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

Cataclysm Tank Reputation Guide

Here are my thoughts on how tanks should gain there rep in Cataclysm. I will list the reputations in the priority of what I think is most important first down to the least important. Keep in mind that this guide is for tanks only with emphasis on Deathknights.

The Earthen Ring

The Earthen Ring is at the top of my list due to the simple fact that there is no dailies for this faction and it contains the tanking head enchant. It is the most "difficult" to build rep with. The only way to gain rep is to make sure you complete the regular quests and wear your tabard while in dungeons until revered for the tank benefits from them. You can go further after getting where you need to be with the other tank factions but this will bring nothing more to you as a tank.

Enchants

Arcanum of the Earthen Ring (Revered)

Items

Friendly: Tabard of the Earthen Ring

Honored: Stone-Wrapped Greaves

Revered: None

Exalted: None

Quartermaster

Provisioner Arok - Shimmering Expanse 49.1, 42.1

Therazane

Therazane makes it in second for the tank shoulder enchants. As a raid tank

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.