dk tank?

[Mercy]

So u basicly rely only on bone shield?

Yes and no. It is a very strong ability, especially when you build around it. It is definitely a focal point of the spec, much like Vampiric Blood is for Blood spec. I mean, there's a reason that after 8 years of the spell having been created, it still exists on retail as a primary mitigation mechanic. (Just saying. :p )

What if something hits u more than u expected and u are left for 30sec without a single CD?

Well, a more avoidance-built tank is going to spike more because they don't have the same mitigation as a pure EH built tank. That's part of why avoidance and Bone Shield mesh so well together. But as for other CDs, I'm sure you're well aware of what other CDs a DK has. Icebound, Army, Blood Tap (via set bonus), AMS, and then there's AMZ for Unholy. Death Strike for Unholy is also more potent than it is for Frost (3 diseases for it to scale with).

And why would u get descecration? In most cases it does more harm than it does good...

Reason you get descecration and lichbourn are for RS boss's only, Slowling Embers / removing Fear again depending on comps aka how many Fear wards all that jazz.

And for off-tanking Lich King. But yes, that's about it. Which is why I pointed out that the build is for those two fights. If it doesn't apply, then just move those points elsewhere. If you read through the talents and understand them, you should be able to pick and choose which talents are appropriate for the situation, or which aren't.

I'm not entirely sure in which cases it would do more harm than good, though. For example, a Shambling Horror is moving slowly because of Desecration while you're moving out for transition, and you need to move it quickly? That's what Death Grip is for. You also have a Ghoul stun to utilize as well, if you really need to clutch-interrupt a shockwave.

I dont aggre with more than Lichbourne and Scourge Strike talents tho...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...9/IMG_2201.PNG
- WatcherDev

Can u link the frost hybrid one with Imp. Icy Talons pls? And can someone else link unholy Tank spec that u (other dk tanks) play?

Id personaly go something like:
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#j0Er...cxhIz0bxchp0uc
or maybe:
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#jZhx...cxhIz0bxchp0uc

Imp. Icy Talons build: http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#j0bZ...cgGh00dxcuzbuc
Sub-optimal sturdiness in the build which can be clearly seen, but it's a trade-off for raid comp. Can be fine for 10-mans where you're the only DK and you over-gear the content.

The main difference between the spec I just linked and the first spec you linked is that you invested in more threat via Killing Machine, while I went for the utility of Lichborne and Icy Reach. I prefer Chill of the Grave & Runic Power Mastery over Glacier Rot in terms of threat increase and just having the extra Runic Power is nice sometimes. I'm of the opinion that all DK's should have at least one Runic Power generation talent, but Dirge is just awful for tanking. Chill of the Grave grants the same Runic Power boost at half the rune cost, on top of it coming from your primary source of threat for single target (Icy Touch).

- Killing Machine is a good threat generator talent for single target, that's for sure. But I wouldn't go more than 3/5.
- Lichborne is good for Blood Queen fight, and it allows you to dump your Runic Power to heal yourself.
- Icy Reach is a preference of mine because it requires me to run less in order to pick things up off people via Icy Touch.
- I would only consider Black Ice particularly useful with Wandering Plague and Plague Strike.
- Unholy Command is great if you're regularly using Death Grip on an encounter that has grippable mobs. LK, Halion, Deathbringer, etc.
- Epidemic allows you to spend more time Death Striking if you have a threat lead and spend more death runes on Death Strike.
- Master of Ghouls is something I consider to be a "must have" if you are going to grab Night of the Dead. It lowers your ghoul's CD down far enough to where you don't really have to worry about it dying and not have it available for Death Pact. It also gives your a ghoul the ability to be controlled, and it has a stun ability. Both of which can be very useful.
- Desolation I don't consider it to be really worth the points invested in it, as it requires a lot of invested points to make it good. I would only put points there if you feel you have nowhere else to put them.
- One point in Improved Unholy Presence replaces Tuskarr's, which allows you to use the pure stamina enchant on your boots. A second point is just as good as the first.
- I would comment on Wandering Plague, Scourge Strike and Rage of Rivendare, but seems you prefer a hybrid spec. You won't be able to have any of these talents in a hybrid spec.

- Spell Deflection is one of the big things I dislike about Blood. It's RNG and both other specs have talents that provide straight non-RNG spell damage mitigation via Acclimation (Frost) and Magic Suppression/Anti-Magic Zone/Bone Shield (Unholy).

But, how i see it, neather one of those specs can beat the frost blood hybrid:
http://wotlk.openwow.com/talent#j0Er...obsZhxbxcMIzZz
U get soo many defencives with this and u buff the raid so much its just ******ed. 10% atk power, 20% melee haste, 20% phisical dmg increase on ur top dps. Only problem with it is that u dont have AOE aggro since DND doesnt do much...

Hey, if that's what you prefer. More power to you. 10% attack power raid buff is moot the moment any Marksman Hunter or Enhance Shaman join the raid. And I think we both know that Marksman Hunters are common to the point where most raid leaders want at least one in the raid, regardless of 10 or 25 man raid size. It's probably the least important buff a DK could bring to a raid group for that very reason. Whereas, Crypt Fever/Ebon Plaguebringer is always wanted and can't be replaced by anything but another Unholy DK for two reasons: It boosts disease damage (other DKs and Shadow Priests are happy) and it boosts magic damage on the target (whole raid is happy) and allows any Warlock to use their damage-dealing curse instead (Warlock is extra happy).

So... Blood MT, Unholy OT? Perfect!

[dike]

So u basicly rely only on bone shield? What if something hits u more than u expected and u are left for 30sec without a single CD?

ye, thats why with -20% chance to dodge from chill of the throne or twillight precision hurts so much for bone shield.

[angrylol]

It should be obvious by now, after 8 years of this content, that Unholy mitigates more damage while compared to Blood. Every single graphic found on the internet can provide your answer to that. Theorycraft such a thing after 8 years of proper experiments by the best raiders out there makes me cringe.

The only thing that we can agree is that Blood is the "Tanking for Dummies" spec. If you're unexperienced and untalented by nature you should keep yourself playing Blood. Other than that, don't spread misinformation when you're lacking experience about other specs.

Talking about cringe...

Tankink for dummees or imba-skilled-pro-earningmoneybyplaying unholy tank it boils down to some simple things.
Unholy has maximum 26% "mitigation" - bone shield and Magic suppresion, part of this wowomgsostronk is 1min CD. With minimal uptime 4.5 seconds, if you are lucky you can stretch that to maybe 15 seconds. It is good CD and it has potential, but don't oversell it. Army of the Dead is 6mins CD, that counts for something and you can consume ghoul on every death pact cd, but I wouldnt add this as big "pro" of spec.

Frost has stacking megic resistance, that is worth about 20% less magic damage taken, armor/parry CD which is losing its value with every piece of gear you get and 3% less chance to be hit.

Blood has passive 100% uptime on any damage Will of the necropolis, that will work as soon as you are in danger. Vamp blood that you gyph to 15 second and it gets only stronger with gear, boosts your health pool and boosts healing receieved(DS+RT yo). And deflection talent that is kinda meh, but still feels good even once per raid to see reduced shadowbolt or something.

So choice is obvious, of coarse when you get bored you make unholy-shmoly-frosty specs, argue that those are best on forums and stuff, but please don't misinform people.

[magaginho]

Talking about cringe...

TL;DR. Not going to discuss something that isn't rocket science. Open your browser, google the results from live content and be amazed by the output provided by that same search. I'm tired of wasting my time discussing with idiocy in general.

[Justmarried]

Talking about cringe, this whole thread went crazy. Dude just asked if blood is best tank spec and this all turned into keyboard wars. Feelsbadmen

[magaginho]

Talking about cringe, this whole thread went crazy. Dude just asked if blood is best tank spec and this all turned into keyboard wars. Feelsbadmen

Don't you know?

Everyone has to be right in this threads.

[Justmarried]

Don't you know?

Everyone has to be right in this threads.

Sigh... For crying out loud, Trump winning elections is less cancer than this thread.

[Mercy]

Talking about cringe, this whole thread went crazy. Dude just asked if blood is best tank spec and this all turned into keyboard wars. Feelsbadmen

I still stand by my initial post.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with friendly discussion.

[Handepsilon]

I guess that's what happens when you distribute tank and dps talent on all three available specs. There's just too much variations that no one can agree which one's the true best.

I guess my opinion about DK specs is that they are one of the most adventurous one to explore. So much potential, so little points.

[densi77]

Death Strike for Unholy is also more potent than it is for Frost (3 diseases for it to scale with).

Yeah because Threat of Thassarian is bugged and doesn't give the Offhand heal from Death Strike. Otherwise, the 3rd Unholy disease, Improved Death Strike and Threat of Thassarian would boost all Death Strikes, no matter the spec.
The bug is on bugtracker and in the bug discussion thread if you want to read up on it.

[Mercy]

Yeah because Threat of Thassarian is bugged and doesn't give the Offhand heal from Death Strike. Otherwise, the 3rd Unholy disease, Improved Death Strike and Threat of Thassarian would boost all Death Strikes, no matter the spec.
The bug is on bugtracker and in the bug discussion thread if you want to read up on it.

I'm aware, and I don't consider exploits as a supportive point to the discussion. Thank you.

[DarkenedHue]

Not necessarily, WotN works only when you are in "danger" and before that there is not much to reduce damage, while Bone shield can be used very smartly and passive magic dmg reduction from talents gives less overall damage taken. Idk if numbers are precise, but could be. That does not mean anything.

Actually it's very necessary. His figures show his Unh tank taking around 35% less melee damage with each hit. Even if you were generous and allowed Bone Shield consistently at least 15 seconds of uptime with each use, and ignored WotN as well as how Blood's higher ehp, that shouldn't be much more than a 7% difference in melee damage taken.

[angrylol]

Actually it's very necessary. His figures show his Unh tank taking around 35% less melee damage with each hit. Even if you were generous and allowed Bone Shield consistently at least 15 seconds of uptime with each use, and ignored WotN as well as how Blood's higher ehp, that shouldn't be much more than a 7% difference in melee damage taken.

Yeah, numbers may be exaggerated or whatever. The point is if you as tank are dying from constant damage there is something wrong. Most dangerous moments are "damage spikes" like Blistering+Breath. And mere 20% damage reduction can be simply not enough. Compared to Bloods passive 15% reduction plus Vampiric Blood. Average damage taken is not the characteristic that should influence choice too much, maybe in situation where you are doing heroic with healers in t9 sets.

[dike]

Yeah because Threat of Thassarian is bugged and doesn't give the Offhand heal from Death Strike. Otherwise, the 3rd Unholy disease, Improved Death Strike and Threat of Thassarian would boost all Death Strikes, no matter the spec.
The bug is on bugtracker and in the bug discussion thread if you want to read up on it.

lel so finnaly, when that **** was fixed u struggle? feelsgoodman

[blackfriars]

This thread lol.
The main question was really unclear and doesnt imply whether he is playing on Lordaeron OR Icecrown which is a huge factor when it comes to the actual instance he wants to tank. For Lordaeron the Unholy would arguable be the most effective relative to other mitigation tanks but frost and blood are not to be discredited for current Lord progression aka TOC either since they are just different tank styles (Prot Pal, Prot War,UH dk, frost dk=> Mitigation tanks, Blood dks, bears->stamina tanks aka punching bags(btw im not implying blood dks should go full stamina)). While on the stale progression of Icecrown you have a pretty clear idea of what tanks have the upper hand on tanking and with upper hand i mean marginally "better". And UH dk just comes short in icc and rs due to the nature of the environments of the instances(huge stamina buff in icc, huge avoidance nerf in both icc and rs (currently not working in rs but due to halion melee swingtimer reset bug the reason the boss is even close to doable). Those specific environments just give some little edges towards the blood tanks while the avoidance loss is a huge downside for the UH dk. People keep talking about how Death strike spamming is sort of the main reason to play a blood tank and then trying do dismantle the argument by saying it heals only 5% more than an UH dk death strike, but first of all 5% is 5% and in an icc environment with insane health numbers 20% frankly a big deal but the main reason to be a blood tank is the tier9 talent point will of the necropolis which reduces damage taken by 15% below 35% HP which is INSANE, this talent basically can let you prevent every death if your Blood Rune management is on point and you save at least 1 blood rune for reactionary use.
Now i see people also discrediting the blood tank as a faceroll tank while saying UH is a more complex tank. i thought about that a while but simply cant work my head around that, because there is basically no difference in sort of "play-style" when it comes to uh<>blood since the only thing that changes might be 1st your gear 2nd Vampiric blood<>Bone Shield 3rd less defensive talents on UH dk side. Everything else is pretty much the same when it comes to actually tanking a boss. Additionally back to the "faceroll" argument, whoever is saying that has either never played in an heroic environment or never had the motivation to improve, because whoever you are, chances that your def cd rotation, rune management and death strike/threat control is perfect is close to impossible, there is ALWAYS something you could have done differently/better in each situation of an encounter.

So to give some final statement: It doesnt matter what you do, just be clear of the consequences. if you want to tryhard and progress on icecrown you should chose the best spec available for that certain progression state which would be Blood, but when you just want to have fun and try something different go for the marginally weaker UH, its certainly not "unenviable" but you might encounter a few stepping stones. When you play on Lordaeron you probably have the widest range of options as a dk tank. Both UH and frost are really strong ( btw with current state of threat of thassaria you might want to consider a 2H frost tank similar to this since using 1handers got kinda pointless without that ) and while blood doesnt have the icc-buff-opness anymore he still has will of the necropolis which makes him incredible hard to kill anyways.