Yes, Icebound Fortitude and Bone Armor are amazing. But active, short-duration mitigation abilities don't make for good raid tanking. My concern is that DKs are going to take very spiky incoming damage as those abilities drop off, which will just make the MT healers work harder than they'd need to with a different tank.
I'll agree with this. While Bone Armor and Icebound Fortitude can make for some great mitigation(like use them at the beginning of a large pull, stacked together, you just skewed their mitigation even more since some of those mobs will be dieing shortly), they will play out poorly in raid tanking.
I'm thinking Bone Armos should stay as it currently is, but Icebound Fortitude's average mitigation should be made into something passive like defensive stance, then have Guile of Gorefiend tack on 5% more.
Has anyone tested if Mark of Blood works on the caster of a DOT, either if its on them before its cast or (unlikely) placed on them after the DOT is cast on you?
I'll agree with this. While Bone Armor and Icebound Fortitude can make for some great mitigation(like use them at the beginning of a large pull, stacked together, you just skewed their mitigation even more since some of those mobs will be dieing shortly), they will play out poorly in raid tanking.
I'm thinking Bone Armos should stay as it currently is, but Icebound Fortitude's average mitigation should be made into something passive like defensive stance, then have Guile of Gorefiend tack on 5% more.
I just don't see it being a serious disadvantage... total armor values between DKs and Warriors are extremely similar when compared to warrior tanks with a shield at the same item level as their main armor pieces. Warriors get a shield, but the coming shield block change means that a Warrior's blocking is more similar to avoidance than it is to mitigation now (unless getting 102.4% avoidance/block chance is reasonable... which I don't see happening without giving up stamina), and the DK's pure avoidance should be higher as well. We will probably see starting Naxx warrior tanks taking 25% or more of hits that are completely unmitigated by block value. That fact clearly moves block into the "avoidance" category with parry and dodge.
So the main difference between a Protection Warrior and a Tri-Spec DK Tank becomes a Warrior's defensive stance 10% passive bonus vs. the Icebound Fortitude's 10% average bonus (up 20% of the time, 50% bonus when up... even better if talented). This tells us a few things. First, if the DK simply hits Icebound whenever it is up, the total damage taken is, on average, the same. So we must look at the mechanics, to see which one you would rather use on a boss fight... Now, if you're talking about a Raid boss that does consistent, even damage, all or most of the time, the Warrior clearly wins out. But we need to recognize the fact that very, very few bosses do this. Even if tank damage is relatively even, nearly every boss in the game has special abilities that serve to either distract the healers, make them focus on something else, or have a harder time healing through an increased amount of damage. From Prince dropping an infernal near the group, to Malacrass' melee calls, to Archimonde's fears, to Brutallus' stomp... raid bosses have specific abilities that always seem to cause problems on progression kills. In the hands of a skilled DK tank, these abilities are drastically reduced in danger. Prot. Warriors get one Shield Wall per encounter... DKs get one every minute, which is sometimes enough to mitigate an important boss skill... So, unless the DK is simply getting burst down by normal raid damage (which seems exceedingly unlikely), the reality is that the DK seems to have what it takes to tank normal progression boss kills at least as well as Prot. Pallys, and maybe as well as Prot. Warriors.
They do still need a bit of a tweak to make one tree a bit more tanky. The fact is that if one wants a reasonable tanking build, the way it is currently set up, you can't even think of going 41, let alone 51 deep in any tree. The best I've come to optimal is a 23/37/11 B/F/U build, but that is still missing some pieces. Now, I know that they want "any tree to be able to tank"... but if they really want DKs to be viable tanks, they do need to give us some deep talents worth taking!
The thing that we, as the theorycrafting community, need to do is take a serious look at DK vs. Warrior/Pala/Druid in the current top end content. That means level 77s, dressed in exactly the same (or very similar) defensive gear, with parsed combat logs to determine who is taking more damage, who is taking more healing, who is being overhealed more, who drops to dangerous levels more often, etc. I just wish I was in beta so I could work on such a project... but from a purely theoretical standpoint, it seems that the DKs match up pretty damn well to the other main tanking classes.
A) One tree needs to get more defensive focus. The entire notion of all trees being able to tank is fairly self-defeating as it stands now. And if you look at the other tanks, they all have a tree that not only has more defensive focus than the others, but is insanely defensively focused to the point of easily spending MORE than 51 in that tree. You have to look no further than the fact that two of them are named 'Protection', and look at the paladin tree in particular.
B) We need to give Blizz as much definitive feedback as possible. Take a 51 Unholy + 'other' DK in the same defensive gear as a warrior and do some tanking runs. Do the same with a 51 Frost. Articulate each and every spell like ability and how they respond in boss encounters. Do they work, do we find ourselves unable to quickly react to extra adds (non-diseased, and no runes available, how do you "recover"?)? A lot of our bonuses are proc's or have long gaps between, so is our damage too spikey?
Things like this need to be presented to the Devs in Beta, or it will take half a year to get them fleshed out once the game goes live. For those with DKs and Beta keys. Please start taking a hard look at tanking, and post your findings on the DK Tanking Thread here: Blizzard: WoW DK Tanking
Of course, if you could share those finding here on EJ forums as well, it would be appreciated.
Second, I don't know what magical gear set she's using, but Unholy Aura + DK Toughness will almost always be equal to warrior toughness + shield. I did it on my warrior, but since a few of my pieces are old(level 60 AQ40 shit, which actually would have placed more emphasis on shield AC), I did it on some T6/SW profiles, same result. There might be some nice 2H tanking weapons too.
Third, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of people aren't using Icebound Fortitude...at all. Talented it's 50% mitigation for 18s every 60s. HELLO! That's 15% mitigation averaged out per cooldown, and in effect, more because you probably spend some of the cooldown time out of combat. You CANNOT use IBF as a reactionary, it is too damn good. Notice how, the OP in that thread, it's not specified in her rotation.
I assume you mean Frost Presence, it's the +armour +threat +resists one. Unholy is the -0.5 sec GCD one. Also, I expect most betas haven't got used to how good IBF is because it's been bugged untill the lastest patch, it was just giving +50% armour instead of -50% damage.
In other news, here's today's latest blue DK post:
We think we have a pretty good idea now about what kind of death knight abilities are fun and useful and which ones are clunky or confusing. So now feels like the time to get the death knight into a more shippable state. A big change you'll see in the next patch or two is consolidating death knight diseases.
We like the gameplay that evolves from trying to get a disease on a target in order to do cool things. On the other hand, we need to fix:
1) The confusing array of diseases with their different durations, effects and stacking rules.
2) The crazy number of debuff slots a death knight can occupy on a target.
3) Diseases not playing well with freezing targets.
4) Getting a new talented ability only to find that you don't have the runes availble to incorporate it into your rotation.
The kinds of changes you're likely to see include: meh abilities going away or getting packaged together, talents sliding around in talent trees, and more logical synergies and rotations. We don't want to lose the depth that the class offers and certainly don't want to lose what's fun about being a DK.
We'll try and get the official talent trees updated when the changes are ready, because that will explain things better than me trying to do it all here in a wall of text. But I wanted to mention these changes in case it affected any of your feedback on the class. (Which continues to be awesome, in this forum, online and throughout the community.)
I just don't see it being a serious disadvantage... total armor values between DKs and Warriors are extremely similar when compared to warrior tanks with a shield at the same item level as their main armor pieces. Warriors get a shield, but the coming shield block change means that a Warrior's blocking is more similar to avoidance than it is to mitigation now (unless getting 102.4% avoidance/block chance is reasonable... which I don't see happening without giving up stamina), and the DK's pure avoidance should be higher as well. We will probably see starting Naxx warrior tanks taking 25% or more of hits that are completely unmitigated by block value. That fact clearly moves block into the "avoidance" category with parry and dodge.
So the main difference between a Protection Warrior and a Tri-Spec DK Tank becomes a Warrior's defensive stance 10% passive bonus vs. the Icebound Fortitude's 10% average bonus (up 20% of the time, 50% bonus when up... even better if talented). This tells us a few things. First, if the DK simply hits Icebound whenever it is up, the total damage taken is, on average, the same. So we must look at the mechanics, to see which one you would rather use on a boss fight... Now, if you're talking about a Raid boss that does consistent, even damage, all or most of the time, the Warrior clearly wins out. But we need to recognize the fact that very, very few bosses do this. Even if tank damage is relatively even, nearly every boss in the game has special abilities that serve to either distract the healers, make them focus on something else, or have a harder time healing through an increased amount of damage. From Prince dropping an infernal near the group, to Malacrass' melee calls, to Archimonde's fears, to Brutallus' stomp... raid bosses have specific abilities that always seem to cause problems on progression kills. In the hands of a skilled DK tank, these abilities are drastically reduced in danger. Prot. Warriors get one Shield Wall per encounter... DKs get one every minute, which is sometimes enough to mitigate an important boss skill... So, unless the DK is simply getting burst down by normal raid damage (which seems exceedingly unlikely), the reality is that the DK seems to have what it takes to tank normal progression boss kills at least as well as Prot. Pallys, and maybe as well as Prot. Warriors.
They do still need a bit of a tweak to make one tree a bit more tanky. The fact is that if one wants a reasonable tanking build, the way it is currently set up, you can't even think of going 41, let alone 51 deep in any tree. The best I've come to optimal is a 23/37/11 B/F/U build, but that is still missing some pieces. Now, I know that they want "any tree to be able to tank"... but if they really want DKs to be viable tanks, they do need to give us some deep talents worth taking!
The thing that we, as the theorycrafting community, need to do is take a serious look at DK vs. Warrior/Pala/Druid in the current top end content. That means level 77s, dressed in exactly the same (or very similar) defensive gear, with parsed combat logs to determine who is taking more damage, who is taking more healing, who is being overhealed more, who drops to dangerous levels more often, etc. I just wish I was in beta so I could work on such a project... but from a purely theoretical standpoint, it seems that the DKs match up pretty damn well to the other main tanking classes.
The disadvantage I was thinking of was that it's very hard for healers take advantage of on-demand mitigation. In the same vein of a warlock(me) expecting a renew or lifebloom when I do a couple lifetaps but instead receiving a greater heal, regrowth, and a flash of light; I don't expect healers to react that fast enough, and even if they do notice, slow down their healing.
Also, curious about your tank build. How come you didn't pick up Bone Armor? I thought it the best death knight tanking skill.
Dancing Rune Weapon is affected by your weapon skill, also seemed to me like having it out helps on leveling it. Noticed this when i just got a sword, having skill of only 277/330, DRW basically just got parries/misses, same as me.
Yes, Icebound Fortitude and Bone Armor are amazing. But active, short-duration mitigation abilities don't make for good raid tanking. My concern is that DKs are going to take very spiky incoming damage as those abilities drop off, which will just make the MT healers work harder than they'd need to with a different tank.
Bone Armor will be fine when you consider that, as the talents currently stand, DKs will easily hit 60-70% avoidance on an essentially permanent basis. Blade Barrier is crazy good. When you're only getting hit 30-40% of the time on a 3 second swing timer (assuming standard 20% slow), and AOEs and DOTs don't remove charges, 4 hits will last a majority of the time of their 30 second recharge. The times when you get really unlucky and lose all four charges quickly you can pop Icebound Fortitude or, if BOTH are down, Lichborne.
Bone Armor will be fine when you consider that, as the talents currently stand, DKs will easily hit 60-70% avoidance on an essentially permanent basis. Blade Barrier is crazy good. When you're only getting hit 30-40% of the time on a 3 second swing timer (assuming standard 20% slow), and AOEs and DOTs don't remove charges, 4 hits will last a majority of the time of their 30 second recharge. The times when you get really unlucky and lose all four charges quickly you can pop Icebound Fortitude or, if BOTH are down, Lichborne.
How easy is it to keep Blade Barrier up 90+ percent of the time?
The disadvantage I was thinking of was that it's very hard for healers take advantage of on-demand mitigation. In the same vein of a warlock(me) expecting a renew or lifebloom when I do a couple lifetaps but instead receiving a greater heal, regrowth, and a flash of light; I don't expect healers to react that fast enough, and even if they do notice, slow down their healing.
Also, curious about your tank build. How come you didn't pick up Bone Armor? I thought it the best death knight tanking skill.
Not that I particularly want to get back into specifically talking about tanking builds especially since a lot of things are sure to change between now and the end of Beta, but I completely understand what you're saying... the reason I lean a bit towards the first build is merely a matter of grabbing as much STA and effective health as you can find. The second build drops a lot of health in exchange for Bone Armor. Could one drop Forceful Deflection to grab Frost Aura... yeah, but it seems to be so integral a skill for the Death Knight's stat synergies that even dropping a couple of points seems wasteful. Without it, there are no synergies between threat stats and "tanking" stats... and it's inevitable a DK's tanking gear will have a large amount of STR on it. So, it's all situational and depends on what type of encounters we end up seeing in WotLK. Bone Armor, as it is now, will be amazing in some fights, and simply 'meh' in others... so I normally assume I won't be able to take it.
But you see from those builds... there really are *no* tanking builds that allow one to take a 51 point talent, and it's even a reach to get a 41 point talent. I would love deep frost to be viable, that just isn't going to happen unless Forceful Deflection is turned into a class ability (the defining class tanking ability, like a Paladin's Spiritual Attunement), Bone Armor is moved up the tree (and maybe turned into a 3-point talent for 2/4/6 bones), or the 46/51 point talents are changed to be more useful to tanks. I understand that they want *every* tree to be viable to tank 5-mans... but are they going to use that to make DKs even more difficult to grab a tanking spot in a raid. They aren't even particularly good at many caster mobs without being deep unholy, and that makes them less powerful against the vast majority of "regular" mobs.
How easy is it to keep Blade Barrier up 90+ percent of the time?
Very easy, even when keeping a free rune for quick bone armor or whatever like this. You just have to use that rune just before the first one you use refresh, and it'll pop Blade Barrier for pretty much one rotation. Using it every 8secs though, that's hard. But every 9-10secs, yeah it's easy. If you're not keeping free runes it's even easier, since most of the time you'll be out of runes anyway.
Seems like tri-spec will be the way for tanking and DW at the moment. Deep frost also lacking compared to the other two?
Would changing Hungering Cold's effect to much like hunter's frost trap be any help? with added benefit of +threat on all abilities under the effect when in frost presence. In a DPS sense Tundra Stalker makes HC very good too, since you'd get multiple attacks do more damage rather than just one. Also add HC to Frost Bite (to have a chance for the old effect).
It would maintain the idea having all specs able to tank and dps, keeping frost very much pvp capable as it is, increase frost dps and make frost have the desirable 51 point tanking talent (opposed to blood/unholy 51 point which aren't as good tanking talents). Yes, unholy blight is good for aoe and bone armor is great and there's the catch
Seems like tri-spec will be the way for tanking and DW at the moment. Deep frost also lacking compared to the other two?
Would changing Hungering Cold's effect to much like hunter's frost trap be any help? with added benefit of +threat on all abilities under the effect when in frost presence. In a DPS sense Tundra Stalker makes HC very good too, since you'd get multiple attacks do more damage rather than just one. Also add HC to Frost Bite (to have a chance for the old effect).
It would maintain the idea having all specs able to tank and dps, keeping frost very much pvp capable as it is, increase frost dps and make frost have the desirable 51 point tanking talent (opposed to blood/unholy 51 point which aren't as good tanking talents). Yes, unholy blight is good for aoe and bone armor is great and there's the catch
To be honest, I don't really see what that accomplishes... I don't think a DK tank's weakness is going to be threat. Maybe on AoE pulls, but a Hungering Cold / Deathchill / Howling Blast combo generates a TON of threat on any AoE pull... combine that with an un-nerfed Death and Decay, and you've pretty much frontloaded all the threat you'll ever need to generate on the pull.
The best way to fix the DK's tanking talent problems is probably to simply move Forceful Deflection/Spell Breaking to tiers 1-2 on the Blood tree, and make Bone Armor a 3 point talent (maybe slightly nerfed to account for the lower position) on Tier 2 of Unholy, and throw some kind of tanking-related 5 point 45req talent (STA/STR buff hopefully) into Frost. This allows Blood to be a decent offtank, Unholy to be the best anti-caster tank, and Frost to be a more viable endgame tank. It also forces tanks to choose between Hungering Cold and Lichborne... another emergency button, or an ability to help with AoE tanking/CC/etc. That will be a great sort of progression from Heroic tanks to Raid tanks.
There's nothing wrong with putting tanking talents in all three trees... the problem comes when there aren't enough tanking talents in any spec to be anything but a hybrid.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the entier concept of "all trees able to tank" should be thrown out as soon as possible. Stuff is far too spread out to make anything really viable, and when you look at the other 3 tanks in the game, none of them attempt such a crazy notion. The paladin protection tree easily has 55 points worth of desired tanking stats. Druid, Warrior ... same thing. Why in the world would you split those points over 3 trees, making it nigh impossible to get them all. To top it off, even if you could with a DK, the talents are 'suspect' for providing the same level of tanking ability as a paladin or druid. I don't think people are expecting the next warrior raid MT, but if DKs are going to be the "4th tank" at all, they need to at least be on par with druid/paladin ..... that's far from the case right now.
I just hope Blizz is hearing this loud and clear now. There's no doubt they want DKs to be the 4th tank, so it will get fixed eventually, but if they don't get moving towards that now, it'll be 6 months into WotlK before the necessary patches sort it out. Tossing out this 'any tree can tank' notion now, and giving some real defensive focus to either Frost (most likely) or Unholy deep in their trees is really needed right away. That can be done by either moving around current talents, making some talents standard abilities, or creating new talents ..... but I think the philosophy shift is the first step to making any of that happen.
"Part of the reason we chose to add the death knight to Wrath of the Lich King was because groups seemed to have trouble getting tanks. We think tanking in general will be more popular if it's more fun. Improving the dps of tanks will certainly help, which is something we're trying to do to the 3 existing tanking classes through talents and gear changes.
With death knights, we are taking that a step further and trying to allow death knight with different specs to still be viable tanks. Maybe a death knight tank won't burn out if they can try a completely different tree without giving up their tanking role. Maybe death knight off-tanks can still contribute decent dps and utility when not tanking. Maybe it will just be more fun for everyone if you see different abilities getting used depending on who you bring along as a tank.
We admire the valiant attempts to come up with specs that cherry-pick every single tanking talent, but really that's not what you should have to do to tank. If Frost Presence reduced all damage by 95% and generated 200% more threat, it's pretty clear that a death knight could tank any boss in the game, probably trivially, with no talents spent at all. That is clearly a silly example, but my point is that there are lots of ways we can adjust the base class to be an exceptional tank without you having to be dependent on keeping Blade Barrier or Bone Armor up 100% of the time.
Should you get talents that help you tank? Absolutely. Will a paladin be a better Ulduar tank because she spent 20 talents on tanking and you only spent 6? There is no reason that has to be the case. Is that fair? I think it can be. The paladin will still be a better tank for some encounters and as long as she doesn't totally gimp her dps or healing abilities in order to take those tanking talents, we think the design can work."
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the entier concept of "all trees able to tank" should be thrown out as soon as possible. Stuff is far too spread out to make anything really viable, and when you look at the other 3 tanks in the game, none of them attempt such a crazy notion. The paladin protection tree easily has 55 points worth of desired tanking stats. Druid, Warrior ... same thing. Why in the world would you split those points over 3 trees, making it nigh impossible to get them all.
Vitality, Strength of arms, Furious resolve. There is some way to build an Arms tank, a Fury tank, and of course a Protection tank, the best tank still being Protection, for all those shiny "oh shit" buttons, and better shield blocks. 50+/x/15+ and x/50+/15+ are very much Feral duidesque in my eyes, being able to shift stance in combat to switch their role from tank to dps and vice-versa, in all those raid encounters where it is necessary.
So, we still don't have Protection warriors claiming to be dps specced, but I really have no problem with Blood specced, frost specced and unholy specced DK all being able to claim themselves either tanking specced or dps specced.
How easy is it to keep Blade Barrier up 90+ percent of the time?
With the caveat that my DK isn't high enough level to have both Blade Barrier and Bone Armor, so I've not tested them together, it's very-easy-verging-on-moronically-easy. The only times I have Blade Barrier fall after it first activates (~6 seconds into the fight, usually) are when I get long strings of misses/dodges/parries. With raid-quality gear including hit rating and expertise rating, that problem should be minimized to a great degree. With a typical tanking rotation you can eat one or two misses per cycle and still keep 100% uptime on Blade Barrier.
It will be a problem for specific fights, though, especially ones involving lots of movement between tanking or fights where you have to transition tanks (such as Illidan - not that DKs will be able to tank Illidan since they can't block Shear), but those usually aren't very common, and even then it only takes about 6-9 seconds (2-3 normal swings) to get Blade Barrier active again.
I actually wouldn't be too terribly surprised to see a bit of a nerf to Blade Barrier, because I see it as a no-brainer at the moment. I can't see how any DK tank could NOT take BB. Bone Armor is similarly awesome, which leads to a base spec like this one being really hard to beat (note there's still 6 talent points left over, but there's no really good tanking talents reachable so I usually dump them in DPS talents to help with threat; if you wanted to, you could potentially drop Magic Suppression and Anti-Magic Zone and retrieve 6 more points).
Part of the reason we chose to add the death knight to Wrath of the Lich King was because groups seemed to have trouble getting tanks. We think tanking in general will be more popular if it's more fun. Improving the dps of tanks will certainly help, which is something we're trying to do to the 3 existing tanking classes through talents and gear changes.
With death knights, we are taking that a step further and trying to allow death knight with different specs to still be viable tanks. Maybe a death knight tank won't burn out if they can try a completely different tree without giving up their tanking role. Maybe death knight off-tanks can still contribute decent dps and utility when not tanking. Maybe it will just be more fun for everyone if you see different abilities getting used depending on who you bring along as a tank.
We admire the valiant attempts to come up with specs that cherry-pick every single tanking talent, but really that's not what you should have to do to tank. If Frost Presence reduced all damage by 95% and generated 200% more threat, it's pretty clear that a death knight could tank any boss in the game, probably trivially, with no talents spent at all. That is clearly a silly example, but my point is that there are lots of ways we can adjust the base class to be an exceptional tank without you having to be dependent on keeping Blade Barrier or Bone Armor up 100% of the time.
Should you get talents that help you tank? Absolutely. Will a paladin be a better Ulduar tank because she spent 20 talents on tanking and you only spent 6? There is no reason that has to be the case. Is that fair? I think it can be. The paladin will still be a better tank for some encounters and as long as she doesn't totally gimp her dps or healing abilities in order to take those tanking talents, we think the design can work.
This quote really scares me, and shows a bit of naivete on behalf of Blizzard when it comes to endgame, tanking, and viability. I sincerely hope that some of the beta-testers here can pass some of our sentiments here on to the Beta Boards and feedback, before it becomes too late to make any significant changes.
The scariest point is: "We admire the valiant attempts to come up with specs that cherry-pick every single tanking talent, but really that's not what you should have to do to tank". Well, of course, in a perfect world, this would be the case, but in the reality of endgame raiding, players can and will do anything they're able to, in order to give them an advantage. So, if things remain as they are, we are faced with two possibilities. Either DK tanks will be extremely underpowered, or extremely overpowered. If they tune the base class to ensure that a 51pt Blood, Frost, or Unholy DK can tank most encounters, one of these "cherry picked" tanks will end up significantly more powerful, and a Warrior would fall by the wayside. If they tune the class so that you need to "cherry pick" talents to become a viable tank, then there was absolutely no reason to make all three trees viable in the first place.
DKs that are interested in DPS won't take a single tanking talent in the first place, unless it also makes them better at DPS... DKs that are interested in tanking will do everything it takes to maximize their tanking ability. Blizzard is trying to balance a fine line between imba and useless, and in all honesty I think that it will prove impossible, and one or the other will take over. There are two ways to make this fair, while adhering to the "spirit" of adaptability that Blizzard wants:
Move all the core tanking abilities to the lower end of each tree, assuming that all three trees will have 10 points in the first two tiers dedicated to the main tanking talents that all tanking DKs can pick up. The DK can then choose which tree to specify down, and any further tanking talents in ANY tree should be deep enough so that the DK can only choose one. This is what I call the "Mitigation Specialization method" and will allow for, say, a Blood DK being better at tanking fast-hitting mobs (getting health back from each incoming attack), a Frost DK being better at tanking hard-hitting mobs (more mitigation, etc), and an Unholy DK being better at tanking casters. This will result in three reasonable tanking builds (51/10/10, 10/51/10, 10,10,51)
Move all the core tanking abilities into Frost, creating a linear progression of tanking abilities down to deep Frost. Then, place core DPS talents in the first four tiers of each tree, allowing the deep Frost tank to choose which methods he wants to use to do DPS/Threat. I call this the "Threat Specialization method", and will allow for, say a Blood DK being better at generating threat on single physical mobs, a Frost DK being better at generating threat on ranged mobs (taking some of the place of a Mage or Warlock tank), and an Unholy DK being better at generating threat on AoE packs. This will also result in three reasonable tanking builds (20/51/0, 0/71/0, 0/51/20) as well as a couple of more generalist builds...
Either one of these ideas will allow DK tanks to have variety in playstyle, versatility, and real viability. Moreover, they will make it much easier to balance DKs without requiring them to cherry pick talents, or making them imba. Hopefully, Blizzard will recognize this before it's too late in the game to make these sorts of changes...
edit: Apologies for reposting the blue, but that took me quite a while to write =D
Last edited by Raedix : 07/30/08 at 2:23 PM.
Reason: List formatting was off...
The difference with paladins, warriors and DKs is the simple focus of each tree.
Paladins have 3 roles to fill, so they have most talents of the same kind in the same tree.
Warriors clearly have like 5 talents purely most efficient with 2-handers in arms, DW in fury and tanking in protection.
DK is different because it is both roles in every tree. It does NOT mean it's less efficient, it just means you have to make CHOICES.
It's just different design.
My version of HC makes AOE tanking way more efficient (all mobs take extra threat from your diseases etc. for the duration of your rune power), maybe it's even too similiar to concecration... Tanking must have something at the 51 point too. While blood is more geared on dps, unholy is good for tanking too but moreso dps.
It's a reason to go 51 point in tanking. You still get lichborne or whatnot.
If Death Knights are supposed to be able to tank regardless of talent choices, does that mean they're balancing Death Knight tanking on a 0/0/0 spec? You can't balance an encounter assuming the DK has Lichbourne. You can't assume they have Blade Barrier, Spell Deflection, AMZ or Bone Armor. The base tanking ability of DKs, combined with whatever tanking talents they've chosen, on top of their higher than average dps just screams overpowered.
There's nothing wrong with putting tanking talents in all three trees... the problem comes when there aren't enough tanking talents in any spec to be anything but a hybrid.
Improved DS and Improved Tclap can be possibly removed from these categories depending on raid makeup.
Utility Talents(5):
Concussion Blow
Safeguard
Vigilance
Shockwave
Last Stand
So, really, not that different. Especially if you have a dps warrior covering DS and tclap, or a warlock with improved CoW. Just because you're not able to spec down one tree for tanking doesn't mean you're going to be a worse tank. I think the design approach Blizzard's taking is risky, but I like it.
Also, you have to consider not just the number of talents, but also the magnitude. Blade Barrier, Forceful Deflection, and Bone Armor are really powerful mitigation talents. 2 to 3 times the return you get out of something like Shield Specilization, Shield Mastery, or Critical Block.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention with Blade Barrier -
Don't ever take a Rune Mastery talent if you want to keep it at 100% uptime. The RM talents screw up your timers something fierce and it becomes a juggling act to keep everything going. Death Rune Mastery might be OK, but the others basically make your runes recharge fast enough that you can't use all of them in one cycle without serious pre-planning, and it's really hard to pre-plan for 10% events.
Seems to me Blizzard is balancing DK tanking more or less on 15/15/15 (or I guess that'd be a good baseline for the way to do it). That is below 15 points there's plenty of passive talents to help mitigation/threat. Everything below that goes a little bit more specialised. So if you want Bone Armor, you can't have X and vice versa. Those talents make you more suitable to a type of mob but each tree has some way to counter the same mobs so you can still tank them, for example Acclimation vs. AMZ. In every spec you will have 15 points in 2 trees at least.
With the caveat that my DK isn't high enough level to have both Blade Barrier and Bone Armor, so I've not tested them together, it's very-easy-verging-on-moronically-easy. The only times I have Blade Barrier fall after it first activates (~6 seconds into the fight, usually) are when I get long strings of misses/dodges/parries. With raid-quality gear including hit rating and expertise rating, that problem should be minimized to a great degree. With a typical tanking rotation you can eat one or two misses per cycle and still keep 100% uptime on Blade Barrier.
07/30/08, 12:38 AM
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