I think I've found the source of the 8 second cooldown.

If you're in combat and a rune has been ready for some time before you use it, it gets that much time subtracted from its next cooldown, up to two and a half seconds. So if you IT/PS and then SS those runes, they'll be ready again in 8.5 and 10 seconds, respectively. If you use a rune that's been ready for a while, it'll be up again in 7.5s.

RuneHero makes it clear that something's going on; I added some numbers to doublecheck.

RuneHeroWithNumbers.zip - FileFront.com

Are you sure that's an "also"? I read GC's post as Tundra Stalker will increase HB and Obliterate by X% per rank(for the life of me can't remember where I saw this, but X=5 keep coming to mind) and 2 expertise per rank. No more 10% increase all spell and ability damage for 5/5.

EDIT: An unrelated question: I've been out of the loop lately. Is the charge cooldown on BS still 2s? And do AE physical attacks(like WW or Cleave) and spell attacks(AE or single target) remove charges?

5/5 means the Blood rune always turns into a Death Rune, not just a chance of it happening, plus you get a small dps increase to BS. Also note Death Runes stay Death until they are used. Obil is the best Frost attack, so it is good to have more runes to cast it.

If you are concerned about DPS or threat, you want 5/5.

I'm not sure, no. But I don't think she would have described it as frost getting a 'buff' if runestrike, FS, BS, and PS were all removed from the talent. Certainly IT will still be on there, and she didn't mention that in the blurb either.

The X=5 is probably coming from the mmo-champions listed talent's effect on icy touch.

Is this true while dual wielding?

No, I mentioned as much. Though I honestly don't see much point in going down Frost past Imp Icy Talons if you're a DW spec. Howling Blast is good but the cooldown doesn't make it that good of a nuke.



@Daedalix: Runic Power Mastery gives you greater freedom and less of a DPS potential loss when you can't spend your RP for whatever reason. It's a lot more useful for a 2H build with Frost Strike than it is for other specs - 2 points are generally fine for 120RP.

I guess at that point you're down there for the expertise and the 10% damage. You could tank kael better with both spell deflection and acclimation, but if there isn't a fight like that ever again, then you're just gimped.
That said, maybe spell deflection should be an alternative for DRM for that tier in blood.

What's the point of creating a magical tanking class if there's no heavy magical fight ?

I think there will often be high PvE content that requires from the tank a classic physical avoidance efficiency AND a caped resistance, if not more. (actually, capping resistance is not difficult for a DK without great sacrifice on the stuff. It's not the case for other tank classes)

If warriors can do the same job as magical tanks (i.e. if there's no magical fight more difficult than the BC ones), then there's no point in picking DK magical tanking talents. I agree. ^.^

You can see it in another way : with spell deflection and acclimatation, you can avoid a lot of resistance gear, and taking avoidance gear instead. This way you have a lot more physical avoidance than a warrior on boss like Hydross, for exemple.

Plus, if the class is well-balanced, and with the method of aggro generation in WOTLK, I think you won't necessarily NEED the aggro bonus of 5/5 tundra stalker. I don't think Bli² wants the tanks to take aggro (= DPS) talents prior to tanks (= Mitigation/Avoidance/Magic Resistance) ones. (but it is only my opinion here)

As I already said, I'm a "mitigation" tank, not an "aggroing" tank. I prefer losing aggro than dying.

While it may not prove to be a viable min/max spec, it is possible to spec into two different auras, the example below is frost/unholy. Its only benefit would be providing two auras to a 10 man raid where there was only 1 DK present and you wanted two auras (gimmick fight maybe?). Or it might be useful for leveling, with a blood/unholy mix.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Frigid Dreadplate is getting a nerf. Apparently, some of you guys didn't understand the tooltip!

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Frigid Dreadplate. Is this talent working?

Icy touch and howling blast are both pretty good nukes while DW - They hit for about 2k and 3k in t7 gear while DW. (And FS is still quite stronger than DC even with a one-hander). Those numbers are in unholy presence, so knock em up a bit if you're in blood.

Add in the synergy between DW and Killing Machine and it's pretty much the most obvious DW spec, since its core abilities suffer so much less from not having a two-hander.

If you lose aggro, you will then die.. Honestly, our magic mitigation is already way better than other tanks, just taking whatever talent is in the tree of choice. GC has repeatedly stated that there will be no tanking niches. They will not make fights that require any particular tank (or even that preclude any particular tank).

In a raiding scenario, losing aggro is equivalent to dying. You just won't die first.

You want aggro talents as this is the design of the WoW 3.0 tanks. Passive mitigation, a few 'oh shit' buttons to pop when needed, but overall they want us to be dealing significant damage. They have intentionally removed the "causes High threat" from many abilities and increased the damage and the scaling damage in it's place. This is all in addition to the fact that you have to deal improved threat as you gear up in order to keep aggro above the scaling threat your focused dps classes will deal as well.

Overall, Tundra Stalker is one of the most powerful talents per point in the tree, if not the strongest. Expertise, flat +damage, and IT bonus. I mean no offense, but I don't see your arguement at all.

What is up with all these specs that use Runic Power Mastery as deep frost for either tanking or dps? If you are tanking you will be rune striking almost constantly and frost strike is arguably the best RP dump DK's have. At what point would you even need to horde runic power up to 100, let alone 130?


As for tanking. Being a good tank is more than just holding aggro, it's maxing your aggro potential. Many bosses can reduce your aggro and any ability or talent that increases your maximum aggro is worth while all the time. Simply "holding aggro" may work in a generic tank and spank fight, but many fights, even in 5 mans, have places when you cannot build aggro effeciantly or even at all while other classes, healers especially, will still build threat. If all you are doing is maintianing the minimum threat standard, you increase their potential to die and wipe the raid. Beyond that, it is also your job to ensure a maximum dps ceiling for your dps classes so they can end the encounter sooner rather than later.

Regarding the mitigation vs threat 'styles' of tanking, I think my perma-group's tank in FF11 put it the best as we were rezzing him for the nth time on a bad night: A tank's job is to keep the badass angry monster looking at him while healers try to keep the tank alive and dps tries to kill said mob. If a fight becomes impossible, it is also the tank's job to be the last to run out, often resulting in more deaths but...

Basically, after reaching a minimum amount of mitigation, a tank's sole job should be to keep the tanked mobs on him/her and care about nothing else. Mitigation talents should generally be bypassed once a tank reaches this threshold and only talents providing unique functionality/buffs or additional threat should be picked up.

Actually that's not the input and the output of the equation. Let's say it like this :
If you lose aggro because you lack 5% aggro generation, you lose 2 DPS, maybe 3 (and that's only if their too stupid to look after omen - in most cases DPS are intelligent/reactive and you just lose overall raid DPS). If you die because you lack 5% magic mitigation, you lose everyone in the next 10-15 seconds. DPS can lower a little their DPS, but healers can't heal you a little more than their maximum if you take too much damage. I don't know for FFXI, but Battle Resing you won't save the raid, in WoW.

If it is for taking aggro talents over tanking ones, then spec full Blood DPS, and active frost presence. And take DPS gear. I assure you nobody in the raid will take over your aggro. See what I mean ?

I'm not saying that a good tank don't care about aggro. However, a tank that picks aggro talent instead of avoidance ones is just nonsense IMO.

A magic tank that picks only one of his two spell protection talent is nearly like a warrior who don't take a shield because "a 2H generates more aggro".

That's not because no class is required to raid (which is good) that all classes will be equal on all encounters. That's impossible, and I highly doubt that's the will of bli². Morogrim will always be more simple with palatanks. However it is totally possible to fight and kill it with no palatank. But I've never heard of a palatank who would say something like "I don't see the point of taking consecration" because of that.

Every tank will have his way to deal with every fight, different but (trying to be) equal. The high magic resistance of DK actually seems to balance their lack of classic mitigation. If you don't increase magic resistance on your DK because "they have too much of it !", it's as if you don't increase armor on your drood because "they have too much of it !" Maybe 20k armor on your drood is "too much, already more than Paladin and Warriors !", but I've never heard of a drood tanking efficiently with so few armor.

Actually, all this discussion is "talking in the void", because we don't know where will be the cap in WOTLK where you need to take aggro over avoidance.

I just hope we won't need to tank in DPS spec. No point being tank if all we do is DPS. We're tank, our pleasure is to use mitigation/avoidance talents or abilities. Having to take a DPS talent over a tank one would be sad.

I still don't see how traiding tundra stalker for spell deflection is a marginal increase in survivability. You won't give up guile of gorefiend because of the IBF increase and acclimation is also magic damage reduction. So it's inbetween SD and TS for the trade off.

Assuming 40% parry, that's 40% chance for 30% less DIRECT spell damage, it will do nothing for dots and aoe damage.

Giving up 5 points in TS will lose you 10 expertise, not expetise rating, but straight expertise. So you will have less threat and more enemy parries which can also kill you.

You do realize, of course, that "droods" (please don't use stupid leet speech like that any more) DO have too much armor in TBC in high-level raids, right? Sunwell-geared druids have hit the armor cap and are basically forced to pick pieces of equipment without any bonus armor because the item points are totally wasted.

Heh. Take out the 'high level' part there. We can hit the cap in t4 and badge gear easily.

Sorry. I knew that our bears started complaining about it about the end of BT, so I assumed (whoops) that's where the problem started. That just makes the point even more strongly, though.


I'm actually not sure if they ever fixed Spell Deflection, actually. The last time I tested it, months ago, it triggered a 6 second buff every time you parried that decreased incoming spell damage. That version was, to say the least, pretty useless. I never did get a response on whether that was the intended functionality. I guess I need to track down some spellcasting mobs on beta and try it out.

the build i eventually settled on was

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I am not a fan of Unbreakable Armor as a dps cooldown, because it screws up the rotations. Runic Power Mastery is a waste of points assuming you are using blood presence because you will never be executing more than 2 FS in a row in a proper frost rotation. i THOUGHT about giving up vicious strikes for more armor -> ap, but the amount of ap gained from 6% armor just wasnt worth the trade off vs an ability that you use approximatly once every 10-12 seconds. Now if anyone can figure out a good solid rotation with unbreakable Armor in it and show that the dps gain is worth the loss of an obliterate, then im all ears. And yes using unbreakable armor means losing an obliterate due to the fact that the IT-> PS rotations are set in stone, so really its just a matter of how many FU abilities you get.

Regarding the threat vs. mitigation discussion: Threat has a fairly binary result. Was it enough or was it not. Progression survival tends to have a fairly spastic result. When learning Brutallus, my guilds wipes were 80% tank death and 10% threat related (10% stupid related....perhaps more). This isn't Diablo. You can respec. You will get a chance to raid at whatever spec you have and see if it is enough. Having said that, spell deflection reads, to me, like an almost 100% pvp talent. Most spells in BC raiding from bosses seemed to be frontal cone or aoe. Many were targeted dots, buffs, and debuffs. Solarian did targeted damage spells as did Kael Thalas. A 30% resist half the time, however, is fairly mediocre to try and hang your survival on. It'll save damage over time, but it's not shield wall. I should think a deep frost tank with 18 seconds of IBF a minute should have good survivability. The 10 expertise might also save more tank deaths from parry mechanics than spell deflection. So, while I would generally spec for survival and an adequate level of threat, tundra stalker looks to me like a far superior talent. And, if you're not MTing, TS becomes a no-brainer.

For runic power mastery - if you finish RP dumping into FS and have 35 RP saved, you risk capping on your next rune rotation. By having a couple points in RPM, you can finish your rotation without interjecting FS into it and delaying rune usage.

On Unbreakable Armor, I also don't like that it costs a frost rune. I would greatly prefer that it cost RP.

The value of epidemic in a frost build hinges for me on what exactly the rune recharge time is. If a total 2 set cycle when dpsing is over 18 seconds, epidemic does not help. If it can be compressed to 18 seconds using 4 oblits and 8 second recharge, then it makes the 4 oblit cycle usable. However, cutting the number of ITs in half leads to less rime procs.