Heroic DPS Tanking – Death Knight aimed but not totally specific

Whilst tanking a heroic or two on my DK I was approached by a fellow Death Knight asking how I was able to hold up 4k+ dps on a single target boss whilst tanking so I thought I would post up some information on here that took me a long time to collate and some I've had to figure out myself.

Well, first off you need to stick to your decent tanking rules, the aim is to help the party as much as possible not stress the healers whilst making the run as fast as possible. A lot of tanks seem just to throw on dps gear and go crazy but adding 2k+ to your dps is bad if the healer is having to spam heal to compensate for all the crits personally I like my healer to be able to dps as well, makes thing so much more interesting for everyone.

So what are these rules?

You need to stay un-crittable. To be un-crittable in a heroic you need to have 5.4% crit reduction. This can come from Defense, Resilience or a mixture of both. A mixture of both is what your really aiming for.If you have defense then there's a really good chance you'll have some reasonable avoidance as well it also implies that you'll have a reasonable amount or stamina which leads me to my next point.

Health. If you're look at this then I'm presuming that you're probably not just a tank starting out and that you will therefore have access to a reasonable amount of gear. I personally would aim to have around 31-33k health unbuffed, in no way am I saying that this is what you need to tank heroics just purely for the aim here that is what you should have.

Finally mitigation and avoidance. Frost Presence gives us a nice modifier to our armor and I'm a big Effective Health fanatic, therefore I'm going to suggest to keep a good amount of armor. I like to have at least 26.5k unbuffed armor and this means that I always run with 1 dps trinket and Glyph of Indomitability. You should still be wearing some tanking gear and thus should be able to keep a reasonable amount of avoidance, I run with around 19% dodge and 16% parry. This gives me lots of Rune strikes as well as reduced damage (obviously)

So this is what I mean by sticking to tanking rules.

What spec should I use?

I'm blood. I have been blood since Ulduar patch when they nerfed my old Frost-Blood hybrid spec (Veteran of the Third War + Howling Blast was a lovely fun spec) and to be honest I love it. It's what I imagine from a Death Knight, swinging a mahoosive weapon and not being such a baby about it that I have to wear a shield or apply fur to my armor. Therefore, blood is the spec that I will be suggesting. I use the following spec for both raid tanking and heroics...

Clicky Link to Spec

Depending on your gear setup, weapons and personal choice you could move the points in Virulence to Improved Icy Touch or to anywhere you want, I just like to be fully hit capped for melee and spells for raiding. If you were making an offspec just for heroic tanking again you could definitely move the points in Virulence into another place, again either IIT or some extra DPS talents.

What are the caps?

OK, there's a number of caps that it would be helpful to know for heroic dps tanking. These would be as follows.

Uncrittable Cap: 5.4%
Melee Hit Cap: 6%
Spell Hit Cap: 6%
Expertise Cap: 21 expertise for both Parry AND dodge.

If you can balance your gear around this then you're good to go!

What gear should I look at getting?

This is all up the air for me at the moment, as my Death Knight is only an alt I do not have access to all the best gear in game. I will be compiling what I feel is a Best in Slot list at a later date but till now I will say the following.. Look at the cap section and get as close as possible to those caps, look at the standard tanking rules section and get as close as possible to them and then for anything else chuck dps items in those slots.

As I don't pvp much I am currently using Furious Shoulders, Cloak, Belt and Legs as my resilience gear. The 2pc bonus is exceptional for this tanking and the belt had more stamina and sockets than my actual tanking belt so it wasn't much of a decision to choose that. Standard tanking gear is in my Neck, Chest, Bracers, and 1 ring slot. The other slots are all dps items. I'm sure I will be able to optimize these items at a later date and when I do I will update this blog.

For a weapon I'm using Citadel Enforcer's Claymore with Rune of the Fallen Crusader and for my Sigil I'm using Sigil of Haunted Dreams. The crit from this is just too good to use and although the +200 str from the 245 sigil would be nice I like seeing big crits and Heart Strike is probably my most used attack. This could change at a later date, we'll see.

What about a rotation?

Just a standard Blood Tanking rotation will do nicely.

IT, PS, DS, HS, HS - dump - HS, HS, HS, HS, DS - dump

is pretty much what I use. Depending on the healer though I may use DS at different points if I need to keep myself up. Or, for example, if I'm playing with my pocket heroic healer he likes to dps on bosses as well so I use DS a lot more liberally so he doesn't have to heal me as much. When you're tanking mobs just before a boss try to keep your runic power ready, this way you can run into a boss, pop Hysteria and Dancing Rune Weapon straight away for some amazing DPS and Stupid Threat Per Second.

Anything else I should know?

I like to have a good supply of Fort, Wild and Kings scrolls/drums with me. This means a) You can buff yourself if those classes aren't there and b) If you have 1 paladin you can beg for a Blessing of Might and buff 8% Kings (I actually have /p %t, can you buff BoM / BoW please and I'll buff 8% BoK macro'd   target the pally press the macro) and this will give you yet more stupid dps!

Army of the Dead - Is not a dps buff. Somewhere around 30%+ of my damage comes from stupidly high Rune Strike Crits. If the boss is hitting your army (s)he's not letting you dodge or parry him/her/it. So I'd really suggest not using it!

The end

I've chucked up a couple of screen shots of DPS (ranging from 3.8k to 4.7k) that I've done in heroics in case you want to see!