(H) Ji-Kun DK Tank dying

[Stinkyshaman]

One of the guilds I'm doing 10-man ToT with started heroic Ji-Kun last week and our DK tank is getting his crap pushed in. He is tanking it with a pally tank (me) and I don't have any trouble taking up to 4 stacks. I can take 5 if I need to with a cooldown. He just got destroyed on Tuesday and if it continues it's going to be hours of him dying when he only has 1 stack of the Talon Rake de-buff.

What cooldowns should he be using for Talon Rake?

Does he need to glyph a certain way for the fight?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[zoomgpally]

How much overkill is it?
Maybe save bone shield for 2nd rake?

[Allarius]

There's not really much of a reason to be taking more than 2-3 stacks besides stacking vengeance. He should be able to cooldown 2 talon rakes by himself, if for whatever reason he is still incapable just give him an external cd while your stacks reset.

I can't comment to the exact specifics of a DK tank, but there's really no reason why ANY tank is dying to a 2 stack, that's just poor playing.

What's your dps like? How are you handling nests? How many healers do you have? Need more information about your comp and strat.

[zoomgpally]

There's not really much of a reason to be taking more than 2-3 stacks besides stacking vengeance. He should be able to cooldown 2 talon rakes by himself, if for whatever reason he is still incapable just give him an external cd while your stacks reset.

I can't comment to the exact specifics of a DK tank, but there's really no reason why ANY tank is dying to a 2 stack, that's just poor playing.

What's your dps like? How are you handling nests? How many healers do you have? Need more information about your comp and strat.

Assuming he can get away with only taking 2 stacks, just do it simple and pop IBF for the 2nd

If he takes more, id say bone shield for 2nd, IBF for 3rd

[Spiralphoenix]

Might want to unglyph vamp blood, as that can help. IBF glyph might be useful as well, which should let him IBF every second stack of talon rake. Looking at our own logs, there's about 1:40 between each 2 stack for an individual tank.

[Woceip]

Don't have a lot of experience with DK, but he should be saving his bone shield for just before the rake for one thing. It will be eaten off by other things if he doesn't, and it's one more layer of protection. He should, if possible, not be using a cooldown for the first application. If he is, then that's part of the problem.

It does end up being a difficult fight for DK. I normally play DPS, but I tank for that fight due to how hard it wrecks our DK tank. (we just end up 3 tanking it. 25 man).

One thing I suggest is having your healers turn on Emphasize for Talon Rakes, and know when your DK tank needs cds (and of course, be ready to heal some of the damage if death strike doesn't take of all of it. First talon rake he has to take - nothing but bone shield. Second - IBF, and maybe vampiric blood for the extra health if you want to play it safe, as well as bone shield (should be up). Third - external and bone shield. Fourth - External, bone shield, IBF. 5th... pray?

Glyph of IBF is amazing, since the damage on Talon Rake is all at once.

[Orion Antares]

First of all we have no information on gear level here. The lower the gear level the more the tank has to do it right.

As far as taking a 2nd talon rake, he'd likely need to use a minor CD at best, Bone Shield in this case. Worst case he'll need to use IBF.

Why are you taking more than 2 stacks? There's really no reason to do that outside an emergency. Though if he's undergeared enough to need IBF to survive two talen rakes, then I can see the need to stack more on a higher geared tank until IBF comes off cooldown.

[Stinkyshaman]

I don't have any logs from the night in question.

Armory: I don't have enough posts to link his armory but his name is Darkreverend on Arthas-US in the guild Pernicity


And to clarify, he would survive one Talon Rake fine. It was the second one, with the de-buff from the first, that would tend to kill him. If the second one didn't kill him it would drop him to 5% HP and a some other dmg would kill him within 0.5 seconds. I go to the first nest and then come up and taunt once the first Talon Rake goes off on him so he can go to the 2nd lower nest. I keep him until the 1st upper nest is about to spawn or I get a third Talon Rake on me. After that we try to keep the Talon Rakes to 2.

I will be watching the logs closely tonight but I need to know what I'm looking for first. I really don't know much of anything about DKs. So I was hoping some people with exp could tell me what he should be doing so If I don't see that I can tell him to fix it. Tuesday when he was dying all I could really say was "You have to do something man because right now it's the tanks that are preventing us from killing this.".

From what I've read today Death Strike gives him a shield so he should perform a Death Strike right before the Talon Rake. He should also have bone armor up. Outside of that I'm a little lost as to what he should be doing. I just want to make sure he can live through 2 rakes (maybe a 3rd once in a blue moon) so we can kill it tonight. Like I said I can easily take 3 rakes with just shield of the righteous.

[announced]

you are correct in a way, Death strike grants an absorb shield... he should be able to stack in with bone armor on and VB if necessary to avoid dying.. this comes back to single tanking madness of Deathwing impales.. if you didnt have enough hp for the 400k impale dmg or so you needed to DS like 3 or 5 times to build a 150-200k absorb shield and survive it.... ie.. bottom line he needs to reset bone shield and time vb+ add in some death strikes so he can survive talon rake.

[zoomgpally]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...erend/advanced

Mastery 196.41%, should be about 220-230% with buffs

Problem with the DS shield is its based on healing(+overhealing) done, and healing is based on damage taken last 5(?) seconds

Do you have any external cooldowns available?

Glyphed IBF got 90 second cooldown, that should be every 4th rake(rake is every 25ish seconds i think...)

So you should be able to take 2>2>2>2, with him using IBF for the 2nd

[Orion Antares]

Like he said, he should have bone shield and possibly VB lined up for that second talon rake. If he needs one of those to survive the first, then there's a bigger problem. Either he's not doing something right or he's feeling panicked early on because the healers are not giving him the attention they need.

If either of those issues are not correctable you will need to consider throwing IBF in there and some other external when IBF is on CD like Sac for the second rake.

That glyph for IBF could help there as well to be able to use it for the second rake.

[Trubo]

I don't have any logs from the night in question.

Armory: I don't have enough posts to link his armory but his name is Darkreverend on Arthas-US in the guild Pernicity


And to clarify, he would survive one Talon Rake fine. It was the second one, with the de-buff from the first, that would tend to kill him. If the second one didn't kill him it would drop him to 5% HP and a some other dmg would kill him within 0.5 seconds. I go to the first nest and then come up and taunt once the first Talon Rake goes off on him so he can go to the 2nd lower nest. I keep him until the 1st upper nest is about to spawn or I get a third Talon Rake on me. After that we try to keep the Talon Rakes to 2.

I will be watching the logs closely tonight but I need to know what I'm looking for first. I really don't know much of anything about DKs. So I was hoping some people with exp could tell me what he should be doing so If I don't see that I can tell him to fix it. Tuesday when he was dying all I could really say was "You have to do something man because right now it's the tanks that are preventing us from killing this.".

From what I've read today Death Strike gives him a shield so he should perform a Death Strike right before the Talon Rake. He should also have bone armor up. Outside of that I'm a little lost as to what he should be doing. I just want to make sure he can live through 2 rakes (maybe a 3rd once in a blue moon) so we can kill it tonight. Like I said I can easily take 3 rakes with just shield of the righteous.

1. Should use Blood Tap or Runic Corruption over Runic Empowerment; the former lets you store up Death Strikes as needed and the later is currently bugged in that it increases the proc chance of RPPM trinkets such as Fabled Feather, Spark, etc.

2. As strange as it sounds you may want him to stop reforging/gemming for Dodge and Parry. Death Knight's Active Mitigation works based on damage taken, not your vengeance. Instead of Dodge/Parry, Haste up to 10% can help increase the number of Death Strikes he's doing. Someone more experienced tanking can go into more detail but if you're doing fewer than 10 Death Strikes a minute then you're not getting the most of the ability.

3. The Ji-Kun tank trinket is bleh; better off with an older Mastery/Stamina trinket, Council trinket or even some DPS trinkets such as Brutal SPA (this causes conflicts with your other trinket), Spark of Zandalar (with RC bugged it has fairly high uptime, reforge the Haste to Mastery), or even Fabled Feather (probably wouldn't due to how much Hit he already has).

4. As for the fight itself have you tried three tanking? Not familiar with how Nest Guardians work on heroic 10 man but the DPS requirement for the fight isn't that hard to meet even with three tanks; that way your two main tanks always get 2 stacks while your third plays with all the Nest Guardians. Course this doesn't solve the problem of him dying on the second Talon Rake.

5. To prepare for a Talon Rake you want to be able to Death Strike before and immediately after Talon Rake; the first give him a little bit of shielding while the second will top him back off + shield. He shouldn't need any cooldowns for the first Talon Rake but for the second might want to combine Bone Shield and un-glyphed Vampiric Blood; if he drops below 30% with both up then don't know what to tell you as he's more than geared for the fight.

[Odina]

The rake is probably not what is killing him but I would wager that infected debuff is clipping him really low just as one is about to go off. Make sure there is no early uneeded taunting to keep that debuff low. On a pallie you hardly notice it as your self healing is pretty damn OP with that veng but I know myself as a war if I taunt too fast or get a bad string where I don't shield it right and it stacks up it starts to hurt bad! 300k ticks of infected = a wipe for us lastnight but the talon rake is a Joke to handle!

Watch that infected debuff it's a killer!

[Spiralphoenix]

Just have him glyph IBF, use on every second talon rake on himself. Tanks swap at 2 stacks, there's no reason to go any higher for progression. He'll be fine.

[Tarazet]

On our 10HC attempts, we had me going to nests full-time while the DK tanked the bird. He had no trouble going up to 5 stacks when I screwed up/died, which happened a couple times when I missed the platform. His ilvl is 523 and he follows the Mastery>Parry>Stam priority. He just saved his Death Runes until right before Talon Rake - Purgatory activated on the 5th stack and he got killed on the 6th. When he had spare Death Strikes, he used them only when the bird was melee'ing to absorb them (and avoid getting high on Infected stacks).

[Orion Antares]

The rake is probably not what is killing him but I would wager that infected debuff is clipping him really low just as one is about to go off. Make sure there is no early uneeded taunting to keep that debuff low. On a pallie you hardly notice it as your self healing is pretty damn OP with that veng but I know myself as a war if I taunt too fast or get a bad string where I don't shield it right and it stacks up it starts to hurt bad! 300k ticks of infected = a wipe for us lastnight but the talon rake is a Joke to handle!

Watch that infected debuff it's a killer!

That is a good point. He may need to watch those stacks and have AMS ready for that. He might also consider AMZ if it's a frequent issue for him.

[Deleted]

He should pool runes, get Bone Armor up, and use 2x Death Strike right before he gonna get hit. Also if he have dot on him, he can pop AMS to be sure. If he still have problems (and he should not have any) he can stand in green puddle for few second before using Death Strike to get bigger shield. If he somehow still wont be able to survive glyph IBF and he will be able to use 50% reduction almost every time he gonna need it, but i really thing pooling runes should be enought. Also little trick: you can use pet to catch talon rake just make everyone get out of his range when he use it and make sure some kind of pet is still attacking him.

[Liax]

The point here is you're trying to make him take too many stacks. you only do 4 tanking nests. Simply put, you take one stack and go down for second nest, come back, take one stack and let his drop. You go to 4th nest, come back and take 2 stacks and let his drop. You'll be on the platform for a while down as you don't do another nest till number 8. Just do 2 and swap. Rinse repeat as 8 is the second Nest #2.

Take this with a grain of salt as it's with a 10m PoV, if you're 25m it's different.

[bals]

The point here is you're trying to make him take too many stacks. you only do 4 tanking nests. Simply put, you take one stack and go down for second nest, come back, take one stack and let his drop. You go to 4th nest, come back and take 2 stacks and let his drop. You'll be on the platform for a while down as you don't do another nest till number 8. Just do 2 and swap. Rinse repeat as 8 is the second Nest #2.

Take this with a grain of salt as it's with a 10m PoV, if you're 25m it's different.

He's dying on the second one if you read op

[Liax]

Have him pool runes for the first one, glyph IBF and Bone armor the second.