Hi all,
Long time reader, first time poster. This seems appropriate for this thread, much has been given to the discussion of Sarth+3D. However, if this is off topic, please accept my apologies in advance.
I've found the information on tanking 10man Sarth+3D very useful, however one component seems to be that of gear. What is most important in this fight - health or avoidance?
For example, in our attempts I've been putting on the three Icebane pieces to up my health. When we do get two drakes down, I tend to get clobbered - however we have not got to this point often enough for me to put together any meaningful data to determine if this is wrong mix of gear, bad healing or what.
The trade off I have is in Icebane I gain 1500 Health, but lose 2% dodge, 2% parry and some hit rating.
I'm curious what others have found - is their particular gear that makes this fight easier?
Necrosis vs. Desecration: Aside from the 5% increase in sustainable DMG (due to the change of SS), the snare could prove to be useful on certain fights with adds. Just using an example from current content- kiting zombies on Gluth.
Whether Unholy Presence is worth it or not (and whether its worth it to even spend both points in it) comes down to this: Is 7 stam (tuskarr's vitality vs. major fortitude) worth 1-2 talent points? I'm not really sure it is.
Wandering Plague- Great AoE talent whose value is proportional to the number of adds there are (i.e. more useful with more adds, crap on single targets). If you end up getting this, it'd probably be 3/3 WP at the expense of 2/5 Desecration. Then again, we also have other AoE abilities that can make up for not having WP: DnD, UB, BB, etc.
Originally Posted by sanddemon
With the loss of our "oh shit" button usage, the constant bone shield seems to rise up.
Not sure if this will be the case with a 2 min CD, even with the glyph.. With a 1 min CD, maybe. Not sure what uptime is on BS right now though, haven't tanked as unholy since the beginning of Wrath.
I'm curious what others have found - is their particular gear that makes this fight easier?
I find that, for the most part, wearing my normal gear is sufficient (optimal?). Although it's nice to pump up your health, keep in mind that sarth swings still hit you for a decent amount. If you find yourself just getting chopped down by melee swings, then it will probably be a good idea to just wear whatever your normal tanking gear is.
The only gear changes I make for this fight are:
(1) Helm of Vital Protection with the spell dmg reduction meta gem
(2) 4 pieces of t7.5 for the increased duration to IF
The spell damage reduction meta is bugged and gives +2% increase to resistances (i.e. if you have 200 resistance against something the meta makes it 204) rather than -2% spell damage taken. Unfortunately, this means it's a very bad meta gem for anything.
Personally, I gear for stamina because the only time I'm really at risk of dying is when a top-end breath leaves me at very low health. Remember, you can always just have a normally geared tanked taunt Sarth off of you when the danger from breaths passes if you feel the need. It's really not a problem though, considering that after Vesperon dies and the melee damage is really ramped up you'll have every healer in the raid with nothing to do but heal you.
The spell damage reduction meta is bugged and gives +2% increase to resistances (i.e. if you have 200 resistance against something the meta makes it 204) rather than -2% spell damage taken. Unfortunately, this means it's a very bad meta gem for anything.
Personally, I gear for stamina because the only time I'm really at risk of dying is when a top-end breath leaves me at very low health. Remember, you can always just have a normally geared tanked taunt Sarth off of you when the danger from breaths passes if you feel the need. It's really not a problem though, considering that after Vesperon dies and the melee damage is really ramped up you'll have every healer in the raid with nothing to do but heal you.
That's good to know; for some reason I was not aware of that. In that case it would be better to just wear t7.5 helm, which allows you to wear the maly legs instead of the t7.5 legs.
I suppose my comments about getting chopped down were more focused toward OS10 3D where you will likely only have a single healer on you until all the drakes are down and you don't have the option of having a tank taunt off you.
What about death strike in all of this? Does it even become a consideration?
Using this skeleton as the basis of a build, you're left with 7 disposable points. That is not enough to max out annihilation without sacrificing Might of Mograine. Factor in that Sudden Doom, Morbidity, Subversion, and Imp Icy Touch are all valuable talents, there's just no room for annihilation.
That said, Death Strike doesn't quite beat out Obliterate; however, it is reasonably close enough that placing the extra points in Frost to get Annihilation doesn't equate to any significant increase in TPS.
Assuming you're wielding an Inevitable Defeat (average damage 692.5) with 3300 AP (Abom's Might activated). Death Strike deals 75% weapon damage in 3.1. Thus
Now grant it 20% from the glyph, 25% from diseases, 4% from 2H Weapon Spec and 3% from Bloody Vengeance
1643.486 * 1.20 * 1.25 * 1.04 * 1.03 = 2640.75
Three hundred more damage at 3k AP before Abom's Might. Considering that Death Strike will also grant the occasional healing aggro, and I really don't see how speccing the extra points into Annihilation can be considered worthwhile.
Furthermore, if my math is correct (though it rarely is), it seems that Death Strike will scale faster than Obliterate. Death strike scales at .75 * 1.25 * 1.3 * 1.04 * 1.04 = 1.3055 multiplier or 131.55%. Obliterate scales at a "meager" .8 X 1.2 X 1.25 X 1.04 X 1.03 = 1.2854 constant or 128.54%.
Finding the function of the barrier at which Death Strike officially overtakes Obliterate wouldn't be difficult as the weapon damage function is linear in both; however, I am far too lazy and tired to deal with a matrix at this time.
I feel like taking Acclimation for Ulduar as a main tank DK will be much more beneficial than it has been up until this point.
Assuming Hodir's Biting Cold aura procs Acclimation, you'll be able to reach max FrR in very few pieces of alternative gear.
Steelbreaker in the Iron Council encounter also has an aura that does nature damage every 3 secs, and will use Fusion Punch (35k nature + 20k/sec) on the tank. He also has more nature damage if you keep him around longer for a hard mode. Assuming it is partially resistible, it'll make Acclimation a very solid talent for at least those two fights.
I'm almost tempted to pick up Chilblains for easily kiting the ads as Frost during Ignis (just Howling Blast and run around like a goof). I'm sure the debuff also causes a minuscule amount of additional threat, too. Unfortunately, I think you have to sacrifice too much for the convenience it would provide on just this fight.
If it is a progression fight where you know you gonna spend the night on, you take the right talent/spec for this particular fight. Like I guess, we all did for Sartharion. I don't think you are able to find a template that will be optimized for every Ulduar fight.
Now grant it 20% from the glyph, 25% from diseases, 4% from 2H Weapon Spec and 9% from Bloody Vengeance
1643.486 * 1.20 * 1.25 * 1.04 * 1.09 = 2794.58
Three hundred more damage at 3k AP before Abom's Might. Considering that Death Strike will also grant the occasional healing aggro, and I really don't see how speccing the extra points into Annihilation can be considered worthwhile.
Furthermore, if my math is correct (though it rarely is), it seems that Death Strike will scale faster than Obliterate. Death strike scales at .75 * 1.25 * 1.3 * 1.04 * 1.09 = 1.3816 multiplier or 138.16%. Obliterate scales at a "meager" .8 X 1.2 X 1.25 X 1.04 X 1.09 = 1.3603 constant or 136.03%.
Finding the function of the barrier at which Death Strike officially overtakes Obliterate wouldn't be difficult as the weapon damage function is linear in both; however, I am far too lazy and tired to deal with a matrix at this time.
Bloody Vengeance is actually 9% (stacks 3 times) in most circumstances, so I corrected your numbers (changes I made are in bold). As you can see, with that in mind, Obliterate and Death Strike scale almost identically, though OB has more "variables" to it's scaling (both diseases *and* 3 stacks of BV up 100%). They are certainly close enough that it's definitely not worth taking the "filler" talents to get to Annihilation if you are speccing Blood, particularly when there are more tasty synergies with the threat talents in Unholy (e.g. Necrosis).
Edit: In addition, one change I'd make to your "skeleton" build: drop MoM. MoM isn't nearly the "required" talent for Blood that GoG is for Frost. Here's my alternate skeleton. The single point in Sudden Doom is strictly filler to get to Blood Gorged. It could be placed in Improved Rune Tap or MoM instead.
Is there any reason everybody seems to be picking up Blood Gorged? It was my understanding that it would be too unreliable for a tanking build.
I was looking more at a build like this. It picks up one point in Runic Power Mastery to help keep Glyph of Death Strike maxed. That point and points in imp Rune Tap can be shifted around. I also removed mark of blood because 4% health/attack for 20 seconds with a 3 minute cooldown seems too weak for me, but it can be taken over RPM.
Is there any reason everybody seems to be picking up Blood Gorged? It was my understanding that it would be too unreliable for a tanking build.
I was looking more at a build like this. It picks up one point in Runic Power Mastery to help keep Glyph of Death Strike maxed. That point and points in imp Rune Tap can be shifted around. I also removed mark of blood because 4% health/attack for 20 seconds with a 3 minute cooldown seems too weak for me, but it can be taken over RPM.
The reason people include Blood Gorged is because its a high threat talent, even if you aren't above 75% all of the time you should be above 75% most of the time if your healers are terrible and if the fight doesn't have any strange mechanics. The 10% Armor Pen is a pretty amazing factor as well for threat. I changed the spec up a bit to get this:http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...0&version=9767
You're going to want morbidity in a tanking build and especially a Blood build. I don't have points in Spell Deflection or Improved Rune Tap because I think they're both pretty situational and not worth the points in a basic tanking build unless you know you're going to need them for the fight(s). I don't see a reason to pick up Runic Power Mastery because you only need 25 RP to maximize DS and with a rotation like IT>PS>DS>HS>HS//DS>DS>HS>HS// or IT>PS>DS>HS>HS//DS>HS>HS>HS>HS// you can wait until the end of a rotation and RP Dump from 100 down to 20 and restart the rotation to get above 25 for maximum DS.
My build doesn't have Scent of Blood either because I don't find that there is a lot of use to extra RP as Blood, the RP you do use is just two DCs and then your back into the regular rotation. Blood is a high physical damage tree which is why Armor Pen is one of the best stats for it.
This is all just my opinion on the current 3.1 Blood Spec/Rotation, I most likely won't even be going Blood in 3.1 either (Frost here).
Are you taking Rune Strikes into account when looking at Scent of Blood?
No, I wasn't taking Rune Strike into account and it seems that I overlooked it completely. When I do take Rune Strike into account it does seem to be a better choice to take Scent of Blood but trying to find what I should take points out of to acquire it is somewhat challenging. You can take a point out of Rune Tap and then the other two out of Two-Handed Weapon Specialization or all three out of Subversion. Although neither matters when you view Ulduar as a place where we need to prioritize survivability over threat until its on farm and we start to work on hard mode specs. Then again some may view that keeping maximum threat to burn through a boss (or phase) quickly would be important too.
I'd say if you wanted to maximize threat that getting Scent of Blood would probably be a wise choice. If you wanted to maximize survivability then getting Mark of Blood, Improved Rune Tap, and Spell Deflection would all probably be worth it. I noticed the change to WotN making it so that any attack that does less then 5% of your health would not affect WotN, this change doesn't really fix WotN on a fight like 3D but hopefully it proves to be worthy in Ulduar.
No, I wasn't taking Rune Strike into account and it seems that I overlooked it completely. When I do take Rune Strike into account it does seem to be a better choice to take Scent of Blood but trying to find what I should take points out of to acquire it is somewhat challenging. You can take a point out of Rune Tap and then the other two out of Two-Handed Weapon Specialization or all three out of Subversion. Although neither matters when you view Ulduar as a place where we need to prioritize survivability over threat until its on farm and we start to work on hard mode specs. Then again some may view that keeping maximum threat to burn through a boss (or phase) quickly would be important too.
I'd say if you wanted to maximize threat that getting Scent of Blood would probably be a wise choice. If you wanted to maximize survivability then getting Mark of Blood, Improved Rune Tap, and Spell Deflection would all probably be worth it. I noticed the change to WotN making it so that any attack that does less then 5% of your health would not affect WotN, this change doesn't really fix WotN on a fight like 3D but hopefully it proves to be worthy in Ulduar.
This is actually one of my biggest issues with our "fix" for them taking Blessing of Sanctuary away: They took a talent *nobody* in their right mind takes, and made it a "mandatory" tanking talent and left it in Tier 2. Combine that with the less than stellar new Blade Barrier and it's even more annoying.
Essentially, we now have a "required" 8/8/5 start to all tanking builds. That doesn't leave a lot of leeway for getting much in the way of Tier 3 or 4 talents without sacrificing something "necessary". In fact, with the way the Frost and Blood trees are top loaded, it's damn near impossible.
In fact, if it wasn't for Bladed Armor, Scent of Blood and 2H spec in Tier 2, I'd be tempted to skip Blood altogether since Blade Barrier is really only something like a 2-3% damage reduction (depending mostly on your armor), except against magic. The 5% damage reduction is really pretty awful for 5 talent points since it's multiplied with all other damage reductions. The problem is, Blizz won't ever notice that because it's still the best choice for every tank to take to get to Scent of Blood which is *absolutely* required now.
Bah... I'm starting to sound like a whiner from one of the other boards. I'll stop now.
Scent of Blood is far from mandatory. As long as it's a 15% chance to proc when you dodge/parry/miss it's uptime will still be very low. The change from 5 RP per swing to 10 RP per swing makes it an ok talent (as opposed to how abysmal it was before) but Scent of Blood is no more necessary than having a Resto Druid healing you at all times.
As Frost, I see no need to get Scent of Blood. The Icy Touch glyph and Chill of the Grave grant the death knight more than enough Rune Power. Consider also that Rime Procs generate 5 RP just from Chill of the Grave.
As Blood, however, the DK lacks any other +RP talent, needs to keep a high RP bar for Death Strike Glyph, and likely will not have the Icy Touch glyph as Vampiric Blood and Death Strike glyphs are guaranteed. That leaves 1 glyph spot for Rune Strike, Death and Decay, Dark Death (15% on Death coil with Sudden Doom and 3/3 Morbidity could be interesting), Disease, or Icebound Fortitude.
Hey guys, im new here but i liked to receive some help about comming patch 3.1. Atm im a unholy tank but in new patch id like to spec frost i was thinking about something like this 15/51/5 what u think about this spec and glyps?
And about rotation this one:
IT PS HB OB BS BS - HB OB OB
Can i improve on something, any help will be welcome thanks again
Scent of Blood is far from mandatory. As long as it's a 15% chance to proc when you dodge/parry/miss it's uptime will still be very low. The change from 5 RP per swing to 10 RP per swing makes it an ok talent (as opposed to how abysmal it was before) but Scent of Blood is no more necessary than having a Resto Druid healing you at all times.
From mmo-champ patch notes:
Scent of Blood: Will now proc on a dodge, parry or when taking damage, and now grants 10 runic power per charge. Internal cooldown removed.
Mmo-champion and wowhead's talent calculators still list a 10s cd on SoB though, so i'm not sure about that last part.
So we lose approx. 5.92 seconds per minute giving us an average uptime of (32 - 5.92) = 26.08 seconds per minute. If we have a swing time of 2.72 seconds, we will gain an average of (26.08/2.72) * 10 = 95.88 RP per minute.
Assuming my math is correct, we can use the RP generation rate of 95.88 RP/min to determine whether it is worth getting. I've already decided that I will be getting it instead of Subversion just to help smooth out my Rune Strikes, even if Subversion is a slightly better threat gain. I'll leave the number available to you in case you decide to calculate the gain, however.
EDIT: Most of the other information in that post is incorrect now, only the Scent of Blood calculations remain valid.
Can someone confirm when the patch is live if SoB has no internal cooldown. If it hasn't have a internal cooldown it can be a mandatory since it is a good replacement for BoS.
I think I'll be walking in with a frost spec tonight, BUT (hate blizzard, shoulda given more time with this change) because of the recent change to scent of blood, I'll probably be using something like this
The scent of blood change : (mmmmmm, sanctuary)
# Scent of Blood: Will now proc on a dodge, parry or when taking damage, and now grants 10 runic power per charge. Internal cooldown removed.
"Remember, the first rule of brainstorming is to openly mock the opinions of others. "
Suno, if memory serves, Desecration is about a 4% dps increase for 5 points (0.8% per point), putting it roughly on par, per point with BCB and ahead of Necrosis. Wandering Plague, as I recall, was closer to 1% per point. Wouldn't it be better served to move those points from Desecration to 3/3 WP and into 1/5 Necrosis and 3/3 BCB, from a threat stand point.
The math was done long ago showing that even worse case scenario, BCB's chance of parry hasting still resulted in less hasted swings than a warrior tank. Now that Necrosis no longer double dips and optimistically a flat 20%, but closer to 19% maxed out, white damage, BCB is a superior dps and tps talent.
04/08/09, 11:17 AM
