saiyajinmaster

I wanted to touch on how other folks are finding AE tanking as a DK. I had a warrior alt (prot) prior to rerolling as a DK, and with the 3.0 changes found that hitting thunderclap/shockwave on cooldown was intuitive and easy. I know they want all of the tanks to be able to cover the major niches well, but I'm finding AE tanking in unpredictable situations to be a huge hassle as a DK.

My normal setup in 5 mans or raids on a pull is to IT, PS, Pestilence, HB, Blood Boil, repeat, or to death grip a caster in and start from there if I need to, that works very well and it's a simple rotation to maintain, the issue I have is on fights with unpredictable adds (Or even predictable ones at awkward intervals). For instance the fight that really frustrated me and predicated this, was 25 man Gothik, where on the 'caster' side the mobs are spawning such that I can't just 'wait' on HBs or Pestilences to pick up new ones, or I'll lose threat on the old ones, yet if I continue my rotation as normal new adds will just blow right by. Has anyone else had issues with situations like this? I think I'm generally a pretty good tank but it's frustrating as heck to be in a situation like that as a DK tank honestly. Bursts of mobs are fine, streams are almost impossible to control.

 

Feverdreams

Just to clarify we're ignoring the per point DPS increase found on the DPS forum because in tanking gear our crit is so much lower, and our Armor likely higher; that BA surpasses Wandering Plague in DPS boost. Correct? Just want to make sure.

Also Bucknasty both of your Unholy Builds do not take Virulence; are we sure Virulence is not required for tanking because of the spell hit?

Also are Ravenous Dead and Shadow of Death worth picking up over Necrosis? I supose if you're really really hurting for mitigation the strength boost it might be better, but I see both of those talents as pitfalls in a tanking build.

 

Wrathe

Regarding the frost build:

Has any testing gone out to determine how much armor is needed for the last 2 points from Bladed Armor to overcome 2 points to Two Hand Spec? I could see a 3/5 Bladed and 2/2 Two Hand Spec being more threat then just 5/5.

Also, Subversion is 9% to essentially just Blood Strike and Obliterate. Would it not be better to spend the 3 points into Dark Conviction to give a flat 3% increase to all attacks instead of 9% to just two? Especially in any AE scenario, where one of those Blood Runes will likely be spent on Pestilence every round.

If nothing else, it'd add more credence to the KM substitution of BoTN.

Now if they'd just lower Acclimation a tier, we could not worry about BoTN or KM and have a win/win.

 

Cloudgatherer

Are you specced morbidity? I've found the 15 second CD on D&D is incredibly powerful in add based fights in heroics, and the huge threat that ability puts out has been noted in this thread. For unpredictable situations, we have several levers to pull to contain them.... but all of them are on a cooldown of some type. D&D can be 15 second cooldown. HB is 6 seconds. Pestilence is 5. Hungering Cold is a minute CD, but I've found this ability to be an excellent "oh crap adds" button, if for nothing other than applying frost fever on all the mobs in question, and then HB a few seconds later.

For pulls I'm doing IT (gets them moving to me), D&D (as they are closing), PS, Pest. Now there is a D&D and diseases rolling on the adds, so HB on CD and D&D on CD is well enough to keep aoe threat I've found so far.

On a different note, how much damage are people doing while tanking runs? I'm not talking about DPS, just overall damage on a run. I've found the "bad" heroics I've been in I was doing most damage, while the better ones the damage dealers are above me. So far it's shaping up to be a pretty good metric of good/bad puggers =0.

 

Darian_TruBlade

28% miss rate + 5.6% dodge rate + 12-15% parry rate = 45.6-48.6% white attacks avoided. As I stated in the post you quoted this is without any hit or expertise.

It is important to note that if parry haste has been removed entirely, something that is still in question though increasingly likely, all 2H tanks will cap their expertise at 5.5-6% as anything beyond will be half as valuable and they also will not go beyond 9% hit. In order to remain competitive on mitigation DW tanks will likely have to follow suit, meaning that a 19% white miss rate and a 7-10% parry rate remain. While not as stark as nearly 50%, a 26-29% avoidance rate on white attacks still has the potential to be vastly more unreliable for threat.

This could turn out to be a non-issue, and it might be shown that DW tanking has significantly greater threat generation with the correct build. While it would be a good thing if DW tanking was shown to be equal to 2H, at the moment I remain skeptical.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

calisti

Regarding the frost tanking builds in the original post, I'm honestly surprised that neither of them include Endless Winter for free Mind Freezes. With Frost Strike, Horn of Winter, Icebound Fortitude, and Rune Strike consuming runic power, I'd think that a free interrupt every 10 seconds would be a good thing. I've tanked countless instances with an unholy DPS build, and there have been more than a few occasions where I found myself without the runic power to use Mind Freeze. This isn't a big deal in 5-mans, but in raids I could see it being a problem where interrupts are vital for beating an encounter (Opera, Illidari Council, High King Maulgar, Reliquary of Souls, ect).

 

Suno

Shadow of death is a nasty one pointer. 2% stamina and 2% strength is a no brainer for one point.

Virulence would be a nice pickup, as DK tanks will never reasonably reach the spell hit cap. Much like rogues, we'll be looking to reach the yellow-attack cap and then spread the wealth into other stats (prioritizing expertise of course as well). Please keep in mind that my analysis of our trees is largely experiential, and the rest comes from feverish reading and analyzing data provided by others. In my experience, pursuing the melee-special hit cap has gotten me to trust icy touch very much, as that's the opener used on most bosses. The other spells (DnD, Pest, BB) are less consequential should they miss one unit or one tick. Once geared, I never felt that I could use more spell hit, let alone -need- it. Maybe the RNG was nice to me all of Beta and recently in live, it's certainly worth a look to evaluate that talent versus it's nearby competitors.

TLDR: no, I'm not sure, but I've never felt that I need more spell hit, especially once well-geared.


Regarding Subversion vs. Dark Conviction: as a frost tank, Obliterate will do around 35% of your damage, head, shoulders and waist above any other single ability. It's the bread and butter of your rotation and getting more of them is the main point of 5 points in BoTN, it's that important. Adding 9% crit to it is monstrous. 3% crit to BB, PS, Pest are near-useless on most boss encounters, though 3% for FS and HB is nice. IIRC, there was an analysis of this in the original DK thread where someone more mathematically inclined than myself broke it down. I think Subv won without even considering the Blood strike crit increase.

 

faight

Another good thing about Shadow of Death: No durability loss. Maybe that's only if you explode yourself though, but I have yet to take durability as long as I have the skill, however I always end up exploding since (soloing) the mob either dies or we're in an a situation where there is no chance we'll survive so I just get started on running back.

I'll double check and see if you run the full duration or you get killed while ghouled if you take durability, but I can confirm if you explode you take none.

 

Sternumus

I can confirm that by right clicking the Shadow of Death off your buff list to die you will not take a durability hit.

 

comablack

Every raid i've done in the past 4years it has been the rogues' job to kick, never the tanks.
I'm 99% sure its like that for every other guild as well.

 

crimsonsentinel

So is it the consensus that due to the crit talents, glyph, etc that when tanking single targets, frost DK's should always use obliterate over howling blast?

 

Zerath

Single target - Yes, you are correct.

**NEW INFO**

We were speaking about how we weren't sure if our damage reducing cooldowns stacked - they do not stack additively. They are multiplied, i.e. 50% of 40%.

This was a several minute test with a boomkin, during this test I record his hits/crits while in Frost Presence and without BA/IBF/AMS. BA reduced hits roughly 40%, IBF roughly 50%, etc.

Normal Starfire was 3.5k, with BA up 1.9k, with BA+IBF 1k.

Popping BA + IBF + AMS (in that order) lead to average Starfire of 60dmg, though.

Food for thought.

(If I figured out the math incorrectly, please, let me know.)

 

Flopi

I've never checked the numbers but I always thought they stack like BoP and Tranq. Air used to. I'm not sure if that's what you mean but math used to be something like that:

x is the amount of damage.
First x is multiplied by the IBF coeficent 0.5 leaving 0.5x
Then that is multiplied by bone armors coeficent 0.4. 0.5x multiplied by 0.4 = 0.2x
That's making total of 80% damage reduction with both skills up.

About Shadow of Death. I haven't checked combat log or monitored the skill with my full attention but sometimes it doesn't seem to work. I die, period. No repopping as ghoul like it should be. Is there some kind of cooldown that's not in the tooltip or?

 

Metapod

Ok here is my imput.

I played on beta and raided horde side, clearing naxx 10 man everyday.
We did naxx 25 once a week on weekends.

I main tanked naxx 10 many many times and off tanked naxx 25.

I speak only of naxx because it has the most bosses, requires a diverse amount of strategy and has hard hitting bosses.
Obsidian sanctum and Vault is negligible.

This is the build I originally started main tanking with. I had about 35% total avoidance, and dodge trinkets which upped it to about 42%.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
I was told the hit cap was 9%, so I took the spell hit over the 4% 2H damage.

Now on Live I am hearing mixed hit cap results. Some people say the hit cap is not 9%, it is 16%. However that may be for DW and Spell. I need a confirmation on this.

This is the build I went after I had 45% avoidance:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
I went this build. I found that glyphed death strike along with three diseases out threats frost.

This is what I did on beta, I am currently gearing up on live. Feed back and discussing is greatly appreciated.

 

Windchief

You can find all of the current believed stat mechanics here. You can find more specific information on the Death Knight abilities and stats here and to save you the click, the relevant data:
Hope I have answered your question!

 

Griefknight

The hit cap for yellow hits is 9%. The hit cap for spells is 17%. When speccing unholy spell hit cap is more important then spell hit cap if you were blood or frost due to small amount spell damage the two specs deal. Since unholy is the highest spell damage dealing spec of the three your spell hit cap is rather important, any unholy spec should have Virulence due to this factor.

26.2 spell hit rating = 1% spell hit
32.7 hit rating = 1% hit

You will need 296 hit rating and 367 spell hit rating (both are itemized as hit rating) that is 367 with Virulence.

I hope this clears things up.

 

Crackensan

So Hit Rating=Spell Hit Rating?

I'm still slightly confused on this and how much Defense at 80 one would need.....

 

Pyros

While I agree Endless Winter is lackluster, with the interupts off GCD and threat being what it is, not interupting as a tank is either being lazy, or on a fight that has a lot of stuff to keep track of. It used to be rogues's job because a tank would often be on 1.5 GCD due to having to spam abilities to keep aggro, while a rogue would be on a 1s GCD with the possibility to just autoattack for 5secs everytime a cast was coming up to make sure to interupt it.

That said, there's not that many fights where you actually have to interupt something though, and as a DK tank you can miss interupts on purpose on stuff like kelthuzad frostbolt, to AMS it for full RP and negligible damage.

 

mav1234

Assuming that there is no parry haste, would the benefit of two mitigation weapons, particularly in early gearing for uncritable status, actually outweigh the TPS bonus from a 2h for some of us? I think it might help in very early gearing. Later on, when TPS becomes more important and mitigation is at a high level already, it may not be so great.

I assume that Nerves of Cold Steel would be absolutely required for any such build... Which may make it difficult to pack everything good into a frost build, if you're also carrying the icy talons line.

Removal of parry haste is interesting, and offers a lot of new opportunities to us. Two mitigation weapons don't look quite as bad if that is in fact the case, as someone mentioned earlier.

 

faight

I'd say two mitigation weapons should be fine for trash, but against a boss I'd personally prefer a 2hander due to the much lower hitcap required, allowing you to land your attacks for more threat and keep your itemization focused towards tanking stats instead of hit.

Unless of course it turns out we need to go for capped spellhit, in which case we'll have a ton of melee hit as well and then two one-handers with mitigation + high hit rating + no parryhasting would probably end up being better.

So much stuff up in the air.

 

hvidgaard

Not only is it irrelevant what you've done the past 4 years. With the massive change to the game in 3.0 you can't reason based sole on how it used to be. For 10-man content where you almost always will have sub-optimal raid composistion it does indeed matter. I don't know much about Druids or Pallys, but Warriors interrupt is off the CGD and can be used at any time - any Warrior tank that doesn't interrupt is a sub-optimal tank.

Anyone with light on Druid and Paladin interrupts?

 

faight

Having played the last expansion as a Prot Paladin I can say we didn't have any interrupts other than Hammer of Justice then. As of 3.0 I know that HoJ has a "Interrupts spells being cast" bit in the tooltip language now, which was theoretically supposed to interrupt a spell if the mob was stun immune (bosses). However, it has a long cooldown (talented 30s, normally 60s), but early reports stated that if the mob was stun immune nothing would get interrupted. Arcane Torrent was useful, but only Horde gets that.

This might have changed recently, however since Wrath hit I only logged on to drag him to Northrend to learn new skills so he could cook for me as I level.

As for Druids I thought they were in the same boat, their only interrupt being a stun. Perhaps a feral tank can fill us in on that.

I have to say, coming from Prot, having spell interrupt and a short term silence is golden.

Also not being forced to be a Blood Elf.

 

Hraka

While I am unsure as to whether or not the HoJ interrupt currently works against targets immune to stuns, it is a spell on the global cooldown so relying on a paladin for this (not even considering the 30/60 sec cooldown) would not be a reliable method for interrupting a spell.

Edit: Druid's Bash (60 sec cooldown/30 sec talented) is also tied to gcd.

 

nokomisa

I have been doing some tanking lately, and unholy seems great at aoe tanking. Generally, after 2 rotations (roughly 20 seconds) i have 54k threat on main target, and 25k threat on other targets. my rotation is

D&D>IT>PS>Pestilence>DC
SS>BS>SS>BB>UB

Obviously, it can be changed a little. on boss fights, i find gargoyle as a great runic power dump. If there is only 1 target left, UB is useless, might as well just DC once or twice. My spec is Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The extra crit helps generate threat much more, and since most tank gear doesnt have crit, the most through talents we can get is great. I skipped corpse explosion, because with UB, D&D, Pestilence, BB and Wandering plague, you already have enough aoe. I put 2 points in Morbidity so that the D&D CD is up by the up by the time both of my rotations are done. I put points in master of ghouls, just for soloing. At 80, for raiding, i would imagine taking it out and putting it in something else. This spec generates a ton of threat, and im sure once i hit 35-40% avoidance (im at 26 right now) the mitigation will be great too.

 

Khana

I tested something yesterday, which is mass trash mobs pulls and AoE tanking in Blood specc (frost Presence).
Death rune mastery is the keys for AoE blood tanking, the extra Death Runes are used to chain-blood boil over the groups -AND- rotate Death Strike with DnD.

DnD, IT, PS, Pestilence, BB, BB, DS
Repeate untill you get 2B, 4DR then spam DnD and BB, refreshing plagues. If you got Blood Worms also, they are very likely to procc, experimental environment leads to the idea that Blood Worms procc on any damage you do, DnD also.
I could have a perfect sequence of 6 BB while DnD was down, which leads to something like 400 DPS or more on any target in range at level 61: plagued, blood boiled and DnD'ed.

I will test this on Blood Presence to see how much I can heal myself with all this DPS.
Level 61, cared for six level 63 fel orcs.

Tried this in instance as well, at level 62 in Blood Furnace; Anihilate supporting OB as main threat generator.