New blood dk help

[Orthios 271]

So, I recently got my dk up to lvl 90 and started tanking lfrs, and while I don't seem to be doing 'bad' by any means, I know I'm not performing to the best of my potential.  So, any and all help and advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Logs: 

Warcraftlogs

AMR Combat log for anyone who wants to see it.

You can safely disregard anything from siegecrafter on, as that was all on my hunter where I forgot to upload in between logging.

[Storm 426]

Rotation wise, pretty much as long as you death strike and runestrike as much as you can then you're doing it 90% right. I do notice that your disease uptimes are low (like 50% on most of the fights I checked). since you're taking the rolling blood talent you should be able to easily blood boil  to keep diseases up 95%+. it's just a matter of watching them. admittedly I blood boil instead of heartstrike a lot more often than I should, but it helps to keep diseases up as often as possible.

 

I do see a lot of potential for improvement in your cooldown usage. This is mostly a matter of repetition until you know exactly what each of your cooldowns do, and when to use them. 

 

- It looks like you're doing alright with bone shield, the amount of casts I see follows pretty closely with the fight duration. on a few fights you probably could have used it a few more times, but at least you're using it most of the time.

 

- Icebound Foritude, I have to admit even for me, this is like my last cooldown that I'll sit on until I absolutely need it. sometimes I'll vampiric embrace just to help the healers out, or I'll AMS offensively to generate some RP, but IBF I'll always sit on unless I absolutely need it. but if you're just starting out DK tanking and it seems like you're taking a lot of damage sometimes, definitely IBF more often. 

 

- AMS: learn which fights have spells that you can soak on purpose with AMS to gain runic power (most of them do) and use it as often as you can. it's a solid dps boost when you use it to cap your RP a few times per fight.

[Ceraius 34]

If you need help with disease upkeep, you can try importing this string to WA2. Its a little crude maybe, but it gets the job done.

 

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If you want some cooldown tracking auras, refer to this thread here on IV.

https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/4347-weak-auras/

 

 

About the AMS tip though. Storm is right, it is an exceptionally good tool to cap RP if you know how to use it, but as a tank I'd rather use it defensively since many fights have some magical abilities it protects you from, and it is a ridiculously good defensive cooldown imo.

[demonardvark 556]

One thing that helps is to stack mastery as much as possible. This increases your maximum blood shield and helps keep you alive. As a blood you don't really have active damage mitigation like the other tanks do, you have to take every other hit to the face. Maximizing your self heals that way is great. Also use rune tap as much as possible with your blood runes. That little self heal makes all the difference. 

[Storm 426]

AMS is also awesome defensively, and if you use it defensively you're using it offensively as well, as long as your RP wasn't already capped. it effectiveness all depends on the fight. On Sha of pride for example, you can AMS every single swelling pride. it will absorb 100% of the attack and give you 100rp every time, so this is the most perfect situation to use it.

 

But on something like immersius it isn't critical that you use AMS as the slimes are hitting the middle. Most of the time the damage you take here is minimal, but you can still AMS just to save a few hundred thousand HP, and most importantly to cap RP.

 

Now that I really put some thought into it, there aren't really any fights in seige where I go out of my way to stand in something just to soak with AMS, but there are a lot of situations where the incoming magic damage may be small, and you wouldn't think of using AMS, but if you know to use it you'll get a nice offensive boost.

[Orthios 271]

Disease/DoT uptimes are something I generally struggle with, either I forget about it and it falls off or I forget to apply them in the first place.  As for defensives, this will mostly come with learning the fights better and what does what.  Though coming from a hunter where the only defensive is deterence (my general oh-sh*t button or when I pull mobs off the tank), I'm not used to actively using defensive cds.  

[Ceraius 34]

Being a DK you have a very high amount of defenive CDs, so I'd start getting used to using them :D