[Guide] Active Mitigation Hipsters - 5.4 DK Tanking

[Nillo]

Or he could just cancel his Righteous Fury which wouldn't end up being such a drastic dps loss compared to what you suggest.

---------- Post added 2013-05-07 at 10:19 PM ----------

I got the exact problem, the other way around.. The pala tank in our guild cant gather threat what so ever, even though he uses all the shit he is supposed to do.. Even when I give him dead time I sometimes overaggro him :P

Well if you're talking about a situation where you're less than 1 min into the fight it'll take too long for vengeance to catch up and there's little you can do.
Hand of Salvation or just taunting a few more times usually solves the problem of vengeance differences.

[Deleted]

I can suggest that to my co-tank, would stop his threat gen, although it seems a little unnecessary.

Cheers for the input Nillo.

[Deleted]

Lets assume my healers are bored.

Would going for dps trinkets, hit/exp cap, 200% mastery and the rest haste help with my dps or is it better to stick to the pure mastery build?

[Kiqjaq]

Haste is better dps than mastery, yeah. As far as trinkets go, see if you can't find haste or crit ones. Strength doesn't do very much for our dps, at least not compared to haste/crit (which "scale" with vengeance).

I would still recommend /sitting over gearing strangely though.

[Deleted]

Came across that a couple of times, but how does that work? Just spamming your keybind?

[Kiqjaq]

Yeah basically.
When you're sitting down you take full crits; given how Vengeance is calculated--quick to scale up, slow to fall off--you can easily get much higher values that you're "supposed to" on a given fight, and it won't deteriorate down to normal values easily.

What I do is just continue my normal rotation while spamming sit until eventually a crit lands (doesn't take long, but using a spell makes you stand back up so there's a bit of timing to it). Obviously do it intelligently, since crits can really wreck face. When you have more Blood Shield than you need, or you can pop IBF when you know you won't need it for a while.

Not that this precludes gearing Haste as well, but when I push it I'd rather retain the ability to go full defensive again if needed.

[Deleted]

Thanks, going to give it a try tonight.

[Nillo]

Does the vengeance from taking a crit really compensate for the trouble of actually taking one? I mean most bosses don't even deal that much autoattack damage.

[Deleted]

If I would go for a more dps focused build, what would be better:
Using the 2 mastery trinkets or going for Shado-Pan DPS trinket + Spark?
The proc's might even give more overal avoidance than the on use health and dodge. (Shado-Pan tank trinket and Fortitude)

[Reniat]

Well the dps trinket + spark is better dps. As mentioned mastery gives no dps, so 2x mastery trinkets aren't going to do a lot of damage. That said, if you find that with 2x dps trinkets you are too hard to heal, you can always do 1 and 1 or go to 2 tank trinkets until you're heal-able again.

[Deleted]

What do you think, is there a moment where you have to much mastery?
Because 6/12 and 263.77% mastery seems a bit of overkill.

[Reniat]

MAstery scales linearly, so there is no such thing as a cap. If you feel like you can benefit your raid more by sacrificing some mastery for dps, that's up to you, but that's because you have enough of a surplus of survival and your raid's dps is low not because mastery has an "overkill" %.

[Deleted]

Wouldn't the mastery cap be the moment you do 100% of your healing taken and start overhealing? (physical damage)

[Reniat]

Ok, if you want to get theoretical 500% is the mastery "cap". Have fun getting the 43k mastery to get there.

[Dunker]

A question regarding Blood Death Knight gearing for someone that isn't progression oriented.

Currently I do old content, 5-mans, scenarios, and LFR. I was looking at two crafted pieces (with haste/mastery) along with several valor pieces in the same vein. I'm curious if gearing my blood death knight in almost the same way as my DW Frost spec would be worthwhile? Especially considering overall stamina is the same between DPS and Tank gear, the only difference would be the gems and my stance. (Masterblood?, hit/exp to cap, haste)

Thanks in advance.

[celinamuna]

Ok, if you want to get theoretical 500% is the mastery "cap". Have fun getting the 43k mastery to get there.

Wouldn't the cap be ~1428% ? (based off 7% of max health) (And it's fun to get 2+ mastery buffs on primo, generally pushes you to 400% i think).


On another note was wondering if switching out my current bracers (armory in sig) for 522 frozen warlord's one would be an upgrade.
I would be losing a lot of mastery for some haste/hit, but gain armor/stam/str.

And would appreciate any other gear suggestions.

[Reniat]

its 20% of the damage you take, so if you want to do 100% of the damage you take (which is the cap pragnoran was asking about) it's 500% (500% of 20% is 100%).


If you want the cap where you would insta-cap mastery on a min shield you are correct in that it would be 1428.57%, which is 132.4k mastery if you're curious.


Either way, we aren't likely going to reach either cap anytime soon.

[Kiqjaq]

Does the vengeance from taking a crit really compensate for the trouble of actually taking one? I mean most bosses don't even deal that much autoattack damage.

Well it stands to reason that taking double damage will give double vengeance though.
It's hard to put a number on that exactly, but I'll try. >.>

The formula for melee vengeance as I know it is:

newVengeance = max((0.36*newAutoAttackDamage/swing)/2,
newAutoAttackDamage*0.018+oldVengeance*vengeanceBuffRemainingTime/20)

Basically there are two formulas, one which gives you roughly x vengeance, and one which slowly builds up to 2x vengeance and holds roughly steady. Blizz has been kind enough to compute both of these formulas for us and give us whichever one comes out to a higher number.

The first formula is just so it builds up quickly, you're quickly given a sufficient level of vengeance to hold aggro. The use of crits is obvious here: the damage from sitting and getting crit will not only probably be totally absorbed by Blood Shield, but you'll also immediately jump up to match whatever vengeance the other tank has. It makes tankswaps a relative breeze, and the downside is that your healers will have to actually start healing you sooner (as opposed to being untouched for 10 seconds and letting healers slack). Sometimes you rely on this shield though, to protect Bone Shield or something, so obviously just be clever about sitting.

As for the one that slowly builds up: each hit you take gives a chunk of vengeance, which is then added to however much vengeance you already have (this addition decreased by however much duration of the Vengeance that's fallen off). The thing about this is that each "chunk" is rolled each time you take a smack. Rather than a 100k vengeance chunk falling out of the pool after 20 seconds, every second and a half it's decreased by 7.5%. By the time those 20 seconds are up you still have around 35k vengeance left from just that chunk, still being added to whatever other vengeance you've accumulated. It really *never* falls completely off so long as you're still taking damage.

Eventually this value stabilizes when 7.5% of your vengeance is equal to 18% of the autoattack damage you're taking (or in other terms you'll end up with 2.4 times as much vengeance as the autoattack damage you're taking).

If you spam sit, you can easily get your vengeance values to double what they should be, obviously. And that doubled value won't really fade from your vengeance pool for something like a minute. I wouldn't go popping Death Pact just to take a single crit, but if you're sure it won't be life threatening then it shouldn't matter. Pop IBF if you won't need it for a while and then sit with a bunch of extra vengeance for a minute. (I was doing this on the first phase of Lei Shen N, and I like to tell myself it helped us beat the dps check needed to only give power to 3 pylons)


Really though just give it a try during farm. You can get the hang of telling when you can afford higher damage intake and then apply it to progression (or to rank attempts). I introduced it to my cotank a while back and he's obsessed with it; if WoW had better physics he'd leave ass prints on the stone floor of every boss. >.>

[Deleted]

@reniat But if you take 300k damage in 5 sec -> 60k DS Heal, let's continue with my mastery (263,77%)
60k heal + 158,262k Blood Shield = 218,262k

That's 73% of the 300k damage taken.
Wouldn't you only need 400% mastery, because of the heal?
Using your cooldowns effectively would make the mastery need lower.

If I made a mistake, please correct me.

[Omertocracy]

If you want the cap where you would insta-cap mastery on a min shield you are correct in that it would be 1428.57%, which is 137.1k mastery if you're curious.

I have a new goal!