DK Tanks - What Presence do you tank in and why?

[knopstr]

Hachoo,

I started this thread after noticing in some, if not all of your videos (which are really a godsend - can't thank you enough) that you tank in unholy presence.

It got me to thinking, what presence should I be tanking in?

Is it a personal preference?

What are the advantages to one over the other?

I have always played dps style characters. This is really my 1st tank of any kind and I'm still learning. I personally was tanking (still am for the moment) in frost for the extra armor/threat.

Please discuss. As always, thanks to all who contribute.

[Bigfish]

People tank outside of Frost? Mind=blown.

[Svpernova09]

People tank outside of Frost? Mind=blown.^^ Seriously, if you're not in Frost, you're missing out.

[turbonapkin]

As an unholy tank, I highly doubt he tanks in unholy presence... what you are seeing is probably an unholy aura buff, the mount speed thing. I run an unholy tank in frost presence with four shamans and know that not using frost would be suicide when those LBs hit!

Happy to be proved wrong of course!

[knopstr]

I guess I'm mis-interpreting the green skull on the screen for the unholy buff aura...if this is the case my apologies...I don't have the green skull anywhere on my screen as a buff and I'm obviously a knucklehead :)

[puppychow]

unholy aura = 15% movement speed buff for party, removed in patch 3.1. A talent in the unholy tree.

Every DK tank, when tanking, will be in frost presence. And your weapon should have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Always. Without frost presence DPS will pull aggro pretty much every fight.

The nice thing about DKs is you can quickly swap gear, change to blood presence, slap on rune of the fallen crusader, and be top 10 DPS. Don't have to change spec, reglyph'ing of course would be nice for more DPS.

Unholy presence is pretty crappy and I don't think anyone ever uses it for anything.

[Hachoo]

Yeah I've only ever tanked in frost presence - what you're seeing in my videos is unholy aura - not unholy presence. Unholy aura is a talent...

You should never, ever, tank in anything other than frost presence unless you want to get slaughtered and not be able to hold aggro :)

[Zerocool2024]

When I 5box my DK's through Heroics, I HAVE to keep them all in Frost.
I tried specing 3 of them DPS, and two keep tankage.

I put DPS gear on them, put them in Blood/Unholy, and I could hardly get past the trash.
Because I have no healer persay, any damage they take, or aggro, or AOE damage, it drops them quick.

Put them back in no Crit range/Frost Aura, and back to normal clearing.

[Multibocks]

unholy aura = 15% movement speed buff for party, removed in patch 3.1. A talent in the unholy tree.

Every DK tank, when tanking, will be in frost presence. And your weapon should have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Always. Without frost presence DPS will pull aggro pretty much every fight.

The nice thing about DKs is you can quickly swap gear, change to blood presence, slap on rune of the fallen crusader, and be top 10 DPS. Don't have to change spec, reglyph'ing of course would be nice for more DPS.

Unholy presence is pretty crappy and I don't think anyone ever uses it for anything.

Actually once you hit the minimum defense +25(so you dont drop below) you can switch to the 4% parry runeforge. That one comes out slightly ahead, but its not a game breaker.

[Hachoo]

Eh - IMO its better/easier to just keep the +25 def and gem for something other than defense - unless your tank has mostly/all valorous gear you're not going to hit 565 defense without wasting a bunch of gems on +def.

[Zal]

unholy aura = 15% movement speed buff for party, removed in patch 3.1. A talent in the unholy tree.

Every DK tank, when tanking, will be in frost presence. And your weapon should have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Always. Without frost presence DPS will pull aggro pretty much every fight.

The nice thing about DKs is you can quickly swap gear, change to blood presence, slap on rune of the fallen crusader, and be top 10 DPS. Don't have to change spec, reglyph'ing of course would be nice for more DPS.

Unholy presence is pretty crappy and I don't think anyone ever uses it for anything.

Actually once you hit the minimum defense +25(so you dont drop below) you can switch to the 4% parry runeforge. That one comes out slightly ahead, but its not a game breaker.
Parry is bugged and if you parry and attack the mobs next attack comes faster. So really you want that to be your lowest and never try to increase it. Stack dodge ftw.

[Hellraiser]

Sorry in advance for my bad english.

I'm playing my DK now since the release of wotlk. As many people before have said, tanking without frost-presence is a suicid. If you go ahead and tank that mob, make sure that you have at least a defense of 530. The defense needs to be higher as the mob-level increases. You'll need 540 defense against bosses in naxxramas. I rather have 1-2 more points in defense to avoid any problems due to scaling against any oponent. It has happen before that a tank got one-hitted from a boss with a critical hit, while he had 540 defense. WoW didnt calculate everything correctly and so he had like 1% chance on getting a critical hit. Just a few basic-stats from my DK: 27727hp, 18.44% parry, 27.49% dodge,16899 armor and 542 defense. Stats are messured in blood-presence. Talents are set to 7-57-7.

Tanking in frost-presence will give you 2 bonuses. An increased armor and more hp. You can put your talents in every skill-tree as you like as long as you chose talents with defensive bonuses.

[Niley]

unholy aura = 15% movement speed buff for party, removed in patch 3.1. A talent in the unholy tree.

Every DK tank, when tanking, will be in frost presence. And your weapon should have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Always. Without frost presence DPS will pull aggro pretty much every fight.

The nice thing about DKs is you can quickly swap gear, change to blood presence, slap on rune of the fallen crusader, and be top 10 DPS. Don't have to change spec, reglyph'ing of course would be nice for more DPS.

Unholy presence is pretty crappy and I don't think anyone ever uses it for anything.

Actually once you hit the minimum defense +25(so you dont drop below) you can switch to the 4% parry runeforge. That one comes out slightly ahead, but its not a game breaker.

You wont find any dk in top guilds that doing that, IF scales pretty well with def, and You still get avoidance from def over 540. On the other hand parry is one of the worst scaling avoidance stats for a dk.

[Hachoo]

unholy aura = 15% movement speed buff for party, removed in patch 3.1. A talent in the unholy tree.

Every DK tank, when tanking, will be in frost presence. And your weapon should have Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle. Always. Without frost presence DPS will pull aggro pretty much every fight.

The nice thing about DKs is you can quickly swap gear, change to blood presence, slap on rune of the fallen crusader, and be top 10 DPS. Don't have to change spec, reglyph'ing of course would be nice for more DPS.

Unholy presence is pretty crappy and I don't think anyone ever uses it for anything.

Actually once you hit the minimum defense +25(so you dont drop below) you can switch to the 4% parry runeforge. That one comes out slightly ahead, but its not a game breaker.
Parry is bugged and if you parry and attack the mobs next attack comes faster. So really you want that to be your lowest and never try to increase it. Stack dodge ftw.You have that backwards...

If you parry something, your next attack is 40% faster, if a mob parries you, it's next attack is 40% faster - though I think they're removing this in 3.1 (or they removed it in 3.0.9, can't remember).

Either way, if YOU parry something its never a bad thing - the reason people recommend against increasing parry is because it scales poorly (diminishing returns).

[puppychow]

Parry is bugged and if you parry and attack the mobs next attack comes faster. So really you want that to be your lowest and never try to increase it. Stack dodge ftw.

NO, NO, NO, NO.

I see this bit of misinformation all the time. You geming/enchanting/etc parry is OK. Its a bad stat to shoot for, since each point of parry is not much, whereas each point of dodge (or defense) is a lot more.

What you are talking about is parry-haste. That is, when you attack a boss and he parrys your attack, he parry-hastes then and suddenly can swing 2, 3, 4 times in rapid succession. That can kill you. That is YOU SWINGING AT HIM HOWEVER, not HIM SWINGING AT YOU. When he swings at you, you have a chance to dodge/parry (and block for pally/warrs), and those are all based on your dodge/parry numbers.

When you swing at him, HE has a chance to dodge/parry/block. To avoid this, you have to increase your hit and expertise -- expertise directly affects parry haste.

This is why paladin tanks for example shouldn't get reckoning, unless they have high expertise. Also DK tanks who dual wield could get parry-hasted and gibbed, since when you duel wield the expertise requirements are higher than a 2h.

This is a bit of info that a lot of tanks get wrong, remember, gemming dodge/parry is FINE AND GOOD, you will never hurt yourself having more of either.

[algol]

Parry is bugged and if you parry and attack the mobs next attack comes faster. So really you want that to be your lowest and never try to increase it. Stack dodge ftw.

NO, NO, NO, NO.

I see this bit of misinformation all the time. You geming/enchanting/etc parry is OK. Its a bad stat to shoot for, since each point of parry is not much, whereas each point of dodge (or defense) is a lot more.
Except of course that the rune enchant is % based rather than based on the shitty point scheme. How many % avoidance does 25 defense beyond the cap translate to? (Hint: 4% if you have a shield and can block, 3% if you don't...)

[puppychow]

Yeah I think enchanting parry is fine if you can hit defense cap without the rune, but imo thats pretty tough and not worth the tradeoffs. You pretty much would have to equip repelling charge (84 defense rating points, which is around 17 defense) and thats a bad move, imo. For a DK tank you are way better off equipping the +111 stam trinket from AN and if you are a JC you should have monarch crab with +24 stam and +41 stam, for a grand total of 137 stam on one trinket (CRAZY) or 248 stam on two trinkets, which is 2480 HP or 2728 HP after kings. Can't beat that. Especially for Ulduar, where bosses are hitting for 25-40k swings on plate.

Anyways the point was you having more parry is no big deal at all, up until hard diminishing returns. It does not cause bosses to parry haste - having little expertise and/or duel wielding does that.

[Hachoo]

Parry is bugged and if you parry and attack the mobs next attack comes faster. So really you want that to be your lowest and never try to increase it. Stack dodge ftw.

NO, NO, NO, NO.

I see this bit of misinformation all the time. You geming/enchanting/etc parry is OK. Its a bad stat to shoot for, since each point of parry is not much, whereas each point of dodge (or defense) is a lot more.
Except of course that the rune enchant is % based rather than based on the shitty point scheme. How many % avoidance does 25 defense beyond the cap translate to? (Hint: 4% if you have a shield and can block, 3% if you don't...)You also get 2% stamina from the rune.

[algol]

You also get 2% stamina from the rune.
Yep, but that mostly just reinforces my point. Which is better depends on what gear you have.

I think you have to get pretty high to give up 2% stamina for 1% mitigation though. More so because the better your gear gets, the more health 2% stamina becomes.

What's raid tank stamina at these days, anyway? Isn't there a 50 stamina enchant? You'd need 2500 for 2% to beat that, and I don't think it's quite that high yet...

[Hachoo]

You also get 2% stamina from the rune.
Yep, but that mostly just reinforces my point. Which is better depends on what gear you have.

I think you have to get pretty high to give up 2% stamina for 1% mitigation though. More so because the better your gear gets, the more health 2% stamina becomes.

What's raid tank stamina at these days, anyway? Isn't there a 50 stamina enchant? You'd need 2500 for 2% to beat that, and I don't think it's quite that high yet...I don't understand the question? If there was a 50 stam enchant you can't compare it to 2% - you have to compare it to 2% stamina plus 25 defense rating, because you can't do +50 stam to weapon and the 4% parry.

IMO theres nothing better for a DK tank than stoneskin gargoyle in the game right now, at all, no matter what the scenario is.

[puppychow]

+50 sta doesnt exist, it was removing during 3.08 ptr testing