Death Knight Tank In Depth Guide Wrath of the Lich King

hey guys in this video we're going to be talking about all things death knight tank we're going to go into a lot of detail over pretty much everything there is to talk about with the death knight tank just a little preview what we're going to talk about we'll talk about uh why play a death knight you know the strengths and weaknesses of a death knight uh different ways you can play your death knight yourself and how to play around your raid all the different abilities uh especially focusing in on the defensives that you have and how to use them talk about rotation talents gear the stats you want gems enchants professions and add-ons and weak auras as well uh so if you do have any additional questions always feel free to stop by my twitch Link in the description below and of course subscribe to the YouTube channel so first thing we're going to talk about right out the gate why are we playing Death Knight uh what's what's the point of playing it at night why are they good why are they strong why play Death Knight instead of the other tanks and uh I think death Knights are very very strong and very powerful and uh you know definitely worth playing but why right so the big things to death knight does really well death Knights really can do it all in my opinion I think they can really do everything you ask of them so they can be a main tank they can be an off tank uh they can be an off tank that just you know is sitting there taking damage or building up threat and trying to stay high on the threat meter they can be uh you know an off tank that is switching to DPS a lot and do a lot of really good damage they don't need a lot of gear to do a lot of good damage so it's a good off tank in that sense but but you can also really maintain uh you know all the content and they do have their weaknesses so for example the biggest weakness of a death knight in terms of survivability is going to be enemies that attack really fast the reason for that is because they are going to have a lot of talents and don't mind my spec here it's my utguard Pinnacle spec check out that YouTube video as well but there's going to be Talent so the big one is going to be will open the necropolis because Talent is insane uh and it's really good against big hits that hits you really hard you're going to be able to live through big hits other tanks can't handle think of the death knight almost like you're gonna feel like you're as tanky as a bear in terms of like you're mitigating so much damage when you get low on health you're gonna feel like a bear in terms of the dams you're able to soak but you're able to heal a lot of it back and you have even more powerful defensives than a bear has while also having better single Target threat and better AOE threat than a bear if you spec into an AOE spec so death Knights are insane very very powerful but again the weakness a week two mobs that attack really really fast which is why it's nice to pair with a tank that has a shield because obviously mobs that attack really fast are good uh to uh good when you have a shield to block a lot of these little hits so that's the big the you know weakness we might see algalon being a boss that makes uh might be tough on the death knight we'll have to see an old war how that goes but besides that I mean the only other weakness of Death Knight really has is uh if you were playing a full single target blood tank spec your AOE threat is not very good and uh as well you're not very good at moving and fighting so for example when you're playing your death knight and you have all your runes on cooldown you're completely useless you literally are used you just like half your eighty percent of your abilities turn off and you're just sitting there you're just gonna sit there and watch people die uh if your abilities are on cooldown your taunts are on cooldown and you have no runes you just you're completely useless so when your runes are on cooldown you're useless and also when your death and Decay is on cooldown and you're the one pulling trash in either a dungeon or a raid you're also completely useless so those are those are the weaknesses of the death knight when it comes to taking damage fast attacking enemies when it comes to holding threat you're bad if you go full single Target build you can't do any AOE uh probably the worst tank for AOE threat if you're not specked right but you also have the ability to be the in my opinion the best tank for AOE thread as long as you're not constantly moving if you can place death indicate down on the ground and you play a frost spec that goes into howling blast you in my opinion it is the best AOE threat of all the tanks um you know playing a paladin you realize you can't hit every Target with a lot of damage at the end of the day you're if you can't wholly wrath the pack you're walking up to that pack your Hammer the righteous thing it's not going to hit everything and then you're waiting for your consecrate to tick the Death Knight has the ability to howling blast every Target followed up with a blood oil and of course you've got your death and Decay on the ground too you're very good snap thread if you play Frost uh and Incredibly good uh sustained threat as well so those are the strengths of the death knight strengths everything and then just a couple weaknesses they're so good they're so strong they also scale really well I'll talk a little bit more about why they're so tanky I guess while we're on the topic so there's a ton of things that make death Knights scale really well so first of all there's stamina scaling so we have Frost presence which is going to increase the stamina you get it also increases your armor contribution which is really strong in fact it scales so well that it keeps up and often even surpasses the armor that other classes are getting from their Shield so think of whenever you press Frost presence it's as though you're equipping a shield except you don't actually have to equip a shield so that's really strong armor component but the stamina component you've got eight percent stamina from your Frost presence you've got six percent from your veteran sorry three percent it's six percent the strength three percent from your veteran of the third war but then you get extra percentage from your weapons and your Rune forges if you use the stone skin gargoyle you get two percent stamina and if you dual wield you obviously get the two percent through two in chance that each give one percent so basically deaf clients that get they scale really well with health they get a lot of stamina now as you're getting this stamina unlike all of the other tanks stamina has double value for you as a death knight not only traditionally is stamina good for not getting one shot it gives you a really big Health pool so that healers have a lot of cushion to keep you alive for death Knights it has double meaning or double value you're going to actually have basically every healing move scales with percentage Health really the only exception is uh blood worms if you choose to spec into that which most will not most builds don't want bloodworms unless you're soloing things but bloodworms is really the only like source of healing that that is not percentage-based health your Rune tap is 10 of your health talents up to uh to 20 and then you also can glyph it for slightly more but it's percentage based your death strike is percentage based uh and of course also has some talents that make it uh even stronger you've got your uh death pact is percentage-based healing and even if you spec into Mark for blood it is also percentage based healing so basically all of your healing is percentage-based healing which means as you are getting more Health not only are you getting a bigger cushion to not get one shot but you're also going to increase your healing which makes stacking stamina very fun because you know you're becoming an unkillable you know tank but you're also you get to heal a lot and I think healing is pretty fun it's Death Knight now to temper some expectations as a death knight you're insane at soloing things you're insane at healing and in a raid you can heal a lot but you're typically you know not going to be out healing healers um it can happen I've had it happen a few times in Wrath already but but you're typically a lot of your healing isn't going to come straight from your own healing abilities but a lot of it's going to come from your mitigation so will a necropolis is tracked as healing and logs and that is going to be a ton of your healing and a lot of your healing is also going to come from anti-magic show another strength I haven't mentioned yet of the death knight is they are the best tank at taking magic damage by far it's not even close anti-magic shell is incredibly broken also scales based on percentage of your health so the more Health you get the stronger anti-magic shell gets it absorbs 75 percent of the damage dealt by harmful spells up to a Max of 50 of your health it also prevents them from applying their debuffs and stuff so lots of times you'll anti-magic shell some sort of breath or something that's supposed to leave a DOT doesn't leave a DOT you can sit and eat abilities that are supposed to give you really nasty debuffs you don't get them so if you use this um you know with you know use it smartly and have some foresight of what's gonna about to happen you can actually prevent debuffs and stuff as well it also gives you a bunch of runic power when it actually absorbs magic so anti-magic cell is incredibly broken ability insane makes you single-handedly makes you the most powerful tank for magic damage but it gets even better spell deflection is incredibly powerful in Scales very well as the game goes on you have a chance equal to your Perry to take 45 percent less damage from a direct damage spell so basically what this means I mean you've got a lot keeping you alive but worst case scenario if you're about to get owned by a massive magic spell that could otherwise kill you there's just a 45 chance it just doesn't um you know oh are you about to give Breath by sartharian and you don't have a cooldown up and it's going to kill you well 45 chance you just don't die insanely powerful of course uh or sorry sorry the Perry chance it makes you take 45 soon I should stop saying 45. the Perry chance that's why I said it scales later into the game so as you get more and more Perry this gets better it's 45 less damage to be clear sorry about that but it's on the topic of strength and Perry you also have uh a talent that makes it so or a passive uh what tree is that thing in uh basically yeah forceful deflection increases your Parry rating by 25 of your total strength and then of course we saw earlier that we get strength scaling from our veteran of the third war so basically what you're going to see is that as you are so strength is on all your items uh and you know just all your tank items are just going to have strength on them anyway right however uh as you're getting these items you know you're slowly just going to be increasing your parity as this is happening uh because of forceful deflection which is going to increase your physical and Magic mitigation but the other cool thing about uh all of this kind of happening all this strength you're building up right is while the other tanks are getting block value and they're using their Shield you're getting Perry that works on ever you know helps against spells because of the spell deflection and also helps against physical attacks so basically as the other tanks are getting free block from their strength you're getting something better you're getting Perry and you're getting and it works against spells and physical so you're just not going to have the same vulnerability as the other tanks you're going to scale super hard so we've talked about you you're going to scale well with avoidance you're going to scale well with stamina you're going to scale well with even armor um you know your Frost presence is going to cause them to scale well so all things considered here just a scaling machine you're a monster death Knights are incredibly powerful Okay so we've kind of built up why they're super strong um you know you can adopt a lot of roles as a death knight and that's the main thing I want to say you know before we get into a lot of the different abilities and the talents and you can do a lot of different things with your death do not limit yourself or get stuck into what you can and can't do all right death Knights are not just single Target tanks you can spec into Frost down to hauling blast and be the best AOE tank in the game you can uh play Blood with morbidity and still be incredibly tanky and you're not going to have the best AOE threat but it'll get the job done if you need to have a deep tank spec and you need to have you know morbidity at the same time so we will resume talents probably a little bit later um and I'm going to start talking about the abilities and kind of how your death knight should be playing and uh yeah just go through some of the some of the basics into a lot of the advanced stuff as well so obviously death Knight's not going to go through how runes work and all that I actually have a YouTube video on runes and Rune Grace uh so check that out I'll put that in the description but we're just gonna jump straight into what's going on with the death knight how are you using your runes and what's the plan so the first thing I want to mention is there's two ways to play your death knight first of all uh I just want to get right out of the way at no point in this video am I going to be giving you any suggestions on how to do more damage as a blood if we're talking blood tanking um I'm not going to talk about parsing in my opinion if you were trying to parse as a blood death knight you should just pick a different class they do the least amount of damage uh actively trying to increase your damage is often counter-intuitive to just how your your class should play and let me give an example right let's say I'm in combat with this mob right so I might put up my diseases um and then I might want to use my blood runes and this is going to put the talent called blade barrier on cooldown it's going to make me take five percent less damage now uh as I'm fighting this guy right I can put a blood Rune on cooldown and then I'm going to as this Blood Rune is about to fade away I'm gonna use another Blood room so we've got this damage reduction now there's no reason for me to use this Blood Rune right now I probably have plenty of threat I can use it right at the end and you see this kind of Rhythm we have here I'm just gonna use my blood Rune right as the other blood Rune Fades away and this is manipulating the talent called blade barrier right when your blood runes are on cooldown you take less damage so you're gonna see I just I keep using my blood Rune at the last minute and the reason I'm doing this is to keep the blood Rune available so in an emergency I can vampiric blood I can run tap I have these blood runes available for defensives now if you are just trying to parse you're just going to smash smash blood strike put them both on cooldown you're just going to use your rooms off cooldown to do more damage what what happens if you start dying right you start dying also the highest threat abilities are not the highest damaging abilities so if I put my diseases up right if I press blood strike it's going to do what 900 damage 935. if I press icy Touch it does 764. so if I have blood tap here and I've got a death Rune the highest damaging ability is going to be for me to not maybe not necessarily the highest damage ability but it's going to benefit me to use blood strike instead of using icy Touch even though icy Touch generates more threat so hopefully you've kind of gotten the idea by now um but basically everywhere you go in the death knight kit if you were trying to optimize damage you are going to be griffing and it's really bad so that's why I'm never going to mention damage throughout this video um because for 99.99 of players trying to optimize your damage is just griefing as a blood death knight especially all right um so another example of course of how you can play your blood death knight that really highlights this is the way I like to play my death knight is I like to death strike for healing I'll use my blood runes to keep my blade barrier up but I'm I'm just waiting to take damage I'm Gonna Keep My diseases up I'm just waiting to take damage I'm watching my swing timer I'm waiting to take damage and then I'm gonna death strike that way the second I take damage I immediately am healing it back right and I'm and I save all of my runic power I don't I let roon strike I have it macroed into abilities I let Rune strike go off on its own and I keep my runic power very high because I don't ever want to be in a position where uh oh emergency I need to sacrifice my pet 40 runic power I need to anti-magic Shell all right I just went through 60 runic power if I had death coiled right I would I wouldn't have enough ruining power especially if a rune strike has gone off at the same time so throughout this video I'm gonna be telling you you know how are we going to be the tankiest tank we can be we're also going to be talking about threat threat is very important threat is different than damage it is very important to have very high threat and it's expected of you as a death knight and it's important to build threat early in a fight and especially uh when the fight is less hectic so that later in the fight you have time to heal take for example a fight like my axna beginning of a fight like myaxena it's like impossible to die right so I'm gonna start the fight you know maybe come in with some death runes you know maybe before the fight try and get my my blood barrier up and I'm just coming in I'm icy touching I'm icy touching I'm just going crazy with the icy touches uh if I need it I'll even Empower Rune weapon and just keep icy touching icy Touch some more I'm I see touching like crazy boom 112k Threat all right now let's say it's in Rage mode right my action is owning us and she's enraged at this point I am going to try and keep my blade barrier up but after that I'm just sitting on my runes I'm sitting on my runes and I'm just pressing destiny um I will need to refresh my uh sigil so I am going to be keeping an eye on that and refreshing my sigil when it falls to make sure that stays up at all times but besides that we're just death striking we're healing we're not worried about threat at that point in the fight because we have a big enough threat lead from earlier Okay so we've talked about it you kind of get the idea now we're talking about when we're talking about blood we're talking about survivability uh we're talking about living we're talking about threat damage never factors in if you start thinking about damage re-roll play a different class that's not what it's about you're going to do like the least amount of damage of any tank by far as blood spec you can do a lot of damage when playing Frost and you're tanking a lot of AOE mobs so that is an opportunity where you'll have a lot of damage and if you're ever off specking again you can do lots of Damages at upsdk but when we're playing blood we're not talking about damage okay we got some of the some of the ground rules out of the way uh now let's talk about some of the abilities so as we talked about it so right from the get-go you're keeping up your diseases why are we doing this uh the reason we're keeping up our diseases at all times there's a few reasons the first reason is obviously the diseases do damage they generate threat and gonna give you some threat the second reason we're keeping up our diseases is because Death Strike heals more based on how many diseases are on the target so we need to keep our diseases up and if they ever fall it's actually going to affect our healing a lot so we need to make sure both stay up and we're able to death strike to keep them up uh the next thing you know when it comes to diseases some of the specs are going to go into Glacier rot depending on how deep they go into Frost that's going to cause enemies to take more damage from your icy Touch which means that you want an icy Touch before your previous set of diseases fall off not after um now how do we keep up our diseases obviously there's there's two ways we can press icy Touch and we can press plague strike um or we can use Glyph of disease which I heavily recommend for any build that is playing deep blood I'm always going to play Glyph of disease because it allows you to heal more if you have to press icy Touch and plague strike and right now I'm even playing you know in my weird little solo build I'm playing epidemic which makes the them last longer but if you don't play uh disease you're going to have to icy Touch and plague strike every 15 seconds which means every 15 seconds you're committing uh a frost and an Unholy Rune or even bathrooms to you know I see touching and plague striking that is a death strike that you could save whereas your your blood runes are way less valuable so it's much better to use one blood Rune on Glyph of disease than it is to use two blood runes or rather two ice or Unholy runes on refreshing your disease so that's why we're going to play Glyph of disease now when we're playing Frost there's a really powerful glyph called a glyph of howling blast let me go to a talent page so I can pull it up Glyph of howling blast is incredibly powerful for let me see if I can zoom in flip of howling blast is incredibly powerful for the frost build it causes your howling blast to apply Frost fever which is the icy Touch disease which is huge um so that bill doesn't need to run Glyph of disease it's focusing more on AOE and the howling blast is going to apply it to everything for you so that's pretty nice so those are the ways you can apply diseases to the Target and that's why you want to keep them up in an AOE situation it is a trap a common trap that you need both diseases up um because of blood boil another thing I haven't mentioned so blood boil does extra damage to targets that are diseased but I can show you with a little test here we'll walk up we'll blood boil this guy you can see it does 600 damage now if we put one disease up I put play Strike Up now if I press the ability it does 850 damage now if I put a second disease up and I boil again you notice in 900 it did about the same amount of damage about 900 again so what that shows is that you do not need both diseases up for your blood boil to do extra damage one it suffices and it doesn't increase with the second disease what that means is you know as we get into other builds and other things just know that you don't need two diseases on the target for your blood boil to do more damage but that is yet another reason you want to keep targets diseased is for your blood boil to do more damage uh also when you play a frost build and you take howling blast which does a bunch of frost damage uh keep in mind Glacier rot is applying to that as well so keeping diseases up is also good for uh you know making your your just your damage uh go a lot higher from every time you cast your howling blasts cool all right so other things we've talked about diseases we've talked about the basics I see touch you've probably heard a lot about icy Touch icy Touch causes a lot of threat it's your best threat ability a lot of people say you just press icy Touch as a death knight that is only true if all you care about is threat and you don't care about survivability and you're not getting hit very hard um to be quite honest you honestly could just if you had an auto clicker to press icy Touch you could walk away from the computer in phase one I'll be honest you could I see touch icy Touch hands off the computer you don't have to press anything else just sit still icy Touch comes around icy Touch again icy Touch again and that would hold threat and that is pretty much all you'd have to do so it is very very powerful don't get me wrong however if you are efficient and optimal about how you generate your threat like we mentioned before later in the fight you can do a lot more healing you can play a lot more defensive and uh you're not gonna have to worry about threat as much so I see touch scales with quite a few things in terms of how you can make IC touch generate more threat of course you can just get more more strength in general but there's lots of talents that make it do more damage black ice increases your Frost damage it also can crit from killing machine and from Death chill these are both methods in which you can get guaranteed crits uh when it crits it is going to obviously generate more threat um Glacier rot can just make it do more damage in general yeah and then also uh there is a talent down here uh your spells and abilities do more damage so when you defrost your icy Touch is just going to do more damage so you're gonna actually realize deep Frost does more threat than actual normal Frost um so icy Touch is extremely powerful now rhyme is another Talent you can take if you go uh deep Frost you don't have to take it um but it increases the Critical Strike chance of your icy Touch which would also increase your threat definitely not necessary because you already have plenty of threat in the build but these are all the ways that you can make your icy Touch do more damage and generate more threat obviously you can also just get hit icy Touch is a spell uh so when you are using uh virulence it counts as spell hit of course as you're getting uh hit you want to look in the spell hit section of either your add-on or character page you're gonna have your melee hit here my melee hit is eight percent my spell hit is higher it's ten percent so you actually get more hit per per point um so it's a spell so spell hit or just hit rating in general is going to help it and you can benefit from hit up to 17 fully buffed for your icy touches I will stress though that your IC touch is missing is not that big of a deal because you can just press it again if your icy Touch misses your your ice Rune doesn't go on cooldown just press it again so hitting the spell hit cap is not necessarily that essential for icy Touch it'd be more relevant for probably taunts um one thing I'll uh mention there was a good question that was relevant so I can answer it uh there are some abilities that scale off other targets diseases and not your own so for example blood boil actually scales off other death Knights diseases as well so if you have another DK in your group that's spreading diseases you don't even have to necessarily worry about spreading diseases if you don't want to there's going to be some packs of mobs where it's better to double blood boil than it is to pestilence bulb oil but again a lot of this doesn't really matter because anytime we're talking threat you should just be playing Frost uh Frost AOE spec when we're talking about AOE um keep in mind though for your death strike to heal you it has to be your own diseases though um that is one differentiation but some of these talents do just say diseased enemies and do work off other people's diseases all right uh what else to talk about so we're talking about just the basics of our character we've talked about you know kind of the start we're going to keep up our diseases we're going to use Death Strike to heal we're gonna run Glyph of disease to refresh our diseases we're going to try and spend our blood runes to keep our blade barrier on cooldown and we're healing we're going to be using icy Touch to keep up our sigil that we're going to be using definitely used for phase one now there is another sigil I guess you could use that increases your icy Touch damage but I don't think it's typically necessary but there's a place for it as well you want to increase your threat that's another way you can increase your IC touch thread is to use this sigil okay one other thing to mention is the talent and the way IC touch works I see touch or rather than icy Touch Frost fever reduces attack speed so that is another reason we want to keep our diseases up is because so long as our diseases are up everything is attacking slower that's another powerful thing about the death knight you can just press pestilence in every enemy in the area is now going to attack slower so even if you are playing death knight as an off tank there's a lot of things you can do to make your other tank you know either potentially take less damage even if it's an AOE situation by spreading your diseases and there's even some cooldowns that you can use that can help the other tank like Mark for blood which we'll talk about all right um on to the basics right so so basic stuff obviously we're gonna use anti-magic shell to prevent magic damage a tip I'd give with the anti-magic shell and something you can practice in sartharian depending on the pacing of the fight you don't have to just press anti-magic shell every time you're about to take magic damage think of it like a cooldown so for example I am never using anti-magic shell on sartharian at the beginning of the fight when there's no Drakes out because why would I want to waste a defensive cooldown before I'm taking extra damage from all the Drake stacking up and before the healers are stressed and there's lots of different tanks taking damage lots of different Raiders taking damage so treat anti-magic shell like a cooldown which it is and only use it when it's actually going to do something meaningful at the same time there's no point in holding it if you know the mechanics of the fight and there's only one magic damage Source just go ahead and use it on the magic damage but treat it like a cooldown we're not going to get quite into cooldowns yet other things I'm not going to get too basic obviously use Mind Freeze to kick things a lot of specs are going to go over to endless winter so it won't cost any runic power I already mentioned it be careful death coiling because you want to save your runic power for emergencies it's kind of like a risk reward you know I'll when you get more used to playing the death knight you'll know okay it's the start of the fight I'm just going to go about my rotation I'm going to go about my business um I'm not really too worried about what's going on I'm just going to death coil off cooldown but you're going to notice that uh if you overspend your runic power it's a disaster if you don't have enough rooming power to use a defensive you're going to cause a wipe and it's going to be your fault right that you could have saved it okay um what else um that's kind of the basics we're gonna come over you know are you we're gonna talk about detailed rotation lots of stuff obviously keep up born in winter but that's kind of just the basics to get started with now I think it's probably a good time to talk about talents we already talked about some but at least now you know the basics of how our class is going to work and I'm going to try my best to talk about obviously all the different ways that you can tank as a death knight so we'll be talking about Frost and blood so let's start looking at some talents um so to start here is an example of a blood tree now I want to say at the start death Knights probably have the best talent trees of all the classes it's actually a talent tree there's actually a ton of choice in these trees especially in the Frost Street so as I go through these talents I would worry a little bit less about the exact tree and a lot more about you know what I'm actually saying about the trees in the flexibility you have and feel free to make this tree your own so let's start with blood um again we're talking about blood right now so we're going to talk about single Target tanking it's going to be the main focus of what we're going to be doing um right out the gate we talked about blade barrier must have all five points damage reductions are incredibly overpowered um don't don't sleep on these get in the habit of keeping this up use a weak or to keep this up um or to monitor it very very powerful um ability or Talent uh the other talents aren't really necessary for you to take as a as a tank and they don't really do anything to help you as a tank so I wouldn't recommend taking these two-handed weapon spec just to be clear uh two-anded weapon spec only applies to attacks that are dealt with the actual weapon when you use a two-hander I'll talk about dual wielding versus using a two-hander um a little bit later probably right when we started talking about gearing but even if you use a two-hander this Talent is not good you know most of the time if you have nowhere else to go with your talent trees um you can take points out of bloody strikes in a solely single Target situation put them in the two-handed weapon spec if you want uh but again that is not something that uh this is typically not a good talent because it doesn't help your IC touch threat it doesn't help your disease threat it's very narrow but it is not completely worthless and can help your threat if you've got extra points in the tree next we've got uh scent of blood this is especially powerful if you do wield you have a 15 chance uh to after dodging parrying or taking direct damage to gain of blood it causes your next melee hit to generate 10 Runa power basically you're typically gonna have more runic power than you could spend now you don't really need to put many points in this one is plenty uh if you're dual wielding you're going to go through these points faster one is still plenty but very very uh good talent a bladed armor is just you know great for threat um obviously strength slash attack power is going to help all your your spells do more damage as well as just everything you do right so definitely worth the talent points you're going to get a lot of armor you're wearing plate and obviously it just says armor value and so a cool thing you can do is you can look at your attack power and see we have 4 000 attack power if I go to Blood presence it went down and that's because the armor scaling from frost presence actually does apply to uh bladed armor which means the bladed armor is insanely good for you as a tank so very very powerful and even better for you as a tank than the other specs then we've got the next row of talents we you can see we take all of these deathrun Mastery is must have and very powerful I don't know why this says three minute cooldown that's just a wow head issue here it just does not have a three minute cooldown this is going to play into a rotation a lot um whenever you hit with Death Strike or obliterate you're not using obliterate so whenever you hit with death strike the runes turn into blood runes or the they turn into death runes rather and they count as all runes so the reason this is really important is because your rotation is going to be something like follows right so let's say we open up with an icy Touch um you know our blood runes don't worry about them we're going to use that on pestilence refresh our diseases don't really think about it too much so this is what a rotation can look like right you can Death Strike to convert all of your runes into death runes so you can Death Strike twice in a row and then quadruple icy Touch and just alternate so icy Touch four times in a row and then next time the runes come around we're gonna death strike twice and then we're going to quadruple icy Touch now I would not recommend this typically this is kind of the baby way to do it um the simple way to do it the beginner way to do it what is typically better pacing is to do half of this right so but you can see this is this is how you can generate more thread on your death knight is by using death touch to convert the runes now the quote optimal way to do this would be you know at the start you do need to convert your runes to death runes um but then you can start doing double icy Touch death strike and so we're going to icy Touch icy Touch and then we're going to death strike now this whole time I'm not really paying attention to my plague strike obviously I should be pestilencing to keep it up um but we can go over to this mob too and continue this so we're going to icy Touch icy Touch test drive and that rhythm is going to make it so that we're a little more steady rather than icy touching four times and going a really long time without a death strike instead get an icy Touch icy Touch strike it doesn't have to be that exact order by the way we can instead icy Touch wait a second uh Death Strike icy Touch you just have to make sure that Unholy Rune is is ready to use you can mess it up it it can be messed up let me try and mess it up um yeah this should mess it up so here if I I see touch and then I Death Strike too soon I wasn't able to do it uh because of how the runes were synced but basically if if you go for a death strike too soon you might use up all of your runes except the Unholy Rune and you might be left with a naked Unholy room that you don't have anything useful to do with so that's the only thing you want to keep in mind when doing this is is make sure you're watching those runes but that is that is how you want to and we'll get into I guess more specific rotations when we're done with talents but that is why this Talent is so important and it's kind of the bread and butter of your rotation and you do need to think about those death runes when we're using death or mastery all right on to dark conviction uh increases your crit chance obviously this applies to everything including icy Touch um so it's worth taking but again it's not like a must-have Talent it's just nice increases your threat it's good um but yeah typically you're always going to take it because you just have spare points in the tree next we have room tap now one important thing I want to mention about Rune tap this first point is actually not that good it's not until you put three points in improved Rune tap that this gets extremely powerful obviously that should make sense because with three points it's cooldown is cut in half and its healing is doubled so it gets you know like what four times better you know double the usage double the power you know a little multiplication going on there it's like four times better when you get improved room tap so if you only have one point to put in room tap for example if you're going in a frost build you don't have to take it necessarily but even then it's typically worth taking even in a frost build if you've got the point to spare but I absolutely must take for for an obviously a blood build a very strong ability very strong uh to to heal you that much and obviously as your your health pool increases it'll heal you for more keep in mind all of the healing we talk about all of it interacts with vampiric blood the empiric blood increases your healing I haven't found a source of healing it doesn't scale with it increases your health pool and increases the amount of Health generated through healing so every time we talk about a heel just know that vampiric blood is going to make it heal harder when you have it up also because of the empiric blood increases your health pool it doubles up so when we have a heel like room tap it says it heals for 20 percent of your health however when vampiric blood is up your health pool has just increased by 15 percent so now 20 of your health is more and then there's a 35 healing increase so basically whenever you press the Imperial blood you're going to heal like crazy it's very powerful um very very strong you notice it especially when you're soloing things so yeah keep that in mind when we talk about healing so yeah Rune tap very very good on to spell deflection we talked about this before this makes you scale really well makes you a great tank against spell damage uh must have must take always take this Vendetta now Vendetta surprisingly has some usages uh for solo stuff I doubt it's ever going to have any usage in a raid um hypothetically if you had ads that give you Soul shards which some do um you know you could have the death knight get the killing ball on them for healing but that's not really something you're typically ever going to coordinate or ever use but hypothetically if your tank was ever off in the corner tanking a bunch of ads away from the rest of the group this would be actually good it's just that's realistically probably not going to happen we already talked about in pre-room tab must take if you have room tap very good I'm actually a mark for blood this is not a must-have and a lot of people don't take this I think you should take it I think you T pretty much always should take it generally speaking the the gain that you get from taking basically any other Talent is not really that powerful there's really nothing in this tree that we're not getting that we really want so it's I would say a free Talent point now I did some testing actually just you know right before starting up uh this recording and Mark of blood is significantly better when the target attacks fast right so you can read this here whenever the marked enemy deals damage to a Target that Target is healed for four percent of its maximum health now obviously the target can deal damage in more ways than just Auto attacks so if there's a boss that's shooting out lots of little hits of damage you know shooting out a steady stream of magic damage attacking really fast dual wielding lots of things can make this trigger and you can use this in certain clutch moments so for example Mark of blood can be used on myaxena before you're stunned and then while you are stunned you're going to be healed by the boss every time it hits you obviously this is percentage Health again obviously it's going to scale with vampiric blood as you get more Health um I will say that a lot of times you're not going to use up all the charges it only lasts 20 seconds it only is going to um it's only going to trigger sometimes five times it might only heal you for 20 of your health keep in mind I keep saying you know talking in intensive it's on you it's the target it's the target so for example if if you've ever got a situation where your off tank is in trouble you can put this on their target or if you're the off tank you can put this on the boss and it heals the other tank um but this gets much better if the the boss is attacking fast and it gets much better if the boss is steadily doing damage it is worth taking the talent in my opinion pretty much all the time but it's most the time not very good it's just nothing else is really like what are you gonna get you're gonna get uh a tiny amount of healing from blood presence that doesn't really you're not doing any damage so this isn't really very good blood worms is not very good it's flat and doesn't scale with your health pool sudden do I mean like all of these talents are are basically useless and if you're looking at something lower in the tree it we you know it obviously wouldn't help us there because we want to stop at 43 points most of the time when we're playing blood all right on with veteran of third war um competitive third war is absolutely and let me actually now that I think of it let me move this you might not have been able to see all the tooltips so sorry for that I was hovering over vampiric blood at some point uh there's that now my camera's out of the way all right a back to veteran of the third war increases your total strength and stamina and expertise obviously you take this three points don't even think about it really strong bloody strikes now this technically is not a must take Talent it is not something you have to take uh I would always take it because if you're ever in a situation where you need your blood boil if you're pressing your blood boil in an AOE situation you want it to do more damage you want it to use threat there's times when you're playing blood and ads come out um I personally think like if you were to compare this to two-handed weapons back you're typically going to get a lot more value out of bloody strikes than two-handed weapon spec so typically you're going to take this you're going to take this any situation where you would ever press blood boil however there are some single Target situations where you don't actually need this Talent so you don't have to take it but you're typically always going to take this next we have Abominations might increase it to AP uh for the party also increases your total strength by two percent more strength scaling this makes it uh you know pretty much worth taking anyway even if you don't provide the attack power buff even if another class brings it I believe it's what an Enhancement Shaman with Unleashed rage is the other spec that brings this buff um is it true shot Aura from Hunters as well the people that can bring the attack power bonus are the yep the three I mentioned Enhancement Shaman Marksman Hunter if they run true shot Aura which some specs don't take uh and yeah Enhancement Shaman unleash rage so that is pretty much just an always take our bloody Vengeance now this is not required but for one point it's just you know decent value in terms of threat um a little bit of bonus physical damage you deal after after critting it Stacks up again it's not you're not doing that much physical damage you're typically not struggling with threat so this kind of town is not necessary you're going to see some builds are going to take a point out of Mark for blood and they're going to put it in bloody vengeance again like I just said the percentage of fights in which this is gonna matter is basically zero um basically Never Gonna matter percentage of fights where this could save someone's life not zero in my opinion I think this ability could actually be very relevant if the target attacks very fast uh so that is something to consider all right uh up next we have improved blood presence mentioned it uh before uh you know the healing you get from blood presence is not very good uh because of well you're just not doing much damage so this is a talent you're typically not going to take really doesn't really do anything you're not going to notice it um yeah it's just not very not very good but yeah on holy frenzy this is definitely always worth taking um give this to a physical DPS if you're confused on who to put this on don't also don't worry about the damage this does it causes the target to lose Health equal to one percent of their health every second one percent of your health every second is like so worthless and like so meaningless uh blessing of light or Judgment of light being on the target is gonna out heal this so don't you're not even gonna notice this does damage it's not you're gonna forget that this even does damage the person so just completely ignore that it does not it does not matter uh but yeah give this to someone who does primarily physical damage that does not mean melee right so an assassination Rogue does a lot of damage with poisons even a DPS Warrior that does less damage than an assassination Rogue a lot of times would benefit more from Unholy frenzy so give it to a physical damage dealer we're talking uh feral cat we're talking uh DPS Warrior uh Marksman Hunter Combat Rogue is okay with it those are the classes that are going to benefit most from it now if you're ever curious just pull up a log for us back and see how much physical damage they're doing to see if this would help them much next we have blood worms uh blood worms unfortunately I can I can show them to you if you dual wield there's a higher chance that they proc so I can put on some fast weapons to proc them pretty quick um but blood worms they are not you know they're just a random minion thing that spawns here they come and you're gonna see you're gonna get healed for 2x the damage they do I think they just got thunderclapped immediately and died there goes our blood worms but you you might have been able to see they did 61 damage 61 damage per worm which kills me for a hundred and that's what they're gonna do the whole game they don't scale at all and that's the issue with blood worms they just do not scale so here's some more worms you can see they're hitting for 63 which heals me for 128 124. they got stomped again so your dad oh there's another worm we still got a worm living it's not a completely meaningless healing and hypothetic it's it's nearly meaningless healing you could take bloodworms if you felt like there was some threat talents in your tree that you didn't need help with threat and it is free healing it's just so it's just so minimal it's so little so I would not recommend taking blood worms in most cases it's extra healing for soloing you can see here this this fight it's healed me for five four thousand so it's something but it's not uh yeah it's just not very powerful doesn't scale very well but it is technically a non-zero amount of healing and if you're not having threat issues you could take points out of some of these threat talents for some free healing but yeah typically never never gonna be useful the blood worms can soak abilities sometimes so if there is a fight in which a boss is going to Target a random you know player or pet and do some powerful ability they can soak uh they can soak abilities so for example I I don't have a great rate example but in a dungeon the guard Pinnacle dungeon Scotty the ruthless throws a poison spear he can throw it at worms so that would actually be a situation in which worms would be good it would be worth specking into if there is a boss that is targeting friendly targets or pets and they can help either soak something or or get hit so that a party member doesn't not typically great kind of fun though on to vampiric blood now uh I know I kind of had my screen hidden a little bit earlier so we'll talk about this again increases your health this is like a mini Last Stand now this is a one minute cooldown this ability is insane one minute cooldown mini Last Stand costs a blood room and it is going to increase the amount of Health generated from like all healing it's insane you press this other healers are hitting you really hard your own healing heals for more it's it's kind of hard to die with this up to be honest with you it's so strong um which is crazy because you've got other powerful defensives as well uh very very strong ability must take really good all right uh sudden do your blood strikes and your heart strikes have a five percent chance to launch a pre-death goal you're usually not even using blood or heartstrike that much free death coil I mean again it's just we're at this point we're too uh we're too deep in the tree to that if you put all three points in this we're committing more than 43 points in blood so you'd only put at most two and even then what industry would you rather lose in favor of a random death coil sometimes when you this is not very good right don't take this all right next as we're continuing down blood we're going to talk about first uh uh sorry last one improve Death Strike increase the damage of your death strike by 30 increases its critical chance by six percent and increases the healing it's mainly the last part increases the healing by 50 must take my take or uh tanking single Target cool now will the necropolis we'll talk about next must take very powerful this is one of the most powerful talents in the entire game incredibly broken you can see the impact of of how strong this is based on logs and your healing I'm not going to say that this is an average example or an average case but I can just show you in the right situation how strong it can be you know the probably the best fight for it is soaking patchwork as an off tank and if I click on myself here's an example this was a patchwork fight we did and I healed for 140 000 from Little necropolis alone this is just damage prevented so you can see what this Talent is doing in logs it's classified as healing and you can see how powerful it is basically what this Talent reads is if you were gonna die take less damage that probably saves your life if you're going to be taken low take less damage so basically anytime your health actually matters you just take less damage 15 damage reduction any time your health is in question unbelievably broken unbelievably broken things that are supposed to one shot you you will just live through because of this Talent um sometimes it'll feel like you dip low and you look through the logs and you're like man he almost that blood death knight almost died was you know he should have died you say and then you go and look at the logs you're like oh wow he actually never could have died there was never a hit that would have finished him off because of will in the necropolis if you like are stuck at 40 hell for 10 seconds getting owned by a boss you can actually look through and be like oh wow he actually could have gotten hit twice in a row by that boss but because will and Acropolis is taking off 15 damage each time he would have lived insane Talent incredibly powerful and a must take for a single Target tanking and and pretty much throughout this entire tree the main thing that we're looking at here when you're deciding if you want to play Frost tank on a fight I would say the biggest thing you ask yourself is okay do I feel like I need will the necropolis do I feel like I need vampiric blood in my opinion those are like the only things that you're really thinking about if you're playing a frost tank build and trying to figure out should I switch to blood for this boss do I want the extra defensive do I want will necropolis if that's the case you should switch all of the rest of this stuff is is pretty minor um if I had to give Runners up it would be the Rune tap and the death strike is still powerful but everything else is kinda kind of gravy you know self-deflex your spell deflections of course great but this is the main reason we go down the street uh these these couple talents so this is where typically blood bills are going to stop um and the reason they're going to stop is because the rest of this tree does not help with our goal our designated goal when we spec into blood is we want to generate single Target threat and we want to be as tanky as humanly possible none of these talents help with survivability at all or tankiness and while they may contribute some threat it's not relevant to our single Target tanking really uh crit damage of your blood boil blood strike that's we're not creating that much this is not very good we don't need this heart strike hard strike is one I would heavily recommend taking this for fun while leveling casual play sure but when it comes to actual rating it's it's not that big of a deal you could just take a point out of a Dodge and have heartstrike if you want it's just what does this Talent actually do this Talent is optimal in two target it hits two Targets how often are you fighting two Targets we're already using our blood runes On Healing we're already using our blood runes on pestilence with Glyph of disease so those those leftover blood runes we're going to use on hard strike which isn't really much better than blood strike in single Target it's mainly better in two target but when we start hitting three and four Target we want to blood boil anyway so basically the only time heart strike is good is exactly to Target even then you could just blood boil and and probably not notice the difference in tab Target I see touch and not notice the difference so basically heartstrike is never good but it's casual play sure you can take it I guess but it's just it's just never needed which is why you're gonna see basically no bill take it um but it's not that bad so hopefully that makes sense a blood Gorge while you're above 75 healthy deal more damage and you'd armor pen uh armor pet is not very good for you because it doesn't help your IC touch do more damage uh this is just kind of you know not a very good talent um obviously it's 10 more damage above 75 Health that part's good that part can help you get more snap threat but you're a lot of times going to see that some of these Frost talents that we can go to are actually going to give you uh more threat than blood gorged but yeah pretty much the only time you go blood gorged is I guess someone else is covering icy Talons you don't need to bring that buff there's no AOE for morbidity the boss doesn't hit hard and you don't need any avoidance and you have three points to put in blood Gorge that's that's the only situation if threat is incredibly important and your health doesn't matter at all um you could play Blood gorged but again you are you could just go down Frost get more survivability bring a raid above and also just get more threat from some of the talents in that truth so yeah not and it's actually not that bad but you typically never even take it and then dancing Rune weapon is just not um just again doesn't help with our mission statement we don't need it for threats so we don't need to take it kind of a cool ability kind of a cool effect but we don't need it all right now we're going to talk about uh uh still under the purview of single target blood tanking we're going to talk about our Frost talents and then we're going to talk about Unholy talents I'll go back through and do a frost AOE build in a second which is going to be over here all right um toughness we're always going to take toughness grease his armor reduces duration of movement slowing I mean automatic just armor is damage reduction physical we take it we want damage reduction easy no-brainer Five Points improved IC touch no brainer icy Touch doing more damage you're keeping it up 100 of the time so it's just free threat and at reducing the attack speed of enemies is also great you take less damage also it is uh very very strong for um well you want to go down the tree anyway but it's strong in AOE because you can spread the disease and reduce the attack speed of all the targets now we're not really taking Rune of power Mastery it is nice to bank extra runic power I guess you could use this as a crutch if you feel like you're mismanaged your rooting power you could use it and the argument would be to let you freely coil more while saving rooting power but it's just yeah we've got a lot of good talents here it's just not worth uh not worth the point to be spent there uh nerves of Cold Steel this increases your chance to hit with one-handed melee weapons and increase the Damage Done by your offhand so again your auto attack damage is not a big contribution even if you're dual wielding you don't need to take this uh you'd much rather increase the damage of your icy Touch Your diseases and your death and Decay through black ice so we're pretty much never going to take nerves of Cold Steel um yeah permission Never Gonna Take It even window wielding as a tank black ice now this Talent is actually good so don't get misled here that this this example build doesn't have any points in black ice uh this Talent is actually good and you can put lots of points into it like I mentioned increases your your threat of icy Touch uh plague strike and death and decay all of those things you should be thinking okay um well I see touch a single Target but especially everything else is AOE so this is a good talent and AOE threat take this if you are interested in AOE threat um if you're going morbidity I would probably Play points in black ice the reason why we have some points in killing machine instead of black ice is just single Target um depending on your uh you know preference you could put one point in a killing machine a couple points of black ice that's perfectly fine I've been seeing that in in the death knight tank Sim I've been experimenting a little bit it seems like killing machine a lot of times we'll end up with more single Target threat and also more snap threat so if you're going uh if you have a proc before a pool or something that can be good so I've been experimenting with that but really both are are correct choices um but yeah killing machine would be their own the thing you'd take away to put more points in black ice all right now Annihilation um basically completely worthless never take this as a tank you don't use obliterate you don't need melee crit uh so don't worry about that uh you you would consider taking this if you are doing some sort of hybrid offspec because this is very important talent for frost DPS uh not a bad effect basically if you ever foresee that you're going to be Charmed feared or slept take it if you don't don't take it uh again you can take points out of killing machine or Glacier rot lose a little bit of threat for lichborne there's not a lot in uh Max Aramis phase one there's really not a lot in phase one that does any of these things it's pretty much just gluff Bluff has a fear and it doesn't really matter so you don't really need this in phase one can potentially be good later on to icy talents um again are you getting attack speed is not the best thing in the world it lets you get some more Rune strikes out it's fine Urban strike hits pretty hard and cause a lot of threats so it is going to increase your threat but again it's not like a melee haste is like a really big stat for you so it's not that big of a deal we're pretty much just taking this to go improved icy Talons if you are not going all the way down to improved icy Talons don't put points for points in other things um put points in black ice again the attack speed is nice for single Target but yeah we'd rather other things cool uh Untitled winter strength of course is threat are you gonna see here actually a few places we're getting strength now we're getting strength scaling from Abominations might we're getting strength scaling from veteran the third war and we're getting strength scaling from endless winter so starting to get a lot of strength makes your kick free of Rooney power basically take it you know obviously strength is going to convert into Perry so this is an avoidance Talent as well as well as threat all right chill at the grave uh this thing is basically never worth taking in a blood tank build if you're playing a frost build some specs do tank it do take it I don't think it's it's good for tanking ever in my opinion I never take this talent I think there's much better choices other place in the tree but you will some see some builds taking it um really it's just going to come down to how powerful your Spenders are if you end up Frost striking or death coiling I'm not a fan of this Tom next killing machine uh killing machine is going to make your next icy toucher howling blast crit uh this is mainly very powerful in the frost tank build you get a killing machine proc and then in the next pack you have a guaranteed crit howling Blast for insane snap threats so a must take for uh Frost AOE tank I like to put all five points in that one just for consistency and it's super strong it also is going to cause you to do a lot of damage in the frost tank build uh however um beyond that can also be good in single Target because it causes your IC touch to crit and icy Touch is your biggest threat increaser and what better way to make you know increase your threat than to just give guaranteed crits I mean you can get a little bit of spell damage here and there you can get more strength uh the quickest way to gain more threat is to just cause your IC touches to create a lot um and yeah creating icy Touch is going to be really strong so killing machine is in my opinion a a decent talent to use there we've got death shield now death chill is you're not going to see this taken a lot it's not bad it's extremely underrated the only reason I don't have it taken here is typically you don't need a guaranteed crit at the start of a pack right now in any phase one fight but if you were ever in a situation where you need snap threat desperately at the start of a fight death chill is very very powerful for SNAP threat very powerful to increase your single Target thread on pull it's just a guarantee so I I think death chill is actually worth using in some situations you lose a little bit of threat over time for some snap thread that's a worthwhile trade if anyone in your guild is having trouble pulling thread off you on pull if you're ever having any threat issues death chill can help cool um next Glacier rot this just causes your icy Touch to do more damage that's pretty much it pretty good um pretty good talent pretty powerful worth taking frigid dead dread plate very strong reduces the chance melee attacks will hit you it's very strong the reason this is good is because it doesn't have diminishing returns and it's not going to affect your Dodge or your Parry in Wrath of Lich King as you get more Dodge and as you get more Parry each point of Perry and Dodge gets less valuable so frigid death plate does not have any downside there so really strong the only thing it doesn't do is it doesn't proc Rune strike it's only downside all right now improved I see towns this is just a haste buff uh this is of course shared with uh quite a few specs uh well I say quite a few specs I guess it's two uh Frost death Knights also take this and then uh any Shaman can drop a win Fury totem but only the I believe only the enhancement shamans can do the improved win Fury totem which is going to uh give you the same amount of haste so this is a nice raid buff especially useful in 10 mans a lot of times in 25 mans you're going to have someone else supplying this buff so this Talent point is not necessary so you can go this building 10 mans to bring the most bus it's kind of I guess you could say free uh but if you don't need to provide this buff your talents can be very different so let me give you some examples of how you can deviate in some of the Unholy stuff before we start Frost so obviously you can take points out of icy talons if you still want to go down uh to something like frigid red plate you can just switch a lot of the points out of this attack speed and put them into other talents like black ice and play something like this um right you can go points into frigid drug plate Five Points into anticipation this is going to give you more tankiness and you don't you don't have to go with icy Talons get more of the threat this is a perfectly fine build as well uh you also can go even further into the Unholy tree I would typically only recommend going to morbidity after that it gets it gets worse um but you could also go for virulence so if you wanted to do that you could again just start taking more points out of the tree you could stop right at endless winter and when you stop at endless winter it's kind of nice to get that kick as well as some of the strength and then you could go over to morbidity you could do something like this if you really wanted but if you wanted to make sure you were spell hit capped which is 17 hit which is not that hard to get you only need about eight point around nine percent physical hit virulence and raid Buffs and and you'll hit hit cap so could go for that but typically you're going to see either see stopping at morbidity or some of the other variations I showed before of course I'll show have some links in the description um one other town I didn't mention I should have mentioned icy Reach This Talent is insane I would never not take this icy reach is very powerful I've I've seen some bills that don't take this and it's very confusing to me what is the best way to increase your snap thread it's honestly to attack faster than the rest of the group this makes it easier to time pre-pots for your group this makes it easier to get snap threat right from the start this makes it easier to make sure that you're not chasing into melee range to start I see touching things this is also incredibly powerful if there's ads in a fight and you need to you know bring them over to you well icy Touch does so much threat that it can bring over ads pretty easily so I see reach in my opinions must must have even over some of these uh threat talents right okay so let's go back to maybe a little more of a standard build just to keep up in the background here um let's talk about somebody in holy talents you're never taking vicious strikes it doesn't really help you virulence like we said before can be used to hit spell hit cap I would typically think about using virulence when you are on Farm and content is super easy and you just never want to miss your icy touches or your pestilences to increase your threat because you're typically going to lose um either the buff or the survivability so a lot of times it's not worth taking or it could cause you to not have the talent if there's a fight that taunting is really important instead of using a whole glyph on Glyph of command you typically do not need eight percent from Glyph of dark command to not miss your taunt typically typically however um this is so I'm basically saying that eight percent is a lot of times Overkill sometimes you only need three percent if you're at uh if you can get to nine percent hit which you can't always do but in those situations where you already have a lot of hit in your you know your build you could just take virulence and then have a whole another blip slot so that's an option um or again like I said on deep Farm your IC touch is not missing it's a slight annoyance I really don't think you have to worry that much about your spell hit though because you just press icy Touch again if it misses not a big deal on to the next row of talent trees uh reminisce dread can give you more strength but since your ghouls aren't out all the time it's not the best but could be something you could take for even more strength um which obviously would turn into Perry on holy command again if there's a specific reason in the fight you want death grip up more you could take it morbidity increase the damage of your death okay this is a must take in any AOE threat build and it is incredibly powerful incredibly powerful dungeons must take for dungeons must take in any build where you need to take AOE threat it is very very good however lots of single target blood death knight specs do not need to go morbidity so do not feel you have to take this in every single build obviously if you go morbidity you cannot go I see talons so there's a pretty big cost there if you go morbidity you're missing out on that but I would say generally speaking morbidity is must take if you're going to play Blood as a solo tank spec and you're going to try and use a DPS spec as your second spec which I don't necessarily recommend if you're like a main tank okay cool um I mean epidemic's okay but you already don't have much use out of your blood runes um so I I think you just run Glyph of a disease and you don't need epidemic so I wouldn't ever really ruin the epidemic as a single target blood tank everything else in tree doesn't really matter so I wouldn't take those you you can take corpse explosion in dungeons for fun it's not the worst for damage but it's not necessary so that's where we're gonna stop for those talents now we're going to switch into so you've kind of talked you see there's a lot of flexibility here that is it for single Target tanking now we're switching into the world of the frost howling blast tank this build revolves around um well I guess I should talk about maybe glyphs first I'm not sure exactly what would be best but we can talk about lifts after I think I'm just gonna have to talk about the howling blast one right away now we're in the world of howling blast Frost this is the spec that has the best threat in the entire game again the only downside to this spec is you kind of need your death and Decay up to start a pull um and then you don't want to move out of your death and decay but once those conditions are met best AOE threat spec tank in the game insane snap threat you go in with an icy Touch or sorry you go in with a howling blast it's typically a guaranteed crit from either killing machine or death chill it's hitting everything it's applying Frost fever so now every target has ticking diseases then you run up and blood boil it so now you have even more AOE threat on it and then as soon as your runes you can you can even uh pop a blood tap for a second blood boil and when your runes come around your icy or your howling blasting again and guess what it does even more damage this time the reason it does even more damage this time now everything has Frost fever and your Glacier rot and your Tundra stalker are up so now your second howling blast does even more damage and it also is uh going to benefit from from killing machine which you a lot of times have a proc by then so basically what I'm saying is your AOE thread is insane you do a ton of damage very strong build in my go-to build for solo tanking Max my go-to build anytime I'm tanking trash tanking dungeons insanely powerful how good this build is now what are the downsides of this build obviously we miss all this Blood stuff um but also we're using a lot of our runes on threat and we don't really have a lot of spare rooms to do anything else so for example we're not really death striking very much because we're using death and Decay and Howling blast and then all of our frosts and holy runes are already gone so we're not going to heal we're no longer really a self-healing tank anymore when we play the spec we just have good threat and that's really all we do we're no longer the self-healing tank we're no longer the the Behemoth we don't have spell deflection we don't have improved asteroid wool necropolis vampiric blood so we lose a ton of single Target tankiness so unless the content's on Farm or is very easy you're not going to want to play this on any hard-hitting boss but insane threat so let's talk about the individual Talent a little bit in this spec so I've already talked about a lot of talents I kind of mentioned how they might be in the frost build pretty much everything just gets better in the frost build let's talk about some of the talents starting at this point going down so I do I first want to mention you can run rhyme although I do not think it's necessary it increases the Critical Strike chance of your icy Touch This spill should have no trouble with single Target threat I think this is a waste um you're not using obliterate so this is not very good merciless combat is useless because as a tank you really shouldn't care about doing more damage when targets get low on health you should be focused on Snap threat right so this is worthless uh improved Frost presence is the best like the best for this build great must have it's going to cause you to just take two percent less damage we love damage reduction always love damage reduction next we got hungry and cold now this do not sleep on hungry cold it is not bad it is not bad and you have extra talents in this build do not sleep on this in some raids in the right context this can be very good uh an obvious example is glut on Bluff there's not a lot of fights like glove but on glove if you're kiting the ads you can use hunger and cold and freeze them in place for 10 seconds 10 seconds is a very long time when this lines up it is very powerful it is usually useless it is usually useless read it as read it like this the best use for hunger and cold is to think of it like interrupt any channels around you on a one minute cooldown sometimes that's good enough if an enemy me mob is is casting any channel it will stop it then they won't start it up again if any any nearby enemy mob is casting spell you can hunger and cold and it will stop the spell but they usually cast it again immediately as soon as they take damage so when is hungering cold good it's good when lots of ads can be Frozen and do channels um this stops the whirlwinds uh well it can stop whirlwinds it can stop flurries it can stop cast channels it stops a lot of things like that but obviously the targets need to be able to to be hit by the ability in a dungeon this is actually not that bad and unironically you could run the glyph of hunger and cold to make it cost no runic power because it kind of is expensive but again we're getting kind of Niche here typically you don't need this but it can be worth taking so don't sleep on this point um could be good could be good all right chill planes another one that's absolutely not necessary you don't have to take this but allows you to do a lot of very broken things obviously anything that can be slowed can be permanently Guided by this uh if you're in a heroic dungeon and you're getting owned and your healer's not healing very much just walk away from the mobs decent chance that a lot of them can be slowed if there is any ad on any boss in the entirety of any content you're about to do in all of Wrath Elitch King if any AD can be slowed chilled Lanes has permanent 100 uptime on AOE packs you might have seen a a YouTube video let me see if I could find it uh NAX solo Farm trash the guy has a can in his name uh t-can here we go this just to give you an example right look at this you can permanently kite anything 100 uptime you press howling blast howling blast AOE applies a slow to everything with the glyph of howling blast and then they're permanently slowed that is broken guys that is broken there's going to be lots of situations where you can just permanently kite something that's not intended that way obviously glove another example you can permanently kite the ads in glove never get touched but it's gluff so it's not a big deal but yeah another talent that can be very powerful and if you know about these kinds of things you could say hey let me go respect and I could actually make this fight much easier very very cool very powerful all right so we're still tanking unbreakable armor worth taking increases your strength by a lot which is also going to increase your Parry don't forget that and gives you some armor you can lift Glyph of unbreakable armor I don't really use it ever but you could increase the armor it gives um can use this before a pack makes all your stuff do more damage uh typically you need to have your blood tap up to use it because death and Decay and Howling blast both take a frost run you're not going to have one left over so you can use your your tap on that every minute and that's what you typically should do uh blood of the north don't think that you're using much blood strike in Frost strike and uh I don't even pestilence much in this build so uh also if we're converting our blood Rune into a death Rune surprisingly it's not that good in this build because blood boil is really strong in AOE when you howling blast so you don't really even need to convert our runes two death runes unless we're single Target tanking but again a single Target tanking a lot of times we just want to play a different build but yeah if you're planning to do some single Target tanking you can use blood of the north but it is not needed uh not not a necessary Talent you can definitely just move points from chill planes into blood of the north though if you're planning to single Target tank with the spec um even then you're not really worried about survivability if you're playing the spec in single targets you don't you don't really care you kind of get what I'm saying all right threat of thesarian while dual wielding you get more damage yada don't really care about this we don't care about obliterate damage plague strike damage blood strike damage prostate damage dealing damage with our offhand weapon or offhand weapons usually not going to be very very slow anyway not that not not at all necessary but it can be just free damage on your Rune strike again you can take it you just don't need to again you could just move chill blinds into it for some free extra damage not a big deal all right now we have guy logorphine again over tanking this is a must-have it is this is insane increases the Critical Strike damage bonus of howling blast we can stop there don't have to keep reading we're creating a lot of howling glass with killing machine and death Shield again death show you don't have to take in this build but you can take it for more consistent snap damage with your howling blast snap threat well yeah gal of morphine is just great and the bonus it increases the duration of your icebound fortitude which is even better um Frost strike but you see no point here this is something you're just gonna have to test as well it depends on your gear it depends on your weapons depends if you're dual wielding it just depends a lot of times death coil is just going to do more damage than Frost strike and it's ranged a lot of times you don't even need to press Frost strike as a tank with that said if it is doing more damage for you okay another asterisk a lot of times you don't want to consume your killing machines and it's incredible grief if you get a killing machine proc which is going to make your next howling blast a guaranteed crit and you're trying to dump runic power you literally don't want to press Frost strike like it's actually griefing so that's why I typically don't take Frost strike is because it messes up your killing machines uh you know again from a tank perspective if you were trying to make a frost build a frost DPS build to off tank with you absolutely can you absolutely can play a typical frost build and still tank pretty well but if we're just talking about Frost tank you know we don't need Frost strike we obviously want it if you're you're off dpsing as the same spec all right acclimation when you were hit by a spell 10 chance to boost your resistance that's about this thing is terrible horrible you'll get blasted by a ton of spells and it's not really procking and even when it procs it doesn't do anything I would never recommend taking this Talent if you're ever at a point where you care about like getting blasted by Magic damage just play Blood and place spell deflection this thing's terrible absolutely horrible all right thunderstalker expertise damage take it then we get howling blast must have for the frost tank build um must have again we need to go over to morbidity uh very very powerful your rotation again death and Decay into howling blast unbeatable threat and then we go over to blood in this build again we still want to get Blade barriers so we're taking less damage uh pretty easy to cut our blood runes on cooldown in this for trash then we've got scent of blood scent of blood is uh again still typically worth the point but you don't have to take it you can move it somewhere else to move it into Frost you can move it into Unholy you can take it anywhere likewise the five bladed armor points again it's just so good when you're in Frost presence because of how much damage you're gaining from it that I I still take it even in uh even in the DPS you know Frost tank setup here uh the broom tap here is not required again I kind of like it just to have there but you don't need to take it at all you can take both these points out if you wanted put them somewhere in Frost I think this one point is definitely worth but you can put them somewhere else in Frost if you would like but yeah that is it for the frost tank that's it for the talents next we are going to talk about let's see maybe is it time for glyphs glyphs and then we'll talk about defensives so what glyphs you're gonna run so for the frost tank we're gonna run typically just not not many options here we're typically going to run Glyph of death and Decay Glyph of howling blast and Glyph of icy Touch now keep in mind the vicey touch only causes the disease to do more damage but that's a lot of times still worth it in this build because you are you have howling blast instantly putting it on everything so you're pretty much always going to have every Target affected by Frost fevers so it gets a lot of mileage um again helps your threat that's the point of the build other options you could take though uh really really nothing else specifically for the frost build except the meme Talent we talked about with the hunger and cold which you're pretty much never going to take and the glyph of unbreakable armor which you already talked about so I'll go back to blood glyphs and some of these could apply to frothank but most of these are are for for blood tank now we have Glyph of dark command I already talked about how you can potentially hit spell hit cap without needing this but if you're ever on a fight and you especially if your hit is really low you're in like really high mitigation gear and you need your taunt to work um you can you could put this in I I do think that this type of talent is not super necessary in a lot of cases just because you have a death knight have two taunts ah but yeah for the situations where you absolutely need your taunt to work go ahead and take it and it's going to prevent more wipes than a lot of the other random talents you could take I always take the disease so that you can do a lot more healing it makes the class A lot more fun to play as well um so I'm always taking that and then I'm also a lot of the time taking a glyph of Vamp blood I'm taking this probably probably 100 of the time to be honest probably probably 99. uh Glyph of amp blood is insane it is already a one minute cooldown in last 10 seconds now it's 15. it's too good too strong amazing ability uh the reason why 15 seconds is really significant too I think it's important to think of what 15 seconds means if if this lasts 10 seconds you get one cycle of runes it's going over to 15 is huge because it's now two cycles of rooms which means that extra five seconds you go from two death strikes to four um so yeah actually pretty significant definitely very good glyph um basically must have other glyphs you can use uh Glyph of anti-magic shell you're very rarely going to use but forever there was a situation where you're taking constant magic damage That Never Ends you could use it but you're typically not going to use it very much um your Glyph of death indicate again you still can use that in the blood build especially if you go morbidity if you ever care about your AOE threat definitely the best glyph if you ever care about AOE threat um if you're ever trying to tank ads and the boss while playing blood um you know most of these are not going to have much use Glyph of ice bound fortitude can be good uh especially if your defense is low you're using a lot of resilience but it's not it's not the best because your icebound for it it's based 30 damage reduction most of the time you're not dying in icebound fortitude anyway so you would need number one a specific reason that you need to take less damage like you're taking an insane amount of damage during an enrage or something and you would also need to have a low amount of Defense to make this even provide much value to you typically not using this very much all right Glyph of icy Touch again is a small amount of thread increase not a big deal I wouldn't I would rather use Glyph of maroon strike if you're trying to increase your threat um so if a green strike can be used to increase your threat lift up Rune tap can be fun in dungeons but it's typically not very good it only gives you one percent more healing for yourself it does heal your party for 10 of their Max Health uh definitely could whip this out if you're in a two-tank fight and the other tank keeps dying and you're fine you know maybe you just take out Vamp blood for one fight and and put in Rune tap and just have an extra little heal for the off tank I mean it's not gonna do much but hey maybe you could do something but yeah that's pretty much it though for glyphs you're typically not going to use any of the other ones so that's it for glyphs that's it for talents now it's time for defensives talk about what your defensive are how to use them and uh yeah let's get into it so uh I've got most of the defensives down here but we also have anti-magic or we also have Army as well can't forget about Army so your first line of defense if you're taking damage obviously you're just going to want to use her in tap so let's say I get chunked these guys don't do very much damage to me um let's get some more friends here okay so as my health is going down first line of defense is I'm getting owned by enemies I'm like okay let me get some healing out let me use room tap now if you know you're dropping like a rock and you're getting destroyed You're Gonna Want a vampiric blood first because it increased the healing so here let's say I'm in a lot of trouble worried I'm gonna die your first line of defense is Rune tap if you're missing a little health but vampiric blood then Rune tap if you're getting destroyed vampiric blood is going to cause the healers to heal you for more tooth let's say your health is still dropping Like a Rock then you're going to want to use death Pact or a crazy amount of healing uh that can burst you for your healing and it also is going to benefit from extra healing during your vampiric blood now the big problem about uh death pact is you need your pet out so it says it's a two minute cooldown it is not a two-minute cooldown it is a three minute cooldown unless you're playing Unholy because you need your pet out and your pet's on a three-minute cooldown so uh you do need to have that up and then you need 40 Rune of power it also takes two globals so death packed as a defensive is probably your riskiest defensive because it takes two levels to get off but if you get it off it's gonna heal you for a ton and the other problem with uh summoning the pet is you typically want to summon the pet right before I said it takes two globals you can summon your your ghoul in advance and then sack it when you need it but your goal is going to die pretty easily especially on a fight like sartharian he's gonna just die to the breath so it's kind of hard to get it out ready in advance but you can pre-cast your raised dead if there's not going to be AOE that kills it so that you were ready for a death Pact so that is that is another way you can use the ghoul um but yeah so so keep continuing on with defensiveness again vampiric blood is our first line of defense shortest cooldown uh we're using Rune tap just use it whenever don't worry about it too much just use it not a big deal um don't have to get full value all the time just just go ahead and use it if you really want to be disciplined out things don't just use it when you're missing like 80 of your health save it when you actually dip low because a lot of times you're at 80 Health your healers are just going to finish you off you know maybe just use death strike at that point for you all right icebound fortitude this is your wall um take minimum 30 less damage but it increases with defense so it's 12 seconds um and it is increasable by set bonuses uh the four set from your tier is going to increase the duration by three seconds so that's really good and then also you are going to uh just when you take less damage you also it says you become immune to stuns a lot of stuns still hit you so keep that in mind it's not always going to work against a lot of raid stuns it does make you immune to stun and is going to make you take this damage uh icebound fortitude is what you're going to use when you're about to take a lot of damage typically when vampiric blood is down or you're concerned that you might die even through vampiric blood but I spam fortitude is your your big cooldown now what makes death Knights overpowered is that your big cooldown's only two minutes right think how strong this is you're getting owned by a boss you Vamp blood you're fine all right 15 seconds pass you're getting owned by a boss you uh you know maybe you you drop icebound fortitude 15 seconds pass you've already got your room tap back up right you only need to make it another 30 seconds and you've got your vampiric blood again and then you just need to make and then you you'll have room tap back up then you need to make another 30 seconds to your second Rune tap a little longer you get your third Vamp blood and then your ice spawn fortitude's back again and so basically you just always typically have a cool down for something now when do we use empowered Rune weapon there's two ways to use empowered Rune weapon what I'll show you I guess uh what you can do for a big opener is you can start the fight with a bunch of icy touches always use blood tap before empowered Rune weapon if you're using it for threat because it will refresh the death Rune and you'll get more value so let's say I start the fight here and I just want a big threat opener I can I see touch I see touch and then I'm going to icy Touch again then I can refresh the runes and I can I see touch three more times now that is a pretty good amount of snap threat right and that was with no runes pre-prepared ideally you want to use Death Strike to convert some of your runes to death runes before the pool starts so you can I see touch even more before the pool starts so that's one way to use empowered Rune weapon is for SNAP threat but if you don't need it for SNAP threat you can actually saved empowered Rune weapon for a double death strike and that's what I like to do on every boss that can threaten to kill me if I ever feel like I have no cooldowns left I got nothing in the tank and my health is low empowered Rune weapon double death strike and uh again that's a lot of healing right with all my modifiers you've got talents here my death strike is healing me for five thousand so if I empowered Rune weapon double Death Strike it's a 10 000 heal right which is a third of my health which obviously makes sense because it should be doing 15 healing because our death strike has a 50 increased healing in it tooltip does 10 so that should be 15 of our health right so that isn't a use of the empowered Rune weapon that's how I like to use it defensively haven't talked about anti-magic show anti-magic show again you want to use on any big chunk of magic damage I would recommend if you were taking constant and steady magic damage think of it like a cooldown and if the magic damage you're taking is sparse or intermittent just use it use it off cooldown right whenever you're about to get hit by it but again like I said on a fight like sartharian do not anti-magic shell when you were safe do not anti-magic shell and overlap with other cooldowns if you don't need to if I already had Vamp blood up because I was low on health I'm just going to let myself get hit by a breath I know I'm gonna be fine vample is going to give me enough Health I'll heal back we're good I'm Gonna Save anti-magic shell for when it actually does something likewise I'm not pressing anti-magic shell on sartharian when I have all my healers focused on me and no dragons have landed in the dragons land I start taking improved damage increased damage and my health will shrink then I'll use my anti-magic gel um all right next up we have Army the last defensive I have not mentioned um well I can talk about Mark and blood too markup blood is not very good no one hears no one was gonna say it's very good but it can be good if you know that big damage is about to come so for example if a mob attacks asked if it's enraged if it's berserk if it's frenzied lots of anything that increases its attack speed pop-up Mark of blood and you're gonna get some healing back and just don't worry about it don't think about it it's just a little extra bonus it's again not super valuable so just pull the trigger on it whenever you think it will be helpful if I'm ever in a situation where I'm desperate I'll just throw it up I'll just throw it up and you might think it's not that big of a deal four percent of your health is not bad right for me it heals me for sixteen hundred I throw it up in a panic and I'm starting to dip low on health it procs twice hey I'll take three thousand health procs three times I'll take I'll take five thousand health why not um why not definitely your weakest cooldown though so don't don't worry about it too much but again better against targets that attack faster do a lot of constant damage all right uh last cooldown we're going to talk about is is your army of the Dead Army of the dead at the bottom it says the death knight takes less damage equal to his Dodge plus Parry so that's a damage reduction and that gets better as you go through the game and this is probably the most underutilized a cool down in pretty much all death Knight's kits and even I I don't use this pretty much at all right I mean I know the content is easy but it's something you really should be using better when is this good so obviously when you Channel Army of the Dead you cannot Dodge you cannot Parry because you are casting so if you start channeling Army of the Dead in a boss is auto attacking you it doesn't really do very much you're taking less damage but you can no longer Dodge and Parry anyway so it's kind of just almost evens out the only thing it does in that case is makes you take consistent damage so if you're afraid of getting bursted by an enraged boss and you're afraid two consecutive hits in a row might kill you um you could make the damage more consistent and smooth by taking less damage but not avoiding anything so you could do that but typically where it's going to be best is is Magic damage or a big hit that can't be dodged or buried when you cannot Dodge or Parry the incoming damage it's just damage reduction at that point so let's say we're on sartharian you've got no cooldown left nothing in the tank Channel Army of the Dead if you get breathed it'll take it will do less damage equal to your Dodge and Parry right even in you know phase one gear that's going to lead to well let me go to our defense section right Perry plus Dodge we're looking at a 40 Dr that's not that's not bad at all that's easily life-saving and again you can use this while you are affected by dots damage over time you could uh you know a bleed a stacking bleed that's gotten out of hand uh lots of uses for it but again it's a 10 minute cool down and it's one you're not going to be comfortable using because it's such a long cooldown and it's kind of niche but definitely has the potential to save your life all right those are all your defenses um I guess I can talk about taunt and death grip kind of self-explanatory obviously don't death grip things you don't need to um probably the biggest thing I see is uh textures waste death grip it's pretty valuable and the further you're moving something the more value you're getting a lot of times if you have spare runes you can just use strangulate which is long range silence to move a mob closer to you sometimes your strangulate is less valuable than your Death Grips so sometimes you should be strangulating first obviously death grip is a taunt and a grip um so you can pull thread of things with it and it brings them to you so it's very strong even if they're immune to the movement part it is still a taunt um and if I meld here my worms might yeah if I just walk up and get in combat with this guy so let's say I'm in combat with this guy he's hitting me right if I use my death grip on him it's going to apply that taunted effect and keep targets from hitting other things you can use it on pull even on a Target that is immune to the grip in combination with your icy Touch if your icy Touch resists well guess what you're your death grip had the taunt effect anyway so that's kind of cool obviously you've got a taunt as well um both 30 yard range both useful for just taunting getting things under control um other utility other important things we already talked about kicking just kick I see chains is very strong don't forget you have this in your kit or chains of ice it slows by a lot it's kind of insane so just think just know that anytime there's ever something that needs to be kited you can use icy chains to kite it you personally could spec Frost and play chill planes and kite it but yeah death Knights are great kiters all right I'm trying to think if there's anything else uh get comfortable pressing corn of winter just anytime you're out of combat free runic power press it in between packs just muscle memory just keep pressing it um pretty much the gist of it not much utilize I think there's not much else to really talk about in the kit only other time you're really going to change your presences is if you want to move faster within holy presence but obviously you lose health and damage so keep that in mind that you don't really want to be and threat so you don't really want to be an Unholy presence long but if you're kiting something you want to move faster or uh you're not currently tanking a boss and you're trying to dodge something or you've got a specific phase of a boss where you're not doing any tanking you can pop in in holy presence to move faster all right uh last thing I guess I'll talk about a little bit is blood tap I talk about a little bit in my Rune video so I'd recommend watching that but long story short of blood tap uh it converts your Rune to a death rune it's always going to prefer the left room if given the choice and it is not smart enough to know which Rune is about to come off cooldown so it's going to prefer the left one so long story short typically you want to get use out of your your leftmost Rune before you press your blood tap a common mistake people make is uh yeah not not using the blood Rune before blood tapping and then it wastes it you don't always have to use it though all right that is our defensives that is we've at this point talked about all the abilities what else do we need to talk about uh we talked about talents we talked about rotation um how to do the optimal threat rotation how to I guess I could talk about it a little more using a swing timer waiting to take damage using Death Strike converting our runes into death runes and we use pestilence to refresh our diseases and again we're going to try and manipulate our uh our our blood runes to get the effect the blade barrier effect now one other thing to mention uh uh when it comes to our blade barrier you can establish it before the pool begins so let me give an example let's this time and get some death rings so many rocket boots away from this guy hopefully reset him let's say we're starting a pool on pestilent horror you got a pull timer 15. well this guy's kind of in our way let me reset him first okay let's do a new pool timer we got a pool timer 15. you can see it here so as the pool timer is getting to like maybe 12 or something I can use blood boil right I'm sitting here I'm chilling I'm even gonna read it to armor pop maybe armor pot again now I can blood boil again put this blade barrier on cooldown then I go start icy touching I'm going to use my blood tap I'm going to icy Touch a bunch I'm an empowered Rune weapon reset all my runes I see touch three more times and pretty much this whole time I had blade barrier up and then I refresh it again right at the end then I can put up my disease then I keep icy touching I can start death striking get the 30 use out of our blood Rune if you're a little too slow you don't get it though you need to be careful of that when you blood tap you got you're gonna get one more use out of your death Rune and then if you empowered Rune weapon you get two more uses out of it make sure to icy Touch fast enough that you actually get the use out of it um but that's an example of a big threat opener and you can see it's insane snap threat if any of your icy Touch misses just recast them not a big deal make sure to use that healthy frenzy off cool down I see not off cool none you try and use it during lust kind of goes without saying but just you know you want a person who's getting uh the buff to benefit the most from it so try and use it during lust typically they're going to use all their cooldowns then and uh yeah that is that is rotation that's your opener a lot of the advanced stuff when it comes to death knight is just how can I get the most healing out of my Deathstrike while still holding threat while still keeping up my sigil while still keeping up the blade barrier that is the advanced component of the rotation um cool now it's time for the fun part we're going to talk about gear gearing in general now this whole time as we're talking about stuff you know we talked about some healing um we talked about threat your threat is very good you should never be itemizing for DPS as a blood death knight if you were having threat issues typically something else is the problem uh even in a very high end raid you know there's Salve and misdirect worst case you can be tricks as a tank um I say worst case it's going to be pretty common for a lot of average guilds to just tricks because it's safe even though tricks can be used to increase damage of damage dealers play a safe tricks your tank it's a good bet for most guilds uh but with all that we're going to be itemizing for survivability only that's all our itemization is going to be when it comes to what stats we want the biggest stat we want by far is stamina and the reason for that is everything we've talked about with the percentage-based healing the more stamina we have the more healing we can do and keep in mind stamina is already the best stat for all the other tanks too so imagine you've got a prop Warrior you've got a prop Paladin they're gemming stamina stamina is their best stat and they don't benefit they don't have as much stamina scaling as a DK Bears have more but but they also don't benefit from the healing component but dks benefit from the high stamina scaling and the healing components so they benefit from stamina more than any other tank and uh you know they benefit from defense um not as much as paladins and warriors because you can't block so you lose a little bit of value there so you're not as interested in defense you want to be crit immune and you want High stamina that is the that is the basic level for a tank so create immunity you want to have 540 defense or a combination of defense and resilience in this case I'm cheating a little bit you're gonna see wait a minute you just said 540. let me put my actual tank here you said 540 defense you have 500 what's going on right icy Touch gives 53 defense rating so if I icy Touch This mob I have 5.44 chance not to be crit and I also have a little bit of resilience you add them together 5.44 plus the uh you can get we I'll link a week or that does the math for you too my weak or is up here in the top left I have a zero percent chance we create right now but we have a five point uh four four percent chance not to be cripped from defense and resilience also helps we're getting resilience from our shoulder enchant but you also could use you know different resilience pieces uh maybe deadly Gladiator glove or deadly Gladiator chest or something here and there that aren't aren't the worst if you are in trouble with crit immunity so first priority High stem and create a mini basic stuff for tanks get the weak order check if you're crit immune um you know press icy Touch to see if you're pretty immune with this buff up I would say it's a little bit Advanced I guess to try and count on always keeping icy Touch up to make sure you're not getting crit is something to think about um so do that with caution if you're going to go under crit immunity and rely on always keeping a vicey touch you're going to want to use a weak Aura to make sure you actually keep it up cool um next we have our avoidance stats so let's talk about avoidance so so a couple problems with avoidance um avoidance is RNG it doesn't matter if you've got 40 Dodge or 30 Dodge the boss could just hit you three times in a row and you can just die this is why we never did gem Dodge never gem defense never gen unless we need to and we never did Dodge or Jim Perry um for this part unless we need like a socket bonus we're typically not super in love with avoidance but we want to get it for free so for example take an item like a boundless ambition or take an item like the leg plates of sovereignty from eye of Eternity 25 men this item has perion are we equipping the leg plates of sovereignty because they have 57 Perry on them no we're equipping them because they have an insane amount of you know stamina armor strength expertise and they also happen to have extra parry and stuff so basically what I'm saying is you're gonna get Perry you're gonna get dodged no matter what you're just going to accumulate it as you get more of it it gets weaker because of diminishing returns but it's still important if if you're using too much resilience and too much PVP gear you're going to be taking more damage than other tanks but that really mainly stresses healer Mana which is usually not always a problem so all of this is a way of saying you're gonna get defense you're gonna get Dodge you're gonna get Perry it's all going to naturally come through your gearing but stamina is going to be your main focus this means items like breastplate of Frozen pain are actually very good because they are very high in stamina this item is missing avoidance right and I would use the tier chest if I had it so I could work towards four set but since I don't have it you compare an item like the dragon storm breastplate with the breastplate of Frozen paint they're actually going to be pretty similar right if I don't need the defense from Dragonstone breastplate I can use an item that has no defense on it and I would actually recommend especially if you get comfortable using the sigil to dip under crit immunity um I would recommend mixing and matching your gear so that you have a couple items in your set that do not have any defense on them for example I currently have a chest with no defense a ring with no defense and a weapon with no defense on if you're using a two-hander you typically can't can't get any defense on it I think there's like one in the entire game that has defense some random Quest item but yeah typically you're not getting defense from a two-hander so you can usually have you know maybe three four items that don't have defense on them um getting critim units is pretty easy when you use your your enchant as well don't forget that this gives flat defense skill not defense rating uh so that is that is the deal when it comes down to individual stats though I haven't yet mentioned hit and expertise I am a big fan of expertise uh and the reason I really like expertise especially up to 26 expertise rating so expertise is of course a stat that prevents you from getting parried or dodged from attacks against bosses you need uh you need 26 expertise for the boss you're hitting to never Dodge you and you need 56 expertise to make the boss never pair you if you are putting points into expertise it's going to reduce the chance you get Perry hasted we'll talk about it a little bit more later right now bosses are Perry Hasting and Wrath all of them so expertise is going to help a little that there and Perry haste is an opportunity for you to get one shot it the boss Winnie Perry's hits you back faster than usual um but the big thing is is think of expertise like double hit right lots of people talk about getting hit to cap expertise is twice as good as hit to get to cap as a tank because you're attacking from the front expertise is removing Perry and Dodge so it's like twice as good as hit up till 26. why do you care as a death knight you said whoa whoa I thought it was all about tankiness and stuff well the answer is because Death Strike heals a lot and if you're confident in your abilities to press death striking you know react to damage taken and press Deathstrike you're going to realize pretty quickly that wow sometimes I go to press death strike and it doesn't hit and I don't heal and it's bad it's bad and then I die and I didn't get the heel off so as long as you're confident in your abilities right it's gonna make it more consistent that you connect your heels now if you're not looking to min max your death knight you probably haven't been watching this video for hours so I don't know why you're here but if you're trying to take it easy right and and not really take things too seriously avoidance is probably going to be better than expertise if you're not going to use a swing timer if you're not going to try and get the most out of the healing if you're not trying to get as much healing out of your Deathstrike you know if you're not really too worried about that but expertise up to 26 is going to increase your survivability more than avoidance do not have 26 expertise you should be gemming expertise in your purples um and to get good socket bonuses typically stamina and you should be also using expertise food until you hit 26 expertise but yeah expertise is very very good now past that point it's still not worthless and you can still gem it if you want for good socket bonuses and it's still decent you're still going to get parried by the boss preventing him from parrying is very useful so he doesn't hit you back if you do dual wield expertise is even better because you're attacking him even faster you'll even higher chance to cause parries uh so if your dual wielding expertise gets even better but yeah I'm a big expertise a fan and I would heavily recommend you guys go for expertise it's also the most fun stat uh as well if you're you're talking about enjoying your character it's frustrating for Deathstrike to miss it's frustrating to not connect and not get that healing when it connects it obviously is much much more fun we'll talk about hit um already mentioned before if you get to yourself to around nine percent hit you are spell hit capped if you take virulence um just a fun thing to keep in the back of your mind would make it so that all your icy touches and stuff hit now I don't think hit is as good past eight percent for a death knight it's mainly a frustration thing if your pestilence misses it can be annoying as long as you're not risking it and waiting really low on your pestilence you just press it again um if your icy Touch resists you just press it again and to rewind a second if your pestilence resists on the primary target you get your uh in like single Target you get your you get to recast it if it's spreading to a bunch of targets and one of the the fifth Target it hits it resists you do not get your blood room back but it's yeah it's not that big of a deal to just recast pestilence or to just recast icy Touch if they miss so so past eight percent hit I don't think hit is that important uh I don't think trying to achieve the spell hit cap is that important it's mainly missing a taunt that's annoying and you can achieve that with a glyph I do like again getting hit up to eight percent um less important than expertise but it's nice to get hit update percent again just so your icy touches don't miss too much and obviously below eight percent eight percent is the physical hit cap that's going to cause you to hit more death strikes as well so if you get to eight percent hit 26 expertise you're kind of in a good spot for your uh your death strikes to connect but I wouldn't sweat it don't actually sweat it if you don't hit eight percent hit and you're only at five percent hit but you've got way more expertise that's also completely fine because again if your icy touches are missing just cast them again it's not that big of a deal expertise before 26. is better than hit by a landslide and even after 26 expertise I would say expertise and hit are close until hit gets eight percent um but it's still still good still good and I would still gem expertise even past 26 over over Dodge and Perry um but yeah big fan of expertise so that's it so that's our staff priority we are becoming critimmune we're getting as much stamina as humanly possible stamina rules stamina is King even random items like this I Spain chest guard this is pre-raid biz this item is insane preread you're like whoa there's there's like it's a frost resistance item but look how much stamina that has it's the highest stamina item in the game in phase one it's not even close triple socket 170 stand this thing isn't actually quite good pre-raid actually good it's really not bad uh stamina is King so we go again crit immune stack stem try and find room for expertise never gem pure expertise but but gem expertise and good socket bonuses if I one that I could put more expertise here I think in this set I'm eating expertise food I definitely am because I'm at eight percent hit I'm eating expertise food in this gear so I didn't need it to get 26 but I could even put on Farm you can keep using all of your socket bonuses for expertise all the way up to 56 expertise and just remember that all the bosses right now are Perry Hasting in Wrath and it may continue into ulduar so even if you're thinking like I don't know if I really want this much expertise just remember hey you're most likely way for you to die uh on Fawn is Perry haste because that's an unusual pattern of damage that's more damage than your healers are expecting it's more damage than you're expecting and it catches you off guard so yeah I'm an expertise chill uh stats like hit haste crit kind of just ignore them to be honest with you not really relevant um strength I wouldn't look too hard into the strength on the item it is going to convert into some Perry but not that much and you're just passively going to get it because all of your tank items have strength so again we're looking mainly at stem and then of course Dodge and Perry are are good as well similar in value um you know as you get more Dodge it gets worse because the diminishing returns as you get more periods it gets worse as you get more and more strength you're going to find that you have a lot of Parry so Dodge is going to get better um but yeah there we go okay that is it for gear and stats in terms of gems and enchants again it's it's the same kind of thing you know socket bonuses you're typically going to want to go for easy to acquire stamina socket bonuses if you're struggling for create immunity a good way to get to stamina socket bonuses is by using defense stem gems um or hit stamp gems if you need to hit so basically your yellow gems you're not going to use too many of them but you can use them in sucker buttons you can put defense and stem you can put a hit and stem here in this build I have a few different defense gems in my gear that are hybrid I actually don't lose that much because I'm hitting socket bonuses that are giving me stamina back and because I've gemmed a little bit of Defense it allowed me to use this chest which has very high stem so I was able to increase my health and my hit by uh by doing that but I also could have just used a tankier more avoidant chest and uh just had less hit which is also okay too but like I mentioned before I really liked consistency of hitting my death strikes all right uh what else do we have going on um enchants enchant wise uh Helm enchanters I'll get on 80 upgrades for this Helm wise there's two different enchants you can use they're both very good Arcanum of stalwart protector is better if you need the defense to hit crit immunity you're typically going to use that one if you're ever in a situation where you have way too much defense mind amplification cap is just more stamina ate more stamina in favor of the instead of the 20 defense so that's if you're engineering uh shoulder enchant you always want to use the resilience enchant even if you do not have a use for the resilience it's better than the uh the sons of hodie or Dodge thing the stamina is just too strong in terms of our uh our cloak enchant I'm a big fan of the agility cloak I do not think it is better than defense or armor um I think it's about as good as armor I do think defense can be better if you're you're having to gem it or you're struggling to gem it but I just I mean come on you're really not gonna play parachute if you are an engineer and have access to it like you're kind of you're kind of goofy if you do that so always parachute cloak for the utility of it for the fun of it um in terms of the rest of the chance I can Health on the chest you could go for uh stats but nah Health stamina's King gotta go for health wrists easy go easy stamina on the wrist don't even think about it for tanking you always want the enchant uh the gargoyle enchant for two-handers the narub enchant for one-handers it just gives too much defense too much stamina it's always going to be really good for the gloves you go armor if you're a engineer if you are not an engineer you typically are probably going to want to go for uh threat one uh where is it it's called armsman armsman is going to increase your threat gives a little Parry back but that's nice for threat now you don't need it you don't need it because you're typically going to have plenty of threat but like I said before extra threat means you can play differently it means you can start death striking and healing more at later points in the fight so uh while armsman is great you definitely could just put a stamina kit if you wanted or you can put expertise on your gloves I would put expertise if you're not at 26 expertise yet if you're not an engineer the armor enchant I think is too strong in most cases but I mean this you know it's it's it's quite good but you can always just work with any of these other options hit expertise stem kit or armsmith is all fine leg enchant only one option right go for the stamina and Agility boot enchant we're going rocket boots if we're engineering every time the mobility is worth more than the stats the defensive stats not even close if you are ever thinking that you would like more stamina I mean you gotta you gotta think that rocket bootsing away from the boss and or running in a circle while rocket boots in the boss sometimes is going to be more valuable than stamina too um obviously if I like the boss that can't move it's not gonna help but uh yeah rocket boots are typically even a better defensive option than these simply because moving fast prevents you from taking damage if you can move if you realize I am too slow to move out of mechanic and you rocket boots out of it how many people are you going to notice who's gonna judge you man you just prevented yourself from dying it's pretty good it's always rocket boots if you have them if not again you put stem or tuscars I would I would probably always go tuscars for the movement speed if I didn't have rocket boots um meta Jam all right so like we mentioned we're going Stam stammon Blues uh putting stamina in bad socket bonuses a bad socket bonus is typically going to be Dodge Perry uh block anything useless like anything anything useless or anything offensive we're gonna ignore and then Dodge and Perry were typically ignoring as well defense sometimes can be worth getting but we're always going to go for convenient stamina socket bonuses but if it requires us to commit too many uh too many sockets it's not worth getting so if it's if we have to use like a yellow and a red um it's typically not worth going for all right um what else uh metagam if you're a gamer you can go for movement speed honestly um seen Bears have a business list where they go for minor run speed you could do that not saying it's wrong you don't necessarily need a stamina gem in all situations so you could go for a run speed but I would only go for two meta gems either run speed meta gem to move faster uh if you want that movement speed to you know clear an instance faster run through faster be ahead of everyone going fast or you can go with uh stamina and armor which is the default pretty much always go with this but hey don't count out the movement speed you can use that uh in terms of professions um professions to go on your death knight obviously you can see here we got JC we've got uh mg JC I think is definitely less required I like JC because on any tank you just guaranteed of two stamina trinkets you don't have to worry about essence of Gotham or dropping you don't have to worry about what you're gonna do with your second trinket slot which is pretty much always just going to be much worse than one of the JC trinkets at the start but as the game goes on JC is going to be less valuable and less required and uh but Engineering in my opinion is is I I don't want to say required but it's probably the closest to required you can get um of any profession you probably exist some tanks out there that aren't getting g-kicked because they're not NG but in my opinion it's it's pretty much mandatory uh sappers are nice AOE threat I think that's a blood Decay you lean on sappers more than any other tank and the reason for that is there reaches a point where you can't cast abilities if I am in deep blood if I'm in one of these blood specs if I'm deep blood and I don't have runes and a pack runs into us or or any ads show up there's nothing I can do if death and Decay is either on cooldown or my runes are on cooldown I just literally watch people die so so death knight is the best spec or is the class that I think relies on it the most because unlike Warrior you don't have as much Mobility you don't have as much Mobility as a bear so it's like Paladin in that it doesn't have any mobility and the rocket boots really help but I would say they're the most sapper Reliant because they're the most likely tank to have no button available Bears have AOE taunt Warriors have AOE taunt paladins have um you know consecrated hammered wrath on shorter cooldowns if you have no runes no death and Decay cooldown sapper is going to save lives so I think sapper is insane obviously rocket boots are insane rocket boots help with poles rocket boots help with avoiding things kiting things I couldn't imagine not playing Ng after that again it doesn't super matter what you play if you're not playing ngjc If You're Gonna Play um oh let's go here if you're gonna play Alchemy there's this dodge stamina trinket that's all right um you can use that you're typically not using healing potions you're typically using armor potions but hey Alchemy is not the worst I believe uh what's the Alchemy the Alchemy bonus that increases your health for using the I think there's a tank bonus for using the the stamina flask it doesn't equate to be better than JC but it's not it's not the worst so you could play Alchemy you could play leather working for a bigger stamina enchant on your wrists again it's not the worst could play blacksmithing blacksmithing lets you put extra sockets on your your wrists and your uh yeah your gloves it doesn't scale it scales well as we go on but right away it's not the best but it's perfectly fine I would basically say Alchemy is respectable um leather working is is respectable I think inscription is bad I wouldn't I wouldn't even use the inscription enchant a lot of times over the stamina one so the inscription I'd say is the worst profession I'd say you know Gathering professions are typically going to be pretty worthless except mining mining gives you a little stamp um but yeah I'd say anything except inscription and skinning herbalism everything else is fine even enchanting you get reentions but I would definitely go I would say Angie is basically mandatory uh it's not even don't even get upset if you hear me saying that man just play NG it's more fun you're gonna have more fun it's worth whatever money it costs you to switch it's worth it rocket boots are worth it bombs also I forgot to mention you can cast serenite bombs off cooldown I have two different blood voil keybinds one is just a normal blood boil and the other blood boils and throws a serenite bomb at my location you're going to see the serenite bomb go on cooldown yep see the bomb and it goes on cooldown um basically you're going to you can have two Cubans like or Cubans like I have to make sure you don't accidentally put your sap or Uncle down but yeah you can use those regularly on trash to just have more threat do more damage and these saronai bombs are completely worthless uh you accomplish that with a macro I can put it in the description but it uh it uses app player serenite bomb Slash use app players here cool um obviously other things I didn't mention macro wise you can macro Rune strike into all your abilities uh I need to talk about dual wielding too you can macro Rune strike into all of your abilities safely with the two-hander if you're dual wielding and you have a fast main hand it can be a little scary but you're typically fine as long as you're not depth coiling to macro it into every ability um and you usually it's just going to be a threat increase you're not going to run out of running power the only risk of macroing Rune strike and every ability is you use too much burning power you can't cast a defensive so just kind of monitor that if you feel like manually pressing it I think is it's fine if you want to have a keybind to manually press it every time it procs in case you have nothing else up but personally I I just I just press an ability that's already on cooldown if I want to press it because I know it's already mackered in but saves me a keybind and I'm a boomer besides that there's not a lot of macros I use I mean start attack pet attack can be put in stuff doesn't matter much you can use Mouse overs for stuff like grip and taunt or you cannot either way you can use a mouse over for your Unholy frenzy to Target someone in the raid using your frames or you can put a specific player there so it picks them always that's pretty much it for macros to be honest one last thing I want to talk about that I forgot to mention is dual wielding should you dual wield or not I think blue wielding has become incredibly overrated as a first point a lot of people say okay do we do wield or do we not the answer is you use the best weapons available right so for example if I've got you know red sort of Courage and then some random blue weapon I think I might have it in my bank cell did I vendor it if I got red sort of courage and Crescent of Brewing Fury uh that's not even that's the lower item level one but you get the point like I should just use a doohander I should just use a two-hander from raid if you get the the best two-hander I have it in the 80 upgrades you get inevitable fee just use that it's there's no ban against two-handers the reason one-handers are used is because they can have defense on them and if you don't care about threat defense is a more defensive stat and some of the one-handers can have really high stem that Warriors use to tank so if you don't care about uh threat which we don't a lot of times in our gearing we have plenty right you're better off going with two tank one-handers than a two-hander because you just get more tank stats you're usually going to end up with more stamina more defense however however like we mentioned before there are some two-handers that have very high expertise or very high hit and as we talk about expertise is very good so Inevitable Defeat on its own is a very good weapon but the big difference or the big issue right now with dual wielding and why I have stopped dual wielding in raids on raid bosses currently bosses are bugged in Wrath the Lich King and they every single boss is Perry Hasting even bosses like Patchwork which are specifically not supposed to Parry haste because of how they're designed are Perry Hasting because of this it is basically basically never correct to the wield um basically never correct if you have way better one-handers than you have a two-hander you could still do wield but based on just how Perry Hasting works uh if you're attacking really fast with two fast weapons and you're dual wielding you're gonna get buried a ton in Perry Hastings very dangerous you can even see it in the death knight Sim and the Death Knight Sim which I'll link to below if you switch between Perry Hasting and using a two-hander your chance of dying goes up even typically if you are gaining defensive stats it's because Perry Hasting so long story short right now try not to dual wield this is new information this is obviously before wrath came out we didn't know how things were going to work but as of right now keep an eye on it you know feel free to drop a comment asking if this is still the case whatever when we're in old or we don't know the bosses currently are not supposed to Parry haste and they are and because of that dual wielding is not very good I will be using two-handers until this is changed I will not use one-handers again unless I have two amazing one-handers and the two-hander I have is not very good now let me give an asterisk if you reach 56 expertise you cannot be parried anymore one-handers once again become better if they contribute more stats than the 200. um also if you are tanking something that is not a boss and is not level 73 you only you need lower expertise so for example you can uh you could hang a dungeon with 24 expertise and you will not get any Perry hastes and you can duel comfortably so you can only are going to get Perry hasted by Bosses but again hopefully that makes sense I think that is pretty much it um I might do um additional video on just a UI or something I'll probably try and post my UI if you want it it's still a work in progress I just finished this UI so maybe uh I'll have some links to UI or add-ons and stuff there's only like one death knight specific add-on I use and I already have an add-on video um so I'll link I'll link the week Aura for crit immunity I'll link the week Aura for this UI and uh I think I broke something in it so I'll fix that first before I link it but I think I broke my sigil tracking at some point but that's pretty much it guys if you have any questions please leave them in the comments I hope I covered absolutely everything um if you made it this far you know so I'll do YouTube channel follow the twitch feel free to ask me questions on my twitch as well in the description thanks for watching guys and uh yeah I'll see you guys next time in the next video whether it be DK or maybe another guide

Channel: Zatar

Views: 13,898

Keywords: wrath of the lich king, wrath classic, world of warcraft, wow classic, wow guide, Zatar, zatar_wow, wrath, wotlk, wotlk classic, dk tank, dk, frost tank, blood dk, blood tank, dk tank guide, dk tank gearing, dk tank talents, dk tank glyphs, dk tank rotation, icy touch

Id: nJYtDAYGZ54

Length: 147min 39sec (8859 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2022