gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

A quick update on my death knight. Over the weekend I hit level 80 with lots and lots of solo content to spare. I dinged having not touched quests in Sholazar Basin, Storm Peaks, or Icecrown. I did do both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord and ran about half the leveling up instances once, but still there’s way more content than anyone should need to hit the level cap.

Once level 80 I needed to try out some serious death knight tanking first hand. I respeced to my frost tank build and have started added level 80 instances and heroics to my immediate to do list. Last night I did my first heroics.

The first one I ran was Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom. Pro tip: not a good heroic to learn how to tank. The difficulty of the game (which has been pretty low to be honest) severely ramped up for me and the run was just brutal. We downed two of the bosses, but just wiped too much and gave up after we had serious respawns. It definitely left me thinking I need to sweet talk my way into a “yes I wear plate but I’m DPS” position in raids.

Luckily another group pulled me into heroic Utgarde Keep afterwards and that run picked my spirits up. We had a few deaths, but otherwise a clean run with everything else dead.

A quick summary of death knight tanking, coming from a DPS class before, is that there is a lot of stuff to do and track. Our rotation is complicated enough compared to some, adding using mitigation abilities and all of the other things a tank needs to do is a lot to try and learn at once. I’ve got the rotation down and watching out for the group will come with some more runs. The mitigation part is going to be what is hard for me in incorporate well. In theory I see how I can use the abilities regularly, not just at panic moments, to make the healer’s life easier, but that’s going to have to come later on.

Gear wise I need more stamina and I’m not defense capped yet, but I have a few pieces of my heroic tank set yet to get and enchantments should help as well. I’m thinking getting some tanking glyphs will help a good deal as well. Once I’m more comfortable tanking the higher end instances I can start playing with different builds. I want to see how much tank talents a death knight really needs if they only tank in raids part time and in 5-man instances outside of the raid schedule. I’m hoping for a stronger DPS end of a DPS-tank hybrid build. Right now I have no problem killing things solo, I’ve done farming and some Icecrown quests, but it sure isn’t the same as my unholy leveling build.