Ebon Plaguebringer

DK tanking in Dragon Soul

2012-02-10T20:43:00.000-08:00

For this little guide, I'll assume everyone is familiar with each fight. I originally wrote this out and had explained each part of the fights, but that was just ridiculously long and it seemed like I lost the point of the entry. So basically I'm just going to go over when I used each ability I have, if there's a specific point in the fight I feel is ideal to use them and all that.

Morchok

For this fight, I tank Morchok the entire time while the other tank is on Kohcrom, but I have tanked both. Morchok does 3 Resonating Crystals, and I have to move him near each one to make sure all those soaking them will still be within Stomp range. This isn't hard since it has a 25 yard range. I put up a range check of 20 yards to help out here. Having a hunter in your soaking group sometimes makes this a little annoying since they have that dead zone where they can't shoot at all. I try to time Rune Tap (with Glyph of Rune Tap) after each Stomp if possible. I also use Vampiric Blood right after a Stomp if I see the crystal explode around the same time so the healer gets a little more healing power to bring everyone back up. Obviously I use Icebound Fortitude when the boss is sub 20%. Anti-Magic Shell is used whenever I'm closer to the crystal initially than one of the soakers to ease healing. I've also soaked crystals when people have died while tanking the boss, so obviously it's good for that as well.

Yor'sahj, the Unsleeping

I feel this fight is catered to dk tanks. Deep Corruption I would think would be a problem for a lot of tanks. But none of my self healing adds any stacks to it. It's rare that I even get 1 stack from healing sources; although I know healers are also very aware of which of their spells don't add stacks. I use Anti-Magic Shell usually right before the 5th-6th application of Void Bolt to absorb the initial hit as well as some of the DoT. Icebound Fortitude is usually reserved for the one combo where we don't kill the Glowing Globule since Void Bolt stacks higher and there's just generally much more damage going out. Dancing Rune Weapon is usually used when there's adds out as I can sometimes get a bunch to stick to me (although that's all RNG). Army of the Dead is usually used for the second wave of adds during that combo with the Glowing Globule not killed.

Warlord Zon'ozz

We just recently got this guy down, so I can give a little guide now. Since the introduction of Necrotic Strike, I've been searching for a time to actually use it. In PVP, I'm sure it can be quite useful, but I don't PVP. Enter Psychic Drain, the bane of my existence. I use Anti-Magic Shell and stack Necrotic Strike on the boss in the time leading up to his usage of it. The problem for me always seems to be when he uses it. See, Deadly Boss Mods has a timer for it, but it rarely lines up. Sometimes he uses the ability immediately after the timer runs out, other times it can literally be 7 seconds after the timer reaches 0. But my favorite is all the times he does it 1-2 seconds before the timer reaches 0. Since the cool down on Psychic Drain is shorter than the cool down on Anti-Magic Shell, I alternate it with an old favorite trinket from tier 11, Mirror of Broken Images. Vampiric Blood I use for the start of each dark phase.

Ultraxion

Anti-Magic Shell is my best friend here. Hour of Twilight does around 50% of my health when topped off if that's the only cool down I use. I usually add Icebound Fortitude to it as well. This usually drops me about 10% instead, which is just crazy. Dancing Rune Weapon is used each time it's available if I'm currently tanking the boss. Vampiric Blood is used on cool down as well since the raid damage gets pretty insane. Rune Tap I pretty much use on cool down here as well provided I'm missing any health really. 5% isn't a lot to the other 4 people in my group, but every little bit helps.

One last thing to note here, before Thrall gives the tanks the Last Defender of Azeroth buff, if you're tanking the boss, use all your normal tank cool downs. Don't use trinkets, just your normal cool downs. Why? As soon as you get the buff, it resets all the cool downs on them. Vampiric Blood, Dancing Rune Weapon, Icebound Fortitude, Anti-Magic Shell, even Rune Tap are all effected by it.

Unfortunately that's as far as we've gotten on heroics so far. We've been working on Hagara next. Focused Assault does a ton more damage on heroic, but stacking my Blood Shield up beforehand seems to work well there. Common complaint I'm getting from the ranged in my group is moving her too much. I don't like moving her much to begin with since melee then has issues getting damage on her. I know moving her also makes blocking the Ice Lance beams difficult for ranged as well. At the same time, standing there means almost certain death. I try to keep her around the center as much as possible. But I also have to bring her to the side where we're going to start each transition phase to try to limit the amount of time we spend in it. So yeah, interesting balance I need to find there.

Hopefully this helps out my fellow dk tanks a bit. Again, this is just how I tend to use my cool downs for these fights. If you find a better spot to use any of them, I'm always open to advice.

Heroic Yor'sahj Down

2012-01-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

That's right, my guild is now 2/8 heroic. After a major hiccup in terms of dps output (roughly 40 million damage behind), with some respeccing and a change in raid composition, we managed to get the dps required to finish him off. Previously we had been attempting to three heal that fight. But with the tight enrage timer this proved to be impossible. So we went with a discipline priest and holy paladin. It seems that a holy paladin is almost required to heal that fight properly. In addition, our marksmanship hunter respecced to survival and our frost dk specced to unholy. Also, our other healing priest went shadow.

On our first attempt with this new setup, we hit the enrage timer and wiped with him at 2%. Had we just ignored the last set of oozes, we probably would have gotten him. But hey, hindsight is 20/20, right? I've experimented with my spec a little to help with overall damage. Seems tank dps makes a bit of a difference on heroic. I managed to increase my dps output to around 17-19k on most attempts. I'm no bear tank, so I'm pretty happy with that. I changed out the Glyph of Death Coil for the Glyph of Death Strike a little while back and haven't bothered changing it. Seems to really help when I can hit a Death Strike for an 80-90k crit. I experimented with helping to bring the Mana Voids down in health while the rest of the raid went to kill each ooze. It definitely seems like the key to that fight is managing those. Leaving the first one up but bringing it low in health, then killing the first after the second has spawned and drained mana again.

Our composition for our kill was:

Tank
Blood Death Knight

Healers
Discipline Priest
Holy Paladin

DPS
Survival Hunter
Frost Death Knight
Feral Druid
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Demonology Warlock
Shadow Priest

One thing I've been thinking of writing about has been tips for dk tanks for each encounter, such as when I use each cool down. I honestly don't know how many people actually read this anymore. I see referring links from Repgrind a lot as well as some other sites that I haven't even been to. I really do appreciate that. I didn't think anyone would really want to read what I have to say.

If anyone has any suggestions on what I should write about, feel free to let me know in comments. Also, let me know if dk tank tips would be something that you would find interesting as well.

On to hard modes!

2012-01-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone... ok, maybe it's like 5 people who read this, but whatever. I haven't had a lot of time to update this in the last few months, as you've probably noticed. Work has been keeping me busy (remote start season), and with the new tier of raiding, I've been spending a lot of time doing that, reading up on fights, sifting through world of logs and all that good stuff.

So, how has my guild been doing you ask? Not too bad. Currently we're 1/8 heroic, in like a 10 way tie for third on the server. Took us 62 attempts to finish Madness of Deathwing. That was a little discouraging, but then we one shot it the following week. So, at least we retained all that knowledge.

Heroic Morchok seemed so easy on paper...or, internet text rather. Splits in two, divide the raid, designate a Stomp soaker, keep the boss moving towards each Resonating Crystal so all those soaking that will remain in range of the Stomp. Not so bad. But man, did it not go well. Since that fight is much shorter than Madness, we had almost as many wipes (57) in just two nights of work on him. But we eventually got him. Some of the info on websites like Icy Veins may not be entirely accurate. For example, we noticed the double share of Stomp that the tank and someone else takes doesn't seem to be based on proximity to the boss like most sites state. Rather it seems it's based on proximity to Morchok's (or Kohcrom's) main aggro target. So stacking on the corresponding tank seemed to work well in controlling who received that double hit. Let me tell you, a clothie taking a double Stomp is devastating. We also noted that Morchok ends up summoning three crystals each phase before channeling Earth's Vengeance and starting to cast Black Blood of the Earth, while Kohcrom only gets to summon two crystals. This makes the tank on Morchok have to move the boss more often.

On some attempts, it was noted that the healing required to keep me alive wasn't a large amount. That whomever was healing me could take a little extra time to heal others. Some of those attempts the healers died and I was left to survive without them, which apparently I could do very well. This played a part in our final strategy. We decided to put me on Morchok and only had one healer on that side. See, because this week we only had 3 healers. Most guides recommend two or four healing this fight. So, two healers on the Kohcrom side and only one on the Morchok side. This seemed to work well. Now this isn't to say that it's ideal to divide healers that way, rather that since I didn't require as much healing, only one healer was required to be in my group. This last raid lockout, we had a hilarious downing of him when the Kohcrom side died with the boss around 1-2% and we finished Morchok off. Not realizing that despite their shared health, Kohcrom didn't die when Morchok did. Instead, while looking at the loot, Kohcrom came over and killed most of my group. Luckily I was able to finish him off before he could kill me.

As I've continued to gear up in this tier, I've noticed that Blizzard seems to have done a pretty decent job in terms of making sure dk tanks are still quite viable. The PTR had me quite worried, but they did a great job fine tuning everything. As it stands right now, my survivability is incredibly high. For the Madness fight, I can sometimes completely absorb an Impale while using a damage reduction cooldown.

[22:55:22.345] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (155664)
[22:58:09.026] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)
[23:00:53.396] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 184719 (O: 71570, A: 2911)
[23:01:29.147] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 118164 (A: 43836)
[23:03:54.337] Mutated Corruption Impale Serãphyn 112100 (A: 211900)
[23:04:30.470] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 155664

[23:48:17.795] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 45552 (A: 92816)
[23:48:53.550] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 191994 (A: 2406)
[23:50:52.413] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (124531)
[23:51:28.515] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 123299 (A: 71101)
[23:53:42.604] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 129772 (A: 64628)
[23:54:18.740] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko 57009 (A: 83088)
[23:56:46.919] Mutated Corruption Impale Amahk 115732 (A: 59228)
[23:57:23.064] Mutated Corruption Impale Schriko Absorb (50435)

During our last downing of Madness, I died to an Impale because my Icebound Fortitude hadn't come off of cooldown yet. A problem when we kill things a bit faster than usual. This was definitely my error for not realizing before the Impale was being cast. But a battle rez solved that problem. Only issue then was when the other tank died on the final platform after the first wave of Elementium Terrors. Somehow the healers were able to keep me alive through the second wave of them. I don't know how, but it worked very well. I don't see Guardian Spirit in there, so I'm at a loss as to how I survived.

The last thing I want to talk about is how things have changed since coming to the guild. When I first came here, I was obviously an outsider. But I've gotten to know most of these people and they're fun to play with. True, it's not peachy all the time. But that's to be expected. I came in to be the second tank, essentially. But after the first weeks of Dragon Soul, whether it be to gear or otherwise, I've become the main tank. I have a 395 item level now. I know part of that is due to me being present for every raid and the raid leader making sure I got my four piece bonus early. The utility of an extra raid cooldown is pretty great. As it stands right now, my tanking partner (warrior) is at a 387 item level. Still very respectable, but obviously a bit behind mine. Unfortunately he's a busy man as well. Poor guy is always so tired from work. But at the same time, it seems as though his class is at a disadvantage compared to mine. He has reached full CTC, but there are so many times where the damage is magic or unavoidable. That's where my class shines with all that self healing. Before this patch I thought about going back to playing my warrior tank as my main. But now, I think I've made the right choice sticking with my death knight.

Dragon Soul

2011-12-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

I've been slacking again with this. Just needed some new material, I think. So with 4.3 out and guilds going to town on Dragon Soul, I figured now is about the time to update.

The main thing I seem to keep hearing from other players is that Dragon Soul is very easy. I don't know if it actually is, seeing as this is my first time entering a tier in heroic gear from the previous, but they might be right. My guild one shot Morchok with ease. Seems most guilds are going at least 4/8 in the first day or so. We've managed to get to 5/8 and still have one more raid night before reset. I think the only thing that's been holding us back in simple mistakes. Standing in fire (or ice), just generally being noobs when it comes to these fights. In all honesty, we are. We didn't do any of these on the ptr and haven't done any raid finder as a group. A couple people have done some of that, which is why they have a little more insight. But generally speaking, we have no idea what's going on with these fights aside from what we've read and watched in videos.

Honestly, if any guild is having issues with Morchok, they're doing something wrong. He doesn't even hit tanks all that hard. Yes, there's a tank swap. Yes, I died at one point due to a taunt being a little late and me taking a ton of damage due to the stacking Crush Armor he puts on us, but otherwise it was a simple kill.

Warlord Zon'ozz is a really interesting fight. The game of ping pong you have to play with the purple orb he summons is very different. After a few wipes, we found a good position to allow better control of that. Too often was melee having to run out to get in the path of the orb and then the tank had to drag the boss into it's path if we wanted to reset Focused Anger. I suggested having the tank just move the boss to the side very slightly and face him towards that side which then put the melee stack right behind him and thus right in the path of the orb. The boss was also still in the path as he's huge like all bosses in wow. So that made it easy for use to move out of the way when we wanted it to hit Zon'ozz. Healing was extremely rough once the orb hit him. But with people rotating cool downs, we got him down.

Yor'sahj the Unsleeping is another interesting fight. Summoning different Globules and having a kill order dependent on which ones he summons. Took some refining, but he wasn't so bad either. Some combinations proved to be extremely difficult for healers, but others seemed like a vacation. Tank damage is fairly low and despite the tank swap, there's a significant amount of down time in terms of that damage since he doesn't melee the tank while summoning the globules. This allowed me to heal myself back to full each time while the healers followed the group around killing the chosen globule. When all was said and done, I ended up with my t13 leg token.

Next up was Hagara the Stormbinder. This is basically the Alysrazor of this tier, though I feel there's less going on. It's still an execution/stay alive and win type of fight. Lots of obstacles to avoid. Ice Wave proved to be an issue for a lot of people since, seemingly like all things in wow, the graphic and actual effect didn't match up. So you could appear to be 5-10 yards from the graphic yet still get hit with it and die. The other issue we ran into was breaking people out of Ice Tomb. We eventually had our hunter call out which tomb had priority and tried to get both people affected with the debuff to run into the center before they were encased in the tomb. This proved to be very helpful. Melee had to do less running around and the first person, usually a healer, was broken free fairly quick. One wipe we had was at 1%, so maddening when that happens. We ended up not killing her the first night and came back for our second raid night and finished her off. I received my t13 shoulder token from her as well.

Ultraxion has to be my favorite encounter of this tier so far. That fight seems to be designed specifically with a dk tank in mind. All the magic damage going out combined with the tank cool down reduction makes it extremely easy for me to stay alive through seemingly everything. We had some wipes due to people not understanding that Fading Light works like Searing Seeds from Majordomo Staghelm. The debuff is applied with a random length before the ability actually happens. For Fading Light, it's between 5 and 10 seconds. Heroic Will only lasts for 5 seconds, so you have to activate Heroic Will only when you have less than 5 seconds left before Fading Light goes off. Many deaths were had due to this. Eventually people got it down. I suggested taking all of Ultraxion's Hour of Twilight attacks as I would always have Anti-Magic Shell up and every other time I would have Icebound Fortitude (50% damage reduction through Blood talents) up as well. With the two up, I was somehow only taking 8-9k damage from that attack. With only AMS up, I would take 100k. Either way, I could easily survive it and still have multiple cool downs to choose from to use in combination with AMS. After working out the kinks, we got him down. Healing at the end was once again insane. Seems this tier is all about putting the healers through hell at points in the fight. As for loot, the shared boss table tanking ring dropped and my tier chest token as well. I felt really bad about already getting 2 pieces, so I passed on the token and just rolled with the other tank on the ring. He won it yet still offered it to me. Good guy, but he definitely deserved to keep it.

Pro Tip: If using a dk tank for Ultraxion, have them use Army of the Dead before Thrall gives out the Last Defender of Azeroth buff. For some reason it resets all cool downs. This might be because until the hot fix today, Army was being affected by the buff. But at least when I used it at the beginning with another dk (frost), I was able to use it again right after getting the buff from Thrall. My original Army was still up and so was his. So we ended up with 3 armies up. It was pretty funny to see.

Warmaster Blackhorn is the fight I have been fearing this tier. Riggnaros was in a video I linked a few entries back where he was destroyed on the ptr by this boss. I wonder if he had more than 2 stacks of Devastate on him at the time since it reduces armor by 20% per application. Either way, add control was proving to be an issue for us. We started work on Blackhorn late so we didn't expect to get him down. We should get him Monday night when we next head in.

Looks like I'll have to read more in-depth on the Spine of Deathwing encounter then. One thing I will say about these fights, they're fun, at least for me. I'm mainly happy to know that dk survivability isn't in a bad place right now. We'll see how that holds up once we get into heroics. For fights like Morchok, Yor'sahj and Ultraxion, it was fairly easy for me to max out my Blood Shield before taunting the boss off the other tank. I gotta say, sitting there at max health with a 200k physical absorption shield really gets me pumped. The addition of 2 more charges to Bone Shield seems to be working pretty well. AoE fights still give me trouble keeping it up as it seems Blizzard still hasn't addressed that yet. I'm sorry, but 200 fire damage from an AoE should not eat a charge from Bone Shield. That's crazy considering I'm going to get hit with like 10 of those in succession in most fights with raid wide AoE. My only hope is to get Bone Shield up close to a minute before the AoE starts so I can put it back up once the AoE is done.

A change of scenary

2011-11-15T09:13:00.000-08:00

Just so everyone is clear, I have left my guild, Electric Mayhem. It was not an easy decision to make. My raiding experience there has been awesome and the people are fun to play with. But Shanthi, Naishee and Vorlen have moved to a new guild to be with a friend they have known for 10+ years that recently transferred to our server. Since the 3 of them are some of my closest friends, I had to make the decision to leave.

I tried to get in contact directly with Averry since he's GM and my raid leader. But unfortunately the long hours at work have been taking their toll on me and I've been in bed by 10-11pm recently. Kashina came out and asked me if I was leaving. As I'm not the type to lie, I of course told her that I was. She was obviously upset about it. I've known her for roughly a year and a half, both of us raiding in HSM back in WotLK. Unfortunately nothing I said made her feel any better about the decision. She felt overall rejected. I kept trying to be clear that this wasn't an easy decision to make and that it wasn't that I didn't like raiding with EM, but it just wasn't making her feel any better. I am truly sorry that I have upset her and anyone else in EM for that matter.

Now, what I've come here to talk about is how Blizzard is struggling to balance the 4 tank specs. If you've read any of my previous entries, you know that I feel death knight tanks are awesome but extremely spikey and that, in 4.3 combined with boss damage scaling to further challenge block capping tanks, will possibly make bringing a dk tank to a raid a liability.

As it stands right now, in order of least damage taken, it's Paladin - Warrior - Druid - Death Knight. As I have said in that past, even with a dk's ability to self heal, surviving the damage upfront is the actual issue. If you die before using Death Strike, what's the point of your self healing and Blood Shields? This order will change in 4.3 with Warriors being able to reach full CTC. Mastery will continue to be a valuable stat for Warriors even after reaching full CTC due to Critical Block, which gives them a chance to block double damage. While for Paladins, it will become useless after reaching full CTC.

At present on my dk, I'm sitting at 382 ilvl, 32,029 armor (55.13% damage reduction), 35.69% total avoidance and 173,603 health. Equally geared Warriors and Paladins have 8-10k more armor than I do, while Druids... don't get me started. Their armor makes mine look silly. In addition, warriors and paladins have slightly less avoidance (before block), usually around 4-5% less (Rune of Swordshattering for the win?), druids have more avoidance. Friend of mine has a 368 ilvl and already has 36% dodge.

Now some of this will change in 4.3 due to the heal from Death Strike no longer not happening if a dk misses or is dodged/parried. Dks will still have spikey damage, but will be guaranteed that clutch heal. The problem is, and really has always been, surviving the incoming damage so you can react to it accordingly. If you get no time to react, all your tools mean absolutely nothing. Taking 200k damage in a single global cool down will kill any tank. Not amount of quick reactions will save you there. Preshielding via Blood Shield or Power Word: Shield still won't be enough. Especially if that amount of damage is becoming more and more common. Eventually something will give. So what to do here?

I've been a huge advocate for making full CTC not so easily achievable. Not only will it balance incoming damage a bit, but bosses could then be retuned so they don't have to destroy someone who doesn't block every hit that isn't avoided. But Blizzard has clarified their stance on that...

We decided not to prevent or discourage block capping for paladins and warriors, because it would have required several corresponding changes to compensate for such severe nerfs and the risk of getting things wrong or asking players to change gear was just too great. Instead, we decided to buff DK and druid tanks to improve their ability to handle streaks of bad luck. In the DK’s case, we increased the armor bonus of Blood Presence

Don't get me wrong, buffing dk armor will be great in that the spikes we take won't be quite as huge. But we're still going to be destroyed by any hard hitting boss. The buff will bring armor up to Warrior and Paladin levels. Here's the thing though, when will a warrior or paladin take an unmitigated hit? They won't, plain and simple. It will be dodged/parried or blocked. Period. As bosses have scaled to challenge them, damage has increased quite a bit so even a string of avoidance through block still requires a substantial amount of healing. Take block away and you have a ridiculous amount of damage, and likely, a flattened death knight.

At one point, it was proposed to have Bone Shield work in a way that it would only lose charges when the death knight takes a spike of damage. Obviously this would have to be percentage based to make it scale correctly with health and damage. I feel this change would have been the answer. Adding charges to it is meaningless if even the smallest hit can remove a charge.

The sad truth is that unless some changes are made, it may become impossible for me to seriously raid on my dk in 4.3. If I cannot survive a couple hits from bosses, I'm holding the group back. In which case, it might be time to dust off my warrior. He needs some gear love. Or, I could *gasp* go dps!

2011-11-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

Well, haven't updated this in a bit. Work has been a bit stressful. Stupid stealerships trying to throw me under the bus.

Anyways, so we downed Alysrazor on heroic last week. It was actually pretty awesome. People kept making little mistakes and, of course with heroics, it meant they died. After a couple wipes I gave a little speech about how we know this fight inside and out and we should have this down. And hey, we downed her on that pull. Looks like I should give motivational speeches more? I don't know. I'm just really happy we finally killed the bird.

So that now puts us to 4/7 heroic. We have our sights on Baleroc now, which is turning out to be very different for me since we usually two tank it on normal just to make sure one doesn't die to Decimation Blade. Although we quickly found out that isn't necessary. So now I'll be going unholy for that fight since our other tank is mostly set up for pvp in his off spec. Yes, I said unholy. I will not conform to frost dps!

I feel out of my element as dps at times. No matter what, I'm always thinking about some way to help mitigate damage while playing. So in a couple of our attempts, I ran up to the other tank to drop Anti-Magic Zone during Inferno Blade. Usually I was the Inferno Blade tank and would eat a lot of the damage with Anti-Magic Shell. Since I know Warriors don't have much in the way of magic damage mitigation, I figured that would help.

Like it was when we were first learning the fight on normal, this just seems like dance steps that we need to learn and we should have it down easily. Countdown is an interesting mechanic. Trying to find the right way to meet someone you're connected to while not spreading Tormented is proving to be challenging. But I think we'll get that with time.

We put in a few attempts on heroic Beth'tilac this passed week as well since we didn't have enough ranged to deal with the crystals for Baleroc until later that night. But those didn't turn out too well. We'll save that for after we get Baleroc down.

In other news I've been on an achieve rush. Been farming reputation with most of the Outlands factions as well as grinding out Loremaster achieves. Very slow going, I have to say.

I'll have a more serious update likely later this week. Perhaps I'll talk about the interesting things I saw when finally watching the Blood Legion vs Vodka challenge at Blizzcon?

4.3 and the PTR

2011-10-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

There's a specific topic I've been stuck on lately and that's the assumption that Death Knight tanks just get trucked on most bosses. I will not dispute that we take more damage than other tanks. I've seen that myself and there are countless logs showing it's true. But I think some of the values people are claiming are a bit skewed. For example, that post on the blood death knight forum on EJ claiming that a dk tank will take, on average, a melee attack of 71k. I have never taken that much damage from Shannox before. I have taken that much damage in a single hit from Riplimb when his stacks got out of hand and he had basically one shot everyone else before coming for me.

The obvious cause for this higher damage intake is simply how our class is designed. We have lower armor, so we take more damage. We take more damage so we can heal for more with Death Strike and gain a larger Blood Shield so the next hit is smaller than what even a Paladin tank takes on average. It creates a ton of spikes in health. But that's "working as intended."

There have been times where I have been scared that I will be destroyed in seconds on bosses. Cho'gall during Flame's Orders comes to mind. But the problem there was mostly from having a healer chase the other tank back to the entrance, having another mind controlled, and then I have one left on me. If they have to move out of something, I'm not getting any heals. So it all makes sense. But generally speaking, I don't feel like I'm going to die in the next attack. I'm not afraid of being one shot, as it has never happened. So I'm a little lost as to why so many tanks talk about dks being one and two shot all the time. To me, it seems as if they're doing something wrong if that's happening.

One thing I will say though is that the current PTR is definitely geared in a way that destroys dks. Riggnaros has a video displaying exactly what I'm talking about here. Obviously, he isn't doing it wrong. He spoke with a GM about this issue on the PTR as well and the GM agreed that it shouldn't be possible for a dk tank to be killed inside of a GCD from full health. So we'll see how they address that. If they do not fix that issue, it may not be possible to bring a dk tank to raids in 4.3.

But speaking of 4.3, dks are getting quite a few tweaks to their abilities. Most of the dk tanking community labels these as band-aid fixes, but I'm actually pretty excited about them.

Death Strike will always provide it's heal effect even if the hit did not land. This is an amazing change. Most of my time is spent spamming death strike since, despite the actual chances of this happening, it very often will fail to connect upwards of 5 times in a row. The downside is that before if it didn't connect, the runes would immediately be refunded, allowing us to spam it until it actually did connect. It won't do that anymore. So damage and thus threat from this attack will go down a bit. Well, as a tank, I look to survive first. So I'm fine with that.

Veteran of the Third War now also reduces the cooldown of Outbreak by 30 sec. This is also amazing. Before if my disease were about to fall off, I'd have to make that call of reapplying them or getting another Death Strike in because they have the same total rune cost. For periods of high damage, Death Strike would always win. With Outbreak on a 1 minute cool down, using it sometimes felt clunky. But with my build using 3/3 points in Epidemic, this will allow me to use Outbreak each time it comes off cool down without letting diseases ever fall off, and not taking away a Death Strike.

Blade Barrier has been revamped and is simpler - You take 2/4/6% less damage from all sources. It's now passive. This I feel was not necessary. Many dks complain about the "rune tetris" they have to play to keep Blade Barrier up while keeping runes available for as many Death Strikes as possible. To me, keeping Blade Barrier up was not very difficult and I liked trying to have the highest up time for it as possible. I felt that using a blood rune right before the next one came off cool down wasn't too hard. Obviously Runic Empowerment can suddenly change things if it activated a blood rune, but I actually liked it.

Bone Shield now has 6 charges. This would be great if they fixed something about it. That being that the amount of damage it takes to consume a charge can be anything. Even something as little as 50 damage. Before 4.2, I would see Bone Shield up almost constantly for me so long as I continued to avoid attacks. Only melee attacks and direct magic spells would consume a charge, not AOE. After 4.2, that changed. It wasn't mentioned so far as I can remember in any of the patch notes or hotfixes. It's a little frustrating during encounters like Alysrazor and Beth'tilac where their raid wide AOE attacks that do damage every few seconds consume a charge of Bone Shield each time they tick. So if I put Bone Shield up right before the pull, the AOE will likely eat all my charges and it will still be on cool down when I actually start to tank something. I remember seeing a proposed change for Bone Shield where it would instead only use a charge when hit by a certain amount of damage, a spike essentially. That would make me extremely happy. But just changing it back to the way it was before 4.2 would make me happy as well.

Blood Presence armor bonus is going to 55% from 30%. This would essentially put our armor on par with Paladins and Warriors. We'd still take more damage due to no actual block, but our overall damage would be less. I like this, but again I fear that further tweaks will happen due to the changes this will cause to Death Strike's heal. Less damage intake will result in smaller heals from it and thus smaller shields. But again, survivability is my main concern, and this should increase that overall.

Hopefully they can fix the balance issue that has been present for quite some time: block capping. Paladins can block cap already and Warriors will be able to in the next patch. This obviously skews tank damage quite a bit. If blizzard does intend on eventually addressing this issue, I'm sure the outcry from those classes will be huge. Much like when Paladin tanks complained about having to use Ardent Defender when they're low in health instead of it saving them automatically. I could go on and on about my pally hate, but I'll save that for another post ;-)

Alysrazor VS God Mode...

2011-10-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

My guild has been working on hard modes the last month or so. At first, we were moving along very steadily, at least getting one new boss down each week. Shannox, Rhyolith, Majordomo Staghelm all fell at our hands. Then we moved on to Alysrazor. Now, I remember pounding our heads against the wall against her on regular back before the nerfs. It felt so incredibly impossible that most of us wanted to give up. Eventually, we got used to the pattern of things.

The hatchlings were a major problem back then. Tank dps wasn't high enough, survivability was seriously in question while a Tantrum was going on. The main thing that was maddening to me was the tendency for the game to give either tank Gushing Wound and then, right when we were about to hit 50% health, Tantrum. Then 4-shot in something crazy like 3.5 seconds. What's with that? Both tanks would look at the log and see around 200k damage in such a short period of time. All from melee swings from the hatchling. Eventually we go the pattern down. Tantrums didn't last more than a few seconds and while they were going on, our healers spammed their fastest heals on us while we fed them.

Now that fight is trivial with the nerfs on regular. But heroic isn't the same cakewalk for us. The changes on heroic are interesting. On paper, it seems like a ton, but it really isn't so bad. Hatchlings have less health, but you get three waves of them before the tornado phase. Meteors to watch out for and kill to create a line of sight element for her Firestorm attack. Meanwhile all other mechanics are going on. Initiates cast Fieroblast faster, everything does more damage, you know, the usual heroic stuff. The thing that makes the fight interesting to me is picking up the hatchling. The meteor lands directly in the middle of the 2 eggs. It's anyone's guess which direction it will choose to start rolling. Keeps me on my toes.

Last night, we were beating our heads pretty hard on this fight. There's so many things moving around you have to avoid, making one mistake is sometimes pretty fatal. I know I get hit with brushfires and the occasional lava spew from the worms. But I usually can avoid most everything. My movement is probably a bit annoying for whoever happens to be healing me though. On heroic, my hatchling rarely tantrums for more than a few seconds. Usually I'm either right by a worm or it's about to die.

On one attempt, the one my guildies know I'd be blogging about, someone went down before the first tornado phase and we used a battle rez on them. Later, the other tank went down right before his hatchling died. Oh no, we're screwed, right? Nope, at least, not right away. With two healers on me, I picked up both hatchlings on the next part of the cycle. Managed to feed them all the worms and had to tank one through a firestorm. Survival cool downs and amazing heals for the win there? It died soon after the storm. Well, now we have the third wave of hatchlings. Let's do it again. Sure enough, managed to do the same thing again. One left over when the tornado phase started. Tanking a hatchling during the tornado phase is bad. I'm sorry, it's extremely bad. But, with some more stellar heals, managed to kill that one too. So now she's down. Got some help from melee for interrupts on the casters, then had to solo tank her while she regained Molten Power from 50-100. I managed to survive there as well.

Unfortunately, people started dying at this point and we couldn't continue to see if we could keep this going. But man, did that make that fight interesting. To be honest, I'm usually pretty bored for that fight. I feel I've got it pretty well down. I make mistakes here and there, who doesn't? But it doesn't cause a wipe. So that was a lot of fun for me. Kudos to my amazing healing team on that one. Making me feel like a god.

Although I know of guilds reporting they have successfully one tanked the hatchlings, we had never tried it before with much success. Once a tank goes down and we don't have a rez for them, we pretty much wipe it. I pride myself in being hard to kill and always try for the moral victory. If there's a hatchling up and almost everyone is dead, you better believe I'm over there trying to kill it before it kills me. I may be a spikey bastard, but I think I hold my own.

These aren't the stats you're looking for...

2011-10-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

As a tank, stats used to be pretty straight forward in WotLK. You stacked stamina to high hell and that was it. Right? Right. After defense rating was eliminated, even I went that route. But again, I decided to go for more hit and expertise mixed in there for threat since our dps could essentially pull aggro any time they seemingly wanted. But what about now?

Cataclysm introduced many changes. Aside from the introduction of mastery (which is pretty fantastic for every tank), boss mechanics changed too. Bosses no longer do enough damage to one or two shot tanks. Healers don't have to spam heal them all the time anymore. So is stamina as useful as it once was?

While gearing up my death knight, I still went by the wrath standard of stam, stam, stam. Everything was stam on me. When running heroics my healers and I noticed that I was extremely spikey. Well, I'm a death knight. That's normal, right? Sure, to some extent. After some experimenting, I decided to go the mastery route. For a dk, gearing can go one of two ways: mastery or avoidance. When raiding in t11, I experimented with an avoidance build for fights when I was the add tank. My shields from my mastery would constantly be destroyed in seconds with so many adds, so avoidance seemed logical. Although it seemed good in theory (multiple mobs and therefore many melee swings), RNG did not tend to smile upon me enough for it to work for me. That's essentially what I took away from that experiment. Avoidance builds, although completely viable, are too dependent on RNG for me to feel comfortable. I like the amount of control over my own survival the mastery build gives me. Also, it's kind of a sense of personal satisfaction when I can do some crazy things and survive in most cases when other tanks would surely die.

When my guild first started doing heroic Firelands, I took it very seriously. I went to Elitist Jerks and read everything I could about gearing for heroics. It seems a good majority of dk tanks have gone the stamina route due to high boss damage. The reasoning being that bosses are designed to challenge tanks survivability, aka paladins with full CTC. So the death knight gets the short end of the stick there, with us taking more damage than any other tank class. We started with Shannox, as most guilds did. I remember reading a post on EJ detailing the average amount of damage per melee swing from him on each tank class. The ridiculous 71k average swing on a dk tank got me worried, and I continued to read more to see what tanks did to help out with this. Stamina, that's all they mostly talk about here. Using stamina trinkets, stacking stamina gems, using Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle... anything and everything to make their health pool larger. They also went more towards hit and expertise cap to guarantee Death Strike would connect. That clutch heal needs to connect. So, I decided to try it.

I ended up increasing my health pool around 50k with raid buffs. It seemed like an absurd amount of health, 221.6k at the time. So away we went. I noticed I didn't seem any more spikey than usual. My shields were noticeably smaller due to gearing. My Death Strikes didn't fail to connect, which was nice. But the shield was so small and was popped immediately in the next swing that I still had to spam Death Strike. We downed him and moved on to other regular bosses.

When I reviewed the logs from a couple regular bosses that week versus last week, I saw some pretty crazy numbers. When comparing Beth'tilac on normal, my healing on the stamina build had increased around 400k. More Death Strikes landing and Rune Tap healing for more. But I took around 1.4m more damage. All our healers had higher healing numbers than the previous week as well. This could be from people making more mistakes, but also because I had to be healed more. Although I could clearly see they were capable of healing me with this build, it seemed to essentially be doing the exact opposite of what I like to do as a tank; make the healer feel as useless as possible. Forcing a healer to use larger, less efficient heals on me isn't right. I want to make the healer feel secure that a slower, smaller heal will make it before I need more healing. The cast cancel game isn't a fun one for healers, I imagine.

The second thing I was shocked by in the logs was the average melee swing damage on me: 36k. Where did that 71k figure come from on EJ? Was the death knight tank wearing dps gear and in unholy presence or something? 36k was pretty typical damage from Ragnoros on normal to me. So, back to the mastery build I went. At present, I sit around 185k health, 36-37% avoidance, and mastery increasing my shield to 151% of the heal from Death Strike raid buffed. These numbers seem more than sufficient for the content I'm currently doing.

Before someone goes off about pre-nerf versus post-nerf, the nerf to Shannox on heroic was 15%, not 50%, and he definitely was doing close to 50% less damage to me than what was previously stated.

The main thing I took away from all this is that while stamina is still important, it's not at all what it used to be. Bosses are not one or two shotting me. Maybe heroic Ragnaros will, I don't know. We're not there yet. We're only 3/7 heroic. But for the content my group is currently doing, stacking stamina is not necessary and only strains your healers. So don't do it. Instead, just go for socket bonuses, which are always stamina on plate tank gear. Use some hybrid gems that have avoidance/mastery with stamina on them to achieve those bonuses. But prioritize avoidance or mastery above all else. You'll get plenty of stamina that way without giving up potential mitigation.

A brief intro, I suppose

2011-10-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

I'm still a little unsure as to what I will inevitably use as a theme for this blog. Obviously it will be WoW based. I thought about using it as a how-to in terms of playing a death knight, but there's already far too many of those out there. Maybe a collection of my in-game experiences? Again, many of those exist as well. The problem is that it's very difficult to actually come up with something original. As I am no expert in writing, sadly I don't believe I'll be able to offer anything of major interest. Maybe I'm just being hard on myself. Meh, whatever.

To start, I've been playing WoW for a little over two years now. Yes, I am indeed a "Wrath baby." Bring forth your judgements! I currently play on Kargath server in a raiding guild that is somewhere in between casual and hardcore. I feel that I tend to lean a bit more towards the hardcore end a bit more than others. But at the same time I enjoy having free time and the little personal life I have is important to me.

My main is a death knight tank. Oh, here we go. More judgements. It's true, the majority of death knights are people who just leveled a character to 55 so they could play a dk. Most of them just faceroll the keyboard and do top dps, blah blah blah. Yeah, try that while being a dk tank. Sure, holding aggro isn't hard, even before the major threat buff. But dks are spikey as hell. Even more so if they don't know how to properly manage their ridiculous number of survival cooldowns. A good dk tank is one that a healer doesn't have to heal that much. We'll always be spikey, that's our nature. But our self healing and shielding is designed to negate a lot of the need for heals. Often I hear from my healers that they feel like they can ignore me for a bit and heal others that stood in fire or something and not worry about me dying so suddenly.

Gearing has always been fairly important to me from the time I first started raiding on my warrior tank. Maybe that's why I ended up the loot/gear officer in my current guild. I've thrown around different methods, tested the EJ approved ways of doing things, made up my own gearing strategies. In Wrath, I was constantly ridiculed by other tanks and raiders because I didn't stack stamina in every possible socket. I, instead, went for an effective health model. Gearing towards defense rating to raise overall avoidances and then stamina in all blue sockets. When pugging during that time, I laughed as all the stam stacking tanks would spike up and down in health. Probably giving their healers a heart attack in the process. Meanwhile, when it became my turn to tank the boss, my health was fairly steady. When the other tank died due to a huge melee swing, I lived long past the amount of "stacks" a tank should have safely taken before the other should taunt off. No, I didn't rub this in everyone's faces. But I should have.

Pugging to me is a dirty word. I can't stand those who cannot do their job with a certain degree of competence. Unfortunately it seems as if my luck in the dungeon finder is terrible for that. I know I'm not alone there. But I refuse to tank for any pug unless I have friends with me. Tanking is a thankless job most of the time. I would imagine healing is much the same. There's no real way to measure how good a tank or healer is aside from no one dying, which most people assume is all due to the healer. I will not downplay the role of the healer. Some of my best friends are healers, amazing ones at that. But the tank is also responsible for the group's survival. So try not to rag on a tank who isn't doing everything perfectly. Sometimes this is hard for me as well. I tend to backseat tank. I must be a terrible dps when I use that spec, always looking for a way to help the healer or pick up strays adds that got away.

Well I did say this would be brief. Clearly I'm a liar. I suppose this will be a blog about the two things I mentioned at the beginning. Sounds like as good a plan as any. Stay tuned for more awesome?