I agree with the aforementioned of cap not currently being present. I have around 800 haste and the GCD still is not under 1 sec while not under the effect of bloodlust, BT, power infusion, or other haste buffs.

Blood DK's will tank in Cataclysm

This seems a bit of unfortunate news, although I welcome a dedicated tanking tree.

Announced today by GC

<quote> In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.
</quote>

So for all those Frosty's out there... enjoy while you still have it.

A new thread may be worth it when they release more details.

(DK: Shaidar - The Scryers)

first of all grats on a very helpful guide on blood dk!!

here is my thought: in my guild i play as dps unholy but i wanna go blood. the problem is that i need to find a nice specc to do so and it seems i have some minor problems. the situation is that in my guild we have a dk tank who is blood and has allready put 2 talent points on AM so i was thinking that it would be a waste of TP for me to go for AM since we have it allready and it wont stack up even i go for it!

the help i need is to find a usefull blood specc to play with without using AM. i thought to go for the healing talents in blood such as rune tap etc. but i am not sure about it!

i then thought to tell my buddy (the other dk) to respecc and not use the TPs on AM but in some other talent (the healing ones) as he is the tank and they would be more usefull on him!

what do you think about it?

last but not least i would like to to have some suggestions on a blood pvp specc is it good or should i stick with unholy?

keep up the good work guys!!

ps: my character's name is yashodhan and is on twilight's hammer now (faction change+migrate)

Since the last patch I think my 5/61/5 is the best DK tank spec I've ever used, and here is why. I love it more than any blood spec, and any other frost spec I have used. This is an alt and I only tank ICC 10 one day a week, so don't worry about my gear, that's not what I'm trying to tell people about. Check me out at The World of Warcraft Armory - Savaage @ Medivh - Profile. First off, since the change to IT there is no need for bladed armor at all, but before you think im a nub, no, that does not mean I IT spam, my rune strike still crits for 4k+ and it is always my #1 single target attack on recount, and I still pretty much use the standard suggested rotation. Also epidemic is pointless because I do IT frequently enough to refresh it. I do not need to plague strike at all, ever, in any situation. I love having a no cost interrupt from the Endless Winter talent, and the 4% strength is great too. Having Icy Reach is fantastic for picking up adds that get away, one Killing Machine IT is as good as a taunt now, and the extra range on HB makes add tanking easier as well. I also use Chill of the Grave for my RP generation, Scent of Blood sucks in my opinion, I always, repeat always have 100 RP at the end of my rotation (even with rune strike macro'd to everything but frost strike) and can dump two frost strikes easy or pop CDs if I need them, plus not having to waste RP to interrupt makes me way more useful as an interrupter and as a tank. Acclimation does not get all the credit it deserves I think, on fights where I take alot of magic damage it is a life saver! Let's say I'm taking shadow damage, and we have a shadow aura up and maybe a druid buff, after Acclimation stacks I'll have over 300 shadow resistance, no one can say that is bad, no one, plus it is almost always up in some form, and sometimes I have 2 or 3 stacking for different elements.
My main is a healer, and DK tanks are squishy, every healer knows that, you could be a blood DK tank with all 25 man ICC gear and you will still get hit like a little girl wearing a nightie, blood has terrible mitigation, and that's why you have 60k hp and Festergut smacks you for half that and u die.
The point of this reply is I do more threat than ANY tank I have ever seen, and I take less damage than any other DK tank I've ever seen, even less than most warriors and paladins.
So please! Rip this reply apart, rip my armory apart, ask me my rotation! I would love to discuss this spec with other frost DW tanks, I really think I'm ahead of the curve and I'm pretty sure this is the best DK tank spec ever.

I wanted to come in and talk about these changes, but the cataclysm sticky i read pretty much should just say "Do not talk about in anyway or form, these changes" So im pretty sure il end up with an infraction for this. I have some interesting ideas about the heroic strike change, but il just say in short that i dislike the idea of it being on the global cooldown due to the feeling and control it gave (or atleast used to before we all became insanely overgeared) over rage and dps.

The changes arent all here yet but i really hope they have something good instore for changing this core mechanic, atleast it; along with the rage change will do something to help balance the scaling of warriors throughout different tiers of gear.

Since no one else has posted this. Seems relevant.


MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm



We're doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we'd go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

Frost has 2% more mitigation. Two. While blood has 3% stam. Those are the only 2 effective health differences in the 2 specs. Hardly a night and day difference. Plus blood has the WOTN which = 5-15% EH. I described advantages, and disadvantages of both frost and blood on a per encounter basis, if you have anything to ad, or disagree with shoot. I'm not saying frost doesn't have its uses, and I'll agree with the IT change two things have changed for Frost DK's.

1. You can afford to pick up utility talents like you mentioned, which helps.

2. Even without IT spam, just using it to refresh your diseases, especially with a KM proc, frost probably has the highest tps at the moment.

Same thing is happening to me, it's not just you. Not sure why it's happening.

Orc racial + axes?

Read: Feral druids are so ridiculously overpowered that even with significant time off target are a better use of the buff than pretty much anyone else because Blizzard just doesn't seem to care that they can pump out 15k on Saurfang while comparable pure melee DPS classes (rogues) can manage about 12-13k on average? Feral are stupidly overpowered == Feral druids get the buff early to maximize their stupid overpoweredness. A good Feral can and will beat the everloving shit out of pretty much anyone else that can get that buff first.

As with most things in WoW, the problem is DRUIDS. (I don't like Druids as they are evil and I cannot beast lore them in every form.)

Also, a lot of guilds really like having the buff in melee to start with, and then pass it out to range so that it spreads relatively equitably. In that situation, again a Druid is your best option for taking the buff first. (I hate Druids. )