Pali vs Death Knight "Tanking"

[TeK23]

So I got my pali and love her! She's just a sick tank and my shamans can't pull aggro even if they wanted. "As long as RF is up "

But with DK's being out. I wanted to know if anyone here has played both Pali and DK tank v3+ before and what your thoughts are.

I've invested alot of time and gold into my Pali but if a DK is a better tank then I will roll that way. I 5 box (1) Tank (4) Ele DPS mainly run 5 mans and PvP @ times.

What are your thoughts.

Please no therocraft, I've read tons of it on other sites. I'm looking for personal experience please.

Thanks!

[Mosg2]

I've tanked with a Paladin and a Warrior pre and post-3.0 and right now my Death Knight is 75 and pure tank spec/geared.

I can tell you that The Paladin and DK are in a whole other world as far as tanking goes compared to the Warrior as far as multiboxing is concerned. A lot of people keep pushing Paladins mostly because you can make a castsequence for tanking, which allows you to focus on your heals/dps, but honestly rotating with the DK is not that difficult. As long as you don't mess with any of the Death Rune abilities, you basically put up Icy Touch and Plague Strike to get your dots going and then Pestilence to spread those dots to all mobs within 15 yards. Then you Death and Decay for added AoE--That's your first rotation and uses all your runes. Then you can just Scourge Strike and Blood Strike for single target threat/damage and use Pestilence every 10 seconds to keep resetting the dot timers on all the mobs. Use your runic power for Unholy Blight and Rune Strike and you're set. You really only need about 3-4 buttons to tank as a DK just fine.

That all having been said, I chose the DK and I'd do it again over any other tank. The raw damage that a DK tank does is ridiculous, especially on 3+ mob pulls. Please don't forget that DK means you get another 12% damage from all of your Shaman due to the talent Ebon Plaguebringer. With Mana Spring stacking I have zero mana issues, so to me the DK brings far superior buffs. You gain run speed but lose mount speed.

All in all I'm more satisfied with my DK than any other single toon since I started playing this game on launch day.

[Coltimar]

I have had a four year love affair with paladins. When they were 'the hybrid who did nothing well', when blizz kept ping ponging our role, and when 1.9 ruined ret the first time, I hung on. 2.0 and everyone had reason to love pallys. 3.0 and most people switched over to ret for the pwnage. But I am having more fun with my DK than I ever thought I could. This is the class that I wanted when I read the beta notes on pallys. We'll see how long the honeymoon lasts but, for now, DKs have my attention.

[Kulzor]

mosg2 - how the heck did you get your DK to 75 already? Questing, grinding, instancing?

My five-pack is only 72.5 right now, I'd love to find a way to level faster.

[phineas01]

Post your spec?

I'm debating on giving my DK a try at tanking and replace my pally for the team in my sig. That's one thing I never thought about was the fact that a DK can put out some damage and I could really use that since I'm only boxing four characters and one is just a healer.

[Aradar]

I'll play devil's advocate here. EVERYONE says the DK is OP so my concern would be investing the time in a class that I'm pretty comfortable with saying has an incoming nerf bat and probably a large one. You have to remember this is a brand new class and regardless of Blizzard's testing and the beta, the real information occurs when the general public starts playing with the new changes. On the other hand, I'm comfortable with saying not much is going to change with the pally other than possibly some damage buffs due to the nerfs to ret and maybe a taunt. As with everything in this game though, time will tell.

[Hachoo]

Actually the cries about DK being OP are still few and far between against the cries that pallies are STILL op even after the nerf...i think the paladin is more likely to get more nerfs before a DK.

Honestly if a DK gets any nerfs it will probably be in PvP, not tanking. If anything our tanking would most likely get buffed some.

[algol]

DKs were OP in beta. Yay. So were mages, who now are just really squishy (other than the occasional toy like when you could get half a dozen ice lance crits off on a single nova). Most of what's left is thanks to players being unfamiliar with how to shut them down yet, and what goes beyond that will be tweaked. Post-expansion patches tend to be numerous.

[Drizzit]

K, now i don't think DK are that much OP now... I hit the new land now, with like 90% of the Blues for DK, and there is a difference in mobs (not as much as original and BC). But i don't know how they will be when i start replacing my gear with quest stuff from the new area... Is it me or do most of the plate out there have +spell and +haste there. Which are both no good for DK (there spells are based off of AP, from what i heard).

[Mosg2]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...nd&n=Chernabog

That's the armory link for my DK. With Frost Presence on she's at 19.4k health and 18.5k armor, roughly.

I used my Shaman team to follow along behind her from 58 to 70 doing Outlands stuff. Nobody was able to gank me because of the muscle, and I breezed through the content. Each Outland level took me about 3-3.5 hours on average.

Once I hit Northrend I just did all of Borean Tundra and Howling Fjords. I mean all of it. Every single quest in each zone. Yeah, I averaged about 8-9 hours per level, but I hit 64 doing both those zones with one or two Utgarde Keep runs thrown in. At this point, I can clear to the first boss in Utgarde and then reset the instance in exactly 12 minutes, which nets me about 45k xp. That comes out to about ~7 hour levels. I plan on doing all of 75-76 there and then starting back up with questing.

On the off-topic nerf related theme:

DK is the first class Blizz designed from the ground up with this new philosophy of each tree doing everything (ie tanking, dps etc) while just having a different flavor. This allows for a lot of flexibility. I would say that DK's are about average as far as class balance goes--There's nothing they can do that makes you go "FFS, wtf just happened?" When Strangulate got nerfed from a ~15 second cooldown to a 2 minute cooldown and AMS went from a ~30 second cooldown to a 2 minute cooldown, most DK's said "Sounds fair." Right now I think they're in a good place. Powerful, lots of potential, but nothing broken like Wings+Bubble.

All that having been said, I don't think that DK's are going to get nerfed. They are still in line for some small tanking buffs as far as mitigation goes due to the lack of shield block.

Huzzah!