i wont dispute the fact i suck at building tanks lol, i’ve always did dps roles. your post was not helpful at all tho, just some epeen waving. care to give some actionable advice?
edit: this is a grimtools of the general idea defensively i was going for, but there’s not enough points to get any offensive skills wich sucks. i’m open to ideas.
Sure thing. You want your tank to have a shield. fleshwarped bulwark to be exact, with physical resistance ideally. You want most of your gear to have both % and flat health regeneration. Next you have to take the giant and tree of life as mandatory devotions. Max possible regeneration nodes, physical resistance nodes and some resistance reduction constellations to support your party damage. You want your tank to have either soldier or demolitionist or both. Demo gives you more regeneration via vindictive flame which is further buffed by the conduit amulet with the relevant v.flame regeneration buff. You want some “generate additional threats” skills like war cry.
That’s a quick version. Let me know if you want more tips on items.
Here’s one good example of how to tank:
Keep in mind though, his build can still kill bosses and even celestials. You can just focus on support and make yours way more tanky.
Well i do have some doubts about effects like - resistance to mobs. does it stack or only the strongest effect apply? same for damage reduction. i have warcry on my char and i was also planing to go for Ravenous Earth because of the support skill decay. My idea is to get the 25% reduction from warcry + the 20% reduction from Decay. Does it work like that, or will i only get the higher of the two? Because that being the case i’ll have to totally rethink this build. I really want to stick to Deathknight tho. I’m using a 2hander right now just because its better damage for leveling up but eventually i’m going to respec into shields.
edit: i know the sensible thing would be just to follow someone’s build, but i actually have alot more fun making my own builds and improving them little by little.
I’m totally with you on making your own build vs following someone else. If you want to stick to a DK 2H it’s just gonna make things significantly more challenging. 2H damage is overrated and while you have many options like forcewave, bone harvest, cadence or even blade arc, they won’t make your leveling process faster. A single additional component like enchanted flint will add 100% fire and burn damage to your skill. That’s a ton of extra damage, especially early on. Plus, you will die less with a good shield. Or cast much faster with an offhand.
Your combo won’t be a real support like a zdps monk, but rather a decent hitting meat ball. Which can be very fun! Id either go with the good old forcewave or bone harvest. The play style is very similar. But I’d still focus on getting good resistance and regeneration both via items and devotions. As for damage reduction, IIRC war cry will overrule decay if both are active. Best use them in rotation.
Not to be rude but perhaps you should read up on some of the game’s mechanics to answer some of the questions you have. Most of them are documented here whilst being aimed at new players, might be of interest to you.
that’s actually useful, thank you! would be much better if all that info was on the wiki too.
The wiki is user created, community maintained. That means you, me… everyone. If you want it updated then update it. That’s how wiki’s work.
and yet another thing i dislike… why on earth does storm totem needs a 5s cooldown when it has a hard limit on the amount of totems you can have up? its just annoying me to no end. when i finally get the 3rd totem up the 1st is about to expire! why u hate me so much game design guy?! =/
Because cooldown reduction has to have a point to its existence.
Because theorycrafting to make the choice to maximize your storm totem means you go look for items that reduce the cooldown.
Because without the CD you could instantly deploy 3 totems at once which would be a huge raise in DPS.
-To promote specialising in it and other abilities. You wouldn’t notice the 5 second cooldown if you had 2-3 other damage skills to use during that time / debuffs to keep up or items that lowered the cooldown on Storm Totem.
-To keep it as an active main damage ability like any other cooldown ability (like Trozan’s Sky Shard).
and how exactly is that a bad thing?
another annoyance for me now is the clairvoyant set, why the hell does it convert the fire damage from aar into aether and then goes and converts lighting into vitality? FUUUUUUUUUUUU how am i supposed to optimize my dmg type now? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Hence why no one uses the hat. 
Because it would have to be nerfed to the ground because the dps would be ridiculous. And i don’t think totems need more nerfs after the several it got in recent times.
Do you always complain about things without even trying to understand the reasons behind them? Have you tried thinking?
It has a cooldown for balance purpose. Without cooldown you could instantly deploy all the totems in less than a couple of seconds, getting the maximum dps from the start and being able to keep it constant with little investment. The cooldown is there to make the raise of the dps more gradual and to encourage players to get CDR if they want more dps. Storm Totems have a fixed attack rate and aren’t affected by neither the player’s attack speed or cast speed so CDR is their attack speed in a way. Also, you can bet your life that if cd was removed the totems would be nerfed to the ground to compensate the player being able to cast them all at once.
i wouldn’t call 17 skill points little investment tbh! and honestly, designing a damage ability to NOT be used 100% of the time is the problem in my opinion. Do you guys even dps?! Anyways this is a post where i vent my frustrations, you dont have to read it or agree, but save the condescending tone because you’re not the only sentient being in the universe, we basically disagree on this issue, doesnt mean you’re some luminary of game philosophy and design. NOT FUN!
And to the other poster above, i still play the game because i like other aspects of it, you dont have to agree with 100% on something to still enjoy it.
Again, you demostrate you’re not thinking things through. I’m talking about the investment of having the totems constantly active, not about skill points; that’s a different thing. Without the cd, you could deploy all the available totems in less the 2 seconds and call it a day.
If you want to vent your irrational complains without anyone disagreeing with you, you can write a private diary. Until that, I’ll keep commenting as long as I feel like.
out of 240 or so points ? that is little…
you could say the same about other skills as well (and it would be wrong there too…), not sure why you limit this to damage skills - or why it should be true for them but not others
This seems to be only about personal preference, not based on any kind of fact