gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

Of course you want to tank! There’s a tank shortage out there and you, my death knight friend, were specifically created by Blizzard to fix it. I was hearing complaints within days of expansion being released about not enough tanks being available for groups, both in the guild and for pugs. Of all the high speed level 80s in my guild none are tanks. Granted the problem is being compounded by players refusing to tank. Among those complaints were stories of warriors and paladins looking for tanks. Even one case of two paladins looking for a tank and a healer. Apparently some people have yet to get the memo about tanking, so I say we take advantage of the situation and get all the instance runs we want.

Blizzard did more than make the first hero class a DPS-tank hybrid to address the tank shortage. They gave us what the other tank classes have always wanted: no tank specific talent tree. Blood, Frost, and Unholy are all valid trees for pure DPS. They are also all valid for tanking. As with DPS builds among those trees so do tank builds for each tree have pros and cons. In the end, however, this means you can still have the play style you want, solo play better than most other tanks, and still bring what is needed to the party or raid.

Leveling Up Tanking

For the pre-80 instances you don’t need to talent specifically for tanking. The other tanks don’t have to, nor do healers need to drop their own DPS builds in order to heal. These instances were designed with quest gear and builds in mind. So if you are more of a quester or PvPer than an instance runner don’t worry about tank builds until level 80. If you prefer to run instances more than anything else then an early tank build may be worth it for you.

For leveling up tanking I would suggest building a tank gear set. The death knight starter gear is great for killing everything in Outland, but it sucks for taking blows from Northrend bosses. Later I’ll go over tank sets you can build, including a level 70 set you can have ready to go in just a few hours after entering Northrend.

End Game Tanking

This is going to be a work in progress for all of us. We’re the new kids on the block and don’t have the benefit of years of theorycrafting, testing, and actually raiding to know what works best… yet. We need to learn fast, as end game raiding will be here before we know it.

In addition to pre-raid tank gear, which we’ll get into later, this is when we’ll focus on tank builds. I’ll go over builds in detail later, but for now here’s a summary of how each tree looks to work for tanking, so you can start thinking about your own preference and play style.

Blood has good single target threat and some self healing, but is weak with AoE tanking and has fewer mitigation options.

Unholy is the AoE tank build. It is designed to gather everything up and piss it all off. In addition to mitigation talents it also has the best talents for dealing with casters. Close range crowd control is actually a problem with this build as it is going to be you, not that crazy hunter in the back, who will be breaking sheep. Think paladins AoE tanking, just with a more impressive floor show

Frost is likely to become the default tank build. It has the most mitigation options and respectable frontal AoE capability. Its 51-point talent is weak for tanking, but I think we can find a situation or two for it.