Minor issues as a Frost Tank

Post by Thraisenth

After getting owned for threat in a BT raid as a 2h wielding unholy tank (spec), by a dual wielding badly specced frost tank I took a good long look at my gear my spec and my rotations, I was doing everyhting I could and this guy was still putting out equal to and sometimes more threat than me and his gear was a fair bit worse than mine (I'm in mostly heroic/emblem/crafted epics, he was in dungeon/crafted blues). This has lead me to take a second look at Going Frost for tanking and I have come up with this build, I "think" that it has all the bases covered for the msot part and has decent rheat output, however I feel that I should have Epidemic in there but I'm not sure where to take the points from to put into it, any suggestions here with reasons would be greatly appreciated, also should I be going for multirune abilities, eg HB whenever it is off CD and Oblit otherwise or spamming Icy Touch and howling blast whilst keeping blood plague up, atm I have been keeping both diseases up and been using HB where possible otherwise Oblit, is this right?

Thanks in advance for any clarification and help you can provide :)

Post by 259032

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Post by Thraisenth

Well I'm quite liking Imp Icy Talons as in my guild atm we only have an ele sham so it won't be overwritten, and we have a melee team of about 5 so thats quite a dps boost, I'm happy with the frost part of my spec, its just juggling about the 2 points into epidemic or whether or not its worth it. Also I may have neglected to mention I'm solely a tank and so pure DPS talents aren't something I am overly worried about, which is why I prefer Bladed Armour to Dark Conviction as I'm getting about 700 AP form that atm, which is a much more constant threat increase than a small amount of crit.

Post by 233242

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Post by Thraisenth

Yes I see how you mean that there Zetta, I'd been converting my old Unholy rotation into one for Frost which just doesn't work as Unholy is more spamming Scourge Strike whereas Frost is trying to have the runes ready for HBs whenever possible whilst maintaining diseases, Thanks for the clarification about that though :)

Now onto the other point of this thread, should I be taking Epidemic in my build and if so what talents should I move to it?

Post by visas

you shouldnt have had problems with threat as unholy, the issue is more likely in your rotation than your build. Either that, or the frost DK was pulling off howling blasts two seconds into the fight without waiting for you to get diseases up.

Honestly, the only time I've ever had threat issues as unholy is when:
a) Another tanking class taunts the mob off me
b) DPS go all out before I can even get my diseases onto the target

Unholy needs around 4-5 seconds to get solid aggro on a single target, and a few more to get aggro on an aoe pull, especially if you start with no runic power. Standard rotation on single targets is Icy -> Plague -> Scourge Strike -> Blood strike x2, and until you land that scourge strike you're going to be struggling for threat. On AoE pulls, always start with death and decay, then icy/plague/pestilence to get your diseases spread out, and pop unholy blight as soon as you have enough runic power for it.

That's really the difference between frost and unholy for threat at the moment - frost is all about big burst damage, so it has a lot of instant threat but only moderate sustained threat. Unholy takes a little bit of time to get going, but once you're set up nothing is going to pull aggro off of you.

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Post by Thraisenth

Hmmm, I get what you're saying there visas, I use that same rotation although I swap PS and IT around so that IT hits for a good 1.3k or so due to the increased damage it receives and when it came to MS in BT I was able to get a good few seconds lead and I flew ahead of others on threat, however I really am starting to like the frost playstyle as for burst threat it is similar to a prot pally which I used to play. Thinking I may stick with frost and see how it goes however I've noticed a slight decrease in survivability, or it could have just been I had a different healer to usual in todays round of heroics, will need a few more days to test to see how it fares in survivability against my old unholy build because threatwise using pretty standard rotations for both I was doing approx 200 more DPS on a single target dummy as frost than I did as unholy (taking 100dps off to aco#$%^ for multitarget HBs).

I was thinking of taking the points from 2h weapon spec but I was also considering that maybe 2 points from bladed armour might be less of a threat decrease, that said at the time of writing this I'm starting to think does 2h wepaon spec matter that much for frost because a large portion of my threat will come from HBs which is purely an AP coefficient and so 2h weapon spec has no affect, will respec for this and see how it goes, I'd just like to thank you all for your help here, good to know that we have some helpful intelligent people amongst some of the speel I've seen on these forums :)

Post by Papercolor

Post by Thraisenth

Id really like to see how on earth unholy or blood is anywhere near as good as frost for tanking...threat, avoidance, dmg reduction. etc.

I dont like healing unholy/blood tanks and have left groups many times because of it.

Having seen you post a couple times in other threads about this I have decided I may aswell ask in a thread I started, why the hell not? You can't just say Frost is better for threat avoidance and mitigation and then not say why(well you can but it only makes you look like an ignorant ...person, for want of a better word), I'm finding that I was able to survive a lot more punishment as Unholy than I am Currently as frost and I'm just toughing it out till we get our passive mitigation buffed so I ask you this;

Why is Unholy and possibly to a lesser extent Blood "anywhere near as good" as a frost spec for tanking? and I want numbers, not just "Oh some unholy guy with points all over the palce wasn't a good tank".

Post by Papercolor

Post by Infinitekaos

Once again.

Unholy has this "bone armor" and magic suppression.....

Bone armor...5 hits....only 5 hits...get some dmg meters and see how fast 5 hits goes.

Magic Suppression....acclimation + frost aura is nearly as good.

Ill let you look at the numbers youself

Frost . Frigid Dreadplate, Unbreakable armor, as said above acclimation + frost aura ( its like 150+ resistance), 6 sec added to icebound fortitued.

Notice how on any of my posts ive never said ANYTHING about threat?

You do know that there is an internal cooldown associated with Bone Shield? So eventhough you may get hit 5 times, I find that on most bosses with a decent amount of avoidance Bone Shield will last for longer than UBA and works on magic damage as well. Even on fast hitting bosses like patchwork, the internal cooldown of my bone shield still lasts a significant amount of time.

However, that being said, I will be respeccing back to frost for tanking once 3.0.8 goes live. I like it better for AoE tanking as Howling Blast is an absolute beast as is Frost Strike.

Post by Afoxi

Once again.

Unholy has this "bone armor" and magic suppression.....

Bone armor...5 hits....only 5 hits...get some dmg meters and see how fast 5 hits goes.

Magic Suppression....acclimation + frost aura is nearly as good.

Ill let you look at the numbers youself

Frost . Frigid Dreadplate, Unbreakable armor, as said above acclimation + frost aura ( its like 150+ resistance), 6 sec added to icebound fortitued.

Notice how on any of my posts ive never said ANYTHING about threat?

I'm not really a fan of Unholy, but I've seen Bone shield last a whole 12 seconds when this guy i knew pulled the entire Stormwind Stockade and triggered it. Unglyphed.

I'd say it behaves similar to a Shaman's Elemental shield, there's an internal cooldown for each charge.

EDIT: Where a shaman's shield effect activates when a charge is depleted, Bone Shield's effect persists as long as there's at least a single charge remaining.

EDIT 2: 3 to maybe 3.5 seconds cooldown per charge. Someone on the Bone Shield page mentoned the 3.5 second cooldown.

Post by 146010

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Post by Thraisenth

Notice how on any of my posts ive never said ANYTHING about threat?Id really like to see how on earth unholy or blood is anywhere near as good as frost for tanking...threat, avoidance, dmg reduction. etc.

I dont like healing unholy/blood tanks and have left groups many times because of it.

I see....

Bone armour, serious unholy tanks will have this glyphed, so assuming that at the worst this has a 2 second internal cooldown per charge thats 10 seconds, assuming at best it has a 3.5 second colldown between each charge thats 17.5 seconds, which is about all it would last on a large pull I agree, however on a boss with decent mititgation and a little bit of luck you cna keep that up for msot of the BS duration and then when that falls off pop IBF and wait for the cooldown on BS to finish.

If we're talking heroics then the amount of magic reduction provided by Magic Suppression is quite probably better than 80 resistance due to it being a flat reduction which at that level is going to be larger than partial resists, in raids frost aura overlaps with a pallys resistance auras and so provides no bonus that an unholy tank could not get otherwise. Acclimation, now here's the fun one, it has a 30% chance to proc on each spellcast. so the first few spells are quite probably going to hit you fully anyway whilst you wait and hope for acclimation to proc an unhoy tank would already be having fun with the casters because his magic damage reduction is up all the time and he doesn't have to hope it will proc. As I beleive visas said on another thread, the only time you can really rely on acclimation is on a fight where there is constant magic damage bombarding you, and here I agree it really shines, I'm actually taking my points out of morbidity for it because its very good to have on fights where you can rely on it, nowhere near as good against general trash though.

And finally, since respeccing frost I have not even noticed the increase in avoidance provided to me by frigid dreadplate, I'm not disputing its value in a min/max kind of way but for general purposes you wouldn't notice whether or not it was there I have found from personal experience. Oh and a lengthened IBF coupled with Unbreakable Armour does not really stand up to BS in terms of mitigation versus bosses, and for trash IBF lasts for about as long as you need it as unholy anyway.

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Post by Gorgangio

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Wildhammer&n=Carmel

pew pew my cookie cutter tank spec. Any questions about it please ask i can be asked to explain it all!

http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t36998-dk_tanking_discussion/p20/#post994487

Explain some of it there but my spec has changed since then

Post by Thraisenth

Post by Gorgangio

Oop my bad thought you wanted unholy builds as there were problems with frost >.< Sorry =[

Minor issues as a Frost Tank

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