If you missed out on the Beta test, or you didn't get to play that much, I have some advice that might help you understand the way a Death Knight tank is going to interact with your group.

Trash:

It takes a few GCDs to establish threat on a trash pack. The Death Knight is likely going to open up with an Icy Touch and a Plague Strike on the "main mob". This will apply Frost Fever and Blood Plague (and Ebon Plaguebringer if he's Unholy). The Death Knight will then Pestilence to spread the diseases from the "main mob" to the rest of the mobs. The remaining three runes will likely be used on Death and Decay. Death and Decay can be used before the Pestilence combo for a little better initial threat, but if you spread diseases first it will hit harder.

What does this mean for a healer?

Give it a couple of GCDs before you drop a heal. Don't HoT the Death Knight up before the pull, or you're going to get agro on everything but the "main mob". When you see the Death and Decay go out you can likely begin healing. The Death Knight will probably use a short cool down defensive ability to mitigate damage at the onset of the pull anyways.

What does this mean for a DPSer?

Well there's about one more week to go until Death Knights are unleashed on Azeroth. I finally have all of my preparations complete:

• Materials for 1-350 Blacksmithing
• Materials for 1-350 Jewelcrafting
• Quest turn-in materials for Light's Hope Chapel
• Quest turn-in materials for The Blasted Lands
• Quest turn-in materials for Zangarmarsh
• Glyphs for grinding ready
• RAF account leveled to 60

There is a bit that I have to do still:

• Go to the grocery store and buy food for a week
• Tell my friends not to worry if they don't see me for a week
• See my parents before Wrath

I have decided to spec Unholy for leveling. I leveled as many different specs during Alpha and Beta, and while I thought Blood was decently fast and efficient while I was specced that way, I had a more enjoyable experience leveling as Unholy.

Here's the spec I am hoing to use most likely:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight=2055020500000000000000000000...

A couple notes on this spec:

 It's been a while since my last blog post. I have, however, been pretty busy. I have tanked every 5 man and most of the Heroic dungeons. I have also Main Tanked a few Naxx 10 runs, a CoA 10, off-tanked a Naxx 25, and a CoA 25. I have been a few variations of Unholy, and Frost throughout this.

The sum of my experiences is that I enjoy boss tanking as Frost more than any other spec. I'll link my proposed spec and Glyphs.

Let's take a minute and analyze talent by talent a spec I think has some potantial in the next push to be a great tanking spec.

BLOOD

Blade Barrier (5/5): After your initial 6 runes go on cooldown and proc this, every rune thereafter is considered your last rune as long as you use it before the next rune comes up. What this means is that once you get your rotation going Blade Barrier has a near 100% uptime. 10% parry is amazing for tanking. This talent is a must have.

FROST

Improved Icy Touch (3/3): More damage to a core rotational ability, more speed reduction on Frost fever, and required for Icy Talons. Need I say more?

Glacier Rot (2/2): Everything you fight should have at least Frost Fever on it, so a 10% damage increase to your core Frost abilities for 2 points is a great investment.

Toughness (5/5): 15% armor. Standard tanking talent. Grab this.

Black Ice (5/5): 10% damage to all of your core Frost abilities, and your disease damage. Not much better at this point to spend points on.

Icy Talons (5/5): Icy Touch should be in your rotation, so this is like a permanent 15% haste buff. This will lead to more threat, and more Killing Machine procs.

Lichborne (1/1): 25% miss, and fear immunity for 30 seconds when you need it. Great burst mitigation talent.

I've been asked by many people to put up something about Mutilate. I will preface this by saying that the goal of my recent Mutilate experience was to gauge how it performed vs. an equally geared and skilled combat swords rogue.

First, one intriguing thing that I was hoping to test was a rotation posed by Left at EJ that 3-5s/5r would be a superior rotation to a "3 finisher" cycle. Essentially you end up cutting a lot of SnD time, but your Rupture uptime is pretty high, and all of your Ruptures fall pretty easily under Find Weakness. I ran this cycle on Illidari Council, and Brutallus.

On Brutallus I parsed about 2200 DPS with 1 Bloodlust. I was using WSC and AToL for trinkets. Deadheadd out dpsed me by around 150 dps, and I out dpsed myself the following week as combat swords with the same gear. Perhaps a "3 finisher" cycle could have been better, or perhaps combat swords is really that much better on a stand still fight.

On Illidari Council I got one of my more impressive parses of 2324 DPS. Now I can't really attribute this all to Mutilate spec. I believe that having Fleet Footed upped my DPS by quite a bit on such a movement intensive fight, but honestly I was in a stacked group and got all of the Bloodlusts. I also used the 3-5s/5r cycle here.