Sweet, DK tanking nerf.

[Multibocks]

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)

•Frost Presence: Magic damage reduction is now 10%, down from 15%.
•Howling Blast: Base damage and scaling doubled. This ability no longer deals bonus damage to targets with Frost Fever. Cooldown increased to 10 sec.
•Rune of the Fallen Crusader: This weapon enchant now provides only 15% strength, but its chance to proc is doubled.
Blood

•Blade Barrier: Now grants 1/2/3/4/5% damage reduction instead of 2/4/6/8/10% parry.
•Dancing Rune Weapon: Damage done by this pet reduced by 50%, but duration doubled.
•Hysteria: This ability now causes the target to lose health rather than take damage.
•Might of Mograine: No longer increases critical strike damage bonus and instead increases damage on its listed abilities by 3/7/10%.
•Vampiric Blood: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes from 1 minute.
•Will of the Necropolis: This ability now has a 15 second cooldown on how often it can occur.
Frost

•Glacier Rot: Third rank added, and damage bonus increased to 7/13/20%.
•Guile of Gorefiend: No longer increases critical strike damage bonus and instead increases damage on its listed abilities by 5/10/15%.
•Lichborne: No longer improves your chance to be missed.
•Unbreakable Armor: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes from 1 minute.
Unholy

•Bone Shield: Cooldown increased to 2 minutes from 1 minute.
•Outbreak: Increases the damage of Plague Strike by 10/20/30% and Scourge Strike by 7/13/20%.
•Scourge Strike: Damage increased.

Nice, we lose 5% magic mitigation. Also 10% parry from Blade Barrier, Unbreakable Armor no longer includes a miss chance and Bone Shield cooldown increased. Oh, and Will of the Necropolis can only occur once ever 15 secs. Sweet, was there any other tanking stuff left to nerf?

edit: And then they throw this in there?

Enchant Weapon - Blade Ward *New Enchant* - Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

Uhm ok so DK tanking was too good and then you throw in something that can stack for 1000 PARRY. WTF Blizzard, wtf indeed.

[Hor]

There's been some comments this way and that about this, I MT for my guild with a DK. And I'm actually happy with the changes in general. Then again, I'm an Unholy Tank. Much as you might miss the parry chance from Blade Barrier, the Damage Mitigation actually proves mathematically to be superior. As for Bone Shield, I actually save this one for things like Enrages. I don't really see how this is going to effect me adversely. All I see is subtle buffs...

[Multibocks]

Care to explain the subtle buffs? Im not seeing it.

edit: let me do some more research into this, but I DEFINITELY do not see "subtle buffs"

[Hachoo]

This entire thing doesn't really affect me at all as an unholy DK tank except the bone shield cooldown nerf, and I only use Bone Shield on boss fights anyway... Doesn't really seem entirely like a tanking nerf just a rebalancing of DKs in general.

[emesis]

This entire thing doesn't really affect me at all as an unholy DK tank except the bone shield cooldown nerf, and I only use Bone Shield on boss fights anyway... Doesn't really seem entirely like a tanking nerf just a rebalancing of DKs in general.

Umm, you don't have Blade Barrier? Hard to imagine that you'd skip 10% parry for a measly 5 talent points in the first tier of Blood. Going from 10% avoidance - which BTW did NOT suffer from diminishing returns - to 5% mitigation is a HUGE nerf. Period.

That notwithstanding, it's a warranted one. DK's have had pretty much an unreasonable amount of avoidance compared to other tanking classes, with several talents & weapon runes not subjected to dimishing returns. Blade barrier and both the defense and parry weapon runes come to mind as not being subject to DR iirc. I'm pushing 65% avoidance in iLvl 200 gear on my DK; there are many, many boss fights in heroics where I don't toss a single heal to my tank. Scaling this to Ulduar gear, well-geared DK tanks were going to have >90% avoidance.

One of the threads documenting this issue and likely helping provide the impetus for this nerf is here at EJ: http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t47413-i...2/#post1113031

Bottom line - the blade barrier nerf is a very big one, but it mostly brings DK avoidance back down to a reasonable level needed for Ulduar gear to scale appropriately. DKs will certainly stay excellent tanks.

[emesis]

There's been some comments this way and that about this, I MT for my guild with a DK. And I'm actually happy with the changes in general. Then again, I'm an Unholy Tank. Much as you might miss the parry chance from Blade Barrier, the Damage Mitigation actually proves mathematically to be superior.

Huh? Can you explain or cite a reference for this?

I have a hard time seeing how 5% mitigation can be considered superior to 10% avoidance. I suppose the 5% mitigation applies to spell damage as well as melee, but still.

[Hor]

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.

[emesis]

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.

[Bigfish]

The tanking nerf has me scratching my head. Seems like a lot of sweeping changes for stuff that wasn't overpowered to begin with.

[Multibocks]

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.

You mean like have 80% armor buff when in frost presence? Your post smells of Blizzard apologist, but that aside: I love it when people say, 'omg its the test realm, it could change.' I bet that if you looked, 90% of stuff that makes it on the test realms GOES LIVE. In fact I can only think of a few things they have reversed from the test realm, hunter changes come to mind. But that was after massive outcry, and a lot of it still went live. So please don't pull that excuse for this being ok. Also I dont need to test it, the math is there and it clearly shows this is a nerf.