17% runestrike is nice BUT....

#0 - Nov. 4, 2009, 8:49 p.m.

I'm happy blizz has decided DK's need a threat boost of some sort however.....

I'm not really fond of runestrike as a crutch to hold threat.

Let's face it..... if your a DK tank if RS lights up alot your threat will be fine.

However there are those times it just doesn't light up at all............ now before you pallies and warriors get all emo like (hey man we miss stuff too and it hurts our threat) I want to point out that RS isn't like anything else anyother class has. It requires a sequence of motions.... dodge parry, then our next auto attack.

I believe the term some blizz mod used was "overpowerevengestrike" but anyways I like runestrike and think it has a place, but imo it's just it's too much of a crutch for DK tanking.

It's like a catch 22..... you need to RS to hold good threat (granted your dps'ers aren't terrible) but sometimes it won't let you and we cannot hold threat end game on bosses without using it. Therefore we are an RNG based tank system all around RS.

Some fights RS just isn't as useful on certain bosses (as in hardly lights up).

If RNG screws us on RS not activating we get caught very fast by skilled hunters/warlock.

DK threat is low.... no problem you can buff it another way but I don't really like the idea of doing it through RS (even though I'm sure what I say won't affect the decision at all).

Also I'd like to say RS buff is a nice start but what about unholy tanking threat end game? AoE wise it's hurting more than ever and single target needs help also.

Is there any plans to help UD tanking or is it sort of shevled as a pvp/dps tree now?

Ghostcrawler

#6 - Nov. 4, 2009, 5:08 p.m.

The fundamental problem is that DKs are allowed to tank from three trees. (And no, we're not going to change that.)

A Feral druid uses different buttons when tanking than when doing dps. The same is true of the paladin and warrior. We want tanks to use different buttons for a couple of different reasons. One is that it's not fair to do as much damage when tanking as when not tanking. Second, we just think it's more interesting for tanks to learn to use different abilities. The class has more depth when you mix your buttons up than when you just use the same attacks when filling any role.

It would be easy to change Frost Presence to have a huge threat multiplier and just let DK tanks hit the same buttons they do when doing dps. But we don't want to do that for the reasons I stated above. A better answer is to give DKs a new FU ability that they use instead of Death Strike, Obliterate or Scourge Strike. This new ability could even be Rune Strike, just instant and costing runes instead of rp. The problem is that the Blood, Frost and Unholy talents are based around those existing strikes. Adding a new strike would require a lot of talent changes. For example, a talent like Vicious Strikes would need to also boost this new FU strike for DKs to really benefit from it (else half the Unholy tree sort of falls apart for an Unholy tank).

Originally with the DK we had rotational differences because the tanks used their rune-based cooldowns (VB, UA, BS). None of those really contribute to threat though and we found that because of the DK's complex rotation that missing say an initial Plague Strike (because it's hard to be hit and expertise capped while still getting all your mitigation stats) really clobbered DK threat. Rune Strike was a way to give some threat back to the DK. We're really not fond of on-next-swing attacks and would love to get rid of them in Cataclysm, but it's going to be a ton of work for all affected classes.