Our DK tank was gone for tonights raid, and after hours of whiping on farm status bosses I and my guild realised how bad the current tank balance is. Like, you’re griefing your raid so hard by not having a blood DK maintank.
Due to the tank absences, we had to resort to prot pala/prot warrior setup for the evening. Which turned out to be a disaster. The bosses we killed last week just destroyed our sword and board tanks. It was such a different experience from healing our blood DK maintank last reset.
Since class changes has been made in classic before, perhaps Cata tank classes should get an overhaul. In heroic raids in particular, it’s just silly how much stronger blood DK is compared to other tanks.
We ended the raid by just oneshotting some of the leftover bosses on normal, and realising we shouldn’t even attempt heroic bosses without our blood DK.
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welcome to blizzs failure of balancing tanks
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Welcome to “an amazing expansion” … LOL!
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Because tank balance was so great in vanilla too. Gimme a break
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Clearly wasn’t, but the raids were so easy you could afford to bring non-meta tanks. Cata raiding is way more demanding and less forgiving.
DK is probably the one outlier far above others. You either bring all 3 classes to DK level or nerf DK to the level of other 3. Which would you prefer?
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As a healer main, I’d vote for finding some kind of middle ground.
Quickly glancing over our logs, the blood DK tank is on average doing 8-9k hps during boss fights. On some bosses he’s pumping out even more healing, and is sometimes seriously challenging our resto shaman for the 5th spot on healing done. That is completely bonkers for a tank considering it’s almost exclusively self healing. It’s like having a built-in 6th healer on your team that only focuses on tank healing.
You can even look further at healing done amongst the tanks. The top DKs are pumping out 10k+ hps on most bosses. The top paladins/druids seem to be around 2-3k, and the top warriors barely break 1k.
My suggestion would probably be to tone down DK self healing a bit, and buff the other classes self healing in some way. You could perhaps also look at the classes defensive toolkits. I’m no expert in that field and don’t know what tank is lacking in what department, I just know that DKs have many of them for different situations.
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Speaking as a BDK:
Imo, Cata’s BDK is built around using CDs properly - and by that I mean even runes for death strikes, using DS “when available” is actually not the way to go…and when the player does that properly, BDK gives admitedly overpowered results, while if he fails to do that properly, he burns down like a paper, much faster than other tanks.
On the other hand, other tanks have more passive mechanics and if we’re talking pure tanking (aka not feral’s swapping into cat when not tanking), they should not be that reliant on the skill of the player.
In another words, BDK’s potential is higher than other tanks’, but it’s harder for player to reach 100 % of a BDK than other tanks.
Thing is…after all those years, with many private servers players could hone their Cata skill at and with all the logs and minmaxing, there is actually a lot of gamers that play BDK very well - and due to the globally increased skill, BDK simply rule. Imo that’s not really a reason to get deep into tank balancing (which is what you suggest - balancing the tanks would need a substantial rework of all the tanking classes)…the game simply is what it is.
Just my opinion ofc…and would have the same one even if the goal was to boost other tanks (aka my class wouldn’t get nerfed…and since I raid with a guild, I wouldn’t worry about my spot anyway).
I think it’s more a case of unexperienced or bad tanks.
Ye we have Bdk as MT & Prot pala as OT.
But he plans his Death strikes like Girrion says, he calls out for cds from the healers.
He plans ahead for each strike from the boss.
If he screws up, hes dead.
Are Bdk an outlier? For sure. Are they perhaps to strong in some regards? yes for sure.
But are the other tanks trash that can’t clear heroic? Hell no.
Do keep in mind that Cata is a VERY healer unfriendly expansion in terms of raw damage. You need to play really well just in general for all heroic bosses.
Take Magmaw for example or Nefarian, overall very high aoe damage constantly.
The toughest job in cata is a healers.
But keep in mind aswell that both prot pala/warr are the bottom tanks.
Guardian druids are strong as hell to.
A quick fyi to, Method used warrior tank back in the day.
That was waaaaay before all the big nerfs, the big buffs to classes etc etc.
Now their skill is on another level to pull that off. But it should say something that maybe classes arn’t THAT bad as you make it out to be.
For paladin,
- have a talent deep in the protection tree that reduce the CD of Word of Glory by 10 sec (or bake it into an already existing talent)
- remove the penalty on self-healing from divine plea
- increase the amount healed from seal of insight (base or with talent)
- increase the CD reduction on glyph of lay on hands from 3 to 5 minutes
For Warrior
- have a talent deep in the protection tree that remove the kill condition on victory rush in defensive stance
- decrease the CD on enrage regeneration
- buff shield wall (i mean 40% reduction on 5min CD agaisnt paladin’s gardian of ancient kings 50% reduction on 3min CD, one is clearly better than the other)
- reduce the cooldown for shield block from 1 minute (40 sec with talent) to 45 sec (25 sec with talent)
Numbers can be tweaked around if tanks are under or over powered. The idea is not to make warrior and paladin overpowered like DK, but like someone says, have all tank brought to a middle ground.
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Well honestly i think this tank disbalance is mostly an issue for the 1st phase, and later it will smooth out due to sword and board tanks will reach avoidance cap and will basically have passive 30% damage reduction from melee swings, which are pretty big part of current incoming damage. Although i still don’t deny that blood dk are overtuned (seeing how dk tank just didn’t die on chimeron hc last phase where you have 99% healing debuff)
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Problem is taht similar to every other classic expansion classes are in last patch balance , 4.3.5 fore Cata
Originaly Blood Dk was kinda crap tank at begining of cata and in FL i remember meny people laught when Blood DK wanted to be our MT
But in 4.3.5 BDK are kinda overbuffed and other Tanks over nerfed, they are more even with DS gear but…
I think either prot warrior needs buffed defensive cooldown, better victory rush talent or increased scaling with Mastery is it is eaiser to reach critical block.
Dont forget to buff fury warriors too! They are so underpowered atm, they really need to be looked into by blizz. I dont wanna go PVP specc for pve. I want to wield 2 weapons and hack and slash! Why the F is battleshout on same GCD as bloodthirst? A buff literally nerfing my rotation! This game is broken.
Blood dk´s selfhealing equal 30-50% of the incoming dmg they take especially when including mastery. This is without mentioning their still large armor and magic dmg taken reductions, that are still rather more unique to them specifically. The easiest way to bring the other tanks to dks level is to simply increase the survivability of most other tanks a decent amount. This will let em more easily equal blood dks and can even swap out for more dps to more evenly catch up on dps as well.
Biggest outliers RN is dks selfhealing mechanic and how dps stats like mastery and haste directly increase a blood dks survivability insanely, to the point where you barely have to care about tank stats outside of stamina and that mastery.
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To be honest i do not agree with you. Both for masterig the class and cause of teh balance problem. Any person who has a starter knowledge about blood dk can tank a raid so easy as i experienced it on dragon soul raid retail. And be sure other tanks are much more complicated on mechanics. U have to use your mind also for other tanks. but with dk.
And peopel say ‘‘But keep in mind aswell that both prot pala/warr are the bottom tanks.
Guardian druids are strong as hell too.’’ and i say them try a prot pala. Yes you can tank with just buttoms but no you can not master a prot paladin as easy as dk since prot paladins is getting easier after gearing progress on raids, not before gearing progress like Blizzard’s favourite child 
So while progressing a raid dk is always way more easier.
No you can’t in classic. Because then you’re griefing your raid aswell. Other tanks generate so much less threat then fury prot your fury warrs are forced to hold back.
LMAAOOOO a bdk trying to avoid balance patches. It cannot be that bdk’s are so much better than other tanks balance patches are mandatory.