Skip to content

Upcoming changes to Death Knight tanking

Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler has made a detailed post regarding DK tanking. Highlights include:

the death knight really suffers when attacks fail to land, especially opening attacks. Having a Plague Strike dodged or parried can throw off an entire rotation, eventually leading to bad Obliterates because both diseases weren’t up at the same time. Missing attacks is a fact of life for all tanks since it’s hard to stack +hit and +expertise along with mitigation stats. However, existing tank classes have mechanics to let them “burn off rage” (or mana) to make up for those bad strings. The DK plays more like a rogue who can’t get enough combo points in play. This had a deadly effect on DK threat generation, which just didn’t compete with that of other tanks.

He then goes on to list 5 key changes to DK abilities:

  • Blade Barrier now procs when your Blood Runes are inactive.
  • A bug where a naked, untalented death knight only had 2.5% dodge instead of 5% like warriors and paladins has been fixed.
  • Frost Strike can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried.
  • Rune Strike can only be used after you dodge or parry an attack. It affects the next swing, so it doesn’t compete with global cooldowns and can be spammed to some extent.
  • Bladed Armor went back to attack power and Death and Decay got a decent threat boost to get it closer to the realm of Consecration and the new Thunder Clap.
  • You can read the full post with some more explanations on the above changes here.

    Post a Comment

    You must be logged in to post a comment.