[Guide] Active Mitigation Hipsters - 5.4 DK Tanking

[blackspark]

My current concern is about the tier 15 trinkets, all of them are... awful from a blood dk perspective as far as i've tested.

Soul Barrier has a nice amount of stamina and will be used by pretty much by everyone but the on-use absorb i've only found it useful on things like horridon's combo breaker (melee+triple puncture+dire call), and it is lackluster even there.

Delicate Vial... i can only see it being used for challenge modes since it's usually bad idea for a dk to tank great amounts of adds on a raid enviroment, not to mention that a 4% proc chance on dodges makes it completely undesirable for single target tanking.

Ji-Kun's Rising Winds. The 40-45k heal is barely noticeable, you have better panic buttons to press on that threshold and if you spiked so low chances are that you procced purgatory and that heal will actually kill you; besides, blood dks gain very little from expertise beyond 7.5%.

Steadfast Talisman is barely decent but rng can still mess you up.

Fortitude of the Zandalari is the best one so far and self explainatory.

Spark of Zandalar would be the only dps trinket suitable for tanking (although not optimal), but you obviously shouldn't take it over your dps.

I'm currently using Soul Barrier with H;Vial of Dragon's Blood, and i can't really see any of these trinkets as an upgrade except for Fortitude of the Zandalari.

Thoughts?

[Reniat]

You pretty much hit it on the head in terms of what trinkets we'll be using. For the most part it will be barrier + fortitude and then barrier + lao chin's liquid courage (yes the 5.0 VP trinket) for double stamina trinkets. We don't really have any "great" trinkets like Indomitable Pride from T13, but we have a stam trinket and a mastery trinket, and we don't really need much more than that.

[Thalenas]

Do you think 10 man heroic Horridon can be done with a blood dk tank solo tanking the boss the entire fight like prot paladins, prot warriors and monks can do. If so do you have any tips and tricks for it?

[Nillo]

The boss itself is no problem as long as you have 2 paladins for HoP - if you talk about also tanking the adds I don't think it's reasonable to do that as a dk.

[Thalenas]

Unfortunately theres only 1 paladin in the group so 3 HoP's total throughout the fight will be available. also no priests or resto druids for pain sup or ironbark. heal comp consists of a holy pally and a monk

I was thinking of going with SSG and glyphed IBF + unglyphed VB for the extra hp and getting 10 charges on my BT before the tripple puncture so i can build up a shield right before it hits+ holding to at least 1 pair of frost+ unh runes so i can use it for an extra DS , for trinkets i have Fortitude of the Zandalari's CD.

and no i don't talk about also tanking adds, just being able to stay full time on Boss only the entire fight or at least to the point where Ja'lak is down.

[Hunter Extraordinaire]

Hey, I recently got

http://www.wowhead.com/item=95727

And am not sure whether to use or not...I'm only running lfr's and normal MSV normal... (Just a group of Friends having fun)

Other trinkets I'm using at the moment

http://www.wowhead.com/item=81243
&
http://www.wowhead.com/item=79329/relic-of-niuzao

Thanks

[Reniat]

With those options i'd go with Ji-Kun's rising wind (reforged from exp->mastery) and your relic of niuzao.

[Thalenas]

nobody has any ideas or suggestions regarding my question?

[Reniat]

I'm curious what benefit having one tank stay on horridon gives you. You don't remove a tank, you still need 2. You just complicate things by not allowing the horridon tank to drop stacks without a gimmick method with HoP. What's so bad about having the tank's swap add duty each door? are you doing something else with adds that doesn't require a tank?

[Thalenas]

It's just a part of a trial so i was asked to do it and i was looking for ideas or suggestions on top of what I already have in my head to make it work.

[Nillo]

Well I'm solo tanking horridon as well but we also have 2 paladins for a total of 4 HoP - and out of those I need at least 3 to survive until the last phase.

Advantage of doing this? I think we're still one of the worst aoe tanks and one of the best tanks for low-medium single target damage.

[Thalenas]

I will have 3 HoP's available so can you share your personal survivability strat if you don't mind

I also noticed that you have a very interesting reforging, having 11,40% expertise, is there something i am missing by having 7.5%?

[Reniat]

We're fine AoE tanks. We're not the best AoE tanks, or even 2nd best, but we're completely viable AoE tanks. It's completely possible for a DK tank to take the "hard" doors (2 and 4). I know because that's what I do for our 25H horridon kills. If it is really an issue for your raid however, you can tank doors 1 and 3, which is essentially only 1 since half the adds on door 3 have random aggro and you just need to worry about the Warriors. Having a DK tank adds is not harder than using a strategy you don't have enough HoPs for in the first place.

[Nillo]

I will have 3 HoP's available so can you share your personal survivability strat if you don't mind

I also noticed that you have a very interesting reforging, having 11,40% expertise, is there something i am missing by having 7.5%?

I don't really have a strategy except for using cooldowns all the time (rarely using IBF in phase 1 though)

11.4% expertise sounds like my dps gear (just can't get rid off all that hit/exp >_>) - my tank gear is at close to 15% with exp food.

[celinamuna]

Was looking at a possible way to improve my dps. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/7cjh1ip10o0sptwi/ (Armory in signature) While i feel that survival wise i'm doing fine, my dps is very far behind the dps i do on the same fights on my paladin.

[Reniat]

Are you filling every GCD?

Let's compare Iron Qon kills. There's only a 5 second difference in our kill times (10:45 vs 10:50). Don't look at the actual dps, even though i'm not using a dps build i'm just going to be higher since i've got 25m vengeance. Instead look at how many times you used each ability and how many times I used it:

Rune strike
you: 118
me: 148

Death Strike
you: 79
me: 82

Soul Reaper
you: 20
me: 28

Heart Strike
you: 52
me: 76

Diseases uptime
you: 81%
me: 93%

Even though our kills were almost exactly the same length, i managed to get 30 more rune strikes, 3 more death strikes, 8 more soul reapers, 24 more heart strikes (some of this is due to BT vs RC and blood rune throughput, but not all) as well as 12% more disease uptime. It looks to me like you just need to be making better use of every GCD. Go up against a target dummy and just hit it for a while and try to minimize the time you have an open GCD with RP available. Then do the same thing in LFR, until you can keep track of GCD and your RP without thinking about it so you will just do it in your actual raids automatically. I don't want you to spam away your FU pairs though. Death Strike isn't part of this "wasted GCD" thing. You still want to try to maximize the time you have a single FU pair up. This mainly applies to rune strike and you blood rune abilities (HS and SR).

[celinamuna]

<snip>

Hmm will try to look at that more often, been trying to focus more on survival then dps. And on Qoh the 2nd phase debuff really slowed me down in 3rd phase.

[Reniat]

Hmm will try to look at that more often, been trying to focus more on survival then dps. And on Qoh the 2nd phase debuff really slowed me down in 3rd phase.

That's fine. survival will always be your top priority. Tank dps only becomes an issue if the raid simply doesn't have the dps to defeat an encounter without it, which can happen on REALLY tight enrages.

[celinamuna]

That's fine. survival will always be your top priority. Tank dps only becomes an issue if the raid simply doesn't have the dps to defeat an encounter without it, which can happen on REALLY tight enrages.

Just feels odd looking at the difference in dps of my 2 tanks, when they're equally geared :/

[Reniat]

Just feels odd looking at the difference in dps of my 2 tanks, when they're equally geared :/

Pallies and monks just have higher DPS right now. Take a loot at: http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Iron_Qon/...00011111000000