DnD and runestrike are the only baseline tanking abilities we have that are not used for dps as well. Any threat buffs will likely come from a buff to one of them. That said, the set bonus seems a bit more convienent for unholy tanks.

Death and Decay is still a useful tool in any AOE tanking situation regardless of spec. Spamming Blood Boil (when Blood specced) is an effective sustained AOE threat generation tactic, but Death and Decay will buy the precious set up time to get that rhythm going. I think that this is a bigger help to Blood Dks that typically struggle in high AOE situations. Sadly it doesn't offer much when MT'ing a single target encounter.

Not necessarily; they've shown good creative initiative for set bonuses. If RS and DnD buffing becomes too cumbersome, I wouldn't put it past them to introduce a "your x ability now causes 15% more threat when used in Frost Presence"

That's the thing though, Blizz has said many times they're not fond of "high threat" attacks, and will likely be even less fond of turning other abilities into high threat. They also don't like the "on next melee" abilities.

There are still some avenues like lowering the runic cost of RS, or perhaps giving it a little extra kick based on diseases.

Very well then, just make it "your X ability now causes 15% more damage when used in Frost Presence". The only real problem with the set bonus is that other classes get both a single target and AoE damage increase on their most commonly used abilities, while we don't.

I'd rather they just deviate our set bonus from the model used on the other tanks and give a completely different bonus than simply ignoring it.

I agree, but when you deviate from the model is becomes very hard to maintain balance; not that its balanced now. Frankly I would be happier if they gave RS a mini-cleave or something: RS hits up to 3 targets (including the primary) for 10% damage. In single target its a 10% rune strike buff (which has already been done) but also gives a buff to our AoE tanking.

It'd also go a ways to improving the AoE threat of Blood tanking, which can't be bad.

The 2 piece bonus is rather lack-luster in my opinion considering you can basically get the same effect from specing into Black Ice, or the D&D glyph. I rarely have AOE issues by taking both as a blood tank.

Another 10%? Feels weak comparatively.

I do like that 4 piece bonus however. An extra CD for 12% damage reduction will make a big difference in survivability and handling some of the harder hitting encounters we are starting to see. Especially when it says ALL attacks. I'm assuming this will include magic damage, Meteor Fists, Big Bangs, and whatever Icecrown has in store for us.

I currently tank for my guild, and I love it. However, it seems that there are more and more reasons to not have a DK stay tanking. The main reason is that we are stuck on 25Man Heroic Anub. We get him to p3 constantly, and probably get him to ~15%. However, my healers are saying that there are times when I take too much spike damage and would like to make that part of the fight less random.

I currently raid Blood, but I am starting to think that Unholy may be worth it for Bone Shield. I have 4p T9.25 and off the top of my head I have around 31% dodge / 23% parry fully raid buffed.

So my question is two fold, is that enough avoidance to make Bone Shield worth it. Along with that, does Bone Shield reduce Leeching Swarms tick? I know that AMS will stop the tick, but is it treated like a DoT where it is reduced in damage but doesn't take the bone shard?

Yes I believe it is reduced. I have only tanked the 10man heroic version multiple times, but as Unholy and Blood I had my healers claim I was easier to heal than our paladin tank even in the Blood spec, so are you sure your healers know for sure what they are talking about? Now this might be because I had a slightly higher avoidance setup, whereas the pally is slightly block-focused, but there's not a great difference in our stats. I can't imagine the balance would tip in the 25 version.

I think that p3 Anub is just one big fight to use every little thing DK can do to get by, and pray to the healer gods. Move to DS-heavy rotation, use army of the dead the last 5% or so, manage CD's. I have found that if you have something like Furnace Stone (didn't check armoury) it was better for me than the stam trinket just due to the armour increase use. As long as you can survive his hit+slash+tick, super high max hp doesn't really help you much due to his swarm leech, unless it's something extreme like druid survival instincts.

edit- Also Magic Suppression works on the swarm, if you're curious about that Unholywise.

Are you sure Magic Suppression and Bone-Shield work on the swarm? I haven't tested them myself, but I did test Icebound Fortitude. IBF doesn't do anything to the swarm, so I would be surprised if other effects that reduce damage by a percentage work.

The below is from a 10-man heroic run
The highest tick with IBF active was 11k. For a 20% leech tick to be that high with the IBF damage reduction counted in, you would need to have 95k current health.

You can reduce the Leeching Swarm with absorption effects like Anti Magic Zone and nature resistance, but damage reduction effects don't seem to do anything to it.

Hmm, I stand corrected. I could have sworn i noticed a difference but maybe it's just due to the hp levels changing between tries, as it's based on the max HP. So it should only affect the Freezing slash if so. Well, and Penetrating cold in case it hits.

OK I have gone through a lot of the pages, the links, etc but have yet to find this. Is there a stat weight table similar to what you would use on a DPS?

I mean on DPS you would find a table that would say (and I am making the numbers up so please no flaming cause they are not from any table you have seen) :

AP = 1.00
STR = 2.50
EXP = 3.00
HIT Until Hitcapped = 1.75
HIT After Hitcapped = 0.50
etc


This allows a very easy way to see if one item is better for you then another, etc.

I would think that there would be a DK Tank one (even if it is 3 tables, broken into Blood Tank, Frost Tank, Unholy Tank like the DPS stat ranking are) but it would include additional things like :

DEF Until Def Capped = x
DEF After Def Capped = y
STAMINA = z
all the other stats of course needed like post and pre hit, threat?, STR, AP, blah blah blah.

I also get that this is not a chart that means you will be a better tank because as it takes skill, that same argument applies for the DPS stat weight guide. It is a guideline for if a specific item is better then what you currently have that can be used ingame versus havingt to pop out a load a RAWR, or an optimizer, etc cause you could for example put the stat weights into something like PAWN so that the numbers are right there in game with you. I know I keep comparing to the DPS information out there, but I have those stat weights for DPS xyz that I have from Elitist already but cannot for the life of me find it for DK tanks.


Thanks...

There isn't one here (to the best of my knowledge) and the reason is that tank values are a bit more volatile in value and often change value based on a sliding scale. More concretely, diminishing returns affects many tank stats.

Defense, hit, and expertise all have definite break points at which values drastically change (defense cap, hit cap/spell hit cap, and soft/hard cap respective). However, dodge and parry have different values based on how much dodge or parry you have already. You also need to throw in the parry you derive from strength from forceful deflection.

Then, even if you give your avoidance values, you need to give EH value to gear as well, which also varies with how much stamina and armor you have already.

In short, there's a reason Suno has four separate BiS gear sets as you need to tailor your sets to your encounters and there is no straight single value you can place on gear for comparison. For quick calculations, I'd just use something like rating buster and see if you like the tradeoffs associated with a new piece of gear.

Pyrius...thanks for the quick reply.

Although there are 4 BiS tabled, for someone building set as he goes and my not be at the BiS slot yet or hell, between 2 of the BiS tables (as I am making an assumption here that there are items available between the BiS categorizations) it would be very helpful.

I hear you on the diminishing returns thing, but I know there is a geek out there that has to have figured something out. Even using RAWR, it just basically makes Stam king...rating buster must have figured out something or it is useless for anything tanking, etc.

Hey I am totally aware that I can be wrong here, but I would have thought there was something.

Not sure if the restriction on talking about H-Anub strats is lifted, please delete if it is not:

I tanked heroic 25 Anub for our kill last week and it was pretty solid once we got the healing assignments for sun-30% set. A big question is how many healers are you running? when we were running 6 I was a lot more likely to die during a slash than when we went up to 7 healers. Having a hpally on the MT is huge for survivability, he can FoL during Slash CD and then switch to HL spam once Slash is possible. You will also want to time your cooldowns around Slashes, rather than trying to have them always up. If you go unholy, you have BS, AMS, AMZ, IBF, AotD, plus any outside cooldowns that your priests bring. Use one cooldown per slash and you should be fine, as long as your healers know that you're going to be taking 1 guaranteed hit while you are stunned since you can't parry/dodge. When we did it I had a PS and a GS (glyphed) to work with, so i stacked AMS with AMZ since he can be a dick and not cast slash for a while after it's off cd.

As stated just above me, there is no single value you can place on a piece of gear. It depends on your spec, your current gear, and the encounter. For example, most of the time, I like a healthy amount of avoidance because it not only reduces damage, but it feeds into Rune Strike procs. However, on fights like NRB, I like to gear for EH because you just can't avoid the bleed.

Rawr basically sees EH as king of everything (hence why pieces with bonus armor get such high ratings). Rating Buster doesn't try to give a singular value. It just tells you what stats change and by how much should you switch to another piece of gear (for example, it would tell you how much health, dodge, and parry you gain). It's up to you if you want to trade x% dodge for y% parry and z% hit.

There isn't a defense cap, only a defense floor. You can't really rate defense's value below the floor because if you aren't crit immune you can't tank, period. Above the defense floor, defense rating still gives us dodge, parry, and miss. According to rawr defense rating is only about 5% worse for me than dodge rating, which is vastly superior to parry.

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Because of DR you can't really have specific values for defensive stats, but you can have some guidelines. For DKs, dodge will pretty much always be better than parry unless you have some crazy gear set. Armor doesn't diminish is respect to time to death (until you get to 100% reduction).

The reason stamina always championed by rawr is because it doesn't diminish, works against all types of damage, isn't based on RNG and rawr is setup for 'generic boss'. If you have a boss that only does physical attacks and hits very hard, avoidance would be more valued; a boss that is primarily magic damage then stamina will be even more valued.



You can't really compare the values of stats for threat and for defense, be it EH or avoidance because their relative value will be based on situation. If you are under-geared compared to your healers and DPS, then threat would probably be of more importance. What you have to keep in mind for progression, any threat more than enough is wasted. Most progression tanks tend to favor defensive stats to threat because in progression tank death is more common than a tank not doing enough TPS so that the DPS can beat the enrage timer.

Thanks again to Fn who completed the gear table. I removed the stat totals from the sets because I don't find it very useful. Feel free to plug in the items into wowhead and get them should you desire.

I wanted to comment on the lack of a stat weight table, and my answer is along the lines of what you see here already.

As a general rule: stamina is king. If you're ever unsure which stat you should be gemming/enchanting: add stamina. Desirable avoidance levels are achieved with the stats that already exist on gear. If there's a nice socket bonus you want, use a Nightmare Tear or Regal/Enduring.

If you find yourself wanting additional avoidance on mana-sensitive fights like Vezax or Algalon, you can beef up your avoidance easily by swapping trinkets.

No "defensive stat weight table" exists in this thread because there are way too many variables involved in maximizing survivability (including your healers). Such a table would confuse more than it would clarify. There are, however, diminishing return / Parry vs. Dodge tables that exist, but DK's are unusually simple in that Dodge > Parry effectively always.

In an attempt to bring order into chaos and reach actual numbers that make sense,

EP values for tanks could be split into categories such as effective HP against magical (can be further separated into schools), effective HP against physical, mean effective HP, threat, avoidance, since "tank points mean value" systems are largely nonsensical for most uses.

However, any threat EP considerations are related to (and depended on) avoidance since it procs Rune Strike, the predominant TPS contributor against a single target and tank's own parry hasting - the separate treatment of multi-target tanking may be a necessity. Furthermore, an avoidance meta-points system would depend on expertise (a stat related to a threat points system) due to NPC parry hasting (which is disabled on certain NPCs, something that should be taken into account).

In that train of thought, dodge could be represented by both a threat EP result and an avoidance EP result (avoiding to nonsensically only provide a mean value).

Similarly, expertise could provide both threat EP and avoidance EP values (pre-dodge and pre-parry cap valued separately).

Last but not least, threat and perhaps avoidance EP values, could be depended on the swing timer of an NPC.

A point of clarification, Armor has a max reduction of 75%, but otherwise doesn't have a DR like stacking avoidance stats, so what Evilbunny says.

Also, survival weights (HP + Armor) in Rawr are currently a bit heavy with default settings. This can be shifted if the incoming damage increases or the survival weight decreases via the options panel. With the coming of the BossHandler class that's being done, you'll be able to gear for specific bosses if you so choose, but that work is still in development, and a ways off. I'm going to try and put some hooks up to use it soon, but most likely, you'll see it in Rawr3.

I hope you're not being pendantic for my sake. I use defense cap because despite the fact that it's a misnomer, it's still the phrase most commonly used. What you say is true but it doesn't really rule out defense as having a value below the floor. Rather, it essentially has infinite value. Repelling Charge would automatically win over Medal of the First War if that tank didn't reach the floor without it. It's just a different value proposition from the other break points.