Asylan

I don't want to prolong the conversation pertaining to S3D anymore than it needs to be but I really think I need to clarify something. (Hopefully this thread will help others who are not quite getting it, like me, heh)

I am main tanking sarth in Heroic. There are 25 people. Can I still wait until TT to start popping my extreme CDs?

Last night I tried not using any CDs until Shadrack (lol) dropped. As soon as Sarthy phase-shifted I popped AMS. Next IBF. Next I put up Mark of Blood to try to get some health from the hits ensuing at this point. Right at the raid warning for Vespy's portal I pop vampiric blood and hopefully don't have too quick of breaths at this point so that my AMS is back up. For the first cooldown I use AMS. Still waiting for IBF to be back up at this point, so the healers use one CD on the
second breath. Then I cover the third. That's as far as I can get because DPS are still dying to fissures and lava waves.

On Sunday I'd like to try not using any CDs until Vespy's portal has spawned because that would make A) my job way easier and B) the healers won't have to use anything until after 2 FBs have gone by. I managed to get my HP up to 43.5k with shout last night, I love being a JC!

 

Cloudgatherer

I wait for TT before I start popping thru cooldowns. I haven't had any problems staying up before then, though after all the drakes are down I take quite the beating (given the spec was design to eat breaths). I would be surprised if others are having a problem, my healers are a druid and a pally, no disc priests (or even normal priest) shields me at all while MTing Sarth.

 

Dismal

I did it last night (specced Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft) using rune tap right after the first mediocre breath (post shadron but pre-vesperon), death pact after the second (night of the dead making it no issue to get the CD back up - I was pretty much summoning him and using a petattack macro to send him for drakes), and then had the healers just keep me up after the 3rd one. Then when vesperon landed I started rotating through AMS -> IBF -> Bone Shield + AMZ + Monarch Crab (to try to prolong charges) -> Army of the Dead if AMS didn't come up soon enough. If I ended up having to blow Army, then AMS and IBF would be up for the 2 breaths after that, and by then Shadron would be down and everyone would be in the twilight realm. I did this with a LOT of 10 man gear being solo healed by a resto druid (until Shadron died, then a resto shaman switched to help keep me up since my avoidance wasn't too great and I was taking severe melee damage). To be honest it's more or less just about getting people to survive flame walls - it took us probably around 90 attempts before we finally got a kill, with literally only 1 attempt other than the kill having Vesperon go down.

hope this helped, also, lolwalloftext

 

clairecakes

It just seems like you're sacrificing a bit of single target TPS for Unholy Blight. 3.1 Blood Boil is MUCH nicer then live Blood Boil. This Blood Tank spec adds some extra mitigation and buffs your two big AoE's (BB and DnD). It also gives you some of the best single target TPS available and a self heal in DC on your Lichborne'd self.

 

Illundai

From the limited amount of pulls I got in on Thorim tonight I'd say Scent of Blood is pretty hot.

Scent of Blood 850 Runic Power 170 5 5

That's over 5 pulls, one of which was pretty much near insta wipe (~1:30 min maybe)

 

Asylan

I just want to say one last time how awesome and helpful this forum thread has been for me. I can't tell you enough how hard it is to make sure one is MTing Sarth correctly. It's such a crazy fight!! For anyone who's tanking Sarth with the OP Blood spec, here's what I've been doing successfully. I have 270 stamina from gems (2 +41 JC gems in there), using Monarch Crab for the 1 min use ability and the crazy amount of stamina you can stack in it, 4 set Valorous T7.5, Stoneskin Garg on my Inevitable Defeat. My defense rating is 561, my unbuffed Frost Presence stamina is 33,347. I'm using the tanking sigil because it basically gives me a total of 572 defense throughout the fight.

I have DBM set to only tell me when Vespy and his portal arrive:

1. Vespiron lands

a. Use Vampiric Blood
b. Use Mark of Blood
c. Use Monarch Crab (macro with VB)
d. Stop attacking

2. First two Flame Breaths after Vespy lands

a. Anti Magic Shell
b. Ice Bound Fortitude

3. Next two Flame Breaths

a. Priest/Paly CDs

4. Rinse/repeat starting with 1a

I just wanted to share this with whoever might be doing the Blood spec instead of Unholy, or whoever might want to try the blood spec. It's working great for me. Regrettably we haven't even killed Shadrack yet, we got him down to 10% or something last night. The DPS is having a hard time staying alive with TT, adds everywhere, etc.

 

Foundry

Reforge your weapon to Spellshattering. 4% magic deflected is worth it over 2% stam until Shadron is dead, then weaponswap to a backup running Gargoyle as melée damage is increasing and Gargoyle is effective due to the defense as well.

 

clairmont

What do you folks think of Ghostcrawler saying "DKs are probably too good on tanking fights that do have those kind of timed, big hits if they are magical. Unfortunately the one really hard encounter in the game is a dragon that does just that." ?

 

Pyros

I think he missed the memo saying "DKs are probably too good on tanking fights". The rest is superfluous really. He does have a point on dragons however, AMS is really powerful against high dmg breath attacks, but that's not the only DK issue with tanking, we're just too good at everything.

 

Cloudgatherer

Instead of designing a top end encounter that specializes in "here comes the big magic attack!", I could see one where it would be advantageous to the pals/wars in regards to shield blocking. At least in the current content, we always use a paladin or warrior tank on Loatheb due to the shield block nearly negating all the damage. As long as the boss fights continue to have large spikes of damage, then the cooldowns on a DK will generally "win" in terms of picking a tank for that fight. I'm not completely read up on Ulduar, but I do recall reading Hodir gains a short term buff that deals a significant amount of frost damage (last I saw though, warriors could reflect it, but this leaves bears/pallies out).

 

Oniichan

Hi all, really great reading material in this thread thus far, we're doing 10m 3D tomorrow and I'm third tank/whelp duty as opposed to my usual role of dpsing.

A guild mate and I were looking into something along the lines of 43/23/5 (Will of Necrop / Frigid DP / Anticipation) for maximum survivability/avoidance and was wondering what others thought about it

At first look I was thinking something along the lines of Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft , it just seems crazy how many tanking talents you can obtain with the build.

I had some minor debate on Bloody Strikes vs Subversion but it seemed like a moot point. I could also see stacking the healing talents to be even more beneficial if 3.1 live ends up anything like PTR (insane healing coefficients on buffed death strike).

Constructive criticism/input would be appreciated.

And as for Ulduar, it seems like the boss fights are going to be pretty diverse from one another with quite a few dynamic encounters...It would be nice to the tanking classes for each class to shine in certain types of encounters but if it ever became too advantageous it would have a pretty negative affect on 10m raid groups who don't have geared tanks of the preferred class.

 

clairecakes

If you're an adds tank then huge health and Will of Necropolis isn't important. Threat is. You have to be able to pick up adds (potentially all over the map) and do so in a timely fashion.

The build you posted has excellent mitigation but at a severe cost to threat and Blood, as a general rule, is not the best for add tanking currently.

Personally I prefer a nice Frost build for whelp duty. Usually a single Icy Touch or Howling Blast is enough to pull an add off someone. If you're worried about keeping your health up don't be. A solid frost build leaves you with at least 3 cooldowns to help eat sudden bursts of add damage.

 

Suno

For add tanking, there's a few talents that I feel are very helpful. Morbidity is number one. Death and decay is so powerful with this talent; for 2/3 of the fight there's a huge area where you don't need to worry about adds. I wouldn't attempt this role without it.

I'm also very partial to Unholy Blight for this encounter, especially if you have BoSanc. Death coil has great range for picking up adds without compromising your position on current adds, and with UB, you gain a lot of flexibility. A single Deathcoil or taunt/DG will bring an add to you, UB will make it stick.

Your build has some nice talents that will work with this fight, but I would encourage you to tweak it just a bit, into something more like this.

Good luck tonight.

 

Griefknight

I'm wondering why this rotation is "...HS>HS HS>HS..." because IT>PS>OB>HS>HS will mean that you should have both U runes and F runes before any B runes are up which means you would be sitting there not attacking and waiting for the B runes when you could just do IT>PS>OB>HS>HS//OB>OB>HS>HS// repeat.

 

Sulihin

Death Rune Mastery in the linked spec means those initial FU runes from IT>PS>OB come back as blood runes, giving you more heart strikes.

 

Suno

DRM doesn't affect IT/PS. OP updated, thank you Griefknight.

 

Samurro

At first I have to say that the gear listing is kind of useless for me on the first page. There is no ordering in there and such a list provides nothing helpful imho.

I read through a lot of stuff on tankspot.com in the last days and found one really nice thread, which provides the best items for every slot for every setup. The only problem is that all the information is based around the Warrior.

So if I want to collect three different sets for different tank setups, can I take the information given in that thread and use it for my DK Tanking gear? Let's take for example the threat chest enchant, the author of the topic recommends +10 to all stats enchant, is that the best threat chest enchant for tanks too?

Thanks in advance.

 

Grishnaz

That is but one thread in a huge useful sight, deathknight.info it has tonnes and tonnes of info on tanking+gear for different jobs, in the various forums and sub forums, It would be hard to pin point precise threads too since theres a hell of a lot on there.

One thing that confused me is why you have to go unholy because the tanks but out low DPS, is this really a problem? And is it so you can switch to a DPS role or just do more whislt tanking?

Thanks for the good thread anyway, helped me with my spec a lot, since it's an exact replica :P I also used this to tank the blazes/whelps for sarth+3, probably not the best choice of spec but There wasn't really time as it was a late announced raid, however it worked flawlessly. Good job

 

Namuh

And more changes - PTR showing nerfs to Tanks.(I think?)

Some of the more notable (possible) nerfs are:

FROST
Frost Presence now reduces spell damage taken by 10%. (Down from 15%)
Lichborne doesn't increase the chance of your enemies to miss you anymore

BLOOD
Will of the Necropolis now cannot occur more often than once every 15 sec.
Vampiric Blood cool down has been increased from 1 min to 2 min.
Blade Barrier now decreases damage taken by 1/2/3/4/5% for 10 sec.

UNHOLY
Bone Shield cool down has been increased from 1min to 2min.

----------

Any thoughts from unholy tanks?
Will the increase of Boneshield’s CD make for less ability to mitigate damage thus forcing more unholy tanks to either stop earlier in the tree or changing trees altogether?

Lichborne – straight removal of a major CD that allot of tanks worked into their specs – probably one of the best ant-melee CD’s we had.

Will of the Necropolis means you simply get 1 major life saving mitigation instead of a straight reduction to damage when you get below 35% HP. This, along with Vampiric Blood is what made the blood tree viable as a tanking tree. Now with 2 mins on VB and a 15 sec cool down on WotN I don’t know if I see how it is going to compete with deep frost. Though I must admit I’m merely speculating as it FEELS like a major nerf and I don’t see any real reasoning behind it.

Blade Barrier being turned into a damage reduction only talent – someone with better math skills that I will have to figure if straight damage reduction of 5% is greater than 10% to parry. But again, it feels like a nerf but I will withhold my opinion on that until a smarter man than I tackle the math.

Icecicle - Human
Frost DeathKnight Tank

 

Namuh

To go one step further in a Positive direction there were some Buffs to tanks that may outweigh the above mentioned nerfs.

Howling Blast: Base damage and scaling doubled. This ability no longer deals bonus damage to targets with Frost Fever. Cool down increased to 10 sec.
YAY now able to open with HB instead of IT > Pest > HB (or DnD > IT > Pest > BT > HB)

Not going to go so far as to list all the Buffs but we have Damage Buffs to nearly all of our abilities – thus a straight threat increase across all trees and specs.

Armor Penetration Rating: All classes now receive 25% more benefit from Armor Penetration Rating. << Buff to Blood Tanks in general

Haste Rating: Shamans, Paladins, Druids, and Death Knights now receive 30% more melee haste from Haste Rating. << not sure how helpful this will be for IIT Tanks but it sounds like a threat buff to me.
Taunts: All player or pet-generated taunts now have a shared diminish category. << multiple taunts on the same monster will have to be monitored (not that we have allot of encounters where multiple taunts are necessary…Gluth)

Enchanting

Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward *New Enchant* - Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

Could this possibly replace Swordshattering Rune? As not only does it increase Parry rating but has a threat generating effect?

Icecicle - Human
Frost DeathKnight Tank

 

Griefknight

(taunt) The made this change to taunt because in Ulduar you can simply have three tanks spam taunt on a boss (I haven't seen Ulduar so I'm not 100% sure what encounter you could do this on) while standing in a triangle form to where range can beat on the boss and the tanks don't get hit.

(enchanting) I highly doubt Blizzard would make Death Knights use enchants over runeforges, I'll be taking SS from 3.1 and on due to the Blade Barrier change.

I don't have to much to say on other changes, obviously we received some changes that aren't positive but I'd like to see what other changes are made before 3.1 is released.

 

ZaoZao

Almost every Cooldown has been nerfed (not sure if UA has "gained" a 2 Minute CD).

It doesn't really help that we <could> generate more threat, Honestly...I don't think they will ever put Haste or ArPen on Tank gear)

And for the blade barrier nerf: My napkin math tells me that it's a huge nerf

I'm sitting at something around 60% avoidance and 70% with blade barrier.so total damage taken = 30%
The new Blade Barrier gives us a 5% reduction to damage taken, which is only 40% of the incoming attacks, so our total damage taken = 38%
The 5% damage reduction nets a total value of only 2%, 1/5 of Old Blade Barrier's value.

The higher our Avoidance goes, the less our new Blade Barrier is worth.

If my math is off...tell me

And regarding the other nerfs:

Blood did perform far too well on premonition's test at the Patchwerk dummy on the PTR, so I think some of the nerfs were justified. What bothers me is that Unholy was more or less in line with the other tanks, while Frost wasn't even tested because UA is so lackluster in it's current state.

 

nachrichter

To illustrate why your approach is wrong, realize that you didn't compare old and new Blade Barrier to a base case. Using your approach:

Base, no Blade Barrier: 60% avoidance, 40% damage taken
Old Blade Barrier: 70% avoidance, 30% damage taken -> Old Blade Barrier decreases damage taken by 25%
New Blade Barrier: 60% avoidance with 5% damage reduction, 38% damage taken -> New Blade Barrier is a 2.5% decrease

Oh my god! They nerfed Blade Barrier to 10% of its old effectiveness!

We have too much avoidance. With the change, our avoidance falls back in line, we take 5% lower physical damage when we do get hit and a tiny bit more magic damage (old FP 15% -> new FP+BB 14.5%). Finally, if you have 20% avoidance, new BB reduces the hits you take by 5%. If you have 90% avoidance, new BB reduces the hits you take by 5%. I don't think I love this direction with the talent, but it's not as bad as you'd like to make it out to be.

This thread is like a lich except his phylactery is the mind-numbing idiocy of every imbecile that walks the earth. -Slake
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MURGGRUGURGURGMRRMGRU?
<Sappo> ARE YOU NOT MORGRUGURGRMRGURGGRMGURGRMG?

 

Exalthia

The new enchant actually has the potential to replace Sword Shattering, regardless if it was intended for or not. Undiminished 4% parry is worth about ~240 rating (give and take 20 perhaps) due to DR. The enchant can stack up to 5 stacks which means a potential of 1000 parry rating.

So the determining factor will be the proc rate of Blade Ward. 2 Stacks of that enchant gives more parry compared to Sword Shattering. If that enchant has a good enough proc rate to statistically grants 2 stacks at any given time, then we should replace the Sword Shattering Runeforge with Blade Ward.

 

Foundry

The thing about Blade Ward is that relying on procs for avoidance factor gets you killed. It's a % chance on a proc to get a % chance to not get hit. That's double dipping of a dangerous kind.

If it's the threat component on Blade Ward, I can see that maybe as we do parry a lot. Less so with the change to Blade Barrier but as long as Forceful Deflection (FFD) stays the way it is then our parry will be quite reasonable.

The thing is if we go off FFD for proc chances on Blade Ward, well FFD itself draws from strength. Fallen Crusader is better again as a threat choice. % increase on strength so it scales and even though it's coming down to 15%, the proc rate is going up. The 15% more strength is now increasing parry in a small measure via FFD too. Worth a comparison test but I don't see Blade Ward being aimed at DK's when we have Swordshatter, Stoneskin Gargoyle and Fallen Crusader already.