Sweet, DK tanking nerf.

[Hachoo]

The subtle buff is that we gain mitigation ... we don't have shields. That damage mitigation is quite nice, as far as I know it does effects incoming spells. I agree with the above poster; that this is more of a retooling than a huge nerf, but who knows. This may or may not even go live. imo, try it out before you cry foul. The math comment is that you have a constant damage mitigation (ie it's not on a cooldown, or dependant on blood runes being on cooldown, etc. It's flat damage mitigation). Whereas with Blade Barrier you do have to actually get your blood runes down, it means there's a little less we "have" to keep in our rotation. it's not incredibly hard to do. But it does leave you open at the beginning of a boss fight, which seems to be the most dangerous point of combat for a DK.

Say a mob swings at you 10 times, if he hits he does 1000 damage.

10% parry would be expected to parry 1 hit - saving you 1000 damage - on average.

Let's assume that you're at 60% avoidance; on average the mob will hit you 4 times. 5% mitigation saves you 1000 * 0.05 = 50 HP per hit. Over 4 hits, that's 200 HP.

How is this nice? Yes, mitigation "smoothes" out the damage that you take, making it less spiky and more predictable. But that's a 5-fold damage difference.

I'm not crying foul - I made the point that this is a _very_ justifiable nerf as DK avoidance is way out of proportion to other tanking classes ATM. But it's a big nerf still.

With respect to needing to burn your blood runes to activate blade barrier, there's nothing in the PTR notes that suggests to me that this is going to change with shifting from parry % to mitigation.

This is a very narrow view and is leaving out all sorts of details, such as the fact the 5% mitigation works even on attacks that can't be parried, for one, not to mention others.