Curious about something in reguards to the Threat generated by Death Strike Vs Obliterate now that we are getting extra healing/damage and health in ICC.

Obliterate increases with damage, no brainer that one.

But am curious as to see how Death strike will increase in threat per strike now that it will increase in 1st the damage it does, and 2nd in the amount of health it returns. (The return of health I refer to now larger health pools with the ICC buff so the % return increasing.) And finaly; if the last part of the buff, if DS increase's in healing with the ICC buff. I have tried to look at this myself at lengh using parses on world of logg's etc. But unfortunatly lack the prowess to look/explain this in details that make sense to anyone else other than myself.

As such, and the reason for my post and subsiquent question, Is there or with the increasing buff in ICC, will there be a point where Death strike will overtake obliterate in terms of threat generated?

Remember, DS in Blood and Unholy specs returns 15% health, while Frost only generates 10%. DS also has 0% chance to proc Rime, and is naturally 15% lower crit rate. Guile of Gorefiend also does not affect it, making it one of the worst candidates for your UF runes. In threat terms, DS is pathetic as Frost, even if you're healed for the full amount, which you won't be.

Yes, can you post this spec please? I've been digging around in the thread a little bit and can't find an IIT spec that someone hasn't discouraged. I was playing around in Rawr and it's telling me that 12/54/5 is better in terms of both mitigation and threat than the standard SoB DW spec (12/52/7 as in the OP), regardless of the presence/absence of raid buffs and/or another source of melee haste. While I don't trust Rawr entirely, it's maintenance today and I was wondering if I should spend the 50g to respec my DK for raid tonight.

I dont think I explained myself correctly so you are not understanding what I was getting at, My faliure to be more exact in my question I must admit, so I appologise for that. Not able to write a more compleate response at the moment due to being stuck at work. But will post a more detailed example of what I mean later this evening. In short though, if those conditions of Rime and 15% higher crit rate did not aply to obliterate due to say, taking a spec as my own, then at what point, if any; would DS overtake.

But as I said, more compleate explanation of my question later.

/Edited

Just wanted to add that some of the reasoning behind this is due to the Rime nerf with no more double chance to proc rime with MH+OF being treat as one hit now not seperate, so a straight 15% not the 27%ish chance we have had previously. (I think that 27% is correct, sorry if not, doing from memory)

You're running a non-Rime frost DW spec, with 2/5 Bladed Armor, and no Annihilation. Your spec is missing all the things that make OB such excellent value for threat, and has literally nothing of the talents that make DS any good.

Even accounting for the Rime nerf it is unlikely DS will overtake OB. The only valid use of DS in a FR setup I've seen was with a T10 3/3 Morbidity DnD spec, where you'd replace OB with DS simply because the OB-per-second was so low and the talent starvation so bad it was a negligible difference. Plus GoOB was out of the question.

The Rime nerf is particularly bad news for GoHB specs. Combined with the threat increase of IT, it makes GoHB specs doubly pointless: Firstly, Rime won't happen nearly often enough to avoid having to refresh manually, and secondly, why nerf your TPS by skipping IT?

I'd suggest ignoring the Rime nerf and moving to a 2-disease frost spec without GoHB or GoD and put Frost-GoHB-DS specs aside.

At the risk of giving unwanted criticism, I'd also advise speccing out of Ravenous Dead, which is extremely bad for TPS, speccing into the last point of BA, which is one of our best TPS talents, and not wearing GoDnD without Morbidity. Why are you wasting a glyph slot on a spell you never cast? With 30s DnD you're getting exceptionally bad mileage from that glyph.

Unless I'm mistaken, single disease/GoHB frost should still have appeal for aoe tanking. It frees blood runes for blood boil (instead of pest) and IT's increased threat won't affect most of the targets in a pull. I'd still carry the glyphs in my bags. Not like there are a ton of appealing alternatives vying for that third slot anyway.

Because AoE threat is such a problem, and adding FF to HB will solve it.

If AoE TPS is a problem, a tiny thing like GoHB will not solve it. By now everyone and their dog has 2/5 T10. Glyph DnD and AFK on AoE TPS like a champion.

Is it worthwhile to take 1 point from bladed armor to get 5/5 KM? With the new IT change, the threat is through the roof when it is used.

Well, both BA and KM are TPS talents. If TPS is through the roof, do you really care? Perhaps we're better off speccing into Virulence to avoid missing ITs.

Alright, I'm bringing up IIT within a DW tank spec again, because I think that the new patch changes make it worth another look.

Strictly from playing around in Rawr.TankDK and anecdotal evidence, I find the IIT spec I posted previously (this) to be better than the OP's 12/54/7.

However, further poking around in Rawr tells me that I should drop 2 points in Black Ice and put them into Killing Machine, like this.

So, two questions:

1) Is the new IIT worth spec'ing for?
2) Assuming the answer to 1) is yes, should I fill out KM, Black Ice, or perhaps put points in other talents, such as Scent of Blood or Epidemic?

With Endless Winter (EW) now giving 2/4% bonus to str, how valuable has DK frost tanking become. I am going to use my character as a basis, I need to say this is mostly an alt and have only cleared the first wing of ICC normal, resulting in a major gear difference than most of you.

So assuming that you only have 100 str without EW you will have a parry rating from the str of 25 or .54% parry. now assuming you take 2/2 EW it will bost your total str to 104 giving you a total of 1 extra parry rating or an extra .0217% to parry. so if you just take that to 1000 str you will have a parry rating of 250 or 5.434% parry un talented and talented you will have 5.652% parry a bonus of ~.218%

As you see this str bonus only gets better with the more str you have at 2000 str its about a .5% difference with the talent

I was testing DW spec my GS is only about 5300 and i run just shy of 11% hit and running 21 exper. On a ST boss fight steady tps was between 6k and 9k with a peak threat of 12k. The rotation i was using was
IT>PS>OB>BS>BS>IT>PS>OB>IT>IT (RPDUMP). I noticed a few thing the first being i almost always had a RS waiting to be used (taking full advantege of a 27% parry). The second being i was never starved for RP and while i almost never did a dump BC my runes were ready if I had a KM proc i could FS right away and not worry about losing my rotation.

Because my gear is not optimal I do use Victor's Call trink to get me to 21 expertise so my actual HP is only about 37k.
I think I will be DW frost tanking in the future.

I posted this also in the endgame tanking thread but i feel it is better suited for here. And my Question is is EW 2/2 worth the avoidence and increase to TPS? I am running an IIT spec (i dont know how to link)

Too many players wondering about Endless Winter: The talent is a fluke. We've had the biggest buff to TPS generation since 3.0 this patch in IT threatbuff and in the only tanking spec that is truly talent starved you're looking for ways to spec into 2% str. That's +40str per talent. You're gaining about 195 AP per talent from Bladed Armor, which is twice as much, and that +40str is only worth 11parry with raidbuffs.

KM directly influences game mechanics, so does CotG. Black Ice gains more value the more IT you use in your tanking. Endless Winter is simply a bad filler at a point in a talent tree which is extremely starved. Ignore it. Using UA on the pull, if you have threat trouble with two IT you're probably in the wrong presence.

Pint already noted the relative difference between BA and EW for tanks, and merely to reemphasize EW is not a tanking threat talent in any real way. You will never need EW to get further down the tree whether or not you choose IIT, and so those are for optional points. The talent actually scales under BA in DPS gear, and the difference is far more significant in tanking gear with more budget spent on armor, and with toughness and frost presence factored this is no contest.

Using the Cataclysmic Chestguard, an item most tanks will want to get, we have 3817 Armor with 123 Str, and per point this equates to 21.2 AP with BA and 2.46 Str with EW. Using the Blightborne Warplate with less item budget on armor with 2641 Armor and identical Strength, this is 14.67 AP which is still significantly more. AP gained with BA using Frost Presence with Cataclysmic Chestguard is 12.7, and toughness adds 2.12, so depending on the when WoW rounds the calculation (each step or end result) you can have 35 AP which needs just beyond 17 Str requiring which needs 850 Str to be equivalent, or a mere 350 Str on DPS gear.

Valid and well made point about Ravenous dead, quite unsure what I was thinking about at the time. And yes, I know I take endless winter, but this is becuase I value the "free" interupt rather than the strengh and took it previously. However I do like the D&D glyph, as mainly I have thought about what I would replace it with, Especialy recently with the single target increase. My options are limited to say the least, and nothing other than GoD would possibly increase AoE TPS, so its more personal preference for the D&D glpyh than anything.

The main thoughts behind the whole "why I use death strike instead of oblierate" was because of the lack of Rime and also Annihilation due to having to spec into IIT for the raid buff. I used to play a rogue, I know how much ours would bitch if i was not there with the 20% haste. So the reasoning was not really "Is it better if" as i know its not in a normal situation. However I was curious as to if there is; with the improved health within ICC that deathstrike with therefore heal for considerably more, if there is a point that it WILL overtake the un-improved obliterate. In theory, there has to be a point where the a full 10% heal will generate more threat generated than the extra wepons damage of obliterate. Was curious to see if someone had looked at this, as my maths is really not to the level that I could find this accuratly myself at this time.

Just to say my two cents. I have been tanking as blood since my DK hit 80. I tried out frost dual wield tanking when the ICC 5 mans came out but my heals always told me I take a lot of damage. When I am doing heroics and any of my toons and there is a frost dk tank, there is always trouble. I heal on my druid and on a pally and I notice that frost dual wield tanks take much more damage then unholy or blood. Due to this I gave up frost tanking and took up blood again and every DK that i know i tell them not to tank as frost but to tank as blood. I just find frost dual wield tanking to be the weakest of the 3 specs.

See, I find frost dual wielding to be the strongest of the specs, however I have never tried an Unholy tank spec, but combinations of frost and blood. After the recent patch here I was out performing one of the Pally tanks with us that I normally have trouble with holding up to his a threat. Also I out DPSed him with the new increase to the second hand weapon. I am running Bone Wardens Splinter DPS weapon in main hand and Bonebreaker Scepter tank weapon in the off hand. My TPS was well over 10k. Now also back in Conquest gear and so on yeah I had healers tell me I was a bit squishy but not since triumph gear.

Though the IT threat increase is nice, I don't think it is any reason to simply start spam builds or rotations. I believe that perhaps we should consider being a little bit more free with our specs since DW Frost Tanking has been time and time again stated as starved for talents.

And as nice as having an unreasonable threat lead sounds for those of us who appreciate having no to little stress over threat, I also don't believe that we should forgo our rotations that can do some more damage for further increasing on over killing our threat lead.

I'm sure we can probably all work into perhaps either a balance of hitting Icy Touch each rotation or just shifting rotations from the beginning of fights as they progress onward when our threat is secure. Either way, its no reason to justify just simply setting ourselves as simply being threat machines over a balance of threat and damage.

Heal agro is a rate of 0.5 agro per point healed, I believe. Amplified by Fr. Pres, just like damage is, so treat any heal you do to yourself as half as much damage worth of agro. However, only effective heal counts, and if you try out a non-DRM blood spec you'll realize how extremely hard it is to actually get that DS to heal you in the first place. Within the space of 10sec you have for a cycle of rune usage, you''ll only have a 1-3sec window twice in which to use DS and produce a heal, and the nominally small amount of healing it'll (possibly) generate is waaay less significant than the TPS you're losing by not waiting and instead smacking the boss.

Also, you're not comparing an OB to a DS. You're comparing a DS and 5/5 Black Ice with an OB, 3% crit, and 2/5 Black Ice (as BI is the most likely candidate to take points out of for annihilation). It also depends on whether you can afford a 3rd glyph: GoOB will offer more TPS than GoDS will, despite the 5% discrepancy between them. Both OB and DS hit for physical, get a sampling of the scale they hit for on a target dummy. The test isn't accurate in any possible way, of course, but it's useful for comparing them in scale terms. If one is 4-5k distant from the other, DS would have to heal you for 10k (which it wont), assuming 0 raidbuffs. The more raidbuffs, the less threat is relatively added from the heal, and even so, that's all assuming it's a perfect-case scenario where all the heal heals you, which it won't most time.

Long story short: It won't.

I am following what you are saying pintofbrew, but at the same time I think you are making assumptions without really taking things into account. You seem to be blinkered to the fact that obliterate is THE move to use as frost, its THE move when you take the talents to improve it. However not taking into account that if you DONT take the talents to improve it nor glpyh, that it basicaly hits for around 30% more wepons damage + some fixed damage than a death strike, not taking into account crits (not that they are abuntant with bog standard obliterate crit NOT improves through talents)

Now this 30% wepons damage if you are using a big 2 hander or 2 slow DPS wepons is a very big large figure, and would agree at the 4-5k difference you came up with. However we are using 2 fast taking wepons, as threat was not a issue in the 1st place. so that 30% difference + fixed amount can be as low as 2k.

So using that same logic you mentioned, that only means a 4k heal from a death strike (full heal). I do that unbuffed never mind with the scary high health we are looking at when the ICC buff reaches 10%+ that it will go to. Factor in the improved DPS generated from taking improved icy touch with the free 25% haste in the 1st place, Then I dont see how that there can NOT be a point where using death strike but with improved ITT and the joy of haste it brings.

OR is there something compleatly wrong with my reasoning here so i can drop this?

I can think of exactly 1 time when 2 fast tanking weapons actually makes sense in ICC. so the real question is why are you even thinking about a time when we wouldn't be using at least 1 slow DPS weapon?

If and as threat is not an issue as I stated, can you tell me 1 reason why I would NOT want more tank stats than dps stats?

edited/

Parry hastened attacks actualy comes to mind, but with a any wepons combinations you still run the parry haste risk, but thus is the life of the tank, and unless you are hitting extreame levels of expertise you will always get the odd parry. so I dont value the parry haste arguement high on reasons to give up alot of avoidence stats in honesty.

My current guild does not have an enhancement shaman, so I specced into IIT, but also full oblit talents as well. My current spec is 6/58/7 and i enjoy the haste while using 2 slow dps weapons.

The tanking stats from actual tanking weapons is nice, but threat does not scale as well as dps does and ive attempted 2 fast tank weapons and even 1 fast tank weapon and our fury warriors and locks were quick to pull aggro.

As far as Oblit vs. DS I would have to agree with pintofbrew on this one. The heal and the threat from the heal is not predictable enough for it to be dependable for major threat. Even with the ICC buff potentially going up to 30% the threat from the damage/healing of DS will still be the same as the scaling of damage threat that oblit gives.