So death knights compared to prot warriors will now have:

Significantly lower threat(BoSanct got removed).
Lower mitigation(no block, 5% less baseline mitigation against physical after taking new blade barrier into account).
Lower baseline avoidance(5% from talents, 8% if frost). Very slightly better scaling(parry rating scales poorly and forceful deflection being reliant on strength on top of being parry rating makes it a minimal bonus). Only comparable avoidance if frost and after taking runeforge into account.
Lower magic damage reduction(only 10% from new frost presence, warriors get 10% from def stance and 6% from imp def stance).
Comparable cooldowns unless unholy(IBF vs Shield Wall, Last Stand vs Vamp Blood/Bone Shield/UA).

I understand our avoidance needed a nerf but to me this seems significantly overkill considering we don't get weapon or shield enchants(our runeforges now will only offset our lower base avoidance), we can't block, and our threat is inferior, and this is on live before any of the incoming nerfs.

Warrior defensive stance got nerfed to 5%.

Caused, not taken. 5% outgoing damage increase for warriors.

All i know is these changes better get reverted, these are some MASSIVE nerfs to our viability as tanks and seem to be insane overkill.

It looks like the previous discussion about skipping the possibly detrimental BCB is out. This leaves a 17/0/54 unholy build down 3 points. =(

Requesting napkin math on a dps increase comparison of the 15% DC increase from Morbidity vs the DPS gained with the no-CD version of BCB.

My thoughts:

- The howling blast nerf is unfortunate. Abilities on two cooldowns are not handled well by the UI. The ability should have been changed in such a way that the cooldown could be removed entirely.

- Tanking nerfs aren't surprising due to DK tank superiority on sarth3d, gimmicky as that fight was. Every cooldown was heavily nerfed and 5% passive avoidance lost. My guess is that PTR tests will prove they went too far here. One change I was surprised to not see is magic suppression either removed or moved very low in the tree.

- Good to see that the devs are acknowledging DW DPS as legitimate builds by rolling back previous nerfs.

Across the board, I'm pretty disappointed in these changes. Speaking as a tank, I know we needed some nerfs, particularly to avoidance, but this seems a bit over the top.

Blade Barrier: -10% parry, +5% damage reduction - This one I get, and even agree with
Frost Presence: -5% magic damage reduction - I guess this is balanced by the Blade Barrier change, but I'm doubtful
"Big" Cooldowns: +1 min to cooldown - *HUGE* nerf
Lichborne: removal of miss chance - Unless they make this reactive, I don't see any tank ever taking it again.
WotN: added 15 sec cooldown - *Huge* nerf to mitigation

So, all the analysis before this showed that DK tanks took too much damage without cooldowns up, but with cooldowns up we took too little (or effectively too little in the case of VB). So, we give up 10% avoidance, gain 5% physical mitigation, and nerf all our cooldowns into the ground. Wow. Unless there is something else that's not in the patch notes and not in the talent calc, I think we just went from being OP on progression content to pretty clearly the worst tank across the board.

Is there something I'm missing?

I like the idea of being less cooldown reliant. One minute cooldowns were always up and used every fight, even on trash. Switching to 2 or 3 minutes makes them more meaningful and is probably good design. Do you refresh a bone shield with only 3 charges before the pull or wait until it's gone? That's a decision we don't have to make right now.

However, for a class previously entirely reliant upon those powerful cooldowns, doubling their timers while simultaneously nerfing avoidance does seem likely to lead to performance issues. Testing will tell.

I don't know, most of the 17/0/54 builds I've seen, well actually I've seen them going to 16/0/55 builds lately for 3.1 already included 3 pts in the then-nerfed BcB and 3 pts in Morbidity. Where were you putting the other 3 pts?

Rune of the Fallen Crusader -- Affixes your rune weapon with a rune that has a chance to heal you for 3% and increase total Strength by 15% (down from 30%) for 15 sec.

One of the things I most liked about the class, shot in the head.

Was fully expecting blade barrier to be changed as our avoidance this early in the expansion is far too high in relation to other tanks. Whether this is the change that was needed is still up in the air.

I really do hope however that Bone Shield and Lichborne are buffed in other ways considering the changes implemented. While bone shield will still be picked up as an unholy tank, I hope the damage reduction value is reconsidered. Remember that on average it's not going to be up as long considering we just lost 10% parry from blade barrier. Lichborne needs a CD reduction or some new secondary effect, as a three minute fear break that leaves you vulnerable to a few types of CC seems a little, well, lacking.

Ghoul frenzy still doesn't look very attractive for 2H unholy DK's but it may prove useful for dual wielders who try and stay away from strike damage as much as possible. This combined with necrosis and Blood caked Blade being changed back is good for people who choose the dual wielding route.

Although I don't raid as frost or blood for DPS, it seems to me that the GoG and MoM changes are slight DPS decreases (probably more so in regards to 2H frost). The change is obviously to limit the 'burst' factor of DK's in PvP in favor of more consistent damage. My only concern is that it further devalues critical strike for Death Knights, which already have very few stats that scale well with the class. Strength, strength, strength I suppose ;(

The rune of the fallen crusader nerf is disappointing, but hey it's still on the PTR!

edit: Actually MoM and GoG most likely provide small DPS increases, or at least break even.

Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward *New Enchant* - Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

I guess it remains to be seen what the proc rate on this is but it seems like it could be better than SG or SS runeforges.

That's giving 4% parry (before diminishing returns of course) that can stack up to 5 times as well as additional threat.

As far as I know, there is no ICD on Fallen Crusader, unless it was added in the PTR. I've had it proc back to back lots of times on live.

Some numbers will have to be run, but this seems to make Cinderglacier and Razorice more attractive, especially with the new Death Coil glyph:

Glyph of Death Coil -- Increases the damage done by Death Coil by 15%. (Old - Reduces the cost of Death Coil by 8 runic power.)

Is it possible that we will see some DW builds with CG/RI?

Why do they nerf runeforging? Looks like they want it to be removed, too much people cry about free weapon enchants.
After the self-Ghoul was removed this is the next thing dks got as a unique ability, that will vanish, maybe they change from runes to energy soon, too. You never know for sure.

What about howling blast? Nerfing it, buffing it, so it`s back to old power, than increase it`s cd to 10 sec, after just recently reducing it to 5, oh and I have I mentioned due to the nerfs done to it, it now qualifies for an ultimate talent (51 pts), anyone else got the feeling blizzard does the exact opposite of what they are saying?

Why do they rebuff dual wielding, as necrosis and BCB both are back to old power, while reducing the 2h damage in frost/unholy by quite a bit?

I fear that there will be a lot of changes we won`t like and those we like would be like "Due to large amount of dks out there, you can delete your dk for a free coffee at starbucks, going to take place on 1st of april"...

Disappointing. At least its still better than the zerker enchant though on a properly geared Death Knight. Assuming no strength modifying talents, a Death Knight needs around 1334ish strength at 15% to outdo Zerker.

Assuming a Ret Pally (who gets 25% more strength from talent + Kings), that enchant would give 200 dps, while the next best enchant Berserker gives 90 dps. Halving makes it still the best enchant, but it should be tweaked up a bit.

Do they nerfed Unbreakable Armor too? Anyway, frost tanking seems to me the best choice with +3% miss, 4% magic reduction and unbrk. armor.

Yes. UA cooldown is also up to 2 minutes, from 1.

Over nerfing because of a highly specific niche, great stuff (Tanking that is)

Will of the Necropolis seems extremely unreliable now. You get one attack reduced by 15% every 15 seconds? Not only that, but it's the attack that brings you under 35%, and only that attack? The fact that the attack could also be something as trivial as aura damage (Saphhiron's for example) makes it even worse. Yikes.

Call me crazy, but I think three points just got freed up for anyone who wants to tank as Blood after this.

That's what I've been thinking, after being able to tank with alle Speccs we will be forced to go to Frost for tanking Progress. Kind of sucks, I really enjoyed the Blood Specc with VB

*edith* wrong quote

" * Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward *New Enchant* - Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75."



Maybe i do the math wrong, but at the moment this enchant is way better than garg. or shatter. The effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec, so there is no icd and you get 20% Parry+thread from the damage........uhm, yeah.