Improve my Death Knight!

[Hyve]

Greetings MMO-Champion Community & Death Knight Forums!

I'm looking for some advice that is tailored specifically to me situation, something I feel other members of this community may have been in.

I've recently returned to my Death Knight Tank, after not tanking with her for two years. I'm currently in a bad situation, where I am seriously struggling for threat from the other tank in the raids. The other tank out-gears me a lot, while my gear sucks, but I don't quite think this is it entirely.

Now, the obvious thing to do will be to get into a +Hit / +Exp set up and keep threat, but when I do this, I then die far more often due to a lack of Parry, Mastery or Dodge.

I was wondering if anyone here would be kind enough to take a look at my armoury (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Hyve/advanced) and give me some help or advice. I've been using AskMrRobot to assist me, but it often puts me in a reforge set up that means my threat is miles below the other tank.

[Kiqjaq]

Get a better weapon and your woes will be gone.
DKs scale a lot more with their weapon and less with vengeance than other tanks do. Get something pretty and purple and you won't have people ripping the boss off of you.

Aside from what's easier said than done, you can employ some tricks to keep your threat higher. DRW gives a substantial boost to threat while it's up, if you can spare it as a defensive cooldown. Aggro values are usually lower in the beginning of a fight, so that's the best time to push your hardest to keep someone from blowing past you accidentally. Use an addon to properly track your vengeance so you can only refresh diseases when you have a lot of AP.
Other means of it include slowing your rotation for a little bit before taunting, so you can unload once the boss is on you, and standing in **** on purpose with AMS up to get some extra Runic. Rune Strike does nice damage, and speeds up the rest of what you do, so an AMS refill if you aren't going to need it any time soon is splendid (best do it glyphed so you're not taking any damage from that and wasting healer's attention or Bone Shield charges).

And yell at anyone who pulls off of you. If the other tank rips the boss back, that's his own damn fault for pulling off of you. Tank dps is important, yes, but tactics are more so, and if they're meter-whoring at the expense of screwing things up then they need a good yelling at. (accidents do happen though so be kind)

And then, you can always go for an accuracy build if all else fails. Mastery>Hit>Expertise>Avoidance though, Mastery is too valuable to give up. Parry and Dodge, while better at reducing damage than accuracy, aren't all that and a bag of chips, so it's not too much a loss. Especially now that tank dps matters, a number of tanks are going for hit/expertise caps after mastery.


As for your armory, I would recommend against using Stamina gems. They're grossly under-budget, you give up far too much Mastery per point of Stamina, compared to what you could do with trinkets or other means. If you're under a comfortable EH though, feel free to keep them in. Just be aware that they give like half of what they should.

[Hyve]

Get a better weapon and your woes will be gone.
DKs scale a lot more with their weapon and less with vengeance than other tanks do. Get something pretty and purple and you won't have people ripping the boss off of you.

Sadly, I've yet to get a better weapon, but I wasn't aware of the Death Knight reliance on Weapons, so thanks for the information.

Aside from that, you can employ some tricks to keep your threat higher. DRW gives a substantial boost to threat while it's up, if you can spare it as a defensive cooldown. Aggro values are usually lower in the beginning of a fight, so that's the best time to push your hardest to keep someone from blowing past you accidentally. Use an addon to properly track your vengeance so you can only refresh diseases when you have a lot of AP.

Haven't all DoT spells been changed, so that they remain updated based on the spell / attack power that they have at the time of the check, rather then when they were cast. That was my belief, but if that didn't happen, i'll be sure to do this. I assume a reset with Pestilence / Blood Boil wouldn't have the same effect.

[Darsithis]

Greetings MMO-Champion Community & Death Knight Forums!

I'm looking for some advice that is tailored specifically to me situation, something I feel other members of this community may have been in.

I've recently returned to my Death Knight Tank, after not tanking with her for two years. I'm currently in a bad situation, where I am seriously struggling for threat from the other tank in the raids. The other tank out-gears me a lot, while my gear sucks, but I don't quite think this is it entirely.

Now, the obvious thing to do will be to get into a +Hit / +Exp set up and keep threat, but when I do this, I then die far more often due to a lack of Parry, Mastery or Dodge.

I was wondering if anyone here would be kind enough to take a look at my armoury (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Hyve/advanced) and give me some help or advice. I've been using AskMrRobot to assist me, but it often puts me in a reforge set up that means my threat is miles below the other tank.

Your gear is quite nice. However, the blue slots you put full stam gems into I would switch out for Mastery + Stam gems (green). You don't need quite that much stamina, especially with the thousands you have due to your trinkets.

You should maintain the mastery, if possible, and reforge outta dodge/parry for your hit/exp. You can also gem in the blue slots full hit gems instead of mastery/stamina. This will improve, but won't fix, threat issues. If other tanks are easily pulling off you that means that they're probably not stopping their dps during swaps to let you get a lead. That's on them, not you. But 3% hit and 1.9% expertise won't cut it, either as dps will start to exceed you in threat.

I do want to know what your rotation is and how you're using your cooldowns. Is this LFR or a regular raid? Do you have logs?

[Kiqjaq]

Sadly, I've yet to get a better weapon, but I wasn't aware of the Death Knight reliance on Weapons, so thanks for the information.

Haven't all DoT spells been changed, so that they remain updated based on the spell / attack power that they have at the time of the check, rather then when they were cast. That was my belief, but if that didn't happen, i'll be sure to do this. I assume a reset with Pestilence / Blood Boil wouldn't have the same effect.

Well it's not quite as extreme as it was before with weapons. A decent amount of our damage has been pushed into diseases (40%ish? of our single target is diseases), but the rest of it are Strikes that scale quite heavily with weapon damage. It's a very noticeable effect going from a blue to, say, N Shinka.

And nah, that's ghouls that update dynamically even after they're there, both Army and Timmy. DoTs snapshot when they're applied or refreshed.
Blood Boil recalculates them on whatever it refreshes, and Pestilence recalculates on whatever the diseases get spread to (but not on the target you Pestilence'd). If you do a Roiling Blood spread then everything gets updated to your current AP.

[Ragethorn]

And yell at anyone who pulls off of you. If the other tank rips the boss back, that's his own damn fault for pulling off of you. Tank dps is important, yes, but tactics are more so, and if they're meter-whoring at the expense of screwing things up then they need a good yelling at. (accidents do happen though so be kind)

My co-tank is a bear and constantly rips threat off me during tank swaps. Extremely annoying, almost to the point of being ready to stop raiding with him.