Resilience is not wasted. A combination of resilience and defense rating can be used to reach the crit immunity cap...

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Defense - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

It is barely possible to not reach the Def crit cap (using the proper Runeforge) once you get full 226 gear (which should be common by now), but it does help if you had weaker tanking gear. Note IBF gets stronger as you get more Defense.

I've been bouncing around from Blood to Unholy and back quite a bit. I really like the DR abilities that Unholy has, but Blood keeps calling me back. I think that this is due to Unholy's limited physical DR abilities.

However, I starting thinking about a perma-ghoul/Huddle build. I haven't seen a build including this before, so I was wondering if anyone in the community has tried this. It would make ghoul sac'ing quite a bit more accessible, too.

Here's the build that I plan on giving a run this weekend... PermaGhoul.

I'd be interested in finding out if anyone has tried this before.

In terms of just the sacrifice, I suppose it's a nice alternative if you really want to spec unholy (I personally find no use in having AMZ for current PvE content, but the magic debuff is handy), but if you're loving Blood's DR anyway, it seems kind of unnecessary.

Death Pact:
40% every 30 seconds, costs 40 RP

Improved Rune Tap:
20% every 20 seconds, costs 1 Blood Rune

Used with Vampiric Blood, gives 37%, allowing 15% over maximum if for some reason you're using it with more than 80% health.
Vampiric Blood is on a minute cooldown, so assuming you use them at the same time when both are up, IRT is an average 28.5%, which should be plenty while tanking... if your healers can't keep you up after you're popping 30% health back every 30s, something is wrong.
EDIT: I was mistaken about the RT glyph... it multiplies the 10%, so your previous 20% from IRT becomes 22%, with VB is averaged to 29.7%. Not much of a difference, but the 10% party heals may be useful.

This is just taking into account the health gain, not the ghoul's damage while it's up (minimal) or the rest of the unholy spec, or the fact that IRT is one extra talent point vs. NotD + Permaghoul

All that said, I'm a frost tank. My healers love the mitigation, my dps love icy talons, and everyone loves not having loose adds. Plus I can respec into HC/Chilblains when I need to slow/freeze. (FC + Anub ToGC).

The ghoul sac is just an added bonus. I'm more interested in the Huddle, which applies 50% of incoming damage to the ghoul for up to 12 seconds and on a 45-second CD.

In defense of Unholy, I find the magic reduction very useful during the worm encounter, Val'kyr's and with Anub'arek. Furthermore, Bone Shield is just fantastic.

I realize the Huddle DR would be quite limited (two to three hits halved), but at no cost and on a 45-second CD it would be quite nice.

Personal threat and survivability of the ghoul are my primary concerns, though I doubt that the former will be an issue.

Why is it necessary for you to have the ghoul out and ready at all times? All the major spikes in current content can be easily predicted which allows for you to easily get the ghoul out 5-10s beforehand if you happen to have an upcoming spike with no cooldowns (either from yourself or the healers) ready. Furthermore, your ghoul already gets an automatic AoE damage reduction, so there's no reason why it should be dying even without huddle.

Yes, the Huddle is for the Ghoul's survival only. While it would be nice if they incorporated pets into tanking (points issues aside, could be fun with something like 20% of pet damage to threat, etc) it's of limited use atm.

When I started tanking, I was Unholy and had MoG for a long time, and it was useful on things like Iron Council where the ghoul could stun the dwarf in case my freezes didn't land, etc. And the more frequent deathpacts were a nice bonus, as were the added dps, but I think it's just too hard to get Magic Suppression and ghoul talents for it to be worth it right now.

I agree... they should consider adding some kind of tank mechanic to MoG. We're not exactly Hunters, looking for a BFF sidekick, but after switching from leveling Unholy to other specs, I've felt naked without a ghoul(s), and Unholy could use one or two tank buffs.

Maybe give us some kind of ghoul's blood presence... give us a percentage of his damage back as health, kinda like a gimp (but mobile) Judgment of Light. Add it to Ghoul Frenzy? I think Unholy is fine on threat, but could use an extra defensive cooldown, why not make it an elaborate ghoul-HoT? But for four points, it better be worth it, because with the AoE reduction coming in 3.3, there won't be much use for GF in its current functionality.

This is so very true.

Now we already have IBF-2min, AMS-45, Boneshield-1m, AMZ-2mins, Death Pact-2mins, Army-10min and I'm not even mentioning other cooldowns that are being used by your healers. If you are so worried about your pet survivability spec into the proper damage reductions for your pet and micro manage your pet via macros(startattack, stopattack, stay, leap, follow, huddle, etc), shoot you could even use some globals to heal your pet with deathcoil. Or even better yet, do some research and find out if its even worth spending that point on Master of Ghouls until you have the necessary buffs like Leader of the Pact, JoL, etc for your pet. From a tanking standpoint this is a lot of managing to do when you should be more focused on you and the encounter. Unholy Dps worries about there pet because there dps actually matters and scales extremely well with their gear.

Using i245 gear, in Frost 3.3 (with -20% dodge aura and +17% threat on RS, using 1.1.8.0 of Kahorie's sim).
The below are the threat stat weightings for Frost two-handed, sim'd with 10-man raid buffs up.

ExpertiseRating (before cap)	2.83
Hit rating (BeforeMeleeHitCap 8%)	2.34
Strength	2.34
ExpertiseRating (After Dodge Cap)	1.52
CritRating	1.45
ArmorPenetrationRating	1.31
Agility	1.1
AttackPower	1
SpellHitRating	0.4
HasteRating	0.34

Obviously survival vs threat is a separate issue. The above is useful if you're looking at threat in isolation.

They datamined Shadowmourne today: Shadowmourne on wowhead.

Now, it seems like it's really got more DPS-type stats, but given that my guild has a dearth of outstanding 2h DPS, I'm wondering how good you guys think it is for a DK tank. I imagine Blood would benefit the most from it.

Fair enough, Darkside. What's your opinion on Bryntroll? When we compare it to Justicebringer, it's interesting.

Hard to say thus far, because we have no idea what the frequency of the proc will be and whether or not it will be affected by buffs/debuffs. The stats on it are painfully low, so it'll have to proc at an incredible frequency to justify losing all that stam/agi/hit etc.

Bryntroll is amazing for DK dps (scales with spell hit/crit, Blood presence, raid debuffs), but tanks should stay away due to low passive stats that are there because it has an amazing dps proc.

The APE value of bryntroll is actually a loss compared to even the ilevel 245 version of justicebringer by stats alone, so barring the proc being significantly more frequent than a 45s ICD it'd end up becoming a crystal if your raiders have the ilevel 258 weapon already. For EH you lose way too much in the way of stam/str to switch IMO.

Weapon procs don't have a cooldown in Wrath. You are right that the EH is a little low for a tank (unless they didn't have a 258 already).

While I agree a dpser should get Shadowmourne first and foremost, I'd hardly say a tank DK using it is an abomination. The amount of stamina on that, especially with 3 gem sockets, is truly amazing, and the raw damage would make it incredible for threat.

I agree, Qaenyin. And I don't know if I'm the only one called on to spec DPS sometimes for 1-tank encounters (well, usually the dualspec).

Though that said I think we kind of sit in a hard place about tank weapons. While you can easily argue that the drop we loot is the "tank weapon drop", I'm sure the DPSers who could also have used it doesn't easily see that logic, nor indeed is it easy for myself at times. :p

(Un?)Fortunately I only raid 10man so it's not going to be a decision for us anyway. I'm however interested in some of these procs myself..

Well clearly, if we are to make a decent claim to any weapons at all, we should focus on the ones that are in fact best for us.

To be honest, I think agility-based weapons are best for tanking as a general rule (Cataclysm, of course, will probably change this. Weapon design is going to be the hardest part of the stat consolidation effort).

I had never really thought about it until the first time I did TOGC10 and heroic Fordragon Blades dropped. I won the roll, and you would not believe the howling about how "it's a DPS weapon, DKs want strength weapons so they can turn that into parry." This from a ret pally. It actually took a while to convince the raid leader to give it to me (it helped that I was currently tanking with normal mode Reckoning).

The thing is, an agility weapon provides more for us as tanks than strength (we're somewhat similar to druid tanks in that way). Agility provides crit for threat and even a bit of effective health through armor, but where it really shines is avoidance - even with the strength to parry conversion, you'll get more avoidance out of agility than strength. An easy way to test this is to blow your Horn of Winter. Your parry will go up by maybe half a percent, but dodge goes up by by one percent and some change.

As it turns out, after reviewing the other weapons in 3.2, the only weapons I'd switch to for tanking are from TOGC25, and for pretty much any class, Fordragon Blades is the worst dps weapon at ilvl245 (except the Ony polearms).

Unless I'm absolutely starved for threat, I don't see myself ever using a strength weapon over an agility weapon if I can get my hands on one that's comparable, and unless strange itemization prohibits it, I don't think that will change for Icecrown.

And taking Shadowmourne drops for tanking, despite it's three sockets that can be gemmed stam, seems unbelievably selfish unless there are literally no two-hander dps on the quest. And even now I can tell you that if I did get my hands on it (which is very unlikely), I would most certainly gem/runeforge it for my dps offspec, not for tanking.

It's too early to tell on the weapon for T10 tanking. [Lothar's Edge] and [Decimation] (or horde equivalents) are the best choices at the T9 level, and this is largely due to the lack of hit on tank gear at the T9 level. I'm seeing a bit more hit on tanking pieces, in general, in the T10 tier. If hit were as scarce as it were in T9, then (Cryptmaker) would be a good option, but I can easily imagine tanks at T10 maxing hit/exp (soft cap) before even factoring in a weapon. Shadowmourne will likely be the BiS for dps and tanking, but I have yet to see what the good alternative weapon will be as far as tanking goes.

Looking at the updated loot list on MMO-Champ it looks like Bryntroll got it's stats upgraded so it'll be close in terms of EH to the 258 weapons.

Valid point. However, none of the thus far discovered agility weapons in ICC25 are 2h swords or polearms, they're all onehanded weapons and a staff. Unless a 2h agility non-staff appears on Arthas' loot table, Shadowmourne is likely going to be the best in slot DK tank weapon by a pretty large margin simply due to the amount of stamina present on it. The difference between 180ish agility and 223(and up to 360 additional from the proc) strength is probably not going to be more significant than the difference between 220ish stamina and 288 stamina, even ignoring the threat generation boost.