Should DK tank be stacking mastery over stamina or other way round?

[Hellforge]

Should DK tank be stacking mastery over stamina or other way round?

The answer is both are equal (but stamina still slightly more important). How so?

Lets compare a situation where deathstrike does 7% of max hp most of the time (which is the case in current tier, it will take the tank to get 70-80k damage in order to break the 7% limit, which is almost half hp gone.)
DK tank with high hp and relatively low mastery VS DK tank with low hp high mastery

High Stamina tank with just 110% shield:
Raid buffed stamina 210k's will give him a 16.1k blood shield

Low stamina tank with 150% shield:
Raid buffed stamina 160k's will give him a 16.8k blood shield

Lets talk about the high stamina tank, he got his trinkets with stamina + all gems with avoidance + stamina or pure stamina gems. With stoneskin gargoyle enchant and pretty good gears with stamina here and there.

Whereas Low stamina tank have trinkets that is fully mastery ratings and all his gems are mastery +40


So, the theory people always accept is tank should never stack stamina like in wotlk. Is it really true?
Not to a large extend, its still viable and infact might be very important for a tank to have alot of stamina. How so again?

We must understand (im not sure about warrior/pally/druid) that a DK tank requires minimal amount of hit/expertise and reforge them to avoidance and mastery as much as we can. In short, sometimes we will be missing some of our Deathstrikes.

So how does this affect the high stamina tank?
It will not be dire for the high stamina tank because he has alot of hp to take damage and healers can top up within 4-5 seconds.

So how does this affect the low stamina tank?
It does alot, if the tank misses 1-2 deathstrikes in a row, it spells death or very hard time for healers throughout the whole raid to top up the tank.


So we can just cap our hit/expertise so we will never miss a deathstrike?
Nope, it is not viable to cap hit/expertise and sacrifice mastery/parry/dodge. If thats the case, you will end up being a low stamina low mastery DK tank which is bad.

So how can you explain why DK does not need that much hit/expertise? I even seen DK who has zero hit and minimal expertise rating and still do well in Heroic raids?
We are not DPS, what do i mean? Ok lets make an example, a frost DK strikes 100 melee strikes in 1minute. If this frost DK does not have hit and expertise, how many of the 100 strikes will he miss? probably 20-30 strikes which is VERY significant and loss of huge dps.

So what about a tank? In a 1minute time frame, how many strikes or how many deathstrikes can a DK strike in 1minute? A good DK tank who time his DS properly will do around 12-15 DS in 1minute roughly. So with that low hit and exp, he might miss 1-2 DS if you count it. As mentioned, we are not dps, our miss is not a DPS concern, its a survivability concern. We all know clearly, a viable tank in current raid must let the boss hit you without heals for at least 5 strikes and still survive. That is a viable tank, if he misses 1-2 DS in a 1 minute time frame it will not kill him.

To top it off, runes are not used if the strike missed, so in short, it is just a GCD wasted. Any dire situation that arises, pop AMS if magical, pop IBF if melee. A well timed DS will put up a 40-50k blood shield along with healing the DK.

Will it affect the DK's ability to hold aggro if he has low hit/expertise?
No to a large extend, from experience, i pull with DND on the boss + dark command. The hunter and rogue will both MD and tricks, according to omen, the 1st 20 seconds of the fight im holding 300-400% aggro, and as the fight goes on, my aggro stays at 150-170% due to vengence. So no worries on aggro unless you totally auto attack.


A side note on parry/dodge importance:
Parry and dodge is different from a warrior, druid or paladin's one. Their avoidance is simply to mitigate or totally avoid an incoming damage and thats all to it (correct me if im wrong here, i dont have those tanks experiences) But for a DK, If you land a DS that is 40k huge, and manage to parry or dodge the next attack, you will possibly be stacking double blood shield, which means if your previous shield is 40k and the next is 15k-20k, they both add up to a 60-70k shield, literally makes you "melee invulnerable"

Therefore Stamina >= mastery > Parry=dodge


Feel free to correct anything i mistook in the post
The above are just from testing and experience, im 7/13 in a small raid guild

[Rhenaya]

having 40% more mastery only makes 4% more blood shied seems a bit wrong to me

also note that blood shield scales with incoming damage too and not only max healthpoints, so 20% less hp cant be that impacting either

[Hellforge]

having 40% more mastery only makes 4% more blood shied seems a bit wrong to me

also note that blood shield scales with incoming damage too and not only max healthpoints, so 20% less hp cant be that impacting either

erm, yea as i state, in a 7% minimal hp DS context. thats the difference,
common DK tanks will be spamming their DS without collecting the 5second window, that is where their DS suffers. however it will take that tank 80k damage to break the 7% hp limit.

[Deleted]

That's exactly the question I asked myself yesterday.
I share your argumentation and your result^^

Although I use 20mastery-30stam gems and I'm at 150k unbuffed (176k raidbuffed) + 17,25 mastery.

There's one more thing to add. Max life only counts towards your min DS heal. If you are good enough to time it well, you shouldn't need so much stamina because you will always hit more than 7 percent of your life, and the you get also a bigger bloodshield.

So basically you may say that upon your own estimation of performance, choose between stam (if uncomfortable) or mastery (if you're a pro^^). Or do it like me and use mixed gems^^

[Hellforge]

though i feel current 4.1, the difference between mastery and stamina is very very slight. not very big significance so most tanks just balance both out.

highly likely you wont accept a 160k tank in a raid, its too risky and hard on the heals most of the time.


stamina is the easy mode to survival
mastery is the hard mode which require the tank to time his CD and DS very timely.

[Deleted]

Personally, I think the selfheal of DS should stack with damage done. wouldn't be as clunky as it is right now. Althoug it may be overpowered because of vengeance or several bossmechanics. (halfus ololol^^)
After all you steal life from your opponent and if you steal, you don't look on what you already have.

[Saevio]

erm, yea as i state, in a 7% minimal hp DS context. thats the difference,
common DK tanks will be spamming their DS without collecting the 5second window, that is where their DS suffers. however it will take that tank 80k damage to break the 7% hp limit.

The problem with that response though is that you say the common DK tank. Trying to base your numbers on what the common DK tank will do doesn't neccessarily mean they are correct. The whole idea of DK tanking is to properly judge the use of your death strikes to get the biggest heal possible and in return the biggest blood shield possible. Just because the common dk tank is spamming DS doesn't mean they are doing it right. The DK tank mastery is the best tank mastery I believe in-game. It puts the control in the tank hands so to speak. You can either choose to get minimal benefit from it by improperly death striking, or get the maximum gain possible by death striking based on incoming damage. I personally prefer to go with maxxing the benefit of mastery vs. having a higher HP but of course everyone has their own opinion.

[Duckeh001]

From a healers point of view.

Whenever i meet a stamina stacked DK i shiver. All they r good for is a massive mana dump, every fight i have to spam them to keep them up, and it's the only ONLY tank i have to drink in between every pull, as i have to spend closer to 70% or more of 112k mana to keep em up.

[Hellforge]

The problem with that response though is that you say the common DK tank. Trying to base your numbers on what the common DK tank will do doesn't neccessarily mean they are correct. The whole idea of DK tanking is to properly judge the use of your death strikes to get the biggest heal possible and in return the biggest blood shield possible. Just because the common dk tank is spamming DS doesn't mean they are doing it right. The DK tank mastery is the best tank mastery I believe in-game. It puts the control in the tank hands so to speak. You can either choose to get minimal benefit from it by improperly death striking, or get the maximum gain possible by death striking based on incoming damage. I personally prefer to go with maxxing the benefit of mastery vs. having a higher HP but of course everyone has their own opinion.

erm i didnt say u cannot stack mastery lol
i meant they are pretty balanced, instead of the saying of stamina is out, mastery is everything

[Elathi]

I know they're made up numbers, but they seem kind of exaggerated to make a biased point.
A Frost DK (Let's pretend it's 2h spec for simplicity.) with zero hit and expertise would fail to land a blow closer to 14.5 times out of 100 (Assuming boss-level mob and they're behind it.). Though I'm not disputing it's still a big dps loss.
A Blood DK with the same hit and expertise would fail to land 28.5% of Death Strikes out of the stated 12-15. That's more than 1-2 misses.
And about that. Is 12-15 accurate? Fifteen would put it at a rate of one DS every 4 seconds.

[Hellforge]

Anyway, for the replies
ive tested it in both ways
the low hp and the high hp way

i die alot more in low hp than high hp
i thk that tells alot
nothing much to do with skilled or what, im tanking HM for months..all these are experiences i had in all raiding nights regarding tanking issues.

---------- Post added 2011-06-21 at 06:33 PM ----------

From a healers point of view.

Whenever i meet a stamina stacked DK i shiver. All they r good for is a massive mana dump, every fight i have to spam them to keep them up, and it's the only ONLY tank i have to drink in between every pull, as i have to spend closer to 70% or more of 112k mana to keep em up.

yea i understand your point, but my point is on boss, not on pull lol

and a low hp tank will just die before u can spam heals. thats why u are full mana =D

[Duckeh001]

Anyway, for the replies
ive tested it in both ways
the low hp and the high hp way

i die alot more in low hp than high hp
i thk that tells alot
nothing much to do with skilled or what, im tanking HM for months..all these are experiences i had in all raiding nights regarding tanking issues.

---------- Post added 2011-06-21 at 06:33 PM ----------




yea i understand your point, but my point is on boss, not on pull lol

and a low hp tank will just die before u can spam heals. thats why u are full mana =D

You misunderstand my point. With less mitigation by stacking only stamina to raise your HP pool, you take higher incoming hits than a tank with more mitigation. I think it's proven time and time again since cata, this isn't WOTLK, stam stacking is not the way to go anymore. That's the understanding i get from reading blogs and forums at least.

[takolin]

You forgot about improved deathstrike which means your DS heals for 45% more.

So lets go back to the unlikely situation you don't get hit hard and you only get hit for minimal damage and thus DS is linked to your HP.
210k*0.07*1.45 = 21.315k heal which translates into a 23.4465 bloodshield
160k*0.07*1.45 = 16.24k heal which translates into a 24.36k bloodshield

Now I looked our atramedes log and on non blocked hits on our warrior tank he hits for 55k on hc, now assuming he has a debuffed swingtimer of 2.5 seconds, a tank takes 100k damage in a 5 second time span so lets see what that does for bloodshield.

High HP tank. 110k*0.2*1.45= 31.9k heal which translates in a 35.09k bloodshield
Low HP tank. 110k*0.2*1.45: 31.9k heal which translates in a 47.85k bloodshield

[Zka]

You forgot about improved deathstrike which means your DS heals for 45% more.

So lets go back to the unlikely situation you don't get hit hard and you only get hit for minimal damage and thus DS is linked to your HP.
210k*0.07*1.45 = 21.315k heal which translates into a 23.4465 bloodshield
160k*0.07*1.45 = 16.24k heal which translates into a 24.36k bloodshield

Imp DS doesn't work that way.
The talent is applied BEFORE the 7% minimum heal calculation. So it won't raise the minimum heal at all.

And the reason you don't stack exp/hit as blood dk is: 1) you cannot reach expertise hardcap against a raidboss (56 expertise needed). Even if you can, your mastery and avoidance will suffer brutally 2) you don't always have FU runes up when taking unexpected burst damage AND unless you're hard exp+hit capped (see previous point), your DS won't be landing 100% of the time. So DS is not the primarry tool to bring you back from the brink of death. RT, DP, LB+DC is there for that. DS should be used to dampen melee bursts by generating absorb shields. And yeah of course it's a great tool to recover from burst, but it's not the primary tool for that.

[Eijnar]

I think we should bury the "stack" simply because it is not the way to go anymore. We gem for socket bonuses the differnce is if we choose parry / mastery, mastery, stm /mastery or stm, stm / mastery, parry / stm.
The question is - Do we tend to focus on mastery or avoidance or stamina ? If we focus on mastery we get a bigger shield from our DS which can save your butt, but you can also experience 2 x parry /miss in a row and this will make you look more spikey, and spikey is what healers generally dislike. Furthemore, mastery does only increase DS.

Focus on avoidance will make us take less hits overall, but RNG is RNG and we could take 3 hits in a row which will make us look even more spiky, and will make your healers sh#t themselves.

And then we got stamina, which provides no additional "survability" just more HP for the boss to pound through. However, a larger HP pool will make your AMS, Rune Tap, Unglyphed VE become more powerfull and you will likely take more damage, but it will be less spiky compared to the other two, and what is it that gets you killed ? Spikey damage which your healers isn't ready for or can foresee. In addition to that a higher HP pool will also make the use of CDs like IBF, PI and Guardian more "potent" because no matter how you spin it - If you got 50% dmg reduction a person with 150k HP will have to recieve 300K damage in order to die (we exclude avoidance / DS and healing) and a person with 200k HP will have to take 400k damage.

I am personally focusing towards Stm., but my DK is also just a backup tank and I do believe that stm. is the winner "overall". I got no data to support my post, but talking from a healer POV - I'd rater take "stady" heavy damage over "spiky" heavy damage.

[Deleted]

though i feel current 4.1, the difference between mastery and stamina is very very slight. not very big significance so most tanks just balance both out.

highly likely you wont accept a 160k tank in a raid, its too risky and hard on the heals most of the time.


stamina is the easy mode to survival
mastery is the hard mode which require the tank to time his CD and DS very timely.

If you mean 160k unbuffed it's fine for most fights.

[Valleygamer]

Anyway, for the replies
ive tested it in both ways
the low hp and the high hp way

i die alot more in low hp than high hp
i thk that tells alot
nothing much to do with skilled or what, im tanking HM for months..all these are experiences i had in all raiding nights regarding tanking issues.

---------- Post added 2011-06-21 at 06:33 PM ----------




yea i understand your point, but my point is on boss, not on pull lol

and a low hp tank will just die before u can spam heals. thats why u are full mana =D

Ye that tells a lot, it tells you aren't using DS properly, and that your healers suck. Just b/c you tanked HM's for months doesn't mean your way is right or your experience makes it right, right for you maybe. High mastery tank is much much better on single targets, in fact it's their strong point, what he is saying, and I can as a player that has played a holy pally endgame for 4+ years agree, stam stacking dk's are indeed a mana drain, they just soak dmg, that's about it, just more healing to top them off for the next huge unshielded hit. He is at "fuller" mana b/c the good dk tank doesn't take much damage at all, not even so much on trash if cd's used well, L2P imo.

[takolin]

Imp DS doesn't work that way.
The talent is applied BEFORE the 7% minimum heal calculation. So it won't raise the minimum heal at all.

I did not know that, but it still doesn't change the fact that in heroic content you'll more than likely get hit for more than the bare minimum in 5 seconds, which makes total stamina moot to compare a bloodshield size.

[Hellforge]

Ye that tells a lot, it tells you aren't using DS properly, and that your healers suck. Just b/c you tanked HM's for months doesn't mean your way is right or your experience makes it right, right for you maybe. High mastery tank is much much better on single targets, in fact it's their strong point, what he is saying, and I can as a player that has played a holy pally endgame for 4+ years agree, stam stacking dk's are indeed a mana drain, they just soak dmg, that's about it, just more healing to top them off for the next huge unshielded hit. He is at "fuller" mana b/c the good dk tank doesn't take much damage at all, not even so much on trash if cd's used well, L2P imo.

l2read imo
i nvr mentioned must go all stamina, ignore mastery!

[Duckeh001]

Before this dicussion comes out of controle because ppl can't see other ppls difference in opinion, i'll just end my posts with what iv'e stated above, is my view on the suggestion/problem/issue.

I'll stand by my posts, and add. All i know is whenever im in a group where the tank enters with an abnormal high amount of HP i think "oh no not this again!!" And confirming by inspecting the tank is all about getting high HP, i know it's gonna be a terrible run with spamming heals left right and center. It never fails to happen.
Give me a 140-160k tank with correct gems and avoidance and mitigation stats anytime, rather than a 170k+++ mana drain tank.