Is corpse explosion any good, or has that really just been shelved for DPS specs? I can see it being a nice burst of AOE threat once the first target goes down, and it only takes 1 unholy (and 1 talent point). Otherwise alternatives (since at the 19 point mark you need to put a point somewhere to get to the next tier) are Outbreak (which I voiced opinion on above), Ravenous Dead (which is, needless to say, worthless for tanking), Necrosis (too many points for too little return value), On a Pale Horse (and I agree of it's questionable usefulness now), or right back to Unholy Command.
I would like to point out something about Corpse Explosion: If you target your ghoul and active CEx your ghoul will detonate for roughly 25% of his max health in damage in a fairly large AoE (with 6600 max HP my ghoul detonates for over 1700 damage). I'm not sure what the damage formula is exactly.
For level 80 (not there yet) I can see CEx being combined with 2/2 Night of the Dead to produce some silly AoE threat/damage assuming AotD Ghouls can be targeted the same way.
There is NO REASON for Blizzard not to make tanking 2-handers now that feral forms are changing to take weapon DPS into account. DKs and Druids can both use 2h maces, so both could use defense-oriented 2h maces, making such weapons not a "single-spec drop".
The only stats that are nice for both druids and DKs are stamina, dodge rating, and to a lesser extent armor. Everything else is either poor for a tanking druid or poor for a tanking DK. Unless and until Blizzard itemizes 2h tanking weapons for DKs, we'll just have to hope they'll compensate with abilities and talents that make up for not having tanking weapons just as we make up for not having shields, tanking guns, etc.
I think we can all agree that a tanking sigil would provide just as much benefit as tanking stats on a 2 hander.
2H weapons with dps stats do not necessarily mean they have poor tanking benefits either. A 2H weapon with str/stam/hit/expertise is a great weapon for tanking, especially when it means that we can shift some focus out of those stats in our other gear. Of course you can also shift to using the arena weapons, which have resilience and high stam which makes them by default the only 2 handers in the game that have "defensive" stats.
When I've been looking at 2h drops I'd like to get my hands on I can't help but feel the "Hunter" Polearms are looking like the best bet. Sure your going to lose a bit of TPS but you get far more avoidance out of them.
BI has a very nice 3.60% dodge (before DR's) compared to DB's 0.52% parry, looking at the threat stats on each weapon as well they have almost the same amount of crit and BI has slightly more hit.
BI's main drawback, aside from looking like a twat using it, is of course AP, Its got a pretty hefty 77 less than DB.
A rotation along the lines of:
D&D>IT>PS>Pestilence>FS(should still outdamage DC)
HB>HB>IT>BB>FS
For a smoother rotation, you can take out D&D and go:
IT>PS>Pestilence>HB>BS>FS
HB>HB>HB>FS
HB has a 6 second cooldown so you can't do that rotation, it would be godly if you could... i've been tanking heriocs and the AOE tanking works well (frost) nobody really pulls unless they are attacking the wrong target.
i'm specced into epidemic/blood of the north, so the dots last 18 seconds and i OB spam. so for AOE i do:
DnD, IT, PS, Pest (rune strikes too, rune strike does insane dmg), i rarely use frost strike unless i got like 60+ RP
HB (crit), BB, OB, HB
Single Target:
FS, PS, BS, BS, OB
OB, OB, OB
I'm getting spikes of 4200 TPS with that rotation, but it goes anywhere from 3000-4200 it's very spikey.
Some of my complaints for a DK tank (coming from a warrior tank), is picking up sudden mobs that appear (like 3+) is a pain. the best thing i've come up with is to blood tap then cast pestilence and hopefully it spreads to all the new mobs (usually works). Unless of coarse i had a blood rune up (which seems to be rare).
I also think DnD is pretty crappy threat for the price of runes... they should up the innate threat more, i had a resto shammy pull aggro off of DnD at the start (only happened once) but i was pretty surprised... i didnt even get a chance to get pestilence up yet...
After reading several of the posts here, I stopped myself from trying DW tanking (and read up on the parry-gib'ing, did not know that a parry speeds up a mobs next melee swing)and at the same time I get closer to crit-immunity and decent avoidance.
Since our attacks are mostly being converted into special attacks, and the first post backs it up by saying to avoid the auto-attack talents. So I've made this spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft.
I've avoided WP simply because my crit chance will be too low for it to actual benefit me and at the same time I've avoided the auto-attack talents: Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade. My biggest changes is the loss of several DPS talents and the threat reducing talent from blood tree and getting Bladed Armor plus Magic Suppresion and Anti-Magic zone. Basically my question is, among those that also swear to Unholy tanking, am I missing something real good? Been reading here the last few days and I fear that my head is spinning, so any pointers would be great.
What I think is the key observation about death knights trying to main tank, mostly already known here, is that
threat is not a problem, mitigation is (since death knights lack a passive damage reduction ability of the other three tanking classes).
With this in mind, I wanted to present the following talent/glyph build:
major glyphs: bone shield, icebound fortitude, death strike
minor glyphs: pestilence, horn of winter, blood tap
(Note: since the idea here is to sit at mostly full runic power, icebound fortitude glyph can be replaced by some other main tank glyph -- for instance glyph of anti-magic shell increases its average uptime by almost 40%. Another alternative is glyph of dark command if taunts are important.)
As you can see, this build sacrifices the deep unholy talents, which are mostly threat, in exchange for frigid deathplate, which is trading quite a bit of threat for a little avoidance. However, threat is not a problem, and avoidance scales very well with bone shield. This build doesn't have scourge strike. Ordinarily a build like this would replace it with obliterate. However my idea is to use death strike instead (hence runic power mastery and death strike glyph). The idea here is to sit at (mostly) full runic power and use all the unholy/frost/death runes on death strikes. This will obviously hit much less hard than either scourge strike or obliterate -- but threat is not a problem, staying alive is the problem. In fact, given that death strike in this build will heal for nearly triple its damage, and healing threat is half of damage threat, effective death strike threat will end up being more than double its usual value, as long as it doesn't overheal. Glyphed death strike at 130 runic power will heal for enough, I hope, to function as yet another button death knights can push to help healers deal with those spiky damage streaks which are such a death knight problem.
Thoughts? (Caveat: my death knight isn't 80 yet, and there might be a better arrangement of unholy talents in the middle of the tree, though I think the frost/blood talents should be just as they are).
One way to think about this build is that you give up a bunch of threat for a little avoidance -- and the ability for the tank to hit himself with what essentially amounts to an instant max rank Flash of Light every 5 seconds (2 unholy runes, 2 frost runes every 10 seconds). Actually a little more frequently than that due to death runes, but you get the idea.
I though of a very similar template, the only difference was 1 point less in Ebon plaguebringer and 1 point in scourge strike.
And I dont think 3% of avoidance, not counted for the diminush return, is "a little"; from my tank experience on my paladin, 3% is huge, and there wasnt any diminush return at this time making it even better now.
The question is does our threat will be enough with this spec in single tanking? (it's obviously not a spec for AOE tanking even if I think any DK, and even any tank will be good enough for the AOE tanking, threat wise).
I will definetly test it anyway.
However, I am not convinced by your death strike thing ^^
However, I am not convinced by your death strike thing ^^
Healing-as-mitigation is sort of counterintuitive (which is why people think Blood DKs are worse for tanking than they are).
Imagine this situation: say Blizzard made it so prot paladins had a self-cast holy shock, every 5 seconds. Let's say it healed for 3000 hp with typical prot paladin gear (they have a talent for converting stamina to spellpower). This means that their healing per second is 3000/5 = 600. Now say he's fighting your typical Naxx 10 boss, say he's taking hatefuls for Patchwerk, which is 7000 damage every 1.5 seconds, which is 7000/1.5 = 4666.67 dps. The healing from holy shock works directly against this dps, reducing it to 4066.67. This means our friend the paladin's mitigation went up by 600/4666.67 = 12.9%. Just from this heal! This is a big deal.
Now this is idealized -- in practice self-healing isn't QUITE as good as straight mitigation because it doesn't always work. Specifically there are two important cases where it fails: if you are at full hp (in which case there's no reason to heal), and if you get bursted down to 0 (in which case straight mitigation may have saved you, but a reactive self-heal would not). The first case isn't such a big deal, since the tank has the ability to apply the self-heal exactly when needed. The second case is a problem -- but as long as burst doesn't kill you, a self-heal can make the healers' job a lot simpler! It's like having infinite healthstones on very short cooldown .
Death strike is basically this self-heal I just described. In fact, glyphed, with good gear, and at full 130 runic power (with runic power mastery talent) it may well hit for more than 3000 and it can crit. The only problem is you have to give up some dps since death strike hits less hard than actual dps strikes (you won't give up much if any single target tps because of the healing it does).
I've gotten off a 7k heal off of a Death Strike crit and been able to solo multiple mobs of a much higher level. The nice thing about using DS for healing/quasi-mitigation is that it will continue to scale with gear as death strike dmg increases.
So far tanked Abomination / Death Knight / Spider wings of naxx 10 man, and Sarth 10 man, both as frost and unholy. Unholy is easily superior in my eyes, and while not exactly timed, I estimate I've been able to keep bone shield up for above 30 seconds at times with a disc priest healing me (although at times fell off under 15, thats the price of avoidance tanking I suppose). Threat increased by about 500ish tps on respec, and aoe tanking went from OK to phenomenal. I miss howling blast, but the faster cooldown on D&D at least partially makes up for it. I'm nearing in on 50% raid buffed avoidance, and I'm sure that helps with bone shield.
While frost might be a good starter spec, bone shield just seems to blow everything out of the water, no contest.
The Fallen Crusader 30% strength bonus grants a DK with 800 strength about 60 parry rating which adds about 1.2% parry. The Swordshattering permanently adds 4% parry. Assuming we can achieve getting capped by gear, the Swordshattering would become unuseful and letting Fallen Crusader the only rune to use as a raid DK (Tank and DPS).
The Fallen Crusader 30% strength bonus grants a DK with 800 strength about 60 parry rating which adds about 1.2% parry. The Swordshattering permanently adds 4% parry. Assuming we can achieve getting capped by gear, the Swordshattering would become unuseful and letting Fallen Crusader the only rune to use as a raid DK (Tank and DPS).
Did someone already made research about this?
Even if you get enough strength to make the 30% bonus from Fallen Crusader give you more that 4% parry you have to realize that Fallen Crusader appears to have a 1 PPM rate, which means you're only going to the buff up 15 seconds out of every minute (roughly).
For tanking you're going to get 4% parry. On content you outgear tremendously such as running heroics for Heroic Emblems in full T7/T8 later on down the road you could switch to Cinderglacier for Frost/Unholy or something, but for progression tanking or anything you need to worry about the damage you're taking the 4% parry is the enchant of choice.
I must say that I didn´t believe that blizzard would be able to pull it off, getting all trees more or less viable for tanking.
Myself was meant to be dps, but since we lacked tanks when I turned 80 I went tank.
So, after 4 days in Naxx 10 as main tank with unholy spec ( http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000 ) I must say I´m very impressed. Tanked full Spider, Plague and military wing, and first 3 in construct wing. And in mostly quest/dungeaon blues, we havent had any problems keeping me up. After yesterdays raid I now got 5 epics, but already got 35.5% unbuffed avoidance, and somewhere between 24 and 25k hp. Took the hurtful strikes at Patchwerk, and that was np either. Can imagine what it will be like once we have gotten further.
About the runes. I don´t have any research, but I´m sticking with Fallen Crusader. Sure, its less avoidance. But 800 str gives both extra threat (isnt a problem anyway), but also, we do pretty good dmg when tanking, and that 800 gives a nice boost. So, now when still in 10 man and all is pretty poor geared, that might be the difference between a kill or not. But as faight says in the post above mine, when things gets a little harder, or if healers got problem keeping you up, go for swordshattering.
Anyway, got a stupid question. Does haste affect the runes cd? Can´t see much use for it otherwise for us, and wont hurry with the badge sigil
Hey there, my main is a Discipline priest who has been levelling doing mainly instances.
I have healed with all 3 speccs blood, frost and unholy tanking.
I also have a DK who I am levelling up hopefully to tank so my pally can go ret.
Out of healing the 3 tanks I found blood the easiest to heal they were equally geared all around 71 but both the times I have had a tank spec blood DK they have been easier to heal than the frost or unholy.
This is in different instances so not due to the damage type etc.
Why do people keep on saying frost and unholy are more viable?
Is it because they are easier to reach the levels needed at 80 for raids in avoidance etc?
Help me out here as I do still want to have my blood DK a tank or am I just deluding myself.
Frost and Unholy have specific tanking talents, going more specific, Frost specc is specificaly a spell-caster boss oriented tank with unique spell resistance abilities and talents the other 2 specc don't have.
Unholy seem to be to most viable solution for AoE tanking, while Blood is incredibly good at single target threat generation which, aided by the self-healing abilities can give you the illusion they are more easy to be healed.
They are not easier, they are just healing themselves. Now, I admit that tanking non-heroic pre-WotLK instances is a joke nowadays and it is especially with a DK (I could make a Ramparts run with 4 DKs and 1 Lock, AoE cleaning and tank switching on bosses. It worked, Blood Aura [talent] effects stack), but this doesn't mean we expect Blood specced DKs to be able to tank 25 men Arthas.
Well, actually, we don't know what to expect at that level, and as someone says, it is pointless to close the DK tanking discussion over Frost specc only, although there are given situations where one specc is better than the other.
So, running as my unholy spec yesterday I got in a group with some of the guys who got the server first on our server for Naxx-25. Generally when tanking, I try to hit up the healer to see what they think bout how it was to heal me.
I was told even before I asked: "Wow, I'm surprised. You've tanked better than any of the frost DKs I've been with, and you take a ton less damage. You're much more a pleasure to heal than any DK I've had, and a lot of other tanks.
What would be the best glyphs to use as a frost tank? I was thinking UA, DS, and IT would be the three best major glyphs to use but then again IF and Obl both look worth using.
I think I am gonna test out tanking with this frost spec and seeing how it works out.
I put 4 points into killing machine mostly as a talent dump, but I also want to see if it procs of rune strike. My guild has a dedicated enchancment shaman, so I didn't bother with icy talons.
So the issue I have with it would be virulence. I can't decide if I should drop 2 points in bladed armor to max it out or just leave it at 1% and try to fill it out with gear. I'm guessing that 2% chance to not miss IT/HB/Pest/BB is more important, I am just so stuck on how awesome 5/5 bladed armor is.
What would be the best glyphs to use as a frost tank? I was thinking UA, DS, and IT would be the three best major glyphs to use but then again IF and Obl both look worth using.
Best Frost Tank Glyphs will change per person but UA for extra mitigation, IT for more RP generation (I use this even for my Unholy Tank build), and IBF. No RP cost for IBF proves to be quite in my favor since it always seems my RP bar is at 0 when I *need* IBF. This also lets me pop IBF immediately on mutli-mob trash packs and get UB that much quicker.
Used DS for awhile but couldn't find myself using runes for it since my healers are quite pro with always keeping me up, thus, it was replaced with IBF.
For Unholy - I'm using IBF, IT, BoneShield. Finding this setup to be very nice so far. May experiment with IT and switch it out but that extra RP is just so nice.
Blizzard is removing armor on rings, trinkets, weapons, and bonus armor on items. They are also changing bear form armor.
No they aren't. The armour will still be there. They are changing the way Dire Bear Form multiplies the armour, in that it will no longer multiply what is considered bonus armour on items.
The armour will still be present on these items. Whether it is affected by Frost Prescence or not I do not know, I only rolled my DK yesterday as an alt tank so still swotting up on everything.
Originally Posted by Shadowed
The best part is, not only were you late in linking it, that's an April fools topic from 6 months ago.
No they aren't. The armour will still be there. They are changing the way Dire Bear Form multiplies the armour, in that it will no longer multiply what is considered bonus armour on items.
The armour will still be present on these items. Whether it is affected by Frost Prescence or not I do not know, I only rolled my DK yesterday as an alt tank so still swotting up on everything.
Yeah, this is the thing. Otherwise they have real itemization issues where +armor on those slots is tremendously overvalued. Look at how much bear tanks got out of the badge of tenacity versus other tanks. +armor trinkets are far and away best-in-slot for most bear tanks, and they can't really price that benefit on trinkets right: should the iLevel points go toward the armor bears would get from the trinket, or everybody else? Because of the huge bear multiplier, it works out as a problem either way.
I was having a good chat with a friend who's in a quite high end guild last night on Vent regarding Tanking with my Death Knight, and I found it quite enlightening. I thought I'd share and see what people thought about the points he raised with me.
Basically the conversation started with a chat about the defence stat and the effect of having the ability to block on tanking.
Warriors & Paladins he mentioned obvoiusly get a full benifit from all three elements of the defence stat (+dodge/parry and Block) and can block. That leaves DK's with the same issue as Druids in that without Block from a shield what we have to do is make the difference up with avoidance and/or something else.
A druids "something else" is a huge health pool (some people reporting 35K in Naxx gear now on their bears) + the avoidence.
For a Death Knight their "something else" is lots and lots of "clicky" abilities, usually on a 1 minute cooldown which and/or have a rune/runic power requirement. Icebound Fortitude/Bone Shield etc.
His point being that he agree's that a Death Knight can be a good tank at endgame, but Warriors, Paladins & Druids basic ability to mitigate and avoid damage (as all classes usually have their clicky abilities) is passive, while a Death Knight, even a good one, will have to constantly be aware to keep their "clicky" abilities going. Effectively, his point was that a good DK player has to actively stay on top of all his cooldowns to be as effective as another class is who passively mitigating or avoiding about the same (or just absorbing it in their ludicious health pool).
This wasn't/isn't a swipe at the class btw, just really an observation that a good Death Knight Tank possibly/probably be just as capable as the other tanking classes, however it may require the player to be a little more on the ball and "clicky", with possibly greater relience on Mod's & add-on's etc to give downtimes on abilities.
Ho-hum, sounds like that makes the class more *interesting* to me ;-)
11/25/08, 6:56 PM
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