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Blood Tanking (Leveling)
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Post by
kodikun
First off: In before "Go 2H frost"
Now that that's out of the way, I was wondering if someone might help me to understand basic tanking "rotations" for death knights. I read the sticky, and I'm still sort of confused about it. For AoE (trash pulls and the like) I know I should open with Death and Decay. After this, should I spread diseases like back in WoTLK? What should I do next? Heart strikes? As for single target, should I open with diseases, then heart strike? Should I only use icy touch, and not plague strike? To be honest I've never tanked on a Death Knight, and I don't want to fail horribly at it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh, I've read the EJ article too. Great stuff, but still doesn't help me too much with understanding what skills to use.
Post by
falcov
Like the sticky said, there's no rotation anymore.. there's only a priority system.
in other words, DnD to start off the pull, DS to maintain Blood Shield and health, and then heart strike/BB to use your blood runes.
And in all honesty, don't even worry about diseases as a DK tank. I don't use them at all. Well let me rephrase.. don't worry about applying diseases outside of Outbreak (which you get at 81).. the debuffs you get when you apply diseases are great, but they're not important enough to warrant worrying maintaining them.
Let me simplify things a bit for you.. in a regular pull, this is what I do for AOE:
DnD->DS->HS/BB->DS->HS/BB etc etc
I might recommend picking up Morbidity and glyphing DnD for the interim (hell I'm doing some raiding and I still have both of those) to make tanking easier on you and ultimately you aren't going to feel confident in your tanking skills until you go out and tank.
You can check out my profile for an idea of how I spec/glyph for tanking:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/lightninghoof/unshackled/simple
Post by
kodikun
Thank you very much! Having things simplified a little bit has made it much easier to understand. I should spread my death strikes out so I don't clip the blood shield, correct? and thank you for the armory link. :)
EDIT: About hit/expertise capping, I know I shoud reach the expertise soft cap, should I try for the hit cap (on abilities, anyway) as well?
Post by
Thror
Personally, i find the diseaseless rotations boring, and shunning people from using common tanking debuffs sounds outright stupid. To me.
Do you hold aggro without diseases? Yes. Do you hold aggro with diseases? Yes. How in the world does it hurt you to apply your diseases to reduce the damage you take? When you do not apply diseases on three melee enemies, and use a single extra Death Strike instead, do you think you end up getting less damage? The main goals in tanking for me are reducing damage taken as much as possible, and protecting the party from harm. If i can do good DPS along the way, i am glad. By running diseaseless, you are voluntarily gimping your damage reduction, which is in exact opposite of my goals in tanking.
That said, i should emphasize that not everyone probably shares my goals in tanking.
Post by
110480
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
NedEllis
First off: In before "Go 2H frost"
Now that that's out of the way, I was wondering if someone might help me to understand basic tanking "rotations" for death knights. I read the sticky, and I'm still sort of confused about it. For AoE (trash pulls and the like) I know I should open with Death and Decay. After this, should I spread diseases like back in WoTLK? What should I do next? Heart strikes? As for single target, should I open with diseases, then heart strike? Should I only use icy touch, and not plague strike? To be honest I've never tanked on a Death Knight, and I don't want to fail horribly at it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh, I've read the EJ article too. Great stuff, but still doesn't help me too much with understanding what skills to use.
Hi. In my hopinion you have to spread disease always, for maximize damage and consequently, aggro (also
hearth strike and blood boil gains an increased damage when diseases are on targets
).
For AOE, i always start with DND, then plague strike (it put 10% physical damage reduction, a must for tanks, and for melee dps) and icy touch, then pestilence to spread disease and debuff to all.
If you have very well geared dps in your group start rotation with DND and then 1 or 2 blood boil. Then diseases all or first rune strike your skulled target.
After that, alternate death strike and rune strike, and reapply diseases if you need. Blood boil when you have it free and heart strike.
With these tricks actually i
never
lose aggro if dps nuke heavy with aoe.
Single target is really more easy: for boss put outbreak, then death strike 2 times and rune strike it. At first few seconds you gain aggro a bit slow but can absorbs a lot and gain fast runic power for rune strike. You can't lose aggro then.
But rotation isn't the first "weapon" for a death knight. Many times in forums people speak about "rotations", but rotation in itself it's useless if you don't use the cooldown and extra abilities that you have:
Icebound Fortitude (50%reduction damage), Horn of Winter (remember to have it always for increased damage and obviously aggro), Anti-Magic Shell (huge amount of absorbed spell damage), raise dead and death pact (for extra emergency heals), Army of the Dead (use it carefully and in some situation it saves your life and a lot of healer's mana), Blade Barrier (talent, Whenever your Blood Runes are on cooldown, you gain the Blade Barrier effect, which decreases damage taken by 6% for the next 10 sec), Bone Shield (talent, you take 20% less damage from all sources and deal 2% more damage with all attacks), Rune Tap (talent, a lot of extra heals and mana safer for healers), Vampiric Blood (talent, extra healt for emergency situations), Dancing Rune Weapon (talent, additional 20% parry chance).
Make a macro that cast istantly many of this cooldown or use these cooldown whenever you can and you will be a huge tank!
Post by
724197
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
110480
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
kodikun
Thanks for all the input guys. :) I really appreciate it!
Post by
GenXCub
I also wanted to add, the first reply mentioned Blood Shield, but you don't get that until level 80, so make sure you're ignoring any mention of Blood Shield until you get to 80.
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