Lichborne: Gemming, reforging, and other gear tweaks for blood death knight tanks
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Apr 5th 2011 at 6:00PM
Last week, we discussed the basics of death knight tanking, including finding your perfect spec and figuring out which stats to aim for. This week, we're taking it one step further. Once you're all geared up, you need to put the finishing touches on your gear. Today, we'll look at how you can use gems, reforging, and enchants to bump your tank gear up to the next level.
Gemming: Stamina vs. mastery
There is some debate over whether stamina or mastery takes priority in gemming. As we discussed a bit last week, stamina's not as powerful as it once was, thanks in part to the huge health pools of the Cataclysm era. Myself, I tend to fall on the side of gemming for mastery, except in cases where a slot bonus looks juicy enough to aim for. For the most part, I'd recommend against gemming for threat. You can take care of hit and expertise rating with reforging if you really need it.
Your gem choices are as follows:
- Fractured Amberjewel is your pure mastery option. You can also grab a Puissant Dream Emerald for a mastery/stamina combo if needed for slot bonuses or metagems.
- Solid Ocean Sapphire is the stamina gem.
- If you need to balance your avoidance, you can gem with a Flashing Inferno Ruby for parry rating, or a Subtle Amberjewel for dodge rating. For an avoidance/mastery combo, you can grab Fine Ember Topaz. Stamina/avoidance comes as Regal Dream Emerald or Defender's Demonseye.
Enchants: The finishing touch
Enchantments are easy to overlook, but a well-enchanted gear set is one thing that separates the scrub tanks from the pro tanks. Of course, with the price of Maelstrom Crystals what they are, getting a full kit of enchantments can be fiscally prohibitive. In those cases, at least get a lower version of the enchantment while you save up for the mats (or get gear worthy of being enchanted with it). Here's a basic rundown of your best choices.
- For the head, get revered with the Earthen Ring and grab the Arcanum of the Earthen Ring.
- For your shoulders, get exalted with Therazane and grab the Greater Inscription of Unbreakable Quartz.
- For your cloak, just grab some Protection.
- For your chest, go with Stamina or Greater Stamina.
- The most straightforward option for your bracers is Dodge. However, you may also wish to consider Precision or Greater Expertise if you're trying to reach those soft caps. There's also a strong argument for reaching back an expansion and grabbing Major Stamina.
- For your gloves, go with Greater Mastery or Mastery, as your budget allows.
- While it's not technically an enchant, be sure to grab an Ebonsteel Belt Buckle for your belt.
- For your legs, get some Charscale Leg Armor. Twilight Leg Armor is the blue option, but if you're raiding or getting ready to raid, you really want to spring for the Charscale.
- For boots, Earthen Vitality is pretty much the default choice, since you do want run speed. If you have money to burn, you can also grab Lavawalker. If you chose the Fleet Shadowspirit Diamond for your metagem, though, you can just go ahead and grab Mastery here.
- For your Runeforge, Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle may win out for heroic raiding, but there is currently a strong argument for taking Rune of Swordshattering. Again, this is because stamina's value has been deprecated enough by Cataclysm's huge health pools and new boss mechanics that you don't need to stack it to the detriment of other stats.
Reforging is the process by which you take one of a piece of armor's secondary stats and convert it to another secondary stat that is not already present on that item. It can be very useful in helping you balance stats or reach soft caps for certain stats. Blood tanks can definitely take advantage of this ability to apply some of the things we discussed in last week's column. You can find reforging NPCs in every major capital.
The first thing you'll probably want to do with reforging is even out your avoidance. If you have higher parry, reforge some of your parry rating to dodge rating. If you have a higher dodge rating, reforge some dodge rating to parry rating.
Once you've dealt with that, essentially, you'll want to reforge as much as you can into mastery. This is actually another way to deal with the avoidance imbalance. If you have higher parry rating, just reforge some parry rating into mastery, for example. You may also want to reforge any hit or expertise you can into mastery, especially if you have over 8% hit or over 26 expertise. Use your own judgment to decide if you need to hit those soft caps or not to be an effective tank. If you do decide you need to hit those caps, you can also reforge some avoidance (or even some mastery, though I'd reforge away avoidance first) into hit or expertise rating.
Essentially, consider reforging the cherry on the sundae. Once you're properly kitted out with enchantments and gems, reforging will help you maintain your stat balance and slough off any extra stats you don't need in exchange for ones you do.
Learn the ropes of endgame play with WoW Insider's DK 101 guide. Make yourself invaluable to your raid group with Mind Freeze and other interrupts, gear up with pre-heroic DPS gear or pre-heroic tank gear, and plot your path to tier 11/valor point DPS gear.Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Danimo Apr 5th 2011 6:30PM
spot-on. I don't think the hit and expertise "soft" caps are necessary even if you're going all-in on mastery, but if you're having threat issues or are just unlucky with death strikes then you may want improve them.
my reforging strategy:
1)if it doesn't have mastery, give it mastery
2)balance dodge/parry (if you have Swordshattering don't look at percentages but the raw points. +4% from Swordshattering won't effect diminishing returns)
3)if hit or exp are really low, reforge into it
I try to avoid reforging away anything but crit or haste. Reforging for a blood tank is nowhere near the juggling act that reforging for Frost is.
Andrew Breese Apr 5th 2011 6:41PM
Quick thought on reforging, sometimes it is seriously worth considering the alternate or secondary enchants. eg. the Boot enchant which adds Stam and runspeed is darn good, although the runspeed can be gained using the glyph of BoneShield; and the two don't stack (from what I've seen). So the Mastery enchant is the go-to Boot enchant.
I also read and am not sure if the balancing of Parry and Dodge is based on the rating %, the rating % before weapon enchants (ignoring the extra Parry from a runeforge), or the raw rating level (say parry at 1377 vs dodge at 1299). I've read that it is based on the raw rating levels, which are then converted to %, but that would seem difficult to calculate the balance of dimishing returns. Any thoughts?
Chokaa Apr 5th 2011 7:47PM
Its just rating. You get the same avoidance per rating point for both, and they are on the same DR table now(thank God - it was crazy when parry diminished a helluvalot faater than dodge!) You want them to be as close as possible without going insane over it. If the disparity is less than 150 rating, I've gotten more bang for the buck as it were, from reforging into mastery.
Twill Apr 6th 2011 3:46AM
Any tips on stat values for extreme soloing?
Althronondor Apr 6th 2011 4:13AM
Deprecated?
All our health pools got together and made fun of poor stamina?
Perhaps we gave it an atomic wedgie afterward.
Depreciated, sir.
st1pe Apr 6th 2011 7:09AM
I'm a little confused (forgive me im a new-ish dk) I'm gearing my alt in Blood spec to provide a little raid cover. From what I read I though I was supposed to be gemming primarily for avoidance, while balancing parry and dodge over than going for mastery or am I doing something horribly wrong there? Is there a kind of mastery raiting a should be aiming for before moving to avoidance then?
Dharmabhum Apr 6th 2011 9:58AM
Two schools of thought really. For Blood DKs, Mastery is a very great stat because of the Blood Shield mechanic, enough that it can rival avoidance stats. I don't know the rating conversions, but since both Mastery and Parry+Dodge provide similar benefits when used as a focus for gearing and gemming, either is a viable choice. Really it comes down to what you have for gear and what path you want to take.
Without anything on my part to back this up, it appears EJ and similar sources recommend Mastery, though that is also aimed at higher end tanking in general.
Maes Apr 6th 2011 7:28AM
there are multiple different ways to go about gearing. as a fresh 85 your first goal is to get to around 140k hp unbuffed, at which point you forget about stamina completely (when there is an alternative) and focus on either avoidance or mastery. this will get you through normal raids. i personally prefer the mastery route because i like feeling like i'm more in control of my own survival (the reason i tank on a dk to begin with)
once you hit heroic raids you'll have about 160k(+/- 5k) hp without any focus on stamina. at that point there is 2 ways to go, theres a mastery route still, but theres alot of top end dks that refocus on stamina, i'm not sure why, i'm only in normal modes still, but if they're 13/13 they've got to be doing something right.
BlazeStrangio Apr 6th 2011 9:38AM
The hit and exp soft caps are bugging me. Everything I read says to make your soft caps before worrying about anything else. But when I talk to other tanks on my server, DKs, pallys, da bears, some of them have 0% hit and are tanking heroics...
I just re-forged all of my hit and exp away into master/parry/dodge and got rid of any gems I had for hit/exp and replaced them with mastery or stam or both. I notice that I occasionally miss a death strike, but it doesn't really seem to be causing any major problems with regards to my ability to hold threat or mitigate damage.
Are hit/exp really worth it?
Darthregis Apr 6th 2011 10:27AM
If threat is a problem for you, then definitely hit/exp are worth it.
And depending on how much you rely on Death Strike, then it probably is useful to some degree. That said, I would think (and hope) that a missed DS isn't going to be a deciding factor between a wipe or not.
Amanda A. Apr 6th 2011 10:45AM
Generally, they're not at this point. You'll basically gain (or avoid losing) more HP over time by having more mastery or avoidance than by your death strikes connecting a little more often. Remember that you don't expend runes if you miss, so you can try again in 1.5 seconds.
raeloneq Apr 6th 2011 1:50PM
Hit and EXP are not worth it in my opinion. Threat should not be an issue with vengeance.
Darthregis Apr 6th 2011 10:29AM
While we heard about the Stam/Mastery debate, I would like to hear people's thoughts on Mitigation vs. Mastery.
What sort of Dodge/Parry stats should be achieved before diving into mastery?
Atou Apr 6th 2011 11:32AM
For heroic dungeons, I'd say you want somewhere between 15-20% total mitigation before delving into mastery stacking. For raids, at least 30% mitigation before mastery stacking.
uriel.abraham Apr 7th 2011 5:05AM
As a blood DK i found out that hit/exp is only vial choice in 25 men raids. and HC normal 10 when you can't afford missing scarlet fever for a second.
Also, i made some tests and found no real noticable differance between 20% parry 10%~ dodge between having 15/15 parry dodge %. i'll choose mastery over everything because damage absorb is 100% of the time and it easy to maintance blood shield even if you missing some death strikes (due the fact blood shield lasts 10 seconds and no way you gonna miss all 3-4 death strikes in 10 seconds).
Baranbaykir Apr 12th 2011 9:35AM
Even though you are right by claiming that there is, for you non-warrior tanks, no difference between having 20%/10% to 15%/15%, you are forgetting the most important reason why you should try to equalise them.
Diminishing returns. Having such a high %'age of one above the other leads you to needing more rating of one to up your avoidance 1%. You need less total dodge+parry rating to get 15%/15% than you need for 20%/10%. This leads to you wasting statpoints just by gearing/regorging wrong.
However, there is a general consensus among deathknight tanks, it is reasonable to have one stat's rating 20% higher than the other. This would mean 12%/10% is acceptable.
Another note, if you ar using SwordShattering instead of Gargoyle, you should deduct 4% of your parry, so that would mean that instead of the normalized 12%/10%, you could use 16%/10% and still be "acceptable".
This is why when you're trying to equalise your parry and dodge you should look at the rating displayed on your character sheet instead of the actual percentages.
Garthar, warrior tank.
Skullknight, Unholy/Frost, with a tanking offspec.
Both on stormscale EU.