Rainysundays.net

This was going to be called “Frost Tanking Diary” but since the announcement of Blood becoming the only DK tanking tree I decided to change the name. I’m going to keep my DK in his Frost build till Cataclysm comes out and I’m forced to change. I think Blood tanking will be interesting but I really love frost tanking also.

The other week I rolled a Blood Elf Death Knight by the name of “Cathartik”. You can see his armory profile at the bottom of the post.
I decided even before I roll him that I was going to make him a tank and level him by just by doing dungeon runs. I thought it would be interesting to track his progress by blogging about it and write some newb guides to DK tanking.

A lot of new DK’s seem to get confused by multiple DK tanking builds. It’s true that you can tank in all three tree’s of Blood, Frost and Unholy with two handed weapons or two one handed weapons. But for the new DK’s its recommended you go Frost using a two handed weapon. Until you get some nice epic gear at 80.

Here’s the build I’m currently using along with what glyphs to use: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#eSQeNhlIJIHf6h,wYae-3,11723

You should get all your Frost talents first so you can get Howling Blast at 60 (get the glyph as well!). Then you should get Blade Barrier and Anticipation next in any order.

It’s recommended that you start tanking at 60 as you will have both Death and Decay and Howling Blast at your disposal. You can start at 58 if you really want to. You need to have a good rotation set up in order to keep multi-threat. You basically need to spread your diseases and blood boil to keep multi-threat. So ask the dps to hang back a second till you do that.

I currently use this rotation on my DK for groups at 64:

Death Grip/Strangulate (if not on cool down) > Howling Blast > Plague Strike > Pestilence > Blood Boil > Obliterate
Then Frost strike as your rune dump then maybe Blood Boil then repeat.

The rotation is basically applying diseases via Howling Blast and Plague Strike. You then use Pestilence to spread them to the other mobs and Blood Boil to do damage to any mob effected by a disease. Once my diseases are up I use Obliterate then I have enough runic power to my frost strike once or twice.

I currently use this rotation on my DK for single mobs/bosses at 64:

Howling Blast > Plague Strike > Blood Boil > Obliterate > Frost Strike

Basically the same rotation without pestilence. If you need to grab agro quickly on a mob thats running for a dps or healer then hit it with Icy Touch as it produces a lot of threat now (Patch 3.3.3.).
Please don’t just spam Icy Touch though, you will keep agro but it lowers your damage a lot and makes you look noobish.

Next entry I’ll talk about upcoming Cataclysm change that makes Blood the only tanking tree.