The DK tank is no longer fun

#0 - March 7, 2009, 1:38 a.m.

I just don't understand where this is going.

Its no secret that when cooldowns are not up, death knights take the most damage.

Going from 10% parry to 5% damage reduction is break even on spell damage taken thanks to the frost presence nerf, and a nerf to physical damage taken as well.

On top of that you've bumped our 36pt talents up to 2 minutes, made unbreakable armor very weak, and nerfed vamperic blood drastically. You've completely killed off Lichborne. And you're changing the icebound fortitude glyph so pvpers get an extra 10%, never mind pve tanks often relying on it costing no RP.

Our cooldowns are going to be up far, far less, our cooldowns are all weaker, and we take more damage than the other tanks while they're not up. This is not a recipe for success.

I play a frost tank. I probably won't after the patch, for for now, look at what you've left me. Lichborne is worthless to me. Unbreakable armor... every 2 minutes I can block as well as a warrior or pally can 100% of the time for 20 seconds. And Icebound Fortitude. Thank you for leaving me that.

Warriors pretty much have me beat on practical cooldowns now with shield block last stand and shield wall. We both have our spattering of situational ones. But they're also packing more passive mitigation. And more Avoidance with the blade barrier nerf.

Not to mention, our threat is going to go down the crapper. We were already pretty much accepted as the lowest TPS tank. We're gonna be getting 10% less rune strikes now, and our damage took some all around nerfs. 10 seconds on howling blast... ugh.

But lets ignore all that for a moment. I played a prot pally all the way through TBC, from 2.0 and karazhan all the way to sunwell. I can handle being the weaker tank. What I hate the most is that you have slaughtered the entire playstyle of DK tanking. We were the active cooldown tank. You said so yourself. That was the entire focus for a DK while he was tanking, using the right cooldowns to minimize the damage they took. But now that is completely gone, and all that is left is DPSing in frost presence. And I mean that quite literally. If you were dpsing in blood and knew a damage spike was coming, you hit the exact same abilities you would as a tank. There is no cooldown management to worry about any more. Just DPS in frost presence. A pally or warrior's entire toolset changes when they change from tanking to dpsing. Death knights? Just dps in frost presence.

We went from high avoidance to quite possibly the lowest... from active cooldown tanking to "well, we got one or two to use". From managing our defenses to just dpsing in frost presence.

It really disappoints me.

Quote from Errant

Ghostcrawler

#40 - March 7, 2009, 6:31 p.m.

If DKs take too much damage now, we can fix that. If increasing cooldowns means they aren't fun any longer, then we can try and fix that too. But I hope you understand that we don't want to have an unbalanced class in any aspect of the game just because that makes it fun (for that class).

Ghostcrawler

#187 - March 8, 2009, 7:07 p.m.

There are two arguments being used here that I want to dismiss:

1) Because you said DKs are supposed to use cooldowns to tank you can't change it.

2) You said tanking with DKs should be fun. Because the DKs were fun when chaining cooldowns you can't change it.

These are both examples of what I call "lawyering." Essentially you are trying to get us to revert a change by claiming that we went back on our word or somehow broke our rules.

Making DK cooldowns fun and meaningful is absolutely a priority. But having 4 viable tanking classes is also a priority. One of those things cannot just completely trump the other. We also have a slight concern that DK tanking was fun for some players not because of the mechanics but because it was overpowered.

Players who are making suggestions about how to keep DK tanking mechanics fun without being overpowered are making useful comments. Players who are just posting "the class is now gutted; I'm gonna reroll" are making the kind of comments I just skip over (and the mods tend to delete).