Originally Posted by
kritor
Good guide in general, but I just wanted to comment on a few things. And yes I realize this is not a tank specific guide, but since tank is my MS, my comments are from that perspective mostly:
1) You left out one important feature of Army. "While channeling Army of the Dead, the Death Knight takes less damage equal to his Dodge plus Parry chance." Thus it can in theory, be used in a pinch for some survivability when tanking dungeons/raids.
2) Conversion is not as useless as you claim IMO. I am the MT for my guild and in the week or so we've had the patch it's saved me several times. It's on par with Death Pact IMO. I picked it up because of what I read about it on the beta and because DP was something I had already used many times. Plus this gives us an extra thing to spend RP on when we're maxed out on it, instead of just spamming RS. It syncs well with Blood Tap in that regard because once you get your BT stacks to 12, you can't get anymore (AFAIK) and thus you're free to use your RP on something else while the BT buff is still active. And once you have significant threat you don't need to RS as much and should be focused on keeping up diseases and mitigating/healing as much damage as possible to keep yourself alive (through DS and the BS it provides).
3) The DRW glyph is useful if you raid with trigger-happy players. Some of my guildmates fall into this category and like to pop every cooldown they have as soon as the pull starts so in order to not wipe the group I have to get as much threat as possible as quickly as possible. Your job as a tank is first to get threat and hold it and then if possible add damage. Focusing on damage only is not advisable IMO. Damage is for DPS to do. This concept can be seen to great effect on normal and heroic Zon'ozz. Ball placement is haphazard at best without DPS being trigger-happy, so you would need the extra threat immediately.
4) The VB glyph I don't think is that useful for me. I'd rather have the extra HP personally rather than additional healing. Especially if you're running fights with only 2 healers where you're less likely to have a dedicated tank healer. Thus you're less likely to see benefit from the extra healing it would provide. Just my 2 cents. But of course if you're constantly running a 3+ healer group configuration, and thus most likely have a dedicated tank healer, then it could be useful for that.
5) Rune of Swordshattering is preferential in my experience for tanking at the level cap until you're doing heroic raids only and then it's more of a toss up between it and Stoneskin Gargoyle.