I'm tanking with a Frost build at the moment. I find that with my spec 11/52/8 I am able to Hold AE threat almost all the time.

Figure that I drop D&D and then Grip 1 mob from the pack into myself. PS->IT and the rest of the pack have arrived, D&D ticks to stop em running off. Pestilence spreads diseases and then Blood Boil. By this point, you will either have a Rime Proc, or HB will be about to come off C/D. If not, you can always Rune Tap / Empower to generate runes for a Howling Blast. After this, I tab around, casting HB on c/d and renewing D&D.

No AE pull lasts long enough for me to pestilence twice at the moment, but I'd renew that in preference.

The joy of frost spec is that you get more 'oh shit' buttons than other classes. IBF is nice, yeah, but with Unbreakable Armour and Lichborne, tossed in, you are effectively Shieldwalling every pull. I also have trinkets of love as well, which is nice, means I can pretty much roll a cycle of cooldowns and normally have *something* up most of the time.

Re your spec, its similar to mine, but I drop the Icy Talons tree in favour of killing machine and mobidity. But I usually 5man/10man with a shaman, its a quick deathgate and a respec away if I find myself offtanking a 10 man with heavy melee and no shaman.

I think that with the next patch, we will see an increase in Frost Tanks as Boneshield becomes less of a 'musthaveimbatalent' Single target threat, I think is the biggest weakness of Deathknights, but looking at your spec, adding Killing machine in there will give you a lot of help.

Log into the game yourself and check. Absolute avoidance values from sources like talents or runeforging are not subject to diminishing returns. Swordshattering is always a flat 4% to parry.

I just respecced to a build for tanking, and gathered all the craftable gear I could. I'm aiming for Loken's trinket, but without it I'm currently at 520 def with only helm and chest enchanted.

After my first bout of tanking, I immediately re-organized my UI to centralize as much information as I could. I tanked all TBC as a paladin and it's a lot to wrap your head around. Find it requires much more attention. I put together a spec to test out, and I was happy with the durability of it; Threat was a little iffy on some pulls, but the volleying hunter outspecced me quite a bit and my rotations are, admittedly, rather poor. Overall, it was a very entertaining experience.

The build I am using is 25/41/5. It includes Mark of Blood, Veteran of the Third War, Rune Tap in the blood tree. The frost tree could use some work but includes Lichborne, UA, and FS. My armory is here.

I'm looking forward to the patch, as I leveled as Blood and grew quite fond of the spec. Would like to see it's tanking viability brought a little closer to par.

Thus far the healers are having no issue keeping me alive. I pop bone shield and IBF everytime they are up. If my health gets low I sack a ghoul for 20% health if ghouls dead i summon a ghoul and sack him. I have not tanked every boss in Naxx 25 man. Ive tanked pretty much all of them in 10.

I am reletively well geared which helps. I just went for def > dodge > sta > parry. I use flasks and stat food all the time. I also pop my trinkets when I can too. Raid buffed I sit around 32k hps.

I will confess I get some fairly nasty spike dmg here and there but not considerably worse than the other tanks. I'll try to remember to wws some raids to compare.

In reguards to trinkets they are my defense boost. I did the same with warrior. This frees up some gem slots for Sta or str depending which you need most. Dont waste raid points on the parry trinket 95 parry = not much help found out the hard way 8(.

I was also wondering the same thing. I am currently clearing the 10 man content I have tanked as Frost since I hit 80 but I always wanted to go Unholy for more AOE goodness and bone shield. The question I am wondering is with the new changes incoming will Unholy still be a good tanking choice? If so, I am interesting it giving it a run.

I don't have plans to leave unholy. Overall, I consider it a total buff to all tanks, just that unholy not quite as much. I'm happy to see frost regain it's strength, but the new unholy (40RP UB ) will be every bit as viable in end game as any other build. I'll be watching Blood closely to to see if we determine it ready to raid. I think Maly-25 will be a good test.

In regards to the threat discussion we had a page or so ago, I'm very excited to see the runestrike change. I'll miss the damage, but the ~12% threat boost is huge. It will still be one of the biggest DPS contributors for Unholy tanks. I've also seen threat become a significantly smaller issue since upgrading my weapon this week. I underestimated the contribution to single-target threat. It made nabbing "The Undying" title last night a breeze

Grats on "The Undying"! I like the new achievement raid stuff.

I upgraded my weapon as well this week, (also to Inevitable Defeat, 246 expertise rating now, good lord) but am still not pleased with my threat gen. Although a recent change I made ended up making single target threat much easier. I picked up the SS glyph and began ignoring PS and IT almost completely. If I hit a disease drought, so be it. They almost never last more than 1-4s. If they do I ERW and fire off two more SS's. This change, coupled with RS macroed into SS, makes my rotation consist solely of DC's, BS's. and SS's. After about an hour on a training dummy trying my old rotation and then the SS glyphed ignoring PS->IT, I was rather impressed/surprised that simplifying my rotation was actually a dps/threat gain. I'm not sure I'd suggest this as the new norm for single target threat just yet, but it deserves a bit more testing. I wonder if this is what the Unholy DPSers are doing these days? I'll have to poke into their forum.

I've been doing some thinking about a spec that picks up as many DPS talents as possible yet still retains most of the mitigation ones since I'm mostly going to be taking a off-tank role for my guild.

I came up with 12/5/54, it assumes you have someone else to apply the attack speed reduction but I don't think that will be an issue.
The main things you gain are a ghoul and a garg, the ghoul is up even while tanking and so adds a constant chunk of damage but I doubt its possible to sustain a garg whilst putting out decent threat, after your targets died or if you've had a sizeable lead before the DPS switch to your mob how ever you should be able to use it.

I don't have any experience beyond a few wings of Naxx 10 though so would like to hear if this spec would have any pros over a "normal" unholy tank spec in the proper raids.

This is my inclination too. It's a bit of a worry, but one of the rules-of-thumb of playing an arms warrior back in the day (and I presume, now as well) was that a new 2h weapon was by far the biggest increase to one's DPS. The difference between PvPing on my old warrior with the [Draconic Avenger] and [Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood] was like night and day... so why should I expect tanking on a DK (which uses many of the same percentage-of-weapon-damage mechanics) to be much different?

We somewhat obsess over our diseases, but even for Unholy, they really don't contribute nearly as much as our big strikes, and our big strikes are directly related to weapon damage.

edit: Hah! Now that I think of it, that old Draconic Avenger is pretty well itemized for a DK tank. Anyone up for a BWL run? =D In related news, I'm sincerely hoping the next expansion involves Deathwing, and thus they decide to re-tool Blackwing for Level 90. The memories of that raid are much more pleasant than the memories of getting my Wrath-Wearin'-Ass handed to me in Naxx.

I also have a question for someone more mathematically inclined than myself (with perhaps a moment's more time).

I'm trying to determine the best-in-slot tanking weapon for Unholy Orcs. I currently have [Inevitable Defeat] but I'm looking at [Death's Bite] as an upgrade. The agility isn't that impressive (though it IS useful), and the crit is great for WP. I'm also currently getting nothing out of my Orcish axe racial.

Are you overlooking the 6 sec HB cooldown, or are you reccomendiing not spending any runes and waiting for it to come up again?

Does anyone have any info on the line from the patch notes "Wandering Plague will now properly reset after being cast." I haven't read anything on a bug with this talent.

I don't see how you could argue that 1% dodge, 6stam, and 256 armor is a "trade off" vs nothing but pure threat stats. Death's bite is a threat weapon, that is all. You could get both and enchant death's bite with fallen crusader for those times when mitigation doesn't really matter, but it isn't even close as a tank weapon.

I have heard of rotations like this, and I'm about to test it out myself.

I agree fully that even with the racial expertise, [Inevitable Defeat] is a much better tanking weapon. But, and this is a pretty significant one, the current problems with DKs have nothing to do with mitigation! The problem is completely one of not being able to generate enough single target threat to keep well-geared aggro-dump-less DPSers from being capped. Now, if you don't run with DPS warriors or Enh/Elem shamans, or if you have some good paladins that are always quick with the Salvation, this becomes less of a problem... except for the fact that none of the other tanking classes have this problem in the slightest.

So, we return back to the old "What is the best upgrade for what I need right now?" and the answer is pretty clear that for the vast majority of DKs (aside from the few people that claim to pull 6000 single-target TPS but never back up their claims with a spec, a rotation, and a parse) the "what do I need" is answered by "more threat". Yes, the change to Rune Strike will be a buff, no, it will not bring DKs even close to the other three tanks in single-target threat. (RS moves from 200% weapon damage as threat to 225% weapon damage as threat... an increase of 12.5% to a skill that comprises about a quarter of one's threat...).

So, from that perspective, [Death's Bite] will make you a better tank than [Inevitable Defeat].


edit: Metapod, let me know how it works out. I've been non-stop searching how to significantly improve my single-target threat gen, which is sitting at around 3000TPS with 10man buffs right now... which I guess would be fine... if my buddy wasn't an Enh. Shaman pulling 3000+DPS and riding my ceiling the whole way up.

Yeah it is definitely a problem I am having as well. However I thought Death's Bite was better than the Inevitable defeat because of the orc racial bonus, I guess my ratingbuster was wrong ><.

I'm gonna see how it works on sapphiron and sartharion, two slow swinging bosses I have trouble creating threat on.

I did when I started, but have just gotten more 'used to it'. I was unholy to start, but never took UB since it's such a waste of a talent point. I'd rather have Lichborne or fill up Bladed Armor and only take 50 in Unholy. That said, I've tried that Unholy spec, the SS/VoTW spec, and a full Frost spec, and I always fit in Morbidity. Having DnD up for 10sec out of every 15 makes this type of thing pretty much easymode, unless your raid decides to lose their minds and run all over the place. As long as they all stand in the DnD or right behind it, you'll usually get aggro unless your Mage/Hunter/Lock/Elem is an idiot and decides to nuke first and ask questions later.

Just save your Pestilence for the few seconds DnD is down.

I hate to be the one to bring this up, mostly because I know you spent a lot of time crunching these numbers, but every single number after the bolded line is wrong. This pretty much invalidates the findings (although your final result is pretty close to what I've found as well).

540 defense is a result of 400 base defense plus 689 defense skill.

400 + (689/4.9185) = 540 defense

Any defense above MobLevel * 5 is added to your avoidance, and diminished according to miss/dodge/parry formulas. So if you have 540 defense and you're fighting a level 83 (boss) target, the effective defense bonus would be 540 - 83 * 5 = 125. 125 defense skill * 0.04 = 5.00% miss/dodge/parry before diminishing returns.

That's ... pretty amusing. It's excellent damage-per-RP for a single target and unmatched on multiple targets, it's nearly passive thanks to the long duration, it ticks every second which is excellent for building threat, and it's just overall an excellent talent. Sure, it was more fun back in beta when it counted as a disease too (which meant everything pretty much automatically had 2 diseases up thanks to Ebon Plague), but it's not really any less powerful now - and it's getting much stronger in the next patch with the 33% cost reduction.

Almost hilariously inaccurate. I've found this talent point to be amazingly invaluable, and it's only going to get better (reduced cost). The AE threat it generates is solid and picking up loose adds outside DnD (or waiting on it to come back up) is a huge ability that's unavailable anywhere else. There is no AOE RP burn (elsewhere) and for a tank, I find it nearly indispensable. I will be staying Unholy well after the patch in large part to the superior tank this talent helps make me.

The numbers just don't add up. Assume single target. Of course, during an AoE pull, UB helps immensely... but I've never had much trouble building AoE threat, in beta and in live. So, if we're talking about single target, with the talents like Morbidity and Impurity that change these factors:

Unholy Blight:

Base Damage: 48dps
+ 2500 AP : 41dps (0.013 * 2500 * 1.25)

89dps * 20sec = 1780 damage for 60 RP, or ~30dmg/RP

Death Coil:

Base Damage: 443
+ 2500 AP : 468 (0.15 * 2500 * 1.25 * 1.15)

1046 damage hit... assume ~15% Crit rating (UB can't crit), and you get ~1200 damage average per hit... which is the same ~30dmg/RP

Now, you have to weigh whether that extra half of a GCD every 20 seconds is worth one talent point, but remember that Rune Striking is even better... and you'll get extra AP for that talent point by not putting it in UB. Again, if you want to take it as a "perk" to make AoE tanking an absolute joke, go ahead. Plus, when they lower the cost, it will be, as you said, a better damage-per-RP skill than talented Death Coil. But as it stands now in 3.0.3, for single target, it just isn't worth the point.

edit: Two other notes: Death Coil scales better with AP due to the 15% damage talent... and yes, I forgot Ebon Plague, but both skills are affected by it, so it doesn't really change anything.

Your numbers are off. I'll use your AP and crit numbers for comparison's sake.

UB: 48 base + (2500 * 1.25 * 0.013) = 88.625
88.625 * 1.3 (crypt fever) * 1.13 (ebon plague) = 130.190 per second
130.190 * 20 = 2603.803 damage per cast
2603.803 / 60 = 43.397 damage per RP

DC: 443 base + (2500 * 1.25 * 0.15) = 911.75
911.75 * 1,15 (morbidity) * 1.13 (ebon plague) = 1184.819
(1184.819 * 0.85) + (1185.819 * 2 * 0.15) = 1362.542 average damage after crits
1362.542 / 40 = 34.064 damage per RP