An Aside Concerning Parries

So, after some encouraging comments by Askevar at You Yank It, You Tank It, I healed my first dual-wielding death knight tank the other day. He was no more difficult to heal than he had been while using a two-hander.

What does this have to do with warriors? Well.

As a healer, I was most concerned that my death knight fellow would be more prone to the dreaded parry gib (in which a boss parries an attack, speeding up the next swing, and smacks the tank in the face) or at least take more damage from parry-hasted strikes. This did not prove to be the case, which got me thinking: is a death knight tank the one who needs to worry about parried strikes the most?

Although I have yet to acquire any numbers to back this up, I think the answer is no. Why?

Well, it's because I think we warriors actually hit faster, meaning more frequent strikes and more potential parries. I come to this conclusion for two reasons. The first is that the bouncy thing to the right is, in fact, what my character looks like while tanking, with the odd pause for Shield Slam's animation (although the yellow numbers never slow in their scrolling). When tanking a boss we don't massively outgear we have the rage to attack on every global cooldown, with further attacks occurring every melee swing (be that white damage, Heroic Strike or cleave, they can all be parried). That's a lot of potential parries.

Of course, the death knight is swinging fairly frantically themselves as one-handed tanking weapons are naturally quick and these guys are using two. Like the warrior, they have a melee-swing replacing attack - Rune Strike - but we differ in that skills such as Death and Decay, Icy Touch and the frost tank's Howling Blast are spells. Spells cannot be parried. While I definitely do not mean to suggest that all of a death knight's skills are spells - they're not - I do believe there may be enough of a difference between the number of a death knight's GCDs spent on physical attacks and the number a warrior uses to mean parrying is definitely not a DWing death knight-specific concern.

That said, I haven't found it too problematic for my warrior. Seems boss parries just aren't that consequential anymore, mayhap.