DK Tanking Discussion - Page 160

Arterus · 01/28/09, 7:12 PM

Originally Posted by Raedix

Rigor, 'people' like you are the reason the Elitist Jerks forums have gone so downhill in the past months. You are not only flaming people without having done a single bit of math or in-game testing to back up your claims, but you're doing it with disgustingly awful grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

So, while I (probably) shouldn't feed the troll, how has it been 'proven' to be better to gem for stamina and mitigation? Do you have some type of Universal-WoW-Theorem-Prover that you'd like to share? I'm sure the academic community would be ecstatic to adapt it to theoretical math. I'd love to adapt it to stochastics and finance, as I'm sure to vastly increase my trading bottom line with such an ingenious tool. Oh, right, you were just speaking out of your ass. Sorry 'bout that.

But regardless, I, too, gem for Expertise and Hit. Why? Because they're low, and my stamina and avoidance are high. Simple as that. You see, there are two goals as a tank: first, stay alive; and second, keep aggro. Now, you might be part of a guild with trash DPS that has no clue what they're doing... but I have Fury Warriors, Enhancement Shamans, and Arcane Mages pulling 5000-5500 dps breathing down my neck. That means, when I'm tanking, I need to pull around 2200-2500dps to prevent them from hitting a threat ceiling (and possibly pulling aggro during a transition). Now, if you think I'm going to be doing this in tanking gear without being hit-capped and expertise soft-capped, you're positively insane.

The two warriors that I tank with and I have relatively similar gear levels (both of them are slightly better-geared than I). Compared to both of them, I have more Health, higher avoidance, and about 5000 more Armor. They produce more threat - so I gem to compensate for my weaknesses.

If you have unfettered access to every single piece of ilvl 213 and 226 tanking gear out there, then, yes, you can put together a tanking set that gets you to both caps without having to gem for it at all. But, there is plenty of avoidance-only gear out there, and if, by the luck of the RNG, that's what has dropped most commonly for you, then you fill your holes by any means you are able.

Moreover, the fact that you don't understand gearing for threat is absurd. In every single previous tier of content in the past four years, tanks geared for survivability during progression, and for threat during farming. It makes the runs go faster, and keeps people awake. Now, it even helps with doing many of the tougher achievements out there. Maybe in Ulduar it will be advantageous to regem to pure STA. Maybe not.

Go back to the Official WoW forums. You don't belong here.

I know I'm not supposed to quote for "Truth", but dear GOD thank you! Navigating these forums in recent months has been increasingly painful (especially this thread).

Gemming for threat in Expertise and Hit Rating is the primary reason I'm browsing here today.

On to more pertinent information:

I know how Frost is *supposed* to perform, but I can't seem to get those kinds of results out of it. I actually do about ~400DPS more while specced Unholy. Survivability is another issue. I most definitely miss Frigid Dreadplate, but I can't shake the idea that Unbreakable Armor is just flat out inferior to Bone Shield.

While tanking as Frost, my rotation needs to be fairly tight to maintain the threat I'm accustomed to putting out. If I run into a situation where I need to pop Unbreakable Armor, I find that the added Frost Rune out of my rotation usually screws me up quite a bit. Yes, I generally wait for a Blood/Death rune to pop it, but it still jumbles me up while using a PS-free rotation.

6-charges on Bone Shield end up lasting a goodly amount of time - and while it's only 20% mitigation, it's 20% to EVERYTHING for as long as it's up. Which is usually longer than 20s.

Does anyone have data to show Unbreakable Armor as being more than 20% in total damage mitigation/avoidance? Due to DR on Armor, I have a hard time believing 25% more Armor and 10% more strength would add up to 15%+ total damage mitigated.

I'm primarily the OT for our Guild runs (Good Warrior MT) so AoE threat is important - which is why I'm not really all that interested in a Blood spec.

cbruno777 · 01/28/09, 7:20 PM

just 2 questions.... anyone know if there is dk rated tank gear list? and second has anyone figured a rotation for frost tanking.... i feel like half the time im just spamming howling blast when ever i can

Keishara · 01/28/09, 8:13 PM

May I ask what major and minor glyphs you are using for this spec? I'm quite curious about Blood tanking and intend on trying it in Naxxramas tonight.

Edit: Meant to quote Zerath's post. (#2281)

Kashir · 01/28/09, 9:14 PM

Originally Posted by Arterus

Does anyone have data to show Unbreakable Armor as being more than 20% in total damage mitigation/avoidance? Due to DR on Armor, I have a hard time believing 25% more Armor and 10% more strength would add up to 15%+ total damage mitigated.

Armour does not suffer from diminishing returns, nor is 5% parry equal to 5% mitigation. In fact, because UA adds a % of your armour, it becomes more and more valuable the higher your base armour is (until you're at the cap, of course).

For the 5% parry: Let's take some very conservative avoidance (say you gear, gem and enchant for stam) of 25% dodge, 30% parry, 10% miss. With 55% pure avoidance, you're taking damage from 45% of incoming attacks. Increasing this by an additional 5% parry drops this to 40% incoming attacks; effectively an ~11% decrease in damage taken.

For the 25% armour:
Assume you start with 30,000 armour ~= 64.3% mitigation, .
Increasing to 125% is 37,500 armour ~= 69.3% mitigation.

Total incoming damage reduction ~= 35.7% to 30.7% ~= 14% total reduction.

Putting them together, you end up with a very conservative ~25% damage reduction while UA is active.

You also gain some parry rating from 10% strength, but it's not a huge amount (say 1200 strength = 120 bonus strength = 30 parry rating).

Unbreakable Armour is even better if you have higher avoidance; 60% or even higher base avoidance isn't unreasonable for DKs. In any case, unless you're hopelessly undergeared, it's always much better than BA for physical damage mitigation while it's up.

// edit: Oops, mucked up a couple of figures for the +5% parry calculation. Fixed, hopefully.

// edit2: This is the same reason why Lichborne is an absolutely insane physical mitigation cooldown. If you're already at 60% avoidance, it's a 62.5% reduction in the number of hits taken. Being able to pop IBF, Lichborne and UA at the same time makes me a little sad for the other tanks :p

Zerilan · 01/28/09, 9:45 PM

Originally Posted by MissnL1nK

People had mentioned the patchwerk fight which is why I posted on it, I also have my other threat numbers posted for normal fights. Read my other posts first before you open your mouth.

I haven't been Unholy for awhile, but I haven't seen any Unholy DK tanks I've partied with put up as much TPS as you've been stating. Not trying to claim you're bullshitting or anything. Wondering though, what is the Rotation/Glyphs you use for your spec?

Flouyd · 01/28/09, 9:59 PM

Originally Posted by huntcaudata

Well, I might as well be somewhat complete, then.

[(Damage - Runestrike.damage - DnD.damage) x 2.0735 + Runestrike.damage x 3.11025 + DnD.damage x 3.93965]

That would be the most basic. For completeness, add in:

25 x (Deathstrikes+Obliterates+Plaguestrikes+Scourgestrikes) //for Dirge.
25 x (Howlingblasts+Icytouches+Obliterates) //for Chill of the grave
25 x Descecration.applications //
AMS.absorbed.damage x .1 //WWS reports this as damage done to AMS from what I've seen
(Deathpact.healing + Deathstrike.healing) x .5

And there are more that are really insignificant, like healing from Crusader, .57 from raise dead, .55 for hysteria, etc. So, you can see, I think all of these together are going to add very little threat in proportion to the amount generated through damage.

And i'll reiterate, anything of this nature is going to be far better than "I saw omen spike to 9k, and it hovered around 6-7k".

That should be 2500 for Dirge, Chill of the grave and Desecration right?

Arterus · 01/28/09, 10:04 PM

Originally Posted by Kashir

Armour does not suffer from diminishing returns, nor is 5% parry equal to 5% mitigation. In fact, because UA adds a % of your armour, it becomes more and more valuable the higher your base armour is (until you're at the cap, of course).

For the 5% parry: Let's take some very conservative avoidance (say you gear, gem and enchant for stam) of 25% dodge, 30% parry, 10% miss. With 55% pure avoidance, you're taking damage from 45% of incoming attacks. Increasing this by an additional 5% parry drops this to 40% incoming attacks; effectively an ~11% decrease in damage taken.

For the 25% armour:
Assume you start with 30,000 armour ~= 64.3% mitigation, .
Increasing to 125% is 37,500 armour ~= 69.3% mitigation.

Total incoming damage reduction ~= 35.7% to 30.7% ~= 14% total reduction.
Putting them together, you end up with a very conservative ~25% damage reduction while UA is active.

You also gain some parry rating from 10% strength, but it's not a huge amount (say 1200 strength = 120 bonus strength = 30 parry rating).

Unbreakable Armour is even better if you have higher avoidance; 60% or even higher base avoidance isn't unreasonable for DKs. In any case, unless you're hopelessly undergeared, it's always much better than BA for physical damage mitigation while it's up.

// edit: Oops, mucked up a couple of figures for the +5% parry calculation. Fixed, hopefully.

// edit2: This is the same reason why Lichborne is an absolutely insane physical mitigation cooldown. If you're already at 60% avoidance, it's a 62.5% reduction in the number of hits taken. Being able to pop IBF, Lichborne and UA at the same time makes me a little sad for the other tanks :p

This is the part of the equation I was missing. I was reading 69.3% - 64.3% as 5% mitigation. Total reduction only comes in to play when taking account for the reduction already present.

Thank you.

With the reduced cooldown on AMS, I may go back to Frost and really honestly try to give it a better shot.

huntcaudata · 01/28/09, 10:18 PM

Originally Posted by Flouyd

That should be 2500 for Dirge, Chill of the grave and Desecration right?

All of the numbers on tankspot are multiplied by 100. IE, if you use their numbers, damage actually does (damage x 207) threat, not (damage x 2.07). I just think it is pretty silly to multiply everything by 100. There's a lot of discussion around this on the article linked from the Death Knight one where some people were getting confused that some warrior attack was better than sunder when it was obviously not in practice. Overall the practice is pretty confusing to me (maybe it's used just because that's how the game engine reports it when queried?).

Volrath50 · 01/29/09, 12:55 AM

For a non-blood tank, is expertise really worth going for? I can understand why warriors love expertise to death, but looking at a parse of my actual damage, not much seems to actually be dodge/parriable. I typically have 2-4x as many Runestrikes as normal autoattacks, which already negates expertise on them. Right now, the only thing in my rotation that is under the effect of expertise are Scourge Strikes, non-Runestriked auto-attacks, Blood Strikes, and BCB procs (the extra parries are not even remotly a concern atm). That amounts to about 25-35% of my damage. While it would be nice to have less SS dodge/parries, the runes refresh quick anyway, so I'm still only losing a GCD on a dodge/parry.

Basically, while I do like incidental expertise on gear, it just doesn't seem like something I really should be aiming for, unless I'm overlooking something really obvious, or I've made a horrible mistake in logic somewhere. I keep hearing from people that expertise is the stat to go for, but from my own recounts/wwss, it just doesn't seem like it would give a whole lot of benefit.

Indicate · 01/29/09, 4:17 AM

I don't see unbreakable armor that valued over bone shield or vamp blood. It does nothing for incoming magic damage and raid buffed with.
Ancestral Healing - Spell - World of Warcraft
or
Inspiration - Spell - World of Warcraft

(I know they don't stack) your already pretty close to cap. I wonder if someone does the math, on how much unbreakable armor will take you over cap.

Specialy if you hardcore and are using [Indestructible Potion] every CD

*note*
You use the potion right before pull and it goes on CD this way you can use another 1 min into the fight. Effectively you can have it up for 4 mins during a boss fight. (Unless this has been fixed and i am unaware of it.) Also stacks with [Seal of the Pantheon] and other armor trinkets.

i won't say its lackluster in endgame raiding untill someone proves it, but it just seems not enough.. I honestly wish it increased armor by 25% and reduced all incoming magic damage by 25% so frosties had some chance at sarth 3D

Désespoir · 01/29/09, 4:17 AM

Originally Posted by Volrath50

Right now, the only thing in my rotation that is under the effect of expertise are Scourge Strikes, non-Runestriked auto-attacks, Blood Strikes, and BCB procs (the extra parries are not even remotly a concern atm).

Not directly linked to your question, but BCB is a terrible talent for a DK Tank

dreadai · 01/29/09, 5:08 AM

Originally Posted by Désespoir

Not directly linked to your question, but BCB is a terrible talent for a DK Tank

Nice assertion, care to say why, or link to some sort of evidence? Perhaps explain your logic.

gorsameth · 01/29/09, 5:12 AM

The logic behind it is that BCB can be parried so it increases the chance to get a bad parry string. The relevence of this and the actual risk is something opinions vary on.

Tho in my opinion increasing the chance for little gain (note i'm not 100% sure of the tps benefit of BCB but i doubt its major) is a bad move.

Indicate · 01/29/09, 5:14 AM

Originally Posted by dreadai

Nice assertion, care to say why, or link to some sort of evidence? Perhaps explain your logic.

BCB counts as physical and can be parried, as far as the threat out weighing the increased parry i am honestly not sure, but i believe the main reason is the parry. If anyone wants to show math your more than welcome too.

dreadai · 01/29/09, 5:29 AM

With a deep unholy build, auto attacks constitute a lot of damage due to Necrosis. With high hit and expertise BCB would be a more effective TPS talent I would have thought. At 60 Expertise, parry is removed from the table altogether, and while that's a bit high to achieve without gemming/enchanting for it it's possible to head towards the Hard Cap.
I think that BCB is a good Threat talent for Unholy specifically 2H.
Claiming that it 'Can' create strings of parries, increasing the likelihood of a parry gib is something of a straw man. Having a dodge gem instead of a stamina gem 'Can' cause you to die to an attack when you could have been left on 20 hp. Without proof positive of a BCB causing a parry death I'll see it as a useful threat boost talent to fill my unholy tree with.