This whole post was made of awesome and win!

I often feel a bit sorry for banking toons, sitting around in cities while everyone else goes off on adventures. My Troll Shaman is my bank alt, but I’m thinking of leveling her and making a Goblin bank alt instead, since a Goblin would love nothing more than to handle transactions all day. Yes, I know it’s silly to treat toons as if they have feelings. LOL

Think about it everyone, you know it’s true.

Once you get into it, DK tanking becomes quite… not rhythmic, exactly, but similar.

Once thing I found useful was to use Bartender and to put all my instant, no-cooldown abilities (death strike, heart strike etc.) on a separate bar, bound to easily accessible keys (1, 2, 3, 4, q, e, r, f, tab, plus Shifted versions of those), then to hide that bar completely. This forces you to rely solely on the rune/runic power display to know what abilities are available – you learn to read your rune patterns and know immediately what you can use.

I use MagicRunes for this, but using the Icon Display instead of bars for the runes – this lets me have a nice compact 3×2 grid of large circular icons like this:
F U B
F U B

It may just be because I’m used to it, but I find it more intuitive to read than a bar-based rune display. For runic power I use Magic Runes’ bar, and have made it quite large, with the actual amount of RP displayed prominently on it.

Rules of thumb for runes goes:

blood rune = heart strike if enemy count is equal to or less than three, blood boil if greater.

frost rune = pair it with an unholy rune for death strike, or use the pair to refresh your diseases if they’re gone or about to be gone and you don’t need that death strike desperately.

unholy rune = see above. You also use unholy runes for bone shield and for death and decay, which can mess up your rotation by removing half the pair.

death rune = either wait until you have a pair for a free death strike, or use it to patch your rotation from bone shield refreshes and disease/DnD replenishment. Don’t use a death rune for blood-rune abilities.

You want blood runes on cooldown as much as possible to maintain blade barrier, and keep things cooling down in general to get more runic empowerment procs and more free stuff. When everything is on cooldown, that’s when you spend your runic power.

Not very intuitive, but once you master it the sense of control is very, very satisfying.

Thanks for indulging US.

You probably want to pick up DocsDebugRunes: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/docsdebugrunes.aspx

Doing anything effective with blood or frost relies on being able to effectively work with the runic empowerment system, which means being able to easily distinguish death runes from the other sorts, since you want to save them for your paired strikes- death strike for blood, yay healing and blood shield. Blizzard’s default UI sucks for that, but DDR is a very compact and distinct package for rune management, visible blood shield uptime, and disease tracking. I luuuuurves it for my DK.