I disagree. My concern is with aggro. Toughness, Frigid Dreadplate, Lichborne, and Blade Barrier still form a solid backbone of tanking talents and is still the majority of the survivability talents we even have. However, with the loss of the larger 2-handed instant melee specials, my thoughts are regarding whether or not Howling Blast can be made "big" enough to make up for the loss along with the difference in white damage. Losing 40+ percent crit chance Obliterates and having BS/PS shrink a noteworthy amount is a rather big deal with regards to aggro.

As a 3pt talent GoG is a solid increase in damage/threat for HB while also providing you with 6 more seconds of IBF and points in dark conviction would increase KM procs, all helping towards threat.

In the end we put 5pts into KM, crit is what KM requires, 25% from your ap to boost non critting HB/IT is a waste of 5 points.

Also where is your extra ap coming from? Without bladed armor your ap is very low.

All our abilities scale with AP don't it? Wouldn't bladed armor be the better choice since there are boosts coming from many sources (UA, +armor trinkets, frost presence, protection aura?)

As for the ap bonus from bladed armor not updating fast enough that sounds a bug or maybe your ap is increased but just takes longer to show up.

The issue with GoG is that it means 43 points have been put into Frost, leaving an insufficient number for the other talents mentioned.

That is your opinion. Without math to back it up, don't expect it to sway me. Impurity is strong for HB because of the multiple stacking percentage buffs. We're already taking an ability that does 280 base damage and managing to make it reach 4-6k and higher. A difference of 10% versus 12.5% is a big deal when it happens before another 10%, 10%, 30%, 200% and possibly 245% after that.

Tanks don't exist in a vaccuum. The AP listed on my armory is without a presence, so it is already short a few hundred. Then boosted with Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Mark of the Wild, Horn of Winter, etc. As I stated earlier in the thread, aggro is something I am concerned about with switching to dual-wield, so when I post, expect that to be a focus.

It has a delay. You can test it. Stay in Frost Presence. Test your spells. Then shift to Blood Presence. For 15-20s, you will have the damage from the bonus attack power from Frost Presence's armor plus Blood Presence's multiplier.

Just done a H UK run to test my spec out.

I had zero aggro issues thanks to KM procing alot, compared to another spec I tried before with impurity HB does pretty much the same if not more damage.

I also get boosts from all the buffs you listed. Looking at your armory I have around the same AP as you when I'm in unholy aura, and your still using 2H. Your crit is very low which would make taking KM useless, I'm not saying you must take dark conviction but such low crit just doesn't make sense putting 5 points in KM.

To sacrifice UA and GoG means you lower your survivability. If Blizzard fixed/changed the AP delay it makes bladed armor even more valuable.

Again, the delay from changing a presence sounds like something not intended.

Having tested my 10/54/7 build tonight in some heroics I can say that the damage and thereby threat is very good. Sporting only BoK and HoW I still "won"dps/held good threat in two different setups in four instances. This obviously is in no way proof that it provides enough threat to MT in 25man or w/e but it did give me an indication that there probably won't be any problems once you get all the other sweet buffs, foremost 5% crit.

When my gear is better I can start to leave som high defense gear behind I will try to replace it with str/sta/crit/exp gear to provide better threat.

Another nice thing for me atleast is that the build produces very good DPS in Blood Presence/DPS gear. I am fairly certain I will top the damage meter with this spec in my guilds weekly 10man naxx. For us casuals, who still like to opt gear/spec etc, that is a bonus=) atleast until dual-spec arrives.

Wouldn't the delay average out? For all the time you don't get the benefits, you'll also statistically have an equal amount of time with AP that you shouldn't because UA has already worn off but it hasn't updated.

I've just been testing the AP update delay on Bladed Armour for the last 5 minutes or so on the PTR (to see if it's been fixed more than anything). The update frequency is almost exactly 30 seconds.

Easy to test:
Open the Blizzard stopwatch timer.
Start in frost presence. Check AP.
Switch to blood presence. Check AP, wait for it to update - as soon as it updates, hit start on the stopwatch and switch to frost presence.
Wait for it to update, check the timer on the stopwatch.

I did this about 10 times checking back and forth between frost and blood, and every 30 seconds it would change my AP. This would mean that you have a fair chance to not have Bladed Armour update while UA is active, but quite a good chance for it to update and give you 30 seconds of increased AP. If you can manage to work out the timer on this (switching presences pre-boss pull or even at the beginning of the instance to start a timer, which you can then refer to at any time to work out when use of UA would be best), then you should be able to use UA every cooldown and always have it give the +AP for 30 seconds. Same goes for trinkets with a 2 minute cooldown (such as the [Seal of the Pantheon]).

I assume the update frequency is to reduce load on the server more than anything.

Just a friendly reminder for all the people popping in to "help" the thread by saying "we held aggro with <said> spec!" - could you *please* post TPS results for averages. That's what this thread boils down to - how much TPS does DW Tank specs actually out put.

Now, back to the fun.

Impurity - it's a wonderful talent but there's too many "filler" I need to get. Now, with 3k AP we're receiving an additional 750 (spell?) damage...which is amazing. This is what it looked like: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000

Epidemic may not be as wonderful as we originally thought, plus, with a Frost build it only effects FF seeing as our rotation is starting to leave out PS.

Necrosis...that's some thing I'm waiting judgment on until I get factual numbers. In theory it'll be nice. But then comes SoD (which is amazing for my repair bill) but holds no real factor over other talents we have to pass up.

BCB is filler that increases our Parry Gibbing and is only effected by 1 disease. So, for those talents what did we pass up?

Bladed Armor.
BotN which enables an additional HB every other rotation, with the effect still persisting with Pest - it's a very nice talent for AoE pulls (which is the entire game so far.)
GoG. People are up in arms about this. Increased Crit for 2 moves used constantly by +45% and an extra 6 seconds of mitigation - I'll wait for numbers on this, too.
Tundra Stalker - Exp which we won't need as much with the Frost rotation and increased 10% dmg which makes HB/FS even larger. (IT, too, but it's not a truck.)

Not taking Bladed Armor with Impurity is a large issue seeing as it's roughly 500AP for us. I, for the life of me, can't find a solid spec that has Impurity in it while still grabbing FS..this is the closet I can figure: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=000000000000

Which leads back to the passing of BotN and BA - missing that HB starts defeating the purpose of grabbing Impurity (Yes, it will effect 2 HB in a row but that 3rd HB...maybe I'm being greedy).

I'm also seeing a mindset of pushing for TPS while mitigation comes second or even third in people's mind. We can't forget about our healers - we don't want them to hate us even more. GoG is very nice for *that* reason and adding in +Crit dmg.

H UK run showing details for HB, buffs were horns and spell power totem. Not the best numbers as it was just a quick run testing the spec out so I didn't wait for KM procs for alot of trash, but the damage HB does when it crits is more than enough to hold aggro.

With horns up I have 16.XX% crit and KM procs come often.

When I was DPS specced Necrosis was already doing a very low overall percentage of damage, I don't see how its justified for a 5pt talent.

I also agree with the whole mindset about TPS over mitigation, what good is our TPS when we die? Sacrificing all those mitigation talents that ALSO boost AP for filler talents just to get to impurity just doesn't seem worthwhile.

Is there a good way to measure threat outside of dungeons? (some kind of target dummy, just for threat?

---
Some math regarding FS vs. DC:

According to [1] the threat values of FS and DC are identical to their damage. DC has an attack power coefficient (APC) of 0.15 according to [2].

Untalented, this means:
FS damage: 60% weapon damage + 150
DC damage: 443 + (AP x 0.15)

Impurity increases the DC APC to ~0.19 (1.25*0.15). Morbidity boosts DC by 15%.
FS gets a bonus damage of 57.3% from Glacier Rot, Black Ice and Tundra Stalker.
Neither FS nor DC can be dodged, parried or blocked. In 3.0.8, FS will consume less RP (if glyphed).

Looking at how DC and FS scale with AP, I came up with this plot:


In case I haven't missed any bonus modifiers, FS seems pretty much A LOT better than DC. This makes reaching Impurity by giving up FS even more questionable.



[1]: Death Knight Threat Values
[2]: DK Attack Power Coefficients

Instead of trying to theorycraft about DW tanking, has anyone actually had success tanking all of Naxx 25 or Malygos as a DW tank? Is it even realistic to discuss it at this point and time?

Heroics are one thing. Raids where some people are critting for 20k and you're not are another.