I left 1 point in that build, didn't know where to put it. BB and URM are both too awesome, I hope they change the behavior of BB in the future. But since this is a tanking build, and URM technically doesn't get you any more mitigation, I'll go in the favor of BB for now. URM is nice, as stated above, for keeping Unholy Blight going indefinitely(if it's supposed to be that way. Do 10s of unholy blight outdamage one Deathcoil?

As for Dirge...I don't know if talents like that are useful. If your normal rotation is 5 rune abilities followed by a runic power ability, how big of a difference is an extra 2.5 or 5 runic power going to be? Certainly not going to of any difference to static abilities like death coil or frost strike. Woohoo, an extra death coil every 100s, assuming you can afford the GCD. Gargoyle is about the only relevant one I can find where more than an average of 5RP/s would be beneficial.

So I decided to go smack on some servants in the Blasted Lands for a little bit and this is what I managed to come up with.



This was my spec at the time: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

My rotation was Icy touch -> Plague strike -> Heart strike -> Heart strike -> Death strike -> Deathcoil (or Dancing rune weapon if possible) -> Icy touch -> Plague strike -> Heart strike -> Heart strike -> Heart strike -> Heart strike -> Repeat

Nice, Esuna. 1742 DPS self buffed is pretty good. Could you try the same but with an obliterate rotation? Just to nit-pick, did you do a deathcoil/Dancing Rune Weapon at the end of your second rotation?

I'm a bit disappointed to find Blood Plague and Frost Fever(assumed off the screen) account for so little damage. Do those not scale with AP?

Dancing Rune Weapon looks nice though, almost 20% damage increase.

That was done with the same spec and an Icy touch -> Plague strike -> Heart strike -> Heart strike -> Obliterate -> Deathcoil (or dancing rune weapon) -> Repeat rotation.

As for blood plague/frost fever AP scaling I dropped about 600 or so AP and Blood plague went from 141 a tick to 137 a tick, that definitely needs to be boosted.

And yes, dancing rune weapon is amazing.

Is Necrosis bugged?

Melee: 254-285173
Necrosis: 254-36541

That's... 12.8%, instead of 25%

I recall someone saying on the forums that it doesn't scale with AP

Ah, I see. I was a bit confused about the AP scaling discussion, as I was under the assumption that it just took your white hits and added 25% of that as shadow damage.

Has anyone had an opportunity to look into how Wandering Plague works in terms of threat generated? I'm looking at Unholy for tanking, and it would SEEM like it may be of benefit for 5man/poor-man's Paladin use, but if the threat from the disease on the extra targets isn't given to you, it's pretty useless. Also--as one can assume anything in reach will have Blood Plague at the very least--will the "extra" disease procs trigger URM as well as the normal disease procs, or is URM restricted to autoattack+instant damage only? If so, then this spec may be functional. If not, then it may be default to put the 3 points from there into Ebon Plague. One could also move a point from 2h Spec into Lichborne, but I'm looking at it as 4%+ threat generation, and with Bone Shield and IBF, one has a decent array of emergency buttons already.

Also, Pestilence would appear to be a Swipe clone, so, does the ability damage/cause threat if all mobs are already diseased? I would hope so, but I can't, regrettably, confirm for myself.

I did some testing on my DK with this spec. Not sure if it's better than unholy if you don't use a ghoul, but since Necrosis is bugged I wanted to try it out. Sitting at about 21% crit, 1750ap before procs and 812 armor pen(does this even work right now?).

Dancing rune blade is pretty damn awesome, and goddamn Heart Strike was getting some big crits. With Hysteria up I was seeing over 6k, top being almost 6.5k.

Wandering Plague's damage is attributed to the DK, so it should provide threat for the DK.

Your other questions are hard to answer at the moment thanks to bugs; URM has a very very very low proc rate and Pestilence has an insanely small radius of effect. I wouldn't recommend any of the Rune Masteries for a tank build, though, because they make it very hard to keep Blade Barrier up. You want to keep Blade Barrier up at all times.

Excellent, thanks. I do always hate when cool concepts are useless in practice.

As for the masteries, I don't see why they'd be a problem. Blade Barrier reads: "Whenever you have no runes active, your parry chance increases by 10% for the next 8s." As such, I assume it's an 8s buff that goes up when you drop your active runes to 0, starting when the last rune is successfully triggered. If Blade Barrier's activity was dependent on the amount of time you had no runes active, I could see how the masteries would pose an issue, but as it is, "BB buff duration" wouldn't seem related to "rune recharge duration".

I'd also expect that the behavior would be that the buff duration resets each time you satisfy the "no runes active" condition. With a rune mastery, wouldn't you actually be able to do that more frequently?

If this isn't the case, what is the actual behavior of Blade Barrier?

Bliss or Esune, did you test dancing rune weapon with just 50 runic power, or a full bar? I think not using one death coil would be worth it to get at least 10 more seconds on DWR.

I was using it with full runic power, I actually did less deathcoils than I had runic power for because of the GCD and Sudden Death procs. Blood uses very few double rune abilities, 1 in every 2 rotations, which uses a lot more GCDs and gives you more runic power. This combined with having Scent of Blood left me with more than I could use too often. But with dancing rune blade being so damn good it's nice to always have enough to use it with full runic power. I did some testing as blood/unholy, but with Necrosis and BCB both being bugged it's hard to say what the dps would really be like. My ghoul was doing ~300 dps though, so being able to have it up for 3.5 min instead of 2 could be a decent boost. BCB and Necrosis seem a bit overpowered though honestly if they worked right.

Those numbers look interesting. Makes me wonder what kind of benefit a DK would gain from WF, as far as a percentage increase of white damage. Does this kind of reliance on weapon damage mean we'd want a slower weapon with a high top-end?

As it's looking now, most definitely yes. High weapon damage is most definitely the thing you want to get, as all our strikes are based on weapon damage.

Don't get too excited, those mobs are 20 levels lower. Armor is lower, so melee damage is higher. Spell damage remains the same.

An interesting trick - on slow hitting mobs (or soft-hitting/magic ones with spells > 2s cast), you could burn extra runes very quickly if necessary by jumping to unholy and back.(internal cd, but no gcd).
Only if you theres a way for you to not get busted for 1.5s of not being in frost, of course.

You don't only have to use them as frost runes. Consider:
Icy -> PS -> Obliterate -> Blood -> Blood (out of runes)
Icy -> PS ->Obliterate -> DnD (or a second Obliterate) (out of runes again)

Or really just consider the rune usage as a tanking DK. Frost runes really aren't the problem, it is usually unholy runes b/c we will use DnD nearly every CD (15 seconds w/ Morbidity, a must have for any tanking DK IMO). There isn't actually that much to spend blood runes on (Pestilence doesn't seem to even be working currently).

Frost is shaping up to be a very strong 5 man tanking spec. FRM seems to be NYI, and Hungering Cold is not applying Frost Fever, which is a pretty important factor in how Howling Blast performs. DnD (with Morbidity) + Hungering Cold + Howling Blast are all very nice tools at holding multi-target agro in 5 mans, likely 10 mans and raids as well. Despite those not working quite right (close enough though), I tanked several instances (UT, Nexus, Drak) using a spec such as:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

As far as Death Coil vs Frost Strike, yeah, the incentive to even cast it is pretty much gone as a deep Frost DK. Tagging someone at range can be done using Icy Touch, and unless there is some pressing need to send a bolt across the room, then the RP is better spent on Frost Strike (which pretty much devastates Death Coil damage-wise, especially with Killing Machine + Guile of Gorefiend).

Ah, I see, thanks. I'd still think it would be possible to drop to 0 runes within the 8s buff duration at least once, but I of course haven't tried for myself, so can't speak to the reliability of that.

No, it's not. It takes 5 abilities, minimum(unless you use DnD all the time) to use up all your runes. That's 7.5s of GCD. If you have one more rune pop during that time frame, it will take 9s and you'll lose BB. 9s to drain 7 runes(unless you use DnD), but an 8s buff duration. That will never work.

Bloodstrike, bloodstrike, deathstrike, obliterate.
Then,
icy touch, bloodstrike, oblit, oblit.

It's pretty easy to use 6 runes with four abilities... are there some cooldowns I'm missing?
I'm not claiming these are optimal, but it's totally possible to keep BB up with rune mastery.
just very hard, and a a lot of work and instant decision-making.
8 runes will take 6 cds unless there's a deathrune mixed in,
leaving no time for an rp ability though (except on d&d rotations)

I hadn't considered that rotation because of how bad it gimps your threat.