Why shouldn't DKs be ahead of paladins and druids? They're 3 and 4 role hybrids respectively, with the druid getting double talent points in one tree because they whined too much about having to respec like every other class in game to fulfill two roles. While the rough ability of each tank spec will be somewhat equivalent if they are specced properly, the only thing DKs would have going for them is the same flexibility of a feral but with more utility/higher dps. The DK is easily the worst physical tank, the second best caster tank and the second best ranged tank currently. How do DKs shine at being mediocre at two things while having to respec between them while hybrid classes offer much better with additional flexibility? The druids will always have in combat flexibility over the DK, because they gain avoidance from agility and threat from damage in addition to requiring less defense, whereas plate tank gear necessitates defense, parry, dodge, block, block value, etc. This means they can dps fairly well in tank gear whereas the DK will be handicapped without a gear and possibly rune swap.

The raw mitigation and avoidance a warrior has means they will never be replaced as the premier raid tank. The removal of CBs is a moot point too, as most heavy-hitting bosses can't crush in TBC anyway. The problem is DKs inherently can't be pure tanks because none of the trees allow this. They have nothing to make up the obscene armor values of ferals or the block skill of paladins or warriors. Avoidance just simply isn't reliable like mitigation, especially when the avoidance is proc based. Thus, they have to be more flexible in role or else they are simply a bad warrior clone. Judging by the presences, the difference is supposed to be in flexibility much like a feral druid's.

Also, as I mentioned above, I'm kind of curious how DKs are meant to fulfill their role as THE 'caster tank'. AMS has a 20 second cooldown and is 75% reduction only increased to immunity deep in the caster-dps tree. Meanwhile, spell reflect is on a 10 second cooldown. It seems like besides gimmick abilities that are absorbed by AMS but not reflectable, warriors are still the best anti-caster tank. Look at warlocks vs. DKs for ranged tanking, too. Fel Armor's 20% more healing > difference hps, especially with DKs only having 4% hp to their frost presence if talented deep in frost. Warlock threat will be higher too, unless they remove the add'l threat component of searing pain in order to artificially create a niche for DKs as the only thing you can do at range is icy touch spam.

Don't get me wrong, I love the DK class so far and I think the DPS aspects are already well on their way to finished. I just don't see the same in the tanking department, which is kinda odd because the first thing Blizzard said about DKs is that they would be a tank since that role is the most needed one on most servers.

@Azurai - all the things you are mentioning about druids have no place in Wotlk. They are based on TBC, and what little we do know about WotLK, a lot of tanking stuff about druids are changing.

#1 - Druids will get no defence on gear - all their crit needs are via talents in WotLK.
#2 - Druids will no longer get obsene armor - all the green text high armor leather has been removed. Obsene armor for druids was meant to cover crushing blows that druids couldn't avoid. As you've said - crushing mobs go bye bye, and so does high armor for druids.
#3 - Druids will no longer get very high dodge % too - their super good agi -> dodge modifier is getting nerfed to correspond to what rogues have.


Also unlike druids - DK's can parry with a weapon... they just can't block - but block on a 8000 hit is still just 200-300 max.
Based from what I see DK's will be #1 at melee elemental (most of their talents point to that), and decent at aoe tanking - that's it. Remember you can't block elemental melee bosses. You can still dodge or parry their attacks. Ranged tanking is hard when the class is supposed to hit something with a sword.... and hopefully will compete on dps charts with fury warriors (cross fingers).

Those changes are good, didn't know they were changing druids that much. But your block value amounts are kinda skewed. Our MT has 670 block in miti gear and 850 in threat gear right now. That's a huge amount of damage mitigation.

The elemental boss thing is true, but that seems to be such a small niche it doesn't even really matter, because you'll still have to wear full resist gear to tank it. DK's need to take less damage from magic passively than warriors and be able to go immune to spells more often without talents. Frankly if AMZ were no longer talented as well, it would make it a little more reasonable to call DKs the anti-caster tank. I just don't see the advantage when warriors have 16% reduced spell damage and can reflect every 10 sec, while DKs have 0% spell damage reduction and can go immune (only with talents) every 20 sec.

DK tanking advantages as it currently stands/is indicated:

Higher Parry than other tanking classes. With talents it could go as high as 70%+ at times.
Spell Damage reduction from DD spells at 30% of parry rating. Which, depending on the parry a DK has, could be 10-20+%.
Anti-Magic Shell, which can absorb damage from many sources that spell reflect cannot.
Magic Suppression.
Acclimation.

AMZ is useful, but it's not going to change a whole heap if all DKs have it. The real advantage at the moment looks to be in Spell Deflection and the Parry talents. However there may well be a few abilities that have not been put into the game yet that they are intending to include.

This is based on procs. While this is currently what allows DKs TO tank physical damage, its still the worst way to do it. DKs are still dead last in terms of mitigation. Which is fine as long as they get other benefits.

This talent is really good... but again, proc based mitigation isn't very reliable.

As I said earlier, this is a gimmick mechanic. They could easily make stuff reflectable. An entire class built on the niche of a single raid boss that does an attack which isn't reflectable isn't DKs being good at something, its blizzard hard coding a boss to be anti-warrior.

It's talented AND strictly worse than warriors by 11%

PvP talent. In no way will you ever tank an elemental boss without capped resist and expect to live as long as its new content. I just don't see this skill amounting to anything until it's changed to flat % damage reduction.

AMZ, though, is exactly the sort of skill which would make DKs truly anti-caster. The ability to use a skill like AMZ and apply it to any boss with an AoE and trivialize it for a group of people who are taking damage from another source on the fly is the type of thing DKs should be for. Gimmicked fights where you have to use a DK because they basically coded a boss that way is a completely artificial niche. Yes, shear, I'm looking at you and your bastard cousins sure to poke their heads up in WotLK.

It's alpha. The numbers aren't tuned - the information coming back is more indicative of Blizzard's intentions than the actual "Who will be better than who by 4%?"

Death Knights will be viable tanks. That's Blizzard's intention (as stated over and over and over) and I have no reason to believe that they will fail to achieve it, given that it's not terribly hard. (Yes, most of the comments have centered around 5-person tanking, but no one is going to gravitate to a tanking class that can't compete in the hardest content, and Blizzard knows that.)

I would fully expect the situation to be similar to BC - warriors can tank anything, each of the other classes can tank 90% of the encounters, and each encounter favours one of the four tanks (not talking about gimmicks, just that for example Azgalor favours a druid but can be tanked by a warrior just fine, or Gathios favours a warrior but can be tanked by a druid or paladin without undue trouble, etc.).

Icy Touch will definitely work on bosses. There's actually no problem with the implementation whatsoever into the current system. Speed reduction debuffs don't stack, only the most powerful one is ever applied. That also makes it far from mandatory. Improved Thunderclap is 20% attack speed reduction, Curse of Tongues and Mind-Numbing Poison are both a 60% casting speed reduction. The new post-70 rank of Curse of Weakness also includes a 20% attack speed reduction.

The only part of Icy Touch which isn't easily available is the ranged attack speed reduction, but that's a fairly limited application.

Warriors also have a spell interrupt in the form of Shield Bash. As with all spell interrupts, including the Death Knight one, it's cooldown is too long to typically allow the Warrior to handle all interrupts by himself however. Feral Charge is also technically a spell interrupt, but due to having a minimum range it's rarely used for spell interrupting.

You obviously have little idea what you are talking about and have given everything only a cursory look and made a whole heap of assumptions. That's fine, just please don't degrade the conversation here by letting every little thing you think of out without some reflection.

Blade Barrier is not a proc exactly. It's 15% parry when you have no runes avaliabe.

If you have 6 runes on a ten second timer you go like this:

0.00: Use two runes. 4 left.
3.00: Use one rune. 3 left
6.00: Use two runes. 1 left.
7.5: Use one rune. 0 left.
BB Active for 8 seconds.
10.00: Gain two runes, Use two runes. 0 left.
BB Active for 8 seconds.
13.00: Gain 1 rune, Use one rune. 0 left.
BB Active for 8 seconds.
16.00: Gain two runes, Use two runes. 0 left.
BB Active for 8 seconds.
17.5: Gain one rune, Use one rune. 0 left.
BB Active for 8 seconds.

See how that works?

If you have 4 frost runes the chance you have unbreakable armor procing at least once will be ~50%.

So you will have a base parry of ~30% (complete guess, but given Forceful Deflection and the fact that parry rewards DKs so much that people will stack it and strength it makes sense). Then you have BB up always or near always. 45%. And 75% half the time.

30% of 45 is 13.5% DD spell reduction. This is the lowest it gets. 30% of 75 is 23% reduction. You have this ~ half the time. Or you might go Blood/Unholy and have 13.5+5=18.5% all of the time.

I could go on but I wont because:

1. This discussion has already be covered in this thread.
2. It's still Alpha, numbers are just indications if they are anything right now.

AMZ is a utility spell, not a tanking spell. It has some benifits for tanking, but the DK can use it to help a warrior tank as much as himself. It is not a DK tanking talent per se.

Perhaps a silly question, but: how good is the deathknight in AoE-tanking?
Death&Decay has a casttime and he seems to be quite fragile against physicall damage?

someone in this thread mentioned it having a 20sec CD.

As far as Frost tanking goes, Hungering Cold will last 26 seconds, talented, so D&D>Hungering Cold > DeathChill> Howling Blast(6 times the damage) > D&D would be pretty stable aggro holder. And by that time, most of the mobs are down already, and AoE tanking no longer needed.

Hm, Death and Decay like consecration would be nice

I repeat myself: Blizzard will not make DKs non-viable for progression raid tanking. If the numbers are wrong right now they will be fixed. This is their new shiny tank-on-a-pedastel - few people are going to roll a DK to tank if they can't tank raid content, and Blizzard isn't dumb. They will make DKs raid-viable tanks.

I think Blizzard's stated intentions (to address the tank shortage by introducing a new tanking class) carry far more weight than whatever the alpha numbers work out to. They made druids viable tanks and they made paladins viable tanks. They will make DKs viable tanks. (It is *possible* that they will muck it up and it will take a few patches for them to fix things, as was the case with protadins in TBC, but I suspect they will have learned some lessons from that and this time they will be more careful. Plus DK tanking is considerably more central to their big sell for Wrath than protadins were for TBC.)

If its a really big problem, blizzard will redo the numbers to fix the balance. I could easily see BB be changed to activate when a deathknight has 1 or less runes active, that would allow for the gimmick fights and still give them the buff proc.

I'm a bit curious about tanking itemization for DKs.

* Anyone hear anything about T4-T6 DK token drops? It would be nice for DKs to not get boned in this area, but presumably with 70 no longer being end-game, the gear would be too transient to go through all the effort of creating/balancing.

* Seeing as there's a 1H +hit talent in Frost, I presume tanking while dual-wielding is encouraged. Seeing as most tanking weapons are "one-hand", and many such as [The Brutalizer], [The Unbreakable Will] and [Inuuro's Blade] aren't even unique... a DK can get some decent mitigation stats going through DW... or perhaps going with something like [Dragonstrike] in the OH for increased dps/threat. Double weapon enchants also!

Edit: Presumably all that new expertise-heavy tanking gear would mitigate some of the implications of fast DW based tanking...

* Armorwise, there's a few issues that DK tanks will be looking at. Spell damage (Frost) is a small factor, so would paladin tanking gear be desirable at all? A lot of "warrior gear" has useless block rating and block value. At first glance [Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian] seems better for DKs than [Chestplate of Stoicism].

Cheers

I believe all of their "Spells" go of AP, at least the ones the curse writer tasted at WWI

Ah, you beat me to it Lascero Here's the Hex details for those who are interested:


Introduction
Hex is a tool designed to allow experimentation with the various Death Knight talents and abilities. Hex is, for now, based around the parameters of a level 55 Death Knight only. This is because the vast majority of testing so far has been done with starting level characters and extrapolating the known information (ability base damage values, scaling factors, etc) would involve wild guesswork at best.

The tool allows you to see how individual abilities, as well as your overall DPS, vary based on talent choices and cast rotation used. To do this, Hex generates a sample combat log intended to mimic an in-game combat log as closely as possible. In 'Target' mode, attacks are made against a target with specified AC and HP until either the player or the target dies. In 'Loop' mode, attacks are made until the specified duration is reached. Target mode can be used to test combat rotations for leveling, while Loop mode can be used to calculate average total DPS. All parameters used to calculate the log are based on known starting DK values, with a small amount of guesswork involved for some stats. The DK is assumed to be attacking an equal-level target from the front (ie. leveling).

Installation
Click the link at the top of the post to download the installer. Hex requires the .NET Framework v3.5 and will automatically download and install this if you do not already have it.

Notes
Aside from the fact that many talents are not implemented yet, this is purely a BETA release so please bear in mind that things are still being tested and fixed. Hex will automatically check for program updates when it starts so once it is installed you can easily stay up-to-date with all the latest fixes.

Hex started out as a spreadsheet but the complexity of testing cast rotations meant that I turned it into a fully-fledged program instead. The disadvantage of not using a spreadsheet is that it is not immediately apparant how damage values are calculated so I would encourage people to double check calculations themselves if they are not sure.

I appreciate all comments and criticisms, especially from those who have access to the alpha to see how Hex compares to the game itself.

as per WotLK Wiki, Survival of the Fittest talent now grants 2/4/6% less chance to be critically hit.

A lot of interesting stuff being discussed here.

Let's start with the DW/2H usage discussion. Seeing as that is a pure lore discussion, lore arguments are appropriate. And while I find DWing death knights a wee bit uncharacteristic, again I can't see why they should be nonexistent -- certainly, the style would befit the more bloodthirsty amongst their ranks. Besides the "Death knight = two-handed" logic runs completely against the way Arthas himself is portrayed, always wielding Frostmourne one-handed.

Rune changes and layouts are a pretty interesting realm of discussion. For one, I doubt you'll ever want to go 6/0/0. 5/1 with at least 1 blood gives you much better flexibility, seeing as you can convert that 1B to 1D for Empower, presence switching, etc etc. Realistically, 4/1/1 setups seem to me like the best general purpose setups, seeing as they still allow you to use any ability that doesn't require 2B (provided your 4 isn't 4B), as often as you can convert blood to death. I'd say that the most natural way of handling this is by having layouts bound to your weapons, with changes only becoming active out of combat.

Having the layout be per-weapon and having the main-hand weapon's layout take precedence for dual-wielding would, in one fell swoop, give you both a tactical advantage in using DW over 2H (while still eventually giving 2H a raw power advantage) and the "I can change layouts in an easy manner without it being completely gratuitous" feel. Sure, you *can* change weapon, and therefore runes, on a per-fight basis, but you're not doing so completely freely, so it achieves Blizzard's stated in general feel if not exactly as written.

Insofar as talents are concerned, I feel that, as the trees stand, 11 points in blood will be about as fundamental to most specs as 11 points in Assassination are for rogues. Bladed armor is HUGE. A full s3 warrior has about 10k armor, so a like-geared DK would get 250 AP from there alone. Supposing AP from it scales with all armor modifiers (namely, with Frost Presence), that's a nice threat synergy with your tanking presence right there. The next 5 points in forceful deflection scales with strength, which gives us a threat to avoidance attribute conversion. I'm sure all protection paladins (me included) would kill for one of those. Then finally we get a close to spammable oh shit button. If you're tanking, there's no reason whatsoever to not get these.

There's scarce little reason *not* to get 7 more points for blade turning (mitigation) and crit (threat), seeing as those points are pretty good, but I don't think they're quite as straightforward "must-haves".

I wonder about the present state of improved blood tap. Going from 10% to 14.5% health returned is close to the biggest waste of 3 talent points ever, while 55% health on a 1-minute cooldown is a bit overpowered.

One talent in particular that intrigues me is runic power mastery. Its real-world effect is radically different, depending on whether runic power abilities can exceed their nominal effect or not. If a full-bar hungering cold, for example, freezes for 3.9 seconds under runic power mastery, the talent basically reads "all your runic power abilities are amplified by 30%", which is pretty damn powerful. On the other hand, if abilities can't exceed their nominal effect, then 76.* 1.3 = 100, so anything above 77 runic power is wasted, and it is functionally equivalent to "you accrue runic power 30% faster", which is great, but a fair bit less so than the other interpretation.

I don't actually think that DKs will be do as poorly on the physical tanking side of things as some people seem to believe. My T4/ZA badge loot protadin sits on 16600 armor, of which 5700ish come from my shield (ALD). In the same gear, running the maths quickly, the 45% extra armor from frost presence would mostly make up for the lack of shield, leaving a DK only 900 armor behind (assuming only toughness). Individual hits won't be that much harder than what other plate wearers take, and your superior parry, even if spiky, will keep your average incoming damage about even. Compared to paladins in particular (for 5-mans), the simple fact that you can apply icy touch for the attack speed debuff already makes up for all mitigation advantages paladins might have. What I *do* find worrisome is that there are precious few talents to prop up your life pool.

pdpi brings up an interesting point about lore and DW, that DW is usually seen as a more bloodthirsty and berserker type of fighting style. And while this fits with DKs in general, it doesn't fit so well in the Frost tree in specific. Blood, obviously, would be the more fitting place.

250 AP is big, but it's not game-altering in the way that Demonic Sacrifice or Relentless Strikes are. It also doesn't scale very well. I expect many DKs will get Bladed Armor, but it's not required in the way that Relentless Strikes is required, and it doesn't even scale the way Dual-Wield Spec does for rogues. The best comparison is probably Commanding Presence or Trueshot Aura, and though it's better than those, that's by degree not effect. The best scaling comparison is probably Demonic Knowledge in the warlock demo tree, high base bonus and low scaling.

In comparison to a Protection Warrior a Frost Death Knight doesn't really fall short there. Though the extra health talent they pick up is a party wide benefit, and not a personal benefit. 4% extra health is about the same as 5% extra Stamina, due to the fact that it benefits from the base amount of health a character has, while 5% extra stamina doesn't do so nearly as well.

Paladins and Druids also get more health increasing tools to compensate the fact that they're mana classes; mana-based classes get a lower amount of base health compared to classes that don't use mana. While I don't know how Druids compare to Warriors on a base health level, I do know that Paladins at least are ~2k base health behind. Death Knights will likely have the same kind of base health pool a Warrior does on the other hand, meaning they need less talents to compensate.

Bladed Armor isn't too shabby, as the armor you'll get per tier of gear will most likely scale up once again. Currently plate wearers get approximately 1000 armor per tier when not counting a shield, which is basically a "free" 25 extra attack power per tier, on top of whatever base line amount of armor you start off at in max level rare gear. It interacts fairly favorably with Frost Presence too, which would increase your damage dealt and thus threat generated by a bit in that Presence. It wouldn't get close to the 15% extra damage of Blood Presence of course, but it's still some extra threat.

No, it's not relentless strikes. Few talents are . But those 10 points in bladed armor and forceful deflection give you mitigation and threat scaling off each other, which is something that's pretty nice.

More importantly, you have an ever so slightly gimped Battle Shout (250 AP for 10k armour at 70, versus 305 AP baseline at 69 for BS), always on, stacking with other buffs. Under present itemization circumstances, tanking gear would be somewhat short on strength, so it's a Good Thing that you get some of your primary threat stat from the defensive side of things. Don't forget green armour on rings and stuff! Regarding the bonus damage, I guess that's what the 25% extra threat is there for .

You also made a good point about making up for lower base health. Guess I'm just too used to all the extra stamina on my protadin.

Sure. Most of my deductions stated come from reading the forums, and the patch notes on wotlk wiki, as well as the official blue posts by blizzard.

#1 - Druids will get no defence on gear - all their crit needs are via talents in WotLK.
#2 - Druids will no longer get obsene armor - all the green text high armor leather has been removed. Obsene armor for druids was meant to cover crushing blows that druids couldn't avoid. As you've said - crushing mobs go bye bye, and so does high armor for druids.
#3 - Druids will no longer get very high dodge % too - their super good agi -> dodge modifier is getting nerfed to correspond to what rogues have.

Point 1. Look up in the feral talent tree on wotlkwiki. 6% crit from talents alone. unless bosses suddenly get more than their ususal crit rate, druids don't need def to accomodate it.

Point 2. Blue reply to the gear question. They said that they are trying to get away with the unique gear designed for one class only and make gear drops desirable for multiple classes. They specifically quoted feral druids and rogues to be using same gear set. This info combined with patch notes removing crushing blow and Point #1 tells me that a typical rogue set gear is meant to be sufficient for a druid to tank with. Now whether or not it really will be sufficient? who knows.. it's alpha, but I do know no rogue gear has green armor text and any gear with that was automatically classified as druid only. I'll try to find it again, just to link it in this post.

Point 3. wikidot wotlk patchnotes before they got shut down. It was buried with other general changes at the bottom of the patchnotes. wikidot used to have direct copy of the blizzard patchnotes copied verbatim before they got shutdown. Now the new website just posts the major class spell changes and the likes.

Now even without green text armor leather at 70, druids should get to ~15k armor in bear. So equivalent armor mitigation at lvl 80 to that should be reachable. Will that be enough? Who knows, a warrior can reach 15k armor as well, and warriors have block and parry. But one thing is for sure.. blizzard sure didn't like druids armor capping....

ALso about high armor, blue post from over two years ago (good luck digging it up ), had a CM explaining to whining druids that druids will not be able to mitigate crushing blows. He pointed at using high armor as means to combat the inevitable crushing spikes. This was before BC, and before they took the high armor for druids to a whole new level.