Tank abilities in Cataclysm

[frontfelloff]

TL;DR We're talking about the different flavors of tanks come Cataclysm, how the few tools they have which remain unique might stack up.

/wave
Hey folks, like many players right now, I've been putting a lot of thought into the upcoming expansion, the most important question being which class I'll be leveling first thus making it my main. I've been on break from WoW since mid-August due to RL issues, but I've been following all the news and changes and I plan to start playing again around a week before release.

Until about 2 weeks ago, I was pretty convinced that I would choose my druid (bear MS/resto pvp OS) to play first, since it was my favorite character before the break, although not my main. I loved the archetypes, the old tree form running around waving his arms in the air and the big fat hairy sack of meat shaped like a bear. While at first I was sad to see the old perma tree form and hot spamming playstyle go, resto was just gonna be my off-spec so I didn't mind too much. But when they recently announced the changes to bears which put their health pools in line with the other plate tanks, it took away the "meatshield" essence which I liked about playing him.

Seems like I'm verging on the brink of being accused of whining, so a quick disclaimer: I'm a firm believer in the developers best intentions towards making this game fun and as balanced as possible. I don't believe they "hate" any specs or that they ruin anything. I know both bear and resto druids will be perfectly capable of performing competitively in Cataclysm despite any changes that have or will happen. I will either learn to get over my nostalgia for the old ways they were, or I won't. Entirely my problem.

More to the point, so I re-opened my search for my Cataclysm main character, druid still in contention, just to see if I could find something that would capture my attention enough to stand out. I'm fortunate enough to have 8 lvl80 characters (no hunter and lock, yet) to choose from, and I started by looking at tanking classes, since I'm 90% convinced that a tank spec is what I will dedicate myself to first in Cata.
Tanks push buttons for two reasons: threat and survivability. I don't really care about the former, optimal threat generation is in principle not different from learning an optimal dps rotation (or priority system).
I focused on abilities which help the tank survive, pushing those at the right times is the staple of a good tank and what defines the tank play style, although I've also included passive ones. To qualify, the ability has to positively impact how much health the tank will have as opposed to not using/having it. Here's the list:

Death Knight:

• Icebound Fortitude: 50% dmg reduction for 12s, 3min CD
• Death Pact: 40% hp heal, 2min CD(3min CD to summon ghoul though)
• Bone Shield: 20% dmg reduction 3 charges, 1min CD
• Vampiric Blood: +15% maxhp +25% healing received for 10s, 1min CD
• Anti-Magic Shell: 75% magic dmg reduction for 5(7)s, 45s CD
• Dancing Rune Weapon: +20% parry for 12s, 1.5min CD
• Rune Tap: 15% hp heal, 30s CD
• Will of the Necropolis: 25% dmg reduction for 8s after getting below 30% hp and free Rune Tap, 45s CD
• Blood Presence: 8% dmg reduction passive
• Death Strike: 30% of dmg taken last 5s as a heal, ~10s CD

Druid:

• Survival Instincts: 50% dmg reduction for 12s, 3min CD
• Frenzied Regeneration: +30% maxhp and either (a)up to 3% heal per second or (b)+30% healing received, for 20s, 3min CD
• Barkskin: 20% dmg reduction for 12s, 1min CD
• Natural Reaction: 12% dmg reduction passive

Paladin:

• Guardian of Ancient Kings: 50% dmg reduction, 3min CD
• Lay on Hands: 100% hp heal, 10min CD
• Word of Glory: self heal, no precise amount or CD
• Divine Protection: 20% dmg reduction for 10s, 1min CD
• Ardent Defender: 20% dmg reduction and attack that would have killed you brings you to 15% hp for 10s, 3min CD
• Divinity: +6% healing received passive
• Sanctuary: 10% dmg reduction passive

Warrior:

• Shield Wall: 40/60% dmg reduction for 12s, 2/4min CD
• Shield Block: at least 30% physical dmg reduction for 10s, 1min CD(30s talented)
• Enraged Regeneration: 30% hp heal over 10s, 3min CD
• Last Stand: +30% maxhp for 20s, 3min CD
• Spell reflection: negates magical dmg but rarely usable, 10s CD
• Defensive Stance: 10% dmg reduction passive
• Field Dressing: +6% healing received passive

I think it becomes quite apparent, unless I managed to massively screw up and miss many of them, that Death Knight has the most tools at his disposal, Warrior and Paladin pretty much tied in second, and Druid dead last. I left out a few things, namely: Savage defense for druids, block for warriors and paladins, and the bubble from Death Strike for DKs, since all these mechanics are the subject of masteries and will likely be used and tweaked to make all the tank classes viable. I'm not doubting that they will all be. But the amount of options a DK has makes it seem to me like that might be pretty fun to play, variety is rarely not a good thing. On top of that most of their cooldowns are pretty short so it seems like you can stack or chain them pretty flexibly depending on the encounter. Not to mention many of those abilities are self heals which we can expect to be even more valuable in Cata raids where healer mana should be an issue.

So what are your thoughts? Am I missing something or does a DK tank really look that good on paper at least? Are you surprised by the difference in number of abilities available to each class?

p.s. Not trying to make this a discussion about which class will be the "best" tank, that will get balanced and re-balanced over time, it's more about the play styles of the classes, of what they can do when they're not just putting out damage to gain threat.

[Slakkers]

This is really not that different from on live, and really... Death knight's are not OP compared to the other tanks. Other tanks have more passive mitigation AND usually don't have to carefully manage their resources in such a way a death knight must do.

[Faladrath]

An actual good non-whine post on mmo? no way

Anyways to the topic as you say it's more to to with the the playstyle now, I am in the same boat of figureing out which tank class I want to use as my main and at 1st it looked like I was forced to go druid cause of how vastly ovrpowerd they were on beta and no blue stating they would change it untill all of a sudden they get slapped right back in line.

So as it seems it's down to play style, I personally cant stand the DK resource system or if as Slakkers says if you manage it wrong your out of luck but what I found the most frustrating about a DK tank was when someone accidentally pull something and your standing there with all runes on CD and no RP, and you just go ummm ye ok and try your best till the runes come back. I find it very restrictive to say the least.

So for me then it stood between druid,warrior,paladin. Now my current main is a pala and again after the changes it feels very restrictive, you have no choice but to press cs/HoR every 2nd gcd or you will lose out on a holy power which you so sory need to get a 3pt HP SoR off, and if that miss in some way then you lose so much threat that if your dps is any good they will pull of you. I guess it's just a new rotation but it seems to be buildt around SoR with 3pts of HP a little bit too mcuh for me, no room for individual playstyle.

Which left me with Warrior, Druid and then it got easy for me as I feel a druids toolbox is tiny specially compared to a warrior and warrior is far less restricting like a DK and pala or unforgiving like a DK and pala when someone fuckes up and pulls extra or nukes the wrong target etc.

As for survivability from a glance palas seem to be the least spikey tank to be healed from it's flat 40% blocks and 50% parries assumeing block cap will be within reach of the 2nd raid tire or so.
DK's mastery just seams extremely weak vs the other 3 which was another point that put me of DKs.
Druid is all depending on how fast they can get back to a steady uptime of Savage defense and since they removed it being proced of dot crits it might be a while, tho druids still have a tiny bit more passive dmg red and a whooping 1% more hp, and even with their nerf to scale with 35% of ap instead of 65% they will still shine pretty badass endgame of cata IF they can get it's uptime back with enough haste/crit.
and Warirors can become strong now due to the change in mastery and shield block but can only wait and see if warriors can get to the stage where they get more crit blocks then reg blocks and on a block cap without too much sacrifice to make parry less valued then mastery.

Sorry for the babbling, hope it was of so use to you OP.

[Direpanda]

For what it's worth, Death Knights have to be active in doing what a lot of other tanks get as passives.

For example, Infected Wounds goes up thanks to threat attacks the Druid would use anyway, and isn't ever going to fall off; and LOTP is completely passive. Paladins do similar with Judgements of the Just. The DK's equivalent abilities are tied to Icy Touch and Death Strike respectively, both of which require resources to manage.

Also, every tank class except DK's has a long single-target stun and a multi-target taunt.

I'm not fond of the changes though, particularly the nerf to bears' armor and hp, because it does feel like everyone's got mostly the same thing now. The biggest difference between each tanking class, from what I can tell, has less to do with what you can do and is more about how you do it. With a handful of exceptions (Masteries being the most prominent), everyone has the same cooldowns, debuffs, threat tools, and mitigations.

I recognize that something like this is nigh necessary in a game where everyone expects you to respec for a 1% increase in whatever, but for me, it's not enough to keep each tank class distinct and flavorful.

[frontfelloff]

Thanks for the constructive input. Let me reply to each of you in this post. This will make for a heftier post again, sorry
Slakkers: Can you expand on what you meant by other tanks having more passive mitigation than DKs? I believe that armor values have been brought in line for all classes, they all have baked in 8-12% passive damage reductions into their talents/forms/stances, and the only other form of mitigation I can think of is block, which should be offset by Savage Defense for bears and the Death Strike heal+absorb package for DKs.

Faladrath: Both you and Slakkers brought up the DK resource system. Fair point, I haven't had a chance yet to try out the new(slower) implementation. I hope I will get at least a few days before Cata hits to test it, RL permitting. As for the situation you describe: there's always Empower Rune Weapon(if that's still in the game), or the other tank Or if it's just one loose mob, taunt or Death Grip. Besides, why should there be a loose mob in the first place? I'll slap the dps and healers if that happens. My tolerance for failure is quite low, good thing I play mostly with RL friends who are really good

What you say about Paladin tanking and SoR with 3 Holy Power up being so important, is Word of Glory even used then? If not at the moment, do you think it will find a spot in the priority list come level 85 to help the healers? Or are the numbers it puts out simply too low to even bother with the gcd?

The DK mastery I think is a good concept. Will it have enough of an impact? Hard to say. One thing I noticed is that it scales pretty highly, adding I think something over 6% for every point of mastery, unless that's been lowered but I didn't see it. On top of that, if it turns out to be lacking, DKs might just give up on mastery and stack/reforge for avoidance through more dodge/parry.
I agree that a warrior is probably the safest choice, there has never been a time I believe when they haven't been a top2 tanking class, and I think the whole critical block mechanic will make them the best tanks for heavy physical damage encounters.

Direpanda: Good point with the attack speed debuff application. It becomes especially prominent after I've been reading about a diseaseless spec and playstyle for DKs, which openly relies on another source of the debuff. It's far from hard to keep up with Icy Touch, but you do delay your next Death Strike when refreshing. Something to consider. The Leader of the Pack comparison on the other hand I don't really buy. Yes it is passive, but Death Strike is without a doubt the default ability to use for a frost/unholy rune combo, so it gets used automatically and no real effort goes into it. The LotP heal will likely go off more often on average, but it heals for less and you can't time it for when it's of most use to you like Death Strike.

I don't much care about the lack of a stun, I'm mostly concerned with single target boss tanking so it's of no use to me. Similar with an AoE taunt, but that one just might come into play on some encounters, so I'll give you points there

I agree with your summary about the classes becoming more similar than ever. However, as far as everyone having the same cooldowns goes, not entirely. They did make an entire group of them nearly identical(SI,IF,GoaK, SWall) and each class then has one smaller mitigation cooldown around a 1min CD(Barkskin,Bone Shield,Div.Protection,SBlock). But when you cross those out, the DK to me is still left with a huge bag of tricks. On average all classes will likely fall into a small margin as far as how good they perform. However in the hands of a very skilled or experienced player that large arsenal of abilities used at the best moments in an encounter might give them the edge, or at least be fun to play It seems like they have a version of every tanking cooldown mechanic other classes have, but then also some unique ones.

I believe that Anti-Magic Shell is huge, other classes don't have anything to use against magical damage in particular, and the cooldown of AMS is ridiculously low too. Rune Tap is pretty useful on many fronts as well, heals you instantly, saves your healers mana, and you gain some threat. The amount it heals will also become more significant at level 85 than it is now me thinks. With the average tank hp I believe I saw in beta videos around 130k, that should be a 19.5k(15%) heal, every 30s, in an era when it actually takes the healers a few seconds to get you up to full from half hp, and it gets you threat as if you hit the target for half that(iirc the baseline values are 1 threat per point of dmg and 0.5 threat per point of healing). I dunno, still seems to me that what you mentioned, the how a tank gets the job done, that the DK way of getting it done when used to it's fullest potential might be the most complete.

[Faladrath]

What I meant about lose mobs etc is that atleast for me o shit moments happens when someone fuck and pull a an extra pack or worse, at that time I feel the DK is lackluster but ofc this will never be a case if you play with only good players so makes my point mute.

As for mitigation I think what you ended up with will be the case unless it's changed and that is DK's for fitting their mastery for more avoidance which in turn will lower their mitigation quite a bit once hit tho ofc less hit. But also by the looks of how blizzard work on putting tanks in a neat line I'm guessing they will change/make sure the DK mastery is appealing enough like the others. So I think by what you pointed out about the tanks "shield walls" also been put in line tho warrior one is still 10% better for some reason but it will be all down to what play style you enjoy the most and since my last post im just more sure on the warrior being my pick mainly cause of the size of it's toolbox vs any other tank.