I've been thinking the same thing for a while. Its great to have a a place for open-ended discussion on anything related to Death Knight tanking but most of the time I want specifics relating to a particular spec. Being able to follow all posts about Blood tanking without having to wade through pages of Frost and Unholy discussion would definitely save time.

I just had to offer a slight disagreement with this point. With sufficient hit and expertise, the blood rotation can be almost as easy as the howling blast glyphed frost rotation. Simply put the difference in threat between one death strike and 2 heart strikes in a single target situation is very minimal as you are not in dps gear and your threat is largely coming from white hits and runestrikes.

Specifically, as a blood tank, you can forgo death rune mastery and have a simple: IT + PS + HS + HS + DS with every other rotation replacing IT and PS with an extra DS (depending upon epidemic). You could even include IT + PS in every rotation and still not impact your threat that much, which will give you the opportunity for unclean rotations as other more pressing tanking concerns come up.

Last week I ran some simple numbers with my current tanking gear on lvl 80 target dummies and it showed that with my gear and a perfect rotation, I would gain 150 dps by using a rotation with death rune mastery and sudden doom. Personally I am quite happy to give up around 200 (maybe 400 raid buffed) threat and gain 6 talent points and an easier rotation allowing me to focus on other parts of tanking.

My point with all of this, it is not fair to discount a tree because the optimal rotation is too hard, especially when there is a slightly sub optimal tps build which plays just as easy as any other while keeping all the other benefits of the tree.

So I'm normally specced DPS for my Ulduar 25 group, but our raid leader (also the maintank, who is a warrior), often has me switch to a tanking spec for some fights because I'm competent, and in this case, can better handle the fight than him due to class. The fight in question is Vezax on 25, and we're currently going with the "have a DK use IBF on the Surge of Darkness" strategy. Problem is, our healers are having trouble getting the fight down, and I have a tendency to be killed if they fuck up even slightly. In an effort to edge out every last bit of healing he can get, he wants me to respec from my Frost tanking build to a Blood one.

My question is: Is this prudent? Will of the Necropolis seems like a really strong ability for a boss that can almost 2 shot and easily 3 shot me, Vampiric Blood is way, way better than Unbreakable Armor in every conceivable way for boss fights, and the extra little bit of self healing would help, he thinks. But do those outweigh the 3% chance to miss from Frigid Dreadplate and the 2% straight damage mitigation from Improved Frost Presence? The extra 6 seconds on IBF is also very valuable, as I have it glyphed to maximize the effectiveness.

I was also wondering if Vezax parry-gibs, because there are some situations where he seems to, but I cant be sure.

Blood is definitely stronger for Vezax...though I question the intelligence of using the MORE healer-dependent strat for the fight if the healers can't keep you alive through the increased damage. Make sure to cooldown quickly when he's casting so they're up in time for the next.

If you are having problems with getting enough healing, then it could be worth it to re-consider kiting. While you can tank the Surge of Darkness, it will make things harder for the healers especially if they're having mana problems from healing people who can't move away from shadow crashes. You can effectively avoid 12-15 seconds of damage on every Surge of Darkness, as well as save Icebound Fortitude for other times if you aren't tanking through it. A good time to use it is just as Vezax catches up to you after a Surge, as you may be out of range of some of the healers.

A good way to ensure you get out in time is to stand at the maximum range of his hitbox with your camera turned in the direction you want to run to. When he starts casting Surge, simply press both buttons of your mouse simultaneously, and you'll start running in the direction your camera is pointing. Alternatively you can bind the "move and steer" button somewhere.

The biggest problem with the kiting strategy is that you may run into some threat issues. While kiting you'll end up spending as much as 20-30% of your time out of his melee range unable to build threat.

Oh, I don't die when IBF/Surge of Darkness is up, I die when it's NOT up. I'll bring up that kiting is easier on the healers, though I'm not sure they'll go for it. If we switched back to kiting, our Warrior would be tanking him, not me.

How do both of you come to this conclusion?

Vexaz, iirc, has a 1.8 swing timer w/ an average hit of ~20k (probably slightly lower).

Breaking that down - every 15 seconds (best case) we'll get a reduced 1k dmg from WotN.
VB is there soley for extra padding for 30 seconds every 2 minutes.
Spell Deflection doesn't do anything in this fight unless Shadow Crash targets you and you don't run away from it.

Guile increases IBF by 6 seconds every minute at a reduction of 50%. Best case - 2 (3 hits if parry hasted) hits reduced by 10k.
Improved Frost Presence reduces *every* hit by 2% - or ~400dmg. If you put that on the same block as WotN in 15 seconds it reduces damage by 8 hits for 3200 damage. This also stacks with IBF, all though, very minimally.

I don't have time to bring in Unholy to the mix but, in my mind it's not going to be as good as Frost for tanking Vezex unless you stack Dodge trinkets and a few dodge gems to boost your avoidance to keep BS up as long as possible.

Not bringing Surge of Darkness in to this because you should be kiting. That's too big of an increase of damage to your healers.

If you are glyphed for IBF and use it on the surge phases the damage doesn't go up at all really. We've successfully done Vezak without kiting through surge mostly because with IBF up, the surge damage increase is very minimal. I think I saw my incoming hits average 300-400 more a swing through that phase. Remember also when he's casting the flame debuff he isn't swinging either, which usually shaves 1.5 seconds off the surge phase and cuts about 2 swings out.

So if he is swinging every 1.8 and surge lasts 10 seconds he can get a max of about 4-5 swings in with the buff.

If he casts searing flame (i think thats the abilities name) during that 10 second window (he always did when we did him) he will cut down at least 1 swing. So now your looking at 3-4 swings with the buff.

Factor in avoidance and your going to rough take on average 2-3 melee swings during that phase.

Yes it does add a little bit more healing but if that little extra is the problem than one of two things are wrong. You're not bringing enough healers or they're not managing their mana/ rotation on healing you well enough.

We could math out how many extra swings that potentially adds to the fight and how much more damage and on paper it will most likely look like kiting is the best way to do it. But when I did the fight not having to kite him made it much easier on me, the raid and my healers since positioning wasn't a factor, healing range and all the other complications that comes along with moving the boss all around the room.

Have the warrior tank; intervene out to a totem/raid member. Put your DPS gear back on.

Or tank, because having a death knight tank Vezax pretty much totally trivializes the fight. Surge of Darkness is on a precisely 60-second cooldown - I wouldn't even bother glyphing IBF for it if you don't normally. Taking ~10% increased damage for 3-4 swings is pretty minor here, and everyone has trinket/external cooldowns if you're that worried about it. It's just not worth it to run him around if you can simply stand there and tank it normally.

That said, he hits hard enough overall that you probably don't want to just throw one of your normal DPS DKs against him with whatever mishmosh of gear they have - though most people should have pretty robust tanking sets by now.

Why wouldn't you kite him? You reduce so much damage, and threat is not an issue.

With kiting, and using cooldowns at end of each kite, his average hit was only 15k on me this week. Much easier on the healers.

For the hard mode perspective sitting through the surge and using a CD on it is a terrible idea for a few reasons. First, you're taking an increased amount of damage that is completely 100% avoidable in a fight where all mana users, healers especially, need to conserve and spend carefully. Most importantly though you're using a cool down to handle easily avoidable damage when it could be used during the normal tank phase.

Kiting the fight doesn't make it any less stable if you set up properly. If running out of healer range is a legitimate issue than that is completely the fault of poor raid set up or sloppy play. You made the comment about vapors being the fight, well if mana was that tight of an issue at SoD then a little more work needs to be put into vapor management which is a complete non-issue for the hard mode. If kiting is too challenging a prospect for your guild and you're getting the fight down using a cool down for surge more power to you, but actually kiting the boss is not the least bit difficult and something that should be done if you want to seriously tackle the hard mode. On 10 man the animous is another 2 million HP, the general is still active, and he does a raid wide stacking shadow attack. The damage is intense and comes at a time in the fight when mana is short across the board so doing anything you can to conserve it is imperative.

I'm strictly speaking of Hard Mode Vezex. Where kiting the boss is your main option because healers can't use vapors and need to conserve their mana for Animus + Vezex phase.

Now, Drolz - you bring up a fantastic point for Blood with the increase in healing for 30 seconds. The over all question for that will be - is the damage reduction from Frost outweigh the healing of Blood? This I'm not sure how to figure out that easily.

Sorry, I may have been unclear, but I didn't mean that guilds actively attempting the hard mode should avoid kiting. I was directing my comments towards a guild still learning the normal mode. When I talked about tanking the surge as a preparation for this I was referring to the importance of threat, and I see how this was confusing.

I disagree that kiting does not make the fight less stable. When you kite, three things happen that can be avoided if you tank the surge. First, you or the melee can end up out of his melee range and be targeted with Shadow Crash and Mark of the Faceless. For a guild that has this fight under its belt, not a huge deal. For one just learning it, and probably killing him very near the enrage timer, it can be highly problematic. This seems to be the situation the poster who asked the original question is in, and it is what I directed my comments to. Second, when healers are just learning how to use the vapors, they are much more likely to be unprepared for your movement during the surge, and for you to end up out of range. Third, similar to point one, melee may be out of range when he casts his armor debuff.

As to your insulting my guild, pretty unnecessary. My guild in fact uses a warrior to tank Vezax, and he intervenes out of Surge to kite. The normal mode has been trivial ever since our healers learned the vapor system. In disagreeing with people in this thread, I have always been polite, and there's no reason you cannot do the same.

This is something I have been thinking about too. I noted earlier in the thread that I thought hardmode Vezax might be an exception to what I consider Blood's generally weaker performance in important situations. If we were dealing with 1 minute CD VB, I think I would be prepared to say that Blood is THE tanking build for hardmode Vezax. Some quick thoughts on the issue as it stands now:

Given kiting, you will be taking damage about 1:30 to 1:40 out of every 2 minutes. In an ideal situation, this could work out to VB being up 1/3 of the time, which would be about 10% more healing over the entire course of the fight.

Frost, however, has 2% more mitigation and 3% more avoidance along with an extra 12 seconds of IBF, which itself works out to be 12/90 seconds (kiting math) of -40% (unglyphed) damage. That would be about 5% mitigation over the course of the fight, I believe. Throw in UBA, and figure it shaves 1500 off 20000 hits for 20 seconds, which is about 1% mitigation over the fight.

Looking at this, Frost actually seems to have the edge if you compare it's damage reduction to VB, but if you throw in Blood self healing, it might still come out ahead.

I don't know enough about Unholy tanking to judge it.

Unless we can retain our pre-3.1 avoidance numbers - Unholy is sub-par for this fight as it's only cooldown would be Boneshield which relies purely on RNG. Granted, it's been averaging for roughly 12-15 seconds for me on Vezex. At 20% damage reduction it doesn't stand up to the constant of Frost.

Math...I'm going to scour some of our WWS logs and look the average healing but it seems non-crits average around 5-6k. Equaling an extra 900 healing per heal.

[This is going to require a bit more math in which I will do after a nap.]

With the glyph, the fastest you can lose all 5 charges is 15 seconds....right?

For some reason I'm thinking the internal cooldown on BS is 2 seconds. If it's 3 seconds, that's my bad and it puts my BS lasting 15 seconds on average. The odd part is I'm noticing a charge subtract with every boss hit - Vezex is at 1.8, Freya is around there, too. That's why I'm saying 12-15 seconds.

Unless they finally fixed it without telling anyone... yes, the internal cooldown on BS is 2.0 seconds. It has been ever since they announced it'd be 3.5 seconds like lightning shield, waaaaaaay back in beta.

One thing to remember about Vesax and Blood tanking that seems to be discarded in most discussions is Deathstrike and Imp Runetap. For Runetap it's really useful if you get hit a single time while you're kiting away for example(like a potion you'll tell me, but I've gotten hit while being pretty far more than once) or timing it when it'll 100% heal. It also synergize pretty well with VB times, heals for like 13k. Death Strikes are a constant supply of self healing, that can help with the load on your healer by topping you off and stuff like that. You can choose to time them slightly so you hit with DS right after the boss hits you(if he misses or you avoid, it'll be 100% overhealing, but if you get hit that DS pretty much puts you into the safe area even if you get it again). You might need to work some stuff out with your healers, but as blood I can call when VB is up and for 30secs you can cut 1 or 2 healers from watching you who can go sit in a green cloud or just wait without wasting any mana if doing hard mode.

I don't really see how popping rune tap "if you get hit a single time while you're kiting away" would be very helpful. If you get hit a second time, you're going to die even with the rune tap, and if you don't get hit again, I can't see why you wouldn't be healed to full before Vezax was back on you. I am also unconvinced that timing your DSs in this manner won't result in considerably lower TPS. As I said before, I don't believe Blood confers any particular advantage for normal mode, because the fight is entirely trivial once your healers understand the vapors, and entirely impossible before they learn.

The real math on whether self healing gives you a considerable edge versus Frost's mitigation on the hard mode is beyond my abilities, but something I'd be very interested to see.

Blood's self-healing is so RNG-dependent, I'm not even sure how you would begin to model that.