[WoW] 3.1 - Ulduar

[spronk]

For those who say DKs are better overall tanks in 3.1 ulduar, don't DKs still generate less threat than the other tanks? Is blood a better single target threat gen than frost?

My DK is my alt so I don't play him as much, MT/OT'd naxx25 a few times before 3.1 as unholy and I hated MTing since threat at the start always seemed sucky (compared to my paladin). I recently dual spec'd as unholy DPS (and put on tank gear for aoe tanking) and frost tank (for single target) and it seems a lot better, but is blood even better for single target tanking?

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by spronk

For those who say DKs are better overall tanks in 3.1 ulduar, don't DKs still generate less threat than the other tanks? Is blood a better single target threat gen than frost?

My DK is my alt so I don't play him as much, MT/OT'd naxx25 a few times before 3.1 as unholy and I hated MTing since threat at the start always seemed sucky (compared to my paladin). I recently dual spec'd as unholy DPS (and put on tank gear for aoe tanking) and frost tank (for single target) and it seems a lot better, but is blood even better for single target tanking?

Depends on your gear and stuff like that, threat is very stat/buff dependant on DKs. With that said, I've never had any threat issue in ulduar but in a few particular occasions: People attacking mimiron's tank before me(obviously), Mages on Hodir because I'm kiting him around a lot, meaning I don't get full threat generation and they stand in fires/starfall and that's it really. I destroy every other tank on threat, and depending on the buffs and their crits, I can rip threat off a tank while offtanking(so no runestrikes) from the front. I generally ride their tail close enough if I can't pull aggro from them. I was almost soft hit capped and soft expertise capped though(dropped a bit lately since I got some T8 with parry/dodge instead of dodge/hit or dodge/exp).

Now, they're not as much better tanks as they were in the past, but it's still right as far as I can tell, and a lot of fights use certain mechanics where having a DK tanking just makes shit easier. Stuff like Runetap might look like shit, but a potion every 30secs is invaluable on these shitty fights where you get hit for 60% of your life every hit and healers have to move to avoid shit. That's like 1/4 of the fights in Ulduar ^^.

[lumberjack]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

There's a -ton- of freedom in the order you do bosses though. The only ones you can't skip are FL and XT before you get to the last 2. You kinda make your own progression. With the nerfs to him I can see him being a lot easier as well.

i actually like that method... that way we dont have to clear a whole wing of crap bosses to get to whoever we want for certain pieces, seems now there is the option to skip some bosses if there are no drops that people want

[Xequecal]

Originally Posted by spronk

For those who say DKs are better overall tanks in 3.1 ulduar, don't DKs still generate less threat than the other tanks? Is blood a better single target threat gen than frost?

My DK is my alt so I don't play him as much, MT/OT'd naxx25 a few times before 3.1 as unholy and I hated MTing since threat at the start always seemed sucky (compared to my paladin). I recently dual spec'd as unholy DPS (and put on tank gear for aoe tanking) and frost tank (for single target) and it seems a lot better, but is blood even better for single target tanking?

Frost threat is higher than Blood threat. I personally find Frost to be terrible, as Blood single-target threat is high enough threat to hold aggro easily, and more than that really doesn't help you. Frost has better AE threat, but if you need that go Unholy it's way the fuck better at it.

With the ridiculous damage amounts Ulduar bosses hit for, Block becomes worthless and the DK armor advantage becomes amazing. Not to mention having over 2000 more HP than PAL/WAR and having Will of the Necropolis.

For example, a 43/23/5 DK tanking Ignis with 2 stacks of the buff takes about 20-25% less damage than a Paladin or Warrior with similar gear, AND has better cooldowns. A good DK tanking the adds will take a fifth of the damage a Warrior or Paladin takes or less, due to the ability to Chains of Ice the adds in the fire. (Druids are also excellent at this, but chances are you don't know one good enough to execute it.)

A DK can solo tank Hodir and just cooldown every Frozen Blows, PAL/WAR need a frost resist offtank. A Druid could probably straight up do it in FR gear but would still take much more damage overall than the DK.

I am really glad I rerolled DK because on pretty much every encounter in here I discover I am simply vastly superior to my old Paladin as well as Warriors in virtually all cases, and Druids in some. On XT-002 you can switch to Blood Presence and do pretty good DPS when the heart comes out. Druids can too, PAL/WAR tanks just can't. On Auriaya you can death grip the panther out of the raid when it's about to die. Iron Council hardmode is another encounter where all the tanks are absolute lol compared to DKs.

[Seryne]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

I died on a Hodir pile possibly because I was also in a light beam. That or it is straight up random bullshit.

Sometimes when you run onto the pile, you actually run into the pile instead of on top of it so your feet are touching the ground, and this causes you to die. We just tell everyone to jump onto the pile (or jump when on the pile) in order to ensure no buggy deaths.

[Northerner]

We went from a Druid always MT with a Paladin often OT or occasional DK to a DK MT and whatever showed up OT right around Sarth 3d. The Druid is our GM and we still like and trust him as MT but a small amount of time in Ulduar has made us quite happy to use out DKs as MTs, even the ones that are not anywhere near BiS.

Even with the nerfs, healers seem to be happier working around the cooldowns. It doesn't hurt that the base mitigation and now health are similar. Well, that and now our old MT gets to RAPE THE FACES OF CHILDREN as a feral kitty. I mean, seriously, fuck that as a competing dps class... T8 bonuses are all kinds of balanced.

EDIT: I did not mean to give the impression that Cat-Form Druids are literally raping children. They, of course, actually do rape not only young children but any they can find. That is not a nice thing to say however and really, remember the last time people got pissed off at druids? Blizzard agreed and punished them with 360 swipe.

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by Xequecal

Frost threat is higher than Blood threat. I personally find Frost to be terrible, as Blood single-target threat is high enough threat to hold aggro easily, and more than that really doesn't help you. Frost has better AE threat, but if you need that go Unholy it's way the fuck better at it.

I'll just comment on that, not sure Frost is higher than Blood anymore with the DS changes, and blood gorged being ArP and stuff like that. With that said, in most cases both are high enough that no DPS is gonna pull aggro but in some particular heavy movement cases like I noted earlier with Hodir kiting and stuff.

For AE threat however I have a frost build, because while unholy is easy mode AE tanking, I still think it's fucking terrible to support the tanking. It has absolutely no defensive talents(magic reduction, amz and bone shield are all mostly worthless when tanking massive adds like the shit on thorim) while frost on the other hands has plenty(longer ibf, 3%miss, 2%less dmg and UA is actually good for trash stuff, shield blocking ~1500hit during 20secs). The AE threat of the new HB and Hungering cold utility(since it does actually work on some stuff in ulduar) really push it to good levels, I just get morbidity in it, glyph DnD too, and it's just fine. The big change to frost ease of use is now you just HB when you want, since it doesn't do double dmg on frost fever, and with the glyph it applies FF so you can then BB after for fucking solid AE threat burst.

Matter of taste but unholy seems like it didn't age well with the various changes, bone shield specifically got the shaft, with the avoidance nerf and the increased cooldown but still the same charges/internal cooldown, and only amz/ams boosts as defensive talents. The other trees have multiple tanking(or tanking related) talents.

[Nalaan Succube]

I'll just comment on that, not sure Frost is higher than Blood anymore with the DS changes, and blood gorged being ArP and stuff like that. With that said, in most cases both are high enough that no DPS is gonna pull aggro but in some particular heavy movement cases like I noted earlier with Hodir kiting and stuff.

What rotation are you using as blood now?
Havent' bothered to try it since the changes.
I know pre patch going into frost until anihilation and using obliterate as blood was pretty good (I hated the alternative of spamming HS), do you just go DS now?

[spronk]

Originally Posted by Northerner

We went from a Druid always MT with a Paladin often OT or occasional DK to a DK MT and whatever showed up OT right around Sarth 3d. The Druid is our GM and we still like and trust him as MT but a small amount of time in Ulduar has made us quite happy to use out DKs as MTs, even the ones that are not anywhere near BiS.

Is anyone using a paladin MT in ulduar? I did a pug ulduar last night with two pally tanks (each ~40k hp buffed) just for fun, and while we got 4 bosses down it was a lot of wiping (first time for practically everyone) and the tanks died a LOT. Especially on stuff like the guy with the two arms and xt02.

I dropped to casual rank in my guild since I don't want to raid every night, but its funny that the guild leader is a warrior so he HAS to MT every fight, they have only dropped 2 bosses so far in ulduar25 after 4 nights. We don't even have a raiding DK tank afaik, I wonder if ulduar will make him change his mind.

Pyros - so on your DK you don't try to keep a dps/pvp spec at all? Since my DK is my alt I really want to have a good DPS/pvp spec and a good tank spec. From everything I'm reading frost is probably the best overall tank spec (good single and AOE threat, good for 10 and 25 mans), just not sure I guess what to spec for DPS. I'm staying unholy for now since ebon plaguebringer is really nice for 5/10 mans, may play with blood once arenas start up again.

[Lenaldo]

Originally Posted by spronk

Is anyone using a paladin MT in ulduar? I did a pug ulduar last night with two pally tanks (each ~40k hp buffed) just for fun, and while we got 4 bosses down it was a lot of wiping (first time for practically everyone) and the tanks died a LOT. Especially on stuff like the guy with the two arms and xt02.

We have been trying to use a pally for our main tank but it hasnt workd out well. He is our raid leader and so of course keeps trying to make himself the main tank, however there is noticable difference between him and our feral/dk tank. there has been a lot of arguments as of late from the healers complaining about healing the pally compared to the dk/feral and of course the raid leader yelling at the healers for letting him die.

I think overall, pallys just arnt great main tanks in ulduar. Both the druid and dk are vastly easier to heal.. and in most cases the DK makes a better offtank than any of the classes(death grip + interupts + aoe tanking = FTW).

I really think tanking balance is all sorts of fucked up right now. I really feel bad for our raid leader because he hates holy and we already have a ret pally.

[Aria]

Originally Posted by Lenaldo

We have been trying to use a pally for our main tank but it hasnt workd out well. He is our raid leader and so of course keeps trying to make himself the main tank, however there is noticable difference between him and our feral/dk tank. there has been a lot of arguments as of late from the healers complaining about healing the pally compared to the dk/feral and of course the raid leader yelling at the healers for letting him die.

I think overall, pallys just arnt great main tanks in ulduar. Both the druid and dk are vastly easier to heal.. and in most cases the DK makes a better offtank than any of the classes(death grip + interupts + aoe tanking = FTW).

I really think tanking balance is all sorts of fucked up right now. I really feel bad for our raid leader because he hates holy and we already have a ret pally.

You shouldn't feel bad for him. People shouldn't play hybrid classes if they're only interested in one facet of the playing field. I mean I sure as hell wouldn't roll a paladin if I wanted to be a main tank as much as I wouldn't roll a druid if I wanted to DPS all day. Don't get me wrong, they do those jobs great, but far too many players I meet will say "DPS only" or whatever when they can very well be a healer, tank, or whatever.

I've had a lot of raid leaders who were awful tanks but were the main tank solely because they were leader. Some were ok, and others.. well, you seem to know the feeling too.

[MinionOfCthulhu]

Originally Posted by Vatoreus

i'm going to chime in on the bandwagon of "Death Strike is Shit Now". They really should look into the way EQ2 does abilities and just have them do different shit in PvP instead of taking a massive dump allover PvE when trying to balance PvP.

Thank god I spec'd frost for PvP I guess...

The crazy thing is they showed that they can do it, because Faerie Fire is 5 minutes on a mob but 40 seconds on a player. They just don't want to.

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by spronk

Is anyone using a paladin MT in ulduar? I did a pug ulduar last night with two pally tanks (each ~40k hp buffed) just for fun, and while we got 4 bosses down it was a lot of wiping (first time for practically everyone) and the tanks died a LOT. Especially on stuff like the guy with the two arms and xt02.

I dropped to casual rank in my guild since I don't want to raid every night, but its funny that the guild leader is a warrior so he HAS to MT every fight, they have only dropped 2 bosses so far in ulduar25 after 4 nights. We don't even have a raiding DK tank afaik, I wonder if ulduar will make him change his mind.

Pyros - so on your DK you don't try to keep a dps/pvp spec at all? Since my DK is my alt I really want to have a good DPS/pvp spec and a good tank spec. From everything I'm reading frost is probably the best overall tank spec (good single and AOE threat, good for 10 and 25 mans), just not sure I guess what to spec for DPS. I'm staying unholy for now since ebon plaguebringer is really nice for 5/10 mans, may play with blood once arenas start up again.

Paladins are probably the worst tanks currently(or druids depending on the fight) but they're not too far from warrior, who are not too far from DKs. Overall it's not a super huge difference, but DKs survivability is higher than any other tanks due to the sheer amount of options to survive when shit goes wrong. And 40k hp is low. Our warriors have 44k or so. However, tank deaths might also be due to healers in ulduar, the boss output is huge and quite often bursty, healers have to be spamming or at least controlling what's going on, waiting for a hit to start casting a flash heal or whatever isn't going to cut it(while it would have in naxx). You have to consider each boss as 25man patchwerk on HS tank pretty much.

As for my specs, I don't PvP at all(haven't pvped seriously since arena S1 pretty much, the game doesn't appeal to me as a pvp game anymore), and I don't DPS either because I'm one of the guild main tanks(switch with the prot warrior titular MT that's been here forever), and there's pretty much no fights where you only need just one tank, on 25man, and on 10man the other tanks respec cause I'm better at tanking in general(both skill and gear). So I have 2 tanking specs. If you wanted a tanking spec to do everything, I'd still go for blood, but getting morbidity with it. Blood AEing is ok now, it's not like super awesome but decent enough, and the single target tanking seems better than any other spec. Frost is a good choice too, but UA totally sucks on bosses unholy seems the worst to me as a general spec nowadays.


One last thing, downed Mimiron finally, and the thing I noticed is, when I was calling glares(well the super beam shit) and rockets, I'd usually end up failing, the fight requires way too much concentration to be raid leading with any sort of efficiency and tank it without making mistakes. It's one of the funniest fight I've ever tanked though. So I don't think having your MT being your raid leader is such a great thing. Especially when there's a lot of stuff to do(for ppl who haven't done, you have to move out of melee range on some casts, make sure you're not in a dark glare type of mechanic, make sure you move out of rockets, make sure you don't walk into mines, and reposition the boss correctly everytime).

[Zehn - Vhex]

Our paladin tank is back to doing the only thing paladins were good for tanking initially, AE trash.

Could fix it with about 2~4 tweaks that took me about 15 minute to think up while taking a dump, but Blizzard insists on this "LOL DIFFERENT!" bullshit. Which basically translates to "Give Dk's everybody elses abilities but make goddamn certain none of the other tanks are worth a fuck"

[Zehn - Vhex]

Angry Zehn time.

Originally Posted by Aria

You...

Fuck that noise. NONE of the tanking classes are a 'pure' class so their should be little to no fucking discrepancy between them. This "there will always be slight difference..." excuse from Blizzard is utter bullshit as well. This is a fucking -massive- difference and there is no situation under which Paladins are the preferred tank. It's not like it would be hard to balance either.

I'm not even a fan of this "pure dps should do more dps" idea either simply because I don't believe in the idea of pure dps to begin with. Fucking terrible game design and a leftover to the days of pre 2.0 when druids were meant to heal and that was that. Give rogues/hunters a tanking tree and mages/warlocks a healing tree and fucking be done with it.

Anyways...

The -only- way a Paladin MT would be preferably would be if the mob was immune to everything but holy damage and even then it would be far more preferable for our DK to just taunt it off the paladin everytime the Paladin over-agro's him.

Now, the guy is a douche bag for not respeccing to something more useful while paladin MT's are in the state they are in. -Especially- now with dual spec's. There is just no goddamn excuse. On that point we at least agree. You shouldn't roll up a hybrid with the intent to only ever play one spec when there are times other spec's are more useful. It'd be like rolling up a rogue and saying that using stealth breaks character with your roleplaying experience and you refuse to use it. Just fucking stupid.

I know it sounds like I just contradicted myself, but it's more the reasoning then concept. Unless I misunderstood your point, in which case I apologize. But it sounded to me like another "lol ur a hybrid silly, hybrids heal!" post so I had to nerd rage a bit.