[Suggestion] Talent For Death knight Tanking.
by Forgewraith | 29/07/2008 17:48:27 So I've tried out tanking with a few different builds. I think every DK can agree that our mitigation just isn't up to spec yet. While I can understand the desire to make the DK able to tank in every spec I honestly don't think anything viable will come of this philosophy for end game content unless one tree is truly dedicated towards tanking. Having said that I think the 51 point talent in the frost tree should be as follows: Blade Absorption: Allows the Death knight to 'block' incoming melee attacks with their Rune blade. Can block attacks based on main hand weapon speed blocking for the damage range of the Death Knights melee weapon. Costs 40 Rune power, Lasts 10 seconds. ______________________________________________________ Anyo ne who plays frost knows we have tons of runic power and nothing to blow it on. Furthermore being able to essentially 'block' attacks will give us the desperately needed mitigation we require for Melee Based attacks. Hit roll would thus be: Dodge Parry Blade Absorb (Block) Finally this talent will add some customization to the types of encounter variations we may encounter in the upcoming end-game content. Large Hard hitting boss? Use a slow high range 2-hander! Fast attack boss? Dual Wield. I know that bone shield may have been intended to fill this role, but the 30 second cooldown is just not viable from an instance perspective. Feel free to tear apart my suggestion as necessary. -Forge Edited for bad grammar. [ Post edited by Forgewraith ] |
by Ghostcrawler | 30/07/2008 17:07:13 Part of the reason we chose to add the death knight to Wrath of the Lich King was because groups seemed to have trouble getting tanks. We think tanking in general will be more popular if it's more fun. Improving the dps of tanks will certainly help, which is something we're trying to do to the 3 existing tanking classes through talents and gear changes. With death knights, we are taking that a step further and trying to allow death knight with different specs to still be viable tanks. Maybe a death knight tank won't burn out if they can try a completely different tree without giving up their tanking role. Maybe death knight off-tanks can still contribute decent dps and utility when not tanking. Maybe it will just be more fun for everyone if you see different abilities getting used depending on who you bring along as a tank. We admire the valiant attempts to come up with specs that cherry-pick every single tanking talent, but really that's not what you should have to do to tank. If Frost Presence reduced all damage by 95% and generated 200% more threat, it's pretty clear that a death knight could tank any boss in the game, probably trivially, with no talents spent at all. That is clearly a silly example, but my point is that there are lots of ways we can adjust the base class to be an exceptional tank without you having to be dependent on keeping Blade Barrier or Bone Armor up 100% of the time. Should you get talents that help you tank? Absolutely. Will a paladin be a better Ulduar tank because she spent 20 talents on tanking and you only spent 6? There is no reason that has to be the case. Is that fair? I think it can be. The paladin will still be a better tank for some encounters and as long as she doesn't totally gimp her dps or healing abilities in order to take those tanking talents, we think the design can work. |
| by Ghostcrawler | 31/07/2008 21:10:26 My apologies if I don't specifically address someone's concerns, because you all raise some really intelligent points.
Almost any warrior should be able to tank a 5 player instance. It's hard for us or anyone to evaluate what will be required to tank a heroic or a raid because the content just isn't finished yet. If your baseline abilities aren't up to par, then we'll buff them.
It's that word "sacrifice" that kind of sucks. I never felt like I was sacrificing to get Shield Slam. It's fun to use, and sometimes it can even do decent damage. What I sacrifice in going down Prot is my speed at doing dailies and my ability to PvP. That is unfortunate, and something we're trying to change. We're changing the existing classes slowly, because frankly we have all become familiar and learned to love aspects of them. But the DK is a chance to start fresh. There were tanking paladins and druids throughout Burning Crusade. Maybe there were still more warriors as MTs, but I think it's easy to imagine some tweaks that would have altered that -- losing crushing blows for example. (And honestly I think a lot of the warrior as MT stuff is tradition, though their dominance in classic WoW certainly didn't help.)
One of the problems with the warrior class is that a prot warrior in good gear can't contribute dps or utility. I meant wouldn't it be nice if DKs could avoid that problem? Ferals can avoid it to some extent (but more on that below).
I realize your druid argument was really about PvP but I am going to talk about PvE here. The problem with ferals in BC was that with a single spec they could do nearly as much dps as a rogue and also tank as well as a warrior. The warriors and rogues understandably cried foul. If you look at the feral tree for Lich King, you'll see that it does have more bear-centric and cat-centric talents. If you pick the cat-centric talents, you'll still be able to tank to some extent, but you probably aren't your guild's main tank. Likewise, there are definitely talents that will help a DK be a good MT. Blade Barrier is a great example. But there are other talents too. You need some of them. You don't need all of them. We don't want either the druid or the death knight to be jack of all trades, master of none. If you want to tank, it's going to come at the expense of some dps talents. But you'll have more options about which tanking talents and which dps talents you do take. The trees are designed so that you can't have them all.
If we give the death knight +10% dodge, doesn't that solve the whole problem? My point is that if there are issues, we have plenty of knobs to tweak.
By our estimates, Forceful Deflection will grant a level 80 death knight tank around 6% parry, probably higher if fully raid buffed. (Don't tell the warriors.) If you let your strength get too low, your parry will suffer, but it's sort of the point to make you not mind all that strength that's going to be showing up on your tanking plate.
I would reword that a little bit. What we want is for a death knight tank to be able to go down the Frost tree or the Blood tree and get the tanking talents from there. It's fine to have dps death knights and tanking death knights. What we want is for the tanking death knights to have fun so they don't all decide to respec dps. That said, there are some talents that benefit both play styles. When you talk to death knights, some of them like the Blood tree and some like the Frost tree (when it's working). Some like to mix and match, and that's okay too. If one of them gets bored with the Blood tree, they even have the option of going into Unholy and still be able to tank. Because our fans are smart and because there are so very many of you, it's entirely likely that a particular spec will eventually be proven to be the best for tanking. These things happen. But maybe the difference between it and the second best spec won't be as dramatic as the difference between Protection and Fury. Even Fury has talents every tank takes (Cruelty) and Protection talents most tanks avoid (I'll let you fill in the blank there). Maybe there are more interesting ways to build talent trees than to say "I only care about X aspect of the game, so I'm not even going to look at 2 of my talent trees." TLDR version: The concern I am trying to aleviate is that just because there is not a traditional protection tree doesn't mean that death knights are doomed to being crappy tanks. |
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