dk frost tank - blood or the north or not?

[solid77]

my current build is

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=111413040503

i'm having trouble deciding between blood of north or more mitigation like acclimation. I'm also thinking of removing frost strike since rune strike is way better and dumps RP just fine when tanking.

blood of the north offers a little more versatility and an extra obliterate when specced into epidemic. however, it also causes lots of gaps of downtime where you can't spam anything for a few seconds because of rune cd's. would not using blood of the north and using blood strike x2 instead of obliterate, yield more DPS/TPS?

So my rotation would be:
1. IT, PS, BS, BS, OB
2. OB, OB, OB

Without Blood of the north:
1. IT, PS, BS, BS, OB
2. OB, BS, BS, OB

[Satorri]

I like Blood of the North not just for the Death Runes, it's also great for the Blood Strike buff, since you will frequently use Blood Runes for something other than Pestilence. Blood Boil is quite weak if you'r frost spec and aren't tanking more than 5 things.

Also, can someone explain to me this universal obsession with Obliterate?

Even single target my Howling Blast tends to more consistantly do more damage. If you have Rime (can't figure why you wouldn't except MAYBE for your tanking spec) then you have frequent opportunities to Howling Blast then immediately Oblit/DS. And if you're hitting two or more targets Oblit can never touch Howling Blast damage. On top of that, even with a 2-hander I have a 55-60% functional crit rate with HB in leveling greens. For a tank, Howling Blast cannot be dodge/parried/blocked, Oblit can. That's further liability beyond just hit chance.

[Urrick]

Been playing around with Frost again (heh not even beta anymore and I keep respecing) and I do find myself Obliting on single mobs. Maybe I'll just do HB and see the results. Oblit just seems to do more to solo mobs, but I could be wrong. Will check this tonight.

[solid77]

yea i'm talking more about main tanking a boss... Rime rarely procs for me it's only a 15% chance on each icy touch, which is used every other rotation when you spec into epidemic.

of coarse there is an obsession with obliterate it does the most damage on a single target for frost spec tanking, period. howling blast has a 6second CD, so it's not like you can use it all the time.

also blizzard has stated in a blue post the "FUFUFU" blood of the north build is something they intended where you can spam obliterate. obliterate will do alot more dmg when you start getting your naxx gear. also naxx drops a sigil that does 460 extra dmg to your obliterates...

yes i do agree for multi mob tanking howling blast is the way to go, blood boil is def dissapointing damage wise, but it's better than nothing.

i just feel uneasy with the obliterate spam since it consumes 6 rumes in 3 moves, which in effect causes you to have 4 seconds of no special moves but frost strike (probably only have enough RP for 1, since rune strike gets spammed). i feel like that idle time would makes my TPS go down, compared to spamming the, FS,PS,BS,BS,OB rotation without speccing into epidemic. i guess it's really hard to say until i get full naxx gear and a good weapon.

i was only getting about 1200 TPS max in nexus on a single target which is very dissapointing to me, my warrior was getting around 3200+ TPS or so on bosses (although he's in SWP gear), however the hit/expertise/AP stats are somewhat similar for both toons, it seems like there's a huge discrepancy with the TPS... so i feel it must be my build/rotation.

[Armstrong]

i'm having trouble deciding between blood of north or more mitigation like acclimation.

As a rule of thumb talents that do nothing but increase magic damage mitigation should be skipped until you are faced with a specific encounter (typically a raid boss) where the talent would make a significant difference. No solo, 5-man or even 10-man content was ever designed with the assumption that the tank had increased magic damage mitigation and I don't expect that to be different in Wrath.

In other words, until Acclimation is given some secondary effect (Blizz has mentioned making it benefit Rune Strike in some way), pretty much any other talent would be a better choice overall. The same could be said about Frost Aura by the way.

I'm also thinking of removing frost strike since rune strike is way better and dumps RP just fine when tanking.

As much as I hate saying it, Rune Strike is overpowered in its current state and will probably get "balanced" at some point. When that happens Frost Strike may become valuable for tanking again. Keep in mind though that when specced Frost, Frost Strike should be providing better damage per RP than Death Coil for situations when someone else is tanking and you can't use Rune Strike.

[solid77]

yea i'm going to keep frost strike in my build regardless, it seems nice for encounters where you have an OT on a boss, but don't get hit too often (like gruuls, supremus, twins etc). seems like DK's can build up some pretty nice OT threat even if rune strike isn't popping and using frost strike instead.