Blue poster Ghostcrawler has answered many Death Knight questions that beta players have been asking on the official forums:
[BLUE=“http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=2B3F453138BDBF92EC7E1A54FEAD8FF9.app11_05?topicId=9336868666&pageNo=1&sid=2000#1”]I can’t answer all threads of this nature, but these are good questions that several people have wondered about.
Q u o t e:
- Why was taunt removed from Death Grip?
Death Grip is a very powerful ability and we feared that the day might come when we have to increase its cooldown. Long cooldowns are terrible for taunts.
Q u o t e:
- Why was Dark Command given to us when we had two great taunts?
As above, we changed Death Grip. Blood Boil was also starting to feel like a better AE DPS spell than a multi-step taunt. We want all 4 tanks to be viable and came to the conclusion that some abilities just need to be standard. We don’t want DKs to be worthless or even really hard to use on boss fights that require taunt rotations for example.
Q u o t e:
- Is there any plans to increase Death Knight Base Mitigation? If Yes, Can you give us a clue?
If it ends up being too low, we’ll adjust it. Death knights do have high parry rates and have a good number of oh snap abilities on short cooldowns. If you look at other forums, some other tanks are worried they don’t stack up to DKs at the moment.
Q u o t e:
- Why do i have so many buttons to push and so many CDs to keep track of? (DG, DC, IBF, AMS, LB, BB, HoW, Diseases, to name a few)
We wanted DKs to play differently from other classes. Runes, somewhat like energy, is an infinite resource. DKs are not dependent on being hit, which is a first for a tanking class. To balance that, there are more cooldowns.
Q u o t e:
- Is there any plans to give us spam able Aggro-generation skills back?
Abilities that add too much straight threat don’t scale well. Paladins would have been far and away the best tanks for threat in Sunwell if more gear had been available to them. Part of the reason is because their threat scales so well with their dps. We’d like to get away more from +threat abilities for all classes if we can.
Q u o t e:
- Are we supposed to be hitting the Armor Cap? Or an Avoidance cap? Because right now i do not see that happening either way and leaving us kind of… lacking mitigation.
No class should be close to either in Lich King. That was actually a problem in Burning Crusade—witness bears being unable to improve their tanking gear because of the armor cap and the introduction of “Sunwell Radiance” to work around excessively high avoidance values. We think it’s fine for tanks to reach the uncrittable mark, and being uncrushable is no longer an issue. Beyond that, we want you to always have a reason to improve your gear… and always be a little scared of those bosses.[/BLUE]
