3.0.8 Tank Talent Theorycraft

Post by skribs

This article is a comparison between blood, frost, and unholy tanking talents, as they pertain to both physical and magic mitigation. I am only looking at mitigation talents in-depth, although I will be looking at the whole tree briefly to provide a bit of context. I am also looking not from a pure numbers standpoint, but rather from the context that you probably have some stats from gear already. Most formulae that I use (for example, armor conversion) are from wowwiki.

The thing that got me thinking about this is that different stats scale differently, and based on the stats before the upgrade can be incredibly different. Take avoidance for example, in this extreme case: 2 people have the opportunity to increase their avoidance. Person A has 5% avoidance, and can get 2% more (7% total); whereas person B has 95% avoidance and can get 1% more (96% total). While person A is going to be avoiding 2% more raw incoming damage, person B is only avoiding 1%. However, Person B will drop the incoming hit chance by 1/5, whereas Person A will only drop the incoming hit chance by 2.1% of the original (as a ratio). Thus, in comparison to the original stats, Person B will actually be getting a bigger upgrade. The numbers I am going to be using are from 3.0.8 changes, since that’s when it will really make a difference.

As such, this article is going to focus on upgrades from talents with the assumption that you have stats to begin with. Those stats we will assume are 218 base armor (not multiplied by talents/presence) and 12500 armor from gear (and an extra 782 from non-multiplied gear slots), 45% avoidance. This is before talents, and not in frost presence.

Specific Terms:

Damage Reduction – Overall reduces damage taken in a given fight. Examples: Mitigation and Avoidance. Reduced damage makes you easier to heal.
Mitigation – Reduces damage taken when hit, thus damage reduction and an increase to effective health.
Effective Health – the amount of raw damage you can take before you die. Health / (1 – mitigation).
Avoidance – Chance to not get hit on the next attack. Reduces overall damage taken, but does not increase effective health.

Formulae:
DR % from Armor = Armor / (Armor + 400 + 85 * (Attacker Level + 4.5 * (Attacker Level - 59 ) ) )
Avoidance Gain Effectiveness = 1 / (1 – Previous Avoidance)
Effective Health = Health / (1 – mitigation)

Stock Tank:
The basic numbers above assume 45% avoidance (10% chance to be missed, 15% dodge, 20% parry), which is about what I have in my current tanking gear sans talents, as well as 12500 armor from items with a base of 1000 armor. In frost presence, that would be 23500 armor, for 58.55% reduction in damage on a level 83 mob (all armor values will be against level 83 mobs).

Blood Talents:

Blade Barrier – We can assume this will have a fairly good up-time, because it’s very reliable and lasts as long as the blood rune cooldown, so excepting fights where you do a lot of movement and don’t burn your runes or the start of fights, we can assume 100% up-time. At 45% avoidance, that would reduce incoming hit chance by ~18% for the 5 points, or 3.6% per point.

Spell Deflection – The exact formula for SD is going to be (Parry * 0.1) % spell damage reduction per point. This isn’t exactly mitigation, because it isn’t 100% reliable, but is more a pseudo-avoidance. At 20% parry, each point would be a 2% reduction in incoming spell damage (6% total), and at 30% (with blade barrier) it would be 3% each (9% total).

Will of the Necropolis – The proc makes it hard to peg an exact amount of damage reduction, however the effect to AMS is easy to see. At 5 second duration, and 1-minute CD, with 75% DR while active, AMS normally reduces overall incoming spell damage by 6.25%. WotN drops that to 45-sec CD, or ~8.3% DR per point. WotN is then ~2.2% reduction, or ~0.7% reduction per point. However, that did not factor in the proc, and the fact that the reduction in CD gives you more versatility (e.g. might be used more often to block the really powerful spells instead of just spell damage in general). I won’t do math on glyph of AMS, because I don’t know exactly what it will look like in 3.0.8.

Veteran of the Third War – this talent simply increases your effective health by 2% per point, it also increases threat generation and (slightly) parry chance, as well as increasing your expertise – which reduces your chance to get parry-gibbed and increases threat. It’s not really a mathematical observation, but anyone in blood should have this talent for tanking, albeit it may be a bit deep for frost or unholy.

Vampiric Blood – The effectiveness of this talent depends on whether or not you are getting heals during the duration of the cooldown, although it is very powerful regardless. If you are NOT getting heals, it increases your effective health by 20% for the duration, or ~6.7% over the course of the fight (which, since it’s not mitigation, is somewhat irrelevant for the duration, but it is relevant as a comparsion). If you ARE getting healed, then it increases the effectiveness of that healing by 50%, which will not prevent you from getting insta-gibbed, but will reduce the amount of (base) healing needed by ~33%. If you consider that to be mitigation, then it adds ~11% over the course of the fight.
VB will also *temporarily* heal you, whereas another cooldown (like IBF) won’t. If you have 30k max health and you are at 500 HP left, you will be at 6500 after popping VB. IBF on the other hand just reduces damage taken, so if you take a 6k hit right after you will still die (2500 overkill after IBF) whereas you will still have 500 HP after VB. That again isn’t exactly something math can tell you, but it is useful to know where the math can’t tell you everything.

Frost Talents:
Toughness: 15% increase in armor from items, at the amount mentioned above, would add 3375 armor, for a total of 26,875 armor. That would increase mitigation from 58.55% to 61.77%, or a total of ~7.5% difference (using the avoidance formula above). This is ~1.5% mitigation per point, which increases effective health as well as reducing damage.

Improved Icy Touch: Anti-haste going from 14% to 20% will serve somewhat as mitigation, although it only affects incoming auto-attacks. It’s actually about a 5.3% slow in comparison to the original, or ~1.8% per point.

(continued in next reply)

Post by skribs

Lichborne: 25% incoming hit chance reduction for 15 sec on a 3 min CD, which is ~8.3% up-time. At 45% avoidance, this would add about 45% avoidance for the duration; and at 60% avoidance (which you could easily assume with the basic 5/5/5), it would add 62.5% avoidance. Since you can assume the 5/5/5, this would be about equal to 5.1% reduction in incoming damage. However, due to the CD, it should not be used as a passive cooldown, but rather when you really need it, as its power will shine there. The math also cannot factor for the CC break it provides, or the healing you receive from other DK’s during that time while it is active. Also know the incoming miss chance (as opposed to dodge or parry) is active from behind and while stunned, making it good for grabbing adds before an AoE pull or for use on a fight like Maexxna.

Frigid Deathplate: FD is 3% avoidance for 3 points. At a 45% base, it would increase your avoidance to 48%, which is a reduction in ~5.4% incoming hit chance or ~1.8% per point. If you have the 5/5/5, it will be an increase from 60% to 63%, or ~7.5% reduction in incoming hit chance, for 2.5% avoidance per point. This is a prime example as to how those talents stack with each other.

Unbreakable Armor: UA increases all armor by 25% and parry chance by 5% (10% glyphed). I’m not factoring strength in right now. With a 1 min CD, we can assume UA is used regularly, and with 20 sec duration it has 33% up-time. Without toughness, your armor would go to 29375 for 63.84% reduction, and with toughness it would go to 33593 for 66.88% reduction. The overall reduction in incoming damage for the duration is going to be ~12.8% and ~13.4%, respectively, for a total of 4.3% or 4.5% for the whole fight. The parry, without/with the 5/5/5, would increase your avoidance for the duration by 9.1% (18.2% glyphed)/12.5% (25% glyphed), or for the overall fight by 3% (6.1% glyphed)/4.2% (8.3% glyphed). Overall damage reduction, with the 5/5/5, should be 8.7% (12.8% glyphed), making this a powerful CD to use.

Frost Aura: If you have a druid in your group, especially one with Imp MotW, this becomes less powerful. Because I cannot find in my quick search a consistent formula for the DR from resistances, I cannot exactly calculate the effects.

Acclimation: Same as with frost presence on the math problem, however the issue with Acclimation is that it takes time to stack up, and will only be useful on fights where you consistently take spell damage of the same type for an extended period of time. I would rather get that from gear and from buffs that are always active, but some people swear by acclimation.

Guile of Gorefiend: 3 points increase the duration of IBF by 6 seconds, to an 18 second total (on a 1 min CD). IBF should be ~35% mitigation in the next patch, and this talent yields 10% extra up-time, thus resulting in an overall mitigation of 3.5%, or ~1.2% per point. While this is a lot less than you’ve seen from other talents, it’s great threat bonus, too.

Unholy:
Anticipation: At 45% base avoidance, this is 9.1% avoidance for 5 points, or ~1.8% per point. At 55% avoidance (with Blade Barrier) this would then be 11.1% avoidance for 5 points, or ~2.2% per point.

Shadow of Death: 2% stamina means ~2% effective health.

On a Pale Horse: Not exactly mitigation, but reducing the duration of CC will increase the amount of time your avoidance is active.

Magic Supression: The base reduction in magic damage is 5%, or 1% per point. The effects on AMS is to increase the overall damage reduction while active by 33% (as a ratio to the original) which increases the effectiveness by 1/3, or from 6.25% to 8.3%, for a difference in ~2%, or 0.4% per point. Thus, this gives 7% magic mitigation, or 1.4% per point.

Anti-Magic Zone: With 4k AP, this will absorb 18k damage from the raid. If you ask me, it really isn’t worth it unless you want it, as most fights where it would be useful to mitigate AoE damage are going to be hitting your raid for quite a bit more than that every second (total). Take for example HLM from ZA, which is a level 70 raid, he does 9000 DPS on his AoE (450 damage every 0.5 sec to 10 people), which results in AMZ absorbing less than 3 seconds worth.

Unholy Aura: Again, not exactly mitigation, but makes it easier to stay on target or back out of effects such as a whirlwind or nova, also subtly increases raid melee DPS.

Bone Shield: This is hard to peg down an actual duration for, because it is based on charges. With a 3.5 sec ICD on the charges, it will be up for a minimum of 10.5 seconds (14 seconds glyphed), however at 60% avoidance and with a 2.0 incoming attack speed, it could easily last for 15-20 seconds (20-25 seconds glyphed), and as your avoidance goes up it will last even longer. At 20% damage reduction, worst-case scenario is 3.5% overall damage reduction (4.7% glyphed), and assuming normal conditions it should provide (assuming 15 sec non-glyphed or 20 sec glyphed) 5% mitigation (6.7% glyphed). The more avoidance you have, and the less mobs you have on you, the better this talent will be, although you have to know the incoming attack speed and your total avoidance to come up with the exact amount for you.

Overall:
Overall, the 5/5/5 should give you ~29.1% reduction in incoming hit chance and 7.5% more mitigation due to armor. Blood will then focus on extending health, frost on extending avoidance, and unholy on mitigation. In terms of physical damage reduction, frost > unholy > blood, and in terms of magic damage reduction blood > unholy > frost. Blood’s extra healing received, however, gives it a very powerful cooldown.

After writing this, I see how powerful in a dedicated tank set some of these talents are, as well as the synergy between avoidance talents, and I understand more why we are called the “avoidance tanks,” because avoidance continues to provide us with some excellent overall damage reduction. I still stand by what I’ve said in the past about 5/5/5 and a 36-pointer being the best method to go for a tanking build, although you should get all the mitigation talents in your main tree and then try to get the most DPS possible from the rest.

Some things to consider before picking a tree (in addition to the above math):
In terms of AoE threat, Unholy > Frost > Blood, although frost has more burst threat. For single target, they’re all probably about equal, although blood will need to spend a few more GCD’s to get through his abilities. As to the 36-point cooldowns, blood will actually have the easiest time using the 36CD than the other trees, because it requires a blood rune (compared with an F or U rune, which make it harder to use OB/SS/HB). Blood also has the option of more expertise.
I haven’t really put out a clear answer in the original post of thread, or linked spec examples; however I am laying the foundation for other people to pick what they want. You could go with a traditional DPS build, and just sub in some of the damage filler for mitigation; you could make designs specifically for tanking, for example an unholy/blood hybrid which picks up 8% stamina, spell deflection, magic suppression, and bone shield – making you the prime tank on magic fights.
One last note: this should also show why the tank-based builds are bad for PvP. The more you dedicate to avoidance, the better they are; however there is little avoidance on PvP gear (it’s all resilience). So your base avoidance will drop from 45% to ~15%, making the mitigation talents a lot less appetizing.

Post by 184358

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Post by 196742

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Post by skribs

I did not know that about UA...hmmm...well the base math stands.

I actually did not consider MoB being an AoE tool, although HLM is unique in how fast he attacks - most AoEs are every few seconds (although I guess if used on the mage boss in Nexus it would really top the group off). I did consider it against normal bosses (e.g. 2.0 attack speed, hit for >4k) where 2% HP would barely mitigate the hit. It really just depends on the fight and the incoming attack speed, where on some fights it will be virtually worthless and on specific fights it will be golden.

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Post by visas

Magic Supression: The base reduction in magic damage is 5%, or 1% per point. The effects on AMS is to increase the overall damage reduction while active by 33% (as a ratio to the original) which increases the effectiveness by 1/3, or from 6.25% to 8.3%, for a difference in ~2%, or 0.4% per point. Thus, this gives 7% magic mitigation, or 1.4% per point.

Dont forget to take into account the effect this has in combination with the new frost presence. The 5% passive reduction stacks additively with frost presence, and a tank with 20% passive spell damage reduction before resistances is pretty damn sick if you ask me =P Even frost aura + acclimation cant match up to that, WITH frost presence on. Resistance isnt as reliable, IMO, as flat reduction.

Of course, the real appeal is the 100% reduction with anti-magic shell. It lets you survive everything from loken's lightning nova to the lava walls in obsidian sanctum, you just need to learn to time it right. Keep in mind that AMS is being reduced to a 45 second cooldown as well (though it should be taken back to 30 seconds IMO, after all spell reflect for warriors is on a 10 sec cooldown).

(oh, dont forget you can add another 4% to that with rune of spellshattering =)

Anti-Magic Zone: With 4k AP, this will absorb 18k damage from the raid. If you ask me, it really isn’t worth it unless you want it, as most fights where it would be useful to mitigate AoE damage are going to be hitting your raid for quite a bit more than that every second (total). Take for example HLM from ZA, which is a level 70 raid, he does 9000 DPS on his AoE (450 damage every 0.5 sec to 10 people), which results in AMZ absorbing less than 3 seconds worth.

Think of it without including your raid members though - because in a tanking role this is really meant for YOU, not for your group.

As an example, we'll use loken from halls of lightning. On average his nova does what, 10k damage? Most players run out of range during the nova, but an unholy tank can drop AMZ and sit there through the nova, you only end up taking 2500 damage and your AMZ will still last for a few more seconds to absorb some of the passive pulse damage afterwards.

Even if a boss is going to smack you with a spell for 20,000 damage, AMZ will drop the amount of damage taken to 5k as long as that damage doesnt hit anyone else. I use AMZ in conjunction with AMS -all the time- for spellcasters.

Really, I only consider it a raid protection/utility talent if you're acting as dps - for a tank, it's a mitigation tool for you, and you alone.

Bone Shield: This is hard to peg down an actual duration for, because it is based on charges. With a 3.5 sec ICD on the charges, it will be up for a minimum of 10.5 seconds (14 seconds glyphed), however at 60% avoidance and with a 2.0 incoming attack speed, it could easily last for 15-20 seconds (20-25 seconds glyphed), and as your avoidance goes up it will last even longer. At 20% damage reduction, worst-case scenario is 3.5% overall damage reduction (4.7% glyphed), and assuming normal conditions it should provide (assuming 15 sec non-glyphed or 20 sec glyphed) 5% mitigation (6.7% glyphed). The more avoidance you have, and the less mobs you have on you, the better this talent will be, although you have to know the incoming attack speed and your total avoidance to come up with the exact amount for you.

With avoidance on a single target, yes, it does last a fairly long time - however you're still only going to absorb 4 (5 glyphed) attacks. The only advantage in it lasting longer is that you can re-cast it with less downtime on the mitigation.

Now, even being reduced to 20% mitigation, bone shield provides something that nothing in frost does - spell damage mitigation. It works against both physical attacks and magic damage, meaning you can use this to further increase your effectiveness against spellcasting targets.

Where it really comes in handy for physical mitigation, in terms of amount of damage absorbed/reduced, is when AoE tanking. With the glyph, you get a minimum of 14 seconds duration out of this, and during that duration -every attack- is reduced by 20%. If you're tanking 10 mobs that attack once per second, you're reducing the damage of 140 attacks by 20% before the shield fails.

and in terms of magic damage reduction blood > unholy > frost

I largely disagree here - blood has one talent that reduces magic damage, and it works on chance. It is nowhere near as effective as having bone shield / magic suppression / antimagic zone with unholy.

With the changes in 3.0.8, unholy deathknights become more effective at tanking spellcaster targets than any other spec or class in the game, you just have to juggle cooldowns right and use the appropriate gear and enhancements.

Post by Ghoso

This post deserves a bump. So many people asking about tank specs.

3.0.8 Tank Talent Theorycraft

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