Feedback: Death Knights

[Brutus-2100700 (Brutus)]

I assume we all know who Yoda is and his ability to tank / play tanks - here is his words on BDK from his latest upload.

”Blood DK is actually the worst tank at everything right now. Well, it’s better at self-sustain than warrior, but like it’s middle of the pack self- sustain in terms of like tankiness. Like without not counting healing, it’s by far the worst.

It also has the lowest damage and also doesn’t have a raid buff other than grip. Uh, so yeah, Blood DK is definitely the worst tank in the game.”

Mimics everything we have all be saying about BDK and goes to show the top end tanks agree.

@Blizzard time to address this and your design goals:

@Linxy

Developers’ notes: Going into Midnight we had a few pain points with Blood Death Knights that we are looking to address. On initial pull, Blood has an incredibly long ramp up time to both get their defensives rolling but also their offensive power. The main culprit is due to how we turned Boneshield into a damage throughput resource because of the existence of Shattering Bone and Insatiable Blade. Going into Midnight we have removed Shattering Bone and re-distributed its power into Blood’s baseline damage abilities for a more consistent throughput that doesn’t require all the hoops to jump through to start dealing damage. On the topic of Boneshield, we’ve also reduced the number of abilities that deduct from it such as Tombstone and Bonestorm. As a tank you have a lot of things to consider in your role and adding what was essentially a third resource to spend felt like it was slightly too much. Not to say we can’t explore this design in the future, but we will need to be much more cautious and deliberate with these ability designs to ensure its not encroaching on the already existing resource system of Death Knights.*The other notable change for Blood is focused on making them more reliable in high end Mythic+ keys. Blood historically (outside of the very strong Sepulcher of the First Ones tier set) has been great at low to mid-level keys but started to fall off at higher end keys where their Death Strike healing can’t overcome the damage they start to take. To alleviate some of this we’ve made a pass on Death Strike and all its modifiers to reduce its overall healing but at the same time we’ve re-distributed that power into their baseline defensives, talents, and Boneshield. The goal being to make their damage intake a little more predictable at higher keys and prevent them from “falling over” before they can start to get their other defensives rolling. We love that Blood has carved a niche for itself as the self-sufficient tank and we don’t want that to change. We look forward to hearing your feedback to the above changes as well as the other changes not mentioned as we continue into Alpha and beyond

We are continually providing the feedback you stated you looked forward to hearing and yet look at the state of the class.

Roll the changes back to early alpha/beta when we competed or give us meaningful changes to allow us to not be in a WORSE position than we were in TWW, which oh look we were the worst tank…. cause that is the way its heading. This isn’t just dooming, this is us asking for HELP for a spec you have neglected for way too long now and has languished as the worst tank in the game still paying for our crimes in Shadowlands.

Meet your design intent, restore our healing potential, buff our tankiness and boost our damage to levels or relevancy, maybe throw in a raid buff as an apology.