DK Tanking (long read)

[:1]Wow, cataclsym, amazing...

Ok...I've been playing since vanilla and stopped at ulduar, returning for cata and I'm glad that I did. I was so excited when I heard about all the fail in heroics...No more ae fests, woot.

My goal is to generally tank although dw frost is insane right now. I wanted to give out a few thoughts that I've noticed while tanking as a DK. I'm not some crazy pro tank, just wanted to share some of my findings because when you hit that first heroic, you'll be "wtf", especially as a DK...I know I was...

If you have an inflated epeen, please move along.

When I first started gearing, I went to EJ's and made sure to follow every detail in preparing for heroics. I made sure to reach the hit cap (8%) and expertise cap (6.5%). This past sunday, I geared up and reforged away my avoidance to meet those requirements. You should never forge away mastery imo. I was sitting right around 126K in blood presence with around 12 mastery and thought I was ready.

I get deadmines and wow, it was extremely hard for me and my healer. I had to really be on my toes all the way through and after tons and tons of wipes, we managed. It was gratifying, but I DID NOT want to go through that again. It was extremely stressful and time consuming.

I then spent the week figuring out WHY it was so hard. I've seen other non dk tanks with the same amount of health not taking as much spikes and not having to be under 50% hp almost through the entire instance, lol.

Last night, I removed all my sta+avoidance gems and stacked pure sta except for the two green (mastery + sta) for meta. I also picked up a few items and managed to reach 140k hp with blood presence. I then had an idea to reforge all my avoidance to mastery and fall below the hit/exp cap. In the end, the cap is for threat. Obviously it's much more important for dps but since I've never had any threat problems I went ahead and reforged it. Now I'm sitting at 17 mastery, 5% hit and 5% exp, well below the caps. I queue up, never did Halls of Origination on heroic but that's what I got, finished in one run with ZERO wipes.

I have good hp, but the crazy part was my death strike. It was INSANE how much damage I was mitigating with it. I almost never had to use any of my CDs even for bosses. IcB was maybe used maybe once while it was on CD almost my entire deadmines run. Most of the boss fights were typically that I'd get hit and my death strike would cover that hit. Healer was almost always full mana entire run, lol...Honestly, you can get by with much less heatlh. Mastery is absolutely unreal with dk tanking.

TLDR;

Don't worry too much about hit/exp and consider reforging all your avoidance to mastery and stick with the hit/exp from the gear. I'd also stack pure sta for DKs as avoidance will be really low anyways and having a bigger health pool is much more important imo.

Also for healers, you'll tend to see DK's health spike more, this is due to our nature and our mechanics and the fact we DONT have a SHIELD. Please be a bit patience and don't bail on the group cause our health dips below 50% on the first trash pull, lol.

THIS IS NOT FOR RAIDING.

edit: I would highly suggest picking up a shield mod to see the life of your death strike bubble. This will help you spam less to not clip the bubble which in the end helps you not to get rune starved...Its even more insane when you try to keep the ds bubble uptime at close to 100%

Blightkush
I would not forge away from dodge/parry into mastery.

You should not need it for Heroics.

As for Hit/Exp, yes you do not need to forge to it (at this time) since you shouldn't be having any problems with threat.


Yup, this is for people struggling with heroics. I was gimping myself when I was reforging to the cap when I had no threat issues. It was insane the mitigation difference was when I reforged all my avoidance to mastery. I'm sure there are other dk tanks out there trying to follow the books for heroics when you don't really need to so I thought I'd write about this experience.

Thats why I put in big bold caps "This is not for raiding", so ppl don't get confused.
Yes I understand that. I am saying that even for heroics you probably shouldn't go all out and reforge away from parry/dodge into Mastery. Gem Master, pick it up where you can, but parry/dodge helps as well, especially for the trash which is harder than any of the boss fights.
I thought this too until I actually TRIED reforging it all away into mastery...The results were astonishing. And yes even for heroics, there are lots of struggling dk tanks out there like I was...

edit: for heroics, the mitigation you gain from the mastery far outweighs the RNG gods of avoidance, at least from my exp. I think as a tank, you might get so attached to the avoidance stats that you won't even try doing what I'm suggesting...TRY IT...
Why did you reforge from Parry to Hit on your gloves and ring of three lights?
I'm not sure if its updated on your screen but on my screen, it clearly shows that I reforged to mastery for those items...lol

edit: lol, nm, maybe b/c those items already come with mastery? after i could reforge everything i could to mastery, i then reforged the rest of my avoidance to hit/exp.