What consumables are people running? I'll be tanking Sartharion with 3 drakes up tonight (DKs are just so awesome at mitigating his damage) and I was looking at different Consumable options.

I could go for [Elixir of Mighty Fortitude] + [Elixir of Major Defense] which increases one of our primary mitigation stats, or just use a [Flask of Stoneblood] which would save me a lot of money, but HP isn't really that attractive to me for some reason. I'm running quite high on HP as it is (29.5k UB) so maybe that's why.

I'd go for either [Elixir of Expertise], [Elixir of Mighty Strength] or [Guru's Elixir] for Battle elixir, and [Elixir of Mighty Defense] or [Elixir of Protection] for Guardian elixir. Guru's and Protection would be my choice giving you 20 strength, 20 agility, 20 stamina and 800 armor.

The Stoneblood flask seems very underpowered to me, although it'll be significantly cheaper to use on wipe nights. I wonder if there's a specific reason for making it so much less powerful than the other Northrend flasks like [Flask of Endless Rage] or [Flask of the Frost Wyrm].

Several worthless points? You need 5/5 toughness in any build, and 3/3 imp Icy Touch is pretty much required too for 5 and 10man tanking, in 25 you can afford someone else to TC your mob, but that's a waste of DPS. Leaves 2 "wasted" points, I like having the range on Icy Touch myself, easier pulling for the adds based fights and such when you're offtanking. Don't really think it's worthless, but yeah you lose plenty of DPS from not having blood stuff. Until dual specs ^^.

So I saw a post earlier about reaching the def cap pre-raid and I'd been looking at a bunch of gear for quite a while and wanted to share. Now, these gear sets are extreme avoidance only. Nearly everything is completely sacrificed for avoidance just to see how high of avoidance I could get at various stages. I'm fully aware of the folly of such a list, but since it DEF caps at all stages I figured it might prove useful or people could just get a kick out of it or hey its just an example of the avoidance we can see. I'm ~99% on the math, its using numbers essentially all from the combat ratings at 80 thread. I can google docs the spreadsheet or something if necessary. Oh and I'm night elf, so -2 for everyone else. I'm also inscription/blacksmithing (as I believe this gets me the most avoidance. well, inscription is the same as some others but not having to get exalted is good++)

Max Avoidance

6% additional attack speed reduction is nice and nothing to snuff at but certainly not critical with the content available and can easily be provided by another class on bosses(it really doesn't matter in 5 mans or raid trash) even in 10 mans. I spec'd 2/5 into Black Ice because I felt between the DK's other ranged abilities and its already 20 yd range I had enough options to get aggro at a distance. Either way I don't feel I get particularly much out of either investment. Perhaps calling them useless is a bit much and we should instead say 5 at most moderately useful talents instead.

I'll try specing out of lichborne tonight and see how it goes in 25 mans. Maybe specing out of the talent will change my thoughts on it.

I thought here would be the best place to ask about my DW Tank Spec, I haven't hit 80 yet so I haven't tried tanking properly yet, so my knowledge of tank builds are fairly minimal. Anyway this is the build came up with (its a take on the DW Tri-Spec with tanking talents):

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I plan to off-tank, but still be viable for heroics.

If you want your ghoul up at all times during a 10 or 25 man, you need Night of the Dead. Ravenous Dead isn't going to keep him alive (it'll help, but he'll still die). NotD lets you resummon basically on demand. Whether the investment is worth it is up to you. Looks like you're rocking a mostly tank-ish spec in which case I haven't found the ghoul completely necessary. For dps he's fantastic, although in that case I feel like you go all or nothing on ghoul talents (Rav Dead, Shadow, Master, NotD).

Would really be nice if they had Avoidance, at least the perma-ghouls.

I have 1 point in Night of the Dead, and don't have Master, and I think it's fine. I mostly summon it if I think I might need a death pact(healer low on mana, boss going berzerk soon etc) or if I want to push a bit more DPS, but unless you get all the ghoul talents they don't do all that much dmg anyway. Night of the Dead also cuts on the cooldown on Army, which while not very useful on a lot of fights, can trivialize some heroics achievements and stuff like that. When I did sapphiron this week as tank dps(since I don't respec every other fight for 10man stuff ^^), I could get a ghoul up every 1min30 or so with 1/2 night of the dead, so 2/2 is probably overkill too.

As for DW tanking, the miss isn't all that bad, because you can easily replace one of your tanking pieces by a dps piece with super high hit%, considering you're getting so much defensive stats off the weapons. There are definitely issues imo in sustained threat though, and probably burst threat too since you rely on howling blast, and if it's resisted it's like old day shield slam parries on twin emps pull level of fuckery, and the parry haste, so I wouldn't really recommend it. It all depends on the content and your guild's level though, for 5man there's not that many bosses that actually hit that hard with normal swings that a few parry hasted hits will matter, and for the few that do, it'll still be rare that you die from it.

Overall I think the conscensus is, it's not recommended, and it's generally worse than 2h tanking, but it can be done if you really want to. It's more viable than say, 2h warrior tanking, or feral cat tanking(even though that used to be good with super high avoidance ^^).

Are there any bosses that do elemental damage in current raid content along the lines of Hydross/etc? I just realized today that AMS works versus any non-physical melee damage when I accidentally hit it while mobbing up some elementals. This makes me curious as to whether there would be any content made trivial by stacking unholy DKs with AMZ. I would guess 3 AMZing DKs would work if the tank had their AMS glyphed. 4 would give it 100% uptime (unless of course the AMZ absorbs enough damage to fall before the 30 seconds is up).

With the advent of dual-spec I wonder if there will be any encounters where DKs would be required to take AMZ in their off-spec just to bypass gear requirements for a single fight?

Regardless, I've started using AMS a whole lot more lately.

How's it going? Medium time reader, first time poster here.

I've been attempting to work a DW Tanking build, and have had no troubles with it thus far. My question is that I don't understand how Parry Haste affects tanking. I assume that with capped Expertise, Parry rating, Defense and Dodge, any Death Knight would exceed the limits for tanking... but if Expertise removes the mobs' ability to parry, wouldn't that remove the problem of parry-gibbing? I probably don't understand how one is "parry-gibbed"... as I was told it was a reset in melee swing count after one is parried... but wouldn't expertise eliminate that problem, making a DW Tanking build more viable?

Basically:

When a mob parries their next attack comes at most 60% faster. The closer the parry is to the next attack the less impact it has, but when dual-wielding you're constantly attacking. This means if something hits you for 10k and then parries your attack it's next attack will come 60% faster. Assuming it has a 3.0 attack speed and the parry happens instantly after it attacks that means it would hit again in 1 second instead of 3, roughly.

Capping out expertise would be necessary for DW tanking. However, you must realize that the parry rate mobs have is around 16% or so. That's a lot of expertise. Not to mention the dual-wield hitcap is ridiculously high, in the mid 20%'s if you picked up the DW talent in frost.

As such the amount of itemization points you'd need to put in to capping expertise and hit would detract from survival stats such as defense, stamina, and strength (since strength gives you parry).

Also along those lines, big bosses such as Patchwerk have had parry haste removed. This means DW might be an option there, but the majority of mobs in the game, and I assume bosses in Heroics too, still have parry haste enabled.

The main point of tanking is that you want to be hit the least amount possible for the least amount possible while hitting as many of your attacks as you can for as much as you can. Dual-Wielding seems to work against this basic principle with it's large miss chance, increased number of chances for a mob to parry your attacks, which make theirs faster, and smaller hits.

Perhaps in the future expertise will be so abundant on tanking gear that we're hitting the parry reduction cap, but until then it just seems like a bad idea.

But would it be that bad to focus more on Expertise rather than Hit for the sole purpose of eliminating Parry Gibbing, while neglecting pure itemization on Hit, since the focus of the Dual Wielding tank is to gain threat through white damage and AoE damage (from Howling Blast), leaving room for the essential tanking stats? Hit rating is good, but when weighted against Expertise.

Also, wouldn't that high expertise rating be reduced by the talents one takes? As a Frost spec, it would take roughly 172.15 expertise to reach the cap. Hit rating would equal 295.53 to reach the cap, and spell hit with Virulence is 288.53. With those numbers, and expertise in more abundance with Wrath... I think that it wouldn't be that hard at all to cap Expertise, which leaves more room for your other avoidance stats

I believe the expertise "cap" is the amount of expertise needed to eliminate *dodge* from bosses. DPS usually attack from behind, so they're not concerned about eliminating parry.

Bosses usually have a parry chance significantly higher then the dodge chance.

On the topic of both consumables and crit inmunity, I'm surprised no one has mentioned [Lesser Flask of Toughness]. I've been using this as my main consumable in raids, it doesn't only help become crit inmune, it also allows for using non defense items in certain slots, namely trinkets and rings, which in return have good amounts of armor. As an added bonus, it is very cheap.

Abynthe is correct, the amount of expertise listed in DPS threads is for dodge, which is 6%. As I said earlier, parry is much, much higher, theorized around 16% based on WWS parses/etc. DPS doesn't attack from the front, as such they only have to worry about dodge since bosses gain the magical ability to dodge from all sides, regardless of how large they are.

Shadow of Death - Same thing happens with me. It's sad because if you blow yourself up you can save yourself from repaircost when there is a wipe. Never had the pleasure to down the boss in ghoul form while tanking it but it's a good point ofc. First I thought that maybe it's tied to my ghoul cooldown but checked it out and it isn't. Hope that we'll get a blue answer for that some day.

Gear - You'll get nice starting gear from different factions with honored standing + Wyrmrest revered. Addition to the BS crafted one that is.

Crushing Blows - You are correct. Only mobs with 4 levels higher than yours will crush now and since bosses are considered 3 levels higher that wont happen any more.


About the AMS. I can't remember if untalented one lasted the whole 5 secs absorbing the damage or just absorbing the first source? In beta it was the latter at some point and in live I've never been without the talent. I just love it. The idea of being immune to all magic damage for 5 secs is great for me. Survived on Thaddius once because of that. Missed the static charge with a second or so and hit the button just in case. Got 9x immune and luckily didn't kill anybody with my charge. If boss has ability to do ridiculous amouns of magic damage that should oneshot raid then it's fun to survive =) That said I do agree that it's not useful talent all the time but I'm keeping it until dual spec is introduced.

Most "magic" bosses are mixing physical with magic bursts right now, so, stacking AMZ/AMS isn't the best way to go about encounters. AMS does help us out when tanking say - Drakes, let's use absorb their breath or with KT and those random Frostbolts that get through.

I'd assume, T7 DKs will have close to 3000 atk so, we're looking at 300,000 dmg negation for AMZ. Which, on an AoE boss is nothing. Maybe 10 seconds?

Shadow of Death - there isn't an internal cooldown to my knowledge because it's proc'd back to back before. Then, all of the sudden, it doesn't proc for hours. I'll post on the DK forums to see if we can get a response. >

Oh no, I've made the swap to Frost for tanking until my gear gets better and I can keep Bone Shield up longer. Two quick questions in this regard:

1) I've read all over the place that Frost has problems with single target TPS, but I've read a few people saying that they try and work through that by using Death Strike for the FU runes to get both healing threat and damage threat. Does that seem like a viable alternative to Obliterating? (which is mitigated by armor) Howling Blast? (not mitigated by armor but subject to resists) Even unglyphed? (since you should be dumping your RP all the time anyway)

2) Should I be shooting for 40% avoidance + crit immune before I think about going back to tanking as unholy? Or should I go for fifty? My theory is that Bone Armor needs to stay up at least long enough to surpass the duration of UA + the extra 6 seconds you get from IBF in frost. Is this an erroneous assumption?

What? 300,000 damage absorb would be game-breakingly huge, but I don't know where you're getting that number from. It's 10k plus double your AP so it'd absorb 16k with 3k AP.

Also shadow is death is not a proc, if you die from being beat on it happens (although it actually goes off when you hit 1HP, so you don't really die). The only time it doesn't go off is when you die is when you are insta-killed from massive fall damage or scripted "you die" events. How exactly are you dying twice in the same moment to have it "proc'd back to back" though?

I've never noticed any issues win single target threat while tanking 5 mans as Frost; obliterate hits *hard*.

Hell, I kept bosses on me, no problems whatsoever, with a 77 Blood dk and an 80 Rogue in party last night (speed running AZN and Old Kingdom; I'm 74 atm). Multiple-target tanking will almost always be harder than keeping one guy on you, regardless of spec, and I really didn't have horrible issues with either when we cared enough about a mob/pack to set up a kill order (and, even when we didn't, I still held everything off of the healer and 'lock).

Even if 300,000 negation was possible; you don't think 10 seconds of magic immunity is a big relief for a healer? That would be massive mitigation uptime

Personally I would go for crit immunity and then avoidance.