WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities. - Page 277

Hunglo · 11/13/08, 6:49 AM

Originally Posted by Aten

<snip>my questions are, can i really afford to skip Anticipation in favor mark of Blood and Veteran of the 3rd war, and how important will expertize will be for a tanking DK, i still have 2 points in to use and can access thundra stalker.

the thing that worries me the most is losing anticipation, is it really important.

Expertise is invaluable (until you hit the cap) for any and all tanks.

Daedalix · 11/14/08, 9:26 AM

Originally Posted by Aten

I've come up with with this Frost/Blood Tanking specc: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

my questions are, can i really afford to skip Anticipation in favor mark of Blood and Veteran of the 3rd war, and how important will expertize will be for a tanking DK, i still have 2 points in to use and can access thundra stalker.

the thing that worries me the most is losing anticipation, is it really important.

Why give up max Tundra Stalker (5 expertise) and 10% dmg (read: threat) for a bunch of poor talents and VotTW? Expertise is important and 5% Dodge is absolutely invaluable. Scent of blood is a poor talent, Bladed Armor is much better. I think someone did some proc calculations on it many pages back (RP generation) but it's not worth it in a PvE scenario. It's primarily a pvp talent for RP-starved situations. Let me remind you that we are avoidance tanks. We rely on NOT getting hit. 15% chance for 15 Runic Power is worth far less than 2 RP every 5 seconds and the threat generation afforded by Bladed Armor. Scent of Blood gets worse as your gear gets better. If Scent of Blood scaled differently for each Talent Point (didn't require 3 talent points, or had a higher proc rate) it'd be a great talent.

There has also been some significant discussion dismissing Spell Deflection as a useful sub-tanking talent. Your build also fails to get Guile of Gorefiend which is an absolutely too-good-not-to-get talent deep in Frost. Increasing the duration of Icebound Fortitude is key to our mitigation.

I'm not recommending you get Butchery but it's better than Scent of Blood. VotTW is a great talent but you give up too much in a Frost tanking build to get it. A base 5/8/5 is pretty much necessary until you reach gear levels where you can give up previously "necessary" talents for more play-style based talents.

On another note: now that people are playing their DKs, have you been using a RuneBar addon? Personally I thought I would need one, but I have since just resorted to using OmniCC countdowns on my buttons and a Runic Power indicator with NeedtoKnow disease bars in the middle-bottom of my interface. MagicRunes is a great addon but I never looked at it (or needed to look at it). Yet.

I also find myself clicking, looking at buttons more often rather than regularly knowing which ability I can use. I suppose this will change when I get experience at playing the class but I feel like I am getting tunnel-vision. I suppose this is what people said by "hard to master" since there are so many abilities on different cooldowns (IT, PS, SS, BS, Pestilence, RP dump, Bone Shield). I'm used to playing a healer with 2-3 buttons to press and just using mouseover macros on a raid frame... it's tough early on with all these misses and AoE pulls.

tedv · 11/14/08, 11:09 AM

Originally Posted by Pyros

The glyph specifically says Will not occur more than once every 6seconds. So no it can't chain. I took corpse explo because I hadn't tested it in the lastest builds, and quite honestly it's pretty much worthless. Takes too long to setup, and does too little damage. Maybe if it was back to a RP ability(low cost, like 15 or 20) then it'd be good, but for a unholy rune, it's pretty bad.

I also tried Corpse Explosion and it's basically been a huge waste. I skipped one point in Necrosis to get it, figuring the total DPS loss would be negligible, and I might use Corpse Explosion on rare occasions. There's two big problems with it though. The first is that you have better things to spend unholy runes on during AoE pulls. You have the initial plague strike, a Death and Decay, and after your runes reset, you'll probably want to Death Strike to heal up. And because most of your AoE damage is from DoTs, not effects that can crit, the monsters tend to die at exactly the same time. This means that everything is already dead by the time you can corpse explode something. Corpse Explosion never sped up anything.

On the subject of Glyphs, I'm trying Scourge Strike + Ghoul. I didn't feel like testing if the Death Strike glyph bug has been fixed, and I honestly think the Scourge Strike glyph will be the optimal choice for Unholy at 80. Refreshing diseases means you can spend more runes on scourge strikes (which perpetuates the cycle). You lose the use of the desecration talent, but I think there's enough other comparable DPS talents to buy. I'll need a simulator to figure out exactly how many scourge strikes the glyph buys. This is because when you're in the 20 second rotation of 4 scourge strike, 2 blood strike, 1 icy touch, 1 plague strike, your disease refresh chance is lower than 5 scourge strike, 2 blood strike. My quick napkin math says the glyph will convert 1 icy touch / plague strike pair to a scourge strike every 30 seconds if you still maintain full disease uptime. You also lose 10 runic power from this.

Glyph of the Ghoul seems to be stronger than I gave it credit for. Just at level 60, it increased my ghoul's white damage by 14 DPS, so I'd estimate it's near 20 DPS after including specials. It's reasonable to think this is a 50 DPS upgrade or more at level 80, making it an extremely competitive glyph. Many classes don't have major glyphs that even come close to that much extra damage.