gnomeDK – Your Pink Haired Guide to All Things Death Knight

To everyone who complained I was too small to keep track of as a tank, how about this screen shot? I’m breaking my poor mount for you people, geez.

Nothing like some experience and better gear to make your play more enjoyable. Since my first heroic tanking, um, attempt last week things have improved. Since then I’ve respecced, completed my tank gear shopping list, and have tanked several successful heroics.

For the respec I went back to what worked for me, which is an Unholy DPS build believe it or not. I loved Frost in beta, I really did, but the Frost tank build just wasn’t working for me as a play style. Maybe it was the impression of more limited AoE or maybe it was having too many mitigation buttons, but I felt clumsy with it. I did get through a few heroics with it so I gave it a shot, but things got easier for me when I respeced.

I’m currently running with a 17/0/54 build, which is not designed for tanking obviously but works. It is based on the min/max end game DPS build for Unholy, I just tweaked it a bit to get mount speed back. I wanted to see if I could spec for DPS as my main raid spec but still manage to tank 5-mans and the occasional off tank in raids as needed. It really seems like, for most heroics anyway, Frost Presence and proper tank gear are all you really need. My healers have commented on my damage intake being a bit spiky, but that has been commented about a lot of death knight setups while tanking. I’m building up stamina next as a short term fix to that. I had been prepared to switch to a more hybrid build, 7/5/59, but I’m holding off for now.

Getting experience has helped as much as hitting the defense cap. I’m no where near the abilities of the raid tanks in my guild, but I’m able to control the mobs (ret pally damage spikes aside) and get my mitigation buttons used more often. Situational awareness is improving as well. I even managed to main tank a 10-man Obsidian Sanctum run, which too be honest wasn’t a big challenge for anyone in that run.

All death knight tanks have a problem with AoE and crowd control, but the Unholy’s ghoul is a new problem. The ghoul comes and goes in runs, sometimes it is good DPS and sometime it causes adds. I think I need to go over hunter pet macros and see if I can find some gems for us.