Very good information in the past 2 pages, Riggins. I strongly agree with most of what you have to say about HM LK and Halion.

In our guild's experience DK is the best MT for the Lich King and also the best for all three tanking roles on Halion. I was our add tank for Halion this week using a hybrid Unholy tank spec that I highly recommend: Halion add tank Unholy. It provides Ebon Plaguebringer for the casters in P3 as well as strong anti-magic defense and extremely high AE threat, removing the need to pull rogues out of the inside for Tricks. I wear fire resist helm/cloak enchants and Rune of Spellshattering as all the add damage is resistible fire. Unfortunately DK's are also the best tank for the dragon itself (especially inside) so a guild may decide they can't afford to use their DK as an add tank.

I do want to mention that I think many tanks dramatically undervalue resistances. On any fight where magic damage is relevant, resist helm/cloak enchants are much much more effective than the usual defense/armor tanking options. Once we had our tanks switch to shadow/fire resistances and use Magic Resistance Potions instead of Indestructible, we noticed a huge improvement in survivability. If anyone hasn't read up on the resistance changes in WotLK (as compared to TBC and Classic), I really recommend studying this thread: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t44675-resistance_mechanics_wotlk/

As far as HM LK goes, I'd really like to decide once and for all if Unidentifiable Organ is better than the stamina choices (CSK/Satrina's). Even assuming minimal uptime on the stacking stamina buff, the armor alone may be better than the passive stamina options. I'll take a look at the armor formula this week and see if I can reach a conclusion.

Anyway, keep up the good work guys. It's been a while since I visited this thread and I was impressed to see such a good discussion the past few pages.

Nice posts Riggins.

-Edit-
Here's a log from a recent kill World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

The fight can be pretty overwhelming at first but once you get positioning down and learn to manage your cds and taunts it just only a matter of time.

/cast [target=mouseover,harm,exists,nodead] chains of ice; chains of ice
Definitely helps when you need to mouseover chains while your tanking.

What value should we be placing on hit and expertise rating at end game, considering the 30% ICC buff is now making stamina awesomesauce? I'm not having threat problems and only a couple of the bosses parry-haste. I've got a handful of decent items that enable a better chance of survival, and although expertise isn't really a problem to get up to soft cap the hit drops down to about 80/90 if I just equip all of the 'best' of my gear.

At the moment my interchangeable items are:

T10 Chest (264) / Emblem Chest
T10 shoulders (264) / Boneguard shoulders (264)
T10 legs (277) / Pillars of Might
Bloodfall (277) / Cryptmaker (264)
Ashen Band (277) / Juggernaut (277)

Is it criminal to forgo these in favour of better hit rating, and similarly dropping tier 4 set bonus?

I've been using RAWR to help me figure out the best setup with these modified weightings: Threat 0.7, Surv 1, Miti 0.8. Am I way off here? Based on optimal drops it wants me to drop to only one tier piece. Is there a better simulator people recommend?

The tanking spec you'll see on my armory isn't my usual - this is a copy of Rigg's recommended LK setup. Unfortunately with the summer exodus we're having problems getting past Sindy to have another crack at him

The 4 set CD is absolutely amazing and will help you an insane amount on H LK, along with many other fights that require heavy CD usage. Technically the best off-piece is Pillars of Might because of the bonus armour. You shouldn't really consider any other off-piece unless it is 277. The helm is a fairly popular off-piece from what I've noticed.

You'd also be well off using Bloodfall for the superior mitigation over regular CM. If threat is a huge issue and you're missing a lot of important things then maybe using CM would be better, but the armour on Bloodfall is so amazing for a fight like that with such huge hits.

The only boss that could be possibly considered challenging and parry-hastes is H Halion, so don't worry too much about Expertise unless you're doing him. Although we have found having me on the adds works well so I don't have to worry about Expertise for that fight.

Can't really comment on RAWR as I stopped using it along time ago due to all its bad advice. The tank module may be decent, but the DPS one just turned me off of it completely.

Please direct your attention to the new original post. Gravity will be taking the helm in Cataclysm and he's been proactive enough to make some overdue revisions to the current guide. A big thanks to everyone for making this thread a success and I look forward to working with all of you as we help Gravity make the Cataclysm guide an even greater success.

*Note - as he mentions in the OP, a new thread will be built for Cataclysm once we get closer to release. This thread is strictly for pre-4.0 discussion.

Yes, I think you're way off. Putting mitigation at only .8 will nerf nearly every Cooldown along with any mitigation that is still required for fights. As mentioned in the tooltips, you don't want to stack only survival. You want mitigation and survival balanced so that you are not taking too much damage over all, and you're not being bursted down. My personal settings are much what are set for defaults: 1 Threat, 1 Surv, and 4-6 Mitigation. This is because mitigation is being rated at damage mitigated per second. Since we should be looking to survive 4-8 seconds (if we were to look at the Burst/Reaction graph), that seems reasonable. I believe the recommendations are correct at that level.

As mentioned above, the 4p10 bonus is great as an extra CD. I use it during Sindy to great effect, so I would not choose anything other than 4p10 + PoM until 277. And then I would work to keep that 4 piece bonus.

If you have any issues w/ the way Rawr is working for you, please go to Rawr and create an incident in the issue tracker.

Just wanted to thank everyone for the past couple of pages-def a big help for me.

We just down'd 25H Halion, and I found myself in the un-enjoyable position of offspec tanking in the twilight realm. Let me preface this with the statement that my gear isn't very good-264 tier, a 232 neck, corroded skele key/251 organ and a couple 277 offpieces. With that said, DK cd's are extremely potent for this encounter for the following reasons:

1. Either VB or the tier 4pc is up for every cutter phase
2. AMS is up for approx. 75% of every cutter-phase breath (With the Sindy trinket, you will have a cd up for 100% of them)
3. Even though Halion hits hard and fast, there are usually a couple sec. to react to my lowering health pools-particularly during the cutters when the frequency of inc heals(esp big ones) is reduced. Two things on this: A) Death strike is OP (but sucks when you get parried), and B) Rune tap is clutch. Understand that I am not trying to argue for 100% efficacy on these two abilities; it is not infrequent that these self-heals are either overheals in themselves, or result in an overheal immediately after a healer's cast lands. The point, is that sometimes neither the casts or the self-heals are overheals and therefore play a role in keeping me alive. Other tanks do not have this ability. These abilities are particularly effective since you can time, at least to some extent a reactive heal to the breath/tick/swing (often times this is really the same as spamming)
4. IBF during P3 marks on the holy paladin make it look like I'm good at what I'm doing. 28-31k swings drop to 11k, it's a beautiful experience.


Gear:
I stack as much armor as poss., using the PVP weap, and the SR resist enchants on both the helm and cloak(25 defense rating for 25 SR seemed obvious; 225 armor for 20SR on the cloak less so, but I decided to give it a shot). I considered playing around with a resistance flask, but with my gear levels being the way they are and the possibility of the stam stacks dropping from the UO(rare, but it does happen), I didn't think I could risk lowering my health pool. I go for 9+ stam socket bonuses since my hit/exp is borderline and getting parried sucks almost as much as missing a death strike.

Misc:
I found it helpful to use a max camera dist macro and extend the camera as far back as possible, with a slight slant towards the orb to my left as the boss is rotated clockwise around the room. Ideally, this would enable me to hug the beam to my left and give the melee some room to dps without getting parried. In practice, this rarely happens and it takes most of my concentration to hit my CDs and not fail but I suppose this still makes me ambitious.

I'm sure there are other tactics which never occured to me, but hopefully some of these are useful to the community.

@OleFrosty

I can only elaborate on the Fire Embers, as its what I tank for the encounter. The embers damage can be resisted by using fire resist. Raid buffed, I'm sitting at 180 FR, including a resist flask. Is the flask worth it over a Stoneblood, hard to say.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

(Resisted around 2million throughout our attempts)

Ah, elemental melee. Basically, it's magic damage you can avoid (block, dodge, parry). Armour doesn't effect it, but resists do. As to losing flask HP, 1.3k health, when you have lets say 55k (using my HP when I'm raid buffed) or higher doesn't really seem that bad of a trade-off for the mitigation that resists give.

Thanks for the info! I'm new at indepth wol usage, but I used the same search linked on living embers, for the MT & Living Inferno.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

So that's showing 100% of all the adds damage, big or small is resistible. Good to know! I would assume both AMS and AMZ work as cd's against them then.

To use AMZ for the healers be sure they are in your group. Contrary to the tooltip AMZ is only group-wide, not raid-wide.