Frost Dk - Dual weild tank spec?

[Lapaladin]

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator



I was playing around with the talent calculator for a tank spec and i got this?


Good/Bad? Thoughts or comments?

[Krenian]

Most tank specs wil go 5/5/5 no matter what. You have the jist of the frost stuff however you're focusing far too much in Blood and are forgetting Unholy. Look up the Dual Wield Demystified thread I have in the Theories and Articles as it pertains to all of the information gathered about dual wielding.

[Lapaladin]

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

So this perhaps?

BTW what im aiming for is the extra strength and stam from the veteran talent plus the expertise

[lyd]

i see this being my final spec:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/deathknight/talents.html?tal=03500000000000000000000000032504350305301103010051 01351035000000000000000000000000000

5/5 killing machine + DW is amazing. 50% chance on auto-attack crits to gurantee your next howling blast, frost strike, or icy touch to be a critical strike. i pretty much use this exclusively for Howling blast. seeing your primary AE crit every single target it hits is pretty substantial.

[Lapaladin]

I just think veteran of the third war is a bad ass talent worth getting for frost tanking

Am I putting too much value on it?

[Satorri]

It's great, no doubt. Best thing since sliced bread? Maybe not, but it certainly is tempting for a Frost Knight.

[skottjones]

I think you may want to look at this build, I went through and think this would do for damage as well as defense
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

tell me what you think about it

[Satorri]

Hmmm, first thing that jumps up, you're missing a major value as a tank in not having at least Acclimation, and/or Frost Aura.

I recognize that a lot of Frost DK's take Morbidity to rely more on DnD for aoe threat, but I think it is a losing investment. I say that because 1.) you're losing half of the buff's itemization on Death Coil improvements (which you shouldn't be relying on for threat at all, only when you NEED a ranged shot) and 2.) Frost can and should rely on Howling Blast first and foremost for AoE threat. Budgeting for DnD means you're not planning on using one of your essential skills, and your buffing something else at its expense.

Subversion is a nice buff, though honestly it's buffing a smaller part of your threat reliance. It's not bad, but there are almost certainly more bang for your buck from other talents. One such, specifically, is Bladed Armor. As a tank Bladed Armor REALLY adds up for AP, and scales heavily with your gear (and is buffed by both Toughness and Frost Presence).

Always finish Black Ice before Glaciar Rot, you get 6% damage increase per point as opposed to 5% with Glaciar Rot.

If I were to change it to suit my own preferences, assuming you want to make the most of Killing Machine (which, beware, will not proc very often, sadly), I'd drop Hungering Cold, Subversion, and Morbidity and take Bladed Armor and put some points into Dark Conviction. That being said, I think you're gimping your tanking ability to support a costly investment. Specifically, I'd sooner drop Killing Machine, don't touch Dark Conviction, and make a point to fill Black Ice, Glaciar Rot, and Tundra Stalker, and get Chill of the Grave and Acclimation and/or Frost Aura.

A spec like this would be more stable foundation threat, and a bit less spikey or reliant on lucky melee crits. I am re-writing a lot of your choices though, I'd sooner you pick your talents smartly to suit your needs than just follow my choices blindly. =)

[nessin]

Chill of the Grave stands to be a useless talent for tanking with the patch. Especially for Dual Wielding tanks since you don't rely on Frost Strike quite as much.

As for Acclimation, you can count the number of bosses it'd be even remotely useful for on one hand, better to spend the talent points on a ability which will help you all the time rather than only a very few select times.

Also, Annihilation? Why in the world do Frost tanks take this talent? Assuming you're going deep enough in Blood for Bladed Armor, then put the points in Dark Conviction. You shouldn't need to turn Frost/Unholy runes into Death Runes, and the critical strike bonus on Annihilation won't apply to Icy Touch and Howling Blast where it does on Dark Conviction, in addition to applying to melee specials.

And no Lichborne? I'd argue its far more useful than the point you put into Frost Aura.

Also, Killing Machine is pretty critical for any Death Knight Dual Wield build, tank or otherwise. My 2-handed tank gear puts me at 8% crit rate which can easily be boosted to at least 10-15% after talents and with two weapons. That means you should get a free critical strike at least once every 10 seconds or so, even with a low hit rate, a major boost to your TPS (at least 150 TPS on the low end).

[Satorri]

MASSIVE disagree on Chill of the Grave. Next patch you can spam HB, which means with Chill of the Grave every time you do you'll get 20 RP, and IT without glyph will be worth 15 (with will be 25). You use FS as much as you can, regardless of weapon damage, to convert your RP into threat. RS will chew some but not all of that RP, and FS still does about 2/3rds of the damage of a 2-hander if you're dual wielding with an equivalent iLvl slow one hander. More RP means more threat, so it's definitely not useless.

Acclimation is useful with only one stack which you will get from periodic spell damage, and for the fights where you can keep 2 or more it's a serious life saving value. As with everything it is still a personal choice of whether or not you take it, you can tank fine without it.

Annihilation let's you Oblit (won't touch it otherwise as Frost tank), and it buffs your BS/PS/RS/OB/FS threat slightly. In the next patch I'd quickly leave this off since I'll never use Oblit, and my threat will come even more from IT/HB.

Lichborne is another one in the balance of personal choice. 15 sec of protection every 3 min is a real oh sh*t, not a universal tanking buff. If you use it or have need to it's worth the point, otherwise you may get more out of one more point in Frost Aura, Acclimation, or any number of other things.

As for Killing Machine, I've played it out tanking and it's way too expensive for 2-handers since in a run you'll have suprisingly few weapon swings for it to proc off of.

That being said, let's take a quick napkin math stab at dual wielding (which I generally accept as the only tank to make it worth while though I've never run these figures).

Optimal for getting KM procs and maintaining other threat moves for damage, I always favor a slow main hand an a fast offhand. Let's say that gives us a 2.5 main and 1.5 off hand for easy math. That will mean you will get 64 weapon swings. Let's say you've got enough expertise to remove dodges from the equation, and for the moment to be generous we'll remove parries (though this could be as much as 8-10% more misses). I'll use my hit buffs which total ~8% in tanking gear with my draen talent, so we'll round off to only a 20% miss chance on the boss (couple less on other stuff, not a big discrepancy). So from those 64 swings we have 51 that hit. We'll give the tank a generous crit chance of 15% (maybe he has great gear, maybe he has a feral druid/fury warrior). That means maybe 7 of those swings crit. 50% of those can proc the KM effect if you spend all 5 talent points, so we'll be even more generous and round up. 4 procs per minute of continuous swings would be the most you could hope for, which would be one proc every 15 sec if you were also lucky enough that you didn't crit twice in close succession (thereby wasting the buff).

This is a very friendly set of numbers for the computation. If you don't stack plenty of expertise parries will be at bare minimum another 5% missed swings. If you're using 2 tanking weapons you'll have a lower crit rate than many 2-handers because they have no crit rating or agility, you'll further not have any agility that could've given you crit because you were stacking expertise in those slots instead. So you gain crit chance at the expense of hit, or vice versa, either way I'm not sure one or the other would be a huge win for proc rate.

It could be worthwhile, but it is a tricky investment, and I wouldn't bother if you don't dual wield. I wouldn't call it critical if you do, though it would indeed be a threat increase.

[nessin]

MASSIVE disagree on Chill of the Grave. Next patch you can spam HB, which means with Chill of the Grave every time you do you'll get 20 RP, and IT without glyph will be worth 15 (with will be 25). You use FS as much as you can, regardless of weapon damage, to convert your RP into threat. RS will chew some but not all of that RP, and FS still does about 2/3rds of the damage of a 2-hander if you're dual wielding with an equivalent iLvl slow one hander. More RP means more threat, so it's definitely not useless.

I've played with all three specs for tanking, and I've never had any major issue generating a mostly full bar of Runic Power to use when I've got the time for more than one Runic Dump skill. I imagine I won't even look at my Runic bar after the patch as I can reasonably assume its maxed out based on my current experience.

Edit:
I should point out that my statement is on the assumption that you're not spamming Rune Strike. If you are, and you still have Runic Power even with Chill of the Grave, then keep doing it. But even my attempts with macro'd Runic Strike and Chill of the Grave, I could never keep Runic Power to save my life and it only cost me a few Runic Strikes over the boss fights I actively tried it on (which, granted, was only a few).

Acclimation is useful with only one stack which you will get from periodic spell damage, and for the fights where you can keep 2 or more it's a serious life saving value. As with everything it is still a personal choice of whether or not you take it, you can tank fine without it.

The problem with Acclimation is that its so deep in the tree that you can't take it in place of spending the points in a talent you can afford to swap out of. Burning the points that deep in the tree for it means you're stuck losing heavily elsewhere.

Annihilation let's you Oblit (won't touch it otherwise as Frost tank), and it buffs your BS/PS/RS/OB/FS threat slightly. In the next patch I'd quickly leave this off since I'll never use Oblit, and my threat will come even more from IT/HB.

At what cost? If you can afford to ditch those three points in Frost, put them in Dark Conviction in Blood for 3% boost to everything. If you can't, wouldn't those be better served in another talent early on in the Frost Tree? Maybe you're missing Icy Talons, or Improved Icy Talons. Or maybe you're missing the extra runic power talent (3rd Frost Strike + More Rune Strikes for the win), so on and so forth...

Lichborne is another one in the balance of personal choice. 15 sec of protection every 3 min is a real oh sh*t, not a universal tanking buff. If you use it or have need to it's worth the point, otherwise you may get more out of one more point in Frost Aura, Acclimation, or any number of other things.

True, but at the moment Frost Aura is only truely useful for two fights in the game, Sapphiron and Sartharion with 3 Drakes. Everywhere else its only marginally useful at best, and on 25-man Instructor it actually hurts you. Lichborne on the other hand can be a the difference between a wipe or success any time something goes wrong or you're working on a boss you haven't got on farm. Not to mention that Lichborne is the only way a tank can keep up 60+ seconds of some sort of tank related cooldown without being able to keep Bone Shield up for a long duration.

Edit:
Cut out the section on Killing Machine since the more I thought about the more I'd actually like to test it before I followed through with my comments. Although it is important to note that with KM going PPM, its a huge buff to 2-handed tanks, and well worth it to DW tanks as well, its only a question of whether it is worth it until the patch comes out.

[Satorri]

Well, your points are all good, except Frost Aura is worth a lot more than 2 fights, so long as you don't have a druid. Without a druid it gives your raid 80 resistance to everything which will do some to mute raid damage taken all over the place. It goes in the pool with stuff that benefits the whole group so it needs that additional consideration beyond self-only considerations. But as many have pointed out, one druid in your raid means you have only 5 less resistance and you can put those points elsewhere.

All in balance.

[demifiend]

This is what I use as dual wield frost:

The World of Warcraft Armory

[Satorri]

Nice, points for a fairly unique tanking spec. I can see the F/U dual wield dps spec influence. Have you run this spec all along, or have you adopted it more recently?

[demifiend]

Have you run this spec all along, or have you adopted it more recently?

Its new, been running it for a week or so now. You see I ran into threat generation problems when comparing myself to a well equipped bear in guild. This has helped a lot. The rotation is still screwy until HB cooldown removed.

Here's a wall o' text explaining my reasoning from my guild forums:

general notes and a warning

First off a warning; it is easier to 2h tank. period. You need more specific gear, and you need to utilize a completely dif type of spec to dual wield. I wouldn't even begin to consider it until you have over 300 hit MINIMUM, and I still consider my expertise sub par. You don't even mildly need hit like that for 2h realistically, though you would want 27 expertise to get by boss mob dodges.

However as benefits, you gain tank itemized 1 handers, can take advantage of proc based melee mechanics far more frequently than a 2h ever could, and (if my estimates are correct) should be as or more capable for threat gen in 3.0.8 than 2h. You also won't be pigeonholed into the gargoyle runeforge in 3.0.8 to address the fact you're using a dpser weapon. 2x swordbreakings actually gives more parry anyhow (bout 1% more than the new forge would from def conversion) which procs more rune strikes, which is good for dual wield.

• currently @334 hit (~83% to hit, damned offhand), important in tps. soft cap for dual wield dk with 3/3 in nerves of cold steel is 6% for special attacks. However, much dmg, and hence threat comes from white hits turning into procs of blood caked blade / necrosis / killing machine. So additional hit is highly attractive

• currently @229 expertise (27 rating) important to tps and survivability. expertise rating of 27 ish required to eliminate lvl 83 boss dodges, and lowers chance to parry in real world tests to about 5-7% for me. more expertise >> less mob avoided damage + less chance of parry hasting a mob. This is an effect where a mobs swing timer is reduced when they parry an attack you make. If this occurs you may take mob white hits in quicker succession briefly. This will produce a spike in dmg, which may hurt you badly or kill you. We must seek to minimize this effect. Dual wielders are naturally more susceptible to it due to more frequent attacks per unit time than their 2h brethren.

• currently @~56% avoidance between dodge / parry - note you should NEVER gem for parry (steep DR), you must be >=540 def at all times to eliminate mob crit chance. Higher the better for avoidance between dodge and parry obviously. More parry == more rune strikes (v important for dual wield due to frequency can use).

• I cannot stress enough how important hit and expertise are when dual wielding. In fact I went to the hassle of redoing my professions to blacksmithing (for 2 extra slots, in bracer and gloves) / jewelcrafting (for jewler only gems) to get extra rating in these stats.

• weapon choice is V important. you want a slow main hand, for strike damage primarily. Dual wielding broken promise is ideal as slow/slow reduces parry chances a mob has per unit time, but if you can get enough expertise and hit a fast offhand like last laugh or that sword off the split add fight in naxx (name eludes me) is great as you're gonna get more proc based dmg (read tps).

talents
The World of Warcraft Armory

Frost
Many key talents here for DW...

• 5/5 toughness - required

• 2/2 glacier rot - has synergy with key attacks in rotation, as well as our RP dump

• 5/5 black ice - much of our dmg is dealt as frost. get it, love it.

• 3/3 nerves of cold steel - hit more often (we need a lot of hit DW, ask a rogue), hit harder. white hits are a significant portion of our dps (read TPS).

• 5/5 icy talons + improved icy talons - provides haste when shammy totem not available. Provides 20% haste vs untalented shammy one of 16%. Additionally provides 5% haste at all times to the specced DK. This means you attack faster, which means you have more chances to proc blood caked blade, and you are doing more dmg with necrosis*

• lichborne - some dont take this, I think they're crazy. its a fear/sleep/charm break that gives you 25% avoidance for 15s on a 3min timer. for an avoidance tank that uses a bunch of CD abilities to increase survivability, this is right up our alley.

• no annhilation - i had used this in the past but quite frankly the dmg on obliterate will not be as high as that from howling blast for the same rune cost. The crit from this is nice but I for one don't have the points, plus we falsely raise our crit for several abils with killing machine.**

• 5/5 killing machine - tanks typically have a low crit rate as opposed to dpsers. however, even with base crit + typical crit buffs from raid members this procs a LOT. I'd say 4-10 ppm with my current weapon setup. This artificially raises crit chance on our runic power dump (frost strike), icy touch and on our main 'strike' howling blast. This will raise our dps significantly, and thus our tps. In recent testing I've seen 30-40% crit rates on howling blast / frost strike.***

• 2/2 chill of the grave - another one people sometimes skip, foolishly. Extra runic power >> more frequent RP dumps in the form of frost strike, which has synergy with killing machine.

• 3/3 rime - raised crit rate on icy touch + chance to make HB cost no runes. extra HBs, particularly in 3.0.8, has synergy with killing machine as well as being a free attack in cycle on 15% of your ITs.

• unbreakable armor - im not going to even explain why you'd want something that raises your parry, dps(read TPS) and dmg mitigation for 20s out of every minute

• howling blast - replaces obliterate in attack chain (fully in 3.0.8 due to removal of current 6s CD). This is what we want to use as howling blast is NOT WEAPON DAMAGE BASED. The damage will be significantly higher than what you see with obliterate, particularly if frost fever active on mob. also, its an aoe, obl isn't. You'll use this in replacement of D&D more often than not.

• no deathchill - while good for snap threat, your spending a talent point for a SINGLE crit every 2 minutes. no thank you.

• no blood of the north - no room

• 3/3 guile of gorefiend - icebound fortitude duration up (dmg mitigation), crit strike bonus from key abils in rotation upped. Note that DK spell crit dmg is 200% not 150% base, so extra 45% on this allows for MASSIVE howling blast crits.

• no tundra stalker - obtain more dps/tps from other trees. DO NOT skip this if you have <27 expertise before talents.

• no hungering cold - too situational, not enough points, in raid situations 99% of time the freeze effect will be broken in under a second by raid member AOE

Unholy
a good chunk of dmg comes from going into unholy a ways... lets examine:

• 5/5 anticipation - required.

• no morbidity - why buff death coil when our RP dump is frost strike? we only use death coil when it is absolutely necessary to dmg at range with RP. Not having reduced cooldown in D&D can be a pain, but remember we have howling blast - which is a cheaper and more dmging alternative. Note that the 'high threat generation' text on D&D only means that it deals double threat for the dmg it does. it does little dmg unless you're much deeper in unholy. Don't get me wrong, D&D is a great spell, im just saying you're not screwing yourself by any manner of means by not reducing its CD. This will be particularly true in 3.0.8 where you'd be able to back to back 2 howling blasts for aoe threat gen (CD removal)

• 2/2 epidemic - lengthens disease duration, useful in rotation as allows more HBs before having to refresh. also improves effectiveness of pestilence by giving you more bang on the buck for the blood rune. I'd considered putting 2 points in virulence, but I'm not having problems with spell hit at all.

• 3/3 ravenous dead - 3% extra str. more parry, more AP (partially makes up for the fact we lose some AP from not having 5/5 bladed armor in blood tree). A better choice than morbidity for this reason and those discussed above.

• 5/5 necrosis - fantastic abil, AND in 3.0.8 theyre doubling its dmg. synergy with nerves of cold steel in frost. Currently does about 5% of my overall dmg, and as mentioned theyre doubling it.

• 3/3 blood caked blade - awesome abil, with danger. The extra dmg, and thereby threat gen, from this abil is large - particularly if you maintain diseases on your target at all times (another reason not to use oblit in attack cycle without annhilation). Note that the extra attacks can be parried by a mob, so it is ESSENTIAL you have a lot of expertise. consider now that we're attacking rapidly with 1 handers, we have 25% haste at all times from icy/improved icy talons and now 30% of the time we're doing extra attacks. the sheer number of attacks raises the chances of a dmg spike event occuring from parry haste on a mob in a given period of time. In testing I've found this is becoming increasingly rarer, and will be significantly less so if I can get my hands on a particular pair of pants from our friend 25 man malygos.

Blood

EDIT: Previous statement on bladed armor was incorrect. Bladed armor does indeed work with frost presence, albeit after a server lag issue stops display of the AP increase for a time. Moved a point from shadow of death to 4/5 bladed armor as a result. Ty to Nips / Amnith for the info.

A short note on blood. Blood we take the essential blade barrier (more parry, more rune strike yay) and 4/5 bladed armor for the ap boost.

typical rotation

MACRO RUNE STRIKE INTO ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU DO. EVERYTHING. YOU WANT EACH AND EVERY PROC YOU CAN GET.

We don't use obliterate. We dont spec into it with annhilation. it wont do as much dmg as howling blast because we are using 1 handers rather than a big ol 2h dps weapon. Oblit is based on weapon damage, HB is not. They cost the same runes (UF). HB currently has a 6s cooldown. This is a PITA as it mucks with our rotation a little.

in 3.0.8 a rotation might look like:

IT>PS>HB>BS>BS>RP dump with FS>HB>HB>BS>BS...


* They are doubling the damage done by necrosis in 3.0.8. This is awesome.
** They are removing the cooldown from howling blast in 3.0.8. This is fantastic as it removes the hole in the rotation from the HB cooldown.
*** Theyre changing this to a flat ppm rate per point in 3.0.8. This may end up buffing the proc rate for tanks, due to our generally low crit base.

[nips]

Blood
A short note on blood. Blood we take the essential blade barrier (more parry, more rune strike yay) and 3/5 bladed armor for the ap boost. Note that bladed armor works against your BASE armor. In other words your AP doesnt go up when you switch to frost presence as an effect of having more armor from the presence. Unbreakable armor will raise the AP bonus from this while active, as this affects your BASE armor temporarily.

Are you sure about this? i got 4/5 in Bladed Armor and i can see a +200ap when changing to frost presence. Might be you have not waited for the armor to update on the server side? Try again and wait atleast 30 second, there should be a change on your ap.

[Amnith]

Are you sure about this? i got 4/5 in Bladed Armor and i can see a +200ap when changing to frost presence. Might be you have not waited for the armor to update on the server side? Try again and wait atleast 30 second, there should be a change on your ap.

It scales with Frost presence alright. Several tank builds uses this to gain additional threat. It's just that the server calculates that attack power like every 20th second and not instantaneously.

I tried a DW tanking spec like Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft but I figured that it gave me a poor threat generation compared to using a two-hander. I use DC for Runic Power dump.

A problem with dual wielding is that you have to get an insane expertise rating to avoid getting parried since you hit much more often than with a two-hander. You also need a good share of hit rating to ensure that you are actually hitting the boss. This was mainly why I generated poor threat.

[demifiend]

You are correct, thank you for pointing that out.

Edited above post and updated spec to reflect new information.

effect of change:

3/5 bladed - 2629 ap, 23.05% parry in FP
4/5 bladed - 2735 ap, 23.00% parry in FP

so 106 AP gain from making this change at cost of a .05% parry chance loss and 2% stam loss. Well worth it imo for tps.

[Satorri]

Thanks for sharing Demifiend, I always love hearing the thinking behind conscientious tank builds/techniques.

2 small things:
1.) Boss dodge is uniform at 5.6% (if I'm remembering correctly, and it hasn't changed from my dps days), which requires only 22 or so expertise to remove, though parry can be upwards of 12-15%. So, until we pass 22, expertise gives us double the hit value of hit rating and the added survival value of reduced parry haste. Afterwards the removal of parry chances still increases our hit value and reduces our liability, especially for dual wielders who just plain have more swings to parry.

2.) On hit rating and expertise, I've done a lot of playing with values for the sake of dps, but the same certainly applies to tanking. At zero hit value (which no one has), a single 2-hander will do more damage than a pair of equivalent 1-handers. It doesn't take too much hit value for the dual wielded weapons to pass the white dps of the 2-hander, and certainly below the special cap. The trade off for our class is the loss of damage from other moves, the strikes, BS, PS, RS, FS, ScS, DS, OB, etc. With comparable level items, and a nice slow one-hander in the main hand, they will lose about 30% of their damage value, but they don't change the CD situation with the runes, so we don't use them more often. The upshot is that we want to get more positive returns on dual wielding to balance out our threat. Certainly, the increase in white damage goes towards this, but it's very hard to draw a line of where it will outweigh the loss of instant weapon damage (high spec specific). Using a frost spec that relies heavily on non-weapon based damage values, IT and HB and disease ticks, namely, makes the trade in weapon styles a much smaller issue than Blood or Unholy where you are relying on weapon damage abilities more (Blood more than Unholy). An important point is that dual wielding will benefit from hit and expertise farther than 2-handers will. You can stack hit rating over 300 and get positive feedback still. Your spec in particular, with Necrosis and BcB and Killing Machine (in its current design) perform better and better the more swings connect, making that hit value pay off much better than many others will.

For the sake of generality (your spec is a good example of deviations from generality in this example), there are soft caps where you shed value.

Expertise:
A given boss will have 5.6% dodge, and say an average value of 13% parry. Up to 22 expertise (180 expertise rating), you are removing both dodge and parry %, so 1 expertise rating is worth 2 hit rating for a tank's hit chance. Above 22 expertise you are only removing parry chance, so 1 expertise is worth 1 hit rating until about 65 expertise (426 expertise rating). This is only for the sake of hitting the target, and only for tanks (dps should always dps from behind where the boss cannot parry, making it equal hit value to 22, and worth nothing after that). Parry neglect will save you some extra swings and a % damage increase from that, which is a bit harder to factor, but is worth something to be sure and means expertise is still slightly more valuable than hit rating when it comes to melee maneuvers. But we use a mix of moves that are both spell and melee. For the sake of spell moves, expertise does nothing. You need to factor that in as well when looking at what moves you rely on that are spells and which are melee (again, Frost takes a much higher % from spell moves).

Hit rating:
There are 3 values of note when we're dealing with a boss (that's important, this is worst case scenario and the numbers shrink significantly with lower level mobs, such as trash). These 3 values are the 3 hit values:
1.) Melee Special Hits
2.) Melee White Hits (melee swings, auto-attack for those not familiar)
3.) Spell Hits

Melee specials use the same cap as wielding a single weapon (sword and shield or 2-hander). Currently this has tested to be 8% miss chance. To remove this miss chance, you need 262 hit rating. Having a draenei in your party (note: NOT raid wide) is worth 32.78 rating off that, and likewise each 1% melee hit chance is worth 32.78 rating (for DKs that is only Nerves of Cold Steel, worth 3% or 98 rating, when dual wielding). Beyond this value, your hit rating will do nothing more unless something debuffs your chance to hit (curses, etc).

For dual wielders, your white swings, auto-attacks, have a larger chance to miss. Specifically, 19% higher than the base/special/single weapon miss chance. So, on a raid boss that is 27%. Beyond the hit cap above (adjusted for your talents and buffs), you are ONLY increasing the hit chances of auto-attack weapon swings. The cap before hit rating no longer helps this is 885 hit rating. A value you will never reach as a tank, unless you stop wearing tank gear, ha.

For spell attacks, the cap and the scale are different. On a raid boss, and the scale is even steeper for spell hit scaling through the level difference, the base miss chance is 17%. Hit rating is a unified stat, but it translates into spell hit at a different conversion, namely 26.23 rating per 1% miss reduction. So, to never miss a spell with no buffs you'd need 446 hit rating. Again, the draenei presence is worth 26.23 rating, as are each 1% from every other buff. As opposed to melee hit buffs, spell hit buffs are far more prevalent. Most classes have a talent that offers 1/2/3% reduced miss chance (the ones that cast spells anyway), worth 26/52/79 hit rating. For DK's that is Virulence in the Unholy tree. There are also 2 buffs in particular that can be applied by other classes that will further buff spell hit chance: Misery the spriests will apply with any of their shadow spells, and improved FF that balance druids can and should be applying. These do not stack, but either one is worth 79 hit rating. So, if you are expecting to have an spriest and/or boomkin in your raid, the functional hit cap for your spells will be 14% with no other buffs/talents, which works out to 367 rating (if you are a Draenei or will be in a party with one, it's only 341).

These numbers should give you a relative idea of where you stand in the big hit/miss picture. For those who have missed it before, the easy way to tell what moves follow what rules are as follows:

If it has 'strike' in the name, it's a melee hit move, otherwise (and logically by spell description) it is a spell hit move.

Melee: BS, PS, Oblit (the one exception), DS, ScS, HS, RS, FS, etc
Spell: IT, HB, Pest, DC, DnD, BB, CE, etc

Special notes: Frost Strike and Rune Strike, while being melee swings. cannot be parried or dodged, further cementing Frost's very limited use of expertise in specials. Spells can nevereverever be parried or dodged, yay.

(please forgive the wall o' fundamentals for everyone who knows this, this is for the folks who don't =D)

[demifiend]

Thank you for the info and feedback, I for one found it very useful

Did you guys hear about the 5s CD on howling blast they put in the latest ptr build... I really hope it doesn't make it to live.

Be sure to contribute your qq here: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> [Feedback] Howling Blast Cooldown