Tanking ADVICEFollow

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/shadow-council/Darkpoett/simple
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/shadow-council/Lbobbit/simple


I'm wondering outside more VALOR gear and maybe start raiding again since I Really haven't since WRATH due to real life time schedules, and being deployed the day before ZA and ZG got re-released if there is ANYTHING ELSE I can do to MAJORLY IMPROVE both characters..

My guild while I was gone switched their mains to another server yet kept the max guild available on our server.. so I'm prob going to be re-building and making a raid schedule with the amount of people we have left..... going to start with starter raids just to fix the holes in everyone gear before going to FL... outside those raids any one have any viable suggestions?

Also ya I should run those fireland dailies just to get the other gear

THIS

A tank should be properly tanked.

Also parry and dodge should be reforged to be as close to equal rating wise as possible to minimize the impact of diminishing returns. But mastery is the priority in reforging, the DK has more leeway in wanting expertise, hit to a lesser degree, to make sure DS hits when you need it to land.

also on the pally due to windwalk I didn't keep reforging parry into dodge.. figured the 1.3% difference windwalk should make up for..

When you go Lichborne, you can heal yourself with Deathcoil. It's not an insubstantial amount if you use it properly, either.

/cast Lichborne
/cast [@player] Death Coil

It's a 2-global self heal that can be very useful.

Death Strike (for Blood) is absolutely VITAL to use properly. You need to know when the shield is up and when to use DS (right after a big hit usually). DK tank health is far more spiky than the other tanks due to how DS works with mastery. If you don't properly use this mechanic, your healers will hate you.

According to some talk on EJ and O-boards (zomg, inorite), the conclusion seems to be that while there are optimal times to use Death Strike, using it whenever possible is never wrong. You need to have your runes refreshing constantly so you get more out of your Runic Empowerment, or whatever the hell that ability is called, which means, unless you do some crazy math before and during an encounter, you'll be hitting Death Strike whenever you can.

Death Knights have a lot of self-healing, the issue being that their mitigation (self-healing) was designed to work with the triage healing idea (as were so many other things) which never got implemented. If you let a Death Knight hover at around 70% of their health, you'll see that they are capable of providing a great deal of self-healing. Unfortunately, most encounters don't allow for the healers to leave the tanks at 70% health as a boss ability might one-shot them (so much for non-spiky damage, right?).

As it stands now, a bad Death Knight is a horrible tank, a good Death Knight is a mediocre tank and a master Death Knight is an excellent tank (except for some specific encounters). That wouldn't be a problem, except any nitwit can pick up a Warrior or Paladin, or even Druid, and perform better (as a tank) with less effort, which means Blizzard has to balance encounters around those tanks.

I love running 5-man dungeons with good Death Knights as they're pretty much the most OP thing to have ever hit this game, but a bad Death Knight is going to crash and burn and drag everyone else into the fire as well. Since Cataclysm was launched, I've run with maybe three good Death Knights and a hundred bad ones. Just pulling my own Death Knight through Outland at the moment and it's pretty apparent that, despite the requirements for rolling a Death Knight, people haven't learned **** about **** by the time they get to play the "zomg hiro class wtf!"

Wish Blizzard would figure out what they want with the game before the next expansion. Either implement triage healing or scrap the idea completely. None of this bit-of-both-worlds ******** they've been fiddling around with.

In the end, though...