Answer to the Focus Magic question:

FM each other, its way way better, there shouldn't even be a question. Instead of just getting a 3% by putting it on someone else, you get 6% with the chain. Any # of mages more than 1 can all daisy chain their FMs on each other... even #s doubling up, odd numbers putting one on the next mage, making a circle. It's a no brainer... and it is what the spell is there for.


Question: In Rawr, why does it ALWAYS pick haste as the top DPS stat? With ttw/fb spec, crit gives you way more bang for the buck, and losing 8-10% crit like Rawr expects with BiS gear would be horrible.

Haste is a luxury, and nice, but to be a decent ttw/fb spec mage you need at the very least 35% crit or else you're just wasting raid space and everyone knows it. Getting 100 more haste for 2-3 more fireballs (which amounts to about 15000 more damage per minute is nothing, when 1 single crit will out perform the extra couple of fireballs you get.

Who the hell is crunching these numbers? Do they even raid?



Also, shouldn't there be a separate pvp question/answer thread so we don't need to wade through unnecessary information?

What I don't understand is all these people coming out and acting as though threat is a real concern for Blood tanks. There are only a few situations where threat is ever of concern, and those are things like Hodir and Vezax, where casters are getting incredible damage buffs that the tank has to find a way to keep up with on threat. And if you're trying hardmode for either of those, you don't have a second tank there to apply a debuff like that. Your prot warrior has gone arms or fury for the fight and your prot paladin has gone to either ret or holy for the fight. Therefore unless you have a Frost DK in raid, it's likely that in those situations you are going to need to apply that all important debuff yourself.

And Grief brings up another great point re Thorim hardmode. What happens when you're the last tank left alive, Thorim has 6 stacks on him and you don't have IIT? Most likely you are going to die extra fast as his attacks are starting to come so quickly your healers can't keep up with it.

Also, the anecdotal evidence provided doesn't seem to me to add up to a significant amount of extra damage/threat. We're hearing that it provided 5-5.6% of total damage. How much damage did Icy Touch provide? On my Vezax (normal mode) kill last night, it provided 3.0% (30038 raw) of my damage. If I don't have IIT then I lose 15% of that. Now, that only ends up being a .5% damage loss overall to me if I don't have IIT in that, but it would be a MUCH bigger raid loss if we had to have someone that would be DPS'ing (we have no Frost DK) spec into something and then provide that debuff. Prot warrior DPS is crap, so if our warrior stay prot for the fight, we probably lose 2-3K DPS, as opposed to 100-200 DPS extra from me taking Necrosis.

Overall the math just does not add up unless you have a dedicated Frost DK who will basically be following you around every fight and always on your mob to supply that debuff. It's your responsibility as a tank to have it and debuff your target, not someone else.

I think people dramatically over-estimate the effect of not having improved icy touch. It's a 6% slow. That's not even 6% less damage, because nothing (in Ulduar) does 100% of its damage through autoattacks and on-next-swing attacks. Vezax is close, admittedly. Still... solo tanking the arena? Who cares. Those mobs aren't going to kill you even if they had 0% slow, let alone 14% vs 20%. If a tank dies on Thorim, it's going to be far enough into the fight that an extra 6% slow isn't even going to be noticeable. On Vezax, a warrior can indeed keep it up just fine on Vezax while tanking or DPSing the animus because Thunderclap is AOE and they get tanked on top of each other.

As for how large the threat gain is -- did you even bother reading his post? He said 5-6% of his damage is Necrosis. That follows through for me, too, for the record. With 4/5 Necrosis, I dealt 6% of my total damage to Vezax with it on our last 10 man kill (56k damage), and that's counting the damage my army of the dead and ghoul did. Taking the various ghouls out, Necrosis was a 7% increase to my total damage, and roughly a 6% increase to my threat. What fights need the extra threat? Hodir. Vezax. Why not drop WotN and fill both ITT and Necrosis? Because you can't drop all of WotN without also giving up Blood Gorged, and because WotN cannot be replaced by another character. IIT can.

If you're the last tank alive and Thorim's only at 6 stacks, you seriously need new tanks. We never lose a tank on Thorim until 10-12 stacks. And, again, at 10+ stacks, IIT vs no IIT isn't even noticeable.

Is there a resource that has current, confirmed, and quantifiable information on our spells and totems?

For example, do pulse totems (HS, MS, MT, Cl, Tr) affect the whole raid, only your group in the raid. the X closest people to the totem, the X neediest people in range, or some other.

Another would be, what is the max distance a chain heal can jump. "The jump range of the spell is approximately 10-15 yards." I believe it's currently 10 on the live servers as the patch notes mention jump range increased 25% to 12.5 yards. 10 seems nearly worthless when people need to stay 10 apart for most boss battles.

Thanks for your help and time,

Fyst

19.52.0 mage.

I cannot seam to win rolls on trinkets and am stuck with 1 nub trinket.
So my question is should i keep my

[Sundial of the Exile]
Equip : Crit rat +84
Equip : Chance for harmful spell to increase Spell power by 590 for 10 sec

or get

[Darkmooncard: Death]
Equip : Crit Rat +85
Equip : Each time u deal dmg, chance to deal 1750-2250 aditional shadow dmg.

I want to think its the first, but I have a second question. Can it prock from periodic damage of Living Bomb and Pyroblast and ignite?

tyvm

Every fight.

That little extra mana from the healers is the difference between setting up your DK for max survivability or setting up your DK for max threat. You can choose both but then your lacking survivability you could have on a fight like Hard Mode IC, Thorim, XT, GV, and Mimiron then why do it? What fight do you need that extra threat? I'm pretty sure almost every Blood tank spec has Hysteria, you can easily stick it on yourself for the first 30seconds of a fight and get a very nice threat lead.

You have no way of saying 60% of them will be avoided when talking about avoidance, it is completely random and you just may avoid 100% or maybe you will avoid 0%. The way I look at it is if I had 0% avoidance, in a 6 minute fight I'll take 12 extra hits if I don't have ITT. You could say you will avoid 50% of them, then you are taking 6 extra attack. You could say you are taking 75% of them, then you are taking 3 extra attacks. Unless you avoid 100% of the attacks over 6 minutes you will get hit anywhere from 1 to 12+ extra times without ITT and any of those attacks could be fatal.

This is about as random as avoidance. I'm at 20 Expertise in my Survivability gear which means that I have a 9% chance for my attack to be parried by the boss. There is also the fact that Blizzard has an on and off switch for which bosses can have there swing timer reset due to a parry. Unless we know exactly which bosses have this ability or do not then we can't really weigh how important expertise is overall.

I wasn't being serious when I said that WotN was more important then either ITT or Necrosis but you were dropping ITT so you could have more threat and WotN provides no threat.

EDIT:
@Zurai
It simply comes down to if you really do need that extra threat. I personally have no threat issues on any fight besides Hard Mode Hodir, which I don't tank, and near the end of Vezax. That is why I focus on maximizing my survivability and not threat. I only have one tank spec but if I had two then I would surely maximize threat in the second.

With that logic, Anticipation isn't "needed". Toughness isn't "needed". Please. One can make the argument, which you apparantly are, that no fight in Ulduar requires you to be specced in an optimal manner, and perhaps that's true. But it doesn't change the fact that speccing for IIT is optimal, whether or not that level of optimization is required of you.

It's like a dpser not speccing into a straight up X% dps boost talent. Yeah, they don't have to. Yeah, if they don't spec into it they can probably still kill any fight. But that doesn't change the fact that it is rather irrational not to do so (unless there is something better you get in return, but there is nothing better than ITT in terms of DTPS) and that these forums are designed to discuss what is optimal, not ignore it.

Until the day when, as a tank, increasing threat outweighs reducing damage taken, dropping IIT makes no sense. And, at this day, encounter design is not at that point, nor (seemingly) going in that direction.

Trinkets with static damage spells on proc, traditionally have less DPS increase potential because their proc does not scale with your gear. Regardless of your spec, Sundial of the Exiled is a much much better choice.

Edit: Also it doesn't matter what it procs from, because they all have an internal cooldown.

Why? Why in the world do you think saying "I WILL avoid 60% of the attacks because my avoidance is at 60%." is better then saying "I may avoid 0%, 100%, or 50% because random is random." ?

You do realize with this terrible logic you are saying Feral druids don't need Infected Wounds and Protection Warriors don't need Improved Thunder Clap because other classes can bring the debuff.

I've always been pro-ITT and the reason is because people seem to say you don't need ITT at all. I would like you to realize that 100s of other people read this thread weekly or daily and that they may just not be bright enough to realize you're in a situation where you never need ITT and they in fact are not in the same situation. We have already discussed in the DK FAQ, that is stickied at the top of the page, that every DK tank should be specced into ITT anyways.

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These quotes are straight from the sticky in case anyone doesn't feel like going to the thread themselves.

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I'll be willing to take back the "You may avoid 0%, 100%, or 50%." and I'll throw this statement out instead.

Avoidance is spiky and the less amount of attacks you take means the less chance you have to take that hit and thus less spike damage. This is a reason we take SSG over SS, less avoidance but more HP for less spike damage and the ability to gem for stamina instead of defense.