Trial of the Terrible Death Knight

Wait, before you leave, this isn't your normal "lol I was in a random with a terribad DK". I swear! This had a twist.

I was the DK.

I'd not played this guy in months. He's my bank alt for storing old world mats. So if you need a BoE tier 1 belt of some scarabs, he's got 'em. If you need a geared tank, look elsewhere. He's just barely at the heroic defense cap. Maybe 22k unbuffed. It's enough, but, just enough, not actually good. Still, this is about what I tanked with a year ago.

He started off as blood. That was a lot of fail. I went frost. That was much less fail. But still some fail.

I was amazed to learn that aggro isn't a magical field of perpetual taunt. When I'm in all blues except one green and a ToC stam trinket my aggro is less than full 226+ epics. Surprising. Aggro didn't seem at all related to the gear of the other players. I'd lose aggro to someone in blues and keep aggro off someone in full epics.

Responses were mixed.

In HCoS the healer said "Please tell me you're at least defense capped." I said I was and we went along our way. Aggro was tough, but we got through it and I got a drake.

In HHoL we had a lot of wiping and cycled through probably 10 different people by the end. At one point the healer started ragging on me for not interrupting one of the mobs, somehow I was the only person who could have possibly done it; not the mage or warrior, just me. He said it was funny that I have two interrupts, I said I liked the joke, he said "25k hp? Fuck you." and then left. Then we got a healer that wasn't an incompetent fucktard and killed the rest of the instance. The douchy healer was also the one who started mocking someone's gearscore right about as he zoned in. I have no clue how he didn't notice mine.

Most of the time people didn't say much of anything. DPS would pull aggro and the healer would heal them and no one seemed to get the idea that the tank was at ilevel 200 compared to their 232+.

I needed to work on my glyphs.

But why a DK?
I had him shelved for so long, why now? Well as these things go... Molten Core. I was lucky with the RNG and planning, did a MC run with the eye of sulfuras reserved, and it dropped. But I need 7 more blood of the mountain and two ingots. The ingots I can get from my weekly runs. The blood, I figured I'd farm the destroyers with my DK. He was promptly beaten down because his gear was terrible and I didn't know how to play him.

So now so he can farm blood of the mountain and so I can try out something new, I'm gearing up my DK through random heroics. As a tank my queues are effectively instant, though I have run into some delays from healers leaving because they get scared by less than 30k health. Since first writing this, my gear has improved dramatically. I now have a 245 level helm and T9 chest and shoulders. This is in addition to a few epic upgrades from heroics, including new weapons. Healers don't leave anymore and my aggro has gone up by a ton.

Also since writing this I've gotten all the blood of the mountain I needed. I offered 250g, people said it costs more than that. I bought it for 250g anyway, proving that the only true price is what the buyer and seller agree to. For a moment the true price was 50s, I guess someone posted based on vendor price.

On the subject of DKs and underpriced items: A DK tried to sell Zom's Crackling Bulwark in trade for 90g. I sent him a tell right then and walked ten yards to open trade. Undercut the one already in the AH and after the AH cut I got 715g. 625g for at most 60 seconds or 'work' yielding a gold/hour of 37,500 and I didn't even have to fudge the numbers by claiming half the time was 'semi-afk'.