Cambriel

See, I've also had problems with groups just obliterating whatever I Grip before the rest of the pack gets there, which doesn't solve the disease spreading issue. Using IT at least gets one of them out of the way before the dps demolishes their target.

 

crimsonsentinel

I highly doubt it will be a major concern when we're doing serious content, but if you have high single target dps you can just sic them on some other mob while you build aggro on the rest.

 

Rejju

I am a big fan of frost tanking, mainly for the shear amount of threat generation. It has amazing burst capability that makes it awesome TPS. I have heard that unholy is good once you are T7 geared or higher, but I honestly feel that needs more live testing. Can every spec tank? Obviously, but I feel frost is the best for raid tanking.

This is the build that I am looking at using, but I have 4 points that I am debating on. The first one is Butchery vs Two-Handed Spec. I have heard that runic power regeneration at 2 is approximately +500 TPS vs the extra 4% damage. The second issue I am having is, Vicious Strikes vs Epidemic. Obviously, longer duration diseases makes rotations just that much easier and a bit more damage from longer DoTs, however extra critical chance and damage from Death Strike is nice for the healing and threat generated from the damage and healing.

Any ideas?

 

kalbear

It would be better to actually put some real numbers here and discuss them. To do that, we need to make some base statements.

What is the typical expertise value of a DK?
What is their typical avoidance %?
What is their typical HP?

Then we need to take typical tanking weapons into consideration. I would say that a 1.6 speed 1h would be typical (I realize there is a great, slow 1h in naxx, but that is not the standard), and a 3.0 speed 2h weapon would be typical.

The special hit rate between 2h and 1h will remain unmodified. That leaves only white attacks and weapon speed.

With 2 1.6 weapons attacking, you will have 3.75 as many attacks in 3.0 seconds as you would a 2h weapon. This means you have 3.75 times as likely a chance of being parried. Clearly, as you get slower tanking weapons this value goes down. The question is whether the value of using two tanking weapons is worth getting parried almost 4 times as often.

Comparison time. Let's take [Titansteel Destroyer] vs two [Red Sword of Courage].
124 str
105 stam
54 hit
vs
50 str
116 stam
76 defense
52 hit

The gain of 76 defense rating (15.4 defense, or 1.83% total avoidance) is great, but the loss of 74 strength is pretty poor. Still, that's only 18.5 parry rating, or a bit less than .4% parry. So the total avoidance gain is around 1.5%. So to deal with being parried 3.75 times more often in terms of white attacks, you are gaining 1.5% avoidance and about 12 stamina.

To me, this doesn't sound remotely good enough. And note that using the comparison above, it's actually worse; you get parried 4.25 times more often from white attacks.

Finally, note that the overall parries is not 3.75 times as many times due to the special attacks also having parry chances. In a 200 second fight, you would have 133 special attacks (assuming one every gcd, which I admit is fudging things), 67 attacks with a 2h, and 250 attacks with 2 1h. Or 183 more attacks total. That is 1.9 times more than with a 2h alone. So basically you're trading at best 2% avoidance for a doubling of the chance to be parried.

Really, not worth it to me.

 

Crax

As I'm analyzing various possible tanking specs, I keep coming back to one issue I haven't seen addressed: How our "auto-attack" talents interact with Rune Strike.

Currently, with Blessing of Sanctuary, a reasonably high amount of avoidance, and a nice, slow 2-hander, I'm anticipating we won't actually *have* many "white" swings when tanking. This would appear to greatly diminish the value of Necrosis, BCB, and Killing Machine. Or do these talents still function with Rune Strike?

 

Rejju

I feel that BcB and Necrosis are more dps talents than tanking talents. The small amount of extra threat gained from those vs other talents just don't look appealing. Then again it remains to be seen. Killing machine is a must for free Icy Touch, Howling Blast and Frost Strike, that is arguably far more threat than Necrosis or BcB.

 

Kallor

Tanking thread - Unholy Tanking Question.

I am not currently BloodBoil'ing as Unholy. It has been suggested to me numerous times that I should be.

I would assume that the Idea is that you BloodBoil 1.5seconds before your IT or PS (whichever you do first) comes off CD... It just seems to me that BloodBoil causes less threat than the 4.5 seconds (3 gcd's) to put your disease back up and then Pestilence them.

So, what am I missing?

 

Crax

Bloodboil does not remove the diseases. It simply causes damage to everyone that is diseased.

 

slant

Blood boil does not consume diseases anymore. It's definitely worth using when AE tanking as it'll also refresh to a death rune with reaping.

 

Rejju

Pestilence and Bloodboil are AMAZING for dps, too. I cannot imagine not using them for AoE tanking. Personally, for single target tanking, blood strike is FAR better due to the damage bonus from the diseases. Blood boil doesn't hit that hard on one target.

 

mav1234

Killing Machine is a free crit, not a free IT, HB, or FS. This is a bit different and likely lowers it's TPS value. I do not know that I'll have the spare points in my Frost tanking build for Necrosis, BcB or KM, though.

EDIT: The free crit I suppose functions as a second free IT/HB/FS if the original wasn't going to crit. So in that respect, I guess you are right - and if Guile of Gorefiend is in a frost build, that would actually increase the value of the KM proc.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of it that way... so I guess you were right in a way.

 

Crax

I'm not sure this will be the case. I saw an anecdote of a Warrior Tank on Illidan post 3.0 that had a total of 3 "white" hits for the entire fight due to rage gains from BoSC. Granted, Rune Strike has more restrictions on it's use than Heroic Strike, but if we are ever able to even approach that kind of Rune Strike output, I really don't see how Killing Machine would be worth the points. An average of an extra 1.5 HB/IT/FS crits in a ~10 min boss fight doesn't seem worth 5 talent points.

Am I overestimating Rune Strike replacement of "white" hits?

 

mav1234

I think you are slightly overestimating it, but I know that when I am tanking in normal instances now, I am able to runestrike just about every 2-3 white hits... Just anecdotal, but yeah.

 

Rejju

Ah, yes. You are correct, I did read it wrong. Although, free crits are still increased threat.

I don't think we can currently count on rune strike replacing white hits, unless you are dual wield, which I do not recommend.

 

Rosenrott

With what little experience I have DK tanking, I'm still unsure what to go for in order to maintain threat and max mitigation, but so far this is the spec I have devised for 80: 25/36/10. I'm not currently (at 72) this spec, but actually blood with the top avoidance talents of frost and unholy. I've tanked Nexus and Utgarde with only a couple snags. It ran a lot smoother when I slowed the pulls so that I could mark everything, and made sure everyone got on MY target instead of picking their own.

I've been reading a lot of good things about Bone Armor, but either I just haven't ever had high enough avoidance to keep it up or I'm just not getting it. It feels like I'm the only one going that far into blood, but the 6% str/stam and 6 expertise for only three points just can't be beaten if you ask me. Mark of blood has actually come in handy as well, mostly because a lot of the healers I've been with have gimped their healing to help them solo.

Regardless, I'd appreciate input.

- Me(h)

 

hvidgaard

I've only played Frost and Unholy so can't reason much about blood. My limited tanking experience from the first few instances in Outland I've grown to like Unholy much much more for the simple reason that I can put out some respectable AoE threat. Meaning my dps can use abilities that hit more than my main target without worry much about aggro. I haven't really tested threat on a single target, but seeing that single target dps is near identical I'll assume they are at least comparable.

One of the talents in favor of Frost as the tanking tree is Frigid Dreadplate, but that isn't really that good. 3 points for 3% melee miss is only barely better than the Nelf racial and I be damned if Blizzard tuned encounters so those points matter. I know it's about min/max, but somethings just doesn't matter.

Now comparing the trees appropriate talents would be Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield. Assuming 2 sec swing timer the course of 10 BS/UA cooldowns (600 sec) is 300 swings.

Unbreakable Armor will parry 5 hits, and provide a 25% armor bonus for 10x20sec = 200sec. I unfortunatly don't have any data on armor values and mitigation, but it has to make up for some serious incoming damage.

Bone Shield will mitigate 40% of 40 landed hits or the equal of 16 hits.

This of course don't have much place in the real raiding enviroment, but it gives a hint of how they compare. To any matematician it's obvious that both get better the more avoidance you have. Both scales exponential with avoidance.

I haven't done any concrete math to compare the two talents besides this fairly simplified math (which could be terrible off since I wrote this because my son finally gave me 30 min of spare time),

Bone Shield (uptime * mitigation (constant 40%))

Unbreakable Armor (uptime (constant of 1/3) * % of otherwise landed hits (shorted OLH))
(NOTE: this DOES NOT factor in the 25% increased armor)

Actually you can just add a flat 3% to the TDR of the frost tree if you like to factor in FD - that still doesn't make Frost superior for melee bosses. Until I get some formulae for armor mitigation at lvl80 and look at the actual gear - my hunch tells me that Frost will have the edge (barely) until somewhere into the second WotLK tier where they will become equal. And we've seen that the first tier doesn't require hardcore min/maxing - so I dare to go ahead and postulate that Unholy is a 100% viable MT build with better AoE capabilities than Frost.

 

Solithaira

I think the main reason Blood is being avoided as a tanking tree, is that it doesn't really have a concrete niche. While the 6%str/stam you referred to might help with threat generation over the other two trees, but doesn't offer much else.

Frost offers excellent mitigation for tanks without high levels of avoidance, and is excellent for single target tanking. Unholy offers better AoE tanking capabilities, and will potentially offer extreme mitigation once certain levels of armor have been reached.

On a side note, I wonder if Blizzard will allow the bone armor mitigation to remain at 40%. Assuming that it will at some point be possible to maintain bone armor up at all times, DK's will have an incredible tanking advantage.

 

Rejju

I do not disagree that both unholy and frost are viable, however, I do disagree that unholy is better at AoE tanking than frost. The main reason for this is Pestilence. It's an amazing ability that spreads your diseases and Icy Touch, Pestilence then Howling Blast would be an INSANE amount of threat. It's only a 6s CD and will hit all targets in the cone for thousands of damage. I'm fairly certain unholy blight does not scale that well in comparison. Right now, at level 67, it only hits for about 55-60 damage on all targets close by. Lets not begin to mention Deathchill and the guaranteed crits on all mobs in the cone for some insane AoE threat.

 

kurokaze

Rosenrott:

At first glance your spec seems highly threat deficient. Rime is absolutely huge, Chill of the Grave is good, and the lack of Frost Strike, TS, and GoG is pretty huge. Killing Machine isn't so hot with a 2H. Runic Power Mastery is pointless.

Why Death Rune Mastery? What are you planning to do with blood runes that is better than Obliterate? Blood Boil in AoE situations maybe, but you didn't take Outbreak, so I don't know how focused on Blood Boil you're trying to be...

hvidgaard:

I have had absolutely no trouble with AoE tanking as frost. I don't mean just keeping threat off the healer, I mean full fledged volley/blizzard/consecrate/whatever starting as soon as i hit stuff. I'll occasionally flub my rotation (usually by Obliterating instead of using HB, or letting diseases fall off) and lose threat, but when I'm doing things right things are stuck on me.

That's using the more flexible but likely less TPS Pestilence/BB/HB rotation rather than DnD/Pestilence/HB. I mainly use DnD just for situations in which I expect the mobs to get split apart too far to Pestilence if the mage blizzards before I get it off.

I do have Outbreak at the moment though, which likely contributes to my success. But I don't have any of the deep unholy stuff that makes AoE tanking so much 'easier'.

 

hvidgaard

kurokaze - if that is the case then perhaps the only difference between Unholy and Frost is how much actual dps you do, needs some more testing.

Rejju - Pestilence is baseline? and have you factored that UB is a 20s DoT that does 48dmg/s before modifiers? Base dmg is 960dmg pr target if they get to live the full duration (and correct me if I'm wrong, but an instant cast get the lowest contribution from gear, whereas a DoT get maximum? but scaling issues can only be uncovered if we know how they actually scale). Have you factored Wandering Plauge, Ebon Plaugebringer and Impurity? because they all greatly enhance the DoT effects of the diseases - and hence the AoE threat.

 

SpaceDrake

The real brass tacks concerning dual-wielding will come down to what parry rates in Wrath are for bosses. It has to be remembered that Blizzard expects tanks to be stacking a hell of a lot of expertise as a threat stat; it's freely available and easy to get. So any good tank will be packing at least enough expertise to get rid of dodges, which will also drastically reduce the number of parries.

The trick is, what will the parry rate be? If it's 15% as some have put forward, that'll still give us 9% parry which is pretty harsh in terms of increased boss haste. While I don't think the situation is as dire as some people make it out to be due to our high base evasion rate, it's still pretty hard to justify parrying quite that often when dual-wielding.

If it's less, however, all of a sudden the pendulum swings the other way. If it's 10% base parry, then a 4% per swing chance to haste a boss a little versus 60+ defense and other avoidance stats, when we easily have a 55% or greater chance of avoiding that attack anyway, starts to look very attractive. I don't see threat as being a problem due to just how much threat tanks put out anyway - given that you'll be Rune Striking all the time combined with Obliterates, Scourge Strikes, Howling Blasts or what have you, and threat should not be a problem in the slightest.

The real allure of dual-wielding is that defense rating. If we don't dual-wield we give up an easy 60+ defense rating that Warriors and Paladins now get as a matter of course. That's like saying that other plate tanks don't need those stats on those slots to tank... which just isn't true. 60+ defense is nearly a tenth of the defense rating required to be uncrittable. I'm having a fairly hard time justifying to myself giving that up, and the main reason is that I'm assuming that bosses still parry 9% of the time.

We'll need to get some hard numbers in on boss parry rates before making the final call - but as I went through the beta I found it increasingly hard to justify giving up those delicious tanking stats on those one-handers I kept getting.

 

kalbear

Bosses haven't parried for 9% of the time for a long time now.

15-16% was the value in the beta. It was also the value throughout BC. If it's changed, it's changed since then. It shouldn't be hard to verify.

And honestly, I'm not sure that even with a 5% overall chance to parry per attack after expertise is factored in makes the calculation any better. No matter what else, you are doubling the amount of parries that you will take in each fight (unless you've reduced parries to zero). You're trading random avoidance to get random burst damage, meaning the worst case just got much, much worse.

If it's really a concern to lose all that defense, I'd recommend getting a couple of pvp items or enchanting/gemming for resilience. It'll be faster and easier and allow more flexibility in other gear slots.

 

Rejju

The threat and damage that I am referring to isn't from pestilence itself, but from Howling Blast. Since you can use Pestilence to spread your frost fever to all targets in range, then cast Howling Blast, thats a TON of added threat. You are, however, correct about the AoE threat from Unholy Blight, but thats over 20s as opposed to immediate threat.

 

pfooti

I'm similarly not trying to say "frost is better" or "unholy is better". But it is worth noting that howling blast and unholy blight have very different mechanics. UB is an RP dump, whereas howling blast eats runes - runes that are difficult to come by in a standard IT-PS-Pest-DnD AoE rotation. Unholy simply has better long-term AoE threat building - the diseases last longer and hit harder, DnD has more uptime, and the death rune talent costs 3 points instead of 5.

On the other hand, frost has a few more mitigation talents and much better snap AoE aggro. I don't doubt that an opener with howling blast would have lots of burst aggro in it, but after playing with rotations and specs on a training dummy (and at 80 on the beta as well, back in the day), it just seems a bit easier to keep it up on unholy, especially with the right runes. Frost relies a bit too much on procs for free howling blasts and suchlike. That's a playstyle and gearing tradeoff - if you have the reactions to respond to procs, frost will pay off. If you have the gear to be able to pass up frigid dreadplate and the extra duration on icebound fortitude from guile of gorefiend, unholy can probably do more sustainable AoE threat.

Honestly, though, I think all of this is premature. We need another month and a lot of WWS reports before we can come down on one side or the other of this debate. At this point, it's theorycraft, training dummies, and a few raids.

To return to an earlier point - I'm going to actually try diseasing my second DPS target instead of primary (X instead of Skull), and pestilence off of him, then taunt skull. If I pull with icy touch and do that, I can probably keep him alive long enough to spread the disease love around, even if skull gets toasted. It's either that or put a macro on pestilence that says, "okay, now you can DPS".

 

Groggan

I expect this will be a pretty base-line frost tanking spec?
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
It's got 3 points left to place, and depending on preference there seem to be lots of good places for them (Scent of Blood sounds nice for extra runic power, or Virulence if spells tend to miss too much on bosses, or Nerves of Cold Steel if it turns out dual-wielding tank weapons is viable/beneficial). Any comments on it?

Also, are there base-line unholy and blood specs for tanking, or are those much more varied in choices?

Edit: Also also, does it take more expertise to push parries off the attack rolls when dual wielding, or is it the same number? I know we can't find that number(s) until the boss parry rate is settled upon, but I figured I'd ask this now instead of then.