I see several people talking about tanking as frost in 3.1 Currently I'm a 13/50/8 Frost tank that uses an IT/Ob/Ob/BS -> dump rotation. With the changes in 3.1, I'm not sure what talent people are sacrificing to get howling blast and what rotation they are planning to use. Maybe part of my problem is that I don't want to give up virulence in favor of epidemic and use a 20 second, 2 disease rotation.
Is that the current strategy for deep frost tanks in 3.1? Or is there something else I haven't considered?
That depends on what you were planning to put in the slot. I personally was planning to use Vamp Blood, Blood Strike and either Disease or Rune Strike. Depending on how large a gain it turns out to be, it may be worth using over Rune Strike. It would probably have to be pretty significant though, because while Rune Strike glyph may not be as effective in the long run, it ends up being a fair chunk of burst threat, and still remains decent over a fight.
EDIT: I just realized that you do gain an extra GCD. Usually you will be using non-death runes for IT - PS so you'll be replacing that with DS to generate more Death Runes. The actual pestilence itself will be on a Blood Rune, so you'll actually be losing a Heart Strike and gaining 1 GCD + a DS, as well as more Death Runes.
The more I think about this without knowing the non-Glyphed rotation, the more I confuse myself. It would be appreciated if anyone who knows the rotation without Glyph of disease could post it, as I can't seem to wrap my head around it.
Heart Strike heavy rotation:
Without Glyph of Disease
PS IT HS HS DS
DS HS HS HS HS
2x DS, 6xHS, 1xPS, 1xIT, 10xGCD
With Glyph of Disease
DS HS HS HS HS
DS HS HS HS PT (Replacing one HS with Pestilence when diseases are running out)
2x DS, 7xHS, 1xPT, 10xGCD
Net gain IT + PS vs HS + PT
Death Strike heavy rotation:
Without Glyph of Disease
PS IT DS HS HS
DS DS HS HS
3x DS, 4xHS, 1xPS, 1xIT, 9xGCD
With Glyph of Disease
DS DS HS HS
DS DS HS PT
4x DS, 3xHS, 1xPT, 8xGCD
Net gain HS+PS+IT vs DS+PT+GCD
So gaining a GCD depends on whether you prioritize 2 Heart Strikes or a Death Strike. I think you may be underestimating the Glyph of Rune Strike as well. At 25% melee crit it works out to a 8% damage increase on Rune Strike. If 40% of your threat is coming from Rune Strikes, you gain a significant 3.2% threat from the RS glyph.
The problem is see with that first rotation is that your PS IT is going to eat your Death Runes unless you Heart Strike first then reapply, or wait and reapply then Heart Strike wasting about 3 seconds. I don't know if this is ideal or not, but I suppose it can't hurt too badly. EDIT: I assume eating your Death Runes is the best way to go, I'm just unsure on whether we can rework the rotation to make use of those Death Runes.
I'm not so much under estimating Glyph of Rune Strike, I was just unsure of whether Disease would be a further increase or not. Given that you don't gain a GCD from it, Rune Strike is obviously better. If you had gained a GCD though, Disease might have pulled ahead. Obviously this is not the case, though.
Without understanding the unglyphed rotation, there was no way for me to wrap my head around the Glyph's gain, I just can't think that way I suppose.
Is that the current strategy for deep frost tanks in 3.1? Or is there something else I haven't considered?
Why take Virulence? Your listed rotation only uses IT as your only spell, aside from that you may throw in a HB once in a while. If your IT misses, you get the rune right back.
Personally, I'm going to be trying to keep with a 10/51/10 build, and as I feel aoe tanking is pretty crucial, I am keeping morbidity. Overall, Frost Tanking became more expensive talent wise in 3.1. Glacial Rot increased in cost by 1 point. Frost Presence is now worth putting 2 points in. And we save 1 point due to Lichborne becoming (effectively) a pvp ability. I think lots of people are going to go blood next patch for EH reasons given our blade barrier is nerfed, so I may consider that as well.
Why take Virulence? Your listed rotation only uses IT as your only spell, aside from that you may throw in a HB once in a while. If your IT misses, you get the rune right back.
Personally, I'm going to be trying to keep with a 10/51/10 build, and as I feel aoe tanking is pretty crucial, I am keeping morbidity. Overall, Frost Tanking became more expensive talent wise in 3.1. Glacial Rot increased in cost by 1 point. Frost Presence is now worth putting 2 points in. And we save 1 point due to Lichborne becoming (effectively) a pvp ability. I think lots of people are going to go blood next patch for EH reasons given our blade barrier is nerfed, so I may consider that as well.
Just because you get your rune back, doesn't make missing any less painful. In fact, it might be less painful if you just lost the rune, because at least it wouldn't mess up your rune refreshes. Missing an Icy Touch puts your rune refresh back 1.5 seconds and messes up your rotation.
On your second point, I'll be using Frost for trash tanking and Blood for boss tanking. I decided to do this because Frost is an extremely strong AoE tree, not only because of it's strong burst AoE threat (HB - BB - DnD) but also because of UA and Frigid Deathplate which are both extremely strong talents against large packs of mobs. Frigid simply because it increases your avoidance and avoiding many small hits is much more consistent than a couple large ones. UA because it lasts a flat 20 seconds instead of disappearing like Bone Armor.
I chose Blood for boss tanking because 30 seconds of +health and +healing during a regular damage increase is extremely strong, in addition to WotN and Rune Tap saving your ass when the healers aren't ready on a progression fight. Blood also seems to have some of the strongest single target threat at the moment.
There are obviously many more benefits and reasons for both, but I'm not trying to sell the specs at the moment.
What kind of effects will the newest build have on blood builds without DRM? Death Strike's damage was lowered again, but Heart Strike's was also lowered by making Glyph of BS no longer affect it. I've been running a build without DRM on the PTR and doing well with it, but haven't had the opportunity to test it since this latest update.
Anyone tested the new numbers yet and have a verdict?
2h vs DW
There are no dual-wielding specs that generate comparable threat to 2-hand tanking while retaining other essential tanking talents. There are also serious parry-hasting concerns that currently render DW tanking inferior to 2H tanking. This is subject to further study of course.
Just one tidbit to toss in, though it wont hold true in 3.1, but I'm currently running a modded version of a DW dps build a DK on my server runs that's similar to this 5/33/33 . You lose out on the cooldowns but gain the flexibility provided by using 2 tank weapons making it a bit hard to get used to, but quite worth it. I now pull an extra 1k TPS BEFORE gem changing (will be replacing a lot of def gems for hit/expertise and parry/stam) using the build and a rotation revolving around as many icy touches as possible for single target, and using a combination of Pest/BB/HB for aoe.
As is however, come 3.1 this will no longer work, leaving me considering a 10/32/29 build revolving still around IT spamming main targets, but gaining blight for AE to make up for the loss of HB. The biggest concern at the moment is CotG + GR or KM. I take improved frost presence to gain a total of 13% damage reduce from all sources, still 2% less against magic over current live, but a substantial boost for melee damage reduce (at the loss of 10% parry) and bladed armor for the 700ish ap bonus for threat gen. I'm open for thoughts on the builds, but they do prove that DW tanking is viable, as for the parry-haste effect i dont seem to notice to many more over my 2h build other then what's accounted for by the loss of the 5 expertise from deep talents.
Misada, sorry in advance if I am rude, that is not my goal.
Yes you can tank most of the boss using DW set up. But there are some encounter like Malygos where your damage dealer have at least a +50% damage bonus and sometime more, but not the MT. And it's more revealing when your are working on the 6 minutes achievement, where 5 k TPS is not enough to keep the aggro.
The question is not can you tank most of the encounter, but can you tank anything with a dual wielding setup.
And by the way, don't gem for parry, gem for dodge.
Just curious about sme views on this:What spec do you guys think will have the highest TPS?
I'm leaning towards frost personally due to the fact that it's the only spec that doesn't have tools that either are situational tps gains or contribute to dps but not TPS(a large contribution of blood dps for example is DRW, which does not produce TPS, Death Strike overheal also does not produce tps. Unholy's gargoyle and ghoul also don't produce tps). Plus frost will have better aoe snap-aggro for adds on bosses and such than unholy or blood(blood boil requires diseases, and UB is more of a tagging tool and extra sustained tps than snap aggro, whereas Frost can HB, Bloodboil, then DnD for a massive amount of aoe aggro right off the bat, assuming you have glyph of HB of course, which may end up passed over considering how may good Major glyphs frost has in FS, DnD, UA, HB, and OB).
I'm pretty certain Blood Boil won't require diseases to do damage but it will require diseases to do its max damage. I'll be staying Frost in 3.1 unless something pops up in Blood or Unholy that substantially increases there threat.
I'm pretty certain Blood Boil won't require diseases to do damage but it will require diseases to do its max damage. I'll be staying Frost in 3.1 unless something pops up in Blood or Unholy that substantially increases there threat.
Well yeah but the significance of the bonus damage wth diseases up is so large, that using bloodboil without any is like using howling blast in 3.0.8 without frost fever up.
I'm thinking about a 10/51/10 frost build, with a 4Ob (over two cooldowns) rotation. Would 5/5 bladed armor be better than 3/3 Subversion and 2/5 bladed armor for threat?
Misada, sorry in advance if I am rude, that is not my goal.
Yes you can tank most of the boss using DW set up. But there are some encounter like Malygos where your damage dealer have at least a +50% damage bonus and sometime more, but not the MT. And it's more revealing when your are working on the 6 minutes achievement, where 5 k TPS is not enough to keep the aggro.
The question is not can you tank most of the encounter, but can you tank anything with a dual wielding setup.
And by the way, don't gem for parry, gem for dodge.
It's understandable, and i don't claim it's the "it" build and should be the main, however it does go towards the point of proving DW IS viable in MOST situations, at least for now. That being said do i plan on going with DW in 3.1, probably not given my tests on the PTR so far. Yes in a perfect world i'd run around 2H spec using betrayer of humanity, but I make due with what i have, which at the moment is 2 half way decent 1H weps and the ability to think outside what I'm told is the "tank spec to go"
And i gem for for the simple fact that it was what i had on hand, and the DR for both of them is about even currently, so either one grants me similar avoidance overall and the scarcity of a JC with the Stalwart cut.
TL;DR:
DW isn't the best spec to be for every single fight, but it's also not the worst, I'm simply pointing out that there IS a tank spec based around DW that can, in the absence of "perfect gear" hold it's own against most other DK tank's TPS.
And i gem for for the simple fact that it was what i had on hand, and the DR for both of them is about even currently, so either one grants me similar avoidance overall and the scarcity of a JC with the Stalwart cut.
Actually this is incorrect.
It takes ~49 parry rating to get 1% parry and 39 dodge rating to get 1% dodge. Also the DR of the two ratings is NOT even, parry has a much steeper DR than dodge. Dodge caps out at 88% where parry caps at 47% as a result parry has a much more agressive DR.
I see a lot of posts explaining that frost has the highest threat of the 3 trees and that people are pushing 7-9k threat. Is this with constant misdirects against patchwork? I'm a 10/50/11 build and I seem to hover between 4-5k in most situations. My rotation is:
Start: DnD + IT + Pest + BT + HB
Middle: HB, OB, IT, BS (depending upon what combination of runes, cooldowns, and procs are available)
I see a lot of posts explaining that frost has the highest threat of the 3 trees and that people are pushing 7-9k threat. Is this with constant misdirects against patchwork? I'm a 10/50/11 build and I seem to hover between 4-5k in most situations. My rotation is:
Start: DnD + IT + Pest + BT + HB
Middle: HB, OB, IT, BS (depending upon what combination of runes, cooldowns, and procs are available)
EDIT: I forgot this is the DK Tanking Discussion, go look at the last few pages of the Endgame Discussion for the posts by Zerath on deep Frost threat.
For 3.1, I think i'll keep a blood spec (probably something link that : 54/7/10), but i'm not sure of my glyphs choices...
Glyph of Vamp Blood and Rune Strike are must have for me, but i'm hesistating between Dark Death (+15% DC) and Death Strike (+25% max)...
With Scent of Blood + Sudden Doom, I think i'll use a lot of DC, so i think Dark Death is better, but i'm not sure...
What do you think about it ?
Edit : After some tests on Kahorie's simulator, i find :
Sigil of Awareness + Glyph of Death Strike : 5172 mps
Sigil of Awareness + Glyph of Dark Death : 5014 mps
Sigil of Haunted Dreams + Glyph of Death Strike : 5051 mps
Sigil of Haunted Dreams + Glyph of Dark Death : 5060 mps
Sigil of Vengefull Heart + Glyph of Dark Death : 5027 mps
As a conclusion, Glyph of DS seems to be the best... Do I have to keep 50 RP in order to maximise my DS dps ?
I was wondering if anyone has had a chance to test the new IBF glyph on PTR. I have seen a few posts that have some small parses that reflect 10% more damage reduction while in tank gear than when not using it. It looks as though it bumps you up to 30% and then adds the 540 defense mitigation amount. If this is true that its a worth while glyph.
It's a pretty solid build, but I would take points our of subversion for Rune Tap, seeing as you don't use Oblit and 9% heart strike crit doesn't warrant 3 points imo.
Also as for the third glyph, I'm looking at AMS glyph for 2 extra seconds after getting the 4p T8 bonus... thats 40% longer duration for the 10% extra mitigation. But then I've always been a survival tank over a TPS junkie.
I did some testing on the boss target dummy trying to check my dps for a general idea of how my threat would be and didn't see any significant loss of switching from full unholy to the following spec for more survivability.
Primary attack would be Death Strike instead of Scourge Strike. I'm basically trying to get more survivability since there isn't any in Unholy past Bone Shield and Abomination's Might to help my raid. Please ignore the points in pet talents and stuff. I'm just trying to check survivability of Veteran of the Third War, Improved Rune Tap, Spell Deflection, and Mark of Blood versus the threat generation of maxing Crypt Fever, Ebon Plaguebringer, and Rage of Rivendare.
This will be my first time having to main tank on completely new content, and I've tried the 24/11/36 sarth +3 spec and found my aoe threat suffering on fights with adds like Gothik (didn't feel like respecing at the time). But that spec does not have Unholy Blight currently and Death Strike has gotten buffed.
From the testing that I have done it does not appear that my threat will suffer much if at all.
I'm thinking that the extra survivability of Veteran of the Third War, Improved Rune Tap, Spell Deflection, and Mark of Blood will be much more beneficial when trying to progress through Ulduar, than 20% to diseases, 10% damage, and aoe 13% magic damage (as opposed to elements) provide.
It just doesn't seem worth going all the way down the Unholy tree now that Unholy Blight isn't the 51 pointer.
The Tankspot threat table doesn't seem to have any info on just how much threat Ebon Plaguebringer, and Rage of Rivendare add, and I couldn't find any info on this when searching these forums.
Currently full Unholy I don't ever have threat problems and actually ask for vigilence when off tanking so I can give threat to the MT and don't pull too much trash off him, so I think the survivability will be more important progressing through Ulduar.
Am I missing a reason to go all the way down Unholy?
This will most likely be the tanking build I start out with. As much as I want to pick up VOTTW for the 6% stamina, I can't seem to justify it in a non-fully blood build. The synergy between Scent of Blood to the buffed FS will be the main TPS generating along with Oblits/HB's. the deciding factor will be exactly how much TPS FS generates.
On a side note, I've seen a few DK's choosing for Garg on their weapons instead of parry. The usual reason given is that e-hp > avoidance, and that the 25 defense allows for more stamina gemming as well as another 2% Stam. I find this a bit hard to compare still to 4% non dim returns parry though.
This will most likely be the tanking build I start out with. As much as I want to pick up VOTTW for the 6% stamina, I can't seem to justify it in a non-fully blood build. The synergy between Scent of Blood to the buffed FS will be the main TPS generating along with Oblits/HB's. the deciding factor will be exactly how much TPS FS generates.
On a side note, I've seen a few DK's choosing for Garg on their weapons instead of parry. The usual reason given is that e-hp > avoidance, and that the 25 defense allows for more stamina gemming as well as another 2% Stam. I find this a bit hard to compare still to 4% non dim returns parry though.
There are MILES of text on the SG vs. SS runes. Check in Suno's thread for it. Generally though, it comes down to what you like more. I don't really like SG, but some people do.
Tastes like Awesome, because it's made of Awesome(TM)
On a side note, I've seen a few DK's choosing for Garg on their weapons instead of parry. The usual reason given is that e-hp > avoidance, and that the 25 defense allows for more stamina gemming as well as another 2% Stam. I find this a bit hard to compare still to 4% non dim returns parry though.
The long and the short of it is that they're just different. There was a good bit of what I described as "tail-chasing" on the topic between roughly pages 95 and 105 of this thread if you want to see some numbers that clearly describe the relative value of SG. At the risk of over-generalizing it's similar to choosing between Blood and Frost in 3.1. SG offers better gib protection, SS offers better avoidance. Depending on the encounter, your heal setup, and what you ate for breakfast one might perform better than another on a given night.
If we ever hit something so tightly tuned as Sunwell again it might be worth Death Gating and swapping between them as the encounter dictates, but so far tanking runeforge seems like one of the few genuinely balanced choices we're presented with in the game. Neither is clearly better than the other.
03/22/09, 12:24 PM
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