World of Warcraft: Tank or DPS for Leveling?


Currently, I am homing in on level 90 with my death knight in World of Warcraft. That’ll mark my 4th level 90. It took me slightly longer to work on my death knight as I had prioritized my other 3 90’s much higher. However, getting slightly bored of dailies and with the patch approaching quickly, I figured it might be better to spend time on developing my other toons rather than focus completely on gearing at this stage.

That said, the other major issue I had in being somewhat hesitant in leveling my death knight was getting occasionally frustrated during the leveling process. Having already gone through every quest a few times, there’s nothing really new to excite me. More than that though there are certain areas in the game that I completely dread. But in a few instances, I pretty much was ready to throw my keyboard against my window.

Most of my frustration revolved around choosing a leveling spec. Since I primarily DPS, I went with frost especially since I geared him more heavily during Cataclysm. While the gear lasted up until Kun-Lai summit, some areas were tougher as a pure DPS class. Areas with high mob density would slow me down since I would attempt to maneuver around mobs to avoid unnecessary fights. Yet in some instances there wasn’t any possibility to avoid them. More than once I found myself running back to my corpse as the mobs ganged up on me and I found that my death strike wasn’t doing enough to keep me alive.

As I moved into Kun-Lai summit, there was one area I knew which had some nasty high density mob action. So I switched over to blood, having selected both DPS and tanking gear as I quested. Lo and behold my problems instantly went away. Not only was I surviving with ease, I could bypass certain quests several times faster due to the fact that I could group up mobs without worrying about dying. My DPS did take a slight hit but overall I found myself progressing faster because I no longer worried about survival.

That leads me into the theory that tanking specs tend to go a bit further because of the survivability factor. Part of the problem is accidentally pulling mobs or being quickly overwhelmed. While a DPS spec can down mobs faster, I feel that the overall time in comparison is comparable because you have less down time either healing yourself or resting.

Now, this may change a bit depending on the class. For instance, at one point, I ended up switching my pally from protection to retribution in the middle. I think his damage output wasn’t high enough and that I still saw him taking a fair amount of damage. I might have to experiment with this a bit when I get the chance to level my warrior. I did level her mostly as protection back during Cataclysm and found the spec to be loads of fun.

Regardless, this is primarily for leveling. Once I hit 90, I’ll switch back over to frost for gearing since I don’t want to enter instances as a tank.

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