Major Tanking Changes Coming
Ghostcrawler hit the forums today with some major tanking changes coming (in the next build?).
GhostcrawlerWe have been doing some more tests on DK tanking, this time especially on raid bosses. We think the DK design has some limitations, which weren’t showing up as much on tanking 5-player dungeons.
Specifically, as many people suspected, the death knight really suffers when attacks fail to land, especially opening attacks. Having a Plague Strike dodged or parried can throw off an entire rotation, eventually leading to bad Obliterates because both diseases weren’t up at the same time. Missing attacks is a fact of life for all tanks since it’s hard to stack hit and expertise along with mitigation stats. However, existing tank classes have mechanics to let them “burn off rage” (or mana) to make up for those bad strings. The DK plays more like a rogue who can’t get enough combo points in play. This had a deadly effect on DK threat generation, which just didn’t compete with that of other tanks.
We didn’t want to just solve this with more free expertise because A) that has major PvP ramifications, and B) the death knights would start to hate expertise on their gear.
Instead we are making some fairly big changes:
1) Blade Barrier now procs when your Blood Runes are inactive. While the initial implementation of this ability was fun, as we added Death Rune mechanics it became harder to use, and the fast recharge on missed attacks made it even harder. Now it should be up almost all the time.
2) We also found a bug where a naked, untalented death knight only had 2.5% dodge instead of 5% like warriors and paladins. With these two avoidance changes, death knight survivability should be very close to the other tanks, recognizing that avoidance is more dangerous than mitigation for a tank. As an aside, death knights, warriors and paladins currently mitigate a similar amount of damage, and druids may very well be mitigating too much.
3) Frost Strike can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried. Frost death knights were losing too much potential damage and threat when Frost Strike failed to connect, putting Frost tanks in the awkward position of wanting to skip Frost Strike and just use Death Coil.
4) We changed Rune Strike completely. It is now mostly a tanking ability meant to dish out high damage (and therefore threat). Rune Strike can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack. It affects the next swing, so it doesn’t compete with global cooldowns and can be spammed to some extent. It hits for 200% weapon damage (remember 100% of that is the white swing you lost) plus a percentage of AP. It cannot be dodged, blocked or parried, and costs 10 runic power (for now). Think Heroic Overrevenge. :)
5) I think we already announced these changes, but just to get them all in one place: Bladed Armor went back to attack power. It was changed only to match the warrior talent, which we changed back. Death and Decay got a decent threat boost to get it closer to the realm of Consecration and the new Thunder Clap.
AWESOME SUFFICIENTLY LARGE TWEAKS
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Now the question i have is this….say your blood runes become death runes….do those still have to be inactive or does that count?
rune strike looks awesome.
Genius changes. I love how Blizzard really do their best, and test things. True to their word.
If you want to be real raid tank reroll warrior, paladin.
Haze, stop being so narrowminded.
Don’t blame him, he just wants to play a DK at Wrath without having large lagspikes to deal with. xD
Very nice indeed, mihgt make us plauseble enough to compete with the other tanks, cool i was looking forward to tanking in WotlK.
1 thing though, im not mutch of a pvper, so personaly i dont care, but is frost strike now the ultimate anti warior attack ? or is it now fully a spell and will it be able to be spell reflected ? any thoughts ?
great changes.. now they just need to address our issues with reaching crit immunity compared to the other tanks :)
Like the changes . Atleast in theory thes seem more than promissing :) . Anyone from the beta – how is the DK’s damage on raids comming up ? From the numbers I can assume than it’s just not pausible that a DK would do competative damage . Anyone ?
DK is design to be good OT like bear was. Couple of month of whine from Druid community Druid can might become MT but never good as Warrior or Paladin. If you remember early stage of TBC raiding (When Karazhan was top raid) druid started to look like a great MT but in fact after plate scaling stated to take effect and mitigation taking its nature purpose, druid become nothing more then great OT. Therefor DK is and always will be OT. When he is not taking he is DPS-ing good I might add. So to pray the day DK will more the OT is silly. I do not know whats wrong with that fact.
Haze,
You really need to work on your english brother. And in regards to this:
“DK is design to be good OT like bear was.”
Your totally wrong. It has already been stated several times that the developers vision of tanking in Wotlk is for all 4 tanking classes to be able to main tank equally well in their own way. If there is a problem with one class in regards to this vision they will fix it. It might take a few tries I am sure but as you can see they will continue to work on these issues through patches until all the tanking classes are in line. Besides it is not like we are going to be tanking level 80 raid dungeons the first week of release anyway and I believe the developers are aware of this too.
Haze your a fool, Bear tanks are awesome in end game. My guild has a warrior and a bear MTing Brutallus and the bear has far fewer issues because of the huge armour and Health pool.
DK’s will be able to MT in Wrath – personally i wish they had come out in TBC as I think there are a few encounters where a DK tank would really shine.
i like those buffs from a pvp point of view more than from a pve tank point of view lol….
and they did it again! they said that they know that avoidance isnt as good as mitigation as a tank and DKs still have ZERO mitigation beyong armor value and they AGAIN only buff fucking avoidance -.-.
Sword blocks are not going to happen. So the whole “mitigation beyond armor” is a very moot point for us.
Remember that DK, War, Pala armor values are very close together. As long as stamina values are also close together you’ll see the
same reliability in tanking bosses from an effective health stand point between all three.
DK’s will pull ahead in the taking less damage for the encounter as a whole. If you are a skilled tank that’s smart enough to save some runic power for reactive abilities for when you take an hp float… tank viability is a non-issue. Fact as an MT I would prefer more avoidance or avoidance on demand (hellooooo pocket watch) to random reductions in the incoming values (hellooo block %.)
Haze, Death Knights weren’t just made for the storyline and fun. It was also made because their is a bit of a tank shortage in TBC. They know that there will be quite a lot of Death Knights being made, and think that this will probably raise the amount of Tanks. Also, Feral Druids CAN MT.
ive been looking around on the wow forums and have seen several people say they have tanked 10 man naxx on seperate occasions in all three different specs. Frost being the best for mitigation, unholy being decent, and blood being not so good but doable. Anyone care to comment on this? It would be nice to know i could spec unholy and still tank in 5 mans and possibly in a 10 man.
Now if Blizzard get rid of frost immunity for mobs/raid bosses things would looking good for death knight tanking.
ok i play a prot warrior who is MT raids …and i have been looking into making a DK tank but im not sure how its looking…i dont understand most of their talents and im trying to figure out if they will be more similar to pally tanks with heavy aoe and not many threat based attacks or like warriors with lots of threat attacks like devestate, revenge and so on..?
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