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Should dks really be tanking?
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Post by
Madkowdizeez
DKs, of course, can tank anything effectively. The primary disadvantage I feel DKs have is that there will be periods of up to 4 seconds where you can't generate any additional threat, besides the ticks of diseases and DnD, when runes are on cooldown and RP is low; rage on my feral druid is more reliable for consistent threat. However, it's really only an issue on multi-mob pulls when your dps is improperly targeting.
Post by
tomgc
I love DKs while leveling. The only important talent to me as a healer is morbidity, for chain pulling trash. Any tree will cut it fine for tanking, dps oriented or not. All the DK needs is to know how to tank and have some nice gear.
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Post by
Aris
DK tanks fill a void.
You have single target mitigation tanks (warriors)
You have aoe mitigation tanks (paladins)
You have single target avoidance tanks (druids)
But until WotLK you didn't have an aoe avoidance tank (DK's)
As an aoe tank, us and paladins are the preferred tanks for trash mobs and boss adds (off tank duty). Sure WotLK improved aoe tanking for warriors and druids, but DK's and paladins are still the best at it.
As for boss tanking (main tank duty) i find i have to compete with druids most (the two avoidance tanking classes), and tend to be passed up in favor of druids since they have higher avoidance.
But i think the biggest advantage DK's have over all the other tanking classes is threat generation. Every other class needs to take damage in order to keep threat generation high. DK's do not. The only ability we have that works off of being attacked (rune strike) works even if we take no damage at all since it works off of avoidance. This means that even if we have a string of avoiding attacks, or are bubbled from tanking damage from say a disco priest or popping cooldowns to nullify all damage with cooldowns we can still maintain the same amount of threat generation. If the same happened to a druid or warrior they would become rage starved and threat gen would suffer. Paladins arnt effected as bad, but it would cause they to possibly go OOM and then threat gen would drop off.
Not only is a DK's threat generation very consistent regardless of circumstances, our threat generation starts high, and continues to stay high throughout the fight. Warriors/Druids tend to start out low and slowly build higher and higher, and paladins start out high and then drop off and plateau.
A really good example that shows this advantage best is on the "Gothik the Harvester" boss fight. The way my guild does it, everyone stays on the living side and i stand at the gate waiting for it to open. When it does open, i drop D&D, and pop my Unbreakable Armor ability. For the next 20 seconds i take zero damage from all mobs pouring in from the undead side, and with the combination of D&D, HB and BB i hold aggro on all mobs. Everyone turns and AOE's down all the mobs and the boss fight becomes ez-mode.
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The OP's entire basis for saying DK's are poor tanks are based on our lack of using a shield. He says DK's lack a shield and thus the defensive capabilities it gives (stats and armor), but he fails to realize we get frost presence which gives more armor than any shield currently in game and the lost stats are made up with the added stats of a 2h weapon instead of a 1h w/ shield and the fact that we have the best tanking enchant for our weapon that non DK's do not have access to. So in reality we have more armor than warriors or paladins. Not to mention we have more avoidance. Then add in the fact that we mitigate 12% (w/ frost spec) of all damage (physical AND magic) before armor mitigation and spell resistances and you get a very potent combination that heavily favors DK tanks over warriors or paladins.
Honestly i think the only class that bests DK tanks are druids, and only for single target boss fights (main tank duty) where their higher avoidance is needed. In any other situation i think DK's are hands down the best tanking class. If a bear tank is not available (like in my current raids), then i truly believe that a skilled DK tank is your best option for any scenario.
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