5/5 Bladed Armor over Morbidity and Unholy CommandFollow

Unholy Command= -10 seconds to your Death Grip.

A. This isn't an ability you use every time it is on CD. You are wasting two points to reduce the CD of a taunt just in case you would want it. And you already have another taunt.

B. You could easily go months without ever benefiting from the CD reduction. Dark Command should be your go-to taunt. Death Grip is if you absolutely need to taunt in those 8 seconds that it is on CD. DG is most useful as a positioning tool.

Morbidity is optional for Frost, but required for Unholy and Blood. Morb.'s two effects are that it lowers the DnD CD by 15 seconds (to 15 seconds) and increases DC damage by 15%.

A. Frost gets Howling Blast. This is a ton of snap threat. Unholy and Blood don't get anything close to it.

B. Both Unholy and Blood use DC. Frost doesn't. You are ONLY getting CD reduction from that talent.

C. Part of why DnD works out well for those two specs is that they don't really lose anything from it--just 1 BB. They place DnD, place diseases and spread them. Frost, however, would have to make a sacrifice. Either they use DnD then place and spread diseases, or they use DnD, HB and then BB. Except that this means ALL of those abilities will be doing 10% (or way more) less threat because there isn't FF present.

D. The most dangerous part of a trash pull are those first few seconds. That's when someone is most likely to take threat from you. HB is snap threat, and sets a high initial threshold for this. DnD sets a higher threshold, but it takes 10 seconds (I don't know at which tic it ACTUALLY passes HB threat). Since HB is going to give you more than enough threat for most groups, you won't need to replace DnD when it wears on a pull. So that CD reduction means nothing if you aren't on a new pack every 15 seconds.

E. Bladed Armor is just so good. It gives my DK 800 AP. Yes, that's right, Eight HUNDRED. That's crazy awesome. I mean, you pay 250G for an epic Str gem on my server and that's only 40 AP for Frost. This is 20x that.

Rawr tells me that my DK would lose 650 TpS by dropping 4 points from BA.

I think I'm gonna hold onto it.

Blade Barrier should be baseline for any tanking build. 5% damage reduction is HUGE, especially since DKs don't have Block to help mitigate damage. If I saw a DK tank without 5/5 Blade Barrier, 5/5 Anticipation, and 5/5 Toughness, I'd seriously question whether or not they knew what they were doing.

In terms of Bladed Armor, like Idiggory said you're looking at anywhere between 700-1000 AP as a tank, depending on your Armor. That's absolutely huge considering that all of your attacks (hence threat) scale with AP.

It depends on the fight. On the Lich King, I can definitely see a tank making that swap as a DK tanking the adds in P1 will be using D&D and DG pretty much every time they are off CD (try pulling multiple mobs of the MT and ranged group without moving. Yeah.). If you want to do utter min/maxing, I'd say you want 5/5 BA over anything else in pure single-target tanking/threat, 2/5 BA and 3/3 Morbidity in an average fight focused on AOE tanking and 0/5 BA, 3/3 Morbidity and 2/2 Unholy Command for off-tanking very rare fights like the Lich King, where you really do use D&D and DG as much as possible.