I disagree, stacking defense for IBF is useless since its a cooldown. I can almost imagine stacking defense for a passive talent that scales with defense, lets say WotN scaled 2.5% for every 5 defense, that may be worth something looking into but a CD that lasts 12-21 seconds based on your spec/gear is not worth stacking defense towards. I don't think anyone would even be redundant enough to try stacking defense at this point in progression. I also don't think anyone is "healthy" on everything, I know for a fact there are people in full 25man Naxxramas gear who could work on a few stats and if you truly are hit capped, expertise capped, at X unbuffed health, and you have all the other perks I'd imagine you would still be able to go for dodge/stam or straight dodge gems which would provide more then pure defense gems (for example).

Thats the great thing about opinions we are all entitled to them. You may try reading back through some posts to see the benefits. Each to their own I guess. You can reach over 570 def pretty easy and still keep dodge / parry in the 20s.
I think I maybe have 1 def gem and I'm at 565 or so thats without the proc from the sigil which is pretty much up 100%

A 1 min cooldown for a spell that lasts 15 sec and reduces ALL dmg by 20% x def modifier is pretty huge IMO plus glyphed it doesnt even have a cost to cast. Should you sacrifice stam / dodge for more def? Probably not, but its not a waste by any means. If I recall defense doesnt suffer from diminished returns either unlike the others.

edited to add info

The World of Warcraft Armory

I specced into 51 point talent in frost for kiting purposed (Gluth Primarly). And I am taking the point out of BoftN and putting it into IR AoE pulls. It was just a test.

Enchants are being farmed - I will not enchant bracers as I am getting Heroic Badge bracers.
Boots with Icewalker or Stam.

IBF is used when you know your gonna take spike damage. Dragon Breathe attacks/packs of 15 mobs where your back is exposed as you quickly kite/Malygos breath after falling.

I guess for my purposes High Defense allows you more liberties in your gear, but stacking for the sake of stacking I would lean more towards even distribution of stats.

Know as far as I know 540 defense = 50% damage reduction or is this not the case? Does it suffer from penalties over the 540 mark?

Defense is a pretty close second behind dodge for pure avoidance. It also spreads the stats around for you, and has the bonus of increasing IBF's effectiveness. There is certainly nothing wrong with stacking defense, though from a passive avoidance perspective alone, it's better to grab dodge.

At 540 you can no longer be hit with a crit, thats the main reason we get to that point.

Pure numbers 540 defense gives you 5.6% to dodge and parry
If you go upto 564 defense gives you 6.56% to dodge and parry

24 def gives you 1% to both

573 parry is 11.65%
614 parry is 12%

so another 41 parry is not even 0.5 %

406 dodge is 10.32%
359 dodge is 9.12%

47 dodge is 1.2%

If I'm reading it right pound for pound def > dodge and parry

This is complete gibberish.

You are confusing defense rating and defense skill. Defense is not better than dodge, even in a vacuum starting at 0 rating of everything dodge is better. The way diminishing returns works, the more of something you have the worse it gets. A regular gear set will have far far more defense than dodge. Not to mention that defense uses miss and parry which both diminish faster than dodge. While defense starts close to dodge, in a real gear set it isn't close.

The math has already been done. Stack dodge until >800 dodge rating, then you can think about stacking something else (i.e. defense - parry will never, ever, be better) if you are attempting to maximize avoidance.

If you want to balance the effect that defense has on IBF, great. I'm sure one can make an argument for that.

EDIT: I found my previous post with supporting spreadsheet.

It isn't worth making theoretical statements like parry can be better than dodge if you have lots of dodge. In reality every dk in the world probably has more parry rating than they do dodge, let alone the massive dodge rating advantage you would have to have before parry is better.

In 99.999% of cases it will be dodge > defense > parry.

It may be a more realistic possibility for warriors/paladins since they don't have 250+ parry rating from their strength, but it isn't for us.

Edit ... you have a few decimal typo's there.

I believe the she used commas instead of decimal, which makes 122.9625 defense rating = 25 defense skill. I would imagine the 40.9875 defense rating equals 1% avoidance means 8.333 defense skill equals 1% avoidance, because 8.333 defense skill is roughly .333 dodge/miss/parry.

It's right, it's 1% total avoidance(so about 0.33% dodge/parry/miss).

Edit: oh and yeah I guess commas, depends on the country you do math in ^^.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but +defense and +dodge are very close for DK at any reasonable gear level. When gemming, I would imagine that the two stats are close enough to simply go for the socket bonus when choosing between the two.

For gear choices, I can't think of too many options where you have to choose between +defense or +dodge. Generally it's either +parry or +offensive stats which are traded for +dodge, not +defense.

Yep

2.4 = 2,4

In my country we use commas. Even though I try to stick to the "dot" some comma sometimes run wild

The real problem is that someone see 10,000 and reads 10k, which is source for many misunderstanding when I lose control over the comma/dot thing (and the reason why I try to use dots instead of commas). Why do you need to mark it anyway? :/

Of course you can't ignore gem bonuses, etc. Consider, though, in my current gear a Dodge Gem gives me .306% avoidance, and a Defense Gem only .240%, or a difference of 3.5 dodge, or 4.4 parry rating worth. Your socket bonus would have to be better than that (not that difficult) to merit using the inferior gem. At the very least, it should make you use a dodge/defense gem (I think these exist...) rather than a pure defense gem. Or, it should convince you to put JC gems in Yellow slots instead of red slots. So, you do often get to choose between Dodge and Defense after all.

The point though, is to convince people to stop asserting things like, "I feel as though Defense must be better because it spreads out your avoidance," without having any theory to back it up.

Hellstrum, Looking at your spec and rotation is there any reason you are taking Death Rune Mastery? The only instance that it seems to be useful is for doing consecutive Pestilence/BB on AOE pulls and maybe to have a Blood rune for Vamp Blood. Just curious =P

Reworked numbers to prove a point...

573 / 116.5= 4.918 (def) these are my numbers divided

406 /10.32 = 39.34 (dodge) these are my numbers divided


the numbers are purely specific to 2 individual toons and compared, just not laid out in the normal format. Far from gibberish. Maybe not explained well by me though...

Ninja the frost rotation lol

The reason I ask about DRM is because I would like to try blood, but I am finding it hard to get points. I am also debating Sudden Doom's use in a tank spec.

Yeah, I'm going to start reading the Frost thread now. /sigh

Sudden Doom is near worthless since I rarely have a spare CD to use DC. Some times it works out where I have two DCs back-to-back but those are few and far in between. My goal is to always have ~50 RP for AMS and a RS if procs.

Plus, where are you going to get the points?

~26 to be Dodge capped.

Okay, tested 43/0/28 ... 10+3 down Was a total joke to tank. Didn't think the spec would work anywhere near as well as it did.

Has anyone run 23/45/3 (or 23/44/4) after the patch? I'd like to get some numbers on it's performance after trying out Blood last reset I want to give Frost another go. With 32 RP/FS how did you find your threat? My main concern with builds has always been threat, so I'm on a crusade to find the spec that does the most. It just makes sense as I literally take almost no damage at all on virtually every boss...

Also, I was wondering if we could apply the 21/50 reasoning to a tanking spec. They DPS via this rotation:

OB OB BS BS [Frost Strikes here]
IT IT IT IT IT IT

This would be using the Icy Touch sigil. I know not having Tundra Stalker will cut down a lot on the threat of that rotation, so it'll probably have to be in a more traditional spec that includes TS. Thoughts?

Well my threat is really high usually as frost, as in, I've never lost aggro to anyone yet but those crazy arcane mages when they decide to go full burn(and by this I don't mean the usual pop your cooldowns, but more like spend 20k mana in 10secs spamming the most inneficient shit ever and pushing 20k burst DPS).

First, you have options when moving/boss is moving. Death coil is nice, but let's be honest, it's total crap threat wise when a boss isn't in melee range, better than nothing but still. In comparison as frost you can just throw howling blasts, and they hit for almost as much as obliterates(~5k crits, crit rate is through the roof due to KM procs). 2k ITs also help, and a Deathchilled HB on pull is always nice for initial threat when positionning the boss or what not and your DPS are trigger happy.

Then you can glyph for 3 threat glyph. The common IT glyph, the OB glyph and the FS glyph. I've unglyphed UA(or will, forgot if I actually did it before raiding) because it's overkill if you have a priest or a shaman healing you, which is pretty often in my guild. FS is much better than DC as a dump, even unglyphed, so glyphed it's obviously much better. In a usual rotation, only IT can eat KM, which means all the FS you do will crit almost. Obviously depends on the fight, don't always have RP to FS, but for a guaranteed 5k crit that doesn't hit your next autoattack, you can make room sometimes. The basic rotation is simple and low maintenance, and as far as I'm concerned, you can break it at any point and still not lose much threat at all. In fact, besides glyphed scourge strike unholy when it procs, I think it's the easiest rotation.

I find it very versatile and easy, which is why I liked it for trash clearing and stuff. I can chain pull without an issue and people can just press AEs without worrying about getting aggro, and other tanks can relax/focus on getting adds. With that said, for a pure boss fight, assuming you don't need blood defensive tools, I'd say which will give ou the highest threat will depend on the fight still. A pure tank and spank, I could see blood pulling ahead(with full debuffs/buffs). A fight where you have to pick up stuff, where the boss moves around, where the boss has insanely high armor or in a not very well balanced 10man, I'd say frost is ahead. It's a more well rounded spec for your everyday tanking, and it's less reliant on external help to do its job. It's also total shit for magic mitigation, so yeah, it's definitely not perfect ^^.

Most of my tests are using a traditional frost build though, not the votw builds, it seems to me you're wasting too many points to get votw, and if you actually need the stam, you might as well make a full stam build(blood/unholy stuff). The 6IT build seems awfully complicated for tanking too, mostly because it eats so many GCDs to maintain.

Edit: Also don't the 6xIT rotations use unholy aura to DPS with? I haven't read all of the frost DPS thread, I sometimes read a few posts and see what's the new cool stuff, but it seems the last few posts use unholy aura for their various 6xIT rotations to be able to fit the FS in too.

With the minimum 540 defense gear, due to diminishing returns, dodge rating is a better statistic to stack than defense rating. You will gain more %total avoidance per dodge rating than you will gain per defense rating.

Parry is the worst of the three statistics with parry having the worst diminishing returns curve and requiring 49.2 parry rating per 1% avoidance.

At 540 defense: dodge > defense > parry

That said, I use the parry trinket from Sapphiron because the differences between Medal of Valor dodge trinket are nominal at my gear level and because I like to runestrike more and spell deflect more often (which I hopefully is no longer bugged).