I'm under the impression (please correct me if I'm wrong) that IBF is not good at all for tanking. Perhaps its a badly worded tooltip. But it states that it reduces damage by AT LEAST 30% REGARDLESS of your defense skill. Its not saying it adds 10%. Just saying that if you have 540 def or not, it will always be at least a 30% reduction. This has fallen out of tanking favor into the realm of PVP.

It's been brought up before on these forums as well...not sure which thread it was. As frost, I would definitely agree that this is a great major glyph, due to a 21 sec IBF. 50% dmg reduction up 33% of the time? Even a 15 sec IBF glyphed is probably worth it as it'll be up 25% of the time.

I suspect the glyph may get nerfed...I would really hate it if they made IBF a longer CD like they did with UA/BS.

Some things I wanted to bring up in regards to glyphs:

1) Is being able to FS more often (instead of 4 FS, you'll get 5) better for threat than 10% crit on rune strike?
2) Is the DS glyph actually better than the RS glyph as a blood tanking spec? DS is used about 2x every 1 full rotations...whereas, I envision RS being used more frequently than that. I think this notion is only strengthened by any fight where we have to tank multiple mobs, which would lead to more RS procs (but would not affect the number of DS' that we put out per rotation).

As a blood speced tank, I find that my top 3 damaging abilities (on Recount) are Rune Strike, Melee, and Heart Strike (not necessarily in that order, and depending on what I'm fighting), followed by Death Strike at number 4. Of these, only Rune Strike has a built-in threat increase. I run with both the Death Strike glyph and the Rune Strike glyph; however, if I had to chose between the two, I'd take the Rune Strike glyph hands down - with Scent of Blood, I can Rune Strike every cooldown and still keep my RP above 50 (while throwing in the occasional DC) making max use of the DS glyph.

I've been keenly aware of the changes made to the Death Strike healing to damage ratio this afternoon, and I'm heavily curious as to how this effects me as a Blood Tank in raid. I feel like I'll see very little difference in a 25 man, but I am quite sure the additional healing lose will be felt heavily by my healers.

I'd like to hear some experiences about this, post change, as I'm not sure I'm sure when I'll be given the opportunity to off-tank in our Ulduar raids in the near future. I'm trying to see discover if I should be seeking the extra mitigation from the Frost trees instead of looking to Blood for more effective health, as I'll be less-capable of healing myself through trash damage (Which I'm partially depended on to do at certain portions during Razorscale.)

Also, I'm curious if anyone is looking into actually calculating the ratio of damage to heal from Death strike based on one, two and three diseases. (I'd heard that the third disease of Unholy doesn't scale with this properly, if at all. I'm unable to spec for it at the moment, thus my curiosity. I'd happily take PMs of numbers run by tanks who in different specs for some personal analysis.)

Given the most recent update(that was a link, there) to the DS changes, I think "10% health" for a 2-disease DS is just dandy for a tank running around with near 40k health.

For those too lazy to click, healing is now 5% DK HP per disease on target, max 15%, utterly independent of dealt damage. That's... Pretty darn solid, I think. MUCH better than the initial round of nerfs to it.

It's much more reasonable than the nerf it got before, for sure. I was hoping they might go a little higher than 5% per disease, but it's enough to maintain the kind of survivability that DS provided pre 3.1.

I have found unholy single target threat to average from 6 - 8k TPS with a standard unholy ST rotation. As for the mitigation for things like Hodir during the blows, BA is rarely down as most of the mobs hit incredibly slow and with Hodir in particular, maintaining BA the entire time is feasible. With the IBF put in a couple seconds after the initial application of the buff on Hodir you should be safe the whole time, or if you get lucky with a Anti magic shell. I will say as a long time blood tank advocate, when I had to change over to unholy for EP debuff for raid and AoE trash, I was pleasantly surprised at how much better single target threat seems to be in 3.1, and in general, after playing around with blood and frost, unholy is not the strongest ST, and maybe not the highest AoE burst, but it is definitely the most consistent and reliable as far as functionality and purpose.

Back on the topic of the IBF glyph, with speed at which mobs are hitting in Ulduar, you can forgo the glyph if you are unholy. The BA should be up most of the time on these bosses, combined with the regular IBF on those crunch moments in fights, you should make it through most encounters. Mind you I am only up to Freya at the moment.

*Also speaking of Hodir, the Icebane armor really helps negate those blows he does. Especially in 10 mans, we noticed an incredible reduction in difficulty with a all the epic frost resist gear on MT.

You could probably forgo either the SoB or Chill of the Grave, making sure to keep one or the other as you are probably heavily loaded in RP gain right now.

I'm thinking I'll do that and see how this week turns out. My threat as a Frost tank is already much higher than it used to be, so I don't think the hit I'll take from relocating talent points will make a big enough impact to frustrate the DPS or myself. After going through 10-man, I can see some serious advantages to having Acclimation that never existed in Naxx outside of Sapphiron. I never imagined I would say so, but I'm really pleased with the amount of ambient elemental damage in Ulduar encounters.

I'll probably end up taking the points out of blood. 4/5 Bladed Armor and 2/3 SoB seem like they'll be sufficient.

@ Bagotostitos: You can't really supplant points from Chill of the Grave into Acclimation because of how many points it takes to get down the far in the tree in the first place.

@ Illundai

I suppose the way you have it here is probably the best way to do it.

However, if you want some more threat (ie, 2 hand spec back) then my suggestion would be to pull 2 points from Anticipation to fill it, similar to the old tanking VotTW frost build. That way your trading avoidance for mitigation instead of threat.

I am personally not a fan of the new IBF glyph. I think that it is a waste of a glyph spot because there really are not any situations where having 50% Damage reduction vs. 40% damage reduction will save you from death.

Essentially, when I use IBF (unglyphed) 40% reduction is enough. While the extra 10% may relieve a little stress on the healers, I am not convinced that it will be a lifesaver. There is no question that the IBF glyph does improve overall mitigation, however our goal is to survive, and I really do not think we have a high risk of dying when IBF (unglyphed) is up as it is.