Just so everyone is clear, I have left my guild, Electric Mayhem. It was not an easy decision to make. My raiding experience there has been awesome and the people are fun to play with. But Shanthi, Naishee and Vorlen have moved to a new guild to be with a friend they have known for 10+ years that recently transferred to our server. Since the 3 of them are some of my closest friends, I had to make the decision to leave.
I tried to get in contact directly with Averry since he's GM and my raid leader. But unfortunately the long hours at work have been taking their toll on me and I've been in bed by 10-11pm recently. Kashina came out and asked me if I was leaving. As I'm not the type to lie, I of course told her that I was. She was obviously upset about it. I've known her for roughly a year and a half, both of us raiding in HSM back in WotLK. Unfortunately nothing I said made her feel any better about the decision. She felt overall rejected. I kept trying to be clear that this wasn't an easy decision to make and that it wasn't that I didn't like raiding with EM, but it just wasn't making her feel any better. I am truly sorry that I have upset her and anyone else in EM for that matter.
Now, what I've come here to talk about is how Blizzard is struggling to balance the 4 tank specs. If you've read any of my previous entries, you know that I feel death knight tanks are awesome but extremely spikey and that, in 4.3 combined with boss damage scaling to further challenge block capping tanks, will possibly make bringing a dk tank to a raid a liability.
As it stands right now, in order of least damage taken, it's Paladin - Warrior - Druid - Death Knight. As I have said in that past, even with a dk's ability to self heal, surviving the damage upfront is the actual issue. If you die before using Death Strike, what's the point of your self healing and Blood Shields? This order will change in 4.3 with Warriors being able to reach full CTC. Mastery will continue to be a valuable stat for Warriors even after reaching full CTC due to Critical Block, which gives them a chance to block double damage. While for Paladins, it will become useless after reaching full CTC.
At present on my dk, I'm sitting at 382 ilvl, 32,029 armor (55.13% damage reduction), 35.69% total avoidance and 173,603 health. Equally geared Warriors and Paladins have 8-10k more armor than I do, while Druids... don't get me started. Their armor makes mine look silly. In addition, warriors and paladins have slightly less avoidance (before block), usually around 4-5% less (Rune of Swordshattering for the win?), druids have more avoidance. Friend of mine has a 368 ilvl and already has 36% dodge.
Now some of this will change in 4.3 due to the heal from Death Strike no longer not happening if a dk misses or is dodged/parried. Dks will still have spikey damage, but will be guaranteed that clutch heal. The problem is, and really has always been, surviving the incoming damage so you can react to it accordingly. If you get no time to react, all your tools mean absolutely nothing. Taking 200k damage in a single global cool down will kill any tank. Not amount of quick reactions will save you there. Preshielding via Blood Shield or Power Word: Shield still won't be enough. Especially if that amount of damage is becoming more and more common. Eventually something will give. So what to do here?
I've been a huge advocate for making full CTC not so easily achievable. Not only will it balance incoming damage a bit, but bosses could then be retuned so they don't have to destroy someone who doesn't block every hit that isn't avoided. But Blizzard has clarified their stance on that...
We decided not to prevent or discourage block capping for paladins and warriors, because it would have required several corresponding changes to compensate for such severe nerfs and the risk of getting things wrong or asking players to change gear was just too great. Instead, we decided to buff DK and druid tanks to improve their ability to handle streaks of bad luck. In the DK’s case, we increased the armor bonus of Blood Presence
Don't get me wrong, buffing dk armor will be great in that the spikes we take won't be quite as huge. But we're still going to be destroyed by any hard hitting boss. The buff will bring armor up to Warrior and Paladin levels. Here's the thing though, when will a warrior or paladin take an unmitigated hit? They won't, plain and simple. It will be dodged/parried or blocked. Period. As bosses have scaled to challenge them, damage has increased quite a bit so even a string of avoidance through block still requires a substantial amount of healing. Take block away and you have a ridiculous amount of damage, and likely, a flattened death knight.
At one point, it was proposed to have Bone Shield work in a way that it would only lose charges when the death knight takes a spike of damage. Obviously this would have to be percentage based to make it scale correctly with health and damage. I feel this change would have been the answer. Adding charges to it is meaningless if even the smallest hit can remove a charge.
The sad truth is that unless some changes are made, it may become impossible for me to seriously raid on my dk in 4.3. If I cannot survive a couple hits from bosses, I'm holding the group back. In which case, it might be time to dust off my warrior. He needs some gear love. Or, I could *gasp* go dps!
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