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).

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.

Sanddemon said most of what I would in response to that post (like the fact that you somehow forgot about Bone Shield), but I would like to add one thing.

Mitigating damage is better than healing it. The one situation where this might not be true is Vezax, if you're doing the hard mode. Otherwise though, Death Striking, and Blood Worms or Imp Blood Presence (How do you even fit the latter two into a tank build?) are no where near as useful as having a 6 second longer IBF or Bone Shield. When it had 50% uptime, VB considerably increased mana efficiency over the course of a fight, but with a 2 minute CD it just doesn't cut it as a reactive cooldown. I can't think of any situations where, over a 30 second period, my healers don't have enough throughput to keep me alive. It's also completely useless when you take massive burst on a fight like Thorim (I have taken about 60k damage in less than a second on 10 man hard mode here).

Unbreakable Armor is fairly anemic on bosses (though awesome for trash if you healers fall asleep or something) but a 50% longer IBF makes up for that. Blood's slight health boost (was like 2k for me last I checked) is offset in part by Improved Frost Presence.

To be perfectly honest, I believe the only good reason to spec Blood is if you melee simply MUST have 10% AP from you.

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 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.

Fair catch, but I stand by my disbelief in his reported numbers. Also, if you are relying on Death Runes, you are looking at a pretty weak opening threat, since you would be unable to drop DnD if you wanted to DS for the runes. Of course, ridiculously low snap threat compared to other tanks is characteristic of all DK builds in both single target and AE situations.

Just a few quick questions based upon nothing other than being bored!

1) Can someone link a cookie cutter MainTank threat spec? I know that you should be using what you are comfortable with, but the thing is: I'm not a normal person. I can comfortably adapt to new specs/rotations without question, and do just as good as someone who has always loved the spec!

2) Gearing. I know I'm not in endgame gear, as my DK is my 2ndary toon which I rarely raid on. However, I was wondering if my gemming for Stamina is correct or not. My options for taking up the socket bonuses to add in some avoidance looked like a Gain of 1.07% Avoidance before Deminishing Returns, 4 Defense skill, but a loss of approx 627 Health. As the Main Tank, is the 1.07% avoidance before DR, better or worse than the 627 Health?

Im quite bored, and just throwing out random stuff to take you off track of your Bloodboil disputes.(Although for shits n giggles, Im also doubting the 4-5k Bloodboils. I ran blood spec tank since 3.0.4 and I haven't seen that high of Bloodboils. Maybe 2-3k with more gear, but not 4-5k... that seems a little overboard.)

I think my 14/51/6 build is about as much threat as you can get with Frost.

It is generally agreed that effective health is the most important stat for progression content. Socket bonuses are usually worth it, which is why JC is such a fantastic profession. That said, skipping +4 Def or whatever for another 12 stam is a fine tradeoff, especially if you don't have at least like 34k unbuffed HP.

I disagree.

On fights where one would actually use AMS for the magic dmg absorption as you mentioned it's indeed not wort it that much.
The strength imo lies in the fact that you make an ability, which normally is useless for anything else but magic dmg absorption, an ability usefull for melee dmg fights. Making the ability way more versatile.