Dark Knight Megathread

[SargeTheSeagull]

I'm gonna be that guy. Honestly CS3 needs to take after WoW again. Each WoW tank feels wholly unique, especially with the hero talents added in TWW. To give a basic overview:

Blood Death Knight uses a basic attack to build stacks of bone shield that increases its defense. A stack of bone shield is consumed after taking X damage. It uses a heavy hitting attack to heal itself for the damage you've taken in the last few seconds and there's a cap on how much it heals. Its basic rotation is based around putting wounds on the target and using other attacks to cause the wounds to burst.

Protection Warrior is the basic tank. It's main thing is spending its resource on "ignore pain" a barrier it puts on itself and shield wall, think bulwark if it had no CD and consumed MP. It's main offensive spender costs the same resource as shield wall, but deals extra damage when shield wall is up. It's also got tons of ways to stun and interrupt enemies.

Protection Paladin puts down an aoe centered on you. While in the AoE you heal yourself a bit over time, your defense is higher, and enemies take damage over time. Your main spender deals damage in a cone in front of you and increases your defense. You've also got light themed cooldowns like blinding enemies nearby as well as classics like putting an invuln on yourself or a party member.

Vengeance Demon Hunter is pretty squishy and based around two things. Maintaining "demon spikes", a short CD with two charges that increases your defenses a bit and soul shards. Every basic filler attack breaks X soul shards from nearby enemies. You can consume these to heal yourself and damage nearby enemies further. They also can increase the damage the enemies take for a few seconds. The other focus of VDH is sigils. Placeable AoE's that cause different effects on enemies within. One locks them in pace, one silences them, one causes them to flee in fear, one causes them to shatter extra soul shards for you etc. It's also insanely mobile being able to double jump, glide, and one of its basic attacks works like shukuchi.

Brewmaster Monk is super squishy, but that's mitigated by its "stagger" mechanic. Half of all damage you take is directed into a gauge which empties and deals all that damage to you over the next few seconds. Its rotation is based around increasing your dodge chance (so the stagger gauge doesn't fill as much) and its cooldowns (which are all various brews or kung fu techniques) are all different ways to interact with the gauge. One CD drops half of it for example.

Guardian Druid is boring as shit so I don't play it. You turn into a bear and can use lunar magic to inflict DoT's. Very much baby's first tank.

Then you've got hero talents, I won't go into depth here but for example, Prot Paladin can throw holy armaments to allies, letting them deal extra damage with the holy sword or create a barrier with a shield. Brewmaster monk stores a bit of the damage it deals in a buff, you can use a defensive CD to cause all that damage to empty from you as chi dealing damage to nearby enemies. One of VDH's hero talent trees makes it a pseudo ranged tank, letting it infuse its weapons with fire and throw them at enemies. I could go on but I won't.

TLDR: The way tanks in WoW work is that their basic rotations either increase their defense (which is relatively low by default), heal themselves so healers can focus on the party (damage in wow is nearly constant) or interact with their main class gimmick. Their CD's all play super heavy into their class fantasy and none of them feel like reskins of the others while all of them are viable in everything under mythic raiding (ultimates essentially).

While basically none of these would work in 14 1 to 1, the dev team could take tons of inspiration from them. Like why does DRK not have an on demand powerful attack that heals you for the damage it deals? Outside of living dead obviously. Why does gunbreaker not focus on using cartridges to stun enemies or have a ton of barrier esque CD's? Why do none of the tanks' rotations play into their defense kits at all? This imo is the main point. Tanks in 14 don't feel like tanks because outside of pressing a "take less damage button" nothing I do is any different, really, than playing a melee DPS.