Death knight tanking

[Satorri]

Well, Acclimation is a fine damage reducer against the punch, but it requires you to go deep into Frost to get it which means you may lose out on the (superior?) buffs from Spell Deflection and Magic Suppression.

Actually, as I write this, I'm wondering just what is the best value for surviving those massive single shots. They come about 10-15 seconds apart, and provided your dps is cooking you shouldn't have to survive more than 6.

Spell Deflection is pretty easy to gauge. Parry % chance to reduce the hit by 45% with a 13 pt investment in Blood (probably just 3 pts more than usual if you are like me and never leave off Bladed Armor). Let's say you have 20% parry in raid buffs (maybe a little low for someone trying hardmode), then you'll statistically avoid one of the punches almost for sure, so that's ~7.5% damage reduction over the whole fight (hopefully it doesn't happen when you have AMS up, if you don't have Magic Suppression).

Magic Suppression is a 6% always on damage reducer so it'll take the sting out of his aura and his punches by 6% down the line. The AMS buff will probably not get much of its full value since your AMS is capped at 50% of your health. In the most generous situations that is only 25k removed, but the value is still there if it can be used it will be.

Acclimation is a bit trickier because of the nature of resistance. First, the stack will be at a full 3 the entire fight, that means you'll be mitigating the aura and the strikes with 150 more resistance. If you only have the nature resist aura of a totem or Aspect of the Wild (I don't know anyone packing Nature resist gear for this), this will put your total resistance at 280 (130 without acclimation, we'll call that baseline). We'll not get into the mess of partial resist chances yet, just pure mitigation from 130 resistance is about 23% nature damage reduction. 280 is about 50% reduction, for a grand total gained of 27% in pure mitigation of Nature damage. Then you add in the chances of partial resists. Very briefly, 130 resistance will get you about 45% chance to get a 1/4 resist, and the other 50% will be split fairly evenly between 1/2 resist and unresisted. 280 resistance will push the numbers to read more like, 44% 1/2 resist, 20% 1/4 resist, 24% 3/4 resist, and well less than 10% should go through unresisted.

Based on that, I'd actually say Acclimation is the single biggest buff we can get, though the question is whether we can comfortably compound it with anything else (I'm fairly certain you cannot reach it and Magic Suppression). Unbreakable Armor is NOT a CD for use against big hits so it'll be fairly unnoticeable against the Fusion Punches, but using that and avoidance trinkets on CD or around Punches may ease the underlying physical beating baseline.

[HootyElune]

I just did this on the weekend.

AMS is must. #1 proirty absorbs 100% FP and the dot (the pally loved me saving 9% of his mana for this) #2 is IBF sufficent to absorb dmg. #3 is UA and dodge trinket (UA absorbs some of it) but it really hurts should you get FP & hit at the same time. #4 AMS. #5 parry trinket if IBF not cooled down, #6 parry trinket\IBF (dependant on #5), #7 AMS.

Hopefully by now you have downed steelbreaker. If not plan for overheals. for the next couple of FP.

But agree on Acclimation for this fight. When it was stacking it reduced the dmg nicely