Death Knight Tanking Guide for 4.3

 

Foreword

This is the first dedicated Blood Death Knight post on this Blog and it intends to be a comprehensive Tanking Compendium covering all aspects of  Blood Tanking. I realize that it is pretty late in the content for such a post, but I am confident that its functionality might as well be to prime you for the next content, since it will be followed up by coverage of the upcoming MoP content for Death Knights and for tanks in general, depending on how much time I have left after covering the DK stuff.

This Guide is dedicated to Sunnier, who gave me the idea to start this blog.  I hope it’ll help you, Sunnier Bear, with your Death Knight, as much as it will help all of you guys. I would also like to thank Chrisbehk of Quantum for the conversations about DKs that we had and without which I would not be able to pinpoint the difficulties many people have in understanding our class and I therefore would not be able to explain them to you. Thanks Chris! You are a great tank and a world-class DK!

How to use this Guide

If you are wondering whether a Blood Death Knight is the right class and spec for you, then you don’t need to read this guide. I can answer this question upfront. If you like playing a tank and you like being in direct control of your damage intake, you like strategizing about tanking an encounter, micromanaging your resources as a tank and “being responsible for your own survival”, then the Death Knight might be for you. Unlike other tanks, you have to be awake, vigilant and active during the entire fight, and you have to be able to overview your resources, your HP, your abilities and cooldowns while keeping your eyes on the battlefield at the same time. The DK tank feels analogue, it feels manual, and to me, it feels more natural than all the other tanks, and I have played them all (I love the Druid, too- might be the coolest all-around class at the moment).

This Guide will not be theorycrafting- heavy. For me, tanking, even at the highest level is just as much about intuition, knowledge about positioning, tactical planning and being comfortable with what happens during an encounter as it is about perfect min-maxing. I am even willing to make an incendiary statement, since this is the internet: Even a imperfectly min-maxed tank can achieve a world-first end boss kill if they are good tanks. This might not hold true for DPS or even healers. The purpose of this guide, even of this whole blog is to make you well-educated and clever tanks, not to make you pathologically adherent to mathematics or spread sheets. This said, I will make the occasional detour into theorycrafting, when I think it increases how well what I write can be understood.

If you just hit level 85, start reading at the beginning and proceed to the end. You will get a complete understanding of how the class works and how you can be good at it.

If you are an advanced DK tank and are here just for my amusing opinions, just read the pertinent parts and you might find something you have not seen the way I see it. This way, you can flame me in the comment box below, I can answer to your comment, we can start a DK discussion and be friends <3!

Dry text might not be for everyone, so I will try to liven up the post with pictures or even videos when I think some points bear more illustrating. These might be added in the process.

Introduction to Tanking- Basic Concepts

Tanking is the act of dealing with high-level mobs directing high-damage attacks at one person (the tank). The tank’s function is to keep said mob’s attention focused on the tank and to survive the high-damage abilities directed at them. Depending on the fight, the tank might have to fulfil further roles such as collecting adds, swapping the boss to another tank etc.

The tank’s ability to survive stems from a number of attributes, also called “tanking stats”. These are

• Armour
• Stamina
• Parry
• Dodge
• Mastery
• Block
• Agility

Furthermore, there are other stats which might be of use to a tank. (Strength, Hit, Expertise etc.). Those are called “offensive stats” and aid the tank in other functions, not necessarily promoting survival. Those will be dealt with in a separate section.

I will now give a brief overview of the stats to aid general understanding.

• Armour is the best tanking stat since it provides a flat decrease in physical damage taken. This reduction is applied before all other reductions. There is no way of obtaining additional Armour except trinkets, gloves reinforcements and the Cloak Armour Enchant. All tanks have varying degrees or Armour through the gear they are wearing and the armour contribution from those items might be further modified through talents and passive skills.
• Stamina provides an increase in HP, essentially providing more meat for the boss to pound on with his hammer, but does not modify the damage taken at all.
• Parry is the act of stopping the opponent’s weapon with one’s own weapon. Parry nullifies damage.
• Dodge is the act of evading a physical attack. Dodge nullifies damage.
• Mastery is a rating which was introduced in Cataclysm and provides a benefit based on class and spec. Mastery will be extensively covered below.
• Block is the act of blocking the enemy’s attack with a shield. Blocking reduces the damage the attack would do to you by 30%. It only works for physical attacks.
• Agility is of importance only to Druid tanks. It improves many aspects of their tanking and is mentioned here only for completeness. Come MoP, it will be a tanking stat for the Brewmaster Monk as well.

For a Death Knight tank, only the first 5 tanking stats are of importance. Block rating does not apply to the DK, since Death Knights cannot use shields. Agility could provide a theoretical benefit, but since there is no plate gear with Agility currently in the game, this point is disregarded.

Since the DK must be an equally good tank to other tanks, and Block does not pertain to them, the game developers have conceived another method of reducing physical damage. All tanks have both a form of Damage Avoidance (i.e. Parry and Dodge) and a form of Damage Mitigation (Block and Mastery- related abilities).

One of the key concepts in understanding how the Blood Death Knight works is knowledge of those most fundamental forms of damage reduction or avoidance.

Avoidance, Mitigation and the DK Mastery

Definitions

Damage Avoidance means to have a chance of completely ignoring a physical attack made against you. It is provided by Parry and Doge rating.

Damage Mitigation is the act of reducing incoming physical damage by an amount up to 100%. It is provided by Mastery rating in conjunction with the Death Strike Ability.

The DK uses Plate Armour with Stamina and Strength as primary itemization. (“white stats”). The preferable secondary stats (“green stats”) for Death Knights are Parry, Dodge and Mastery.

Since Avoidance is very simple to understand (rating translates into a chance of avoiding an attack), it will not be covered in depth.

Mastery rating is, however not easy to understand and I will cover it in detail.

The DK Mastery Rating

The DK’s Mastery rating, as a most basic concept, provides the DK with the Shield that he cannot use, as other tanks can.

On a basic level, each time Death Strike is used, the Death Knight is healed for a certain amount and surrounded by an imaginary shield absorbing a certain amount of physical damage. This Shield is called “Blood Shield”.

Facts about the Blood Shield:

• It absorbs only physical damage, magical damage is not influenced by it.
• It procs every time Death Strike is used and lasts for 10 seconds or until the full amount of physical damage is absorbed.
• When the Blood Shield is not up, every hit taken is either full-strength (i.e. only modified by Armour) or completely avoided by Dodge or Parry.
• It can be stacked up by using Death Strike more than once.
• It caps at the DK’s maximum HP.

The interaction of Mastery rating and the Blood Shield is the next point that will be clarified.

To achieve that, lets first have a look at the tooltips for both Death Strike and Mastery.

This essentially means, that:

• When we Death Strike, we heal ourselves for a fraction of the amount of damage we have sustained during the preceding 5 seconds. The Shield is applied even when a healing reducing effect is currently residing on you (Maloriak, Baleroc after the Decimation Blade etc.) 
• The size of the heal is influenced by our maximum HP
• The Blood Shield size is derived from the heal
• The Blood Shield size is thus influenced by our maximum HP
• The Blood Shield size is also influenced by our Mastery rating.
  
  
  

Therefore, to increase the efficiency of our tanking we must find a way to increase the size of the self-heals and the amount the Blood Shield absorbs.

The only way to increase the size of the self-heal is to increase our maximum HP, which can only be achieved by increasing our Stamina rating.

The way to increase our Blood Shield absorb is both through Stamina and Mastery.

And here we reach the first milestone of Death Knight tanking, an axiom if you will.

Axioms of Mastery

Theorycrafting has shown, that:

• The best way to increase our efficiency as tanks is not by increasing our Stamina rating, but by increasing our Mastery rating.
• For all current encounters in which the boss hits for large amounts of physical damage, increasing the Mastery rating is preferential to increasing Stamina.
• For encounters with large amounts of magical damage, Stamina is superior. (Al’ Akir on Heroic- little physical damage, high amounts of magical damage).
• The higher the physical damage we have to deal with is, the more valuable the Blood Shield becomes and the less valuable the self-heal becomes.

Unfortunately, this creates a multitude of complex considerations, which I will cover in detail.

This section might be the most important thing in this guide, so read carefully and you will be enlightened by otherworldly knowledge.

The “Active Mitigation” Model of Tanking

Our entire tanking model relies on the fact that we need to take damage to be able to avoid damage.

The real art of being a good DK lies in being able to control when you are going to take the damage, and when you are going to absorb it.

No guide can teach you this part of being a DK, you have to practice, watch other DKs in action and learn to anticipate what will happen in an encounter.

In its simplest form, DK tanking can be reduced to Death Striking at the best moment. This way you will be able to either take a constant, controllable stream of damage like other tanks do or to survive big hits without dying where other tanks need cooldowns.

This idea, take damage to reduce damage, is however modified yet again by the tanking stats themselves.

The Avoidance vs. Mastery Conflict

Lets not forget that our Avoidance stats function by allowing us to completely ignore a certain amount of attacks. For instance, if your Dodge and Parry rating sum up to 15% Dodge and 15% Parry, you will statistically completely ignore 30% of the attacks a boss makes against you, not matter how big they are.

This means that 30% –in this model- of attacks made against you will not cause you to receive any damage, will not be calculated as “damage during the preceding 5 seconds” and will not contribute either to your Blood Shield or to your self heal. In short- a disaster if you want to be in complete control.

We will have to therefore find a way to use Avoidance to suit our needs, to tailor it to our control-freakish attitude of being able to choose when to take damage and how much damage to take.

Cancelling Avoidance to Benefit from Mastery

To be able to achieve this, let us think for a moment about how Avoidance functions: You are tanking a mob facing its front with your front. This means that you cannot take advantage of the fact that mobs cannot parry from the back, but the same problem applies to them. You can dodge and parry their attacks. This, by extension also means that if you turn your back, you cannot dodge or parry and will thus decrease your Avoidance to zero!

I realize that I might have just made a statement that many tanks are going to be rather cross about: Turning your back on a boss as a method of tanking. But if we think about it, it completely solves two problems of the Active Mitigation model: You control when you take unavoidable damage and you can make full use of your Avoidance, and by that I mean the Avoidance on your gear. For quite some time now DKs have been trying to remove the avoidance from our gear whenever we wanted to go for the "full Mastery build", as if this build would magically solve all our problems. As we will discuss in just a minute, it doesn't. Mastery is our best stat, no doubt about it, but it has a series of limitations. Now we can take full advantage of the itemization of our gear, be it Avoidance or Mastery by being able to control when we Dodge and Parry and when not. I will talk more about itemization, stats, gemming and reforging later down the line.

It is, of course, not trivial to decide when you want to turn your back. Threat certainly is still an issue, especially at the beginning of a fight. Loosing aggro just isn't good style, and explaining that you lost aggro because you had your back turned on the mob, your back being a part of your hitbox your axe is not normally in range of, tends to make you a target for abuse, so be sure to have good threat established. With the tanking changes, threat will of course become more and more of a non-issue.

The second question is the question of the "right moment". I find that for most encounters, even the hardest ones on HC prenerf, the best moments to turn your back are as soon as you have found out that a big hit is going to come, and want to prepare for it by having a big Blood Shield. Examples are:

• Before Morchok's Stomp
• When Zon’ ozz reaches high stacks of Focused Anger
• Before Hagara starts her Focused Assault
• Before Warmaster Blackhorn Stomps
• Before the Hideous Amalgamation is loaded up with 9 Bloods
• Before the Impale on Madness

This is a good starting point from which you can then expand and get a feel for the "opportune" moment.
Sometimes, though, you just cannot do this; the damage incoming is so high that you just need to rely on all your stats, not only your Mastery, to survive. A prime example are the Regenerative Bloods on Madness Heroic. They apply their debuff on a successful melee hit, and at the same time, the Mutated Corruption is Crushing and meleeing you. This is not a good time to turn your back to anything.

More Facts about Mastery

For many of those cases, there will be people who will shout "This is all rubbish!, Mastery, Mastery, Mastery and no other stat! Mastery, after all gives you a bigger Blood Shield!"For those of you, I will offer these special facts, that many don't know or understand.

The first of these facts we have already mentioned: Your Blood Shield caps at your maximum HP. This has a very important implication. Mastery never really increased the size of our Blood Shield. The only thing it ever increased was the speed with which our Shield builds up. But since there are other parameters influencing this, namely the damage we have sustained during the preceding 5 seconds, putting everything into increasing our Mastery rating isn't a good idea.We have to find the amount of Mastery which will allow us to get a big Shield up quickly with our individual levels of Avoidance and back-turning without leading to Overshielding.

“Overshielding” and the Mastery Cap

I am sorry to throw another term at you. Especially since the term "Overshielding" doesn't really exist. But if we take a few minutes to discuss it, our understanding of the DK tank will be complete, and we will be able to talk about practical stuff.

Overshielding doesn't really exist. It's a term I invented to make what I am going to say now sound sweeter: Mastery has a cap.
I know that there is not a single piece of writing out there on the net which will agree with me, but I will prove my point.

Mastery has a cap beyond which the stat starts diminishing itself, because it cannot longer provide the function it is suppose to provide, i.e. to Shield you.

Lets assume you have an insane amount of Mastery, say 8000 Mastery rating. In this case, whatever damage you have taken during the last 5 seconds, even if it is a mob 60 levels beneath your own hitting you, you will immediately have a Blood Shield capped at your maximum HP.

Since your maximum HP at the moment is about 200k and there is no boss who normally hits for 200k, the probability is high that you are not going to have your Shield expended completely in one, maybe even two of the bosses swing timers.

This means that your Mastery just caused you the same problems as your Avoidance, which we discussed above. They both now prevented you from taking damage! Therefore, the next time the boss hits you, you will Death Strike, of course, provided you have the runes, but your Shield will be puny. In the worst case, though, you won't have runes, you will have no Death Strikes, and you will give your healer a heart attack, they will say you are a bad DK and they will be right. Bit of a lose-lose there.

Mastery is, in a way, even more treacherous than Avoidance, since you cannot turn it off except by a /cancelaura. I personally would suggest your don't attempt this though, it looks quite bad on logs and feels even worse if you just canceled the Shield that would have saved your life. Also, Mastery absorbs damage from the front, top, back, bottom, every direction, therefore you cannot turn your back. In short: Don't mess with this shit.

Conclusion

The function that Mastery has is to smooth out our intake and whenever we want, absorb spikes. But for it to work properly we have to treat it as a resource, not as a stat we have to cap. So what is the cap you will ask?

If you pushed me, I would say around 30-35, depending on the amount of damage you take from bosses and the amount of back-turning you do. For 25-mans the amount is a bit lower, since the bosses hit harder.

The rest of your stats can go into Avoidance, or even into Stamina or offensive stats.

The next thing you will ask me, since I already told you a number, is "how much Stamina" and "how much Avoidance"?

You need enough Stamina to survive three straight hits in the face by the hardest hitting boss in the tier. For this tier this is about 200k for Heroics, more like 180k for normals. The way to find out? Simple: If you are getting gibbed and doing everything right, and your HP is below this number, chances are it was too low.

As for Avoidance, there are a few ideas, some of them even contradict what we said before, and so, once again, we have to start explaining.

Facts about Avoidance

There are two critical concepts when dealing with Avoidance:
The first concept is that since the introduction of our Mastery, people have been saying that it makes the Death Knight complicated and we should therefore rely more on stats which are simpler to understand and that work for us, without us having to do all the work. For some reason, most of those people were freshly-rolled DKs coming over from Warrior or Paladin tanking, only Druids understood somehow how powerful our Mastery is, and even they sometimes failed to see the point, what with a sturdy bear capable of sporting nearly 300k HP and a solid 50% of Dodge.
So the point was, get rid of Mastery, go for full Avoidance.

I will loosely endorse this idea for one, and only one scenario: You are a new player and want to get to grips with your class, which is admittedly not easy to play, instead of having to worry about all the things I talked about on the last pages. Basing yourself on Avoidance simplifies handling a lot, but it also creates an issue that you won't be capable to ignore if you are raiding or playing at or above a certain level: It removes control in favour of chance. For me, this is the ultimate disaster. I don't need to think much further than "We were on 1% but our tank got one-shot because he got unlucky and didn't dodge the big hammer descending upon his skull, and since he didn't have much mastery he ate the thing straight in the face. Too bad we lost the world ranked kill…"

There was a post by a highly decorated player declaring that a full avoidance build is superior for Baleroc in the Firelands. For those of you from other planets, the premise of the boss was that he hit harder and harder the longer you stayed in the fight, and he also increased your HP. People quickly jumped to the conclusion that Avoidance is good in this case, since the hits are so big. Wrong, the clever idea would be to stack Mastery to the absolute maximum. The Blood Shield would be big enough to tank the boss like any other boss and since you would have had so much Mastery and the hits were so big, the Shield would be practically capped for as long as you had runes. And since having runes isn't exactly magic, as we will see below, I dare say that the Avoidance build looses some of its lustre, even for this boss.

Therefore: Avoidance over Mastery only if you want to learn to play.

Is Avoidance evil?

This is not to say, by the way that Avoidance is evil. As described above, the Bloods on Madness had an Avoidance-based mechanic. I do not, therefore deny the possibility, that there will be a boss where Avoidance is superior to Mastery. But at least, you will be able to judge the most effective builds and choose wisely between them. At the moment, Mastery is more versatile for me, and provides more control, therefore I would choose it for every encounter.

Diminishing Returns

There is another concept with Avoidance about which we have to speak, of course. I speak of the so-called "diminishing returns", which you will find mentioned if you hover your mouse over the Dodge or Parry rating on your Character Sheet. Many guides provide instructions to "balance out your Avoidance", without telling us why, so I thought I'd provide a a few clarifications:
When you have small amounts of Avoidance, a given amount of Avoidance rating gives you a proportional amount of Avoidance percentage. The higher your percentage becomes, however, the less percentage extra you get from an amount of rating. Therefore, if you invest too much in one stat, say Parry, you will gain less benefit from it the more you stack it instead of investing in the other stat, which has the same effect (they are both Avoidance stats). Therefore it is preferable to balance out the stats, to make sure that you don't diminish one at the expense of the other.
People make it a sport to balance out their avoidances to the second digit after the comma, I was told by a paladin that he managed to balance his Avoidance at 17.00% dead. This is what I call stat paranoia and find a bit scary. Theorycrafters seem to agree that everything within a thousand (!) to 500 points of rating difference to be tolerable, any closer to that being so good that you would not notice any difference.

And thus we reach the end of this very long chapter about the basics. The implications of what we just said are the basis of what is called the "Active Mitigation" tanking model, and the developer seems to like this concept so much, they have promised to make other tanks be more like us. Therefore if you really understood the basics of it, you have a good chance to understand many tanking-related posts which are to come, even if they do not directly concern DKs.

Now, lets talk about the practical stuff.

Stats and Stat Budget, Gear, Gemming, Reforging, "non-tanking Stats"

As mentioned above, the gear choices for the DK are pretty straightforward. Under normal circumstances the so called "tanking Plate items" are pretty easy to distinguish, since they have any combination of Dodge, Parry and Mastery as their secondary stats. Things become a bit harder though, when we see items with stats like Hit or Expertise, which have some utility for us tanks but are not what we traditionally call "Tanking Stats". Lets, therefore make a short excursion into itemization and discuss which stats can be useful even if they aren't "tanking stats" as such.

The Offensive Stat

As mentioned above, Strength, Hit, Expertise, Critical Strike Rating, Haste and other stats commonly used by DPS classes are considered "offensive stats". They are not usually considered to be any good for tanks. There are, however two scenarios where those stats come into play.

The first scenario is threat generation. A tank who is Hit and Expertise capped has an easier time keeping aggro. Since threat is becoming more and more of a non-issue nowadays, and will be even less important in the future, I can safely suggest disregarding Hit and Expertise as a means of increasing threat generation and instead performing a correct and context-sensitive rotation, as we will describe below.

The second, more juicy scenario is damage output. There was a fight, where being Hit and Expertise capped provided a distinct advantage, and that was Alysrazor in the Firelands. Also, if you are in the competitive 10-man raiding scene you will find yourself having to put out as much damage as possible to help beat the DPS check during the first weeks of progression. In any scenario where Tank DPS matters, being Hit and Expertise capped can provide a benefit to your group without jeopardizing your survivability too much. Stats to remove in this case are Avoidance before Mastery.

Hit, Expertise and Choosing Between them

Also, if you have to choose between Hit and Expertise caps, definitely go for the Hit cap over the Expertise cap, since the Expertise cap only provides a benefit to your special attacks (i.e. the "green damage") and not to your auto-attacks and the boss can still parry from the front. Also, since Parry-Hasting is a thing of the past, the Expertise cap becomes even less attractive (Parry-Hasting was a boss attribute by which the mob would attack faster after parrying an attack, therefore reducing the parry chance reduced the total damage intake).

I have to make a short reference to Hit and Death Strike. Up until patch 4.2 being hit-capped was of enormous benefit for tanking, since Death Strike needed to hit for the effect to proc. Since Death Strike now does not longer need to hit, this consideration is null.

Strength

Lets now talk about Strength. Strength is present on all tanking gear, and provides the biggest net boost to your DPS, even as a tank. In fights where tank DPS is super important (Spine HC prenerf comes to mind), you might want to increase your Strength by using one or more actual "DPS items" (more about the definition of a DPS item below). Trinkets are the most practical thing to swap, since they have usually large amounts of a stat and can mostly be reforged to tanking stats if they provide another, less useful stat. They are also very easy to exchange without creating problems with set bonuses etc.

A fine example of such an item is the Essence of the Eternal Flame; with lots of Mastery and a Strength use, this item was my trinket of choice for Spine HC prenerf, which was admittedly the biggest DPS check in the current tier.

Strength also increases your Parry rating by a small amount. This is the reason that tanks will often call for a Horn of Winter rebuff, since they need the Parry to be CTC-capped.

Lets now have a look at the following item. This is itemized very nicely indeed for DPS, especially if we look at the socket bonus. But it also can serve as a nice tanking item, and indeed I have been using it to tank since the beginning of the tier. (Yes, nothing else dropped!).

Therefore, some times it is difficult to distinguish when an item is a pure DPS item and when it can be put to good use by both specs. General hints towards an item being more DPS-worthy are the presence of Critical Strike rating or Haste, a Strength socket bonus and large amounts of Strength at the cost of Stamina.

Haste Rating for DK Tanks

A word about Haste. In a theoretical world where we could have unlimited amounts of any stat, we would first get up our Mastery, then our Avoidance, then our then our Haste and our Hit and Expertise. Since Haste provides faster rune regeneration, it is of some use for us tanks and promotes survivability. Crit is even less useful and I would not suggest you equip any item with Crit (except a weapon). That said, I would not really suggest equipping any item with Haste either, but since we are trying to be thorough I thought I would mention our "best secondary stat", just for the sake of completeness. Also, as you have seen, sometimes you just cannot avoid equipping a certain item because of bad luck.

Gemming and Reforging- the Stat Budget

The game's developer has decided to give each item a certain itemization. The stats all items of identical item level have are equally worthy, just not as useful to every single class and spec. The total amount of stats an item gives you is called the items' "Stat budget". As with every budget, we must try not to waste any of it.
A first step towards being kind towards our Stat budget has already been undertaken: Trying to balance out Parry and Dodge via reforging. The other real difference we can make is our gemming. Other gear modifications such as Enchants and Armour kits etc. improve our Budget too, but cannot really be influenced as there usually is a "clearly best alternative".

Gems

Gemming is a dangerous thing to have an opinion about, since much nonsense has been written about how much better Mastery is than any other of our stats and how important it is to gem Mastery in every socket. Were it up to the people who write these guides, we would put Mastery sockets in every orifice of our body.
To me, there is a simple algorithm to gemming: Gem for the socket bonuses to improve your Stat budget. Two exceptions are permitted:

• The socket bonus is a non-tanking stat such as Strength, Hit or Expertise
• You have not reached the Mastery soft- cap of 30-35, depending on your tanking style

In these cases, pure Mastery gemming is permissible or even needed.

Meta Gems

For the overwhelming majority of the fights, the Austere Shadowspirit Diamond is the meta gem of choice, since Armour is our best tanking stat. For fights with a lot of magical damage, you might however want to switch it out for an Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond, which provides some Stamina and another 2% of Spell Damage reduction.

Runeforging

Because of the importance Armour has for us, Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle is the rune of choice, although its benefit does not become apparent unless you are tanking at the bleeding edge of progression and even there the difference is difficult to notice for many.
There are only three real alternatives to SSG which can be considered "Tanking Runes" and these are the only ones I have ever used, although others might disagree here. I will provide my thoughts and offer the fact that I had no problems at all tanking all the fights the developer ever threw at us with these Runes.
The first is Rune of Swordshattering, which increases your Parry chance by a flat 4%. This should be chosen for fights where Avoidance is superior. (e.g. some points on Madness HC, see above). Other than that, it comes with the usual Avoidance problems, which I have outlined above as well.
The next alternative is the Rune of the Fallen Crusader. This is not a tanking Rune, since the Parry chance we get from Strength is neglectable and the heal will rarely save your life (it could, it's just not a controllable heal as we like it). It is, however, very useful on fights where tank DPS matters a lot, say Spine Heroic prenerf. The proc doesn’t occur very often, but it has an enormous duration of 15 seconds. It's a staple of DPS DK Runeforging, since as we have mentioned, Strength is the best DPS boost you can get.
The third alternative is Rune of Spellshattering. The 4% flat magical damage reduction is fantastic on any fight with high magical damage, say Al'Akir HC or even Madness Heroic (Tetanus). Combine with the Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond for maximum effect.

2H or Dual Wield?

I will touch on this subject very briefly, since it has been a subject of discussion in many popular DK forums and theorycrafting websites. The two-hander is the better choice in 99% of the cases. The stats are better, the damage output higher and the threat generation improved. In the current tier, there is an exception and it is being able to Dual-Wield two Heroic Souldrinkers. I am aware that this is a luxury many will not have, but I tried it out and indeed the healing from the proc heals for more than the Fallen Crusader proc and one can additionally add a Rune of choice to both weapons (I would pick Nerubian Carapace, in this case). That said, however, my damage was lower and I wouldn't try to tank a progression fight while Dual-Wielding.

Conclusion

• Be un-insta-gib-able by having enough Stamina to survive two to three direct hits.
• Get your Mastery up to the cap of your personal playstyle
• Get your Avoidance up to as much as you can by gemming for socket bonuses as much as possible and balance out by reforging.
• Get your offensive stats up as much as you need for any given encounter. Prioritize Hit over Expertise. Strength is the largest all-around-DPS boost.
• “DPS-items” can be used for tanking if the stats match
• Trinkets are an easy way to improve your stats by a lot without having to mess around too much with the other items.
• Runeforge to suit your needs for each fight individually, you have free weapon enchants, use them!

Resources and resource management

Introduction

The DK has two resources he has to manage: Runes and Runic Power. Runic Power works a bit like Rage, it is generated from dealing damage and taking damage and does not decay in combat. Out of combat it decays at the rate of 1 RP per second.
Runic power is the more straightforward of the two resources as it only has three distinct states: Generation, Decay/Utilization and Stagnation.
The more complex of the resources is Runes. Many, mostly ignorant, players compare Runes to Combo Points or Holy Power. This is, however, completely mistaken.
Combo Points of any sort are, in a way, extensions of the Rage, Mana or Energy Bar. They start out empty most of the times, do not regenerate on their own and are used up to perform special abilities inside or outside a regular rotation, such as finishing moves, self-heals and the like.

Runes

Runes are very different from this kind of resource and make the DK tank both more engaging and more demanding to play. Let’s clarify some things about them.
You start out with 6 runes arranged in pairs, 2 Frost runes (F), 2 Blood Runes (B) and 2 Unholy runes (U). There are also Death Runes (D), which are generated by using special abilities. Death Runes can be used as any other rune. They are “Joker Runes”.

Runes do not decay if not used. They are only depleted by the use of abilities. All the base DK abilities use Runes; they are the primary resource, so to speak.
The base rune regeneration rate is 1 Rune per 5 seconds.

Haste modifies the Rune regeneration rate at certain haste breakpoints (see above). Since we have already discussed that Haste is a theoretically interesting stat but stacking it as a tank is not practicable, I will not further discuss this point.

Runes regenerate in and out of combat. However, at any given time only one Rune of each type can be regenerating. That means that the total time to regenerate both runes of each type is 10 seconds.

Let’s now discuss the implications of this system in a bit of detail.

Dealing with Runes- The Rune Puzzle

As is well known, even to non-DKs, the base ability of the Blood DK is Death Strike. Death Strike costs one Frost rune and one Unholy Rune, or – as it is more commonly called- an “FU-pair” (or UF-pair, if you don’t like someone typing such explicit acronyms in a DK guide).
Since without Death Striking we would be doomed, and other abilities use Frost and Unholy runes as well, there has to be a way for us to be able to Death Strike more than twice in a row without having to wait for 10 seconds every time.

At this point we have reached the core of the system underlying our Resources and the key to how to manage them properly: Runes and Runic Power interconnect. To be a successful DK we have to manage both of them at the same time, and this is what creates difficulties.

Axiom of Resource Management

Let us now have a look at how the two resources work together. In the most simplistic way the DK rotation works as follows: You spend your Runes by using abilities and thereby generate Runic Power. You then spend that Runic Power by using other abilities and get Runes back. Therefore, the key to successful DK tanking is to balance out your spending Runes and your spending Runic Power.

The link between Runes and Runic Power is a passive ability called “Runic Empowerment”. The tooltip is a bit complicated, and therefore we must analyse it.

• Rune Strike and Death Coil are the two abilities we use to expend our Runic Power and which proc this effect. The other abilities have no implications for Blood DKs.
• The chance to regenerate a Rune is 45% with every Rune Strike or Death Coil
• The Rune is randomly selected
• To regenerate, the Rune must be fully depleted.

This is a lot of info, and the two last points are the most difficult ones to understand. So again, this time less technical:
Whenever both Runes of a certain type are on cooldown, we call them “fully depleted”. This is the fundamental condition for Runic Empowerment to work. If only one Rune out of the two is on cooldown, it won’t work.
Now some of you might sigh and say “this is too hard, why didn’t they just make it so that any Rune can be randomly regenerated”. I answer that I have no idea, but I am grateful, since this provides us with our favourite thing: Control!

We can now basically force the system to regenerate any sort of rune for us as long as we make sure that the Runes we do not want to regenerate are either already regenerated or one of them is on cooldown. Since having regenerated Runes lying around without using them is called “wasting a resource”, only having one Rune on cooldown is practicable and useful.

An Example

Lets have a look at an example, the most common example in everyday practice:

The fight begins, you apply your diseases via Outbreak (more on that later) and you have all your runes available: BBFFUU.
You Death Strike Once: BxFxUx
You are a smart Death Knight and you spend one Blood Rune (say on a Blood Boil): BxFFUU
You Death Strike a second time: Bxxxxx

By now you should have at least 70-80 Runic Power, which means you can Rune Strike twice, giving you a 90% chance to regenerate either a Frost Rune or an Unholy Rune.
Had you not used up your Blood Rune you would have wasted damage output and threat generation, both bad things. Had you used up both your Blood Runes, you would have a 90% chance to regenerate any Rune, including a Blood Rune. Since we are Blood DKs, our Blood Runes are our least useful resource (ironic, eh?), therefore you don’t want to actively regenerate a Blood Rune unless absolutely necessary, I will talk about when such a thing makes sense in the “Damage as a Blood DK” section below.

By Death Striking again you generate more RP, and you can Rune Strike again, and therefore have the chance to regenerate more Runes. Using Rune Strike at the opportune moment and planning ahead when to Death Strike and when to expend what sort of Rune gives you the tactical advantage of being able to have Runes available to Death Strike when YOU want. YOU are in control of your life. Welcome to being a DK.

The Death Rune

A short word on Death Runes. You will notice that every time you Death Strike, your Frost and Unholy Runes become Death Runes. This is intended for us to be able to Death Strike often enough and is down to a passive ability called "Blood Rites". It has no significance to our playstyle in the way that Blood Runes are unaffected by it, and therefore should be spent normally. The only way to convert a Blood Rune into a Death Rune is via Blood Tap (or Empower Rune Weapon), abilities we will discuss in detail later.

By the way, ever wondered why Rune Strike cannot be dodged, blocked or parried? Because otherwise Runic Empowerment would not work, because we would have to be Hit and Expertise capped to just be able to get our rotation going.

“Runic Power Dumping”

Another very important thing: Rune Strike and Death Coil are not a “Runic Power Dump”! Not only is this term hideous and reminiscent of what you do when you go to the loo, it is also completely incorrect. You never “dump” Runic Power! You use it in the opportune moment to regenerate Runes you need.

Runic Power Capping

And another thing: You will hear from many DPS DKs that capping RP is a sin. This is correct…for DPS. Our rotation is not based on spending all our Runes with maximum efficiency; it is based on being able to survive by Death Striking with maximum efficiency. Therefore don’t fret if you are stuck at the RP cap for a few seconds, it is preferable to wait and Rune Strike when you need it, rather than Rune Strike early, Death Strike too early and have your Shield run out much too early. If you don’t have to tank at some point and just have to DPS, trying to avoid capping your resources is the right thing. We will talk about “dealing damage as a Blood DK” further down the line.

Conclusion:

• The key to resource management is knowledge of the way the interaction between Runes and RP works.
• Keep one of the Runes you do not want to regenerate on cooldown to avoid them regenerating by accident
• Plan your moves ahead of time and Rune Strike to regain Runes whenever you need them
• Try not to cap your Runic Power for too long, but don’t fret about keeping it uncapped too much, you are a tank and you must survive, not perform a perfect DPS rotation.

In-Depth Skill-analysis

This large chapter is a complete guide to all the skills relevant to the Blood DK. Pair it with the "rotation" chapter below for an overview of what buttons to press on the Battlefield. I will not explain what the ability does if it is clear enough, just give some special considerations.

"Blood" Spellbook Page

Blood Boil: This is an AoE which hits all targets around you for medium-low damage and medium threat. It uses a Blood Rune even if you miss. The radius is 360 degrees, therefore even enemies behind you will be hit, careful when CCed mobs are behind you. It should be used only when packs of more than 4 mobs are being dealt with, since otherwise the damage and threat to resource ratio is not beneficial

Blood Presence: This is our tanking Presence. It provides all the stuff we need for tanking. You should be in Blood Presence nearly all the time, although stance-dancing is possible even as Blood and sometimes useful. Read below for more info.

Blood Rites: This has been described above as a means to be able to Death Strike more often, since all Frost and Unholy Runes will become Death Runes whenever we hit with Death Strike (yes, this means that a miss decreases the chance for this)

Blood Strike: This is a starter ability and should not be used at level 85!

Blood Tap: Sometimes you just don't have an FU pair or a combination of these Runes and Death Runes and you cannot Death Strike when you need to. If you are missing only one Rune, you can Blood Tap instead of using a Blood Rune the usual way to get a Death Rune for 20 seconds. You can then Death Strike and hopefully survive. Mind that this actually activates a Blood Rune and then converts it, it does not subtract one Rune, so you still have to use that Rune for it to count as a used-up Blood Rune. Also, the Blood Rune will regenerate as a Blood Rune, not as a Death Rune

Bone Shield: This fantastic little CD reduces all damage taken by 20% until all the charges are expended. This usually gives it significantly higher duration than the 20% tanking CDs other tanks have (usually 6 seconds) and that makes it better. For details on how to use it, check below under "Cooldowns” . It costs 1 Unholy, or half a Death Strike, which situationally is preferable to Death Striking but in other situations it isn't. More on this below.

Dancing Rune Weapon: This increases our Avoidance dramatically for a short period of time. It also copies any ability you do for 50% damage (or healing). This becomes interesting when you consider that it will also copy your Death Coils and heal you if you have Lichborne (more on that later). It does, however, not copy your Death Strike healing. Another interesting aspect is its combination with Army of the Dead, since the 15% Parry chance increase equals a 15% damage decrease.

Dark Command: Our taunt. Use it to taunt but never use it to pull!

Dark Simulacrum: This is a whole lot of fun in PvP, but does not really work that well in PvE. Only Hagara has an ability that can be copied (Shattered Ice). I personally have also never witnessed it "absorbing some harmful spells"

Death Pact: This requires you to pool RP to summon a Ghoul and then kills it for a juicy self heal. It is highly situational, since you might not always be able to afford the GCDs or the RP to do it, but the heal is significant.

Death Strike: This ability has been dealt with concisely, therefore I will not cover it again here.

Heart Strike: This is a hard-hitting ability, which hits 3 enemies in a frontal, approximately 60° cone. Damage is increased if your targets have diseases on them, so Pestilencing in advance will increase the aggro you generate as well as the damage.

Parry: We have discussed this in detail

Pestilence: This is a nice ability. It costs 1 Blood Rune and spreads your diseases to all targets around. This has significance not because of the damage the diseases deal, but because of the debuffs they apply, which are significant tanking debuffs. More on those later. Also, they increase the damage output of the "proper" damage abilities. It can be used to spend the customary Blood Rune.

Rune Tap: This also uses a Blood Rune and is a way to spend one. It heals you for 10% of your maximum health, which is a lot. This can be combined with a talent (Will of the Necropolis) for an emergency button. More on this later. There are two schools of thought on this, one proclaiming that one should use this every time you are below 100% HP, the other to use it whenever you anticipate a burst of damage. This will be described in detail in the "Rotation and CD section"

Strangulate: This is our ranged interrupt. It also costs a Blood Rune and has a long CD. This can be reduced with a talent.

Vampiric Blood: This provides both a max HP increase and a healing increase when unglyphed and only a healing increase when glyphed. The importance of this will be discussed below. It is considered one of our CDs.

Vengeance: This provides an Attack Power increase when you take damage. It is good both for generating more threat and for dealing more damage, both of which are useful to tanks. Vengeance will be extensively revamped next expansion to ramp up quicker. Also, it can be /cancelaura to remove the effect and therefore the high threat generation. You can zerg away at a boss that way without fearing of pulling off your fellow tank.

Veteran of the Third War: This is a passive ability we gain with the Blood spec. It decreases the CD of Outbreak by 30 seconds nowadays, and therefore makes it a real utility for the modern Death Knight.

"Frost" Spellbook Page

Chains of Ice: This is a snare costing one Frost. It can be used on many mobs but equals half a Death Strike. Use it, for instance, on the Twilight Sapper on the Warmaster Blackhorn encounter.

Empower Rune Weapon: This is one of the most powerful Cooldowns we have, and it is largely underestimated. It converts all of your runes into Death Runes, that means 3 Death Strikes in rapid succession.

Festering Strike: Not a Blood Ability

Frost Fever: This is one of the diseases that are applied by using our Icy Touch ability. It is an attack speed debuff and a source of significant damage reduction in boss fights. The disease does not really do a lot of damage, but it increases the damage done by other abilities.

Frost Presence: This is the least used of presences because of the minor benefit it provides. Check below for an opinion about stance dancing.

Horn of Winter: This is our "Extra Strength and Agility" Buff. Other tanks need it to be CTC capped, DPS need it for the boost in provides, we use it for our own DPS and for the bit of Parry it gives extra.

Icebound Fortitude: This is our big CD. More on it below. It also makes us immune to stun and can be used to break out of stuns.

Icy Touch: This is the ability which applies Frost Fever. Since  Outbreak is on such a low cooldown, it should rarely be used. More on this below, too.

Mind Freeze: This is our 10-second CD, melee-range interrupt. It costs resources, therefore has to be talented to become free.

Obliterate: Not a Blood ability.

Path of Frost: Lets us walk over water and also reduces fall damage if glyphed.

Rune Strike: Has been discussed in detail above, more on it below.

Runic Empowerment: Has been discussed in detail.

Runic Focus: This might seem a little confusing, but it comes down to the fact that Icy Touch, for instance, counts not as a melee strike but as a spell. As such it is subject to the spell hit cap, which is 17%, 9% higher than the melee hit cap. This detail does not mean that Intellect and Spellpower suddenly become good stats or anything, although I would find that interesting.

"Unholy" Spellbook Page

Anti-Magic Shell: This is one of the best cooldowns in the game and makes us so good at absorbing magical damage. The effect works two ways: For one it absorbs a significant amount of magical damage (magical= non-physical, i.e. fire on the ground too). On the other hand it prevents the application of new magical effects. Therefore it can be used to clear stacks on debuffs, like Tetanus on the Madness of Deathwing Encounter. More on this in the "Cooldowns" section below.

Army of the Dead: This ability has a relatively long channelling time, and creates some Ghouls who help you (or not). For one, you can stop the channelling at any time to stop producing Ghouls, you can for instance cancel it early to get only one Ghoul. One Ghoul of the Army can be sacrificed for a self heal, which is nice if your other Ghoul summon is on CD. The channelling prevents you from Dodging and Parrying and doing anything else for that matter, but it does provide you with a damage reduction equal to your total Avoidance at the time. This means that you can pop Dancing Rune Weapon just before the channelling and get quite a significant damage decrease for the duration of the channelling. I personally do not use this, since it has a few downsides. For one, your total inability to do anything for the duration of the channel is a problem. You cannot Death Strike, you don't generate aggro etc.. Therefore I only recommend using it when you know that you are going to get a predictable big hit and you need to reduce it, without having to worry about anything else. Another point is the fact that the Ghouls run around and taunt everything, including adds and even bosses (not raid bosses, but they can taunt bosses in 5-mans). This might not be what you want, and since you cannot cancel the effect you will have to live with it for the duration.

Blood Plague: This is the disease applied by Plague Strike. It provides no benefit other than a small amount of damage over time and a boost to your other abilities' damage.

Death and Decay: This creates a large circle on the ground and mobs on it take damage over time with a high threat modifier. It can be used to pull mobs which are further away from you or as a AoE threat tool. It is also useful for single-target DPS if the mob in question is going to stand in it for the entire duration of the effect. It can also not be canceled, so this should be taken into consideration when applying the effect in places where you don't want damage to be happening.

Death Coil: This is a ranged version of our Rune Strike and has been discussed above. Since the damage to resource ratio is worse for Death Coil than for Rune Strike, Rune Strike is preferable for most scenarios. If you, however, want to damage a distant mob or proc Runic Empowerment while not near mobs, it can be used for a good effect. The other effect this provides is healing an undead. This can be either your Ghoul or yourself. There has never been any situation in which I needed to heal my Ghoul, therefore the utility is reserved for a self-heal in conjunction with Lichborne, which we will talk about in the "Talents and Glyphs" Section.

Death Gate: Opens a gate which transports you to Acherus where there are the only DK trainers and the Runeforges we need.

Death Grip: This is a DK signature ability. It moves most mobs to your location and acts as a taunt. It sometimes also performs other functions, like knocking back meteors on the Ragnaros encounter. Useful for positioning mobs or just for taunting.

Necrotic Strike: There are two effects to this ability. For one, it absorbs healing on mobs which heal themselves (such as Maloriak). It also applies the slowed casting effect, which is identical to Curse of Tongues. I would not usually call this a Blood Ability, but since it is sometimes very useful, keep it in mind and use it whenever needed. The healing absorb was very useful on Maloriak for instance, since it completely nullified some of his Remedies if applied enough times. It has a low resource cost compared to other hard hitting abilities, but still costs half a Death Strike.

Outbreak: Applies all your diseases on the target. This is always preferable to applying them manually via Icy Touch and Plague Strike, since it has no resource cost and the Cooldown is so low. It can, however, miss, which is the reason why you should have your diseases on your bars nonetheless.

Plague Strike: A weak hitting ability which applies Blood Plague.

Raise Ally: This is our battle rez. It is worse than the Druid's battle rez, since it only returns the target to life with 20% HP and 20% mana. It also has a high resource cost, which makes it unreliable sometimes. Therefore, tell your groups that you aren't a resto Druid who can just "rez" right away, but you need to pool some RP for it, which might take about 3-4 seconds.

Raise Dead: Creates a single Ghoul, increasing your DPS. The Ghoul can be sacrificed to heal yourself. Since the Ghoul has a fraction of your own stats, it is preferable to cast the ability after stat increases such as potions or Bloodlust. More on this in the ""How to deal Damage as a DK Tank" section.

Unholy Presence: This is the presence of choice for DPS DKs because of the increased Haste, Rune regen and movement speed increase. More analysis in the "Stance Dancing" section.

Talents and Glyphs

This section will be an in-depth Talent analysis, without burdening you too much with Theorycrafting. Since the talents are changing anyway, I will try to make you understand the ideas behind the talents more than the actual effects.

Blood Talent Tree

Butchery: I suggest not picking this talent at all. You will be swimming in Runic Power if you tank right, and you don't really need the combat regen. Also, you really seldom get any killing blows in PvE.

Blade Barrier: A no-brainer. Other classes would kill for such a damage reduction effect. This has been revamped, previously it was a proc you had to keep up, but since it was counterintuitive, it was removed. (The reason for this was NOT that people were noobs and keeping up the Barrier was too difficult, this is the stupid excuse people who think "Blizzard is making the game ez". The reason was that to have the reduction, you had to have both Blood Runes on CD, which conflicted with our Runic Empowerment because we kept getting Blood Runes back, which were no good)

Bladed Armour: Filler choice but useful if you want to deal damage.

Improved Blood Tap: A definitive choice. More on Blood Tap in the "Rotation" section.

Scent of Blood: One of the reasons we have so much Runic Power. There are varying opinions on the effectiveness of the third point here, but I would suggest going for 2 points, since this seems to be the most accepted and widespread way of doing it.

Scarlet Fever: A must-have. The disease decreases physical damage done by the mob by 10%, which is a required debuff.

Hand of Doom: Pick for fights where you have to interrupt a lot, such as Tier 11. Obsolete in both Tier 12 and 13.

Blood-Caked Blade: This only provides a minor DPS increase and is largely a meaningless talent. If you are desperately trying to increase your DPS by all means, this could be an option, but I never had this situation arise.

Bone Shield: Will be discussed in detail below.

Toughness: Armour being our best stat, this is a must-have.

Abomination's Might: This is essentially a Blessing of Might without the regeneration and increases our total Strength. A key to increasing our DPS output.

Sanguine Fortitude: Not only the name of this Blog, but also the talent required to make our Icebound Fortitude as powerful as the other tanking Cooldowns.

Blood Parasite: Spawns some cute worms, which drink blood and then blow up and heal you and the party. Self heals are good, especially if we don't have to do much more than attack to get them.

Improved Blood Presence: What else to say… Improves the presence we are in 98% of the time.

Will of the Necropolis: This is the talent which was implemented to limit us being killed by big hits, since spiky damage intake was always the trademark of (mostly mediocre) DK tanks. Read the tooltip well, and I will discuss the implications of it in the "Cooldowns" section.

Rune Tap: Has been described above and will be described again below.

Vampiric Blood: Ditto

Improved Death Strike: Sounds juicy, pick it.

Crimson Scourge: This basically gives you free Blood Boils. Very useful for 5-mans, for Madness of Deathwing (procs Spellweave a lot) and for encounters where you have to pick up a lot of adds. A mediocre choice for all other raid-level encounters without many adds.

Dancing Rune Weapon: Has been described above.

Frost Talent Tree

Runic Power Mastery: This is a prerequisite to always get back Runes via Runic Empowerment. The base RP is 100, which equals 3 Rune Strikes when capped, i.e. still a 100% chance to get a rune back, but I have found that with 100 RP you usually either have it capped or you are missing RP. I like the cushion that the full increase provides (1 more Rune Strike), especially since we sometimes need the RP for other things (summoning Ghouls, rezzing noobs who died etc.), but feel free to experiment and add or remove points as you see fit.

Icy Reach: Increases the range of some of our abilities. I don't recommend taking it unless you need to spec for deeper Frost.

Nerves of Cold Steel: Useless for Blood

Endless Winter: Spec into this if you need a free ranged interrupt.

Lichborne: We now come to the “elephant in the corner”. Many people see this as a DK tanking staple, I do not, therefore I will devote an entire section to it under "Cooldowns".

Unholy Talent Tree

Epidemic: This is very useful, since it can be used to extend the duration of your diseases above the cooldown of your Outbreak, which is nice. I recommend taking all three points here, since the longer your diseases last, the better for you, since you don't need to use a GCD on Outbreak until the last moment and because Outbreak can miss, so you might prefer uptime over neatness. However, you can use the spare point anywhere else if you feel like having your diseases tick exactly for as long as the Outbreak CD is.

Virulence: Increases the pitiful damage of our diseases. Many people pick this for fights where DoTs have some sort of gimmick (see Manno'roth and Varothen for instance) or just to increase the damage a bit. Short discussion about this under "Dealing Damage as a Tank" below.

Unholy Command: No reason to have this in PvE.

Resilient Infection: Ditto

Morbidity: Increases the damage of Death Coil and DnD. Will be discussed under "Damage Dealing" below.

Desecration: This is the Unholy tree "elephant in the corner". Many people think this is a fantastic ability, when in fact it is a liability for your group in nearly all the encounters. The main problems are : (1) It procs of Plague Strike, which is widely regarded as the worst ability to be having to press since it doesn't deal much damage, it doesn't apply a debuff and it costs half a Death Strike while at it and (2) the slow is unreliable, since it often does not catch all the mobs, it is limited in size, since the ground effect has a diameter of 7 yards and it cannot be turned off if you don't need a slow anymore. I strongly advise against picking this talent.

Sample Build

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jcGr0srrkszhZ0h

4 points available: Use them for Hand of Doom, Crimson Scourge, Virulence.

Points can be removed from Runic Power Mastery

Glyphs

Prime

Death and Decay: Increases the damage done by Death and Decay, which is nice, but not really superior to the other Primes. Maybe useful for heavy AoE scenarios.
Death Coil: Even with this Glyph and the Morbidity talent, your Death Coil still does less damage than Rune Strike per Runic Power used. Avoid it unless speccing for Lichborne, in which case you should read below.
Death Strike: Increases the damage of our hardest-hitting ability. Nice one.
Heart Strike: Flat damage increase. Use it.
Icy Touch: Your diseases aren't known for their damage, and this doesn't cut it either, so avoid it.
Raise Dead: Increases your Ghoul DPS. More of a DPS choice, not really for Blood.
Rune Strike: Increases the critical strike chance of Rune Strike. Since Rune Strike hits quite hard, a nice choice overall, especially since it improves your Threat output as well.

Major

Anti-Magic Shell: Improves the duration of an already great Cooldown. A no-brainer.
Blood Boil: Useful for AoE fights where you have to pick up mobs.
Bone Shield: Since Bone Shield should be used for its damage reduction, not for the speed increase (other tools for that), I don't suggest picking this. I used it for Ragnaros Heroic and it nearly never helped.
Dancing Rune Weapon: Useful if you want to boost your threat output in some situations without relying on DRW in other situations.
Dark Succour: Since you don't get many killing blows, this doesn't work as well as it sounds.
Death Grip: Increases your taunt range by 5 yards, which is useful on some encounters like Ragnaros HC.
Pestilence: Good for fights where you Pestilence a lot, like Spine of Deathwing
Rune Tap: Adds some party utility by healing them for 5% of their maximum health. Read more below under "Cooldowns"
Vampiric Blood: Extensive coverage of this below.

Minor

Blood Tap: Use this, it's good.
Resilient Grip: Useful on Ragnaros Heroic, where you can knockback Meteors like a machinegun, but I have not seen another very useful application.
Horn of Winter: Nice one, pick it.
Path of Frost: Not really useful, unless you fall off ledges a lot.
Death's Embrace: Used primarily in conjunction with Lichborne (read below).

Conclusion:

Primes: Death Strike, Heart Strike, Rune Strike except heavy AoE, where DnD is better.
Majors: AMS, two Glyphs of your choice
Minors: Blood Tap and any other Glyphs.

 

Rotation

All we have learned from the previous sections should make the rotation pretty straightforward. Since we are such a dynamic class, it is difficult to give an algorithm of how to do what and when, so this is more of a priority system:
Diseases should be up 100% of the time. Letting diseases drop off to get larger Blood Shields is usually not worth it.

Basic Rotation

You can start Death Striking pretty much immediately after diseases are up to get your Blood Shield going and get Runic Power. This is modified by some other thoughts:
If you have up to 3 mobs, Heart Strike once to get aggro, use any Blood Boil procs from Crimson Scourge immediately, since the effect procs often
More than 3 mobs and you should start Blood Boiling.

Pestilence

Pestilence is not usually worth it in 5-mans. It is however very much worth it on some boss encounters. On Spine, the damage from both the Blood's melee hit and the burst is decreased by 10%, same on all adds on Madness. Generally, whenever you are tanking adds in raids, think about Pestilencing. By the way, a "Pestilence Swap" is when you pestilence a few seconds into a fight and instead of reapplying diseases when they run out, you just select one of the mobs which still has diseases on it and press Pestilence again. This way all the mobs have diseases and you don't have to reapply. Also, you will say that Pestilence damage is low. It's right, but as we have said numerous times before: It's not about the damage!

General Truths

DnD in all AoE situations and in single-target situations when the mob is going to stay immobile for the entire duration of the effect.
Keep one Blood Rune on CD either via Heart Strike or  Blood Boil or Rune Tap or Pestilence to get Runic Empowerment rolling.
Try to balance spending RP with spending Runes.
Death Strike intelligently, don't spam DS when the damage income is not as high, use it after spikes or after turning your back.
Rune Strike intelligently, not when forever reason both Blood Runes are depleted.
Death Coil if you are out of range or on distant mobs.
Death Grip for positioning.
Slow stray mobs with Chains of Ice.
Provide your Group with Horn of Winter.

And something else (I don't think you need to hear that, but nevertheless): NEVER PULL WITH A TAUNT!

Cooldowns and Group Utility

Lets shortly revise which cooldowns we have and which abilities can be used as Cooldowns under the appropriate circumstances:

• Rune Tap and Will of the Necropolis
• Anti-Magic-Shell
• Vampiric Blood
• Icebound Fortitude
• Bone Shield
• Empower Rune Weapon
• Army of the Dead
• Death Pact
• Dancing Rune Weapon
• Lichborne
  
  

Lets sort those roughly into categories:

• Damage Reduction: Will of the Necropolis, Icebound Fortitude, Bone Shield, Dancing Rune Weapon and Army of the Dead, AMS
• Healing or Healing Increase: Rune Tap, Vampiric Blood, ERW, Death Pact and Lichborne

This makes us the class with the most cooldowns in the game, if I am not mistaken.

Basics of Cooldown Use

For one, we differ from other classes in that we use our cooldowns not "proactively" most of the time, but "semi-proactively". Since we generally have spiky damage input, it is sometimes hard to anticipate when a big hit will come. Also, it is most of the time not a problem to recover from a big hit. Sometimes, however you have healers going OOM or the damage being constantly high and you have trouble surviving or are stuck at low HP etc. In this case, the cooldown is there to help you recover your HP or to not die within the next hits. You will, however, find it difficult to "foresee" the big damage coming most of the time, as Paladins or Warriors are supposed to be able to do. Therefore, you have to learn to use the CD judging when you are not likely to survive the next seconds.

Cooldown Analysis

• Bone Shield is the simplest CD to use. It has long uptime and a low cooldown. It does, however decrease your Blood Shields if you have it up before starting the fight. It also is not off the GCD and costs 1 Unholy. Balance all these considerations and you will find it a good Cooldown to use in medium-peril situations like Warlord Zon' ozz on higher stacks of anger or situationally to decrease a big hit like the Impale on Madness. The best usage for Bone Shield is to put it up as soon as you have a big enough Blood Shield, so as to reduce the damage your shield takes. Using it before (such as having it up from the start of the fight) is not advisory, as a higher uptime on Bone Shield drives up the Mastery softcap.
• The next CD which we like using is Rune Tap. If you are not yet accustomed to the playsyle, just use this whenever you are not at 100% HP and want to spend a Blood Rune. With the Glyph, you can also use this to heal your party for a certain amount. The more advanced and comfortable you get, the more you will be able to foresee when you are going to drop below 30% HP. Then, you should use Rune Tap before you dip below 30%, then Will of the Necropolis will proc, you will have  25% damage reduction and you will have another, free Rune Tap, which is very helpful.
• Dancing Rune Weapon is a minor-efficiency CD for average damage situations. I use it more for the DPS and on fights where a surge of Avoidance helps, like Madness HC. It can also be used in conjunction with Army of the Dead as outlined above. When glyphed, it helps with Threat output.
• Anti-Magic Shell is enormously useful for any high-damage magical situations. Since the CD is low, be generous with this. Also, you can time it so you can drop stacks of various debuffs. Example: Tetanus on Madness of Deathwing. Wait till the duration is 5 seconds, then apply AMS and you will reset your stacks.
• Vampiric Blood: This can be used in two different ways: When unglyphed, it provides you with some additional HP and with a healing increase, when glyphed, it does not provide extra HP but a big healing increase. The increase affects all healing taken. Another consideration is the T13 4-set bonus, which applies 50% of the effect to the whole party. The choice between glyphed and unglyphed is yours. I have to say, though that for yourself as a player, if 25% healing increase cannot save you, 40% won't be able to save you either, most probably, because it's down to the healers. For the party, 20% increased healing is nice, of course.
• Death Pact: This is a nice Cooldown but a bit fussy: You need to summon the Ghoul, pool RP and use it, which you might not always have the time for. The healing you get is quite substantial though. I seldom use it, frankly. Can be used on one Army Ghoul as well, i.e. twice in rapid succession.
• Empower Rune Weapon: Fantastic CD when you need those Death Strikes fast! On longer fights you can use it twice for higher effect. Potentially time it with Vampiric Blood or other healing increases, since the Death Strike Healing scales with VB.
• Icebound Fortitude: This is our big "oh shit" switch. It can be also used to break stuns and makes us immune to them. I generally, and a bit superficially, judge players by the amount of times they use this, since there is rarely a real need for it, except timed, anticipated attacks like Impale, Hagaras' Focused Assault etc. Therefore, don't plan with this CD too much, plan surviving without it, and then use it if you cannot otherwise.
• Lichborne. This is the talent and CD I love to hate. I will analyse a bit for you, because I will be ravaged otherwise for making such a claim. Lichborne's premise is, that you can turn undead for a while and heal yourself with Death Coil. The healing done by Death Coil can be increased by a significant amount via other talents, glyphs and the healing taken by it can be further increased by Vampiric Blood. In all honesty, it is not a bad talent at all. It is, however very inelegant in my eyes. The reason is the enormous effort you need to make it worthwhile. You have to spec into it, pick additional talents, pick glyphs, spend Vampiric Blood, pool Runic Power and then you can heal yourself over an amount of CDs. You are left without RP, you have no Blood Shield and you have used 2 Cooldowns. It's your choice whether it is worth it. There are some fights where it comes in handy and those are the fights where you cannot Death Strike much because you are running around, but still taking damage. Examples are Al'Akir and Ragnaros. For all other fights, Death Strike is better in my opinion.

Since I have mentioned Rune Tap as a means of healing your Group and the title of this section is "Group Utility", here is a short list of what you provide for your group that is useful:

• Horn of Winter
• Debuffs on the Boss
• Healing via Rune Tap
• Healing via Blood Parasites
• Healing increase and HP increase via Vampiric Blood with the 4-set Bonus
• Abomination's Might
• Slows
• Interrupts
• Battle Rez
• Water Walking
• The feeling that you have a pro Blood DK in the Group… Priceless

Dealing Damage as a Blood DK

Especially in 10-mans and the closer you are to top-level progression, the more you will be asked to deal as much DPS as you can. This short section is intended to give you an overview of how to do that.

Damage-increasing Tools in the Blood DK Arsenal

• Talents: Bladed Armour, Abomination's Might, (to a lesser extent Blood-caked-blade), Virulence, Morbidity
• Glyphs: DnD, Death Strike, Heart Strike, Rune Strike, (to a lesser extent Death Coil and Raise Dead, which I don't recommend)
• Skills: You hardest hitting ability is Death Strike, dealing the highest base damage and scaling from there via Runic Power. Next is Heart Strike, Rune Strike does nearly as much but with a significantly higher threat modifier and Blood Boil is last, dealing pitiful damage in comparison, but to all targets around. DnD deals even less damage and just ticks for 10 seconds, while mobs step on it. Diseases tick for very low damage. Their application via Icy Touch and Plague Strike adds a little damage at the cost of a GCD per disease. They increase the damage of other abilities, Heart Strike in our case.
• Other Abilities: Bone Shield, Ghoul, Dancing Rune Weapon
• Items: Trinkets, Consumables, DPS gear
• Stats: Reforging, Gemming, Enchanting, Runeforging

I'll start off with the full-fledged Damage Spec and you can tune-down from there to suit your needs.

Max-impact DPS tank: (for fights like Alysrazor etc.): Talents according to the fight (for AoE Crimson Scourge and Virulence, for single target Virulence and maybe Blood-Caked Strike), Glyphs ditto (The three Strikes for single-target, DnD instead of Rune Tap for heavy AoE), Rune of the Fallen Crusader, potentially some DPS items (go for Strength over everything else), DPS trinkets, preferably with Strength, Reforging for Hit and Expertise, Strength Food, Strength Flask, Strength Potion

Normal DPS tank: Talents and Glyphs according to the fight, Rune of the Fallen Crusader, DPS trinkets, Reforging for Hit and Expertise, Consumables according to your needs

Regular tank with a DPS mind-set: Talents and Glyphs according to the fight, Rune of the SSF, one DPS trinket, Reforging to Hit only, tanking consumables (see below)

Even if you are not specced into more DPS, you can still do many things with what you have in your basic arsenal as a DK:

• Always apply Diseases via Outbreak, the two GCDs are not worth the damage of the individual disease application. Keep 100% uptime.
• Use DnD when the mob is stationary.
• Have Bone Shield up
• Use your Ghoul after you have used your Stat increases and after Bloodlust has started.
• Use your Dancing Rune Weapon when out of Runes and high on RP
• Use Empower Rune Weapon if you haven't used it before or intend to use it later (final burn phase)
• Use Horn of Winter.
• Line up Trinkets and Consumables for maximum synergy. Watch the Fallen Crusader Proc, too.
• Take an example from our DPS friends and try to not cap Runic Power.
• Use your abilities with the following priority: Heart Strike after your Diseases to get your Runic Power up, Death Strike then to take advantage of the scaling with the increased RP, Rune Strike last to get Runes back. Runic Empowerment works for you in this case, since you are actively using your Blood Runes.
• Use any Blood Boil procs you get immediately, since it procs a lot.

Stance-Dancing as a Blood DK

This is a bit of an unyielding topic and it has many potential problems: For one, we loose all our Runic Power when we change Presence and for another, none of the other Presences allow proper tanking. Therefore, unlike DPS DKs who switch from Unholy to Frost for some special scenarios, our Stance Dancing should be limited to swapping from Blood to Unholy. The only case you should attempt such a manoeuvre is when you need the run speed boost from Unholy. It can also be used as a burst helper, since the DPS will be higher because of the lower GCD despite the fact that the Rune regeneration will not be strictly speaking higher. The problem with both Frost and Unholy is that you cannot Rune Strike on the burst, therefore you will have to use Death Coil, which is inferior to Rune Strike from a damage perspective. My suggestion is to use Blood in all occasions except prolonged running periods, like Hagara, where Unholy can be used.

Minor considerations: Professions, Consumables, Enchants

These are things that you can find on any semi-proper guide on the net, therefore I will only mention them briefly for the sake of completeness.

Professions

Professions that give Mastery are preferable to those which give Stamina. Therefore, Leatherworking, Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing spring to mind, although with the advent of the Epic 4.3 gems, Jewelcrafting has lost a bit of appeal.

Consumables

Elixirs are better than Flasks for tanking. Stock up on Elixirs of the Master and on Prismatic Elixirs for most fights. For fights with a strong physical damage component to them, Elixir of Deep Earth is better, though. Our food is called "Lavascale Minestrone". You can use a variety of Potions, but for tanking Health Potions, Armour Potions and Movement Speed Potions are king, followed by Strength potions in case you need an additional burst, see above.

Enchants

I will not list them here, since they are limited in number and pretty straightforward. I would like to mention the boot enchant, where I would suggest Lavawalker for most situations, unless you can run without being hit, like Hagara, where Mastery is better. For your Gloves you have a choice of either Mastery or Armour, and your decision should be based on whether you have reached the softcap or not.  

Final thoughts

This Guide was written with the intention of explaining all aspects of DK tanking in as much detail as is necessary to make a player who knows the game understand. If a point is unclear or needs further explanation, ask for it and I will provide it. The purpose of this guide is mainly to function as a primer for the upcoming content and as such it will be left alone in its current state. All updates will be posted separately and will be coming very soon. I hope I haven't destroyed your brains with too much information...

Have fun tanking!

-Sami