Frost DK dps spec, video (beta)

I took a short video, pausing on the tooltips, of a Frost two-handed DPS spec.

My respec for Lich King off-tank

We’ve got Lich King tomorrow. I’ve just changed my spec to suit my role as off-tank.

I handle the dredge ghouls and shambler, then taunt for soul reaper, and try to get chains of ice onto the Valkyrie.

For that specific role, I’ve changed my spec slightly from what I was using to this.

The new features are:

  • 25 second death and decay, which makes picking up all the ghouls a guarantee on the final wave before

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Choosing your second tank spec

I have two tank specs, and most tanks who will never dps can do the same. It’s a nice situation.

When I first joined my guild, on trial, I sometimes played as a dps before securing my spot in our tank corp. At another time in the past, I had a tank spec and pvp dps spec.

This post is written for those tanks who can carry two tank specs. I’m not talking to those top 300 tanks who

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DK tank 3.3.3 Icy Touch spam

Quite a few tanks really don’t like the idea of an Icy Touch spam build. At its most extreme, this kind of spec involves skipping any talent which helps you do strikes like [Obliterate] in favour of those which help you slam Icy Touch. The playstyle is then use death runes for icy touch.

Many tanks do not like it out of principle, and strongly argue against using it, because Blizzard have said they will nerf it if they

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Possible no-epidemic spec for Frost tank in 3.33

Just a quick note to point out a spec worth investigating further, no epidemic Frost, both DW and 2H. Read my post and discuss in forums over here.

By the way, on the website blog you’ll see “(Comments are closed)” on some blog posts, when it’s not actually true, most comments are open. It’s a bug I’m trying to fix.

Death Knight tank spec 3.33

We’ll probably see 3.33 this week. There are a few important changes we all know about: [Icy Touch] gives loads of threat, [Will of the Necropolis] is always available and [Improved Icy Talons] stacks with itself (45% melee haste); the last being confirmed by Ghostcrawler. Other Frost changes to talents in 3.33 are not so tank-oriented but will help give us a small threat boost.

Icy Slam

Icy Touch will hit like shield slam. In Frost Presence, it will

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Weapon speed effect on dual-wield tanking

Dual-wield frost tanking threat is effected by the weapon speed.

My weapons. I have two: Black Icicle, and I also have two Rimefang’s Claw. They’re not hard to get, just takes time.

Using my own gear (i232 average), the simulated difference is that those two slow dps weapons (always both with [Rune Of The Nerubian Carapace], for stamina), do ~13% more threat than fast/fast.

A slow/fast combo is 8% more threat than fast/fast.

Runeforges
With slow/fast, if you put fallen crusader (“FC”) on the fast off-hand, you get about 12% more threat than fast/fast, which is another nice middle-ground. FC is better than Razorice (“RI”).

With slow/slow, if you go fallen crusader main-hand and razorice on off-hand to max out threat, it’s a 6% threat gain over two Nerubians. Quite a lot.

Fast/fast with FC and RI, is 6% more than fast/fast Nerubian.

Presumes you’re still over 540 (or 535 defence for 5-mans) without Nerubian. I value stamina highly, so wouldn’t recommend DPS runeforges in a raid (unless it was Ulduar or something below your gear level).

Tabulated answers

Using i232 gear levels, for a 5-man tank. I include the absolute threat values from Kahorie’s sim (v1.202), then I indexed them to a baseline of the fast/fast, and put that index in brackets (it’s a percentage). Obviously, the damage difference is because of strike damage being higher with two slow weapons.

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Dual-wield, weapon speed and expertise

Frost dual-wield tanking is very popular now. Six months ago, many people were violently against the idea. A year ago, it was so bad I put up a sticky on deathknight.info and policed all discussion into it, because it came up all the time.

Now, it seems to be a debate of the past. I barely ever see questions about parrygib or complaints that DW Frost tanks are dying because they’re pretending to be rogues, or whatever. A few things changed, notably the Nerubian runeforge and the Thassarian talent, but I also think people just realised parrygib risk is negligible now because they didn’t see DW tanks dying like the naysayers had suggested. Some of the bosses also have parry-hasted turned off by Blizzard.

Here, I’m going to revisit the relationship between expertise and weapon speed for tanks, and weapon speed and threat. I’m not going to cover the basics here, that’s in my main dual-wield tank post. I’ll compare DKs with Warriors for baseline purposes.

Warrior parry-haste risk

I need to the number of parryable attacks per minute.

Special attacks

All of a warrior’s tanking attacks can be parried except for shockwave, thunderclap, demo shout and conc blow. Even revenge and heroic strike can be parried. Those unparryable attacks are lower in the priority system used by tanks in a typical fight.

A warrior’s threat priority has two parallel streams: (1) shield slam > revenge > devastate > shockwave | concussion blow; and (2) heroic strike, when it doesn’t conflict with the first stream. See readers’ comments below for elaboration.

Let’s assume in every minute a warrior uses: thunderclap once, demo shout twice and conc blow once. Those five attacks can’t be parried. Let’s also assume a fight where the warrior is not rage starved, and can just keep going at it.

There are 40 GCDs in a minute. Five are used on non-parryable specials, leaving 35.

Auto-attack

There’s also auto-attack, at weapon speed, the whole time. Many of them should be replaced by heroic strike, but since that can be parried too, for this analysis it nets neutral. Let’s use Rimefang, 1.6 speed. Lovely tanking weapon and readily accessible.

Auto-attack at 1.6 speed is another 37.5 attacks per minute.

Total

Grand total of 72.5 parryable attacks per minute, based on specials + auto attack.

Side note: When first writing this analysis, had thought the best way to work it out was to look at a log parse, and take the proportions of attacks used. After feedback from readers, it appears that was unnecessary since the proportions of attacks would only matter if a good number of them cannot be parried. I have included the logs I did look at in ‘further reading’ below, in case you’d like some verification of what happens in Saurfang.

Death Knight

It’s more difficult to model the interaction of a DKs abilities such as Rime, so I’ve used the simulator to get an ideal case.

Special attacks

A two-disease DK priority will be: icy touch > plague strike > rime howling blast> obliterate > blood strike > frost strike. A Frost DK played appropriately will use Howling Blast on every Rime proc, which is not parryable.

A single-disease DK will not use plague strike, but for modelling I’ll base it on two diseases since it’s a worst-case for the boss gaining parry-haste.

Read more… » continue reading

Why I'm jealous of maintankadins

In order:

  1. [Consecration]
  2. [Hammer of the Righteous]
  3. [Holy Shield]
  4. [Holy Wrath]

I used to be a pally tank too, so I know what I’m missing when I do Halls of Reflection: no gaps in the AOE threat and reflective AOE threat. Rhidach enjoyed himself in Plagueworks last night, with a sidenote on the AOE awesomeness that is Paladin.

Over the last week, I ran the Blood tank spec for 5-mans (includes death and decay glyph and corpse

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Frost talents by the point

For Frost tanks, what threat values do some of these talents provide?

  • chill of the grave: +1.6% with Icecrown dodge-nerf radiance, 1.8% outside it (tested by going from 1 to 2 points)
  • scent of blood: 1.1%  with Icecrown radiance, and 1.4% outside it
  • subversion: 0.9%
  • dark conviction: 0.6%
  • runic power mastery: 0.4%, which is a tiny gain, but you take the talent for quality-of-life so it’s easier to keep 20 RP

I like taking the [Icy Reach] talent,

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Frost is intended to dual-wield

Blizzard have given a unequivocal statement that Frost is designed for dual-wielding. That two-handed Frost will not, and is not intended to, give the same DPS (for raiding) as dual-wield will.

In tanking, it’s the same: you get higher TPS in dual-wield. Just remember, you should have more expertise to tank dual-wield than two-handed.

What’s refreshing is a black and white statement about their design intent, from blue poster Zarhym.

Q u o t e: Just curious….are we ever

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DK spec threat comparison

I have verified some of the threat comparisons using the latest version of Kahorie’s sim. It’s had a few tweaks so I wanted to see if that refinement had led to much change in the comparative threat of DK tank specs.

I have also itemised the threat per talent of various blood alternatives.

Blood vs Unholy

I tested a mainstream Blood tank, with a survival bias in its spec, against an Unholy high-threat tank spec.

Blood was 6.4% more

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Best tank spec in 3.33

For raids, I’d go with blood or frost.

Here are my posts with much more detail.

Patch Blood Frost Unholy 3.33 blood 3.3

Gravity’s Grid of Blood specs 3.3.3

Interactive talent tree to explain each talent Frost 3.3 spec here or dual-wield Unholy tanking 3.3

March 23, 2010 update: 3.33 does not change your spec much, if at all. Read my full analysis, or visit the forums to see what others have to say.

Unholy should not be used

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Frost tank spec in 3.3

Frost tanking has always been and will remain in 3.3 a very solid choice. You can tank with either dual-wield or a two-handed weapon and both are viable. DW is slightly higher threat at the moment yet is best suited to a character with 30+ expertise skill.

For dual-wield frost, I have a full post you should read.

3.3.3

For 3.3.3 highest-threat 2H spec, see this forum post here. It shows that whilst the Icy Touch buff, predictably makes [Black Ice] talent more valuable than before, 5/5 Killing Machine is better plus that you should spec into IIT.


Original post continues:

Here I’ll talk about two-handed frost tanking.

Frost tank spec templates:

A very balanced tree. Has the best snap-agro for AOE, excellent single-target threat and a mix of damage reduction talents. Formidable in Heroics and can MT raids too with the same spec, so deserves to be a very popular tree.

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Warriors from the swiss army, DKs from lego

I like warrior tanks, they have so many abilities really they deserve to be called the swiss army knife of tanks. Warriors can intercept and charge, interrupt/silence many ways, cancel fear, actively protect raid members, and more. That left me wondering, what’s the analogy for a DK? We’re pretty flexible too.

Lego!

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the Death Knight tank

We can build up a DK tank to suit a variety of tank scenarios, but unlike the swiss army knife which can use its variety of tools any old time, the DK needs to be rebuilt from lego into different shapes.

Death Knight tanks are like lego.

You can spec into three different tank types, and within each tree there’s a further bit of construction.

Tank leaders or officers should be aware of the various construction their lego tanks can take. A good DK tank should be humble and flexible enough to do what’s best for the raid, too.

I’ll chat a bit about the tree trees. » continue reading

What is the frost, unholy or blood rotation?

I get a lot of questions like “what’s the rotation for that spec?” Rotation is like Death Knight basics, and since I write on more advanced tanking questions, it’s not content I usually include. Besides, a DK should think in terms of priorities and not rotations. More on that distinction later.

But then I started writing this, and realised… there’s some of subtlety here. I’ve played a DK since they WotLK was released, so it’s second-nature, but if you are new to the class there might be some crucial info in this post.

So, here are the answers which I can then refer people to for what’s the frost/unholy/blood rotation or priority.

Important context on being a DK

Parry/dodge: As a DPS, you attack the boss from behind and have enough hit and expertise so you do not miss. Tanks face the boss, so generally can be parried. This difference alone means a tank rotation has to be flexible because you will re-do a strike once in a while after being parried. DPS DKs, when well-geared, do not have this problem and can use a very tight rotation.

Priority/rotation: Tanks need to think in terms of a priority system. Rotations are a stepping stones towards achieving those priorities. The best DKs do not stick to a rigid rotation, they stick to a priority system. If you have to run away from a boss to avoid his Big AOE thing, then run back in, your rotation will be meaningless if the diseases have fallen off. DK damage requires diseases, so your first priority is to put them back up.

Unholy presence: some DPS specs use unholy presence to they can stuff more attacks into the 20 second rune recharge cycle. If you’re using such a spec, you must know the rotation too, since they’re intimately connected, or you’re ruining your own dps. I will not cover any of those rotations here.

Frost or blood presence: the rotation/priority are the same for dps and tanks, you just use different presences. The below details will work for both.

Tank specs: use my tank specs launch page to find frost, unholy and blood tank specs.

Blood runes and blade barrier: a tank needs to always have blood runes used up or recharging. Even if they’ve become death runes, spend them asap. You need that for blade barrier. A DPS DK does not have that priority. The priority systems written below have an overriding principle of keeping blade barrier up, but there isn’t a hard and convenient rule I can give you.

I do whatever I can to keep blade barrier up. I have it as a watched buff. I’ll notice its remaining duration. Even if the boss has no diseases but barrier is about to expire, I’ll spend blood runes on blood strike/ pestilence/ blood tap /rune tap / obliterate (whatever) to get barrier back up. Exception is if you’re just starting the fight, you’d open by running in with an icy touch, plague strike in melee range, then use blood strike twice.

Runic power dump: frosties use frost strike, the others death coil. Tanks keep 20 RP at all times; save that much for rune strike or IBF. Don’t use it on a dump. If you have a spare GCD and nothing to do, hit horn of winter for some free RP.

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Dreadplate blood hybrid spec, no threat

A poster on dk.info was wondering about this hybrid spec, probably best called Dreadplate Blood, 21/41/5.

It takes a lot of Frost talents, but then goes into blood for some nice survival options (rune tap and Vot3W). I was curious to see how it stacked up in threat, because in theory it should be fairly weak.

Simulation confirms Dreadplate Blood is low in threat:

3.3 Death Knight dual-wield tanking

March 23 2010: checked for 3.3.3.

Can and should a DK dual-wield as a tank? Patch 3.22 made it possible, with rune strike now being effected by Threat of Thassarian. Patch 3.3 now lets you DW tank with DPS weapons. DW for DPSers in Frost is very strong.

Sure a tank can do it too, but is it wise? What should the lead tank say about it to their corps?

No parry-haste, Feb 9 2010, almost none of the Icecrown bosses have parry-haste turned on. Therefore, parrygib is irrelevant on most bosses. Therefore, don’t worry about expertise anymore!

3.3.3

For the highest threat dual-wield frost spec in 3.3.3, see this forum post. I do not recommend Icy Touch spam builds.


Original post continues:

The questions relate to survival and threat. To work it threat, I used my simulator.

Threat

  • impressively, the threat on dual-wield (“DW”) tanking is the same or slightly higher than a two-hander, based on a like-for-like simulation I did.
  • for the stat values for threat (to help choose gear or weapons), I provide a complete equivalence table here.

Survival: incoming damage

  • if a DK tank has two fast tank weapons and 30+ expertise skill, they will receive about as many parry-hasted attacks as a warrior with one fast weapon and 26 expertise
    • this is because warrior’s attacks can nearly all be parried, but some of a DK’s cannot (icy touch and howling blast)
  • because of their itemisation (dodge/parry/defence), you should end up with up to 2% higher avoidance from two tanking weapons; a lot relatively if you’re already around 60%
  • note you no longer lose the 2% stamina from Gargoyle runeforge, but gain net 1% avoidance from swordshattering runeforge, because of the new 3.3 runeforge.

Gear and expertise stats

  • ideally you would get two slow tank weapons, but they don’t exist except for the now old Broken Promise. With two slow weapons you only need 21+ expertise skill, 26 is preferred.
  • you could get two Peacekeepers, for example
  • try to get Quel’Serrar from Onyxia, it’s lovely
  • in the new 3.3 content, tank one-handers are Bonebreaker Scepter, Rimefang’s Claw, and Lucky Old Sun. The latter two from 5-mans.
  • now in patch 3.3, you can dual-wield two slow DPS weapons (as opposed to tank-itemised one handers) and runeforge them with the new one-handed version of Gargoyle, called Nerubian
    • slow one-handers give significantly more threat, and lower parrygib risk, so I’d suggest that’s a good path to go
  • expertise: you should bias your gear selection towards expertise
    • you could use two expertise/stam gems, I’d say (that’s not scientific, but based on a notion of minimal compromise on the primary tank stat). Otherwise, like in any tank spec, gems should tend to be all-stamina.
    • if you need more than two gems to reach this expertise target, you should consider not DW tanking at all. Go get a two-hander instead.
  • your gear is going to still need 540 defence with the Nerubian runeforge’s 25 included towards that total.

To help choose betweeen weapons, read my longer post on survival vs threat.

More about expertise and hit»

Spec

  • there is not much variation, this is the main spec.
  • alternatively, for 1.5% more single-target threat you can move 2 points from KM into [Scent of Blood] for this spec but note the KM procs are useful in AOE situations for howling blast, so you lose that edge
  • for [Improved Icy Talons], it is more difficult to spec well, best to read my full discussion with specs
    • 3.33 changed the stacking for IIT, my full analysis is here.

You cannot DW tank as Unholy or Blood, not enough threat. Frost is it.

Rotation / priority

Read the full post here.

Simulation

I have run several tests at i213, i219, i226 and i245 gear levels. I’ve compared DW to 2H, and cross-compared Frost DW to Blood and Unholy. The general theme of results is this: dual-wield frost generates slightly more threat than 2H, and more of it is physical (less frost), with a much higher proportion of damage from Howling Blast (because it procs Rime on offhand).

Patch 3.3: Two fast tank weapons -vs- two slow DPS weapons: two slow weapons are notably more threat and less parry-haste risk. Read my complete analysis of threat from weapon speed.

So, should I do it?

Remember most ICC bosses basically don’t have parry-haste turned on!  This post was written before that was known. » continue reading

Expertise reduces the chance the boss can parry you.
Bosses have a 14.25% parry chance and reducing that to 1% would take 467 expertise rating (= 57 expertise). That’s massive and it’s not sensible to even try to achieve that when stacking stamina would be more effective instead.

For level 83 the soft cap is 6.5% dodge or 26 expertise (214 rating), and the hard cap is 14.25% parry or 57 expertise (468 rating). Source.

Expertise rating:skill conversions:
*  1 Expertise Skill reduces the chance your attacks will be dodged/parried by 0.25%
* 32.79 Rating is equal to 1% less chance your attacks will be dodged/parried.
* 8.20 Rating is equal to 0.25% less chance your attacks will be dodged/parried and thus is equal to 1 Expertise Skill.

To-hit

Spell Hit and Melee Hit scale differently with Hit Rating. You need 26.2 hit rating for 1% chance to hit with spells and 32.7 hit rating for 1% hit to melee attacks.

Dual-wielding, the offhand has a 24% chance to miss rather than the usual 8% for two-handed weapons. Note, your special attacks (eg. frost strike) disregard the offhand miss rate, your special melee attacks are 8% and spells are 17% even if you are DW tanking. To-hit does not effect your survivability, just your TPS.

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Patch 3.22 site news

I’ve updated all key posts (including my main post) on the three DK tank talents for 3.2.2.

You can refer to my 3.22 index post to find them all.

In 3.22, glyphed bone shield will have eight charges over two minutes, whereas in 3.2 it has six. I really like that change.

Update: patch 3.22 is downloading for me for USA server now.

PTR 3.22 unbreakable armour

Currently, PTR 3.22 unbreakable armour gives +25% armour and the glyph takes it to +30% (tooltip on glyph is a bit confusing).

If you compare that to bone shield at 15 seconds, giving a flat 20% reduction on top of your normal tank armour, I find that bone shield is ahead on total damage reduction. I modelled this in a google spreadsheet.

I used example armour of 25123 unbuffed and 27858 buffed.

Unbuffed, UA leaves you taking 32.66% of the

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Patch 3.22

This index post helps readers find my posts on the 3.22 changes for DK tanking. I had it stickied to front page for a while.

  • Death knight tank builds for unholy, frost and blood
  • new: highest threat no-epidemic Unholy DK tank build
  • dual-wield tanking in 3.22 (DW DK tanking)
  • initial commentary on the 3.22 changes. Patch notes 3.22 from the downloader.
  • Find everything else on pwnwear through my new index

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    DK 3.22 talent changes

    3.22 is now live, check my index post.

    My tank builds and levelling specs have been updated.

    These changes mean:

    • Unholy dps will go back to using Scourge Strike (instead of Unholy Obliterate, because of the glyph, subversion and dirge changing).
    • Frost tanks will be awesome again, with Unbreakable Armour actually being worth using (the new glyph only gives 5% of your base armour, so that’s around 1200)
    • Blood will not be the overarching dominant tank spec it is now because its vampiric blood has been balanced to 15s glyphed, bone shield is back to one minute and frost is fixed
      • heart strike’s cleave got nerfed but it’s still good, and not changed on a single-target
    • plus… dual-wield tanking is back on the agenda with RS threat fixed in DW specs. Basically, you just need 30 expertise to use two fast tank weapons and you’re only going to be parrygibbed as much as a warrior (ie. if they’re ok, you’re ok). Read the whole article.
    • But to make up for it the T9 set bonus will be 10s not 20s reduction.

    Sept 12 update:

    • unholy bone shield reduced to 3 charges, and its glyph to +1. This is them completing the change from 2min to 1 min; vampiric blood was tweaked in one patch to 1 min with 15s uptime. Blizzard push patches in bits, so this is their complete patch for the talent now (as opposed to an afterthought).
    • My paladin colleagues will be sad about this “Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.”
    • Warrior tanks might like this odd buff “Critical Block: This talent now grants a 20/40/60% chance to block double the normal amount instead of 10/20/30%.” Source.

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    Threat stats equivalence points for Death Knight tanks

    Dec 18th: updated for 3.3, using latest calculations from the simulator, and adjusted for ICC avoidance aura. Jan 4th: dual-wield frost updated.

    DPS Death Knights are really into Equivalance Points (“EP”) to help them decide between one piece of gear and another.

    Since I’m a tank, DPS is TPS and it’s not the most important thing. I usually have enough threat. That said, it can be useful to understand which stats are going to contribute more to threat if

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    Simulation on Frost Death Knight tank TPS

    Nov 17th 09: Please see my 3.3 Frost DK tank post for latest answers.

    There is a DK simulator which I’ve been using to test the various DK tank specs. But it’s a DPS tool, so it has some limitations for my purposes.

    Nevertheless it helps answer questions like, “how much does your rotation TPS drop if you use a single-disease with howling blast rather than two-disease with obliterate?”  The answer is below.

    Other tank classes’ simulation tools

    My

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    3.2 Death Knight tank specs

    Overview of blood, unholy and frost recommended tank specs.

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