is DK tanking good for someone who isn’t good at complexity?
nope not in the slightest
Didn’t you hear? To play BDK, you need a PhD in theoretical physics and applied mathematics.
Source: My dad works at Microsoft
It’s not hard but it can be frustrating.
They are generally not sturdy in the traditional sense, and play mostly reactionary with a kit revolving around recovery rather than prevention.
They are at their weakest at the start of a fight without resources as in order to get mitigation up, they need to spend resources.
Additionally, you are often limited to the global cool down, where you must choose to employ mitigation building, threat building, or recovery, which at times can lead to a failure of one or more due to poor decision making.
Specifically, marrow rend is required to generate bone shield (outside of DRW and deaths caress) and is single target and on the GCD. Death strike is single target and on the GCD. These are your main mitigation and recovery abilities, and are both on the GCD and single target, making it challenging to decide what to do to survive and hold threat.
Example is you want to get bone shield up or need to death strike immediately after engaging a pull because you got chunked, so you didn’t use your globals on threat, and melee DPS pulled aggro from you. Or vise versa, you died because you didn’t have enough defensives up or recover fast enough because you wanted to try to keep that fury warrior alive when he opens with blade storm. They’re also incredibly slow with poor ability to control the battlefield especially when many mobs are immune to grips. The one thing going for them is their interrupt has a decent range.
I don’t see a lot of people talking about the above much, but having played this class for years, these two abilities being in the GCD are by far the most frustrating and difficult aspect of tanking on death knights.
Resource recovery can sometimes feel slow with no buttons to push and you feeling powerless to react to dynamic situations (someone body pulls after you unload, unexpected death recovery, etc)
If you want simple, powerful, and fun, play protection warrior. Almost all of their defensives, and especially shield block and ignore pain, are off the GCD, their damage is phenomenal and threat is basically impossible to fail as a side effect of that damage, and they are the tankiest of them all. Plus, they have excellent mobility to charge around the battlefield. They also are generally GCD locked and always have buttons to press and seemingly an answer for almost any situation except sustained recovery.
Source: me, tanked most of s1 tww KSM as blood and have a 605 prot warrior
1 Like
BDK is touted by most high level tanks as the most rewarding and fun tank to play. However, it’s definitely not the most beginner friendly.
They are the tank with arguably the most opportunity for personal skill expression. A well played BDK is stunning to watch.
The challenge comes from limited globals and the fact that our primary defense button (deathstrike) is on the GCD. This makes every single global a decision between threat, or survival.
Like the others, I’d also recommend either bear or warrior if you’re new to tanking, just to get the basics of mob positioning, defensive usage, routing, and threat management down.
Once ya get those things down, and want something a little more self-sufficient, you should give DK a try.
1 Like
I was just thinking how absurd warrior tanking would feel if shield block and ignore pain were both on the GCD
Lol
Gotta start somewhere.
no.
/10char.
Yup, health goes low => hit death strike
Ezpz
1 Like
You really should only be low on RP going into the first pull. From there, you should be banking RP at the end of every pull going into the next.
Still takes a global to ds, and a lot of stuff can happen during that time.
Like bladestorm
An extra piece of advice that was given to me, don’t be afraid to pop icebound fortitude and anti-magic on the pull if you don’t have anything else established yet. It can give you that nice buffer in order to get everything else up and rolling properly with minimal risk.
Third week of the expansion, I watched a blood DK solo half of the second boss of Dawnbreaker as the rest of us fragged up and got killed. It was incredible.