Death Knight Tanks: What Cataclysm Means For You

March 17, 2010 in World of Warcraft 10 Comments

As I am sure you are already aware if you pay any amount of attention to WoW-related news, the Cataclysm expansion scheduled for release later this year is going to cause some pretty big changes to our stats. Covering all of those changes would make this article boring and like one of the million or so other articles that you can find with a quick search on Google. Instead I am going to focus on these changes in relation to Death Knight Tanks.

Most of the information here comes from my own experience or research that I have done into the class as it stands right now and how the proposed changes might impact it based solely on the information we’ve been provided up to this point. I have also spoken with Satorri of TankSpot.com who is widely known for his significant contributions to the DK Tanking community.

Where Do We Stand Right Now

As of right now, on the verge of Patch 3.3.3 going live, the stats for a Death Knight Tank, in no particular order are:

– Armor
– Strength
– Stamina
– Defense Rating
– Dodge Rating
– Parry Rating
– Hit Rating
– Expertise Rating

I was going to point out which of these stats was going to be affected by the proposed changes and which are not, but since every one of them is being impacted in one way or another there’s no point.

Stats That Will Disappear

Since I am focusing on DK Tanks I am not going to bother covering changes that will not impact Death Knights. Of those stats which are going away entirely, there is one that stands out:

Defense Rating: Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.

Well if that’s not a direct impact on tanking, then I don’t know what is. Defense, probably the single most important tanking stat in the game, is going *poof!* right out the window. If you turn on Frost Presence then you are instantly immune to being critically hit by NPCs. Reaching the Defense Cap was never exactly “hard” so much as it was annoying because you would not equip an item that was otherwise and clear upgrade if it dropped you back down below the Defense Cap unless you were able to re-gem or re-enchant a piece or two to make up for the difference.

I see this being an especially good feature for DK Tanks who are still leveling since it can be pretty hard to find good +Def gear while you’re leveling, and calculating what your Defense needs to be prior to level 80 can be a pain if you aren’t well versed in where to find that information or in calculating it yourself.

Stats Being Removed From Gear

Attack Power: This stat will no longer be present on most items as a flat value, though it will still show up on some process. Strength and Agility, which will be present on items, will grant the appropriate amount of Attack Power (generally 2 Attack Power per point of Strength or Agility) depending upon which stat a particular class favors. Agility may provide less Crit than it currently does.

Rather than seeing gear with a bonus to Attack Power (+AP), we’re going to see gear with higher values of +Strength and +Agility. We get AP from both Strength (2:1) and Agility (1:1), and luckily they both contribute to our survival skills as well. Strength contributes to Parry Rating, and Agility contributes to Dodge Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Armor (2:1).

I think this change will be a good one in the long run. Having high AP allowed us to generate higher threat by hitting harder where switching to +Str/Agi will provide us with extra threat and extra survivability at the same time.

Stats That We Will See

Haste: Haste will become more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as energy and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you “do stuff” more often.

We have received word that our Runic System is going to change. We don’t have a lot of details just yet, but Frost DKs in particular are going to receive more abilities based on Runic Power and their Mastery Buff from spending points in the Frost tree is going to provide Haste as well as additional Runic Power generation. I expect that we’re going to see some of our tanking abilities shifted over to the Runic Power system rather than the Rune system, and as such we are going to want more Haste to generate that power faster.

I expect that Haste will become more important for all of the DK Tanking specs, but it’s all a bit up in the air right now. We don’t have enough details yet to say for sure just how much this is going to impact us, so it might be a little early to be saying so much about Haste, but I personally think it’s about to really become a big thing in the DK Tanking industry (at least for Frost Tanks).

Parry: Parry no longer provides 100% avoidance and no longer speeds up attacks. Instead, when you parry an attack, it and the next attack will each hit for 50% damage (assuming they hit at all). In other words, Dodge is a chance to avoid 100% of the damage from one attack, Parry is a chance to avoid 50% of the damage from two attacks, and Block is a chance to avoid 30% of the damage from one attack.

The change to Parry is potentially pretty big. Right now if you Parry an attack then you don’t take any damage at all. With this change though, Parry stops being an Avoidance stat and instead becomes a Mitigation stat by simply reducing the damage of two individual attacks. If you take 50% off of one attack and 50% off of another attack, then you may have essentially avoided one full attack, but not necessarily.

Right now we tend to stack Strength more than we do Agility because of the threat that we get from the Strength-to-Attack Power ratio. With Parry becoming Mitigation rather than Avoidance, I’m not exactly sure how things are going to balance out between Parry and Dodge now. Right now we do a bit of a balancing act between the two with Parry winning out most often because we’re stacking more Strength, and then getting Dodge up there as close as we can behind it.

Agility gives us Dodge but it also gives us Armor which is our big mitigation stat as a tank, allowing us to reduce the damage we take by up to 75%. Death Knights get 2 Armor:1 Agility, so it does remain important to us (so seeing more +Agi is a good thing), but our primary contributions to Armor will always be the actual Armor and +Armor stats on our gear.

Mastery: This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It’s directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.

We don’t know much at all about the Mastery system just yet, except for what I linked you to earlier which only mentions the Frost tree. If you want to see the article that gives a little more detail on the system then you may also want to look at the Master System Q/A.

Armor: The way Armor mitigates damage is not changing, but the Armor stat has been rebalanced to mirror changes to the armor curve in Cataclysm. As a result, bonus Armor will go down slightly overall. We are also changing the mitigation difference among armor types so that plate doesn’t offer so much more protection than mail, leather, and cloth.

Items that give +Armor then are going to shrink a bit, though it’s not going to go away. Right now we get additional AP by increasing our Armor with points in the Blood tree. It looks like we’re going to see some smaller numbers in the Armor area, but I don’t know that it’s going to be a serious enough change that we’ll actually care in the long run. With so little detail it’s hard to say just how much this is or isn’t going to affect us, so we’ll have to see.

Armor is still one of our most important stats though, allowing us to reduce incoming damage by up to 75%. Depending on how large or small that “slightly” actually is will determine how large an impact it actually is.

Strength, Agility, Hit Rating, Expertise, and Critical Strike Rating: These will all still appear on gear as well. Aside from situations mentioned elsewhere in this list, in general these will function similarly to how they do now, though the details — such as how much Hit Rating you might need to effectively combat high-level creatures — are likely to change.

This is the part that keeps everything just a little bit too fuzzy to say for sure how everything is really going to pan out for us in the end. How much Strength and Agility are required to hit our Parry/Dodge caps will be a possible impact from this particular change, though without any numbers it’s hard to say how much or whether or not it will be enough to actually matter.

We need Hit Rating and Expertise in order to actually hit the targets and generate our threat, but again we don’t have the numbers here to actually compare it with. My gut feeling on the Ratings stats is that there won’t be much difference between what we have now and what we’ll have then. The numbers needed to reach caps will increase of course, but proportionally they should be about the same as they are right now.

As for Strength and Agility, there just isn’t enough information to really say for sure. Both of them are important now, and both of them will be important once Cataclysm goes live.

Other Stats We Need to Be Aware Of

Combat Ratings: All ratings will be much harder to “cap out” at maximum gear levels. Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

This one gets me a little bit more worried. A lot of the other changes mentioned are pretty small or trading one thing for another, but this one is “much harder” which can be a pretty big deal. They go on right after that to say that mobs will be harder to hit or crit similar to how they are right now, but that doesn’t qualify as “much harder” in my book, that’s a simple bit of mathematics (well, it would be if they gave us numbers anyway).

If it really is just a ramp up for new levels of mobs then it’s really not that big of a problem, but if we have further diminishing returns on those Ratings stats then it could prove to be quite a challenge. Of course, we also don’t know what they’re doing to our talent trees, so whatever big changes they make to the stats might easily be made up via talents.

Reforging: While these changes will go a long way to making a wider variety of stats more attractive, we understand that sometimes you simply don’t want more Hit Rating on your gear or you’d rather have more Haste than more Crit. In Cataclysm, we are going to give players a way to replace stats on gear as part of the existing profession system. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be able to convert one stat to 50% of another stat. While some conversions (like converting Stamina to Strength) won’t be permitted, the goal is to let you customize your gear more.

This one I just want you to be aware of. If an item drops that potentially an upgrade in some areas while not in others, then you can make use of the Reforging to get rid of a stat that you do not want for half as much of one that you do want instead.

They mentioned it’s being tied into the existing profession system, which I expect will be a Blacksmith/Leatherworker/Tailor for their respective armor types, a Blacksmith for melee/thrown weapons, and perhaps an Engineer for ranged weapons (just a guess on my part). If recipes for making those changes are trainable then I don’t see a problem with it, but if they are drops from Cataclysm raids or something similar then I might be a bit disappointed.

What they haven’t told us yet is which stats can or cannot be changed, or how many stats can be changed on one item. We do know that you can’t trade Stamina for Strength, but that’s the only example we’ve been given so far.

What Blizzard Tells Us to Expect

Blizzard didn’t completely leave us hanging though, at least they gave us some general ideas of what to expect.

If you are a tank (druids excepted), expect to see:
No more Defense on gear. Existing Defense becomes Dodge, Parry, or Block Rating.
No more Block Value on gear. Existing Block Value becomes Block Rating.
You’ll have as much Stamina as you’re used to, though you may notice your tanking plate has a bit less Stamina than a comparable piece of DPS plate, since we tend to take the gem budget out of your most attractive stat.
Bonus Armor on gear will go down slightly.

If you are a melee DPS class, druid tank, or hunter, expect to see:
A lot more Stamina. Bear-form Stamina scaling will be lowered as a result.
Strength if you wear plate. Agility if you wear mail or leather.
Existing Attack Power becomes Agility and Stamina.Armor Penetration becomes Haste or Crit.
No Intellect on melee gear. Hunters won’t need Intellect since they will no longer use mana. Shaman and Retribution paladins will get mana and spell damage in other ways.

So going off of the summary here, we should expect to see more in the way of Dodge and Parry, though still nothing from Block since we don’t use shields.

Our Stamina isn’t going to go up or down much, but other classes will raise up closer to our level of health; Which in turn means you may very well see some tanks starting to wear DPS plate in order to maintain larger health pools if we’re still able to reach other soft/hard caps without having to use tanking plate to get there.

This Article is Useless!

Yeah, a lot of that is sort of useless simply because so much is still up in the air. Blizzard has actually kept pretty quiet so far about where they’re taking Death Knights as a class, and that leaves even more things for us to wonder about. But, I don’t want to leave you feeling like you’ve gotten nothing out of this, so here’s a summary of what I think we will see once Cataclysm hits, based solely on the information we have right now.

General Gear: Armor and Stamina are going to remain the top dogs of any tank. There are two primary responsibilities for tanks: staying alive, and maintaining threat. Armor and Stamina are always going to be staples for a Tank, being the main source of survival. I think Parry is going to take care of itself for the most part since we’re seeing an increase in Strength on our gear, but it might be harder for us to maintain the level of Dodge that we need; Dodge may well become a higher priority because of this.

For threat you have to be able to hit things first and foremost, so Hit and Expertise will likely still need to be at least soft capped by default. Next you have to actually build the threat, which is where Strength and Agility come into play. My gut tells me that Agility is going to be more desirable due to the change in Parry vs. Dodge and the fact that Agility does still help to improve threat via Crit and Attack Power, even if it’s not as large of a contribution as Strength.

I wouldn’t be too surprised though if you see a DK Tank rolling Need on what would otherwise be considered a DPS piece. We’ve always gone after DPS weapons, especially of the two-handed variety, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw DK Tanks wearing DPS Legs or other pieces once they managed to reach the other necessary caps for tanking.

General Play: I don’t know what all we can really expect to change in our general playing as a DK Tank. We’ve received too little information to really move forward with anything, but we’ve received just enough to know that things are going to be different.

Right now it looks like Blizzard is tired of healers never running out of mana and being able to just spam their heals until the bosses are down, and it seems they want to step back from that and get back to the days where healers had to put some serious thought into their healing or else run the risk of having no more mana to heal with.

What that means is that you better get used to those cooldowns and how to use them if you aren’t already.

The One Thing We Do Know

Well, we know we’re getting stronger, and that’s got to count for something, right?

If you would like to see my full conversation with TankSpot’s Satorri, then you can find the information on my blog: Conversations With the Masters: Satorri.

Cataclysm, Death Knight, Psynister, Satorri, tanking, TankSpot, World of Warcraft