When you have to tank massive incoming of ads (e.g. Thorim or the encounter in Halls of Stone) do you go only with Death and Decay (in reduced cooldown) and Blood Boil or do you risk it and try to always also apply diseases? I found that if the healing is imba applying diseases is optimal but if it's absolutely imperative to hold agro at all times by everything Blood Boil and Death and Decay only may be better though I am concerned damage(threat) is minimized. I wanted to hear your opinions.

Diseases are your bread and butter. Sometimes I have to get some threat on mobs RIGHT NOW and I might neglect spreading diseases (I"m blood spec) in favor of a quick blood boil. However if you have the time you definitely should always spread diseases. It amplifies all of your abilities (including blood boil) and hence all of your threat. This is one reason blood ae threat isn't as good as unholy or frost. It basically takes 3-4 GCDs just to set yourself up. By contrast, Frost can put a disease up on all mobs with Howling Blast.

Hi there, I have a few questions moderately specific to my own Death Knight- I'm sorry if these have been answered, I was unable to find them in this thread or the other threads.

My alt DK:
The World of Warcraft Armory

I have literally no Expertise. Statweighs show that for my particular spec, Expertise is worth a good deal more than Strength, but I have been told I should gem for pure Strength regardless.

What is the Expertise cap, and what should I be gemming for given my extremely low Expertise?

All properly DKs have 5 or 6 expertise, you have 5. Strength is higher on the stat weights, however I would recommend using Rawr to make sure that strength is better.

I just swapped from dps to being our guilds main DK tank after our previous dk tank quit the game.
I'm currently working on Algalon 10, and I was wondering whether or not it'd be optimal to use avoidance/avoidance, avoidance/stam, or stam/stam trinkets for the rather hard-hitting encounter.
Input is appreciated, thanks!

I went to the DK DPS frost thread and tried out the rotation PS IT BS BS FS Oblt,

I am Spell hit capped and almost Phyiscal Hit capped but no expertise capped.
it seemed to lose some of the dmg I was putting out, so I swapped back to my previous rotation.

It PS BS BS FS HB.

which proved to have a higher dps, but note not a raid, no raid buffs but on last boss of H Gun.

Link of armory The World of Warcraft Armory
if helpful if not I could use some assistance on this, perhaps I am doing something wrong.

Thanks for the help.

In preparation of doing some rough math on SoA versus SoV for DW frost, I'd like to find out how the following abilities scale with AP:

Icy Touch
Blood Plague
Frost Fever
Howling Blast
White hits

Thanks in advance.

It's a mixture of both really. Don't forget the power of single disease Pest + BB too by the way. In an encounter such as Thorim, the saved GCD can make the difference.

D&D should always take priority of course, and you always have ERW to use if things get a little hairy.

It's quite easy to search for the expertise cap within the forum, I'm somewhat surprised you didn't find it.

However, as DW frost, expertise to the soft cap of 26 is a higher DPS increase than strength. As such, you should gem / enchant EXP until you reach that cap before for STR. The same goes for HIT.

I think you'll find that all 'properly' Frost DW DKs aim for 26 EXP, and not "5 or 6".

Please be cautious about giving innacurate advice in this thread - a lot of people who are looking for answers come here.

Head over to this thread: Death Knight: PvE DPS

I'm fairly sure he meant 5 or 6 from talents. As for gemming expertise, the general opinion is split. If you want your rotation to be smooth and eliminate all possible dps losses from a dodge, you cap Expertise (using gems if necessary).
If you want to go for theoretical max dps, you gem pure strength and take expertise as you go from gear, gambling with your rotation being performed successfully.

You can find more info about this if you search through the DW frost thread.

Edit: Thanks for the link, Reflex.

Many simulation setups show higher DPS with expertise. It's not just a utility advantage - such as Spell hit - if that is the case.

I'm not so sure he was, but let's hope the mods give him the benefit of the doubt too

I'd have to disagree with you I'm afraid. As per the stat weights indicated here, EXP until cap is a much higher EP than STR, and consequently a higher theoretical DPS increase. It's worth noting, however, that this is in a high level raid environment of course.

Once the soft cap has been reached, EXP drops right down in EP, and of course STR exceeds it by a long shot.

Unholy blight works like ignite, "banking" damage and resetting duration when repeatedly applied. You won't lose damage if you spam deathcoils and you won't gain damage applying the debuff with trinket buffs up and then trying to "roll" it. Think of it as a flat 20% bonus to all death coil damage if your target lives for 10 seconds. The link below goes a bit more in-depth into the mechanic.

Unholy blight is not a major source of damage in most builds, but it is more than worth one talent point over the alternatives.

Mage Guide to Ignite – Frosty Magecraft | Spicytuna

1. Is death grip spell or melee based?
2. Is dark command spell or melee based?
3. If either are spell based what spell hit should i be aiming for endgaming tanking, don't want to sacrifice too much hp.
4. Aside from gemming for hit, is it ever worth gemming for anything other than +stam and to meet the meta gem?

thanks for the help

1) Physical
2) Physical
3) NA
4) If the socket bonus is beneficial, or your HP is high enough, you can gem avoidance (dodge / parry). To be honest, it all depends on what you're tanking, what you've got and what you lack

An individual a few posts back nailed it on the head. Simulators calculate out long hours of combat, ie simulated maximum sustained DPS, where expertise has shown to be the best, as it increases the minimum value of your DPS, but not your maximum (as you mentioned, there is a cap to when expertise becomes essentially worthless). Strength, on the other hand, increases the theoretical maximum dps one can put out in the event he can pull a lucky string of no misses / dodges in a fight (while not being hit / exp capped).

EP values aren't everything, you have to use your head on some of the stuff here, the EPs are calculated over the course of a 100+ hours (generally around 1,000) - not your average 3-4 minute burst encounter like we currently have in game. As for frmorrison, he was stating 5/6 expertise from all properly spec'd dks, I personally raid with him and know that he wouldn't have said something to the effect of 5-6 expertise is all you need, he simply left out 'spec' in his post.

well im 35k self buffed as a blood tank at the moment, 24.76% dodge, 20.96% parry. my melee hit is 216 (6.59%), is it worth gemming to hitcap myself as a tank or just leave as is? i'm aiming to be doing uld10 hardmodes

I wouldn't easily sacrifice HP for taunting only. In most scenarios I'd first use Glyph of Dark Command if I'm nervous about it (maybe a good idea if twin-tanking is needed on a new boss, e.g. Gormok Impaler).

Game designers have managed to make effective HP the king in tanking lately and it will need quite a critical need that can not be overcome otherwise to sacrifice it.

i.e. I'd only go to something other that stamina after crit cap if:
a) DPSes constantly steal agro, requiring threat through hit, expertise or remotely, strength
b) Where tanking is aimed (in a rare scenario) at multiple targets where avoidance is more useful or in another rare scenario a boss is so rapidly attacking with low dmg hits that avoidance becomes superior,
c) Frost resistance or other specialized resistances are needed.

Does Death Grip act as a taunt the same way Taunt does? I'm still not entirely sure on Taunt mechanics. Does it give you a large amount of Threat to give you aggro or does it just temporarily give you aggro? Same with Death Grip.

Both dark command and death grip are true taunts. They set your threat equal to the mob's highest threat target + 1 and force the mob to attack you for 3 seconds.

Also, unless something has changed recently, taunts are indeed on spell hit chance, not melee hit. So you need 17% to never miss a boss, -3% with a shadow priest/boomkin, -1% with a draenei, -3% with virulence; 10% overall. That comes down to 263 hit rating for alliance and 289 for horde. Interestingly, 263 hit rating is also the melee special hit cap at 8% (melee and spell hit scale differently).

Which means an interesting minor fact is that Developers actually wrote in Death Grip's tooltip the full extend of a taunt not found on the actual taunting ability: It acts like a negative spell on the target for 3 seconds.

I understand, however I'd argue that the EP variation between the two is large enough to negate relying on a reasonably lucky string of hits. EXP will still give a higher net DPS increase until cap than STR.

You are correct on the taun mechanic, and it's worth noting that once you've taunted, the second highest player in the agro table then needs to exceed your threat by an additional 30% in order to pull agro again.

WOW Head reports both Dark Command and Death Grip are physical abilities...