I started out in Ulduar 10 with both a Blood and a Frost tank spec. Over time, I used the Frost tank spec less and less until I finally replaced it with a DPS off-spec. While I still think Frost is viable for all or most of the non-hard mode fights in Ulduar, Blood works better in my experience. The 3% extra stamina plus the self-heals from Death Strike make it easier to soak up big hits. I used to put points into Rune Tap and found it to be very useful when my healers were still a little under-geared. I prefer Vampiric Blood over Unbreakable Armor, but others probably feel differently.

Frost should be viable for every regular fight in Ulduar 10. There are several fights where I think Blood will work better and very few where I would prefer to be Frost (Razorscale and Thorim arena). Howling Blast is nice for trash and adds, but there really isn't a lot of trash in Ulduar (and none in ToC if you're looking ahead). On boss fights, you'll only use Howling Blast to spend your Rime procs.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions about tanking any of the encounters.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...&version=10392

I'm not a person to mindlessly copy high-end raidguild MT's builds, I'm always trying to find the best build suitable for my current gear and situation.

The situation this build was born in:
I have a DK alt who I tank HCs for my main's guildies with. I did this as an UH tank in s5-s6 due to the heavy AoE threat the build provided. Needless to remind you, this changed a lot in s7 with the UH nerfs. The problem escalated because the need for AoE threat remained the same, and so did my DK's tank gear (an average of 200-213 ilvl), while the DDs got a lot of Ulduar25 and ToC25 gear. I had trouble finding a build that could hold threat against such overgeared DDs, both single and AoE wise, meanwhile having a great survivability (needed because the healers are regurarly alts too, and toc 5-man HC is a beast to heal out in blues and some ilvl 200 gear). I tried frost, which was kind of nice both single and AoE threat-wise, but lacked the HP pool and self-sustainability. So I started to mingle with blood, and this is the build and glyphs I came up with. Recommended rotation is:
AoE: DnD - IT - PS - Pesti - BB - DS
Single: DnD - IT - PS - HS - HS - DS
Yes, DnD on singles too, I don't have data to back it up, but I found this rotation to do much more threat than the one where you did a DS+HS instead of the DnD.
Didn't include RP dump, I hope it's obvious.

If anyone is in the same situation (to be honest, I recommend it to every starting DK tank for pre-raid), try this out, you'll love it, it has everything. Do not, however, try this on raids, it's not built for that.
Also feel free to self-customize it even further, there's a few points in it that is up for personal prefrence.

One of the ulduar25+toc25 geared DDs told me to not keep this to myself, so I came here to share. Hope I helped someone/anyone with it.

Sry if this is the wrong topic to post this in, the pre-raid discussion is only about gear, so I didn't want to paste a build in there.

*Edited rotation mistakes

Sogron, I think the important thing to realise is that blood's TPS is rather dependent on melee raid buffs.
If you only do 10-mans, and you usually take a caster raid with few melee, frost might actually be better.



I have a question regarding DnD, if you are only tanking 1 mob, is it worth using all the time? Should you keep it up like a paladin's consecration? (this question is more aimed at blood tanking)

I was playing around a bit on the training dummies, comparing DnD to Heart strike+Death strike since they all use the same runes.
(with morbidity and no glyph, dmg values recorded not threat)

1 Death & Decay = 10 ticks of ~235 dmg, with no crits = ~2350 dmg * ~2.1 (frost pres) * 1.9 (dnd multiplier) = 9350 threat
1 Heart Strike + 1 Death strike, no crits again = ~1200 + ~1300 = ~2500 dmg * ~2.1 (frost pres) = 5250 threat

See what I mean? On a per-rune basis, with no raid buffs/debuffs/crits considered, DnD generates a huge amount of threat (when glyphed+talented).

DnD uses spell crit and the other use melee crit (melee crit will be a lot higher, and talents affect HS/DS crit + crit damage bonus).

Without Sunder up, it seems DnD would be better than a HS/DS though, but you always have Taunt + Death Grip if you have aggro issues.

First off, DS generates two death runes, so using D&D denies yourself two additional HS in the second half of your rotation. DS also generates a significant amount of healing threat, though on some fights it's more likely to be overhealing than others.

Your DS damage is also very low--my DS usually hit ~50% harder than my HS. Do you have DS glyph? It's very strong for single target threat, even though you sometimes end up RP-starved and don't get full benefit. This may also be a function of AP scaling and better DS damage with raid buffs.

Maintaining maximum D&D uptime is also very awkard, as the 15s cooldown does not line up well with 10s rune cooldowns. Of course, you can use it every 20s with no trouble.

Anyway, like you said, blood threat is highly dependent on raid buffs--in particular, sunder/ff--so I don't really see unbuffed numbers as particularly interesting. I don't even consider frmorrison's point about crit that significant because crit rates are so low for a tank, spells actually gain more crit from raid buffs than melee (though I guess if you take subversion regularly your HS will be higher). On an interesting side note, I see they've fixed D&D to crit at 200% properly.

Yep, fully aware that training dummy numbers are completely useless :p


I raided as blood for the first time in ages last night, a full toc10 clear. Had no problems with threat at all, so there is no use in debating this significantly really :p

And yep, I forgot about DRM from the death strike. You're right teiglin too, I didn't have a DS glyph (was in the middle of swapping some glyphs around)

I'd say the best time to use D&D is when you pull, it is a solid threat increase to start you off, (and the rune shortage can be covered by an Empower Rune Weapon)

D&D might also be worth using all the time in 5-mans. And all the time in 10-mans when you're lacking melee buffs.

Guys, you weren't paying attention to the part where I said the build and rotation is for 5 man HCs, so without raidbuff and lack of gear both tank- and healer-wise.

The DnD vs DS+HS numbers in my case (simplified out the frost pres):

DnD (with 5/5 Black Ice+Glyph): (321*10)*1.9= 6099
HS+DS (every talent+glyph): (1500+1800)*1=3300

As you can see DnD does almost twice as much threat for me per rune. And that is in ilvl200-213 gear with fury glad axe (s6 gave free weapons for blue geared DKs), so my melee abilities are in a better gear situation than my attack power based spells.
My spell and melee crit are roughly the same, so don't bother about that either. And yes, by the way, raidbuffed you get 13% spellcrit (Moonkin/ele:5% Imp.scorch/SB:5% retri/totem of wrath:3%), whereas you only get 5% melee crit (fdruid/fwarri). Also, as a beginner, you may not have enough melee hit and expertise, and an avoided DS or HS is a lot worse than a missed DnD tick.

I did not and still do not recommend this to people with higher lvl gear (just for example ilvl 232 tank plate has twice the str than ilvl200), or in a raid enviroment (both 10 and 25 man). As mentioned above, on a single target raidboss, if you use DnD, you deny yourself the 2 HS from death runes, and that puts the 2 things on par (DnD+HS+DS~DS+4HS), so why waste talents and a glyph on DnD?

This build and rotation is strictly a 5 man TPS build for crap geared starters.

P.S.: Meanwhile I got a lot of upgrades (~100 str amongst the tons of defensive stats) and am now also using the standard Raid blood tank build, I only swapped Glyph of Vampiric to Glyph of DnD for AoE purposes.

*Edit: some punctuation

My guild started out on 10 man H ToC this weekend. We got stumped on the first boss. Mostly the issue was that DPS wise we were not making the timer and the beasts where out while the magnataur? was still at 4%-5%. DPS issue aside, we were running with 2 healers and I noticed that they could not keep me up reliably with more then 2 debuffs on. I understand that most of the damage by the first boss is physical so the question is this - am I to low on HP with 34.5K in FP fully unbuffed, and if yes, what should my hp pool be (minimum) for us to try it again while I am tanking?

2 healers is kind of pushing it, we ran with 3 (depending on what kind of healers you have, you may need 3 for Jaraxxus anyway). I have 38k (37996 qq) hp in FP, and I don't think I was close to dying, or if I was, I had lots of heals queued up. It's significantly easier with 3 healers/2 tanks, and good dps. We killed Gormok and two remaining snobolds and had ~8s before the Wyrms entered.

If you have any effective health here, it's a good idea to stack it, because the most lethal damage you take here is a combination of 2, 3, or all of Impale, Stomp, Impale DoT tick, and a melee swing, three of which are unavoidable. It's also a good idea to prepare yourself in case a snobold lands on you and you get stunned.

We tried 25ToC Heroic twice this week and we managed to get to Icehowl with 1 worm at 20%. I think at the moment we also lack the dps.

Tactics for tanking at Gormok that we used were:

• 3 Tank rotation, taunting at 27-29 second, just before the 3rd stack of the debuff was applied
• As soon as his stacking buff reaches two, tanks should use CD's
• If a tank gets 3 debuff's BoP him
• BoP the tank's who are tanking the worms after the encounter if there is enough time
• Other tanks fight Gormok from behind when they are not tanking to avoid any parry/haste
• Use trinkets before you taunt

I also read yesterday that the worms can be tanked by having 2 tanks on the moveable worm and 1 caster tank on the grounded worm. Tanks swap aggro when they have a debuff. We have yet to try this although we might practice it on normal mode first to see how it goes.

I don't know if this is similar to how other groups have done it, but we found it worked pretty well. Icehowl doesn't seem that hard as long as you have the DPS.

We cleared 10m HToC a day or so after it came out and one thing I noticed (as co-raid leader) is the DPS checks are very high.

Switching at 3 works fine for Gormok, but you can't allow yourselves to get behind. The best advice I can give is make sure you pack as much raid buffs as you can into your 10m raid, and make sure you are stacking certain DPS that will mesh well with others.

I didn't tank on the night we cleared, but switching me and the prot pally wouldn't have made much difference. Here is the comp we used:

Warrior: Prot
Paladin: Prot
Paladin: Ret
DK: Blood
Rogue: Combat
Shaman: Ele
Mage: Fire
Druid: Resto
Druid: Resto
Priest: Disc