Tanking Primer: Racials

Greetings everyone and apologies for the lack of content on the blog recently. I have been a bit busy for a while, dealing with various real-life issues, as well trying to maintain my in-game presence. One these was a pretty bad period of migraines, which I suffer from regularly, and had to, on one occasion, visit the emergency room. Anyway, I should have it mostly under control now, so without further due, lets kick start this day’s topic. I decided on this particular subject, simply because of the overwhelming number of people who are ask about it. I am not kidding when I say that if I had a dime every time somebody, at mmo-c or other discussion boards, asked this I could buy a cool new iphone instead of paying my rent. Another reason for picking this topic is because boards like mmo-c have a problem with people posting, simply for the purpose of boosting their post count, resulting in that the threads are eventually clogged by people saying every race between earth and heaven is a good alternative.

While it certainly holds true that any race fits the description just fine, as racial benefits are not very earth shattering, there are still choices to be made, particularly if you are interested in truly min-max’ing your character, as I assume most people are.

So what are the best races? To me, survivability is the key element to search for and with that in mind, it brings out the three most prominent alternatives; dwarves and elves on the alliance side, and tauren on the horde side. They are the three most viable choices, hands down. Some people argue for all sort of other attributes, like arcane torrent for blood elves and regeneration for trolls but the simple fact is that for tanks, survivability trumps everything else. This actually favors the Alliance side a lot more because we current have the strongest of the available racials.

Elves gain quickness, 2% extra miss chance to their avoidance, allowing them to reach 100% coverage on the attack table a bit quicker. Dwarves, however, have stoneform which not only removes all poison, disease, bleed effects but also grants a 10% damage reduction from all sources, including physical and magic, for 8 seconds. To me, that is easily the best racial you can get for a tank. For the horde, your options are a lot more limited and quite poor for now. Taurens gain endurance, which increases their base health. This was actually quite powerful back in Wrath of the Lich King expansion, where EH was the undisputed master of all attributes, but now in Cataclysm, EH is probably the poorest attribute that you can increase. It can help a little, for those tanks who still opt to stack stamina, but I do not put much stock in that paradigm.

Tanking Primer: Combat Table

This article will be targeted primarily towards warrior and paladin tanks, because out of the four classes, these two sport shields and thus use the block stat. DKs and druids have their own unique mechanics in dealing with damage reduction, in the form of blood shield and savage defense. To them, knowledge of the combat table is less important but still good to know, if you want to continue reading.

In its simplicity, combat table is a mechanic within the World of Warcraft game engine, used to determine if a mob scores a successful hit or not. Every time you attack, or are being attacked, the game rolls a random number between 0 and 100 and checks it against the combat table. As a tank, it is important that you are aware of what your combat table looks like. Put into a cohesive list, it looks like this:

• Miss
• Dodge
• Parry
• Block
• Hit

There are additional entries on the combat table as well, such as Glancing Blow, Critical Hit, and Crushing Blows. However, as a tank you will have specced into talents such as Bastion of Defense (every tanking tree has its own version of this talent and picking it up is the first prerequisite to becoming a tank), which removes critical hits from the table and the chance for Crushing Blows was removed with the TBC expansion. Glancing blows only occur with white attacks (term used for autoattacks) and are not relevant in the context of this article.

If you look at your character sheet’s defensive stats, you will see four of the five stats listed there. The first, miss chance is always 5% and does not normally change, unless you are a night elf and receive the Quickness racial ability. Once you fill the combat table with the values of your character sheet, you should have a good idea what kind of hits you will be suffering. As an example, I will fill in my own current stats and the end result looks like this:

• 0% – 5% to miss
• 5.01% – 16.6% to dodge
• 16.61% – 31.94% to parry
• 31.95% – 93.29% to block
• 93.30% – 100% to hit

Notice how as our stats increase, the chance for normal hits (at the bottom) grows smaller and smaller? Since those are the hits that deal the most damage to us, our goal is to minimize, and ultimately remove, their chances of occurring. Eventually block will completely replace the chance for normal hits and since mastery has no diminishing returns, it is by far our very best stat. However, before you get all excited, there is a final snag to the combat table; the numbers you see above, only apply against mobs that are the same level as I am (alas level 85). Heroic dungeon bosses are ranked level 87 and raid bosses are ranked a step higher, level 88. This introduces a 0.2% less chance, for every level the mob is above you, for the mob’s attack to miss, get dodged, parried, and blocked, thus skewing the table by 0.6% on each stat (a total of 2.4%).

Taking this into account, against a raid boss, in truth my combat table looks like this:

• 0% – 4.4% to miss
• 4.41% – 15.4% to dodge
• 15.41% – 30.14% to parry
• 30.15% – 90.89% to block
• 90.9% – 100% to hit

It is something of an oversight in my opinion, as to why the character sheet does not take this into account. Blizzard could very easily include this feature, the same way they included a similar element on the hit rating (breaking it down to show different chances of hitting different level mobs). The easiest way for us to implement this last factor is to simply move the finishing line and instead of using 100% as the roof, use 102.4%. That means there is still a 9.1% chance for a raid boss to land normal hits on me. This is not bad by any means, but more work still remains to reach unhittable (a term used when normal hits can no longer occur). For a warrior tank, it is currently not a position that is possible to reach, even with the BiS hard mode gear. Paladins however, receive more block from mastery and have been able to reach the cap for months now. Warriors should not be far behind, once the patch 4.2 is released and we move onto the next tier of content. Some applications also take the additional chance to hit into account, such as Rawr. So if you use one, do not be alarmed if you cannot get the stats between your World of Warcraft client and the program to match up.

When spoken generally, on discussion boards, combat table coverage is often simply described as a figure that is the total chance for a hit to be avoided or block, thus; 5% miss + dodge-% + parry-% + block-%. In my case, that would be 93.3%. This is the most common way total avoidance and mitigation is described and is the value we are most interested in. Of course, understanding of the combat table is also important for other variety of reasons; e.g. gimmick fights like Chimaeron encounter of Blackwing Descent, which favors pure avoidance over block and mastery.

Tanking Primes: Intro

Those who follow the mmo-c forums regularly, know I post there quite a lot, and most notably on subject of tanking mechanics. The problem is that, unlike some other sites, mmo-c doesn’t really have a good method in place to filter out repeated topics and we end up writing a lot of material over and over, and that’s quite draining. So I decided to start a tanking primer on my blog, to try cover some of the more common tanking mechanics.

Now before you mail about how the stuff I’ll be covering is basic and obvious, spare me. I am not trying to educate the educated, but teach the ignorant. It might make me sound a bit like a douche, but I do not use the word in a degratory manner. The simple fact is that a lot of tanks, even those who clear a lot of content, do not fully understand how their stats and mechanics work. E.g. if I had a penny every time the combat table is explained on the mmo-c forums, I could retire to the Bahamas.

In a way, this is not complicated stuff but then again, most of the tank theorycrafting isn’t overly complex, unless you get to the math of it all; e.g. how to figure the optimal benefits of parry and dodge, without suffering from DR and still taking Hold the Line into account. I might get to that as well, but I will start by covering the simpler mechanics and just see where it takes me. After all, lets face it, you don’t need to understand that stuff to be a good tank and unless you are really into that sort of thing, you will most likely only waste your time.

That brings us to the actual target audience of these articles; they will mainly be targeted at tanks of all flavors, but obviously less for others, due to diversity between the classes. Also, I play a warrior tank, so my main focus will be around mechanics that affect me personally. But like I said, there will be something for everyone.

So, stay tuned.

The Journey Continues

Fellow greetings again Internet. I know I have not been very active on this blog and I do apologize for the inconvenience. As it currently stands, I have taken up the duty of keeping up with writing raid tactics and our Guild’s insider blog on tankspot.com, which sadly eats most of the time I have for writing blogs. However, I currently find myself sitting in Dalaran and having plenty of time to spare before our next raid so I decided to start up my Writer and and put some words down.

First, for those who are interested you can check our Increment Insider blog at our tankspot. For those who insisted on screenies of our progression should find plenty in there. Progression-wise we are currently holding at 9/12 in ICC25 HMs. A fact we are very proud of and have had several experimental goes at three different HMs; Professor Putricide, Sindragosa, and Halion just to see which we would like to commit our time to.

A lot of news filter in about Cataclysm almost every day. Many times I’ve gazed upon them and thought to myself “that deserves a mention in my blog” but there are so many that it is impossible to keep up and in the end, this blog isn’t really about publishing latest news. Just what seems important to me. On that note, details about the new Tier 11 gear sets have been released, with a couple of screenshots.

The part that strikes me about these sets is the fact that tanks might again care about the Tier bonuses, which we clearly did not need to do towards the end of Wrath. Sure, they were a nice addition but was somewhat mellowed by the fact that Blizzard decided to add much more sexier gear pieces to both the frost vendor and drops from ICC. Looking at the Tier 11 bonuses I feel a certain excitement as a tank, a feeling that these might almost be a must-have thing.

Warrior’s Earthen Battleplate:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Shield Slam ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Shield Wall ability by 50%.

Death Knight’s Magma Plated Battle Armor:

2pc - Increases the damage done by your Death Strike ability by 5%.

4pc - Increases the duration of your Icebound Fortitude ability by 50%.

I do wish Blizzard would get out of their habit of adding a threat boost to our tanking sets and more complicated elements, like added health regenerated by our Death Strike. The whole concept of threat has a very controversial feel for me. I wouldn’t want to make it trivial but nor do I want to generally worry about it. Some tanks have whispered about the return to TBC’s type aggro where tanks where holding aggro was the single-most hardest thing to do in the game.

That’s ridiculous in my opinion and I’m glad to report Blizzard has officially agreed with me on numerous occasions. Tanks should have all the tools they need for holding aggro, if they use all their respected abilities properly. If you’re only spamming one button through the entire encounter you deserve to lose aggro but otherwise, for players who know what they are doing, it shouldn’t be an issue and not warrant threat bonuses in Tier sets. To me the pleasure of tanking is in pulling, positioning, taking the hit and surviving it so rest of the raid can do their jobs.

Likewise, for me  Tier sets represent an addition to your abilities, not their completion. Seeing that Shield Wall’s duration goes up by 50% is awesome and means I can survive for much longer. Seeing a threat modifier in the sets just means threat would be partially gimped prior to getting the set. That type of sets also inevitably lead situation during the next upgrade process, when you will not have that ability, thus making your performance rather poor until you get the two new pieces, or worse the next set will not have it at all and you run on half power for the rest of the patch.

Blood Tanking

After weeks of waiting, Ghostcrawler has finally dropped the bomb on death knight tanks and how we will fundamentally change in Cataclysm; we will all be converted into the Blood tree. Yes, you heard me right, we are finally getting a dedicated tanking tree, in the same spirit as paladins and warriors have the Protection tree. A lot of people did not believe such a thing could happen and even personally, I was skeptical, though I hoped, and seems Blizzard has prove us all wrong, for better or for worse. Ghostcrawler will be posting more news on the death knight changes, tomorrow on 8th of April which is when we will be getting more details but we can still collect our thoughts on this change.

After all, this is probably the biggest change to the class that we will see. The actual details of how the class will work are interesting, but just this knowledge, of one, the dedicated tree, changes everything for us and it is not difficult to begin seeing the consequences up ahead.

Was this a surprise? Not really. If you look at the history behind DK tanking in WotLK, there has always been one, the best tanking tree and it has usually always been Blood. Sure, all three trees are viable but Blood has always been the best, thanks to self-healing abilities that it provides and that really is the bottom line when tanking big and hard hitting encounters. It is difficult to describe just how valuable that is sometimes.

Originally, when the class was released, death knights were balanced as having larger health pools and the ability to regenerate it with their special abilities. Much like druid tanks, we needed it because we did not carry shields for extra mitigation. This is something I hope Blizzard can bring back to us, not how we were overpowered back then, but a level of equilibrium between the classes. Today DKs are squishy and it takes a lot of experience and skill to play the class because we rely heavily on our cooldowns to provide what other classes get for granted. Relying solely on death strikes to equal it out is a bad idea, at least in the current game because the fact that you can regenerate %5 (or ever 10%) of your hit points AFTER a boss takes away 80% of them with one hit, is not helpful. But perhaps this is an element that will balance out better in Cataclysm, where we are being told health loss is not quite such unforgiving. Death strike becomes only truly useful in a setting where attacks nibble your health down at a slower rate, where there is more chances to resist the loss and the road from 100 to zero takes longer.

Another big question becomes, how will they now balance the tanking elements from all three trees into one. In its current configuration, the Blood tree has a big drawback, which is AoE. Even a deep frost spec requires a special glyph to speed it up to the level that warriors and paladins run it. Compared to them, in standard AoE setting, we are crawling because we need to setup diseases before we can actually create viable threat. With a total revamp of the trees, this can of course be solved rather easily and my guess is we will perhaps get a glimpse of the mechanic that they are working on. However, regardless of how it is fixed, the point is, it needs to be fixed.

What about dual-wielding? Again, we will see tomorrow but I think we can safely assume DW is an element that will continue to stay in the frost tree. It could become a viable tanking spec, if the necessary talents are somewhere very low in the frost tree and Ghostcrawler did not provide any hints as to the state of this possibility. We shall see what information they decide to provide us tomorrow.

Icecrown Citadel Hotfixes

This is a bit of a misnomer, they are not really fixes, as in fixing bugs, but rather diminishing the difficulty of some boss fights. Anyone who reads wow.com or mmo-champion.com has already seen this. For me, I am still digesting and wondering what is going on. We already received a buff to the instance on all three fronts; more health, more damage, and more healing. Now, we are receiving nerfs that are about to completely trivialize the encounters, or at least some of them.

Lets examine the Lord Marrowgar encounter for instance; I was rather pleased when there were aspects to the fight that involved more on my part, than just standing in one spot and going round and around my tanking rotation. For one, I had to continuously dodge the cold flames. Second, I have to work together with my fellow tank, always sync our movements when dodging the flames. Thirdly, was my responsibility to taunt the boss after each bladestorm.

Except, now the bladestorm no longer resets aggro, which means I can just stand still during the storm and resume randomly smashing buttons when he returns to me. I understand that there are many fights in the instances that represent a significant challenge to players, but this is not one of them. I have seen tanks fail at aggroing the boss after a bladestorm and each time, I would wonder where they learned to play.

It is the easiest thing in the world, just dodge the coldflames and be within taunting range of the boss when the storm fades, and watch the DBM timer. Since taunts are effective for three seconds, you need only wait until there is less than three seconds on the timer and hit taunt. I promise, if you are not a horrible tank, you will have no problems resuming and building aggro on the boss, thanks to that taunt and neither a healer or any dps are in danger of being killed.

Another nerf to make tanking almost trivial is on Rotface, where as part of the excitement was that Mutated Infections arrive faster and faster as the fight progresses, making finishing the fight a fun challenge. Now, that speed no longer exists, at least not to an extent and running around the room with a goo behind you, seems no longer very exciting.

There are not a whole many tanking challenges in this instance, if you really begin counting them. Mostly it is about switching aggroes via taunt at certain stacks, which is conveniently eased by the use of DBM. Encounters like Rotface make tanking a joy, when you really have to do something and focus on execution. I was delighted the first time I did Rotface, as the mechanic was something new and fun for me.

At least I can hope Blizzard can refrain from nerfing Icecrown Citadel any further. Just ignore the moans about difficult it is. People who complain about it, obviously do not know how to appreciate it properly. They just want to run in, faceroll a bunch of stuff and come out bragging they killed the Lich King.

For full source of the changes, read the blue.

Stats in Cataclysm

Without a doubt, most of you have already seen and read about the updated information about, how stats are going to work in Cataclysm. Of course, we should keep in mind that we have yet to see but a small portion, or a much bigger picture. Because of that, I would suggest caution from assuming too much. An overhaul of stats like this, in the entire game, is going to have an enormous impact on every aspect of the game. Even leveling up will be affected, as Blizzard has already released that they will be altering most, if not all items in the game; from random drops, to dungeon loot, and quest rewards.

All and all, I am still excited though. It cannot hardly be any worse than it already is, when you are leveling a character. If anything, new stats will only make it more interesting, when going to dungeons and completing quests will again have an impact on your character, beyond just awarding experience. Most of the time, these days I just buy greens from the AH whenever I level up. Efficient but incredibly boring and unrewarding.

Concerning end game play, we are finally getting rid of the biggest baggage that seriously character have; gearing up tanks. I remember when I was subjected to the harsh reality of trying to reach my def cap on Durithim, desperately scratching together enchantments and whatever small pieces of gear I could find, to reach the magical 540 number.

In cataclysm, we no longer have this issue, and we will not have to burden our talents points with it either.

“Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.”

Makes perfect sense, and is in its way, a genius solution. We already associate certain stances with tanking, which you must have on, continuously or you will fail before you even manage to really start.

So what can we expect for tanking stats on plate in Cataclysm? Funny enough, the exact same stats that we have come expect; Str, Sta, hit rating, expertise, and avoidance stats. With the one big difference, defense is gone. Makes you wonder how things are going to actually change? I am certain it will, but as always, trade speculations are over blowing it with unjustified foresight. The main big one is the fear that the game is turning to become easier. I very much doubt it. It will become clearer and simpler to manage, but I highly doubt all challenge will be stripped from it because of a few stats.

Vulnerable

It is common knowledge that death knights are more squishy by nature than our warrior and paladin counterparts. The trick is, how to counter-balance it; which we can do to a length, through game mechanics but it is always going to hurt us and I figured it would serve well to right down something on the subject, to all those of us who, at times, struggle to live up to our peers.

Some of us remember the happy days, before the huge load of death knight nerfs that literally killed our health. I am not saying many of those nerfs were not warranted, but I said it then, and stand by my argument that there were too many cutbacks. From the start of the Wrath, death knights lacked shields, therefore the developers gave us higher health to balance it.

Now, we are on par with warriors and paladins, overpowered as they are, can even go beyond us when properly specced. So what can we do about it?

At this point I will ensure that you have a proper specc and at least moderate gear, concerning the level of content you are playing, and skip those parts. If you think you lack in these areas, have a look at Ensidia’s death knight tanking guide for 3.3. I had a look and it is really good and thorough.

I would bring attention to one piece of gear though, which is your sigil. It is very important that you use the right one. Right now, my personal choice is the sigil of insolence. I went by a dps sigil during ToC, for threat purposes, but now in ICC, insolence is the best.

Another piece that should belong in your inventory are potions; specifically Indestructible Potions. On my server they are very cheap and you should carry a truckload of them. In ICC in particular, even on trash because everything in that place hits rather hard. Pop one right before you enter combat to start the cooldown, and if the fight (doubtful with trash) lasts longer than that, pop another after it expires. Same goes for bosses and generally you will need to use two for every boss kill.

Next are your cooldowns, particularly as Frost or Unholy, you have the choice of Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield, both which also help your initial aggro. I have personally noticed that before the first hit lands on the tank, healers can primarily only wait. So by reducing the damage that the first big hits deal, you are prolonging your life-expectancy.

Next comes Antimagic Shell, one of the cooldowns you are using near constantly in ICC and it never hurts to use it elsewhere either. The good thing is that when to use it, is also easily predictable because it usually involves casting, effects landing from the sky, or breath weapons. Magic damage is simply everywhere, and not only does it heavily mitigate the damage, it provides you with oodles of runic power.

Last I’ll bring attention to avoidance. While it is true that effective health outranks avoidance, little bit of extra cannot hurt, from wherever you can get it. I am still using the Heart of Iron trinket, thanks to the avoidance boost. You can also gem for dodge/stamina in gear, if the socket bonus supports it. A general rule is that if the socket bonus provides +9 stamina, you can go for it. Anything less is a waste.

Death Knights in 3.2.2

I am the first to admit that I have not been keeping up with all the 3.2.2 PTR changes, until today, when I finally decided to see what is expected for the next patch. In fact, for the first time I had high hopes because so far death knights have not had a very graceful patch history and the rumor around the block was that we are getting actual buffs.

If you are doing the same, I suggest you do not trust (at least not at the time of writing this) what it says on the official World of Warcraft PTR patchnotes. They do not yet include the changes PTR testers are experiencing on the servers. Naturally, there were a lot of various changes but here I am limiting to are relevent to death knight tanking, since that is my real forte.

• Heart Strike now has a its total damage increased by 10% for each of your diseases on the target to the primary target, and half that to the secondary target.
• Vampiric Blood now lasts 10 seconds (down from 20 seconds).
• Frost Presence now reduces damage taken by 8% (up from 5%).
• Threat of Thassarian now also affects Rune Strike.
• Unbreakable Armor now increases your armor by 25% and increases your Strength by 10% for 20 seconds.

Reading the above makes me personally happy for all those death knights out there, who like me, are tired of being nerfed and beaten to perform less and less. But, as always, I find something in these notes that I cannot quite understand and we will get to that soon.

But first, lets talk about the goods news. The two most exciting news for me, personally, are the buffs for Frost Presence and Unbreakable Armor. The first of course, is self-explanatory because as a class without block, death knights are extremely squishy compared to warriors or paladins. More mitigation will take us a long way.

The second is that Unbreakable Armor finally becomes a useful cooldown. Up until now, it has provided with a fixed damage mitigation, based on your armor: 5 * Ar *0,01. After the patch, it should get a major buff and become 25% increase to your total armor. Lets examine what this means for a typical DK tank with a healthy 25k armor.

In the current game, this will provide a 1250 points of mitigation from every hit that you take. Come 40k hits from General Vezax and it doesn't take a genius to figure using this talent is useless. True, it gives a strength bonus so it is good for threat but that is hardly a selling point. Now after the patch it will instead provide a nice 6250 armor increase. For anyone wondering how much this mitigates, on a level 83 raid boss it is an extra 27.3% of mitigation.

This makes frost death knights viable for a lot things, which includes tanking encounters where your life expectancy is depended on your cooldowns, the examples which are quite numerous, like Iron Council hard mode, General Vezax, or even tanking the adds on Anub'arak (that's in Trial of the Crusader ofc).

Alright, moving on.

The Threat of Thassarian is an obvious one, it never made sense why that talent would not include Rune Strike, considering the Blizzard ever had the intention of making two-weapon tanking viable for us again. No Rune Strike, no tanking. As simple as that.

Now for the nerfs. The first does not really hit me that hard personally, for I rarily find myself in a situation where I try to aoe tank anything in blood spec. True, when tanking the adds in Anub'arak (still in Trial of the Crusader) blood spec's cooldowns and self-healing are crucial, so the ability to hit for nice threat on both adds with the same strike has its benefits. But we will coup.

The nerf to Vampiric Blood definitely annoys me. Much less for fights where you only temporarily need a cooldown like surviving a surge of darkness on General Vezax but you will feel it for fights where the longer you can prolong your cooldowns, the longer you live. When in 25-man of Anub'arak (yeah I'm using this alot aren't I?) and when your debuff begin to stack 15+ the hits are coming down too hard to survive without cooldowns. If dps takes too long to bring them down, you die.

Naturally, both the Glyph of Unbreakable Armor and Glyph of Vampiric Blood have been updated to fit the new upgrades. For Vampiric Blood, I would say that even if you have not glyphed it up until now, it becomes almost mandatory after 3.2.2. For Unbreakable Armor, the increase of armor goes up an extra 20% so if you plan to take full advantage of this new cooldown, the glyph will be necessary.

Avoidance vs Stamina

This is one of the hot topics of tanking and has been for a very long time now; essentially an argument, with one side arguing for the supremacy of their choice of tanking style, based on either avoidance or stamina. This means that one side prefers to stack gear that increases their dodge and parry, allowing them to avoid most of the hits that a raid boss throws at you. Stamina based tanking still has a lot of avoidance, but relies instead on a large health pool, letting more hits land and survives because he can take the hits.

Reading discussions like mmo-champion forum threads, gives me a strange sense that we have entire culture of tanks clashing, with avoidance tanks carrying themselves a lot like french nobility, sophisticated and demure, believing in supremacy through class. Their attitude towards stamina tanks seems very much like talking to hicks and hillbillies. Of course, this is not true but the general attitudes are fascinating :)

So, which side is right, which is better?

I would like to say that everyone are born equal but this is not true. Sadly, stamina tanks are just more reliable than avoidance tanks. The answer lies in studying current raid design, with bosses that hit massive. Anyone who has been tanking Ulduar hard modes know how much damage is flies around with bosses like Freya or the Assembly of Iron.

The general rule is that you have to be able to survive at least two boss hits without a heal. Shrewed but so is life. With Freya's hard mode, the hits that she lands on you are consistently around 18k. That means that as a tank, you much have more than 36k health after all the raid buffs, along with a healthy sortment of cooldowns because extra damage from ground tremors.

A tank with 39k health can survive this no problem. An avoidance tank, with 35k health will dodge most of the hits, but that is like playing russian rulet. Eventually the minority occurs and he will take two hits in a row, quickly dying, taking rest of the raid with him. This is what it essentially comes down to and each time the stamina tank is simply more reliable.

From a healer's point of view, this is even more desirable because healers like predictability. As a death knights, I'm no strange to healer-rage about taking heavy spike damage, so this is especially important for me. Avoidance tanks are prone for a lot more, big spikes of damage that can lead to unnecessary wipes, even in easier raids or even heroic dungeons, if a healer is unable to react quick enough.

And before you spam my mailbox, shouting that it doesn't happen with good healers, do not bother. I have been tanking with healers of all shapes and colors, so I know it happens more often than some like to admit. The same story is told by many avoidance tanks, feeling unfairly treated when they are removed from raids because of low health pools, even if they have the achievements to proove they can do it.

However, you cannot blame this on raid leaders. An experience raid leader wants reliable tanks. Running with an unreliable one is like driving a car with nitroglycerin for gas; could blow up at anytime and even more with pugs, can blow your raid up along with it. In the end it also just comes down to raid design and Ulduar is a prime example of this; an encounter's difficulty curve is not so much in the mechanics, but just in surviving the massive damage.

Take the hard mode of the Iron Council; once only Steelbreaker is left, it comes down to a dps race. The tanks literally sacrifice themselves to buy that time for them, with the first tank blowing his cooldowns until he blows up and then the second tank does the same thing. There, if you do not have the health to survive, you are useless and this is true for most Ulduar encounters.

Latest on Death Knights

By now, I think we should stop being surprised that death knights are being nerfed again, but every time they just come at us with new bewildering changes. I apologize if I seem cranky this time around but despite my efforts to try keep up a positive state of mind, I am slowly losing faith in our game designers. Since their inception death knights have been getting the boot in every patch so far and you have to wonder, are they ever going to stop nerfing the class.

The most bewildering aspect is that they are soon running out justifications for all the nerfs, as the changes take more and more ridiculous forms. Emboldened by the positive changes that we are being promised in the Crusader's Coliseum (see Tournament Review) I went out and looked up the new PTR notes to see just what is in store.

The first that nearly popped my eyes out of their sockets was the nerfing of frost presence. In the next patch, instead of a 10% health boost, we are only getting a 6% stamina increase, and I reserve the right to use the word "only" because frankly a 6% stamina increase is pants on head retarded. To outline what this actually means, lets have a show and tell.

In Durithim's proper tank gear and spec, he has an average 26 300 health without frost presence. Once I put it on, it rises to a healthy ~29 000. This is a good starting point for raids like 25-man Naxxramas. However, with a meager 6% stamina bonus that health drops to ~27 400. That is a 1.6k difference. This gets further bewildering when taking a look at other plate tanks, for whom I see no such nerf and remembering that the last big patch actually brought us a raid instance that is all about taking huge amounts of damage.

Second but surely not lesser of two evils, is the nerf of Frost Strike; which can now not only be parried, blocked, and dodged, it also deals 5% less damage than before. Icebound Fortitude's cool down has doubled and Toughness provides a one-third less armor than before. So no, life as a death knight tank is sure not going to get boring in the future. If anything our performance will only continue to drop if Blizzard goes on, incapable of restraining itself.

Interview: Death Knight Tanks

We have a nice update from out fellow warcraft blog, Rolling Hots: A View From the Trees. The topic is a curious one, Tank Triage: Healing Death Knights and one I had the pleasure to contribute personally. This is the first in the author's series of guides for healers, on how to heal the various tank classes, from the perspective of the tanks themselves and addressed to the healers. A slightly unorthodox all thigs considered but without a doubt useful for the healers to understand exactly how the tanks works and how do we go about our duty in the line of fire.

A very nice article and I am already excited to read the next one. Very nice work Sylly :)

Warriors vs Death Knights

I have always thought about warriors as, sort of, the old school tanking class. They were very much the class of choice for tanking in the classic World of Warcraft game, before the Burning Crusade expansion. Since classes like paladins and death knights have taken over a lot of the tanking and warriors are no longer the ideal, or not at least the "true" tanks, even if many old school players would like to think so.

The relatioship between warriors and death knights is an interesting oe however. They are very much twins, their abilities being mirror images of each other, though distorted by the eddies in the lake. Just consider it for a moment, warriors have many abilities that I personally envy; charge, Disarm, and shield. In fact, they are the class of choice against heavy melee fights. For instance, disarming the orc commander, first boss of heroic Nexus makes that whole fight so much more easier, mitigating a whole bunch of damage.

Death knights on the other hand are a class, designed specifically to be the bane of spellcasters. Though, to my grief, failed in that somewhat. We use two-handers, instead of a shield, use Death Grip instead of Charge, and have powers like Strangulate that prevents a caster from using spells. Thanks to their shield, warriors mitigate more damage than death knights, but to our advantage, we put out a lot more of it.

So, death knights are against spellcasters what warriors are against melee opponents. Many have speculated that Blizzard will publish a second hero class, specifically against melee fighters, but this is why I do not believe they will, or at the very least, they definitily should not. We already have a class for that and it works beautifully. The only big complaint I have about the synergy of these classes is the limitatio of stragulate.

A warrior can disarm a various collection of both mobs and bosses. However, death knights do not enjoy the same power over casting bosses. So far, I have yet to find a single one that I could affect by using strangulate, or even Mind Freeze. They are both more PVP oriented abilities, or at least only useful against mobs. But perhaps, once Blizzard has managed to please the public's demand to nerf death knights until we're wearing hong kong made armor pieces and picks for weapons, they desire to actually do something for us, for a change.

All and all, both are solid classes and personally, when death knights first came out, during which information and details about the nuances of playing the class was scarce, looking through the tons of articles written on warriors really helped me personally. Gear is almost identical after all, aside from the shield and block stats, and the tanking techniques do not really change much from class to class, only the way you execute them.