DK tanking stats

[drakhoon]

not a beta tester but i was just curious what beta testers and people in general would feel are good numbers they woudl want to see from a tanking DK in comparable gear to a dedicated warrior/druid/paladin tank for tanking raids/10mans. The reasons i am not including 5 mans is that blizzard has stated they are balancing normal 5-mas to be tankable by a tank in DPS gear. I am talking about a tank in tank gear.

For example my level 70 warrior who has just started tanking kara has 12.6k HP, 12.7k armor, 12% dodge, 18% parry, and 21% block.

I would hope that a dedicated DK tank in equal or close to equal gear would have 17% dodge, 23% parry, roughly the same armor so i will say 12.7K armor and more HP so I will say 15K (now keep in mind that is a random number, however an equal geared DK should have more HP then a warrior but less then a druid of similar gear).

SO i was curious about others people thoughts an ideas, especially beta-testers, if you curious as to the reason why i picked those numbers i will give it.

[Karadros]

I'm unsure about how talents affect things, but won't they have considerably less armour, given their lack of a shield?

[Iamhewhoismighty]

Not in Frost Presence. They gain 45% increased armor value in Frost Presence.

[AariKanes]

Frost presence is for DKs as bear form is to druids.From what I've seen (not a beta tester), DKs tend to have high hp, with very high avoidance, especially parry, so your assumption probably isn't far off.

[Athor]

at 70 my dk had 13.4k hp 0 defense 9% dodge, 21% parry, 13k armor in frost presence. Also has 10% chance to be missed, and has 25% armor 5% parry extra buff up 30% of the time. Has 50% damage reduction up 30% of the time and 75% magic damage reduciton 30% of the time. They basically have the lowest hp out of all tanks, but will haev highest avoidance.

Dks gain 20% avoidance just form talents

Has also a great oh shit button of 25% extra chance to be missed which helps alot, lasts 15 secs 3 min cooldown

[Aeline]

DKs use spells to tank. Even with frost presence their armor doesn't come near what warriors and druids can get. This is why their shield wall is on a 1 minute cooldown and why they have abilities like anti magic shield and bone armor. Also... yes @ parry.

[drakhoon]

well that is what i figured, i pictured DK as a high parry medium-high HP tank with average armor.

I know blizzard right now is just getting everything to work, then they are going to make a pass at the numbers. But i figured if we treid to figure out now about what we feel a DK tank should be it and get a beta tester to notice then Blizzard will ahve a good idea on what to aim for when the do the numbers pass.

Ideally at some point someone in the beta should get a level 80 DK and stick him in the same or equivalent tanking gear as level 80 warrior tank, a level 80 paladin tank, and a level a 80 druid tank and see how all the numbers match up between all the tank classes.

[vodalus]

There seems to be a lot of talk about frost tanking. Are the other trees viable to tank with? Espeically unholy, as that's the one that I'm interested in.

[Kafziel]

There seems to be a lot of talk about frost tanking. Are the other trees viable to tank with? Espeically unholy, as that's the one that I'm interested in.

I tanked all of UK as a Frost DK. The only problem I had was the T6 mages was doing obscene damage and pulled agro from time to time.

I need a couple more pieces of gear from BT and then I'm going to try tanking as Unholy.

[vodalus]

I tanked all of UK as a Frost DK. The only problem I had was the T6 mages was doing obscene damage and pulled agro from time to time.

I need a couple more pieces of gear from BT and then I'm going to try tanking as Unholy.

Cool, hope it goes well. I'm going to tank but I like the unholy tree the best.

[Gestalt]

The jist of DK mitigation (bearing in mind this is an overview, generalized, and changes on almost a weekly basis in the beta):

Expect to see very high armor. Something often overlooked in discussions on DK armor scaling is that while they may be wearing similar plate to warriors they're free to wear similar neck, rings, cloak, and trinkets to druids. In my perfect delusional world that would be where you'd see major itemization differences. Plate tanks wearing roughly similar plate gear, but with high armor rings for DK's, block value for warrior/paladin, etc. Also like druids, they get a lot of bang for the buck out of armor enchants/kits.

DK base HP is pretty high, comparable to warriors. My 70 DK, sitting at 500 stam in roflgreens, has about 10.5k hp. Note that they don't have huge Stam talents (1% here, 3% there).

DK dodge scaling is very favorable. DK's appear to use the Paladin agi/dodge/crit ratios, not Warrior. Agi returns a nice chunk of Dodge.

DK base parry is very high when properly equipped, specced, and runed. With Swordshattering on my weapon, Blade Barrier active, and using my grinding gear to put me at level base for Defense, my 70dk has 12% dodge and 26% parry.

DK's can scale their chance to be missed independent of Defense scaling The talent Frigid Dreadplate adds a flat 5% to be missed and in its current form is applicable to every fight currently implemented.

DK's do not have BIG "oh crap" buttons. They have a lot of little ones that are up a lot of the time. Currently Lichborne has the longest cooldown of the "oh crap" buttons at 3 minutes. Icebound Fortitude, a base ability, and all the talent "tank buttons", have one minute cooldowns. There placement in the tree prevents a DK from taking more than one of them. To understand how this works, consider: Icebound Fortitude reduces damage by 50% for 12 seconds, Unbreakable Armor (frost talent) increases armor by 25%, parry by 5%, strength (which scales parry) by 10%, and can be talented to last 18 seconds. Together these abilities have a "oh crap" uptime of 50%, and that's roughly what's available to every tree (though some are better than others).

DK's have a LOT of mitigation and avoidance that doesn't translate well into stat comparisons. Some of the talent-based mitigation and base abilities are truly unique and don't lend themselves to easy comparisons.

Now the weird part about this that can be hard to get ones head around...
This is true for all three trees.
There are Blood tanks, Frost tanks, and Unholy tanks.
There are Blood DPSers, Frost DPSers, and Unholy DPSers.
Each tree goes about tanking and dps differently, but all the promises really are true: each tree really is tank capable and DPS capable.

[Nythious]

Think of the Death Knight like a Viking Warrior who is an extremely skilled Blademaster.

Extremely hardy hit points and difficult to injure
Able to dodge and parry many attacks
and invoke fear on the battlefield.

They embody toughness, endurance, and evil.

Heavy AC, Heavy Avoidance, Heavy HP
Low consistent mitigation, so they get hit hard and don't shed much damage from those attacks, but are tough enough to endure most anything you throw at them.

[Gestalt]

That's a great way to put it.
When things are going well, I feel like a stone in the center of a storm.

[MestHoop]

I agree with Gestalt that DK armor can be noticeable higher than warrior and pally armor because of wider gear choices.
I also like the idea of a lot of small cooldowns. This allows the player to choose when to take more and when to take less damage (for example the halazzi fight, where you can have a cooldown ready everytime he enrages).

A major downside from what I've seen so far is that DKs have nothing that reduces damage by a %.
Warriors have a base 10% (+6% spell damage from talents) and Paladins have 6% and 4% spell from talents.
Now spell damage we all know wont be a major problem, I'm more concerned about the longer hard hitting fights

[Phyrion]

So from what I read here, DK tanks will basicly rely most of all on avoidance rather then mitigation and a large healthpool.

There's one thing that pops to mind, and that is that they will be an incredible bitch to heal on a high-end bossfight.

Imagine your DK tank having 25k hp in a highend lvl 80 raid. Bosses will hit him for what, ~12k?

So imagine what happens:

parry
parry
dodge
miss
parry
miss
dodge
12k damage
parry hasted attack from the boss, another 12k damage



What I'm saying is their damage intake will be incredibly spikey, wich would be almost impossible for healers to anticipate, and becouse of this, deathknights won't be used to tank any fight, but only the fights that fit perfectly into their niche, magic damage fights (Why let a DK tank a hard hitting melee boss, when a warrior or druid for instance would be a lot easier to heal?). The way things are now, any tank can tank anything in endgame.
We have warriors, druids and paladins all tanking anything in BT we want them to (At least in my guild).

With a warrior, you'd get something more like this:

10k damage
9k damage (critical block)
dodge
9.5k damage (block)
miss
...

The warrior will take a lot more damage overall, but this damage is much more predictable.

Now I'm not in the beta or anything, so the above is all just assumption, but based on what I know, that's how I see it.

[Gestalt]

A few things to extend to the warrior analogy that might help clarify:
Imagine Shield Wall gets nerfed to an average of 40% reduction but has 50% uptime.
Imagine Devastate heals for 3x the damage dealt.
DK's will have more armor than Warriors, less than Druids.
DK's will have more flat-out avoidance than Warriors (mi/do/pa), but lack the mitigation of Blocking (and remember that crushes are gone and Shield Block isn't perpetually up any more).

The DK physical mitigation/avoidance scheme falls almost exactly in between Warriors and Druids. They have more "oh crap" buttons than any other tank class.

Properly talented, spell-based damage against a DK will be negligable, regardless of resist gear and regardless of how many schools are involved. This doesn't just apply to "caster only" bosses. Run a quick mental tour of TBC raid bosses and simply write off damage that isn't Physical school.
That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Take the 70 resist suit of your choice and add 220. Subtract 75% from half of the nonresisted casts. Subtract 10-15% from the remainder.

Overall DK mitigation IS weird, but workable. It also needs to be borne in mind that healing doesn't just come from healers any more: ret pallies, blood DK's, etc and the DK tank themselves will be providing a stream of incoming heals. It's not enough to keep them up, but it smooths the healing spikes.

[Phyrion]

Well, that clarifies it a bit, I was beginning to fear that DK's wouldn't be very viable tanks at all in most situations.

Besides, afaik Blizz said that they could still tinker a bit with some coeficients like the DK's armor value and things like that, so either way there's nothing to worry about till they go live, and even then they could patch things in every week or so.

[Admuntour]

DK armor scales well with gear and most of their avoidance scale very well with stats too.
For a small comparison, I have a paladin DPS with almost 11k armor from mostly T6 and some BT randoms, with no devo aura, no armor increasing talents.
A DK with the same gear as me would have a base 11k armor from stats, 15% more from toughness will bring it up to 12.6k armor and from frost presence it would go up to 18.3k, now that is a lot, and if the DK in question would also pick up the top end tanking cloaks, rings etc, then he could easily reach 20k.
As you can see the scaling is just sky high, their total HP will probably be lower then warriors and paladins since they don't get any massive HP increasing talents like warriors, paladins and druids do, they will end up with the lowest total HP pool, but despite that their HP will still be considerable.
Strength will probably one of their main stats for both avoidance and threat, since they are getting a baseline ability to convert strength into parry, and since strength also boosts damage this will be one of their favorite stats.
I can't give any good example at level 70 since the stats of level 70 items is radically different to what the stats of level 80 items will be, also I don't know exactly how much strength is converted into parry and so I can't give exact numbers only speculations.

The DK has good avoidance, 20% from talents is quite good, added on top of a base 5% dodge and 5% parry without any defense rating you get 30% total avoidance, at level 70 with about 512 defense a DK would gain 6.48% more chance to dodge and parry adding up to 42% almost, 43% avoidance.

Any additional avoidance a DK could have would be pure speculation, with SWP gear and the strength->parry conversion total avoidance could be 60% to maybe 70%, most of which would be parry, and the beauty of parry is that if you parry an attack your next swing comes faster, that means more damage, for a tank it means more threat and its great with 2h.

So far it looks like the DK have the stats for tanking and even main tanking, the sure as hell have the oh #$% buttons, Icebound fortitude, Unbreakable armor/Bone shield and Lichborn.

I love how the class is turning up so far and I've already made up my mind about DK, I'm going to try and become the main tank of my guild on my DK, and I'll do whatever it takes to prove that DK are capable MT as well.

[Ighox]

Pretty sure DK's will be great tanks, all classes will have strengths and weaknesses, but I don't think the gap will be as big as it has been before.
Frost presence scaling is great, it might not provide the same amount of armor as a shield the same level as you if your gear is bad, but at 80 in epics it's gonna be alot better as it scales with % of total armor.
And the stat differences probably won't be that huge, since Blizzard wanted all 3 plate tank classes to share items (random-items, not set-items) and other tank-classes doesn't really have that many talents that increase hp by too much, other than druids of course.
Threat is honestly my main concern right now, because we all know Death Knight damage is going to be tuned down quite alot before retail, and we don't have that many skills that "Generates a high amount of threat", that together with warriors getting a new +% threat modifier to defensive stance I'm not sure how well we can keep up with threat.
It's pretty hard to get reliable threat readings right now because of how much damage classes are doing, we'll know more when they tune it down at the end of the beta though.
MOST of the current testing Blizzard has received from DK tanking has been tanking lower level instances, with lacking gear and even bosses more than 3 levels higher, thus crushing blows, so there's definately alot of mixed feelings out there from people who have had a bad experience.
Not crit immune and getting crushing blows gives people the idea that DK's are "magic damage tanks" but I honestly don't believe that to be true at all on 80 with proper gear.

[drakhoon]

well i figured or was hoping the DK would also have hit points in between warriors and druids as well, I mean that is a real fear of mine, i know we get high avoidance but waht happens if it works out someting like this.

parry
miss
hit 5k
hit 5k
hit 5k
(crap all cool downs have bene blown already)
dead

wouldnt a bit more hit points help smooth that out?

and i am jsust glad i got everyone thinking