DK	Druid	Paladin	Warrior
Melee	71340.08	56789.31	45504.8	43767.29
Arcing Slash	89345.31	71044.61	89145.46	95339.53
Combined	160685.38	127833.91	134.650.26	139106.81
%	79.56%	100%	94.94%	91.90%

Those are the average numbers over the top 20 DPS parses on WoL (sans druid, because there is a lot of cats that pop into bear and the logs register them as bears).

Jagged Tear is ~12-18k average. These numbers alone though do not say everything and are basically useless because numerous things aren't taken into consideration like avoidance, bear shields, dk shields, cooldowns, etc. but the numbers are pretty telling. Arcing obviously isn't mitigated except by purely 'reduce damage by %', so you have to look at purely melee damage, where we take 25.62% more damage than our druid partners.

To rival a druid we have to have a min BS (@24 mastery) up for 65.42% of melee strikes. Not too bad, just a DS every 2.75s. This doesn't take into consideration that druids also proc shields for ~14.5k every 3.65s on average. This means we have to have have a min BS up 83%+ of the time, which requires a DS every 2.176s. Only then are we comparable on *average* physical damage to a druid, who is still 24.80% behind paladins, who are 3.97% behind warriors.

The discrepancy becomes a lot more clear when you start looking at that. A 6% reduction to physical damage (through an armor buff) would reduce our melee in take by 4280 per strike, putting us at 67059.67, which is reasonable. The better option would be to buff us by 10% armor, which reduces Shannox's strike to 64206.072 and then slightly nerf our mastery from about 6.25% per point to something closer to ~5% (at 20 mastery this would reduce a BS from 17938 to 14350, obviously retaining the strength of higher DS heals from higher damage in take, which would push us to roughly druid levels of mitigation after healing/absorbs).

Bumping our armor from Blood presence up to 60% (WotLK levels) will give us ~6.75% more reduction from armor, still shy of 10%, but workable. We could adjust Bladed Armor from 6% to 10% granting us the extra 4% reduction, but placing a bigger emphasis on spending blood runes.

Honestly numerous options are available, but it really just boils down to the numbers showing we are *significantly* behind block tanks and after the druid buffs we are even behind them.

edit: This is factoring in a dk with 205,000 health and 24 mastery.

He obviously isn't factoring in blocks, which is stupid considering that every pally is hitting the ctc mark and warriors should be by the end of this tier or mid next tier (but still be >97.5% ctc).

You can't block Arcing Slash. Hence the big numbers on Paladins.

Not sure if that was directed at me or not because I did say "Arcing obviously isn't mitigated except by purely 'reduce damage by %', so you have to look at purely melee damage, where we take 25.62% more damage than our druid partners." in my post.

He other poster also said "I have no idea how a pally takes 70k melee swings" and not "90k", which implies he meant the melee hits, not Arcing Slash.

You know what you are right I wrote down the wrong numbers doing it too fast without going back to double check the numbers. You are absolutely right about this I guess for now just tank the dog I suppose.

edit: I found this old spread sheet from the pwnwear.com math. https://docs.google.com/a/bu.edu/spr...CKe5srQD#gid=4

the concluding to this for time to die was stam>mastery>avoidance as evident by this. It was initially disregarded due to healer mana issues and the such but literally gave you the longest possible survival given no heals. It may be time to relook into this issue as once again moving to a damage sponge with good rebounds instead of trying to fit ourselves into another model.

Perhaps this goes back to the idea of stam soft cap > everything else and you just aren't meeting the cap, whatever it ends up being for 25mans. If you can't take a hit, you can't take a hit. I'd try moving my blue sockets to stamina or even value it higher in the mean time to make sure you can take the hit.

edit 2.

Back to the numbers of the combined hit... A dk taking a hit of 160685.38 will heal for at least 32137. The difference between the two is 128548.38 which is in line with bear tanks. I think if blizzard wanted us to take as little damage as all the other tanks we'd be on par for self healing.

Asphyxialol is it possible to also include selfhealing (sans absorbs) into your chart? Since the healing part of DS is part of our damage "negation". It doesn't help much in those situations where you have to take three hits in a row without runes, but if we're just comparing total damage taken you should definately include the selfhealing of classes.

I figure that would bring us up by a few percent, although I am very unhappy with selfhealing itself. The "Take more damage but heal it back up again" system started to fail as soon as bosses started threeshotting us again and healermana became much less scarce. There's a reason selfhealing was only a nice gimmick in WotLK.

You're missing the point. This would be a valid suggestion if there wasn't a EH problem. There is an EH problem, and that's the crux of this discussion. Provided we live through the spike, the incoming BS has us more competitive, just like last tier. We can't live through that spike as it stands.

BS as a block mechanic works with a condition: you have to get hit, to prevent getting hit later. If you die while setting up the condition, it doesn't matter if the subsequent BS would mitigate 100k.

No, that's absolutely correct. Even against a paladin if you want to take my damage taken and reduce it by the amount of healing and blood shield I did, I often times was only taking about 60-70% of the damage my paladin was (as far as my healers were concerned). Again, as said, your healing, and consequently your blood shield, do not matter at all if a) you don't have a chance to use them before you spike to dead, or b) you are forced to use DS so frequently you run out of the runes to use and die while waiting for a rune cooldown.

You could do the trolololol response and say 'well use a cooldown every time you have no runes for DS', but this happens a minimum of once every 20 seconds, and at most once every minute (refreshing tank cooldowns). Unfortunately this only leaves us with a total of 3 cooldowns to rotate around within a reasonable time frame. 1) Bone Shield (which I assume most dks have learned to use at the same time as IT/PS application every minute), 2) Vampiric Blood (solid choice, 1 minute cooldown, typically works well when you run out of DSes - but also one of our stronger cooldowns we frequently have to sit on at various stages of a fight that shouldn't be used in this scenario and it doesn't actually reduce the damage you're taking so you're still susceptible to spikes), and 3) AMS (nearly worthless if the fight doesn't have substantial elemental damage). You're still going to end up with dead space where you are risking your survival without consistently getting externals rotated on you. A burdensome objective that no other tank has to have.

The fact is that we need to have higher passive reduction and reduce the effectiveness of our shield to compensate. That's all that really needs to be said. Until Blizzard finally does this we have to find a temporary solution, which kind of works with the spreadsheet from pwnwear (which was already pointed out to have it's flaws).

We can 1) go heavy avoidance, risk the RNG, not have any substantial on demand coverage from DS/BS, 2) stack stamina - increase the threshold necessary to kill us, but even doing this will only net a ~13-15k health difference for most gear setups, or 3) we go for a very heavy mastery setup with a major emphasis on hit/exp, and possibly haste to reduce rune regen which allows us to land our DSes when we need them, but falls prey to all the current concerns of DKs (arguably to an even greater degree because you're sacrificing your avoidance often to the tune of ~5-6% or more).

I think I may end up swapping back to a heavy stamina setup with a major emphasis on avoidance, because it appears to be the best route available to deal with the current damage in this tier.

I use the TTL as a very general statement of this was the original thinking of our survivability going back to the original question of when do we go for more stamina over mastery. Regardless of how you put it the fact is that you don't have enough health to take a hit if it goes through, To take the RNG out of it you need more health. I don't know what you run but your situation where you take a 160.1k hit with 48k of tear then you have to be able to take a hit of 208.1k. How much breathing room do you want from this? I'd say 12k isn't enough but that's what I'd get right now. Regem to get that extra 13-15k and you have 25-27k. It's do-able. I'm not trying to troll or tell you that you are doing it wrong but instead of having a convo where we say the class is broken I'd rather find solutions.

We really can't do anything about the class being bad in comparison on some situations other than try to work past it and hope that in future patches blizzard takes this into account.

edit: you must forgive my thinking sometimes I often go back to early posts and respond in that convo while trying to deal with more recent ones as I pull everything together in my head. My thinking is that as a mechanic (DS) it works in comparison, from a taking a hit stand point it doesn't because of mitigation issues and that's evident by dk tanks getting gibbed. As a currently mitigation stand point and reducing damage taken obviously mastery will always be better than stam but reaching the point where you can't possibly be gibbed is more important than reducing damage taken over the course of a fight.

edit2: I took everything back a step and went to the "traditional" gemming and use of sword shattering. With flask, fort and kings I ended with 216k health, 22.70 mastery. Using a situations where stamina >>>mastery where all but maybe 2 or 3 sockets were stamina I ended with 228.9k using scales and moonwell phial trinkets for the stam, stoneskin gargoyle and changed my boot enchant to earthen vitality. I ended with 228.9k hp at the expensive of 1.756 mastery which is a 10.975 DS heal conversion and 4% parry (which we know having more parry means less damage taken and small blood shields). Given a 50k average damage taken you lose 5.5k from the bubble but gain almost 13k hp. Obviously as boss dps goes up then this will be much different and mastery will take over again. This doesn't take into account the successive DS which will obviously be better in the long run for reducing damage taken but given a snap shot in time where you can be one shot this seems very viable without losing too much in the means of longevity. Also you gain about 949 armor.

Given this situation where you take the full on hit and unmitigated tears you get left with 20817 hp. It's low but you are alive.

At this stage it should be fairly obvious that stamina is the most reliable way to deal with Firelands 25 and heroic encounters.

The bosses hit hard enough, that our EH is being challenged before death strikes can occur. So we need to increase our EH to a level that guarantees us a death strike.

The main reasons we stepped away from stamina in favor of mastery were:

• We don't need a larger healthpool. The original Cata bosses did not possess the ability to challenge tank health, outside of telegraphed mechanics. Increasing health did not provide any sizeable advantages.
  
• Healers are short on mana. If we're not carefull with the damage we take, our healers will be oom before the encounter is completed. Overall damage must be minimized to ensure mana conservation. Mastery allows you to reliably reduce damage taken, thus saving mana.

With the current state of affairs in Firelands, neither of these are true.

Clearly bosses are capable or 3-shotting a death knight tank. They present a serious challenge to our EH, since it's possible to die in 6~ seconds. With only 6 seconds, it's possible to eat 3 melee attacks before a death strike becomes avaliable. If you die before you can death strike, mastery has done nothing for you. Also increasing your health pool still improves the effects of many death knight abilites. AMS, Death Pact, Rune Tap, and Vampiric Blood all directly scale with health.

Healers are no longer in starting equipment, clinging to every last drop of mana. They're gained higher itemized gear, with more base intellect and spirit. Even chain casting, it's unlikely that they will run oom before your typical boss fight ends. So long as they're properly utilizing mana regen mechanics, they end many fights with mana to spare.

At the moument I see no drawbacks to stamina gearing in Firelands, but plenty of benefits. We have the highest stamina multiplier of all the tanks, and should use it to our advantage.

I was poised to disagree, but with further thought I can't. I was about to say that stamina is a futile pursuit, as it will only mean lower mitigation/avoidance, hence more to heal, but given that we're prefectly competitve in terms of mitigation (provided we live through the spike) I think it's worthy of debate as to whether or not stamina gearing is worth considering. The problem with it is that even with heavy stamina bias, you'd be lucky to afford 20k total, which while it will save you on occasion, won't make your healer's heart condition any better.

Obviously, this doesn't negate the problem of EH, which up to now had been removed and the game was the better for it, but perhaps heavy stamina bias will alleviate some of the EH pressure without risking becoming too much of a manasponge due to the corresponding lower mast/avo.

Regardless, for serious 25 progression I think we've lost the ball this patch. Even if we do re-gear to accomodate the EH issue, even considering all else equal, who in their right mind would not prefer a tank without an EH issue over one with?

For the time being, I'm siding with Asphyxia's suggestion of higher passive mitigation via armor or %DR (though I disagree with the Blade Barrier suggestion) and corresponding mild nerf to the active mitigation of DS. Coupled with making DS unparriable, or even adding several points of Expertise onto our DS/Blood spec would go a long way to alleviate this; Tankadins spend a glyph for 10 Exp, our spec only affords us 6 and arguably Exp is several degrees of magnitude more significant for us. At some point earlier Asphyxia suggested faster runes by a further 10% in Blood presence but then rejected the suggestion due to PvP concerns. I don't believe this would be an issue frankly. Tied to imp. BP who cares about what blood-DKs do in PvP? They're hardly a contending spot, and where tanking is concerned slightly faster rune CD would help hugely. As would the old Glyph of Pestilence.

So re-reading the ability as blizzard gives it to us

Arcing Slash - "Shannox inflictes 125% of normal melee damage in a 120 degree cone up to 10 yards in front of him and inflicted Jagged Tear on his CURRENT TARGET"

Jagged Tear - "Shannox's Arcing Slash leaves a Jagged Tear that inflicted 4000 Physical damage ever 3 secs for 30 seconds. This effect stacks."

Has anyone tried or can confirm that the damage from Arcing Slash is split among targets and not a flat damage inflicted to every target in front of them.

I found a WoL (World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis) where 2 people are getting hit by this ability and are taking 150-160k on that hit but the last 2 paladins there are taking only 115-116k and are actually being hit at the same time. In theory you could have the melee stack on the tank for the higher stacks of Jagged Tear if you find that the extra stamina isn't increasing your survivability. Also looking through log Arcing Slash doesn't seem to be dodged or parried from what I've seen but it can be absorbed so avoidance is really only going to help for the melee hit,

I know this is a crappy idea in general specially moving into sub 30% and is more of a last resort idea but given the fact that DK tanks are having a hard time taking the combo this in theory seems like a viable alternative.

edit: For clarification:
Tank - Darus - 77k hit
DPS -
Cunami - Solo - 168k
Veilira - Solo - 153k
Tearyzo - With Tjokeh - 117k
Tjokeh - with Tearyzo - 115k

I realizes it's not just shannox I just noticed that as a possible way to deal with the potential hit if the extra stamina is not quite enough for this particular situation but as you pointed out it doesn't soak so that's out. I don't have 25 logs since I don't do them it was just something I noticed while looking over some of the parses. I guess it's back to the drawer board so to speak honestly just trying to find a better ways to deal with that particular situation on a whole without telling people to have the DK not be on shannox or avoid other similar situations and in essence telling people to reroll.

Taking a look at my current gear (365/372 stamina trinkets), by gemming and enchanting it with a stamina > mastery priority I get:

• +18,929 health
  214,101 -> 233,030
  
  
• +1,273 armor
  36,145 (52.6% phys reduction) -> 37,418 (53.46% phys reduction)
  
  
• -3.33 mastery
  25.27 -> 21.94

So assuming a firelands boss' melee swing is 230k base, EH gearing takes 83,312 melee hits after passive reduction (blood pressence, blade barrier, inspiration). Mastery gearing would take 84,852 melee hits.

EH gearing would die with 16,912 overkill if no healing occurs duing 3 melee hits. Mastery gearing would die with 40,747 over kill, if no healing occurs during 3 melee hits.

The difference between those two overkill values, is that 17k healing in 5-6 seconds can be accomplished through hots, shields, rune tap, and other passive healing effects. Even if your healer didn't recognize the sudden burst damage, and decides to heal someone else, you should still live to take a 3'rd melee attack and death strike counter the damage. With 41k healing needed to live, you "need" a strong heal (Divine light is usually in the 30k range) to hit you, otherwise you'll be dead.

Of course, in an ideal world, theres a constant flow of healing going into the tank. However, anyone whose raid tanked knows there are times when that is not the case.

That looks like what I more or less came up with the other day when I was messing around with my gems/gear. Go to Stoneskin Gargoyle, Reforge for mastery like we have been doing outside of working for more expertise as needed.

Blue = [Solid Ocean Sapphire]
Yellow stays as is = [Puissant Dream Emerald]
Red = [Guardian's Demonseye] if you need expertise otherwise [Defender's Demonseye]

There is some other enchant changes as well that I noticed looking back at yours.
Gloves: [Heavy Savage Armor Kit]
Feet: [Enchant Boots - Earthen Vitality]
Bracers: [Formula: Enchant Bracer - Major Stamina]

Was curious if the changes are on the bases of maximizing all sources of stamina or if you used a specific weight for each?

It would also push Leatherworking quite a bit higher on the list of professions, because there's still no Bracer - Stamina enchant in cata.

But going for more stamina is only a temporary fix. Assuming bosses hit even harder with 4.3 We'd get into even more trouble, without having the option to regem for stamina, while the other three tanks still have that option.

And a short note on the OP; With the hotfix to DS, wouldn't the GoDS have a higher threat/DPS value than RS? They all were fairly close together even before.
old Cataclysm DK endgame tanking [4.x]

This is a very valid point, what this last bit of discussion has done, effectively, is debated the validity of slightly less effective mitigation in lieu of surviving the EH issue, which needs to be elliminated with class changes. We'll only run into the same problem later on when boss hits get even bigger, and once all the loose stats have been swapped from MST to STA there's not that much leeway left.

We need the EH issue addressed, no doubt, but until that happens sta-gearing for 25man HC seems to be inevitable in the search for survivability.

For that example, it was enchanted under the assumption that "As long as you cannot survive 3 melee hits, stamina > all other stats".

I used [Heavy Savage Armor Kit], [Formula: Enchant Bracer - Major Stamina], and[Enchant Boots - Earthen Vitality] on my usual stamina gear to support that idea.

What I usually run with, are stat weights that say "Well itemized stamina is top priority. Mastery is a close second after stamina. Expertise soft cap is more important than avoidance. Once you have a fair amount of avoidance and dr picks up, start reforging into hit."

Set up in Mr.Robot's optimizer, it looks like this: Stamina Gearing (with hit and expertise)

Along with using fallen crusader, [License to Slay], and [Heart of Rage]; I always try to make sure to run the hatchingling by the Blazing Talon Initiate whenever I'm not hunting down worms.

Alysrazor 25H log
Fraps from my healers pov

Usually the melee can throw up faerie fire and brittle bones, as well as get some splash damage on the hatchling. I often end up with the hatchling dead in time to spare.

You can also have a moonkin toss up ff and thorns on you. I had alot of trouble with my hatchling the first few weeks we pulled Aly and I noticed a big difference when the moonkin was helping with debuffs.

As a history reminder, for those who are/were bringing up returning to the 60% armor bonus from BP from back in Wrath. I would just like to add that BP before about halfway-through Ulduar was actually an 80% armor buff that, nowadays, would put us roughly on par with druid armor.
So in case anyone decides to lobby for a return to a prior BP value, I just wanted to get that out there.

I created a spreadsheet that actually shows the amount mitigated with regards to rune recharge time. Mastery is better at mitigating it, but dodge is important also. The Blood Shield will Mitigate more damage more damage than dodge will. Also probability is probability. You can have a 40% dodge and parry and still take 100 hits in a row. Chances of it happening are slim to non, but its probability and every swing is not mutually exclusive.

The problem though going a full mastery build is the fact that users have to obtain higher levels of hit and expertise.

The problem of going a full dodge and parry build is Threat. A tanks two top Priorities are Threat and Damage Mitigation.

When a tank fails to do one they are not doing their job. I ran with a DK tank that has a 3% hit and 15 expertise, and This tank could not hold threat at all except with misdirects and tricks of the trade being thrown on them all the time. Where as with Myrothran, I have 7% hit and 20 expertise rating, and I have raid dps that pull over 29k dps and they never pull off me. The problem is I only have a 25% dodge and parry, but i have almost 26 point into mastery. Which equates to approximately 156% Blood Shield. This part isn't the problem but rune recharge is. This is why a good balance is desired. Regaurdless of what anyone says the numbers add up to show that mastery is better at mitigating damage, but dodge and parry are important to keep you up while waiting on runes. Anyone who focuses only one one aspect are not doing both jobs. Keep in mind Hit and Expertise are both damage mitigation stats for us also. Because it ensures we will have our blood shield exactly when we need it.

I did trade out for my 2 piece bonus for the other and i received about a 1% damage reduction in armor. This really only did one thing for me, I was doing about 8k DPS on single target mobs, where as now I do about 12k with keep the 2 piece bonus.

For those who do not know. Armor > Hit> Expertise> Master> Dodge&Parry> Stamina. This is information I deduced from my spread sheet and I tried to account for every aspect of damage even looking.

The problem with Armor and dodge and parry is diminishing returns. Where as Hit, Expertise and mastery do not have these. The key to everything everyone needs to try to balance out for what they need. I personally feel like I need more dodge and parry currently so that tanking beth'tilac will be easier. But at the same time I feel it is imperative that I try to keep at least 24 point into mastery. Which means I can't sacrifice very much hit. I am thinking of dropping my hit down to 6% instead of the 7, but I need the expertise because the majority of time when Death Strikes don't connect is because a boss parries the attack.

To summarize try to get your dodge = parry as best as possible and try to get it to 30% Where as try to keep your mastery about 24 points. This will make raid tanking very easy and doable for Firelands. Also refrain from tanking Beth'tilac as long as possible cause she can be a very stressful fight.

You're making a lot of big claims without providing any of the "numbers." Perhaps you should link your spreadsheet so people can see how you're coming to these conclusions.

As for threat, you really shouldn't be struggling even if you're very low on hit and expertise. Making reference to one DK tank that you've come across that had threat problems doesn't exactly prove your point. Glyph of DRW should solve any sort of threat problems you encounter (if any). There's a decent argument for getting hit/expertise from people like Liar, but the argument has nothing to do with threat generation; it's to help your DS connect at optimal moments.