Thursday, April 16, 2009

3.1 Death Knight Tank Spec


W
ith the weekend quickly approaching I can only hope that blizzard fixes the instances servers to give me a chance to check out my tank specs prior to the big show. While it has been fun blowing things up it looks like I will still be needed to tank things.

Last time I gave you my version of a 3.1 Death Knight Dps spec and now I deliver the goods on tanking specs. When designing these specs I really tried to keep in mind what I have read about Ulduar boss fights. So far the consensus seems to be hard hitting bosses with lots of aoe. Magic damage seems to be pretty constant as well. With that in mind I give you 3.1 Tanking specs.

The first spec I give you is frost. I was a frost tank pre-patch and I really liked it. Frost is a bit more of a talent point sink than it used to be and it feels like I don't get points in everything I want. However frost as a spec does offer the most mitigation and avoidance with an extra 2% damage reduction (from all sources) 3% avoidance, and Acclamation for magic resist. A lot of the fights I have read about have periodic sources of magic damage or magic attacks from bosses that should keep this stacked pretty well at all times. If Acclimation doesnt turn out to be very usefull it will be dropped for points in bladed armor or to fill out morbidity. This is my first choice of spec and I think I will only be using blood of the bosses hit so hard in Ulduar that I absolutely need the 6% stam.

The blood spec I have here basically trades the goodies I listed above for 6% str and stam, the ability to parry direct damage spell attacks, and a 15% damage reduction to hits that take you below 35% once every 2 minutes. I have one floating point in the blood spec that could be used in a few different spots depending on the utility you want. Could take Hysteria for some increased dps (or tps if you use it on yourself). Rune Tap works for another healing pot every minute. My personal choice would probably be Mark of blood as it has a variety of cool uses and can heal the entire raid. (at least it used to heal my entire 5 man groups when I used it as leveling.)

Hopefully I get a chance to run Ulduar this weekend so I can give a description of these specs in action!

3 comments:

krizzlybear said...

I like your Frost spec, as it is fairly standard. I'm kinda iffy on acclimation myself, so I would put it into morbidity and, due to personal taste, Epidemic. Less refreshing of diseases means more obliterates, and I have more room for error on my TPS rotation.

P said...

if acclimation doesn't work out the last few points WILL fill out morbidity and epidemic.

Ithiel said...

lol @ fluffy