Death knight armor penetration or defense

In a recent blue post , Ghostcrawler stated that the ArPen nerf going live in 3. He claims the reason for this nerf is that people were focusing on ArPen at the expense of all other stats. Does anyone else see the faulty thinking involved? Instead of avoiding gear without ArPen, as GC stated was the case, I often find myself choosing gear with sockets and caring very little about the stats, be they Haste, Crit or ArPen. How is that any better?

Attributes , often referred to simply as stats , are the basic building blocks for a character's combat ability. The four primary attributes are strength, agility, stamina, and intellect. These attributes appear on the character sheet under the "Attributes" section. Equipment with primary attributes on it has the unique property of swapping between the active attribute based on whatever primary is most useful to the current player's class specialization. For example, a plate helm will have equal amounts of strength and intellect on it, but only holy paladins will use the intellect, while protection and retribution paladins and the other plate-wearing classes will use the strength. Primary attributes also affect secondary attributes and the derived combat attributes.

Death knight tactics for Mists of Pandaria are presented below. Be advised that the rest of the article is significantly out of date, and that while it may contain some strategies and advice that is still relevant to the current game, much of its content may no longer be accurate. Please add any available information to this section. Death knight tactics have undergone some radical changes since they were first introduced with Wrath of the Lich King 's release, and several options that were both viable and competitive have been removed from the game. Cataclysm brought changes to the talent specs that meant this Hero Class is no longer the utility beast it once was - while Death Knights can be effective as a Tank or DPS , they are now more structured due to talent trees being more strictly defined.

Feel free to move this thread to a different category, but I figured since it has to do with tanking I'd ask my feral friends. I want my DK to tank. But, I've never had a tank and I know very little about it - least of all for a DK. So I thought I'd start here and branch out.