I know it's a relatively easy task as frost spec, but my DK is speced Unholy and Blood, so I would prefer not having to respec, reglyph, rehotkey (twice) if I could avoid it. It doesn't sound like that's really going to be possible, though. Ugh. Go fuck yourself, Ghostcrawler.
Out of curiosity, do you swap to tank gear for the extra health/survivability? Or do you just stay in DPS gear for the increased damage->threat/rune regen from haste?
In my attempts last night, not being able to snare them wasn't a huge issue; it was having to get into melee range to do decent threat, which forces infections, which spawns more parasites, which just snowballs that way for the rest of the fight. I highly doubt Blizzard Q&A did this fight with a tank spec kiting the parasites -- you just can't consistently get good runs that way.
forty on
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
I havent made the jump to Warrior tanking, but I regularly main tank alongside a warrior or a paladin (3 of us rotate the duties depending on fight) for raids. I havent had complaints from our healers, or I did, until they got used to me taking more damage, but also healing some of that right back after a DS. Part of tanking as DK is having your healers understand that your damage is more spikey but not too panic.
And sometimes our self-healing and defensive cooldowns are awesome for healers. CHimaeron seems to be an easier fight to tank for DK's since DS and Runetap brings us about the 10k mark, making you 1 less person to heal post Massacre.
And AMS, use it for everything you can think it'll work for. Like Nef's electrocute, again 1 less person to heal up, or On Twighlight Ascendant Council for Ignacious' flamethrower thing. With a 45s cooldown and such a big reduction in non-physical damage, its one of my favorites.
There are things I love about DK and you pretty much covered most of them. Being able to clutch heal ourselves with vamp blood+ghoul+ghoul sac is great, same with lichborne healing under vamp blood and of course rune tap. The number of times I've saved situations that went bad by self healing myself from near dead to full and been the last man standing after I kill everything else .. man it's a great feeling. IBF and Vamp blood and AMS being on short cooldowns is great. But at the same time if we aren't using them nearly every time they're up, we're 'bad'.
I think the loss of a shield and the extra mitigation it gives is what I miss most. We self heal and have short cooldowns to make up for the fact that we don't have shields, but I don't think it's enough. Using rune strike and praying that the runes refreshed are ones that I can use for another DS isn't my idea of efficient tanking, and god forbid a fight goes on long enough that our diseases wear off and then we're forced to use a frost and unholy to put up the debuffs again, whereas rend is spread and refreshed via TC. A Pestilance cast refreshs the diseases on other targets but doesn't affect the primary target.
I don't know, like I said it could be a grass is greener mentality.. I love some things about DK tanking.. it just has me wondering is all. Maybe I should just level a warrior up and make the choice for myself haha.
and god forbid a fight goes on long enough that our diseases wear off and then we're forced to use a frost and unholy to put up the debuffs again, whereas rend is spread and refreshed via TC. A Pestilance cast refreshs the diseases on other targets but doesn't affect the primary target.
As far as "maintenance-y" things like that go, warriors have to refresh thunder clap and demo shout pretty often. Both bears and paladins are better off in the "refreshing damage debuffs" department.
I know it's a relatively easy task as frost spec, but my DK is speced Unholy and Blood, so I would prefer not having to respec, reglyph, rehotkey (twice) if I could avoid it. It doesn't sound like that's really going to be possible, though. Ugh. Go fuck yourself, Ghostcrawler.
Out of curiosity, do you swap to tank gear for the extra health/survivability? Or do you just stay in DPS gear for the increased damage->threat/rune regen from haste?
In my attempts last night, not being able to snare them wasn't a huge issue; it was having to get into melee range to do decent threat, which forces infections, which spawns more parasites, which just snowballs that way for the rest of the fight. I highly doubt Blizzard Q&A did this fight with a tank spec kiting the parasites -- you just can't consistently get good runs that way.
I'd say a mix, for me I go with whatever gives me the most mastery, in frost its more frost damage, so bigger HB dmg, in unholy, more damage from any diseases you can spread around so better threat. Death N Decay is a great threat generator. In terms of health and survivability, i guess as unholy or blood you gotta get in close to spread the disease so i guess the dodge and parry helps unsure. I;ve never had to try, but I'd say cant hurt since its not like you'll be doing any real dps on magmaw anyways.
I bit the bullet and fucked up my tank spec last night for a frost kiting spec for heroic Magmaw. Sure enough, that made it ridiculously easy to hold aggro and not get hit by parasites. Only problem is that random parasites are prone to evade bugging for a while if they happen to get on that mound on the north side of the room. Eventually they stop evading and have reset threat and head off toward other people. Hooray for pointless, glitchy geometry!
I'd say a mix, for me I go with whatever gives me the most mastery, in frost its more frost damage, so bigger HB dmg, in unholy, more damage from any diseases you can spread around so better threat. Death N Decay is a great threat generator. In terms of health and survivability, i guess as unholy or blood you gotta get in close to spread the disease so i guess the dodge and parry helps unsure. I;ve never had to try, but I'd say cant hurt since its not like you'll be doing any real dps on magmaw anyways.
Nah, getting into melee isn't viable. Once you start getting infected, you get more random individual parasite spawns that need to be threated (without decent ranged threat tools), which puts you into melee range again and things just spiral out of control. D&D is good threat but unfortunately you need to hang on to it for pillars due to the cooldown, and it alone won't keep things on you for long.
In my attempts last night, not being able to snare them wasn't a huge issue; it was having to get into melee range to do decent threat, which forces infections, which spawns more parasites, which just snowballs that way for the rest of the fight. I highly doubt Blizzard Q&A did this fight with a tank spec kiting the parasites -- you just can't consistently get good runs that way.
Misdirect, yo. Or just have you ranged blow them the fuck up without worrying about kiting them.
Edit: Missed that this was Heroic Magmaw. Apologies.
Yeah, this was heroic Magmaw. You just can't spare having all that DPS repeatedly breaking off to take care of parasites, since between the skeletons and Magmaw you've got a lot of damage that needs to be done.
Like I said in my latest post, I switched to Frost and it became much more doable. It'd be even easier after 4.1 with 4 "frost" runes instead of 2.
Here's a question: Does a second spread of pestilence halve disease damage again?
EG
Outbreak -> Pestilence to a second mob. 100% disease damage on original target, 50% on Pestilence Target
30 seconds later I tab target and hit pestilence again. Diseases are refreshed on original Outbreak Target, diseases on second mob are about to fade, so I pestilence on the original outbreak target. 25% on original target, 12.5% on second mob?
I would guess not, but it's not something I've tested or looked up. It should be easy enough to test on the Ebon Hold dummies, though. There are packs of three pretty close together.
QUestion, since so far hasnt been an issue, but how do you guys maximize dps as a tank? Like a situation would be in 10m Halfus and we use 3 tanks, and I'm the odd tank out after we're done with the drakes. Do I stay in blood presence? what have you guys used as a dps rotation. Another situation is We're just got nef down first time, but still ironing out details, and one possiblity is using a 3rd tank at some times.
I speculate it'd be like I go to unholy presence and play it like a UH DK rotation, except my dps CD is dancing runewapon
I do that. Going Unholy is a bit of a mess because you have to switch from using Rune Strike to Death Coil, which hits less hard, costs more, and is on the wrong button (...), but it has the added benefit of making sure you don't pull aggro back off the tank (this happened to me all the time on Captain Planet if I didn't switch).
I just stay blood presence until there's threat of me pulling aggro, which, depending on the fight, there usually isn't by the time the fight is over. Like on Halfus, I'm only tanking drakes and almost never taunting Halfus unless there's some really unlucky stacking with the other tanks or a cooldown is needed or whatever, so by the time it's Halfus burn time, I'm so far behind on threat there's no issue.
This way I can keep using Rune Strike instead of having to switch to shitty (for blood) DC. I have to imagine RS vs. DC, the 8-second rune refresh, and the slightly higher armor->AP at least balance out with -- if not outright outdo -- the 10% haste/rune regen and GCD of unholy or the 10% damage/RP gain of frost.
So I just got my raid the "0 parasite infections" achievement doing heroic Magmaw this week. I also ended up doing 1.4 million damage to Magmaw over the course of the encounter. And considering we basically were about 5-10 seconds from a total wipe when Magmaw went down, that definitely made the difference. Feels good man.
After one of the Magmaw wipes, my runes (as frost spec) looked like this:
Death, Blood, Frost, Frost, Unholy, Unholy
Somehow, one of my "perma-death" runes was back to being blood only. Using Blood Strike didn't get it to switch back, either. I ended up having to switch spec out of and back to Frost. I saw some screwiness as Unholy as well, but nothing that lasted too long.
Anyone know if RS was fixed to work in macros, yet?
Can't find the raid chat so I will post my woes here
My guild is having serious trouble with Cho'gall. He is getting worship stacks because everyone is running between the adds and the boss, and we are only using two healers so we can beat the dps race. I wish I had shockwave or pally shield so I could make it easier to interrupt the worships but all I have is the range silence on a 2 minute cooldown.
Phew. I feel better. Any suggestions?
InfestedGnome on
AKA [PA]Ilovepandas
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
Can't find the raid chat so I will post my woes here
My guild is having serious trouble with Cho'gall. He is getting worship stacks because everyone is running between the adds and the boss, and we are only using two healers so we can beat the dps race. I wish I had shockwave or pally shield so I could make it easier to interrupt the worships but all I have is the range silence on a 2 minute cooldown.
Phew. I feel better. Any suggestions?
Who are you tanking with? Are you not running adds?
Can't find the raid chat so I will post my woes here
My guild is having serious trouble with Cho'gall. He is getting worship stacks because everyone is running between the adds and the boss, and we are only using two healers so we can beat the dps race. I wish I had shockwave or pally shield so I could make it easier to interrupt the worships but all I have is the range silence on a 2 minute cooldown.
Phew. I feel better. Any suggestions?
I believe Death Grip should break worships now in 4.1, unless I am mixing something up. Mind Freeze too, but it sounds like this is an issue with people Worshipping that are out of range of the raid. So DG is the only ranged Deathknight specific thing I can think of (aside from Strangulate, but that's unconventional).
I'd suggest looking at your raid comp and looking at individual abilites of each person that can break worships. Any form of interrupt works, any disorient, stun, fear, etc works. Anything that makes people lose control of their character.
It's a bit harder to give further advice than that, since I don't know your comp, or your strat, and anything else and it'd start to bleed into raid advice and not DK advice. Perhaps post in the general Chat thread, I'm sure you'll get a lot more views and better overall advice.
Tell people not to run all over the fucking place. They should be stacked/lined-up to ensure slimes are all running through the slows/aoe anyway. And yeah, strangulate and death grip should both work now. Hell, Cho doesn't cleave or anything, I ofter spin him around quick to mind freeze my healer if the rest of the raid is particularly busy.
I have the pvp weapon currently on my DK. Coming back into the game I notice the the new troll zone has a purple axe (trollbane i think) that might be good for me.
The question is which is better?
The pvp weapons has almost 30 raw dps over the other, but it also doesn't have as good of ability bonuses as the axe (to hit and mastery vs crit and resil).
Any thoughts?
Nyht on
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
I have the pvp weapon currently on my DK. Coming back into the game I notice the the new troll zone has a purple axe (trollbane i think) that might be good for me.
The question is which is better?
The pvp weapons has almost 30 raw dps over the other, but it also doesn't have as good of ability bonuses as the axe (to hit and mastery vs crit and resil).
Any thoughts?
Stop looking at DPS on tank weapons.
You want tank secondaries: Mastery, Expertise, Hit. Currently there is only one true epic DK tank weapon and that is Akirus. Reforged Trollbane comes in second, over the other 359 2h weapons.
Honestly, if you can, dump that trashy PvP gear now. Tanking is all about secondaries and PvP gear wastes half of it on resilience.
I have the pvp weapon currently on my DK. Coming back into the game I notice the the new troll zone has a purple axe (trollbane i think) that might be good for me.
The question is which is better?
The pvp weapons has almost 30 raw dps over the other, but it also doesn't have as good of ability bonuses as the axe (to hit and mastery vs crit and resil).
Any thoughts?
Stop looking at DPS on tank weapons.
You want tank secondaries: Mastery, Expertise, Hit. Currently there is only one true epic DK tank weapon and that is Akirus. Reforged Trollbane comes in second, over the other 359 2h weapons.
Honestly, if you can, dump that trashy PvP gear now. Tanking is all about secondaries and PvP gear wastes half of it on resilience.
It's the only piece of PVP gear I have on me. The weapon did me just fine in the past (better than my blue 2 handed I had before) but with these new weapons I was curious. I only look at dps due to 1) threat and 2) death strike heals. Not a number cruncher by any means but it made sense if the dps was higher, I'd heal/bubble for more.
Good to know about the axe though. Guess I'll start running that dungeonf or it.
It's the only piece of PVP gear I have on me. The weapon did me just fine in the past (better than my blue 2 handed I had before) but with these new weapons I was curious. I only look at dps due to 1) threat and 2) death strike heals. Not a number cruncher by any means but it made sense if the dps was higher, I'd heal/bubble for more.
Good to know about the axe though. Guess I'll start running that dungeonf or it.
Death Strike heals are not affected by weapon damage, it's based off incoming damage done to you in the previous 5 seconds. Aside from that, weapon damage/dps doesn't matter too much for threat either, since Vengeance and Rune Strike should take care of that.
Definitely try to get Trollbane if you can, it will be a huge upgrade over a pvp weapon.
A funny thing happened to me today. I was in a heroic trying out frost for the first time since wrath and the tank+dps bailed on the first boss (hurf durf no drop for the shadow priest). Switched to blood to clear trash while we waited for replacements, switched back when they dropped in and apparently every single one of my runes was a death rune.
I'm afraid I did not die on the next trash pull, but it sure was amusing spamming all those howling blasts.
Coconut Monkey on
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
A funny thing happened to me today. I was in a heroic trying out frost for the first time since wrath and the tank+dps bailed on the first boss (hurf durf no drop for the shadow priest). Switched to blood to clear trash while we waited for replacements, switched back when they dropped in and apparently every single one of my runes was a death rune.
I'm afraid I did not die on the next trash pull, but it sure was amusing spamming all those howling blasts.
Yeah, there is a lot of screwiness with runes this patch, especially if you're switching into/out of a frost spec. In some cases, you'll have runes that appear as death runes to your client, but the server knows they aren't and won't let you use, say, death strike or scourge strike with them since they're actually just blood runes in disguise.
So I need a new tanking weapon. I'm tired of looking at Foe Reaper, Wormbreaker won't drop, and apparently Trollbane needs a ZA speed run that I can't seem to do. Is Jeklik's Smasher a reasonable replacement for Foe Reaper, or is it too much lost hit/expertise off Reaper?
Since that debate has proponents on both sides, I'd just recommend getting whatever weapon has the highest level of mastery on it if you're going mastery heavy. In that case, the smasher does fine.
If you have no qualms about being an ass, the Spear is easier to farm since you only have to kill like three trash packs and one boss and then can ditch the group. And of course you'll piss off any hunters and/or feral druids interested in it if you win the roll.
I run three dungeons specifically every day, Lost City, Stonecore and Throne of Tides (in whatever order they come up). So far I've yet to see the Spear, the Sword or the Axe from those dungeons.
Being an Orc, I'd prefer to get the Axe to replace my current mace for DPS and if I did I could swap the Runeforge on the mace to tanking. But I'll take whatever at this point... and actually, I've had multiple runs where no one else would've used the Spear if it did drop.
There are other things from all of those dungeons I also want... but not a single other one has dropped either. I have seriously had absolutely no luck with drops since returning from a two month absence. It's annoying.
In other news... first of my set of runs tonight was Throne of the Tides. Eagle Ray Cloak didn't drop, but the Whitefin Axe finally did (not as good for me as the Axe from Springvale, but PuGs have been skipping him lately.)
Later Edit: And in other weird news, the LFD tool put me into a H VP that was in progress... in fact, they were fighting the second boss. Right after I got in, the healer welcomed me and mentioned I was from the same server. I was concentrating on killing the dragon, but afterwards, I realized they were all from my server... then realized I recognized the healer's name, and the hunter's name. They were alts of some friends of mine from an old guild. Small world.
So we raped H VP and proceeded to queue up for 2 more dungeons, Lost City, which finally dropped the Heart of Solace (no spear though), and then Grim Batol, where the last boss dropped the Circle of Bone! And then I had enough to buy the DPS JP shoulders, so not bad at all. I'm finally hit/expertise capped for heroics too, so that should help slightly.
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Out of curiosity, do you swap to tank gear for the extra health/survivability? Or do you just stay in DPS gear for the increased damage->threat/rune regen from haste?
In my attempts last night, not being able to snare them wasn't a huge issue; it was having to get into melee range to do decent threat, which forces infections, which spawns more parasites, which just snowballs that way for the rest of the fight. I highly doubt Blizzard Q&A did this fight with a tank spec kiting the parasites -- you just can't consistently get good runs that way.
There are things I love about DK and you pretty much covered most of them. Being able to clutch heal ourselves with vamp blood+ghoul+ghoul sac is great, same with lichborne healing under vamp blood and of course rune tap. The number of times I've saved situations that went bad by self healing myself from near dead to full and been the last man standing after I kill everything else .. man it's a great feeling. IBF and Vamp blood and AMS being on short cooldowns is great. But at the same time if we aren't using them nearly every time they're up, we're 'bad'.
I think the loss of a shield and the extra mitigation it gives is what I miss most. We self heal and have short cooldowns to make up for the fact that we don't have shields, but I don't think it's enough. Using rune strike and praying that the runes refreshed are ones that I can use for another DS isn't my idea of efficient tanking, and god forbid a fight goes on long enough that our diseases wear off and then we're forced to use a frost and unholy to put up the debuffs again, whereas rend is spread and refreshed via TC. A Pestilance cast refreshs the diseases on other targets but doesn't affect the primary target.
I don't know, like I said it could be a grass is greener mentality.. I love some things about DK tanking.. it just has me wondering is all. Maybe I should just level a warrior up and make the choice for myself haha.
I'd say a mix, for me I go with whatever gives me the most mastery, in frost its more frost damage, so bigger HB dmg, in unholy, more damage from any diseases you can spread around so better threat. Death N Decay is a great threat generator. In terms of health and survivability, i guess as unholy or blood you gotta get in close to spread the disease so i guess the dodge and parry helps unsure. I;ve never had to try, but I'd say cant hurt since its not like you'll be doing any real dps on magmaw anyways.
Nah, getting into melee isn't viable. Once you start getting infected, you get more random individual parasite spawns that need to be threated (without decent ranged threat tools), which puts you into melee range again and things just spiral out of control. D&D is good threat but unfortunately you need to hang on to it for pillars due to the cooldown, and it alone won't keep things on you for long.
Misdirect, yo. Or just have you ranged blow them the fuck up without worrying about kiting them.
Edit: Missed that this was Heroic Magmaw. Apologies.
Like I said in my latest post, I switched to Frost and it became much more doable. It'd be even easier after 4.1 with 4 "frost" runes instead of 2.
EG
Outbreak -> Pestilence to a second mob. 100% disease damage on original target, 50% on Pestilence Target
30 seconds later I tab target and hit pestilence again. Diseases are refreshed on original Outbreak Target, diseases on second mob are about to fade, so I pestilence on the original outbreak target. 25% on original target, 12.5% on second mob?
I speculate it'd be like I go to unholy presence and play it like a UH DK rotation, except my dps CD is dancing runewapon
This way I can keep using Rune Strike instead of having to switch to shitty (for blood) DC. I have to imagine RS vs. DC, the 8-second rune refresh, and the slightly higher armor->AP at least balance out with -- if not outright outdo -- the 10% haste/rune regen and GCD of unholy or the 10% damage/RP gain of frost.
Having 4 frost runes all the time is really nice.
Bad Times: Rune system is horribly, brutally fucked up. Still. Wee, tanking with no death strikes!
THey hotfixed it though, i think the issue had to do with the new frost dk blood of the north thing. Didnt have problems last night after the hotfix
Still happening. Just happened to me a few hours ago.
Death, Blood, Frost, Frost, Unholy, Unholy
Somehow, one of my "perma-death" runes was back to being blood only. Using Blood Strike didn't get it to switch back, either. I ended up having to switch spec out of and back to Frost. I saw some screwiness as Unholy as well, but nothing that lasted too long.
Anyone know if RS was fixed to work in macros, yet?
My guild is having serious trouble with Cho'gall. He is getting worship stacks because everyone is running between the adds and the boss, and we are only using two healers so we can beat the dps race. I wish I had shockwave or pally shield so I could make it easier to interrupt the worships but all I have is the range silence on a 2 minute cooldown.
Phew. I feel better. Any suggestions?
AKA [PA]Ilovepandas
Who are you tanking with? Are you not running adds?
I believe Death Grip should break worships now in 4.1, unless I am mixing something up. Mind Freeze too, but it sounds like this is an issue with people Worshipping that are out of range of the raid. So DG is the only ranged Deathknight specific thing I can think of (aside from Strangulate, but that's unconventional).
I'd suggest looking at your raid comp and looking at individual abilites of each person that can break worships. Any form of interrupt works, any disorient, stun, fear, etc works. Anything that makes people lose control of their character.
It's a bit harder to give further advice than that, since I don't know your comp, or your strat, and anything else and it'd start to bleed into raid advice and not DK advice. Perhaps post in the general Chat thread, I'm sure you'll get a lot more views and better overall advice.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
I have the pvp weapon currently on my DK. Coming back into the game I notice the the new troll zone has a purple axe (trollbane i think) that might be good for me.
The question is which is better?
The pvp weapons has almost 30 raw dps over the other, but it also doesn't have as good of ability bonuses as the axe (to hit and mastery vs crit and resil).
Any thoughts?
Stop looking at DPS on tank weapons.
You want tank secondaries: Mastery, Expertise, Hit. Currently there is only one true epic DK tank weapon and that is Akirus. Reforged Trollbane comes in second, over the other 359 2h weapons.
Honestly, if you can, dump that trashy PvP gear now. Tanking is all about secondaries and PvP gear wastes half of it on resilience.
It's the only piece of PVP gear I have on me. The weapon did me just fine in the past (better than my blue 2 handed I had before) but with these new weapons I was curious. I only look at dps due to 1) threat and 2) death strike heals. Not a number cruncher by any means but it made sense if the dps was higher, I'd heal/bubble for more.
Good to know about the axe though. Guess I'll start running that dungeonf or it.
Death Strike heals are not affected by weapon damage, it's based off incoming damage done to you in the previous 5 seconds. Aside from that, weapon damage/dps doesn't matter too much for threat either, since Vengeance and Rune Strike should take care of that.
Definitely try to get Trollbane if you can, it will be a huge upgrade over a pvp weapon.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
I'm afraid I did not die on the next trash pull, but it sure was amusing spamming all those howling blasts.
Meant hit/expertise, I mistyped.
Unfortunately the fucking thing *never* drops, so good luck.
Being an Orc, I'd prefer to get the Axe to replace my current mace for DPS and if I did I could swap the Runeforge on the mace to tanking. But I'll take whatever at this point... and actually, I've had multiple runs where no one else would've used the Spear if it did drop.
There are other things from all of those dungeons I also want... but not a single other one has dropped either. I have seriously had absolutely no luck with drops since returning from a two month absence. It's annoying.
Later Edit: And in other weird news, the LFD tool put me into a H VP that was in progress... in fact, they were fighting the second boss. Right after I got in, the healer welcomed me and mentioned I was from the same server. I was concentrating on killing the dragon, but afterwards, I realized they were all from my server... then realized I recognized the healer's name, and the hunter's name. They were alts of some friends of mine from an old guild. Small world.
So we raped H VP and proceeded to queue up for 2 more dungeons, Lost City, which finally dropped the Heart of Solace (no spear though), and then Grim Batol, where the last boss dropped the Circle of Bone! And then I had enough to buy the DPS JP shoulders, so not bad at all. I'm finally hit/expertise capped for heroics too, so that should help slightly.
All in all a good night via some crazy LFD luck.