It's good to see reference to the healing portion of this equation, as it rarely seems to get mentioned despite it's significant impact on the relative value of gearing strategies. However, despite not playing a healer myself, I'm puzzled by your assertion that avoidance becomes more valuable at the apex of current content and that avoiding a certain number of incoming swings over a small sample size is necessary to avoid a tank death in the absence of a cooldown.

Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but if overhealing is a function of 'being caught up' then a high percentage of overhealing seems to suggest 'being caught up' a proportional percentage of the time. Given that logs are not some mystery beyond the scope of human understanding and the remarkably large amount of overhealing you see being dished out by tank healers, how is this consistent with your claim?

I wasn't saying that healers are always falling behind, just that when you fail to avoid they can end up in a situation where they are; I'll attempt to clarify.

There's a lot of overhealing because healers just keep healing as though you're going to get hit. The current damage model of bosses hitting for large percentages of a tank's health means that all healing must be proactive, rather than reactive, hence overhealing. My point was that in certain situations such as Heroic Sindragosa or Heroic Lich King, the boss's DPS, disregarding avoidance, is actually higher than the healers' HPS, leaving them in a perpetual state of catch-up. This makes successive strings of hits very dangerous, and I view a healthy amount of avoidance as vital for surviving these encounters.

Anecdotally my healers feel far more comfortable healing me on Heroic Lich King and Heroic Sindragosa than they do healing our prot warrior. Our gear levels are pretty equal, so it comes down to me having a slightly higher health pool and about 8% more avoidance due to sigil and Forceful Deflection, while he has shield block. Going through the logs we take roughly the same damage over the course of a fight, I take fewer hits, but they're a bit bigger; he takes more hits but blocks a certain amount of many of them. Even so, he dies more often than I do. This is usually when one of our tank healers is incapacitated due to Unchained Magic or something, and he takes several successive hits in a row. Due to the size of the hits being so large compared to the size of the remaining healer's heals, he simply cannot keep up with the damage. Granted, I've died to this same situation as well, but it has happened considerably less often.

I'm not saying this is some sort of definitive argument for avoidance, nor am I placing any real weight on my anecdotal examples, I'm just trying to illustrate a point, which is that once hits become so large as to outpace the HPS of the healers, your best hope of survival is to minimize how often you take strings of hits, by maximizing avoidance.

I realize that raid damage is what causes the majority of wipes these days. I just know that in my experience in ICC25 Heroic nearly every one of the wipes we had due to a tank death was because the tank simply took a string of normal hits in succession, and the damage of the hits was greater than the amount that the healers could output in that same period of time.

There's been a lot of discussion on the 4x/2x/0x build recently and it seems like everyone who advocates it suggests only going 23 points deep into frost. Why not go deeper and pick up Improved Icy Talons for the extra raid buff?

For example a spec such as this spec
gives up 3% avoidance to get it. However, if you compare this to the 56/8/7 blood spec you are only giving up 1% avoidance.

Comparing this to the blood spec you also lose a lot of dps (about 500dps for me) but I'm fairly certain the 20% melee haste you
provide for your dpsers more than makes up for the personal dps loss.

Since it would require you to drop either WotN or Anticipation, while the sole reason you spec into a hybrid build is WotN + Frigid Deathplate (with 5/5 Anticipation of course).

...Why wouldn't you change the gems and runeforge? Or is this your offspec?

Either way, there's nothing wrong with tossing out a few extra ITs to cement threat. My first set of runes generally goes IT, IT, PS, HS, HS, blood tap, IT, then into a normal rotation. I don't hesitate to use some death runes on icy touch if a DPS is creeping up on me; it doesn't happen often, but it's better for me to lose the 1k DPS by switching to a lower damage rotation for 10-15 seconds than for a DPS to have to hold back.

I really don't understand why some people are so strongly against "IT spam." You shouldn't use it to the exclusion of all else, certainly, but it's an incredibly useful tool, and it fills the long-lamented void for a way to frontload threat as a DK.

Damage wise HS Vs IT, quite obviously HS wins. However you don’t need extra damage when DPS is on your ass in threat. So altering the occasional HS to an IT to keep a lead over DPS is more important than the DPS lost. Consider this, if you had even more of a lead in threat over the DPS, the DPS chasing you would not have to worry about threat and may do more DPS than the DPS you lost from altering a HS to an IT. If they are on your ass the majority of a fight then there will be times where they will probably hold back in fear of pulling agro (Using hero with CD’s and then forcing them to hold back due to threat makes them go mental). So altering your rotation to include the odd IT will certainly not be a massive difference in terms of DPS, but in terms of TPS you will notice a considerable difference.

@Rahlar

I think that's a perfectly logical choice; I think mostly the argument advocating a IT spam rotation is what sparked discussions, not the use of IT to cement threat. Just like excessive mana regen or excessive hit rating, excessive threat is pointless. Making a balanced rotation/spec so you can hold your own while adding dps feels like the best compromise, which I think most of us can agree with.

As long as you've got Blade Barrier up as much as possible, and you're using your other cooldowns proactively, I don't see why you should be getting hit too hard; tell your healers to get stronger heals.
I've been told a few times that "you get hit too hard" and it simply was that the healer was used to paladin tanks, since that's what her husband played. I've asked other healers how different it is to heal me compared to another tanking class, and the majority was "you're pretty much the same, I don't see a difference." You do have the typical "dk tanks suck," but you can ignore the unfounded insults from the haters :]

If you're actually taking more damage, it's probably something you can fix (check logs), if you're not, it's just perception. Lord knows I've died enough on Sindragosa to get the "LOL DK PAPERTANK" but WoL will show my average hit intake being below even our druid so..just roll with it. Usually if you're going to die it's because of healing gaps which would've killed anyone.

Pally single target threat is lacking and I found a skilled, equally geared warrior's threat is pretty much on par with DKs as long as I don't cheat (IT spam). Tanking ICC bosses, a blood DK is actually better on fights with large hits (Fester, Sindra, LK, etc) and doing at least good on the others. The only situation I can think of where you should take more damage compared to paladins/warriors is when you're tanking multiple mobs (ship, Dreamwalker, LK adds) - shields are obviously advantageous then. With blade barrier, frost presence combined with WoTN and the insane healthpools and armor in ICC blood tanks are THE tanks for hard hitting bosses.

What do you mean with cooldown rotations - use them well, not just right away everytime they're up. When healers are moving, when you have 8 debuffs at Sindra and a breath is coming, etc etc.

What I mean is, which CD to use in which situation. For example, whether I want to use Vamp. Blood or IBF, or both when the single target damage amps up in Fester, that sort of thing

I'm also wondering if my 41.2k health pool unbuffed is having something to do with it, or if it is just my healers being a pain