Just to clear up a misconception (Either on the part of this poster's, or my own if mechanics have changed), my prior main for four years was a rogue, PPM as I have always understood it is based on the BASE weapon speed and that is it. IE: a 3.0 weapon with a 5 ppm proc rate with no haste or special attacks at all will give you a 25% chance to proc it per hit with the weapon, and that same 'chance' to proc remains even with haste and special attacks. So yes, 20% haste if you have NONE at all is substantial.

Edit.

Rune Strikes yes, for more frequent high threat attacks sure.

Killing Machine yes, the talent was changed to a proc per minute rate. Edited this point to reflect that PPM is calculated on base weapon speed, not hasted attack speed as per here and here.

Killing Machine PPM is based solely on base weapon speed, so haste from gear/talents/buffs will increase the number of KM procs you get.

Some "PPM" based procs have been based on current weapon speed so that they don't benefit from haste (I believe Mongoose and Executioner had this property in BC, but I could be wrong). For these, special attacks use base weapon speed while autoattacks use hasted speed to determine the proc chance.

PPM does _not_ mean you should expect that many procs in a minute. In the case of killing machine, it is the number of procs you will average per minute over a large sample if all of your white attacks land and you have no haste. Precisely, you have a 5*base_weapon_speed/60 chance to gain KM every time you land a white swing. With a 3.4 speed weapon, that's 28.3%.

Indeed. Rereading the Proc Mechanics TTT, and updated testing from 3.1 PTR instead of the previous PTR where KM was changed, looks like I have my wires crossed on this particular change. KM will benefit from haste as well as Rune Strike, when tanking with a two hander especially. Post edited.

You think Morbitity is really a plus at all to frost? Picking up trash and incoming trash seems enough with howling blast, pestilence, and even blood boil now without the diseases. It would be easier than unholy dk tanks situation since howling blast is on a 8s vs dnd's 15s cd. Think maybe those 3 points would be better off in acclimation for ulduar?

I actually think those three points would be best in Scent of Blood, but then I'm already on record as saying it's a "required" talent in my opinion.

I think the cookie cutter blood build is quite good in general, however I have one issue. I noticed you put 3 points into sudden doom. Unless something has changed, I thought it was established that sudden doom was not really a good source of threat.

Some quick napkin math. Assuming a raid buffed attack power of 5500, and a crit chance of 15%, I calculate that HS should be doing around 3700 per hit plus an average of 800 for crits, for a total of about 4500 average damage per HS. Death Coil should be doing around 1400 per. Hence sudden doom would be adding an average of about 210 points of damage per HS, for about a 4.6% increase in damage.

For those 3 points you could get:
a) Subversion
b) Spell Deflection
c) IRT

All 3 seem like better choices than Sudden Doom. Subversion itself would improve your damage by more than 9% considering MoM. The other 2 aren't going to boost your threat, but are decent mitigation / healing talents.

Please let me know if my math is off.

3700 Seems a bit on the high side only because you're not accounting for armor mitigation. With a Worldcarver
I come out to 3960 Pre-armor non-crit damage. Also, factoring in Curse of Elements raises the DC addition to Heart Strike to 247.

With 5 sunders and blood gorged a boss should have 6868.5 armor rating (assuming you have no additional armor penetration gear on).

6868.5 / [467.5 X 80 + 6868.5 - 22167.5] = 31% reduction. so if you're hitting for 3960 before armor, expect to only do about 2732 after armor is factored in.

If DC hits for 247, you're looking at 9% increase in dps. With a weaker weapon like Inevitable defeat, Sudden Doom seems to be better than Subversion. But once you get an Ulduar 25 man weapon (or even better a Hard-mode weapon), subversion should pass it up.

Previous Sudden Doom was a proc which gave you a buff that gave you a zero runic power Death Coil. Since 3.1 it just automatically launches one at your target regardless of GCD.

Any other frost tanks feeling REALLY badly RP starved? I'm specced to fill out scent of blood and chill of the grave, but I'm finding myself always waiting for enough RP to frost strike or rune strike with no runes up. I'm to the point where I'm considering un-macroing rune strike from half of my abilities or more.

Also, to the OP's frost cookie cutter spec..... no scent of blood but you took epidemic and morbidity...

Anybody out there using D&D on single target mobs as frost? Or did you take morbidity purely for trash? I haven't even been using it on trash in Ulduar25 because there really isnt a whole lot of AoE tanking anymore.

And lastly, my threat seemed really low in a 10 man Ulduar last night due to being RP starved and hardly EVER getting KM procs. It was so bad I was about to say f this and go respec. My threat was nuts before 3.1 but then again that was with Blessing of Sanc. 25 man threat seems decent but nowhere near where it was.

I think overall your runstrikes will be better threat than your froststrike. Frost kinda has a disadvantage in that their strike is based on RP and not Runes like Heartstrike and Scourge. Do you have the glyph of Icy touch? Do you use your horn?

Sup man. Yeah i made the switch a little over a month ago. I started out unholy but my single target threat was pretty unsatisfying (come on i used to be a warlock, i need huge numbers) so I changed to frost a few days before 3.1.

Anyways....AoE threat is actually not too bad for me. With an IT, pest, HB i usually have pretty good snap agro on most packs, then my other tanks help maintain. KM or Rime procs make it even better. I was surprised that the AoE threat wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

As for my current RP issues, I suppose I could try swapping out Glyph of Rune Strike for Icy Touch (oblit and FS being my other 2 glyphs) but I don't know that 10 additional RP every 15 seconds is going to be game breaking. And as far as Horn goes, its not really in my rotation. I have only been using it before pulls and as its expiring. Maybe that will help too. Every little bit helps when you spam your FS/RS button as much as I do.

Your math is wrong, at least on the value of Subversion. Since as blood, you won't be using Obliterate, Subversion is only a buff to HS. HS will be 20% of your damage or less, in all likelihood. Let's just say 20% for easy napkin math. With that assumption, *if* you take MoM (which I recommend against for reasons I posted earlier in this thread), the 9% crit from Subversion will be a 1.45 * 0.09 * 0.20 = 2.61% increase in overall damage, and less than that in threat. Not a strong candidate in my opinion, particularly since it requires MoM to be even that good.

Does anyone know what the current optimal Frost rotation is with the new disease scaling? I was using IT BS OB OB pre-patch, but perhaps IT PS BS BS OB OB OB OB is stronger now? Which rotation is better would, I think, play a large role in determining whether one takes full SoB or puts points into Epidemic.

I'm also starting to be convinced that even though the extra HP of Blood is nice, the extra 6 seconds on IBF with Frost makes it the best tanking tree, especially in Ulduar. An 18 second IBF, or 21 second with 4 piece T7 will will completely trivialize a lot of the trickier things bosses in Ulduar are prone to, such as Hodir's Frozen Blows. It's been my experience that surviving in Ulduar is much more about mitigating semi-regular intervals of extreme burst (Sunder/Unbalancing on Kolo/Thorim, if the OT is busy or dead, or buff stacking on Ignis etc.) than dealing with overall damage.

Vampiric Blood is getting less appealing to me as time goes on due to the number of mechanics that potentially disrupt healing (Flame Jets, well placed Icicles). When this cooldown had 50% uptime, it was exceptional. With less than 25% uptime, I believe it falls behind options that provide active mitigation, making Unholy's Boneshield and Frost's UA/extended IBF superior.

I did a quick search for feedback on the DS hotfix changes and I'm wondering if my rationalization here is way off track.

The way I see it in my possibly over simplified manner, is that even with DS only healing a specced and glyphed DK tank like myself for 800 normal and 1700 crits, it can be likened to a warrior and paladin block. From what I asked my guild's warriors, they block for a little more than 2k. I view Death Strike as a reactionary ability where block is reflexive. Considering that we should have more armor and more avoidance (even with the BB change), Death Strike's lowered healing seems to bring us in line with shield wearing tanks.

I'm sure there are holes in my logic, but with this in mind, the changes to DS makes sense to me.

DS was healing for 10k+, regularly. Anyone who expected it to stay like that was not thinking clearly.

It used to be that Blood builds got Annihilation. Now they get Improved Death Strike, a DS glyph, and use DS instead of Obliterate in that spot of the rotation.

However, you want your Death Strikes to come after your two Heart Strikes to make sure you have at least 26 RP for the glyph to get maximum effect.

The AoE rotation can be modified to:

DND - IT - PS - Pest - DS - BB - Pest - DS - Pest - BB X 5

It's a typo/error. He means Death Strike, but must've forgot to change it. Substitute DS...so:

IT-PS-DS-HS-HS, DS-HSx4, RP DUMP.

Also, not to nitpick the rotation, but wouldn't it be valuable to just use RS when it procs, particularly for blood (and unholy)?

Due to the fact that you don't have as many GCD's to spare as Frost or Unholy, I'm inclined to think RP is better spent on RS and defensive cooldowns instead of just dumping it right away at the end of a rune rotation. Dumping it just leads to being starved for RP when you need to RS (or worst-case, IBF). Frost is a little different with how hard FS hits (compared to DC).

I could be wrong and maybe some of us are brimming with RP due to SoB, in which case it'd be ok, but I'd imagine not dumping RP past 40ish with DC wouldn't be a bad idea.

Thanks guys. The single target rotation makes a lot more sense now.

Question on this one. Since Pest doesn't actually do damage anymore, what's the point of the 2nd and 3rd Pest within this rotation?

When I tank Unholy and Frost, I macro RS to all my main attacks since it is better threat than the other RP dumps. Even doing this, I'd still usually have excess RP to dump at the end, but then again I would usually be running w/ BoSanc. It will be interesting to see if I can keep RS macroed in a Blood spec or if I'll need to manually RS to keep above 26 RP. Time will tell I guess, but I'd be interested to hear what others do.

Thats simple really, your diseases will expire, dont forget that after DND - IT - PS - Pest there's a fair old wait before you drop DS, if you BB instead your diseases expire

As blood you should be alright (since you'll definitely have SoB)...and I feel like the need to dump RP isn't as important as it is with frost, since FS is a bigger source of threat than DC is for unholy or blood. I've been tanking as frost in ulduar, and I macro RS to all my obliterates, and RP has been an issue especially when I use dump RP using FS like Photek mentioned earlier (though he has SoB).

Having enough RP is absolutely essential on fights like council in order to mind freeze.


Anyone know if spell deflection work on Hodir's frozen blows? I'd imagine it would. If it is, I'd think it'd be a much better investment of 3 points, than Sudden Doom.

On a side note....does anyone else feel like the trash before council (Double Golem pack wth flame cannons for hands) just isn't survivable without IBF or AMS? That flame thing they do just absolutely demolishes me if those CDs aren't up.

Can i get some pointers please because no matter what i do to my talents, gear, gems, enchants and rotations my tps is stuck at around 4.5k. Another dk in my guild is telling me 4.5k is fine and that i should just gem and enchant for stam now, I think this is the wrong way to go at my current level. How can i make the most out of what i have? im pulling my hair out.

Heres my gear.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...ight&n=Hessian

Heres my talents

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

And my Rotation

IT > PS > BS > BS > OB > FS and Rune Strike whenever it is available

Finally i was wondering what do to with my last few talent points.

Is 5/5 bladed armour better than SoB?
Is Imp Frost Presence worth it
Do i need the Icy Talons talents we run with shammies but the other members like an almost constant haste buff.

Sorry about the poor formatting im new to forums i don't use them very often