This table is being developed for a "Best in Slot" analysis for tanking, from an Unholy perspective. Due to the changing nature of boss fights and incoming damage type/size, it's nearly impossible (and barely useful) to create separate tables for each type of fight. Clearly the sets listed here will be less/more ideal depending on the encounter.

I'm evaluating the slots with reasonable gemming. This list is being developed at work; progress may be slow. The current listed gear is merely placeholder and may not be accurate until this disclaimer is removed.

Slot	Effective Health	Avoidance	Pre-Heroic hard mode	Hit/exp capped as priority
Helm	[Conqueror's Darkruned Faceguard]	[Helm of the Faceless]	?	?
Amulet	[Bronze Pendant of the Vanir]	?	?	?
Pauldrons	[Conqueror's Darkruned Pauldrons]	?	?	?
Cloak	[Titanskin Cloak]	?	[Cloak of the Makers]	?
Breastplate	[Conqueror's Darkruned Chestguard]	?	?	?
Bracers	[Mimiron's Inferno Couplings]	?	?	?
Gloves	[Handguards of Revitalization]	?	[Conqueror's Darkruned Handguards]	?
Belt	[Indestructible Plate Girdle]	?	?	?
Legplates	[Legplates of the Endless Void]	Same	[Saronite Plated Legguards]	?
Boots	[Charred Saronite Greaves]	?	?	?
Ring	[Fate's Clutch]	?	?	[Platinum Band of the Aesir]
Ring	[The Leviathan's Coil]	?	?	?
Trinket	[Heart of Iron]	[Furnace Stone]	?	?
Trinket	[Royal Seal of King Llane]	[The General's Heart]	?	?
Weapon	Dark Edge of Depravity	?	?	?
	-	-	-	-
Stamina	1857	-	-	-
Strength	889	-	-	-
Armor	14652	-	-	-
Dodge Rating	509	-	-	-
Parry Rating	277	-	-	-
Hit rating	214	-	-	-
Expertise	72	-	-	-
Haste rating	85	-	-	-
ArPen rating	0	-	-	-

Wouldn't [Royal Seal of King Llane] be better than [The General's Heart] for effective health?

Edit - Also, threw the EH items into wowhead for the stats:

Stamina 1690
Strength 940
Armor 14589
Defense rating 604
Dodge rating 562
Parry rating 291
Armor penetration rating 70
Critical strike rating 85
Expertise rating 132
Hit rating 150

I guess my question is simply "why?" 4pT8 is a 10% physical damage reduction that lasts for 5 of 45 seconds. If you want to move on to use 239 tanking items (hands, legs, and possibly undiscovered), are we convinced that this set bonus is worth it to not take more than 1 of those items? From my own point of view, the 4pT8 bonus is very unappealing, as there are multiple fights where it makes perfect sense to use AMS on reacting to a boss event (debuff, big blast attack), and relatively few where spamming AMS on CD would even make much difference.

2pT8, on the other hand, is free threat at very low cost. We have to use the chestpiece anyway (perhaps there is an undiscovered hard mode chest alternative), so pick your next favorite piece and go from there (helm or shoulders most likely).

I also cannot understand the appeal of the 4 Piece. It seems utterly useless to be honest.

I will echo the sentiments on the 4pc T8. The only fight I can think of where using it would make a lot of sense, offhand, would be Vezax combining AMS with IBF so you can take even less damage during his enrage and avoid having to kite him.. but having to hold back so much RP to ensure availability might gimp your threat.

That said I don't consider the T8 pieces to be "bad" as they are decently itemized if you can look past the parry rating on them.. but Blizz really didn't do the best of jobs giving people an incentive to upgrade before 25-man Ulduar as most of the 10-man tanking items are junk compared to T7.5 ones, and some are even junk compared to T7 10-man.

I made this post a couple of pages ago, seen here as a single macro doesn't work very well. It requires two macros and obviously, wouldn't be very good for anyone using Glyph of Disease (or Glyph of Howling Blast).

Yeah the 4-piece isn't great. Comparing the set items (including the set bonus) to the offsets aren't compellingly in favor of either however. The bonus will be used regularly on Ignis (if your raid is offtanking adds) when the stacks are high, Freya and/or snaplashers, pounce, Crusher tentacles, Thorim, Eternal Guardians, etc. Describing it as "utterly useless" is hardly accurate; it's 10% off during the hardest hitting moments in Ulduar, short of Plasma Blast.

When I get my sheets in order I'll post the specific tradeoffs.

On the other hand, many of us are likely going to hammer away at Ulduar10 for [Royal Seal of King Llane]. Additionally, the best tanking helm stat-balance wise seems to be [Ironbark Faceguard], which drops from Freya10. Another pretty decent ring is the [Signet of Winter] and a pretty unique set of legs [Archaedas' Lost Legplates] (only legs itemized in this way). With the exception of the trinket and helm, I'm not saying these items are better than their 25 man counterparts, but they are still pretty good for certain gear set-ups.

I'm curious about this. I have basically that frost spec as one of my two (Blood as my other) I'm curious how other DK tanks are noticing it in relation to ping? I'm very comfortable with the frost rotation as I was frost pre-3.1, but I'm curious if my ping is just a tad too high to reliably keep this going. What will happen is I'll hit pest to refresh and it will only catch Frost Fever and not Blood Plague (Which I also find puzzling since IT is the first of the two in my rotation. I've even tried starting with IT PS OB Pest BS, OB OB OB to 'equalize' the diseases and I'm still finding that IT will refresh and blood plague won't. It's VERY tight timing-wise either way, and I feel like it's my ping making the difference (150ish is normal for me, almost never below that, sometimes up closer to 200).. Really makes that build falter on threat unless I play it the same way I did pre 3.1 without glyph of disease. My other spec is blood and that one works fine, of course, but I miss frost and wonder if there's just something I'm doing wrong or if other DKs with similar ping times to mine are having the same trouble. (I don't think it's me not hitting keys fast enough, previous main was a rogue and I'm renowned in my guild for sounding like I'm spamming keys like my life depends on it when I talk on vent).

This is the spec i'm using at the minute and it just feels like complete guff when i'm tanking. Really not feeling that i'm putting out enough damage and threat even though I feel I have a nice hp boost from this spec. I really want to try frost now for howling blast, frost strike and obliterate to up my threat and damage but I have always been an unholy tank and i'm scared to change away from my comfort zone. Any chance anyone could give me a few tips on my current spec or if frost is the way to go. Using IT>PS>DS>BS>BS>RPDUMP(rune strike as much as possible and DC) then DS>DS>BSx2>RPDUMP.

The Ironbark Faceguard is no where near better then the T8.5 helm but I'd say that the Signet of Winter with The Leviathan Coil are the two BiS rings. Those legs are unique but compared to the 25man Maly pants they aren't that great, especially when you have the Signet of Winter because you lose 17.5 Defense if you traded the Maly pants for those.

Sadly, [Furious Gladiator's Sunderer] and its variants seem to be BiS for progression.
[Saronite Plated Legguards] should be used over T8 and [Fate's Clutch] is also missing in the list.

What's the cap points for DK tanks on expertise and hit rating? Noticing a lot of people are stacking it, especially in comparison to hit rating (personally sitting at 200ish hit and 24 expertise). Just wondering if there is some hidden benefit to this expertise surge of top tanks compared to pre 3.1 patch. Even the original poster of the thread is sitting at around 33 expertise...

Also must say that I ran through Ulduar 10man last night as MT again, new instance through thorim and I must say I was highly disappointed when I went back to blood spec over frost. There's no comparable AOE (can't keep worms off AoE in Hodir's cave), the lose of avoidance makes the entire fight spikey (WoTN isn't that much help), and the TPS is nowhere near the same. The one thing I did notice was I didn't have sunders regularly which hurts the TPS but still...I can't base a spec off a specific raid buff. One reason it could have sucked was that I did try glyph of disease and using primarily death strike...probably should have got death rune mastery and a different glyph, since heart strike spam was doing better TPS in general. It's also very hard to do the rotation of glyph of disease without death mastery because your "oh shit" VB/Rune/MoB are all blood runes...which you need for pestilence to keep the rotation going. Kind of contradictory.

Either way, I plan on finishing it up with Unholy to kind of get a feel of each spec..even though Blood could have been gimped a little, it just doesn't match up. Frost heavily outweighed my ability in Blood in nearly every aspect.

Threat is very important, especially on hard mode burns like Hodir, so people are wise to max out hit and expertise. Getting misses and dodges/parries can really screw up your threat, especially early in the fight. Expertise is more valuable than hit up to a little over 5% because it affects both dodge and parry. After that it's equally valuable (or close to it) until you hit the parry cap.

I believe you are correct about Blood. I think that people routinely overvalue its benefits and ignore its severe drawbacks (namely gross inferiority in active mitigation).

His point was totally different, he was talking about threat, which definitely seems worse on single target especially in 10man where you don't get all buffs(but still enough with enough exp/hit for normal mode burns) and AE threat tools were crap, as well as Glyph of Disease not working very well with the spec, which is understandable, I'd never used it and I'm still pretty convinced that while interesting, the glyph is inferior for about every spec, tanking and DPSing alike.

I'm not sure what gross inferiority there is in Blood however, and it'd be interesting to hear what you're comparing it to. Frost does have better passive mitigation in the form of Frigid Dreadplate(technically avoidance but well), Improved Frost Presence and Guile of the Gorefiend. Unholy however has pretty much nothing(a bit of magic mitigation). Blood has Spell Deflection and Will of the Necropolis as passive, but it doesn't shine through mitigation but through constant self healing, which while not technically mitigation, count as a whole in your ability to stay alive(EH is it?). Constant Death Strikes, Bloodworms, Improved Runetap and arguably Mark of Blood(which I dislike because of the poor returns), and Blood Presence which is rather weak. Still all those are not to be discarded, because they're much better than anything in Unholy, and they can in my opinion offset the 3%miss, 6secs of IBF and 2%dmg reduction of frost, if you combine them with the passive. As for a comparison of the best 2mins tree specific cooldown, Vampiric Blood is again in my opinion the best one, and UA the worst by far. Bone Shield is good in some cases, weak in others(2-3mobs or a fast hitting boss) so I figure it's average, but it rarely holds up for 30secs anymore with our avoidance under 60%. Oh and unless you go for an hybrid build, Blood also has 6% more stamina, which is about 2k hp.

Well let's address it one by one.

1. For frost, you are right about Frost Presence, GoG and Frigid Dreadplate. Don't dare deny the ability of unbreakable armor though - especially if you get a Furnace Heart. Taking 1800 off everything and the strength boost (for increased threat and parry) is exceptional in a lot of situations. Getting hit thirty times for 2k or thirty times for 200 is a big difference. If I'm getting hit a LOT of times, I'd rather have them all lose a significant percent than get a bonus to healing. Vampiric Blood was nice but the extra minute I think killed it in comparison. If you doubt me, try it out.

2. Self healing from blood presence isn't really all that great. Assuming you do a nice 2k dps, that's 80 healing per second - which is pretty much nil when main tanking. If you're constantly below 100% health to have a decent effect aside from normal healing ticks (HoT), it's more of a healer problem than anything.

3. Self healing from death strike isn't exactly all that great either - yes you can time it so you help the healers out but more often than not it can screw up healing. Either yours goes off when at full health (about 90%) of the time or you heal yourself causing the healer to overheal. In that rare situation where you can self heal to save the raid, more often than not I find other ways to stave the pain. For example, ghoul + death pact or healthstone or potion or all the other "cooldowns" can usually save you as well. Death strike is also I'm finding lower in TPS - I've got the gear/trinket/etc and more often than not I wish I had obliterate. If you're that worried, you can do it for the same healing effect in unholy tree. In those situations I'd much rather have Rune Tap anyways if we're getting to brass tacks (which takes 4 points to be worth it).

4. Never used bloodworms for MT - nor have I really seen anyone else use it. Unless this is some hidden gem, they die 99% of the time or have such a low effect it's not worth it. I did have a crazy plan for dual-wield super haste blood worm swarm once...

5. In comparison, I like bone shield over vampiric these days. More and more fights are not about how much you can heal but how much you're taken in pure damage because healers have to move, watch mana, get silenced/thrown or the damage is just so much they're using bubbles/guardian/etc. If this was Naxx, I'd take blood in a heart beat because healers can just sit there and spam heals...or more often than not, go AFK while I self heal but Ulduar is another story. At minimum, bone shield will hold for 15 seconds with 5 charges - that's 15 seconds of 20% less damage. Yes you can't keep it up permanently but it's a lot easier to keep it up past 15 seconds especially in a single target Boss fight (which most of Ulduar is) and taking 20% less is a lot more effective than getting a bigger health buffer.

5.5 In all honesty as well, your argument about multiple targets....I rarely pay much attention during trash As MT for the guild it's pretty rare to have a point where I need to tank multiple things and bone shield was make or break the end all for that fight...half the time I don't even use IBF/AMS/etc except bosses. As a blood DK, you just give the AoE tanking to the paly/frost/unholy tank because they just do it better...and I got tired of those situations.

6. Losing the 6% health does suck but there's offsets to it in both trees that are comparable. 6% less magic damage is pretty dang useful in Ulduar. I've been there with 55k+ health...last week I had 36k unbuffed hp in blood spec but I'm telling you, Frost/Unholy at 33.5k is seeming to turn out a lot better. 2k hp for me has rarely been the save to keep the raid alive...but that lucky miss/dodge/absorb/etc has been.

Try the other side of the fence Blood was awesome but I think it got beat down like a red-headed step child in comparison to the other trees. Maybe when the world is in farm status we can go back to it but right now it's not there.

Are people forgetting the 15% health boost from VB? It's equivalent to a 13% damage mitigation shield if the tank is topped to full by every heal. Counting cases where the tank won't be healed to full (and thus the 35% healing bonus will come into play), in practice it's a little better than that.

20% from BA is better than 13% from VB, but 13% for 30 seconds plus 15% from WotN plus 6% stamina boost gives a clear advantage to Blood over Unholy.

Frost is a little more interesting. VB is clearly superior to UA, but the extra 6 seconds on IBF is enough to mitigate this IMO (your miliage may vary). I think the real tradeoff is 3% miss + 4% mitigation vs 6% stamina + 15% WotN. For taking the big hits, I think Blood still has an advantage over Frost too.

// Edit: Plus, you get some nifty Death Strike and Rune Tap healing. A major advantage? Probably not, but helpful to cement Blood into top place.

// Edit2: And I should clarify, this is for heavy physical damage. For heavy magic damage I'd go with Unholy > Blood > Frost.

I sometimes find myself wishing for that Glyph so that I could get off 5 Death Strikes in a cycle. I understand that's not the ideal thing to do, but it does come up.

I think this analysis overvalues WotN. The mechanics of that ability make it most useful against fights where you're mainly taking heavy melee damage from the boss, which is exactly the kind of fight that I am not at all worried about dying on.

If we take, for example, a boss that hits for 20k, and figure that the DK has around 43k HP, WotN will activate when the DK would drop below ~13k and shave 3k off a hit. WotN would proc when the DK was as high as 33k HP prior to being hit. That's 79% HP. The threshold for a life saving proc is when the player is between 17k and 20k HP. Below that you die, above that you would have lived anyway. According to the math, 9% of WotN's procs are life-saving. If we're honest, we will further admit that with the amount of non melee damage you're likely to be taking, there's a very good chance you will die a fraction of a second after WotN "saves" you. (By this logic WotN's truly life-saving procs are ones that would keep you above a margin of 5k or so, but it's the same 9% window.)

I do not believe WotN is that great of a tanking talent. It's entirely too random and randomness is what tanks have been trying to eliminate ever since a guy put on defense gear. (And well before then.)

As blood AoE tanking, I pull aggro from our prot paladins and unholy tank dk, you are simply doing it wrong.

They really boosted bloodboil to the roof last patch, in tank gear i've seen 4k hits. With DRM you can setup some pretty insane AoE threat.

Also, I know this might seem silly but I've found that blood has more lifesaving options than blood/unholy - There's so many times where I know the next hit could kill me so I compensate with either Rune Tap + DS or Vamp and hop, saved a wipe right there. Most will say that being frost that hit had higher chance of being avoided but still, I'd rather have a 100% chance to live than bet on my luck.

As far as I know, the DRW has its own threat table. And I absolutely do not believe that your BB has hit for 4k.

I think you misread, he was talking about Death Rune Mastery allowing you to line up multiple BBs in a row, not Dancing Rune Weapon.