Now that the 3.3 DPS Specs are all but done, let’s talk a little about tanking. I was surprised that I pretty much like my tanking specs from 3.2, with the exception of Unholy. There’ve been some changes to Scourge Strike and some other abilities in Unholy, so it warrants a second look at the spec I picked out.

Blood
53/8/10

Blood hasn’t changed at all since I looked at it in 3.2. This spec provides strong regeneration and mitigation as well as nice utility talents in the top of the other two trees. I think Blood is a superior raid-boss tanking spec.

Perks
Health Regeneration via Imp Death Strike, Imp Blood Pres, and Vampiric Blood
Enhanced mitigation via added Stamina, Armor, and Parry
Hysteria and Might of Mograine raid buffs
Improved Runic Power generation

Frost
10/51/10

From my experience, Frost is the superior Aggro spec. Along with other abilities; you get stronger initial threat thanks to Howling Blast. I use Frost the most for Heroic tanking and on raid trash, due to its snap-aggro on the pull.

Perks
Improved Avoidance and Mitigation via Frigid Dreadplate and Unbreakable Armor
Improved AoE threat via Howling Blast and Morbidity

Unholy
13/8/50

This unholy spec focuses more on raid tanking. It drops talents for magic immunity because they’re pretty much useless in a raid situation. Unholy focuses more on AoE threat and avoidance. I’d imagine it would be great for trash tanking, but I think it falls short on aggro generation for raid bosses.

Perks
Superior AoE Threat via improved diseases and wandering\ebon plague
Improved Avoidance via Bone Shield

Frost DPS is my favorite spec, I guess I just like the style. It suits me.

Following Naxxramas, Blizzard pretty much killed Frost-based Dual-Wielding specs (and Unholy-Based Dual-Wielding specs). The problem was that these specs relied on Icy Touch spam to make ridiculously consistent Killing Machine procs. At the time, Killing Machine wasn’t really normalized, so the faster your weapons were, the more procs you could get, essentially buffing your crit percentages to insanely high numbers at the time.

In response to this, Blizzard nerfed Icy Touch, and some Sigils that took advantage of it. They also normalized Killing Machine to a procs-per-minute setup. The damage of Dual-Wielding specs was slaughtered, pushing most dps Death Knights to Unholy and Blood.

Popular demand forced Blizzard to redesign the Frost tree and make Dual-Wielding a viable option again. Nerves of Cold Steel, Threat of Thassarian, and changes to Obliterate were added to essential turn Frost into the Dual-Wielding tree. Frost is an iconic path for Death Knights in Wow Lore, while Dual-Wielding is a play-style that many players are drawn to. Part of it is rebellion against the norm and being different, part of it I believe is just personal preference.

The frost tree has always been more magic damage than melee. While Blood fills the melee-based roll, and Unholy is traditionally for AoE, Frost fills a spot in between. In a fight like Lady Deathwhisper a Death Knight can help kill those mobs that your Warriors, Paladins, or Hunters would be otherwise unable to kill effectively.

Strengths
* Frost excels at single-target damage, while still retaining competitive AoE damage via Howling Blast.
* Frost relies more heavily on magic damage than Blood.
* Frost provides raid utility in the form of Imp. Icy Talons, a haste buff similar to Windfury.
* Enhanced damage and survival via Unbreakable Armor.

Weaknesses
* Other classes can provide similar raid buffs.
* Weaker AoE damage performance.
* Weaker defensive capabilities, lacking the avoidance and mitigation of Blood or Unholy.
* At this time Blood or Unholy have a slight dps advantage.

Weapon Speed and Frost DPS

In previous incarnations, Dual-Wielding relied on Fast\Fast weapons or Slow\Fast weapons to achieve maximum dps. Since Killing Machine, one of Frost’s best procs is now based on procs per minute, slower weapon speeds are best. Get yourself a good 2.60 swords or axes (or maces if you’re a dorf) and you’ll achieve maximum dps. For best effect, you should use Fallen Crusader on your MH and Razorice on your OH.

Glyphs

Glyph of Icy Touch
Glyph of Obliterate
Glyph of Frost Strike

0/54/17 Rotation

Rotations for Frost are based on a priority system. Which will look kinda like this: Frost Strike (Killing Machine) > Diseases (IT, PS) > Howling Blast (if Rime and Killing Machine are up) > Obliterate > Blood Strike > Frost Strike. A priority system means that the priority queue is evaluated when deciding which ability to use; instead of following a set rotation. Please keep this in mind as you consider the rotation below.

General Frost rotations will look something like this.

Rotation 1
     Dump(  )

Rotation 2
    Dump(  )

NOTE: This ability list is prone to change based on your Killing Machine and Rime procs. For instance, when you have a Killing Machine and Rime proc, you should use Howling Blast. When you have a Killing Machine proc, you should use KM prior to hitting Icy Touch again. Also, I'm still trying to find some good stat weights for Frost.

First order of business, been having some server issues. It’s makes things a bit difficult to get more people to the site when things don’t work. It’s Vmware’s fault, and I’m trying to get it settled. If you’ve had issues getting on; I’m sorry about that. If you haven’t, forget this first paragraph. I’m a one man show here, I designed the site, I host the site, and I write content; sometimes the gnomes tinker with my hardware.

First bit of news is a big “I told you so”. According to Blizz, rogues are getting nerfed. They expect a 7% damage decrease to Assassination and a 2% decrease to Combat. Taking into account the meters from ICC, I’m not surprised at all. Take away 7% of our rogue’s damage and she’s still ahead, but not by quite so much compared to everyone else. We have good people with about equivalent gear and skill, if someone’s THAT far ahead, something is wrong with the class. This is the same argument other people used against Death Knights back in Naxx. The buff nerf game is part of the class-mechanics merrygoround that the devs use to keep everyone interested; deal with it. As expected some wonderful people of the WoW community have taken the news waaaay too far. Check out this read from Ghostcrawler on the forums:

It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is.

In your eagerness to find a gotcha I think you misinterpreted me. You guys (the community) theorycrafted the nerf to be about 7% for Mutilate. For you guys (the community) to then complain that it's a massive nerf that will cost you a raid spot seems disingenuous. Either you don't believe those estimates, in which case I advise you to address those players who made them, or you're just being melodramatic.

We know how much we wanted to lower rogue damage, but we typically don't share our numbers. What happens is if we said "Rogue target damage is 7.5K dps" then every time players did less than that or saw other classes do more, they'd try and argue that we need to make changes instead of them trying to do better.

- Ghostcrawler (Source)

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to say that Rogues DESERVE to be nerfed, or that they shouldn’t be a little bit higher on the meters than a DK. What I am trying to say is that an equally geared and equally skilled rogue should not be topping the meters by as high of a margin as they are (or maybe were) currently. That turns into a class balance issue, and guilds start stacking rogues as they have stacked other classes in the past, and an overpowered class becomes a crutch.

As promised, I did a little comparison between blood and frost. These meters were taken on the same raid with the same raid members. I used my normal frost DW spec (0/53/18) and the top 2-hand blood dps spec (51/0/20). I think that the damage ended up being relatively the same. Blood scored a little less, but I chalk this up to less familiarity with the rotation. I was able to come up top on one of our attempts against Saurfang.

Blood	Frost	Frost

We killed Saurfang again, but we had to slightly modify our strategy. We had a hunter and a balance druid for ranged dps. We had the ranged, and one of our DK’s on permanent flesh duty, while myself, Kaali, and the rest of the melee dps focused totally on the boss. We were able to get to Frenzy just as Saurfang was using the first MoB. The strain on the healers was a lot less. Even though we had less overall dps, we still rolled the encounter. If we hadn’t made that change, we would have failed. So, if you’re raid is low dps-wise, you may want to consider a similar strategy.

That was it for the night unfortunately, we had some people bail before we could try the new wing, and then Yuriken and Kilios’ dad was rushed to the hospital, killing our raid night this week.

Got something you want me to talk about, feel free to drop me a line. Also, if you have a screen shot of someone being a Deathnoob, feel free to email it to me for our mutual amusement and their humiliation.