Griefknight

What would you say I need to change in this build?
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

I don't know the weight of Runic Power Mastery and I didn't take DC because I feel it is a PvP talent.

 

◊ Vontre

You're not going to get Tundra Stalker without losing Veteran of the Third War, so that's outside the scope of this build. The point was to maximize survivability against physical opponents.

The relationship between Killing Machine and crit rate is not as sharp as you might think, because increased critical chance means the impact of your procs is reduced accordingly. Here is the comparison with 0 crit rating:

http://www.magegraf.com/deathknight/...2ec855c3678972

"Dual Spec FS no haste" still comes in slightly higher than "Dual Spec w/ FS no DRM". Icy Talons and Killing Machine show similar results, but Icy Talons increases the average damage you will take, based on the amount of expertise you have. Killing Machine, on the other hand, is less reliable threat. It's a judgment call based on your group and encounter. If you're lacking a windfury totem, for example, I would definitely go for Icy Talons for the raid buff. Otherwise Killing Machine should be fine, really 20% haste isn't very impressive either.

www.magegraf.com

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

"We agree with Communism." - Greg Street 2009

 

Rejju

I don't like going so high in blood as a frost tank. Personally I feel that the gain is not worth what you lose from the top tiers of frost. I like this spec. Death Chill isn't a PVP only talent, it's very good for getting that extra threat at the start. Guaranteed crit is always nice for the extra agro on anything. I am also toying with the idea of vicious strikes vs epidemic because my rotation renews my diseases before they run out most of the time, I need to test that more. I feel that the Icy Talons talents are also needed simply because you get more white hits out of the static 5% haste and you do not always need a shaman to drop WF. It gives your raid more variety.

 

Griefknight

I don't see much benefit in Vicious Strikes unless DS is in your rotation, I would think it isn't but what do I know. I never played the beta and I'm only level 73.

 

Rejju

Part of it, is the healing is very nice. I use either DS or Oblit depending on health. Also, soloing its quite nice.

 

Zerath

Straight from a Blue's mouth (a very high up Blue even!):

So, there we have it. DW won't be a viable spec due to this unless it's on a Flagged Mob.

(Also, this is awesome, the first time a Blue has posted on one of my topics.)

Link: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Parry Hasting - Was it removed?

**EDIT**

Realized this was brought up (only a link) on the previous page but chances are - people didn't see it due to skimming. I'll keep the blue'd post here if that's fine.

 

Metapod

Heres my rotation:

IT -> PS -> BS -> BS -> FS -> OB -> OB -> OB.
Squeezing FS where ever I can.

I lost threat on patchwerk to my prot paladin friend. I was trying to main tank and apparently I failed.

Tips?

I lost threat to the OT. He said he started auto attacking and was able to keep around 60% threat, problem?

Guile - Ysondre

 

Effekt

I have to be honest up front, I haven't gone through everything in this thread yet but I have read most of the initial DK theorycraft thread. (All 100+pages) Through what I've been reading from various sources, some educated, some not, I've come to the ultimate conclusion that frost, in this point of the game is nowhere near as viable as unholy is for tanking. Let me explain! Comparatively, frost has the aforementioned "oh shit buttons". But how good are those 2 talent really? I don't have the math to back me up, I'm still new to the game design mathematics.

I am currently specced Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

With this build, I get all the must-have tanking talents as well as some utility talents. Let's talk a little bit about my current stats. I'm not poorly geared but I am nowhere near "well-geared" (Thanks itemization). I have a few tanking pieces from naxxramas (10 man) and from badges. I currently sit at 27194 Health unbuffed, 19% parry, 22% dodge, and 24k armor. This does not include horn of winter or Blade Barrier. I find with my unholy build that I can have bone shield up almost a full duration of icebound fortitude cooldown. For example, i use Icebound Fortitude. As soon as it comes down, I use Boneshield (let's assume this is in the middle of a fight). IBF is a 60 second cooldown. I can keep boneshield up, usually until around 10-20 seconds of IBF coming off cooldown. Now, let's say these are on cooldown on a difficult boss. I now have a 2 min trinket that I can use (I currently have the badge dodge trinket as my only "use" trinket). This, so far, has been up everytime I came into a situation where all my life saving buttons were on cooldown. Now, on top of the build we also get spell deflection. With blade barrier up, I have +30% chance to parry (depending on buffs). That's an innate +30% chance to take 30% less damage from a head on spell. Then icing on the cake is veteran of war which bumps my health so... healthfully :P and in my gear about 1% to parry.

If we compare this to a typical Frost build, we have to look at Lichborne, Unbreakable armor, and frigid dreadplate. I was using an unholy/frost build before this and I can honestly say that I believed Lichborne to be rather lackluster. The cooldown is just too long to be reliable. I can't say i've ever used it and noticed a significant difference when multiple tanking mobs. Maybe one mob but the only fight I do that on is Patchwerk. I also only use it in heroics when I pull a couple packs and just use all my CD's to aoe burn everything down (like the gauntlet in pinnacle). I just don't see it being as comparatively useful in raids (yet). So we move on to Unbreakable armor. This bumps me up to about 30k armor (about 9% total less damage?), and ~7% parry total (probably did the math wrong). This last for 20 seconds. When you reach a certain avoidance level, such as myself, doesn't it just makes sense that bone shield offers more mitigation for the point? (please, please, please correct me if I am wrong on any of this) I'll be honest and say that I can't accurate model the 3% chance to not be hit, but it seems to decrease in usefulness at a certain avoidance level as well. Point for point, it seems that boneshield in itself is more mitigation than all 3 of these combined for 3 points (again, at a certain level). For the sake of it, I wasn't going to throw acclimation against spell defelction simply because they are both RNG numbers and let's be honest... neither is incredibly useful to this point. I can see them being used for Sapphiron and Malygos but that's it. In this case, I would assume acclimation wins on Sapphiron and Spell deflection on maylos (assuming MT'ing).

If it's about AOE tanking, than that is just a player thing IMO. Tanking has become somewhat of a joke. DnD, put 2 diseases up, pestilence, bloodboil and I have aggro. Go from there. Unholy actually helps this as well with increased spell hit/damage.

Now, we get to MT'ing. I can honestly say that we have some VERY good players in our guild, and some not so good players. However, I have not found MT'ing anything to be an issue. The occasional Rogue (cough ereturns) will ride my tail for a bit, but he never seems to surpass me. Even on patchwerk I can stay within, literally, points of threat off our MT. (who I consider to be the worst player in the world, but others do not )

Moreover, we can talk about DPS while not tanking. As frost, I was lucky to be doing 1k dps on a single target boss in dps gear. My unholy/frost build was a bit better. I was holding around 1100-1200 dps consistently. As my new build, I do around 1400-1500 dps. Some people may consider this unimportant. But, for min/maxers such as myself, this is all but unnecessary.

As a final point we have to talk about auras. I read the "napkin math" of the unholy Aura for dps and survivability was not accounted for. If you haven't read it, I believe it came out to roughly 500 raid dps in a 10 man moving fight? Again, this doesn't model survivability (heigan, anub, and sapphiron to name a few). I beleive this to be far superior to the frost aura. This brings us back to the point about acclimation and spell deflection. It's useful in 2 fights (and maybe required for bugged malygos but we've gotten him to 55-60% without it so I wouldn't say necessary). At this point in time, the spell mob tanking DK is just simply not required.

Hopefully i didn't make any glaring mistakes but if I did please fel free to flame me! It will teach me a lesson! Please, help me if I am wrong to understand where and how. Like I said, I'm a noob still at the game mechanic mathematics! Also just delete this if it's an unnecessary post!

 

Bealzebull

I actually like your spec a lot, going deep into blood for VoT3W seems pretty good when, from what I've read, our biggest issue is mitigation and not so much threat(I've yet to hit 80 and tank but I'm close). This may seem like another wild idea but what about going into blood far enough to get abominations might and going far enough into frost to get Imp Icy Talons and get all the mitigation while you're at it+unbreakable armor something like this 28/36/7

 

Effekt

Well, my whole argument is basically Boneshield > All other 1-point mitigation talents combined. You're spec may be decent for 10 mans, but it still lacks alot of the big number talents as well. You'll be utility but 5-6 more people need to make up your lack of dps.

 

Arakai

I keep reading about this but obviously I'm new to DK tanking, what is the mechanic behind insta-gibbing? Also, I thought I read somewhere on this thread someone said that the Mobs will hit you faster if you are DWing? How does this work. don't they have a fixed attack rate or is this referring to reactive type abilities of the mob that will strike you each time you hit??

Also I read about "avoidance", is this a combination of parry and def? Is there a new "uncrittable" def value?

Sorry for the lack of understanding.

Thanks

 

Yamanaka

I like that build Effekt. Currently I am frost spec, but I am a sucker for Stamina, and your build has loads of it (and boneshield). I modified it a little to my own taste: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

How would that spec be for tanking and dps-ing?
Besides tanking I still want to be able to grind well, hence I liked frost-spec for the nice damage.

But Unholy does seem better and having tanked as frost I find the CD on Lichborne to long and Unbreakable Armor not good at all. I usually use UA because the rest is on cooldown.

Also, how good is Impurity really? I read that it only adds 2.5%?

And the Desecration 3/5. Does it still have enough uptime with those number of points?

 

Flopi

Yes, mobs have fixed attack rate but when they parry someones attack the swing timer will reset and they will hit you again instantly. Now imagine some hard hitting boss and you'll get the picture.

My guess about avoidance is as good as yours which is dodge + parry together. Defense also gives you chance to be missed by mob. Maybe that too then, someone with higher knowledge can confirm that.

You'll need 140 extra defense to be uncrittable by mobs 3 levels higher than you.

 

Ati

I really like Effekt's build. However I would change the 3 points from Ravenous Dead into Outbreak. Gives a little more AoE control + DPS. 3% strength for 3 points is a really low amount imo. I'd also remove the unholy aura for some DPS talent points.

 

Kharnator

Question about Parry Rating and Dodge Rating.

Why everybody favors Dodge Rating over PR? I have read it all around, but as far as I know they are both affected by diminishing returns so that shouldn't be the reason... I assume parry doesn't reset the swingtimer of the parrying Death Knight either, though if it was so that would affect the DK more, I assume.

Ps. I did try to skim through the posts, trying to find a reason, couldn't.

 

gorsameth

a single % of parry takes more rating then dodge. so assuming identical stats distibution an item with dodge will have more dodge % then the same item with parry instead.

 

jacclark

I'm just adding my unholy glyph suggestions.. I'm trying different builds now - I like the previous posters mix of blood and unholy. I will try it and give my comparison versus my current unholy build. My biggest weakness has been to spell damage and I wonder if a 5% reduction all the time is worth spec'ing for.

Anyways, glyphs for the unholy DK.


bone shield - extra bone - essential
death strike - extra self healing - crucial
death and decay - aoe stun per tick! - helps reduce the hits.. I think this has a huge benefit to aoe tanking where a DK's biggest strength is its weakness -- multiple hits can take a DK to his knees quick. This helps avoidance.

horn of winter - 10 RP - easy and quick to buff - key!
pestilence - range -- great
raise dead -- 20 RP gives you more RP to buff and get to 60 RP for unholy blight and / or increase Death Strike healing.

Comments?

Talisabt of Lightning's Blade
<Ski Doosh>

 

Kharnator

Okay, so Dodge takes less rating to turn into %.

Anybody know why? Wouldn't avoidance%'s have the same ratings needed? Or is this DK centric thing because of our STR turning into parry rating? Or is the parry rating so expensive, because it resets... our swingtimer?

Thanks already for a possible answer.

EDIT: Also, anybody know these values? How much rating is 1% parry and same for dodge?

 

gorsameth

@jacclark

Tanking without the Icebound Fortitude glyph will bite you in the ass and kill you. Having to worry about keeping a spare 20 RP around for when you want to use IBF can really mess up rotations. Esp if you macro Runestrike into your ability's.
Nothing is worse then needed to use IBF only to find out that you need to use 2 rune ability's and hope you dont also use a RS. I would replace the Deathstrike glyph with it.

Using the Deathstrike glyph is something i have always questioned. Why would you keep sitting on 100 rp when you can burn it on Unholy Blight and Deathcoils to produce more threat?


Combat Ratings at level 80 has all the conversion values you need.

As for why thats because parry will give you parry haste and as such has a "minor" added effect compared to dodge.

 

gorsameth

Double post. Ignore this please.

 

Kharnator

Alright, thanks for confirming!

Also, one more question about the DK tanking. How about gemmings? AFAIK pre-WOTLK tanks went for stamina pretty much everywhere until SWP and started to stack out avoidance instead. How do DK's handle this -generally-? Of course this is based highly on the encounter, but how would you gem out your own gear?

I am JC and I have the JC only gems so socketing will be sweet. I can decide between the high stamina gems, which benefit from Frost Presence and BoK or go for the avoidance ratings (dodge/parry).

Is there any general way of doing this, or does it depend fully on what gear you have?

 

zokauskas

For Unholy you need to get lots of avoidance for the bone shield to be effective and as someone stated stacking defence would lower the diminishing returns on avoidance stats thus giving you most per stat point. With a reasonable bone shield uptime you wouldn't need the health pool paladins or warriors need. Just my thoughts.

 

Kharnator

I am attempting to stick to being Frost specced for raiding as that's the spec that I enjoy. It's only until that Unholy is dramatically better that I might change.

But does the same thing stick to Frost DK? As Unholy DK's stick avoidance to keep up BoneS, but we don't have that. Would stacking defense still be good post-cap? Or should we aim for stamina, instead?

 

Feverdreams

Ok so now that we have confirmation that parry-haste is still a factor, where does that leave blood-caked blade? It is a nice boost to dmg and threat, but it comes at the price of being a second attack which can trigger boss parry-haste. I was loving it after I found out it can proc off of Rune-Strike, but now with the parry-haste confirmation, I'm a little weary of putting it in my tanking builds. Any thought on where we place this talent now for tanking?

 

Raspyn

If you still want extra damage on your white hits & rune strikes, just simply move your talents from Blood Caked Blade to Necrosis. Blood Caked Blade does physical damage, and counts as an extra strike, whereas Necrosis does shadow damage and is considered a spell, and cannot be parried by the enemy. The nice thing about Necrosis is that since it is a spell, it is affected nicely by the deep unholy tree, which gives an extra 13% damage to magic attacks.