Death Knight Tanking and Solo Tank specs
A few people have asked me about specs lately so I thought I would throw a few out there!
I'm mainly tanking as blood now, the changes to the frost tree mean I cannot spec how I used to. I really liked my old spec and the high Hp it gave me, I also liked the bonus crit chance I used to get, it was lovely to see crit spam on my screen. But with Howling Blast as a 51 pointer this is no longer possible. Soooo I've switched to Blood.
Patch 3.1 means that Blood tanking is just as good as it was on single targets, but now the damage put on targets from Blood Boil has now gone through the roof making it much easier to AoE tank. We still have to tab Heart Strike but it's now much easier than before.
The tank spec I will be using is as follows...
Combined with Glyph of Death Strike and Glyph of Pestilence you find a nice spec where you can chuck on diseases in an AoE pack and heart strike and Death Strike your heart out and only need to hit pestilence to refresh your diseases on all targets! Loads of crit, and 9% increase to your strength across all the trees which in a 25 man raid environment should mean your hitting 7, 8, 9, 10k tps depending on classes in the raid. Just solo i'm easily able to hold down 5.5-6k tps on single targets which i'm personally quite happy with.
Ok the other spec i'm going to link is the one I use to solo with. As most people know i'm spending a lot of my time at the moment soloing heroics and raid instances. I do this because... Well 1. I make good gold out of it.. but 2, and more importantly, I enjoy a challenge! So this is the spec I use for this...
I don't need to worry about threat because i'm soloing however the most important thing I need is healing. This spec pulls all the blood healing talents available including worms, aura and improving Death Strike talents.
It means a constant 300hps plus a nice amount when worms proc. Around 1k heals from death Strike (1.7 on crits) and a 6-7k heal from Blood Tap. Sure is good for soloing! 
Hope people found this an interesting read!
Also Posted on or guild forums: http://wotlk.bloodlineguild.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3214
May 8th, 2009 - 18:21
I have an Orc DK that I would like to do something similar with so thanks for sharing your build for making this work!
I am also considering rolling on an Alliance server for a change of pace. I am going to do this with the soloing of instances as a goal for that character.
For this guy I was thinking of a Draenei as the race(self heal) with Herbalism (lifeblood) and Enchanting (for Disenchanting instnace drops). From your perspective does that sound decent or am I overlooking something? Of all the Alliance races I like the looks of the Male Draenei the best so it even has the “what you like to look at” factor in there as well.
Thanks
May 8th, 2009 - 23:17
Hey, thanks for the comments!
Dreanei is possibly the best choice for this aim due to both the Self heal (even though it isn’t much I use it quite regularly) but also the extra 1% hit you get. Personally I’ve gone for Jewel Crafting and Mining this is purely for the amazing stamina that these professions offer. You get almost 600 hp from having 450 mining and Jewelcrafting not only offers you stupid +stam gems but also possibly 2 of the best stamina trinkets in game until Ulduar Heroic!
So Mining+JC are definately the 2 professions I would go for. Herbing heal wouldn’t be enough for me to take purely for soloing, Enchanting offers a slight stamina upgrade from the ring enchants and the fun of DEing a LOT of drops. I’d suggest you don’t overlook JC at all as it offers the best buffs in game for soloing as far as i’m concerned!
Hope this helps!