Only time I have issues is maylgos but yeah I notice my threat is overall lower than our paladin/druid tanks.

I guess TPS is suppose to be another one of our tanking weaknesses?

I cannot say I've ever had an issue with threat whatsoever. If you are running frost, you aren't optimizing your threat or mitigation for that matter.

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Q u o t e:


http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/clazz/tps/all/6

loololo bosanct threat, dks everywhere in top 10 threat :D

but yeah, nerf bosanct and make dks not rely on it >.<

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You already tried this in another thread. You need to look at the breakdown of those numbers and you'll realize that it's parsing Maximum burst TPS from anyone, not tanks. The DK's in those situations are DPS players. This is clear when you note the lack of Rune Strike or the use of the Gargoyle. In Kel'Thuzad specifically, the top spot is held by a DK Unholy DPS who was cranking out 4.4k DPS. Similarly, only 6% of his damage was from Rune Strike, with 13 Rune Strikes and 18 white melee attacks. These are not tank numbers.

You think you're making a point, but you're just being lazy and irresponsible. Stop.

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Q u o t e:
I cannot say I've ever had an issue with threat whatsoever. If you are running frost, you aren't optimizing your threat or mitigation for that matter.

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Then Frost and Blood need to be fixed. The intent is that all specs can tank, not just Unholy.

As many have noted, there's a certain level of DPS progression where the threat issue really shines. I didn't look, but I'd be willing to bet that you're not close to that point in progression yet.

If you are farming Heroic Naxx and not having a threat problem, break down what you're doing and the kinds of numbers you're seeing.

Thus far, people who believe that DK threat is competitive give no explanation other then "my threat is fine l2p." That is not good enough. If you're telling the truth then help the rest of us understand what we're doing wrong.

I hate to do it, but I think this thread is getting a message across more effectively then some others about the same issue.

/Bump

Can we get a blue comment on this please? This is probably thread number 20...and we've had some of those threads reach as long as 25 pages...with no acknowledgment.

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Q u o t e:
Another aspect of the DK threat issues:

Every tank has a survivability stat attached to an aggro stat.

Warriors gain more durability and aggro through Block Value (both Strength and normal Block Value)
Paladins gain more survivability and aggro through Block Value and Stamina (if talented for SP)
Druids gain more survivability and aggro through Agility and Stamina (superior Agility->Dodge conversion, melee crits, healing aggro from Improved Leader of the Pack)

DK aggro is tied entirely to Strength, Attack Power, and Weapon Damage. Our Strength increases our Parry by an abysmal amount. At 1000 Strength, a DK gains 250 Parry Rating, or 5.08% parry rate, except that Parry has the worst rating-to-return rate of any defensive stat, the lowest threshold for Diminishing Returns, and the worst curve for Diminishing Returns. In fact, the very existence of this conversion makes Parry rating difficult to justify for Death Knight tanks, as that which we will accidentally get with gear lacking Block Rating will already advance us down that curve.

Death Knights do not have a stat that we can stack to increase both our survivability and our aggro generation. We have the worst time attempting to reach the Defense cap of the classes that do need to reach it, and in doing so we are forced to sacrifice stats that could assist with aggro generation (hit, expertise, AP, etc.).

Forceful Deflection doesn't quite cut it when compared to the other tanks. Rune Strike is a mish-mash of other abilities assembled in combination, but has some of the worst parts of all three.

Next Melee + Single-Use per Window of Opportunity + Reactive trigger = NOT RELIABLE

Part of the beauty of letting Rune Strike be 200% weapon damage is that it was like getting a reactive instant attack that reduced our parry gib worries instead of increasing them. Reducing it to 150% weapon damage is equivalent to it giving us a 50% weapon damage instant with "produces high threat."

Basically, Death Knights are like Warriors that can only use Revenge for aggro. They are not too far apart in damage production (count Revenge plus one white swing versus one Rune Strike). The difference being that on tonight's run through 25-man Naxx, Revenge was weak enough that it only accounted for 8.7% of that warrior's damage (compared to 22.6% of damage from Shield Slam and 12.4% for Devastate, used 2 and 4 times more often than Revenge).

As has been noted, Death Knights tank a lot better on fast-hitting melee mobs because it triggers Rune Strike more. However, so does every other tank class. Warriors and Paladins, because it triggers Damage Shield, Revenge, and Holy Shield more. Even Druids tank these mobs better due to increased rage generation. NO tanks have superior threat generation against slow-swinging mobs or casters.

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Rueel is completely right. A DK cannot maintank Patchwerk unless the other tanks auto-attack. I'm the OT in our 25 mans in general, but was asked to MT Patch because we had 2 feral druid OT's.. well, I had to ask them to just autoattack for a bit. Really sad.

/wave Rueel, this is Xuruk of Omega, and I agree, our threat sucks. bad.

I've seen threat issues and haven't done all of 25 man naxx yet.

I know of other DKs that are having issues too. The problem is a definite lack of a way to generate BURST aggro on bosses. RS doesn't get it done alot of times, and I can't go all out with threat gen abilities like a war/pally as I'm hampered by cooldowns, rune cooldowns, lack of RP etc..etc...

Most warriors I know get rage so fast that they can spam their high threat moves at least a few times in a row if the threat meter is closing in on them. And paladins have many means of burst aggro generation.

If they just modified FP to increase the threat gen that would be fine for high dps groups and good tank groups, but I think that may make DK the "Go To" tank in lower content, like 10 man naxx etc... as that would put their threat gen way ahead at those levels.

I'm sure everyone who's going to has read this already, but I'd like to keep it up in front so we can continue adding to it as new ideas pop up. Maybe GC will respond to it too, and the discussion can get a little more in-depth.

One thing I was thinking of is allowing pestilence to refresh the diseases on our primary target (basically allowing us to use it on boss fights). Icy Touch and Plague Strike have really lackluster threat, and re-assigning the extra Frost and Unholy runes would be great (plus BOTN gives Frost tanks a death rune for using Pestilence). That'd kill a few birds with one stone, but I wonder how Blood tanks would feel about having to use one of their primary runes for disease refreshment.

/Bump

For the record:

I am not saying DK aggro is "bad." I am saying that it is "noticeably inferior." However, we are being given fights like Malygos, where the DPS should have a huge increase in output while the tank does not. These situations make me uncomfortable as a Death Knight tank.

1. Of my talent points 43 of them are increases to damage. FORTY-THREE. Of those, 24 of them are pure damage with no (or minimal) secondary bonuses. Nine of the points I put in Blood are purely optional damage increases, not even things selected "on the way" to higher tier talents. My aggro is still inferior and if I switch to dps gear, my damage output barely changes (I trade 141 defense, 14% dodge, 10% parry, 4% expertise and 3% hit for 13% crit and maybe 400 AP -- along with the 15% from Blood Presence). The nerf to Rune Strike's damage is going to hurt quite badly on this front.

2. In many situations, all three talent trees have silly bloat and/or poor "filler" talents that do not increase tanking capacity in any meaningful way and don't give a noteworthy increase in damage output. Blood has a giant fistful of talents that decrease downtime, thus once the DK is geared up, they mean virtually nothing outside of rare circumstances and situations. Frost tanks end up taking A) Range increases, B) Runic Power generation increases, or C) minor damage increases to near-dead targets in order to reach the deep talents, many of which are marginal or "must have." The range increase is pure filler because it sets the range of abilities with an artificially shorter range to match the baseline range for other abilities (Death Coil, Death Grip, Death & Decay).

3. The threat multiplier for DK's in Frost Presence is identical to that of Warriors in Defensive Stance and Druids in Dire Bear form. Our damage is usually superior but our threat output is inferior. This is due to a shortage of controllable abilities that have individual threat multipliers and while gearing for mitigation/avoidance, our damage output does not necessarily scale better than that of the other tanks. Druids have three abilities with significant bonus threat, Warriors have three, Death Knights have one expensive AE with a cooldown and duration that never match and soon an uncontrollable "next melee" ability. This is significantly less true of Paladins, however their threat multiplier is split and higher than other tanks for Holy damage and lower on other sources (white damage).

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Q u o t e:
We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

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It's not gear choices, it's encounters


checking WWSes for encounters like patchwerk show numbers as high as 40% of our threat coming from rune strike....

Then we go to encounters like malygos or gothik or kel'thuzad.. enemies that very rarely or never auto attack, and all of the sudden my threat drops by 20-30%.

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Q u o t e:
We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

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My guild has been doing heroic content for awhile now and I have to echo the op''s comments. Single target threat as a DK is markedly lower than other classes. I don't think it has been a huge problem as DKs don't seem to be most guild's choice for MT. I see a ton of DK off-tanks but not so many mains.

It is my understanding that we are supposed to be viable main-tanks so I look forward to changes that will allow me to keep up with the ever-increasing tps that our dps puts out.

(By the way, the numbers in this thread seem about right. I seem to put out about 5k on mobs that actually swing at me and about just shy of 4k when they don't. Sometimes it bursts to reasonable levels, but then I won't crit for awhile or my runes will be on CD and it's back down to non-heroic raid tank levels again.)

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Q u o t e:
It's not gear choices, it's encounters

checking WWSes for encounters like patchwerk show numbers as high as 40% of our threat coming from rune strike....

Then we go to encounters like malygos or gothik or kel'thuzad.. enemies that very rarely or never auto attack, and all of the sudden my threat drops by 20-30%.

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This is noticeable even in Heroic content. In Culling of Strat, I've noticed a significant loss of TPS going from Meathook (physical boss) to Salramm the Fleshcrafter (caster boss). This is with the same rotations and macros, the same party, in the same instance.

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Q u o t e:
We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

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It's a high-end raiding problem as the OP states. I took the liberty of logging out in my tanking gear. You might notice I am hit capped, and that I have 27 expertise which caps me on dodges, but not boss parries. You may also notice I have forsaken my Defender's Code for a Darkmoon card.

As an example last night we killed Malygos in 10 man in 4:15. The group was me tanking, 3 mages, 1 warlock, 1 boomkin, 1 elemental shaman and 1 shadow priest for DPS. I was struggling, but succeeding, to hold threat from 1 mage and the boomkin in particular. The mage crits Frostfires for roughly 13,000, and the boomkin just crits a lot. I did not have a rogue for tricks, or a hunter for Misdirect. I was completely alone. I could barely keep ahead using ERW early for burst threat, and using a heavy Scourge Strike rotation centering around the Scourge Strike glyph.

This is a problem on other fights as well. For example, Kel'thuzad in Naxx. He does not melee as much as other bosses which leads to less Rune Strikes. He also has an agro wipe, and it can be a challenge to get the burst threat during my Dark Command to take the lead again.

I would say in the absence of people that can add to my threat (rogues/hunters) my threat is only about 10% higher at times than DPS. People are dumping their threat (Invis) and catching back up to me. I could get any DPS in my guild to post in this thread if you thought it would be necessary, but the problem is a limitation of the class.

Another example is one week I was tanking the 3 drakes during the Sartharion fight. When the tank we were missing logged on a prot paladin in blues (his offspec) tanked the drakes, and his threat, according to the mages, was leaps and bounds above me.

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Our AoE threat is great, our single target threat at LOW gear levels is great, but our single target threat against highly geared DPS is pretty bad. I'd suggest possibly making Frost Presence increase the threat from Strikes (Blood, Heart, Rune, Scourge, Oblit, and Plague) that way our AoE threat doesn't improve, but our single target threat does.

Again this is only present at high gear levels because our threat scales poorly with gear. If you'd like names of the people that generally push my threat its: Kluian, Herakleitos, and Confirmed.

Threat is a definite issue, when the other classes tank no one even needs to use their deaggro abilities. Without blessing of sanc our threat is extremely gimp.

We started out being designed as the class that does the best threat while not being hit, and we are now the worst class on threat if we aren't being hit, I can't really keep up to the dps when I am second hateful on Patchwerk because he doesn't swing at me enough. Without runestrike we do next to nothing, and we can't runestrike with any sort of consistency unless we have blessing of sanc.

Not to mention Sapphrion, who has like 300 frost resist or some such and I get 10 ITs resisted in a row.

This will be even more blatant next patch when an even larger portion of our threat is from runestrike. I don't know what you mean by gear choices, warrior and paladin threat comes from a mitigation stat, you can't possibly expect us to gem hit and keep up with them in survivability.

I wish you would remove the threat modifier from Runestrike/D&D and increase passive frost presence threat generation considerably.

I guess I should also note that I never have Blessing of Sanctuary as we never have a Prot. Paladin.

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Q u o t e:
We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

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Gear choices might be playing a small role in this issue. Right now most DKs will be stacking defense rating however they can. This greatly limits us from putting in threat stats where we can. However, a few gems won't make enough of a difference even after the new rune coems out in the next patch.

Also at lower levels our threat is sufficient for the DPS to not feel capped all the time, but as both sides get better gear, their DPS/threat scale much faster than ours, which is why the actual issue is mostly being felt by DKs who are tanking with geared out DPS. Major DPS culprits in this area are Warlocks in my experience. They are almost instantly right up there in threat in almost any fight.

Another problem as has been put forward quite a bit already is our reliance on RS for threat. If we don't have enough RP to spam it (which we usually don't without BoSanc) or if we're not getting hit fast enough for a near 100% availability our threat plummets by a lot. The changes next patch are only going to add to our reliance on it.

And more importantly there's the issue of our snap aggro. IT and PS are both very poor threat generators. waiting 3s for us to start generating enough aggro isn't really viable when other tanks don't seem to be having similar snap issues.

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Q u o t e:
We're looking at the issue since players have brought it up. However, we are not hearing widespread feedback from across the board that DKs are struggling to maintain single-target threat. That is what makes me wonder if something else is going on, like it only occurs with some gear choices for example.

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EDIT: Perhaps it's foolish and sentimental, but to everyone who's been keeping up with this thread and contributing ideas and experience to it, thanks. We have GC's attention now and we can make a point. Good luck!

Thanks for the response.

I think Rueel really hit it on the head when he said that DK threat isn't "bad," it's "noticeably inferior."

I don't want to try to speak for all of the other DK's that agree with me, I'm sure they'll all be here shortly to chime in. So I'll do my best to not generalize these perceptions.

I think the point at which players will note this inferiority, or the degree to which it's noted, will change based not only on the DK themselves but the content and DPS of their raid. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the biggest reason we haven't seen "wide-spread" acknowledgement of the problem.

For those of us already there though (and I'm not the only one), I don't really want to have to wait for it to be addressed, not to mention the fact that it shouldn't make our feedback less relavent because fewer people agree. We could be wrong, certainly, maybe I just don't know how to play my class, but there needs to be a better way to determine that then guaging how many other DK's are QQing at my side - I'm sure you'd agree. Is there internal testing going on or is there some kind of numbers you'd like to see that would be more indicative?

I didn't see low TPS and run straight to the forums without messing around with gear choices, rotations and specs. I check elitistjerks just like everyone else (which, you should note, has a fair amount of "DK single-target threat is boned" mixed into their DK conversation too) I came here when it seemed like the issue wasn't just applying to me as a player but DK's as a class, based on conversations and TPS/DPS numbers from other DK tanks on my server that I speak / play with.