Recently switched to Blood tanking and still working out the kinks.

Has anyone done a comparison between using Glyphs of Rune Strike and Blood Strike.

Going DRM route - since the "snare" debuf is usually on the boss in one way or another, would it not make sence to increase 6 gcds out of 10 by 20% (using BS instead of HS) and loosing 10% crit on RS?

The "snares" do not count for the blood glyph on bosses.

The blood glyph doesn't work on bosses? I always thought it did. Torment the Weak for Mages certainly works and it's also activated on snares.

No, count it, you do exactly the same amount of DS. You drop IT+PS at the beginning of the rotation in favor of pestilence + HS.

IT can have a higher chance to miss (no virulence, assuming melee hit cap is around 3% miss on spell).
If pestilence always hits (I've never seen a pestilence miss/dodged/parried before), this rotation will let us gear ourselves like warriors (i.e. expertise is always better than hit) and aim for expertise hard cap for perfect rotation.

Torment of the Weak is a different case. It is activated by attack speed snares and movement speed snares, while the Blood Strike glyph is only activated by movement speed snares. Although there are a few exceptions (such as the Frostfire Bolt debuff), most movement speed snares cannot be applied to bosses. Regardless, even if you can rely on one of the few boss-applicable debuffs to activate the glyph in your raid, Heart Strike is still (slightly) superior damage wise for a Blood spec, so it makes no sense to sacrifice a glyph for what is, in the best case scenario, a dps loss.

Blood Strike glyph doesn't work on Heart Strike.

Taizu - I know that the glyph does not work on HS. I am proposing to use BS (glyphed) on a single target with DRM.

Perhaps my question was not clear enough.

I know the boss is not slowed or other wise impeaded by the "snare" effect. Hovewer the snare effect does count toward the dps effects on that boss. This has been discussed a long time ago and like you pointed out the frostfire debuff is one of the effects and I can count on that since it effects stationary and mobile fights the same way.

I was trying to find a specific calculations for differences between the BS and HS. I know HS is superior, but not by exactly how much and under what conditions.

Could you please point me to where you got your numbers from.

Wouldn't Infected Wounds and Necrosis also work? I obviously wouldn't use Blood Strike for a full-Blood spec, the reason I'm asking is I'm thinking of doing a 29/5/37 Blood Strike spam tanking spec for 3.2 to focus on what the DK is still good at, namely tanking magic damage since we seem to be pretty far behind Paladins and Druids for physical damage. I don't know if it will have enough threat if glyph of blood strike doesn't work on bosses, though.

Glyph of Blood Strike does work on bosses, assuming the Feral Druid slow of FF Bolt are up. Since that is a poor assumption (especially considering multi-target boss encounters), you should be looking for other glyphs.

That build may have enough threat for your group (not enough for top 100 guild's dps though), why not try it now? I doubt Death Knights are done on the PTR, so saying DKs are only good for Magic damage is a little early.


They are viable, especially considering non-hard modes and Blood's weakness of weaker AoE.

Was hoping to get a little guidance from the experienced members on these forums. My guild has been doing Ulduar 10 man for about 3 weeks now, were nothing special or fancy, we've only cleared to Thorim (Freya and Hodir down but not Mimiron). Here is a link to my WoW Armory.

The World of Warcraft Armory

My question is this, looking over my characters gear/spec, I seem to have issues staying ahead of the agro curve only against two members of my raid. Using a rotation similar to IT, PS, HS, HS, DS, DS, Dump on single target, what areas can I work on to generate more threat? The one class in general that seems to give me trouble are hunters, no matter what I do this one hunter is always riding my coat tail and having to FD + MD every cooldown. The other member is a warlock but she normally knows when to hold back and let me catch ahead. But as odd as it sounds it drives me crazy seeing dps have to hold back or even worse pulling aggro and having to taunt.

(Let me know if I should move this to another forum, just seemed a bit off putting it in the simple questions and answers forum)

This is probably a question for a DK tanking thread.
A simple answer is to change your rotation, move 3 points from Deflection into Death Rune Mastery and switch to:
IT-PS-DS-HS-HS, then DS-HS-HS-HS-HS, and use Rune Strike whenever you can. You can also use the points from Rune Tap talents to further strengthen HS with Sudden Doom or Subversion.
Also, do you have someone in raid debuffing with sunder armor/fairie fire/expose armor?

The problem with Death Rune Mastery was just that Death Strike provides more survivability with the self heal part of it, but I've considered that. If I did go that DRM route I could pick up sudden doom.

I used to raid frost all the time but I could give it another go, Unholy just seems awkward to me since all it seems I ever read is that is holds great AoE but terrible Single target.

** Just read the debuff comment, we have a feral druid so I get fairie fire but now EPA or SA **

Coming from a long time frost tank, I can say the only time I miss frost is when I have to tank a bunch of little adds (see thorim p1). I made a switch to tank the gauntlet.

Otherwise single target tanking I find blood to be more than enough and better than frost (and much better than unholy). How is the gear of your 2 DPS? IF they are loaded in Uld25, that might be the reason why they pull aggro. You are still in mix of Nax25 gears.

The other two dps do out gear me actually, I know that is an issue. Spec-wise I've noticed you chose Subversion over Sudden Doom / Morbidity, do you find the 9% crit for HS to be better then the 15% for a free no gcd DC or the 15% bonus DC dmg?

I noticed that you're using Glyph of Death and Decay. I think you should replace it with Glyph of Rune Strike which will give you much better single-target threat. Also, replace IT, PS, HS, DS on your toolbar with macros that include Rune Strike, like:

#showtooltip Icy Touch
/cast Icy Touch
/cast !Rune Strike

These macros will make sure Rune Strike is used every time it procs. If you don't already do this, using the macros and the glyph should up your single-target threat quite a bit. This macro was originally posted much earlier in the thread.

Quick Question, we are going to be working on 25-man Steelbreaker tonight and I was curious if DRW will benefit from the overwhelming power debuff. Would it be worthwhile to drop one point in something else to pick it up just for the extra dps on Steelbreaker? and should I put Hysteria on myself when I get overwhelming power?

I don't think losing 1% hp every second is not going to be the difference between your healers being able to keep you up or not. Overwhelming power has a 200% damage dealt modifier I believe, effectively tripling your DPS. I'm not sure if % damage buffs stack multiplicatively like % haste buffs do, but you probably will end up getting more damage out of it by putting it on yourself than on a DPSer. Keep in mind though, if you run out of range to explode with 5 seconds left on your debuff, you're losing that much time on hysteria. It really depends on just how much damage your next best alternative is able to put out with it, but it would have to be an awful lot to beat combining it with overwhelming power.

This was the first time I went blood, and I was concerned about the uptime of bloody vengeance. I always gear/spec for TPS when I tank as my guild has some of the best DPS in the server. After picking DRM, subversion or sudden doom is the only solid options. We don't cast enough DCs as blood for Morbidity to be significant; if anything you take morbidity for the lower DnD CD for AoE tanking.

Math comparing Subversion with Sudden Doom:

copying my previous thread:

Per full rotation (20 seconds)

Benefit from 3/3 Sudden Doom:
with DRM you do 6x HS
15% per HS gives you 90% chance to cast a free DC.
Assuming 15% spell crit raid buffed (realistic with isb/boomkin aura/jotc)
0.15*2720 + 0.85*1958 = 2072
So over 20 seconds you gain 0.9 DC = 1865


Benefit from 3/3 Subversion:
with DRM you do 6x HS
assuming 20% melee crit raid buffed (realistic with kings/lotp/jotc)
without subversion you do 0.2*5962 + 0.8*2348 = 3071
with subversion you do 0.29*5962 + 0.71 * 2348 = 3396
So over 20 seconds you gain 6 * 325 = 1950


The numbers of course vary depending on what raid buffs you have. This was assuming 25 man; so you have all the available buffs for both melee and spells. Notice that subversion and sudden doom give about the same damage increase. I took subversion as it will also help me keep the uptime on bloody vengeance.

However, you're now skipping Necrosis which is an insane threat boost.

If you switched to my build but moved the point in Corpse Explosion (Just there for fun) and two points in Necrosis over to Imp Icy Touch you would be trading Subversion and MoM for Sudden Doom and 3/5 Necrosis.

First, you're losing 9% crit on Heart Strike. That means you go from 21 crits in 81 strikes (26%) to 14 crits in 81 strikes (17%). Your old damage from HS was 54 * 2348.1 (Hits) + 21 * 5962.1 (Crits) + 3 * 3795 (Blocks) = 126797.4 + 125204.1 + 11385 = 263,387 damage. This changes to 61 * 2348.1 + 14 * 5962.1 + 3 * 3795 = 143234.1 + 83469.4 + 11385 = 238,089 damage. So far a loss of 25,298 damage across the fight.

It gets a little worse there because we lose MoM, meaning crits go from 2.45x to 2x or crits are reduced to 81.6% of their current damage. This affects HS and DS for single-target tanking. On the HS side, the formula becomes 143234.1 + 83469.4 * .816 + 11385 = 143234.1 + 68111 + 11385 = 222,730 or a loss of 40,657 damage so far. We then lose damage from DS as well. According to the WoL link, DS crits accounted for 44,801 total damage. That will be reduced to 36,558 bringing the total loss to 48,900.

Now to the gains. First off, we're getting some free death coils. 15% chance for a DC per HS with 78 landed heart strikes means 11 (conservative) Death Coils. You cast Death Coil 37 times for a total damage of 74,743 meaning each DC averaged at 2020. Adding 11 of those is 22,220 damage and that's also our total gain so far.

Morbidity increases both sources of DC by 15%. Your total damage from DC including SD procs is now at 96,963. Adding 15% on top of that brings it to 111,507. That's a gain of 14,544 for a total gain of 36,764

Now add in Necrosis- Melee accounted for 211,117 total damage and RS accounted for 134,587. That combines to 345,704. Each point of Necrosis adds 4% of that number or 13,828. 3 points of Necrosis, then, is 41,484. This brings the total gain to 78,248 which is significantly higher than the 48,900 we're losing. Note that 3 points in Necrosis is almost enough to offset the 6 points lost in MoM and Subversion. Also note that this only works if you're willing to sacrifice Rune Tap.

Edit: Another minor point of interest is that if your choice is between points in either MoM, Subversion, or Sudden Doom and you already have Morbidity, Sudden Doom will come out on top.


Short version: Necrosis is absolutely stunning for threat.

You are perhaps forgetting that MoM adds to AoE threat and big numbers, both which are pretty invaluable to me. Necrosis is amazing, because of the scaling damage with Rune Strike and as you get more avoidance you get more Rune Strikes.

Couldn't seem to find an answer for this, so I'll ask here. As a frost tank, which two talents gives the most threat per point spent, Bladed Armor, Scent of Blood or Two-Handed Weapon Specialization ?

Hey guys,

I just recently started tanking 25-man Ulduar (I switched my main from Rogue to DK because tanks weren't showing up to raids). I started last Wednesday with Freya and General, and since then have seen every fight once from a tank perspective. I'm running a Blood spec with Morbidity and have a couple of questions:

1) Those of you who MT Hodir, how much FR do you wear, and otherwise how do you deal with Frozen Blows?

2) Those of you who Blood tank, what is your dual-spec? I find myself having to switch to DPS occasionally because a few of our tanks started coming back, so I picked up Morbidity instead of having two tank specs. My current dual-spec is Unholy DPS, but I'm wondering if another choice might be better.