Hmm... I've got 1pt each in SoB, SD and Necro now. I tend to use all my Death Runes for HS though, so that would push (at least for me) a little in favor of SD. You're right though, the numbers are close enough that it probably comes down to playstyle difference.

I hope the hotfixed removal of Necrosis from Rune Strike is not intentional, less threat is not going to help us, and weakens the already weak Unholy tank even more.

Ive noticed Runes bugging out more than usual lately. Blood/Death Runes are shown but can't be used.

I've noticed the same thing Cesrae. Getting runes are not available messages when they really are.

On a different topic.

I haven't seen any discussion of gemming in this threat for quite a long time. With the Emblem pieces generally having reduced avoidance do people feel it's worth gemming to gain some back?

I have some anecdotal evidence that will steer my decision for awhile.

Last night was my 10 man teams first attempt of Festergut. The first attempt I ended up dying. Getting hit 3 times in a row for roughly 15k each hit. This sudden "spike" of 45k damage in about 3 seconds was more than the healers were prepared for. The third hit's damage was overkill by only 1.9k. This speaks pretty highly to me for EH versus avoidance. Avoidance is never 100%, EH is always present.

On the next attempt I put much more focus on effective cooldown usage and we got him down. It could also been favorable RNG, or better expectations from the healers.

@last two posts

I have seen the same, but it seems limited to ICC encounters.

It might be worth noting in the frost build section that Frigid Dreadplate potentially becomes useless in a fully raid buffed environment with the current level of gear available. 16% is the miss cap, unless new crunching has been done to prove that the 16% miss cap is no longer correct.

Personally by the time I've got the 264 ilvl gear I'll have reached 596 def skill, which is past the point where I need to pull 2 points out of the talent, and the 3rd is only giving me 0.7% miss to bring me to the hard cap.

Ah, my character is a night elf, so the def skill point will be different for other races.

A very interesting thing to point out, it's been ages since somebody mentioned the miss cap, and in fact you're right, we're perilously close to it.

However, I may add, even if one point is only contributing 0.7% miss, it's still avoidance, and while bad value per talent there's no other choice to dump that talent that offers mitigation or avoidance, merely threat talents instead.

Likewise, I believe we're so close to the armor cap I'm considering speccing out of UA. Almost from Ulduar it's only been (effectively) a 5% damage reduction when on, and unbuffed I'm sitting on 30003 armor, without taking into account extra armor on chest, legs, gloves and Unid. Organ. Including raidbuffs, I suspect we'll be well over 70% damage reduced from armor resulting in UA offering even less than 5% armor, making it's one talent point perhaps better spent elsewhere, maybe another point in SoB or (dare I say it) Acclimation?

Edit: A thought just occured: If you're less than 1% past the Miss cap, you can easily bring back the lost avoidance by swapping Nerubian Carapace / Stoneskin Gargoyle with Swordbreaking / Swordshattering. Netting you more than 1%+ however much you lost to the cap in the process, at the cost of some HP. Awesome value.

There's an error in your logic here. You're calculating the benefit of a tank cooldown as a reduction of the base damage of the attack, when it should be considered in terms of reducing actual DTPS.

Example: a mob uses an ability that deals 50k base physical damage. At 70% reduction you will take 15k; at 75% you will take 12.5k. 12500/15000 = 0.83'.

So if your base armour mitigation is 70%, popping UA will reduce your physical DTPS by 16.6'%.

I’ve been experimenting with whether acclimation is worth it in ICC. I’ve looked over the logs from some runs where I’ve specced either 2/3 or 3/3 into acclimation, and what I’ve found doesn’t look too promising.

On Rotface I have the job of kiting the slimes, and with 3/3 acclimation has a very impressive uptime of 83%. I compared the amount of elemental damage that I resisted to the amount that was resisted by a bear tank, that as far as I know lacks any equivalent to acclimation, that we used to kite slimes on our first kill. However the proportion of elemental damage that was resisted varied between the 20-25% range for both me and the bear tank. So the disappointing part here is that the extra resistance doesn’t seem to reduce the damage from any of the sources in the fight. The log of me kiting is here World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis, and the bear kiting is here World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

For Festergut, acclimation was up about 60% of the time, and about 60% of gaseous blight damage was resisted. However, the problem here is that when the gaseous blight is hardest hitting is also when Festergut is weakest, and 60% off a 4k tick is nice but not that huge of a difference to healers when you are also tanking a raid boss. Also acclimation will fall off when Festergut releases pungent blight, because the phase directly before it has no gaseous blight around to cause it to proc. The Festergut log is here World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I don’t have access to any logs of when I tanked Putricide with acclimation, but there does not seem to be very much elemental damage that you should be taking that would cause it to proc. Looking over some parses where I was blood, the elemental damage is less than 10% of total damage taken coming in small ticks, which to me does not seem to be significant enough to warrant getting acclimation.

For Blood Princes I was not tanking Keleseth (the shadow one), so I can’t comment on acclimation’s use for that. I was tanking Taladram (the fire one) though, but his fire spells are fairly spaced out, so acclimation had a pretty low uptime of 14%. A log of this can be seen here World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

For the Blood Queen, acclimation procs very often, I had an uptime of around 75%. The bad news is that this high uptime doesn’t seem to mean jack shit. The damage from blood mirror does not seem to be resistable. Also, because some mechanic that is mysterious to me, the raidwide shroud of sorrow dot does not seem to hit the offtank very often. I got hit with it less than 10 times for almost all of the logs that I went through, and correspondingly it makes up less than 1% of my damage taken. Similarly bloodbolt does not hit often enough, or hard enough if you are spreading out correctly, to make any real use of the increased shadow resistance. Blood Queen log is here World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

On a separate but related note, does anybody know if the damage from blood mirror can be mitigated by any cooldowns? I ask because I soaked for 10 man as unholy, and noticed that while blood mirror doesn’t eat charges off bone shield, it also appears to be no damage reduction.

From everything I've seen so far, nothing at all will reduce Blood Mirror damage. And I do literally mean NOTHING. Ideally, the best setup for BQ would be a high avoidance tank on BQ, and a DPS-specced, tank geared OT (DPS-specced since none of the actual tank talents will help anyway, and tank-specced since you'll need the stam). The other option is to use both normal tanks (or three, if desired), and have them use CDs and then swap. Doing that, you could cut out a large portion of damage on the Mirror tank.

Also, you are correct about Shroud. It doesn't seem to hit the OT at all.

Confirmed - Bone Shield doesn't work on Blood Mirror, this also applies to Frost Presence, Blade Barrier and similar talents.
Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound were working just fine.

Delirious Slash: Damage seemed to be reduced by Bone Shield.

No, you're doing it very wrong. 31.5k and 33.75k are the amount of damage PREVENTED by the armor.

In the 45k example you take 11.25k and 13.5k, which lo and behold, 11.25/13.5 = 0.83'. A 16.7% damage reduction.

This should be obvious upon inspection however, since Frost Presence, Blade Barrier, Armor and whatever else are all multiplicative. So F * A = A * F in other words.

That sounds about right. The armor cap at 80 is around 49,000. Fully raidbuffed, I'm at close to 35k (with one armor trinket and one of the high-armor pieces).

Can you equip both Organs at the same time? I was under the impression that Blizzard had made normal and heroic versions of ICC trinks, rings and 1H weapons exclusive to each other.

Regardless, at 71% reduction from armour going to the cap still mitigates by just under 14% over normal damage taken (using our handy friend the 50k hit: 12500/14500 = 0.862), so if that's the most we can get under normal circumstances then I'd say UA was a fair use of a talent point. We're at the point where diminishing returns kick in rapidly, though, so much higher and UA wouldn't be worth it.

Yes you're quite right, apologies. It would appear that UA is in fact significantly superior than it first appeared to me. Mea culpa.

This is incorrect. From the 3.3 patch notes:

- Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.

Just wondering if the use of +Hit food is acceptable to use to maintain my hit cap? Gearing up my off tank set because we need another good reliable tank, but maintaing hit cap is a pain right now. Having to use iLvL 226 gear in order to stay close to the cap. I really don't want to pass on upgrades just because my hit rating will dropl. So could I just use hit food to reach cap if an upgrade drops me below it?

It's acceptable to use hit food, since you get the same amount of stamina. It's also acceptable not to be at hit cap. If you're not having threat problems below hit cap, then being at hit cap isn't only really a concern for taunts. Since you have a second taunt to fire in case your first one misses, that's also not as big of a concern. It's nice to be at hit cap, but you should concentrate on survival stats first as long as you aren't having any threat issues.

I can't imagine it will be changed. I expect that the change was in fact a bug fix, since the tooltip for Necrosis states "auto attacks."

A recent post on the tanking forums today, perhaps making the tanking T-10 more desirable:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Tier-10 Tank Armor Changes

Hurrah for bad gear choices! (I bought the gloves)

We still don't know exactly how much armor is being added on the them yet, so the badge pieces may well still be comparable. That being said: the 4pc Bonus.

How exactly is it applied? Are we looking at [ basehit - basehit * (armor DR + 4pc DR) ]? If so, that would be a significant reduction while up, and in the case of frost, would allow you to chain CDs up for 48s.

Why would the 12% DR stack additively with your armor DR?

All of these kinds of effects just multiply through. Armor, Frost Presence, Blade Barrier, Blessing of Sanctuary, Icebound Fortitude and now that set bonus are all just multiplied against the base hit and whatever is left over is your damage taken. It's a good cooldown if they add any Plasma Blast or Flame Breath mechanics, otherwise I'd prefer the Paladin +12% dodge if I had a choice.

Depending on the actual stats of the new pieces I still may ignore the set pieces, if the CD isn't necessary for some fight gimmick then an averaged DR may still lose out to superior mundane stats. Although at this point I"m just trying to rationalize the loss of 95 badges, since I bought the Cata BP (and was about to buy the gloves!).