Khana

Is there a specific cap-like number for this?
Or any calculation, model or scheme whatsoever?
Because I can understand the idea, but in the very end, we play a number based game.
Do you already know of a series of weapons we can aim for to have a dual-wield tanking DK who can really ignore the parry-gibbing?

Because as stated elsewhere in this post, a DK tank weapon should be specifically designed for DPS because of threat issues.
So proposing a, for example, dual-wielding King's Defender is something we need calculations about.
How many slowing effect do we need to stack, raid-wise, in order to be sure we can survive or own DW tanking?

 

Asmadai

From a Tanking standpoint, is Merciless Combat something being taken as just a filler talent to get to the next Tier or are people considering this as a needed talent for Frost? Given it only effects targets lower than 35% health, I've been under the assumption that by that point in the fight, aggro should not be an issue, so this would simply be a little bit of added damage.

I really think that the people saying Frost = the best tanking spec have been misled by not just rumors or misinformation being spread around, but by Blizzard themselves. By making our tanking Presence "Frost Presence", it's natural for some people to assume that "Frost Spec" would in turn be the best tanking spec. I prefer Unholy more to be honest, but I think it's still too close to call a definitive 'best spec'.

 

Noraj

For me, it's most helpful to think about it as the DK version of Execute or Hammer of Wrath, though that doesn't really cover it. Yes, the tanks should be well ahead of the pack in threat, but as has often been the case in the past, you're likely to see high DPSers riding your tails very closely, and many classes do increased damage at low enemy health. If anything, it's a threat smoother more than a giant dps increase in my opinion.

"The question is not how far we are going to take it... the question is, do you possess the constitution to go as far as needed?" - Il Duce

 

Talgog

The mitigation from a second weapon is outweighed by the prospect of being instantly killed. Slightly less mitigation is healable. Badly timed boss parrys are not.

There is an awful lot of effort going on to square peg/round hole death knights tanking with DW. Right now, it just doesn't work that well. You miss too much and you have an increased chance to kill yourself unless you are expertise capped. There's also no gear on the horizon that really fixes that - 25 Naxx DK tank gear has no expertise on it and 2.23% hit on the five pieces. You get another 1.5% from the tank +hit ring and neck. The boots add expertise, but still no hit. These are not DW stats.

You can gem and enchant for those stats, but you start to look like DPS rather than a tank, and trade significant mitigation and stamina.

 

Septus

Can I get a quick rundown as to why bone shield needs high avoidance to work well? I now know that it provides the damage reduction benefit for every hit while it's up, even the ones that don't eat charges. However, adding more avoidance, while prolonging the time that bone shield is up, is also just going to result in more attacks that never hit the target, and so for those parries and dodges, bone shield doesn't even come into play. It seems like bone shield is at its most useful, when a lot of attacks are loaded into the 2 second space between charges being eaten up, and with a high enough avoidance, it seems like you'd end up having hits land rarely enough that a higher percent of the hits would eat charges, than a low avoidance scenario.

 

Malcophant

Because not all damage you take is physical, or eats up bone shield charges. Many (most) bosses do some form of magic damage, or AOE that does not eat up the charges, but is still affected by the damage reduction.

 

Feorthas

You kinda answered your own question--if you get enough avoidance for one bone shield to last through it's CD timer, you can effectively add the mitigation as base mitigation rather than as temporary mitigation from a buff. While you're technically just adding in a few more seconds of +armor time to your spreadsheets, it basically makes your worst-case scenario that much easier to deal with because, past 45% avoidance, Bone Shield will *always* be up (as long as the rng doesn't decide that today is the day where you're not allowed to parry or whatever).

It's not so much about bringing your peak mitigation values up so much as raising the lows and averages.

 

Teyrocar

It seems to me that a huge disadvantage to dual-wielding is the added miss chance. That said, you'd need to be at a very high gear level with an abundance of hit in order to make it work while still being able to maintain your other stats.

As for Frost vs. Unholy, I personally am a Frost fan. However, I can easily see Unholy becoming a more powerful tanking spec... to those who know how to use it. Thus far, Frost seems to be easier to use. Much like how Blood is a simpler spec to level as while Unholy is more complicated, but surpasses Blood in speed when used correctly.

 

zagor

The DW hit penalty doesn't mean it's a bad thing.
It's 'balanced' with 2h weapons doing bigger hits.
Gives another stat to scale with (white dmg).
Specials are hit capped with the regular 9% anyway.

About parry haste, it has been mentioned here many times that the bad thing about it is not just haste to next attack. Bigger problem was if that attack happened to be a crushing blow. And bosses (83) can't crush now.

 

Feorthas

While I'm here, I thought I'd post a few quick notes/observations about my limited tanking experience so far:

-Death Knights can be rather fragile; coming from a Druid's large HP pool and insane armor numbers, coupled with decent to good avoidance, I'm finding it rather unnerving watching my HP bar plummet after a low avoidance streak. Also, a lack of partial avoidance (block) makes this worse for us than pallies/warriors in poor gear (expected).

-Threat generation on single targets, as Frost, is fine to great. Multiple targets can be fine but, with the "don't wait for threat--simply spam AoE" mentality going on right now, blowing 3 runes on DnD isn't my idea of an optimal long term fix as it pretty much denies you any flexibility rune-wise until those come back (again, assuming you want to immidiately put up your diseases and pestilence them to the AoE pack).

-No comments on Runic Strike as of yet but I should have an opportunity to play with it tonight to see how badly it impacts RP generation. Based on my soloing experience, it shouldn't be too bad, even macroed into every non-RP ability.

-Is Unbreakable Armor worth the Frost rune? IMO, probably not if Icebound Fort is up, but..

-Deathchill is definitely on my shortlist for abilities that need to be macroed. Was consensus reached on whether it was superior for HB or FS? (macro on both, maybe?)

-Somewhat tangential but has anyone come up with a 'best practices' for rune usage? Personally, I favor multiple-rune abilities over single rune ones (Oblit > BS, for example) as it gets more runes on CD faster--and, thus, available faster--but it does hurt flexibility..

-On that same train of thought, has anyone come up with any useful tanking macros, aside from the generic put-runic-strike-into-everything macro?

 

kaxfenix

I was thinking maybe a panic button macro along the lines of (assuming Frost Spec)

#showtooltip Lichborne
/cast Lichborne
/cast Unbreakable Armor
/cast Icebound Fortitude

But at the same time I do not think it will be viable considering more than likely you frost runes will be on cool down keeping threat up, and unbreakable armor will not fire.

However I am unsure if it is more beneficial to spread these abilities out over the course of the fight or save them for the above Panic button situation.

Thoughts?

 

Teyrocar

D'oh, I forgot about this, good point.

 

Teyrocar

Unbreakable Armor has the side bonus of being a threat increase (unless you use the glyph), and both it and Icebound Fortitude are on EXTREMELY short cooldowns. It would probably be safe to spam both of them, especially UA for the added threat. Lichborne, however, is on a longer CD and should be reserved for when you really need it.

 

Darian_TruBlade

Crushing only made parryhaste worse, but wasn't solely responsible for every tanks' healthy fear of parries. Even without crushes there's the chance for a parrygib (plenty of tanks died to Gruul without taking a single crushing blow), and each parry represents 20-40% more damage that needs to be made up for somewhere.

It boils down to what exactly do you gain by DW tanking? 2H weapons and two 1H weapons have approximately the same number of item values at an identical iLevel, so at best you're shuffling around how those are spent. In the absolute most extreme favorable conditions (going from a 3.1 speed 2H weapon to two 2.7 speed 1H), you're looking at a 2.3 times as many attacks. In more realistic conditions you're bound to have at least one tanking weapon at a sub 2.0 speed simply due to availability. With that setup you'll be attacking 3.25 times more than before.

Without a large investment in expertise that kind of increase is simply suicide on any boss with significant melee damage. You're increasing your potential for spike damage threefold, which will very quickly make you the bane of your healers.

"A man's IQ, yearly income, sexual prowess, ingenuity, physical appearance and generally every other aspect of his character can be condensed down to four digits: his Arena rating." - Zechsy [70 Rogue - Skullcrusher (EU) - 10/23/2007]

 

Believer

It would be interesting to compare the relative benefits of the passive Spell Resistance of Frost versus the extra magical mitigation an Unholy DK could bring to the table.

It was mentioned earlier in this thread that Acclimation and Frost Aura combined provide a total benefit of 230 Spell Resistance for 5 talent points(It should probably also be taken into consideration that Frost Aura is an aura and, as such, another Death Knight in the raid could be providing that benefit to the MT).

An Unholy DK would be able to get a passive 5% additional magic damage reduction and additional reduction(e.g. complete damage immunity) on Anti-Magic Shell for the same number of points. For a single additional point, another solid magic damage mitigation ability (Anti-Magic Zone) could be picked up as well.

Ignoring the AMS aspect of Magic Suppression, will 230 Spell Resistance result in a 5% damage reduction?

If not, a talent spec which picks up Bone Shield, Magic Suppression, Anti-Magic Zone, Lichborne, Frigid Dreadplate, and Blade Barrier could arguably provide the best total damage mitigation. Bone Shield more than makes up for the loss of the 6 extra seconds to Icebound Fortitude from Guile of Gorefiend. A spec like this would seem to sacrifice at least a portion of the tank's threat due to the absence of the high-end damage(i.e. threat) enhancing talents, though. Here's an example of a spec attempting to do this: 11/23/37

EDIT: Fixed some grammatical errors.

 

calisti

I made my first attempts at tanking Nexus and Utguard Keep last night (level 71 DK using the standard unholy leveling build). I found that macro'ing Rune Strike into all of my other abilities was definitely limiting my ability to cast Unholy Blight on the initial pull. I typically opened up with Death and Decay --> Plague Strike --> Icy Touch --> Pestilence, which generates 55 runic power. Even one Rune Strike proc was enough to significantly delay my ability to cast Unholy Blight. I think unholy AoE tanks should definitely avoid using rune strike until the first Unholy Blight goes off. Note that I won't have the Glyph of Icy Touch until level 80, but I suspect the extra 10 runic power will definitely help on the initial pull. Thankfully, runic power generation was only a problem on trash. I didn't have any problems maintaining enough runic power to use Anti-Magic Shell or Icebound Fortitude while tanking bosses.

The biggest problem I encountered while tanking was dealing with silence. The stewards in The Nexus cast arcane torrent, which locks us out of several of our abilities. My previous tanking experience is limited to my feral druid, so I was quite surprised to find myself unable to use several of my AoE tanking abilities. A bad silence on the initial pull definitely caused a few problems.

And here's a trick for the tanking compendium: Bone Shield and Death and Decay generate runic power out of combat. You can use both of these to generate 30 runic power to cast Horn of Winter. The Glyph of Horn of Winter reduces the cost to 10 runic power, which means you only need to cast Death and Decay to get the buff up. Having the extra strength and agility before combat starts can come in handy.

 

Avair

Currently (as Unholy), I have Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Scourge Strike and Blood Strike as my 1, 2, 3, 4 keys, all w/ Rune Strike macro'd in for grinding. Assuming one is using the standard UI hot bars, it would seem fairly straight forward to have bar 1 = Grinding and bar 2 = Tanking setup. Same basic abilities, but the tanking bar using unmacro'd versions. Obviously, its not quite the same as warrior stance bars changing, but a simple Ctrl-Mouse Wheel change could switch between the two states.

Update: Since I was asked for a specific macro I'm using, here's a sample for one of my keys:

#show Plague Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/cast Plague Strike

Since Rune Strike doesn't trigger the GCD, both actions happen.

 

Feorthas

Arcane Torrent--or whatever the BE racial is called--also generates 15 out of combat so it can be used for 'free' RP to cast Horn of Winter if you don't need the silence.

 

ranalin

Is opening up with DnD the recommended way to start? I know it's high threat generation but i dont see a problem pulling in a group with a standard rotation and pestilence. Then i cast DnD which keeps the mobs on me.

I've had less mobs get pealed off of me when i waited to cast DnD instead of starting off with it.

 

Leart

Acclimation

Table of Attack Speeds and Chance of Acclimation Loss

Speed	Attacks	Risk
0.5	36	0%
1	18	0.163%
1.5	12	1.384%
2	9	4.035%
2.5	7.2	7.668%
3	6	11.765%
3.5	5.14	15.972%
4	4.5	20.088%
5	3.6	27.692%

Sapphiron - NPC - World of Warcraft
Offensive Aura: Frost Aura
2 second tick intervals
Chance of Acclimation Loss: 4%

Kael'thas Sunstrider - NPC - World of Warcraft
(This is the magister's terrace incarnation)
Main Attack: Fireball
2.5 second cast time
Chance of Acclimation Loss: 7.668%

Gear Difference
The New Frost Resistance pieces can be seen here:
Icebane Set - Armor - Items - World of Warcraft
Total resist: 355 (60 below cap)
If instead, you took Acclimation you could skip the chest and come out with 390 resistance.

Heroes' Scourgeborne Chestguard
Stat Change:
-57 Armor
-58 Stamina
+81 Strength
+47 Defense Rating = 8.41
+38 Dodge Rating = 0.85%
+47 Parry Rating = 0.84%
-Yellow Socket

If we assume Acclimation provides an average of 28% damage reduction, it might not be so bad for it to have a chance to fall off. It would not lead you to immediate death. It's less than an old crushing blow, if you look at it that way. But, the fact is that it doesn't even out to an even 28%ish. Instead, it could leave you taking no more, or 50% because of the RNG. This is really, not that much worse than than getting a crushing blow use to be at 50% more damage. It is survivable, and understandable. But, it won't be just one blow in this manner. It will be a string of them until you regain the buff. There are also problems if you get too many resists, or avoid too many blows, that increase the failure rate.

 

Leart

It really depends on the group, but I've found two ways of looking at it.

Option 1: Open with Death and Decay, have a skull marked and get your diseases up on it first. I'm pretty fond of this. I find there's far less ways the healer can get agro. The problem is if the group sees "AOE TANK?!" and trinkets and begins to AE right off. I don't have much ap yet in my tanking gear, so it gets risky. But, I do have Death Grip left and taunt if I loose one.

Option 2: Death Grip the dangerous target. Stack diseases as the mobs race toward you. If it's still alive (that's a big if), you can pestilence off it to the rest of the pull. Otherwise you drop a Death and Decay. This only works if that first target doesn't make your healer work. If he's got too much threat, this one is a much riskier gambit. I only use it for casters, and healers that need killed quickly.

 

Leart

I'm fairly new to fine tuning for tanking, so if someone could give some opinions on this, it would be appreciated.
I've been looking at two possible frost builds:
Frost with Veteran of the Third War (24/47/0) vs a normal frost build. Obviously, I didn't spend all of the points in the second one.

I'm wondering which you guys view as more useful for tanking:
- 5% dodge, 6% more damage, and whatever you spend those extra points on
- 6% health, 3 Expertise, 6% more str, Mark of Blood

 

pfooti

I usually do that with a death and decay, but it's the same basic idea. DnD + bone shield + (glyphed) horn of winter. Wait a few seconds for rune repop and DnD to come off of CD (easier as unholy). Then go on in.

As far as dual-wield tanking goes, I think part of the conversation we're missing is about the nature of our strikes. A large number of DK attacks are yellow - 9% miss chance no matter what. We can also assume that many of the DW tank's MH attacks will be rune strikes (not parryable), and that there will also be a larger reliance on frost strike as well (also not parryable).

All that said, I'm not planning on DW tanking. At my current realistic gearing levels, all it really means is that I have to gem for STR/hit/expertise instead of defense, since I wouldn't be getting any of those from the tanking weapons.

I'm also very excited about the Icy Touch glyph for unholy tanking. With that glyph generating extra RP, you can open with PS - IT - Pest - DnD - UB from zero starting RP. Getting unholy blight up early seems like a good exchange for 10% of your IT damage. If it means I can take more rune strikes in the long run, so much the better. At 80, it looks like Icy Touch and Bone Armor for certain, I'm still weighing options for the third Major.

EDIT: On pulling - I've had serious problems with the primary kill target getting downed before I can get off a pestilence. Having to reapply diseases throws my rotation off terribly, and really gimps my later threat generation, especially if the pull has 4 or more mobs in it. Has anyone else had this issue? What do you do to mitigate it, besides communicating with group mates (don't open up until I pestilence)?

 

Cambriel

I've had little tanking experience so far, but this has been a situation I've encountered quite a bit. One thing that's helped me is to swap PS and IT in the rotation, using IT at range to pull the group. Yeah, it's less damage since Rage of Rivendare won't apply, but it means it takes me 1 GCD to get PS and Pestilence off rather than 2, which often gives me enough time. It's not the optimal order, but I put more weight on adapting the rotation to fit the needs of the group (in this case, getting my diseases spread) than what's mathematically ideal.

 

crimsonsentinel

This is what I do as well, although part of the reason I do it is because I'm still doing normal intances and we often kill packs faster than grip's cooldown.