Thinking about switching from DK to Pally

I have a DK in average gear (item level 354) have been clearing ZG and ZA pretty easily. But there are certain times, especially on dragonhawk boss with all the adds coming out, that I just have no runes and just can not pick up all the adds. I just hate not being able to do anything for 4-5 seconds because all my runes are depleted.

I also have a level 71 prot paladin I been leveling up that I enjoy a lot. It just seems like paladin would be easier to hold AoE agro with because they have shorter AoE cooldowns especially on their cleave attack. At level 85 are pallys easier to maintain agro with over DKs? I know healers say they like having a DK tank but I feel like im spazing out sometimes trying to pick up adds because I dont have any damn runes.

hey,

yeah our best AE-attack is on a 3sec Cooldown, so we (almost) never have to worry about saving it. Is DK-AE really this bad? Bears also have 3 sec AE attack as well as warriors.

Bye, RedAces.

Yea our only strong AoE ( Death and Decay) 30 second cooldown. Blood Boil is so nerfed that its not even worth taking the talents to make it hit harder. Also our cleave is like a warriors only hits 3 targets. Except warriors still have T-clap and shockwave. Both with short CDs. Im starting to think DKs were meant to be boss tanks.

RedAces wrote:hey,

yeah our best AE-attack is on a 3sec Cooldown, so we (almost) never have to worry about saving it. Is DK-AE really this bad? Bears also have 3 sec AE attack as well as warriors.

Bye, RedAces.

It's reasonably strong but takes a long time to ramp up. You generally have
a couple death (wild-card) runes you can use to pop Blood Boil, but that
doesn't hit very hard.

To really hold an AoE pack takes a stupidly long time - you have to apply
Frost Fever, apply Blood Plague, hit Pestilence to spread them around,
and only then can your AoE threat BEGIN to tick. After that you can hit
Blood Boil every 4.5-ish seconds and the threat becomes pretty good...

I haven't tanked on my bear since the patch, but it used to be pretty
bad. Consider that they basically just quadrupled the power of Swipe.
The apologists would say "shut up, your threat's awesome when you pop
Berserk".

Arcand wrote:To really hold an AoE pack takes a stupidly long time - you have to apply
Frost Fever, apply Blood Plague, hit Pestilence to spread them around,
and only then can your AoE threat BEGIN to tick. After that you can hit
Blood Boil every 4.5-ish seconds and the threat becomes pretty good...

Luckily, Outbreak removes at least one of those GCDs. But being on a 1 min CD means it's not always the "go to" hotkey. And Crimson Scourge is a nice freebie.

I don't have a max lvl bear tank yet (he's still in the old world) but I do run a Prot Warrior in Heroics and alt raids. Their aoe tanking is a bit better than DKs, but maybe by like one or two GCDs.

Paladins really do have it easier when it comes to AoE tanking. HotR, HW, unglyphed AS are just too good. Shockwave is decent, but really not as good as HW or Cons. Cleave (and Heart Strike) can't really compare to HotR.

Now, there are times on my Paladin I really wish I had Death Grip in AoE situations ...

Just came back to the game. I wanted to tell you I left with a Naxx geared DK tank and have now made a Pally. Even back in WotLK I found DKs did not generate the threat a good Pally could. I remember doing the tank switch in Vault of Archavon and my co-tank was a Pally and he always took threat back effortlessly.

I don't know yet if there are any encounters like the OS three drake take down in Cata, but that was really where the DK was best, IMO. At least at that time, the DKs had far more mitigation options on cooldowns and made the best Tank to MT the boss while the drakes were killed.

DKs have a ton of cooldowns, but for my money Paladins have the best tools to control a fight. We have strong AoE aggro with multiple taunt options for the ones that stray. We can tank the boss or the adds. We have a solid base of cooldowns that do different things (magic damage resist, physical resist, instant heal, great big instant heal, drop stacks, cheat death).

I have a bear tank, and while I agree that their AoE can be completely OP, it's only OP once every 3 minutes. Every try running a heroic and making people wait 3 mins before you pull the next pack? They have a room taunt on a long cooldown and a single taunt on a short one.

I have serious issues with DK tank design. It seems impossible to maintain both the blood shield and diseases on 100% uptime. The obvious answer is to run with a class that provides the attack speed and damage debuffs so you can keep shields up, but I would prefer to control my own defense, thanks. And Blood Rites... <shudder>. I read that DKs are like playing Tetris while tanking. Raid leading on a DK is like playing Tetris while herding cats. No thanks.

I have a baby warrior, but I am really turned off by rage mechanics with the bear. I hate being caught flat-footed with a group of things to round up. Granted the bear is not 2nd-nature to me, so I don't maintain rage from one pull to the next as I should (with healers wanting mana and such causing breaks), but it seems to me that rage was the original Vengeance - not there at the start of the fight when you need it, and bucket loads during the fight when you don't need it.

Paladins have an unlimited resource. We have a bucket of "rage" at the beginning of the fight to stack up threat, whereafter if we ever need mana we can swap to Insight because we don't need the extra threat of Truth. We don't have a closer, but we have multiple ranged abilities.

So in the end I rolled a 2nd prot pally. Even got a decent name for him - Capnhammer.