The Blood Death Knight - what works and what doesn't
The Death Knight tank is quite unique among tanks because it is the only true active mitigation tank out of all them all. Not only that, but it appears that how people receive the new Blood DK tanking model is going to be decisive for further adjustments for all the other tanks if this post is any indication:
7 months into Cataclysm I've had ample time to play my Death Knight so I feel confident enough to evaluate how thing have turned out for us.
I'll start with pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of the Active Mitigation Model first with a focus on Blood Death Knights. And finally I'll list some issues DKs still have that isn't explicity tied to the AMM (Though in one way or another, everything is tied to it. But you know what I mean <_<)
Every tank has a way to increase their survivability while tanking right now. The degrees of how much of an impact they make is naturally quite different between DKs and the other tank classes, but it doesn't change the fact that this "new" model of tanking is anything but completely new even if people probably wouldn't recognize these abilities as such:
Shield Block (even the old Vanilla/TBC versions), Word of Glory (and the 4.2 Holy Shield), Pulverize and Savage Defense are all buttons you can push (or in case of SD: trigger) to increase your survival without simply relying on your passive mitigation from armor, defensive stance modifiers and so on. (I suppose you could even list the "real" tanking CDs like Shield Wall here but every class has these so it's wash).
That said, Blizzard has to be commended for actually implementing a tank that relies so much more on this new tanking model than the rest; this is some pretty innovative stuff for a game this old where a raid tank's role wasn't all that much different from a DPS player that attacked mobs from the front (threat atleast mattered before Wrath, so there is that) and was more durable just by virtue of their passive survivability (armor, health, avoidance and so on).
I know some people, especially some disgruntled Death Knight players on the official WoW forums, disagree and couldn't care less about having to manage their survival but that was to be expected with a change this big. Also do keep in mind that this does not even mean that people who hate the new DK model hate the AMM itself since there are more things involved here in terms of DK mechanics (more about that later) and the fact that DKs are on the extreme side of the AMM spectrum; maybe they'd be fine if Death Strike would have less of an impact on survivability but still enough to matter?
For me, the most obvious advantage is the fact that I actually get to have something meaningful to do in raids. I'm sure I am not the only one who felt that tanking was rather boring in Wrath:
Threat didn't matter because MD and TotT could carry you (and now Vengeance does). Bosses would - and still do - exempt tanks from most (if not all) of their abilities which made the encounters fun/challenging (Twilight Cutters on Sinestra, Sonic Breath on Atramedes, Mind Control on Nef and so on) or made it so that a tank would actually have a lower chance of dying by standing In The Fire™ just by virtue of their survivability (I do understand why tanks get a pass on some of the boss abilities naturally, but it doesn't change my point).
tl;dr? Ever been an offtank at BQL? Yeah. That role encompassed everything what was wrong with Wrath tanking.
Now that I actually have to care for my own survival, these things don't bother me as much (although I do wish tanking was more engaging in terms of encounter design on top of this). I actually get something meaningful to do, something which actually fits a tank: increasing my survival. There are worlds between a DK who plays well and one who does not, and I think that's great. You actually get rewarded for playing well with more than just adding X DPS by doing your flawless rotation and so on. Because of this I don't even mind anymore that Vengeance trivializes threat (and I was a big supporter for making threat meaningful again in the Cataclysm Beta so tanks would actually get challenged in raids again). As a matter of fact, I actually started to like Vengeance because it allows me to pool Runes and time my Death Strikes without having to worry about losing threat (YMMV on Vengeance obviously if you are not reading this from a DK tank PoV).
Nothing sucked more than dying to things out of your control (healers had to move, you didn't avoid enough hits in a world where bosses could two shot tanks etc). With the new model you are just as responsible for staying alive as your healers are. It helps that bosses also don't hit as hard as they did in Wrath in relation to your health obviously, but that doesn't invalidate my point.
To be more specific: You can decide when you want to gain that absorb shield. This sounds trivial but it's really not. Healer mana simply does not matter and so in extension your average damage taken does not matter either. What kills tanks is burst damage and being able to put up a Blood Shield when you need it most is extremely powerful. I honestly don't understand why people talk so much about Death Strikes per minute as if they only cared about overall damage taken when that really is not the problem. You can get a big EH boost when it is most needed whereas a Warrior for example has to rely on RNG to block or avoid a swing. And so would a Druid. Paladins, unfortuanately, are exempt from this because they can block cap and gain a massive permanent EH boost - but this is not a flaw with us but a design error to let Paladins block cap that easily.
And with nearly everything in life, nothing comes for free. The AMM is what Blizzard calls "an advanced" playstyle and with that comes a slew of disadvantages. Some are minor like having to use proper mods, some are pretty big.
I admit that doing what we do requires intense focus. The less you focus (or "care") about timing and maximing DS or gaming Runic Empowerment, the worse you play. Sometimes your heart just is not in it, or you are distracted or whatever and then you take a lot more healer maintanance (or in the worst case just die) than a non-AMM tank would. Being responsible for your survival is a double-edged sword after all. If you got the potential to boost your survival tremendously you also have the potential to suck at it. Personally I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages here.
This is one of the more serious issues I have with Death Strike. I absolutely do not mind having to soft cap Expertise and cap Hit. At all. What I do mind is that I will never be able to remove boss parries from the combat table so there is always the chance that a boss might repeatedly parry me at bad times and I'll die. Due to RNG. Remember what I said about DKs having access to reliable EH boosts when they want and how awesome being able to control your survival is? Unfortunately boss parry can mess this up. I don't even get why bosses still have to have that high of a parry chance to begin with. If you want to deter from attacking to the front, there is already block. I am sure Blizz could find a different way to make this happen without screwing over tanks.
Even adding something that gives DS a 7% less chance to get parried would do (but ideally increased boss parry should go away). Think about it.
Avoiding hits in your Death Strike heal window (the 5 seconds before you Death Strike) diminishes the value of your Blood Shield. This is one of the things I am rather ambigious about since timing DS can atleast partially negate this issue. But if Blizz were to find a way to make Avoidance not interact negatively without Death Strike I'd definitely be happy about that. If not? Oh well, there are more important battles to win.
Currently Blood Shield itself and every other absorb shield diminish the following Blood Shield by removing damage from the DS heal window. I can understand why this is the case for Blood Shield absorbs* but it makes absolutely no sense that healer shields will actually mess with our mastery. Blizz had the technology even in Wrath to grant Warrior tanks rage through absorb shields as if they actually took the full swing unabsorbed so this should be doable for Blood Shield. If you are still doubting this, ask yourself this: How does it make sense that if you get healed by a Disc Priest and/or Holy Paladin that you perform worse than if a Druid, Shaman or Holy Priest healed you?
*Imagine you have a 100k Blood Shield with a boss hitting for 50k every 1.8 secs; your Blood Shield would guarantee you would take no melee damage for nearly 4 seconds which is half the cool down of Death Strike. If you avoided something with the Blood Shield up I could definitely imagine the Blood Shield stacking further and further. Blood Shield diminishing itself also controls Runic Empowerment; think about it. The more DS you can do per time frame, the less each individual DS heals and grants an absorb shield for because of the diminishing factor. If this were not in the game then gaming RE would be even more important (or unbalanced depending on how many DS/min Blizz truly balances around).
I already made a blog post about this topic: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/5379-l...ping_bad_game/
In short: Death Knights would get destroyed the moment constant (this is the key word) EH is being stressed by bosses. Sure, there are ways to mitigate this by giving DKs more health (but keeping the armor the same), tweaking Will of the Necropolis etc to ensure that DKs cannot get 3 shot, but if the game truly reaches this stage then I don't see the Active Tanking Model working very well.
Some more stuff I just need to get out of my head:
Survival vs survival choices are stupid.
I do not mind using a Death Rune every now and then for Chains of Ice (Nef) or DnD (add pick up etc) because reasonable threat/utility vs survival choices are fine with me. If I CoI that DPS heading for the MC portal I add more raid DPS at the cost of breaking up half a Death Strike. Sometimes I need the DPS more, sometimes I need the survival more. I really have no problem with this decision making. However Diseases use the same Runes as a Death Strike and both increase survival so it's not really a choice at all.
I can only repeat:
Survival vs survival choices are stupid.
Bring back Glyph of Disease, make Outbreak cost a Blood Rune and remove the CD (etc etc, I am sure there are a million ways to fix this).
There are two issues here:
1) Blood Boil hits for shit so you need to use more than 2 and DnD to hold aggro over DPS. The problem is that these additional Blood Boils come from your Death Runes which you should have been using for Death Strikes. Oops?
2) A group of mobs generally hits harder than one single boss would which in turn means it might get to a point where your EH is challenged. Since DKs need to get hit first to make proper use of their mastery this can get tricky the harder these mobs hit. If you have to additionally kite these mobs then you are even worse off because you can't even Death Strike then.
How serious these problems are depends on your co-tank, I guess. I have a Prot Paladin co-tank so these things don't really affect me (and trash doesn't hit hard enough that missing Death Strikes is such a big deal). I'd still like to see this addressed though.
Bone Shield:
This harks back into what I said about Diseases. Survival vs survival choices are stupid. If Blizz really needs to make Bone Shield cost a Rune (which I don't see the point of, to be quite honest) then it should be a Blood Rune. You know, considering it got moved into the Blood tree? <_< Regardless of what the decision on this is, it really needs to be off the GCD as well just like Divine Protection, Barkskin, Vampiric Blood etc are all off the GCD, too.
Dancing Rune Weapon:
I am probably nitpicking here since DRW is pretty much a proactive/planned cool down so the steep 60 RP cost can be worked around. What I however don't get is the mixed signals Blizz is sending with Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon - Item - World of Warcraft and buffing it's damage in 4.2. Is it just meant to be used for picking up adds that spawn mid-combat? Like I said, it's minor but it was just bugging me (and if it were cheaper you could actually do some nice things with the DRW and Lichborne combo).
Some stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else and/or is a minor nitpick which I included for completeness' sake.
Blood Tap and Rune consumption:
A nice quality of life change would be if abilities would prioritize the Blood Tap'd Death Rune over the "normal" Death Runes. The only way to get the game to use the BT'd Death Rune to Death Strike with is if you only have 1 "normal" Death Rune up. Like I said, it's minor but hey, might as well list it.
In addition, it would be groovy if the game would use Death Runes smartly by getting the first set on CD whenever it is possible (i.e. if you Heart Strike six times in a row it will consume the Blood Runes first and then move on to Frost and Unholy Runes (all up as Death Runes) which is inefficient since using 1 B, 1 F and 1 U Rune after another would atleast get the first pair of Runes on cool down already).
Blood Rites
Is fine. Really. It helps with gaming RE and gives some flexibility with Rune consumption so people really need to shut up about this.
Useless talents
Talents like Blood-Caked Blade are admittedly stupid but they don't really affect us for tanking. Just don't take them.
Runic Empowerment/Blade Barrier
We are very happy how Runic Empowerment and Blade Barrier have worked out and I also think this is fine. RE gaming isn't too hard and gives you something to do. It helps that I consider getting an opportune RE proc as a bonus though and not rely on it as much. I can understand how people would go nuts with RE not proccing anything if they were actually relying on it.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I think that's all.
Hope you enjoyed reading through this. :V According to a guildie this was too cliche and has henceforth been removed. No more gratitude to anyone for reading this.
EDIT: Just in case it wasn't clear, I absolutely love DK tanking and couldn't see myself re-rolling at all. There are flaws, yes, but that doesn't mean that the idea of the DK tank and current implementation is not good. It just could do with being even better.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaivax
We’d actually like to head more in that direction with the other tanks (making them tie more of their defensive performance to their ability usage), in the future)
I'll start with pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of the Active Mitigation Model first with a focus on Blood Death Knights. And finally I'll list some issues DKs still have that isn't explicity tied to the AMM (Though in one way or another, everything is tied to it. But you know what I mean <_<)
Contents |
[top] The Active Mitigation Model (AMM)
Every tank has a way to increase their survivability while tanking right now. The degrees of how much of an impact they make is naturally quite different between DKs and the other tank classes, but it doesn't change the fact that this "new" model of tanking is anything but completely new even if people probably wouldn't recognize these abilities as such:
Shield Block (even the old Vanilla/TBC versions), Word of Glory (and the 4.2 Holy Shield), Pulverize and Savage Defense are all buttons you can push (or in case of SD: trigger) to increase your survival without simply relying on your passive mitigation from armor, defensive stance modifiers and so on. (I suppose you could even list the "real" tanking CDs like Shield Wall here but every class has these so it's wash).
That said, Blizzard has to be commended for actually implementing a tank that relies so much more on this new tanking model than the rest; this is some pretty innovative stuff for a game this old where a raid tank's role wasn't all that much different from a DPS player that attacked mobs from the front (threat atleast mattered before Wrath, so there is that) and was more durable just by virtue of their passive survivability (armor, health, avoidance and so on).
I know some people, especially some disgruntled Death Knight players on the official WoW forums, disagree and couldn't care less about having to manage their survival but that was to be expected with a change this big. Also do keep in mind that this does not even mean that people who hate the new DK model hate the AMM itself since there are more things involved here in terms of DK mechanics (more about that later) and the fact that DKs are on the extreme side of the AMM spectrum; maybe they'd be fine if Death Strike would have less of an impact on survivability but still enough to matter?
[top] Advantages
[top] Fun factor
For me, the most obvious advantage is the fact that I actually get to have something meaningful to do in raids. I'm sure I am not the only one who felt that tanking was rather boring in Wrath:
Threat didn't matter because MD and TotT could carry you (and now Vengeance does). Bosses would - and still do - exempt tanks from most (if not all) of their abilities which made the encounters fun/challenging (Twilight Cutters on Sinestra, Sonic Breath on Atramedes, Mind Control on Nef and so on) or made it so that a tank would actually have a lower chance of dying by standing In The Fire™ just by virtue of their survivability (I do understand why tanks get a pass on some of the boss abilities naturally, but it doesn't change my point).
tl;dr? Ever been an offtank at BQL? Yeah. That role encompassed everything what was wrong with Wrath tanking.
Now that I actually have to care for my own survival, these things don't bother me as much (although I do wish tanking was more engaging in terms of encounter design on top of this). I actually get something meaningful to do, something which actually fits a tank: increasing my survival. There are worlds between a DK who plays well and one who does not, and I think that's great. You actually get rewarded for playing well with more than just adding X DPS by doing your flawless rotation and so on. Because of this I don't even mind anymore that Vengeance trivializes threat (and I was a big supporter for making threat meaningful again in the Cataclysm Beta so tanks would actually get challenged in raids again). As a matter of fact, I actually started to like Vengeance because it allows me to pool Runes and time my Death Strikes without having to worry about losing threat (YMMV on Vengeance obviously if you are not reading this from a DK tank PoV).
[top] You are in control
Nothing sucked more than dying to things out of your control (healers had to move, you didn't avoid enough hits in a world where bosses could two shot tanks etc). With the new model you are just as responsible for staying alive as your healers are. It helps that bosses also don't hit as hard as they did in Wrath in relation to your health obviously, but that doesn't invalidate my point.
To be more specific: You can decide when you want to gain that absorb shield. This sounds trivial but it's really not. Healer mana simply does not matter and so in extension your average damage taken does not matter either. What kills tanks is burst damage and being able to put up a Blood Shield when you need it most is extremely powerful. I honestly don't understand why people talk so much about Death Strikes per minute as if they only cared about overall damage taken when that really is not the problem. You can get a big EH boost when it is most needed whereas a Warrior for example has to rely on RNG to block or avoid a swing. And so would a Druid. Paladins, unfortuanately, are exempt from this because they can block cap and gain a massive permanent EH boost - but this is not a flaw with us but a design error to let Paladins block cap that easily.
[top] Disadvantages
And with nearly everything in life, nothing comes for free. The AMM is what Blizzard calls "an advanced" playstyle and with that comes a slew of disadvantages. Some are minor like having to use proper mods, some are pretty big.
[top] The "Care" factor
I admit that doing what we do requires intense focus. The less you focus (or "care") about timing and maximing DS or gaming Runic Empowerment, the worse you play. Sometimes your heart just is not in it, or you are distracted or whatever and then you take a lot more healer maintanance (or in the worst case just die) than a non-AMM tank would. Being responsible for your survival is a double-edged sword after all. If you got the potential to boost your survival tremendously you also have the potential to suck at it. Personally I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages here.
[top] Reliance on Hit and Expertise
This is one of the more serious issues I have with Death Strike. I absolutely do not mind having to soft cap Expertise and cap Hit. At all. What I do mind is that I will never be able to remove boss parries from the combat table so there is always the chance that a boss might repeatedly parry me at bad times and I'll die. Due to RNG. Remember what I said about DKs having access to reliable EH boosts when they want and how awesome being able to control your survival is? Unfortunately boss parry can mess this up. I don't even get why bosses still have to have that high of a parry chance to begin with. If you want to deter from attacking to the front, there is already block. I am sure Blizz could find a different way to make this happen without screwing over tanks.
Even adding something that gives DS a 7% less chance to get parried would do (but ideally increased boss parry should go away). Think about it.
[top] The effect of Avoidance
Avoiding hits in your Death Strike heal window (the 5 seconds before you Death Strike) diminishes the value of your Blood Shield. This is one of the things I am rather ambigious about since timing DS can atleast partially negate this issue. But if Blizz were to find a way to make Avoidance not interact negatively without Death Strike I'd definitely be happy about that. If not? Oh well, there are more important battles to win.
[top] Blood Shield munching
Currently Blood Shield itself and every other absorb shield diminish the following Blood Shield by removing damage from the DS heal window. I can understand why this is the case for Blood Shield absorbs* but it makes absolutely no sense that healer shields will actually mess with our mastery. Blizz had the technology even in Wrath to grant Warrior tanks rage through absorb shields as if they actually took the full swing unabsorbed so this should be doable for Blood Shield. If you are still doubting this, ask yourself this: How does it make sense that if you get healed by a Disc Priest and/or Holy Paladin that you perform worse than if a Druid, Shaman or Holy Priest healed you?
*Imagine you have a 100k Blood Shield with a boss hitting for 50k every 1.8 secs; your Blood Shield would guarantee you would take no melee damage for nearly 4 seconds which is half the cool down of Death Strike. If you avoided something with the Blood Shield up I could definitely imagine the Blood Shield stacking further and further. Blood Shield diminishing itself also controls Runic Empowerment; think about it. The more DS you can do per time frame, the less each individual DS heals and grants an absorb shield for because of the diminishing factor. If this were not in the game then gaming RE would be even more important (or unbalanced depending on how many DS/min Blizz truly balances around).
[top] (Foreseeable) Effective Health issues
I already made a blog post about this topic: http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/5379-l...ping_bad_game/
In short: Death Knights would get destroyed the moment constant (this is the key word) EH is being stressed by bosses. Sure, there are ways to mitigate this by giving DKs more health (but keeping the armor the same), tweaking Will of the Necropolis etc to ensure that DKs cannot get 3 shot, but if the game truly reaches this stage then I don't see the Active Tanking Model working very well.
[top] Death Knight Issues
Some more stuff I just need to get out of my head:
[top] Diseases
Survival vs survival choices are stupid.
I do not mind using a Death Rune every now and then for Chains of Ice (Nef) or DnD (add pick up etc) because reasonable threat/utility vs survival choices are fine with me. If I CoI that DPS heading for the MC portal I add more raid DPS at the cost of breaking up half a Death Strike. Sometimes I need the DPS more, sometimes I need the survival more. I really have no problem with this decision making. However Diseases use the same Runes as a Death Strike and both increase survival so it's not really a choice at all.
I can only repeat:
Survival vs survival choices are stupid.
Bring back Glyph of Disease, make Outbreak cost a Blood Rune and remove the CD (etc etc, I am sure there are a million ways to fix this).
[top] AoE tanking
There are two issues here:
1) Blood Boil hits for shit so you need to use more than 2 and DnD to hold aggro over DPS. The problem is that these additional Blood Boils come from your Death Runes which you should have been using for Death Strikes. Oops?
2) A group of mobs generally hits harder than one single boss would which in turn means it might get to a point where your EH is challenged. Since DKs need to get hit first to make proper use of their mastery this can get tricky the harder these mobs hit. If you have to additionally kite these mobs then you are even worse off because you can't even Death Strike then.
How serious these problems are depends on your co-tank, I guess. I have a Prot Paladin co-tank so these things don't really affect me (and trash doesn't hit hard enough that missing Death Strikes is such a big deal). I'd still like to see this addressed though.
[top] Dancing Rune Weapon & Bone Shield
Bone Shield:
This harks back into what I said about Diseases. Survival vs survival choices are stupid. If Blizz really needs to make Bone Shield cost a Rune (which I don't see the point of, to be quite honest) then it should be a Blood Rune. You know, considering it got moved into the Blood tree? <_< Regardless of what the decision on this is, it really needs to be off the GCD as well just like Divine Protection, Barkskin, Vampiric Blood etc are all off the GCD, too.
Dancing Rune Weapon:
I am probably nitpicking here since DRW is pretty much a proactive/planned cool down so the steep 60 RP cost can be worked around. What I however don't get is the mixed signals Blizz is sending with Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon - Item - World of Warcraft and buffing it's damage in 4.2. Is it just meant to be used for picking up adds that spawn mid-combat? Like I said, it's minor but it was just bugging me (and if it were cheaper you could actually do some nice things with the DRW and Lichborne combo).
[top] Misc
Some stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else and/or is a minor nitpick which I included for completeness' sake.
Blood Tap and Rune consumption:
A nice quality of life change would be if abilities would prioritize the Blood Tap'd Death Rune over the "normal" Death Runes. The only way to get the game to use the BT'd Death Rune to Death Strike with is if you only have 1 "normal" Death Rune up. Like I said, it's minor but hey, might as well list it.
In addition, it would be groovy if the game would use Death Runes smartly by getting the first set on CD whenever it is possible (i.e. if you Heart Strike six times in a row it will consume the Blood Runes first and then move on to Frost and Unholy Runes (all up as Death Runes) which is inefficient since using 1 B, 1 F and 1 U Rune after another would atleast get the first pair of Runes on cool down already).
Blood Rites
Is fine. Really. It helps with gaming RE and gives some flexibility with Rune consumption so people really need to shut up about this.
Useless talents
Talents like Blood-Caked Blade are admittedly stupid but they don't really affect us for tanking. Just don't take them.
Runic Empowerment/Blade Barrier
We are very happy how Runic Empowerment and Blade Barrier have worked out and I also think this is fine. RE gaming isn't too hard and gives you something to do. It helps that I consider getting an opportune RE proc as a bonus though and not rely on it as much. I can understand how people would go nuts with RE not proccing anything if they were actually relying on it.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I think that's all.
Hope you enjoyed reading through this. :V According to a guildie this was too cliche and has henceforth been removed. No more gratitude to anyone for reading this.
EDIT: Just in case it wasn't clear, I absolutely love DK tanking and couldn't see myself re-rolling at all. There are flaws, yes, but that doesn't mean that the idea of the DK tank and current implementation is not good. It just could do with being even better.
Total Comments 8
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reactive tanking model. there is nothing active about DKs except putting up debuffs.
if wow had an active tanking model (where you plan defensive attacks before the mob attacks you) then i think very few people would have an issue with DK tanking. right now, active tanking is limited to tanking cooldowns; not rotational abilities. |
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I think you misunderstand what I meant with AMM. What I am refering to is a model where the tank is actively responsible for his own survival; yes, most of the time that is reactive to damage taken due to how Death Strike works but it is still active mitigation (just contrast it with taking hits in the face and passively blocking, that is the opposite of AMM).
Apart from the EH issue in future content, how would pre-emptively DSing be preferable to reactive DSing? It's not like you can tell when you need the boost in EH so I don't see a way pre-emptive DS would even work. |
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I think making the survival of Tanks dependent on their performance is probably the most interesting and challenging PvE playstyle WoW has to offer. Also I think generating aggro could play a bigger role in tanking so you could have harder decisions between aggro and survival when you aren't in too much danger. I dont think survival vs survival choices are necessarily stupid as long as there are situations where using one ability is better and other situations where another ability is better its a good design as long as the player has means to know when is the right time to use which ability.
But these things lead to a lot of problems unless they are somewhat optional (meaning for example there needs to be the option to distribute your talents in different ways that either simplify or maximize your tanking performance) so even bad tanks can perform reasonably (or for times where its crucial to concentrate on encounter specific stuff). Even now bad tanks wont use their debuffs and defensive CDs properly meaning the difference between a good and a bad tank even in survival is pretty big already and I'm not sure if widening the gap on all tanks much more would be reasonable in Blizzard's view as they need to cater to many players so they need to find the right balance between a more dynamic tanking playstyle and accessibility as a tank screwing up would typically result in a wipe which means huge pressure on the tanks and much frustration for the other raiders if the tank keeps failing. And the accessibility to tanking still seems to be rather low compared to other specs. |
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Updated 06/17/11 at 5:35 AM by Furion |
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I definitely agree that tanks being in control of their survival is great fun. But I am not sure if threat should be made more important for a tank (or tanks if every tank gets the DK treatment) if they already need to care about survival. These things generally boil down to DPS being annoyed by being threat capped (assuming threat is made hard again) since tanks tend to choose survivability wherever they can. Don't get me wrong, if I wasn't playing my DK then I would definitely have a problem with threat being too easy because I just don't have anything to care about except increasing my DPS/TPS - which is boring, IMO.
Blizz is already talking about adding a talent to let people decide how powerful Death Strik should be so people can pick which playstyle they prefer (with a DS heavy build being a bit better than the passive mitigation build): Quote:
Originally Posted by Zarhym
Tanking can often have a lot going on. Maybe there is a talent choice that lets DKs have a more powerful Death Strike in return for weaker passive mitigation. Some players would take that talent, and some might only take it for some encounters.
And I also have to disagree on the Disease application front. The current system is just tedious. Some DKs don't even need to care about debuffs because they have other people applying them for them (reminds me a bit about how Blood Shield is negatively affected depending on which healers you have). Some people don't have the luxury and in either case it's not like if DKs could provide Diseases themselves that the fundemental AMM playstyle changes: It would just feel less stupid. :V Quote:
Originally Posted by Zarhym
We could offer a talent or glyph (or something) that lowers the cooldown of Outbreak for instance, without turning Blood DKs into a spec that can play optimally by pushing nothing but Death Strike. It’s something we’ll consider.
Source for all quotes: Analyzing this Development answer... - Forums - World of Warcraft |
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While I agree with your threat argument its pretty much the same argument working against tankskill determining survival: If the tank cant deliver (on thread or survival) it drags the whole raid down much more than anyone else underperforming and thats why I brought this point up in this context in the first place. The DPS isnt just annoyed by being threatcapped (actually that can be interesting sometimes) they are even more annoyed when their tank keeps dieing out of stupidity. In the end blizzard should probably balance in a way that tanking normal mode doesnt require the tank to do anything special in the survival or threat department (by using passive survival and/or even threat talents) and in hardmode they would have to pay more attention to one or both to perform adequately. The main difference is really, that maximizing survival is just much more fun than maximizing DPS/Threat so thats definetly something with a lot higher priority to implement. Preventing a close death as tank multiple times during a progression fight can deliver some pretty epic feelings
 And I dont think we disagree on the disease application it is indeed a problematic choice my statement was meant in a more general way as you probably dont mind having a choice for example between different survival cooldowns with different effects that help in different situations for example between Vampiric Blood and Icebound Fortitude. |
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I think you misunderstand what I meant with AMM. What I am referring to is a model where the tank is actively responsible for his own survival; yes, most of the time that is reactive to damage taken due to how Death Strike works but it is still active mitigation (just contrast it with taking hits in the face and passively blocking, that is the opposite of AMM).
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Apart from the EH issue in future content, how would pre-emptively DSing be preferable to reactive DSing? It's not like you can tell when you need the boost in EH so I don't see a way pre-emptive DS would even work.
DS as a pro-active model could simply reverse it as it stands, based on some other metric. for instance. for the next 6 seconds, all damage from your target is reduced by 15% of your maximum health, for a total reduction of 500% of your current vengeance. Now DS is purely an EH tool, as tanking tools should be. and there is no negative interaction with healers. |
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I think a pretty reasonable fix to the diseases vs death strike issue would be to just do away entirely with blood/heart strike and move death strike to 1B. DPS isn't using blood/heart anymore anyway and it wouldn't affect blood in any really negative way to make obliterate their random filler strike instead (possibly with a talent to add a little cleaving, if that's really necessary).
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That's quite a big change. If all you want to do is fix diseases, bring back Glyph of Disease. It's really as simple as that.
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