Dual Wielding DKs: Demystifying the Myth.

[Ramalama]

Whoops! I just remembered that Patchwerk has parry-hasting disabled. So we won't have the option of actually counting the attack rate. The second part of my post still stands, showing the difference in number of parries per unit time and converting that to increased attack rate. Sorry for the confusion. I'll work on re-doing the analysis for a different fight as soon as I have the time.

[Ravencry]

Well, honestly Ive did both DW and Two hand tanking. I prefer Dual wield, the parry chance just flys up by 4% with Swordbreaker Rune by itself, not counting the weapons base stats, versus my 4% loss in parry and my 1% gain in dodge with my two hander, but right now Im using dual wield becuase of just my lack of 80 epic one handers.

[Krenian]

Hrm..if Patchwerk has his disabled...Tank Maexxna. She's a pretty much sit there and tank like a mofo and only has that one part where she webs you. SHe could give you a good indication.

[Ramalama]

Yep, Maexxna's a good candidate. The result will be dependent on boss attack speed, though, so I'll look at a few different fights and write it up again today or tomorrow. For now I took down the original post so I don't confuse or mislead anyone.

[Krenian]

Dunno, maybe Grobbulus swings faster than the Spider, but you have to deal with a lot of weird mechanics in that fight that could skew your data. There's no fight like Patchwerk that swings like that to test it.

[cheatz]

You know, I've been tanking as DW for a couple weeks, and I will post this weeks WWS online, so you guys can see, but I act as 1 of the two OT and we have a druid MT bosses.

As of right now, there are no bosses I tank that parry-gib me. I mean, if your a Die-hard MT tanking those bosses then I mean go for it, and maybe my WWS will help you out. But honestly, if anyone has a problem with you as a OT with parry-gibbing /slap them kuz they're just ignorant.

Ill list the bosses in naxx that I ACTUALLY tank:

Anub - Tank spider
Widow - Tank followers
Maxeena - DPS
Patchwerk - MT (no parries)
Grob - Tank slims
Gluth - Kite Zombies
Thadius - Tank add or DPS
Instructor R. - N/A
Gothic - Tank adds, and him (but he doesn't melee)
4 Horse - Tank a horse man! (Parry-gib potential! lolz)
Noth - Tank Skeles
Hegan - Dance dance!
Lothab - pew pew
Sath - Deeeeps
KT - Tank anub-add (you could /stop attack to prevent parries if you were really worried about it..but im pretty sure they have a fixed attack speed)

Malygos - No Parry-gib
Sarth - No parry-gib
Arcavon - Lol?


SO! to conclude the only boss you can actually fk yourself over with now, is 4 horse, OR gluth! as a OT. So I would suggest ALL DK to DW because of the better stats you get on 2 1hders. I also play an Orc, and Im hoping to get my 2nd last laugh, and the expertise from that racial should be good. anyway I'll post more results when I get the WWS reports posted.

OH! also I use the dodge trinket from badges and the parry trinket from Sath to gain more Runestrike chances, and to up my mitigation and threat, again im not @ my "ideal" tanking set but i'll be getting there soon.

[A Man In Black]

Yep, Maexxna's a good candidate. The result will be dependent on boss attack speed, though, so I'll look at a few different fights and write it up again today or tomorrow. For now I took down the original post so I don't confuse or mislead anyone.

Maexxna doesn't parryhaste either.

[Krenian]

Necro'ing this thread for people to actually get an idea of dual wielding.

THOUGHTS AND IDEAS:

Right now, with the gearset I have, I'm sitting with nearly 40 Expertise and trying out a Blood spec'ed build. And I have to say..I'm not liking the TPS dual wielding is putting out.

Whether perhaps Blood is more for a two hander because of it's physicality, or I'm not doing something right, Blood seems to be the tree that should do more damage.

We'll have to look and analyze this further so we can bury this possible spec.

[Satorri]

Ok, Tony, I have 3 major points that I think will be a very big help to your threat:

1.) Bladed Armor. For shame not having it. =P With your gear that will add nearly 50% to your ap (about 800 more AP)!!! Find a way and make it happen. =P

2.) DRM. Normally, I'd eschew death rune talents as matters of convenience and versatility, but with Blood there is a central theme that is very important to play up. I'll explain more with my following point(s).

3.) Subversion and Bloody Vengeance!! You may think this is a ho-hum deal for a tank, but in fact this is a mechanic you want to use heavily. Let me explain my concept on Blood and threat/dmg.

Blood spec's mechanic hinges around crits, but as tanks we don't sport a lot of crit. The way we work around this is through combining the various +crit talents with Dark Conviction and Bloody Vengeance. Particularly, one major pattern for this is combining Subversion with Bloody Strikes, DRM, Sudden Doom, and Abom's Might, The way it works, you place your diseases, and start converting FU pairs. You want your focus to be HS spam. The more HS you use the more Sudden Doom guaranteed DC crits you get, as well as more shots for crits (as Subversion buffs HS/OB to the highest crit possibility even without crit on your gear). They will keep Bloody Vengeance stacked far more easily than you might think for a solid baseline damage buff.

If you want to pick this stuff up, I'd recommend dropping from the following talents: MoM and Scent of Blood are easy choices for 6 pts. Bloody Vengeance will get you way more mileage on threat than MoM will anyway, remember you aren't banking on crits being a big portion of your damage, merely crit count to keep your damage buffs up. Scent of Blood is nice, albeit limited. If you trade into HS spam more you'll find you rack up a lot more RP just for using lots of 1 rune abilities (half the rune cost for 2/3rds the RP). From there it's more style choices. The talents I'd take on the fence would be Blood-gorged, Spell Deflection, Hysteria, Bloodworms, and Butchery. Blood-gorged is a nice talent and one I'd hold on to when you can provided your healers usually keep your health in the high margin (and you have a strong health pool that should make that easier) as well as the expertise for improving hit %s with dual wielding and HS spam. Spell Deflection is nice, though it's one I'll trade for the sake of better threat as it is only a partial damage reduction and not a full time deal, the dragon fights (Maly, Sarth, Sapph) would be obvious exceptions where that talent is significantly nicer. Also we're balancing the trade-off of survival for threat. Bloodworms are a lot rockier. They give you a decent amount of healing, to be sure, but they're squishy as can be and probably low on the value for 3 points. This may change in 3.1 but I'm still reluctant to use them while tanking since the health return doesn't scale well with tank health. Hysteria seems like it should be a nice tank threat buff, or in general a hot raid damage buff, but it can be a bit limited, more than you may like. I wouldn't say it's useless, far from, but I tend to put the points elsewhere in favor of buffing all-the-time threat for blood. Butchery is another nice RP thing to have that steady income, but I'd also see it as disposable. Really what you're interested in is enough RP to drop RS on CD with Blood. DC is your sole RP burn and it's damage is a little disappointing even with Morbidity (though Sudden Death is still gold as a free guaranteed crit that will stack Bloody Vengeance). With DRM and HS spam you'll find you won't want for RP when you need it. Small side note though, I notice on your WWS you didn't pop Rune Tap at all. Hit that! Find ways to use it whenever it fits. It's weaker for aoe threat since healing threat is divided, but on single targets that's a major hit, the Frost Presence threat bonus actually more than counters the 50/50 heal threat cut, so on a single target with your health (~38k raid buffed?) a 6-7k heal is worth more than much threat for 1 rune. Not to be underestimated. =)

Just throwing some points together (though I'm more excited for 3.1 Blood) here's something I put together to play on what I was talking about: Blood Test.

I played on your DW setup, and I opted in Epidemic rather than Spell Deflection to get more room for HS spam between disease reapplication. I think you could easily trade Annihilation (since you shouldn't be relying on OB vs DS damage anyway as it really is just a means to get more HS's in rotation). Depending on your team you may actually want to move points from WotN into Spell Deflection. WotN is nice for Blood with the low health damage save, but that may work out to be less common an occurance than taking spell damage, that's a personal call and may be a whole new game when Ulduar comes around, but then all the talents jump at the same time. Those are 6 pts that could bounce between those 3 talents or a bunch of other stuff. And remember don't be shy with Rune Tap and Mark of Blood. Use them at the right time and you can get big value, use them at the wrong time and you may still get a partial value. So long as you're really playing up DRM and using lots of single rune rotations they won't be detriment.

Let me know if any of that helps.

[Krenian]

Thanks Sat, I wanted to ping it off of you considering you're the ying to my yang when it comes to these forums and DKs hehe

I'll test out the setup when I get more gold. My DK's pretty flat broke, and it's ridiculous how broke he is. I may have to step up and be a tank for a little while until situations in my guild resolve themselves so I'm looking towards a solid dual wielding build that could work. I'll try it out on Sunday if I'm required to tank and let you know the results.

[Satorri]

Cool =)

[visualdeity]

Satorri, what's your opinion of a spec like this for DW blood?

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Blood is my first love, and I'm interested in trying it, but am unsure of what might be a good spec. I'm thinking my rotation would basically be diseases/DS/HSx2 on pass 1, and HSx6 on pass 2 (with DC spam as needed). Seem feasible?

[Satorri]

Well, you may want to look at things more in terms of 3.1 at this point, but that may be in your favor. MMO-Champ has a great calculator with glyph selection, you can find that here:
MMO-Champion Talent Calculator

Otherwise your spec is pretty standard Blood but with the necessary 2h Spec to NoCS swap. It's a fine idea. Personally, I'm addicted to fully talented Rune Tap, 20% of your health every 30 secs is just silly nice.

Tony, I created a new thread to look at some of the dynamics of hit rating and auto-attack damage for tanks considering for dual wielding and 2handers. It may be valuable for you in measuring out some comparisons, maybe it'll spark some ideas.

[Krenian]

I'll take a look at it after my back isn't disturbed by cat claws digging into it. ...damn cat.

[Northsoul]

Hi all, I decided ot give DW tanking a try now that I have a decent set for it to even have any chance of working. I'd like some spec imput if you all don't mind. Thanks in advance

Possible Unholy build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Possible Frost build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

[horarz]

Devesh/thorium brotherhood/horde
Duel speced tank 2hander and duel wield. Nice gear and nice weps both. Threat is definitely better in my DW tree along with my avoidance. Like both and use them dependent on the boss. Any ideas where I can improve and trinks always messing me up so best combo for my DW tree pls thx J

[Bakadno]

I have long argued for DW tanking, and play a dw DK.

2h DKs have a much larger stam build, and as all tanks, around 20% dodge/parry rating value (including the usually 5% dodge/parry talents) diminishing Returns starts to penalize you a lot. As seen with bladeward, tanks with over 20% parry rating before proc, tend not to feel it.

For blood tanking DW is bout as useful as a square wheel, but for frost and unholy it boast 2 problems. More mob/boss parries, higher hard hit cap, reducing melee threat. These mean you need to build stats away from Stam, which is what many tanks dislike.

A dw DK should focus getting his 20% dodge/parry before his stam. Otherwise he will get raped when he gets parried.

A dw DK should also focus on items with expertise and hit rating, being dw you will be aiming for a hit rating that naturally caps your spells, so use the Virulence 3 points in something more effective, where as this talent is very useful got 2h tanks.

A good tank dk, using dw mechanics needs about 300+ hit rating, 20+% both evasion stats and as much expertise up to a 8% cap as possible.

Important note, DW dk tanks require baseline health only, The following is a scale from 10man content, naxx uld, totc(normal only) from the comparison a warrior needs to DK health wise. You will notice as content increases so does the scale difference, DK listed is DW only. 2h has a significant less evasion, and needs the hp to compensate.

Naxx
Warrior 28k advisable 26k doable
DK 26k advisable 24k doable

Uld normal modes
Warrior 33k advisable 31k doable
DK 31k advisable 29k doable

Uld Hard modes
Warriors 38k advisable 35k doable
DK 34k advisable 31k doable

Totc normal
warriors 37k advisable 33k doable
DK 34k advisable 31k doable

The reason for the scaling, is due t good weapon choice a DK can take home upto 20% more dodge/parry ratings, although DR will eat this up, a DK can easily make 45% evasion after DR in naxx 10/25 gear, same as the agility base on a druid can give up to 15% more dodge before DR stars to reduce the effectiveness of dodge from agility.

Remember all hits that do physical regardless of melee or range can be avoided. This includes hit from skills like XT002 Deconstructors' Tympanic Tantrum. This attack hits 8 times for 10% damage in 8 seconds (once a second)

On average my DK dodge/parries 2-4 of those hits.
My warrior pulls of an equal evasion, but often only blocks, meaning he still takes a fair bit of damage. And as with patchy (Hateful Strike), Tympanic seems un-effected by mitigation. (A confirmation of this would be nice).

[Bakadno]

Well, honestly Ive did both DW and Two hand tanking. I prefer Dual wield, the parry chance just flys up by 4% with Swordbreaker Rune by itself, not counting the weapons base stats, versus my 4% loss in parry and my 1% gain in dodge with my two hander, but right now Im using dual wield becuase of just my lack of 80 epic one handers.

Not mentioned in my other post, the 4% from swordbreaking is perfect, as it doesn't effect Diminishing Returns from parry rating.

Giving DKs a 24%base parry rating before noticeable DR.

[Krenian]

This is a pretty old and outdated thread folks. DW is alive and well as a tanking mechanism thanks to Rune Strike being added to ToT. So this thread's kinda of a non issue.

[Satorri]

and as all tanks, around 20% dodge/parry rating value (including the usually 5% dodge/parry talents) diminishing Returns starts to penalize you a lot.

I'd love to stop hearing this largely misunderstood comment being thrown around.


There is no magical point at which avoidance ratings start being horrible. They diminish at higher levels to give fairly consistent survival values as you keep adding rating, but even that isn't entirely the case. Much more savvy math/sim people than me have suggested it still has a slightly uphill trend meaning each additional bit of rating is a bit better than the last.