Infraction for Lichloathe: 8. All accounts must have a valid WoW profile.

• Narcosleepy · 10/13/10, 7:07 PM

Post: Cataclysm DK endgame tanking [4.0.1]
User: Lichloathe
Infraction: 8. All accounts must have a valid WoW profile.
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Fix your profile, there is no such character on that realm. We don't allow anonymous posting here.

Original Post:

Howdy gents. Popping in to try and save Disargeria some of his sanity. Note that in all contexts, Diseaseless refers to applying Diseases only through Outbreak.

Diseaseless: All indications are that this will be optimal as long as anyone else in the Raid is providing the attack speed debuff. If for some reason it isn't, there is currently no reason to apply Blood Plague as Blood outside of Outbreak. Frost Fever can be applied on a rotating basis by Outbreak and then by either a floating Death Rune from Runic Empowerment or making use of 30s Blood Tap. Don't worry, I have data.

In my baby (BloodSim), I ran a number of extensive comparison tests between a Diseaseless build and a full Diseases upkeep build. Relevant settings:

- 20% avoidance
- 8000 base attack power
- 3.8 speed weapon dealing, base, 1469-2728 damage
- 0 Haste
- 75% Blood Shield
- Boss swing timer of 2.0 from 18k-23k damage (this is probably pretty low but player armor is not factored in the sim)
- 25 six minute fights per setup

The results from switching to Diseaseless were as follows:
- Loss of roughly 5.7% damage and 4.7% threat
- Gain of 19.5% healing and 18.5% absorption
- 2.6% less damage taken
- Average gain of 8.6 Death Strikes over 6 minutes
- Quality of life gains not measurable

This is with pretty low stats, but no one can argue that Diseases scale well - We all know that they scale like a bad joke. The real contribution they have is to boost Heart Strike damage. Given that the 18.5% extra absorption resulted in 2.6% less damage taken, we can make a general assumption that the 19.5% extra healing will also mitigate roughly that much more damage if Death Strike is used optimally. Given a certain margin for error, by going Diseaseless you are trading 5% threat for 5% damage mitigation.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a gain, especially with the changes to mana and healing. While, as someone else said, threat is always going to be a concern for end game tanks, I find it extremely unlikely that encounters will be tuned so tightly that 5% threat is going to allow DPS to start pulling. That, and Blizzard wants DPS to start caring more about their threat anyway, so, yeah.

[Edit: Yes, I realize the context is for 4.0.1. I find it pretty unlikely that the overall percentages are going to be much different as we reach 85, but I'm going to re-run the numbers in a minute and see what happens anyway.]