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- 0. Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 04:48:01 PM PDT
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I'll start out by saying that I tanked in Alpha and the experience was pretty fun most of the time. There were a couple points where I'd lose hate to another class, but overall it was pretty easy.
Yesterday, I picked up some tank gear and decided to try my hand at Utgarde Keep just to see how I held up with the changes. The increased threat generation is great on paper, but in practice I had a hard time keeping hate. I know that ret paladins got a damage boost, but I kept losing hate to one and that's just not cool.
A couple of issues I see is that we simply don't have enough hit points. Even buffed with priest stam buffs, I couldn't get over 10k HP. Which is bad in some cases where being able to last is extremely important. The final boss in UK would tear me a new one with just his regular smash. On top of that, my parry and dodge were horrible. I don't think my dodge was over 10% even in tanking gear. Something needs to be done about that. My parry was 12% or something to that effect and that's with the parry trinket we started with. My armor was also only about 11k which was about 53% damage mitigation. My protection warrior in a mix of tank gear is well over that with a shield. I think the 45% armor gained in Frost Presence should be boosted because shields give more armor as well as more defense rating, parry, dodge, stats, and any combination of abilities. Granted, we still don't have excellent tanking gear yet, but something needs to be done about basic mitigation.
For a single target, I tried to keep my normal rotation which is Plague Strike -> Degeneration -> Icy Touch (if I didn't use it to pull) -> Death Coil -> Blood Strike (or Obliterate) rinse and repeat. For solo play that seems to work pretty well, but when tanking, it doesn't generate hate fast enough. The sad thing is, it used to. So I had to make some changes to my rotation since damage is extremely important on the initial pull. I tried to use Obliterate and Plague Strike a bit more since those are my major damage dealing abilities. I'd dump runic power by using Death Coil as well, but when going against caster mobs, Mind Freeze would find its way into the rotation if no one was interrupting them. If I lost hate from the mob, I could use Blood Boil to get it back (provided there were diseases on the target), or use Death Grip, but the long cooldown on Death Grip makes it something you can only use once in a while. Death knights do need some kind of "get hate back" ability that we can use reliably and often.
Multiple target tanking is fun as hell. I'll go ahead and admit that. With Death and Decay in a much improved state over it's Alpha version keeping hate on multiple targets is rockin'. The main problem with this is that if you use it as an opener, then you'll be rune starved for a few moments. I usually dropped D&D, then hit the mobs with Howling Blast. If you have a mage around, then having the mage freeze the mobs once they get close, then use Howling Blast on them is quite effective. Not sure why, but I can pretty much keep all mobs in check if it's a multi-mob pull. With Pestilence and Blood Boil, you can really do a good job with that. Granted, it's not as awesome as a paladin, but it's damn close. Where you're gonna have problems is when a mob is immune to diseases. In that case, you'll be having an uphill fight to keep hate since none of your really good moves will work. I hope D&D doesn't get changed, since it really works well and can be used even when soloing. The cost is high, but the payout is awesome.
The biggest issue is that you have to avoid getting rune starved, so it's best to try and use abilities that either use one rune or runic power. Multiple rune moves are great, but can stall your ability to do damage. Waiting is bad, bad, bad.
Casters still kick your butt. I know Blizz has said that death knights are good against caster mobs, but I don't see it. Until you get the Anti-Magic abilities, you're just as good as everyone else against caster mobs. Warriors are better since they have Spell Reflect. Mind Freeze is great if the mob can be spell interrupted, but as you know, most boss mobs can't. So you're eating those spells most of the time. The resistances are nice in theory, but still too low to really make a huge difference. Some of the more interesting abilities for dealing with casters you have to put talent points into, so death knights aren't really anti-caster out of the box. I'm going to run some more tests before I really get into this, but so far I don't see much of a difference between a death knight and a paladin with regards to caster mobs.
Mitigation and hit points...please fix this. Perhaps it doesn't need to be as high as a warrior, but something needs to be done since parry and dodge stats are so low. I'm going to get some enchants and such for my tank gear to see how well I can improve the stats. Either throw more agility on the gear to get some dodge and crit (both are good to a tanking death knight), or perhaps allow other stats to contribute to dodge and parry.
Well, I have to head to work, but I'll keep this thread updated as I try more things. Perhaps with the new build some issues will be taken care of, and there will be some new ones.
-EDarkness
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- 1. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 05:10:41 PM PDT
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Forgot to mention...
My spec is currently 19/36/8. I tried to spread things out since I liked things in all the trees. My final spec should be 21/42/8 as I want to pick up Frost Strike again to add it to my tanking rotation.
-EDarkness
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- 2. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 05:34:04 PM PDT
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Useful feedback. Thanks. :)
I don't know if this was true in your situation, but one thing I have noticed is that the death knights who have leveled quickly tend to be grouping with veteran characters in epic gear. It's tough to test threat generation of a death knight in Shadowmoon quest blues against dps classes in T4 or better gear.
If you're getting trounced by Ingvar, that is probably a problem with the dungeon and not the guys you're running with. The earlier instances need to be reasonably easy, especially since a lot of players will be running them in Borean Tundra greens.
We haven't made a big pass comparing threat, dps and mitigation among all the classes yet, frankly because the abilities haven't stabilized enough yet. Fortunately with the death knight in particular, there are a lot of knobs to turn.
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- 3. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 05:50:53 PM PDT
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- 4. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 06:04:01 PM PDT
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heck ya, at 67 i've almost got 8k health, in just quest greens. I think it's because of all the extra +stam talents blood's got in it's uper teirs.
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- 5. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 09:29:25 PM PDT
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- 6. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 09:41:58 PM PDT
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Without seeing what gear you're in, I've noticed a lot of the early greens have str and dps values (ap, crit, w/e) on them, and in many cases NO STAM... I really don't understand this, completely moving backwards from early BC gearing. If that's what you're using to tank (and again I don't know, nor am I pointing a finger at you) maybe some of the quest gear needs to be looked at. I'm glad I don't have to use any of it though 'cause all the ap in the world won't keep you alive if you've only got 5k hp.
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- 7. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/28/2008 09:51:40 PM PDT
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- 8. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/29/2008 07:07:02 AM PDT
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I've tanked a few things now, before the latest build, with a collection of horrible gear.
Some thoughts:
Parry seems like my primary tanking stat - I'm spiking all over the place, and giving t6 healers an "exciting" time. They're catching me, but there's a lot of *Parry Parry Parry* *Smashed* *Ridiculously large Holy light/greater heal* going on. I don't think a non-epicced healer could heal me through some of those spikes.
Tanking does not feel controlled. I don't feel like I have a single target rotation that is worth using, and in fact started moving towards aoe bombing things even when I was tanking single mobs. Death and Decay was a big crutch here, allowing me to DD, then oblit twice.
Echoing the concerns regarding taunt/death grip cooldown. One of the least fun parts of tanking 5 mans is when you have dps split (and I've been encouraging this from my veteran friends to get a feel for how the class handles it) and death knights are terrible if the usual pug assist occurs. Not to mention how fast things go south with taunt resists. I can't imagine (for instance) a death knight tanking a fight like brutallus or 4h where you need taunts to succeed.
Lastly, the GCD lock that's been commented on elsewhere is really painful while tanking. I often found myself just letting runes rot (unholy runes in aoe pulls, frost in single target) to use up runic power with gcds, and it was pretty glaring how tight the gcd stress is when you added in death grip or blood boils to try and get things back on you. I'm almost thinking the base gcd for dks needs to be 1s, or all non-rune abilities need to be off the gcd.
Gearing to tank as a DK seems like it may also be an issue - just looking at it we appear to have as viable tanking stats:
AC
Sta
Dodge
With less valuable but still relevant:
Parry (This is less valuable because the itemization cost has been higher than dodge in the past)
Defense (Not getting block lowers this compared to dodge)
This is going to cause some issues down the road. I'd like to see at least one more dodge equivalent value tanking stat show up for dks. (Similiar to druid agi or warrior str/block).
Lastly - when specced frost, unholy runes seem the odd one out. When specced blood/unholy it appears to be frost. In both cases, I've noticed that if I'd had an extra death rune I'd have been able to consume the "wasted" runes. This suggests to me that the 2/2/2 rune system needs additional flexibility.
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- 9. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/29/2008 01:14:21 PM PDT
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I've been MT'ing for 2 years on my warrior, and I've been having so much fun in Beta on my DK so far that I'm very tempted to make a full time switch for Wrath. I will say first of all that I have not yet tried the Frost tree, but I have a few observations on it.
A tank's 2 main roles IMO are to protect the group through holding aggro, and to mitigate as much incoming damage as possible. When I think of tanking and specs I think of tanking a boss. Trash is rarely a concern because trash shouldn't hold you back. A wipe or two to get the positioning maybe, but not an entire evening. So far looking at the Frost tree it tends to fail a bit on the threat and mitigation counts.
Again, all my thoughts are based off boss tanking because those are the guys dropping epics for me, not trash.
The biggest issue to me are Freeze effects. I know Crushings are being removed from Wrath which benefits both DK's and Ferals immensely, but unless bosses can be effected with Freeze effects then DK's feel weak out of the box. Frostbite, Frost Rune Mastery, Frost Strike, Guile of Gorefiend, and Howling Blast are all either directly or indirectly effected by Freeze effects.
Frostbite is both fail and win. It's obviously not going to effect bosses, so I likely won't even touch it. The idea of having it for trash with Howling Blast is pretty nice. Too bad I won't get that triple damage for bosses when I need the threat.
Frost Rune Mastery also becomes non-existent in a boss fight which leads into...
Frost Strike Our 41 point talent. This should be the big one, and it has potential to deal double damage, but only on frozen targets.
Guile of Gorefiend is pretty much a must have, but there goes Frost Strike potentially dealing more damage.
Some of the mitgation talents in the Frost tree are pretty amazing. Toughness, well, that's pretty standard for all tanking classes. Frigid Deathplate, Icebound Fortitude, and Unbreakable Armour all sound pretty godly... Talents any tank class would love, but the mitigation love ends there. No dodge or defense or crit reduction talents. Expertise talent is so deep in Blood it's unattainable in Frost.
Sorry, for the scatter brained post, writing this at work so I feel all over the place in throughts, but looking at the Blood tree it feels like it has just as much mitigation as Frost. Forceful Deflection, Spell Deflection, Blade Barrier... Heck, I'd forgo Hungering Cold just to get Mark of Blood.
With today's patch, I loved a lot of the Frost talent switches as it's going to make Blood a lot more solid for DPS, but I'm still not feeling the DK tank wise. Nothing to get really excited about yet. More thoughts later...
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- 10. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/29/2008 01:20:21 PM PDT
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- 11. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/29/2008 01:25:30 PM PDT
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- 12. Re: Death knight tanking impressions 07/29/2008 01:31:34 PM PDT
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