I ran a few keys for raderio’s break the meta event and I realized that BDK just has nothing going for it now aside from grips in raid. It’s no secret that their changes to DS missed the mark with their “tank tuning.” But something that caught my eye was this paragraph:
- “In The War Within, we’re changing Death Strike to only heal the death knight for a percentage of damage taken from a given damage event once, to make it scale more like other tank mitigation mechanics.”
The problem with this entire paragraph is that Death Strike is a unique mechanic, and the entire class is designed around it scaling differently than other, passive, sources of mitigation. There was no effort to change how the rest of the class is played or change the design, they just ruined their primary source of mitigation and gave a slight armor buff.
If they wanted to go forward with their plan of making Death Strike being less impactful, a good place to start would be bringing back the extended rune weapon. This is a quick way to increase their baseline tankiness, and DS could be adjusted accoringly if need be. If they did this right now without adjusting DS, Blood DK would still be worse than prot paladin.
Tank specs in general are significantly stronger than what they were in SL. Protection Paladin gets 25% parry and 10% block upon casting Avenger’s Shield. Dancing Rune Weapon gives 35% parry. This would not break the game, or break blood DK.