#0 - Dec. 20, 2008, 5:40 p.m.
Q u o t e:
The issue wasn't that Bone Shield was too strong per se. It was that when Bone Shield was down, the DK died. Just buffing the DK without nerfing Bone Shield would make them the best tank in the game. Bone Shield was also making them too defensive in PvP, which was much harder to get good testing on during the beta.
Can be found at:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13723762487&sid=1&pageNo=5
GC admits that it was not strong, even goes so far as to say that w/o it up the DK is worthless at tanking... yet it is getting nerfed(having its effectiveness CUT IN HALF). And we are supposed to believe that the frost presence "buff" will save us with its awesome 2-3% more physical mitigation from armor.
If Blizzard thinks that 2-3% physical mitigation from armor makes up for the lack of passive mitigation provided from talents/stances that other tanks get than they are extremely blind. Blizzard doesn't even have a clear direction as to where they are trying to take the DK class. We are NOT avoidance tanks, with tons of avoidance and little mitigation(over a long fight). We are essentially going to be pigeonholed into DPS with the slight chance of OTing adds in boss fights or when the tank goes down we can blow all of our "active mitigation" abilities and stay up for a few seconds... hopefully long enough to win the fight. BUT, we are unable to MT w/o having some form of either passive mitigation or having our active mitigation skills being able to have 100% up time; but if that is he case, we will end up having no "on snap" buttons because our active mitigation abilities ARE our "on snap" buttons.
If we were able to spec 51/51/51 then we should be just about equal with all other tanks for actual tanking abilities... but we can't do that and because of that we are lacking. Blizzard needs to find a way to make ALL of our talent trees equally good at tanking as the other tanking classes, not just gimmicky.
PS: And yes, I have been on PTR and I only got 2.4% more mitigation from my armor with the frost presence change. I know I don't have the highest armor value items, but I certainly don't have low armor. So the 2-3% that I stated above is accurate.
