Eh, even 3 shot can come way too fast (3s to 5.4s on average). As Riggs said it's not a matter of how many hits we can take but how long we have to react before we die. He said 5-6 seconds is pretty solid from a full to dead scenario, and I'm inclined to agree with that. It allows us to optimally use DS every 4-5 seconds comfortably instead of 'OH SHIT I'M GOING TO DIE'.

I honestly think the best route to take is simply 'homogenizing' DKs with a block mechanic. The armor is nice, but overall it won't do much at all for the kind of spike damage we take. It will reduce a hit from 120,000 (currently) by about 4-5k. 4-5k is not going to make any form of significant difference. It will impact fast hitting and multi-mob damage far more than it will impact bosses with the way we are setup.

The easiest chance is simply make bone shield only use a charge if a hit exceeds x% of health. It's still an active ability. It completely resolves our survivability. Even at a 20% reduction it's still doesn't negate as much as a block, which is fine because we heal it back up anyways. I could even see BS being slightly nerfed to compensate for it's increased uptime.

The other option is making blood shield mitigate hits over the next 5-6 seconds.

Another option is the HS option of adding charges to BS.

There are multiple ways to fix it, but the bulk of it is that we suck at fast hitting tanking, we suck at multi-mob tanking, and we are far more susceptible to spike damage than druids, paladins or warriors.

Depending on the Boss you're fighting, this would either make every boss hit use a charge or make none of the bosses hits use up a charge. This would most likely become a static 20% damage reduction for some bosses and not affect other bosses at all. Some Bosses hit very fast for about 40-60k, while others hit you slowly for 70-90k.

Our overall damage taken will already be a good bit lower than that of the other tanks. I don't think reducing that any further would be fair to the other tank classes or help overall tank balance. Our problem is spike damage not overall mitigation, and as such a solution should preferably only affect that, but affect that in a reliable way.

The solutions I see are either
a) buff our HP to the point that our EH is equal to that of a paladin or warrior. Considering how they're taking 30% less melee damage, we'd need 43% more HP (a stamina gemmed DK is already sitting at over 20% more HP, so we'd need another 20% buff)
b) Buff WotN that it will passively reduce any damage we take below 20% HP by 50%. So if you're on 30% HP and take a 40% Hit, you'd take 10% of it normally and 30% of it is reduced to 15% to a combined 25%. This would again increase our EH by 20%, but wouldn't affect overall damage taken by much, since we're still sitting at 100% most of the fight.

I don't see why they are so hesitant on giving us back the old Will of the Necropolis that actually worked like that. Even if it was only a 15% damage reduction on an attack that dipped us that low its better than our current version by far.

Then make it so it only reduces abilities over x% of health and uses a charge and compensate with a buff to our armor or raw mitigation for trash / fast hitting mobs that hit below the threshold. This removes spike damage without any negative impact on the other aspects of tanking provided it's done right.

The thing is we already take comparable damage to other tanks on most fights and on top of that we heal for 6-11k hps effective (or more on some fights). Our overall damage taken and healing is perfectly fine. We need to resolve our spike damage, even if it comes at the cost of higher base incoming damage (which changing BS to work the way I said at the start of my post would).

We simply should not be able to be 2 shot. Even 3 shot is really cutting it close considering that most warriors and paladins are in the 4-5 shot range quite easily.

Boosting our EH via health is far from ideal and simply quite a bit inferior to paladin and warriors. Sure, we'll live, but healers will have to spend even more mana to top us back off. While mana isn't a *huge* concern at the current point it very well could be with a change like that. An alternative change could be increased healing % on us with the increased stamina, but that's just really inflating things.

A WotN change would work similar to the BS change I said, so I'm perfectly game for that.

The problem with this is they want us to have Active mitigation and to react to damage. Changing it to this would be making us more passive so it wont happen.

If we stick it out till 5.0 we will be on par or better than the other tanks.

It has been said many times the problem is not 100% with the Death Knight. Its CTC capping tanks being to strong that's the issue and the lack of raid cooldown.

5.0 Will solve both of these issues, they will no longer be able to block damage of every melee hit, and they will have to choose there raidcooldown by sacrificing something else just like us (we get AMZ in 5.0).

Until 5.0 we will always be the worst tank to take and the tank at most risk of death due to spiky damage this will not change untill the other tanks have the ability to CTC removed.

At the moment we take around about the same damage as other tanks and we heal ontop of this. So in away we are actually better off.

We also have loads of cooldowns to recover from damage when we do get hit to low HP, Other tanks are not as good at recovering from low damage its all on the healer really. We do however get into trouble allot more frequently.

It looks like in 5.0 the only issue that will remain if other tanks cant CTC will be our effectiveness at tanking multiple adds at once but it will be far better than it is today. If you think about it when the CTC tanks cant block something of every melee hit and have to use active mitigation to block some damage they are in the same boat as us now!

Someone has to be the worst tank, and TBH i really don't mind being the worst tank as long as i am viable to raid. The changes we have had in 4.3 are mostly QOL changes but will make us a little more viable.

Changes:

• 2 extra bone shield charges

• 30 sec outbreak so more DS's p/m

• Passive barrier

• 5 - 8k armor buff (2 - 6% melee damage reduction.)

As long as the fix the damage that the bosses can do in a 4 second window in 4.3 our problems will be minor.

If somehow they did buff our damage mitigation to allow us o be less spiky we would still be worse or better than a CTC tank we can never be on par. If they buffed our damage reduction so we were not so spiky it would also most likely mean a fairly hefty nerf to something else changing our class even more.

Guys we are the most fun, and complex tanking class to play in the game! Enjoy it while it lasts and lap it up its not all doom and gloom.

Edit: #1 The change to armor is still not live on PTR, but having played the PTR for a little while now it feels much more smooth playing a DK so much more room for error. Hopefully the armor change will go live monday or tues as its blizzcon weekend at the moment.

p.s sorry for grammar errors i smoked a little to much pot tonight and its rather late.


Edit #2:

PTR changes live!





Total armor gained: 6036
Total physical damage mitigation gained: 4.27%

My gear is not BIS these screenshots were both taken on the old PTR and the New ptr with nothing changed. Totally unbuffed nothing but Blood Presence on (do have the armor enchant on cloak). I was using the standard raid build with no interrupt talent.

Link to armory for toon in screenshot (gear wont change as i now mostly play my paladin tank tbh) Adam @ Eonar - Game - World of Warcraft

Armor change:

Blood

Blood Presence now increases armor contribution from cloth, leather, mail and plate items by 55%. Up from 30%.

So on a completely different note, do any of you guys FRAPS your boss attempts/kills while tanking? Or alternatively, do you guys know of a good source to watch videos from a Blood DK PoV? I am always eager to learn some new things and really curious as to how other people play and time their stuff but finding videos like these is actually freakin hard.

Personally I try to record some of my stuff as well for review but the last hard thing I tanked was Baleroc HM on 10 man pre-nerf so ideally something to compare with that would be great, but I'll take anything that doesn't have gimmicks (though, these are also nice to watch I guess).

Comical bug seems to be active on the ptr with the blood presence buff. Seems like when the armor was added, crit chance reduction from blood pressence was lost.

Details for Otosan

27 crits taken over the course of the night, anyone else seeing it?

The moument I logged on for fear of the patch not forcing it to update. I honestly didn't even notice I was being crit, until I died to a melee with ibf up.

I should note that I did not reset talents / change spec after the patch, so there could be some funny buisness going on there. If you're tanking on ptr, just make sure you watch your logs for it.

They already said that for cataclysm "we dont want shield tank to block 100%, more like 50% of the time" and yet here we are with paladin and warrior being (or close to) the CTC


There is difference between being the worst tank by a few % and being able to be 2-3 shot when shield tank can take 4+ hit. We may be viable to raid but we are not a good choice for progression. I dont care being a few % behind but I do care when I slow down my guild's progression.


And it's not there small change that gonna change this facts.

Like you said we dont take more damage than other tank (maybe even less) and that would be important if healer's mana was a problem (like it was suposed to in cataclysm); it's not.

For me the only solution would have been (yea I know it's too late now) to make us more close to the block tank by spreading our blood shield over multiple hits (exemple: the blood shield reduce incoming damage by 30% until it's depleted; or it reduce the incoming hits by 30% of his size) and eventually reduce our healing (without reducing the shield).



Actually my feeling is that it would be a lot better for my guild if I switch on my paladin (even if he is far less stuffed).

I always like to record fights, but since my guild raids 25-mans my computer can't handle frapsing it.
We have a 10-man group that finishes the older content once the 25 man moves on to the new one, those I usually do fraps.
But since it's older content it's not that a big of a deal anymore and the boss dmg becomes trivial so it's not that hard to tank it.

I will be getting a new CPU and GFX soon, so maybe in the near future I will put out some vids.

My machine isn't that good, AMD Athlon 62 X2 2.9Ghz and a GeForce 9800GT.
Here's an attempt at frapsing Sinestra in 10 man while having ~200ms.