Sh4d0wfury

Blizzard will not be increasing the level of damage a boss can hit you to make healers occupied. They are increasing the damage the raid will take in general, via magic damage. They have already said it and sartharion 3d only proves that.

While on BC a rogue tanked a couple of encounters because of 100% avoidance, most fights he was not able to do that due to the mechanics involved. In fact, even the most simple fights are getting to the point where tanks take more magical damage than melee. Just think on how many poisons have to be cleased and how many magicbolts have to be interrupted these days. While I agree a that avoidance is still a very good tank stat on paper and that it will probably be nerfed in the future, it will not be the holy grail unless it's easily obtainable to absurd levels, while maintaning a good EHP, like it was on sunwell.

 

Foxx2405

I think with this quote in mind, the issue Psy is addressing, and in my opinion some valid points, is that DK due to the way avoidance works have quite a gap on the other tanks.

If the quote is true (and I have no reason to assume it's not, because it seems totally valid with the information we have).

Lets assume a frost tank with Frigid Dread Plate has around 82% avoidance. Then a warrior with the same stats would have around 70% avoidance because he only gets 10% from talents (all stated in the OP).

That means that avoidance wise the DK avoids not 12% attacks more but:
12/30 = 40% attacks more.
Another way of saying is that DK only get hit 18% of the time, and the other tank 30% of the time. 18/30 = 0.6. So we only take 60% of the attacks the other tanks take.
That is a pretty huge gap, and i doubt thats made up by something like block.

However at the moment we are really dependent on those talents for survival.

 

Foxx2405

I think the point is not merely that avoidance is a godly stat when it gets high.

I think the essence is that Death Knights, due to talents create a huge avoidance gap with other tanks without really sacrificing anything in return.

Due to the exponential scaling of Avoidance with itself, the "mere" 10% extra avoidance we get through talents, can in future end game mean that we have 50% more avoidance relative to other tanks.

And unless I get it wrong (I'm not an expert on tanking, and I'm not even a main tank), we can actually stack EHP more easily due to this.
In the future raids, we'll get better gear, which means we get more avoidance from the gear itself, and we can more easily stack stamina for gems and enchants. Where we get 50% avoidance from gear and 20% from talents, another tank might has to chose, he can either try to get as much avoidance (which is more expensive for him, due to DR) or he can also stack the same stamina as we do. But then he loses a big chunk of relative avoidance.
If he get 50% from gear and only 10% from talents that means that, that DK with the same gear relatively avoids 25% more attacks.

Sure avoidance might not be the ultimate stat for all bosses, since we're seeing a lot of magic and aoe damage nowadays. But so far there have always been, and there will always be hard hitting melee bosses. And even most of the magic bosses can still hit like a truck.

 

Ramalama

I think the big problem that we're facing is not that avoidance is necessarily always better to stack, but rather that having a nearly unhittable tank threatens to trivialize certain encounters or parts of encounters.

It's not hard to build a 'regular' set and an avoidance set and switch between them.

 

Zaroua

This is something I crusaded about during the beta, sending (read: spamming) reports to Blizzard about how avoidance for DKs is absurd and that as soon as a DK has access to full 226/239 ilvl gear, the imbalance will become even more obvious.

The problem with the whole situation is that Blizzard apparently doesn't think that being able to reach over 80% overall avoidance in Naxx gear is a problem. The reason I say this is because they changes they brought to the DK class since LK went live change next to nothing for the DKs' obnoxious avoidance stacking: the Vampiric Blood and WotN changes are just the icing on the cake.


So here's the real problem: when a DK stacks avoidance he loses nothing and gains threat because of Rune Strike. Compounded with the fact that DKs have a huge amount of avoidance that's off the DR formula (add another 2% for Night Elves) and the fact that they can rotate cooldowns to the point where they always have "something" up, this simply spells out disaster at high end gear levels. What really worries me is the fact that Blizzard is seemingly ignorant of this problem, or that they just don't care and simply intend to keep buffing DKs so that they're on par with the other 3 tanks at every task while happily foregoing any nerfs to the insane advantage a DK has against a melee oriented boss.


Edit: Just to be clear, I do think DKs need to be able to hold their own compared to the other 3 tanks outside of tanking Patchwerk-like bosses. The issue is how overpowered they are at single target tanking and that it'll only get worse as gear improves. Try to imagine what a DK would be like with Str/Stam/Def/Dodge/Parry/Hit/Expertise and mass amounts of sockets filled with as much avoidance as possible.

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.

 

Inamorata

Kinda surprised that you haven't thought about this before, this is the sole reason I rolled a Night Elf. The 2% miss you get from racial scale insanely with good gear.

I also think you are underestimating the effect of diminishing returns. To get numbers of 90% total avoidance you need to stack 1100-1200 dodge rating and a equal amount of defense. So unless they double the amount of stats on tankgear this expansion I doubt we will see any huge problems with it. Lichborn might need a nerf though since it is at this stage a a 15sec I don't take dmg at all ability against physical only dmg bosses.

As for solving this there is already a easy fix. Make bosses do magical dmg special attacks and the tanks are forced to stack stamina again. Sartherion is a great example of how a magical attack can make tanks stack stamina on a fight with high physical damage. I think all agree that DKs and druids are both viable as MT on that fight yet a DK with his avoidance take 15-20% less physical damage. While stacking avoidance on Sartherion a boss that do 4x as much physical damage as magical seems like a good idea to reduce overall dmg it is not viable because the high spelldmg breaths will kill anyone stacking avoidance. If you balance a breath to do about 90% of the damage of a tank in well balanced gear you can be sure that there won't be any tanks dropping 10% hp to get a little more avoidance, while tanks stacking stamina might be tempted to go for a more balanced set of gear to lower overall damage.

 

Aisuken

I find it ironic that this thread is all about how godly DKs are at tanking melee mobs, and yet they have been championed all along as the ultimate magic tank.

Magic damage and raid damage are the 2 most obvious methods or increasing boss damage output without having insanely large hits when they actually connect. I think we see a lot of this already with fights like Maly/Sarth where the biggest threats are breath attacks and AoE. But is this just another feather in the DK's hat? Honestly I have never really understood what makes DKs so good supposedly at taking magic damage save for predictable attacks that you can save your cooldowns for, but assuming a DK takes the least overall magic damage if it is from a consistent, non-predictable source, then that just compounds the problem.

The whole concept of an avoidance tank has been troubling from the start, but strangely enough it seems the issue has gone the other way from what the original concerns were. Seeing more specific numbers I don't think we will be seeing avoidance in the high 80s (at least within a tier) but by 80% avoidance the problem is already pretty relevant. Its an odd dilemma, because DKs very much rely on high avoidance + cooldowns to survive, yet both are achieved at little-no cost. The most effective answer would likely be to modify the avoidance DR so that lower gear levels feel little-no effect but higher ones are reigned in a bit, but that would of course have very large residual effects on the other classes. I do agree that Bladed Barrier is a likely place for any fix to occur just because having such a large static modifier is very clunky. But then again, maybe not... What seems to be needed is something that scales inversely with gear, and I don't think a talent is a likely place for that to happen.

A good way to approach this might be to look at some WWS reports and ascertain roughly how much damage other tanks are taking at different gear levels, and figure out how much avoidance a DK would need to be at a roughly equal level. ie. ilvl 200 = 60% ilvl 213 =65% ilvl 226=70% for example. Figuring out how to get to a more balanced avoidance levels is a lot easier if we have a better idea where exactly we should be at.

http://zomggamer.blogspot.com/

 

Feanorr

That's not true; we "sacrifice" 10 to 12% of reduction in damage (that all other tanks get), a lot of armor compared to druid, etc.

The problem is that you only consider avoidance; and you compare DK avoidance talents, vs others tanks avoidance talents. But the others tanks got some mitigation talents (or base abilities) that we dont have.

You cant say we got 12% more avoidance and not talking about the rest; it's not that simple.

 

Megaera

These things have pretty much all been discussed in this thread.

Armor's a non-issue since we're slamming up against the cap with Devo Aura and healer talents already. We have no trouble stacking comparable EH when required. Block will pretty much never be good enough to make up the avoidance gap, because then Druids would be up the creek with neither the insanity that is Blade Barrier nor a shield.

Blade Barrier and Swordshattering are very real problems, and unless they introduce new methods of tank gear improvement or significantly hamper starting DK tanks by substantially nerfing those two things, this will become painfully apparent post-Ulduar.

Moving BB and SS to "before" the DR would have pretty severe itemization consequences. Parry rating would become essentially worthless for DKs, making itemizing non-set tanking items even trickier than it is now. It's probably the best solution short of a complete mechanics overhaul, but it's not without its own problems.

 

Nightseye

I wish I took a screenshot of the night when something went wrong during the initial pull of Patchwerk and I ended up tanking him in 25-naxx for 5 minutes with no melee alive and taking both hateful strikes. Recount damage taken showed that I took a total of 3.35 million damage over a course of 5 minutes. Patchwerk melees for roughly 9,000, and Hateful Strikes for 23,000. He attacks twice per second along with 1 Hateful Strike per tank per second. That's 64,000 damage per second total if only one tank is alive. Over 5 minutes, that's roughly 19.2 million total unmitigated damage dealt. If you armory me, you will see that my tanking set is 90% iLvl 200.

That being said, I hope that Blizzard had learned from their mistakes in the past (Sunwell Radiance is a clear sign showing that they at least know the problem exists). I don't believe an increase in 13 iLvls from now automatically means an increase in avoidance. They can simply increase the amount of Stamina and Strength on each piece of gear and keep the avoidance ratings constant.

 

Fellwraith

Technically you have the same passive modifier it's just that the implementation is poor.

You have 15% spell reduction - just like paladins and warriors, and more than druids.

A warrior or paladin's shield is only adding 55-60% more armor. So why are DKs getting an 80% armor multiplier? If you do the math, that extra 20% armor is almost the exact same amount of mitigation you would have gotten if you were in defensive stance or had righteous fury. The problem is that armor caps out eventually - that's the only way you are at a mitigation disadvantage, otherwise you are remarkably similar.

 

CoroHD

Would changing Blood Barrier to reduces damage by 10% instead of increases parry by 10% cause any problems I'm not anticipating?

It would reduce the intense scaling with avoidance stats without significantly nerfing tanking ability, bring DK's more in line with the other 3 tanks in terms of mitigation without significantly buffing tanking ability, reduce RNG dependance (or rather, make it not as dangerous to have a bad string of un-dodged/parried attacks), and would still keep the different playstyle mechanic (keeping the buff up) of the DK intact.

 

Ramalama

I made an attempt at a "no healer" 10-man Patchwerk tonight to see how far I could push the avoidance envelope. It turned out a bit sloppy but I'm convinced it's possible. The elemental shaman had to toss a few heals around 55 seconds into the fight and I died at ~15%.

WWS: Wow Web Stats

We used an all ranged group to avoid anyone but me getting Hateful'd. I rotated cooldowns:

0-20: UA and trinket
20-35: Lichborne
35-60: IBF, Indestructable Potion, AotD, Ghoul+Death Pact, Treants, Infernals, Healthstone
60-80: UA and trinket
I died somewhere around there.

Tonight was totally experimental so I didn't hold out for a perfect group comp. I hope to try again next week with a tighter group (more warlocks, no respec'd healers). I'm sure we can shave ~20-30 seconds off the kill with stronger DPS so that Patchwerk will die before I died this time.

I don't consider us successful tonight because the elemental shaman had to pause DPS to toss some outside heals, but we came close.

Anyway, it was a fun exercise in testing high avoidance and will be a fun personal "achievement" to pursue.

 

Soulsbane

Warriors have a bit more at 15.6% (if multiplicative, 16% if additive, I'm not sure which it is) while paladins have 12% (same as druids).

Please remember that warriors have 4 more slots in which to fit Avoidance or EH as they please. While a DK might be using a 2-hander with 4% parry, a warrior is using a tanking one-hander, a shield, a shield enchant, and a ranged slot. The DK is probably using a defense trinket, while the warrior can fit defense in those four slots and use pure avoidance gear in 1-2 more slots with ease, narrowing the Avoidance gap.

Armor's Diminishing Returns still creates a linear survivability boost, doesn't it? The mitigation gap is exacerbated by healer procs tossing us all near 36k-41k armor. This might throw a warrior to 68% mitigation while it throws a Death Knight to 70% mitigation, but the warrior is still getting the 10% flat reduction, which I am lead to believe is not multiplicative at all. Our mitigation will cap at 75% if we hit the armor cap, while the flat passive reductions continue to function beyond that point. Druids also get 30% damage reduction while stunned, while we get largely destroyed when our avoidance can't function.

Block is a non-negligible mitigation contribution, especially for paladins that can still achieve 45% block with no block rating on gear, and to a lesser extent warriors, with 25% uptime on Shield Block and 5% bonus from talents and 10% bonus block chance from a glyph. The examples used to disprove it are often a little silly. Blocking 3K damage from a 24k hit isn't that great... but it is still a 12.5% reduction in damage from that hit.

 

Fellwraith

The spell damage mitigation is multiplicative, but you're doing the math wrong. Whenever you have multiple mitigation abilities, they always multiply after you've done 1-the damage reduction. It's 0.9*0.94 which works out to 84.6%, so we usually round it to 15%. Paladins have a similar double multiplier effect with a couple of their abilities.

Your point about "changing to avoidance or EH as they please" is about the same as me saying "since you've got a bunch of threat stats on a 2h weapon, you can just rearrange the rest of your gear for tanking stats". We both know it doesn't work that way. The itembudget for a 2h is the exact same as that of a 1h weapon and a shield. You may not like how that budget is spent, but you have equal value. Our ranged weapon slot hasn't been updated at all yet, it's still ilvl 200 and it's unlikely that it will be updated all that frequently since only one spec of one class uses tanking ranged weapons. Meanwhile, other tanks have scaling talents/abilities that were created to offset the ranged slot. They are effectively getting the benefit of an ilvl 213 or 226 epic while we don't, that's the downside of the current system. All of our avoidance from gear is subject to DR (unlike talents and runeforging), many of those items aren't updated each tier (including our ilvl 200 ranged weapon and the current MH weapon enchants), and there's only so much wiggle room with how you configure your items.

A warrior or paladin's passive "stance" bonus also diminishes as armor increases, however it doesn't cap out. It is absolutely multiplicative with armor's damage reduction. If you mitigate 65% of a hit with armor, you multiply the 35% taken by 0.9 for defensive stance. If you increase the armor mitigation percentage, warriors and paladins only get 90% of the benefit. If you do the math, technically DK's scale better with inspiration and ancestral healing until they hit the cap (it's a small difference, but it's there). So yes, once we're at 49.8k armor with all our buffs you'll be at a disadvantage, but that requires you to be at nearly 40k unbuffed armor. Is anyone that high anymore with the unbreakable armor change?

I won't deny that block definitely has its uses, but it's nowhere near as good as pure undiminished avoidance. There's good reasons why people didn't just stack block value or rating for Brutallus. Avoidance is vastly superior when you're talking about compound probabilities of all the attacks landing and 4 hits are lethal. Even with the DR, it's probably more efficient to try and avoid a series of hard hits than to try and mitigate them. Block just doesn't scale that well.

 

rh8452

I'm also of the belief that DK avoidance/mitigation is somewhat OP compared to other tank classes. In a 10-man pug fun run, 4-minute patchwerk kill with undergeared dps that were doing 10-man for upgrades, I was struck one single time in the last thirty seconds of the fight by a regular attack. Calculating everything out after raid buffs, consumables, self-buffs (blade barrier, etc) and such, I reached almost 97% avoidance during the soft enrage after popping lichborne. On four horsemen, the healer assigned to rivendare messed up and ran to the wrong corner of the room, leaving me soloing him with no heals for over 30 seconds, also not a problem watching my HP not dropping much and popping rune tap when it hit 50%.

While DKs are certainly not indesctructable by any means, DK avoidance is really going to require a nerf when ulduar hits. Better gems, better enchants and better gear with better itemization will push our base phys avoidance (assuming blade barrier and unflinching valor) before trinkets/cooldowns up into the 70-75% range, making a DK the "essential" class to bring for tanking anything that does physical attacks. Even on encounters where magic damage is being directed to the raid on top of the phys damage, the DK tank would logically still be a more viable choice because they would be less stressful on the healers, plus AMS gives the DK tank a mitigation tool to deflect nearly a whole single crushing magic attack ie. c'thun eye beam, plus IBF giving the tank immense survivability during a silence/aoe magic aura effect such as Locust Swarm.

I'm aware that druids are getting some rather interesting buffs in this upcoming patch that will bring them roughly in line with DKs for effective health, but I'm unsure where warriors and paladins sit by comparison. It's certainly frustrating having blizzard shuffling the frost tree up making threat generation a bit more wonky than it was previously, but not reducing avoidance gains at all as we approach a new tier with better, more optimized gear. It's also frustrating going into the class under the impression that I'm "the magic mitigation tank" but discovering that I'm superior as the avoidance tank for stand-up physical fights. I wonder how long I'd last against razuvious..

 

Dardrious

If I remember correctly, Razuvious nerfs your defense by 100 when you try to tank him without an understudy. So I'd say not too terribly long (since the loss of 100 defense results in a pretty hefty avoidance loss).

 

teiglin

The move you're talking about is Unbalancing Strike, which is avoidable like any melee hit. The defense reduction is rather irrelevant, at least in 25man Naxx, as if the strike lands it will hit for something like 150k.

 

GrizleyCQ

I'm not sure the avoidance is an issue. DKs lack defensive stance, which is partially mitigated by frost presence, but not completely. Especially since FP is supposed to be making up for the lack of a shield also.

Also, in any challenging fight you can ask your healers if they would rather heal you at 32k hp and 72% avoidance or me with 54k hp and 60% avoidance. I would bet nearly all of them will take the somewhat easier to hit tank with enough hp to suck up damage that will gib an avoidance tank. Healers don't wait for you to get hit and then cast a heal, that kills tanks. They keep a steady stream of healing coming and if your hp goes down it's up to you to hit an oh shit button.

I think the ideal tank would have 0% avoidance, 250k hp and 75% reduction from armor, throw in 15% less magic damage or something as a bonus.

 

tainsouvra

I think they're working on that with crit-procced bubbles (in addition to the itemization issue it's supposed to help with). We'll have to wait and see how it turns out by the time it goes live.

 

Avenrus

That is a highly, for lack of a better term, shitty tank.
the raw DPS patchwerk would put out on a tank with % avoidance would rape any amount of HPS your healers could heal you for.
if you want ideal tanking, look into warriors, where ideal is a consistent amount of incoming damage.
not necessarily lower amount of total damage taken, but lower spikes and more consistent incoming dps.

 

Hond

Its a bit of a sidenote but while i recognize the fact that DK's are very powerfull tanks in most situations, you may wanna observe the power of a stamina stacked druid @ PW. With stamina so high even when having eaten a hateful the feral still has more hp then the rest, thus saving melee's from possibly getting chopped.

Wow Web Stats

Note there is a third tank (Trekala), but it got hit only once due to the immense feral stamina (46k unbuffed)

 

Cloudgatherer

I was discussing tanking classes last night with a paladin tank in my guild. He asserted that while avoidance was an issue, that the bigger issue currently between the tanking classes is the HP pool of each, with Druids and DKs capable of massively large HP values, while Warriors and Paladins cannot reach those levels. This discussion started after we had done our Sarth3D/Maly kills, and I had just specced/respecced in and out of cooldowns to eat the magic damage. He is right about one point he made though, the vast vast majority of raids use a DK or a HP stacked feral druid to eat Sarth breaths. Sure, one could use a War or Pal and have outside cooldowns rotating on the tank, but since this is more difficult, very few do it. Right now, DK is the path of least resistance for Sarth3D, and hopefully that trend does not continue into future content.

If this thread is going to make a serious attempt at looking at the imbalances between the tanking classes, then it cannot just focus on the one dimension of tanking DKs in particular excel at: avoidance. Tanking is more than just avoidance stacking, there are several dimensions that we can compare the 4 tank classes:

- Hit Point totals
- Passive damage reduction (ie, armor, D-stance, etc).
- Active Damage reduction or self-saves (cooldown abilities)
- Avoidance (shield wearers vs not shield wearers)
- Threat generation (single and aoe)
- Raid buffs/debuffs

Just my off-the-cuff rankings for the various categories (intended for discussion, not accuracy):

HP: Druids, DKs, War, Pal
Passive DR: War, Pal, Druid, DK
Active DR: DK, War, Pal, Druid
Avoidance: DK, Druid, War/Pal
Threat Gen: honestly not sure, threat hasn't been a big issue....
Raid buffs/debuffs: War, Druid/DK, Pal

Anyway, there needs to be more said about DKs than "lol avoidance", because tanking isn't just about avoidance. I do think that DKs are currently very powerful tanks (hey, it's why I rolled one!), but the content currently is tankable by all the tanking classes and only Blizzard determines if everyone is "close enough" or changes need to be made.

 

teiglin

It's probably worth pointing out that the latest patch notes claim druids' HotW will be 10% stamina, down from 20%. This doesn't help warriors/pallies at all, but it does close the gap between bears and DKs quite a bit.

Regarding your lists, I agree on active abilities and HP (though pallies have better scaling and will outstrip warriors' higher base health in ulduar with the current talent trees), but not the rest.

Avoidance: In my experience, druids are quite a bit lower in avoidance than pally/warrior tanks, on the order of 5-10% depending on how the gem. Of course DKs are at the top as you note. I don't think either warrior or pally tanks have an advantage in terms of talents, though warrior t7 has more avoidance than pally t7.

Passive DR (physical): These are probably closer than you think. Druids are probably at the top here (highest armor multiplier, 12% flat reduction from talents), followed by warriors (10%), pallies (6% and 3%), and DKs all very close. Don't underestimate how much the higher armor multipliers make up for in terms of physical mitigation--80% frost presence and 15% from talents compared to warriors' and pallies' 10%. Of course, if you include block here, it's impossible to judge in a general sense, as block's value depends entirely on the average swing damage of a boss. Other things that are extremely hard to quantify are talents like WotN and Ardent Defender. They clearly cause you to take less damage without any action on your part--the very definition of "passive damage reduction"--but again they're quite situational in value.

Raid Utility: This is extremely hard to generalize about, as it depends on the makeup of your raid. The only truly unique ability, BoSanc, seems to be getting nerfed so that it's really only necessary for prot pallies. I was starting to list all the raid buffs of each class out, but it was turning into a rather long-winded and useless rant, so I'll cut to what each class does "best" in my opinion, as in no other class brings the same buff with the same ease.

Warriors: Major armor debuff. A DPS warrior sundering or a rogue exposing does not compare to the ease of a prot warrior devastating.
Paladins: BoSanc, plus being one of the at least two paladins every single raid has to have from a blessings/judgments perspective
Death Knights: 13% spell damage. EP is free to apply if you're unholy and it affects aoe damage. Earth and Moon is also free but not AoE, and a lock having to apply CoE incurs the opportunity cost of not being able to apply a damaging curse. Obviously deep unholy DPS DK also brings this with exactly the same ease.
Druids: Physical crit damage, bleed debuff, minor armor debuff, plus being the one druid a raid needs for GotW. LotP is better than rampage both because it can be improved to apply some raid healing, and because rampage can fall off if the warrior has to stop attacking. Arms warriors provide trauma with approximately the same ease as druids do mangle, but lolarms (hopefully that will change in 3.1). Feral Faerie Fire is more or less free for a feral druid to keep up all the time (tank or dps), while non-feral druid will have to spend an extra GCD periodically to keep it up that could be used for heals/damage, a warlock forgoes a damaging curse, and a hunter has to take a particular pet.

In terms of "best in slot" raid buffs for lack of a better term, druids and pallies are clearly at the top numerically, though sunder and EP are both essential to any fight. It just depends on what the rest of your raid looks like; each has something pretty valuable to bring.

 

Qaenyin

At the moment I'm packing roughly 70% avoidance when frost specced, give or take 2%, self buffed but wthout potions. That's without Unbreakable Armor, trinkets or Lichborne taken into account, and it's in only iLv200 gear, some of which is not even epic quality(still using the iLv200 boots from wyrmrest rep for example) and I am using the lesser hodir shoulder enchant, not the greater one.

All in all I'd expect if I was a night elf, had Scorpid Sting/IS on the target, and was in full 213 gear I'd probably have around 77-78% avoidance. This is, again, unbuffed. With raid buffs I could probably push 80% avoidance.

Consider the fact this is the equivalent of Mags/Gruul gear from TBC standards, and also consider that the Untouchable vids didn't come about until around Sunwell's release.

I see it ending up quite possible to have death knights with 85% avoidance or more by Icecrown as frost. The question we have here though is this:Block Value does not have diminishing returns. Considering by that time it's likely that both Warriors and Paladins will be able to hit "uncrushable", so to speak, as they were during TBC, passively, this means we have a question of: Does the fact that at that point Warriors and Paladins are guaranteed to take less damage per hit screw up balance even more?

Consider that we'll only be getting hit, oh, 15-20% of the time at most. Bosses are going to have to hit incredibly hard at that point to keep our survivability in jeopardy. Warriors and Paladins are going to have a flat damage reduction capability, and depending on how blizzard ends up modifying Savage Defense in the future, Druids may as well. Death knights will be reliant on cooldowns that do not have 100% uptime. This means one of two things:

A - Death Knight tanks will make content trivial as the damage is not significant enough to offset the avoidance difference.

B - Death knight tanks will be forced to spec Blood or Unholy as the avoidance combined with Bone Shield making the uptime near constant or the fact that Will of the Necropolis is passive will be the only things making them able to survive a bad RNG outcome.

C - Block offsets the avoidance and Death Knight tanks are worthless as their reliance on avoidance makes them incredibly ineffective to heal due to spike damage intake.

Considering that the new Unbreakable Armor, while a static damage reduction, only has 33% uptime, it will not be able to compete with Block for reliability. Bone Shield is the only talent that actually scales well with avoidance for that reason as it's duration is increased by avoidance indirectly, and bad RNG can be covered by IBF(which is the original reason for the first bone shield nerf).

Another issue:Will of the Necropolis has a dead zone. If a boss hits sufficiently to bring you below 45% or so in a single strike and has sufficient burst, it takes no effect but a bad string of avoidance will kill you before your healers can react(making them 100% dependant on pre-emptive healing a warrior or paladin tank may not need). It's also the only talent made LESS effective by it's own tree's cooldown(Vampiric Blood increases your max hp therefore incresing the amount of damage a mob would have to deal to you to have WotN have any effect whatsoever).