Why do DKs take so much more damage?

I think there is one place where DKs noticeably and unfortunately take more damage, and that is when overgeared characters tanks 5-player dungeons. The reason is the way block works, where a paladin or warrior can almost literally take no damage because so many attacks are blocked and nothing is hitting for that hard in the first place. One of the reasons we want to change block for Cataclysm is to make it useful when just starting out, when on challenging content and when overgeared.

I'd be surprised if your choice of tank class really made much of a difference on e.g. Marrowgar. If your tanks seem to be taking an excessive amount of damage, there are probably a lot of things you can be doing differently. None of the current Icecrown bosses present a huge obstacle in tank survivability, though Deathwhisper may challenge your ability to manage adds.

Now, your choice of *player* tanking may have a big effect. :)

Q u o t e:
DKs do take more than every other class but its not by a huge amount on bosses (IE, what matters.). The problem really isn't "how much damage" a tank takes, its always been how much a tank CAN take in a very small window of time.

Damage in overall won't matter until mana matters and that just isn't going to happen this expansion.

This is an important point to remember. Not all moments of a fight are equally dangerous (nor are those moments always predictable, though they often are).

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Just wondering Ghostcrawler, are you going to be watching to see which tanks guilds use on the limited attempts bosses? I'd think that'd be interesting...going back to the big thread from before, with limited attempts you'd want all the room for error/wiggle room you can get.

Yes, but there will almost certainly be more warriors so I’m not sure we’ll learn that much from those data. There are a few bosses where particular class mechanics might prove more or less effective and we’ll definitely be watching those.

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I can't help but notice that you didn't actually explain if there will be a change to DKs to counter the extra damage taken. You simply said that block is going to mitigate a set percentage of damage.

Players wave the “doesn’t scale” flag a little too often in my humble opinion, but the block mechanic is one in which we do agree it's a problem. Because you block for a flat amount, the damage reduction from block can be enormous when the hits are small and trivial when the hits are huge. I think it’s overly simplistic to just say that damage intake needs to be similar though. Nobody would care how much damage a tank took if the tank had an excessive amount of health, at least until “mana sponge” is a concern once more.

We also don’t think block is a mechanic that every tanking class needs to be successful. Remember we gave druids their version of block not to solve a mitigation problem but to make the dps stats that were largely unavoidable on their leather gear more attractive for tanking. There are many times when the shield-using classes laugh at block as a serious tanking advantage (say Sartharion and Ulduar). I think it's the subject of so much focus now because of Anub’arak adds.

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i say stop tanking, i just dps now since that's apparently what blizzard and ghost crawler want considering they know we take more damage then other tank classes.

Several progression-oriented “server first” guilds use DKs as offtanks. They must have figured out something that works. (And before "GC says DKs can't MT," these guilds tend to use warriors probably it works for them and because they always have.)

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Why does it only matter how much we take on the big boss fights, and if that is not enough to matter, somebody still has to tank the trash up to it, you know all the little hits block helps prevent, a mechanic all other tanks have.

You won’t catch me saying “trash doesn’t matter,” but on the other hand, we don’t see a really high failure rate (or slower clearing times) for DK tanks vs. trash.

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I know....didnt GC say something about all the tanks being able to tank heroics equally if specced/geared properly?

It’s not a big deal, in my opinion and experience, for tanks wearing level-appropriate gear. My quote above was about say the ilevel 245 geared tanks going back to heroic dungeons. The shield-using tanks require very little healing. While it’s fine for trivial content to feel trivial, this isn’t intended as a “perk” for the block mechanic.

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GC is simply parroting his corporate handlers. Admitting a mistake in these forums wouldn't do anyone any good. People would still complain.

I realize this is a sort of a trolling attempt, but we admit mistakes all the time. If DKs fall behind on those boss encounters that are a test of tank survivability, we will buff them (or nerf the others, depending on how the attempts go overall).

I can assure you that my team is fully empowered to make decisions on class design and balance. There are definitely aspects of WoW on which I would not comment without bouncing the idea and even the text by others, up to and including the PR team, but discussions of tank effectiveness don’t fall into that category.

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Remember, Ghostcrawler kept on saying Rogue weaponswapping was fine
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Are you on acid or simply choosing to forget the many times in which he said they were keeping an eye on that mechanic and if they felt it proved to be too much of a demanded thing that they would do something about it?

Yes, here is a good example where we were wrong. We definitely didn’t want rogues to feel like they had to swap weapons, but based on the numbers we were seeing, we didn’t think they would to any large degree. Thanks in part to a very clever add-on (though they might have even without it), it did become a problem. We fixed it.

This is not to say the community is always right either. If you go back to early Lich King, death knights were overpowered in PvP, dps and tanking in part because we were trying to address the concerns of all the beta DKs. Some of those concerns turned out to be unfounded. (I’m not trying to blame player feedback here. The mistake was still ours. I’m just pointing out that you have to be very careful when listening to the community.)

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This drives me nuts by you saying something like that Ghostcrawler. What on Gods green earth makes Death Knights any good at all as an "Offtank".

It's certainly not our threat capabilities since we need to be hit to produce threat above DPS. It's most assuredly not our DPS when tanking since I know for a fact Paladins and Bears can easily out DPS us. Can't be the ability to pick up any adds quickly due to the Rune System mechanics.

So what is your definition of an "Offtank"? And please don't say the ability to swap gear or specs to DPS when not needed.

I don't think "offtank" is a role these days the way "healer" is a role. Most guilds have a main tank that they use on single target encounters, then they have a second tank that they use if the fight needs another tank. Maybe the MT is a better player or shows up more reliably or maybe she's the guild leader or maybe that's just the way the guild has always done it. For these guilds, presumably the warrior tanks Onyxia and the DK picks up the adds. On Twin Valks, each of them tanks one boss. On Mimiron, the DK probably doesn't do much tanking until the end. I wasn't trying to imply that DKs have a set of abilities or stats that make them suitable for OTing but not MTing. I was just pointing out that there are a lot of guilds with warrior MT and DK OT. I can't say for certain that this is the most common setup among cutting-edge guilds because I haven't looked lately, but my hunch is that is the case. There are actually quite a few different combinations of MT and OT that get used, which is a good thing.

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My concern is that, unless this disparity on trash is corrected in Cataclysm, then DK tanks are going to have a very very hard time being accepted during the "levelling up" and "early Heroics" phase of Cataclysm. I mean, if there's no real disparity on raids, that's great, but if people, especially healers, are in a position where DKs are significantly harder to heal, even if for only some of the dungeon, that's going to cause a lot of problems for DK players.

Block won't make you immune to damage in Cataclysm, and once again I was really only talking about say ToC-geared players who go back and run heroic Nexus. I don't think DKs are much harder to heal when first running heroics in quest blues or whatever.

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Blizz got it right with Warriors. One tree for DPS/PVP, one tree for DPS/PVE and one tree for tanking. These could easily be Unholy, Blood and Frost for us

For every player that likes very constrained talent trees like this, I can assure you there are many others who disagree. Just look at all of the "please buff Frost mages for raiding" or "please buff Fire mages for PvP." There are several threads on Arms in PvE.

It's cool if you think those players are all just barking up the wrong tree, but at least acknowledge that they feel this way instead of asserting as intuitively obvious that the "best" way to design the trees is very narrow roles.

Our goal is for spec to be a personal choice you make based on play style. Frost mages generally like to snare things and turn those into big crits. Fury warriors like the idea of the woad berserker or the mechanics of dual wielding and Whirlwind.