Tank Consumables - Food, Potions, Flasks and Elixirs

Interesting post showed up a few days ago on pwnwear.com. I'm not going to re-post Gravity's masterful work but I will provide a list of the consumables form best to good.






Food

1. Fortune Cookie
2. Mushroom Sauce Mudfish
3. Blackbelly Sushi
4. Lavascale Minestrone
5. Grilled Dragon
6. Crocolisk Au Gratin

Potions

1. Earthen Potion

Flasks

1. Flask of Steelskin

Best Cataclysm Tanking Enchants

Here is a quick list of the best enchants for not only Deathknights but all tanks in Cataclysm. Organised by item slot. A great site to see how your doing on gear score and enchants is WoW-Heroes.





Head

• Arcanum of the Earthen Ring - From The Earthen Ring faction. See my Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide for more details.

Shoulder

• Greater Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz - From the Therazane faction. See my Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide for more details.

Chest
You have two choices here. I am personally inclined to saying that Peerless Stats is the better of the two is you take all tanking aspects into consideration such ans survival, threat and damage. Of course if all your going for is a huge health pool then Greater Stamina would be for you.

• Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats - From enchanting or the auction house. Best in my opinion.
• Enchant Chest - Greater Stamina - From enchanting or the auction house.

Pants

• Charscale Leg Armor - From Leatherworking or the auction house

Boots
Three choices for this slot. With the new patch 4.0.6 lurking around the corner the Mastery enchant might not be the best choice for Deathknights due to the mastery nerf we are getting. Of course if your tank class relies heavily on mastery and you already have a speed boost go with the Mastery enchant. If you rely heavily on master and do not already have a speed boost I would go with the Lavawalker enchant. And if you are laking in stamina and/or need a speed boost go with the Earthen Vitality enchant.

• Enchant Boots - Mastery - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Boots - Lavawalker - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Boots - Earthen Vitality - From enchanting or the auction house. Personal best for now.
• Enchant Boots - Precision - From enchanting or the auction house.

Bracers

• Enchant Bracer - Dodge - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Bracer - Greater Expertise - From enchanting or the auction house.
• Enchant Bracer - Precision - From enchanting or the auction house.

Gloves

Two choices for this slot. Again with patch 4.0.6 and the DK mastery nerf coming I think DK and other tank the do not rely heavily on mastery or are laking in HP

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.

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.

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.

Finally good 25 mans

I had a few good attempts at 25 man raid now. I need to say I'm very pleased.

The difficulty curve from 10 mans to 25 mans is not as steep as I thought. I was expecting the bosses to hit harder. There is however something I was not aware of and I'd like to put it out there so others can learn from my experiences. Some bosses in Heroic Ulduar have abilities that the normal mode bosses do not. For example, Auriaya on heroic has an ability called Sentinel Blast that must be interrupted as soon as possible or it will wipe the raid. She does not have this ability in normal mode. As I said just watch out for these "Heroic abilities".

I'd also like to mention that I'm very pleased with the 25 man raiding group we've put together. I wish it upon everyone to have a raiding group like the one exclusion has. Also if your interested in beeing part of this group you can always throw up an application on our recruitment page.

25 mans, an itch I can't wait to scratch

Due to limited time on wow and the loyalty to my guild, I haven't had many chances to run 25's. I did pug Sartharion once, but we call know that doesn't really count now, does it?


There might be an answer to my call. Our guild recruitment has been going reasonably well. We got a 25 group together but were short a couple of healers, so the recruitment efforts press on.

I'm exited to get into 25s so I can compare it to 10s. Just the raid leading aspect and the fact that 25 people need to be organized. I can't hide the fact that I also like some of that epic lewt. I'm anxiously anticipating our next attempt at 25 man Ulduar this comming Tuesday.

Raid well,