Save the Death Knights

We understood that with a decision like this there were going to be players excited about the change and those who hated it. Given the size of our player base, that's going to be the reality of almost every game change we make. That doesn't make it any easier for folks on the "losing" side of the debate. :(

We're definitely sympathetic to players who liked having three tanking trees. We liked it too and we kept it for a long time.

One the first things I was told when I got into this business* was that game designers have to learn, if you'll excuse the expression, to be able to kill their babies. We thought the old design was starting to hold us, and you, back.




* - from the immortal Sandy Petersen, veteran of much pen and paper and electronic game design.

Q u o t e:
Could you clarify that you haven't given up on the idea that the basic tank toolkit is available to all specs for tanking 5 man instances/heroics in Cata?

In other words, we could still see Frost and Unholy tanking heroics. And Arms/fury. And ret.

That is still the intent. Otherwise we would make Defensive Stance / Frost Presence et al. talents and not something all warriors / DKs can do.

Think about it this way: you can go into dungeons at very low levels (well DKs technically can't), and those 5 points spent in a talent tree aren't really going to make you a much better tank. As levels increase and talents become more meaningful, then tank spec starts to count for more. I wouldn't MT or OT a raid without a true tank spec. We'll have to see where the heroics end up, but at the point where you overgear them, then you're probably fine to use say Ret with a shield (or maybe even without a shield).

Q u o t e:
Well, kiss off and listen to the people paying for your service for a change, yeah your text is in blue and you feel special but all you are is a tool of a corperate giant, if it comes down to not getting or playing after the changes roll in, then I'll do that,

This is the point in the thread where I ask if you read all of the other posts around yours where various DK players say they like the change. So clearly this isn't one of those deals where the entire community is united in opposition to our idea (and to be fair, even in some of those cases, we're going to go ahead with what we think is the right decision anyway).

If you're not having fun, then by all means take a break and check out some of the other awesome games out there. But don't expect that threats of quitting will force us to make a change you want. We'd end up with a pretty interesting game. :)

Q u o t e:
Ghost. I know your releasing the info in a few days but are you planning on keeping some of the more popular blood dps abiltiies by moving them to frost /unholy?

Like Dancing Rune Weapon and Hysteria?

And how about the good tanking talents in Frost / Unholy ?

Such as AMZ, Unbreakable Armor, Bone Shield?

We'll talk about some of that in the preview, but we have some tough decisions to make on other talents. On the one hand, we want fun dps talents to be more available to dps specs, but on the other hand, some of those dps talents are fun for tanks too.

The same logic applies to survival abilities in other trees. AMZ really feels like an Unholy talent to me now just because it's been there for so long. Tanks would love to have it though. We'll see. Beta will be a great time to offer your two cents, even if you don't get a chance to participate in the beta itself.

Q u o t e:
GC, any chance that we'll have a hard-hitting 2h physical dps spec? I adored blood dps (I abhor tanking), and I hate dw dps as well.

Pet class? No thx :(

It's possible we'll keep Frost as a DW and 2H tree just for that reason. It's just a matter of a few talent points at the moment that make a difference, unlike say Enhancement where a lot of mechanics are tied into dual-wielding. It's also possible, if a little harder, to make an Unholy build sans Ghoul.

Q u o t e:
I assume Blood was singled out as the tanking tree because the majority of high end tanks were already using Blood?

Not really, though the fact that that's the case probably makes the change make more sense conceptually to a lot of people.

We thought Unholy had a pretty strong kit with its diseases and pet, and Frost has gotten a lot more popular lately. Frost has always been about mixing in a lot of Frost spells with weapon damage and the DW kit has worked out pretty well. Blood on the other hand was the tree that we designed to be the "safe" one (meaning not too far out there) that focused on weapon damage and might appeal to current warriors. The closest thing it has to a real kit is the self-healing component, and that actually translates well to tanking. While there are some unusual talents in Blood, those are also some of the ones players skip over in preference for useful but boring +damage talents. The tree has a lot of those, which we need to tone back for Cataclysm anyway, giving us a lot of holes to fill. So the Blood tree was going to cause a lot of reworking anyway. Plus there were mechanics that just never quite gelled, like Heart Strike itself.

I know there are DK players who loved Blood, but they never seemed as passionate as the Frost and Unholy players. I'm not saying it was a popularity content. But I can imagine a lot more upset players if we had made Unholy the tanking tree.

I don't mean to downplay the change. We knew this would be controversial. I take full responsibility for any grief it may personally cause. :(

Q u o t e:
Why kill blood dps and make blood the tanking tree when the original design was for Frost to be the tanking tree.

We just think the current Frost dps tree is cooler than the current Blood dps tree. It's subjective, I realize.

Q u o t e:
And? So that some how makes it right? I'm willing to bet just as many people are opposed to the change as those who are for it, maybe more even. That said even if everyone in the community opposes the change we all know you are gonna go through with it anyway. So really I guess all the back and forth and QQ is ultimately pointless.

Well, it's not up to a vote, if that's what you mean. We use community feedback so we can make informed decisions. That's a big difference from just implementing whatever the community wants.

The (somewhat angry) post to which I was referring said that we needed to listen to our paying customers. We do! Here we are. But that doesn't mean all of our paying customers agreed with his or her point. The real message of that post was "Listen to me and tune out everyone else," which isn't a fair thing to say on forums with so many participants.

Q u o t e:
You'll never here the end of it if this doesn't happen though.

Yep. :( I should have added my standard no ponies promised.

Q u o t e:
Apparently a lot of people also think the Frost tanking tree is cooler than the Blood tanking tree. Maybe Blood is just an effective but sucktastically boring tree?

That's kind of what I was saying. The Frost tree mostly works, so let's not reinvent it. The Blood tree needs a lot of work, and in the meantime DKs have some tanking problems, so let's fill up a tree that needs new talents with talents needed by tanks.

But I know some players like the Blood tree as is, so I don't want to oversell that point.

Q u o t e:
Would you be willing to admit this switch is really about creating greater tanking homogenization between warriors/druids/pallys/dk's?

I guess I'm not sure what you mean by homogenization here. We're usually a lot more reluctant to homogenize the tanking classes than many players are asking for (see most of this forum for the past 18 months).

We just wanted to be able to offer DKs more talents to help them tank and make tanking fun. We initially wanted DKs to use a different rotation when they tanked than whey they did dps, but that really didn't work out so well, and we think part of the problem is there just wasn't much talent difference between a dps and tank DK.

So if you mean homogenization in the sense that we think dedicated tanking trees are easier to design, then yes, we're going that route. But we're not homogenizing abilities and stats. Druids I suspect will still have the highest health going into Cataclysm. Warriors will still have much more mobility.

(In before "What are DKs and paladins the best at?" since I only used two examples.)

Q u o t e:
I would send you some chocolates and some sake from Japan if you were to get this working.

I loves me some sake!

(But please don't actually send it.)