Help assessing a DK tanking performance

Hi I am an officer in my guild, and we are pushing for heroics at the moment. We are currently being held back by frequent deaths by one particular DK tank (who was recruited as our main tank).

The healers find him really difficult to keep alive, with him dropping from close to full health to dead in very little time

Here is a URL of his armory page

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/dathremar/calìane/simple

I have also included a worldoflogs parse of our first successful heroic halfus kill

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-zecjp ... boss=44600

Now I freely admit tha I am a true DPSer at heart and know little about tanking. Despite this, I have undertaken to look at his spec / gemming / rotations from my reading at elitist jerks. I just wanted to check my observations before I bring the issue to his attention.

Firstly my issues with his spec is his selection of the On the pale horse - this seems to be a purely PVP choice. Also I am not sure why he is missing blood parasites - that seems pretty awesome for healing melee, and less heals on melee means more heals on tank. Also both suggested specs from elitist jerks have at least two points in endemic - is there a reason to skip this talent. We are reasonably melee heavy, so I would prefer him to miss the interrupt talent to focus on survivability

His glyph choice of Death strike is geared towards threat, but given he goes spat - I would have thought death coil would be better.

Looking at his log of the heroic parses it seems he doesn't put up diseases for most of the 8 attempts. According to my analysis he put up frost fever three time in 8 fights, and blood plague once. He starts the fight tanking a drake with no one else on it so he can't rely on other people to put up those debuffs.

He doesn't seem to use rune tap or blood tap much at all. I am not 100% sure if his use of cool downs is appropriate.

This issue has really come to a head as we have recruited another warrior tank, who despite much poorer gear is able to survive fights with ease, where as the DK drops like a sack despite him being in full epics.

I would love to know your opinions incase I am off the mark, as we are interested in helping him reach his full potential, rather than benching him

Thanks in advance

I only looked at the last (successful) pull, things that are obvious:

You're correct, not putting up diseases, so nether scion didn't have any damage reduction debuff for the first minute and a half or so, nor attack speed debuff for a similar amount of time.

He doesn't appear to be using Bone Shield at all (20% damage reduction for 4 attacks, 60 second cd).

He's doing an awful job of keeping his blood runes on cooldown, which means very poor blade barrier uptime (6% damage reduction, should be up close to 100%).

He uses DRW (20% parry chance for 12 seconds) once (90 second cooldown).

He doesn't use Lichborne at all.

These are all pretty damn basic parts of DK tanking, so a bit worrying to see in a tank doing heroics.

Rhiannon wrote:I only looked at the last (successful) pull, things that are obvious:

You're correct, not putting up diseases, so nether scion didn't have any damage reduction debuff for the first minute and a half or so, nor attack speed debuff for a similar amount of time.

He doesn't appear to be using Bone Shield at all (20% damage reduction for 4 attacks, 60 second cd).

He's doing an awful job of keeping his blood runes on cooldown, which means very poor blade barrier uptime (6% damage reduction, should be up close to 100%).

He uses DRW (20% parry chance for 12 seconds) once (90 second cooldown).

He doesn't use Lichborne at all.

These are all pretty damn basic parts of DK tanking, so a bit worrying to see in a tank doing heroics.

Thank you for taking the time to look at the logs. I was pretty sure that my analysis of his performance was accurate, but as I said, I am not a tank so I just wanted to check.

Also thanks to those you have PM'd me.

I has been brought to my attention that I may have posted in an inappropriate forum - if so I apologize and feel free to move this post.

I am very impressed with the degree of depth people put into looking at combat logs at this site - well done

Yeah, this really isn't the right forum for this request. I guess the off-spec forum makes the most sense. I'll move it there.

I've played a DK tank (and sometimes prefer it over my pally) so the basic stuff is this:

http://wowtal.com/#k=Bsq3gnbmv.avv.deathknight.0z6lp is one of the better specs to use. The armory page no longer works so I can't comment on what he had.

Managing cooldowns is essential as a DK. Bone shield and Vampiric Blood especially help. He only used Anti-Magic Shell four times in the entire run, so that can definitely improve. Disease uptime through Outbreak and regular IT/PS is necessary for full survival given the debuffs. Using Death Strike at opportune times really goes a long way to living. His overheal on Death Strike is almost unacceptable.

To be honest he'd probably be more suited to using a different tank class. DK's are by far the hardest to get the most out of.