Trying to decide between these 2 blood tank specs...feeback appreciated

I have gone back and forth and played for hours on the PTR using the Boss training dummy with these 2 specs. Both are the highest single target DPS specs I can figure out (and I have tried full frost and unholy as well to no avail). The DPS difference between these two is negligable and basically is the variance of the RNG.

First up is
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The pro's of this are a hard hitting and high % crit on Obliterate, and a large amount of points in tank talents such as VB, 3/3 spell deflection, and 3/3 improved icy touch.

The other one is
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Pros are Death Strike which is worth about 450 healing per second at my gear level, and Necrosis which also works off of Rune Strike.
Cons is no Imp Icy Touch and less Spell Deflection.


Some of my own thoughts and comments:
I know the training dummy isn't the whole story because you can't Rune Strike.
I do hand calculate the Necrosis damage back into my DPS, so I have already accounted for that when I say their DPS outcome is equal.
I know some points can be moved around in the second tier of the Unholy tree...overall there is not much DPS difference I can find.
I glyph OB, and dark death for the first.
Death strike and dark death for the second.

If anyone can comment or test these out, it would be appreciated.
Also if someone has a frost/unholy spec and rotation that can out (single target) DPS these builds, I would like to see that as well.

Thanks

You don't have Hysteria, which is easily more threat than Ravenous Dead, or really almost anything for a 1 point investment.
You are foregoing Death Strike which is an easily rotationed instant heal at virtually no cost for significant investment.
You aren't getting Morbidity, which is not only synergy with DC and Sudden Doom but a 15 second reduction on Blood's greatest source of AoE threat.
You have Spell Deflection in both builds without WoTN...

I don't really understand either of them, but the Necrosis build is closer to being the best use of talent points. You would do well to consider Hysteria though... it's very foolish to skip out on it for any situation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Edgewalker

You don't have Hysteria, which is easily more threat than Ravenous Dead, or really almost anything for a 1 point investment.
You are foregoing Death Strike which is an easily rotationed instant heal at virtually no cost for significant investment.
You aren't getting Morbidity, which is not only synergy with DC and Sudden Doom but a 15 second reduction on Blood's greatest source of AoE threat.
You have Spell Deflection in both builds without WoTN...

I don't really understand either of them, but the Necrosis build is closer to being the best use of talent points. You would do well to consider Hysteria though... it's very foolish to skip out on it for any situation.

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I will think about the Hysteria. I prefer not to use cooldowns but I can see it would have some early in the pull benefits.
For morbidity, except for chain pulling heroics, I rarely use it more than once (where a short cooldown would make a difference). 1/2 epidemic would be a tiny bit more DPS. Ravenous dead is a tiny bit of Parry and DPS...all quite honestly are pretty close.
If I should have WotN over Spell deflection, why is that? You seem to do pretty well without either in your spec.

You do have an interesting set of priorities with your spec, but like Edge said, I think you miss many synergies to get certain talents, and I'm not sure why you do.

If nothing else, there is no good reason to spec into Annihilation with a Blood Tanking build. Imp DS is easy to take climbing the tree, and using that as your FU rune converter will get you heavy survival value and threat value with a blood design.

If you want the breakdown of other individual talents, I wrote a pretty lengthy discussion, but the short hand is, Ravenous Dead is not high on the list of values, with all the good places to put talent points, neither is Black Ice.

What inured you to these two specs?

Why 1/2 in Epidemic and 1/3 in Ravenous Dead?

You only take Imp IT in one build, that makes me think you don't have a plan for someone providing the de-haste buff which leads me to say, you really don't want to leave that out as it represents a pretty significant survival tool. You can go without it, but that's a pretty blatant sacrifice of survival for threat, and is the threat really that important?

Is maximizing threat really what you're after? If so you can shave a lot of circumstantial survival out and boost your threat more. If you're looking for a degree of balance between survival and threat, I think there are places you are trading good survival for poor threat, or decent threat/ease of style choices for poor threat.

And to be clear, Morbidity makes Sudden Doom worth taking, without it you're imparing yourself more than you gain. The constant value you get is in boosting your DC's, the reduced CD on DnD is for flexibility more than anything, but in some situations it's worth having it continually available.

Ravenous Dead doesn't give tiny AP/Parry per point, it gives miniscule gains. It's a nice enough talent, but just for the %Str, it easily gets passed up by other values for Blood tank threat.

Personally I take Hysteria, but not for myself. I have no need for more threat, but when I apply it to my 6-9k feral dpser, suddenly I just bumped my raid dps WAY up for 1 pt invested.

And WotN and Spell Deflection are two survival abilities with very different applications. I think (guessing) Edge believes that WotN is much more widely applicable, as opposed to Spell Deflection. But he can answer that better, I'm sure. I don't take either myself, but not for lack of value, just because I trade them for talents with nicer synergy in my threat/survival balance.

On live I currently run a build nearly identical (1 point different) as Edgewalker...I am trying these as something a bit better.
Yes I am working on DPS, but its not an all out sacrifice.
Here are the issues...
If I go to take Death Strike and Necrosis, I cannot have Improved Icy Touch, or hardly any points in survival skills in the blood tree.

Where I shuffle my 3 or 5 points among ravenous dead, morbidity, or epedemic is quite trivial in both DPS and survivability. The 1/2 epidemic keeps diseases up through all the HS. 2/2 would be a waste since I use IT/PS right as soon as they go down right now ...the 1/3 ravenous dead is just to get to Necrosis based on only needing 1/2 epidemic. I tried glyph of disease (which might be a reason for 2/2 epidemic) and using Pestilence instead of the last HS but I found the rotation messy and DPS lower than just using IT/PS.

What talents with nicer Synergy am I missing (Hysteria aside)?

Curious, you have some interesting methods. It may be something like you pointed out too, being that you're doing these tests on the training dummy. I wouldn't dip 1/2 in Epidemic because I like to have my bases covered, safe margins and all that.

The Imp IT reason is actually why I don't have any points in Necrosis. That and I was testing Sudden Doom and never switch my spec back on live, which I'm just realizing, ha ha.

The synergy item I was talking about was actually Spell Deflection (forgive the scattered thoughts, I wrote them during the onset of a migraine =( ). Spell Deflection is the one survival talent in Blood that doesn't actually make use of synergy with the Blood talents. It works well enough on its own, but it doesn't scale much with the things you will focus on most. It will creep up with your gear and little more.

If the spec feels good to you, go for it and see what happens in a real raid. As per your original post I'd just leave it at, don't bother with an OB-oriented spec, stick to the other, and I expect that you'll appreciate 2/2 Epidemic over 1/3 in Ravenous Dead, in actual practice, but experience will speak to your own tastes better than I can.