Curse

It was a busy weekend for blue posts on the Wrath of the Lich King beta forums and we have all of the latest below. There are quite a few Death Knight topics of discussion, as well as information on Druids, Hunters and Warriors. Read on for everything.

Druid

• Feral changes - We're not done with Ferals. (src)

Hunter

• Camouflage - Used to be the 51-pt Survival, but we felt it was too PvP oriented, and we're really trying to flesh the tree out to be more than traps and melee (we are not done, as you can tell). That said... Camouflage may just come back as a base ability... *maybe* =] (Though a bit different from the against-the-rules data mining version you saw). (src)
• Chimera Pet critting for 5k - Because the chimera ability does two types of damage at once (like the new Mage spell), it seems to have some crazy scaling effect. This is the first pet ability with two types of damage, so it's likely that is the problem. (src)
• Pet skills & focus cost - I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It's kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It's worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Leting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost). (src)
• Exotic Pets - The NYI tag has been removed from Beast Master now, it's completely implemented. Though, we're still working on the pets themselves. (src)
• Pet aggro - As you can see, the results are a little inconsistent. Before we just buff pet threat across the board, we need to make sure that there aren't more bugs resulting in spikey or unpredictable behavior. (src)

Pets and spell resistance (src)
We don't want pets to get to the point where they resist nearly all CC effects... though being that this is a board of hunters you will probably disagree. :)

But we don't want your pets to die to a single spell either, which is why we'd rather handle surviving spell damage (especially in PvP) through a percent damage reduction. That is something we are looking at now. There are also talents that can further reduce spell damage.

Because your pets benefit from your resistance, it should still be possible to get them to survive in magic-heavy PvE encounters.

Warrior
State of Protection Warriors (src)
The design is that even a decently geared Arms or Fury warrior can tank a non-heroic 5-player instance. Overall they are probably easier than the BC instances at that level, but it's because we want more people to be able to run them.

You shouldn't need to seek Strength out for your tanking set. The way the itemization is designed, you are going to end up with a bunch of Strength on the tanking pieces you do pick up. We figure it will be more fun to do dailies, offtank and perhaps (gasp) even PvP when you can still do reasonable damage (not Fury damage, but perhaps not 50% of it either). Threat generation will be easier since you'll be hitting harder, and Rage starvation might likewise be a little less. In the past, tanks often had a choice between +threat and +mitigation gear, and typically felt obliged to go with the latter (special situations, such as maybe a ZA bear run or a boss with a short enrage timer aside). We figured we'd try letting you get tanking gear that didn't crater your dps.

Tanking changes are not done (src)
We're not done. When a new build goes out in beta, it happens because someone grabs the data and makes a new build, not because we all stand back and say "There! We've done it. Let's see what they say when they get a load of THIS!"

For that reason, it's tough to compare warrior abilities to any other class' abilities. Maybe the designers just didn't work on paladins that day and were planning on making similar changes across other classes. Maybe they just wanted to see the outcome and feedback on the change before deciding whether to keep it. While it may not be fair, we definitely don't parcel out 10% of our time each week to give each class some love. Some class abilities have the exact same bugs or non-functional status they've had since beta began just because we haven't had time to fix them yet.

I know first hand that many of the changes in the last patch were intended as buffs. Obviously Shield Wall et al. had to come down in effectiveness with such a shorter cooldown. If we overcompensated, we'll fix it next time around. Blood Frenzy is a special case because we're still evaluating what to do with unique raid buffs in general. We're not at all happy with the "fun choice" of deciding whether to take a Fury warrior with awesome dps but no buffs, or an Arms warrior who begrudingly picked up BF just to earn a spot in the raid. If you've read any of my other posts, I don't at all consider warrior tanking to be in a shippable state.

Death Knight

• Bloodworms & Death Strike - We might unhook Bloodworms from Death Strike again. Death Strike needs to be useful without the extra talent, so with the extra talent it feels like it might be overhealing much of the time. (src)
• Death Strike healing mechanics - Death Strike heals you for 100% of the damage it dealt per disease on the target. If you hit with DS for 500 and have 1 disease it heals you for 500, two diseases would heal you for 1000 and so on. (src)
• Anti-Magic Shell - We are looking at Anti-Magic Shell as possibly being runic power or even free. We need to get the remaining bugs knocked out of it to see how it feels. (src)
• DK spells & attack power - Note that DK spells are not affected by spellpower and are affected by attack power. We might also allow them to use melee crit instead of spell crit if that gets to be an issue. It may not be an issue since items now always increase both melee and spell crit. Ditto for hit. (src)
• Master of Ghouls and perma ghoul - No this is not intended. The ghoul should die at the end of his duration, however we do intend for deep Unholy Death Knights to have the ability to resummon their ghoul almost on a whim. (src)
• Killing Machine - It needs to affect Icy Touch since we can't assume you also have Howling Blast or Frost Strike. Granted it's not great for Icy Touch, but that is better than having a talent that doesn't affect your abilities at all. We have discussed adding Obliterate, but our concern is that it would then only be used for Obliterate. Increasing the duration is an easy change. (src)
• Build 8770 and bugs - You can find a list of bugs here. Thanks for the report guys, keep the bugs and feedback rolling. Unfortunately a lot of the Death Knight abilities were still in the middle of being updated to their new functionality at the time the beta push was built. Hopefully we can get all of these issues fixed soon. The faster you all make us aware of everything that's not working the quicker we can get it fixed. (src)
• Pestilence - We broke Pestilence shortly before the patch went out. We got rid of the chaining effect (the green lines you used to see) in order to make it more of an area effect ability like Thunder Clap (but one that requires a target). This doesn't really change the role of the ability at all. It just makes it more consistent to apply. Unfortunately the timing of the change turned out not to be ideal. (src)

Druid

• Feral changes - We're not done with Ferals. (src)

Hunter

• Camouflage - Used to be the 51-pt Survival, but we felt it was too PvP oriented, and we're really trying to flesh the tree out to be more than traps and melee (we are not done, as you can tell). That said... Camouflage may just come back as a base ability... *maybe* =] (Though a bit different from the against-the-rules data mining version you saw). (src)
• Chimera Pet critting for 5k - Because the chimera ability does two types of damage at once (like the new Mage spell), it seems to have some crazy scaling effect. This is the first pet ability with two types of damage, so it's likely that is the problem. (src)
• Pet skills & focus cost - I like the idea of removing more pet abilities from Focus. It's kind of a weird energy source since it fills so quickly in most cases. Growl and Cower might be trickier, but perhaps they could just be really cheap. Making the Focus dump abilities (Bite etc.) relatively expensive could do unpredictable things to threat or dps, especially very early in a fight. It's worth considering though since then they would typically only get used if the other autocast stuff was on cooldown. Leting some specials be free would help balance utility specials with pure dps specials (which could still have a Focus cost). (src)
• Exotic Pets - The NYI tag has been removed from Beast Master now, it's completely implemented. Though, we're still working on the pets themselves. (src)
• Pet aggro - As you can see, the results are a little inconsistent. Before we just buff pet threat across the board, we need to make sure that there aren't more bugs resulting in spikey or unpredictable behavior. (src)

Pets and spell resistance (src)
We don't want pets to get to the point where they resist nearly all CC effects... though being that this is a board of hunters you will probably disagree. :)

But we don't want your pets to die to a single spell either, which is why we'd rather handle surviving spell damage (especially in PvP) through a percent damage reduction. That is something we are looking at now. There are also talents that can further reduce spell damage.

Because your pets benefit from your resistance, it should still be possible to get them to survive in magic-heavy PvE encounters.

Warrior
State of Protection Warriors (src)
The design is that even a decently geared Arms or Fury warrior can tank a non-heroic 5-player instance. Overall they are probably easier than the BC instances at that level, but it's because we want more people to be able to run them.

You shouldn't need to seek Strength out for your tanking set. The way the itemization is designed, you are going to end up with a bunch of Strength on the tanking pieces you do pick up. We figure it will be more fun to do dailies, offtank and perhaps (gasp) even PvP when you can still do reasonable damage (not Fury damage, but perhaps not 50% of it either). Threat generation will be easier since you'll be hitting harder, and Rage starvation might likewise be a little less. In the past, tanks often had a choice between +threat and +mitigation gear, and typically felt obliged to go with the latter (special situations, such as maybe a ZA bear run or a boss with a short enrage timer aside). We figured we'd try letting you get tanking gear that didn't crater your dps.

Tanking changes are not done (src)
We're not done. When a new build goes out in beta, it happens because someone grabs the data and makes a new build, not because we all stand back and say "There! We've done it. Let's see what they say when they get a load of THIS!"

For that reason, it's tough to compare warrior abilities to any other class' abilities. Maybe the designers just didn't work on paladins that day and were planning on making similar changes across other classes. Maybe they just wanted to see the outcome and feedback on the change before deciding whether to keep it. While it may not be fair, we definitely don't parcel out 10% of our time each week to give each class some love. Some class abilities have the exact same bugs or non-functional status they've had since beta began just because we haven't had time to fix them yet.

I know first hand that many of the changes in the last patch were intended as buffs. Obviously Shield Wall et al. had to come down in effectiveness with such a shorter cooldown. If we overcompensated, we'll fix it next time around. Blood Frenzy is a special case because we're still evaluating what to do with unique raid buffs in general. We're not at all happy with the "fun choice" of deciding whether to take a Fury warrior with awesome dps but no buffs, or an Arms warrior who begrudingly picked up BF just to earn a spot in the raid. If you've read any of my other posts, I don't at all consider warrior tanking to be in a shippable state.

Death Knight

• Bloodworms & Death Strike - We might unhook Bloodworms from Death Strike again. Death Strike needs to be useful without the extra talent, so with the extra talent it feels like it might be overhealing much of the time. (src)
• Death Strike healing mechanics - Death Strike heals you for 100% of the damage it dealt per disease on the target. If you hit with DS for 500 and have 1 disease it heals you for 500, two diseases would heal you for 1000 and so on. (src)
• Anti-Magic Shell - We are looking at Anti-Magic Shell as possibly being runic power or even free. We need to get the remaining bugs knocked out of it to see how it feels. (src)
• DK spells & attack power - Note that DK spells are not affected by spellpower and are affected by attack power. We might also allow them to use melee crit instead of spell crit if that gets to be an issue. It may not be an issue since items now always increase both melee and spell crit. Ditto for hit. (src)
• Master of Ghouls and perma ghoul - No this is not intended. The ghoul should die at the end of his duration, however we do intend for deep Unholy Death Knights to have the ability to resummon their ghoul almost on a whim. (src)
• Killing Machine - It needs to affect Icy Touch since we can't assume you also have Howling Blast or Frost Strike. Granted it's not great for Icy Touch, but that is better than having a talent that doesn't affect your abilities at all. We have discussed adding Obliterate, but our concern is that it would then only be used for Obliterate. Increasing the duration is an easy change. (src)
• Build 8770 and bugs - You can find a list of bugs here. Thanks for the report guys, keep the bugs and feedback rolling. Unfortunately a lot of the Death Knight abilities were still in the middle of being updated to their new functionality at the time the beta push was built. Hopefully we can get all of these issues fixed soon. The faster you all make us aware of everything that's not working the quicker we can get it fixed. (src)
• Pestilence - We broke Pestilence shortly before the patch went out. We got rid of the chaining effect (the green lines you used to see) in order to make it more of an area effect ability like Thunder Clap (but one that requires a target). This doesn't really change the role of the ability at all. It just makes it more consistent to apply. Unfortunately the timing of the change turned out not to be ideal. (src)

Night of the Dead (src)
Yes, it is a more active ways for players who want Ghouls to have them up a lot. The idea was that you might do more Plague or Scourge Strikes than normal (like even when you had a disease up) in return for having the Ghoul out more. The "next cooldown" was supposed to mean that you aren't permanently lowering the cooldown. You Raise Dead, then work to get the cooldown lower so that when the Ghoul dies, you can get another one up again. Done right, you could have very little down time.

This talent required new technology, which we either got too late for this build or ended up causing bugs somewhere. We'll get it fixed. 

You should have 1 Ghoul and he should die when the timer runs out.

Death and Decay changes (src)
The change to Death and Decays cost was intended to allow DK's more flexibility and provide a better flow and wider variety of options during AE pulls.

Pull with Icy Touch, follow with Plague Strike, Pestilience the disease to everything around you and top it off with Death and Decay.

For those Unholy DK's out there you can top that off with Unholy Blight and follow up with a Obliterate on your target (or open if you want) to activate Desecrate for the AE snare and +10% damage.

Health Bonus and Improved Frost Aura (src)
Frost Presence is necessary for Frost Aura, and while Frost is not the tanking tree, Frost Presence is absolutely the tanking presence. We didn't want to create the situation where a DK assigned to dps had to switch to Frost Presence in order to buff party health.

This wasn't intended as a nerf to DK health. If their health ends up too low, we can boost it through talents or the core stamina of the class.

We don't want to have Frost Aura affect threat because we pulled all of the +threat talents from all classes. We didn't want to have to design encounters assuming every tank had those talents.

Death Knight and Raid Utility (src)
Think about it from a high level. Ten classes. Thirty specs. Imagine each spec brings something unique and very powerful to the raid. You can bring 25 (or even 10). What do you do?

Or imagine we didn't change a thing from Burning Crusade. Now we add 3 new specs to the game and give one of them 20% haste and one of them 20% spell vulnerability. Who is getting the boot? The dps warrior? The second hunter? (And this ignores specs like Survival hunter and Moonkin who traditionally didn't merit inclusions in raids, but whom we'd like to improve.)

Or imagine this scenario: you can have a pair of 20% spell vulnerability buffs or a pair of 20% haste buffs. Maybe there isn't space for all 4 characters. Are the encounters designed assuming 20% vulnerability? Or 20% haste? Both? Neither?

You can't have a unique buff from all 30 specs in the raid. You probably don't want to swap specs in and out for each boss. Some guilds probably will, though I doubt you want all the bosses to be balanced with that assumption.

I suppose we could make 5 of the specs just suck for raiding and expect that you bring the other 25, but that feels kind of lame too. There was certainly deflation following the moment when DKs thought Ebon Plague or some other buff would *insure* a spot in the raid. Is there a class and spec who is happy not to have a raid-mandatory buff or role?

All of this ignores the debuff limit, since that is more of a technical issue and not a design one. Though still, do you want to try and understand what's happening when you're looking at a boss with 60 or 100 debuff icons on it?

It's not a trivial problem.

Parry items for DK tanking
Resilience still works in PvE. Perhaps someone was hearing one of us say that the goal was not for druids and death knights to go get resilience gear in order to tank. Resilience gear is designed for PvP, not for tanking, but we aren't doing anything to prevent it from working.

A druid, death knight and warrior tank all need to end up with similar relative survivability. Some may do it with big stamina pools, some may have more mitigation, and some more avoidance (which we realize isn't as desirable as the others).

I'm not sure we'll offer two-handed tanking weapons for DK tanks, but that doesn't mean they all are supposed to dual-wield. Even among warriors, there are some who recommend using +threat weapons for some fights. If we design DKs to use dps weapons even when tanking, we'll make sure to stack their survivability stats in other ways.

Sigils are tricky things to offer as quest rewards because 9 other classes can't even use them.

Also remember Naxx has like 15 bosses and they all drop a lot of loot. The loot table for that place is gigantic. (src)
----------------------------------------------- If we don't create two-handed tanking weapons, that does not mean death knights are supposed to dual-wield to tank.

Unless we change things (and we might), dual-wielding against a boss is not a good idea since you will be on the receiving end of more parry-based fast attacks.

I also would not look at itemization and make any assumptions that we intend for end-game DKs to have lower survivability or threat generation than the 3 other tanking classes. If you end up wearing plate with wasted block and a lot of defense that benefits you less than a warrior, there will be other things to make up for it. Imagine we added a core DK ability that gives you +defense and +dodge whenever you wield a two-handed weapon. We could even make than a runeforge enchant. Imagine that DKs get double the benefit of parry on defense rating since they don't benefit from block. We have lots of knobs to turn. (src)

DK Tanking Issues Q/A (src)
Most of the arguments and concerns on this topic that I see seem to come down to these issues. Correct me if there are any I'm missing.

1) Blizzard doesn't intend death knights to be end-game tanks.
Ghostcrawler: Yes, we do.

2) Death knights don't have the mitigation to tank end-game bosses.
Ghostcrawler: We don't have enough information yet to make that call, but the design is that they do, so if they don't, we'll change the numbers. There are a lot of knobs to turn from Forceful Deflection to Frost Presence to Icebound Fortitude to passive bonuses.

3) Death knights don't have a traditional tanking tree, which feels weird.
Ghostcrawler: Totally valid concern. But we want to try and fix some of the problems with traditional tanking, such as it being not fun enough to attract enough players or utility being marginal when not tanking.

4) Because death knights don't have traditional tanking trees, I can't get all the tanking talents.
Ghostcrawler: True. Also by design. You CAN get all the tools you'll need for tanking in any tree though.

5) Death knights can tank and dps with the same spec.
Ghostcrawler: Maybe. Warrior and paladins can tank and dps with the same spec too, though a hybrid warrior tends to be less than optimal for either role at the cutting-edge of raiding. The same should be true of death knights.

6) Because death knights can tank and dps, it isn't fair to existing plate tanks who have to give up a lot of dps in order to tank.
Ghostcrawler: Also valid. Just remember the design is that any DK or warrior should be able to tank a 5-player dungeon. A dps death knight, with no tanking talents and crappy gear isn't going to be a very impressive Naxxramas MT. Maybe the death knight doesn't have to give up as much as existing tanks, though that may also be something we want to fix in the other classes.

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it's not fair.
Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I'm not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior's best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn't seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That's a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don't know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong. (I've tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren't fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you've seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class' talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn't terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we're onto something. If it isn't your thing, that's cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you're convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn't need to mean inferior.

Night of the Dead</span></strong></span> (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765780434&amp;pageNo=1&amp;sid=2000#2">src</a>)
Yes, it is a more active ways for players who want Ghouls to have them up a lot. The idea was that you might do more Plague or Scourge Strikes than normal (like even when you had a disease up) in return for having the Ghoul out more. The "next cooldown" was supposed to mean that you aren't permanently lowering the cooldown. You Raise Dead, then work to get the cooldown lower so that when the Ghoul dies, you can get another one up again. Done right, you could have very little down time.

This talent required new technology, which we either got too late for this build or ended up causing bugs somewhere. We'll get it fixed. 

You should have 1 Ghoul and he should die when the timer runs out.

Death and Decay changes (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765639658&amp;pageNo=1&amp;sid=2000#17">src</a>)
The change to Death and Decays cost was intended to allow DK's more flexibility and provide a better flow and wider variety of options during AE pulls.

Pull with Icy Touch, follow with Plague Strike, Pestilience the disease to everything around you and top it off with Death and Decay.

For those Unholy DK's out there you can top that off with Unholy Blight and follow up with a Obliterate on your target (or open if you want) to activate Desecrate for the AE snare and +10% damage.

Health Bonus and Improved Frost Aura (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765640415&amp;pageNo=1&amp;sid=2000#6">src</a>)
Frost Presence is necessary for Frost Aura, and while Frost is not the tanking tree, Frost Presence is absolutely the tanking presence. We didn't want to create the situation where a DK assigned to dps had to switch to Frost Presence in order to buff party health.

This wasn't intended as a nerf to DK health. If their health ends up too low, we can boost it through talents or the core stamina of the class.

We don't want to have Frost Aura affect threat because we pulled all of the +threat talents from all classes. We didn't want to have to design encounters assuming every tank had those talents.

Death Knight and Raid Utility (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765638446&amp;sid=2000&amp;pageNo=7#132">src</a>)
Think about it from a high level. Ten classes. Thirty specs. Imagine each spec brings something unique and very powerful to the raid. You can bring 25 (or even 10). What do you do?

Or imagine we didn't change a thing from Burning Crusade. Now we add 3 new specs to the game and give one of them 20% haste and one of them 20% spell vulnerability. Who is getting the boot? The dps warrior? The second hunter? (And this ignores specs like Survival hunter and Moonkin who traditionally didn't merit inclusions in raids, but whom we'd like to improve.)

Or imagine this scenario: you can have a pair of 20% spell vulnerability buffs or a pair of 20% haste buffs. Maybe there isn't space for all 4 characters. Are the encounters designed assuming 20% vulnerability? Or 20% haste? Both? Neither?

You can't have a unique buff from all 30 specs in the raid. You probably don't want to swap specs in and out for each boss. Some guilds probably will, though I doubt you want all the bosses to be balanced with that assumption.

I suppose we could make 5 of the specs just suck for raiding and expect that you bring the other 25, but that feels kind of lame too. There was certainly deflation following the moment when DKs thought Ebon Plague or some other buff would *insure* a spot in the raid. Is there a class and spec who is happy not to have a raid-mandatory buff or role?

All of this ignores the debuff limit, since that is more of a technical issue and not a design one. Though still, do you want to try and understand what's happening when you're looking at a boss with 60 or 100 debuff icons on it?

It's not a trivial problem.

Parry items for DK tanking
Resilience still works in PvE. Perhaps someone was hearing one of us say that the goal was not for druids and death knights to go get resilience gear in order to tank. Resilience gear is designed for PvP, not for tanking, but we aren't doing anything to prevent it from working.

A druid, death knight and warrior tank all need to end up with similar relative survivability. Some may do it with big stamina pools, some may have more mitigation, and some more avoidance (which we realize isn't as desirable as the others).

I'm not sure we'll offer two-handed tanking weapons for DK tanks, but that doesn't mean they all are supposed to dual-wield. Even among warriors, there are some who recommend using +threat weapons for some fights. If we design DKs to use dps weapons even when tanking, we'll make sure to stack their survivability stats in other ways.

Sigils are tricky things to offer as quest rewards because 9 other classes can't even use them.

Also remember Naxx has like 15 bosses and they all drop a lot of loot. The loot table for that place is gigantic. (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765777566&amp;pageNo=2&amp;sid=2000#21">src</a>)

----------------------------------------------- If we don't create two-handed tanking weapons, that does not mean death knights are supposed to dual-wield to tank.

Unless we change things (and we might), dual-wielding against a boss is not a good idea since you will be on the receiving end of more parry-based fast attacks.

I also would not look at itemization and make any assumptions that we intend for end-game DKs to have lower survivability or threat generation than the 3 other tanking classes. If you end up wearing plate with wasted block and a lot of defense that benefits you less than a warrior, there will be other things to make up for it. Imagine we added a core DK ability that gives you +defense and +dodge whenever you wield a two-handed weapon. We could even make than a runeforge enchant. Imagine that DKs get double the benefit of parry on defense rating since they don't benefit from block. We have lots of knobs to turn. (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765777566&amp;sid=2000&amp;pageNo=2#36">src</a>)

DK Tanking Issues Q/A (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=8765776746&amp;sid=2000&amp;pageNo=7#130">src</a>)
Most of the arguments and concerns on this topic that I see seem to come down to these issues. Correct me if there are any I'm missing.

1) Blizzard doesn't intend death knights to be end-game tanks.
Ghostcrawler: Yes, we do.

2) Death knights don't have the mitigation to tank end-game bosses.
Ghostcrawler: We don't have enough information yet to make that call, but the design is that they do, so if they don't, we'll change the numbers. There are a lot of knobs to turn from Forceful Deflection to Frost Presence to Icebound Fortitude to passive bonuses.

3) Death knights don't have a traditional tanking tree, which feels weird.
Ghostcrawler: Totally valid concern. But we want to try and fix some of the problems with traditional tanking, such as it being not fun enough to attract enough players or utility being marginal when not tanking.

4) Because death knights don't have traditional tanking trees, I can't get all the tanking talents.
Ghostcrawler: True. Also by design. You CAN get all the tools you'll need for tanking in any tree though.

5) Death knights can tank and dps with the same spec.
Ghostcrawler: Maybe. Warrior and paladins can tank and dps with the same spec too, though a hybrid warrior tends to be less than optimal for either role at the cutting-edge of raiding. The same should be true of death knights.

6) Because death knights can tank and dps, it isn't fair to existing plate tanks who have to give up a lot of dps in order to tank.
Ghostcrawler: Also valid. Just remember the design is that any DK or warrior should be able to tank a 5-player dungeon. A dps death knight, with no tanking talents and crappy gear isn't going to be a very impressive Naxxramas MT. Maybe the death knight doesn't have to give up as much as existing tanks, though that may also be something we want to fix in the other classes.

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it's not fair.
Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I'm not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior's best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn't seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That's a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don't know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong. (I've tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren't fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you've seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class' talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn't terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we're onto something. If it isn't your thing, that's cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you're convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn't need to mean inferior. </blockquote></html>