Posts with tag rune-of-the-stoneskin-gargoyle

So, death knight. You're through with Outland. You just dinged 68 in Nagrand and want to move on to whiter, snow covered pastures. Maybe those pastures are in Northrend. Maybe those pastures are in Alterac Valley. Either way, let's discuss getting through those final levels and pushing you through to the end game.

Given the massive amounts of death knight changes in the last few patches, Patch 3.3 almost feels like a drought. Of course, that may be good news if you're a bit tired of adjusting your rotations and glyphs every patch. Then again, don't rest yet. Sure, there's only a few changes to Death Knights (so far), but they're big enough that they deserve some discussion. Let's look at them one by one.

Fresh on the heels of last week's gemming guide, we have an enchanting guide. Like gemming, enchanting is an easy way to go the extra mile to get your gear the best it can be so you can properly keep aggro without dying and/or top the damage meters in your next Naxxramas raid. Since there's so few enchants available, it's a lot less complicated than gemming too. DPS will just want hit to the cap and attack power (Sorry, there's not many strength enchants), while tanks will want defense to 540 and stamina.

It's also worth noting that almost every slot with an enchant has a weaker version and a more powerful version. Although it's usually frowned upon to go weak when can go strong, in the case of enchants, it's probably okay at the entry level to go with the weaker version of an enchant. The more powerful ones generally take Abyss Crystals and the like, and may be a bit steep. In addition, there's a few other quirks and special enchantments to watch out for. Let's take a look, by slot, at some of the best choices for enchanting for both DPS and Tanking.

So by now, I'm sure many of you Death Knights have managed to follow our last tanking gear guide and have put together a pretty decent tank set that's gotten them through a few heroics, but now it's time for the next step: Getting ready to tank Naxxramas. You'll find that while a lot of your gear is probably "good enough," you'll still want to look for a few important upgrades to kick you up another notch so you can be at your best coming into Naxxramas to tank. Let's look at a few heroic upgrades that you can grab to be the best tank you can be heading into 10 man Naxxramas content.

Before we start, there's two things you should remember: One, I'm pretty much following the logic I laid down in the Death Knight statistics primer a few weeks back, so if you want to know why I picked a certain item, the answer is probably there, and two, whatever you do, remember to hit 540 defense skill. You'll need that to survive against the bosses.

Ok, so you remember how Titanguard, the 75 stamina weapon enchant, disappeared from 3.0.8? Apparently, that was intentional. Ghostcrawler spoke out yesterday on the rationale for removing it. In short, it was just too good. That 75 Stamina would have made it far and away the best tank enchant, and would have locked them into creating higher and higher tiers in future patches and expansions so tanks wouldn't just stick with Titanguard and be done with it. Not only would this lead to less variety in game, but the developers would be stuck specifically designing future encounters with the assumption that every single tank had that extra 75 stamina.

Blizzard's certainly shied away from making certain enchants too powerful before. For example, the Crusader enchantment was given diminishing returns after level 60 specifically so it wouldn't overshadow any other weapon enchants. With that in mind, this move does fit in with Blizzard's modus operandi. And if nothing else, it's good that this was nerfed now, before it made its way onto the live servers. While some tanks may not be happy with the outcome, this is certainly an instance where the PTR testing process worked.

Death Knights will still get to keep the +2% stamina on their Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle, in part to make up for the lack of a shield and a solid defense sigil. Ghostcrawler also did not rule out the possibility of future tanking enchants, but only if they could find out a way to prevent the same problems that caused them to take out Titanguard.