I can't really say that I'm sad to see them go, there really wasnt a huge need for them. With as easy as it is to get def capped with a combination of rep and crafted gear (with propper gemming and enchants), it was a waste of time for blizz to develop the weps. the runeforge and sigil will more than help those who for some reason are unable to cap.

The bone shield glyph change is a welcome change though. I don't have a lot of experience as an unholy tank (just was not comfortable with it), but it will deffinately improve the survivability of them.

The change to Killing Machine, to me atleast, makes it look like something I am going to want to spec into. Any thoughts on just how much more valuable this talent is going to become?

I'm glad that they are removing the tanking 2H weapons, they would have set a precedent which Blizzard would have felt compelled to continue with while itemizing future instances. It's not fun for Death Knights to have to look forward to that one weapon upgrade in the entire instance, and it's not fun for anyone else to have to watch an item which only one person in the raid will need. It's definitely a much better idea to just assume Death Knights will be tanking with a DPS 2H, and let the Runeforge cover for the tanking stats - I think it will work out well as long as 2H DPS weapons continue to be itemized with high stamina.

As far as Killing Machine goes, it looks like it will be a very valuable Frost tank DPS / TPS talent now. The procrate for a 2H weapon feels like it is now higher than it was before in DPS gear, which obviously has much higher crit than tank gear. It might be difficult to find the points to fill the talent up though.

I had quite a few "wasted" points in my tanking builds that ended up in stuff like runic power mastery, but if you take imp Icy Talons line, yeah it's gonna be tough.

The issue with the removal of the 2h is, damn that defense 2h was looking so pretty for mitigation fights where threat is a non issue. So much stamina and avoidance. But the best of all, it was crafted, still waiting to see the inevitable mace drop. Oh and also, it wasn't ugly as crap. Now if they'd just hurry with the patching, I could care less what they remove as long as I get gargoyle runeforge and the def sigil and the new blood/frost toys. Even with the nerfed Vampiric blood(I would have wanted the overpowered version though).

Hi there, i have a question about build.
I was tanking most of the time in Unholy (5/11/55), but in my naxx10 i suddenly got Prot Paladin, and boom!
Paladin gave me Sanctuary and whole fights, from 100% to 0% bosses hp i had almost all of the time 100rp.
1-2 Death Coil per rotation cause i didn't have time for more, and triggerig blade barrier or using scourge strike, or even refreshing my diseases was more important, i also can't (well, i can, but it would be stupid) use Unholy Blight every rotation when another is still on more than 50% duration.

So i'm here to ask you for help... should i change build to frost? so i will have more valuable RP dump skill like Frost Strike (wich is more aggro than DC i think).
I don't really have idea what to do to dump all RP every rotation so RP won't be wasted, but used to increase threat.

I was planning on something like that: 13/51/7
Any of you have experience with Sancuary buffed DK Tank? What build is best for RP Dumping for threat increase?

Thanks in advance

I just have a little question...

I heard somewere that a deathknight dont need as much defense rating as other tanks (540).

Is that true, and in that case, how mutch do I need to be uncritable?

DKs don't have any crit reduction talent, you need 540 defense to be 'uncritable'.

Rune strike.
It's one of the most Threat maker ability of the DK.
It's available after you dodge/parry and cost 20 runic power et don't consume a GCD.
On the other side you have BoSc that give you 20 runic power every timer you dodge/parry.

Any way, even without the blessing, you should use this ability every time it's up a long long as you have enough RP for IBF

The only tanking class I'm aware of that don't need 540d minimum are Druids, because they become uncritable via talents.

@czokalapik

In regard to having a prot pally in the raid I've come to these conclusions:

First of all, at the rate at which a DK needs to parry/dodge you'll have so much RP you won't know what to do with. Your problem is really the GCD. Essentially you should always use your highest TPS abilities once the mandatory ones are out of the way (like blood strike to keep Blade Barrier up). So to answer your question about refreshing UB every 10-second rotation, the answer is absolutely no. You're wasting a GCD to refresh something with 10-seconds left on it, use a death coil instead.

Secondly, you need to consider what you're doing. If you know you're going to be running something with the sanc buff, you can respec every time if you want but it seems to me like it's a waste of gold--it's up to you. You should be aware of the benefits of being Unholy or Frost though. There are a lot of posts on that already in this thread but it should really come down to preference and fact.

A decently geared Unholy DK can easily out AoE tank a similarly geared pally tank via DnD, UB, Pestilence and of course, Ebon Plague which all your aoe caster classes will love you for. Frost however, provides snap-aggro, which can be a big deal if you don't see adds getting aggro'd before you can move over and drop another DnD, pest or a few ticks of UB before healers or dpsers start getting aggro, which also tends to be a similar fault of prot pallies from what I've seen.

In addition to this you have all of the talent-specific bonus's you get which come down to gear and personal preference. Unholy scales best after 35% base avoidance I believe (don't quote me) for single target-tanking. It's also very important to tank reduced magical damage for some fights like mting 10-man, 3 drake, Sarth as your hp is reduced by 25% leaving you at basically unbuffed frost presence life.

I'd stick with the spec you have to be honest. It's probably more practical--just generate the most amount of threat you can by not overlapping your RP based abilities as much as possible. One thing I may add is as combat is ending refresh Unholy Blight so that you end with full RP and a nearly full duration UB for additional aggro on the next pull.

This all assumes that you're using Rune Strike every time it's up. Period.

Anyway, on to my questions:

Currently, I'm mting 25-man Naxx and Sarth (with 3 drakes up) with this spec: 15/5/51 Unholy with Magic Suppression. I've looked around at other builds and I quite frankly can't stand the way the talents are fleshed out which is why I picked a mid-mitigation/tps spec.

I noticed as long as my healers communicated with me, I didn't have too much of a problem. With about 29.3k hp 55% avoidance and 26k armor I find that I can tank 10-man encounters without using cd's often and 25-mans w/ them on cd only some of the time.

Also, since I'm an Orc I finally saw Inevitable Defeat drop tonight and passed on it since it was approx. a 23 expertise rating vrs 19 dps, .66% dodge from Betrayer of Himanity which is fairly trivial since it seems that the boss parry-haste mechanic may have been removed. Hopefully we'll see more about that in the new content that's released.

I was wondering what other similar Unholy tanks were experiencing when they also reached full 10-man Naxx gear and beyond for iLvl. After expertise cap for dodge, should I go straight hit till cap? Also, were you finding that you were socketing for more stam or expertise over avoidance sooner than 55% overall?

@T1mm4h
Thanks for tips, atm im @ 22,4% dodge and 19,7% parry with ~24500 armor and 29360 hp in Unholy with frost presence unbuffed, that numbers give me in naxx10 possibility to test out my builds and i don't have to be in Unholy to actually "survive" the fignt.

So i was wondering on frost simply because high Obli crit rate from talens, and Frost strike - similar ability to RS, cant be dodged/parried, also high damage ability athat use RP.

Ofcourse i use blood runes only when Blade Barrier have 3-4sec to worn off, and in first place i'm using higest damage abilities plus RS when it's active, etc etc. but still im frustrated about this wasted Rune Power.

edit:
about socketing, enchanting etc:
avarage single heal, will outheal single damage from boss easily at decent armor rate (for example in my case: raiding naxx10 in 5ppl heroic gear), and MT have most of time 2 healers. Now - with high avoidance, you can avoid 10 hits but get 3-4 shots and be killed, with stamina stacked bud lower avoidance you can avoid lets say 5 hits, get hit by 5-6 and be killed. And i came to the conclusion with 2 of my healers (i was healer also, in tbc, so i also try to look on tanking from healer perspective) that when i'm stamina stacked damage is predictable on me, and it will be eastier for the to heal me, it's like finding the proper rythm and stick with it, while avoidance tanka can suprise healers.

For example i was on naxx10 pug and Unholy DK with 26,7k hp unbuffed but stacked with avoidance tried to score the Faerlina achivement, he failed in first 10 seconds of fight. I tried it little later, also failed, but survived few minutes (from first enrage to 5% of boss, when i was 3-shotted.

To be honest, as long as your threat is fine, the amount of RP you have is irrelevant.

If you're finding that DPS is holding back because your threat is low, I'd seek out other alternatives.

Trying out DK specs is part of the class, you should probably try it out anyway, at least in 5-mans. I'm really excited about the upcoming talent changes but I personally can't stand tanking as frost, I tried it for 2 days or so while I was a fresh 80. I just really hated the mechanics of it.

Depending on the changes that end up being final, I'm definitely going to try blood and perhaps frost again but only in 5-mans unless I get really comfortable with it.

I assume you haven't tried 2 or 3 drake 10-man Sarth yet? I'm more or less wondering how other DK's are fairing with these encounters, like did their guilds find them better on adds find that they were best on Sarth or the Drakes with another class/less geared DK on adds? Did they have a different spec that they found helped with survivability or gemming differently for more/less mitigation/avoidance/stam?

I do find that I'm usually the last one to die, thanks to my healer but is there any other min/maxing that anyone's found at this point since we've been playing our class for a few months now?

haha, same as me, a couldn't understand frost tanking so i stopped trying, but now i'm more used to it because i'm running 2vs2 arenas in frost with Holy Pally.

Btw, you got my point - my tps have strange spikes, it can be 3k tps, it can be under 6k, but it's totally random, that's why i think about respecing for more "rune power user" tank and i hope this RP can increase my tps, or at least it will be static.

I just started tanking whelps and blazes for my guild. I tend to have trouble grabbing blazes that spawn in random spots and go for healers if D&D and HB are on coodown. Whelps aren't too terrible as long as you have the presence of mind to save runes for D&D and place in on the portal when they're about to hatch. At first I had problems with judging where I could get to without being hit by a lava tsunami (I would try to grab a stray blaze on the other side when a tsunami formed and make it to the very edge and get hit by it), but no so much anymore.

The only MAJOR problem I had and can't fix is that sometimes if too many blazes and/or whelps are on me, my FPS will drop like a rock (usually followed by me getting hit by a tsunami). I already have all my video setting turned down to the minimum so I don't miss Fissures in all the AoE, so I think it's got something to do with combat log spam. I turned it to Self and turned off all the input in the options menu, but I don't know if it helped because when my FPS dropped was kind of random in the first place and the combat log has a tendency to bug out and reset record everything when you change zones. This is the only part of the game I have FPS problems, and it's not even completely constant. I don't know anyone else with the problem, but I figured I'd give warning anyway.

I found tanking the drakes to be a much easier task, and our paladin was taking less damage from the whelps than I was and also not having FPS problems. It was also a lot easier to deal with tsunamis because I was distracted with picking up lots of adds and my positioning allowed me to see both sides of the field. However, I didn't get to do it very much because our druid wanted to switch back to drakes, so the paladin went back to Sarth and I was stuck with whelps again.

I'm really not sure what I'll do without HB to get snap aggro on groups of stray mobs once I go blood, but aside from Unbreakable Armor, I'm not a big fan of frost.

Kaejin, drop morbidity and do it now. there is a known bug with this talent where many many people are finding it drops fps to about 2 during sarth +drakes once theres a healthy amount in the effect. I'm not sure if blizzard has even acknowledged this bug yet, but I know it has been reported in the bugs forum several times. Also, if your job is adds for sarth, do not go blood- there is simply not enough aoe dmg avail with that spec for you to be successful at it.

I am my guilds whelp/blaze tank for sarth, and a few tips I have for you would be:
-once the portal is announced by dbm, be prepared for the lava wall. do not stress, the whelps wont come out until after the lava wall passes. you will have time to drop dnd right after the lava wall passes.
-Since you're frost, I would suggest getting Deathchill and macro it into HB- that guaranteed crit will do wonders for snap aggro. and use HB as often as you can.
-Use death grip and dark command as often as you needed to grab stray mobs-just be sure you dont target a drake or sarth as you will become very unpopular very quickly.
-I too tend to have some problems picking up all the adds towards the end if dps is slow and I still have a ton of whelps and blazes on me. Something I am going to talk to the raid leaders about is if this happens again, have one of the mages frost nova the whelps to give me a chance to go grab more adds. I don't to pull all of my adds away from the drakes due to the aoe that the dps is doing to get the drakes and the adds.

One thing I was wondering, are any of the unholy tanks often finding themselves not generating enough threat and the dps having to hold back on single target fights? I had tried it out for naxx to get used to it more for sarth the next night, and no matter what I did, I could not generate enough threat to not need the hunters to chain md me, where as frost it was never a problem.

I have same problem with threat, as i said before i have always been in Unholy in 5ppl and 10ppl (55, 53, 51 and some blood/frost combinations) and on aggro table there is me, lock, mage and BM hunter, i'm #1 with 3-6k tps (spikes of threat, sometimes high, sometimes low) and #2-4 are mentioned dps with 5-7k tps struggling to not overaggro me.

One thing that helped a little was Glyph of Scourge Strike, but still i have problems.
I wonder if glyphed DS or glyphed Obli (when diseases end) won't be better.

Can you link your Frost tank build Valhalla? (nevermind >.<)

edit:
About threat issues: if you are tanking with 2hander there is theory to stack Str and don't get any haste buffs/gear. That way Str will increase AP directly increasing DPS/TPS and also will increase Parry, so you'll get more parry hastes.
If weapon is slow enough and parry is high you can increase melee/RS dmg by lets say 60% (don't quote me, i've read some loose calculations somewhere, and for me it is only theory).

Yeah, I've noticed I don't generate as much single target TPS as is needed on a few fights. Most fights I tank it's not an issue - for instance Sarth+3 (25) that I MT it doesn't really matter what threat I do as there's no need to nuke to start with and once the three drakes are up I have an obscene amount of threat without even trying. But I've had issues on for instance Malygos 10 where several people have caught up with me and had to hold back as to not draw aggro. It's also not the case of casters dpsing through Vortex as it was melee riding my threat constantly. I'll probably use a dps trinket rather than my Pantheon's after the patch to help it out a bit, and maybe switch some sockets around if I can afford the further defense loss. But if it doesn't get better I might feel forced to spec frost, which is something I'd rather not do as I really enjoy being unholy.

How come you don't pick AMZ for Sarth+3? I found it to be rather invaluable to have another oh shit button for when two drakes are up.

I was under the impression that the Morbidity bug was something that happened with the talent at all times rather than when affecting a large amount of mobs. I'll give it a shot next time we do OS and see if that makes the difference, but going back to a 30 sec CD D&D is going to be annoying. Is there any way to check if this is the problem outside of doing Sarth again and risking a wipe? Pulling all of Deadmines and using D&D or something, or is it only in OS?

As far as blood goes, while you do have a point that my AoE threat will suffer, I'm not so sure that Pestilence and Blood Boil spam (lots of blood boil spam because of DRM) won't be able to keep adds in check.

I wonder if Hungering Cold is worth anything for whelp tanking.

The bug is based on a certain number of models not a specific encounter so yes pulling a large amount should be a good way of testing it.

Let's look at Killing Machine with what is probably the most common DK tanking weapon, the [Titansteel Destroyer]. This weapon has a speed of 3.4. As such, it will swing 17.647 times per minute. Knowing that Killing Machine has a proc rate of 5 PPM, Killing machine will activate approximately 28.3% of your autoattack swings (5 / 17.647).

Considering that Killing Machine used to have a proc rate equal to your half your crit chance, the change to Killing Machine is a buff, if your raid-buffed crit chance was below 56.6%. If you had a raid-buffed crit chance above 56.6% (good grief!), you would see a slight dps nerf after the change to Killing Machine.

Just a reminder - these numbers were calculated with a 3.4 weapon speed. If you have a slower weapon speed, you the change to PPM would be a bigger benefit to you.

***Post has been edited thanks to Urotas pointing out my general idiocy. The change to killing machine is fantastic for 2-handed frost tanks and frost dps'ers alike.

The old Killing Machine only has a 50% chance to proc on a critical hit. That makes the right number 56.6% crit instead of 28.3 crit. Few people will ever higher crit than that even in dps gear, so it's a solid buff to both 2h-tanking and 2h-dps no matter what your gear is like.

And remember, that the change to KM even further benefits tanks over DPSers. DPSers have a relatively elevated crit rating already... say, 50% on Obliterate. When KM procs, your next attack has a 100% chance to crit... which is a +50% chance to crit for the DPSer, while for a tank with 30% chance to crit Obliterate, each proc is a +70% chance to crit.

The new KM will be something like a 150dps boost for a tank. Assume 1 proc. per 12sec, My Obliterate hits for ~1850 and crits for ~4550 with raid buffs, a difference of 2700 damage. An extra 70% of that crit difference is ~1900 damage, or 157.5dps, a good 6+% bonus to DPS. Clearly worth the talent points, now.

edit: I was totally forgetting Windfury or a DPSer's Imp Icy Talons... which, with no further haste effects, brings the proc rate up to 6PPM, and the Raid-buffed DPS contribution up to nearly 200dps. Considering all you lose is Imp Icy Talons, this is a pretty big deal for frost tanks.

Mostly because I don't use it anywhere else, but that's actually a really good idea when the third drake lands, I'll have to pick it up.

Not a problem unless someone dps's when I'm pulling Patchwerk to the OT's or something dumb like that. There are plenty of talents for unholy tanks to generate extra threat from a few points in necrosis, BCB or Dark Conviction. I actually did have some problems until I swapped to Colossal Skull-Clad Cleaver from the Titansteel Destroyer. The hp drop was terrible, but worth it for the passive 5 expertise I get for having an axe as an Orc.

If you're an Unholy tank (or any spec for that matter, but primarily Unholy) and you're having trouble generating TPS you need to hit the expertise cap for dodge, which is around 5%. It's weight is much higher than Hit, if you're wondering check out the DK dps compendium since dk tanking only differs from dpsing by keeping blade barrier up and popping cd's on a regular basis.

I don't have a quote but the basic idea behind unholy was that if you miss--at all-- it totally messes up your rotation which is more important to unholy than other spec which directly affects our dps/tps. This is also why I chose [Betrayer of Humanity] over [Inevitable Defeat], passive 55 expertise rating due to my Orc racial.

When my rotation is optional I produce somewhere around 2.7k tps unbuffed, 4k+ buffed according to the DK tanking spread sheet. I think the numbers are a bit funny though.

Yeah, need to account for the 20% Haste buff for sure. If you're tanking with something like Wraith Spear, the KM proc rate is close to 31% per swing. You have a ~3s attack speed with raid buffs (20% WF, 3% Ret) which ends up being 6.2 procs per minute.

It's definitely looking like Frost will be a very cool (pun not intended) 2H tanking tree post 3.08. Very much considering it with my little DK alt.

Hungering Cold I feel is under rated quite heavily as well.

Picture a situation like Sartharion +3 where you're 10% from a Tenebron kill. The DPS can just single target focus him for the last few percent while you pop Hungering Cold and CC every single Hatchling and Flame for 10 seconds.

Also it should be very much noted that Guile of Gorefiend's value to a DK tank goes up significantly with the KM change. Before you were looking at a 45% boost to crits that rarely ever happen, now they are a frequent occurance.

Was thinking something like:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You're going to want Frost Strike of course since you're 2H tanking, which restricts your Blood and Unholy picks. I'd love to get Impurity somehow, but it's not worth it once you're already so deep in Frost. I can't imagine it ever outperforming Tundra Stalker and Guile of Gorefiend together. Bladed Armor is a poor man's version of Impurity and this build is able to reach that at least. 30k armor = 833AP.