I just noticed that - the Defender which is clearly an Axe does say Sword.

I jumped on the PTR last night to check out the Stone Gargoyle Rune and move some items around -

for me personaly I was able to drop 2 defense items without regemming, for a high stam, high STR and high Dodge items namely the Ring from Heroic DTK and the BoE Crafted Cloak

Keystone Great-Ring
Binds when picked up
Unique-Equipped
Finger
490 Armor
+32 Strength
+75 Stamina
Requires Level 80
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 49

Durable Nerubhide Cape
Binds when equipped
Back
150 Armor
+41 Strength
+75 Stamina
Requires Level 80
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 49
Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 21

With these 2 items replacing 2 of my final blues I was able to maintain my Def Cap and increase my stam, and dodge by a large amount.

no CD HB is amazing - if you were ever having issues with AoE threat they are gone now...AoE tanking is now officially NoobProof

At the moment, I would ignore the Bind on Pickup status of those two tanking weapons. The new Paladin healing goggles are also listed as Bind on Pickup, and would be the only Bind on Pickup goggles in the game. Also interesting is the new axe, which clearly looks like an axe, is described as a "Sword" in the tool-tip.

I wouldn't put much faith into the accuracy of those pictures, at the moment. Things are bound to change.

With the new patch notes probably happening have they actually made blood a viable tank spec?

Or is frost still going to be the way to go.

All engineering goggles in the game are BoP, what are you talking about? They require high level profession skill to use, what would be the point of selling them? Hell, you're wearing a pair of goggles right now.

The sword/axe thing looks to just be a tooltip typo made when creating the weapons, but the defense vs. parry thing is pretty stupid. Both weapons should have a mix of stats or there's really not much reason for the sword to exist since it will be worse in every situation.

The Howling Blast change is great, and add much to the Frost-AOE fix along with the pestilence buff. I still think there's some serious work that can be done with Unholy single-target threat, and probably some more proactive mitigation work for Blood tanks (this is speculation, I haven't tested blood).

As is, Frost feels like the tank tree after this patch. I hope to see Unholy's threat given the same love (single-target), the rune strike buff just isn't enough.

I agree, especially the need for Unholy to boost single target threat. I think that part of it comes from the fact that we take a substantial portion of DPS from our pets but we don't get the corresponding threat of our pets. On a fight like Patchwerk where DPS is going all-out and the only thing potentially stopping them is threat, it's been frustrating for me to see my threat - while above the DPS because of the modifiers they receive to reduce their threat - dramatically below the other tanks. It doesn't matter how perfect of a rotation I run, how often I make sure to weave D&D in, the luck I get on my glyph of SS proccing to refresh diseases and allow me to use SS more...I still end up quite a bit behind on threat for single targets. While the threat modifier being added to Rune Strike will help in that fight where I'm dodging and parrying hateful strikes left and right, it offers no help on fights where I am largely taking magical rather than physical damage and thus cannot proc rune strike through a dodge or parry.

Also, I agree that the HB change makes it quite clear that Frost will become the tanking spec come patch day. The benefits of it will now outweigh those from Bone Shield and it will have enough AE threat to compare with Unholy along with better single target. Which I have to say frustrates me as it seems to go against the stated goal of Blizzard to maintain strong and equally viable tanking in all three trees.

Patchwerk is actually a pretty bad example, I've found it was one of the easier fight to tank, mostly because he attacks so freaking often runestrike is up every hit. Unholy main issue in my opinion is the over reliance on raid buffs. If you have like, a fury war and an enh shaman in your raid, you're fine on threat, can do 4-6k single target without DnD. If you don't have either(or the buffs they provide, ap/str/agi/haste/crit/ap%), it's gonna be much more painful. I was doing more single threat in our 8man naxx earlier than our last 10man sartharion, because instead of having 3mages 1elem sham 1lock and 1hunter, we had 2hunters 1furywar 1enh shaman. And I was using a spec with a few more defensive stuff and a few less offensive ones(both 51+unholy specs). They should just make scourge strike generate more threat in frost presence, most other talents are hard to touch because they can either be taken by other specs, or are AE related and I doubt they want unholy as a better AE spec than currently.

Hello all, looking to get some input on a few issues.

Firstly, I, like some others have posted already, cannot take Morbidity due to the FPS bug some people have already posted here about. This normally isn't a problem, except that I OT Lava elementals and Whelps on Sartharion with drakes up. I've come to heavily rely ont he shorter CD to safely pickup all of the adds coming in. With this in mind, I'd like some thoughts on how to compensate for the lack of so many DnDs. With the new changes coming in the patch in mind, I have a few options as I see it:

Go Blood, and rely on pestilence spam to pick up AE waves. The problem with this is, often when I am using Pestilence it doesn't pickup agro as quickly from healers.

Go Frost, and rely on the non-cooldown HB to pick up everything. While the range on HB is very good, my experience so far has been it is somewhat tricky to reliably get everything around hit with the 'splash' so to speak.

Stay Unholy, and rely on UB to buy time for Pestilence. The problem with this is the very small range on UB's Aura. Coupled with the fact that the damage itself isn't very significant.

If anyone with experience doing add duty on Sartharion could chime in with advice, I would appreciate it. My goal here is to somehow become less reliant on DnD and still able to grab the adds ASAP to save the healers.

Oculus - my FPS drops to 0-1 only when the 3rd wave spawns and at that point, it's normally a wipe anyways. We've been getting only 1 wave of whelps which has no issue with the Morbidity bug. But, if you are wanting to know the best - I believe it will be Frost. Why? Frost Fever one, Pest, HB, pop Blood Tap, HB. You just hit the adds with two trucks and they will be glued on you after that point. If you have another portal spawn, make sure to have all runes ready and a fresh FF to Pest to the new wave and then HB again. Simple and effective for that duty.

On single target TPS - Patchwerk is a bad example due to our very high Rune Strike but he enables a very calm/stressful way to start weaving a higher TPS rotation. I was able to hit 6.6k TPS last night tanking Patch in 10man. Now, I understand Rune Strike is used more often in that fight due to attack speed.

DnD -> IT -> PS -> BS -> SS -> SS -> SS -> SS -> BS -> DnD -> IT -> PS -> BS.

Now, that's with perfect hit. Usually, you'll miss what effects the 4th SS and makes you take it out of your rotation. I was also having a timing issue with my diseases, it didn't feel like they were staying up on the boss for 16-18 seconds.

Upcoming Frost Spec:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=101311050401

Everything is obvious except a few things that can be interchanged. Now, even on these forums we have a huge issue with agreement on what uses Spell Hit and what uses Melee Hit (Virulence). Now, iirc, we did agree on IT, DC, and HB. With the removal of the HB cd - we'll be using it much more making Virulence a much wiser choice since Spell Hit cap is so very high compared to our 2H cap.

This is, of course, the Frost Utilitank build. There are 6 "wasted" points if you have a dedicated Enh Shaman. The issue with those 6 points, I can't really find a more enjoyable place for them. Icy Reach is an extremely better talent now with HB off cd, and, I have incorporated that in to a variation of this.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=101311050401

If you don't feel comfortable having 6 "useless" talents during a raid. Now, this is a solid build, imo. Deathchill - whatever, it was a filler point. =p

Merciless Combat is going to be a more aught (I thought it was saught?) after talent with our DPS gearing up more and more. Right now we have dps riding Single Target and most have talents that increase damage at target health lower than 35%. TG Warriors spam Executing and Mages doing whatever they do. Our threat is what will hinder the raid lower than 35%.

That coupled with OB glyph - we're going to see some nice numbers, I'm thinking.

(P.S. I don't know how to Parse, if some one wants to teach me, I'll recreat my TPS rotation next week and post it.)

I start to lag on first wave of whelps due to the blazes myself. I lag out completely at like 18mobs, and I can end up with 18 by the first set of whelps if there's a lot of blazes spawning, and even if I don't it's risky to take the talent. It's doable without morbidity though, you just don't rely on DnD for threat, it's not necessary until the whelps. Even with 10s pestilence. What I found very helpful however is taking Icy Reach(and lichborne since you go that far down frost), a single icy touch will usually stick a mob to you, meaning you can pick up 2blazes with ITs, then DC another with the RP from ITs, and pick the rest up with taunts then spread diseases/pop UB. UB will secure the mobs on you. I only drop DnD on the portal right before the whelps pop, so they don't go flying around, and I usually ready a full stack of disease on one mob, that I pestilence on the whelps as they spawn.

The biggest issue with not having morbidity is you're doing much less damage than you should on the mobs, so you're not killing them on your own and need more help AEing. That and it's really annoying to not have it in naxx for gothik, noth or to drop when you aggro another pack of mobs and you already used DnD on the first pack(that's what especially gets to me).

Anyone else notice that on the PTR boneshield has 6 charges with the glyph...?

That might help counterbalance the mitigation nerf.

No. Did you have buffs last "night"?

Unless your armory is severely outdated, there's no way you had 29k unbuffed, even with veteran of war and shadow of death. You're definitely imagining things.

Confirmed, I have 6 charges with the glyph, although the tooltip still reads the default 4 charges.

Edit: It also looks like they fixed the death rune bug. You now get your death runes back if you miss an attack that consumes them.

I really don't understand why people keep making comments like "frost will be THE tanking spec" after the patch. I keep going back to the wow PTR to see if they have updated something I have missed. Personally I don't really see any changes that would make me give up my beloved Unholy tanking spec.

Heres what I plan on trying post patch:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

Few places where you might argue with me on points: Ravenous dead, Necrosis, Master of ghouls, and Night of the Dead. With the sacing of a ghoul being increased from 20% to a 40% health recover I feel it is worth having. Now that they also have a glyph to make it reagent free I plan on taking advantage of that. Whether I want my ghoul to be permanent or not I am unsure of yet. If I decide not to make him permanent I will probably drop all of those talents (except necrosis).

Two question:

1) Any word from the PTR on whether or not ebon plaguebringer is still overwritten by multiple DKs and only gives one the benefit of an extra disease?
2) One of my guildmates told me last night that he was going to switch to a dual wielding tanking spec after the patch because when DW you may have double the chance to get parried, but also double the chance to parry. This is incorrect, right?

Incorrect. If it was true, it would be pretty easy to get >90% avoidance.

I'm currently unholy DPS specced, but as our guild is looking to ramp up for higher level instances I'm thinking about being our second tank. I was curious about the viability of a Frost/Unholy Hybrid spec for tanking.

As a blood elf, I was thinking this spec would be great for tanking heavy magic fights and It has access to either UA or BS... not sure which is best to have but I'm leaning toward UA. Not sure if all that Unholy is gimped too much by not getting Ebon Plaguebringer. Also, not having one of the high tier strikes makes me a bit uncomfortable.

How does this spec look for tanking? Decent or spread too thin?

I've been wanting to attempt Blood Tanking for quite some time. I'm new to the whole concept of theorizing on what may or may not work, but that's all the more reason why I figured I should take a stab at it and perhaps get some feedback on why my potential build is either good, bad, or on the border between the two.

Someone mentioned very early in this thread that a DK's gear would likely be as such: the weapon provides the damage and threat, while the armor mitigates incoming damage. Seeing as how Frost seems to be the premiere tree for mitigation, and going deep into Frost makes the idea of Blood tanking seem impossible to fathom, I decided that I should try and go for talents that, instead of mitigating damage, would help to reimburse the health lost from taking damage.

Ultimately, this is what I came up with as far as a build. It more or less centers around spamming Death Strike, as it's simply a tank-hopeful rendition of what I use for my soloing exploits. I attempted to remove all of the talents that seemed useless given the spec's desired theme (such as Heart Strike and talents linked to it) and took the earlier advice of this thread and avoided talents that relied on white hits.

The main problem I personally saw with the build was that it seemed to be lacking any real AoE threat gain. My only thought as to rectify that issue was to use Pestilence and Blood Boil as frequently as possible to generate as much AoE threat as possible, while also perpetuating my diseases on the targets so that I could continue using Death Strike to heal myself. The rotation for a fight, I suppose, would look something like the following:

Icy Touch => Plague Strike => Pestilence => Death Strike => Blood Boil => Death Strike => BB => DS, etc.

During the rotation, it's simple enough to switch targets when dealing with multiple targets and use Pestilence on that target so that the diseases are perpetuated on all targets without my having to personally refresh them. The concept of it seems so simple that I'm almost certain I screwed up somewhere, or that it simply won't work.


I even went so far as to make a gear build which had, in my opinion, a decent stats layout for a tanking DK. With all of the gear (including trinkets) considered, the stats were as follows:

AR: 13,218
STR: 733
STM: 1043
Dodge: 359
Defense: 463
Parry: 207
Red Sockets: 3
Blue Sockets: 4
Yellow Sockets: 1
Meta Sockets: 1
Expertise: 50
Hit: 75

All of the gear used for the build are things that are easily accessible to any player. None of them are drops from anything greater in difficulty than heroic instances. This may be seen as shooting low for a gear-set, but I wanted to be realistic for my own abilities within the game.

Unless I screwed up calculating the values after adding in Frost Presence and Talents, that brings the following stat values to:

AR: 23,131
STR: 813
STM: 1126
AP: 2268

Those numbers being armor contributions alone. The AP includes the increase from Strength as well as that of Bladed Armor while Frost Presence is active, and assumes that Toughness' increase of Armor Rating also increases AP accordingly.

The main thing I see wrong with that gear build is the lack of Hit Rating, but I supposed that some clever gemming and enchanting could make up for what it lacked, and it seemed otherwise solid. However, before I proceed with attempting to create this character who might be destined to fail, I wanted to get some opinions on the overall concepts.

I apologize if the post was too lengthy for making so few noteworthy points, but I appreciate any comments or suggestions, or even flat out dismissals with constructive criticism.

I'm unsure if you're talking of next patch or current, but to be honest until the patch, I wouldn't bother with Blood, it's strictly inferior to unholy and frost. Once they buff VB and remove pestilence cooldown however, it should be on par with everything else easily.

That said, it all depends on what you want to do. If you plan to do heroics, then you're probbly fine with any spec as long as you get the first big 3(toughness/bb/anticipation). If you plan to offtank raids, you probably want unholy, or frost, for AE threat which makes up a good part of the offtanking job. If you plan to main tank, I'd say go unholy currently because bone shield is so powerful. In all raiding situations, blood is the last choice. It'll be another story with 30secs Last stand+50%increase healing VB though.

Few quick questions here ;

Which fights are better to use Spellshattering on? I main tank Kel'Thusad, Sarth w/ 3 Drakes and Malygos because of my passive reduced spell damage / on-use abilities, and at the moment I use Spellshattering on Sartharion only, should I be using it on Malygos and Kel'Thusad too?

Post patch, how far behind is unholy in terms of threat compared to frost? Does is it the clear choice to go in terms of min-maxing?

Is morbidity still causing the frame rate problems? ;_;

1. Test this one yourself. I found using Spellshattering reduces the insane breaths you get with 3dSarth but my Bone Shield (usually called it Bone Armor, Buck) lasts 5-10 seconds less. This was tested over roughly 6-7 attempts. Yes, this revolves around RNG but it was consistently down quicker while using Spellshattering. For that reason, I keep 4% parry on all the time.

2. Not a lot of PTR posts yet so, we're only going by Live numbers minus HB cd - which leads to Frost winning in Single Target and AoE threat now.

3. Yes. No matter if you turn your video settings down (my raid thought it was that because they don't believe in "magical DK bugs") it doesn't matter. We've had several people test it. Still bugged as of Thursday night for me.