Suno's Fireside Chat - DK Endgame Tanking - Page 142

Kashir · 12/02/09, 7:23 PM

Originally Posted by Arthemis

Today i was picking a weapon for my dk from early 3.3 items so options for easy 251 level stuff are few. Not to discuss which is best, i want to rather ask a different thing:
I noticed that 150 str gives me slightly over 0.3% parry, and 300+ ap. Thats cool, but 150 agi gives me 1.3% dodge and 300+ armor and 150 AP.

So is it me only or it is worth losing about 30sta (most agi weapons i have option to get, do have 30sta less) for the avoidance/mitigation gains?

Erm... DK don't get any AP from Agility, only +crit. For DK tanks, Agility is avoidance + mitigation + minor threat, while Strength is threat + minor avoidance.

It's really dependant on the encounter as to whether the health and threat is worth trading for avoidance and mitigation. Sometimes it's a good tradeoff, sometimes it's a poor tradeoff. There's really no definitive answer.

• frmorrison · 12/02/09, 10:15 PM

Originally Posted by Kashir

Erm... DK don't get any AP from Agility, only +crit.

DK do get AP from agility if they have Bladed Armor. 150 agility with Kings is 165 agility and 330 armor (180 armor = 5 ap), so 9 attack power. Granted it is not much, but worth noting.

Pintofbrew · 12/03/09, 6:21 AM

Gentlemen, I believe he's not directly comparing Str to Agi, he's comparing a weapon with Str to a weapon with Agi. In which case the 150AP will be an additional stat on the item, which effectively nullifies half the advantage of the AP provided by Str. Granted, the ratio of AP to Agi on an item is not always 1:1, but however his comparisson is still a good one given the ball-park nature of it.

On the other hand I may be wrong, and he may be wrongly assuming we gain 1AP from 1Agi, whereas it's in fact 0.06AP per 1 agi.

Kaeth · 12/03/09, 8:20 PM

@Kaldr

I've found frost to make more sense on anub. I myself use the head and cloak nature res enchants and a resistance flask. this adds 95 nature resistance. the extra avoidance you get from frost is very welcome and unbreakable armor seems to do a better job then vampiric blood for me on this fight. I also use the armor trinket you can buy for badges. Ive still got 50.8k HP raidbuffed by doing this and I haven't taken any unhealable damage as far as i can remember. ofcourse a melee freezingslash melee will stike make me spike down, but it shouldn't kill you. im usually being healed by a paladin with becon on the offtank and paladin on the offtank with a becon on me.

I've also found that even though selfhealing with deathstrike keeps you up also means that by using hp (blood) instead of avoidance and armor (frost) can drag out the fight just long enough for your healers to go oom. We've killed him a couple times now but quite often we used to wipe at 1 or 2% because we were dragging out the fight to long. this is also when me and the offtank switched to higher nature res and me to frost. reducing the amount of healing anub does really has been key to killing him for my guild.

on an other note:
Has anyone tested unholy tanking on the PTR? I'm very interested in reading something about that.

Ithryn · 12/04/09, 10:36 AM

I've noticed that +hit is hard to come by in the IL 258 non-set piece gear, and few DK tanks are at the 8% +hit melee cap.

Has anyone tried piling on the +hit gems, and if so, has that been worth the loss in sta/avoid to have less misses with opening attacks/taunts etc.?

gia · 12/04/09, 11:05 AM

Gemming for hit isn't really a good idea, it doesn't boost sustained threat all that much compared to other stats (Suno's Fireside Chat - DK Endgame Tanking), and you have rogues/hunters that can help out on the initial opener even if you get unlucky.

If you have a yellow socket with a stam socket bonus you can try using a [Vivid Eye of Zul] though. Or +20 hit glove enchant, although it's not optimal compared to +2% threat.

As for missing taunts, there is always death grip as a backup, and if you're in a situation where landing a taunt 100% is crucial, you can always glyph for it.

Best thing you can do is use the few pieces of hit gear available:
Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

and a weapon with hit:
Weapons - Items - World of Warcraft

Cesrae · 12/04/09, 12:45 PM

Originally Posted by Kaeth

@Kaldr

I've found frost to make more sense on anub. I myself use the head and cloak nature res enchants and a resistance flask. this adds 95 nature resistance. the extra avoidance you get from frost is very welcome and unbreakable armor seems to do a better job then vampiric blood for me on this fight. I also use the armor trinket you can buy for badges. Ive still got 50.8k HP raidbuffed by doing this and I haven't taken any unhealable damage as far as i can remember. ofcourse a melee freezingslash melee will stike make me spike down, but it shouldn't kill you. im usually being healed by a paladin with becon on the offtank and paladin on the offtank with a becon on me.

I've also found that even though selfhealing with deathstrike keeps you up also means that by using hp (blood) instead of avoidance and armor (frost) can drag out the fight just long enough for your healers to go oom. We've killed him a couple times now but quite often we used to wipe at 1 or 2% because we were dragging out the fight to long. this is also when me and the offtank switched to higher nature res and me to frost. reducing the amount of healing anub does really has been key to killing him for my guild.

on an other note:
Has anyone tested unholy tanking on the PTR? I'm very interested in reading something about that.

I use Blood. Here's a recent parse of H Anub World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis so you could compare with your specs.
54.7k buffed.

Davia · 12/04/09, 3:30 PM

I also tank Anub 25H with my normal Blood spec. The only deviations from my normal gear setup are NR helm/cloak enchants, Spellshattering runeforge, the badge armor trinket, a 50 resist all flask, and an AMS glyph in place of my Death Strike glyph. The AMS glyph is because AMS knocks off the swarm debuff, so you take 0 swarm damage and it doesn't even hit the cap and knock off AMS. (I've actually noticed in logs that 7-second AMS is knocking off the swarm debuff for 9 seconds pretty consistently for some reason.)

When we were first working on him (before the lowered swing timer) I tried Unholy because I thought Bone Shield and the extra 6% magic damage reduction would be great for the fight, but I ended up going back to Blood because it wasn't really helping much. That might be different now though since the big issue was not having WotN for 30k+ melee hits, which are no longer a threat.

Antitheist · 12/05/09, 7:03 PM

Is there any consensus on what the optimal tanking sigil is? There's no sigil slot in the BiS list, and I have not been able to find any discussion on this issue in this or any other thread. Obviously, we have some avoidance sigils and some tps sigils. Could anyone point me to some discussion on this, or just fill me in?

Monteverdi · 12/06/09, 3:10 AM

For Sigils, I would say take the i245 DPS sigil. You'll get more threat from the Str as well as some Dodge to go with it. The avoidance sigil is better than the 226 version, for obvious reasons, and I'd pick it up just to have it around, but I think for most cases I'd choose the DPS sigil.

Pintofbrew · 12/06/09, 8:09 AM

It's pretty clear what's what in the sigil world: There's only two sigils, one with 200 Dodge and one with 200 Str. 200 Str (220 under BoK) also passively provides 50 (55) parry (not dodge, as above poster noted). 55 Parry is dramatically less, and worse than 200 Dodge, particularly as our very high parry % gets severely penalized by diminishing returns.

All other tank-specific sigils are inferior to the 200 Dodge provided by Insolence, and all other DPS sigils are inferior to the 200Str provided by Virulence in defensive terms. Whether or not they're better in TPS terms is up for debate, though I doubt you'll get more TPS from any of them.

I would never advocate using Virulence of Insolence to a tank under normal circumstances. Perhaps if you had severe threat issues (which you shouldn't) or the scenario was atypical, for example, you have to tank adds which will be heavily nuked immediately, but output little damage, perhaps it could be considered. It is however, a clearly inferior gear choice, as you'll drop your evasion by a lot. It is commonly held that Hit (while under-capped) and Exp (pre-soft-cap) are the conventional choice when desiring additional TPS, not Str.

The new Sigil in ICC is similar to Virulence, except it offers 44 Dodge, stacking 5 times for a total of 220 Dodge. Hardly worth the effort for 20 extra dodge, given that it'll not nearly have the 90%+ uptime it needs to compete with Insolence.

The only exception to this whole discussion is SIgil of the Unfaltering Knight, which is highly useful for starting-out tanks which are struggling to reach the defense cap. This is however an extremely rare occurence now that even fresh lvl80s can PUG Ulduar 25.

Monteverdi · 12/06/09, 6:40 PM

Originally Posted by Pintofbrew

It's pretty clear what's what in the sigil world: There's only two sigils, one with 200 Dodge and one with 200 Str. 200 Str (220 under BoK) also passively provides 50 (55) parry (not dodge, as above poster noted). 55 Parry is dramatically less, and worse than 200 Dodge, particularly as our very high parry % gets severely penalized by diminishing returns.

All other tank-specific sigils are inferior to the 200 Dodge provided by Insolence, and all other DPS sigils are inferior to the 200Str provided by Virulence in defensive terms. Whether or not they're better in TPS terms is up for debate, though I doubt you'll get more TPS from any of them.

I would never advocate using Virulence of Insolence to a tank under normal circumstances. Perhaps if you had severe threat issues (which you shouldn't) or the scenario was atypical, for example, you have to tank adds which will be heavily nuked immediately, but output little damage, perhaps it could be considered. It is however, a clearly inferior gear choice, as you'll drop your evasion by a lot. It is commonly held that Hit (while under-capped) and Exp (pre-soft-cap) are the conventional choice when desiring additional TPS, not Str.

The new Sigil in ICC is similar to Virulence, except it offers 44 Dodge, stacking 5 times for a total of 220 Dodge. Hardly worth the effort for 20 extra dodge, given that it'll not nearly have the 90%+ uptime it needs to compete with Insolence.

The only exception to this whole discussion is SIgil of the Unfaltering Knight, which is highly useful for starting-out tanks which are struggling to reach the defense cap. This is however an extremely rare occurence now that even fresh lvl80s can PUG Ulduar 25.

Oh yup you're right, I said dodge but should've been parry... I posted that in the middle of the night while at work and wasn't thinking too clearly. However, I'm not sure that I'd say the dodge sigil is superior in 'normal circumstances'. I think it would really depend on what content you were in, but really the only place I think the dodge sigil would be more useful is in ToGC. Any other time, it just seems unnecessary, and my philosophy is to first get to a point where I can stay alive without my healers wanting to kill themselves, then buff my damage/threat as much as possible.

Cesrae · 12/07/09, 3:48 AM

Aggro should never be an issue unless dps are tunneling or don't switch off target. I will admit that our inital aggro sucks. Switching out sigils is always a possibilty in combat.

Good Dps does 8k+ and they can sustain it pretty fast and can have me using my taunts just as soon as I DnD as well as put diseases up. I suggest calling out Salv targets, as well as trixes when you feel you need them.

Blood Tap and Empower Rune helped out my tps some at the start of fights when runes were on cooldown. If you are still having trouble with threat after you tried all these steps then it could possibly be your spec/rotations you need to work on for single target or aoe.

Pintofbrew · 12/07/09, 5:33 AM

Originally Posted by Monteverdi

my philosophy is to first get to a point where I can stay alive without my healers wanting to kill themselves, then buff my damage/threat as much as possible.

That is a selfish opinion. As a tank you have a finite and an non-finite job to do:

1) Produce threat.

2) Not lose HP.

Producing threat is absolutely finite. It only needs to be more than what your DPS is producing. Gaining more threat is technically, utterly pointless from a TPS perspective with negligible, trivial gains from a DPS perspective. Your damage output is a very small percentage of the total raid output, and the percentage you can increase it is even less. Going from 4.86% of RDPS to 4.89% because you changed a Sigil is much less useful than going from 58.6% effective avoidance to 60.12%, which at the end of the day, is your job. Nobody picked a tank because "he does tend to die more often, but his DPS is great for a tank".

Not losing HP is non-finite. There is never such a thing as taking too little damage, and ensuring your healers don't want to "kill themselves" is something that can't be accurately established, except if you had so bad evasion you were getting gibbed often. The less strain you put on your healers, the less mana/time they must expend on you, which gives obvious benefits of (1) more time to cross-heal other targets (2) more mana to spare (3) less risk of heart disease/failure for them. Realistically, there is no limit for this, except in content that is so trivial it doesn't matter anyway (like Naxx) where, what the hell, wear half your DPS gear.

If you watch your life ping-pong from 100% to 20% every other second in a hard-mode a few times, you'll realize that really, adding more threat when you're already beyond the reach of your DPS is futile and only feeds your big-number addiction, while adding more effective health, evasion, and damage reduction just makes you more of a tank, which is what's being challenged ever more with increasing encounter difficulty.

Unless of course, you are indeed having trouble with TPS, as the above poster suggested, where it's more likely you're doing something wrong in gear-selection, spec choice or rotation. It could even be something odd, like boss-debuffs. Recently I was in a PUG raid and realized my Blood-tanking spec wasn't generating as much TPS as I felt comfortable with due to there being no Sunder/Expose on the boss, which happily was keeping the Rogue/Hunter/Warrior TPS low, but made the Warlock TPS come closer than I was comfortable with.

Monteverdi · 12/07/09, 8:00 AM

Originally Posted by Pintofbrew

That is a selfish opinion. As a tank you have a finite and an non-finite job to do:

1) Produce threat.

2) Not lose HP.

Producing threat is absolutely finite. It only needs to be more than what your DPS is producing. Gaining more threat is technically, utterly pointless from a TPS perspective with negligible, trivial gains from a DPS perspective. Your damage output is a very small percentage of the total raid output, and the percentage you can increase it is even less. Going from 4.86% of RDPS to 4.89% because you changed a Sigil is much less useful than going from 58.6% effective avoidance to 60.12%, which at the end of the day, is your job. Nobody picked a tank because "he does tend to die more often, but his DPS is great for a tank".

Not losing HP is non-finite. There is never such a thing as taking too little damage, and ensuring your healers don't want to "kill themselves" is something that can't be accurately established, except if you had so bad evasion you were getting gibbed often. The less strain you put on your healers, the less mana/time they must expend on you, which gives obvious benefits of (1) more time to cross-heal other targets (2) more mana to spare (3) less risk of heart disease/failure for them. Realistically, there is no limit for this, except in content that is so trivial it doesn't matter anyway (like Naxx) where, what the hell, wear half your DPS gear.

If you watch your life ping-pong from 100% to 20% every other second in a hard-mode a few times, you'll realize that really, adding more threat when you're already beyond the reach of your DPS is futile and only feeds your big-number addiction, while adding more effective health, evasion, and damage reduction just makes you more of a tank, which is what's being challenged ever more with increasing encounter difficulty.

Unless of course, you are indeed having trouble with TPS, as the above poster suggested, where it's more likely you're doing something wrong in gear-selection, spec choice or rotation. It could even be something odd, like boss-debuffs. Recently I was in a PUG raid and realized my Blood-tanking spec wasn't generating as much TPS as I felt comfortable with due to there being no Sunder/Expose on the boss, which happily was keeping the Rogue/Hunter/Warrior TPS low, but made the Warlock TPS come closer than I was comfortable with.

That makes sense... and to be honest, I am having threat issues. The biggest reason for this is that I stepped down from the raid team when WotLK hit due to my job schedule interfering with raiding and only returned this week. I'm decently geared for what I had been able to PUG or run on raid nights, but this is mostly ilevel 232 gear, and my team is decked out in 245s+.

I still feel like there would be a point where survivability would take a back seat to threat, mostly in normal-modes, but a lot of that has to do with what I remember from TBC when my health would rarely dip below 50% but threat was always an issue. I was typically asked by the guild to gear more for threat, because A) the healers could handle it with no problem and B) the DPS could use more wiggle room. Of course, that may not prove true when I get into the swing of things with ICC. At the moment, my focus is survivability simply because I'm not to a point where I feel comfortable enough with my EH and Avoidance.

I take your point... I'll have to see what happens with ICC (and frequent this forum more) and re-evaluate how I look at things with a more modern perspective.