Originally Posted by urotas

Would having an extra 5000 health be insignificant to you too? For considering physical damage having an extra 5000 health is worse than going from 72.29% armor mitigation to 75% mitigation, since the damage reduction will both help you survive burst and lower the amount of damage you are taking, thus requiring less healing landing in between hits to have enough to survive the next one. Is the health you are getting from VotTW insignificant too because it's "only a lifebloom tick"?

Sure it's true that armor won't help you against magical damage, but by and large most boss damage is still physical, and most of the dangerous burst is either purely physical or a combination of physical and magical damage.

Originally Posted by Zurai

Since most 25-man Ulduar bosses actually do hit for about 80-100k unmitigated, I'm pretty confident in saying that the 10% mitigation from 5/5 Toughness is worth far more than any other 5 talent points you can spend as a tank.

Still, let's compare. 6 expertise is 1.5% less chance to be parried. Let's say you're at 20 expertise before Veteran of the 3rd War; that reduces your chance to be parried from ~10% to ~8.5%, a 15% reduction in parries. However, Unholy DK tanks only attack with blockable attacks perhaps 10-12 times in a 20 second rotation (since Rune Strike cannot be parried, and most if not all of your autoattacks should be Rune Strikes). That means, over the course of a 10 minute tank-and-spank boss fight -- which doesn't exist in Ulduar -- you'll be parried roughly 33 times with 20 expertise and 28 times with 26 expertise. Now let's further assume that you have 60% avoidance -- more or less standard for an Uld-25 DK tank -- and that the boss is hitting for 25k damage on average per hit. Further, I'm too tired to try to model parry haste, so let's turn it into a Windfury attack and give the boss an instant second attack instead of the actual effect which is far less dramatic.

Of the 33 extra boss attacks with 20 expertise, roughly 20 are avoided completely, leaving you with 13 attacks for 325,000 damage from the parry-haste. With 28 extra attacks, roughly 17 are avoided completely, leaving you with 11 attacks for 275,000 damage. That saves you 50,000 damage -- that's awesome, right?

Well, we're not done yet. Now let's compare that to the total damage done during the fight. Most bosses have a 2.5 second swing timer. Thus, over the course of the mythical 10 minute tank-and-spank fight (which is intentionally weighted towards expertise reducing parry-haste), you're going to be attacked 240 times and hit 96 times, for 2,400,000 damage. With 20 expertise, that's 2,725,000 damage; with 26, it's 2,675,000 damage.

We're still not done, though. That 20 expertise build actually takes 10% less damage from every physical attack because of 5/5 Toughness. So, instead of 2,725,000 damage, it instead takes 2,452,500 damage. That's 222,500 damage less than the expertise build.

And, again, these numbers are intentionally tilted to favor expertise. In most actual Ulduar fights, you're going to get maybe one less parry-hasted attack landing on you. Also, your build doesn't actually net you 6 expertise; you don't have 5/5 Rage of Rivendare, you have 3/5. So it's only 4 expertise and 1% less chance to be parried, which further tilts the numbers towards Toughness.

Originally Posted by Zurai

Second, even fully buffed, with current Frost Presence, and including the +25% armor buff from certain crit heal talents, DKs don't come close to approaching the armor cap (just shy of 50,000 armor against level 83 mobs). I have roughly 31k armor unbuffed, and I wear several +armor items that most DKs won't bother with; with full buffs and Ancestral Fortitude, I'm still under 40k. And that's with full 5/5 Toughness. You need to have 39,924 armor before Inspiration/AF to hit the armor cap. Druids might be able to hit that, but DKs sure can't.

Third, spouting off nonsense about "the difference is less because buffed armor is higher" is just that -- nonsense. To emphasize this, I'll show you the capped numbers:

Originally Posted by Vegelus

Weren't bosses (and maybe all mobs on boss fight) made immune to our "mocking blow"? That'd be it.

Originally Posted by cdoctor

So i currently have alot of gear now and alot of stuff to play with. My question is, as running destro 0/13/58, I stand close to 2319 sp no fel armor, 498 haste, 358 hit. My question is, whats the haste number we should be pushing for, or should i stack more gear with spirit/sp and drop some haste? Please let me know, thx.

Originally Posted by fathunter

Not sure if this was brought up, but has anyone noticed that a lot of bosses are untrackable by hunters?

Ignis: Yes
Razor: Yes
XT: No
Council: Yes
Kologorn: Yes
Hodir: Yes
Freya: Yes
Thorim: Yes
Mimiron: No
General: No
Yogg: No
Algolon: No

This leads one to wounder, wouldn't it be worth to dual spec two different mm builds. One that is the cookie cutter build and one that puts those points to better use? Say putting 3 points from imp. tracking to hawk eye, or taking out all the points in survival and putting them in bm/marks?