Switch your weapon enchants from SS to SG and then wear both the dodge and parry trinkets. Your total avoidance should increase slightly.

Of course if you're using stam trinkets then you shouldn't really care since that's a different playstyle.

Well the avoidance numbers I generated are with the SG enchant being used. Have you tried to compare the added avoidance of the def trinket with the avoidance gain of the parry trinket for your own gear situation? I should be really surprised if you didn't end up finding that the def trinket gives you more avoidance too. The DR on parry is horrible.

It is pretty hard to imagine any dk gear set where the parry trinket would not be completely worthless, seeing as it is pretty much always going to be less avoidance than either the defense trinket or the dodge trinket.

So I'm having trouble deciding on a blood spec to try out. Pretty much the only reason I would try blood instead of frost, is for the idea of a diseaseless rotation that would be simpler to manage and let me have more situational awareness while tanking. This would be primarily used for 5 man heroics.

I was initially considering something like this.

The last three points are floaters, depending on how much I need improved icy touch versus blood-gorged.

The other area I'm unsure of is death rune mastery versus improved rune tap. DRM actually doesn't seem that great considering how much damage obliterate does, especially with the diseaseless focus on weapon damage.

Any thoughts?

I haven't played with a blood spec but why would you want the frost and unholy runes to be death runes anyway? I mean surely Obliterate is still the best attack in a Bloodbuild, no?

Hm was the sartharion + 3 drakes thread deleted? Can't find it...

What is the unmitigated worst case flamebreath damage from sartharion 10 men?

It isn't better than 2 Heart Strikes (which is what you get with 2 Death runes).

Hope that helps.

After testing a few tanking builds I have chosen to stick with the following.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This build gives me all the nice frost tanking talents plus 5 unholy for dodge and 23 blood for VottW. I find single target threat generation to be around 4k threat per second without BoS. It depends on gear however. My gear level is not close to best in slot so and threat production will increase with gear.

I think threat production will be fine for future content but DK's could use more help. Honestly i would like it if rune strike produced a godly amount of threat and did zero damage. Thats just my opinion though.

My glyphs are Frost Strike, Icy Touch, and Rune Strike. All for threat generation. I dont use obliterate at all because I find IT's and HB's are better uses of frost runes for threat and RP for RS and FS.

If you have a prot paladin that gives you BoS then you can pretty much spam frost strike and rune strike for way more threat per second. Thanks to icy talons you attack faster for even more Rune Strikes. When I have BoS, I find myself with too many runes so Rune Tap is actually helpful because every 30 seconds I use it to burn a blood rune outside of GCD so i can keep up +10 Parry. Also when i have BoS I find myself using just blood strikes simply to keep up the +10 Parry because I have so much RP I dont find time to use that second frost rune over a frost strike. Moral of the story is BoS is awesome for deathknights.

I should be in my tanking gear if you armory me.

Krapniknil,

I am really liking your build, since my frost tank build doesn't allow me to take IIT (Frost Tank Build. I am unholy atm as I was running a nax10 with no unholy DK and like 5 casters.

There are a few things I can be nitpicking about your build:
1) Not 100% chance to convert blood rune to death rune (only 4/5 BotN). Can be annoying when you're stuck with 1 odd blood rune when you want to oblit instead.
2) 0/2 Chill of the Grave. Less RP, but you mention you have a prot pally in your raid. I don't.
3) Is Vot3W really worth all those points there? Unless you really need the extra stamina, Tundra Stalker buffs your damage more.

If your build works for you then great; to be honest I don't think I have tried your build. I just thought I don't need the survivability yet at this stage to need Vot3w, and the more damage I can create, the higher the threat ceiling will be for my DPS (been doing 6k TPS in 25 mans now, which seems enough for now).

Fully raid buffed/mob debuffed, Oblit will hit harder than HB on single target click here. That is assuming you take all talents buffing oblit as my spec goes.

I found my threat was almost equal to tundra stalker (almost). I dont know how thats possible. Maybe off by 200 threat or something. The tundra stalker build that i tried is this one.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

With my 23blood, 42frost, 5unholy tanking build I never use obliterate (unless i am silenced).

I usually do not have a prot paladin. Generally in 10 seconds I will cast this. IT>HB>BS>IT>PS . Then that gives me 75 RP and i use 2-3 rune strikes and like 1-2 frost strikes. I try to use as many rune strikes as I can. I dont have RS macro'ed to my abilities I just see it light up and I use my rune strike. I try to use Rune Tap every 32 seconds because it goes through GCD and uses up a blood rune. I actually frequently find myself with too much RP and almost all my runes active even though I cast every 1.5 seconds, so rune tap lets me use a blood rune outside of the GCD. Rime procs and the occasional miss with leave you doing something every 1.5 seconds.

I have no problems with 4/5 botn because if i dont get a death rune then i just BS instead of IT.

I never use obliterate. IT does nice damage, gives lots of RP, and has a high critrate and a chance to proc rime. Its my staple.

Ah my armory is working and showing my tank gear. The World of Warcraft Armory

THis is my curent built.The World of Warcraft Armory
I found it to be the safest in therms of mitigation/hp pool not to mention that i was loads of times in limit situation when i had to pop the rune tap, and save my ass, especially in 10 man/25 men raids.
Any1 care to comment? For the know, i manage to keep up aggro until 4k dps aproxx. after 4k dps, thinmgs get messy.
Some comments would be welcomed!
Thx.

Well, you're missing out on a massive amount of TPS by not having Tundra Stalker, Frost Strike and Blood of the North. VoTW is nice, but not that nice. Leave it to the blood tanks IMO.

So, with all the blood fun I've been finally working on making an interesting TPS set.
WWS Loading...
I had a fair bit of system lag messing my rotation and rune spam a tad, but I was getting numbers around 9-10k for PW (OT with vigil up so the first min or so was slow), 12-16k (latter being more spikey) Thaddius, and definitely enjoyed it. Yes, I'm not at 540 D, nor do I use an avoidance enchant (the extra crit-immune comes from the WG trinket). I thought it'd be fun to see how well I could do at attempting to make a limitless threat environment for those that would be pushing it (while not trying to keep them down, ex: hysteria), and for not having Sanc it seemed to go fairly well.
I'd like to know, however, where I may be going wrong with my setup. Should I be using a different piece here or there for a serious improvement? Are there some alternate gear choices for this (while still trying to keep around 60%+ avo in battle)?
I've been using IT-PS-OB-BS-BS > BS-BS|-|OB-BS-BS, so the last one or two are generally non-disease.

According to this tool (threat from wws) you did 5176 tps on patchwerk and 10596 tps on thaddius, which is quite impressive for thaddius if you judge by the numbers of wowmeteronline's threat charts for deathknights ( link).
I got similarly high threat numbers with a frost/votw spec while wearing two stamina trinkets and the SG runeforge. Swapping out avoidance/defense gear for offensive resilience gear sure is a way to increase tps, but i'm more interested in a high tps setup that will still be viable on progression content. I'll try to push some tps tonight (and upload the reports) while remaining at 60% avoidance and 33,4k hp unbuffed.

This is me last week : TPS from WWS.

6K on Patchwerk.

Same gear and spec than those showing on my armory.

(Imho best gear attainable except for the Sigil that won't drop) and 24/5/42 VoTW Scourge Strike spec.

The sad part is that I started as OT and ended MT.

I've got a question for you btw, I see that you are using DMF: Greatness, I crafted one myself, is it any good for tanking? Why did you choose it?

~

That is an interesting tool, and one that I hadn't seen before. Using it for my Thaddius parse last week as 50/14/7 Blood spec, here is my TPS. I did have Sanctuary, though I'm not used to having it (we don't have a full-time Prot paladin, but we had a prot paladin alt in the raid). Also with the blood spec I found it hard to take advantage of Sanctuary since the rotation is already very tight on GCDs.

I haven't tanked with it yet. I just chose to wear it for tonight's raid to see the increase in threat over a second stamina trinket. I will use a Flask of Endless Rage and probably have BoSanc for the first time ever. So i'm pretty curious how my threat will work out with all those buffs.
parvindk, davia and khornn all posted TPS values with BoSanc, so i will delay my judgement/reevaluation of gear/talents until i've seen what is possible with my current setup and BoSanc. My gear is obviously not perfect, but the RNG hates me on Bracers of the Unholy Knight and Sabatons of Endurance.

I created my DK alt as a tank for heroics to give our normal raid tanks a break and allow them to play DPS toons more often. I am now tanking heroics and have done OT/MT for Obsidian Sanctum and Vault of Archavon 10 man. The current build works but I believe as I run more raids a change may be in order.

My current build was designed with these thoughts:

* Rune Tap and Improved Rune Tap were chosen since we often PUG healers on these really late night runs. I don't know how many times I've been in the middle of a boss fight, not getting heals, and see the priest casting Smite.
* Hysteria is an awesome buff for the melee DPS we bring.
* Blood Aura was taken for the ambient heals.
* Blood Gorged is more damage as long as I am healthy - that is, if we bring a guild healer - which means more threat. The expertise is nice as well.
* Will of the Necropolis - I see a lot of Blood DK tanks without it, but the benefits are wicked. Coupled with Vampiric Blood, the Blood tank has nice coverage during those "Oh, noes!" events.
* Dancing Rune Weapon was suggested to me by a Blood tank in another guild. He is their MT, and they've done all of the 25 man content. He claims the DRW adds to his threat. I am unsure since I have read mixed reports. I do find it to be a nice runic power dump.
* Morbidity was taken for the reduced cooldown of Death and Decay.
* Epidemic is nice for the increased duration. I am unsure about this talent since I do not spam Obliterate.

Since I have started running more raids, I am considering this build. It is very similar, but with Improved Rune Tap and Dancing Rune Weapon dropped from Blood, and Morbidity dropped from Unholy.

* If in a raid setting, I should expect better healing, making Improved Rune Tap less important. That said, any self healing helps ease the pressure on the healers. Blood Aura was left in as a filler.
* Dancing Rune Weapon and Death Coil are the only real runic power dumps for a Blood tank. As an OT, I am often called to DPS, so that potential dump for more damage is not present. That said, I don't think the loss of DRW is a big deal.
* In this build, I took Annihilation. It was part of my standard Blood DPS build. It is more involved now that I have to watch disease timers and ensure I can pop Obliterate and then reapply Frost Fever and Blood Plague. (One of my characters is an Affliction warlock, so juggling lots of cooldowns is second nature.)

Questions:

* Is Obliterate as part of the normal rotation, rather than at the end of a cycle, as huge a boost in TPS and DPS as some claim? What have you experienced in-game trying both? I've read counter-arguments that Heart Strikes have been found to be better.
* Does Dancing Rune Weapon add to threat?
* Am I missing something?

Here's my TPS from last week's run on Patch. I was running the build below, except I've opted to remove BCB / WP for Virulence and AMZ for Sarth tonight.

My usual build I run is 13/5/53 Unholy Build: Link

I averaged almost 7k TPS on Patch: Nyissa produced 6973 tps vs Patchwerk

And about 5500 TPS overall for the night: Nyissa produced 5435 tps vs Full report

Full WWS here: Link

I'm the MT for my guild and while we're not cutting edge or anything, we do decent enough. I'm trying to find anything that would help me improve my TPS, so feedback is welcome.

Rotation I use is a priority rotation. On Patch I was MT and using : DND -> IT -> PS -> SS -> UB -> BS -> BS -> SSx3 -> DCx2

I'll put up the run from last night when I get home tonight.

Guild downed Sarth 2D (Vesp + Tene) last night.

Honestly easier than I thought it was going to be. I looked at some other Unholy DK's at a similar level here on these forums and put a slight tweek on their build. At first I was opposed to Desecration but I found it a very useful tool in kiting adds and avoiding damage.

Now on to Sarth 3D.

We are planning on same set-up and I will be tanking the adds.

Is there really any reason to change my spec for add duty?

I can see maybe the flame adds hitting harder than 2D but they were getting burned down before more than 3-4 were spawned.

I was top DPS for the encounter as well as taking the least damage of the three tanks.

Depends on which drakes you were killing, overall I'd say specing into an hybrid build will probably give better results than not(like DPS build but with the 3 5points tier1 tanking talents), but also depend on how many healers you use and what kind of setup in terms of "free" AE damage such as howling blast/ww/ds/multishot etc. The issue comes when vesperon's disc twilight torment overlaps with shadron aura, making fire cyclones(the random little meteors) hit for 12-14k and the blazes hit for like 8k each unenraged. Numbers might be off because I rarely tank the adds in 10man so they're 25man numbers, but still the random damage intake is high. It's tankable however until your DPS kills the disciples in the portal.

That's the biggest issue with 2drakes vs 3drakes since patch, prepatch it was about the same fight with just more raid dmg, post patch it's usually a bit different as most setups have to go into the portals to kill stuff, unless you have 2 paladins with Divine Guardian. I guess you'll see when you get there, each guild has to tailor their particular needs depending on their composition and style, there's no absolute answer.

What a great raid night! I got to tank some bosses in Naxx with BoSanc, Greatness Trinket and Flask of Endless Rage, and i got lucky on Heigan and Thaddius with new threat-gear (sigil/boots). Though my rotations were far from perfect, i managed to pull:
Gruumsh produced 8834 tps vs Patchwerk
Gruumsh produced 7696 tps vs Grand Widow Faerlina
Gruumsh produced 5896 tps vs Grobbulus
Gruumsh produced 11499 tps vs Thaddius (5 deaths)

full report Wow Web Stats (i dpsed on some fights with subpar gear and SG enchanted weapon)


This frost/votw spec definitely feels good and puts out the threatlevel i hoped to achieve.