these are the same problems i am thinking about. can blood rly hold aggro well from the first hit till the end?

in my opinion frost has the worst mitigation of all, yeah u get 3% extra miss and a nice unbreakable armor against melee hits, but u have the smallest health pool and nothing against magic (and plz dont say acclimation now, we all know it sucks and isnt up, when we need it to be)
but at the same time frost has the best aggro of all, u IT>deathchill>HB bäm the aggro is yours, and frost strikes hits like a truck

Well from the Blood DPS numbers at least, Obliterate hits as hard as frost Obliterate. Obliterate hits pretty hard without any disease too, so you could just oblit on pull, THEN apply disease. Which makes it better than Unholy already. On most initial pulls, you'll get a misdirect and a tricks from a rogue at least, so it's not really that much of an issue. Blood looks interesting at least, and I don't see it being much worse than prot war tanking for AE threat(DnD still generates a good amount of AE threat, and you can tab targets with heart strikes to cleave everything old school style).

Someone compared blood to bears too, but it's somewhat different(and better) because vampiric blood increases healing efficiency too, reducing the amount of healing needed and the avoidance is higher. There's also the paladin like mechanic that reduces damage taken you under 35% which helps on big hits which will happen when you're out of cooldowns(blood or not you're going to end up out of cooldowns for like 25-35% of the time anyway).

Blood might not be better than frost, but it won't be that much worse either. Any tank currently speced blood is mostly laughed at, so that's a pretty good change. It'll also give more options for specific fights. Fight is magic heavy? Then spec unholy. Big melee sustained damage on tank? Blood will be nice. AE tanking? Frost is the new best. But each is also viable in the other situations, just not the best of all like Unholy currently is.

I don't think we can decide which talent tree is best until the patch is released and we all spend time testing them. I will most certainly test out blood but I personally don't like Will of the Necropolis. I would like to see something along the lines of 3% damage reduction added into one of the talents like Improved Rune Tap. I'd also like Will of the Necropolis if it reduced the damage of the attack by 30% or more, being so deep in the blood tree it should do more then just a 15% off an attack that may possibly kill you.

While I agree that it too early to decide which spec is best overall, it may not be something that can be decided at all. However, I think it isn't too early to determine which spec gives you the best chance to survive a standard mostly physical fight. Will of the necropolis is either extremely broken, or meh, but either way it beats 5% magic mit by default since most fights the danger is physical. 3% avoidance gets better the higher your avoidance, it is possible, even likely that it is more overall mitigation, however it is not effective health, where as will of the necropolis(and the 6% stam) works on every shot that would have killed you not just the one you happened to avoid, and I would be willing to be it saves you more than 3% of the time. Now eventually our avoidance will be so high that 3% will be literally a 15-20% damage reduction and it may be impossible to pass up, but if our threat is good enough one could always get both.

Agreed. And with that, I'd like to open up some discussion on Blood tanking by posing a few questions and throwing out some ideas or insights I have about it. My DK is Boltzz of <Shattered Oath> so don't be fooled by my Paladin's link ^_^

1.) First off, the skeleton spec, what is it in your opinion for the current PTR Build (9464)?

2.) On the topic of Rotation, what would be the optimal rotation for single target? 2 Mobs? 3+ Mobs?

3.) Spell Deflection, how useful is it currently? Just from Blade Barrier and the Parry from being at 540 Defense, which is 15.6% Parry, this turns to be a static 4.68% Spell Mitigation. Realistically, it'll obviously perform in a more erratic sense but for 3 talent points, it's quite amazing in my head (if it's not bugged ^_^). Additionally, it's a scaling talent. The better your gear gets, the better this talent becomes.

4.) Blood Gorged for tanking. Yes, for tanking. The %damage modifier on it is generally unreliable from a tanking standpoint, but the bonus Expertise is quite nice. It'd be, in my mind, a talent to spec into whilst you're alittle undergeared (IE not dodge capped).

5.) Math of Will of the Necropolis. For the ease of numbers, let's say a DK has 10,000 HP and is specced 3/3 WotN.

To drop the DK from 35% to 0% in one swing would have to deal 3500/.85 = 4117.647 damage, or 41.1% of your total HP. From that information, we can surmise that WotN adds an effective 6.11% HP provided you stay above 35% (or whatever percentage is the trigger point is).

This talent definitely favors hard hitting bosses. Additionally, the talent synergizes well with Vampiric Blood by pushing the 35% threshold numerically higher. This talent does, sadly, seem to have the ability to circumvented by a tiny hit that pushes you below 35% then a large hit would finish you off... somewhat like how the Paladin talent Ardent Defender can be leapfrogged.

6.) Opinions on what talents are a must versus those which are mostly player preference.

That's all I can think of at the moment, any comments or feedback would be greatly appreciated and desired.

My assumption is that WotN does not work the way described above. It is worded different than the ability you compare it with. My assumption is that it reduces everything that lands you in the < 35% range. I do not believe it only reduces shots that take you from the > 35% range to the < 35% range. One way is incredibly strong, the other is not very good.

I don't need evidence to declare something that is both physical and magic mitigation better than magic mitigation for the average fight. I did in fact word my statement as "best chance to survive a standard mostly physical fight". If I were trying to prove WotN better than 5% magic mit for a 100% magic fight or a 50% magic fight then yes, a simple glance would not suffice.

Does anyone have any hard numbers on caps for:
DEF = 540?
Exp = ?
Dodge= ?
Parry = ?

Its hard to tell from this thread what sort of caps we should be shooting for or is it just me?

You are making WotN sound like a much better talent than it really is. Any hit taking you below 35% has a pretty good chance to kill you and 15% off might or might not save you. In any case it's not something that should be proccing more than couple times in a given fight unless your doing something really wrong or things get out of control which means you are almost always going to wipe anyway. It's just can't be considered a mitigation talent you rely on. I realize it becomes stronger when Vampiric Blood is up, but that doesn't make it's usefulness any less situational.

More stamina is not more mitigation, mitigation is making the hits smaller, not making your health pool bigger, that is just soaking. This applys to Vampiric Blood as well which is actually the worst mitigation talent of all 3, because it provides no mitigation at all.

Spell deflection, on paper is quite decent for magic mitigation, ends up around 9% on my gear. However, I believe it is still bugged with AMS, and I would be reluctant to spec into it for any magic heavy fight (and Unholy would be a better spec for it anyway).

Now, will the overall much higher health pool and increased healing during Vampiric Blood be easier to heal through than Frost or Unholy? That depends on your healers I supose, but make no mistake, your mitigation will be much lower than a Frost or Unholy tank. You will take more damage and you will require more healing.

About the strength of the cooldowns I personally feel both Bone Shield and UA will still be stronger than Vampiric Blood. Bone Shield is already staying up for 30+ seconds on most fights. With higher avoidance from better gear, and the extra charge this can only get better. Let's not forget how useful it is on magical damage fights. Unbreakable armor is 10% extra parry with no DR and much higher armor, but only 20 second duration. In comparison Blood's Vampiric blood is around 6-7k higher health for 30 seconds and increased healing, which for me just feels weaker. I'll be getting healed for more and I'll have higher health, but I won't be doing anything about the size of the hits.

"You will take more damage and you will require more healing [during vampiric blood]." I will prove this is false.

Yes health is not "mitigation", but your almost saying health is worthless for survivability. DKs biggest problem for surviability is effective health, we take the least overall damage but our low effective health(by EH I mean no avoidance strings) is the lowest of any tank. If you are only going below 35% a couple of times a fight it is obviously trivial tank damage farm content and it doesn't matter what spec you are, so let us ignore that scenario. Normal fights with danger you will be going below 35% dozens of times. The only two fights with real tank damage so far for a dk are sarth 3 drakes and undergeared patchwerk. PW hit you below 35% every swing that connected(thus making this essentially a 15% def stance) and sarth brings you below 35% every breath that isn't cooldowned, and even some that are. You can't tell me a talent that effectively takes 15% of the damage off that breath isn't more useful than 5% magic mit.

Vampiric blood is actually mitigation due to the increased healing. Assuming you are in a situation with healing it effectively reduces the amount of healing it would take to make you survive in that situation, exactly the same as armor does. If there was only increased healing and not increased health you would still have the risk that no significant heals come in and you die, but the increased health gives the padding needed, more padding than is granted by a 20% reduction in incoming damage. But that isn't really what makes it the best of the cooldowns, what makes it the best is the duration. Guaranteed 30 seconds, bone shield will last that and longer on a slow hitting boss, but a fast hitting boss that has magic damage(like.. brutallus) it would effectively always have a duration of less than 20 seconds.

Boneshield is the worst cooldown against physical when it is up, and in general the least reliable. Yes it will have fights where it shines and has almost 100% uptime. UA has a duration of only 20 seconds, and does nothing against magic. Realistically when the cooldowns are up you won't be dying to physical damage anyways.



Just an example, If you are doing sarth 3d and the breath hits you 40k(after the standard 15% off, and partial resist) when your tree cooldown is up(using a rough health of 38000, 40000 with VotTW). Numbers are made up but should give an idea of how things work.

Unholy takes 30400 and goes to 7600 minus the amount they were from full.
Blood takes 34000(assuming spell deflection doesn't proc) and goes to 12000 minus the amount they were from full.

It now takes less healing to bring the blood tank back to full due to the +35% healing. This example is fairly universal, it will take less healing to heal a blood tank to full, and more damage to kill him with vampiric blood up than it will for an unholy tank with bone armor up. Yes he "took more damage" but that is irrelevant.

No cooldowns up for same example
Unholy takes 38000 and dies.
Blood takes 34000(assuming spell deflection doesn't proc) and has 6000 minus the amount they were from full.

The only time unholy really takes less overall damage when no cooldowns are up is when the fight spends the vast majority of its time above the 35% threshold, but then it isn't exactly a challenging encounter where min-maxing matters.


There will be fights that play to different specs and their strengths. Frost is least overall damage taken on a fight where all sources of damage are avoidable, blood has the best effective health and a cooldown guarentee to be 30 seconds, and unholy's strength essentially lays in fights where you can get bone shield duration over 35 seconds with relative assuredness.

This is really an issue of semantics and terminology. The important thing to a tank is "effective health". In WoW, this boils down to two basic methodologies; mitigation, which as you say involves not getting hit at all, and soaking, to use your term, which involves accepting that you'll get hit and getting a higher hit point total instead. Both of these methodologies have serious issues; neither is inherently superior.

Mitigation tanking has lower hp totals, and this means that a bad string of luck can make a fight risky, as they take damage levels the exact same as a soak tank, but without the other effects soak tanks have to lessen the impact of it. They are also generally much more vulnerable to magic damage, which goes right through mitigation as if it weren't there.

Soak tanks, on the other hand, have more reliable incoming damage; their damage taken is less spiky. Also, the higher hit point totals make it easier for them to take on magic damage, since they're expecting damage anyway. However, they do require more healing overall.

In the past, druids soak tanked via high armor levels. I actually like the Blood tanking system more; they have a bit more mitigation via Parry, and their cooldowns directly affect damage and/or healing taken, which is the big issue with a soak tank. These days, overhealing is pretty constant. For a soak tank, that just means there's less overhealing, and more actual healing. This isn't a "bad thing" necessarily, it only matters if healers can't actually keep up with the damage, which at this point, remains to be seen.

My current plan with my DK is to go Blood tank; we already have some solid mitigation tanks in my guild, and a soak tank/OT would be useful as a swap for certain fights. That's the plan, anyway. I don't think one of the styles of tanking is "better" than the other, though for certain fights, certain types will have clear advantages.


To make the case for Vampiric Blood; getting healed for more and having higher health DOES do something about the size of the hits. The actual number is completely irrelevant; the only factors that matter are what percentage of your health did it knock off, and how long it takes to get healed back to full. The first is important because of how risky it makes taking another hit, and the second how long that risk lasts. If I've got 300,000 hp, and I'm getting healed for 100,000 a second, taking a 50k hit is irrelevant. The size of the hit doesn't matter, because my max health and healing cover that big of a hit.

Bone Shield manages this by lowering the incoming damage to a lower percent of your health, whereas Vampiric Blood lowers the percentage damage by increasing your health. BS has the bigger effect here, but Vampiric Blood also boosts healing done significantly, far more than the health boost, meaning heals will be landing for a larger percentage of your increased health.

I'm not saying Unholy is "bad"; while I said I'm planning to go Blood, eventually, I'm going Unholy until 3.0.8 hits, at least. I just think dismissing Blood now, without testing it, isn't a good idea. It's different, certainly, but "different" doesn't necessarily mean "bad". Blood's abilities will only be an issue if healing isn't boosted by enough to keep up, both via Blood's self-healing and Vampiric Blood.

There is a few things that we still need to make clear.

1) Does WotN have an internal cooldown?
2) Which talent tree generates the most threat?
3) Does VB affect healing from other classes or just self-heals?
4) Can you use Sarth 3D effectively in an explanation with the low amount of people who actually do Sarth 3D?
5) Will Blizzard implement a new feature to a DK talent that isn't in the patch notes or add something last-minute?
6) Can we effectively theorycraft about a patch that hasn't been released yet?