Death Knight Talents disappointing for tanks

#1 - Oct. 23, 2011, 5:19 p.m.

I very much like the idea of the new talent system. Making core class abilities baseline, making talents real choices to allow for differences between characters and customization for different fights; these are awesome ideas.

But the DK talent trees don't seem to follow this. Instead of making core class abilities baseline, Blood tanks appear to be about to lose an ability in 3 talent tiers. We'll have to choose between Lichborne and Bone Shield, Death Pact and Vamp Blood, Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment. And we will need to give up a core ability if we want to get the raid cooldown we need.

I'm not sure what's going on here, because every other talent tree has cool new abilities, or choices that are similar to the choices people make today simply by choosing a spec. Blood tanks, though, are just straight up losing abilities.

Don't mistake, DK's also have 3 awesome talent choices. And I'm not about to complain about numbers or balance, since things are bound to change greatly. When half of our trees are nerfing or dumbing down rather than providing for customization that seems like a pretty big disconnect.

Kaivax

Community Manager

#9 - Nov. 9, 2011, 10:40 p.m.

10/23/2011 10:24 AMPosted by Ironicpally
But the DK talent trees don't seem to follow this. Instead of making core class abilities baseline, Blood tanks appear to be about to lose an ability in 3 talent tiers. We'll have to choose between Lichborne and Bone Shield, Death Pact and Vamp Blood, Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment. And we will need to give up a core ability if we want to get the raid cooldown we need.

First and foremost in discussions of these sorts: All unreleased content subject to change.

That being said, I'm not even that dismayed about what our talent spread looks like. We currently have *more* mitigation CDs than any other tank; if DK baseline mitigation is balanced enough, I can reasonably see us dropping Bone Shield or LB (especially considering a lot of progression blood tanks even now choose not to spec into LB).

On the RE point: Everybody hates RE anyway, and every talent in that tier is a rune-regeneration talent. If MoP went live today, I'd definitely take Blood Tap over RE.

As of our current plan for 5.0, Blood Tap has no cooldown, is off the GCD, and can store up to 6 charges.