What am I doing wrong? MT 10 man ToC

During our Guild Run of 10 man ToC last night I kept on running into issues where it seemed like I was taking massive damage compared to the Paladin.

At the time I had 48.5% avoidance, 543 defense, 27950 armor, 32-34k health.

Not the best gear but a mix and mash for mostly ilvl 200-226 items, and definitely good enough for ToC 10.

The Paladin had around 42% avoidance and around 34-37k health.

I have completed the raid before as a Tank so I know it can be done but what bothered me was what appeared to be a huge difference in incoming damage.

After about 9 attempts and 5 of those me dying on phase 1, I got frustrated and switched over to my disc priest to help finish it up.

Evassara is a Dual Wield tank right now, and I switched some gear up last night after I died a few times to make sure my Expertise was 21+ and hit was 8%+. It didn't seem to make a huge difference.

I had heard someone a rumor of a bug in Frost Presence, but I haven't seen any official threads so I'm assuming thats a rumor and not based in fact.

Any idea's?

How many stacks of impale were you taking?

Were you dying on tank swaps? When were you dying?

Were Snobolds (especially on healers) being dealt with quickly? Two healers or three? Were they adjusting to cover for a healer with a Snobold?

You will have to see the log for real reason but few comes to mind,

1. Gormok does bleed and and impale that hurts, paladin was probably blocking a bit of that damage where as you will have to soak it. Also How many bleed were you switching?
2. Parry gibbing, thats the reason DW tanking is not optimal, 21 expertise is just enough to push doges of the table, not parrys. Check logs for how fast the boss was hitting you, but for the love of your raid please dont DW tank.
3. Healers, Gormok can spike you a lot, few secs missed here and there can be a splat tank, again you will have to check you logs for how much healing you got?

Just my 2 cents, my bet is on parry gibbing :P

EDIT: Forgot there is a 5 expertise talent in frost

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tonylicious

How many stacks of impale were you taking?

---

I would pull, wait till I got 3 stacks and call for other tank to taunt off me.

From that point on we would taunt off each other when our impale debuff faded.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tonylicious

Were you dying on tank swaps? When were you dying?

Were Snobolds (especially on healers) being dealt with quickly? Two healers or three? Were they adjusting to cover for a healer with a Snobold?

---

No discernible pattern that I could see. Most of the time it was near the end of phase 1 after all the Kobolds were down already.

Everyone was told to stop DPS on boss while Kobolds were out, and all but 1 were following this order. Kobolds were going down quick with no issues most of time.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by gabbu

You will have to see the log for real reason but few comes to mind,

2. Parry gibbing, thats the reason DW tanking is not optimal, 21 expertise is just enough to push doges of the table, not parrys. Check logs for how fast the boss was hitting you, but for the love of your raid please dont DW tank.

3. Healers, Gormok can spike you a lot, few secs missed here and there can be a splat tank, again you will have to check you logs for how much healing you got?

---

I know the healers were not doing as well as they could of been, I usually heal so I notice.

I also noticed that I was taking more damage. Without the logs I cannot answer either of your questions though. I'll see if I have them when I get home from work.

I didn't have combat logs turned on so that will be no help.

Maybe it was just a bad night, I'll get some more raids in this week and I'll see how it goes but I had been tanking Ulduar 10 and Naxx 25 for last few weeks with no problems.

I think its a combination of the 2, your dual wielding makes you take more parries because your expertise is only enough to avoid being dodged, not parried, but also at 48% your avoidance seems to be a little low for this level of encounters, I think you should look into going for at least 52ish% (that is about 10% more avoidance than your current).

Well im watching your armory and well i have few ideas.
Offcourse this is my first post here so you can easy scratch what is ay.
Anyway.
First thing is use those weapons for DPS not for tanking. Parry insta gib can cause more then 90% of wipes you mentioned if not all of them.
Also 2 hander gives gargoyle runechant that free gem slots for other stuff.
Second to much expertise gems but i see you need them but with good two hander i bet you can replace some of them.
Blue gems pure stamina, red gems soverign str/sta and for any other colour use hit/sta and exp/sta gems depends what you need.
Also i noticed some enchants are not top end. Like cloak armor is not good for you better get 22 AGI gives armor and avoidance.
Leggs use epic LW enchant.
Dont be afraid to get some more def over cap, it will incrase your IBF time up.
Dont know is it glitch in Armoury but your talent specs are not snyced with glyphs.
It showing Hungering cold glyph with tank spec and rune strike with dps spec so try that also.
Also threat wise its better to have Frost strike glyph then rune strike.
Cuz when tanking trash snap aggro is much better.

This is all in my opinion.

TBH it sounds like DW parry haste is the main problem.

However if you usally heal but instead someone else had stepped in maybe they weren't 100% aware of who to heal when etc.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Pepius

Well im watching your armory and well i have few ideas.

First thing is use those weapons for DPS not for tanking. Parry insta gib can cause more then 90% of wipes you mentioned if not all of them.

Also 2 hander gives gargoyle runechant that free gem slots for other stuff.

Second to much expertise gems but i see you need them but with good two hander i bet you can replace some of them.

Blue gems pure stamina, red gems soverign str/sta and for any other colour use hit/sta and exp/sta gems depends what you need.

Also i noticed some enchants are not top end. Like cloak armor is not good for you better get 22 AGI gives armor and avoidance.

Leggs use epic LW enchant.

Dont be afraid to get some more def over cap, it will incrase your IBF time up.

Dont know is it glitch in Armoury but your talent specs are not snyced with glyphs.

It showing Hungering cold glyph with tank spec and rune strike with dps spec so try that also.

Also threat wise its better to have Frost strike glyph then rune strike.
Cuz when tanking trash snap aggro is much better.

This is all in my opinion.

---

First off I am playing around with Hungering Cold, and I respecced to include the talent and glyph last night. I doubt I'll keep it but I wanted to realize the full functionality and when that kind of cc might be useful. I don't like blindly following what other people tell me is not good. I take their advice in mind when making decisions though.

Secondly, I really want to make DW work. I enjoy the way it plays. It's a personal preference really and based on everyones suggestions I will continue to improve my expertise. There are two pieces of equipment that I will be replacing with items that contain expertise. This should open up some gem slots for Stamina.

My Avoidance in my opinion is fine for my gear level and will only improve to get better. It's definitely better than what I had with a 2H Weapon and SSG.

I will work on getting some more epic item enhancements and switch out my cloak for agility.

After thinking about it a bit more I think it was just a bad combination of factors. 2/3 healers were druids which are not able to handle burst damage as well as a paladin or disc priest. I probably did get some parry-haste issues due to my expertise being a slight bit lower than what it should of been.

Currently I'm at 48.5% Avoidance, 24 Expertise, 7.8% hit, 26k Armor, 28.8k HP unbuffed.

Things should fall into place a little smoother in a week when I get my new sigil and two new peices and am able to meet the expertise with gems and boost my hp.

No Wai, start the QQ waterworks because shields are so OP for survival! :rolleyes:

To clarify, I heard the same Frost Presence rumor and did a 'lava bath' test. Essentially standing in a lava pit in Shadowmoon Valley and watching health ticks, while trading specs/presences & calculating mitigation. From what I saw, damage was within .5% of expected, which likely resulted from the 'small' damage values (~600 base) & rounding in calculations.

As for ToC, it may be a consequence of parries & folks not adjusting to DK tanks in 3.2. I'm seeing issues where healers treat me according to the 3.1 avoidance/mitigation/health as they're used to those values, but all three took hits in 3.2 on DKs. Paladins/warriors/druids changed very little, in relative comparison to how much DKs changed overall.

One other quick note, 22 agility will do less for your avoidance than 16 defense to cloak.

But I did check your armory this time and saw that your avoidance is near 56%, not 48% as you mentioned, so this cannot be the problem.

In your position I would stack more expertise and stamina, try to get to 30k+ unbuffed without dropping too much avoidance and you should do much better.

Farm that tanking 1h from 5man heroic ToC, those will be fine for DW.

I came searching for an answer to this same question. Quick disclaimer, im the healer not the tank. We have a 2480 gear scored Frost DK tank as 1 of our 2 MTs. (I'ld give you stats but he logged in DPS gear) In 25man ToC this presented no problems at all and the tanks did not go down at all.

However we did 10man last night I we could not keep him alive. He seemed to go from full health to dead in under a second. I thought it was a healer problem to be honest. But then we switched our pally healer to his off spec tank and we breazed through with no problems at all.

From what I can tell the bleed at 2+ stacks combind with impale normal hit and stomp all in like 1 second was doing it. The tanks with shields are able to block that impale and hence dont get insta-dead. This is specualtion as he wasnt running a time indicator on his log.

Quote:

---

First thing is use those weapons for DPS not for tanking. Parry insta gib can cause more then 90% of wipes you mentioned if not all of them.

---

Can someone explain this statement to me please? What is Parry insta-gib"?

@ Lagspike: parry insta-gib means that you get parried by the boss which will reset the hit table and giving the boss a chance to a new hit (so basically no time between hits) thus increasing the chance to get killed (gibbed). So it just means u get parried and then instantly killed.

@ Evassara: the problem comes most likely from your DW because you would need +/- 56 in expertise skill (hard cap) to not be paried by a boss (source is elitist jerks). Now the problem with DW is that you will hit more often so the chance to get parried will be roughly doubled. Which would explain your high incoming dmaage and your frequent death. I did check your armery and you are not even by any means close to the hit cap for DW. You need +/- 27% (I think remeber reading somewhere that this is around 700 and some rating)

Parry insta gib... thought DK's got an extra 4 or so parry from using DW? so the chance that the boss will insta hit also has a increase to another parry? The threat granted by DWing now is also very nice and up-coming pach will make DW tanking for DK’s dominant. Or am I mistaken?

Devesh/thorium brotherhood/horde/Dk Tank

Didn't they disable parry haste for Gormok some time after release? I think I remember a blue post saying parry hastes were accidentally enabled.

I don't know for the other bosses though.