Can a DK help me please!

Post by Vickii

Hi DKs!

I wondered if you could just help me a little. I'm a holy priest and I'm having a nightmare figuring out how to heal a DK tank. Some are great and never lose health, some die before i can get a heal off and some just confuse me.

I understand there is going to be players who have never tanked before suddenly going in heroics, but I'm having issues with people i know to have a lot of experience in tanking too. So i just have a few questions if you can help.

-1 What is your primarily tanking spec?
- 2 Would you class yourself as an AOE tank or is it better to be tanking only 1-2 mobs?
- 3 Any major flaw in spec that could cause a fully epiced tank DK to get 1-2 shotted by a heroic boss? (like me running out of mana and not having specced into meditation)
- 4 Any reason for spike damage (due to being a dk, not that is part of the encounter) - ie 1 minute not taking any damage and then suddenly needing to be spammed healed?
- 5 What heroics/bosses are hardest for a DK tank and why?

Any help you can give would be great! Thanks

Post by cassie1

1- There is no tank spec, this causes a great deal of confusion and honestly doesn't make any sense from a design point because there are still tanking talents that are necessary to success. It only serves to confuse anyone who isn't a DK and the majority of people who are DKs as well unfortunately.

A DK tank wants at the least 5/5/5, blade barrier, toughness, anticipation. After that they want to pick up TANKING talents within each tree like boneshield, lichborne, frigid deathplate, etc. They are strewn through each tree to further obfuscate whether or not your tank is capably specced. Frost technically has the most mitigation talents and unholy the most capable ae tank.

2- DKs when played right are capable of both AE and single target threat. Better than druids but much worse than paladins at the former and their sustained single target threat is about on par after initial aggro (they have to disease etc)

3- They might not be def capped, they might not know how to use their cooldowns. DKs are currently poorly designed for tanking. There are a lot of reports of the spikiness of healing them due to their cooldown usage. I've healed them and I hated it, and now i am one and kinda feel bad for my healers sometimes.

4- DKs are cooldown dependant, boneshield reduces damage by 40% while its up, IBF by 50%, they have short cooldowns but even shorter durations so once they are down the DK takes "normal" damage which is sadly higher than any other tank because of their design flaws. This is being somewhat remedied in 3.0.8

5- I haven't had any problems with heroic bosses personally because I knew all the fights from my other classes (dk isnt my first 80)

Post by 160994

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by GenXCub

1) Frost or Unholy. Unholy gets better as their avoidance goes up due to Bone Shield not losing bones when you parry or dodge. I'd say look for Frost Spec death knights if you don't know them, but I like tanking as Unholy. I believe them to be equal to the task of tanking as Frost DK's, but the style is different, and many unholy DK's don't take all the tanking talents. Basically, Frost has 2 cooldown tank abilities they can pop (Lichborne, unbreakable armor), unholy has 1 (Bone Shield).

2) Both frost and Unholy, I would say are AoE tanks. They'll be like paladins in that they'll probably take more damage than a warrior or druid tank, but can really hold the aggro well on aoe fights with mages, locks, etc. With the boosts that Blood is getting in 3.0.8, they might get into the more druid-like area of 1-2 target tanking, but we're not sure yet where Blood will be as far as tanking. Right now it's probably seen as needing the most help as far as tanking goes.

Note: Blizzard has stated that their mission is to make all 3 talent trees for DK's viable for tanking.

3) Not really spec in this case, but maybe they didn't burn the right cooldowns (Lichborne + Unbreakable Armor + Icebound Fortitude for frost, Bone Shield + Icebound Fortitude for Unholy).

4) Definitely spiky for DK's. Since they can't block, they're like druid tanks in that the hits they take will be harder, but will parry a bit more.

5) I'm not raiding yet as a tank, but the hardest bosses for me to handle (in heroics) are Loken in HoL and Grand Magus Telestra in The Nexus. Loken hits like a truck with 15k noncrit hits, and Telestra, just because it's easy to get put out of position against the 3 mirror images, and someone gets burned down before I can snag aggro.

Post by Vickii

Thank you all, this has been really useful actually and makes a lot of sense to me now :-)

It sounds like it will all straighten itself out as people get more experience with the class and Blizz change it around a bit based on feedback.

One last question while I'm here to help me, is there any special benefits or hinderance a DK can get from a healer? Or anything a healer really should know about DK tanks? I.e Shielding warriors affects their rage/aggro, topping up pallies gives them mana back etc?

I'd just like to know a bit about the class rather than QQ about them everytime we wipe :-)

Post by GenXCub

Actually, shielding warriors/druids doesn't hurt their rage generation anymore.

This isn't really healer-specific, but here's my main beef with the way tanking has gone ever since the new talents came out, just before LK.

DPS apparently has no clue what the skull mark is. I think there's a video card bug to make sure they DONT SEE IT.

Wtih all the AoE crap that's been going around since the new talents came out, DPS people just seem to attack whoever they want, whenever they want. Make sure that targets are being focus fired down. On 4-pulls, you need to get it down to 2 pretty quickly. Scream at your DPS if they're not burning down the right target. It always seems that the skull will probably still go down first, but the 3 remaining all die at right about the same time.

If this is what seems to nail your groups, see if the DK will start the pull with Icebound Fortitude (it does cost runic power if they don't have it glyphed, but many fights, they'll already have some left over).

Can a DK help me please!

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