Blood Tanking
by Miste | 04/09/2008 03:12:50 I'm a druid tank. I love tanking. I love the race against my dps to see if I can stay on top of the threat meter while still using my trinkets as appropriate. Fights like Gurtogg Bloodboil or Illidan really get my blood moving. While I am disappointed I can’t tank Illidan directly, I am extremely happy with the challenge presented by being a flame tank. Unfortunately, I severely dislike the dps model for feral druids. I don’t really like the rogue way of doing things and much prefer the style of caster classes (I was a mage from T1 to T5). But I really love tanking, so I thought I would give a death knight a try. So far, I’m really enjoying the game play. It is much more rhythmic than my druid and I get to tank. I've specced deep into all three trees for a level or two and found that I really enjoy blood the most so far. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm missing something. The blood tree doesn't feel as strong for tanking as the other 2 trees. It feels lackluster and too dependent on cool downs or gimmicks. For rune tap to be truly effective, you have to macro it with blood tap which completely eliminates the cool down benefit of improved rune tap. Otherwise, we have to save a blood rune which drops our mitigation by 10% since blade barrier won’t be active very often. Mark of blood will be incredible against fast attacks, but meh against most bosses. It just feels like another gimmick rather than a solid ability. Will of the necropolis requires us to be below 35% health before it kicks in. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t spend much time below 35% in most raids. It’s an emergency ability that is too deep in the blood tree for the benefit it provides. The expertise is nice, but the talent overall is vastly inferior to frigid dreadplate. Blood gorged is also inferior as the threat generation will not be constant like its counterparts in frost or unholy. I think I would prefer 5/5 necrosis and 1/1 shadow of death over blood gorged. The blood tree feels like it is missing a niche or style to differentiate it. One suggestion would be to swap will of the necropolis and veteran of the third war. Buff VoTW to 2/4/6% stamina. That would allow Blood DKs to grab VoTW and Shadow of Death for 8% more stamina. We’ll take more damage, but have higher health pools to compensate. Another suggestion is to change will of the necropolis. Instead of 30% more armor below 35% health, make it 5/10/15% more armor (additive with toughness) all the time. That would make our style more similar to bear tanks in TBC (they will not be high armor tanks at level 80), but with better emergency buttons. Anyhow…that’s my initial thoughts on the blood tanking. I plan to spend more time this weekend tanking to make sure my initial impressions are still accurate. |
by Ghostcrawler | 03/09/2008 17:09:23 A Blood knight can heal herself really well and Vampiric Blood lets the healers heal you a lot too. I think when the damage among the 3 trees is more normalized, the threat will be too. It's possible Frost or Unholy is better for mitigation, but if so, I would expect the difference to be pretty marginal over the long haul and possibly even depending on the boss. |
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