Split Spec Gear?

[zhris 0]

Disclaimer: Let me say in advance that I'm by no means a 'hardcore' player, I don't raid regularly, and I have no desire to excel in PvP or endgame content; I'm a casual player, and the loss of a few pecentage points here and there won't be the end of the world for me.

That being said, I'm really enjoying my DK (currently UH), and want to get into tanking. I'm not super concerned about min/maxing to the point where I need 2 gear sets, but at the same time I don't want to be a detriment to whoever I'm playing with. That being said...

1) What specs are most 'gear homogenous', Blood/ Frost or Blood/ UH?

2) When trying to gear a 'middle ground' based on the above, what should I be looking for?

Thanks!+

[Elro 47]

Quite honestly, there's not really any gear that is good for both blood and either frost or unholy. The stats they use are completely different. Blood is all about mastery, mastery, and some more mastery. Unholy and 2H Frost are all Haste and Crit, with Mastery being last. Add in the Dodge and Parry Blood uses, that isn't found on dps gear, and you've got a problem.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Elro

[Khalam 3]

2h frost + blood.

Blood is all about mastery but haste will help a bit with rune regen which can be used as active mitigation.

2h Frost goes haste > master >crit so if u get gear good gear without crit, you will have very nice dps set that can be used for tanking.

[omicron 3]

As long as you avoid crit, a very high item level and actual tank trinkets to swap out will get you farther than you think.

[Tarazet 144]

Dual-wield Frost is the only answer here. The weapons will be different, since you aren't supposed to dual-wield tank, but this is the only DPS spec that won't punish stacking Mastery.

Blood: Mastery > Dodge/Parry > Hit/Exp (7.5%) > Haste

DW Frost: Strength > Hit/Exp 7.5% > Mastery > Haste > Crit

Crit does still have some small value to Blood purely in terms of threat/DPS, but it's still going to be the stat to avoid. If you're not min-maxing, then you can just favor pieces with a lot of Mastery and gemming for Mastery and you'll be totally serviceable in both specs.

[zhris 0]

Thanks for the replies! Once I get a decent set put together I'll report back and let everyone know how it's working!

[Storm 426]

In my experience DW Frost doesn't actually work as well with blood as it should on paper. Sometime back around 525 ilvl I was trying to DW frost to go along with the high amount of haste/mastery gear I had. I was using 2x 535 1H's and my dps was barely breaking 100k. When I eventually got a heroic 2H my dps jumped to over 125k. Even though the itemization should have been better for DW, I still did easily 25% more dps with 2H frost.

In my opinion play whichever dps spec you're comfortable with, and tank with whatever gear you've got, at least until next patch. A lot of DK's are tanking with haste in their gear now, and I've even seen some using crit because they claim it helps their tank dps more than haste. Most top 10m tanks are more concerned with their dps than they are with the damage they're taking, because quite frankly tanks are rarely an issue. There are a few heroic fights that I'm tanking less damage than most of the dps, and I'm self healing 50-75% of the total damage I'm taking, and thats with a lot of dps gear.

Next patch will be different though, since dodge and parry are going to give tanks crit, they actually may be just as much of a dps boost as haste, and obviously they contribute a lot more to survivability. But even then I'd say you can get by tanking in whatever gear you have, and just swap in real tank pieces when you get them.