Kamaa

With sunder/EA and a druid of any spec for FF, threat shouldn't be an issue on Vezax. The only time there should be any risk of of pulling is when animus first spawns. You said you had a rogue, ensure he starts with TotT for both Vezax and Animus. Immediately dump all of your runes and then ERW for a huge lead in threat. On Vezax hard mode I'm usually far enough ahead in threat that I'm able to wait for myself to take damage before I death strike. Also make sure you're using Rune Tap on cooldown, but only for effective healing. That's a lot of free threat.

As for DK's doing less threat than other classes, I simply haven't encountered this. Assuming similar gear sets, (ie both tanks are in stam gear, or both are in TPS gear) I usually destroy warriors in TPS, and bears are close behind me. The only thing that gives me competition is paladin. Those guys have some serious burst threat with their CD's.

Omegatron has arrived.

 

tauwyt

I'm not sure exactly how you're keeping ahead of the dps by that much, but on our hard mode vezax our warlock rides my ass in threat all the way saving shatter for the animus. We had a hunter and 3 rogues tricksing me too....

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

Granted I have pure EHP gear + avoidance gear on, but I am still hit capped with 31 exp. In that fight I ds alot more than I would in another fight for healing purposes but is there something I am doing completely wrong? My dps as a tank in that fight seems to be pretty solid as well...

 

Zurai

No. Vezax, especially hardmode, is a threat-sensitive fight for your casters, and Warlocks especially as they can deal significant DPS from their DOTs even when there isn't a shadow crash to stand in. I've seen parses of casters pulling 10k+ DPS on Vezax. There's not much you as a tank can do against that which you havn't already been doing.

 

Bsiddiq

If your casters aren't riding your threat where they're almost pulling off of you on Vezax, they're probably not doing enough damage for hard mode (or they got screwed with shadow crashes).

 

donkeyruler

Okay i'm hearing alot of people say that for DK MT Spec. Blood is the best because of more health and more self healing.
But most people used to totally flame me for being a blood tank who stacked stamina to the max.
I'm now frost spec with a stable amount of health 31k and a shit load of avoidance, even considering changing to dual wield to up it some more.

I dont see how blood spec is a better spec for tanking the only benefit i see is the extra health, self healing isnt need what with their being a healer already healing you. Frost has alot more talents, that reduce damage, and spell damage and chance of being hit, all in all. frost looks like the better spec.
I know heaps of tanks i see now are stam whores and wana stack it to the max, but dont you think that is a little silly? especially for dks who dont have damage reduction from block.

please hit me back, im still learning.
if you can prove to me why blood is better and why it is better to stack stam i can get my health to 36-37k ub easy. though i will loose craaaaap loads of avoidance.

 

Consider

Blood is typically considered superior for a couple reasons:
*Higher health, as you mention, yes. This tends to outweigh the mitigation/avoidance of Frost and the magical mitigation of Unholy.
*Vampiric Blood is utterly superior in near every way to Unbreakable Armor. It also tends to have a longer duration than Bone Shield, although BS is much closer in actual potency.
*Will of the Necropolis. Although not near as strong as it once was, it's still better than the nothing Frsot/Unholy has instead. It is excellent for when you take back to back heavy hits and what have you, where you aren't likely to be topped off inbetween.
*Death Strike. Although the value of DS's healing is up for debate, it definitely isn't a bad thing and, once again, beats the nothing Frost/Unholy has in its place.
*Single target threat. Blood is typically superior in this area, although Frost is close (and Unholy is just miles behind).
Etcetera.

All Frost has on Blood is 2% mitigation and 3% avoidance. This isn't near enough to outweigh Blood's superior cooldown, higher health, passive WotN, passive healing, etc.
All Unholy has on Blood is 6% magic mitigation. This isn't near enough to outweigh Blood's superior health, more reliable cooldown, passive WotN, passive healing, superior single target threat, etc.

As to why you see every tank stacking stam over avoidance, that is probably explained in dozens of places on this forums. Essentially, health is reliable and affects magic damage. Avoidance is, well, unreliable and limited to physical damage. Higher health is going to be of more use 9 times out of 10. Probably 9.9 times out of 10.

 

Chamenas

Read this

Even though I disagreed with it at first, it is a pretty decent explanation of why Blood Tanking is currently considered superior to Frost Tanking. In the end, I think it speaks to a problem with the nerf to Unbreakable Armor, but discussing that fact doesn't help people get to the best spot they can be given the current state of the game.

If you read this thread, especially the last several pages, you will see the evidence that supports Blood Tanking as being superior in the current state of the game.


I do have a question though: Why are there not individual tank-spec threads in this forum like there are for dps? The value of this single thread is of course undoubtedly valuable for cross-spec tanking information. But it seems to me like there is a lack of DK tank material here for individual specs. I can't imagine I'm the only one that would like to see what some of the top min/maxers of each spec have come up with.

Edit: In the time it took to do my post, I seem to have been beaten to it.

 

Xequecal

I personally prefer an Unholy hybrid (23/7/41) to Blood tanking. It has lower threat, but it's only on Vezax where the downside to this spec really hurts. Unholy is much better on pretty much all of the other hard modes. Hodir is obvious, Blood rather sucks on him because you don't benefit from Singed while Unholy does. IC and Mimiron have nasty magic tank killers that you want Unholy's cooldowns and magic reduction for, and AMZ is also a raid saver on Freya for when you're all clumped under mushroom and you see 2 AEs about to go off at the same time. Thorim also has significant magic damage and your lower threat doesn't really matter here since the constant taunting makes it pretty hard for DPS to crest over you.

I also find Bone Shield to be a substantially better cooldown than Vampiric Blood, +25% HP and +25% healing is better than +15% HP and +35% healing, and Bone Shield also multiplies the value of your disc Priests' shields. There's a pretty significant cooldown on losing bones and many nasty boss abilities simply don't even remove bones at all. (Plasma Blast and pretty much all the abilities on the Freya fight don't strip bones at all) The 5-min duration also lets you go into the fight with it up and the cooldown refreshed and also to run the cooldown during lulls in the fight.

 

Taizu

You realize that AMZ is very limited in how much they can absorb, right? They are limited to 10k + 2*AP.
With 5k AP raid buffed, AMZ absorbs 20k damage. That won't do anything with 10 people clumping at Freya (hint: shouldn't kill them there).

Bone Shield is answered with Will of the Necropolis (any attack that brings you to lower than 35% max HP will be reduced by 15%).

Unholy hybrid really can't pump the TPS that I'd feel comfortable with. My fellow guildie tank was using it, and his TPS just wasn't quite there as a hybrid build. As most hard mode fights are DPS race, you need to be able to pump out the TPS.

 

Xequecal

Will of the Necropolis is totally unreliable. When you're tanking Steelbreaker, every single one of his melee hits with the other 2 adds dead will set that cooldown, it will almost never be available for when you really need it. (Fusion Punch) It will absorb the first tick of Mimiron's Plasma Blast and then go on cooldown as well for the other six of them. I would much prefer taking 6% less from every Punch and having a 10-15% bigger HP buffer (Priest shields) from my cooldown.

I'm reasonably certain AMZ can absorb more than 20k if it's an AE that hits everyone under it at once.

I agree with the threat issue but on many of these bosses it just doesn't matter. Unless your DPS can somehow go from 100% of your threat to 130% of your threat on Thorim in the 20 seconds before the other tank taunts for Unbalancing Strike, (and takes the threat of the highest DPS) the lower threat just doesn't matter. Unholy has clearly better threat on Hodir because Scourge Strike is magic damage, and on Freya I could see you being worse at tanking the conservator but your threat is also clearly better for tanking the pack of three adds. Of course if you tank Freya herself again your TPS doesn't really matter at all, and you want Unholy's better cooldowns.

It clearly doesn't work on Vezax and you'd definitely have to respec for him, but as full Blood you have to respec to do Hodir so you don't really lose anything from that angle.

 

• frmorrison

The point of Will is it will always reduce some damage, just it may not go off when you need it more, but it still helped you survive. I have tanked as Blood on Hodir, granted I used Taunt to keep up high aggro. If your build works for you, then keep using it. However, it isn't the "best".

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Goldengiff

I've been tanking HM General for 2 weeks now (killed first week, failed last week). We generally run 1 holy paladin on MT at all times with random hots from druids as they have time. My raid buffed avoidance is 57% before DR, with just shy of 50K hp. Standard blood spec for tanking, including rune tap with 3/3 imp rune tap.

The problem we've been running into is even with that much avoidance we're getting 5+ unavoided hits in a row and if I don't have 2x DS and Rune Tap up, it's dirt-nap time. We did try replacing a holy priest with a second holy pally at one point and then there were no deaths on my part, but raid people started dieing to random damage.

Aside from having ranged not take damage, how are other guilds who have DKs MT doing it? 1 healer or 2? paladins or something else?

 

Tel

"Aside from having ranged not take damage"

You pretty much hit the nail on the head there. Ranged shouldnt take ANY damage till animus spawn, and every then with good DPS they dont need too much topping up.

 

• Arawethion

They still take Mark of the Faceless damage. Shouldn't be life-threatening without a major error, but needs to be healed off.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

Veets

This is veering off topic, the failures of your DPS are not your issue. It honestly sounds like bad luck more than anything else.

 

SpaceDrake

I haven't seen this addressed much, but yes. There's been basically no change to Blood threat generation, while both Frost and Unholy have taken nerfs straight to the face. Frost Strike can now be parried or dodged, meaning that Frost tanks have to load up on as much expertise as the rest of us for threat now (and overall TPS from FS will still be lower since you can't really get much above 30 expertise without sacrificing heavily in other areas, meaning FS will still be missing via parries now), and Scourge Strike is being nerfed again, meaning Unholy single-target TPS is going to get even damn lower. Unholy Blight is being changed, yes, but unless you can deathcoil pretty constantly while also runestriking at every opportunity (read: good luck), then overall TPS is going down even further. (This is also ignoring the fact that Unholy tanks already run UHB while using other abilities typically; the question is, will the DoT of neo-UHB really generate significantly more TPS than the current version?)

So yes, as things currently stand, Frost and Unholy need a hell of a lot of help tankwise. Unholy actually needs to match Blood or Frost for TPS, and Frost needs, well, more than a single actual additional cooldown from talents (and it'd help if that cooldown wasn't patently terrible as well).

Of course, there's a few other issues here as well; the fact that any DK tank worth his salt needs to go at least twelve points into Blood for good threat anyway, the fact that Blood has several very nice buffs attached to it (the 10% AP buff, which is not especially common otherwise especially in sub-25 man content; Hysteria is also pretty unique and will get you a lot of love from any of your melee DPS), the fact that Blood can Death Strike without significantly dropping threat (thus Blood self-heals for quite a bit more than the other trees do - a current joke among healers in my guild when doing heroics is "Jules is tanking? BRB then, taking a nap"); I could go on but you get the idea. There's essentially a lot of passive pressure to tank as Blood already, and the direct advantages of Blood tanking don't help. I'd really prefer to not see Blood nerfed into the ground, so the other specs need to be brought up to par with Blood (while still generally getting DKs in line with the other tanking classes, which I think we'll be much closer to in 3.2).

 

Qaenyin

I'm inclined to agree with this, especially on us being much closer to the other tanking classes in 3.2. I'm personally hoping that now that Blood is more or less in line with the other classes, that gives them more room to focus on bringing the other 2 specs up to par with Blood(and thus, up to par with the other classes, which in my personal opinion they won't be after the hp, mitigation, and threat nerfs incoming next patch). When our best tree is on par with everyone else they can simply tie buffs in to our specific talent trees that are lacking to make up for deficiencies, whereas if a spec is overpowered they can't necessarily apply nerfs without globally impacting the class as a whole independent of spec(see:this upcoming patch).

 

KnThrak

The question whether (ultimately) Blood will be nerfed or Frost/Unholy buffed does not rely on the Death Knight though, but on the other three tankclasses tanking the current content. If they are "balanced" for what Blizzard feels should be the difficulty of the content, and if Blood is ahead of them - blood will get nerfed.

If Frost / Unholy are behind them - they'll be buffed.

And ofc if both is true, both will happen.


Ofc, this'd be a long term thing. The primary problem is that Blood self-heals. This is actually equivalent to mitigation in that proper timing extends your EH noticeably, just like mitigation would. I suspect this is tougher to model than just saying "Count them at +20% effective health", or Blizzard would probably never have run into the current balance problems.

So they first need to find a way to model Death Strike as the gain in effective health averaged over all balance-important content (Rune Tap could be seen as the equivalent to AMZ and... well, the old Lichborne :P, and be left there as the third CD), and then model all tanks next to each other and find out who fits where.

SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

 

Qaenyin

True. Especially because the amount of healing is something that can really break some fight mechanics, so blood DKs are completely all over the place on the tanking charts depending on the fight. Vezax is a good example of this, since normally the huge limiter on the fight is healer mana, but when the tank suddenly provides a noticable portion of the healing completely resource-free, this becomes massively more valuable compared to having better mitigation/health/threat/avoidance than on other fights where healer mana is not a major issue. But on the other hand, if they nerf mitigation/health/avoidance due to self healing, then not only are they going to likely heavily impact the other specs, but also they are going to cause the opposite effect:On fights where self healing is not particularly favorable(say, a boss where most of the damage is among the whole raid and group heals are flying everywhere anyway whether the tank needs healing or not), this doesn't contribute nearly as much benefit and that tank actually becomes inferior compared to one with higher threat or raw survivability.

 

GBF

The self-healing of Blood is very valuable (and is also my justification for not putting any points in Death Rune Mastery), but it is really hard to gauge the benefit in general. Some tanks may time their Death Strikes right after a hit from the boss. I myself do not, because on fights where it would be a good idea from a survival standpoint, it's an awful idea from an aggro standpoint (Vezax hard). Starting Algalon attempts tomorrow, I'm the second tank, but if the first tank's aggro is good enough, ideally I could let my threat take a backseat to my survivability after I taunt him, just because he hits that hard, and a 6-8k heal may be enough to offset an entire offhand strike.

 

Immora

I seriously don't think the majority of Tanks actually time their Death Strikes to match boss attacks. While I could be wrong on this, any kind of threat-sensitive fight such as Vezax (Hard-mode) requires a rotation to be somewhat accurate. Healing from a regular blood rotation is minimal compared to the incoming heals as well as the cooldowns this tree has to offer, therefore I do think it is generally best to leave healing to the healers and make as much of an attempt to maintain aggro and stay aware. Do not think this is completely disregarding the healing aspect of Death Strike, as it is a substantial amount which perfectly compliments the effective health of Blood Tanks, but there are better ways to ease the burden of healers like popping trinkets and cooldowns.

As for the Death Rune Mastery comment, whenever threat could potentially be an issue it's better to allow that to be first priority when deciding on a talent build. Taken from the Blood DPS Thread, Blood is based on Heart Strike and not Death Strike. Due to the currently flawed (in my opinion) state of threat mechanics, generally the more DPS you are putting out, the higher your threat will be which practically makes the case for using Heart Strike [Death Rune Mastery] more often.

 

• frmorrison

That is the developer's vision of tanking, that via threat modifiers (Def Stance, Frost Presence, etc.) you will dps to gain threat. It is better than the old days, and helps spot very bad dps.
In addition to putting out more threat (via Death Runes using HS), having death runes helps you use your Blood rune utility (Rune Tap/Vamp Blood/Mark of Blood) more easily.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Dragonoath65

I recently started tanking in a dw unholy spec. My main tank that I normally run with is a 2 handed blooded spec in raids. At first I had problems maintaining treat generation. I have corrected that problem. I can now run heroics and raids as the main tank in an unholy dw spec. What I don't understand is why I am being told that I can not do it. I seem to be managing quite well and the healers are not complaining that are healing me. I even have started running ulduar as a tank now. Can someone please give me an easy explanation to this. I've tried to read the post but most of them are way to complicated for me to understand. Thank you

 

Afabar

The problem of DW tank build is the threat generation. The problem with Unholy tanking is that it's has the weakest tanking cooldown of the 3 trees. With a DW Unholy build, you have thoses 2 problems.
To check your threat generation, just tank on Malygos with DPS having a damage buff that you don't have and try to keep it on you.
Another weakness of this build, is the fact that you don't have gargoyle rune forge, you are forced to gem for defense, instead of stamina. So you only have 24k HP unbuffed that is very low if you want to go into Ulduar.
I would like to give you some advice.
1/ Don't gem for parry, gem for dodge if you want avoidance.
2/ Don't gem or equip resilience unless this is the last resort.
3/ Don't use Block meta gem.
4/ Don't use Block equipment.
5/ Don't take 2 hand specialization on a DW bulid.
6/ Don't take rune tap.
7/ Don't take spell deflection. It's useless in most (if not all) of the encounter.

My last advice would be to stick to the cookie cutter build unless you really know what you are doing.

 

Seiryu

After reading a lot about the Blood Tank spec in this thread I decided to experiment with it myself. Currently I'm Frost tank and the rotations + the few cooldowns the spec brings don't make it a very hard job.

The blood rotation is rather tight and a couple of the CD's use runes. What is the most optimal way to fit these cooldowns in without losing too much on TPS by breaking the rotation? Maybe by activating Empower Runic Weapon and after that continuing with the rotation again?