Please revert death strike/blood shield changes

This is a plea to Blizzard to revert atleast one of the below changes.


  • Death Strike can now only heal the Death Knight for a percentage of damage taken from a given damage event once.
  • Blood Shield’s cap is now 50% of the Death Knight’s maximum health (was 100%) and the cap is no longer temporarily increased by Vampiric Blood.
    • Developers’ notes: This should not affect how much Blood Shield Death Knights are able to generate while actively tanking, but will reduce how large a barrier they are able to accumulate while off-tanking.

I think the 2nd change listed is the worst. Even current patch, their justification is only true if you just dont press vampiric blood or take significant amounts of damage. It effectively caps the benefit we get from mastery going forward in this expansion, other tanks won’t have this issue with their mitigation but BDK will.

The Death Strike change is just bad and makes the spec feel awkward to play. Intuitively if you’re low HP you should want to press death strike to heal yourself to full, but after the changes that’s oftentimes just wrong to do now.

The buff also bugs out once in a long while when the incoming damage is very high (M+) and I just die because my Death Strike removed it but healed me for the minimum amount.

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  • Blood Shield’s cap is now 50% of the Death Knight’s maximum health (was 100%) and the cap is no longer temporarily increased by Vampiric Blood.

This pretty much killed mastery stacking, while allowing less mastery to be needed to soft cap. No one will aim for 100%+ mastery now.

Personally I feel like this kills a Class Theme playstyle and RP. No longer the Mastering the art Blood shed.

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Honestly I feel like a lot of people in general just don’t like the new death Strike. We’re not significantly less squishy so it feels like the spec just plays way worse for no reason.

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