A post by our good friend, Ghostcrawler summarizes what changes are coming for the DK class. Some good things, some oversights.
We 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
(Source)Here was my reply, which is buried in that thread. I think its fairly succinct and accurate:
DKs and other tanks may take a similar amount of damage over a long fight, but DKs are still more vulnerable to burst. While high dodge and parry chances will, over a long fight(s), generally lead to an appropriate amount of damage taken, there will be strings of no avoidance hits in there that can really murder a DK.Just to elaborate, I think the change to Rune Strike and the random bug fix to dodge are good changes. The change to Blade Barrier is critical now that a random miss/dodge/parry in your rotation wont affect up time. In fact, all of the bullet points are good.
Unlike warriors and paladins, we dont have block as a backup for hits that aren't avoided and we dont have the armor of a druid. We're still vulnerable to the same thing that we've always been vulnerable to, and we still have nothing to address the fact that we are the worst tank against magic damage.
These changes really fail to address the serious issues facing Death Knights, and seem like the devs are just really going down the wrong path, overall.
Fix the following:
1) Death Knights are the worst tanks against magic damage. They are able to mitigate less magic damage overall than other tanks with the nerf to AMS.
2) Death Knights are reliant on completely avoiding attacks, and are thus the most vulnerable tanks to being gibbed by non-avoidance strings.
What isnt good is what GC said at the beginning of the post and what I went into above.
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.(My emphasis) This is true, avoidance is more dangerous than mitigation. He also said this:
As an aside, death knights, warriors and paladins currently mitigate a similar amount of damage, and druids may very well be mitigating too much.Problem is, this is NOT true. Like many in the community, GC suddenly lost the difference between mitigation and avoidance. While it may be true that Death Knights and Wars/Pals take a similar amount of damage, they do not mitigate a similar amount of damage. The difference may seem small but it is actually crucial in terms of tank survivability.
DKs have a slight edge over other tanks in terms of sheer avoidance. DKs will get hit less times in a fight than other tanks will. However, DKs have the lowest mitigation of any tank. While druids have high armor and war/pals can block, the only mitigation a DK has is his armor (which is no higher than other plate wearers). This means while they get hit less often, the hits that do connect will do more damage to a DK than any other tank, because they lack the additional layer of mitigation that other tanks have. This further means that DKs are reliant on avoidance, which is an inherently unreliable mechanic, because it is completely dependent upon the random number generator. In a long fight, there will be strings of hits that are not avoided for any tank. What will make or break that tank's chance of living is how well he mitigates the hits that connect. DKs are the worst at doing this, and therefore the most likely to die in any encounter.
Moving right along, we take a look at magic damage. This is supposed to be the DK specialty, so lets look at what tanks take as far as magical damage. First (and foremost) is magical mitigation.
Warriors: 16% magical reduction (10% defensive stance, 6% through Imp. Defensive Stance).
Paladins: 12% magical reduction (6% Imp. RF, 6% Guarded by the Light).
Druids: 12% magical reduction (Protector of the Pack).
DKs: 5% magical reduction (Frost Presence).
Seem right for the tank class that is supposed to specialize in magical tanking? AMS used to more than make up the difference, but with the nerf to the cooldown, this is no longer the case. DKs are left with the unwanted niche of being the best avoidance tank (barely) and the worst at everything else. What no one seems to realize is that these lauded tanking changes do nothing to address this problem. Lovely.
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7 comments:
If you're going to count talents, you should count them all.
DKs have Spell Deflection, Frost Aura, Acclimation and Magic Suppression available as passive spell damage mitigation, not even counting the very nice reactive mitigation of AMS, AMZ, IBF, and Bone Armor. You can't get them all, obviously, but you can get plenty.
I do think that the cooldown on AMS is too high currently, though, particularly given Spell Reflect et. al.
Spell deflection is not reliable. It only affects direct damage spells. Most spell damage in raid is area of effect or DoT.
Magic Suppression, AMZ and Bone Armor are all specific to Unholy specced DKs. They do not assist Blood or Frost tanks.
IBF and AMS are amazing, but do nothing for the time they are down. That is the main problem with DK tanking. The over time 10% reduction does not fix the burst damage issue we face when those abilities are on cooldown. Healers greatly prefer healing someone taking consistent damage than healing someone taking constant spike damage. IBF and AMS both result in constant spikey damage for DK tanks.
You say that Death Knights have the same armor as other plate tanks, and I'm kind of curious about that claim. They lack the armor that a shield brings, but Frost Presence gives them a 45% bonus to their armor value. Overall, I'd say that seems to be about even - I'd expect DKs to have as much overall armor as, or even a little more than, a shield-bearer.
Granted, the mitigation due to blocking isn't there, but block mitigation isn't all that superb anyway, and it's just as vulnerable to hit strings as parry avoidance.
DK armor works out a few percent lower than Warriors and Paladins. By itself, it isn't enough to worry about. However, the other three tank classes have permanent damage reduction modifiers while DKs have damage reduction modifiers on cooldowns. Warriors have 10% damage reduction, Druids have 12% and Paladins have 6%. Paladins block significantly more often than warriors, so it works out to a wash for physical mitigation. DKs have IBF. It's great while it's up and creates a spike damage problem when it is down.
e-r-o-x, I'm confused. You say that Death Knights don't have the same armor as other plate tanks and then say that we do. Frost Presence approximately erases the difference in armor between war/pal and DK, which is what I said. The difference is that Frost Presence does not offer the mitigation of block. You can say all you want that block isn't a big deal, but the reality is that its quite important and reduces the chance that a shield user will get hit for full damage to a value small enough that they will almost never take 2 full hits in a row. DKs, on the other hand, have very good avoidance but the lowest mitigation on hits that connect. No block, no druid-like armor.
As for spell tanking, I did neglect to mention Magic Suppression. Even with this talent, however, DK magic mitigation is the lowest of any tank class. Yes, we have on-demand mitigation provided by AMS, IBF and Bone Armor, however, if we are forced to use all of these every cooldown just to get to a similar amount of mitigation that a warrior has all the time (and warriors still have additional cooldowns to pop, like Last Stand, Shield Wall, etc.) then we are at a disadvantage. Spell Deflection is a bad joke. Even if it was 100% it is still reliant on the RNG, but it isn't 100%, its 30%. Its a joke.
Overall, the problem with DK tanks remains that it is very reliant on RNG and on cooldowns.
DKs need some additional form of mitigation, be it partial parrying or additional armor. The Spell Deflection talent would actually be very good if it worked for physical damage instead of magic.
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