I might have hit something here... (build)

[ubuntuno]

I'm still leveling my dk, since i had to give it a go. Considering i'm very into tanking and three trees for that role is irresistable. But it seems i decided to finally try dk on the worst time, it seems the nerfbat has hit us pretty hard. Throughout official forums all i hear is QQ and no adaptation.

So i came up with a build with a focus in shitloads of survival cooldowns, while trying to taking care of threat generation (this is supposed to be a boss killer, so no aoe focus).
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#YhvdJnCvcKsvYw7,t633-,10596

Apart from a few unsure choices and a couple of "fillers", this looks viable for the purpose intend, although i haven't tested out of the sketch board. The million dollar question is concerning the 45/50 talent common to all trees. Is the 10%/15% more damage of said tier an absolute must in every tanking tree?

[TobiasX2k]

For all specs the answer is: get 5 points in Blade Barrier, 5 points in Toughness and 5 points in Anticipation. The avoidance / armor given by these talents at such a low level is so good they should always be taken.

As for  the rest of your spec... for someone who loves unholy it's good. I'd personally go with either blood or frost as their main "oh crap" button (Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor") have a more predictable uptime; Bone Shield can be great against slow-swing bosses and gone in a flash against things like Patchwerk's 15% mini-enrage.

Overall a good idea

PS. Anti-Magic Zone is very situational; I think I've only used it on Malygos and Sarth + 3D.

[Gravity]

That spec is called the Unholy-Vot3W. It has very bad threat in 3.22, but great survival.

[Mouse]

With VOTW nerfed to 3%, its hardly worth picking up if you aren't blood.

I also try and put IIT in all of my tank builds.  It is a direct decrease in damage taken.

[ubuntuno]

thank you for your feedback, i'll consider it. Since it's so bad threat gen and the effect of IIT, i might go for the mid-frost and blood. I'll lose the anti-magic zone (which is kind of situational anyway) and focus in another direction other then relying on scourge strike to generate threat. At least Unbreakable Armor is more predictable than Bone Shield. Worth the Major Glyph for the 30% granted bonus though?

[ubuntuno]

Here it is, Sh*t loads of cooldowns build 2.0:
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight#tSQHYfm7YzWU6_M,tpr3-,10596

It now revolves around icy touch, obliterate and frost strike for the dump. Subversion still worth the keep for OB. Not sure Frigid Dreadplate any usefull on a Boss fight, merciless isn't great but hopefully it will allow us not to jeopardy the last burn phase of a boss /stares at bloodlust|heroism.

Thanks in advance.

[Gravity]

I remember Masterkiller doing some work on a blood/frigid dreadplate spec too, in this thread. That's what you are basically linking.

I think it worked OK for him, just expect you'd have lower threat.

I was curious though, so simulated your build in Kahorie with i232 level gear and some raid buffs you might get in a 10-man. I changed the glyphs to the superior threat-oriented choice of Obliterate, Frost Strike and Rune Strike.

It gave 1724dps / 3986 TPS using a frost-priority.

Then did a fairly typical deep blood MT spec, same gear, simulated it: 2007 dps / 4684 TPS.

Pretty big difference, with deep blood 17% ahead. I wouldn't use that spec. I ended up blogging on this, thanks for the inspiration.

[Vexill]

Did you simulate using a HS heavy rotation? The problem I've always found with those is that it can be very difficult to actually get a stable rotation going due to the number of GCD's required to spend all my runes. All it takes is having to move at the wrong time or a couple of parries and I find myself having to drop out strikes or improvise.
HS blood does provide good threat, it just never seems to get close to what the sims suggest I should be able to be doing with it. Then again, that may be due to playing on oceanic realms where latency is higher than US realms.

[ubuntuno]

I do have to admit that disregarding anti-magic zone for once, does stray for the porpose intended in the first place. The idea was to have such cooldowns that you would have a very high up-time with some sort of extra avoidance.

The threat issue is pertinent though, is there a tps bar convetionally considered to be on top of dps? 17% does seem enough to ground the idea, but what if that lack of tps is still enough to top the dps department and staying true to the survival priority?
There are the rogue and hunter abilities aswell as threat dumps from each classes, and if upon everyone in the raid being warned about running with that much care of over-aggro.

Anyway, i think my mistake was disregarding the top tank priority - holding aggro, preferably by his own means

i'll be looking forward to your unholy specc mentioned in the blog and its simulation. But still think Vot3W is in that lower tier for a reason in concept, to allow us venturing into hybrrid speccs.

[Gravity]

Ubuntuno, I think our first job is to survive, but you know that.
The catch is you do need to generate a reasonable minimum threat, which varies depending on your content. For normal 10/25s you'd probably get away with a Dreadplate or Unholy-Vot3W spec (except on some fights, like Hodir it can be tough, and you need more threat than usual). For hard-modes you really end up looking at threat/survival trade-offs in your spec.

A nice thing about Unholy at the moment (no reaping), is you can afford to get AMS/AMZ and still have enough threat for most purposes. I was a little surprised the sim had it generating more threat than blood, but perhaps that's because I compared a threat-oriented unholy build (no AMS/AMZ) with a survival-oriented blood build.

I don't think there's any formula for 'how much threat is enough' other than the obvious: don't be a glass ceiling for your DPSers if you can reasonably avoid it.

For unholy in 3.22 I've written on it before, and no-reaping is now fairly well-established (even Satorri's new "tank spec" post on tankspot uses it). I'm curious to sim 3.3 though this week.

Vexill, the Kahorie sim does know about parry from facing the boss (as opposed to being behind it), so it includes that in its factors, but it is a simulator so generates a perfectly executed fight within its limits. I could try it with 250ms latency for a fellow Aussie, but the sim I did used 150ms. So, whilst it was a priority rotation including HS, it was as limited in its use of it as the Frost build, and the sim does have the two key factors of latency and front-facing.