Your post has some good information, but I was under the impression that Gargoyle did not add to threat of the caster, but has his own entry on the threat table. I could be wrong, but in all the time using him for dps I've never noticed a threat problem.

Our warlocks are like the only ones that pull aggro off of me >.>. I watch my TPS being steadily 7k, and I look at a warlock doing 11k, FML.

If you reread what I said, I didn't say to increase your threat, but to increase your DPS. It's a DPS race, if you can pop a cooldown increasing it by a decent amount, it's better than well, if you can't. For 1point, it's a very good investment for most hard modes where you need to burst DPS down something. It's not crazy but every little bit helps. That's why I also always spec Hysteria as Blood and cast it on DPS during Bloodlust.

And yeah, warlocks are just as bad as mages, if not worse. Mages can get unlucky and have their invis fail, but if they don't they can usually manage their threat. Warlocks are pretty much a lost cause, they burn Soulshatter 30secs in then just keep pulling aggro. Luckily for me, we only have one warlock in the guild, so once he's dead bosses stop moving ^^.

I was under the impression that hysteria and bloodlust did not stack?

My apologies, I hadn't considered using gargoyle for dps while tanking. Is that really a smart use of runic power on Hodir? I guess if you can spare the RP and still stay ahead on threat it would be a good idea, but I've always heard that threat is the biggest concern for the tank on that fight.

Hysteria doesn't stack with other 'enrage-type' buffs, EX: Tricks of the Trade, Enrage, Death Wish, Recklessness, such and such (somehow still stacks with Berserking, my feral druid wets his pants everytime he pops both during a Heroism lol).

2 mages.... 4-5 warlocks... /wrists.

Last time I checked, fusion punch was avoidable. So rune of swordshattering/swordbreaking 2x could be just as useful. 4% mitigation of spell damage v.s 4% avoidance of his melee and fusion punch. Since Spellshattering/Spellbreaking 2x will only affect the fusion punch it may not be the optimal choice.

When was the last time you checked? I've never known this ability to be avoidable.

WMO shows the only "miss"es are full absorbs.

After being an Unholy tank for the longest time, 3.1 saw me make the switch to frost because I was taking quite a beating in Ulduar. I had brief stint of Blood tanking in between these two phases of my tanking career and I basically didn't like the meat-shield design of Blood, nor did I enjoy the "non-tanking" talents which inevitable found their way into any build I was contemplating. Since then I have considered making a revisioned set-up for blood tanking, which would pair the mitigation of Will of the Necropolis with the avoidance/stam from Commendation of Kael'thas and the self-heal from Formula: Enchant Weapon - Blood Draining.

Basically, this ensures that you get three passive survival skills built into the buffer zone around 35 % health, which goes nicely with some of the harder hitting bosses in Ulduar.

I am keenly aware that blood-draining isn't considered a viable tanking enchant, especially with the superior nature of our class-specific tanking runes, but in conjunction with self-heals and VB, I thought it might work for this particular setup.

Admittedly, I have done very little in way of theory-crafting this idea, but I'll try it out when I get the damn trinket to drop again. Any thoughts or in-put, would be greatly appreciated.

I think that really sums up the entire post.

You are talking about trading either 25 defense and 2% hp, or 4% avoidance for a fairly weak proc'd heal that is only situationally useful at best?

Beyond that, you are also talking about taking up a trinket slot with a trinket from the last expansion, which is a net loss of 54-98 raw stamina, depending on which other stamina trinket you have available for that slot. In return for this massive loss of health, in a spec that specializes in maintaining high hp, you occasionally gain roughly 3% dodge. The tradeoff really just isn't worth it in a build that revolves around EH, or any build for that matter.

The main aim of this setup was to create a blood-tank who would be very resilient if low on HP, which would be of great aid to the healers and which plays of the basic notion that blood-tanks are partly responsible for helping with health throughput. It's really the synergy between the parts which would make it interesting, but I do agree that both Commendation and Blood-Draining are sub-optimal choices taken as such, but it's really the interplay of the three things I'm interested in.
Don't take my statement of not having done theorycrafting to imply that I haven't considered the trade-offs I'm so obviously making.

Were you wearing 4 pieces of Tier8 at the time? I see only 3/5 on your armory atm but I'm assuming different threat/survival gear setups perhaps.

It's been discovered earlier that the 4 piece set bonus causes AMS to grant runic power as though the melee hits were magic hits (for substantial RP gains of course).

I don't think having 4pc T8 would even give you that much RP from Vezax's melee strikes. I'll look over the parse and see if you had AMS up while a Searing Flame get loose or if it did absorb melee damage.

This is a bit baffling to me too, I'll test it out by not wearing 4pc for a fight.

From what I can tell of the log, Vezax did not get off any searing flames. (You can check this by using the WoL parse and using the log parser to look at Searing flames).

The only thing that I can think of that may cause this is someone having Mark of the Faceless, and standing beside me. However, this seems unlikely as I just hit AMS whenever I remembered. On top of that, if you look at the damage taken section for me, you will see only melee. If AMS was catching some kind of spell damage when I popped it, you would assume that there would also be some magic damage when AMS was not up.

I can corroborate your story. Here's a WWS where I gained 225 RP from 2 uses of Anti-magic Shell on Vezax without getting hit by Searing Flames. The only damage I took during the shells were his melee attack. There was actually a third use of Shell in that fight where I took no damage and gained no RP.

Just out of curiousity, why were you popping AMS randomly during Vezax without 4p t8?

He doesn't have 4 piece T8. He stated quite clearly in his post that he knows what you reported and also stated quite clearly that he doesn't have 4 piece.

Further, that exact same "solution" has been posted and commented on in the exact same manner already.

AMS gives you RP when you're hit, always.


With DPS-gear on:

First time post, been reading for quite some time. My gear is not quite what Myrx's is, and my spec is standard 55/8/10 Blood tank build. I'm hitting 2600+ as far a dps goes, and ~6.7k TPS on Vezax. This with survival very much in mind, Rune Taps, timed Death Strikes, and AMS/IBF/JC Crabbie trinket for standing in (And the occasional waste of RP on catching an interrupt cause melee jumps the gun.).

Yea Mags, single target Rune Strike from a Blood Tank is pretty macho 3,875 average up to 8,246 from a Worldcarver.

On a somewhat related note: I love tanking Blood and can see no foreseeable reason to do otherwise in any fight save Hodir (Which I dps anyway). Threat, Survivability, and Utility have proven quite exciting even coming from a pally tank.

Addicted to more threat though, thoughts? SoA Relic and ERW typically early in a fight, Early AMS (4T8) For Free RP, and Troll Berserking w/ Dodge-on-use for faster RS. (Yea a Troll, was never meant to be a raiding toon, but needed a DK tank.)

Can't answer for Xrkar, but my reason is absent-mindedness. When I was programming my mental subroutines on what to do for Vezax, I decided to want to use Anti-Magic Shell for the 10% damage reduction. Unfortunately I don't have that 4 piece set bonus yet.

Fortunately, now we know AMS will fill you up no matter when you use it, so I guess I pulled a Homer.

Hello,

This is my first post here but I've been watching the threads on this forum for some time. Lately, I have experimented with 2 tanking builds: 1 frost, 1 blood.

The blood one is: link
The frost one is: link

The build I used before testing the above 2: link

For the blood one, I opted for single target only threat (with the previous frost build i experimented, i ended up having rage problems on bosses like vezax or hodir).
For the frost one, it is a pretty strong AOE threat and also good single target.

The main difference between the two specs that I noticed are:

Blood
- It has very strong non magical attacks.
- Rune strike hits like a truck -> more threat
- Death Strike crits for ~6k.
- 5% extra crit goes a long way
- On my gear and HP (44.000 hp full raid buffed), death strike would heal me for 6.800 each strike.
- Main runic dump is runic strike, followed somewhere far by Death Coil.

Frost
- It has less powerful non magical attacks (rune strike hits for ~1k less when critting)
- Obliterate with 2 diseases up and Sigil of Awarness will crit for almost 8k.
- Frost strike can crit for up to 5-6k, affected by different magical amplifiers.
- Main Runic power dump is Rune strike, followed closely by Frost Strike.

Frost discussion
I am mainly a frost tank. But as I said in the begining, i noticed that I had certain problems with threat. The problems I encountered before testing the 2 new builds were:
- Runic power starvation
- High crit dependency (if obliterate didn't crit a lot, dps would catch up).
- Rune strike wouldn't proc that much. This is mostly because the boss missed me a lot instead of dodge/parry.
- Howling blast is very nice for AOE packs cause it distributes the frost fever to all targets affected thus 2x Blood boil will do a lot threat initially.

As rotation, i was using the 1 disease rotation: HB -> OB -> BS -> BS -> OB -> OB/HB -> OB.
For runic power dump, if KM procced and Rune strike was not up, i would FS, else rune strike. If KM did not proc, I continued until I either had ~80 rage to FS or Rune strike procced.

This rotation was plain easy to implement and allowed me to be very mobile as i could do a howling blast from 20 yards away (like Mimiron for example) giving me the chance to have a 100% uptime on diseases.

The new frost rotation would be: OB (for initial threat) -> IT -> PS -> BS -> BS -> OB -> OB -> OB.

Blood Discussion
I tested the blood spec for XT, General Vezax, Mimiron (Ph1, Ph3 (Assault Bots)), Iron Counil Hard mode (Steelbreaker).
The things I noticed, compared to frost are:
- Less hectic threat generation. All hits did more damage (melee, rune strike, heart strike etc). All are physical and are affected by armor penetration and since i was always above 75% hp (lets assume 98% of the time), i would also get the 10% extra damage. So I managed to do a 8229 tps average on XT while tanking him and hitting the heart also in frost presence. (link for threat report)
- Self healing capabilities which can be used on "OH SHIT" situations. Death strike, the main ability to be used for consuming the blood and unholy runes. Using this right after a 24k hit from general will surely save your ass from another strike landing on you before the healers can react. It has happened in the past that i got 2 hits in a row with only some hots ticking on me at that moment and with the big heals just 0.2 seconds too late. so a 6-7k heal will save you in these situations. of course these heals will also push healers into overhealing, but a well timed self heal will save a wipe.
- Disease management wasn't such a pain due to the 21 seconds duration but this spec requires a lot more expertise than frost. I sometimes got parried a lot in the begining of the fight and people would pull aggro. Thank you blizzard for 2 taunts though .

After experimenting the 2 specs, I will stick to the frost one (the new one).

What I would like to ask the great minds of EJ here is if I can improve my spec/rotations to generate more threat.