.. I suspect this is what we need to take into account, DK's can build threat and sustain it indefinitely like a warrior but takes longer to build up this threat due to cool-downs on runes unlike a Pali that starts with a full Mana bar.

Heya,

I have looked through the talent trees, and found one that I would be curious about if I had a DK ready in Northrend. Some of my basic thoughts which guided me are: tanking is hard in the beginning, i.e. slow monsters is good. When you can't get aggro on them, you really really want that. Then, I found some interesting things based on frost: Frost Fever, Hungering Cold and Howling Blast. To me, that combo sounds like an aoe emergency tank thing (or controlled of course ). That's the combo I would try out first.

Unholy Blight is interesting as well, but not as good for emergencies I think.

There are some really nice mitigation talents easy reachable in the other trees, which I would go for at once. Netty has a good point where he points out the need for defense skill and mitigation in raid boss tanking encounters. That's where you really need it. I'd like to add that a tank can never leech through a raid with 9 super friends, not like a dps leech could just skip the heroics and follow on a couple of adventures. Hence, I'd go for heavy mitigation and hit/expertise early, to be able to go to dungeouns that would otherwise be above my level so I could get tried on gear drops earlier while leveling. Blade Barrier and Anticipation would probably be my friends. Reduced CD on taunts is never bad either.

This is the build I would try out first. Note: I don't know what you do with diseases, so I might miss any important point...
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=j0xZuxctIsdo0RVost0xM

About Damage taken on Recount. There has always been a secret discussion among tanks to let the aggro maniacs learn by paying repair bills. The DPSers should never take aggro from a tank if they know what to do to prevent it. However, they will whine about not being able to DPS all out, and that's their right I suppose. But it's not your fault if they take damage or die, they bring it onto themselves. Give them hints to wait a bit before attacking or tell them to get and watch omen... Once I warrior tanked with a trigger happy mage in the group. He would always attack during the cast time of my gun pulls, die (of course), and then complain all over the place about my lack of skill. We wiped 3 times in a row on the first packs in Mechanar and then he left angry. After replacing him we cleared without a single wipe, and a warlock in the group mentioned that he couldn't take aggro from me no matter how hard he tried(!). So, don't care too much about the trigger happy ones and don't let it make you feel bad about your tanking. Just do your best, there is most of the times, NOT a dps race in a dungeon. There is time to DPS slowly.

I must say I'm very impressed at the rate you're doing this, very good and above all fast work. It's really good for us that you take time to do this since I suspect there will be a few fights that really is made easier by having a DK. And to the rest of you if you get greens or blues with defence rating, please ask both Ganafré and Ciyon if they need it since that will promote the overall success of the guild.

you did a great virgin tank run, considering you hade no gear, no exp and that cocky warrior mocking up a dps race between us... when i switch to less aggroing, and did seal of light instead of blood, all vent smooth (exept for the warrior) and the server crash.
i can make som pretty good tank things in black smithing, problem is the insane mats prices.. 200g for 20 cobolt ore.
but ill ask when im lvling bsing if you want any of the things.

I agree with Tylenia about trigger happy dps. Personally I see tanking as another kind of PvP, with me (and hopefully the healer) vs. the dps.

The mobs are, for the most part, predictable and easy, but what makes some tanking experiences stressful is the frantic race for threat between you the tank and a bunch of competing dps'ers.

At least you won't have the problem of rage starvation to deal with, which is the usual outcome for bears and warriors when we get off to a bad start.

Here's a list of Netty's pet hates - this is kind of with PuGs in mind, rather than guild runs. Watch out particularly for:

***
Anyone who deliberately pulls without you having asked them to (even MD pulls, though this may be a special bear thing, 'cause it often happens to me when I'm in caster form. Not good).

People who don't follow your kill order. This includes pet classes who sometimes think it's cute to stick their pet on a different mob.

People who AoE too early in the pull (mentioned this already).

People who intercept corner pulls or positioning by dps'ing too soon (particularly after you've let them know you'll be corner pulling, pulling way back or positioning). Related to this are those annoying talents that proc stuns or freezes, which make positioning really hard. I get the point of these for levelling so will accept them for a while, but once we've hit heroics and raids again I'll be looking grumpy if I see them.

People who run AWAY from the tank once they've picked up aggro. These people deserve to die. Never make the effort to chase them, because more often than not someone who didn't deserve it will die in their place.

And lastly (for the moment, at least), Runcible the priest can reliably inform you that there is a Special Hell reserved for Hunters and Mages who pull aggro (particularly AoE aggro) too early in the pull and then feign death or ice block and so dump all their aggro onto the healer.
***

You may find that some of these aren't a problem for you - everyone has their own style. Also I'm only referring to people who "choose" to do this stuff. Accidents happen and, unless someone is a walking catastrophe, they are part of what keeps the game interesting. But if someone's playing style is at odds with you-the-tank's you should really say something, and ask for them to do things your way - no one likes death-runs and repair-bills, so most people respond well if you ask politely.

Good comments by Netty there. The tank is never solely responsible for the success of the group. The responsible for TPS and keeping yourself (as tank, dps or healer) on the right side of the border is twofolded (not counting healers, even if we like the threat lowering enchants as well). Stuns are a mess, just like flurry or other bad timed aoe attacks from the "anyone got dmg meters?" maniacs. Positioning is generally very important and you will learn to swear at people too when they mess up your big master pull plan.

If your group behave, you can focus more on the tricky pulls. For instance when you got little or no cc and stand there with 3 melee mobs in front of you and you need to tank them all before the oneshot your healer or clothie... That's when you want to stun one yourself (maybe the mind cc thing in the frost tree), switch target fast, hit with your most intence innate threat talent, go to no 3/stomp/do anything to it, switch back to the first to taunt it, hit hard and change targets again. All this without letting the DPSers take aggro on anything.. this is the real fun with tanking if you ask me, even if it can be messy and end with a wipe.. hehe.. but when you need to tank like this and it works out well, you will really start to enjoy tanking.

If you see clothy casters, just mark them for kill, and tank the melee mobs. Casters can't be tanked very well anyway, so let the DPSers to their pleasure thing on them while you get a head start on the melee.

"Casters can't be tanked very well anyway"

Oh, I wish bears could get Death Grip! Lucky, lucky Deathknights...

Thanks all for your advice and guidance!

I have made a few changes to my spec taking into consideration the advice I have been given and what I have read about the class on elitist jerks.

I now have all of the primary mitigation talents off all 3 trees and lost the permanent Ghoul Pet in favor of 'Desecration' which adds a nice damage increase (hence threat), and a 50% slow effect, this now gives me two area effect damage auras, one that auto casts at my feet as I apply diseases and the second which is a castable ranged ground effect.

I've noticed since the 3.0 patch that nearly everyone that has an AOE will use if you pull two or more mobs so I guess the first priority is to get initial threat on all tanked mobs not just the one that is marked for first kill. Do you guys find this a problem since it is easy to loose one of a pack of mobs to the AOE before you've had a chance to get them all tied down? I guess this could be a symptom of PUG's but dps seems to treat AOE with the same cavalier approach as they do with single target dps, possibly because they are used to experienced tanks, or have become lazy after the 3.0 patch nerf to content which made raids easy-mode to the greater extent..

Yep, this is exactly what I was talking about in an earlier post.

I think the simple rule of insisting that the skull target be nuked first before any AoE should sort the problem out. As the skull will usually be a clothie (healer, summoner etc) it only takes a few seconds, which is all the time you need for building threat on the rest. It also guarantees that the "problem" mob in any pull is properly out of the way.

Make sure you pull (or ask for an MD pull) and get one decent hit on the skull, then forget about it and build AoE threat while autoattacking the cross to build a bit of extra threat on the second target (as the skull is usually a caster, it will complete it's first cast on you even if someone else pulls aggro, and may not even last long enough to complete a second cast on anyone else).

If the skull doesn't go down quickly, taunt it back and hit it hard again.

After this point, I'd just tab-target through the rest of the pack getting some aggro on them all, concentrating on the current and next targets.

Also, I keybind the raid targetting icons I use most to f8-f12 on my keyboard, so all I have to do in mid fight is tap f12 and my current target is the new skull, which can help re-focus DPS during a big pull once the early targets have gone down.

Good advice for the raid icons, I'll have to look into customisation a little more and try and improve efficiency. At the moment I'm doing everything by hand, no macro's no warnings, no threat feedback - apart from mobs heading for pastures new when they should be reveling in my attention..

At the moment - obviously due to this being the first new class since the game launched - there are precious few mods which address the specific needs of DK's. Are there any 'must have' tanking aids that I should be looking at to see if they work for me? I've done a search on Curse for such things and everything is aimed at the main three tanks so I'm unsure how / if they will work properly, generic non-class aids should be fine though.

A simple indication of threat on each mob would be marvelous.. When I was thinking about this the other day I imagined a 'tanks' version of the mobs health bar. What I mean by this is the equivalent of the health bar you see above a mob when you hit V. Instead of showing decreasing health it shows current threat on that mob, so as you gain threat it increases, as you loose it it decreases. This would give you at a glance a visual idea of what you need to build threat on or transfer attention to because someone else is gaining threat over you. Omen is great for dps threat management, but I find at the moment that I am too busy to pay much attention to who has what agro while trying to tank a pack, I don't think it would tell me what mob was about to be peeled off anyway..

I think Aloft has a new plug in to show threat in creature name-plates. Very customisable, so you should be able to find a way of getting it to do what you want.

I personally reckon a few good macros make all the diference, especially in terms of reducing the number of keys you need to bind.

I don't know much at all about deathknights, but can give you a feral example: I have 3 spellcasts that boost my damage mitigation, all on timers - barkskin (10% damage reduction, 1 minute), frenzied regeneration (converts rage to healing, 3 minutes) and survival instincts (temporary health pool boost, 5 minutes). Now this also happens to be the order I want to cast them in - i.e. I never want to cast FR without casting Barkskin first, unless Barskin is on CD. So I macro them all to one key:

/castsequence reset=60 barkskin, frenzied regeneration, survival instincts

If I know there's heavy incoming damage, or my health drops below about 70% I'll tap the key and get barkskin. If things go south from there, hit it again, and get FR, if things are really bad, once more gets me SI. After 60 seconds, barkskin is available again, and the macro will refresh to cast it. Quite often (esp. in BGs) I've just hammered my "oh shit" button and become almost unkillable... for about 12 seconds at least! Much easier than remembering where 3 different keys are.

In kitty form I have one that uses "combat", "nocombat" and "stealth" conditionals to either 1. Put me in stealth if I'm out of combat and out of stealth, 2. Cast pounce if I'm out of combat and in stealth, or 3, cast mangle. Way more convenient to just use one key instead of three.

If you can reduce the number of keybinds you use for key skills in this way, you'll find room to bind other abilities to easily accessed keys, which is all it takes to let you start using them when you should, rather than hunting for an awkward button or (/facepalm) clicking.

When I started to use macros, a whole new world of lazy tanking opened up before my eyes. I use the /castsequence as well, with a couple of differences based on CD durations.

All my tank attacks are macroed with /startattack as the first line. Not all of the talents trigger a white attack on the mob, which left me standing doing nothing occationally until I added that command.

Shield block used to be on a very short cooldown before patch 3, and as it did not trigger a GCD it was also added as a simple /cast Shield block by the end of the macro to ensure it was always up.

As a warrior the rage pool is also a factor. In general you want to dump rage when you have more than 30, which led to me having another macro, I called it "rage+". What it did was to queue a Heroic strike, which also does not trigger a GCD. Heroic strike is a talent which is cast at next white attack.
I recommend that you go through your talents and see if you got similar attacks to stack in the same macro. My major rage+ did some really nice magics for me; always making sure I was attacking, always adding a big innate threat attack on white swings, at the same time it cycled through my rotation of yellow attacks, AND kept my shield up.

Because of the somewhat chaotic life as a tank, I then just needed to tweak the castsequence resets. It looked like this:

/startattack
/castsequence reset=ctrl/combat/6 shield slam, revenge, devastate, devastate
/cast heroic strike
/cast shield block

6 = six seconds reset
combat = reset when leaving combat
ctrl = reset at any time you want by holding ctrl and hitting the action button

Concerning addons. The one Netty mentioned sounds like a tank's dream. Never tried it though. I have used something for quick raid icon markup, not sure about the name now but something like raidmobmarker. Omen is a must, since the DPS with upgraded Omen can't trust it unless yours is up to date. OptiTaunt is a general tank addon which announces failed taunts and also sends a whisper to the player with aggro telling him/her to do what they can to save their life in any way they can. Parrypal I think's the name of another one, whispering people who trigger parries on the mob you are tanking. And you don't want that, i.e. ask any melee dps who's in front of your mob to move behind it or stand on the sides (if it got tail attacks like Nightbane). A boss' parry cause a burst attack on you, which spend more healer mana etc etc... parries are super fast attacks.
For marking and announcing current tank target, check this topic on the tank board:
https://recreation.darkbb.com/tank-board-f16/tank-target-macro-t56.htm

If you haven't read about the combat table, you can read about it here. https://recreation.darkbb.com/guides-and-game-mechanics-f25/the-combat-table-t20.htm

The combat table give you an idea about the stats you are going for, after the rule of thumb: defence skill threshold for uncrittable (not a cap), enough stamina for current boss encounter's peak damage. Then stack armor (or avoidance gear for dual wielding bosses). The armor vs avoidance discussion is never ending. I think you know what it's about: stable damage reduction OR chance to be totally missed.

And why the gear comment? Because it also affects threat. Being totally missed as a warrior is bad with a big B. Rage starvation is the worst thing that can happen which makes armor and stamina the best choice in many cases. The use of avoidance during progression can of course save your life. I don't know anything about runic power yet though, so this might be completely useless information for you.

The initial threat work is somewhat crucial. The AOEers got room for all their powers with patch 3, but I've not seen the new content yet. I agree with Netty, insist on having the skull killed first if it's a special and evil one. You do need to build threat on all mobs even though you are single killing all the mobs, because the healer's healed points build threat on all mobs. The amount healed is divided on all present mobs. Bash all mobs and save your healer.

I can hardly wait to see what your DK tanking is like! I imagine AOE slowing the pack, letting CC casters have more time to time the CC, while you Death grip a healer mob onto you which is almost instantly killed, second you grab the slowed group and keep tanking... or something.. I imagine it can be really pretty tanking.

A final thought for the evening. Check out your available glyphs for multi-tanking. Warriors got one which apply an extra sunder armor (a basic threat attack) to a mob nearby which is an amazing glyph for dual mob tanking.