Zerath

You're also getting some talents confused. Frigid Dreadplate is -3% hit while Magic Suppression is -5% less magical damage. So, FD increase your avoidance even more making that ~65% mark attainable.

Afabar explained the difference between BS and UA rather well. It's going to be nice to have a dedicated 41 seconds of dmg reduction instead of "It MIGHT last 20 seconds...."

 

SirCowdog

Don't forget that UA is useful only against physical attacks, while Bone Armor is good against everything. While the melee hits of raid bosses and mobs are usually the most frequent type of damage incoming to a tank, it's not always the case.

Although Bone Armor says all damage, I would be interested to see how it performs against something like a full stack of warlock dots already on the DK when it's cast. Also, does IBF work the same way?

Regardless, I think it's pretty clear that Frost is better for mitigating/avoiding physical damage, while Unholy comes out on top for magic. With the next patch, I think it will really just boil down to personal preference, or in some cases, whatever your raid happens to need.

P.S.: Thx for the clarification for Frost Strike on the guide listed earlier.

 

wamthump

a question concerning spec and aoe tps, with this build would i generate more threat based on the heal agro and is it worth it over the loss of uptime on the diseases from the unholy tree (epidemic)? on heroics its like 3k group heal using a blood rune in the process. not really sure just a thought.

sorry my DK is dethgoat on shadowsong

 

IsaacSirene

I was messing around with the talents just to see what I could possibly come up with. And I noticed something very neat, and was hoping that someone could shed some light on. Is there an internal CD on Deathrune Mastery[Blood]? If there isn't, I would like to know if anyone has already done some testing with this build, just for the sake of seeing if it would clear up our rune CD problems. Seeing how we would be using BS to build the Death Runes on the Blood end, then OB to generate more threat, the OB's would now be also giving up Death Runes, basically giving us a full Rune pile of Death Runes to work into whatever. My DK is Silene on Cenarion Circle, and I am deliberately specced wrong just because I hit 80 today, and needed to be Def capped, as well as lazy to not swap specs for when I want to dps.

 

huntcaudata

Additionally, adding 3% and 5% avoidance, respectively, scales far better than a flat 5%/20% damage reduction. e.g. If some uber tank had 92% avoidance, Frigid Dreadplate and Unbreakable armor combined would provide 100% damage reduction (from melee), whereas Boneshield would stay at 20%. The break even point is 60% avoidance (8% more avoidance is 20% less damage at this point - again, only for melee). The real breakeven point is less than this because of the armor increase from UA. So, I think we can very safely say that Frost tanks will take less melee damage, during UA uptime, than Unholy tanks. Any argument for Unholy would need to center on BS being up for a longer period of time than UA.

There are all kinds of other arguments to be made. DKs already have high avoidance, so maybe one would prefer mitigation. And, of course, Boneshield is far better against magical damage.

 

Suno

For any tanking build, your main tree comes with it's own unique rune-based strike. The point of the Death Rune talents are to allow your less-useful rune types to be often used for your main strike.

For example, as Frost, you want as many Obliterates as possible, so blood runes are less useful (in single-target). So the talent "Blood of the North" is designed to give you death runes in place of your Blood runes to get more Obliterates.

As a Frost tank, it would be quite pointless to get Death Rune Mastery, as the Unholy/Frost runes (that you spent points to turn into death runes) are still going to be used for Unholy/Frost abilities (Obliterate), using the runes for their original purpose.

Is there SOME utility or flexibility provided by having more death runes? Sure. Maybe you REALLY need that pestilence and Blood Tap is on cooldown. Is it worth the talent points? Not at all. The situations where it would be useful are too rare, and the cost is too great.

You can plug in other trees and talent/ability names into the preceding paragraphs and see the logic for why BotN, DRM, and Reaping shouldn't be used together in any combination for a Death Knight tank.

 

kurokaze

Additionally, having experimented myself with a BotN + DRM build due to my Frost DPS build having some random non-DPS points to throw around, combining the two makes rune cooldowns difficult to control. Basically, we tend to use runes in pairs - BB FU FU - and even in cases where we do not (such as the PS-less Frost rotation) the order in which the runes refresh remains important.

However, with DRM + BotN, weird things happen. For example, I often found that my Howling Blast would consume BU, providing a pair of non-death runes after refresh that really are rather useless together. It basically became impossible to realistically run a proper rotation that included anything but death rune-producing skills (just DS, BS, and OB) because of this unpredictability. Sure, a priority system worked, but it didn't work well enough to make the experiment anything but a dps loss.

Tank-wise you could make an argument that the extra flexibility offsets the DPS/TPS loss but when you additionally consider that you're giving up three talent points to do so, it seems pretty wasteful. Specifically you're probably losing 9% crit to Obliterate which is rather large.

 

Platostotle

IBF does indeed work against DoTs. I would assume Bone Shield does as well, though I've never experimented with it.

 

Aezoc

As of the last beta patch, bone shield will reduce the damage of DoTs that are already present when cast, and DoT spells don't consume charges. To the best of my knowledge it has not changed (but I'm frost right now, so it's not personal experience with the latest patch). This is obviously really good against warlocks in PvP, but doesn't really make a big difference in PvE. IIRC most periodic damage effects like Sapph's aura are treated as periodic direct damage spells and do consume charges.

 

jaxdahl

They do not. I've killed Sapphiron with 5x Bone charges, only having to refresh once the timer ran out.

 

Brigaldio

I've run an unholy, a 2h frost, and a dw frost through naxx 25, and my issue with frost is this:

Howling Blast does more damage than obliterate.

My HB does about 2k damage normally, and 4-5k on a crit, compared to 1.3k oblits, 3-4k on a crit. Given that HB is a superior damage generating (hence threat) ability, it made sense to me to use a build that maximized its use. Here's the build i ran through naxx 25:

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

I'm aware of parryhaste, but it didn't eat me. With killing machine procing HB crits at a steady rate, my threat was untouchable. The only change I might make is to take points out of rune tap to finish anticipation and grab 3 points in tundra walker.

Consider this: Using red sword of courage (1.6 weapon speed) and infantry assault blade (2.6), with hasting you get in around 8.08 attacks in the six second window between HB cooldowns. (hasted attack speed 1.2 and 1.95 respectively). Assuming a 13% crit rate, that gives you about a 68% chance to proc killing machine during HB cooldown. (Chance of no crits is .87 ^ 8.08 = .32, therefore chance of a crit is .68). Since killing machine is a 50% chance of crit, that increases the crit chance on HB, our hardest-hitting ability, by, on average, 34% under those conditions.

 

Lujaar

DRM and BotN do strange things together, yeah. They look at the underlying rune type when deciding whether to convert a death rune into another death rune. If you oblit off of two death runes generated by BotN (converted BB runes), they refresh as blood runes. If I remember right, if you oblit off of converted BU runes, they'll refresh as BU because BotN doesn't convert either rune unless both of them are the correct type.

The problem is that using an ability off death runes doesn't preferentially use runes of the correct underlying type, so if you have four death runes (BBFU) and you obliterate, it won't necessarily consume the FU-death runes. So as soon as you get a miss or get out of melee range or whatever long enough to have four death runes up, you have no control over what runes you consuming and they'll refresh in a random order. Even if you do stick to BS and oblit, you have to maintain a flawless rotation or your runes will get mixed up.

 

Metapod

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=151113040605

New frost tanking spec I want to use now that bone shield is being nerfed to oblivion.

I'm debating on a few talents -

Chill of the grave 2 points or Deathchill 1pt and 2h Spec 1pt.

Also debating on glyphs.

Glyph of obliterate is almost a must.
Rune strike looks nice.
Frost strike looks nice.
Icy touch looks decent.
Icebound fortitude is always nice.
Also rather iffy on glyph of unbreakable armor, whether or not it'd put me over the cap

Can't decide!

 

Vinexia

Couple of points to remember about Obliterate vs. Howling Blast:
1) Obliterate has a MUCH larger chance to crit then HB when spec'ing as frost.
2) HB has a MUCH higher chance to miss then Obliterate, modified by Misery etc.
3) HB is effected by Ebon Plague/CoE etc. Obliterate is reduced by armor and is effected by Sunder Armor/Expose Armor/FF/Curse of Reck etc. As these debuffs fluxuate in your raid these abilities damage changes accordingly.
4) HB scales with AP (20% apc). Obliterate scales with weapon damage and AP (7% APC).

Personally fact 1 and 2 are enough to make me Obliterate single targets over HB. Fact 3 and 4 are based on your characters gear and raid composition.

 

Feorthas

Not again...

Firstly, your best threat Gen is from Death & Decay. No contest.

Secondly, of course a DW spec will spam non-strike attacks.

Thirdly, Howling Blast will do less damage than Obliterate given a high-end blue, or any properly itemized purple, two-hander. Maximum Critical Strike damage is for the PvP thread. Not the DPS thread and certainly not the tanking thread. The only numbers either thread cares about are AVERAGES (DPS/Tank) or worst-case (tanking).

Howling Blast does 25% less average damage than Obliterate in ANY non-retarded Frost Tanking or DPS spec.

For the record, someone "discovers" Howling Blast crits on low-resist targets every week and proceeds to inform the world that an ability that crits for 300 more in DPS gear on a raid-debuffed mob is superior to the ability that crits MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH (on average).

 

Brigaldio

My point is this, and I'd like some numbers on it.

1. What exactly is the value of threat generated by DnD?
My intuition is that at some point the additional threat will be surpassed by the force of HB crits.

2. Assuming a single target, does a rotation using oblit cause more threat than a rotation using HB and IT, and what are the relative gains/ losses from speccing for their use?

3. At what point, accounting for weapon speed, crit chance, and haste, does a build using dw with killing machine cause more crits (hence more threat) than 2h oblit?
Oblit gains crit chance from Annihilation, Rime, and Subversion. Put together, those are +27% crit chance to oblit. Add about 8% base and you're looking at 35% total crit chance. The crit chance of HB, on the other hand, scales dramatically with weapon speed and crit chance due to the killing machine mechanic. Using fast 1h weapons, I think that HB will out crit, and hence out-threat, oblit.

My experience in frost is using Titansteel Destroyer vs. (red sword of courage/ infantry assault blade), so weapon damage shouldn't be an issue in my comparison of oblit vs. HB.

I'm not saying that dw is better for mitigation, because it's not, due to parryhasting. What I am saying is that a properly designed spec/ gear selection for dw will out-threat a 2h build based on oblit, particularly (but not exclusively) in multi-target scenarios. So if your group has the heals to support a dw tank, they might consider it due to the threat gains.

 

Zerilan

Something tells me that KM is going to take a nerf at some point anyway.

 

bearformlol

Whats up guys, first time poster here.. I'm looking for some feedback on this blood tanking spec for when the patch hits. With the new changes I'm pretty excited to give blood tanking a shot.. I know the changes aren't live yet but this is what I've come up with at first glance.


http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000


I've never spec'd into blood on my DK at all, not even for DPS, so I'm kinda new to the tree. The choices that I was on the ropes about were.

Rune Tap/Imp. Rune Tap - Seems like it would be a pretty good "oh shit" button for some quick health.

Spell Deflection - Wasn't sure if it would work against attacks like Sartharion's breath.

Sudden Doom - Free DC? I figure it isn't that bad of a talent to take as a tank, a free DC can't hurt right?

Abomination's Might - Is the 2% str increase permanent? Thats the idea I get from reading it.

I can't take Morbidity because I am one of the unfortunate people that goes to 0 frames when I use it on alot of mobs =(

 

solid77

I tested it by laying DnD and just standing there doing nothing while a warrior tanked the mob and Omen was reporting between 1000 - 1500 TPS during the 10 second duration. This was in a 25man naxx raid and unholy spec.

According to the tankspot.com post

DnD threat = damage × 1.90

Deathknight Death Knight threat values - TankSpot

 

Feorthas

Because I like answering the easiest question first, Killing Machine provides a rough 1% DPS increase per point starting in the mid to late 70s and holding true for at least entry level raid gear. That's totally in line with blizzard's target for DPS talents and there's no reason to nerf it, especially when stuff like 2H spec provide about the same benefit.

Onto the more interesting/infuriating stuff:

1) DnD does roughly 3.75-4 points of threat per point of damage when in frost aura. If you would simply read the thread before posting, you might know this as I went through DnD-denial last week.

2) Read. My. [ Fun ]. Signature. (self sanitized) If further enlightenment is needed, refer to my spreadsheet--specifically, the "backend" tab/page (see dps sheets thread). It is seriously about impossible to have HB > OB given any likely 2H setup.

3) Never. Ever. Stack. Haste. With. A. 2H. Spec.

66% haste on a 2.0 speed 125 dps weapon is in the ballpark of a crossover point. 90% haste on my weapon (186 / 3.5) has IT/BS/OB/OB/2Dump ahead by 130 dps (net of 6.6k dps).

I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.

My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.

 

Namuh

If you are the group's only option than I can see this scenario. Otherwise as far as threat is concerned there are other classes with better threat gen then us right now and your group can take them as MT and put you as the DWing OT.

Icecicle - Human
Frost DeathKnight Tank

 

DWeidman

1. It is. Whether it is worth the 4 TP is up for discussion. I have it (for what it is worth).
2. It does. But it is bugged with AMS at the moment (bad bug too). This was discussed earlier in the thread.
3. I don't know what the numbers are comparing your 4 Sudden Doom Talent points to finishing Dark Conviction (for 4% more crit on everything). All Blood builds I have seen fill Dark Conviction out completely, for what it is worth as well.
4. Yes.

======

What I most interested in finding out is how Dancing Rune Weapon plays with the new Cleave (Heart Strike) - how does it pick the two targets? Does it stay on your current targets or if you reposition - can you spread out Threat across 3 (or 4?) mobs?

 

Arhk

Are you using a Red Sword (1.6) as your MH and Infantry (2.5?) as your OH? I saw another DK on my server doing that and I thought it was completely retarded when all of your weapon skills (Plagues Strike, etc.) are based on the MH. Am I missing something here?

 

Brigaldio

No, red sword is my off hand, assault balde is main hand. no point in losing damage on blood/ plague strike.
Who said anything about stacking haste on a 2h build? Haste helps dw due to increased chances to proc killing machine.

Blizz is also thinking about dropping the cd on HB, which would make the build even better.

I'm just saying that where survivability is no longer a concern due either to the ease of the raid or the strength of the heals, it could be better to have a higher threat tank that can, in turn, support higher end dps, and that a dw frost tank build can perform that role.

 

Zerath

They have already dropped the cd on HB.

Now, the second part of your quote throws me off. There's a difference between "strength of heals" and "instagibs." When we start DW'ing, because, let's face it - it's going to happen at patch time, we're going to see people instagibbed immediately on harder hitting bosses (i.e. 3dSarth).

There's nothing healers will be able to do against a back-to-back melee + another boss ability in the matter of .5 seconds.

Don't get me wrong, I've already told my healers, RL, and GL I'll be trying it out to see what we can get done when patch hits. I'm really hoping to have two solid weapons by then, too. Thinking +tank MH with DPS OH. Not quite sure yet.