Contact info

I finally got around to creating some contact info for myself (While I have freely given out my character name, I am somewhat hesitant to just hand out my personal contact info).

So for those interested, you can email me at bloody.DK.tanks@gmail.com (Yes, oddly enough bloody.tank and bloody.tanks @gmail.com were already taken), or you can leave me a voice mail @ +12345643422. (This is a Google Voice number, and as I have my personal phones already assigned to my personal GV number, this one does not have a physical phone connected to it to ring. But I will get voice mail (or SMS text messages) emailed to me, and will be able to respond to you, or even call you back.)

I've added the contact info in the side bar, and included a QR vCard for those that are so enamored with me they want my contact details in their cell phone.

In unrelated news, I am taking online college courses in addition to a regular job and family life, and this semester's workload has been a lot higher than in the past so I have not had much time to finish up the next post, let alone play much WoW. (I think I played all of 60 minutes in the past two weeks).
The rotation post is almost done and just needs polishing up and links to all the spells and abilities.

Update: I have also created a Google+ profile. Not sure if I will end up doing anything with that, and it will really depend on how many people Circle me.

Class Feedback

Blizzard has sent out a mass request for class feedback on the class forums. I think this is great, and will supply my comments here, and post them on the forums, and I hope each of you will also provide constructive feedback to Blizzard to enable them to improve us to be Bloody Tanks. When you do, please take to heart their guidelines, as this is not a place to whine about our class.

HowTo: Pulling

I've been running my level 70 Mage through some random (Utgarde Keep) Lich King dungeons, and finding that around 75% of the tanks I get are DK's. Which should make me feel good that DK's are up and coming, but many have no real idea what they are doing, or are very early in their learning stage. So here is the first of the HowTo guides to help people figure out how to tank as a Bloody Tank.

Dev water cooler

Ghostcrawler posted a new Dev Watercooler which focused a lot on Bloody Tanks and what they are envisioning for us. If you haven't read it yet, I would definitely suggest you read it.

Ghostcrawler listed three methods of active mitigation, which could be used to push Prot and Feral tanks more towards playing like Bloody Tanks. However at this point in time there is no clear path, and they may even decide to choose a fourth completely different path, or design each class with a model of their own. So I will let you draw your own conclusions for now and not comment until more information becomes available.

What is interesting though is the impending changes that Ghostcrawler announced for us in patch 4.3, which make me wish they would hotfix it in, or hurry up and do patch 4.3 already, even though I'm still not finished with the current content.

Minor Glyphs

As the last part of this Glyph series we will be looking at Minor Glyphs. While these are often cosmetic and of little importance, there are a few that can make a difference for us.

Major Glyphs

It's been a while since we looked at the Prime Glyphs. A three week vacation, and a weekend trip as a graduation party for my son kept me away, but I'm back with the next part in our Glyph series: Major Glyphs available for Bloody Death Knights.

Prime Glyphs

Glyphs are an easy way to increase our abilities and utility, sometimes on the fly with some Dust of Disappearance. Often you can come by most popular Glyphs for around 20-50 gold on the Auction House, so it is definitely within everyone's reach to get their Glyph slots populated with something that helps us do what we do best: Getting attention while taking a beating for the group.

Patch 4.2 for Bloody Tanks

Patch 4.2 will be upon us soon (MMO champion pegs it at June 28th and Boubouille is usually on the mark), so let me summarize what will be in it for Bloody Tanks.

General
There's a new daily quest hub in Hyjal called the Molten Front which, after many hours and weeks of doing dailies, will provide three vendors with some nice tanking gear. The vendors can be unlocked using 125 Marks of the World Tree. I'll leave it to other sites to give you the full lowdown on how to unlock these.

Talents: Unholy

To wrap up the series of talent posts we're going to look at what the Unholy tree has to offer for us Bloody Tanks. Unholy seems to be the preferred tree for many Blood DKs to go into for the extra talents, and there's some sweet deals to be had here.

Talents: Frost

Now that we've spent at least 31 talents in the Blood tree, let's look at the other trees to see what goodies we can snag to assist us in tanking. Again I must note that I'm doing this from a 5-man instance perspective and not a raiding perspective. This is not the raid spec you are looking for *waves hand*

Talents Part III

Time to look at the final three tiers of Blood talents to get our tanking build setup.

Tier 5
We start tier 5 off with a strong talent, Rune Tap. Converting a single Blood (or Death) Rune into 10% of your health is nothing to sneeze at, even with a 30 second cooldown. Use that at every cooldown when you're not at max health; your healer will appreciate it too.

Talents Part II

Last time we looked at the first two tiers, and spent around 12 talent points. So now it's time to look at tiers 3 and 4 and see what we must take, and what options are available to us.

Talents

I figure if I am going to provide all manner of information, I'd start at the basics, the talents, and build up from there.

The Elitist Jerks forum for DK tanking goes into detail for raiding, but leaves the heroic DK tank in the dust:

Discussion here should be on DK endgame raid tanking, both 10 and 25-man, biased to progression tanking (as opposed to taking a more casual attitude to your tanking role).

As I'm sure the raiding DK tank can read through that and follow that, I want to focus more on us bloody tanks who stick with Heroics.
I will split this out into three parts for the Blood tree, and then another for Frost/Unholy, and once I'm done I will combine them into a one-page guide for easy reference.

Agility

From http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2723732#classes:

• Dodge: Death Knights, paladins, and warriors no longer receive any bonus to their chance to dodge from Agility. Their base chance to dodge is now a fixed 5%.
• Parry: Death Knights, paladins, and warriors now receive 27% of their Strength bonuses as parry rating, up from 25%. This conversion still only applies to Strength above and beyond their base Strength.

Spectrum

Varanos is my main tank. I figure I'd be up front about that so you can check out how I spec, and what I'm wearing. It may not always be the best; I experiment with gear, so what my armory profile says may not always be what I tank with.
You will notice I am not wearing any raid gear. I gave up on structured raiding during the second half of BC. Dedicating three to four hours a few nights a week was not something I could justify towards my family anymore. I enjoy playing, but family comes first. I am no longer in a big guild either. FDIC is our family banking guild, and we are slowly leveling it up to guild level 4.
Which means I spend most of my time in the LFD tool with PUGs. My wife and oldest son have 85's, and my daughter is in her upper 70s, so grouping with each other happens whenever possible. But for the most part, we rely heavily on the LFD tool to give us a group that doesn't fail. More on that later.

First post

Just posting something to get things rolling. After much Googling I was unable to find any useful information on Blood DK tanking in blog form, so I am stepping in to try and fill the hole.

Comments are fully open. If you stumble upon this site, feel free to leave me a comment