I’ve seen several people suggest that DK representation is high because DKs were incredibly good in Legion so most of the good tanks in the game had already switched to DK, and seeing no reason to swap classes in BFA, they’ve simply stayed on their DK. Why is this? A few reasons, but first I’d like to explore one of the common responses to this tank meta.

To say that the meta is utterly dominated by DKs is actually an understatement. A quick glance at the top 50 runs shows just two keys from non-DK tanks. The next closest tank is DH at 17.5%, meaning DKs show up more than three times as often as the next-most-played tank. At +15 and above, DKs account for 59.4% of the unique tank population. When you move to keys above +10, DK representation jumps to 36.3%. When looking at all M+ runs, DKs account for 23.5% of the unique tank population, which makes it the most-played tank but only barely (paladins clock in at 22.1% and DH is a bit behind at 18.4%). Using raider.io to view the representation of tanks in M+ at various difficulties, you can see a progressive trend towards using DK tanks as keys get higher and higher. I’ve been vocal on my stream recently about the state of DKs and tried to draw attention to the disparity between DKs and the rest of the tanks when it comes to high level keys. Before discussing the potential impacts of a Blood DK nerf, I’d like to address the M+ tank status quo.

One wild moment torrent