Death Knight AOE Spec, MT Spec and Rotations

[Rämpäge]

Tyvm for the info, and I will give it a shot. Thinking on it, Master of ghouls was just something I tryed to see if the ghoul increased my threat or not os tyvm for your info.

[Iceis]

The spec im using comes from a froum dont remember from were but it a HP build i get 8% more HP and when the patch comes i get 2% more. The 8% more hp i about 2,5k hp for me.
Unbuffed I'm have 29k hp 25k armor 21% dodge and 20% parry
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

[Rämpäge]

Ok, so I have respecd and now I am loving tanking. I generate lots of threat and have lots of mitigation. :P The World of Warcraft Armory

[Rämpäge]

Ooops..... wronge button. Oh well, I was still woundering if someone would check my gemming out to see if it is good as is or if I am needing different gems somewhere. (I second guess myself all the time, thats why I ask)

[septic]

hello there

I've been using this spec for a long time and I find it the most balanced.

Unholy Tank with some extra physical def, debuff (icy talons) and single target dmg (icy talons, obliderate) from frost tree (5/23/43)

AOE Threat 9/10
Single Target Threat 7/10
Defensive Physical 9/10
Defensive Magical 10/10

basically this spec is perfect for heroics if you have nice avoidance gear. For AOE tanking i'm using smth like this.

(DnD) > IT > PS > Pest > (DnD) > BS > DC or Obli > DC or Obli > BB

I use DnD in the beginning or the middle of my rotation depending in the number of mobs and the classes in party. The thing you have to notice with this spec is to leave the 3 diseases on the mobs as long as possible before you Blood Boil them. During this time you can spam Talented Obliderate which will not consume your diseases. And basically that's the key when playing this spec. You will have 3 diseases ticking on targets and spam Obliderates.

Off course you should keep Horn up all the time and Boneshield whenever is ready. Keep in mind that Desecration and DnD should be cast whenever ready and don't let mobs without diseases!! In comparison to pure unholy tanking you have better physical defence since you also get Frigid Dreadplate and you debuff mobs with icy talons meaning that they will hit you less and you will hit them more. However you will loose some utility and aoe dmg but imo, extra damage mitigation from frost > extra aoe dps from unholy, when you already have more than enough aoe dps to keep aggro from a group of mobs. Remember you are not a damage dealer but a tank! And this is why this build is balanced, it will offer you most of Frost Tanking talennts, some decent single target dps and very good aoe dps from unholy tree .

Corpse Explode is just a filler talent and nice to have for some extra AOE but I would rather have a single target boost ability in its place.

Glyphs
DnD glyph helps with fear till pestilence hits mobs
Extra bone for bone armor is a must
Death Strike glyph (for crappy moments you need to help your healers)
Icebound fortitude glyph
Corpse Explosion glyph (yeh i know it's kinda crappy, need to find smth better)

With this spec you can tank Naxx Bosses easily. Atm with my gear I have 45% avoidance and during fights this will go to 60%-65% (not sure about the dodge rating of the badges trinket) unbuffed using trinkets and Blade Barrier.

After the patch I'm planning to change to frost for some better single target dmg and threat since i'm OT in naxx with Pally MT and too much AoE tanking is going wasted, sometimes I steal aggro from MT too if i'm too hasty with my diseases and DnD :/. Basically i'm changing to frost because I need the extra single target dps when I'm not tanking, for boss fights that don't need OT.

The thing that bothers me most is the lack of stamina. My current HP is 25k unbuffed as it's almost impossible to use any +sta gems since I need every defence I can get to stay uncritable. I'm looking forward to the next patch so I can craft the tanking axe (90def rating) and enchant it with additional 25 def skill. However I'm worried for fights where bosses/mobs can disarm you! If you get disarmed you will loose a large chunk of your defence and become crittable :/ Not sure if there are any types of raiding mobs that do disarm but it's still smth to be concerned about :> dropping to 500 def skill by disarm won't be fun


please comment

[Urrick]

So with the patch seemly coming on Tuesday I'm again toying with the idea of going blood to tank heroics/ot raids (low end stuff). I know that Frost will get a ton of people playing it now and I just like to be a little different.
Came up with this....

Toyed with the thought of Blood Gorged over Sudden Doom but think the treat from DCs will probably help a bit.

[Satorri]

Ha, yeah eww. I go back and forth on how I like Blood-gorged for tanking since your health can go up and down a bit and you can lose uptimes on the buff, but I never ever ever question the value of Sudden Doom. Using Morbidity with the other Blood damage buffs, DC's hit quite hard, and free crits aside from being good threat also make it easier to stack and hold Bloody Vengeance.

I wouldn't trade, just decide whether or not you want Blood-gorged. =)

[Urrick]

Wish they had an achievement for every 10 respecs!

[xKhellendrosx]

I have a feeling with the new changes that were put into the PTR that we might be looking at more than 1 week before this hits live again. I think I'll need to transfer my current geared DK to the PTR again and play around with some of these changes.

[Satorri]

I was hoping with the new patch notes, the way they read, that the patch would be released on Tue. Then they put another push on the PTR, and my hopes slipped a bit. I'd be surprised if we got it this week, but maybe it'll come a week from Tue.


I can hope anyway. For that matter I wish they'd just wrap this into 3.1, ha ha. Dual specs peese.

[Rämpäge]

Would someone plz put a link to the patch notes you are speaking of plz

[Rämpäge]

oh wow just found the patch notes and the tanking axe and sword are NOT going to be in the patch according to a blue blizzard post
damn...

[Satorri]

Yeah, not a big loss though, the new Rune should be way more than enough to get new 80's above the un-crittable cap. Remember: 25 defense skill, not rating, the rune is worth ~123 defense rating.

Now where is my epic level stam trinket??? I'd devour that thing whole.

[Madoxx]

single target rotation

for the best threat rotation assuming 5/5 botn

it - ps - bs - bs - obl - obl - obl

Using the 2 blood strikes back to back you will find is very important and make your life much easier

For those times you get missed,dodged,parried since those death runes will reset to blood runes when that happens. Unfortunately if your timers are a off by splitting up your blood strikes you may have a death rune + a frost rune get used. This will not allow you to correct for that miss with 2 quick blood strikes and instead will throw off your rotation.

with your frost spec as well you should macro runic strike to your it,ps,bs,obl (i personally keep it off howling blast because of changes in my aoe rotation)

your aoe roation is fine, i would hit hb before your first bb tho


spec changes to increase threat (assuming aoe threat isn't the problem because it shouldn't be with how hard hb hits)

-2/2 glacier rot

-take out 2/3 morbidity since your only benefitting from half the talent since death coil is no longer your rp dump of choice.

-get the 5th talent point in tundra stalker


Other than that it is great to see you've done some research

If your going into some raiding you can be a little creative with your spec by dropping imp icy talons and frost aura, in 25 mans i'm having a lot of success and some definate tps increases with The World of Warcraft Armory but this is 25 man raid buffed with an enhancement shaman in my raids.

Also if your looking to keep acclimation remember as long as you have 1 point in the ability it can proc of periodic damage so this is a great ability to have and move your points around in as blizzard changes the spec around in the future.

*added* macroing your deathchill to your first obliterate will make your opening rotation hit like a truck and will make the rest of your boss fight feel a lot easier since if will give your threat a nice boost right off the start

Just a side note on Macroing Merko is there any way i can show the cooldown of the skill im macroing in the macro ? ie im useing this


#showtooltip Oblitrate
/cast Rune Strike
/cast Heart Strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

but im not sure if it it working or not tried testing it on target dumy but rune strike doesnt apear to work on it

[Maci]

Greetings!
Today I tanked with my new spec. I planned to switch to it after the patch, but i thought i little testing wouldnt harm anything. So the spec: Blood Single Target
I tried it first in Hc Obsidian as MT. Originally I wanted to respec becouse of being MT all the time, and Unholy didnt seem to pull that hight single target tps and I dont rly benefit from some talents from the Frost tree like Frost Aura and Improved IT, becouse we have enha shammy and also dual wield hybrid DK at raids. In addition I couldnt wait to test Blood before patch came and start to master it.
One thing that I found very frustrating: In the beggining I didnt rly know when to use Mark of Blood and sometimes VB with Rune Tap, couse as MT the heals just kept coming and I didnt see a gap when i should have used the "Big Selfheal", unlike UA or Boneshield which I use everytime I can. So VB is like AMZ imo. For Mark and Rune Tap I decided to put them on CD asa it was up. Used Glyph of Rune Tap and my party members were happy to see my extra heals(every 30 sec!!!).
Other: I used glyph of Death Strike and so I used DS and not a single OB, thats why I talented Epidemic. I think It was worth it, couse i havent got an issue with TPS and with the glyph and my spec DS almost critted the same as an OB would, which is awesome imo.
My TPS was around 4-5k stable and 5-6k when i was lucky, and this numbers with my not-so-good gear(armory is down, so cant link, but its 80% HC, crafted epics and 5% raid epics) Worst detected TPS was 3-3.5k. When I saw these numbers I was very satisfied. I had a very good xp with this spec although i wasnt 100% sure when to use the spec's CDs as a first timer.
Next time I will save the combatlog for WWS to see he exact numbers, but it seems it IS a viable spec for MTs who have TPS issues. And after the patch its will have more advantages. Never thought that Blood could be any good, but I liked it and will remain blood i guess, or at least until I have MT duties.

Regards

[Shazlonium]

Hey guys!
Wishing you all a belated merry x-mas and a happy new year

I just dinged 80 last night...finally!
and im just wondering if my gear is good enough to take on any heroic dungeon or are there some that i cant yet...

This is my armory page, i dont know why its not showing Frost Presence, anyway, i got 22428 armor, 21473 hp, 531 Def, 16.22% Dodge, 17.21% Parry, 2223 ap....unbuffed.

Hope you guys reply soon!

Oh and Satorri...i respecced to FA and Acc, LOVIN IT!!! you're right, nearly all dungeons have a form of spell dmg being cast against me, so i really appreciate the advice

[dodeworst]

Hej,

I just respecced to this spec Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
but the question of me is.. how about the tanking.. i had the unholy tank spec before and it was like easy to gain agro couse of the aoe skills.. But what about my gear. use 2h to tank with or just my previous tanking gear with DW??

[Hirah]

I just edited this as I noticed the 14 pages of discussion here, so my questions may have been addressed. Sorry I'm new to this site and wasn't familiar with it's format. That being said, feel free to read it anyway, as it might be new.

I'm a frost spec DK, and I use an aoe rotation similar to the one you have, but I find that I have to wait about 4 seconds or so for my HB because I'm still waiting on runes to regen. I got to thinking about how you do this without any breaks in your rotation and realized you must use the talent that converts your runes to death runes, however when I clicked the calculator link it shows you didn't put any points into that talent.

Am I missing something vital? I would love to find a way to have a nice rotation like that without long pauses for either RP for FS, or my runes to regen.

My only other thing was, I personally would find the 1 point into hungering cold as opposed to 1 point in deathchill would be a much better tool for tanking. Being able to freeze and add Frost fever to everything within a small radius of you every minute at the cost of some RP, wouldn't that be better then 1 guaranteed crit every 2 mins? This is obviously worth discussion, and I could totally be wrong, what with the number of raid content creatures that would be immune to the hungering cold, but I was thinking a small amount of Crowd control and added disease applications to be much more useful then a little more dps.

[Merko]

I'm a frost spec DK, and I use an aoe rotation similar to the one you have, but I find that I have to wait about 4 seconds or so for my HB because I'm still waiting on runes to regen. I got to thinking about how you do this without any breaks in your rotation and realized you must use the talent that converts your runes to death runes, however when I clicked the calculator link it shows you didn't put any points into that talent.

Am I missing something vital? I would love to find a way to have a nice rotation like that without long pauses for either RP for FS, or my runes to regen.

My only other thing was, I personally would find the 1 point into hungering cold as opposed to 1 point in deathchill would be a much better tool for tanking. Being able to freeze and add Frost fever to everything within a small radius of you every minute at the cost of some RP, wouldn't that be better then 1 guaranteed crit every 2 mins? This is obviously worth discussion, and I could totally be wrong, what with the number of raid content creatures that would be immune to the hungering cold, but I was thinking a small amount of Crowd control and added disease applications to be much more useful then a little more dps.

I have recently changed my personal frost spec to look like
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
based on the fact our raid contains an enhancement shammy and druids. (frost aura + imp icytalons).

*I should note that with the new patch and people seeing 5ppm with a 5/5 KM build, I will be taking 1 point out of acclimation (making 1/3) to fill out 5/5 KM*

For AoE pulls i rock the DnD, IT, PS, Pest ..(4 seconds).. HB, BB rotation

*If Rime procs you use that HB right after your Pest*

If anybody pulls off you before you get to slam your HB let them eat the mob because they probably started aoeing before your first tick of DnD got in.

However yes... my new build does pick up BotN because with my current 25 setup the raid provides buffs that I do not pick up and the Death Runes really simplify and add threat to my rotation.

Deathchill... very interesting ability... however for 1 point it means every boss pull I will get a big crit with my first Obliterate, and lets face it the raid is happy if you tank well and they don't die... but i know the dps get very impatient waiting for tanks to build threat.

*Also with the Obl/SS Sigil and glyph of Obl (especially after 3.08) An Obliterate crit hits very very hard. *

Lets face it trash control is fun and nice (which is where Hungering Cold has benefits) but by the time you build up the 60 (soon to be 40 i believe) RP the mobs are almost already dead or are being hit by so much aoe that they won't be froze for very long. Especially with the abilities miniscule 10 yard range.

[Hirah]

ahh yeah, I had not thought about the huge RP requirement along with the Rune dumps I need to start doing. As of now I've not been in the habit of dumping off all my rune power.

I have a few changes I really need to get in the habit of doing for raids.. that much is for certain. Currently I've been spending a lot of time doing low lvl dungeon runs for friends and family alts.. and obviously that takes a much different build and play style.

Thanks for all the insight... I'll use that and I'm sure my guild will appreciate that.