A little tank and spank..

So, DK tanking, seems to be my new found passion. Interestingly enough, the mechanics of it are fascinating. I have never tanked before...have been either on the healing lines or the dps side. Admittedly, I've always held a secret desire to level a paladin and try my hand at being the star of the show. Though, sadly, none of them ever seemed to get past level 20.

Why Paladin? Well I'd seen my boyfriend Paladin tank, and very well I may add, and it didn't seem to difficult for him. Where on the other hand, I've watched warrior tanks in our guild struggle to hold aggro on anything more then one mob. So, in my eyes AOE tanking = Paladin. I have been pleasantly surprised at how easily AOE tanking is with a DK.

Picking a DK was more of a rush decision and less of a thought out choice for me. After more then a year playing Alliance side on Shadow Council, the boyfriend decided he wanted to go back to playing Horde on Bronzebeard with his still, at the time, level 70 toons. So what was I to do? Level a toon from 1 - 70, very quickly, in order to be able to play with him? That wasn't' going to happen...sheesh, leveling toons on my own takes awhile. So, the most obvious thing to do was roll the DK. I hadn't played one to this point. Mainly avoiding them because I was too focused on my caster. Honestly, I'm glad I did.

Creating and leveling the DK was a totally new adventure. I got her all the way though Outlands in little to no time and was caught up with his Shaman. We were well into Northrend before I attempted tanking my first real instance. Yeah, we had 2 manned a lot of stuff in Outlands, but not with real DPS in the group. So UK was a pretty interesting adventure but..I was hooked.

Tanking puts so much spin on the game but at the same time, is relatively easy. Just hold aggro. It's that simple. Well, that sounds simple sometimes but isn't always so easy.

With abilities like Death and Decay and Blood Boil, which took awhile to get in the habit of using, AOE tanking has proven to be about as easy for a DK as it is for a Paladin. Granted, we have to have runic power in order to use our abilities, which is a little hard to manage at times. Though I wouldn't guess it to be any harder to manage then mana for Paladins and rage for warriors.

One added ability DK's have that seems to be the death of most Paladins, is magic tanking. Death Knights can spec into Spell Deflection (16-18 points into Blood tree) that reduces incoming magic damage based on their Parry chance. I haven't been able to figure out how to get my talent build to allow me to get this far into the Blood tree, but that is to be my next project. mwhahahah, I shall be stronger then a Paladin!

My second point of interest is in Death Grip. Do you have any idea how much fun it is to "snatch" an unsuspecting mob? Death grip is on a 35 sec cooldown but can be reduced to 25 sec with two points in Unholy Command. If only I could figure out how to get points into that as well.

So, we'll see what I can do, but just playing around with the talent trees hasn't let me figure out how to get points into Blood tree to get spell deflection. *sigh*