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.