Comprehensive Guide to Death Knight Tanking

The functional miss chance is rather less than you might think. Miss chance has pretty steep diminishing returns as the cap is only 16%. The 5% base is also reduced by 0.6% if you're being attacked by a raid boss (level difference). 6% is a bit conservative though, it is true, especially when you add the 3% miss buff from Hunters/Moonkin.

I wanted to be conservative though to show the best case you could expect from SoB. =)

I think, in full raid buffs, including the Scorpid Sting/Insect Swarm, I'm sitting at roughly 11% miss, on my DK tank as Blood.

Satorri (and everyone else), mind if I get your thoughts about a tanking rough spot I have?

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f214/...s-koralon.html

Btw Satorri, there is an addon called ThatJustHappened that announces certain events (such as buffs gained/faded) to a channel of your choice. Perhaps useful for those cooldowns, as you don't need a macro?

I would just like to thank Satorri for an amazing guide and for giving me a reason to dust off my DK. Hopefully, in a week or twos time, I can take my DK to tank TotC 10/25 and leave my main to tank ICC and TotGC.

I'm confused what you're talking about using that for, WarTotem.

Before I ask yet another question, just want to thank Satorri once again for the dynamite guide. With its help, my DK has been 80 for just under two weeks and I've already tanked ICC, ToC, and a couple bosses in ToGC (all 10 man) successfully. Probably also have to thank Blizzard for the lolbadges and new heroics to let me gear up so quickly.

My question pertains to AoE threat. As you state in your guide (and that I've also found in personal testing and experience), D&D pretty much sucks as Frost since HB does the job so well, and because it's awkward for our rune usage, in my opinion. My typical AoE pull is HB/BB/BB/OB (hoping for a Rime proc, and giggling like a school girl when it happens), then Blood Tap for another BB if it's up. Obviously using Glyph of HB, of course.

Anyways, with T10 pieces on the horizon, I can't help but notice the 2pc bonus; +20% damage from D&D. Will this make it the main AoE threat choice even for Frost?

Let's assume that it will make D&D superior for a moment; that probably means that at least I'll drop Glyph of HB. I already use a 2-disease method for single targets; I pretty much only keep the HB glyph for AoE pulls. Unless D&D/HB/BB is an acceptable opening AoE rotation (along with the ridiculous rune blackout following it), I'll see little reason to keep it.

Also, assuming that the 2pc bonus and the Glyph of D&D stack, giving a 40% increase in D&D damage (or a little more, if it's multiplicative), would that even make it a necessary piece of single-target rotations?

I did math on it here:
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/6...t10-glyph.html

*If* you wanted to make use of the DnD set bonus and glyph as Frost, you'd want to make a custom spec around it, particularly taking Morbidity for more frequent uptime. Still, like you pointed out, using DnD kind of impairs the clean rotation of Frost procs with frequent usage, so I'd be inclined to suggest swapping to a different tree.

Fantastic maths.

Nuts to D&D. I like Frost too much to switch, and I doubt anyone is going to yell at me for not using D&D, considering that my HB pulling has been more than adequate thus far.

I'll still have the T10 bonus since they'll more than likely be the best gear upgrades for me (and the 4pc bonus seems pretty darn good), but that doesn't mean I have to use it. :P

Thanks again!

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Originally Posted by Haberdashery

I'll still have the T10 bonus since they'll more than likely be the best gear upgrades for me (and the 4pc bonus seems pretty darn good), but that doesn't mean I have to use it. :P

Thanks again!

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T10 isn't the best gear (for most situations, hardmode content could be a diffirent story) at any level currently. Check the EJ tanking thread for the math. It's estimated at something like 72 stam and 2-3k armor (gained by wearing non-set) vs. 4% (pre-diminishing returns) avoidance and the set bonues (ignoring non-survival stats since both sets easily hit and expertise soft-cap).

I think you'd be hard pressed to consider even the 4p bonus so good it handily out-weighted that much stam and armor.

That isn't to say "avoid t10," because i'm sure at some point i'll have the set, but it certainly isn't a first-buy with frost badges. I would at the very least pick up the gloves, cape, and probably the chest offset bits to maximize your EH. Also, don't forget the crafted legs (which look to be BiS at the moment) and boots which aren't too shabby either.

Why does Unbreakable Armor increase gear/stat armor and not trinket armor?

Unbreakable Armor increases *all* armor. It scales your personal total (i.e. not Devo Aura or Stoneskin as they're applied after the buff, unless I'm mistaken) but it includes trinket/neck/ring armor.

Frost Presence and the meta bonus do not scale those "bonus" armor contributions to help us not scale outrageously.

Hmm.

My base armor (after Horn of Winter) is 26033. I was specifically testing with the Furnace Stone trinket (+5152 armor on use). I'd pop Furnace Stone first and then immediately after UA.

(26033 + 5152) + 25% (7796) = 38981 (but the actual result was 37693 (which is (base + 25%) + 5152))

[EDIT: It occurs to me maybe we're thinking of two different things. Are you referring to on equip armor Satorri?]

This is an awesome guide, and it will help me to better understand the DK tanks that I raid-lead.

I noticed an error that exists in a few locations throughout, and I don't see anyone else mention it. (Although I only browsed the 5 pages of replies... I don't have all day here.)

You mention Improved Gift of the Wild as a 2% stat modified similar to Blessing of Kings. This is incorrect.

Improved Mark of the Wild increases the effect of Gift/Mark and that's the only thing that applies along with the buff. The talent in the resto tree also adds 2% total attributes to the druid who specs 2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild, but that effect only applies to that particular druid and not the recipient of the buff! It's likely designed to be motivation for every druid (especially ferals) to take the buff increase talent, since many people have an annoying tendency to completely ignore utility and only pick talents that buff themselves personally.

(see: Improved Mark of the Wild - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft )
2/2 Improved Mark of the Wild:
Increases the effects of your Mark of the Wild and Gift of the Wild spells by 40%, and increases all of your total attributes by 2%.

The "your" means the druid who took the talent, not the recipient of the improved gift/mark.
You've got calculations showing a 1.02 multiplier on stats such as stamina as a result of this buff and you've also mentioned in a few other places that Imp Gift is a percent modifier.

(removed again)

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Originally Posted by KnThrak

It seems to be rolling, not stacking, from what I see ingame. Or is that just me? :S

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You're correct in how it works, this was already discussed on page 3.

I guess I am a blood tank and having difficulties with frost. All of which I am sure are due to my lack of understanding with how it works exactly. Ive read this post and the EJ post and for the life of me I still miss it.

Oh I understand the concepts and things but I can't seem to hold agro with frost d/w or 2hd for the life of me like I do with blood. Perhaps I need a hand holding or something.

Either way thanks Satorri for the work it's nice someone has taken the time to display all the different spec's and the information about them as detailed as you have.

Well pruke, that is one good thing about the dk. You like blood? Then you tank as blood! All there is to it! The specs are all very well done at the moment, and there's even a discrepancy about the best raid spec. Good stuff overall!

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Originally Posted by Wars

Well pruke, that is one good thing about the dk. You like blood? Then you tank as blood! All there is to it! The specs are all very well done at the moment, and there's even a discrepancy about the best raid spec. Good stuff overall!

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And by discrepancy, he means they're all good except Unholy in ICC right now. Which is lame. Because Unholy rocks with awesome viking power.

I had no big problems tanking ICC10 as Unholy. Bone Shield being used up so fast hurts, but -6% magic damage sure rocks on Deathwhisper, as does AMZ.

Sure, Marrowgar and Saurfang are melee fights, but we only have access to 4 of the bosses so far. The rest sounds a lot more spelldamage based than these we have now.

I had aggro troubles though, until the 251 2Her from Marrowgar dropped. After that it was perfectly fine.

Unholy doesn't really suffer much from aggro issues anymore (link me your spec if that was an issue, i might be able to help), but i think it's going to be a very encounter-specific spec once content is really challenging us. I haven't found any ICC encounter to be much more difficult in any spec, but unholy did come out on the low end since there isn't much spell damage outside of deathwhisper (and our interrupters are usually on the ball, so even there I don't take a lot of spell damage with baseline ams).

On Marrowgar I felt like blood was a top contender, along side frost, and the same with Overlord and airship. Deathwhisper had a lot more to do with just add-control rather than survival, so i actually liked 2h frost varieties there (if you'd like a spec or details on that, i'll post them).