Blood Tanking with DW after threat boost

[Airowird]

If you're fresh in 333-346ish blues, thus ready for ZA/G, why bother farming Honor for gear?
If you want to 'finish' your 5man gear, it's Conquest vs BoT/BWL pugs really and as said they're pretty close to each other.

The thing is now, especially with the Honor gained requirements, it's not always faster to get the PvP gear first. Not to mention that if you are serious about improving your character, might as well do 5mans to learn more about the job you intent to do. If you're not caring about improving your char then 1) It's pointless to talk about gear upgrades and 2) GTFO of my group, I hate slackers!!

[Bovinity]

If you're fresh in 333-346ish blues, thus ready for ZA/G, why bother farming Honor for gear?

Because a lot of us PvP anyway so we have the honor just as a consequence of what we do? Not to mention almost all of my alts has had a ton of honor saved up from BG's while leveling, so they hit 85 able to buy at least one piece right when they ding.

Not to mention that if you are serious about improving your character, might as well do 5mans to learn more about the job you intent to do. If you're not caring about improving your char then 1) It's pointless to talk about gear upgrades and 2) GTFO of my group, I hate slackers!!

Yeah, most of us have been playing long enough that the whole, "Go do 5-mans to L2P." is kinda moot. I think anyone in this thread is already beyond that point. As for "improving your character" I thought we just had the discussion on stats. Besides, remember we're talking about 5-man starter dungeons for pete's sake, exactly how "perfect" do you expect everyone's gear to be?

[Theotherone]

Even in ZA/ZG stats make a difference. RL example from yesterday (not to get off topic, but this is kind of germane to where the thread has gone).

I needed one more ZA to cap VP for the week on the Shammy I'm gearing up. The tank is a bear in full pvp gear (think is was mostly Viscous, the 371 ilvl); I mean full right down to Spell Pen and Resilience gems; being a kinder gentler healer after going back and forth in this thread, I decide to say nothing and give him/her a chance. The run to the first boss was a royal pain, he took a lot of damage, I mean a lot, but nothing I couldn't heal through. However, his threat was horrible. Even with the buff to threat, mobs were coming off him onto me, onto the mage in the run etc. I left at the boss, it just wasn't worth the hassle cause the whole run was going to be spent mob dancing and it only gets worse further into the run.

This is the Shammy http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../Ripell/simple Gearwise it's not like I'm running blues and greens trying to keep people up.

At the time of the run I had the T11 Hands and the crafted 359 chest, so gear was ballpark the same. I picked up the T11 Chest to keep the 2 piece and the T12 gloves later in the day when I had grabbed a few more JP for the Chest.

[swelt]

This is the theory and mechanics forum. It's not a place for cool stories about random dungeons. The fact that a druid wearing gear loaded with agi and crit had trouble with threat tells you nothing about the theory or mechanics, only that he was a bad player. Unless you'd like to expound some theory on how having more dodge and mastery might have helped him produce more threat?

The maths here is fairly clear:
1) a DK can opt to use 1x1H weapons instead of 1x2H weapon and remain viable. He directly trades single target damage and threat for additional healing (from extra bloodworm procs) and depending on available gear, probably a very small amount of avoidance
2) a late starting DK (just as other classes) may find themselves with access to very high ilvl pvp gear compared to their regular pve gear. A smart player using pvp gear in this way might be making the best use of the gear available to him. An idiot wearing any gear is still an idiot.

Despite point 1, I personally would not choose to use 2x1H weapons unless I found myself (through unlucky drops for example) with significantly better 1H than 2H weapons. I find the healing from bloodworms to be largely inconsequential, the extra avoidance to be highly marginal and there are many encounters (especially in 10 man raids) where I feel that optimising my DPS is more important.

[Theotherone]

The "cool story", as you so derisively refer to it, fit with the flow of the discussion; also, I believe, if I recall scientific theory or method correctly, observation forms a part thereof; among other things.

[Tengenstein]

Bears are actually one of the few specs where Being kitted out in full PVP gear doesn't make too much of a difference being that unlike the rest of the tanks the primary stat is much mor important than secondary stats so while the plate tanks are all stacking mastery/avoidance, we don't care too much about strength, How many of us go "ooh thats got more strength on it" when judging upgrades? It's my understanding that Bears love agility, its so much better for them than strength is for the plate tanks. And on the other side of the coin a fair few bits of bear gear have haste on them, which is almost as useless as resilience is to a bear, yeah we platey's may quibble over hit and expertise, but those are still nice stats, there not my favourite but it's not a leper stat, it's not wasted it's still gonna make keeping our active defenses up easier, its still gonna make sure VR's and DS's land, its still gonna have quite an appreciably effect on how fast the boss dies, being threat stat capped would be about 3k more DPS in my raid. I don't think Bears can say the same for haste.

So AFAIK the choice is the often a case of, more agility and one crappy secondary stat, or less agility and a crappy secondary stat.

However, i really can't disagree with Swelt, just becuase someone's in a 5 man with PVP gear and an idiot doesn't make everyone in 5 mans with PVP gear an idiot too, though gemming spell pen and resilience and not being able to hold threat kinda makes you bad for PVE, and i would've quit too, it's not worth the hassle.

Is it really possible to get high ilvl pvp weapons easily?Ithought you had to get so many conquest points to be able to purchase them? is that really easier than tapping a BS/Eng for a 365?

Back on topic, how much of a dps loss is it to DW rather than 2h as a DK?

[Krenian]

Well you have two routes you can go for PvP weapons right now:

1) Get 7500 honor in one season and be able to purchase the 378s.

2) Get an Arena/Rated BG team going and get the Conquest Points weapons at 394 if I'm not mistaken.

either way are a bitch to get however they are great weapons (bar the resil). You lose on one main stat tbh. The damage the weapons do for your attacks depending on Death Knight stuff actually makes it better than normal 353 pve weapons if you can balance the state difference out (and if you actually know basic math, this ain't hard.)

--

Okay. The whole Dual Wield DK thing is silly. Period. I used to be a staunch defender of DW Dks back in Wrath when we had the abilities to do it. Now? It just doesn't happen.

1) Look at every attack you do in Blood: None of them are not weapon based except AoE attacks. DW Dks were able to do well because most of their attacks in Frost, back in the day, were based on AP; not weapon skill. This allowed you to be able to keep up with threat easily enough by being able to proc more runestrikes (the ability to parry haste the mob was subjective to this and could either a) kill you faster or b) give you more threat through more runestrikes. Former normally happened if you didn't have enough avoidance. Latter happened later in the game.) Every major attack in Blood requires weapon damage and only uses the main hand weapon. Effectively, you have an Offhand that is doing SFA other than white damage and missing more often than naught.

2) The increase of stats only comes from having similar ILVL weapons, and even then it isn't that much of an increase as some pointed out by showing the tanking weapons in FL at this time. The only thing that you get, as a benefit, is the fact that you can rune a second weapon. That's it. That adds maybe 2% parry at most.

3) Remember Mastery? That lil tool of yours that most tanks love? Well that Mastery skill is severely gimped on the sole purpose your Death Strike hits like a wet noodle. So you're actually losing mitigation by doing this because you're not keeping that bubble around to keep you up and healthy. That will strain your healers.

The fact that a lot of you think that it was a threat issue only that people didn't dual wield is concerning; it was so much more. Nothing works for DW anymore in the Blood Tree. You won't do it effectively and you will actually hinder your group more than if you just grabbed a trusty two handed weapon and smacked things in the face.

Let it die folks; Blizzard doesn't want DW to be a part of the tanking scenario. The tree they made shows it, the fact that they haven't even once helped DW tanking to be plausible shows it, and just the general feel of the class shows it; we're not meant to DW in a tanking position.

Just...astounding that you guys would keep arguing this.

[Bovinity]

3) Remember Mastery? That lil tool of yours that most tanks love? Well that Mastery skill is severely gimped on the sole purpose your Death Strike hits like a wet noodle. So you're actually losing mitigation by doing this because you're not keeping that bubble around to keep you up and healthy. That will strain your healers.

Weapon damage has nothing to with Death Strike or Blood Shield. Hell, if Death Strike didn't "Require a weapon in the main hand" like most attacks, you could use it bare-handed and get the same heal/shield.

1) Get 7500 honor in one season and be able to purchase the 378s.

Honor weapons are 359 ATM.

[Krenian]

Weapon damage has nothing to with Death Strike or Blood Shield. Hell, if Death Strike didn't "Require a weapon in the main hand" like most attacks, you could use it bare-handed and get the same heal/shield.

http://www.wowhead.com/spell=49998

Death Strike does weapon damage, albeit only 150% unlike some other abilities. It's still indicative to the damage it can do. So using it Bare handed would give you reaaaaaaaaally bad damage.

The only thing is yes, you're right. It doesn't matter 'that' much on the sole basis that the heal/bubble is based on your health. I'll conceed that point. But you're still losing a chunk of damage you could be doing with a two hander.

Honor weapons are 359 ATM.

And corrected, Thanks for that. Haven't looked at them for a couple of days.

[Bovinity]

It's actually 330% weapon damage in Blood spec, but yah, I was just referring to the mitigation/healing element. =D

[swelt]

So if you read back through the thread and just read the theory posts, I think you'll find my summary is correct. Believe me, I would much rather it were a simple "Blood DKs should use 2H", but the maths just doesn't support an absolute conclusion like that. Yes, you absolutely will do more damage using a 2 hander. But since threat is relatively easy and since damage is not the prime function of a tank, there is a legitimate case for dual wielding. Depending on the gear available to you, it's quite likely that 2 'tank' 1 handers will offer more marginally avoidance than a single 2 hander because there are no 2 handers with dodge or parry on, and since blood worms proc from melee hits you get more by dual wielding. You don't get any more from the runeforges (2x2% or 1x4% parry for example), but at one point the thread was mislead by a bug in chardev.

Blizzard should kill this debate for good, make rune strike require a 2 hander or something.

[Krenian]

Think I'm going to do my own theorycrafting in a bit and I'm going to see if there is any validation.

We will have to assume a couple of things and I'm going to use a BiS list that I can get. Furthermore, I'm going to try a BiS list that's plausible for Normal Mode FL atm. That way we can say it's in the realm of possibility.

Write up to follow.

EDIT: This might take a while and require me not to be lazy and not want to do it. TBH, looking at the info I've been looking, all indications are that it's not worth it:

Settings in BloodSim are taken from Zarko's excellent thread on tank stats at Tier 11 (World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> What we look like after one tier of raiding) and damage based on wielding 372 weapons. - 175,685 health, 32.36% avoidance, 46841 armor, 21 mastery - Boss hits every 2.4 seconds for 110k-120k unmitigated damage - 100 eight minute fights Difference in switching from 2H to DW: - 7.9% less damage dealt - 9.8% less threat - 0.1% less damage taken - 0.7% less damage absorbed - 1.1% more healed

From EJ's tanking site, which shows a Simulation created with both DW and 2H. You lose a lot more than you gain here. I'll run my own shortly.

[leethaxor]

There is a drop off of deathwing called souldrinker. This may put DW over.

[Pylae]

I'm at work so I wasn't able to read everything here, but the real factor for me is whether the top tanks are using these. Idiot theorycrafting looks a lot like genius theorycrafting when you don't have the game in front of you...but if none of the top DK tanks are DWing IMO it's very safe to say that it's not worth doing.

What I'm saying is start linking armory profiles of top DK tanks doing this or you'll never convert the masses.