Tanking Advice

This is in response to a comment someone left in my post, “Testing my Tanking in the 5 Mans pt 1.”

She asked me about the best spec and abilities to be “at the top of her game.”  And I thought I’d share the advice I gave her.  It’s good for tanking but also good for most roles as well.

Well, this is more of a druid blog, I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t know death knights very well.

I can give you some general tanking advice though.

Like I said in this post, tank a lot of randoms, either where you don’t know anyone or you only know the healer. This helps a lot with situational awareness. If you can “react” in a moments notice to what’s going on around you, that is a vital skill for any role, but doubly so for the tank. You have to be ready to keep yourself alive and be able to keep aggro off the DPS.

Secondly, knowing the fights you’re up against is always huge. Read up as much as you can before going after any new boss. That seems contradictory to what I just said, but it’s not. With as much randomness can happen during a fight, if you know what’s supposed to happen, that takes more of the “unknown” out of the fight.

Finally, take time to really read about and learn your class. The more you know, the more options you have. The right spec and gear won’t put you “at the top of your game,” as you ask. Knowing what you can do and how to deal with things when they go wrong will put you there. And that’s done by reading up on and playing your class in different situations.

It’s not good enough to have the “best spec” to be “at the top of your game,” you have to know *why* it is the best spec.

Like I said, that’s general advice, for DKs, you might want to try the DK forums at Elitest Jerks:

http://elitistjerks.com/f72/

Wow.com has a lot of data, but you’ll want to sort through all the Cata stuff:

http://www.wow.com/category/death-knight/

As for the rest, just do a Google search on “Death Knight Blog” or “Death Knight Theorycrafting.” I’m sure it’s a lot of info, but that’s what you want a lot of info. The more info you have, the more you know and as the old GI Joe said, “Knowing is half the battle.”

Hope that helps.