Make Us "Block-Tank" - Ardent Defender Idea

Perhaps you could think of it this way.

Ardent Defender: May save your life if you take a hit while slightly under 35% health. If you're at 36% it will have no effect and you'll die, or if you're too far below 35% it'll work but you'll die anyway. Reduces your mitigation by 4%, the amount of your shield wall ability by 10%, and your base health by 2000 to "balance" it vs other classes. Great for trash though! Costs 5 talent points.

Would you still take it? Because it's obvious Blizz is at least to some degree balancing our class around having this talent. If the talent isn't working on bosses, it's causing us a significant handicap. If we are going to have a penalty to our abilities, AD needs to be a large enough gain to offset that.

As it stands now, AD will be valuable when combined with Divine Protection. In fact you could just rename it "Improved Divine Protection". Getting 50% reduction instead of 60% is fine. But as was posted above me, it's unfair to use it to balance the rest of our stats and mitigation since, except for the 12 seconds every four minutes when we have Divine Protection up, we can't count on it to work even a single time.

The only change they need to make to AD is to include in the tooltip: "This will save your life any time that taking 6% less damage overall would have."
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Those who died are justified.

How about if AD also give 100% more block value for like 15sec... like our own little shield block. That way on leapfrog fights when we are always dropping below from huge hits we'd still get a benefit from it.
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Didn't Warriors have 50% as well, and then they buffed it?

why dont they fold rogues cheat death into our AD?????


cheat death kicks in making it so we cannot get leapfrogged to death we get hit for 9k at 36% hp, we get cheat death ability, and anything below 35% normal AD kicks in...

AD is WAY too situational as have been stated many times before.

I think one of the reasons there is no in game way to tell when it kicks in is just how depressing it is to raid a few nights, check tankadin and bam, procced once. Yeah sometimes it ends up giving decent damage reduction over the period of a raid, but generally not too much and if everyone was on the ball and you didn't get very unlucky, it might not have procced at all.

I find it pretty hard to argue against the OP's talent idea being stronger than AD. 6% less damage active almost all of the time (even more so in wotlk if our avoidance is really less like they've said) vs one of the most situational talents in the game. I also don't how everyones' answer to making it a decent revolves around using our shield wall just before it is activated so we get both reductions as that makes the talent EVEN more situational than it already is now.