They’ve changed how the various tanks have worked, over the years. Often with massive changes.
But the Death Strike model seems to be a sacred cow for some reason.
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LOL! Says the warrior that wants to remain God moded. I’ve tanked for years and DF went a little crazy with tanks lmao. LFG will be just fine without your insecurities 
Were you responding to me, or some other warrior further up the post that you failed to hit the reply button to? 
i’m wondering the same thing. I did notice when i switched to warrior for DF that my survivabilty went way up. On Monk, it was just too difficult to stay alive. 
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Blood DKs have horrible design. Either they’re immortal, or they get one tapped from 100%.
If you change deathstrike too much you might need to redesign the class which is about healing, unlike other tanks that have either mobility, evade or pure mitigation via shields etc, BDK doesn’t have either.
Lets said they rework death strike in to just a cooldown, how the bdk is suppose to actually mitigate the tanking damage is taking?
Every class has their own way, the real issue here is that they gave to every tank class sustained heals on their own, that is suppose to be the dk way of tanking or at least it was.
Wether the tank heals a lot or not a healer is always gonna be needed in the group, if on very high keys people don’t use a healer for whatever reason is on them and their way of communicating and playing since the coordination and strat are something that not everyone can pull off.
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Which is fine, and something they should probably do, if the long-standing DK model is problematic.
Designing the entire combat system for everyone else around DK’s relying on Death Strike… that seems poor.
Using Druids again as a reference, they’ve changed many times, largely since Blizzard can’t figure out what to do with them.
They were all about having the most armor but no cooldowns.
Then they were about having a huge health pool and being a mana sponge.
Then they tried making them a dodge tank (LOL remember that? didn’t turn out well)
Then they gave them flat mitigation
Then they gave them short-term defensives (only to remove half of them)
Then they made them Lunar Bears
They had Death Strike, then they didn’t. They had a ranged silence, then they didn’t. They had the most health of all tanks, then they didn’t. etc. etc. etc.
But, again, DK design is a sacred cow for some reason. /shrug
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DK is a hero class, whatever that means for Blizz
Hero class means you don’t start at level 1.
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Dk design itself wasn’t problematic when it was contained, adding self-sustain to all other tanks meant that they had to keep buffing dks self sustain so they kept their niche, to the point that a blood dk in BFA had less armor than a boomkin to compensate their healing.
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I think this is a big part of it. The relative difference in survivability between tanks and literally everyone else is obscene. All mobs have to be tuned around tank survivability, because the expectation is that the tank is going to run in and mass aggro everything into a murderball and nobody else can get hit without instantly falling over.
I think a big part of what’s wrong with tanks is the ability to self-heal. Clearly Blood DK’s are by far the worst, but many tanks can do significant self-healing as well. I don’t mind tanks having great mitigation abilities and cooldowns, with a much larger “effective health” pool than anyone else, that’s their job. But when they can self-fill that effective health pool back up more effectively than the healer, that’s just stepping on toes.
Imagine if healing/dps classes were all given a hunter-style pet that could AOE taunt and had massive survivability and self-sustain, so that these pets could effectively tank high M+ dungeons and people were running them without tanks. Even if having a tank class were to be technically more efficient, that the healer/dps classes had this option at all would (and should) be cause for complaint.
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That’s my whole point.
Who gives a crap about the DK’s “niche”? Blizzard never gave a damn about anybody else’s niche.
All tanks went through changes, you kinda to some point answer your own question definitely Blizzard has cared about dk niche. To some point I’ve said before that frost dks would have made a more balanced tank spec but it’s also Blizzard that pushed blood dks to be the tank spec.
Druids probably went through the most changes, but they still had their time to shine many times. The advantage of blood dk often has been that it always has been an ok tank as self-healing always gave them a niche.
What’s a Druid tank’s “niche” been?
They’ve never had a consistent niche. Why do DK’s need one? Why does Blizzard need to move heaven and earth to keep DK’s with their “niche”?
Maybe the DK “niche” that Ghostcrawler decided on during Wrath alpha was a dumb idea.
Which is Blizzard trying to have their cake and eat it too. If the problem is lumping together mitigation and healing, you can’t have a class that the bulk portion of their effective mitigation is healing.
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Because druid class fantasy isn’t as clear as blood dks, blood dks niche is obvious from the start. A lot of tanks went through reworks and even by keeping dk self sustain a thing blood dk still have changed a lot over time.
You certainly can and I don’t see why not.
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More often this:
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Let me help you with reading comprehension. This is called a conditional statement. The below is the condition. Note the comma.
This means, the following MUST include the former idea as a condition, when that idea is flowing from that condition.
So no, you can’t.
You can disagree with Blizzard, or even disagree Blizzard is doing that. But the statement as written is logically sound. I described that accurately as,
Let me help you 
You certainly can have a tank with his mitigation being based on self healing.
It is not a problem to lump mitigation and self-healing together.
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