Except in those boss fights where the raid is stunned / incapacitated / unable to attack while a cutscene plays out (I'm thinking Illidan right before the last phase, etc).

Because it isn't truly 100% uptime it might be dangerous to be below the crit-immune cap without this sigil. On the other hand, if you have a less-than-1% chance to be crit before the sigil, and the sigil gives you a 99% uptime, the odds of the boss bugging out in some way are probably higher than you getting killed by a crit as a tank.

(Yesterday Malygos decided to melee the raid in phase 2 instead of just flying around and doing deep breaths).

Hey guys, been reading elitist jerk forums for a while not but hadn't felt the need to post until I started tanking as a DK for a while. I am basically tanking on my DK with a 9/11/51 spec. I love it and I have tanked almost all the way through naxx 10.

My question is is Bladed Armor really all that good? I see a lot of people trying to put it in their tank specs. I understand the whole AP adds to threat and all that but a lot of the posts I have seem are doing calculations based off of what there armor is at when they are in Frost presence. As far as I can tell Bladed Armor doesn't account for the added armor when switching to Frost presence. So that 24k armor you are doing your math with is probably more like 14k armor.

Maybe this has been mentioned some where else in this thread, I have been trying to keep up but there are quite a lot of posts .

Hello, my first post here in elitist jerks, so I hope I will give some help in the discussion here.
I'm using a frost speccd DK, and maximing my TPS/Equipment is my aim. So I started reading this thread.

I'v got caught by your last discussion and tried out in-game if using 2 BS is better than using 1 OB.

Here are my Recount Charts in a 6 min. fight against a Dummy (obviously this chart is faked in the melee/frost strike)


Where in the left corner of the image, is me using OBLI when the 2 B runes become D runes and in the right corner is me using BS even when the 2 B runes are D runes.
The test went a little bad, because in the second 6 minutes (the right chart) I had an high amount of parry/dodge.

I think using OB with the 2 D runes is the solution because of:

1) The high risk of f****g up your cycle (i.e. parry, dodge, miss)
2) The high risk of not refreshing blade barrier in time (when i was hitting the dummie, i managed to see the BR buff down a couple of time... too much, I think)
3) The low dps cycle... yeah, teorically 2 BS makes more DMG than 1 OB, but you are not counting parry/dodge/miss that are moltiplied by 2 when you do the second cycle (that is, IMO, a little bit forced and "harder" to do)

I have to appoint a thing, that the second cycle is more "free", you can change your cycle in any way, like hitting with 1 BS, Blood Tapping and be able to OB again or making HB).

Sorry for my rust english

See you


nope, I can assure you can translate blader armor (when tanking) in a: "Increase your atk power by 800, roughly".
Maybe you switched to frost presence and didn't wait the game refresh time, in fact the game doesn't refresh istantly the bladed armor buff (except when you pop up UA).

Leaving aside for the moment whether or not it is actually worth it, where would you put the points from BotN? You still need to get further down the tree for Guile of Gorefiend and Frost Strike.

Back to Death runes. Assuming we decide that DnD should be dropped whenever it's off CD, Death runes could also be spent on it. I've been in situations before having spent both my frost runes (say, refreshing IT and popping UA) and Death runes allowed me to continue uninterrupted.

I want to ask you a thing.
How much TPS do you do? In a normal fight?
With and Without DND, obviously.

Because i watched the cycle for DnD Spam: DnD - PS - IT - BS - OBLI (SS) - BS - DnD
and calculating the number of spells: (6) multiplied by GCD (1.5) = 9 secs

DnD takes 15 seconds to refresh, so what are you doing in the remaining 4 spell slot?
Spamming DC?
In 9 seconds, if you have windfury or icy talons in raid, you swinged like 4 time (more or less) and rune strike proccd 2-3 times if you have a good avoidance, so you don't have so much RP.
Whare are you doing in that void time?

Your theory is close, but not correct; one Oblit is better than two Blood Strikes. Let us stick with your numbers to continue to keep life simple, so...

Since we're pitting these abilities against eachother, and talking about deep frost talents, I'm going to continue to keep things simple and assume a deep frost spec; maybe something similar to mine! (see profile--I'd link but my only 'net access until Thursday is my iPhone) You would do well to note that I have all 3 of these talents. I'm also glyphed for Obliterate because, if I wasn't, I'd be putting annihalation to waste somewhat; note that blood strike does not have a comparable glyph. You may also chose to note that I have stuff like Hungering Cold in my spec; let me tell you how nice it is to be able to pop that to spread FF when I'm Short on GCDs and time--both for dps and tanking for snap AoE (and yes, I also glyphed Icy Touch so I have more RP than I know what to so with).

Aaaaanyway, that takes us to:

Oblit: ~2500
BS: ~1325

BS is still higher after +15% damage vs +20% damage you say, and you are correct; however, you have forgotten that obliterate will crit 15% more often and even with a 30%-after-talents critrate on blood strike, there remains only a 9% chance that BOTH will crit. Whereas Oblit still has a 45% chance of doing double damage.... In half the time.

Additionally, GCDs are more precious than you seem to realize, as is flexibility. Most Frost rotations are pretty tightly GCD limited and, while they all have time to 'dump' RP and procs, there really aren't any more GCDs to spare on swapping one Oblit for two BSes. Not to mention, tanks usually want some flex with their GCDs so they can react to a changing situation; having no spare GCDs means that your maximum threat generation must stop and finally get rolling again as runes become available, which can also be unnacceptable.

Thanks, I found this very helpful. Think you could run something similar on a DnD spam rotation?

If you don't mind, this subject is really interesting for me, so I'd like to know where my math went wrong:

[Helm of Vital Protection] - 1867 armor
[Flowing Cloak of Command] - 140 BASE armor
[Breastplate of Tormented Rage] - 2298 armor
[Kyzoc's Ground Stompers] - 1580 armor
[Callous-Hearted Gauntlets] - 1436 armor
[Legplates of Sovereignty] - 2054 armor
[Pauldrons of Unnatural Death] - 1723 armor
[Ablative Chitin Girdle] - 1293 armor
[Bracers of Dalaran's Parapets] - 1005 armor

13396 total base armor

[Flowing Cloak of Command] - 364 bonus armor
[Keystone Great-Ring] - 490 bonus armor
[Iceforged Battle Ring] - 476 bonus armor
[Amulet of Autopsy] - 350 bonus armor
[Defender's Code] - 850 bonus armor
[Offering of Sacrifice] - 550 bonus armor

3080 total bonus armor

Armor modifiers:
1.15 Toughness
1.80 Frost Presence
1.02 Armor Metagem

2.1114 final armor multiplier

Final armor = (base armor * armor multiplier) + bonus armor
Final armor = (13396 * 2.1114) + 3080
Final armor = 31364

Damage reduction (courtesy of WoWWiki) = Armor / (Armor + (467.5 * AttackerLevel - 22167.5))
Damage reduction = 31364 / (31364 + (467.5 * 83 - 22167.5))
Damage reduction = 65.34%

WoWWiki also notes that the explicit armor cap for 75% DR is 49905 armor, and this falls short by about 18540 armor.

* If I throw in a Glyphed Unbreakable Armor for an additional 1.4 multiplier, the final multiplier increases to 2.95596 and the final armor increases to 42678, which is 71.95% DR (7226 armor short of cap).

* If I throw in a Glyphed UA and Inspiration for an additional 1.25 multiplier, the final multiplier increases to 3.69495 and the final armor increases to 52577, which is 75.97% DR (2672 armor over the cap).

As far as possible mistakes, it's possible that UA/Inspiration includes bonus armor, since it doesn't explicitly state "armor from items" like Bear Form/Frost Presence do, but I find that unlikely/inconsistent.

Corrections are very welcome

Edit: Meh I suck. I don't think Inspiration affects bonus armor however, it's not in the list, but I've seen someone say the bonus armor isn't affected by anything anymore, including buffs.

I think it is extremely likely that UA/Inspiration affect bonus armor, don't see why they wouldn't.

You are missing armor from agility(probably around 1000 armor), around 3000 armor from devotion aura, and if the fight is less than 4 minutes long you can gain another 3500 armor from 2x indestructible potion, another 800 armor from elixir(as 800armor+45agi is much better than the flask)... If you wore that item set you would way over the armor cap without the UA glyph.

I've been dreaming a lot about this sigil.

53 defense plus the 23 defense / 2% rune enchant... Right now with my blood runes activated, I'm 65+% avoidance. Through in my trinket and i was over 70% avoidance raid buffed. Sure, through me another 6% avoidance... look at my armory, I have significant spots to increase my my gear. I'm thinking with trinkets popped, I can probably get to 80% avoidance with this new sigil.