DK 2H frost tank wanting to try out blood tanking

[uglie]

I've been 2H frost tank now for some time and was wanting to try out blood tanking. and i was wondering why Improved Blood presence is not taken in the spec. from what i understand about blood tanking it is about self healing vs damage mitigation. am i wrong here or just missing something?

[Mukluk]

Two reasons I can think of, 1 is that it is very small heals trickling in, although they add up in the long run, they will rarely save you or keep you alive where the healer couldn't. The second reason is talent points, we don't have any to spare. There are enough other good talents for a blood tank that I (personally) don't feel like its an option at all.

[Donnelle]

When we started on Three Princes in ICC I was Blood spec. I was tanking the guy on the right, our Warrior MT was on the guy in the middle (not even going to try and remember their names). Initially I was taking a massive amount more damage than the Warrior, even with Curse of Weakness being kept on my target. The excess damage was much more than my self-healing was making up for. I switched over to Frost and the damage numbers between myself and the Warrior tank were much more even, and my healers commented they were having an easier time with keeping me up.

Previously Blood was really good for maintaining high threat, but with the ICY TOUUUCCCHHH buff it really doesn't matter so much. I stay with Frost myself for the improved AoE tanking utility of Howling Blast, and the added mitigation and avoidance.

[Satorri]

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...865#post337865

The reason that Imp Blood Pres isn't hot for tanks is that as tanks we do rather little dps, which is the root of the healing. For consideration, I usually do about 3k dps in ICC raids, so for me that would be 120 hps, or another way of looking at it, 7200 healing per minute, before considering overheal. Compared to my health that is 12% of my total health per minute (as opposed to say, Imp Rune tap at 40% of my health per minute, DS at about 90-135% per minute, or Mark of Blood that could be 40-80% of your health per minute).

It's not insignificant, but it is weak for tanks. On one hand it ticks very small amounts when you do damage so it can be more effective because it can fill in the cracks when you aren't healed to full. It also is blind to when you need it, so that can make it less helpful in an obvious way.

Really the talent is designed to make Blood dpsers/pvpers more survivable. The increased incoming healing in Blood Pres really is a significant part of the talent's budget and it is wasted on tanks.

[Leucifer]

Improved Blood Presence is a nice tool for dps builds as it takes some of the burden off the healer.

For a tank build.... it's not enough to compensate the beating you'll be taking or to really provide the healer any help.
One talent that I like that I think you should take a look at is Spell Deflection. It's not an every instance useful tool.
I can vouch for this though, it makes enemy mages a bit laughable in some. I love it for Nexus, Violet Hold, dealing
with the large hits of Spellflingers..... anything that does a direct cast spell, and some are crushing hits (like Spellflingers).

Problem with any of the builds are there are some great talents that you don't want to lose out on. Even with a good balance of
blood spec talents, you'll still likely hear from healers that you're "squishy".

[uglie]

ok. thanx for the advise. but as far as Spell Deflection goes (probably taking a step out on a weak limb) but would that parry parry more useful for blood tanks? i would say not because of the DR on parry. So what other talents would be good to take? maybe its just me coming from frost tanking, but when i'm looking at what talents to take i'm looking for survivability talents a.k.a. damage reduction talents.
I think it'll take a huge change in the tanking aspects between frost and blood to make me really want to change cuz right now with frost 2H I'm stacking armor armor and more armor even though in full raid buffs when i pop unglyphed UA I'm over armor cap.

[Satorri]

On Spell Deflection:
Spell Deflection is a fine talent at its job, it just carries the stigma of avoidance. On average it will surpass the value of other classes and Unholy's static portion of Magic Suppression by over 50% (every other class just gets 6% static, if you have 20% parry chance and a 45% reduction from 3/3, that's 9% reduction averaged over the procs). The stigma is that it won't apply *every* time. It has the perk though that when it does it will be a hugely noticeable difference. And just as a reminder, the "direct damage only" is as opposed to periodic effects, not what you'd think of as "indirect" magic attacks. So AoE explosions (not auras), cone attacks, etc will still be up for deflection.

Frost vs Blood distinction in survival:
The difference between the two trees, primarily, is that Frost relies heavily on passive mitigation, while Blood relies on self-healing to make apparent mitigation. In general, Blood will take more damage than Frost (all else being equal) but the self-healing even done without particular skill or attention can make it appear as if the Blood tank is taking less damage. In skilled hands it can actually appear to be much less damage than the Frost tank, in fact. That is why for a long time Blood has been considered the powerhouse tank spec (combined with the fact that it is built to support and encourage what most tanks were already doing: stacking health).

WotN is really our only Blood-specific mitigation talent, and if you are looking for survival, that's your ticket. Otherwise, if you want to make Blood really sing, learn how and when to use Rune Tap and Mark of Blood, be smart and frequent with Vamp Blood, and keep an eye for the times when you can use a full DS heal and pop it even when you're using a pair of Death Runes (they'll not revert to an FU pair and the heal will provide a threat and survival buff over a couple HS's on a single target).

[TheYanger]

I'd argue that with the wotn change, or even before the change, it's a misnomer tos ay that frost even takes less damage than blood. Blood absurdly good, and aside from gimmick times where you may want extremely extended cooldowns from frost (Putricide for 3 stacks for instance) it will probably take more damage than blood along with having less health and less healing.

[Satorri]

I'd wager you'd still see Blood take more damage overall, but for a good test we'd need the same person to run it a few times as both Blood and Frost. In the past the margin was pretty noticeable though. I remember the numbers from Ulduar best where the margin was on the order of ~15%. If that margin were still the case, which it very well may not be, *every* hit would have to be reduced by WotN to break even.

It would be fun data to pull up. Maybe it would be sufficient to pull some tank logs out of the "top performing" groups from WoL, assuming they have some sharp and fairly consistent gear levels.

Very laborious to do by hand though, would want to use a data collection tool to sort it all out. Would want to cross-reference gear too. Maybe not worth the time.

[TheYanger]

Well, frost is 2% less damage taken all the time, blood is 15% less damage taken under 35%. I mean it's just going to depend on how often you're dipping, I'd say on any fight where tank damage is actually a concern, the blood equivilent is going to prevent more for sure, if it's not a concern...then it doesn't much matter and the extra heals are probably more noticeable since it likely means there's damage elsewhere and you want to demand less healer attention.

Similarly, I would ALWAYS take the 15% where it counts (Big hits) than the 2% everything. Frigid Deathplate is really the winner in frost, but as nice as it is I think most of us can agree that avoidance is not quite as important.

[Satorri]

Well, if you want to claim the damage reduction most important where it counts, that's fine. Easy to claim, hard to prove, but certainly not unbelievable.

On the grand scale though I would expect well-played Frost will always take more damage overall than well-played Blood. I also expect well-played Blood to always appear to take less damage thanks to the healing, and generally I expect the overall effect of WotN to be less obvious. Again, easy to say, hard to demonstrate.

Maybe I'll find a way to do some demonstration, but since I dropped my second tank spec, I doubt I'll do it any time soon. Maybe someone else would like to volunteer to log ICC25 raids two weeks in a row, one as Blood, one as Frost, link specs and snapshot gear, and see what we can glean?