Deathknight Death Knight threat values - TankSpot

Damage x 1.90

I assume it's again multiplied by Frost Presence, which is a 207.35 modifier. That means it comes out to what, 4x damage as threat? Maybe I'm mistaken.

Regardless, it's a metric ton of threat.

As far as Frost goes, I'd recommend starting with DND > IT > PS > Pest
Obviously HB after the Pestilence if Rime procced. That should cement hate on you until you can DND again. Also, HB is only threat from damage, no additional modifier. Granted, it hits like a truck, but DND is pretty much silly for threat.

Edit: I guess you could, if you wanted, do this:

DND > IT > (If Rime then PS) > Pest > (Blood Tap if no Rime) > (Deathchill if no Killing Machine) HB. You'll have one Unholy rune if you don't PS, and you'll get the maximum amount of threat for the shortest amount of time. Obviously if you get Rime you do the normal IT > PS, if not then skip PS and Pestilence then Blood Tap so you can HB and it hits everything harder because of Frost Fever. This ensures you get a crit Frost Fever'ed HB out early on to glue stuff to you and DND is ticking away.

I have what I hope is a very simple question about mitigation/avoidance.

Lets say we have 2 tanks, A and B with identical dodge/parry/defense/armor:

Tank A is a warrior that has 16% to block.
Tank B is a DK that has frigid deathplate and blade barrier.

The 10% parry from BB and 3% extra avoidance from frigid deathplate should bring player B extremely close to the amount of damage reduction/mitigation of player A correct?

In all honesty I guess I got a little butthurt when a healer from my guild was talking about how much harder it was to heal me in heroics, than the warrior tank in the guild.

In frost I'm at 21k hp, 21k armor, 539def, 16% dodge, 17% parry. Thats good enough to start tanking the heroics isn't it?

edit: I know my enchants aren't even close to optimal atm, but I'm waiting on the crazy prices on enchanting mats to drop a little first.

I just tested and confirmed that Rune Strike can proc a Blood Caked Strike.

Both Necrosis and BcB are talents for viable single target tps generation.

Keep in mind that warriors have defensive stance/imp defensive stance. At current gear levels, the extra armor from frost presence isn't enough to make up that gap unless you're stacking armor trinkets/rings/etc. Once people get naxx25 gear it will be a lot closer in terms of mitigation.

I've tanked many of the 5 mans now, and firstly let me say, after many re-specs (it's getting VERY expensive now to keep changing spec's!) I have to agree fully with a number of the posters who've already said, for all of the 5 man non-heroics, SPEC makes no difference whatsoever.

Tanked 5 mans non-heroics as Blood, Frost & Unholy. And, if anything, Blood was the best for non-heroics because of the low downtime between trash pulls, practically finished all the trash pulls on full health and ready for the next.

So far, as someone who also has a Druid & Warrior, and has tanked with both, been very impressed with the class. Been using a quite simple tanking rotation on single targets or duo pulls

Icy touch (to pull)- Plague Strike- Death Strike- Blood Strike- Blood Strike

Then tossing out Deathcoils until I can start the rotation again.

As this post on Tankspot details, and as I've found, Death Strike, when used in Frost Presence actually generates quite a bit of threat, as well as the obvoius benifit a 4K crit heal brings to making the healers life a bit easier.

For Multimob tanking so far the DnD then IT-PS-Pest on a mob seems to work great if the DPS is reliably focusing on the proper kill order and you keep up with them. hand a bit of a bodged pull a few days ago and pulled 3 trash packs rather than 1 and had no real issues holding aggro on all while the dps did their work.

On thing I will comment is that both the Blood and Unholy 51 point talents are rather useless and not worth the points.

Also, though this is in many ways just confirming and re-iterating what others have found, Bladed Armour, is an excellent talent for tanking, if you can work into you spec this in any way, it's worth it going 5/5

When i was testing frost build, i have found that its realy difficult to get rid of the blood runes.
Icy touch and Plague strike are priorities to apply diesease and spread them(pestilience with epidemics). Then you might want to put as much dmg as you can ==> obliterate.

Death rune gives you filler for other abilities that requires frost rune(i.e.: Unbreakable armor). You can even use it as an extra threat generation (25RP from IT with glyph and Chill of the Grave can be spared for extra Rune Strike or frost strike)).
It's simply much easier to keep proper rotation.

It does, but healing generates such a small amount of threat its usually not taken into consideration. IF i remember correctly its ((healing done)/2)/(number of mobs)

For that matter what exactly does the healing depend on? Has anyone worked out the % it actually heals yet?

28/36/7

i have tank a lot of instance so far that the build am using right now minus 2 point in the blood cirt talent (only 78 right now)

First on the build i have change around a lot lot and like were it is but now that i have some semi ok tanking gear i don't need rune tap to help smooth over healing anymore not sure were to put the 4 points look at butchery and the range increase for HB and IT

Secondly
yes healing count as threat as long as it heals you so and only for the amount is heals you for so if your down 2k hp and you use DS and it hits for a 2k and heals you for that would would get the 2k Threat from healing on top of what you got from the actually attack i think a better question is if Frost presence threat+ affects this also

Thirdly few things i noticed i pretty much pull everything like a pally and don't bother much with CC my rotation on a pulls is DnD>IT>PS>Pest Second rotation is BB>HB>BB>wait 4 secs(deathcoil if you have full RP) pop another HB if i havn't use the frost rune

Howling blast puts out a lot of damage this way at least 1k+ per target 2k if it crits its beastly secondly i find myself sitting on full RP and only using it for my CDs and Runic Strike i don't use DC much only to grab a stray mob if i have use my taunt or am losing threat and need the extra boost

After using Obliterate a lot when i started i notice using for me at least DS is better it help self healing a bit and if you do heal yourself you get the extra threat

Lastly like i said am look at changing over to this for final build at 80
26/38/7

am hoping to start heroics and at least 10 man naxx this coming weekend so if i find anything new i will report back in hope this helps

If it remember from beta it was 50% per disease on target so, 1 disease 50% damage to healing, 2 disease 100% damage to healing, 3 diseases 150% to healing number look about the same from beta too so i assume its the same

Things have clearly changed since Beta. BcB, Necrosis and proccing off Runes Strikes add large value to them. Necrosis scales as weapon damage increases and gets decent with high-end weaponry. With those changes, it's likely that killing Machine will also proc off rune strikes, but it's still not great, as it requires critical strikes.

This thread needs to focus more on end-game tanking, and the build required for it. Everyone knows fury warriors and blood DK's can tank non-heroics, but we're congesting this thread with your creative tri-spec builds that will never survive a 25-man MT role.

Wandering plague is an awful tanking talent, as it depends on CRITICAL STRIKE RATING. If you're choosing WP over BA, please reread the thread. With possible parry-hasting and Necrosis/BCB changes we certainly need to investigate and eventually update the OP, but there's no need to post your bad tank build. It belongs in the same place that Arms/fury tank builds belong: guild chat.

I'll check the other forums for more info on parry hasting. I wont have access to wow today so if someone can test the overall DPS %'s from BcB and Necrosis in a tanking role that'd be swell. Also, linking your weapon would be useful in evaluating Necrosis.

They upped it then. With 2 diseases I was getting double my damage as healing, or so close to that as to be worthless to quibble on.

Death Strike gives 100% damage PLUS 50% per disease. With the exception that at 0 diseases it gives 0. so 1 disease 150%, 2 diseases 200%, 3 diseases 250%.

Crit rating already was a threat stat. Yes, Rune Strikes probably proc KM, no it's still not valuable for 5 points as tank runestrike crit %s will be ~10% or less. Same thing for wandering plague, but even worse, ~7% max if geared for mitigation/avoidance.

For those considering dual wield builds for tanking, this thread may provide some interesting information. More data is needed to determine what the current state of the parry-haste mechanic is, and if it's just Naxx (or the specific bosses linked so far) that no longer have parry haste.

True...but most builds need to put those 5 points somewhere to get up to Tundra Stalker and the other options are less optimal imo. KM is more valuable to an OT, and I'm certain that most tanks will be walking around with a DPS set as well, to toss on that +Crit gear for instances they are over geared for etc.

I think I like KM in my build, was just wondering why people were saying RS doesn't proc KM and didn't want misinformation to be spread.

I updated my original post found here.

Added unbreakable armor glyph, and update my unholy build, assuming that BcB is close to as good as it is in DPS builds. It gives us a great place to put previously weak talent points. Also adjusted various statements.

I'm glad you are mentioning this. It felt quite disturbing that the DK community on these forums has taken a rather odd attitude towards DW tanking - considering that crushing blows are gone (which already diminishes the dangerousness of parry-haste to a certain degree), no efforts have been made so far to test if parry-hasting is also a thing from the past.
I'm not exactly a DW fan, but if further tests prove parry-hasting is gone, this would bring, in my opinion, even more variety to the DK class. Being able to choose between 2H-tanking and using two avoidance-weapons would be a good thing and would not hurt anybody.

Nice catch. It used to be +20% damage for a 5 RP cost increase. That's a critical rune for a frost tank without IIT. I'll update it, thanks.

My thoughts exactly, especially since we often spec for threat already.

The attitude was taken at the time because A) there was no indication at the time that parry haste might have been removed and B) as a board this place is generally concerned with maximum performance in a role. For the latter, a 300%+ greater rate of parries represents approximately a 10-20% increase in the load healers must bear. That kind of disadvantage flies in the face of one of the two primary roles of a tank, survive.

Generally speaking the attitude was that without hitting the expertise cap DW tanking was ill-advised. Removing parry haste would obviously remove that issue, arguably the biggest one. That said there are other issues.

It is generally easier to upgrade a 2H weapon than two 1H weapons, particularly when it comes to tanking weapons. Depending on your guild's makeup and luck having a DW tank could be a significant impediment to progress, slowing other tanks from getting the tanking weapons they need. Unless you're filled to the brim with TG/Arms Warriors and Retribution Paladins it's likely that the preference will be to have DK tanks which use 2H weapons.

There is also the issue of the hit cap. Without any hit or expertise your white attacks will be missed, dodged, or parried nearly 50% of the time. That can result in some very bad RNG streaks. Over the course of a long fight one would expect the effect to even out, but at the start of a pull it's crucial to avoid that kind of inconsistency.

These issues aren't as crippling as the parry haste issue, but they remain significant hurdles that need to be justified by some as of yet unknown benefit that DW tanking brings over 2H tanking.

Nearly 50% of the time? That seems like a gross exaggeration, one that would become even less prevalent as you get more hit and expertise.

Regarding Killing Machine:

Unless someone is willing to actually check in-game or make a detailed spreadsheet or sim to further refine the work I did last Friday, KM is completely worthless in it's 5 Point form. It's sole saving grace is that it scales based on %s of damage so it might eventuallly scale past other flat-value talents; however, I checked outrageous AP, Weapon Damage, and Crit numbers and they all yielded a roughly 1.1% gain in overall damage assuming super-optimal conditions. I didn't even let Rune Strike proccing or not proccing it enter into the equation--I just assumed that it would, effectively, cause a Frost Strike crit to replace a frost strike swing at a rate equal to 50% of your melée crit chance.

The flaws in my method, which could hurt the overall value of KM, are as follows:
-KM could proc at a rate higher than 50% but have an internal CD
-Frost Strike may be a less optimal target for KM vs HB or IT
-My methodology was wrong*
-My math was wrong (rather possible, but unlikely as I just provided excel the formulas)
-I ignored magical resist and treated FS like an instant melée strike (I think hat magical resist/miss is harsher than melée though, so this is a mistake in KM's favor)
-Other

Anyway, I'm quite happy with my long term plan moving points from KM to Black Ice as the +Frost will not only always be active but do no worse as long as IT alone does more than 4% of my total damage .

-----
*Methodology:
Over a 4 minute timespan on a dummy, I measured the damage output of my character, noting the end percentages of Frost strike, oblit, melée, and 'other'. The %output of these abilities was roughly 15%, 30%, 30%, and 25% respectively, allowing me to make a spreadsheet where Melee, Oblit, and FS are properly modeled and 'other' is extrapolated. Setting some base stat values (2k ap, 12.5% crit, 17500 armor, 3% hit, 3% expertise, 9% target dodge & miss, and 15% target parry), I then ran the modified FS+KM, ignoring any issues with KM procs and timing and simply applying 100% of KM to FS. This resulted in an 8-9% increase in FS damage but only resulted in a 10-11 dps increase and a 1.1% overall dps increase.

I then tested changing crit to values between 5% and 25%, noting that the percentage increase remained roughly constant, hence my earlier remarks about it being totally worthless as a _5_ point talent yet being quite in line with a 1 point talent.

(and, yes, I varied AP, weapon, speed, hit, and expertise values as well)