Are Death Rune Mastery specs putting out more TPS? I've been noticing Hunters usually right up on my ass on TPS lately, and pretty much everyone else on cheese fights like Hodir / General (casters). If DRM is the key to higher threat, what's the rotation for it?
If you're having TPS problems, you should really drop Rune Tap and MoB for Abomination's Might (gives at least 2% str) and Scent of Blood (you also have Morbidity which goes great with this). You also have Subversion, which boosts only your Heart Strikes, so you should definitely take DRM, they go hand-in-hand. Healing is not your job, you are there to keep the aggro on you.
More on Scent of Blood; this talent is REALLY good for tanking. In the last Vezax fight it gave me 640 Runic Power over 410 seconds => about 1,56 per second. This pretty much doubles the Death Coils you can shoot, also boosts the amount of Rune Strikes.
Just a small comment jacclark, you don't have two great threat talents - Scent of Blood and Dirge. That would give one extra Rune Strike every rotation.
The 3 points in ghoul talents don't give any threat or mitigation, and his dps is only usable when soloing old raids.
No toughness? That talent is not optional.
Originally Posted by Rabbitmaster
AoD really provide a very good mitigation (50-60% depending stuff&co), but the thing is that during the channeling of the spell, you won't dodge/parry anymore and eat every boss attacks. Were AoD could really help is with boss spells requiring long channeling (like mimiron's plasma blast) because the boss won't hit you with physical attacks while you're channeling AoD and taking 50% less damage. On the other hand, you won't make more aggro while you're channeling, and even with 10' cooldown you're not sure to get it whenever you want it if your raid is quickly chaining the tries.
In my opinion, it's really expensive to put 2 talents point juste for one very specific mitigation-talent that make you loose aggro and could be remplaced by every paladin/priest around here.
These two comments appeared linked in a way.
Yes, that's a good point about Scent of Blood and Dirge. I haven't considered it previously, but I think I would like it for threat. Thank you. As for toughness, I calculcated a 2% physical mitigation for taking points out of expertise in unholy. Since I have 7.25% expertise - 3 points out would reduce me to ~5%. Is 2% physical mitigation worth a 2% chance of parry? I thought with having the armor bonus from Inspiration it really wasn't a huge factor after everything.
AoD - I used it as points filler to get further down the tree. As the other commenter mentioned, perhaps this would be better spent on Dirge for RP generation and is something I will try. I wasn't sure about the lack of dodge/ parry due to channeling -- I've never died or tanken any damage noticeable to me during the summoning of AoD to my recollection. It's something to consider, but I do still use it as a O.S. Button, but primarily to help burn the boss down during the ends of a fight. Really good point, though. Thank you.
If you're having TPS problems, you should really drop Rune Tap and MoB for Abomination's Might (gives at least 2% str) and Scent of Blood (you also have Morbidity which goes great with this). You also have Subversion, which boosts only your Heart Strikes, so you should definitely take DRM, they go hand-in-hand. Healing is not your job, you are there to keep the aggro on you.
More on Scent of Blood; this talent is REALLY good for tanking. In the last Vezax fight it gave me 640 Runic Power over 410 seconds => about 1,56 per second. This pretty much doubles the Death Coils you can shoot, also boosts the amount of Rune Strikes.
Would you recommend dropping Glyph of Disease and refreshing my diseases every rotation? Is there a significant difference in the TPS between the two?
Thank you. As for toughness, I calculcated a 2% physical mitigation for taking points out of expertise in unholy.
How on Earth are you possibly coming up with only 2% mitigation from Toughness? Using my current armor totals, I go from 66.07% reduction to 63.03% reduction by switching specs between my tank and DPS specs (the only armor difference there is Toughness 5/5 vs 0/5). That's 8.96% more damage taken:
How on Earth are you possibly coming up with only 2% mitigation from Toughness? Using my current armor totals, I go from 66.07% reduction to 63.03% reduction by switching specs between my tank and DPS specs (the only armor difference there is Toughness 5/5 vs 0/5). That's 8.96% more damage taken:
1. 66 - 63 = 3% difference - check our wording; and check your meta gem, you use 2% extra armor instead of spell resist. Also, if you check my post from last year.. i think my calculations were 2% difference. Might have changed with the new gear, patches etc.
2. You can't put all 5 points into toughness unless you really change the spec around.
3. When you get inspiration armor buff, you get dimishing returns.. so at 25000 armor sure, there's a bigger difference with 8% more armor.. but when you're buffed to about 32k armor by your priest, do you care about 32k vs 33k? I have a disc priest with crit gear main healing me with a druid. My armor never drops below 33k during a boss fight unless she dies.
4. You have to weight the mitigation versus chance of parried attack. If you mitigate 2% physical damage per attack but each a 2% chance of parried attack which hits for say.. 3-5k for arguements sake.. what matters more? Personally I'd rather not miss, get parried and keep my rotations smooth and predictable. I think my healers would prefer that too.
5. With 3.1.3 this might change. The 60% nerf to armor could be quite significant.. but again.. in most cases, the special attack a MT has to deal with is magical.....
2. You can't put all 5 points into toughness unless you really change the spec around.
3. When you get inspiration armor buff, you get dimishing returns.. so at 25000 armor sure, there's a bigger difference with 8% more armor.. but when you're buffed to about 32k armor by your priest, do you care about 32k vs 33k? I have a disc priest with crit gear main healing me with a druid. My armor never drops below 33k during a boss fight unless she dies.
4. You have to weight the mitigation versus chance of parried attack. If you mitigate 2% physical damage per attack but each a 2% chance of parried attack which hits for say.. 3-5k for arguements sake.. what matters more? Personally I'd rather not miss, get parried and keep my rotations smooth and predictable. I think my healers would prefer that too.
5. With 3.1.3 this might change. The 60% nerf to armor could be quite significant.. but again.. in most cases, the special attack a MT has to deal with is magical.....
It's alot along the lines of what you're working with, but I can't not put points in toughness with the nerf coming.
I don't feel the need to get any of the crit talents, runic power generation trumps crit any day.
Lose the ghoul mate.
1. 66 - 63 = 3% difference - check our wording; and check your meta gem, you use 2% extra armor instead of spell resist. Also, if you check my post from last year.. i think my calculations were 2% difference. Might have changed with the new gear, patches etc.
That's not how damage reduction works. You are effectively going from taking 34% damage to taking 37% damage, which is a 8.8% damage increase. For example
Boss hitting for 50k base damage
66% damage reduction: 17k damage
63% damage reduction: 18.5k damage
Difference 18.5/17 = 1.088 or 8.8% more damage taken overall, not 3%. Also the armor cap against lvl 83 bosses is around 49000, so it makes no sense not to spec into full Toughness whether you are getting Inspiration or not. While there are many magical special attacks, the vast majority of damage is still physical.
That's not how damage reduction works. You are effectively going from taking 34% damage to taking 37% damage, which is a 8.8% damage increase. For example
Boss hitting for 50k base damage
66% damage reduction: 17k damage
63% damage reduction: 18.5k damage
Difference 18.5/17 = 1.088 or 8.8% more damage taken overall, not 3%. Also the armor cap against lvl 83 bosses is around 49000, so it makes no sense not to spec into full Toughness whether you are getting Inspiration or not. While there are many magical special attacks, the vast majority of damage is still physical.
You're assuming mitigation at base armor levels, not buffed armor levels which are affected by dimishing returns. So you're not comparing 63% vs 66%. You're comparing at a much higher level of armor so the difference is much less than your example. Like 1%. If you want to min / max then you must assume you have the buffed armor levels. Buffed armor levels (which is what is causing DKs to get nerfed to 60% bonus armor) is what gives you the leeway to push for magical mitigation which is what most of the raiding bosses do as their special ability and is what usually causes the MT to take extra damage. Thus I believe magic damage is what we should be aiming to prevent.
I will concede that if you have the gear to decrease your expertise needs, then by all means, put those points into toughness. You now get essentially the best of both worlds, almost best physical mitgation with best magical mitigation.
( Sorry druids! ) I will personally be dropping points out of Rage of Rivendare into toughness as long as I can maintain 6.75% expertise -- the point which I notice parried attacks are consistent. I think the gear in Ulduar 25 will allow us to do this quickly - which will allow us to use toughness btw. (So you are correct in using toughness, it's now a question of when and what gives us the greatest returns at what point in our gearing up process. )
This is my current build with the extra RP generation and necrosis dmg (autoattacks are 20% of my raid dmg). The next upgrade with expertise I will begin to move points into toughness. TPS is much better with the extra RP (Thank you posters for this info on scent of blood and dirge). Personal preference is 1 pt in AoD.
Your assuming mitigation at base armor levels, not buffed armor levels which are affected by dimishing returns. So you're not comparing 63% vs 66%. You're comparing at a much higher level of armor so the difference is much less than your example. Like 1%. If you want to min / max then you must assume you have the buffed armor levels. Buffed armor levels (which is what is causing DKs to get nerfed to 60% bonus armor) is what gives you the leeway to push for magical mitigation which is what most of the raiding bosses do as their special ability and is what usually causes the MT to take extra damage. Thus I believe magic damage is what we should be aiming to prevent.
Again, it appears that you are either talking about something completely different from everyone else, or you need to read up on armor mechanics.
First, there are no diminishing returns worth bothering with on the actual effectiveness of armor. This was proven back when Molten Core was the top-end raid instance. Adding 1,000 armor when you're at 0 armor provides almost exactly the same effective damage reduction as it does when you're at 48,000 armor. If I recall the math correctly, the "diminishing returns" is on the order of one-tenth of one percent at the cap.
Second, even fully buffed, with current Frost Presence, and including the +25% armor buff from certain crit heal talents, DKs don't come close to approaching the armor cap (just shy of 50,000 armor against level 83 mobs). I have roughly 31k armor unbuffed, and I wear several +armor items that most DKs won't bother with; with full buffs and Ancestral Fortitude, I'm still under 40k. And that's with full 5/5 Toughness. You need to have 39,924 armor before Inspiration/AF to hit the armor cap. Druids might be able to hit that, but DKs sure can't.
Third, spouting off nonsense about "the difference is less because buffed armor is higher" is just that -- nonsense. To emphasize this, I'll show you the capped numbers:
In other words, the difference between the base vs inspiration and toughness vs toughness+inspiration percentages is only about 0.75%, even with more armor than it is possible for a Death Knight to have with current armor levels. Toughness, therefore, provides a very nearly constant increase in damage reduction all the way up to unbuffed armor cap (33,711, since 1,050 is the most armor that can be gained through standard buffs -- technically it actually needs to be higher than that, since Toughness and Frost Presence don't multiply the armor from cloaks, rings, necklaces, trinkets, or buffs, nor "bonus armor" on standard armor pieces).
So, to summarize: There are no significant diminishing returns on armor, and even with 5/5 Toughness DKs cannot reach the armor cap. Thus, Toughness is a must-get talent.
Last edited by Zurai : 05/29/09 at 8:02 PM.
Reason: switched the math around to show damage reduction rather than increase in damage
This is where when you get too caught up in the numbers that you miss the bigger picture - hence, the old saying of do not see the forest for the trees.
The absolute difference is 1355. Also not insignificant.
But is it? When you're buffed to 45,000 health and taking successive hits of 13855 dmg versus 12500. Is the damage equivalent of a lifebloom tick or a quarter of a flash heal going to make you live longer? This is where the TTL arguments begin to fail outside of the actual raiding.
At this point, the argument of what is necessity versus what is desired is not conclusive.
Personally, I would prefer not to be parried for hasted parried attack at that inopportune time and will put my points into expertise until my gear improves. Expertise increases mitigation by reduces burst. Burst is what screws the healers and kills the tank.
Since most 25-man Ulduar bosses actually do hit for about 80-100k unmitigated, I'm pretty confident in saying that the 10% mitigation from 5/5 Toughness is worth far more than any other 5 talent points you can spend as a tank.
Still, let's compare. 6 expertise is 1.5% less chance to be parried. Let's say you're at 20 expertise before Veteran of the 3rd War; that reduces your chance to be parried from ~10% to ~8.5%, a 15% reduction in parries. However, Unholy DK tanks only attack with blockable attacks perhaps 10-12 times in a 20 second rotation (since Rune Strike cannot be parried, and most if not all of your autoattacks should be Rune Strikes). That means, over the course of a 10 minute tank-and-spank boss fight -- which doesn't exist in Ulduar -- you'll be parried roughly 33 times with 20 expertise and 28 times with 26 expertise. Now let's further assume that you have 60% avoidance -- more or less standard for an Uld-25 DK tank -- and that the boss is hitting for 25k damage on average per hit. Further, I'm too tired to try to model parry haste, so let's turn it into a Windfury attack and give the boss an instant second attack instead of the actual effect which is far less dramatic.
Of the 33 extra boss attacks with 20 expertise, roughly 20 are avoided completely, leaving you with 13 attacks for 325,000 damage from the parry-haste. With 28 extra attacks, roughly 17 are avoided completely, leaving you with 11 attacks for 275,000 damage. That saves you 50,000 damage -- that's awesome, right?
Well, we're not done yet. Now let's compare that to the total damage done during the fight. Most bosses have a 2.5 second swing timer. Thus, over the course of the mythical 10 minute tank-and-spank fight (which is intentionally weighted towards expertise reducing parry-haste), you're going to be attacked 240 times and hit 96 times, for 2,400,000 damage. With 20 expertise, that's 2,725,000 damage; with 26, it's 2,675,000 damage.
We're still not done, though. That 20 expertise build actually takes 10% less damage from every physical attack because of 5/5 Toughness. So, instead of 2,725,000 damage, it instead takes 2,452,500 damage. That's 222,500 damage less than the expertise build.
And, again, these numbers are intentionally tilted to favor expertise. In most actual Ulduar fights, you're going to get maybe one less parry-hasted attack landing on you. Also, your build doesn't actually net you 6 expertise; you don't have 5/5 Rage of Rivendare, you have 3/5. So it's only 4 expertise and 1% less chance to be parried, which further tilts the numbers towards Toughness.
Armor based mitigation actually has an increasing return per point of armor added when comparing the total damage taken at the previous armor total. Here are some examples to demonstrate my point.
(lots of examples of how armor does not in fact work at all)
You have described why, e.g., agility used to be so dominant for druids. But since WotLK, avoidance no longer works that way, and armor never did. The cap is at 25% physical damage taken, not 0%, and the conversion of armor value to damage reduction up to that cap is on the order of logarithmic, not linear as you imagine, which makes the marginal utility nearly constant, as Zurai and others have described. Those explanations should not be confounded by mistaken assumptions about how the system might work.
But is it? When you're buffed to 45,000 health and taking successive hits of 13855 dmg versus 12500. Is the damage equivalent of a lifebloom tick or a quarter of a flash heal going to make you live longer? This is where the TTL arguments begin to fail outside of the actual raiding.
Would having an extra 5000 health be insignificant to you too? For considering physical damage having an extra 5000 health is worse than going from 72.29% armor mitigation to 75% mitigation, since the damage reduction will both help you survive burst and lower the amount of damage you are taking, thus requiring less healing landing in between hits to have enough to survive the next one. Is the health you are getting from VotTW insignificant too because it's "only a lifebloom tick"?
Sure it's true that armor won't help you against magical damage, but by and large most boss damage is still physical, and most of the dangerous burst is either purely physical or a combination of physical and magical damage.
I'm having trouble deciding whether to use HB Glyph, and run a single disease rotation. This is probably the favourite of my options, however, I then have to get rid of one other glyph. I choose between FS, UA, or OB. At first thought, I would have thought to get rid of UA, however this is my only defensive glyph, and is great for low hitting mobs or AoE packs.
You really should use Glyph of Rune Strike in my opinion. And if you want to use Glyph of HB, then I guess you would have to get rid of either FS or OB. I think I would drop OB since you will probably be using a 1 disease rotation, which means OB will hit lower, and FS still as strong as ever.
Let me just explain my situation/ideas.
Firstly i must mention i am only tanking Naxx 10 and heroics atm so i see this build as a kind of beginner step with the hope of going unholy once my gear improves.
I like to take the HB glyph simply for AOE and trash pulls, my rotation on trash is something like DnD - HB - BB - wait for runes (Dump RP) - BB - OB/HB - OB/HB.The HB glyph really makes it a simple rotation with nice threat.Also my Unbreakable glyph is for the trash pulls also, with the OB glyph helping my threat nicely on bosses.
The next thing is i take 2/2 epidemic as i use a 2 disease rotation on Bosses, again this is to ensure a smooth rotation and i only use HB on rime procs.
So in reply to Bologne, for me its a one disease rotaion on trash and a two disease rotation on bosses.
I just reached 80 with my DK and specced frost for tanking. Right now I'm just getting used to tanking and my new spec/keybindings. I started running a few basic lvl 80 instances as tank first before I start heroics (still in quest reward blues).
The one problem I'm having with tanking is keeping Rune Strike hitting as much as possible. I'm not having any threat problems yet running simple instances with lvl 78's, but I don't exactly take solace in that. I know I'll need to generate more threat and not only from gear, but from my rotation and i know an easy way to do that is to just make sure I'm always hitting Rune Strike because it's a great threat ability. However in the heat of battle though I'm not so great at that. It just messes with my natural rhythm and I was wondering how you guys stay on top of it. I don't want to develop any bad habits and this seems like a great opportunity to. For instance I'm contemplating just using a macro to bind RS to all of my attacks, but I'm worried about losing flexibility to pull off an AMS or IBF perhaps when I start running much harder stuff. Plus there is like 3-4 seconds while I'm waiting for my runes in my AOE rotation where I could conceivably miss a RS push (if blood tap is on CD). Maybe a combination of the two will work. Any tips from the DK tank vets though?
I am also having issues with threat in uldar with locks, and hunters staying at 4 k threat and spiking as 9-10 tps, one thing I am currently trying is using a macro that that ties RS with my other attacks like OB an FS, it seems to help me out.
I am also having issues with threat in uldar with locks, and hunters staying at 4 k threat and spiking as 9-10 tps, one thing I am currently trying is using a macro that that ties RS with my other attacks like OB an FS, it seems to help me out.
Does this work alright for you though? I just don't want to use this and then realize when I reach harder content that it was a useless crutch that is eating up too much of my RP because I don't have any control over it, but on the other hand I don't want to gimp myself if I'd be better served to just bind it to everything else and focus on more important things. It's too hard for me to gauge this stuff right now during pretty easy encounters.
I'm a blood tank and I was just wondering if I should be concerned about my expertise rating. It's not especially high but since I use less spells than unholy or frost builds to get my threat, I was thinking that I should maybe start paying attention to it a bit more. Any opinion would help.
I'm a blood tank and I was just wondering if I should be concerned about my expertise rating. It's not especially high but since I use less spells than unholy or frost builds to get my threat, I was thinking that I should maybe start paying attention to it a bit more. Any opinion would help.
Obviously you should be. Expertise is a great threat stat, specially for a tank even a frost or unholy one, because we all have a lot of physical attacks, and we don't coward in the boss's back ;-)
If you want some numbers, go ahead for the "softcap" at 6.5% after what it's really up to you and your gear to decide if you want more or less. The aggro your raid DPS are producing is also the main criteria.
I'm a blood tank and I was just wondering if I should be concerned about my expertise rating. It's not especially high but since I use less spells than unholy or frost builds to get my threat, I was thinking that I should maybe start paying attention to it a bit more. Any opinion would help.
The biggest things that hit and expertise give you as a Blood Tank is the ability to execute a maximum TPS cycle before your runes are cooled down for the next cycle. On the cycles where you end up needing to do 4 or 6 Heart Strikes you don't have enough time to get them all off and dump RP if your attacks are avoided. If you see yourself get avoided twice in one rotation you can Death Strike instead of two Heart Strikes to burn through your runes.
I've been a DK tank since the launch of WOTLK and hitting 80 pretty fast, took a few months break and played resto druid, now I tank a bit on my DK again.
Went into Ulduar 10 and struggled immensely with the Thorim arena part, getting my runes on cooldown and not having any AOE ability to pick up the new waves. I've always been a frost tank but am now looking to go Unholy as an AOE/OT tank.
To do AOE well I think the following talents are a must:
Unholy Blight
Corpse Explosion
Wandering Plague
To make the AOE diseases and such do the most damage I think the following talents are good to have:
Crypt Fever + Ebon Plaguebringer
Impurity
Epidemic
Virulence
To generate the RP and sustan the RP required for Unholy Blight and Corpse Explosion I think the following talents are good to have:
Scent of Blood
Dirge
Since I'm a tank, and the two jobs of a tank is to take all the beating (Keep threat) and reduce as much of the incoming damage as possible, the other talent choices are for that, single target threat and mitigation.
Now especially the last bit I'm having problems making choices for, what would be the best choices on a talent for talent basis to get the most single target threat possible with this AOE build.
I hope some of you, who are more at home with each talent and its contribution, can give me some feedback on what would be better choices for me instead of the ones I went for in the build linked above.
I am Naxx10 geared so already a bit undergeared for Ulduar 10, working on that, don't know if that makes a big difference when it comes to the talent choices made.
05/28/09, 10:27 AM
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