If you spec for survivability (HP, mastery, avoidance) or helping your healers what other talent would you take in place of LB?
I personally don't seen anything else, sure the glyph got nerfed, but LB+DC still heals you (granted not for as much as before).

If you plan to drop LB for another talent, then 1 of 2 things is happening, either your healers started to over gear the content and they no longer need the help or you are struggling with threat.
I don't believe healers are at that stage yet, and threat should be a non issue.

So no I don't believe LB sub-spec is dead.

Yeah, I run in a 10-man now and with the group make-up I have to take Abom's might. This leaves me with not much wiggle worm. I have given serious thought to dropping LB in favor of a spell interrupt spec for fights like
Nefarian. We only have 5 potential interrupts in the group for the three blast waves and 2 of those are tanks with low hit. So if we miss it's pretty much game over, which has happened a couple times.

Move 1 point from Epidemic into Virulence in the standard LB spec and reforge Hit until you have around 6.8% melee hit. That puts you at the spell hit cap. Personally I also like to get Hand of Blood with the 2 floater Blood points for that spec since it synergizes well with interrupty duty.

The Chromatic Prototypes are level 85, so with a basic set of gear you should be spell hit capped against them.

No, it's not. The nerf doesn't prevent you from self-healing, it just makes it cost twice as much RP since you will not be getting 20 RP refunded per heal.


2 points in Virulence alone would spell hit cap you against level 85 mobs. For other things you should reforge or reconsider your gearing if the strategy requires you to interrupt reliably.

First part - Yeah, that's my bad. I read the patch notes at 4am, completely misread that. Now I'm no longer depressed about wasted floating points. Thank you for pointing that out.

Second part - I wasn't bringing up Virulence nor did the other poster. He made a blanket statement that "a good set of gear will have you hit capped" which is completely incorrect. Which is what I pointed out. I'm well aware speccing in to Virulence would be the work around for that.

Now, you throw out "reforge" - I will only do that if I'm required to interrupt which currently hasn't happened. Sadly, by doing so I will also lose avoidance and some over-all HP. Which, doesn't bode well for healers. My current gear setup makes me pretty much a literal tank - healers aren't even bothered by my damage intake at this point.

While the armor tinker for gloves is excellent, the Grounded Plasma Shield has a chance to backfire and either stun you, or increase your chance to be critically hit by 100% for ten seconds. Both are pretty much guaranteed to result in a wipe.

Flask of Steelskin + the 90 dodge/90 Stam food. (My Parry is hitting noticeable DR so Dodge is priority now.)

That's it. No elixirs, no mastery. I do have Stamina Scrolls for random attempts between when I want to pop a flask (TB boss). You're the tank, you need to be able to take heavy hits.

I'll refrain from discussing the dk changes until they actually decide on what they are, calculating numbers won't help if they change just as you finish.

About the hit tests. As a Mathematics student I see a possible flaw in your test. The simulation is built on a dps scale, so your deathknight is taking constant damage that is equal to the average that a real tank would take, but in real tanking the damage is discrete: every 2 seconds 20k damage is not the same as 10 damage every millisecond for Deathstrike.
So lets look at another abstract example: The boss hits for 100% damage for 5 seconds then 0 damage for the next 5 seconds after that. So if you DS right at the end of that you get a big heal and shield, however if you miss you will DS 1 GCD later so 1.5/5 = 30% decrease in heal and shield. This happens about 20% of the time with no hit and expertise, so a 6% overall decrease in shields Plus 1% you proved simply from having less DS.
This example is abstract but even if the boss does 200% damage for 5 seconds the 100% for the next 5 that is a 15% decrease per miss.
PS. Would like to see a simple continuous addon which displays a DK's input damage over the last 5 seconds to maximize DS heal. (could be displayed like ForteXorcist) For anyone who creates or can find one like that.

And about Armor reducing the Shield argument. Armor is part of Effective health so it will always be very important, and even if you heal 25% and shield 25% of all damage you intake that is still a decrease in the other 50% so it is still very good stat only beaten straight by stamina in my opinion.

The main discussion about Stamina, Mastery, Avoidance, Hit.
Possible places this arises:
Gearing. Especially Trinket.
Gemming.
Reforging.
Now I won't discuss actual numbers because I can't really manipulate the numbers I don't know.

Except for trinkets which can be a choice of stamina vs. mastery, gearing it seems pretty easy since the different ilvl gear has exactly the same number of stats except a change of 100dodge->100 mastery so this will be part of the rest of the argument.

Gemming. Someone said to me that in this expansion there could theoretically be a soft cap in health. If anyone agrees with that I would like to hear arguments.
This person gave the example that: "If a tank can survive for 8 seconds without any healing against a boss and a healer can heal him up in those 8 seconds, then raising your survival time to 10 seconds would not help the healer, while raising your avoidance would give the healer long strings of time when he can regenerate mana."
This is the old EH vs. Avoidance argument of the old days. However I say it is fairly hard for a healer to react to avoidance, it just leads to more over heal, where in the more stamina argument he could use more efficient heals that take longer to cast, or since hp is always there and he knows it, ignore the tank for 2 seconds to heal the group and then come back.
So to me gemming stamina is an obvious choice over any of the other secondary stats since it also does not have any diminishing returns.

Reforging. To me it looks like Mastery is part of effective health, because if used correctly it means you have a shield on top of your health all the time: at this second a boss has to hit you for 180k damage instead of 150k to kill you. So once more which do you prefer EH or avoidance... Reforge for that first.
The second best stat for reforging will be either Hit or Avoidance.
Avoidance has an obvious tanking benefit and as shown above hit has tanking benefit too, however to cap hit and expertise you could get 1700 rating into your avoidance stats meaning around 10-12% overall avoidance, as oppose to the 5-7% that hit gives you, but joined with the other benefits of hit: ease of rotation, ease of interrupts, raising of threat and dps, and the RNG of avoidance argument it is hard to tell, which is better and again I'll leave it to personal choice.

Arutha, kudos on that post. I believe we can take that and elaborate even further within the Blood spec and speak about talents like Bone Shield which favors Avoidance over everything else.

With the a-typical Hit/Exp/Mastery setup my BS lasted on an average 5 seconds. Rarely going above that.

With the a-typical Stam/Avoidance/Mastery setup my BS lasted on an average 12 seconds. The longest I've been able to keep this up was roughly 25 seconds in which I popped DRW and my Dodge trinket (that's a rarity, I like to roll cooldowns, not stack them.)

This lessens over all damage from all sources which means my healers are even more laid back while that's up. I do agree, however, these setups are going to boil down to personal preference since I see a lot of people saying "The sim is correct! Why would we try anything else?" and they haven't personally tested it.

My goal in the next 2 weeks is to go back to Hit/Exp/Mastery setup to see what my healers think (again) and crunch some more numbers on my end. After this is done, I'll be posting my results.

I know they are level 85. I also said I have to take abom's might for the raid comp, which are my two floating points in the spec. If I didn't need to bring the buff to the raid my choice is easy. My current gear is <1% hit FYI.