Death Knight tanks. Much dmg?

[Larcissa]

Providing we manage our CD's right, and have a reasonable ammount of avoidance & Mastery we don't take spikey damage.

Chances are your DK is either;
- Not cycling CD's and instead panic popping 2+ at a time, leaving large gaps of no CD's
- Not refreshing Bone shield when its ready (amasing how many DK's haven't started doing this yet)
- Not burning his blood runes fast enough to keep up blade barrier
- not DS'ing enough, or has low mastery, or is back to back DS'ing ruining the 5second rule.

with 107% mastery shields and ~30% avoidance my healer finding me a joke to keep up on Omnotron. (in 10man with 1 healer on me)

How do you propose we DS when the boss has a shield up?

[Foibles]

Just keep in mind, if the Paladin is using WoG instead of Shield of the Righteous, Seal of Insight, and their respective glyphs, they will be way behind the DK in damage taken.

[Seregon]

How do you propose we DS when the boss has a shield up?

This is really annoying indeed, but that's the time to pop a cooldown of some sort. Also I believe the shields (or some of them at least) damage you when you hit them, so simply stop attacking and use whatever useless abilities you can to keep Blade Barrier up. Personally I Blood Boil.

[Donald Hellscream]

keep boneshield up as much as possible(the 20% reduction really helps) use runetap thenever its off cd and you have a blood run free(wotn refresh a blood rune and reset rune taps cd also the glyph can help your group) and under no circumstances pop all cd's at once also feel free to use death strike thenever its up! on a boss with sufficient damage taken you can negate most of the next hit(provided you have a decent ammount of mastery)

[Larcissa]

This is really annoying indeed, but that's the time to pop a cooldown of some sort. Also I believe the shields (or some of them at least) damage you when you hit them, so simply stop attacking and use whatever useless abilities you can to keep Blade Barrier up. Personally I Blood Boil.

Yeah that's what I do most of the time, I'm just wondering, all the people saying, "Use DS more, it helps"

Well of course it does, we all knew that, it's our main source of mitigating damage, but do you know that the boss puts a shield up, and that you can't hit it 50% of the battle? I think that's what the OP is struggling with

[Shinoashi]

Much QQ about omnitron from me as a tankadin as well, it starved me on holy power and no chance to WoG myself. Apart from the advice above for magmatron your tank should also watch out for when toxitron calls his oozes. If 2 or more healers are forced to kite oozes, prepare for a decrease in healing. Again use of cooldowns would be ideal. Save your IBF in case Magmatron decides to use flamethrower on you (though the clicky from Mirror of Broken Images is also very effective for that). Do not forget to use lichborne, as well as the fact that this fight is very long and using some cooldowns early may well mean you get to use them again. And interrupt arcanotron! This fight taxes the healers a lot.

Healers should always be at max range with toxitron is active. If they're not at max range then they're fail. Also, if any healer is targeted by one of the oozes they are always dpsd down first, since its easier for a melee to kite without too much worry.

So if your healers are not staying at max or your dps is not dpsing down oozes on healers, there is something seriously wrong with your raid group.

Back on topic, if your DK just saves them cds for when the shield are active raid healing should be just fine. Trying hard and I know it wont happen all the time to have a full blood shield for when the shield goes up helps a ton too.

Just remember that the shield does not stay up forever and will eventually fade, leaving then for your DK to DS to his/her hearts content.

[Foibles]

Do you mean Magmatron's Barrier? If that's the case, couldn't you just have the raid switch off and use DS when needed? Even a Vengeanced tank shouldn't break through with just DS.

I haven't done the fight, so if I'm wrong forgive me.

[Larcissa]

Do you mean Magmatron's Barrier? If that's the case, couldn't you just have the raid switch off and use DS when needed? Even a Vengeanced tank shouldn't break through with just DS.

I haven't done the fight, so if I'm wrong forgive me.

You're not wrong entirely, but different constructs have different shields, for example, Arcanotron's shield increases his spell damage when you hit it, and his Annihilator will hit really hard if you let that stack up, can be spellstolen though, but not advisable.

[Foibles]

Ok, that makes more sense, I was skimming over the ability lists pretty quickly, and Magmatron's was the only shield that really caught my eye.

[Simon_Moon]

I downed the golems twice as dk tank, a pally being the other. When I substract my healing done from damage taken we are roughly even, so it only looks hard on the healers. Best assign one healer to each tank so they get used to the playstyle regarding cd's and heals. Or macro tells. everything useful the dk can do is already in this thread.

[Xaos]

How do you propose we DS when the boss has a shield up?

I wasn't throwing out a blanket "MORE DS" I was mearly pointing out what are common problems with DK tanks.
messing up DS/Blood shield is one of those common problems.
The OP didnt say the DK only takes spikey damage during shields, he said he takes spikey damage, so I gave a list of general problems.

The way my guild dps/tank is as follows.
- Adds the poison one spawns are always "kill now"
- When the arcane guy is up all dps is on him for interrupting/purging.
- We never dps the fire one unless its the only one up at the start. (way too many dot classes in my raids )

This means even when I'm tanking the fire guy and he shields I can DS with no risk of breaking his shield at all.
The poison guys shield is meaningless, pop AMS and you cant gain the debuff so DS away.
The other shields I just stop attacking during and pop a CD, normally VB or bone shield depending whats ready.

[Trigg]

How do you propose we DS when the boss has a shield up?

Remember that:

a) the shields are only up for around 10-15 seconds and after that you can attack the target again until it becomes imobile.
b) the fire boss shield does no damage to attackers until it has taken 150k damage which then breaks it, dealing a raid wide aoe.

[Seregon]

a) the shields are only up for around 10-15 seconds and after that you can attack the target again until it becomes imobile.

That is a good point. Remember to start DSing again once the shield goes down.

[Raxiel]

I did 7.2k HPS on my DK tank at one Halfus 10man wipe the other week (I died about the time the first drake was about to fall).

At some point I had 12k HPS on Halfus 10 man, owning ours healers on the meters, was quite fun:P