Hi, I'm the Rawr.TankDK model developer.

Additional discussion can be found here:
Rawr.TankDK - Latest release: 2.3.23 (09/12/2010) : Addons

Rawr3 Open Beta released! See more info here:
Rawr - Discussions - ~Rawr3 Public Beta Released~

I do check the Rawr forums very regularly, so if I don't get to you here very quickly, be sure to swing by there, and I'll be able to answer your questions much more rapidly. However, feel free to post your questions and observations, and let's have a lively discussion.

Notes taken from the TankDK Wiki on Rawr's site: Rawr TankDK Wiki

Support

* Currently supporting Wow 3.3.5

Status
Accuracy has been gradually increasing with each new release.

Current TODOs:
(kind of in order)

* Fix defects
* Fix shot rotation/threat modeling through re-work of ability usage.
* Integrate the BossHandler class.

Recent new model features implemented:

2.3.23:

* Defect 18638: Provide optimizer options for Resilience and Spell Pen. Also provide UI element for Resistances.
* Update to handle 1-h Triggers (CurrentHandHit, MainHandHit, OffHandHit) It's not perfect, it's in there.
* Partial 18340: Update Haste math and GCD calcs in the Shotrotation.
* Rawr3: Added a new flag for comparisons to show Partially Equipped, like Talents where you have points in it less than Max or You selected a Buff like Trueshot Aura and we can show that it conflicts with Unleashed Rage and Abomination's Might
* Rawr3: Added a new Chart comparing Talents from Max against Zero (most people put all the points into the talent, not just one or two, so now you can see what the full talent's value is)

2.3.22:
* Defect 18454: There was an array problem in the VB static Special effects. Everything should be sorted now.
* Defect 18507 & Partial for 18340: Had a bug in my evaluation of Abom's Might. 50% per point rather than 5% per point AP buff.
* Partial fix for 18507: BonusDamageMultiplier was not in CombatTable so certain buffs/SpecialEffects had no value.
* No Defect: Had the sign wrong on Frost Presence DamageTakenModifier.

2.3.21:
* Performance Improvements by making 14 of 15 constantly recreated SpecialEffects into static variables
* Defect 18255: Offhand items were showing a slight gain in mitigation when parry-haste was enabled.
* Rawr3.BossHandler: Worked in the last of the options that have already been programmed into the boss handler onto the pane. What you see is what there is. If you want more options to be considered, post in the forums on the designated threads or make a feature request in the issue tracker.

2.3.20:
* Issue with deselecting Heroic Presence not removing the buff in certain cases.

2.3.19:
* Fix for Defect 17837: Dual Rune of FC issue.
* No Defect: Missing part of the Fallen Crusader Rune. Adjusting special effects to better handle PPM.
* No Defect: Improved Rotation selection
* Defect 17964: There were certain talents that were showing negative at odd times. So I fixed that.
* Fix for Defect 17762: Performance issues

2.3.18:
2.3.17:
* Defect 17712: Fix for a crash on some Vista systems.

2.3.16:
* Defect 16231: EXPERIMENTAL Additional work on the new abilities work-flow. Additional data available in the summary pane to support improved visibility, only available when the new code is enabled. Fleshing out a number of the abilities on the rotation. Optimizer results make slightly more sense when optimizing for Talents, which is a bit disturbing since it's in-complete.
* Removed a bunch of "TODOs" that are being handled by the re-work.
* Defect 15913: Finally! Fix for Acclimation
* SortaFix for 14553: Put in some code to have some automatic adjustment of the rotation back into the schema. This helps when comparing different complete Talent Specs, but is broken when looking at individual talents on the graph.
* No Defect: Better rotation time allowing for a more accurate Threat value. Most folks will see their threat decrease to more reasonable numbers.
* No Defect: Additional work for the updated CombatTable - Initial comparison functions to allow sorting abilities by various values.
* Defect 15192: Integrated Parry haste calculations in the new combatTable code so that in-theory, Parry provides a very slight amount of threat. It's not much, but the math is there, and we're seeing additional white swings provided by the parry haste. In some situations, for really slow weapons with high avoidance rates, this is preventing RS from being capped by # of white swings.
* Fix for defect 15845: Created a switch in options for enabling/disabling onUse abilities.
* Fix for Defect 16231: The rotation viewer now knows what strikes are available via talents. This improves some bit of the talent optimizer.
* No Defect: Noticed a threading issue in threat caused by the auto-rotation bits.
* Stats cleanup - removed a stat, and properly categorized a bunch of DK stats that were all in Additive that should have been multiplicative.

2.3.15:
* No Defect: DS health restore was not contributing to mitigation, which it should be.
* Defect 16231: Additional work on the new abilities work-flow.
* No Defect: Another wave of base abilities checked in for new combattable. Still have more to do, and they aren't complete, but this gets placeholders for most of what's on the rotation UI.

2.3.14:
* No Defect: Update Threat values table from in-game research and matching tankspot post.
* No Defect: Off-hands were providing value in certain cases when 2h-ers were equiped. Finally rooted out the problem.
* Defect 15770: Fix for the blood funny business in RSVs. I believe that we should finally see the RSVs settle down for the Blood tree.
* Defect 16902: Update Bonus Armor in the Armory parser. Update the way I was handling new additional armor multipliers. The stats object is correct, but just my implementation was flawed.

2.3.13:
* Defect 16792: Crash when trying to save - Fixed by Jothay.
* Defect 16745: T9_2Piece now properly evalutated.
* No Defect: Pruned down the Gem templates to help speed up optimizer.
* No Defect: 3.3.3 Changes.

2.3.12:
* Defect 16597: Imp Icy Talons stacks /w Icy Talons
* Defect 16012: IIT was double stacking if it was selected in the Buffs Pane.
* No Defect: Experimental code expanded for shot rotation, and changes to BossHandler features.

2.3.11:
* No Defect: Adjust the defaults to be more appropriate for T9ish levels rather than Heroics.

2.3.10:
* No Defect: Actually implement the T10 set bonuses. Some how these didn't get in.

2.3.9:
* No Defect: Fixed some tool tips
* Defect 15732: Finally rooted out the expertise problem in experimental code.
* Defect 16144: Removing legacy mitigation code and adding the Mitigation multiplier to help with balancing issues until we can fine-tune it.
* No Defect: New buffs for DK tanks to Frost Presence and IBF.

2.3.8:
2.3.7:
RSVs still go hay-wire when using certain blood talents.

* Defect 15829: Armor miscalculated - based on the comments, moving the frost presence application to the end of my accumulate work.
* Defect 14569: Adjusting Survival by providing a more focused means of inputing the kinds of damage seen. This is related to the BossHandler work.
* Defect 15844: Provide a user-checkbox to enable/disable Parry Haste.
* No Defect: Updating some of the tool tips to help with clarification.
* No Defect: Adding some abilities to future migration to the sim model. Updating the calcs to ensure that we're pulling the right data.

2.3.6:

* No Defect: Factor in the DAMAGE procs, not just the healing procs of items. This probably needs to be refactored. Also the specials proc rate for OnMeleeHit was wrong.
* Defect 15682: Add in a Hit Rating option to the Optimizer list.
* No Defect: I had the math all wrong for DW weapon speeds. It was increasing w/ 2 weapons rather than decreasing considering the white hits would occur more frequently rather than less in DW situations than 2H.
* Defect 15212: Refactored ManageRP to just limit based on RP. More work needs to be done to better reveal what kind of values we should be seeing when bringing in Avoidance #s and weapon speed.
* Defect 15671: I had Improved Icy Talons stacking with Normal IcyTalons for the tank's own haste. It works out to only expand the effect from just the tank to the whole raid. This suggests that we still need to find some way to include raid Utility into the value of effects/talents.
* Defect 14553: Attempt to better provide rotations that match the active talents. Only a partial change as I need to do more testing.
* No Defect: Overvalue of things that had stacks & had an ability trigger. The trigger would be infinity if it triggered off of things that were not in the rotation. So now we just make sure to exclude infinite triggers.
* Defect 14553: Change the talent based rotation determination to use HS rather than Bloodgorged to build a blood rotation.
* Defect 15212: the code in the Combat table for RS was totally horked. so I'm ripping it out since I didn't get any satisfactory results at this time. I need to better segment any work that represents an attempt to do optimization for a given ability. That's still a ways off. So for now, RS is purely based on what's in the UI, even if the user enters in more RSs then they could possibly get given the combat situation available.
* Defect 15272: Changed where I'm doing the health calc for the healing talents (Rune Tap & Vampiric Blood) This seems to have settled the RSVs somewhat, but not completely.
* Defect 15732: Experimental mitigation now has expertise involved, but the results are totally weird. I'm not done in there.
* No Defect: Fixed a bug in the way I was handling IBF & the Glyph of IBF
* No Defect: Fixed a bug in Blood Gorged that was not properly giving the bonusdamage part of it's effect.
* No Defect: Pulling out the value of Hysteria. I still want a way to provide value for the utility talents, but for now it will have to wait.

2.3.5:

* No Defect: Implementing HealthRestore & HP5 effects in the model. It's not great, but really I need to figure out what the time frame really looks like for any given value.
* No Defect: Bryntroll, the Bone Arbiter not properly modeled. - Healing not modeled as part of the life stealing.
* Fix for Defect 14840: Fixed parser & internal evaluation of multi-tiered special effects.
* Fix for Defect 15640: Display option values were not all persisting.
* No Defect: Expose experimental switches to play w/ the new workflow - not for everyone.

2.3.4:
2.3.3:
2.3.2:
2.3.1:

* No Defect: Actually remembered to check in the Rune of Nerubian Carapace change.

2.3.0:

* Defect 15229: Survival & Threat weight values = 0 causing all bars to show only mitigation.


Known Issues
* Results from turning on the Experimental switch are currently inconsistent. Use at your own risk.

If you find any problems w/ the model, please be sure to use the Issue Tracker. It is checked regularly, and so if the defect is not found there, please write it up and I'll get to working on it.
Currently targeting Shot rotation work. There are quite a few tweaks and a bit of refactoring that needs to go in to make it work properly.

One issue I have is with regard for the Uncrittable mark. For example, my DK has 15 defense rating "extra" defense while using a 56 defense rating ring. Rawr says using a 0 defense ring in that slot would be a better option, putting my 40 defense rating until the mark.

I think the default boss behavior isn't correct under options (10K Hits is too small), however I don't know what they should be. I just messed with them until it rating the Stamina trinkets over the dodge ones.
The ratings I have are: Survival 2.05, Incoming damage 40,000, and 0.05 magic damage.

Is this based on the Ring1 or Ring2 graphs or actually while using the optimizer with adding the option of "Chance to be Crit" <= 0 ?

If you're just looking at the item graphs, then it's possible that a given item may be better in broad terms, but may not actually fulfill some key points that we consider vital for a tank, e.g. hitting uncritable/Def softcap. The item comparison graphs don't know that's a requirement so that's expected. It believes that all things being equal Ring A w/o def may be better than Ring B that has def necessary to put you over that key mark. For the purposes of individual item comparison, the item graphs are just that: Compare item A to item B, sorted by raw values (Survival, Mitigation, & Threat or Burst/Reaction time). Raw values are generated by comparing the character's total value with the item on vs. with that slot empty.

Agreed. There is a BossHandler class that's being generated to be useful for all modules that will better describe bosses, both in specific and in general. Once that class becomes more stable, I'll be working to use those options rather than just some magic options that can be tweaked by the user. This way you could gear for specific fights, and compare different sets across different fights.

The health values from rawr have not be accurate for awhile.

Like my current setup I have logged out on armory puts me at just above 43586k hp. When loaded into rawr without any buffs, it says I have 45292.

Also the avoid % are slightly off as well.

One part of the health value reported in your particular case is due to Vampiric blood. With the last couple releases, I had code that gave an effective health value of procs averaged out by uptime. So that would give you a buff to health that wouldn't show up on your in-game paper-doll.

However, there is a bug in that particular proc that I'm still trying to figure out that's blowing all the other values out of whack. I'm looking into it, but don't yet have a solution, so for the next release, it may be pulled for that particular talent. Not sure, as it's in-research.

im very interested in seeing a the sigil comparison fleshed out with the 245 dodge sigil

The discrepancy in health has been my #1 issue and I searched around the Rawr forums for quite awhile trying to figure out why. Thanks for the explanation. Is there a way to disable VB calculations aside from removing the talent? At least now that I know what causes it I can manually remove the talent and compare gear choices with accurate health so that is exciting.

I'm assuming removing the VB talent would slightly affect gear scores since VB favors stacking more health?

Thanks for your work on TankDK, I use it all the time.

If it wouldn't be too terribly much of a problem, would it be possible to put a scroll bar on the 'Character Pane'? It is quite hard to procrastinate at work on my netbook when I can't fiddle with my weapons, sigil, trinkets, and wrists.

Good question. I know that the runestrike procs are dependant upon the Avoidance % and I have some of those numbers involved in the rotation. However, at this point, I believe I need to finish the re-write of the combat rotation functionality. With the Blood TPS being completely borked, and things like RS not always having the right amount of applications and such, it's high time I focus on getting that worked out.

Right now, it's not feasible, because of the implementation limitation. But it will be once I finish re-working the rotations.

I'm not sure. I've seen requests for that come across the issue tracker every so often. I believe it's not planned for the normal version, but Rawr3 does have better handling of that, so you will probably have to wait for that.

Sorry.

Wait for 2.2.24 - I just (in the last hour) checked in a change that pulled out the +health aspect that was breaking that talent. So while now the talent is valued much less, it is not breaking everything else. Depending on the time-frame for 24, will determine when I can get it fixed properly.

Also, I now have the Basic Stats just reporting what should be real in-game paper doll values. Things like Dodge/Parry will still have procs factored in, but things like Sta, Health, Str, etc. should be no-proc related.

You're very welcome. I started on it for selfish reasons since it wasn't being maintained, and I'm glad I can help myself and help the community.

Why not have something in the options that can let you choose how you want procs handled? Maybe have like "Don't Model Procs" for purely paper doll stats, "Average Value" for how I assume it is being modeled now (if it adds 300str for 15 seconds and procs every 45 seconds, it would add 100str to your paper doll stats), and "Always Procced" for showing 'best-case scenario' or quickly verifying that you won't exceed some cap and lose value from the proc.

Good stuff. I also noticed that my avoidance on rawr is sightly off from in game. Mainly the miss from defense, altho the dodge/parry is off little too. (I don't run any avoidance trinkets and removed sigil so it isn't because of the averaging on that)

Glyph of Rune Strike broken?

When I check it on, I lose 1 point of aggro. I'm not sure how that happens but it doesn't seem correct.

I'm not dropping another glyph, just toggling it on and off.

Yes. You're right. It had a value, but the value was under represented. 1% rather than 10%. I'll fix that.
Good catch.

How can I make the optimizer enforce a 8% or 9% chance to hit? The +Hit option in the optimizer doesn't really give me a lot of detail...

I noticed that the DK glyph Vamperic Blood is wrong. It should be a boost of 5sec instead of 10 mentioned on the program.

Anyway, this program seems really well done.

I'll give that a shot, and I understand not needing more than 8%. I just was wondering how I could set the Opt. to treat Hit rating like I can with ensuring I remain Defense and Expertise capped at 540 and 26 respectively. I can set Chance to be Crit to be <= 0 and Chance for target to Dodge to be <=0. I guess I'm just looking for a way to set Hit rating to >=264

Pretty sure when you run the optimize, there is an add requirement button. You can set certain restrictions such as making sure you always have > X hit there.

Ahh... This looks like something that I was working on refactoring and then didn't finish it. I'll get some fixes in on that. Thank you.

Thank you.
Also my implmentation of Vampirirc Blood is really messing things up. Looks like I need to take a look at everything around this talent, maybe just start from scratch on how I'm dealing with it.

Also the UI tooltips are separate from implementation, so I need to check up on that as well.

My guildie just got his account keylogged, the keylogger was from the newest version of Rawr. Just warning you guys, be careful with Rawr for the moment!