One nice thing about rolling a DK Unholy is that your tank gear and your levelling gear are probably pretty close. Unholy does large amounts of AoE spell damage coupled with focus fire strikes on a single target. I've found myself basically AoE tanking through most quests/areas.

I rate strength topmost, followed by stam, and crit rating, with hit, expertise and defense pretty much tied. Yes, defense on my levelling gear. Right now I roll with over 350 defense and it works wonders. My spec is a little muddled since I was testing things out while leveling, so I won't post it, but I am primarily Unholy down to Ebon Plaguebringer with some Blood.

I'm currently level 75 and can take down 3 to 6 level 71/72 mobs. It is possible to do 8 level 71/72s, but it requires some fancy footwork. I soloed all the 3-man group quests from Agmar's Hammer between levels 73 and 74... and once while looking for the Orders in the New Hearthglen church I accidentally aggroed the Bishop's bodyguards, 2 lvl 72 elites, who I was able to take down at level 75 without too much trouble.

One of the biggest things to decide is where to set your balance on attack stats vs tanking/defense stats. I've seen a lot of DPS plate pieces with great +strength and 2 other DPS stats, like crit or expertise, but I toss them at the vendors. While the stats are nice for DPS, I can't drop 30 to 60 to 80 stam to pick up a bit more DPS. Keep in mind that if you drop, say, 40 Stamina, you're dropping 400 health, but that health is magnified by your armor and parry and dodge... so if you drop 400 health, but you have 40% mitigation from armor, 9% parry, 5% dodge, (which are pretty tame stats for early DKs), you're giving up (400 * (1/.4) (armor)) * 1.05 (dodges) * 1.09 (parries) = 1144.5 effective damage you could have absorbed (assuming melee damage). If you throw in specific talents and Frost presence, health quickly becomes extremely valuable. Unless your DPS increase with an all-DPS piece is greater than your loss in effective damage absorbed, you'll do more damage, but you won't last long enough to do as much damage as you could have before... especially if you're standing knee-deep in a swarm of mobs and are soloing 3-man elites. In general, for the amount of stats you get on a pure-DPS piece, you're better off chunking it and taking more stam into a fight.

In general my gear evaluation on new gear works like this:
1. highest strength without losing more than 50% of the stamina of the previous piece.
2. if undecided, more crit without losing more than 50% of the stamina of the previous piece.
3. if still undecided, prefer hit and expertise if defense is over 300-ish.

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