How are you doing Warmaster Blackhorn Heroic 10? Small adds better tank on middle of ship and catch twilligh barrage or near drakes for aoe damage? On phase 2 it's better to tank boss with 1-2 debuff or more? Goriona and Warmaster tank on 1 spot for aoe damage or not?

Regarding the tier 13 4-piece bonus, does anyone have definite knowledge of how much of the bonus is shared with the raid? I know, it sounds like an obvious question, but I ask because of how the druid 4 piece bonus works, which increases raid health by half as much as it increases the druid's but if glyphed increases healing taken by the full amount. Yea, kinda OP. Does it work this way for DKs as well? Or is both the health bonus and the healing received increased by only 50%?

You need to tank the small adds near the drakes, and then move to soak up the onslaught. If you have DPS dk's they can soak up barrage with AMS, otherwise you might find it beneficial to ignore barrage, for the most part. Taunt Blackhorn at 2 debuffs, and tank Goriana in a fashion where you still get cleaves but only one tank gets her breath. Standing at a 45 angle should accomplish that.

The DK 4 peice is only half... glyphed or unglyphed.

If you have Vampiric Blood glpyhed (40% increased healing on yourself), then your raid gets 50% of that amount (20% increased healing on the raid) for the same duration as your buff. So on Ultraxion for example the duration is doubled on both yourself and the raid, and the cooldown is half.

I have no experience with Vampiric Blood unglyphed as the extra healing has always been more important to me.

The T13 4pc for DK tanks buffs the whole raid with Vampiric Blood which is weakened by 50%. If you glyphed it, you get 40% healing increased and the raid 20%. If you didn't glyph it, you get 25% healing increased and 15% of your max. life (eg. 40k) and the whole raid gets 12.5% healing increased and 7.5% of your max. life (eg. 20k), NOT 7.5% of their max. life

Could anyone test if this stacks with the 4pc of another DK tank? (your VB + 4pc from another DK tank?)

Unglyphed VB gives everyone 7.5% of your health and 12.5% healing taken. For 10 man especially, I don't see how adding another 7.5% healing taken at the cost of 20k+ health is worth it to be honest. It helps ease the CD requirements for things like Hour of Twilight, Onslaught, high orb bounces, Stomps etc.

It is not 7.5% more healing taken, its 12.5%.

VB gives the raid +12.5% healing taken AND one of:

A. glyphed: another +12.5% (in total +25% healing)

OR

B. unglyphed: increased health equal to +7.5% of the DK's max hp

Why would glyphed vampiric blood and the 4pc bonus cause the raid to recieve +25% healing, instead of +20%? Glyphed vampiric blood creates a 40% healing bonus on the casting death knight. Are you suggesting there is some kind of bug with the healing?

Sorry you are right its 20% (or 10% unglyphed),

It's still 12.5% healing taken unglyphed. Here is the tooltip: Vampiric Blood - Spell - World of Warcraft

Today I was fighthing vs Blackhorn 10 hc. When small drake cast twillight barrage I enter with AMS inside but I don't take any damage and debuff. I don't know if ship take any damage.

I agree with this, except for Spine, where the extra healing makes healing debuffs much easier rather than having an extra health buffer which doesn't really do anything.

Since Hit/Expertise is not really essential anymore, on pieces that have one of those two, is it more beneficial to reforge to dodge/parry which are counter productive to death strikes, or reforge to haste for faster rune speed?

Avoidance is only counter productive if you keep spamming Death Strike on CD. Use lulls in damage caused by avoidance to regen your Runes and hold off DSing until you actually need it.

Avoidance > Haste for survivability purposes.

Keep in mind that damage done by tanks is pretty substantial this tier, and hit/exp are huge tank DPS gains (and thus RDPS gains). Depending on your level of progression and your guild you may want to continue to push your personal damage. For example, on our first heroic Ultraxion kill I did about 30k DPS and we would not have beaten enrage had I done only 26k DPS. Similarly, on heroic Spine I'm near even with other melee DPS on Amalgamation damage, which helps speed up the fight considerably. Check out some of Otou's parses to see high tank DPS.

I've been wondering how DKs are doing so much damage as my dps in tank gear always seems quite sub-par. Looking around the armoury, I see a lot of blood DKs in full dps gear.

So last week I switched to a hybrid setup of all dps gear but with the 4pc tanking set and a stam trinket and seemed to manage just fine on Ultraxion HC. (Didn't kill it, but the incoming damage wasn't that much worse to my full tanking set.)

Are Blood DKs now generally running in full or partial DPS gear? If so, are there any stat weights to use to maximise dps while keeping a decent level of survivability? (I'm just using my frost set, but reforged into exp for whats missing from the teir pieces.)

Haste is a great stat for DPS while tanking since it pulls double duty with increased survivability over the other alternatives (Hit, Crit, Exp). In full DPS gear reforged for Haste you can get something ridiculous like 7 second Rune regen which is just awesome for having DS available often (either for more damage or survival).

I generally try to stay hit capped and atleast Exp soft capped over Crit. The amount of Mastery you want is dependant on you and your healers. On a fight like Ultraxion I reforged away as much as possible because tank survivability was no issue but killing it before healers got overwhelmed from the AoE damage was.

For bosses like Yor and Ultra you will also want to keep your 4 piece (if available) to help ease the AoE damage for your healers unless your healers can go without that. You can even reforge those pieces to Haste if necessary and I did just that on our first kill for Ultra but nowadays I don't bother anymore because of the nerfs and increased gear in the raid (nor do I spec into the higher damage build without Lichborne anymore for the same reason).

I think gemming for something else than Str (like Haste or even Crit) would also improve your DPS because our inflated attack power due to vengeance makes stats that scale multiplicatively with AP more attractive. I haven't done the numbers on this nor do I think most people will be dedicated enough to actually regem their Frost/Unholy gear just for this, but throwing this out here anyway.

My philosophy is that with our active mitigation system and short defensive cooldowns, passive defensive stats (especially avoidance stats) are worth less for us comparatively than they are for tanks of other classes. That means that it doesn't hurt us as much to sacrifice some avoidance for DPS stats. Our resource system is also comparatively complicated and not having full control of our rune cycles due to miss and dodge/parry can be a huge hit in micromanagement performance, both defensive and offensive.

Personally I always wear full tanking gear and trinkets for all fights in Dragon Soul (still doing 30-31k on a typical Ultraxion parse), but I do change glyphs and runeforge for almost every fight. Long gone are the days of the "a tank's only job is to maximize survival" mentality. Tank utility and DPS can be extremely relevant when you're pushing enrage timers or need burst DPS for tendons or parasites. If anyone wants a list of fight specific gear/spec changes that I make (or made, during progression) I can write up a post.

To be clear though, you should not gear for strength as a tank. The majority of our attack power comes from Vengeance, so increasing your strength is a much, much smaller relative gain than it would be for a DPS spec. Expertise is exceptionally strong because ~75% of our damage can be dodged/parried and you're removing both simultaneously up to soft cap (keep in mind it's already correct for most DPS specs to exp soft cap when they're only removing dodge). Feel free to calculate or sim the relative weights yourself, this is just a heuristic argument as to why it works out that you should draw the line in between hit/exp and str.

I'm not saying it's correct to gear for hit/exp, just that it is justifiable to do so as long as you have a reason for it. There are definitely some guilds which will benefit more from having their DK tank focus solely on max survival stats, or it might be something you swap back and forth between on progression. The important thing is that you make a conscious choice as to why you gear the way you do.

Question about solo tanking hc Madness. What sort of forges and gemming do you recommend?
Any particular tips about handling impale+following melee hit?

First thing I want to mention : I didn't kill him yet, we just began. (Just so you know. ^^)

Regarding gems, I focus on EH (so stamina) but always while respecting slots. So red = parry / stam, yellow = mast / stam, blue = stam. My runeforge is obviously SSG for EH purpose as well.
My reforges focus on mastery (pre-shielding as much as possible before the empale is quite convienent) and then avoidance. However, I find almost impossible to avoid the bloods' debuff till you can AMS to destack (even with DRW), so I'm considering reforging my avoidance into expertise/hit.

How I handle impales :

• 1 : Bone Shield + VB + Dream + Hyjal trinket. Usually, this one is quite smooth so doesn't require anything particular to survive follow-up melee hits.
• 2 : Bone Shield + VB + IBF + Hyj. trinket.
• 3 : Bone Shield + VB + AotD + Hyj. trinket. Just after the impale, I sacrifice one ghoul as I died several times from the hits just after this impale.
• 4 : Bone Shield + VB + IBF + Hyj. trinket.

If there a paladin in the raid, he uses HoS on me for every impale. If not, and there's Dpriest, pain suppression on the third plateform. If not, I take a potion of armor for this impale as it is the most painful.
VB is unglyphed. Bone shield should be used between 10 and 5 sec before the impale as the charges drop very fight on this encounter (I assume due to burning blood).

Every 2nd impales are taken by a SP in my raid. It doesn't require any other CD than his own Dispersion, which is always available.

Hope that helps.

How your priest get second impale? how he take agrro on it?

Actually everybody have to move out of the tentacle's hitbox and the priest stays the closest (but still on the hitbox). The tentacle will attack the Aspect (which is fine as it lasts ~5 sec) and impale the closest player regardless of the range who is the priest.

You can see that here : Angered vs Madness of Deathwing 10m Heroic - YouTube