Dark Knight : Just another mitigation tank

[Kaedan94]

As someone that mains a Blood Death Knight in WoW, which is a perfect example of what's the OP is asking for.

It's just a mitigation tank that absorbs a flat amount of damage.
-Death Knights work via an ability called Death Strike. When this ability is used, and can be used twice in a 10s window depending, the Death Knight is healed on damage done and receive a bubble based on amount healed.

While it does work at all levels of play decently, it's not really anything special. It took Blizzard the better part of two years to figure out balance on the design and it still starts weak at the beginning of an expansion and ends with being horrendously overpowered. It has the simplest form of Active Mitigation, and requires extensive personal and external cooldown usage.

The OP is really just wanting a different tank for "reasons". No real need for one and on the development side might require more effort to make work within this games structure.

Thank you, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

Blood tanks are either "weak sauce" or "god tanks". There's no in-between, and mitigation tanks are far, far more reliable.

Also, WARs are mitigation tanks, despite what some would like to claim. It's simply that their basic mitigation comes from having higher HP rather than a flat defense %.

PLD has 20% damage reduction
WAR has 25% HP increase

Their eHP is the same. Plus, WAR has IB, which is effectively an anytime Rampart.

[Averax]

Blood death knights in WoW used to be like that.

It was awful.

They decided to turn them into mitigation tanks. They still have enough lifestealing abilities to make them gods at soloing content, though.

With lifestealing tanks, they will either be severely squishy or immensely overpowered, neither is acceptable. Having a few abilities for flavor hurts nothing, though.

[SpecialKK]

Make a "mitigation" tank, that isn't simply pressing a random skill on a 60 sec CD.. How about some creativity, is all I am saying. I have also provided a number of mechanical examples of how blood tanks can be done. I have also provided examples of how they could use HP overflow or adlo-style shields for "mitigation" style buffs. I'm not a dev. I am asking for them to come out with something interesting and avoid flat out copying skills from one to another then layering a slightly different mechanic that has little impact on top of it.

So you want to do more for sake of creativity (others will call it complexity) to do the same effect?

Yeah, that's going to go over well.

[Hundred]

Kind of hard when Paladin released as absurd as it did.
Every tank they make going forward has to have a Pseudo- Hallowed Ground.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Actually .. the idea of what the TC is calling a "blood tank" is something that I'm not that unfamiliar with. And I can actually provide an example of a tank that actually has life tap spells, and other kinds of tap spells too!

Everquest has a thing called a Shadow Knight.

Like the other two tanks in that MMO, SK's are mitigation tanks. Their taps are more in the vein of utility; tapping a mob's armor to both weaken it and strengthen the group's AC is one example. Strength is another. And, of course, they have lifetaps. SK's, Paladins, and Warriors make up the three Tanks in that game. Warriors are the pure melee tanks. Shadow Knights are the "evil" knights, that steal their opponent's health and power. Paladins are the "good" knights with strong offense against the undead. Warriors tend to have the most HP, and the most AC. Knights have less, and do less damage in straight up melee, but their spells and other abilities make up for it. The abilities that each has make them ideal for different roles within a raid (they're pretty much interchangeable as tanks in the group setting) in a fashion not too dissimilar to the way people here take PLD to be the MT and WAR as the OT.

One thing though. Those classes are balanced around having many of each class in a raid. Raids in that game are 54 people strong. In fact, coming to FF14 from EQ, I have a very hard time taking the idea of a full party event as a "raid" seriously at all - that's just challenging one-group content, not a raid! Raids are multi-group events where I come from ... making the Crystal Tower chain the only three actual "raids" in FF14, at least until they produce some Heavensward equivalent to the Crystal Tower chain.

[Voltyblast]

I honestly agree with the OP...but also disagree on the lifesteal idea and as a warrior who started in 2.0 I can safely say that we weren't the most useful tanks around and I felt really happy with the changaes in 2.1 (but I liked the 300% healing return from IB!)

I haven't played long enough DRK to see but, as soon as I gave a look at the skills I pretty much thought the same: it's a tank with some warrior and paladin skills, without actually being extremely unique and in another thread where people spoke about parry, some people actually mentioned the DRK since it heavily relies on such parrying and I even told that they could turn DRK into magic breakers, with essentially the unique possibility to parry magical attacks.

However, I do agree that the DRK could use some unique traits: yes all tanks are mitigations "in the end" but even within their similarity each tank usually turns out to be unique somehow, with paladins and their strong cd and warrior with their huge hp pools and parry boosts from Raw Intuition, as well as with their IB mitigation and the chance of self healing very strongly with Equilibrium.
Sure, DRK are not bad by all means and they are strong on their own, but as a warrior I just don't feel like turning myself into one when I can easily pick the strongest mitigation tank in the game, or stick with the strongest OT in the game.

However speaking of WoW similarities, and the Death Knight's bubble and such, I actually think differently: what if the DRK worked like a druid instead?

What I mean is, in WoW the druid's tanking mastery is essentially this: you get hit and you obtain a shield based on a % of the damage taken. Less damage means lower shields, which means that if you use one of your CD your shields would become weaker since you receive less damage, or could not produce a shield at all.(http://www.wowhead.com/spell=155783/...acity#comments)

What do you think?

[Asierid]

A: SK waswas so the weaker of the three tanks. You benefited more from warrior/paladins than you did running a SK. Solo or small groups? They were good. Anything else? Not so much.

B: EQ is a completely different beast from 14. Comparing the two ( since the raids were balanced around those numbers) is somewhat pointless.

[Malevicton]

As someone that mains a Blood Death Knight in WoW, which is a perfect example of what's the OP is asking for.

Main recently, or when it launched? It was an absolute mess when it launched, then was only viable as a pvp build, then was super op, then sucked again for a while, and then I quit so I'm not sure. But while I played it was all across the board, hitting pretty much everywhere on the balance spectrum except balanced. DK is actually a pretty good example of this type of tank being a nightmare to implement.

[saber_alter]

I honestly agree with the OP...but also disagree on the lifesteal idea and as a warrior who started in 2.0 I can safely say that we weren't the most useful tanks around and I felt really happy with the changaes in 2.1 (but I liked the 300% healing return from IB!)

i remember seeing a warrior solo the first boss of WP pre 2.1. brought tears to my eyes. the way they initially designed it did see them suffer in coil however.

I haven't played long enough DRK to see but, as soon as I gave a look at the skills I pretty much thought the same: it's a tank with some warrior and paladin skills, without actually being extremely unique and in another thread where people spoke about parry, some people actually mentioned the DRK since it heavily relies on such parrying and I even told that they could turn DRK into magic breakers, with essentially the unique possibility to parry magical attacks.

yes, this would work nicely, and would give us DRKs an edge against a few bosses of note that use magic attacks exclusively.

the thought of a class revamp

though technically you did say DRK's "unique" trait above this thought...
I don't see this happening unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it). for this to happen we would have to change dark knight at a fundamental level (so basically starting from scratch, note that this doesn't mean scrapping the skills it has altogether, just the way many of them work.) even Warrior wasn't changed so drastically. just look at the 2.1 patch notes. the only major changes were that storm's path damage debuff, the healing nerf and 20% damage reduction added to IB, and the hp recovery via healing magic was no longer a part of wrath, but permanently part of defiance.

Sure, DRK are not bad by all means and they are strong on their own, but as a warrior I just don't feel like turning myself into one when I can easily pick the strongest mitigation tank in the game, or stick with the strongest OT in the game.

where's the fun in that?

-tanking, tree talker style-

ehh, the idea of being hit makes me hurt less doesn't really make sense with dark knight, and depending on how it's set up it still would probably be reactive, which is a huge no-no with this game's raids. I however wouldn't mind DRK being turned into something like an evasion tank (parry king of FFXIV tanks) however, using the abyss to re-direct blows (or parry them. can we have the old parry scaling back now please?) before they can even scratch us. the raiding meta still revolves around big hits, so we would still need a few mitigators, but this would be a nice change of pace.

[Duelle]

Blood DK is also a mitigation tank that happens to heal. Just because DS heals or it runs on runes doesn't automatically make the tank something special. There are passive that allow for mitigation more than there are heals.

Anything that uses leeches/heals to sustain themselves with no sort of mitigation is just asking for failure. WAR 2.0 is an example of this.

Indeed. The main problem with 2.0's WAR is that it had self heals as the sole way to stay alive instead of being part of a bigger tank model. This is something that was also repeatedly brought up in the tank forums because we knew that WAR was screwed unless it had some mitigation ability at the baseline. Self-heals are nice as part of your kit, but not as the only thing that makes you a tank.

It'd be as if Blizzard had designed Death Knights entirely around Death Strike's self heal and removed Blood Shield (the effect that Inner Beast's damage reduction was based on), Bone Shield and Icebound Fortitude.

Blood death knights in WoW used to be like that.

It was awful.

Well, I remember 3.0 Death Knights had to rotate cooldowns to make it through a fight. DKs came into their own once Blood Shield was introduced (they had to sacrifice my beloved Blood DPS spec to make it happen, but I can't argue with the results).