Note that you CAN hit the armor cap with trinkets and UA. In my current gear, with UA and Etrigg's Oath fully stacked, I have approx. 41k armor (rounded down). There is a 1755 armor difference between my gear and the BiS list (excluding the Band of the Traitor King, I'm subbing out for Seal of Ulduar) before the armor talent. Combined with The Black Heart's proc, this brings me to a whopping 49755, which is merely 150 armor away from hitting the BOSS armor cap.

Obviously, this would be a little impractical, because the huge stam increase you get from dual Juggernaught's Vitality would WAY outweigh the temporary armor increase, but it shows the real possibility of hitting the cap, if blizzard continues to keep adding armor trinkets or procs. Either way, I'm loving the fact that frost is viable again, I hated having the shiatty aoe of blood.

I wouldn't pick up subversion at all. Specially if you are not taking Epidemic. You will be using a 10 sec rotation, with only one SS, and substituting 1 BStr for BT/BSh once every minute, and on top of that. Your other option is to use DnD on c/d, since it's our most threat generating ability per rune, but our worst RP generator. In this case you would BStr even less. Any way you look at it, the RP gain from Scent of blood is much more valuable.

You took Scent of Blood over Imp IT. This is mostly personal choice, but I would argue that Imp IT is of more importance unless you have another DK to apply it everytime. This is less of an issue in 25 mans, but important nevertheless.

Also, You took BCB over Necrosis. Necrosis is a better talent any way you look at it, it's a steady 12% damage gain to auto attacks (assuming you only put the points from BCB) v.s. a 30% chance to proc.

I'd also like to stress that Necrosis works off Rune Strikes, it should never be skipped as a unholy tank build. It's simply too important for threat.

Other than that, I just have to say that Bone shield is just wonderful now. The tree has a very potent cooldown selection right now, but it does still have a weakness to fast-hitting bosses moreso than the other two specs. I'm likely going to try it in heroic TotC10 this week (albeit with a revised talent selection), and I'm anxious to see how it does on Anub'arak compared to my usual Blood spec. I admit I have a slight feel of dread, but I think it'll be fun.

We had a similar experience in ToGC-10; it seems to be a pretty solid gear check. I'm in a 10-man raiding guild; the tanks are myself and a similarly geared pally. We cleared the available bosses in regular ToC every week and our first forays into ToGC were really rough and we weren't able to get the beasts down until last week. We were really unlucky with our first ToC drops (the dodge trinket and the Dreadscale bracers were all that dropped over the first 5 weeks) so we were both in a mixture of ilvl 219 and 226 gear (mostly from badges) with a couple of the less expensive Triumph pieces during our first attempt. Our healers were similarly geared. We were only able to survive until the Jormungars came out a handful of times. Our DPS was a little low and we weren't consistently burning Gormok before the Jormungars, but (quick) tank deaths were our primary issue.

We were very lucky the following two weeks and our tanks and healers were able to secure a few upgrades each. On our last visit, we suffered an early tank death a couple of times, but it wasn't nearly as much of a concern as keeping the DPS alive (zomg, don't stand in fire) and burning Icehowl before the enrage.

I think that ilvl 226 gear is probably adequate for the encounter, but lesser gear is mostly not and, for us at least, some higher level pieces were necessary to make up for our remaining ilvl 219 gear and tip the scales in our favor.

I think GC was referring to i226 not cutting it for 25ToGC, and even he had to admit that it was at least possible even if extremely difficult. For 10man, our A team coasted through to anub'arak on our first night of attempts. We didn't down anub and left it primarily because everyone was fatigued. Granted, our players have farmed ulduar25 for months now so everyone was in i226 or greater, but compared to what i've seen in 25ToGC, the 10ToGC damage is noticeably lower. As long as your dps is up to par, (we bring 6 dps for 10man), and you're timing your cooldowns properly for the second impale, you should rarely get gibbed (assuming your healers are also good).

Tanked TotC 25 and TotGC thru Faction Champs tonight with this Unholy Build. Worked really well, no threat issues at all. Actually performed a bit better than the old Blood tanking build (people had started to complain about my threat T.T). It really shines on some fights and is just average on others, but it's deffinalty a second viable option for tanking now.

Beasts: Neither here nor there. Magic suppression is nice for tanking stationary worms, BS is nice for reducing damage from Impale dot (not entirely sure this actually works). Kinda meh for Icehowl since he's all phys, but having BS up for the first stun after crash is nice to prevent gibbing.

Jaraxxus: Shines here. Near 100% uptime on BS with his slow attack speed and lots of casting.

Champs: didn't use it here, had to spec frost for PvP fight lols

Twins: Most of the threatening dmg here is magic so Magic Suppression shines again. AMZ also nice 3rd save.

With the recent theorycrafting about Unholy and the 1min CD on BoneShield, i will give epidemic less Unholy a shot when tanking. (Have been Blood for a while now)

Looking at

13-8-50 Scent of Blood and IT-Glyph for getting very much RP

or

10-8-53 WP will do enough with nearly 20% raidbuffed.

Perhaps taking D&D-Glyph instead of the IT-Glyph, but i will have to test this.

Rotation will just be: PS-IT-SS-BS-BS-Dump (as in the Unholy-DPS-Thread), having less RP for my Dumps due to Runestrike will help to fit this Rotation into 10 Seconds as i will miss the haste.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I used this build to tank Twin Valkyr 25-Heroic and it resulted a 23% less damage taken on average than our other tank who was Warrior.

Acclimation stays up constantly due to the aura damage and I used Flask of Lesser Resistance to further boost my resistance up to 330 without wearing any piece of resistance gear.

If anyone of you are working on this encounter I highly recommend the forementioned spec.

Here's damage taken logs from the night of our first kill:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I would like to see a parse involving a 3.2.2 Undead DK tank. Would BCB trump Reaping in threat so much that the added utility of having available death runes or more Scourge Strikes would become null?

Something I am also interested in is the Glyph of SS for Unholy tanking, since IT especially is very weak as a tank. Maybe granting more SS'es would be better for tanking than is the dps case?

I don't think BCB is worth it because I am unsure if it can even proc from Rune Strike swings, and there's always the extra parries - however I would take it if it wasn't for the fact that you get really points-starved even without Reaping picked. At least if you want Desolation which is a good threat talent.

World of Logs for our TotC 25 last night.

World of Logs for the Beasts and Jaraxxus heroic.

The uptime for BS on Jaraxxus heroic is a little misleading, I purposely didn't cast it when there were infernals running around that might eat charges.

Also been said in the 2H Unholy thread that 2/2 Epidemic is a dps loss.

http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t72364-3...1/#post1400325

Are we sure that what applies to Unholy dps applies to Unholy in tank gear though? I am unsure myself since the SS glyph seems to have me put out more threat than the IT glyph does; It glyph will yield 1/4 Dc per cast, but that cast buildup occurs over a long time. I'm most concerned with threat early on myself, and being able to use more SS's while not having to spend points in Reaping (and placing them in other threat talents) seems to benefit my tps. Maybe the reason is that IT and DC are both spells, and in tankgear we have only 3% spellcrit as unholy tanks with EPB?

I have still only had some fights in Ulduar to try it on though, so I'll see if I can get some more testing done over the weekend. Just wanted to toss the thought out there.

The math in UH dps thread applies to tanking as long as it's the math without the 4pc bonus, since we obviously don't get it. If you are right, this is the best I can come up with. You can do the math and improve this for ST Threat.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

2/2 Epidemic is a dps loss when compared to BA and DC; but on the tanking build the points have to stay in the UH tree; therefore your only options are Virulence, Ravenous Dead, and BcB. Ravenous Dead will give you 2% strenght, which is around 24 Strenght depending on your gear. Virulence 2% Spell hit, and BcB 20% chance to hit an extra attack. If you are right, we have those 2 floating points in the UH tree. What talent would be a better choice?


The GoDnD is better than GoSS if you are doing DnD on c/d, which is what I'm doing, because of the 1.9 threat modifier.

I just took Army of the Dead for three reasons. First: One additional CD (sure it is on a 10min CD, but usable once per Bossfight or every second). Second: They do quite a bit of dmg. Third: I just love them. I will play a rota without epidemic.

I just did some napkin math for our options for those 2 epidemic points. I compared 2/3 BcB with 2/3 Ravenous Dead.

Assuming raid buffed, a tank is around 1800 strenght, at 2% = 36 str, 72 AP. This would translate to 4.5 dos, .12% parry, and around 60-70 TPS.

Assuming a 1.8k swing, BcB would produce a 900 hit (assuming diseases up) which translates to 258 dps assuming a 3.5 sec attack speed. BcB is a chance to proc, so that times our answer yields 51 dps, 120 TPS if evey attack hits. Then you factor miss/resists/and glances, I come up with something like 44dps/110 TPS.

From this, I'd say the points should go into BcB. However, I'm new to theorycrafting, and I had a friend help me with the math, so we may be wrong. I'd appreciate if someone verifies this.

BCB can be parried, for heroic modes tanking it should be out.

Two points could be put in On a Pale Horse. Icehowl stuns, and there's fears in champs fight at least, so it's not totally useless.

I have the orc racial and I don't recall any shorter duration on Icehowl's stun. However, the stun from Anub (or the adds), then that talent would work out.

BCB seems to deliver a significant amount of threat. Perhaps placing those points in Black Ice may be a safer choice and provide comparable numbers.

We cant place them in Black Ice. They have to stay in the UH tree in order to grab 5/5 RoR.

I was updating my gear list and I came across these regen items that are dropping from Onyxia and it got me thinking
Purified Shard of the Flame
Shiny Shard of the Flame
Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman
A tank working on TOC hard modes has about 50k and these 3 items are regening for 1187 every 5 seconds. That is roughly 2.3% of his total health. In the current state of raiding hard modes this is pretty worthless due to the stats that you would be loosing in place of these items. As we are working our way though the Hard mode encounters every hit point counts.

I know that death strike can take some pressure off the healers, however this is a 10% heal that I can time when I need it the most.

My question to you guys is, how much passive regen do you think would be needed to reach a useful point for a tank? 5%? 10%? of his total health pool? Or do you think its just completely worthless due to the spiky nature of incoming damage and the healers are just going to spam over it anyway?

I did that they wanted to reduce the percentage of damage a tank takes and how much a healer can heal in the expansion. Which would make regen stronger. But that is yet to come.

The health per 5 second trinkets are nearly worthless, because you can getting lots of heals, so the hp5 wouldn't do much. You would be better off using a stamina or avoidance trinket, since those do something worthwhile.

The Ony trinket is a decent avoidance trinket (since it uses the item formula effectively since it uses more than one stat) if you feel you need that.