Ensidia’s Guide to the Tanking Death Knight

1. Talents
1.1. Stats
2. Rotations and Ability Usage
2.1. Blood Rotation
2.2. Frost Rotation
2.3. Unholy Rotation
3. Consumables
4. Sigils
5. Macros
6. Addons
7. Personal Preference

Stats
Expertise: 15% or 60 expertise needed for the parry cap against bosses (almost impossible to get) – You gain 5 expertise from any talent tree (6 for Blood) and it shows in the character screen.
Hit Rating: 8% is the hit cap for 2H attacks and sepcials.
Spell hit cap is at 17% – 3% from Misery. Since we don’t have Virulence we’d need to get to 14% to be capped, which is almost impossible with the current gear available. However not all our attacks are spells, only Icy Touch, Death Coil, Unholy Blight, Howling Blast and Mind Freeze are spells. In addition to that you are required to get less hit rating to obtain 1% spell hit compared to melee hit, so make sure to check your Spell tab for your actual hit rating.

What stats to aim for
With the launch of TBC tanks started to gem for Stamina so they don’t have to rely on RNG for their survivability. Of course you might get lucky dodge/parry streaks by gemming for avoidance, but you might also get unlucky and take several hits in a row and die. A tank that gemmed for stamina could have survived that just because of the higher HP pool which also gives your healers more time to heal you up. You can always rely on Stamina because there is no RNG involved and the main goal of a successful raider should be to reduce the possible amount of RNG to a minimum. This statement holds true for all three specs which makes it easy to jump between specs without getting different gems each time.