Zurai

I havn't done 25 man Vezax yet, but he hits for the damage range you listed for 25 man in 10 man, ie 16-24k. He regularly hits me for over 20k (and not during the kite phase), and I'm well-geared for 10 man Ulduar. Two upper-middle hits in a row with no healing in between is a dead tank even with having over 40k health.

 

◊ Bryne

You shouldn't really be seeing many 24k hits on 10-man unless the tank is undergeared, but yeah - two high-range swings in a row is probably enough to kill most tanks. Edited my earlier post after looking through some more logs, disc shields, etc.

To the original point, though, I think people are for the most part overestimating the actual danger of BCB parry-hasting a boss - but still, on fights that smash your tanks (this is probably more like Thorim and Vezax, Ignis shouldn't really even be in contention here), it's annoying burst. If you're sticking with unholy to MT, however, it's probably not a terrible place to look for additional ST threat boosts.

 

Zerath

A few things -

1. I'm Blood because I was trying out a new spec (not on Vezex) and haven't respecced to my normal specs (Frost/Unholy).

2. Notice I don't have DRM - meaning, 4x HS isn't possible.

3. Vezex, oddly enough, hits about the same on 10man and 25man.

Now, my build pulls 7-8k threat with ease it seems but I was still having issues holding aggro from casters. But, I did enjoy what Blood had for abilities.

An aside for BCB - it should not be put in to *any* tanking build where a boss can parry haste. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter that it produces "more dps thus more TPS" - it enables you to be 3 shot in the matter of a second. "Oh! That doesn't happen often!" - it happens more than you think.

How this will work is you'll swing, BCB, parry haste, normal boss attack, swing - parry haste. I've seen this happen many times. It doesn't matter if it's "the least amount of parries for any spec" because if RNG is against you - it's not. In one rotation you have the ability to be parry hasted 6 times. 3 attacks, 3 BCB.

Now, the frequency that happens is extremely low - but, the fact that you put it on the platter when trying to get a "First!" achievement could ruin that.

 

Drolz

I think part of the problem might be that people are looking for the best Unholy build or the best Frost build or whatever, when they should be looking for the best build for a situation.

If BCB helps Unholy threat, but Unholy threat is still not higher than another build, say Frost, that has less parry hasting, then that's what you should be comparing it to, not another Unholy build.

When we did Vezax 10m the first week, he was basically a 25 man boss with 10 man HP. MotF healed him for as much as it did in 25m, so way higher percent of his max HP. Frankly I'm not sure if it has since been nerfed in 10m or if people have just learned to avoid it better. At any rate, I agree that he's a boss to avoid parry hasting if possible.

 

Nobull

I'm going to appologize up front for not using specific talent names or exact talenting numbers in this post. I'm at work and most wow sites do not load up to verify details. I'm posting this because I see no current discussion of hybrid tanking builds. Most posts are focused on a single spec tree.

I've begun experimenting with a hybrid blood/unholy build with much success. I am putting roughly 30 points into blood, 10 into frost, 30ish into unholy as I try different variations. In blood talents I'm getting additional attack power, extra health, rune tap, spell mitigation based on parry chance, and the talent which improves blood boil damage to build threat. In frost I grab the extra armor and improved shadow damage talent below it. In Unholy I am grabbing dodge, improved D&D, Pestilence, and anti magic talents. Unholy is the tree I'm trying to fine tune the most. There are numerous talents to add to spell AP and the desecrated ground ups your damage output as well for more aoe threat. On a typical pull I open with D&D, fs, bs, ps, pestilence, then spam blood boil for aggro.

I have seen posts knocking Blood's threat building ability and this hybrid build seems to solve some of those issues. Going straight blood or unholy has benefits in specific encounters, but a build that has strong aoe threat, strong self heals, and maximum magic damage reduction is not to be overlooked. Getting anti magic from blood and unholy is very handy in Ulduar 10 mans from what I've seen even though we're only half way through. The frost talent which adds 10% to all shadow damage is extremely good for DK tanks as most of the unholy threat generation abilities are shadow. Blood Boil is also shadow so you gain pretty strong threat combining these aspects.

I'm focusing on anti-magic tanking at the moment so I don't quite go down the UH tree to Bone-shield though it is possible to get it with this type of build. Feel free to discuss your ideas and experiences on hybrid tanking builds.

 

Cythen

I've been running something similar in 10 naxx as our MT. I've gone so far as to put 44 into blood, I have HS, WotN, Vampiric Blood, Mark of Blood, spell mitigation from parry, and runetap for self heals every 30 seconds. I put only 5 in frost for Toughness. And 21 in unholy, stopping with Unholy Blight for additional AOE threat.

Prior to this I was running a deep frost spec with HB, I used this to MT first quarter of Naxx. The next night I respeced to this blood/unholy spec and my healer had nothing but compliments for me after we cleared the next quarter.

The biggest difference I saw was my single target damage decreased. However I am able to pull threat and keep aggro in fights with multple adds without an issue. Also my survivability greatly increased.

This type of a spec can be incredibly sucessful if you can look past the recount meter being a few hundred dps lower than what you are used to.

 

Drolz

Your spec trades a huge amount of threat (Dark Conviction, Bloody Vengeance, Sudden Doom, Might of Mograine, and Blood Gorged) and 6% melee slow (Imp Icy Touch) for a few Unholy DPS talents (nowhere near what you lost), 10 minute CD AotD (nigh useless), Pale Horse (useless), and Unholy Blight (a completely unnecessary alternative to Blood Boil spam and DnD). I can't imagine why you chose to ignore Dark Conviction and Bloody Vengeance, and instead picked up talents like Spell Deflection (doesn't deflect anything anyone cares about), Mark of Blood (again useless in situations where healing is actually important), Imp Blood Presence (totally useless), and Butchery (merely baffling).

I have no idea where you think you get a survivability increase from this build, and you radically undervalue the importance of the threat talents you are giving up.

Hybrid builds like the one the poster above mentioned generally sacrifice threat for survivability, and because of this are only useful on fights where you alone will be attacking the boss for a large portion of the fight (Sarth 3D, Freya).

 

Disargeria

They cited Patchwerk as only an example, and also Ignis. We know that Illidan and Brutallus didn't. So, we can pretty much assume that most nearly any boss that parry haste would cause a problem with due to their melee damage has parry haste disabled.

 

Cythen

Let's do some napkin math just to give you an idea of how amazing this can be.

Improved Blood Pres:
4% healing returns from damage dealt, in Frost presence.
(40 hp per second at 1k dps)

Runetap:
22% HP every 30 seconds.
(6600 HP at 30k: comes to 220 HPS)

Mark of Blood:
Estimating your at 30k HP you get healed for 1200 HP each time you get hit. At 20x that means you have the potential to be healed for upto 24k HP. Hardly "useless" when a fight is coming to the wire.
(This is of course the best case senario.)

Vampiric Blood: 15% HP increase and increased healing done to you by 35%.
(Comes to an extra 4500 HP buffer to pop when your healer needs that extra 2 seconds.)

Standard DK self-heals

Death Strike: up to 15% Healing per strike.
(Realistically you are looking at 5-10%: Still 1.5-4.5k HP per strike.)

Sacrafice Ghoul
Good for in a pinch, instant 40% health regained. Yet another 12k hp at 30k.


Add them all together?

I'll let you do the rest of the napkin math. But I can tell you that last night I was able to solo Krystallus on Heroic Halls of Stone. My entire group wiped with about 160k HP left and I was still able to finish him off solo with some quick thinking and well timed cool downs. I then did the same thing with Loken in Heroic Halls of Lightning from about 80k HP left.

These self healing abilities are amplified by the 28k armor I'm sitting at right now, which is 65% damage reduction. Combined with abilities like Icebound Fortitude, this gives you the opportunity to raise your HP or atleast hold it steady to give your healer the chance to recover from a mistake or to pop their own cool down for more mana in a long fight.
Add WotN and you're looking at an extra 15% reduction when you need it most.

I do recognize that Spell Deflection may not be as useful as some other talents, but I was going for as much mitigation in damage as possible in this spec. And in a fight with AOE hitting the group I have noticed a definate difference in the damage I take from spells. It let's me tank through tough AOE much more effectively than someone who just eats it.

As far as threat and damage, I am still buffing my raid with Abomination's Might, and my blood boils, unholy blight, and Death and Decay make my AOE threat unbelievable. And yes, I am running Bloody Strikes to boost my blood boil damage.

I'm currently sitting at 45/5/21

I do recognize moving a few points around could increase my dps such as moving Night of the Dead and Pale Horse to more damage oriented slots. I chose On a Pale Horse to help replace Lichborne which I found amazingly useful as frost, and Night of the dead makes your ghouls much more viable in boss fights who are putting out AOE.

Don't toss out the blood hybrid over a little lost DPS. Just remember: You're a tank, and you're supposed to be able to stay alive better than anyone else in any situation. Nobody is going to complain about you doing a little less damage if you're easy to heal and keeping the raid alive.

 

Fenrisette

IMHO

you're a tank and your job is to maintain aggro to be the one that needs healing...

Healers have their own Job... maintaining the raid alive.

So I don't really agree with some of my predecessors in the thread, saying that you need to heal yourself...

Your Job is to keep aggro on you.

with my DK on Elune /http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Elune&cn=Ofense&gn=o+falla+nor+Shando,
I made the bet to take Howling Blast at 51 points Frost.
But took Runic Tap with the glyph, in order to save the life of my raid mates when comes difficulty.

(It has never been my aim to heal myself, in raid most of the time there are Healers, and they do so far better than me)

Well my choice serves me... I have a really good Trashs Aggrometer, Spamming :
Howling Blast
Pest Strike
Pestilence
and Blood Boil...

On Bosses, runic Strikes with both fevers is working well to keep the aggro...

well now I have to check if it goes well in Ulduar, not gone their tanking until now (and think I'm Short on life..., Must equip a little on Naxx 25 first... (but this isn't my main...)

 

Zurai

And Blood specs do that just fine, while also healing themselves for nontrivial amounts. This isn't binary, people. You can have both.

EDIT: Not to mention that a tank's job isn't just to keep aggro on him. It's to keep aggro on him and stay alive; otherwise we'd just tank in DPS gear, because that pushes a ton more threat. You wear tank gear because you take less damage and, thus, need less healing while in it.

Same principle with Blood specs. You heal yourself for up to 37% of your health in a single global cooldown when you need it, meaning that's less healing the healers need to toss at you.

 

prime311

How does 3/3 Ravenous Dead rank versus 3/3 BCB or 3 points Necrosis though?

 

Nobull

"As far as threat and damage, I am still buffing my raid with Abomination's Might, and my blood boils, unholy blight, and Death and Decay make my AOE threat unbelievable. And yes, I am running Bloody Strikes to boost my blood boil damage."
--------------------------------

Bloody strikes is a nice talent to boost blood boil, but if you don't need it to get deeper into the blood tree I would recommend going one step deeper into frost for the talent which improves all shadow damage. That talent will not only benefit your blood boil, but also your death and decay and pestilence.

I have begun rethinking my build and testing the deep blood tanking tree. I stop in unholy at Death and Decay now, but I also take the 10 point talent in frost for more shadow damage. Before, I wasn't looking at the deep blood talents from the standpoint of improved damage translating into improved threat, but it definitely makes sense. If you gain enough improved damage from deep blood there may be little value in going into an Unholy hybrid for simple aoe threat. Deep blood and bloodboil with D&D will provide enough aoe threat. Rather, I'd still consider a blood/unholy hybrid for the purpose of magic tanking as I mentioned briefly in my prior post. You get enough talents to mitgate damage with the 30/10/30 (rough talent estimates here) tanking build to let you stand in some heavy magic fire which would stress another tank and healers in that situation. Again, this is a situational niche the DK can fill, and is by no means an end-all tanking build, but it's worth considering.

 

Drolz

Rune Tap, MoB, VB, Blood Pres could all be picked up in a real blood build that actually has threat talents. If your goal is to solo heroic bosses when playing with incompetent people, I guess you don't really need to worry about threat, and MoB heals a lot more relative to how much you are being hit for.

If your goal is to raid with DPS actually worthy of the name, this spec will be wholly inadequate to the task.

 

Pyros

Pretty sure you're missing a negation somewhere because what you say first doesn't seem to make sense with the rest.

On the subject however, some of these are not very good at all(mostly blood presence), but you can definitely pick up most of them while still taking threat talents if you're playing blood. Haven't had any particular issues with threat as blood spec, and remember that healing does generate threat(only effective healing, but still). Most people saying Blood is bad have a pretty limited vision. It might not be the best for everything, but it's far from being the worst on everything. Unholy is far worse on a LOT of fights due to having very very few tanking talents for example, and comparing frost avoidance/mitigation to blood self healing is a tough job unless you can model both and run them through a simulator to find out which ends up being better.

Overall one thing to understand that's been said thousands of times in this thread, there's no best tanking spec(well not since early wotlk and unholy). Each fight will favor a specific spec more than another, and on fights where it's hard to tell at first hand, it'll be hard to figure which is better because there's no exact model of tanking DKs.

 

Nightseye

Cythen, you can't use examples of Naxx 10 and Heroic tanking as justifications to why your build is superior, at least not on these forums.

An ability that heals you for 1200 per hit against a boss that hits for 25,000, it's essentially useless.

2 talents used to generate 40 HP/S in a raid encounter where you are taking millions of damage in a matter of minutes, it's essentially useless.

On a fight where the caster DPS does 8-12,000 DPS in order to kill an overinflated boss and you spec 0 points into Threat Generation, you are going to lose the second a mage lands a 45k FFB.

The healing that your build gives you are so minimal it's virtually non-existent, provides no real benefit or relief for your healers, and at the same time, your threat is crippled because of it.

 

Cyrix

im sorry to attempt to deter the subject at hand here but right off hand does anyone even know the boss parry chance cause ive always used the 11% parry chance at best expertise but i did a 5 min text on the boss level training dummy and out of about 145ish hits (using normal melee and obliterate with a 3.4 speed weapon) and i got 5 parries and i have 11.5% expertise with is 46 rating since i was using expertise food so yeah as my previous question went, what is the parry chance a boss has ive look alot of places and ive yet to find a good answer

 

darkpuddles

As clearly stated hybrid builds are for purposes where DPS has other jobs than to solely burn the boss. There is not a snowflakes chance in hell that build is going to hold up to the feral druid who is breathing down your neck ripping on 7k dps.

So whilst there is nothing wrong with that spec its just to situational to really become benficial. If you want to be all the tank you can be to your guild then use the dual spec option to build a strong MT/ST spec and a strong OT/AoE spec. Don't settle for a build thats mediocre in both accounts

 

Zurai

I was right with you up until here. Blood spec is absolutely NOT a "virtually non-existent" amount of self-healing, and the best heal from it (rune tap) is 8k+ health with no GCD and 0% overheal unless you mis-time it. Yeah, his spec sucks for raid tanking, but that's not because it takes self-healing talents, it's because it avoids threat talents to do so. Take a look at my tank spec for an example of a self-healing blood tank spec that doesn't sacrifice threat. (EDIT: Although in hindsight, I'd likely remove Death Rune Mastery, which I don't make much use of, for Subversion, which would likely be a bigger threat increase for me) (EDIT2: Unless you were ONLY referring to improved blood presence and mark of blood, in which case I fully agree with you -- they both suck)

 

Grimolkin

I`m on raid team with a druid that is just excellent at AOE tanking so i was thinking about changing from frost. I have read that blood excels as a single target spec. Currently i am looking into this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft Any questions or comments will be very much appreciated

 

Drolz

I believe Frost is the best single target build. It is definitely better than a Blood build which lacks Bladed Armor, Scent of Blood, 2 points of Blood Gorged, and Improved Icy Touch. Suno's thread has some real talent specs that you might want to check out.

 

Tima

Lets be clear: any well designed Blood build will include Bladed Armor, Scent of Blood, full points in Blood Gorged, and no points in imp. Blood Presence, and no points in Mark of Blood. I think the issue here is less which 'tree' has better threat potential, and doing the research to make your chosen tree perform at it's best.

 

czokalapik

Mark of Blood isn't great talent, but can help healers on bursts from bosses.
As for aggro any of 3 trees can generate high amount of threat.

You say that self healing from death strike is not worth it, well, but right after rune strike you have obli/ds/ss as secont highest "threat per strike" skill, and try as many builds as you can, but i'm telling you that DS is best of those 3 because of healing.

Muminmamman produced 3865 tps vs Full report
Sigil of awarness, naxx10ppl tanking gear, i'm pulling 6k tps minimum, up to 8k sometimes.
In this specific raport: 341 Death Strikes, that's 5933 threat per strike +1920 threat per healing. That's 7853 threat per strike avg, i can't remember raport from any other builds that gave such high amount of threat for obli or ss.
Put RS and DS glyphs, and you have great tps build, additionally you are helping healers while using DS (it's not much, but it's something), in addition to vampiric blood this tree offers really great passive talents like will of the necropolis or spell deflection.

 

Nightseye

Yes I only meant Mark of Blood and IBP. Having tanked Sartharion 3D on both difficulties I can't tell you how many times Rune Tap has saved my life when my dedicated healers had to dodge crappy fire walls. However, outside of Vampiric Blood + Rune Tap, I can't see use for any other "healing talents" in the build he posted. Mark of Blood is not completely worthless, but I would never take it over a threat generation talent. A boss that doesn't hit very hard also doesn't give healers a hard time, so the extra 1200 healing per hit is not exactly necessity. On the other hand, Mark of Blood won't save my life against a boss that can 2 shot me with 43,000 raid buffed HP.

 

Wolfetones

Hi, i have been looking at this build for MT'ing Naxx and other entry level raids (Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft) and i still have 3 points left to spend. Should i put them into Scent Of Blood or Morbidity or something? any suggestions would be great