So, a simple enough question. Did the 2% increase to stamina in Frost Presence help Death Knight tanks out much. Are we, suddenly, the hottest tank property around, again.

Short answer is, yes and no. Yes, it helped Blood Tanks out, particularly. Since it’s cumulative with Veteran of the Third War and since Blood Tanking benefits more from more health than Frost  - as in, Blood tanks require a larger health ‘buffer’ since they take more damage anyway, having that buffer gives us more breathing room to recoup damage with self-healing from Death Strike. More health also synergises well with Blood’s major tanking cooldown, Vampiric Blood.

No, we aren’t suddenly the best tank around. We’re still pretty much bottom rung for most encounters and about average at others, and Paladins’ remain ridiculously far ahead of the tanking pack in terms of single target threat, aoe threat and overall avoidance and mitigation – there simply is no situation where you wouldn’t want a paladin tanking Boss X or Adds Y or whatever. They’re in line with warriors and DK’s in terms of HP, now, but all their other tools are still far, far superior overall.

Frost sees less benefit with this buff, though I’d say it’s the tree that needed more help. Blood-specced tanks were actually fine for raid tanking. The fix that was needed was AoE threat for Blood, single-target threat for Frost and for both specs, some way of reducing damage taken from rapid and multiple small strikes. Consistently where Death Knights fail in terms of survivability is when tanking multiple adds hitting for small amounts of damage but doing so frequently and in large volumes. Without a block mechanic, this is where we struggle. Most healers or DK tanks themselves will tell you about sudden and rapid drops in HP when dealing with many adds. Almost always this is the case of a major cooldown expiring right smack in the middle of tanking a dozen mobs.

Which is curious since Blizzard has quite officially stated that they see Death Knights filling more of an off tank role. To do so, we need to mitigate those small hits like a shield-wearing class – which the Block mechanic does.

It wouldn’t be hard to do either. Blade Barrier, right now, is the weakest of our top tier tanking talents and if you read the talent, it seems like it should act as a type of block effect. All that needs to be done is change it from a percentage value to a flat (or perhaps scaling) value of damage reduced. Instead of 5% damage reduction, Blizzard could change it to, ‘when your blood runes are on cooldown, you reduce damage taken based on your total Strength for the next 10 seconds, this effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds’. Or something like that. That could be staggered with cooldowns to provide more of an overall smoothness to our mitigation. Go in, pop a CD to absorb the initial pull-damage, blow DnD, IT+PS+Pest and New Improved Blade Barrier procs to buy you another 10 seconds of solid, blocklike mitigation now that you have all the adds, and blow IBF as soon as the BB effect expires. That would give us about 20 seconds of solid mitigation vs adds which is probably all we’d need in heroics. 40 with IBF popped.

I’m no mathematician though so obviously it would need some tweaking, but the potential to add a simple block-like mechanic for DK’s is most certainly there. Druids have Savage Defense which is very similiar.

Alternatively (or perhaps additional to), extend the duration of our primary tree cooldowns (Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor) by about  10 or so seconds each. Glyphs aren’t enough. I won’t really mention Bone Shield. It’s more or less fundamentally broken for tanking, and there’s no real way it can be fixed without making it totally OP again.

At any rate, personal experience post-buff is that the increased stamina is very welcome, regardless of tanking spec. But we’re still pretty ‘meh’ overall. As I mentioned above, I’ve noticed more of a buff as Blood, and will be sticking to that spec for heroics and the occasional bit of raid tanking until we see some changes that make Frost and Unholy more viable.

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