Rurikhan DK blood tank video

Rurikhan has posted a video about the Death Knight blood tank which runs though specs and shows him tanking a heroic. It is very informative and well worth checking out.

Links for Cataclysm

If you haven't seen this yet, Pwnwear.com have a post with links to loads of 4.0.3 threads, with such useful information as a Tanking 101, starter tank gear list (for Cataclysm) and a cookie-cutter tank spec. Which is very much like the one I have, because pwnwear.com is where I got it from :)

I have been meaning to take a look at the gear available from quests etc, but given my leveling plan, I intend on doing probably Vash'jir -> Deepholm -> Uldum -> Twilight Highlands, with some instances along the way. The gear list posted on pwnwear is excellent and will really help me spot which gear to keep along the way.

It goes without saying that the best quest rewards are in Twilight Highlands, so I will be hitting that as soon as I can so I can finish all the quests and get some great gear.

The Shattering and a strange sort of leveling plan

Not much time left to go until the Shattering hits European servers, in fact tonight is the last play night. The big news from my DK is that Jessica Sellers won't be trading Ink of the Seas any more, so I need to hit Dalaran tonight and get my stocks of glyphs made up. Several gold blog posters are expecting another Glyphmas like 4.0.1 so I shall ensure I am prepared.

Meanwhile I shall be trying to flog a lot of Netherweave bags once 4.0.3a hits, as I suspect people will be rolling level 1 alts either to see the new quests, or try the new race/class combos out, or both. I hope this means an increase in demand for bags and also heirloom enchants, I am ready to go on both of these.

The DK is also just level 79 and one quarter, so I have a little over 2 weeks to get to 80 if I am to have any chance of playing with friends in Cataclysm. Unfortunately this does mean my plans to have a crack at tanking at level 80 will have to wait.

In fact, I have a strange sort of leveling plan, which is to do the quests with the DK and gain gear that way, maybe playing with friends in instances when they are around. On the other hand, I am toying with the idea of just grinding the Dungeon Finder hard on my Druid tank with guildies, trying to gear up and level up from dungeon XP and drops alone. Doing a whole lot of instances should make me very familiar with the pulls and bosses for level 85, but may be boring. Whereas questing to 85 will make me utterly unfamiliar and unpracticed with tanking the instances, but is likely to be more interesting.

I am somewhat concerned over the equation that you need gear to tank instances, but to get gear you need to run instances, or be lucky with quest rewards. The Dungeon Finder also puts you in an appropriate instance for your level, so with every ding you are getting pushed into harder instances, even though your gear may not have improved enough to actually tank them.

Without just picking quests to get good tanking rewards I can see randomly doing quests and instances will result in my death through not being geared enough. However, grinding instances may result in my death through boredom. So I am really hoping those Hyjal and Vashir quests give a good reward that I can use to try tanking up some normal mode instances with.

Cold Weather Flying!

Amazingly in 4.0.1 Cold Weather Flying is trainable for a mere 1000g, BUT at level 74 and likely lower. Now my questing in Northrend will get a big speed boost.

In other news there has been a lot of posts at pwnwear.com about DK tanking in 4.0.1, Satorri's guide is good reading.

Glyphage

So they did warn us the Inscription was changing. I took note and have been stockpiling all glyphs, getting up to a stack of 10 of each.

First day results are pretty encouraging, glyph prices went up to 50g each or more and I sold quite a few. I only wish I had been able to stockpile even more inks. Oh well. 15k in 5 hours of sales is nothing to be sniffed at, and should get me a decent war chest for the expansion. Now I just need to actually level the Death Knight...

DK tank build 4.0.1

Pwnwear.com have a DK tank build up for 4.0.1 linked here. Sadly I will have to also dual spec and take a DPS build as it seems the Blood tree won't be good for DPSing in at all come 4.0.1. This also means I'll have to learn a DPS priority and get some different gear maybe. Fun times.

I have a post up discussing DK tank builds in 4.0.6 too.

Gear upgrades

Did Azjol Nerub and UK with a level 73 Paladin tank who had 14k health and 17k armour. I armoried him later and he had some items from questing which look nice:

Tundra Pauldrons reward from The Nexus quest.
Expelling Gauntlets reward from Azjol-Nerub quest.
Boots of the Unbowed Protector reward from The Nexus quest.

Also Gauntlets of the Disturbed Giant reward from The Nexus quest.

Not tank items but lots of armour and stamina:
Vambraces of the Vengeance Bringer reward from UK quest.
Girdle of Forceful Annihilation reward from Dragonblight group quest.

So it seems the quest rewards from The Nexus are better for tanking than those from UK. I need to get into The Nexus with these 3 quests and get completing them.

Troubles in UK

I tried to tank UK normal last night, but it did not go well.

I had 11.3k health, 493 defense, 13.4k armour.

Was I taking crits? What is the minimum defense level for UK on normal? Crit immunity for a level 70 player against a raid boss (which is level 73) is 490 defense. The bosses in UK are level 72 and the mobs level 70. From Wowwiki a level 72 mob attacking a level 71 player has 5% + 0.2% chance to crit = 5.2%. I must lower my chance to be crit by 5.2%. Every point of defense beyond the base (of 71 * 5 = 355) lowers the crit chance by 0.04%, thus I need 5.2/0.04 = 130 defense points extra, thus my sheet total needs to be 355 + 130 = 485 defense skill. Thus I am over that by enough to not get critted.

We failed on Dalronn and Skarvald, with the DPS and healer getting owned a lot. Reflecting I think it was because the combination of shadow bolts from Dalronn and charges from Skarvald killed off the squishies - we killed Dalronn first or tried to kill them both at the same time, but his ghost was killing people. Perhaps next time kill them both at the same time, BUT interrupt Dalronn's shadow bolts otherwise he will kill people. Also I can tank Skarvald and only secondarily tank Dalronn as he doesn't seem to have an aggro table anyway.

I could maybe do with more health, on the successful run we did the tank had 20k but he was SWP geared. Still some leatherworking armor kits on 5 slots will increase stamina by 90, which means 11.4 * 90 health (for blood tank spec) = 1026 health. Or some normal Borean Leather kits (10g vs 80g) which give 60 stamina = 684 health, ie 60% of the health but for 12% of the cost. Hmm. Also my cloak and rings are pretty bad and I could maybe investigate some quest chains to get better ones with more stamina.

When there is no competition

gold is what happens, specifically I posted some glyphs at midday when the server was meant to be down until midnight, and without much competition managed to pull in three times what I would usually expect. Yummy.

Death Knight tanking guide

I just found a DK tanking guide which looks very extensive on TankSpot.

Level 70 and 77ish Death Knight tanking gear

Ok so after pondering quite how I will get the gear to go tanking the Lich King dungeons, the answer comes to me courtesy of WoWGrrl. That being the Cobalt set as shown here.

The cobalt set runs to 37 cobalt bars or ore and goes a long way to providing crit immunity, and for normal runs should be just peachy. Then there is the Tempered Saronite set which runs to 20 cobalt, 148 saronite ore and 3 crystalized earth, and is rare and seems to provide an upgrade. Things to do, get watching for cheap Cobalt and Saronite ore.

Pre raid tanking gear list

Here is a list of gear obtained by Emblems of Triumph or other grindable items, plus the total cost in Triumph. Not the cost in sanity to grind this number of triumph however. Gear stolen from pwnwear.com forums.

Helm 50 triumph
Neck 19 conquest
Shoulders 30 triumph
Cloak 25 valor (or do Ahune)
Chest 50 triumph
Wrist 60 valor or AH and gold
Hands 30 triumph
Belt 23 conquest
Legs 50 triumph
Feet 40 valor
Ring 1 35 triumph
Ring 2 25 valor
Trinket 1 50 triumph
Trinket 2 40 heroism
2H Sword 25 champion's seals
Sigil 25 triumph

Total is 552 triumph and 25 champion's seals. By spending some gold on the Wrist this comes down to 492 triumph. Total defense rating for all this is 561, 657 including rings etc. The defense skill needed is 540, or 688 rating. However the Rune of the Gargoyle gives 25 defense skill, so some of these items may not be needed.

Now the Titan-forged shoulders are higher item level, but have no defense or parry on them. The Wrathful Gladiator's Bracers of Triumph, Relentless Gladiator's Greaves of Triumph and Relentless Gladiator's Girdle of Triumph have no defense or parry rating on them either. However I may get away with gearing from blues to hit the cap, then farming triumph and stopping once I have the non-honour items, then grab these honour items for threat.

To get started I shall follow this article which shows how to get upto the defense cap, also running daily normal LK dungeons gives 2 Triumph.

Loltanking Ramparts

Ok so after running Ramparts as DPS at level 67, I decided to try out tanking the place. Turns out reading up any boss tactics was not needed, the run I DPSed on we just killed the place and didn't really bother with all the intricate stuff like we did when I ran it in TBC (at level 60).

I didn't tell the group this was the first time I had tanked either :) The tree healer said "pull lots and keep going". Pure chaos was what I will describe it as. I tried opening with IT, PS then Pestilence but usually someone would have pulled a mob by the time Pestilence went off. So I then tried DnD right off, the IT PS Pest and that worked a lot better. Still, I can see what Ghostcrawler is saying about DKs, I am hitting a key every GCD and also trying to target run aways and other mobs, leading to an utterly chaotic feeling. The run itself went well of course as I utterly outgeared it, but I was still shaking from adrenaline afterward. What fun.

Now I have a quest for Blood Furnace and am considering just getting in there, but I still have a suspicion I should read up on the encounters a bit.

Aha finally WoW.com have posted a Blood Tanking 101 article. Still waiting for Rurikhan to post his Blood tanking video.

The cost of all Inscription trainer glyphs

Some project is going on with my DK, a hint to which may be the following. I took the time to work out how much it would cost to learn all the Inscription glyphs from the trainer. In other words, what it costs to learn all trainable glyphs. I went through Wowhead's listing of glyphs and broke them up into bands according to cost. The answer is as follows:

So it is only 150 gold to learn the lot. This is notable because reports on Wowhead say that the Inscription research may find glyphs you could have learned from a trainer if you didn't know them. So it seems best to learn them all before doing research.

Underbog forgotten

Last night I queued for a random heroic as DPS, to see what the wait would be like. Nicely it was 10 minutes, during which I quested anyway. The instance was the Underbog. Erm the what?

Having run dungeons back in TBC I thought I would remember them. However I had no clue whatsoever about the Underbog and didn't really recognise any of it at all. This does not bode well for randomly queueing to tank instances, as I would need much time to study wowwiki or wowhead for boss tactics and even the route through the place. They aren't all linear in TBC!

Will of the Necropwnlis?

Hmm here is an interesting spec for Blood tanking and AOE which is very close to the one I took from pwnwear.com, except this swaps Necrosis, DRW and Mark of Blood for 3/3 in Will of the Necropolis. Thus is higher survivability but for less threat, although DRW and MoB are yet more things to press, so may be better to use this spec instead.

Instance tanking to level

Ok so after reading a lot on pwnwear.com I think I've settled on this blood spec for levelling tanking of various instances. Still not sure which talents to grab first, but we will see when I respec at 60.

Skeleton Jack strongly advised levelling and tanking as Blood, so even though I planned on a Frost spec, I shall try out Blood for self-healing, as I like the idea of being able to compensate for a dodgy healer. I'm sure I shall find one or two!

Back on it (kind of)

So I have picked up my Death Knight again, after WoW Confidential posted an intriguing project to level a DK and get 10k gold. To avoid any temptation, I have rolled a brand new DK on a totally different server where I know no one (almost) and have no resources whatsoever to help me out.

I have decided to go Unholy DPS as outlined in this WoW.com post, mostly for the AoE potential.