How can 25 defense rating compete with 4% parry?

Update from Ghostcrawler:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Upcoming Death Knight Changes
post 137

GC posted again in that thread to confirm that it is skill and not rating.

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hmm i guess the GC update said it's def skill, that's pretty sweet. seems like this would buff IBF a lot, and i can gem for way more stam if i were to use it. right now i have a crap load of +16 def gems...

Well it won't buff IBF if you're regemming and staying at 540ish. IBF was said to be around 35% with 540 defense. What isn't known is how much it improves with more defense rating, and if it'll be worth using the Gargoyle runeforge even after defense cap.

I think you're wrong but only because raiders don't generally take Magic Suppression/AMZ. This might make it more attractive now but that's something altogether different.

The no cooldown on pestilence is fine and can be handy in some fights but I honestly don't feel that it's necessary to go to no cooldown. 5 second cooldown would be enough to allow us to spam it on stragglers to catch everything.

yea i'm pretty suprised they made it that good, i thought they were just going to throw in a "helper" enchant for people trying to gear up for naxx. this opens up a lot of nice gearing choices, i'll probably endup using this over swordshattering for now.

Well, let's quickly analyse how much +25 defense rune enchant would buff IBF.

25 defense is roughly 1% dodge, 1% parry, and 1% miss, or 3% avoidance. In comparison, swordshattering provides 4% parry, or 4% avoidance.

Given that icebound fortitude is 20% reduction at 400 defense, and 35% at 540 defense, and assuming a linear progression:
15% mitigation benefit / 140 defense = 0.10714% mitigation benefit to IBF per defense skill.

Therefore, with a 25 defense skill rune enchant, IBF will receive approximately 2.68% extra damage mitigation when its active (25 * 0.10714).


Now, given that gargoyle is roughly 3% passive mitigation + extra mitigation to IBF versus 4% passive mitigation for runeshattering, let's do a comparison assuming that IBF is used every cooldown.

IBF has a duration of 12 seconds if non frost spec, or 18 seconds if frost spec. Therefore, IBF is up 20% of the time if non frost spec, or 30% of the time if frost spec.

The total mitigation bonus added to the gargoyle rune over the course of an entire fight (assuming IBF is hit every cooldown), is an effective sustained mitigation bonus of about 0.536% (2.68% * 0.2) if non-frost, and an effective sustained avoidance bonus of about 0.804% if frost specced. If you have four piece tier 7 (+3 seconds IBF), these numbers increase to 0.67 and 0.938 percent respectively.


In summary:

Total avoidance benefit of gargoyle rune assuming IBF is used every cooldown:
Non-frost spec = 3.536% without 4 piece T7, and 3.67% with 4 piece T7.
Frost spec = 3.804% without 4 piece T6, and 3.938% with 4 piece T7.

The above results really make gargoyle an attractive rune to enchant if you have the 4 piece bonus of tier 7 and are specced frost, considering that the gargoyle rune provides an extra 2% stamina.

I will especially like having the 25 defense and 2% stamina runeforge and a tanking sigil being added. Also, from the sounds of BS nerf I am going back frost. I still do not think blood is going to be a tanking spec but it may be a tanking spec someday. I will also gain ~3k armor with the new Frost Presence in my current gear. I am extremely happy with these changes.

Does anyone know if maybe frost will be the lowest TPS spec with the changes to blood/unholy?

For comparison purposes in this thread, is Swordshattering affected by diminishin returns? I was under the impression that it was not (being a flat percentage increase).

The addition of the new rune seems like brilliant design on Blizzard's part: a very powerful enchant bridges the gap to swordshattering perfectly, yet doesn't always remain most powerful (due in part to diminishing returns).

That's correct, Swordshattering is not affected by diminishing returns. And eventually the new runeforge will be outstripped by it. In his response on the thread, Ghostcrawler said,

The thought is that it will help you gearing into Naxx but not as much past that. I only wonder if it could still be more valuable by allowing us to toss out the defense gems for straight stam (which would presumably scale with the 2% stam on the rune) or stam/dodge which has a lower DR rate than parry. Granted, the non-DR parry from swordshattering may possibly overcome that, I'm just not certain at this point.

The Corpse Explosion buff may be interesting for Tri-Spec, as most builds end up with a point floating in Unholy to reach the fifth tier. If you're not hit capped, it can go toward Virulence, but now it seems that it fits perfectly in Corpse Explosion.

4% parry should be 4% parry through and through. Same way that expertise talents are a flat %, and anticipation and frigid deathplate work.



Assuming IBF scales linear as the above formulas assume, it makes it almost a sure fire runeforge at any level of defense. Though, a parry here and there from Swordshatter does add to faster damage and threat, that's not the direct reason why anyone picks it.


Still, I wouldn't take Blizzard to make one Runeforge ultimately superior over another like that, so we'll have to see when it's placed on PTR.


edit: 25 defense over cap should be something like 2.6% avoid, not sure if that effects the formula at all by much.

Looks like we'll be saying goodbye to Unholy DK Tanks.

Time to respec Frost. /sigh

Isn't that exactly the type of thing Blizz is trying to avoid with these changes? Pigeonholing all tanks into one spec, and all DPS into one spec, I mean?

What in particular are you looking at that suddenly makes Frost that much more appealing to you than Unholy, which you seem to enjoy based on the tone of your post?

I don't think 25 defense skill is that overpowered. If you look at what a warrior gains in terms of his weapon slots, defense weapons and enchants come out to about 20 defense skill for them. Assuming that we dont gain even more defense from our new tanking sigils, it works out to be only slightly higher than what warriors get for their weapon slots.

IE)
[Red Sword of Courage]=38 defense rating
[Crygil's Discarded Plate Panel]=34 rating + [Item not found!]=20 rating
That works out to 92 defense rating, or 18 defense skill, and that's without a ranged weapon or naxx gear. Add in the defense gun and higher ilevel gear and you come fairly close to 20 defense skill from weapons.

7) Frost Presence -- bonus armor increased from 60 to 80% and magic damage reduction increased from 5 to 15%. We wanted to reduce the effectiveness of cooldowns but bring up base mitigation to reduce damage spikiness.

My frost presence button works while unholy spec, odd that yours doesn't

Unholy tanking will still be perfectly viable. It just won't be clearly superior to frost at high levels of avoidance.

Ewok was being sarcastic.

Truth be told, I was rather hoping that improving Blood's AOE meant a whirlwind type ability high in the tree at the rune cost of BB. High enough to benefit dual wield specs for those that enjoy them, with a damage range between Blood Strike and Heart Strike.

EDIT:

Assuming neither sigil is changed, how do you expect this change to alter the effectiveness of [Sigil of the Dark Rider] compared to [Sigil of Awareness]? Would Dark Rider not become superior for multi-target damage in a Blood spec, with Awareness being relegated to single-target?

So for tanking right now we have:

Blood:
-6% increased stam
-11 expertise
-15% less damage taken under 35% (unclear exactly how this works atm)
-"last stand" type ability-20% increased max health on 1 minute cooldown
-30% spell damage reduction chance equal to parry rating
-20% max health self heal (30 sec CD)
-12 seconds off AMS cooldown (33 second CD fully talented)

Frost:
-3% avoidance
-25% armor, 10% parry on cooldown (up 1/3 of the time)
-6 seconds longer IBF duration (allows IBF to be up 1/3 of the time)
-5 expertise
-Acclimation, which works out to be 150 resistance if the stack can be kept up (unreliable on non-sapphiron type fights)

Unholy
-2% stam
-20% damage reduction for anywhere between 1/6th the time to all the time, depending on avoidance. Usually up -around half the time with current gear
-5% less magic damage taken
-Complete Spell immunity when AMS is used-once every 45 seconds
-~15-20k spell damage absorbtion-2 minute cooldown
-5 expertise

I'm assuming all specs have:
-5% dodge
-15% armor
-10% parry
-Lichborne
-Imp icy touch