ZaoZao

As far as I know only RATING is affected by DR. Flat stat/percentage increases (ie Talents and both Runes)

 

Static-KT

With 3.1 incoming, I'd love to focus on some specs for tanking when it goes live. I've been a big fan of 2h frost and are pretty disappointed with many of the changes, but still I believe I will stay frost 2h.

This is the spec I've been looking at.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...0&version=9626


Why I took what I did. the most non-obvious ones.

Subversion 3/3: I still spam obliterate. 9%crit is nice
Virulence: Spell hit for taunts/icy touch/etc

Frost talents are all for survival or threat.

I skipped hungering cold even tho it's one point because I have never found a use for it. I respec for pvp completely so it's no bother to me at all. With this said tho, I have not seen any of the Ulduar trash and only a few bosses. I might re edit my use of hungering cold if it looks useful.

ST: IT - PS - OB - BS - BS - Runic dump
AE: Depends on how fast runes are up/chain pulls/blood tap. but normally:

DnD - IT - PS - Pestilence - HB - HB

or you can skip straight to IT - Pestilence - HB - blood tap - HB


Criticism go? or Does anyone have one they think is better? or better yet, I'm looking for highest single target threat for MTing bosses. Is frost 2h still the way to go or has blood surpassed it? Anyone got a good blood spec to post?

 

Soulsbane

Post 3.1 Frost

This is likely what I will be sporting come patch day. Single-target threat with two-hander Frost is still going to boil down to strike damage.

 

Lanlaorn

Is anyone else very disappointed by Scent of Blood as a Blessing of Sanctuary replacement? While I understand that Sanctuary is ridiculously overpowered and so whatever replaces it will be weaker; a 13.5% chance per boss swing (Assuming a ~10% chance to be missed, rest dodge/parry/hit) to gain 15 runic power over 3 melee swings with a 10 second ICD is incredibly underwhelming. It's still worthless IMO and since we have such a large difference in TPS with and without Sanctuary, its Runic Power effect being removed from the game has signficant consequences.

 

nythain

They are giving Disc priests an ability that gives 35 runic power whenever a shield is absorbed, as well as the druid revitalize effecting Wild Growth. Between the three of then, we will hopefully still be producing a good deal of runic power.

As long as our runic power gain is significant enough to change a majority of our white attacks into Rune Strikes, we should be good on threat if we play tight.

 

Mercci

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...6&version=9614

Will be the Frost spec i toy with in 3.1, Imp Frost Presence and Hungering Cold are points to be reviewed but i think HC will be fairly nice for those aoe tank moments when runes are all on cd.


http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...6&version=9614

For an unholy build for most caster tanking and to see what tps can be put out from the new improved scourge strike and plague strike. still unsure on glyphs for this could use some advice, although bone armor will be a given and possibly IBF although with the new changes i dont know whether the rp cost will matter and plague strike might be worth while for the threat gain aswell as UB.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...6&version=9614

Blood spec pretty much based around all the possible +heal and self heal talents possible with Death strike being used as the new main tps nuke. Aboms might and hysteria for raid buffing and UB for assistance when aoe tanking. Havent played blood so dont know how useful rune tap would be - points possibly better spent in scent of blood/subversion/butchery. Again would need some advice on glyphs though the deathstrike one would probably be one i have down for this spec.

 

ZaoZao

Mercci, I don't like your tank specc at all, since it's missing almost every blood tanking Talent. (ie. Vampiric Blood, Spell Deflection, Will of the Necropolis) And I can't see a blood build built solely for self-heal being effective in a Raid environment.

I do like your Frost and Unholy bioöds though.

I'll probably run with a Frost or an Unholy build (or both. hooray for dual speccs)

On a Side note: would anyone care to explain the new Unbreakable Armor to me? I recall a blue post saying that it would be a flat damage absorb. But I don't really get the amount absorbed out of the tooltip, and I can't get on the PTR to check it out.

 

◊ Bryne

From the simple questions thread (but better answered in here):

The tooltip on sites like Wowhead is just being reported as "0.05" right now because the armor variable = 0. I'm still really not convinced this is any more than a situational buff to UA, but we'll see.

 

Rhyls

Not sure if this has already been done, but I made a simple spreadsheet showing pre and post DR numbers for dodge/parry/miss. It then shows post-DR avoidance per rating point and displays what to itemize towards to optimize avoidance given a current item budget. If there is any interest, and someone could tell me a good place to upload it, I'd be happy to do so.

I've been playing around with specs for 3.1. I'm currently 11/50/10 as I like the burst AE threat frost is capable of and 21 second IBF. What kind of rotation is optimum for blood on single targets, something like: IT, PS, OB, HSx4, RP dump?

Also, I've had quite a lot of success using the following spec on sarth3d: 43/0/28

This gives a passively mitigated breath amount of: .85(Frost Pres)*.85(WotN)*.97(Magic Suppression)*.96(Spell Deflection)=67%

This allows me to survive breaths with Vampiric Blood(glyphed) + Repelling Charge/Nightmare seed, which generally covers the entire time I'm not using IBF or AMS, thus requiring no external cooldowns until at minimum about a minute and a half into Shadron. Due to Repelling Charge/Nightmare seed CDs being 2 minutes, VB should be used after IBF and AMS, so that they are back up once VB is down.

I'm not sure how the ease of this compares to Unholy. I use this spec because I know as Unholy there would be times where I was only relying on Bone Shield (internally at least), which I have severe doubts will be able to take all of the breaths alone.

In response to Bryne, at my current armor level UA takes me from 65.12% mitigation to 70% mitigation, or a 14% reduction in current incoming damage. If you take my current armor using that formula, it results in 1420 damage subtracted from each hit (which is current given the numbers that show up on PTR). So any hits greater than around 10k benefit more from the pre-3.1 UBA, while any hits under 10k benefit more from the 3.1 UBA. Not sure how that compares to the average boss in naxx.

 

teiglin

I hadn't considered such a spec; I see it's uniquely tailored for Sarth+3, though you'd want to get sarth off of you as soon as humanly possible once Shadron goes down. Lacking Toughness and improved IT would make healing his melee damage pretty painful I think--without a warrior coming by to TC or a frost/dw DK spreading IT to Sarth, you're also taking ~5% more damage from his faster swings. As for unholy, no, Bone Shield alone is not reliable for a breath; usually Bone Shield plus a fire pot or trinket of some kind is good enough though, and adding in AMZ is another useful cooldown. Overall I'm not convinced that the superior magic damage reduction really outweighs the higher melee damage combined with loss AMZ/BS.


As for the new UA, I like the design in principle that it works more like blocking--it's a step towards making mitigation more consistent across tanks. However, in terms of actually using UA, I don't like it nearly as much. It now mitigates less damage on average than warrior's Shield Block and has a longer cooldown on top of a rune cost, and the nominal parry/threat from the strength doesn't make up for this from a tanking perspective. While DKs certainly have a lot of good, short cooldowns, which probably makes it unfair to compare to warrior tank's only short defensive cooldown, the loss of the flat 5% parry makes this feel a lot weaker than it did before.

 

Lanlaorn

Unbreakable armor definitely is a lot weaker than before. While upon cursory inspection it looks interesting, a nerf again the big, slow hit bosses (which unfortunately are the ONLY bosses remotely threatening to a tank atm, Malygos and Sarth) but a buff again a DWing boss or any serious multiple mob tanking boss event, if you look at it more closely it's apparent that 5% (6% with glyph) is simply not enough reduction and the loss of 5% parry is an incredible nerf.

A flat damage reduction of 6% of my armor, when raid buffed, comes out to -1980 damage a hit. I have 33,000 armor raid buffed and even though the +40% armor UA crept annoyingly close to the armor cap, if your raid features constant Inspiration or Ancestral Fortitude then the glyph is pretty much a waste, by itself the current UA gives me ~21% physical mitigation. The new UA would only be better against bosses that hit for less than 9428. And frankly, that's a pretty pitiful list. Even lowly Grobulus hits for 8-9k IIRC. Going into Ulduar where bosses will hit harder still, this is just a nerf that will become harsher as time goes on. Some other form of scaling needs to be used or as a bandaid fix, a number larger than 6% of armor used as the coefficient. Maybe as high as 9-10%.

The removal of the 5% parry, while a signficant nerf, is probably intentional since UA may have been too good compared to BS and VB. If Blizzard correctly tunes the mitigation aspect of UA then I won't really mind seeing the somehwat OP 5% parry be taken away, although considering UA only works on physical damage while BS and VB work on magic attacks as well, the extra 5% avoidance may be justified.

 

Mecha

Just speced into frost for the first time after being unholy since launch. Just want to get your opinions on what's a slightly better way to spend my points in the blood/unholy trees:

13/51/7
With Subversion, 2H, Sent of blood

or

10/51/10
With Bladed Armour, Morbidity

 

Rhyls

Ah, yeah, I completely forgot about the parry component, lol.

His melee is a joke really. I haven't had problems with healers keeping me alive from melee swings. The thing is, with WotN, you have a 15% reduction of every breath, so that's almost another bone shield right there. On top of that, you have an additional cooldown that's up for 30 seconds out of every minute. It's moreso a matter of CD uptime than anything else. Even if Bone Shield is up all of the time, thats only slightly less than a 7% reduction(5/5 Magic Supression and 5% on BS) over the spec I use without me using any CDs.

 

Rhyls

From what I understand, for highest point for point tps, you should prioritize Bladed Armor first, 2h spec 2nd, and Subversion last.

 

Mercci

I will be the first to hold my hands up and say i am not an experienced blood DK in the slightest, i think ive only ever looked at the first 3 tiers of blood in my DK career before the patch announcement, so the spec i made is trying to take as many as possible without sacrificing too much TPS. Like i said really wouldnt mind a few tips on how useful people have seen the talents such as runetap and spell deflection to be.

 

Arterus

I completely agree with this. Another thing to factor is that BS is Proactive, where UA is Reactive. In my opinion, this plus the fact that UA doesn't mitigate any Magical damage at all pushes BS far above UA in total effectiveness.

Again, assuming ~33,000 Armor. Any attacks hitting harder than ~10,000 will be mitigated more through BS than they would through UA. With 6 Charges on Bone Shield and our innately high avoidance, It's very reasonable to expect BS to have an uptime equal to or greater than UA.

Taking a look at encounters like Hodir:
Source: MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies

*Normal melee attacks for 25,000 damage on a well-geared warrior.
BS will mitigate more than double the damage UA would. ~5,000 vs ~2,000.

*After Flash Freeze, Hodir will gain "Frozen Blows" and deal 70% reduced physical damage but each attack deals 40,000 additional frost damage.
This puts his damage at ~7,500 Physical and a staggering 40,000 Frost. (I have heard the added Frost damage has since been nerfed, but I do not have a source).
UA will do almost nothing to mitigate the damage taken during this phase, again somewhere around ~2,000.
BA on the other hand, will mitigate 1,500 Physical and 8,000 Magic.

Those of you far better at Theorycrafting than I am, please correct anything you see wrong here.

If I can find an acceptable Unholy spec taking both Lichborne and Bladed Armor, I won't feel I've lost anything switching to Unholy. Then again, I'm still not convinced Lichborne is really all *that* mandatory.

 

Rhyls

Agreed. Although it's already used twice in our other tanking CDs, they should probably use a % reduction for UA if they want to keep the ability worthwhile.

 

Arks

Ive come up with a hybrid tanking build, 23/13/36

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
basically the only thing that changes in ulduar is that you drop shadow of death for unholy blight.

advantages verse straight unholy:
2/3 veteran of the third war
should have more runic power due to scent of blood (it is possible to pick this up in a standard unholy build, though i have not done so in my standard build)

disadvantages:
you lose ebon plague, so someone else has to throw up the similar type of debuff
you lose scourge strike
you lose 1 expertise from rage of rivendare -> only 2 points in veteran of the third war.

im banking on the fact that the threat lost from large scourge strikes will be made up for by dark conviction and 2 handed weapon spec (which im not currently using in my current spec, and threat is fine)
rotation looks a little bit like standard unholy..

IT, PS, BSx2, -> oblit oblit oblit

I'm probably going to try this out tomorrow just to see how it goes with threat. Anyone care to comment?


edit: for a build with less runic power but more oblit damage, see
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
basically you drop scent of blood in favor of subversion.
When i test this out tomorrow I should have an idea of how the RP generation is, but i imagine that it cant be any worse than unholy, since you still have Dirge.

Long time reader first time poster, be gentle.

 

Hayden18

I understand having OB in there for ST but I don't understand why there is no HB rotation. In my opinion HB works out so much better in the rotation although you could throw a OB in there if you needed a boost in threat.

 

Gorgangio

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I'd personally use this build gonna try it out tonight for TPS on Sarth 2D as drake tanking. Only difference really is i took out all the auto-attack talents as rune strike tends to take up most of them

 

ZaoZao

Since Necrosis procs off Rune Strike there is no reason to not take it, especially over talents like Virulence and Corpse Explosion. I do remember that Necrosis was accountable for around 8% of my total damage done on most non-AoE bossfights
Also Vicious Strike is quite pointless since your main FU ability is Obliterate which isn't affected by it. Not to mention Outbreak which is very lackluster until 3.1 and the buff to Plague Strike.

PS: BcB IS a bad tanking talent since the additional strike can be parried, but I suppose it too would procc off RS (never tested it though and too lazy to read it up now)

PPS: This is how I personally would switch around the points in the unholy tree

 

Zerath

BcB does induce Parry-Hasting but the board came to the conclusion it's not worth skipping if you want to take it. We still have less abilities that Parry-Haste us over Warriors.

If you *really* want BcB - take it. The probability that it will insta-gib you is extremely low, especially in our current raiding environment.

Over all, it will increase your TPS slightly if you have no other uses for those 3 points.

CE is a fantastic "filler" point, imo. Any build in Unholy will have that for me if there will be AoE packs in the foreseeable future, it was a fun talent and increased AoE dmg a smidgen.

 

pr0nny

edit: nevermind

 

verik

In terms of single-target tanking as a 2H/frost tank, what is a better use of runes: Oblit or HB? I find that my HB crits for much more than my Oblit and it costs less runes. So why would any tank use Oblit > HB? Other than single-target tanking I can't think of any situation where a tank would want to use an ability that does less damage and costs more.

 

itseizeyou

I rarely use Oblit. Like Verik said, it seems useless to use it when it costs more and does less damage then a lot of my other abilities. If it's up and I happen to see it, I'll use it, otherwise it's not in my main rotation.

Even on single targets HB crits way more often and does more damage all around for me. I would stick with HB.