Unholy Tank Question

[Mylilpwny]

I came back to the game after a 6 month layoff or so because a friend started to play. I've tanked as a warrior for three years, but due to my friend playing alliance, I started a DK as my new toon.

I've tried all three specs and I'm loving Unholy so far. After browsing TankSpot and Elitist Jerks for a few days, I think I've finally decided on a tanking build and I'm wondering if I'm missing or wasting any talents.

Here's the build. Thanks a bunch.

[Rialév]

No, the build you made works fine, it has pretty good funcionality in most situations, but Unholy is a little more dependant that it previously was.

However, those who have tanked unholy manage to make it work without trouble, so I expect you'll do fine with the build.

I would however suggest trying to work in Virulence, that 3% can really be helpful in a lot of cases.

Is this intended for an OT or MT Spec? Just out of curiosity.

[Mylilpwny]

Mainly OT, though I may end up occasionally in the MT spot.

[Rialév]

Mainly OT, though I may end up occasionally in the MT spot.

Well for OT Purposes the spec you built will perform very well, it has a lot of good trash burning talents, so in that area you'll do exceptional.

I suppose it won't do bad as a MT spec either, though I think Blood, Frost or a hybrid would probably perform a bit better.

[slackhoid]

Your spec is very solid for OT/AOE tanking. With minor tweaks I'd say it is 96% as good for trash, but will do much better as MT spec. My main spec (armory may show my pvp spec)

- Unholy AOE tanking does not need to be boosted max. It is so good even without speccing/glyphing to it. I've never had an issue with trash threat and I have no glyphs or talents to max AOE tanking
- I'd consider replacing DnD glyph with Rune Strike one. RS is our best single target TPS tool (cost only runic and has imba 1.5x threat modifier for dmg) and when it crits that's a huge pile of TPS. You have 5 points in Necrosis and RS and Necrosis have huge synergy since the 20% shadow dmg added on top of swing dmg also works on RS ==> when you get 20% on top RS crit that is a huge jump in your threat par in omen
- Gluph of Disease versus Glyph of Scourge Strike is somewhat debatable. The problem with disease is that while it refreshes the disease it uses rune causes no threat. I feel Virulence + SS glyph is much stronger in terms of single target TPS. If you need to refresh manually with IT + PS you'll still do threat per rune while doing so
- Scent of Blood is good talent for runic generation and since unholy tank has no shortage of GCDs we can dump all the runic we have with DC spam and/or Rune Strikes

So I'd say that if you want to have much more viability as MT (for versatility) while losing quite little in trash tanking, move points from Wandering Plague and Impurity to SoB and Virulence and tweak your glyphs a bit as suggested above.

[Rialév]

I agree with switching DnD to RS glyph as mentioned above. Since your spec isn't so strongly focused on STR% increases and such I'd say the advice above is pretty much the way to go. Otherwise I'd say stick with Disease glyph, but for the Extra Scourge strike per rotation i'd suggest getting a few AP increasing talents available in mid blood tree as well as Ravenous dead.

Which is where you would see the greatest benefit to having an extra Scourge Stike (which mathematically would outperform TPS over IT PS rotation, but it is very much dependant on talents) and as such I agree with Slackhoid with what he said.

[Mylilpwny]

So something akin to this? I made a few more changes to it.