Fully talented Icebound Fortitude (+50% armor) will last 21-22 seconds. 12 seconds basic, +5 Chill of the Grave, +30% from Runic Power Mastery. that means it will be the tanking buff of choice for DK. Every 22 seconds.

Fully Talented Hungering Cold will last 26 seconds worst case (mass frost trap anyone?) Best case, if it will use runic power gradually to allow for you to replenish it - it can potentially be everlasting. All you need in this case is to generate 10 RP every 2.6 seconds to keep it running.
At the end of it if either killing Machine procs, or Deathchill is used - Howling Blast will do AoE for 6 times its base damage, untalented, crit. Factor in all the talents like Tundra Stalker. Thats every one minute - every single instance pull. Or every single solo pull if you pull 2-3 mobs at a time.

Icy Touch + Icy Talons means that at least every 20 seconds you will be using Icy Touch, if not more often - even for the sake of your own attack speed increase. that's your ever-active flurry.

At this moment, taking care of timing deseases is too much for my weak unready mind, so I leave them completely out of the picture.. besides, you cant have mobs frozen and diseased at the same time, so I pick frozen.
Talent tree Deathknight is my tanking spec of choice.

Also, I am not completely decided on Accimation yet, we'll see.

As mentioned, I'm assuming running 10-15% crit. When tanking I'd be suprised if DKs had more than that.


I'm speculating, but apparently Frost Strike crits for 150% untalented at the moment, so it's not unreasonable speculation I don't think. This would affect the usefulness of Deathchill too, obviously.

Is anyone knowledgeable enough to comment on the mechanics of Ebon Plaguebringer? What disease effects can stack to 3 to activate it? How long will it take to put up? I vaguely recall reading that the DoT from Degeneration will stack 3 times, which could lead to interesting tradeoffs in terms of party or raid DPS -- surely Degen x3 at the start of the fight is not conducive to high personal DPS for the DK.

Well, the distinctive feature of Winter's Grasp is that it does not actually Freeze the target; it specifically says the target is considered Frozen. This is very different wording from all the "chance to freeze the target" effects on both DK's and other Frost Mage talents. Look through the debuff list, you won't find that "considered" wording in any other target-freezing debuff. I suspect getting a "frozen" debuff on a boss is going to require a Frost mage specced for Winter's Grasp (tier 8).

10% proc chance every, say, 2.2 seconds on average with various haste effects, 5 second duration, it'll be up around 22% of the time with a single Frost mage working at it. Maybe 25%, since that mage will be throwing at least one Ice Lance to catch the very end of the proc duration.

The big question I have is what this "vulnerable to frost" debuff is going to be. Straight +Frost%? increased crit damage, like the giants in SSC? Something else?

Unholy Blight can stack to 3, Degeneration can and I read somewhere that the Blood Caked Blade disease can, although I can't remember where and haven't seen confirmation.

I'm interested in the mechanics of Ebon Plague. If the 15 seconds refreshes on the refresh of a 3 stack, it seems overpowered, if it doesn't, which seems likely, then it gets more complicated and has some interesting synergy with Obliterate.

This is all true, but I'm more concerned about how the DK "freeze" debuffs will work. If they make bosses immune to them, several frost talents will loose all their utility, among them Howling Blast and Frost Rune Mastery.

There are a couple of places where it simply says "places a disease" without specifying an effect, including the 51-point Unholy talent. Am I to assume that the talent is incomplete, or that it's just putting on extra debuffs that do nothing but raise the number of disease debuffs on the target? Is there a 'standard' disease DoT that we can assume all diseases are unless otherwise stated?

Has this been mentioned yet? I didn't notice in the past 3 pages of this thread, so I apologize if I've been blind.

Blizzard Changes Death Knight Talent Trees | Curse

Apparently, the odd mish-mash of tanking talents across all 3 trees is completely intentional? To let (force?) you choose between different styles of tanking/dps to spec into?

That was actually my initial thought (hope) as to the explanation for the mis-mash of tanking talents all over the place. It makes a lot of sense given the alleged aim of the class (solve the LF1M need tank! spam). Kudos to Blizzard for that, and it should make TCing the "ideal" tanking spec far more interesting (instead of "do I put 2 points here or two points there?" it becomes "So... deep blood or deep unholy?").

The potential downside is that if one spec is better at tanking a certain boss as compared to another, death knights in progressing guilds may end up respeccing a lot. Hopefully Blizzard is keeping this in mind as they design the trees and their raid content (or as they give us talent stables? I wish...).

While not giving each tree a definitive role is a great idea in theory, it has serious potential to backfire. Instead of getting one superior tanking build, we might end up with 3 sub-par tank specs, that drastically limit the use of Death Knight tanks to gimick encounters where abilitys like Anti-Magic Shell are required for survival.

I have one big issue with unholy's style of play right now. The disease part is ok. All the other talents and spells relying on ghouls and corpses are not. The problem is that even though unholy seems to have more pvp applications, this reliance on having a convenient corpse nearby is just too iffy.

In arena, just when you need to use some of your nifty unholy abilities, you can't cos nobody is dead yet, so no corpse. And in pve, there's no gaurantee there will be a convenient corpse nearby for you to utilise. Same for pvp. Say you are guarding a tower or a flag, no corpse nearby, then half your unholy abilities are unusable.

Either they need to give deathknights a way to generate corpses. Like for one unholy rune, 2 corpses will appear bearby. Or raise dead will just cause a ghoul to crawl its way out of the earth without having to have a corpse on hand. And when the ghoul dies, it will conveniently leave a corpse. Make the spells treat ghouls as corpses as well, so that once the ghoul is raised, it can be used rather than waiting for it to die.

So, for example. Say you want to use corpse explosion. And there just isn't any corpses nearby. So, you cast raise dead and a ghoul crawls its way out of the earth. Then you target it and case corpse explosion and it goes off immediately. This is still noticably combersome and places the unholy deathknight at a disadvantage compared to other aoes which can go off immediately rather than this "two state" process. But at least, the unholy DK can now use his corpse explosion ability as and when he wishes to.

Right now, I don't believe the corpse using abilities are so overpowered given the huge limitations of requiring a corpse on hand.

So, I am hoping Blizzard allows deathknights to generate corpses, or like use ghoul like I suggested, otherwise, all the nifty abilities right now like corpse explosion that uses corpses are just too iffy and restrictive, whether in pve or even in pvp.



Got an additional question about DK that I hope people in the know can tell me.

There's this new obliterate ability. What's the rune cost to use it? and does it have a cooldown?

Also, what's the crit multiplier on strikes like? is it 150% of normal damage or is it 200% of normal damage. Because for warrior, heroic strikes can crit for 200% damage. And does the crit multiplier vary from a say blood strike to a frost strike? Thanks in advance

I think I said this before, but the problem is that Blizzard has said DKs will tank one type of fight only, and Warriors will remain the MTs for most occasions. So unless they've gone back on this and decided to have a Spell Tank DK, a Physical Tank DK, etc then it will just mean that raiding-wise all but one of these tank specs are useless and the others are simply wasted talents no one will really use.

I would love to see tanking generaly be dependant on what spec a class has gone, be they druid, pally, warrior, or DK, but it hasn't be the stated intention of Blizzard, and the other tanking classes don't have such flexibility in their tanking trees. It is unlikely that DKs will be raid viable in three tanking builds as each build has different strengths, so unless they cannibalize the tank spots of other classes they wont have a place. They are unlikely to take the place of others and thus it is unlikely that that would happen.

In Blizzard's head raid tanks = warriors, and other tanks are just gimmiks anyway. Unless we see something to indicate this position has changed, and I haven't and have seen stuff to indicate that it has not changed, then it seems highly pointless to make three tank possibilities for DKs when only one of those possibilities is going to be used, gimmiky though it is.

You are quite wrong here. While it is true most guild leaders/RLs don't trust tanks other than warriors it is also true that paladins/druids are happilly and successfully MTing fights for other guilds throughout all content. As long as you have a good tank there's little difference in the class. What makes warriors slightly better MTs is SW. Anything that doesn't require spell reflect is MTable (first kill type) by any other tank class, and has been done somewhere.

It's just that while with dps you can afford to bring another spec/class one night for a first kill most people don't have the courage to do the same to tanks, don't have the actual tanks or have preconceptions which they don't care about changing because what they know already works. And getting a DK tank without a shield, with who knows what kind of stats initially/behaviour ... have fun, no matter how good they turn out to be.

There are a few guilds these days that don't have a Warrior as a MT for new bosses, non-farm stuff? Can you provide some examples of top guilds in the world that do this? Not certain fights, or farm status stuff, or the local guild down the street, but top guilds with full time non-warrior MTs on progression fights.

Anyway, I was talking about what Blizzard said. I read a quote (I will try to find it) where they said they concieved Warriors as still being the primary raid tanks in WotLK.

Ah, a little off (though there may be more quotes, I'll keep looking):

Legacy Items Unveiled - Page Two | Ten Ton Hammer

Personal experience: Pala/Druid/Druid Kalecg 1st kill, Pala/Druid Brutallus to enrages (Druid/Druid kill, pala was on alt shaman healing - can't help when recruits turn off brains), Druid/Pala Felmyst kill, this with 2 dps warriors in raid. Also I'm sure I saw a Brut 1st kill with Pala as one of the tanks.

But personal experience comes from not having a warrior actually tank anything in ~8 months of BT/Hyjal clearing, having a dps warrior spec for RoS P2, Illidan (retraining another tank for Blazes failed more than we were willing to wait so pala always tanked Blaze), having Paladin tank everything that meleed in Hyjal trash waves, including Abos with knockdowns and all the fun, having a druid without Fear Ward tank Archimonde. It teaches you a bit more about what other tanks can or cannot take, it teaches your healers what to expect. I never said warriors aren't best, the Oh Shit stuff makes them best just that most people underestimate other tanks, or have never actually given much thought based on preconceptions.

Conclusion, I've started not having any idea what Paladins can do and being totally afraid of going with one after some not so fun PuGs (have a bear myself and let's say I've gotten SH heroic done before my main because I was the only tank in guild that actually wanted to go there/had fun tanking all the huge pulls without mages/rogues to CC, I knew what I could do as a bear in mostly blues) and ended up in a guild with a full time protection Paladin that completely turned me around, even before the huge stamina buff they got, I will never underestimate any tanking class until I actually see it in the hands of a competent player, as his main gearing spec.

Do also consider, gentlemen, that the DK is the first of the Hero Class. It is expected that certain things that we consider "given" are turned around.

You all too readily accept the Rune system in lieu of rage/energy/mana, you accept spells based off AP rather than +spell and yet many of you oggle and are amazed by tanking talents spread around...?

Remember back when the DK had just been anounced? Many wondered "how will I get to 5man while leveling as a DK?" to which blizz answered: "well, you can tank them yourself". It makes sense that at least some modicum of tanking is possible through each tree, as the trees in the case of the DK are so wildly different as to offer practically three radically different play-styles. The only other class with such difference between trees is the Druid.

Yes they are designed to be the best anti-magic spell tanks, but they're also designed to be able to tank irrespectively of tree major to a degree, it seems. And while Chillton said they're focusing on caster-tanking it by no means implies they can't tank anything else, even if it means they'll have to run specific gear-setups and/or specific talent setups. Even tankadins vary their gear/spec depending on whether they tank single-target or AoE more, there's nothing peculiar in DKs having various tank setups.

It does seem like the Frost tree is very much fun and has a shit-load of various CC, but as pointed out by another poster, it's unlikely the later talents work due to boss frost-immunity. Frost from where I'm standing looks solidly like the DK's AoE tanking tree if there ever was one.

As for Winter's Grasp, I'm fully expecting the "treat as frozen" effect to be specific to the mage that procced it. 4%hit is nice n'all but "treat as frozen" potential for multi-mage stacking is simply absurd. For more specifics, hit the mage wotlk thread.

Can't argue with you, but I certainly don't think you'll see anyone blue say anything of the sort ever. Can you imagine the backlash from "DK forums blue said ALL SPECS CAN GO RAIDS, WHY CAN'T MY SUB-ROUGE DPSZS? MY GM KICKD ME 4 SPECIN SUB WIT DAGR".

I see definite excellence in melee support as a blood-spec, as a new twist on Retadin/Enh-shaman party buffer but I expect the only must-have raid DK tank to be an anti-magic shell specced one. Not that I don't see non- AM-shell DKs being serviceable or even good/excellent tanks, mind. Time will tell.

The more I look at unholy tree and anti-magiX zone, the less I'm convinced, thought there's something weird about the shell part. Yes, it might be true that some frost stuff bosses are immune (like unable to move) but I see slowing their attack speed very well doable.
Also deep frost has a talent 15% chance to increase resistance to a school of magic.

Bone armor is good thought and so here's some idea of combining unholy and frost for a good tank spec:
War Pirate :: Talent tree Deathknight

I'm more concerned about losing threat here thought.

Spell reflect is about as relevant to anti-magic shell as owning a cow is to eating a slice of cheese. 80% magic absorbption on AM shield is much much more powerful than "the next spell is reflected" once every 10sec, for 25 rage.
Spell Reflection - Spell - World of Warcraft
Not to mention, SR does nothing vs. aoe. Having a DK tank could make mince out of what was up to now a necessity: Having to gear up all sorts of asswipe resistances for certain spell-heavy bosses. I welcome the possibility of a DK tank if it means I don't need all my ferals to go around trolling AH for Hydros mixed gear and have a whole guild farming shit for my warr tanks, who then promptly go "toodle-pip thanks for the NR/FR gear, I'm off to another server".

Also just to add that while Spell Reflect doesn't work against all spells, Anti-Magic thingy would in theory work against all damage spells, imagine a MT popping that at Kael for example (yes, it's an old fight but just an example of how strong it can be).

According to wowwiki from a quick search, anti-magic shell absorbs 75% of the next spell (and -80% dmg talented)? Or what's the current news, since that seems worse than SR... And 15% chance +resistance for 15sec > more dmg mitigated in my opinion...

True, you can't eat kael's fireball but that's one fight...

You're looking for precedents which don't exist gentlemen. We never did have magic-heavy fights except ones which you could afford to turn up wearing "of Resistance and Stamina". This means the only magic-heavy fights up to now have been with bosses that hit like spina-biffida autistic girls.

Having DKs available to the raider frees up blizzard to introduce bosses that both hit like trucks (thus need conventional uncrushable, unkillable, dodge/parry/block whores blahblahblah) tanks and spellcast their faces off. Of course there's only single-digit examples of this up to now... We couldn't have dealt with it before DKs became an option.