Dealing with Heavy Adds as Unholy

[Vidus]

Apologies in advance if this has been dealt with...can't find much on searches, but may be using wrong terms.

I have been tanking DW Frost for a good while, and really enjoy it in 5-mans. However, for a change of pace I've been using my off-spec to Unholy tank (since I hardly ever dps). My main challenge has been in getting control of adds in add heavy areas.

What is the best method? I'm still learning the rotation, so it doesn't come naturally to me yet, so I am still a bit up in the air on runes sometimes, which I need to work on, but my main issues I've had are threat issues on waves of adds situations.

Example situation: Event in Halls of Stone. I've yet to attempt as unholy because coming from frost spec, I feel naked with so many adds.


Thanks,

Vidus/Atoril
Scarlet Crusade

[Proletaria]

You are, essentially, naked as unholy with a lot of adds. Bone-shield charges are nothing like they used to be and their minimum duration of 3-4 seconds seems to have flown the coop somewhere between 3.2 and 3.3. While unholy has some pretty stellar sustained aoe threat via strong dnd, a third plague, and possibly wandering plague, you're hands-down the worst at acutally taking hits from that many mobs.

[Synapse]

Unholy's threat compares, with frost, in that it's "more dps, longer ramp-up time". You're stuck with d&d, pestilence and bloodboil. If mobs just die too fast, don't bother with frost fever.ps-pest and using dc to grab the distant enemies is a start.

[swelt]

Agree with Synapse. Would add that, depending on the content you are playing in, you might consider glyphing death and decay. DnD is really strong for unholy, especially once you have diseases on the target. I found halls of stone to be a matter of patience, just keep DnD down all the time, don't burn through too many of your other runes such that you can't drop another dnd, don't worry if you cant get a full aoe rotation up before your target die. A better example might be the initial pulls in ICC. There you have fairly beefy skeletal mobs, with some joining the fight later with fresh agro tables. Here, smart use of pestilence helps, but the principal of being patient remains - getting the 2nd DnD down is important.

[Satorri]

DKs have always been vulnerable on the event in HoS if only because the adds can come in a staggered time frame that could leave us with absolutely nothing to do but auto-attack. This is especially a problem with really hot dps. When stuff dies too quickly you can't keep juggling diseases to the next group.

One of the best bits of advice I can offer, with 3/3 in Morbidity you can keep DnD up with only 5 sec of downtime in between, except that you need to be careful on two fronts:
1.) You need to not be too crazy with rune spending and try to let the runes you need refresh in time for DnD re-setting. This on its own is a challenge, especially in the face of a frantic rush of adds.
2.) Pacing. Don't just drop it whenever, try to drop it at a convenient timing such that you can catch people to the highest effect.

Another thing to consider, if you have really high dps and adds are dying very rapidly, you may not need to obsessively tank things at all, besides being careful to pick up the golems. The rest won't do a whole lot of damage when it dies rapidly, just so long as someone picks it up.

In general, for Unholy tanking, DnD with diseases should be plenty of AoE threat and supporting that where needed with Blood Boil and target swapping melee/RS is plenty of threat to tie everything down.

[Sterbefall]

I wouldn't say always. Back in the day when UB was actually good, it was cake to do HoS as Unholy. I miss that talent.

[Vidus]

Thank you everyone, this has been very helpful. I will start training myself to be a little more careful on the runes and try to keep up the 3 I need for a DnD. I'm finding that I do really well on the AoE in general when I have a single pack that I deal with and keep diseases on (like FoS magic packs, which I find unholy ams talents nice for), so getting that DnD patience down will be a priority.

(though, I do wish UB was still the nice little swarm of bugs it used to be)