[Mortiferum]

Well, as for now I both DPS and Tank so My first spec is dps, second is tanking, Anyway the build was just sort of a thought I had because I figured Frost takes damage the best (In my experience) but Unholy had the best AOE threat was just my mind wandering on the thought of how best to take the place of a paladin (obviously not an easy job for anyone)

[Messerschimidt]

This my DK Tank what is your opinion?

The World of Warcraft Armory

[Satorri]

That this is not the right place to ask for armory reviews. =)

That would be HERE.

If you have questions on functionality of talents and spells, curiosities about how to use things, when to use things, or how to put it all together, then this is the right forum.

[Disanidi]

I'm just coming back from a long break. I started playing my dk when wotlk first came out.

After coming back I decided to go with frost, just to have a new start. The thing is, I don't know what the 'best' keybind combination is.

I was thinking 1-5

Deathgrip
Icy Touch
Plague Strike
Blood Strike
OB

I don't know where I would but the others though.

[Satorri]

Hmmmm keybinding is a very personal thing. I bind everything and to most every key on the left end of the keyboard save for WASD.

[Myiagros]

Hey i have seen more then one saing that hey can make more the 6k tps how are you doing that in avg im at 3,5k tps

anny one have anny tip
curentlig frost tank
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...awn&n=Myiagros

[Infamouse]

@Myiagros

it would help if you would log out in your tanking gear. this will give a better insight in what it could be that makes you only get 3.5ktps

I myself am also playing frost since 2 weeks now and its averageing 6ktps with spikes of up to 9k and this is w/o ToTT or MD's

at first glace on your talent spec it already misses some really important talents and you have some talents that have no use at all in a frost spec.
ravenous dead 1 point can be spend in mandatory frost talents same goes for 3 points in morbidity. then the 2 points in icy talons you should skip aswell the haste buff should be gotten from a enh shammy only 2 points in this is kind of a waste.
the point in deathchill and hungering cold are highly personal choices. in the 2 weeks ive been playing frost i actually never had a need for deathchill and also never for hungering cold. i would skip all those talents and pout the points in scent of blood for the extra rp generation (extra FS) also put points in chill of the grave (same reason as Scent of blood) and put 3 points in rime. every once in a while you weill not have enough RP to burn another FS and all runes on CD but you will have a rime proc giving you a extra and free attack.

it could also be in part be your gear or the rotation you use and maybe not prioritizing your skills in the right order.

if you could post a armory link with your tank gear on and your current rotation that you use. then i can formulate a better answer.

[Shaggai]

For new DK tanks, a 5/54/11 will give you a good understanding of the role.

That Tanks the Cake

[Iamsarapalin]

Hello, I've been a fan of Tankspot for years now, and I just decided to finally make a post. I've got several questions that I can't seem to find a straight answer to.

This is my Frost DK, I am one of the MT's for my guild, and have been away from WoW for a couple of months and since the nerf, I feel slightly squishy. This is my armory link: Iamsarapalin .

1) Do I need to be gemming differently? I've noticed that I am getting way more dodge than parry in a lot of ulduar drops, and decided to go for more mitigation, and so I am using dodge/stam gems. Should I be using different gems? maybe for hit? or some other stat? (oh, and defense is at 539 b/c I usually pull with IT and that gives me the defense to be at the cap)

2) What is the highest dodge I can get before diminishing returns? and should I be worried about getting to that soft cap?

3) really overall, I just wanted to see what I could really improve at the moment that's not related to gear.

Thanks for your thoughts guys, I really appreciate the dialogue.

SaraP

[Satorri]

Hi, Iamsara, great name for a DK ha ha.

Short and sweet because I don't have time to pontificate like I usually do:
1.) You're gemmed fine, nothing wasted, heavy avoidance. You'd benefit from more hit but you don't need it, it'd just give you stronger threat by a bit. Unless you're feeling continually ridden by your dpsers I wouldn't worry that too much.

2.) There is no highest. The cap is 88% and the curve just approaches that value slower and slower the closer you get. There's talk that the mid-20s is where you really start to see it slow down, but I get to 30% pretty easily just swapping in my avoidance weapon and trinkets without any gems. There is no soft cap. Your avoidance already looks pretty solid, I wouldn't be terribly concerned there.

3.) Not related to gear, that leaves spec and player skill. Player skill comes with lots and lots of practice and it's not something I can tell you how to do other than to really play with it and see what you can fit in, what mini-sequences work well together, and what abilities you could be using that you aren't. For spec, you have a fairly straightforward build. The only thing I'd say is Merciless Combat is kind of a waste on the tanking side (though it'll give you a little dps buff), if it's buffing your threat where you need it then you have bigger problems. I didn't do the math but I think you're stuck to that in Frost? Epidemic could be very nice, as can Deathchill, and I think you can drop 1 in Deathchill and 1 in Epidemic if you drop that.


Hope that helps.

[Iamsarapalin]

Thanks Satorri, thats kinda what I was thinking.

As far as frost spec, no, Im not stuck to that spec, its the spec I chose to use as my mitigation spec when ulduar hit. I normally try and tank with blood (yes i know...I'm a dual spec tank), which I find to be way more enjoyable. Thanks for the tip and I'll move the points around and see how it goes. Thanks again for the tips.

[Buckster]

The World of Warcraft Armory
my spec seems to work fine for just about everything, i recently respeced so i could get into magic suppressions so it could help out with solo tanking mimiron in phase 1, but it would be nice to see some thoughts or opinions about it. I also keep a solid 4k-5k tps, sometimes it also bursts almost to 7k tps.

[Tylmarande]

How well does DW Work with a Frost Build? I'm just now starting to try it out, and I think I might be doing better than I was when I was using a 2h but it could just be my imaginiation...

Edit:
I suppose It might help If I post up an Armory link. The World of Warcraft Armory

And... a Talent build Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I'm still a relatively Shiny 80 when it comes to raiding, so my gear isn't all that fantastic.

[Satorri]

It could be just fine, if you do it well. Depending on your gear it may indeed be an improvement, many people suffer from having inferior weapons for one category or the other.

Do what feels fun, I honestly don't think you'll see much of a difference if you apply yourself to both equally.

[Tylmarande]

Source: Satorri It could be just fine, if you do it well. Depending on your gear it may indeed be an improvement, many people suffer from having inferior weapons for one category or the other. Do what feels fun, I honestly don't think you'll see much of a difference if you apply yourself to both equally.

Is there anything I can do to my talents that would make it work better?

[Satorri]

Yes for dual wielding, and yes for tanking in general, I think. I'll try to sort my suggestions to make them more digestable. =)

1.) Talents that may easily be wasted
Unholy Command = this is nice, but very situational. Generally speaking you're talenting expecting to have to pull thing back on you? There are fights where you'll need to taunt more frequently, but they are few and far between and there are better places to spend points.
Runic Power Mastery = I like this one, but it is a trinkety bonus (meaning it only feels nicer but it isn't strictly a big help to anything you do). Ideally you'll be dumping RP frequently enough that your gains will not leave you capped for more than a little, if that.
Icy Reach = another one for covering your bases, but this can be pretty easily missed. If you are holding things effectively the extra splash on HB is wasted, and longer range on IT is only nice for pulling sooner, just run the extra two steps.
Lichborne = once upon a time this was a tanking CD, now it is not. The applications in PvE are virtually non-existant. Generally worthwhile for PvP, but probably a waste in a point-thirsty tank build.
Merciless Combat = this is a not a strong tanking buff. Our priorities are 3 in the following order: 1.) Survival, 2.) Threat, 3.) Damage. You need to survive the hits you take, do enough threat to hold the targets you're tanking. If you can do both fine, it's all well and good to pick up a little extra damage. If you don't have a strong threat lead by the time the boss gets to 35% health (everything else will die too quickly for this to really matter), you have bigger problems and Merciless Combat is not the way to fix them.
Morbidity = this is more of a personal option, I've seen some frost tanks I respect use it and say they find ways to make it work well. Personally, I think it is rather wasted on Frost. There are two parts of the talent, the first is easily disregarded. 15% more Deathcoil damage is a non-value for Frost where (barring the odd situation where you want to dump RP in a less efficient manner to get some more ranged threat) you won't use Deathcoil. The other half adds the ability to use DnD almost back to back. As Frost (and in most situations with Blood and almost as few with Unholy) I do not recast DnD frequently if ever. At most I will use it at the start of a pull. Your HB's and BB's will be plenty of AoE threat after the first application, so this is 3 points that can be easily relocated.

2.) Major values you don't have
Bladed Armor = I can't stress enough how major a value this is. As a tank in level 80 blues, this will represent ~130 AP per point (or maybe more like 5-8% of your total AP per point if that's more helpful). In Ulduar epics it will get closer to 180 AP per point (roughly the same % gain though you'll have much more AP). This is the single biggest baseline threat buff that doesn't come from ability talents. Can you do without it? Yes. Is there any good reason to? I haven't found one yet.
Annihilation = as Frost one of your 4 biggest constituents for threat will be Obliterate. It is huge, and very important (with my next talent), and it is worth using whether you dual wield or not. Annihilation lets you use it without the pain of having to reapply diseases every time (and with 15% damage buffing from Tundra Stalker that is important). 3% crit on top of that is just icing to buff your Oblit, BS, FS, and RS damage.
Rime = the crit buff alone on IT and Oblit alone make this talent fully worth it, but the proc is a MAJOR threat bonus for Frost, even more so for dual wielders. Because your strikes do less damage you're relying heavily on your melee swings and non-weapon-based damage to make up. When this procs (off using Oblit, see above), you get a refresh on your HB CD and it is free to cast which is jumbo free threat, and aoe to boot, if you need it.
Nerves of Cold Steel = this is the last important talent for dual wielding that should not be under-sold. It buffs your hit chance (equivalent to ~100 hit rating), and increases your off-hand damage, which increases your total white damage, which is an important buff since you are relying on that in part to counter the loss in instant strike damage. These three points can make a pretty sizeable jump in your threat values.

It is not required, and you may think it passable, but Scent of Blood is not wasted on Frost either as it allows you more Frost Strikes. Again, even though your FS's will do less damage with 1h weapons, it does more than enough damage to make it worth using, frequently.

An out-moded item on your glyphs, the IBF glyph will do absolutely nothing for you as a tank unless you are getting uncrittable fully through resilience (which is a bad idea in many other ways). For minor glyphs, Raise Dead falls into the same category as Merciless Combat, it will help your dps, but nothing else. Personally, I prefer Blood Tap (and use the spell often to squeeze out more threat/survival CDs) since it will remove the penalty for using the spell, but that will hardly be a make-or-break decision on the build.

The important thing to remember when you're dual wielding is to play up what your new strengths are and support your weaknesses where you still need to rely on them. That means, your -strikes will do less damage, but only by a margin, Obliterate is built into the strongest buffs that the Frost tree has, and FS is always a powerful item to add to the mix. Similarly BS is important for rolling over death runes to get more OB's and HB's. You will get more value using them well then trying not to. Your melee swings will now be a larger portion of your single target threat, so don't underestimate the value of abilities that play on that.

Generally speaking, you will not *need* more hit or expertise, but you can benefit more from them and at higher values than a 2h tank. Hit rating is hard to waste since it will only stop benefitting your melee specials, but will continue to improve hit chances on white swings, HB's, and IT's well afterward. If you should go over 8%, it's not a bad thing (though it is still not your "best" investment). Expertise is far more important now to soft-cap, as you will be generating more parriable swings, but it is not vitally important to go over that soft cap. If you do, again, it won't be wasted, and it won't be quite as little value as for a 2h Frost tank.


How's that? =)

[Bandwagon]

The World of Warcraft Armory

Im new here and i know from reading that this might somewhat belong in the Halp thread or w/e but its related to mechanics and this is the tank DK forum.

So heres my question. I took 3/3 Scent of blood to 1/3 and got 2/2 two hand spec. I put the 1/3 in scent because i couldnt figure out what to do with my last point. any advice is welcome. aslo critiques on gear/gems and what not is welcome although i dont excpect it do to where this is being posted.

Sorry for bad grammar/english my daughter is sitting in my lap and being annoying =)

Also i noticed it says i have 32k unbuffed. that number is actually 35.6k in frost pres.

[Tylmarande]

Is there any recommended rotation I can use when I make these changes to my Spec?
my current rotation was DnD, IT, PS, Pestillence+BB (for multiple mobs) or BS (for a single target), FS and/or RS, HB, Repeat (with small additions and subtractions or switches in order as necessary)

[Satorri]

Personally I rant against rotations (as in stock sequences to follow blindly) as you may as well have a 3rd party program automating key presses. Adapting smartly allows much better use of abilities.

My method is establishing a priority system that you access intuitively. In other words, learn what each of your abilities does so you can use the one that's best suited to the current situation as it changes moment by moment.

As Frost, with this build, it's a fairly easy routine, I only really use a handful of abilities in fairly predictable methodology:

With this build (glyphs are important for this method) I do not set diseases like Blood/Unholy. Open with HB (glyphed applies FF on everything, so you may want to collect them first).

Use BS's to swap in death runes whenever you have blood runes up (for aoe's I like BB to beef that damage up, but they won't convert runes =( ). I'll use OB's on every FU pair that pops up (death rune pairs included), and I use an addon to make big clear indications when Rime procs (called Freezing Fog, if you have stuff to watch procs), so I can use a free HB next CD. On multiple targets (2+) the only switch I make is to use HB on CD, every time it is up if it costs runes or not. If you have no runes available (and since practically everything you do is two at a time you'll have 1-2 free GCDs per rune set) drop a FS. As a tank don't FS yourself below 35 RP.

I bind RS into BS, BB, OB, and HB for this setup. I also make sure to spam my OB button when I can't use it so that I catch RS procs quickly. RS will always trump FS for threat/RP, lovely as FS may be.

**Oooo side note, I've been thinking heavily in patch 3.2 since I've been doing a lot of testing. As a dual wielder, in the live patch, you'll probably want to be using HB on CD as I described for multi-target tanking even on single targets. Double-check your combat log to be sure but I think I remember HB will always hit harder than OB when you're dual wielding.


For Bandwagon, ha, your gear and gems look fine, albeit a little single focused on health. =) As for your spec, that's fine, pretty standard stuff as well.

Scent of Blood is a good investment for a Frost tank since FS is a very nice way to spend the extra RP build up, strong threat. I don't know where else it would be better spent, only equivalent values. You could take Subversion for 3% more crit on OB and BS, you could take Rune Tap for an extra heal when you want it, you could snag a little Virulence to push that last little bit of HB/IT misses off the table, you could take Hungering Cold and play with the snap aoe CC value a bit, or you could see what 1 pt in Acclimation is like, ha. All things equal though, I think it's just fine in Scent of Blood.

[Edgewalker]

Should also be noted if you are directly comparing your TPS to the values of other tanks in this thread or other threads.... people 99% of the time use incredibly inflated values.
It's been that way since the start of wow, and will be until the game ends.