Starting a Death Knight tank

Welcome to my first post on Red Axe! This guide is intended to get you up and running with a DK from 55 to tanking Outland instances, for people who are just experimenting with the class and want a quick start guide. It should cover all of those annoying questions your guild mates ask you when they roll their DK, before they get bored 10 minutes later - just send them over here ;)

To start off you will need to sort out a few things to get you going as an Outland tank. Note that this is not a levelling guide, it is a guide to competently tanking your first runs at ~lv60, having already finished the starting quests. Although it is perfectly possible to level as Blood spec, unless you are chaining dungeons you will probably find it faster and easier to have a frost or unholy dual spec for questing purposes.

Abilities

At level 60 some of your best tanking abilities are not yet unlocked! Never fear, you can still tank an instance successfully at 60 with the following:

Blood Presence - This is crucial! Always ensure this is active for tanking, it is similar to a warrior stance in that you only need activate it once and it will remain active until you change it or respec.

Icy Touch - Use this as your ranged pull, but it also adds a disease to your target which reduces its attack speed which is helpful for survival.

Death Strike - (Otherwise known as "Red Axe"!) A really good ability to use, it heals you for 30% of the damage you took in the previous 5 seconds. Good for general use, really good after high damage abilities.

Heart Strike - Gained from the Blood talent specialisation, this is a core attack. It offers a 3 target cleave so be careful if there are CC'ed mobs about.

Death Coil - A ranged attack that uses Runic Power, use it if all of your runes are on CD or if you need to hit a mob that is not within melee range.

Death Grip - Don't waste this by using it to pull. It can be used for pulling non-moving caster mobs into melee range once the pull has happened, and a fact that a lot of people miss is that it also acts as a taunt which is great because you don't get your actual taunt until lv65.

Mind Freeze - Your standard interrupt, you may as well start learning to use it now. Have it on your bar or keybound to a convenient key. You also have Strangulate which has a 2 minute CD but is great for making irritating caster mobs run to you if your Death Grip is on CD.

Blood Boil - An AoE attack which is very useful for keeping control of multiple mobs. If you talent Scarlet Fever you can reduce the physical damage dealt by mobs by 10% too. You can break CC very easily with this so be careful.

Death and Decay - If you're reading this guide and you're not quite 60, you don't yet have this. It's great for a pull, place it on the ground in the way of oncoming mobs and it damages them and causes a lot of threat. You can obviously break CC with this accidentally too.

You also have a number of other abilities, but some are not particularly useful for tanking and others provide unnecessary complication in my opinion. Some people like to apply Plague Strike as well as Icy Touch and then use Pestilence to spread the diseases all around, I don't think it's worth bothering with these because the mobs are usually dead by the time you've done this, but you may wish to experiment. It's also worth saying that as soon as you get Rune Strike at 67 you should be using it as one of your core abilities.

Race

If you are intending becoming anything like serious with your DK tank, you should probably consider carefully which race to choose. Here is my opinion on order of usefulness:

Orc - a reduced stun duration, increased Axe expertise and two nice DPS racial boosts too.

Goblin- passive 1% increased attack speed, DPS CD.

Troll - passive 15% reduced duration of movement impairing effects, increased health regen, DPS CD.

Forsaken - Will of the Forsaken, 2min CD for charm/sleep/fear effects.

Blood Elf - You look pretty! Hmm...you also get an AoE interrupt but this is very situational.

Tauren - passive 5% increased base health (not very scaleable) and a pretty useless AoE stun. 

Human - increased Mace/Sword expertise, 2min movement impairing CD.

Draenei - passive 1%  increased hit, HoT CD.

Dwarf - Stoneform +10% armor CD, expertise with maces.

Worgen - 'Dash' increased movement speed CD, passive 1% crit for DPS.

Gnome - Escape Artist - get rid of movement speed/stun effects. Note that the expertise with 1H swords is useless for tanking.

Night Elf - You look pretty! Attackers have 2% reduced chance to hit you.

However, as you can see I completely ignored my own advice and went for the pretty option of Blood Elf. *sigh*

 

Talents

You should by now have gained your talent points from the starting DK quests, so here is a decent tanking build to start off with at level 60:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jcur0sMRuk 

Eventually you are aiming for something like this which is the endgame spec recommended by Elitist Jerks, so as you level you know where to spend the rest of your points:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#jcGr0sMruszG0oZ0b:so0zkZz

Glyphs

You will only have two of each type of glyph slot available at this point, so my recommendations are:
Prime
Glyph of Heart Strike - essential
Glyph of Death and Decay - really helpful during BC/WOTLK as most pulls have no CC
(Your final glyph will be Glyph of Rune Strike but you don't have this ability yet.)

Major
Glyph of Blood Boil
Glyph of Rune Tap
(Your final glyph will be Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon but again you don't have this ability yet)

Minor
It really doesn't matter, you can use any of the minor glyphs.

Gear

You will already have your gear from the starting quests which is perfectly reasonable for tanking at 60. You may wish to purchase some of the new heirlooms if your guild has reached the appropriate level.

Your gear will come with Strength and Stamina as standard. As a very coarse rule, if an item (neck, back, ring etc.) has agility on it, you don't want it and there is a rogue somewhere laughing at you for rolling on it.

Essentially, you are looking for the following useful green stats:
Mastery
Dodge / Parry - in equal amounts
Expertise / Hit - but only if you are having trouble with threat

For tanking, you should always be using a two handed weapon. It also goes without saying that you should only opt for plate armour for the bonus which is non-optional.

Professions

Many guides will tell you that JC/ BS / LW / ENc / ENg are the best professions for an end-game Death Knight. However, for levelling purposes I would be inclined to take Herbalism and Mining for two reasons. One, you gain extra XP for picking/mining the nodes, which is helpful for levelling. Two, if you save all of the items you pick/mine on a bank character somewhere, you can use them to level up one of the aforementioned professions extremely quickly once you reach 85.

I hope this guide gets you up and running on your death knight as fast as possible, and playing competently in Outland dungeons. Please feel free to post any comments or criticisms, and check back soon for more DK talk!


- Tabseh