Intro

Here is a guide I created that is designed for gear preparation for Restoration Druids before entering normal Cataclysm raids. This guide should answer the following questions:

* What is the best gear available for a Resto Druid before Cata Raids?
* Which instances should I run and which should I avoid?
* What reputation should I aim for first?
* How many justice points do I need?

This guide does not consider any profession oriented specific gear (unless the items crafted are BoE). However Archaeology items are thrown in considering anyone is freely able to pick up the profession if they desire to put the time into it.

Keep in mind this guide is mostly designed around the gear priorities for 25 man raiding. Running heroics and 10 man would have slightly different priorities. For example, 5 mans would rely less on spirit because the encounters are short, and 10 mans would value mastery.

Stat Priority

For the time being I'm considering Spirit/Haste gear as what one would aim for in every slot if it was available. After that it's kind of a toss up between Spirit/Critical and Haste/Critical gear. I'm leaning towards Spirit/Critical being of a higher value in early tier here because mana regen will be a concern in 25 man raids.

Apparently I have more people checking up on my armory than I thought, and was caught dual-wield tanking! I'm not one to tell people something is good or bad as a blanket statement without knowing firsthand that it is as I am saying it is. Everybody seemed to be hating on DW tanking this past week, and I didn't see what the problem was so I thought I would experiment with it. Here's the spec I am currently using:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#tSHhzDf67StpwD,aYrOe3,10482

You have virtually the same tanking talents that 2H Frost would pick up. The main difference is that you go from SSG on your weapon to 2 x 2% Parry. This ups your avoidance by 1%, and lowers your stamina by 2%.

What was I noticing? I was doing 3500 DPS on average while tanking which far exceeds what I was able to put out as Blood. My threat was exceptionally higher than as Blood as well. Rune Strikes were happening noticably more often, and seemed to be more powerful.

The problem comes as the tanking one handers are all itemized around 1.5-1.6 speed which makes them poor choices for dual wielders that benefit from slow weapons like us. You will need to use DPS one handers which fortunately come with a bit of agility for some added dodge and armor. Perhaps Quel'Serrar is slow enough to offhand.

I always see people asking around the forums if Onyxia is soloable, if AQ20 is soloable, if ZG is soloable etc. etc. While the answer is always yes that sometimes isn't anough for some people to go out and do it themselves.

For all of you visual learners out there I made a short video of me soloing Attumen the Huntsman, Moroes, and Maiden of Virtue. This is just my first solo video, and I would have included more, but I had to eat dinner! 

If there's any specific soloable encounter you would like to see in the future please let me know and I will do my best to Fraps it. 

Enjoy! 

http://files.filefront.com/KaraAMMwmv/;12628785;/fileinfo.html 

Larger stream: 
http://www.gcguild.net/movie/mayong-solo-3-kara-bosses

PS: If you don't like the music just mute it. ;)

 GC: "Death knights seem to tank well when they have cooldowns available and take too much damage otherwise. The change here seems obvious – boost Frost presence’s mitigation while reducing the mitigation of some other abilities, especially Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield."

This is very true. I'm sure that anyone who has healed me will tell you sometimes I take no damage, and sometimes I spike somewhat hard. This is a mixed problem however. The first part of the problem is that with two minute trinkets you can roll all of your tanking cooldowns in to each other so as to have one up at all times. The other problem, as GC stated, is the strength of some of these mitigation cooldowns.

So since I have tanked all existing content as Frost (the spec people claim is the tanking spec) I thought I'd stray away from the herd a bit, and do it all as Unholy.

So far in heroic dungeons my AOE threat is insane. Much higher than when I was Frost even with Deathchilled Howling Blasts. The flexibility to be able to drop a Death and Decay every 15 seconds is very nice. The DPSers all say this is their favorite of my tanking specs so far. This is a very potent AOE spec.

I did Naxx10 with this spec last night, and was noticing a lot on bosses where only one thing is hitting me that Bone Armor was sometimes staying up for 30-40 seconds before the 5th charge was expended. That's 30-40 seconds of 40% mitigation from everything because my avoidance is so high that the charges just don't get expended.

We also did Sartharion with Tenebron up. He's the drake with the eggs in the Shadow Realm. I was able to pick up all of the drakes instantly, and do significant damage to them. In fact, for the fight I was top DPS with 3998 DPS because I was AOEing the ENTIRE fight. When I was using Pestilence on the packs of fire elementals or drakes it was hitting Tenebron and Sartharion as well. I am assuming that it was a product of large dragon hit boxes and the Glyph of Pestilence.