December News/Discussion

[Lissa]

Something that might be worthwhile to note is the general direction Blizzard is working toward for Death Knight tanking. My early experiences tanking in Wrath with my Death Knight showed that they felt pretty fragile if they didn't have any of their on-use abilities available. I never thought I'd see myself run through 28,000 health so quickly… However, Blizzard has noted that they feel this is probably not the way things should be working, so they are planning to buff up general Death Knight tanking by improving Frost Presence while they are also going to nerf the on-use abilities (namely Bone Armor and Icebound Fortitude) to provide a similar level of total mitigation but with fewer spikes when the abilities wear off.

While it sounds like the specifics will take some testing to nail down, I largely agree with the general direction of the changes that have been proposed. This should put Death Knights more in line with the other classes for general tanking situations while still maintaining a lot of the unique aspects of Death Knight tanking.

In other news, Blizzard is also planning to put additional sigils into the game to help alleviate the fact that most Death Knights get their starter sigil at level 55 and don't upgrade it until they can pick up a drop from 25-man Naxxramas at level 80. They have also talked about adding at least one tanking sigil, so that will be good to see, as well, since the current sigils are mainly focused on damage dealing.

One other thing I noticed in respect to DK tanking is there are no two handed weapons that are built for tanking. Not a single two handed weapon that is in the level 80 use range has defense, parry, or dodge, they're all setup for DPS while there are many one handed weapons specifically setup for Warrior and Paladin tanking. They need to alleviate this issue as well for DK tanking instead of having the DK depend completely on their armor for their tanking stats unlike Warriors and Paladins that look to their weapon and shield to give them a number of tanking stats along with their armor.