Best TPS Spec?

[Advahama]

I've been trying out different specs to try and push up my TPS, but can't decide on anything. What spec will be best for TPS while retaining all the tanking talents?

[bujaberry]

The change to Runestrike was not huge, as the dmg was lowered, in total it was 25% more threat from RS, and usually RP is 20% of your damage done, so like 5% mroe threat in total. Not as big as you say it is.

As for best tps spec, basically you want highest dps spec (with the obvious tanking talents picked up), as threat for dks comes directly from dmg, only skills with increased threat are runestrike & dnd, where the latter should NOT be in your rotation anyways.

[tvveeder]

Yeah I have trouble choosing a spec for tanking. The only one I have found I don't like is unholy. I have been back and forth between frost and blood and can't figure out which one I like tanking. From what I have gathered what I like about blood is being able to get Vampiric Blood and Blood Aura for raid utility. My single target TPS is insane with blood, but of course where I struggle is on groups. I tried a weird blood spec where I actually got points in unholy down to outbreak and corpse explosion (as an experiment to see if I could buff some AoE threat a bit) but it didn't work out so well. I know... thats a shocker :P

Anyway the spec I'm looking into right now is along the lines of this for frost. I'm basing it somewhat off the build for IT/FS spamknight but tweaking it a bit to grab the vital tank talents. The only thing is I will really miss vampiric blood, glyhed and improved rune tap, and the utility of having Abominations might and blood aura.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=121019050406


As for blood spec I would be looking for something more along the lines of this.

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...h=200919050406

I mainly did bloodworms as a filler and I'm not too keen on butchery, scent of blood, or vendetta and I love sudden doom but is it really worth only putting 2 or 3 points in it? If I had to pull the points from bloodworms to anywhere though I would say vendetta since I would be taking hits. Now like I said though with this spec I tend to struggle in heroics with AoE threat. Generally how I start a group pull is...

DnD > PS > IT > Pest > RP Dump > Change target > PS > IT > Pest > HS > DS

Then I reapply diseases as needed and HS/OB the rest of the way out. Now to explain myself I only got Vicious Strikes because I tend to pug quite a bit so when I get an awful healer it's nice to have the ability to DS/rune tap and get a huge heal off on myself. Should I move those points to virulence instead for the increased disease duration?

So basically what I'm saying is I can rock single target threat either way, I can do better AoE threat as frost (of course), but I like having the DK last stand and all the utility blood has to offer to a raid (primarily abominations might and blood aura). Doesn't it suck?

[Kadvael]

blood is reknown to be the less efficient aoe/multi target tank of the tree specs. tha'ts part of the game. if you want tremendous amount of threat vs groups, go to frost or unholy.

since you like the blood play style and features why wonder about the other specs ?

anyway virulence is a very good talent since it offer you some more time with diseases up. that's always usefull.

[Beefstyx]

You can check out my spec on armory. I just tried this last night and the threat vs my best geared (and played) warrior tank was amazing. I kept up with him and almost surpassed him on VoA-H last night (we had 6 tanks in our 25man group lol so there was no danger). Anyway, since my expertise was at 30 with Blood Gorged I decided to drop it, drop Sudden Doom (since DC is the only attack i ever "miss" with and it wasnt high on threat), and blood aura (since most of its healing was overhealing anyway).

The talents I picked up were anything that increased my crit and/or crit damage of heart strike and obliterate.

I tried the OB>OB>HS>HS rotation and found it to be vastly inferior in the threat department. Some people on the forums were touting it as the high threat rotation...dont listen to them, or at least verify it using Omen or another threat meter.

Next I went with this rotation:
IT>PS>HS>OB>OB>HSx4ish>OB>repeat

This rotation starts out a little slow, but once you get through the original rotation you put out a lot of threat. That rotation garnered me the highest threat I have ever put out once I got it rolling. Blood isn't the highest, but as blood goes its getting there.

If you want to armory me its Bubonicbeef on the Gurubashi server.

[Gamehenge]

From what i've seen frost puts out the highest tps currently. Unholy might have a slight edge in aoe tps (frost is still very very good for aoe), but frost is well ahead in single target tps. This mainly comes from the fact that frost talents give shit tons of crit. You get 18% crit on your OB from talents and KM puts my HB crit rate above 80% if i use every proc on it. You really can't beat frost for threat at the moment.

[taek]

Agreed. I thought Frost had a bit of a single target TPS advantage pre patch, but after 3.0.8 Killing Machine it's significantly ahead of Unholy. However Unholy has an equal advantage in AE threat, IMO.

[Kaire]

only skills with increased threat are runestrike & dnd, where the latter should NOT be in your rotation anyways.

Lol what?... DnD is a huge part of unholys threat rotation, be it single target or multiple targets...

Say your DnD hits for roughly 400 damage a second, making it 4k damage over its 10s duration or 4k damage for using 3 runes (1f1u1b)

Now lets say you're using a good ilvl213 weapon as a tank. Your SS's are going to push around the 2k mark, with bloodstrikes around the 1k mark. Meaning for the same 1f1u1b rune usage, you're getting LESS damage. Even if you think you hit "really hard" with those moves for w/e reason and add in another 500 damage to both SS and BS each, thats still only breaking even with using DnD.

Thats to say nothing of the fact that DnD has high threat tacked on to it, meaning that even if SS+BS do similar damage for the same rune usage, you're still not getting nearly the same tps out of it.


In short, unless ive missed some direly important change, if you're unholy then DnD is everything to you.

[tvveeder]

blood is reknown to be the less efficient aoe/multi target tank of the tree specs. tha'ts part of the game. if you want tremendous amount of threat vs groups, go to frost or unholy.

since you like the blood play style and features why wonder about the other specs ?

anyway virulence is a very good talent since it offer you some more time with diseases up. that's always usefull.

Well actually I like both, and it's just a matter of working to figure out which one I like more. I was also making sure my logic wasn't off about trying the IT/FS spamknight tank spec and making sure picking up the raid utility talents in blood over single target threat talents (being crit and such) was worthwhile. Me personally I was thinking having blood aura was going to be good for the raid as a whole no matter what, I could care less for myself because I would be getting heals. I was just thinking that it would make raid healing just a little bit simpler because even at numbers like... if someone is putting out 2k DPS they are healing themselves for 80hps and it only scales with better and better dps. Not to mention hysteria to drop on some good dps'er during encounters and so on. If the utility isn't worth it then it's not worth it, but I was just thinking it would be worthwhile considering most end game tanking is single target and that's a cake walk to hold aggro. So to kind of respond to this, I like both tanking builds, I like both play styles, but is it more worthwhile to try to get the utility or just go for buffing myself?

[Vallos]

I'm hitting 5-6k TPS in 5-mans with Might and Trueshot as Unholy.

That's more than enough for any group you run with. TPS of course scales to 25-mans, where I've peaked at around 7.5k.