Pyros

I believe I said that already like 3pages ago, but DW gibbing isn't quite as bad as most people make it seems like.

Let's compare 2 cases:
First cases, prot warrior, uses a 2.6speed main hand. Let's see how many attacks he gets in a 5minutes fight:
MH 2.6 Hit rate 8%
300/2.6=115autoattacks
1.5s GCD, pretty much every GCD used on a special move so let's say 80% of the time using a special:
(300/1.5)*80/100=160attacks
Total is 275attacks over 5minutes, or theorically 275chances to get parried over 5minutes

Now the annoying part, doing the same math with DW frost tanking
MH 2.6, OH 1.6 Hit rate 11%(same gear but 3% more from the DW talent)
MH=115attacks
OH=300/1.6=187 but 13%chance to miss so actually 163attacks
Normal rotation next patch is PS IT BS BS HB HB HB HB. Runic dumps aren't counted because FS can't be parried and death coil is a spell. In this rotation, IT and all the HB also can't be parried, so over 20secs, that's 3melee(PS and BSx2).
Number of specials: (300/20)*3=45specials
Then you have to remember you're probably going to rune strike AT LEAST every other hit. So we can simply divide the MH attacks by 2 since runestrike can't be parried.
End result for parryable attacks with DW frost:
(115/2) + 163 + 45=266(rounded up)

So unless my math is wrong, and I'm sure it's probably wrong somewhere, DW tanking as frost spec is actually LESS parry chances than your usual prot warrior. So the whole parry thing? As far as I can tell it's a myth. Obviously, increasing your hit would also increase your chances to get parried so it's probably not very useful. However, since you use 2 weapons, you most likely have more expertise than that warrior. I haven't double checked talents and what not though.

Edit: After checking wowhead, noticed there's no 2.6tanking weap, and if you use faster Main Hands, due to Rune Strike being artificially "capped" by how often you can dodge and parry, the prot warrior might become better. That's why I think most DW DKs should strive for [Broken Promise] since it's pretty much perfect for DW MH, and leave the other faster MH to prot wars and paladins. Now, finding out if using [Last Laugh] instead of a DPS slow MH instead would lead to higher or lower damage taken, this is way too hard for me to check ^^.

 

Disargeria

Warriors usually aim for a faster weapon like Last Laugh. With a 1.6 attack speed, we get

300/1.6 = 187.5 autoattacks, plus your 160 from abilites. That bumps it up to a whopping 348 parryable attacks.

 

Feorthas

Haste. Is. A. Total. Waste. Of. Item. Points. REGARDLESS. Of. Build.

For X haste, you can get 11/15ths of it in crit, so a little more than 66%. In fact, enabling killing machine on my sheet CLEARLY reduces the effectiveness of haste (~10%) while vastly increasing (~20%) the value of crit; I'm not sure whether that was you looking at it this afternoon/evening while I was making a number of ninja changes but you clearly didn't play with it much or you might've noticed. Hell, the only reason I made Str/AP/Crit/Haste/AP work with KM is so that they can be compared so that people could see just how utterly worthless haste is (for the record, it is worth half as much as the same point-value of critical strike rating, which is somewhere between 50% and 66% the value of Strength when you're enchanted with Crusader).

If you want to make KM more powerful, stack crit. Not only will it boost the rate of KM procs but it totally increases the average damage of everything else too whereas haste ONLY increases your white attack speed.

---

Now, why are we talking about this in the tanking thread? Last I recall, the only haste a tank should have is Windfury/IIT and there are way better talents for them to take besides KM (hint: take this discussion elsewhere, especially if you wish to persist in your insistence that the amounts of haste on gear is worth more than a steaming pile of crap to a Death Knight, Two-Hand specced or not. Seriously, this is reaching "I drop Grace of Air totem instead of (Old) Windfury in Warrior DPS groups" levels of sheer idiocy).

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.

 

Zerath

The above poster said "instant attacks" which DW Frost wouldn't have any, right? HB > OB in DW and can't be parried. IT is a spell. FS can't be parried. PS is the only instant outside of auto-attack. Typical rotation would be: IT -> PS -> Pest -> HB -> BB (interchangeable on the last two skills.) Which, only 1 is considered to be parried.

A fun notation I just thought of - there is no single weapon Stone Gargoyle enchant. Thus by going DW we effectively lose a rather potent enchant that would let us gem in to more Hit for a DW build. If they added a single weapon enchant, let me know. I'm not on the PTRs.

What abilities? Plague Strike will be the only one that can be parried in a typical FrDW build - unless you count Blood Strike. In a perfect rotation and a 300second fight, you should be using PS 17 times and BS would be double that due to them converting to Death Runes every other cooldown. (Assuming an 18s disease w/ Epidemic.)

 

Tel

He meant for Warriors

Re the Gargoyle Runeforge, I believe it was stated somewhere that it was put in to balance DKs having to use 2H without tanking stats so it's unlikely they'll put in a 1h version, as there are 1h tanking weapons already available.

 

Suno

Pyros, I think your comparison is quite noteworthy. However, that doesn't detract from the leg-up that 2h tanking had before: less parryhasting. Also, bear in mind, that unless we have cooldowns up, parryhasting punishes us more than warriors or paladins. We spend a good chunk of our time standing there with nothing running but Blade Barrier.

 

Asmadai

And, isn't one of the more major problems with DW tanking threat generation? Parry hasting can cause problems, but that's something that can be healed through (in some situations), but I'm still having issues pulling threat ahead of our caster DPS when I try to DW tank.

Maybe the Rune Strike threat change will remove this obstacle, but is threat generation still an issue for everyone else trying to DW tank or am I alone in this?

 

Pyros

When I tried to DW tank I had huge aggro issues, but I wasn't geared around it either. I'd probably regem some of my gear for more hit/str to generate more threat, and the changes next patch might also fix the issue with HB on no cd(so no low oblits) and rune strike switching from 200%dmg to 150%dmg and compensating with threat bonus.

As for the damage out of cooldowns bucknasty, I believe that's why they're changing frost presence to offer even more mitigation out of cooldowns. I don't see it as a big issue, and in my comparison I took what I think are generous numbers for prot warriors. If they're using a 1.6weap and we're using a slow MH fast OH(best results I think?) and we use pestilence or bloodboil on bloodrunes, which might do close to the same dmg, we're looking at a much lower number of parry haste attacks than our prot warrior friends. And still, even if you take into account a 15%parry rate on bosses, and assume 5%expertise(easier to do the math), only 10% of the attacks will be parried so about 25attacks in a 5mins fights, half of which are probably closer to the reset timer than the previous hit anyway. That's a very very very slim chance to get a parry haste at the wrong time, and if you combine cooldowns uptime to this, I'd bet the chance to get parry gibbed on any given fight is probably lower than 1/500, which is fine to me(and yeah that last number has no mathematic basis behind it, but I like it ^^).

With that said, I'm not sure I want to DW tank anyway. I've only tried it for a few heroics too, I'm not like, a defender of DW tanking(or DPSing) or anything like that, but I found interesting to check what were the facts behind the parry gib myth. I had always thought most people were way exxagerating the parry gib thingie when you take into account the amount of unparryable attacks in a frost build.

 

Namuh

I think, perhaps, the idea of 2H tanking vs DW tanking when it comes to parryhaste is that ANYTHING that reduces your chance to be parrygibbed is a good thing.

Hands down, 2H provides a lower chance to be parrygibbed than DW. That much can be said is static without question.

CAN you DW tank effectively? Sure, but know that your chance to be parrygibbed by bad ass boss is going to be marginally higher.

Perhaps on the bosses like 3drake Saph and others the tank can simply switch out to a 2H and go back to DW for trash and aoe fights?

Probably stating the obvious here but I think we need to see some WSS or similar reports on a well geared tank DWing against a boss that will most deffinately parrygib you to death.

However getting your guild to allow that simply for testing purposes are few and far between

Icecicle - Human
Frost DeathKnight Tank

 

Vinexia

One of the problems I have found with attempting to make a DW tank build is finding one that doesn't make strange choices or sacrifice some mandatory mitigation talents.

Obviously you will need 31 minimum in frost. We have to choose between Killing Machine, IITt or none of the above. As we build down the tree though we find that there just aren't enough points. KM in a tank spec is a weak option because we can't have Dark Conviction and still get BCB + Blood of the North/UA to make our blood runes do something useful. In any case you end up scrapping one of the reasons to be a DW tank in the first place.... KM procs or BCB procs. If we end up going with a deep frost we can get frost strike and guile of gorefiend but have to scrap points in bladed armor to do it w/o impurity to make up the difference.

I think the closest we can get to a DW spec is something like:Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Even looking at the calculator set up this way makes me grimace though.

 

Broseph

I was under the impression you absolutely wouldn't take BCB as a DW tank, especially if you're concerned with parryhaste. Does that make speccing any easier, Vin?

 

Vinexia

Yes, it gives us no compelling reason to tank while DW'ing unless going for some kind of style over substance thing. DW concepts are built around procs without internal cooldowns. If we decided BCB is a non-viable tanking talent and KM is lack luster because we can't get an acceptable crit rate, then why are we thinking of square peg-round hole this subject?

 

Kaylee

(As far as I remember, 3/3 Blood-Caked Blade is a 30% chance to proc on auto attack, can proc from a Rune Strike and has no internal cooldown. If that's wrong, the rest of this post is going to be junk.)


Using Pyros' numbers from the top of this page, DW Frost had 163 white hits. That would give us an average of 163 * 0.3 = 49 extra BCB procs over 5 minutes, for a total of 315 attacks which can be parried for a DW Frost spec with BCB.

As a reminder, DW Frost without BCB was making 266 attacks, while a Prot warrior with a slow weapon was making 275 attacks. However, as Disargeria pointed out, Prot warriors prefer fast weapons and would actually be making 348 attacks.


So yes, Blood-Caked Blade will get you parried more often. But you'll still be getting parried less than the average Prot warrior.

 

Zurai

"I get parried less than the average Prot warrior" isn't exactly a glowing endorsement when 2h DKs get parried about 30-40% as often as a Prot warrior. More than doubling your parryable attacks is going to lead to more than double the risk of parry gibbing. How many parryable attacks you make relative to the other tanking classes is totally irrelevant.

 

Disargeria

Hold on now, let's define parry gibbing. Parry gibbing as I understand it was back in the days where crushing blows could cause serious problems. A warrior would get unlucky and cause a parry or three in a row, and the resulting parries would eat his shield block charges and leave him open to crushing blows. In the space between shield blocks, the warrior had a very small chance to eat back to back crushing blows for massive damage, which could catch the healers off guard and kill him.

Now, we don't have these huge spikes from crushings anymore, so, a series of massive, unpredictable attacks seems very unlikely as they're only doing normal damage. I could understand this on a VERY slow attacking boss, but in that case the parry haste is probably disabled on him.

 

Vinexia

Right, but our job is to make smart choices and make ourselves easier to heal. Just looking cool isn't excuse enough to DW. There would have to be mitigation or threat based benefits to offset the fact we will be taking more damage on parry hasting capable bosses. The question of parry-gib really should only be examined if we could look at DW and say "Because I DW over using a 2h I gain this XXXXX." We know for a fact in a 5 minute fight, if the boss parries 2x as much, that will increase the number of times the boss swings at us in the 5 minutes of the fight.
For DW at this time I am just not seeing the "Whats in it for my raid."

 

Pyros

Well you do get higher stats out of DW than 2H.
You get defense on them, so you can regem for dodge or stamina, and/or not have to use gargoyle runeforge. Also the sum of stats on DW weaps is usually higher than the stats on a 2H. More stamina, more expertise. With HB and RS changes, it might be interesting to see if a DW frost build can pull ahead of a 2H frost or blood build for single target threat too.

It's not like it's a total loss. But the important factor really is, it's not like it's that much worse than 2H. Sure in the end, it's probably worse, and sure for most people posting here on EJ, it won't be an option because we tend to strive for the best, not the second or 3rd best. But for a lot of people everywhere, it's a decent option, and I think it's useful to know that it's not THAT bad and stop spreading myths on how if you dual wield the boss will do a backflip and oneshot you every 25secs because of super insane parry gibbing. It's not the best, but it's viable, which is what DW should be.

 

A Man In Black

It's not even that much more stats. Try this Wowhead comparison on for size.

The only benefit anyone has much ever explained is "Well, it's more defense." Is that going to be such a big deal after 3.0.8, with three new sources of def available?

 

Zurai

You can still easily get huge spikes from parry haste without needing crushing blows - especially when trying for achievements (our tank got parry gibbed on Widow going for her achievement this week). That's not to say it's only going to happen on achievement runs, mind. Any boss that enrages or frenzies and doesn't have parry-haste turned off has a good chance to gib you if you get an unlucky parry streak. Considering that just about every boss has SOME kind of enrage or frenzy (even if it's just a low-health frenzy), it's worth paying attention to.

As for the stat gains from dual wielding... with the advent of Stoneskin Gargoyle and the Titansteel tanking weapons, there aren't any. The 25 Defense Skill from Stoneskin Gargoyle is 3% avoidance, unaffected by the diminishing returns, which puts it only 1% behind dual Swordbreaking - but it also buffs up Icebound Fortitude. The 90 defense on the Titansteel Defender is more than any DW combo, and it doesn't suffer in the strength or stamina category either.

Dual [Last Laugh]s give +74 strength, +146 stamina, +62 defense rating, +68 parry rating, and +48 hit rating. The parry rating is almost insignificant; you'll have over 400 parry rating just from strength, then another 540+ rating from defense. With parry having such a low cap and us having such a massive base parry rating, we get incredibly terrible returns on parry rating on gear.

The Titansteel Defender, on the other hand, has +86 strength, +133 stamina, and +90 defense rating. It offers comparable total avoidance accounting for DR, more strength, slightly less stamina, and noticeably less hit. However, you also NEED noticeably less hit for 2H, so that's not really a big deal.

I really don't see the advantage to using DW over 2H right now - and thank God for that, frankly.


EDIT: Used Last Laugh for MH just out of simplicity, since it's the higher iLvl 1-handed tanking weapon in the game. Just pretend there's an identical weapon with 2.6 or whatever speed; it's the stats I was interested in, anyway.

 

Kaylee

Agreed that it should be irrelevant. But since warriors have always been the poster child for main tanks to look up to and are still used as main tanks by a large majority of guilds, a comparison to them is still relevant. If parry haste was really that much of a threat, Prot warriors would be using slow weapons over and above any advantage a fast weapon gives them. They don't. So then surely if DW can give DK tanks any advantage, we should also be free to look for it without worrying too much about parry. Right?


As higher tiers of content are introduced, bosses will be dropping new 1h tanking weapons for the paladins and warriors. Unless Blizzard have changed their minds, I doubt they'll be dropping new 2h tanking weapons. Remember the stated intent for was DKs to tank with a 2h DPS weapon, which makes me think that Titansteel Defender was just added along with the Gargoyle runeforge and the new Sigil to help new DK tanks hit the defense cap without the benefit of a tanking weapon, shield and shield enchant.

Maybe Blizzard will make a 2h tanking weapon available through the next tier of badges, or maybe they'll have one boss drop a 2h mace (or polearm) with dodge and armor for DKs and bears to use. If they do then 2h tanking will probably stay ahead, but if they don't then the avoidance on a pair of higher ilvl 1h tanking weapons is going to start outweighing the bonus of a DPS 2H with Gargoyle. Right now, no, DW tanking doesn't seem to have a strong advantage. But when Ulduar rolls around we can take a another look and see if there's a benefit without having people put parry up on a pedestal and giving it more importance than it deserves.

 

Zurai

I think the very existence of the Defender and Deflector are obvious proof that Blizzard has changed their minds, since they said in beta that they had no intention whatsoever of making 2h tanking weapons. That was in the same post that they said we should be using dps weapons to tank, for the record.

 

Psykhe

Sorry, but that is just poor argumentation.

Prot wars have an advantage with fast weapons due to their tanking mechanics and have different means for dealing with parryhaste situations. Using fast weapons *is* a disadvantage from the parryhaste viewpoint for them, but the (considerable) advantages outweight that for them.

With DKs however its a different thing. Right now they *only* advantage for them using a dualwield build for tanking is based on itemisation. If there are equally good slow and fast weapons a DK would always pick the slow one. A war would pick the fast one.

In short, wars get a bigger compensation for the parryhaste disadvantage of fast weapons. Because of this you cannot just say "parryhaste is nothing which stops wars from using fast weapons, so it shouldn't be a major disadvantage for DKs too". Because they do not get the same advantages as wars do, to the contrary.

I do not think you are thinking this through enough.

For DKs dualwielding 2 tanking weapons results compared to a dps 2 hander in:
- less threat
- more parryhaste from bosses
- more mitigration stats (especially defence)

Now, the very reason blizz are adding the new tanking weapons, sigil, rune, is because it is "hard" to reach the defence cap for new DKs (personally I had no issue with that at all, but I have BS/JC as profs which make it a fair bit easier). When you get better equipment this should stop to be an issue however, which is the reason it is not that likely that blizz will introduce higher tier tanking 2 handers.

We can agree on this I think?

However, this very thing - that reaching the defence cap becomes less of an issue at later tiers - also greatly devalues the defence stat advantage of dualwielding tanking weapons. If there is no issue to reach the cap with armor only you can simply get a dps 2 hander which has expertise or hit on it and use any remaining gem and/or trinket slots for more mitigration stats.


In general I would see 3 different possible scenarios:


- DKs still have problems to get their mitigration to a similar lvl than other tanks (with 2 hands) in higher tiers
-> pretty much the same situation as now, meaning it is likely blizz will introduce tanking 2 hands in higher tiers too
-> DW being worse than 2 hands (as it is will be now after patch)


- DKs have no problems to reach similar mitigration as other tanks with 2 hands, for DW parryhaste results in a bigger survivability loss than is gained by the additional defence stats
-> DW being worse than 2 hands


- DKs have no problems to reach similar mitigration as other tanks with 2 hands, for DW the higher defence stats outweight the parryhaste disadvantage
-> If DW tries to reach the same treat & defence lvl as 2 hand it will still be worse (since it has to overcome the threat disadvantage and has to gem/trinket more for exp/hit while 2 hand has to gem/trinket (equally) more for def. However, if DW just ignores the threat/exp/hit disadvantage and just maxes mitigration it should be able to reach higher mitigration levels than 2-hand can, but on the cost of a rather serious threat disadvantage.


In short, for higher tiers I either see DW generally being worse than 2-hand -or- being better in situations where threat is a nonissue, but mitigration is and worse where this is not the case.

 

Prinsesa

Warriors don't use slow weapons because their threat tends to suffer dramatically if they can't dump a lot of Heroic Strikes via a 1.60 speed auto-attack.

And yes, you do make a point about the new DK tanking weapons, but it really remains to be seen how it evolves before we can draw conclusions, because the current PTR implementation is about the worst possible way to go about it.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

escariot

I'm wondering whether the new crafted weapon (I say weapon because the sword currently looks quite inferior to the axe) will be better for tanking than [Betrayer of Humanity] or even [Inevitable Defeat] as MT? I'm currently defense capped already, and as our guild has been clearing 25 man naxx for a few weeks some of our dps has gotten so geared that threat is a slight issue. Specifically on single target fights, our warriors call out for hand of salv a lot and hunters/rogues tend to use MD/TotT on me a lot. My current weapon is only the [Titansteel Destroyer] though.


So how about it, for pure end game MT do you guys think that [Betrayer of Humanity] is looking to be better than the crafted one, or am I wrong about this?

 

Asari

So I'm wrestling with the issue of what do I want to use as stam trinkets once the new patch goes up...

I picked up [Figurine - Monarch Crab] and I'm going to socket it with a 24 stam gem and a 41 stam gem... and I'm thinking about picking up [Figurine - Ruby Hare] as well and putting 2 41 stam gems in it. (It gives me roughly 3,000 HP with just these 2 trinkets alone)

The alternative is to farm heroic AN for [Essence of Gossamer] so the question is how good is that proc in a raid situation?



My plan is to resocket every piece of gear I have once 3.0.8 goes live for stam, probably with just straight up 24 stam gems. By replacing both of my trinkets with stam trinkets, I can get (in my current gear) about 30k HP on JUST frost presence.