Which is an odd turnaround, during beta it was all "We know you;re soft without your clickys, but you have lots of clickys to rotate!". There was never any talk of IBF being the DK's shield wall, it was meant to be used whenever it's up, that's why it's on a 1 min CD.

The purpose of IBF was always for abilities like kaelthas pyroblast, faerlina enrage. As GC said, it is for mitigating predictable spike damage. Hopefully they don't nerf our clicky abilities too much when they buff our mitigation as they are one of our major advantages over the other classes.

This is a meaningless statement. There are no raid mobs that are immune to any diseases (nor likely to be any that are immune to any of them, as they specifically REMOVED Sapphiron's Frost immunity for the reason that it made him too hard to tank for DKs), so WP will always be fully active. It provides just as much single target threat per point as BA does, but it does so passively and in an AOE.

Instead of acting snobby and elitist about it (regardless of the site name), why not just say "It's a personal preference thing"? Bladed Armor isn't a clearly superior choice to WP, and the same is true in reverse. There's no reason to hide behind "I don't care about threat" or "D+ for effort".

I had the same problem that you describe on Sarth this week. I was absolutely fine until the second set of whelps spawned, at which point my machine fairly rapidly ground to a halt. Setting all visual effects to lowest setting made no difference, nor did turning off all addons.

I headed out to Ony's lair and tested with whelps there and found the same problem. Also experienced it in Halls of Stone with the large packs of little rock elementals. Basically any sizeable group of mobs + D&D seems to bring things to a slideshow or a complete halt very quickly. It's usually just annoying but resulted in multiple wipes on Sarth when I literally could not move for 10 seconds and thus died to a lava wave/failed to pick up new adds.

If you end up uninstalling/wiping everything, let me know the results.A poster at the end of the thread linked here claims that Morbidity was the culprit. Guess I'll try to test that out tonight.

Hi, I'm new to tanking and have read this entire thread in an effort to learn and improve. I have received some solid, practical knowledge and I thank everyone who contributed to that knowledge. I do have one question that might be considered noobish, but since I haven't played much with more than just basic macros and I'm still learning tanking concept, I'm honestly unsure.

Lichborne, being on a 3 minute cooldown is mostly an Oh S*&$! button, right?
Lichborne turns you undead for the duration it is up, correct?

If so, would there be any value in building a macro that starts with Lichborne, then targets you, then casts 2 Deathcoils (for the heal undead target aspect) then targets the original mob again (assuming that is even possible)?

Yes it would use up runic power, but in an Oh S*&$! situation, wouldn't that be warranted? Or is it an issue of not having that RP left to activate other abilities while under the effects of Lichborne? A little RP, at least enough to get some other mitigation ability going, would be rather quick to generate. But, DC doesn't heal all that much, so I don't know if it would be worth it in the long run.

Any comments would be appreciated.

I apologize if I came off as a jerk. I read you're initial message perhaps under a different tone than it was intended.

On the topic of WP vs Bladed Armor.

This is misinformation for single target threat/dps. I'd imagine you're looking at the DPS Compendium numbers? We're in frost pres when we tank so we'll get additional benefit with bladed than a dps DK will. Under the outlined circumstance, bladed will beat out WP.

Using the DKTankCraft spreadsheet:

3 pts in bladed: 5412.2 TPS, 2689.1 DPS
3 pts in WP: 5052.5 TPS, 2509.5 DPS

So it's not a personal preference thing, but rather more related to what situation you're in. WP will scale much better the more mobs you tank. So WP may be better for something like KT add tanking. (This really would depend on the internal cooldown and number of mobs tanked. I'd imagine WP would lead over bladed for multi-mob situations until you've surpassed the number of mobs required to be limited by the 1s internal cooldown. At which point bladed would probably gain/overtake WP.) On the flip side, if you're main tanking KT, bladed armor will be better.

Decide for yourself based on which role you're filling. Are you spending most of your time tanking 2+ mobs in boss encounters? Then go WP. Otherwise, go bladed.

Anub'Rekhan: Single target.
Grand Widow Faerlina: Single target / adds that are not DPSed.
Maexxna: Single target.
Noth the Plaguebringer: Multi-target.
Heigan the Unclean: Single target.
Loatheb: Single target.
Instructor Razuvious: Single/multi-target, adds that are not DPSed.
Gothik the Harvester: Multi-target.
The Four Horsemen: Single target.
Patchwerk: Single target.
Grobbulus: Single target or multi-target depending on if MT or OT.
Gluth: Single target.
Thaddius: Single target.
Sapphiron: Single target.
Kel'Thuzad: Single target or multi-target depending on if MT or OT.
Sartheron: Single target or multi-target depending on if MT or OT, and how many drakes are left up.
Malygos: Single target phase 1. Multi-target phase 2.

I suppose the real question should be, "What do you specifically do more of?"
I spend most of my time tanking single target stuff or irrelevant trash mobs, so bladed is better for me most of the time.
To each their own I suppose.

I don't want to clog up the tanking thread too much with posts about framerate and D&D, but since it does have a significant impact on a common tanking situation I'll poke back this one.

While doing my testing and while trying to troubleshoot mid-encounter I did lower AA (both in WoW and then in card settings, to be certain) to 1x. I also reduced filtering, tried VSync on and off, and poked and prodded at just about every other setting I could. Wasn't able to produce any results by messing with video settings. Using latest Nvidia drivers, etc. Gut tells me it is not a standard video performance issue like having spell effects too high when shiny things are happening all over, but obviously more testing is required to determine the real culprit.

I'm starting to see threat resurfacing as an issue for the first time this expansion. On encounters like Malygos where my warriors are chain-salved it can get a little hairy. Thankfully, he's tauntable. I'm considering dropping Lichborne for more threat, now that my gear's getting bit better. I'm a bit surprised that threat can be as tight as it is, I thought threat was supposed to be a bit easier for longer than early WotLK raiding.

Yes this works and is by no means a bad idea. I have done this myself (before I specced out of it) and combined with Bone Armor and Rune Tap/ Trinkets provides a valuable bridge between the downtime of Bone Armor and IBF. I would suggest macro'ing Rune Tap in as well since I believe that will also provide a little extra healing as well as resetting your parry cool down as long as you have a Blood rune available.

I've encountered similar issues as MT in 10 man Naxx as the raid's max personal DPS has nearly jumped from the mid 2k range to more than 5k. With a typical Lichborne + Unholy full mitigation spec in most single target situations I sustain 3.5k-4k TPS, and that puts me struggling to maintain a threat lead on some encounters. My solution was the same: sacrifice Lichborne for more DPS talents. This is fine now with the easy content, but will sacrificing Lichborne be OK for tough progression? Maybe not.

I'll try to get some more specific parses and TPS number this week.

I'm sure this is buried somewhere back in the thread but I basically macro'd all my spells to include Rune Strike (at the advice of a fellow guildie) to make sure I didnt miss any. This helped a lot.

example

#show Blood Strike
/cast Blood Strike
/cast Rune strike

I think I am specced a little odd and I didnt take every tanking talent I could have which maybe helping my threat at the expense of some mitigation. I have however tanked 10 man Malygos and some naxx 25 man bosses successfully.
This xpac is a tad easy mode though so im not sure how I will hold out when / if they add harder content.

I am sorry for the slightly offtopic question, but couldn't find it in the first post.

About the DK tanking weapons, can somebody find the link where Blizzard announced that DK's tank with 2H DPS weapons? Thank you!

I apologize if this was said elsewhere, but I just started tanking as unholy instead of frost for the first time, and since respecing I have had 7 different times where I have been brought down to EXACTLY 1 hp... this seems like a bug to me with master of ghouls... whenever a blow brings me to 1 hp, and then I die, Shadow of Death does not proc. If I just die normally it procs, and sometimes it just doesn't proc at all (it seems to rarely proc when I am the first in the group to die)

Has anyone else seen these weird things happen with shadow of death?

It has saved multiple wipes so far :P so I am not complaining, but I am wondering if its just me being bugged of if its everyone heh.

Long time reader, first time poster, etc...

So reading on MMO-Champion, I came across this post by Ghostcrawler:

We are adding more Sigils. We will likely add a defense proc sigil too and a two-hander runeforge defense enchant. (Dual wield tanks already have lots of +defense weapons available.)

I know with the parry-haste discussion on here so far, it's been putting DW tanking down as not really viable, but it makes me wonder if that wasn't an intent from devs to have us DW tank things.

Anyone else have thoughts on this comment?

I'd assume we could eliminate the parry-haste on DW tanking if we could hit the expertise cap, but that's quite impossible to hit. Even assuming blood spec for 11 points (veteran of the 3rd war, blood gorged) and being dwarf (5 expertise on maces), that's only 16 expertise. You need 60 expertise to avoid parries, which is 44 expertise left to get through expertise rating. No small feat considering it's 32.78 rating per point of expertise, meaning you'd need 1443 rating to be parry capped.

This macro will not work. Rune Strike needs to come first.

@ kharntor

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Death knight dual wield vs. two-hander
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Death Knight Tank Weapons

Would be good to permalink or quote them in the OP, this question will come up often enough.

So will blizzard ever fix the tanking issues with duel wield?

Issues? If you mean parryhaste, I don't really see a need for them to fix it. They always said that DKs should be using 2handers, but they gave them the option of using DW for more variety. They always said they won't bother making DW more viable than it already is due to better scaling etc, and that if they found DK tanks using DW defense weapons over 2H, they'll simply buff 2H tanking so it's better again.

It's a choice you make, but no one is forcing you to tank DW, and 2H tanking works fine(I mean, it works at least, there's issues and all, but they're more related to DK tanking in general, like cooldowns and whatever they talked about). If you think parrygibs are not worth it, then use a 2H.

Or maybe you meant something different, but I don't see any issues with it. 2H is better, but it's possible to tank with DW, and do so effectively. Worse than 2H, and that's by design. It's somewhat like hunters and melee dmg. Sure you can play a hunter as a melee class, but it's worse than ranged dmg. Blizzard didn't intend hunters to be melee classes. They're not going to buff melee so it's more in line with ranged dps damage, because some people want to be melee+pet class.

That's how I see it at least, but I'll accept any DW "buffs". I just don't see it happening, especially since DW is already better than 2H for a number of things, and specifically for stats or enchants, and probably later at a higher gear lvl, for threat.

How much is one of these worth in terms of getting crit immune? Is there a set defense skill you need to reach, at which point popping one of these flasks will effectively take you over 540?

The flask adds 0.61% crit reduction at level 80, which is roughly equivalent to 15 points of defense skill. You'd need 525 def to be uncrittable by bosses with the flask active.

Right off the bat, some people are going to jump all over this but I agree with you. Granted, I'm not geared near as much as some of you but with our DPS getting upgrades very consistently, I've noticed a change in threat over the past 5 days. Last week - I was able to be leaps and bounds above them where as now, our warlocks are starting to close the gap and so is our Enh shaman. While two of our rogues are learning the HaT rotation, they will soon be tapping my shoulders on Omen, also.

Drake Tank: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=010411010405

MT otherwise: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=120411010405

I'm leaning towards build one to help out our healers for 3drakes, 10 seconds of pure magic mitigation will let them relax just a tad. But, with last night - I also noticed my threat wasn't as high in that spec. So. We'll see what happens tonight. Even on single targets, I'm keeping DnD up (I've found it generates more threat than a typical IT-PS-BS-BS-SS).


Yes, it will. It's worked for me the past 2 weeks. I have this macro style on Scourge Strike, Blood Strike, Plague Strike, and Icy Touch. Just to make sure, I'll look at my WWS tonight after the raid.

Just a point on that last post, HaT is currently bugged to give more combo points the more HaT specced rogues you have in group. I wouldn't worry too much about it being a major issue with threat once that gets fixed, mutilate is still going to be the spec to watch out for.