Best Deathknight 4.0 Spec

Hey, so like everyone else I have not been posting recently due to the new expansion Cataclysm. I've been spending all my free time getting to level 85 and setting up our new guild website. Now that that is done I will start posting interesting changes about Deathknights in World of Warcraft again.

I thought a good way to start off posting about a new expansion would be to post a compilation of what are considered "best" Deathknight specs. Keeping in mind that this blog is raid tank oriented the DPS spec are considered offspecs.

Deathknight Raid Tank Spec
Your base for raid tanking in 4.0 should resemble this. You will have 2 spare point to place in one of these talents Abomination's Might, BCB, Virulence or Crimson Scourge. Most endgame raid tanks think Crimson Scourge is a waste of points unless your the designated AoE tank. You should look at what your other raid members and tank are bringing to the raid before spending the last 2 point. It will have a big impact on what you select.

If your wondering about the sub-spec into frost for Lichborne you can read more about it here. The short explanation is; with the use of the Lichborne macro you get an extra defensive cooldown.

Lichborne Macro:

#showtooltip Lichborne
/cast Lichborne;
/cast [@player] Death Coil

If you want to do your own homework here are the sources I look into.
Elitist Jerks - Blood | DK endgame tanking [4.x]
pwnwear.com - Index to all the DK Tank 4.0.3 info

pwnwear.com - Death Knight Cataclysm (85) Tanking Guide

Deathknight DPS Spec
Since DPS is an offspec for me I'm going to keep it short and sweet.

Hot nerf for Deathknight Tanks

In the latests news from blizzard fine tuning of patch 4.0.1 us Deathknight tank are on the recieving end of the nerf bat. While we are getting the least changes out of all the tank classes it's still a nerf. Blizzard decided they were goin to bring our talented Icebound Fortitude damage reduction down from 60% to 50% for a 10% drop and increase the cool down of the ability from 2 minutes to 3 minutes for a 1 minute increase.

Not the worst nerf ever but it will make each of our cooldowns that much more valuable. I don't think this will be a game changer seams to me that it's being implemented only to make us be that much more careful when blowing CDs.

View the official source here.

Blood Shield Tracker - A Death Knight Tank Addon

 So we have this new fancy mastery, Blood Shield. While this sounds very nice on paper blizzard provides no way of tracking this new ability. Good thing our friends over at the pwnwear.com community have developped a new addons called Blood Shield Tracker. This is a great tool for tracking the new ability.


The Blood Shield Tracker addons not only tracks our blood shield but also tracks the average healing we will get from our next Death Strike. As you can see in the screenshot. The larger bar on top is the Blood Shield the smaller bottom bar is the estimated heal for our next Death Strike.

As of this writing, the addon is still in beta phase the developers aren't hiding that. My guess is that it is very near completion. It has a very nice management interface with a mini-map icon is you enable it. You can also customize the look of Blood Shield Tracker. In my opinion, the ease of customization is this addons only remaining weak point.

You can download it from here at cursed.com and discuss it here at pwnwear.com.

Using right now. It has my vote. Can't wait to see what we will have once this come out of beta. Thanks guys.

4.0.1 and the Deathknight

See bottom of page for DK specific patch notes.

4.0.1 has sundered the World of Warcraft as we know it. Bringing many changes to all aspects of the game and requiring us to relearn most of our classes. Look forward and welcoming theses changes here are the DK spec I'm looking into.


Boss Cruncher:
25 man single target raid tank with no utility. http://wowtal.com/#k=Yf93jyRh.a5o.deathknight.WiqGi

AoE Madness:
25 man AoE raid tank spec with no utility. http://wowtal.com/#k=Yf93ftf1.a5o.deathknight.n3KBx

Lonely DK:
5 man/Raid spec with utility and AoE for when other classes are not present with the buffs. http://wowtal.com/#k=YfOo1Fi1.a5o.deathknight.n3KBx

Frozen Death:
Off-spec DPS raid spec.
http://wowtal.com/#k=ebuORkQ.a5o.deathknight.xlGwT

Let me know what you guys think of these and as always a good place to discuss these spec is on the pwnwear.com forums more specifically here.

Nexwave

Sorry for the lack of news. I've been working on getting a small IT company going with my cousin. We founded Nexwave a few months ago and its been taking much of my time since. Things are finally falling into place and I should be able to get back to blogging soon.

Now to advertise a little ;-)

Nexwave is a web and IT service company located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We offer a wide range of web marketing services and networking solutions to small businesses in any industry. Our clients value the quality of our personalised services, which adapt well in the environment of new and small businesses.

Now since the blog is mainly in english, you can visite Nexwave at http://tech.nexwave.ca/ or in french at http://tech.nexwave.ca/.

More WoW comming soon.

At Long Last, Deathknight Tank Buffs

Long awaited buffs put us back in line with other tanks as far as effective health. And the buff to IBF is a very nice plus.

Reading the original post, I do belive that the changes are effective immediately although the spell tool-tips will not be updated right away.

3.3.2 - No Deathknight buffs

While DKs are saved from beeing in patch notes this time, for better or for worse. We did find ourselves with a hidden buff, well if your a DK tank in T10.

All tank T10 sets found an armor increase of about 1000 on the chest and gloves. Like I said not a direct DK buff, but we'll take what we can get. The entire Scourgelord's Plate set now has 10,261 armor its name.

For entire patch notes you can go here. See the Item section for details on armor increase.

Happy tanking.

pwnwear.com?

Hey I would just like to bring http://pwnwear.com/ to everyone attention. This is a great site where you can find almost everything DK related. The site contains analysis log and multiple other informative tools and posts all summed up by Gravity in a way that you don't need to analyse/read them for hours.

The site is definitely worth checking out and participating in. Pwnwear.com has earned a place in my Sites section at the bottom left hand side of the Home page.