old Cataclysm DK endgame tanking [4.x] - Page 6

bpcatt1 · 10/13/10, 4:30 PM

I believe he is referring to using plague strike on a mob that is already debuffed with blood plague... this gives a free blood boil as I understand it... effectively turning an unholy rune into a blood rune (in a roundabout way).

xVanished · 10/13/10, 4:48 PM

Random little tidbit of information, but Icy Touch does not seem to be a high threat spell anymore. Will surely affect the DK Rotation considering Tanking took a bit of a, let's just say, blunder in 4.0

Cesrae · 10/13/10, 4:52 PM

Originally Posted by Sipro

Sorry, I may have missed some of the changes made recently so can you please explain the bold part about converting the unholy to blood rune ?

Hes talking about Crimson Scourge - Spell - World of Warcraft but it does not convert Unholy to a Blood Rune. You get a free Blood Boil when you reapply Plague Strike on a target and it doesnt consume or reset timers on Blood/Death Runes.

Snifs · 10/13/10, 5:52 PM

My guild ran ICC10 last night, we managed only the first wing because of all the down time, but my threat was fine, didn't have any problems the whole run.

Now I began running some heroic dungeons, and found that I had a hard time keeping a good steady pace AND keeping aggro. With the DnD cooldown at 30 seconds it seemed that if I moved ahead to the next pack of mobs without it, I would almost always have aggro issues, when running with geared DPS.

In 5mans with DnD on cooldown, I would normally charge in with a BB, put up diseases/spread then BB again or heart strike when it was only 2-3 mobs.

Is this just something were going to have to deal with now, since DPS has increased quite a bit, and the current heroics are such a pushover?

Zerath · 10/13/10, 6:36 PM

Snifs:
I have been running heroics all day and can successfully say DKs threat was buffed. I have no issues with mobs, even with geared DPS. Try this, example of two close packs:

Pack 1:
DnD -> IT -> PS -> Pest -> BB -> DS.
[Now, if a Frost and Unholy pop before a Death or Blood, use DS, if not -> BB.]
At this point you spam BB and DS.
*trash dies*

You should have 2-4 Death Runes ready. Run to the next pack, IT-PS->Pest->BBx2-4 times. They will stick to you at this. Mind you, DPS *needs* to give you the ability to spread diseases before they go all out. We're back to Vanilla days. If they attack immediately, warn them. If they do it again, kick them or let them die. BUT! The above system worked just fine for me all day (Heroics and Naxx so far.)

By the time you hit pack 3 you'll have DnD up again. I'm running through instances faster post patch which surprised me since I hated my DK this morning. =p

TPS:
I seem to be averaging roughly 8-9k TPS w/o RS on Single Target. Is anyone else getting the same numbers?

Priority System for me:

Diseases > DS -> HS [in a perfect world where RS worked for me, it would be my dump but currently, I'm having massive issues with it so DC is my dump.]

Ripebear1 · 10/13/10, 6:45 PM

I agree. I have found even with the loss of Icy Touch threat, the bonus to Death Strike damage really makes up for it, crits are giving me around 30-40 threat in a heroic. Sometimes the only problem I find is if a Mage or Hunter decides to go full out just as i'm pulling the mob (Doesn't happen when raiding), which was obviously never an issue before the IT nerf. Otherwise Blood tanking is looking promising.

kow · 10/13/10, 7:08 PM

Originally Posted by Alhanna1

i reforged whatever my highest avoidance stat was on every piece. think i lost about 5% avoidance and got DS heal up to 105%.
I'm seriously considering going diseaseless since it seems there is so much time doing nothing without a runic dump I don't want to waste time spreading diseases.

I realize we're not there yet but if outbreak has a 1 minute cooldown and our diseases last 30s+, doesn't that mean we'd only have to use runes to apply diseases once per minute? That doesn't seem like a huge loss if it's making heart strike/blood boil more effective, especially if the new imp blood presence buff helps as much as it should.

kow · 10/13/10, 7:32 PM

so i realize that threat is way down if you dual-wield tank, but if you can spam rune strike, would you then be able to 1) put in 3/3 Scent of Blood and take the overall threat loss and 2) throw out more rune strikes instead? or would the reduced damage output on those rune strikes plus your normal attacks result in a net threat loss?

GravityDK · 10/13/10, 7:33 PM

Some observations from other threads:
• some tanks are eschewing bone shield because of its short uptime, but why would you not take a tanking cooldown when the trade-off is for a threat talent? It's a good talent, albeit needs to be used situationally for most effect, unlike VB or IBF which are general-purpose cooldowns. Bone Shield scales well when used with DRW.
• diseaseless blood has some validity, but you do not get the melee-haste debuff which is possibly crucial for 10-mans and possibly provided by others in 25s. Death Strike is not effected by diseases (not its healing nor its damage).

riggins · 10/13/10, 7:42 PM

First off, I don't know why we have 20 posts on each page talking about shit going on in 5mans. This isn't the place and it doesn't really help much at all. It doesn't matter how much RP you have in a 5man, how much threat issues, etc. Stick to what this thread is about 'DK endgame tanking'. That means raids, not 5mans.

Moving on: I wanted to address a few of the topics so far:

Originally Posted by Cesrae

While threat is a concern for now we still can hold aggro. My only question is has tests been done to see if our mastery stacks? Would be very sad to see a 11k+ DS crit get overwritten by a non crit. But Mastery is still very good considering anything less that a 6k overkill could save your life/buy one more swing timer for them heals to land.

***edited***

Second:

The Mastery is a bit tricky. I reforged all my shit to gain mastery and ended up at 107%. This however was confusing to me at the start because I wasn't getting a near 1:1 ratio of Mastery value DS healing to shielding. The results I was getting after testing in ICC solo'ing the Valk pats were:

83% Absorbed from the DS heal (Mastery rating = 107%)

It also is unaffected by VB.

I would post some WoL, but its completely whack atm, giving me a ton of inaccurate results. I have been testing pretty much all day long with people inside of Naxx10/25 and ICC25. I will post some valid parses as soon as I can. I hate seeing people make claims like this w/o backup, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

Here is a broken excert from what I'm referring to in WoL:

[13:12:21.295] Riggnaros Death Strike Riggnaros +12550
[13:12:22.714] Patchwerk hits Riggnaros 2639 (O: -1, A: 2057)
[13:12:23.065] Riggnaros's Blood Shield fades
[13:12:24.735] Patchwerk Hateful Strike Riggnaros 8447 (O: -1)
[13:12:24.981] Patchwerk hits Riggnaros 4547 (O: -1)
[13:12:25.732] Patchwerk hits Riggnaros 3992 (O: -1)
[13:12:25.936] Patchwerk Hateful Strike Riggnaros 5348 (O: -1)
[13:12:27.137] Patchwerk Hateful Strike Riggnaros 5852 (O: -1)

It seems as if it doesn't have the ability to read/report the BloodShield correctly. All of the above info that I am saying is 'confirmed' was done through manual recording of the combatlog and notepad.

I didn't have time to break down the WMO portion yet, but here is a small section of both if someone wants to do some mathlete supastar action:

WoW Meters Online - Combatlog Replay
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Q: Kind of thinking out loud, but will this DS heal/shield be effected in any way by other shields/absorbs/etc? (ie. If you take a 20k melee with 2k absorbed from a Val'nyr shield, would the DS heal/shield treat it was 20k or 18k?

To touch really quick on gearing and such, I dropped almost all of my 'armor based' items (Rotface neck / badge cloak / saurfang10 bracers) and added items with better avoidance stats since the armor values were within a couple of hundred of each other. That opens up a whole new topic. I am far from perfect and theorycrafting tank stats is far from linear. That being said, looking at the armor value writeup on wowwiki (Armor - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft) combined with everyone dropping anywhere from 2k to 6k armor (unbuffed values) I was pondering if it would give armor a higher or lower value pt for pt than it was before?

On top of that you have the debate on which is going to be more desired: Avoidance or Mitigation. Thats pretty much what it comes down to when looking at reforging and mastery stats. My guess is that it will be fight dependant. Anytime you have a mob like Algalon (fast hitting, dual weild) I would probably favor the avoidance whereas slow hitting 2h speed bosses, the mastery will prevail.

To close off on the Mastery topic: If things stay like they are atm, I hope they change either the Mastery being affected by +healing affects (VB/GS).

Touching on the Bone Shield topic that was mentioned earlier (some people not picking it up) I don't see that being beneficial whatsoever. As you can see, it does have a decent amount of reliable uptime in the pic below. This is also able to demonstrate the amount of uptime a DK can have against pure physcial dmg intake. Obv you still have AMS/Sind Trinket for the magical shit (Breaths/Auras/etc). I'm really liking the new changes. I can't wait for the 20% rune recharge rate along w/ RS changes, I think that will give us the 'smooth' feel alot of us are missing.

^Patchwerk 25m (6 players [1 tank, 2 healers, 3 dps]). We would just wipe it after hitting 10% on the boss or 6min enrage.

As far as the 'diseaseless' rotations and threat; I'll revist those tonight after we finish raids, but I can tell you right now that threat is far from the afterthought it was before w/ the IT hax. Don't even get me started on Vengeance. I hate it. It's broken. I really hope they rework the mechanic fully, but I doubt they will

In closing, I do apologize if those results aren't similar to others that have been doing accurate/viable testing. I am human and have made mistakes before, but I'm fairly certain they are as accurate as they come. Myself and 4-5 guild members put quite a few of the new changes to work for quite some time today. Again, I'm sorry for not having up a parse, but I will as soon as I can. I just wanted to get this post up because I know alot of people are raiding most content tonight and it has quite a bit of useful info.

Thanks

Dillirium · 10/13/10, 9:35 PM

i'm getting same thing as the last poster above me.

went to icc to play abit with the trash mobs, got 18.17 mastery which makes my Death Strike with 113% Shield.

[01:06:49.709] Matrox gains Blood Shield from Matrox
[01:06:50.030] Matrox Death Strike Matrox +10850
[01:06:51.468] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (932)
[01:06:51.796] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (951)
[01:06:51.796] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (1942)
[01:06:53.088] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (975)
[01:06:55.155] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (2009)
[01:06:56.286] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (2006)
[01:06:56.765] The Damned hits Matrox 1441 (O: -1, A: 664)
[01:06:56.790] Matrox's Blood Shield fades

that 10850 Death strike should have given with 113% shield a 12260.5 shield, instand it gives a 9479 shield before it breaks and you get damage, which means the shield was really a 77.31% shield.

Lichloathe · 10/13/10, 11:22 PM

That's some interesting findings, riggins. So, to summarize (so I can make sure I've got it right and know what I need to change in BloodSim to reflect what you've found). Please correct me if I've interpreted any of this wrong.

- Effects that increase the healing from Death Strike, of any kind, do not affect the absorb created by Blood Shield. It always ends up being: Mastery% * 30% of Last 5 Seconds of damage

- Improved Death Strike is actually increasing healing and they did fix that bug prior to 4.0.1 release. This just isn't displayed in any way on the tooltip of Death Strike.

- Blood Shields stack and don't overwrite eachother. I am a little confused on how you are describing how they stack, though. Given two hypothetical Blood Shields back to back, one 5000 and one 7000, which way are you saying this works:
A) You have (either actually or effectively) a Blood Shield of 12000. A hit of 12000 will be fully absorbed and Blood Shield dies.
B) You have two Blood Shields. A hit of 12000 will be reduced by 5000 and deal 7000 damage, killing the first Blood Shield. The next hit of 12000 will be reduced by 7000 and deal 5000 damage, killing the second Blood Shield.

Lichloathe · 10/13/10, 11:36 PM

Using FeS instead of IT/PS to keep Diseases up would be a pretty goofy idea.

Mindaika · 10/14/10, 12:29 AM

Originally Posted by GravityDK

Some observations from other threads:
• some tanks are eschewing bone shield because of its short uptime, but why would you not take a tanking cooldown when the trade-off is for a threat talent? It's a good talent, albeit needs to be used situationally for most effect, unlike VB or IBF which are general-purpose cooldowns. Bone Shield scales well when used with DRW.
• diseaseless blood has some validity, but you do not get the melee-haste debuff which is possibly crucial for 10-mans and possibly provided by others in 25s. Death Strike is not effected by diseases (not its healing nor its damage).

I can already think of one ideal usage for BS: tank swaps. A lot of times healers (at least mine) are slow to react to tank changes.

For example, PP: if you're the second tank in the rotation, pop BS as soon as P3 starts, when you swap, you'll have 6s or so of the reduction, and the CD should be up again.

raivyne · 10/14/10, 1:40 AM

edited out. tested in-game.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also, in looking at this post and running some numbers myself... i can't get the shield amount (modified by mastery) to add up to the healed amount with or without the talent (as I read as a suggesting in an earlier post).

Originally Posted by Dillirium

i'm getting same thing as the last poster above me.

went to icc to play abit with the trash mobs, got 18.17 mastery which makes my Death Strike with 113% Shield.

[01:06:49.709] Matrox gains Blood Shield from Matrox
[01:06:50.030] Matrox Death Strike Matrox +10850
[01:06:51.468] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (932)
[01:06:51.796] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (951)
[01:06:51.796] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (1942)
[01:06:53.088] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (975)
[01:06:55.155] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (2009)
[01:06:56.286] The Damned hits Matrox Absorb (2006)
[01:06:56.765] The Damned hits Matrox 1441 (O: -1, A: 664)
[01:06:56.790] Matrox's Blood Shield fades

that 10850 Death strike should have given with 113% shield a 12260.5 shield, instand it gives a 9479 shield before it breaks and you get damage, which means the shield was really a 77.31% shield.

Heal was 10850, so the shield for his 18.17 mastery should have been 113% or 12260.5 as he stated; instead he got a 9479, or 87.36% shield.

if the shield were being applied pre-talent the math would be as follows (i think):

(x = damage in previous 5 seconds)

10850 = .435x
x = 24942.5287

heal pre-talent = .3x = 7482.7586

shield @ 18.17 mastery (113%) = 8455.517

neither of those shield amounts (9479 or 8455.*) match up. So, am i doing the math wrong, or is there some static penalty at play that we haven't pinpointed yet (or I haven't found)? Granted, this is just one sample so it would be silly to try and glean an accurate modifier from it. Just wondering what others have seen/observed.