Trust me, if you don't have enough attack power, no amount of hit or expertise will make up for the poor threat generation when you have mages/warlocks cranking out 10k+ hits.Īgility is a good stat if you can find it on gear as it increases your armor, increases dodge, and improves your crit.Īfter that, dodge and parry can be both valuable. Strength also increases your parry rating. Attack power increases damage output for spells/abilities for DK's so an increase in attack power will equal greater threat. Strength affects attack power which affects everything you do for threat generation. If you're not hitting, you are losing threat. Main thing here is, managing your threat. You can get by under hit cap if you are at expertise cap. You generally won't want to use dps gear unless it does not affect your survival.Įxpertise and Hit are important for threat generation. Defense plate typically has stats and armor geared for the purpose. You can use various trinks as needed to increase armor, but that is situational. And let's face it, you are going to use plate armor if you're tanking.
a generalized stat weight would be.ĭefense (to the soft defense cap, which is presently 540 for raids in WotLK) > Stamina > Expertise > Hit > Strength > Agility > Dodge and/or ParryĪrmor, can't really gem for that and any DK tank is going to upgrade for armor when they can. But in general, Strength and ArPen will never hurt for any dps build.Īs for tanking. The feel of a build is still important as if it feels awkward you'll never perform to the best of your ability. You have raw numbers here that will show you if you're more effective or not. Glyph of Icy Touch used to be considered the third best, but with changes to Glyph of Disease in 3.3.3, you'll want to run dual disease on Frost dps.ĭps is pretty simple by and large. As for Glyph of Disease versus Icy Touch, Glyph of Disease makes sense with 3.3.3. ( Which is made even more interesting in that you've gemmed for Strength and not ArPen)ģ) Hit and expertise are critical due to DW. ArPen became more useful with 3.3.3 due to changes to Scourge Strike, but if you have a frost sub-build, you get more out of haste. It doesn't hurt to have gear with more armor penetration, but by and large, you'll see blood dps gemming for strength.Ģ) Unholy depends largely on the build you have and gear.
Without an amply amount of strength/attack power, your hits simply aren't going to be all they could be. Much of the gear comes with ArPen on it and there are limits to the effectiveness of ArPen.
I made a few additions to reflect the more general nature of this particular discussion) It was relevant to the class in general so I added it here. (Note: I pulled this from another post I made earlier today. You really need to have a goal in mind when assembling your gearsets. The Elitist Jerks forums for DK's are a good starting place, but not the end all be all. The downside is, you really need to spend a little time planning out a build for effectiveness as you can get considerable dps or performance increases by shifting stats and talents even a slight amount. One of the coolest things about DK's is the amount of options you have for dps'ing or tanking. and your dps automatically drops to zero if you die. As for stamina, it'll never hurt a DK to have extra stamina as you will be up close and getting personal with mobs. In those cases, I'm usually helping them lower their hit rating to try and get other damage producing stats increased. As for hit though, I frequently see a 2H DK with 300+ hit and in some cases, up to 500. The above is generalized for a DK.Ī lot of the dps armor has hit built into it so getting to the hit cap is generally less of an issue. which depends on if you use 2H or DW) > Expertise (until cap) > armor penetration / crit / haste (depending on your build) > agilityĪgility moves up higher for a DK tank in this case. Comment by Archangel76For a DK, the stat values really depend on your build.