You gain RP from AMS for any incoming damage.

While you do get some RP from any attack that hits you while AMS is up (wtf is with that btw, it's only melee dmg that gives you RP. Maybe a bug leftover from 4pt8?), if you look at the 2 log snippets you posted, the one with Freezing slash gave you much more RP/dmg.

[18:00:13.288] Anub'arak Freezing Slash Gruumsh 18442
[18:00:13.288] Gruumsh afflicted by Freezing Slash from Anub'arak
[18:00:15.120] Gruumsh's Anti-Magic Shell fades
[18:00:15.580] Gruumsh gains 305 runic power from Gruumsh's Anti-Magic Shell

Roughly 60.5dmg per RP gained there, versus roughly 105.5dmg per RP from the log just above this post. That would suggest that some of the damage from Freezing slash was absorbed since spell damage gives you a lot more return on RP. My guess is that your first log somehow didn't report the absorb on the Freezing Slash. I'll keep my actual combat logs from Anub this week and post the pertinent sections, probably by Wednesday.

Interesting note: in your second log snippet the RP gains are consistent around 105.5dmg/RP regardless of absorbs. In the second hit, you took 8725 hit, 2559 absorbed but you get 105.5 if you add those together and then divide by the RP gained.

I've been looking over a number of popular Blood Tanking builds and I've noticed that most of all the standard builds do not include Improved Blood Presence. I figure a 10% bonus in healing done to me by myself and healers would be well worth 2 talent points. Why is it not commonly taken?

That 10% healing is only while you are in blood presence, making the talent awful.

edit: beat me to it

Doh! Just realized I need to read tooltips a bit better. Thanks

It is a tank design issue. Pally and Warrior due to shield blocking do better against fast hitting mobs. If you have a Druid as the other tank, maybe they Druid would do better with the adds.

I tank the adds in 10-man heroic with my offspec (unholy or blood tank, depending on the week). While picking up the adds and making sure they don't shadowstrike anyone is a minor challenge, staying alive generally isn't a problem. The expose weakness they stack up can be pretty nasty though, and if they don't get killed fast enough I can see how they could gib someone who doesn't have a shield block, and your healers need to be on the ball.

Regarding adds on Anub 10:
There are other viable options to cope with adds. They require more coordination, and a warrior/pally/even druid is always preferable to a dk for OTing them, since they can pick them up and tank them normally while taking a lot less damage. Obviously the first set of adds in each phase must be dps'd properly and cleared up. Your dps should be able to still stay well ahead of the burrow/enrage timer if you put 2 ranged dps on the 'kill the add' duty. This isnt 25, with an ungodly amount of adds and damage flying about.

1) Burrow. Why not? for the second round of adds, its perfectly acceptable to let them burrow since you should be reaching a critical dps point (usually 25% on anub) and the requirement for healing on you, the OT, is both prolonging the fight, and a waste of healer time, which can be better spent on the MT or even loading up their own judgements/lb/dots. The first time we ever beat anub10 heroic, it was by using this tactic by accident--namely there was no ice left :P

2) Kiting and shenagins: the adds are rootable, stunnable, and otherwise able to be kept on a single ice patch with DnD down and you running in tight circles around the ice, never being hit(hunter experience helps here, remember those early days of gluth-kiting) and depending on the setup, you can have your shammy, mage, or other dks assist you in silencing the shadow strike, or simply have a pally stun them, use a BE racial, or any number of things. Since all the dps is focused on the boss, its very simple to out-aggro the healers with dnd, using taunts, CoI etc as needed to keep them on their ice patch while the main event is going on-- the point being that youre not obliged to stand there and be a punching bag for the adds if you can manage it.

So, Ive got a trophy to spend and Im curious which piece to buy. No access to 25 man hardmode anub thus far so it looks to me that gloves are going to be the most immediate long lasting upgrade. Just looking to get some other opinions here.
The World of Warcraft Armory if you need it, im basically using full 8.5 except for the toc 25 man legs and chest non tier pieces. I also dont see myself doing freya 3 25 man anytime soon.

I just bought the trophy gloves to replace my gauntlets of the royal watch and I am running into a problem that has been mentioned before, the lack of hit on some of the ToC gear. After replacing the gauntlets I am down to ~170 hit and it seems like it will continue to fall as I replace my ilvl226 pieces (56 on belt, 41 on hat, 42 on neck). I thought about trying to get a weapon with with hit, but there don't seem to be a whole lot and they aren't overly simple to get.

I guess I could get some bracers either crafted or from Icehowl. Right now I'm wearing T8.5 head and chest, since RS is such a large portion of my threat and damage, they are lower on the list of items to replace. My defense is high enough that I should be able to get away with wearing a piece of DPS gear that has a lot of hit on it. There is always hit food that I could go make.

What would be the best way to get my hit back up? Is it even worth it or will I not suffer too much from my low hit?

Well, RS can miss too! Right now Rune Strike is 30-40% of my damage and therefore makes up a huge chunk of my threat.

Our best geared raiders are DPS (warlock/hunter), even with soulshatter/feign and salv (at least they claim they are using them) they are always riding me in threat; I assume the other tanks too. I don't know, maybe they are doing something wrong. I'm usually about 6k TPS depending on RNG for RS and what debuffs are on the boss. Maybe I should set up Power Auras to notify me when we don't have sunder/expose armor and IIT/Windfury up since those would increase my threat a decent bit and I don't really pay attention to them.

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I was tinkering around in rawr and looked at the stat weights for my toon and there were 2 that seemed a bit out of place; I was wondering if the values were legit or just a quirk of rawr.

It has agility as my second best stat, stamina being first. I guess because it does so many different things (melee crit, armor, dodge), that it just all adds up, but it just seems odd.

Also, it says that ArP is my best threat stat by a fairly large margin. ArP was (still is?) the second best stat for blood DPS which I assume roughly translates to blood tanking since you have a similar rotation. I guess with the reduced number of death coils and greatly increased number of rune strikes and not using FC/GoD, therefore having less strength scaling and a smaller reliance on buffed diseases, the scales end up being tipped heavily in favor of ArP. Not only does rawr say ArP gives me the most threat, the gap is so substantial that depending on how hard a boss hits and what % of its damage is magic, ArP is a better stat overall than strength or expertise.

Caveat - I haven't used Rawr for my DK - for tanking or DPS purposes.

However, my understanding is for tanking purposes Rawr heavily espouses effective health (as I do personally). Therefore Stamina is a direct increase in health - number one stat. Defensive stats (defense, dodge, parry) do not increase effective health at all the way effective health is normally calculated. Of course they're extremely useful in tanking and not something to ignore, just probably not showing benefit to EH in Rawr. Whereas Agility also grants 1 armour each. Armour increases mitigation, which increases effective health.

So I could easily see Rawr suggesting Agility as a highly desirable stat. I believe there may be a setting to allow for Rawr to suggest items on a less EH-centric basis. I leave it up to the Rawr experts to point out how to do so if it exists.

I find tank gearing the most interesting of specs. Healers can make some personal decision on regen vs haste vs crit, while DPS is strictly hit cap, maybe expertise cap, then seek a specific stat. Tanking requires balance of hit, expertise, and damage for threat, along with avoidance (including the defense floor) and the ever important stamina and armour. Tanks seem to juggle much more and what piece to upgrade, and when, is far more subjective based on personal playstyle (or talent tree).

Hit food is probably worthwhile if you're below cap - less miss mean less breaks in your rune use (and more threat). I see you've got a 232 weapon, an easy replacement would be [Stormedge], but likely the gained hit would only barely balance the lost damage. If you wind up completing ToC10 Heroic with 15+ attempts and a [Lothar's Edge] drops, it wouldn't be amiss to go for it. Otherwise, I agree with Ash. Don't really worry about hit unless you are noticeably seeing the loss of hit affecting your threat.

Something to note when dealing with Rawr.TankDK:
The weighting of Survival & Threat can shift directly because there are values to do so.
You can also increase the frequency of attacks and/or the amount of damage done per attack done by a given generic boss (I'm going to be implementing the bosshandler stuff in the future). This will not change the Survival (EH) value, but change the mitigation value.

The default values of 10k incoming, I agree are very low, and therefore really put alot of weight to EH. I'm going to be looking at how I formulate the Mitigation score to see if there aren't more accurate ways to model it. This I expect to be wrapped in the same range of check-ins as the bosshandler code.

Hit is indeed a problem, especially if your focus is 10man hardmodes and don't do 25mans. Essentially Lothar's edge is the dream weapon for me, but every 2h dps wants it also so with RNG it's hard to count on.

I sit at 170-180 hit unbuffed and I eat hit food to get by. While the Death Grip thing -usually- works, it still loses 1 sec or so reaction time at least when Dark Command misses. And it can fail as well. it's just a general oversight with this gear level I think, especially with the available items for Hit and Expertise mostly share slots.

Regarding Anub's adds, I completely agree with letting the second pair submerge, but you have to make sure your dps is enough first. If they have time to re-emerge they are going to be beelining a healer (esp if you have a resto shaman) unless the tank is on the ball on every nerubian. But that's fairly standard stuff.

From GC:
For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.


I am worried about this for DK threat, since Rune Strike is such a large part of tps. If you don't dodge as much you don't get as many Rune strikes. I guess they can add more threat to Frost Presence if it hurts too much tps.

From the way the blue post is worded, it looks like the game will calculate your standard dodge percent, then substract 20% from it to get the effective value, so I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Assuming most of us sit around 60% avoidance (Maybe 75? I dunno off the top of my head but 60 raid buffed sounds right to me)...am I wrong in thinking that's a 1/3 cut in runestrike tps? That's a bit ridiculous to lose. The debuff itself I'm ambivalent about, they have to do what they ahve to do, but it negatively affects dk threat in ways nobody else suffers.

60 to 65 should be normal. However in Naxx DKs could reach around 70% (due to blade barrier giving 10% parry and dodge didn't get such a penalty as it does today).

I hope there are some DKs on the PTR to give feedback on this new change by Daelo due to Rune Strike not up as much.

In addition to nerfing threat through Rune Strike procs, it's also going to continue to push DK tanks to blood because bone shield's uptime is going back in the toilet and their intent is to make ICC tanking mostly about how big you can make your health bar (VotTW).

I don't keep up on warrior and bear math, but could they possibly see a rage generation boost because they're taking more damage? Or is the rage they gain through dodge approximately equal to the rage generated by getting hit? It would be a really dirty trick to nerf DKs and boost rage tanks in one move (and it would be specific to ICC).

They will have more rage due to this dodge reduction. However, that really affects threat mostly (being able to maul/heroic strike on every attack) and with Tricks threat isn't that much of an issue, but I hope their are some DK threat tweaks if nothing else changes.

I have a strong feeling that they will make Frost presence increase our threat gen by a % even more than it is now to keep us competitive with other tanks who do not rely on avoidance to generate threat. If not, DK's will be probably have the worst threat gen. I have confidence in Blizzard, though, as they have stated before that they want all tank classes to be pretty equal overall.