The way i see it is, if DW tanks are viable, then 2 handed tanks with BCB isn't an issue.

I understand the "risk", but in actual gameplay with current content, my own death hasn't even been close to being an issue. My healers don't go OOM, I don't die, heck, except for Patch, my health doesn't even dip much. I understand the reflexive "parry is bad", but, like all things, it's only bad if it's an actual threat.

As it is, it's something like 4% or so more damage. Eh, I like it.

My rotations is relatively simple and much like the one posted here on EJ, if not the exact rotation. The only thing different is that I do not use DnD on single targets at all. I find that breaking my rotation for an DnD is not worth it, imo.

IT-PS-BS-BS-SS_Runic Dump
SS-SS-SS-Runic Dump

The weapon I choose is because of the top end on it, and the fact that I haven't gotten ID yet.

I thought we dubbed BCB a bad talent for tanks near the beginning of this thread, since the talent hasn't changed I don't see why that would change.

This is more for the end game DK's fully geared but :

At what point should I switch from getting avoidance to threat generation, or am I pretty much topped off?

Right now I sit around 60-70% not getting hit by a boss. (Last night Patchwerk 75% of hatefulls never landed with 74% mitigation)
My threat generation is around 5k tps. (Give or take but average 25man tps in Maly/Naxx/Sarth)

Is that all I should expect? Or is there more for me to improve on?

Personally I have a feeling the only way I can alter the numbers would be switching my spec to Unholy or Blood. From reading these forums I get the feeling that with my gear level being as high as it is I could go probably drop some of the frost talents in favor of threat generating ones.

I've been searching this thread but can't find it: has anyone theorycrafted pawn/ep/equivalency point values for DK tanking?

That is a pretty weak argument against the talent. By that logic you should be looking for only 3.8 speed weapons because a 3.4 speed weapon will hit more often and cause a greater chance for a parry.

BCB adds additional TPS which is needed in an unholy build.

You can get away with BCB if you like, but if you're depending on it for threat then parryhasting is the least of your concerns. Lots of tanks outgear the possible consequences of grabbing BcB and probably would not notice any negative effects.

I plan on being on the competitive edge for Ulduar, and I don't consider BcB a necessary risk in terms of min/maxing for new content.

First I should have stated threat this way - I have never had a DPS pull anywhere near my threat (DW Warriors / Mages / Locks).

The gloves I heard mixed reviews on getting the %2 threat versus 20hit, your saying drop that and get the threat enchant?

16 Agil to cloak until I decide to pony up the gold for the titanweave.

Is the Gossamer going to give me any threat? I have it but the extra health but loss of cooldown and dodge seems a high price. When I ran the numbers I saw an increase in hits that far out-weighted the extra health, especially when getting hit by the 25-Man level bosses. 10-man / Dungeons makes sense though.

I will start looking at some re-gems.

Thank you for your input.

Yes, I'm saying that the 2% threat/10 parry to gloves is better.

I would personally use the Gossamer over the Charge just because I find that there isn't any reason to have more then 540 defense. I also don't find 3k HP for 15 seconds on a 3 minute CD to out-weight ~1.1k constant HP. I don't think that any of this current content besides Sarth 3D require any real min/maxing in the survivability section of tanking if you just gear yourself properly before jumping into the content so if you prefer the Charge then I'd use it but I still recommend using your sockets for threat or EH instead of defense.

Yeah I have a whole assortment of gear from the Heroic 5-Dungeons.

I like the cool down only because I use a macro for Pot / Cooldown / HerbSkill , its my ultimate I am gonna die button. It buys me that .5 second I need sometimes, often I find healers get used to me not getting hit. I wish they would make an epic version of that trinket. I would be all over it if they did.

I will have the badge bracers soon as Military / Mob drops have not provided me with any upgrades for my bracers those will get enchanted as soon as I get em.

I will be enchanting my gloves with the threat enchant today.

To Quote the FAQ thread about using the SG rune:
This is what the [Okuno, the person Griefknight is replying to] appears to have done. Are you disagreeing with the FAQ's advise?

Edit: I didn't mean the original poster in the thread, sorry for the confusion. I meant the original person Griefknight was replying to. I edited for clarity.

Personally I have tried over 15 specs starting with Unholy (Pre-Patch 3.0.8). All of them are effective at tanking. Key word is effective - by that I mean viable. Most raids have 2-3 tanks so filling that role can be different on different fights.

Unholy seems the best for buffing raids with valuable (Increased movement is worth its weight in gold imo) buffs. It has an increased effect on multiple mobs and one AoE pulls its can put out incredible damage.
Unholy seems to favor casters with its buffs (+13% Magic damage)
Second highest health buffs

Blood seems the best for single target and has highest health of the 3 specs. Also provides valuable buffs to melee that stack with other similar buffs. Highest expertise through talents. Very good survivability.

All the trees have their high points and low points. Its a matter of play style and personal opinion. Any good player can make any spec work(To that end I mean barring gear/computer/lag/broken arms).

Please this post is a general statement if I left anything out its not to favor any one tank spec over another.

Hope that helped with perspective.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with the FAQ. Be wary of reading an OP and just assuming they are correct. Consider this thread for example. The OP has never been updated as far as I know.

25 defense skill grants 1% to parry, dodge, miss, and block. We can ignore block. So really all you gain is 3% avoidance and 2% stamina.

I.E. 565 defense (from SG) grants you 2% stamina over 1% avoidance with 540 defense (and sword shattering).

How much is 1% avoidance worth if you have 40k life raid buffed? Assuming you have ~70% avoidance then 1% avoidance is worth about a 30th of your total health (since 30% of a boss attacks hit you). (1/30)40k health = 1.3k health.

How much life does SG give you? I suspect that you'd have about 2500 stamina. 2% of that is 50. Kings and frost presence increase it by 11% and multiplying by 10 to get health gives you an additional 550 health.

I just don't see how SG is worth it for anyone other than a new DK who just hit level 80 or maybe a sarth 3d tank who is trying to maximize his total health in any way possible to overcome magical breath attacks.

SG is worth it if you are not able to get to 540 from gear alone, allowing you to gem for straight stam instead of having to gem def. This gives me a much higher EH than if I took Swordshattering and had to gem/enchant for def. It also allows me to use some of those pieces of gear with lower def rating but lots of dodge or parry, increasing my overall avoidence in the process. I feel that I easily make up that 1% avoidance difference in with being able to take those items. That being said, my tank gear is a mixture of heroics, 10 man/25 man raid gear so it it easily possible that a fully decked out tank in full 25 man/Sarth 3D, etc gear would get a higher return out of Swordshattering. I do very much agree that for a newly 80 dk tank it is great - however its worth for those in mid-range gear cannot be understated.

I will preface my post by stating that my guild is small and casual, and so 10-man content is all we do. I felt similarly to you about SG vs. SS until some our casters began gearing-up and threat became somewhat sensitive. I had RS macro'd to all my strikes, and was zealous about maintaining nearly optimal rotations, but found that the relative lack of hit/expertise on 10-man gear was handicapping my threat gen. While losing the 3% parry hurt, I have noticed that the gemming options that the rune change enabled have allowed me to greatly augment my threat by adding expertise and hit gems to my gear. I apologize for my evidence being purely anecdotal, as we only recently began running WWS logs, but this change has been very noticeable for me. As GC said when he announced the rune, I assume that once people begin gearing-up in T8 content, the SG rune will probably be much less attractive and we will move onto SS.

One realy isn't better than the other I feel. People should just know the advantage and disadvantage of both enchants and go for the one they feel they want. 1% avoidance or 2% more stamina. I like where my stamina is with the 2% increase, and will probably switch when I get a little more stamina from raid drops. The diffrence between the enchants isn't that big that it realy matters too much.

As for people discussing weather dnd should be used in solo rotations as an opener or not. Since people are reporting diffrent results with this there has to be some more factors to this. I am neither expertise soft cap'ed nor (by a few points) hit cap'ed and I think dnd is one of my greatest agro gains. Maybe people who have both cap'ed will have an easier time getting more threat from the other skills that rely on these stats, than using dnd?

In my experience, a significant, often overlooked detail in effectiveness is purely how trigger-happy your raid is. I've been in raids where everyone is a little cautious, and waits a second or two to begin blasting away, and the tank does fine regardless of his opening rotation.

In other raids, everyone's trigger happy and spells are in the air before the first target's even been hit. Or there's some warlock blasting away on the wrong target, which hasn't been hit much by the tank(s) yet.

The raid being way too trigger happy seems to cause aggro loss more often than any alteration of opening rotation. This is especially true when the server shits a brick and lags the tank by a second, and suddenly there's some dps guy way in the lead on threat and getting explodinated.

If BCB's 30% (max) proc rate creates unthinkable extra parries by bosses, then Paladin and Warrior tanks are completely worthless and the worst tanks to bring to any boss. Considering that almost all of them (at least the smart ones) use 1.6-1.8 speed weapons (or thereabout). In other words, they attack twice as often as most of us do, which means they get parried twice as often. This is far worse than getting parried 30% more often from BCB.

Warriors and Paladins don't have any greater access to Expertise (in fact, I can't find any sword/shield combination that grants anything close to my Inevitable Defeat's expertise rating), they are getting parried an equal amount per attack as we are.

Relying on the first post of this thread is probably the dumbest thing you could do. It is replete with horribly outdated information, and hasn't been updated in 3 months. It contains out-and-out bad information. For example: "In general, any talents that are chance on auto-attack should be avoided if better options are available. This is due to the fact that many white-hits end up being converted to Rune Strikes, which can not proc these talents." This is patently false. Runestrike procs both Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blade. Check your WWS/WMO and add up the number of Necrosis hits vs. the number of non-runestrike melee attacks. You'll see they don't add up, but if you add in Runestrikes, they do.

Information posted at the beginning of this thread was when the class was new and none of us really knew as much as we do now. It's outdated and often wrong.

I have 2 points in BCB (do the math based on your Patchwerk off-tanking WWS/WMO -- you'll see that 1 point of BCB contributes more to your damage than 1 point of Outbreak for single target tanking). Parry hasting is not a concern -- on most early-Naxx 25 fights I take 1k damage per second main-tanking.

I have serious threat concerns as Unholy on several encounters. Malygos25 hits so slowly, and does so much of his damage as magic damage, that I cannot runestrike enough to build my usual 6-7k TPS -- I usually struggle to pull 4k TPS on that fight. That is insufficient, considering we have hunters, mages, and warlocks that, on patchwerk and without the benefit of a 50% damage buff, are pulling 5-6k dps. On Kel'Thuzzad, his frequent aggro dump post-Mind Controls creates threat issues. Sapphiron poses many of the same problems as Malygos -- a slow hitting boss that mostly does magic damage, and one that I cannot effectively dps while he's in the air (but warlock and other dots keep ticking). So yes, I will take any extra damage procs that I can to build threat, including 2 points in BCB.

Threat is a concern to me on many fights. If I weren't so wed to Unholy, I would change my spec. As it is, we simply have different tanks with different strengths tank different encounters. When they are not available, I will be keeping my 2 points in BCB to ensure that I can at least pump out the best threat I can.

I'd like to also add that the idea of regemming for stamina instead of defense is not effective of a use for SG either. I realized that the exchange was just not enough. Let us look at it another way.

Suppose you plan on regearing so that your defense stays at 540 defense. In exchange you will drop defense gems for stamina gems. I'm going to make the assumption that the value of the gems are what defines equality.

25 defense skill (@ 4.92 defense rating per skill) = 123 defense rating

123 defense rating (@ 16 defense rating per gem slot) = 7.6875 gem slots

7.6875 gem slots (@ 24 sta per stamina gem) = 184.5 stamina

184.5 stamina x 1.1 (kings) x (1.1 frost presence) x (10 health/sta) = 2232.45 health

Don't forget the 2% stamina (~500 health) giving a grand total net increase of about 2.7k health

Now, what would your raid life have to be for equality with 4% parry? Consider a total net avoidance of about 70%. 1% avoidance is still worth about (1/30) of your total life.

4*(1/30)*total_life = 2700, or total_health = 20250 or 20.25k health.

I.E. if your buffed health is greater than this value, you still benefit more from swordshattering. You would have to be a brand new level 80 DK (or be completely unable to get 540 defense without SG) for SG to be worth it.

I just don't see the value of SG outside of sarth 3d or brand new level 80 DK. Go ahead and use it and smile when your life is a little higher. But your survivability is worse for physical damage.

*Edit* I suppose I can see the value in regemming for hit/expertise assuming you don't need 4% avoidance. I have yet to see this problem though. Most of the times I have had threat problems was when frost presence was bugged or when I would try an inferior talent tank spec. *shrug*

When I used to tank as Unholy prepatch, one DnD would generate on average the threat of 3-3½ Scourge Strikes before considering SS's greater reliance on hit and expertise. Back then I found not being able to use DnD for some reason (people complaining not being able to see aoe effects for example) always caused my threat generation to suffer. The Corpse Fever change hurt it's aggro generation a lot, but you can get most of it back with the glyph. As frost DnD is definitely not worth using on single target rotation because it does less damage and your alternative abilities are more powerful.

One thing to consider with DnD is that it gets crazy good scaling. With Impurity it will get a 59.375% attack power modifier over it's 10 ticks, which is a lot bigger than any other Death Knight ability even before considering the extra 90% threat it generates. I have a prepatch Patchwerk wws with DnD ticking on average for 727 damage. That's almost 29k threat from one ability, while in comparison my Scourge Strikes were hitting for 2300 and critting for 6000.

Regarding the whole threat generation thing, I've found 7-8k was perfectly reasonable as Unholy prepatch. Here's a few examples:

Patchwerk - 3436dps with 11% DnD damage -> 7816TPS (before considering extra threat from hatefuls)
Loatheb - 3139dps with 8% DnD damage -> 6965TPS (no spore buffs)
Faerlina - 3027dps with 8% DnD damage -> 6700TPS (pet removed from dps, no aoe damage done)
Maexxna - 3367dps with 10% DnD damage -> 7596TPS (pet removed, aoe damage to spiderlings removed)

These are all with around 120 hit rating and 26 expertise. Had I actually gemmed for threat I'm sure I could have been pushing 8k TPS on the non Patchwerk fights too. I was also missing the 10% ap buff on Patchwerk since we had no one in the raid to give it. Blessing of Sanctuary does amazing things for threat generation as any spec. If you've never had it, you don't know what you are missing. I've found Maexxna, Faerlina and Loatheb to be the best fights for comparing threat generation. Other fights have gimmicks, fight interruptions or adds to confuse the issue from just examining a wws.

Frost seems even better than prepatch unholy from my first impressions. Even unexperienced with Frost and doing sloppy rotations I'm doing comparable threat to what I was doing before the patch as Unholy.

You might as well resign to the idea that this topic is going to be rediscussed frequently (as with any other tanking topic) in this thread because the OP doesn't update his post. There is no way someone has the time to dig through 100 pages and analyze varying view points (which often include faulty math that the poster later recognizes).

The only way to fix this problem is to redo the tank thread completely. Someone should strip out the best information here and post it and have this thread deleted. That's my $0.02 worth.

You can complain all you want about the topics being asked again and again but the means for readers to ascertain information is antiquated and inefficient. It's easier for them to reask the questions. As long as people are willing to post the answers then why complain? It isn't like this thread is aiming for efficiency anyways.