My personal preference is Outbreak, Taunt. Gives me attack speed before reaching the target, and guaranteed time to establish aggro. Mind you, my guild hasn't got enough 85 healers yet, so thats all based on 5mans, and may not continue to be true into raids.
I'm not really clear on why you would taunt on pull. Taunt has no effect if there's no one higher on threat than you.
Best pull would probably be Outbreak and BB to apply the haste debuff and the damage debuff.
Tastes like Awesome, because it's made of Awesome(TM)
Best pull would probably be Outbreak and BB to apply the haste debuff and the damage debuff.
This.
Opening with Icy Touch and Death and Decay is a loss of a Death Strike.
My personal preference is Outbreak - Blood Boil - Death Strike - Heart Strike - Rune Strike. The initial Death Strike is horribly weak, but its something. First Blood Boil regardless of whether or not someone else can provide the Debuff just to get it on the Target faster. Heart Strike to get Blade Barrier rolling and then Rune Strike really starts pulling in the big TPS numbers.
On Crimson Scourge: Even the 40% added damage to Blood Boil doesn't make it worth it. Just drop a DnD at the start of a pull and you've got all the mobs tied to you like a Perma-Taunt.
One thing I didn't see mentioned here was runeforging, and at first I thought it would be obvious, but I took a closer look.
Stoneskin Gargoyle gives me ~2k hp and 1k armor (my tank set is pretty crappy atm), but Swordshattering is 4% parry. 4% extra avoidance seems to be much, much better than a reletively crappy amount of stam, tho 1k armor still seems heavy -- I'm just not sure how heavy.
Question:
How do most diseaseless tanks find themselves pulling? AoE is normally pretty easy with Bloodboil / DnD, but on bosses I mostly just find myself opening with outbreak. Should I open with IT as the F should be back up by the time I need? Pulling with only the outbreak dot doesn't make me very comfortable.
Pull with Outbreak. It's not like any of the ranged attacks you have will do any significant amount of threat anyway (read: Icy Touch). Blowing IT will make you lose a Death Strike. You taking reduced damage is generally more important than DPS being able to light the boss up immediately on the pull.
Stoneskin Gargoyle gives me ~2k hp and 1k armor (my tank set is pretty crappy atm), but Swordshattering is 4% parry. 4% extra avoidance seems to be much, much better than a reletively crappy amount of stam
Over the last few days I've been discussing this and there is some strong rationale to support swordshattering once you have 'enough' stamina. "Enough" is likely to be when you're in all epics or pre-raid blues. Reasoning is as you suggested: the additional HP is no longer as important as it was in Cataclysm, since we have so much longer to survive than the prior two-shot death bosses; helping your healer with mana is through avoidance not stamina; the additional parry helps more with mana conservation than the extra armour.
About Stoneskin Gargoyle vs Swordshattering.
This will depend a lot on your other stats too, like current amount of armor, avoidance and stamina. Remember that DS will always minimum heal for 7% of your hp's, even if you did not take any damage in the preceding 5 secs. Armor will mitigate a lot of damage over time too. It depends on fight mechanics too, adds and magical damage.
But as GravityDK pointed out, I think it's safe to assume that at higher gear levels with a decent amount of stamina and armor, Sworshattering will conserve more mana. Since armor value diminishes a bit nearing the armorcap, and 4% undiminished Parry is quite a lot.
Since armor value diminishes a bit nearing the armorcap, and 4% undiminished Parry is quite a lot.
This is coming back to vanilla armor vs. stam debate.
Armor value never diminishes. Same amount of added armor will reduce the damage taken by the same amount no matter if one is at 50% reduction or 70%.
This is coming back to vanilla armor vs. stam debate.
Armor value never diminishes. Same amount of added armor will reduce the damage taken by the same amount no matter if one is at 50% reduction or 70%.
Armor damage reduction diminishes, going from 50 to 55% DR requires less armor then going from 70 to 75%. So Mitigation diminishes too. Your time to live doesn't though. You can find an excellent explanation here Diminishing-Returns-Armour
Yes I know that article. I'll just quote this line from that article: Mitigation is subject to diminishing returns, but survivability is not
Like I said, armor doesn't have diminishing returns. Adding more armor will never suffer from diminishing returns, you always get full bang for your bucks.
I'm not really clear on why you would taunt on pull. Taunt has no effect if there's no one higher on threat than you.
Best pull would probably be Outbreak and BB to apply the haste debuff and the damage debuff.
Taunt has the effect of locking the target onto you for a fixed duration, even if someone would otherwise pull aggro. For initial threat and survivability, Outbreak, Taunt while running in, BB once the boss is in range, then DS, RS, HS.
This is coming back to vanilla armor vs. stam debate.
This assumes tank damage intake in a raid makes DS always heal for more than the minimum 7% of HP. I've had the bloodshield addon running all the way from 81 to 85 HC 5-mans and there's very few bosses when the DS would proc a heal larger than 7% HP. Provided this is the case, a larger hitpoint pool will increase both the heal (which may be overheal, remember just because you took less than 7% in the last 5sec doesn't mean you're>93%) and the shield.
Clearly, this evidence is anecdotal and of a non-raiding tier, but it does suggest that the value of stamina is at least occasionally linked to more than EH. In the old Stam vs. Armor debate, stamina did nothing for healer mana. In our case, it may very well do so.
I'm not really clear on why you would taunt on pull. Taunt has no effect if there's no one higher on threat than you.
Best pull would probably be Outbreak and BB to apply the haste debuff and the damage debuff.
I found myself doing this frequently in wrath on my paladin.
Threat is never a problem after 3 seconds, however with trigger happy DPS, it's very easy for them to pull before I hit a few times (Or if I miss a big threat attack).
Having 2 taunts means you aren't wasting your only taunt, too.
On pulling... if the fight isn't a dps check I pull with outbreak... and if someone flexes their epeen to hard I taunt and tell them to keep it in their pants till the mob actually gets to me. If its a zomg dps check I pre-pop bone shield > D&D just beyond their aggro range > horn > outbreak > HS > RS.
On the topic of minimum heal from DS:
I think alot of it comes down to timing. Many bosses now have a mechanic of some kind where they pause from hitting the tank to do something else. While they are doing 'something else' DS often shrinks down to the minimum, often from not much above the minimum. Frequently something else turns out to be a cast / breath / ect and I will get hit quite hard after this 'lull' period. So, if I use my DS during the lull I geta minimum heal, if I wait until right after this big hit I'll get substantially more than the minimum heal.
Knowing the fight, when and where the damage is coming from and if you can survive that 'next' big hit to DS afterwards makes up a big part of DK tanking. Since our tanking involves 'healing' it has the same kind of requirements as are being placed upon healers this XPac - understand the type of damage in the fight, what is and isn't potentially lethal and what is the appropriate time to use an ability.
One simple example of this is Nezir. His melee hits are, frankly, pathetic, and while his aoe pulse can get high towards the end of the phase its not a huge deal, I'm sitting at minimum heal to slightly above it most of the time. However, immediately after a permafrost cast my DS is lit up for large numbers. Since its easy for the healer (druid in this case) to keep me topped off going into the permafrost I let both sets of runes refresh, pop a DS right after the permafrost and then another once the shield falls and/or I'm about to loose the boost form the damage timing out. This lets me jump my health bar back to the point where hots and a nourish are sufficient instead of them burning mana to top me up. Especially given the fact that his ability does frost damage DSing in the moments prior to its use would be an utter waste.
basically... I'm not concerned about the minimum heal value since I can almost always find a portion of the fight where it will be significantly above minimum by either waiting on runes to get closer to full or sitting on full runes for a second or two.
Keeping low damage income topped off isn't the healer mana drain (they have a specific super efficient heal for that) its handling large aoe damage (very expensive spells) and large spikes (again expensive spells) that drains their mana. So being able to keep damage income to a level where they can primarily use efficient spells to heal the tank and save their mana for expensive aoe heals is likely more important to overall healer mana conservation than total damage taken #s once they can ~ keep you up w/o resorting to expensive abilities.
Another note about the timing of our special healing abilities, the rune tap glyph is quite powerful (at least to me) so far in content. For anyone else using it I know that after talking to my healers about it their general recommendation was that using it more towards the middle / end of a aoe phase (such as empowered breath on halfus) is more beneficial than using it at the start. Since they find it more likely to cause them to over heal when used early.
Pretty sure you're thinking of Death Grip. Dark Command doesn't have a forced attack component. All it does is put you a predetermined percentage of threat over and above #2 on that particular mob's threat table, but if you're not actively throwing Rune Strikes on it immediately after your likelihood of losing threat again is very high.
Both Dark Command and Death Grip place a debuff (it reads "taunted") on the boss or mob that forces it to attack you for 3 seconds regardless of threat. It is applied even if the target is attacking you.
Mind that this is IN ADDITION to placing you on the top of the threat list for the boss, which won't happen if you already have aggro.
Last edited by SmithReplica : 12/16/10 at 5:36 PM.
Yes I know that article. I'll just quote this line from that article: Mitigation is subject to diminishing returns, but survivability is not
Like I said, armor doesn't have diminishing returns. Adding more armor will never suffer from diminishing returns, you always get full bang for your bucks.
I don't know about you guys, but my experience has been that healer mana has been one of the key deciding factors in a lot of fights. As a result, I'm planning on using Swordshattering to see how that goes. I think I've reached a point where I have enough HP for the content I'm seeing. OTOH, things aren't dying fast enough that healers can still end fights with comfortable enough remaining mana. A few wipes have been the result of healers running dry. Swordshattering may be more RNG prone than the guaranteed reduction of armor from Stoneskin Gargoyle, but the back-of-the-envelope calculations I've done say that 4% more parry reduces incoming damage significantly more than 4% more armor over the course of an average boss fight.
As for pulls, I tend to do outbreak -> death strike -> blood boil -> heart strike -> rune strike -> death strike, or some variation on that theme. that gets the debuffs up as quick as possible and spaces the two death strikes out enough that there's no risk of blood shield overlap. The only slight problem is that the first two GCDs have relatively low threat and I have had overeager DPS pull off me during that phase. Sometimes I let them eat a couple of hits to the face so they get the idea that blowing all their cooldowns while the boss is still running into melee range is not a smart idea, but mostly I'll taunt off them and explain politely that I'm prioritizing my debuffs over threat, so they need to wait just a little longer.
The only slight problem is that the first two GCDs have relatively low threat and I have had overeager DPS pull off me during that phase. Sometimes I let them eat a couple of hits to the face so they get the idea that blowing all their cooldowns while the boss is still running into melee range is not a smart idea, but mostly I'll taunt off them and explain politely that I'm prioritizing my debuffs over threat, so they need to wait just a little longer.
Just taunt shortly after your initial Outbreak. The mob will stick to you for its duration, which is long enough to get you around to your Death Strike (which is significant aggro). Taunt is also off the GCD, so it won't interfere with your rotation.
I've ran into a very serious issue when me and my guild were doing the omnitron defense system (10m) the other night. They kept critting me! Here a WoL of our kill World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis. Feel free to browse the other attempts aswell.
I have ticketed a gm who responded with: We aren't aware of any issues but we will investigate.
I am not sure if it is related but I had just respecced before a raid and got 10 second Rune CDs even though Improved Blood Presence should lower it to 8.3 seconds. Now considering that both the Rune regen boost and the 6% crit reduction are tied into the same talent, it might be possible that a similar bug happened to you. How did your Rune regen look like when you got crit?
(I fixed it by just changing Presences mid-combat.)
I am not sure if it is related but I had just respecced before a raid and got 10 second Rune CDs even though Improved Blood Presence should lower it to 8.3 seconds. Now considering that both the Rune regen boost and the 6% crit reduction are tied into the same talent, it might be possible that a similar bug happened to you. How did your Rune regen look like when you got crit?
(I fixed it by just changing Presences mid-combat.)
Do any of those bosses have any sort of attack speed reduction debuff? Those affect rune cooldowns too.
Really, IMO they should make Rune Cooldowns unaffected by external haste debuffs (But still affected by buffs like Heroism/Blood Lust/Ancient Hysteria/Time Warp) when in Blood Presence for that reason. I can't imagine any Blood tanks deliberately stacking haste any time soon.
It's just one of the many Bugs that made it out of Beta intact. Originally it was just people getting Crit in Instances, and Presence-Switching fixed it. Now it seems it also affects Rune Regeneration. Last time I heard of it was pre-4.0.3a so I thought they'd fixed it. Guess not.
Originally Posted by Ekeln
Do any of those bosses have any sort of attack speed reduction debuff? Those affect rune cooldowns too.
Really, IMO they should make Rune Cooldowns unaffected by external haste debuffs (But still affected by buffs like Heroism/Blood Lust/Ancient Hysteria/Time Warp) when in Blood Presence for that reason. I can't imagine any Blood tanks deliberately stacking haste any time soon.
There aren't a lot of Bosses with such Haste Abilities so its not a big issue, but yeah it does suck. They changed it so that the Sindragosa one wouldn't if I remember correctly, and in Cataclysm Content so far the only one I'm aware of is the one on Altairus (spelling?), second Boss in Vortex Pinnacle Heroic which can be avoided by moving correctly. Actually, I think if you stand right it actually grants you free Haste.
Do any of those bosses have any sort of attack speed reduction debuff? Those affect rune cooldowns too.
Really, IMO they should make Rune Cooldowns unaffected by external haste debuffs (But still affected by buffs like Heroism/Blood Lust/Ancient Hysteria/Time Warp) when in Blood Presence for that reason. I can't imagine any Blood tanks deliberately stacking haste any time soon.
As far as I know it also slows Energy generation for rogues, focus for hunters, and obviously rage generation and castspeeds.
So the fact that haste debuffs affect every classes DPS quite heavily is intended.
The problem is, that it also reduces our Mitigation which is something the other three tank classes do not have to suffer. or at least not to the extend DK tanks do. But I'm not sure how Blizzard could fix that.
I'd just like to mention that for minor glyphs, path of frost does actually provide a visible damage reduction for fights that have falling damage. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure if it works on party members, but on your self at the minimum it can prevent falling damage in many situations.
For shits and giggles, I am going to e-mail the authors of worldoflogs.com and ask them if they could introduce a section for each boss to show physical/magic % damage taken, ......
To follow on from this, I have now realised that a member of the EJ forums has a link to this site, so have PM'ed with the hopeful outlook that this could be introduced. Let's see if this seed grows into something fruitfull that could help come up with stat's weightings with the information the alteration would provide.
Clearly, this evidence is anecdotal and of a non-raiding tier, but it does suggest that the value of stamina is at least occasionally linked to more than EH. In the old Stam vs. Armor debate, stamina did nothing for healer mana. In our case, it may very well do so.
While higher health totals result in a higher shield when we're discussing this in regards to gemming we have to take into account that mastery will provide better results. To take a few baseline points:
100k Health
50% Blood Shield
Adding 60 stam results in 982 Health (60 * 1.17 * 14)
982 Health increases your min DS by 68.74 (.07 * 982)
Blood shield is increased by 34 (68.74 * .5)
Adding 40 Mastery increases your shield from DS by 1.4%
Thus it adds a total of 98 (100,000 * .07 * .014) to your min blood shield
60 Stam = 982 Health = 68.74 min DS increase = 103 BSh increase (68.74 * 1.5)
40 Mastery = 1.4% BSh = 196 BSh increase (200,000 *.07 * .014)
982 Health vs 93 absorb/shield
If you're reforging and gemming for mastery 150k Health and 100%+ BS is a reasonable expectation raid buffed in all 346 blues. The question becomes how much health is "enough" and the answer is very subjective. Using the prismatic gem slot in our relic for example, we're talking about a .67% increase in health vs a .88% increase in blood shield absorbs overall. The health will increase your TTL, which in return nets a quality of life improvement for your healers (more time to think). While the mastery will directly reduce the damage you take and, as a result, reduce the amount of mana required to heal you. Considering the TTL against a cata raid boss with 150k health is roughly 6-8 seconds without any heal (including your own) and the new healer mana model I'm going for the mastery.
What reasons can people generate as to gemming (nearly) Full-Stamina and Reforging away Hit and Expertise from Gear for Avoidance, without Reforging Avoidance into Mastery at all?
Pwnwear broke down and analyzed DK Tanks from Premonition, Exodus and Juggernaut. You can find the whole, detailed analysis here. Here's a summary of the results however:
- 2/3 Tanks are gemmed for Full-Stamina, Enchanted with a Stamina > Mastery priority and have reforged almost entirely into Avoidance, even Hit and Expertise, leaving them standing between 1-2% Hit, and between 10-15 Expertise.
- 1/3 Tanks is gemmed for Hybrid Mastery/Stamina Gems, prioritizing Stamina Enchants over Mastery, exception is Gloves.
- All Tanks use different Runeforges:
There are possible, specific reasons why they are doing this, such as:
- Stamina - Tanks are under-geared, so the Bosses are 1-2 shotting them.
- Healers just don't go OOM?
- Avoidance -
Originally Posted by Sidh from Pwnwear
(Source) Avoidance has a lot of pluses over mastery - passive; not affected by haste debuffs; works even if you have to use runes on something else. Basically, in avoidance/stamina build you avoid a lot of attacks and then when you get a streak of bad RNG, you have enough health to survive and use DS to cover that up. As for hit/expertise - you really don't need those in such a build. At all.
That can work pretty well.
Yet it seems very odd to me. Anyone that's got any experience in Heroic Raiding: Is this the way to go? Full-Stamina + Avoidance? Is it better/worse than full-Mastery Gemming?
Tried to get a look at the Star's Guild DK Tank/s for another comparison but it seems the Taiwanese Armory is bugged, they all show up Gear-less to me.
12/15/10, 5:53 PM
Similar Threads
