4) Because death knights don’t have traditional tanking trees, I can’t get all the tanking talents.
Ghostcrawler: True. Also by design. You CAN get all the tools you’ll need for tanking in any tree though.

5) Death knights can tank and dps with the same spec.
Ghostcrawler: Maybe. Warrior and paladins can tank and dps with the same spec too, though a hybrid warrior tends to be less than optimal for either role at the cutting-edge of raiding. The same should be true of death knights.

6) Because death knights can tank and dps, it isn’t fair to existing plate tanks who have to give up a lot of dps in order to tank.
Ghostcrawler: Also valid. Just remember the design is that any DK or warrior should be able to tank a 5-player dungeon. A dps death knight, with no tanking talents and crappy gear isn’t going to be a very impressive Naxxramas MT. Maybe the death knight doesn’t have to give up as much as existing tanks, though that may also be something we want to fix in the other classes.

7) Because death knights need to spend so few talents on tanking relative to warriors or paladins who spend a great chunk of talents on tanking, it’s not fair.
Ghostcrawler: This is a valid concern. First, I’m not sure the numbers are all that different. Second, gear and skill probably have a much bigger impact on tanking effectiveness than spec. Third, a lot of a warrior’s best tanking abilities are core to the class, though talents definitely help (and a few talents help enormously). Fourth, and most important, it doesn’t seem like smart design to keep designing trees in such a way that chase off tanks.

That’s a pretty controversial statement, so I should elaborate. We don’t know for sure that the Prot tree scares off tanks. A lot of you adore tanking just as it is, thank you, and I’m not trying to tell you you’re wrong. (I’ve tanked for years and I still love it.) There are some things that aren’t fun about tanking that have nothing to do with the prot trees: inability to solo, stress at wiping the raid, stress at often having to lead and mark, stress at having to play every night lest your friends have to cancel the run, etc.

On the other hand, we do think the prot trees (and even Feral) could use some improvement, and you’ve seen a lot of those changes already. Starting over with a class’ talents would be a lot of work and probably really anger players, so that isn’t terribly attractive. But here is a new class without a lot of baggage, and a chance to try something different with the talent trees. Clearly a lot of people are excited about it, so maybe we’re onto something. If it isn’t your thing, that’s cool. But make that decision for aesthetic or other reasons, not because you’re convinced DKs will be bad tanks. Unconventional doesn’t need to mean inferior.

I’m not sure we’ll offer two-handed tanking weapons for DK tanks, but that doesn’t mean they all are supposed to dual-wield. Even among warriors, there are some who recommend using +threat weapons for some fights. If we design DKs to use dps weapons even when tanking, we’ll make sure to stack their survivability stats in other ways.

Sigils are tricky things to offer as quest rewards because 9 other classes can’t even use them.

Also remember Naxx has like 15 bosses and they all drop a lot of loot. The loot table for that place is gigantic.

Further down:

If we don’t create two-handed tanking weapons, that does not mean death knights are supposed to dual-wield to tank.

Unless we change things (and we might), dual-wielding against a boss is not a good idea since you will be on the receiving end of more parry-based fast attacks.

I also would not look at itemization and make any assumptions that we intend for end-game DKs to have lower survivability or threat generation than the 3 other tanking classes. If you end up wearing plate with wasted block and a lot of defense that benefits you less than a warrior, there will be other things to make up for it. Imagine we added a core DK ability that gives you +defense and +dodge whenever you wield a two-handed weapon. We could even make than a runeforge enchant. Imagine that DKs get double the benefit of parry on defense rating since they don’t benefit from block. We have lots of knobs to turn.

Or imagine this scenario: you can have a pair of 20% spell vulnerability buffs or a pair of 20% haste buffs. Maybe there isn’t space for all 4 characters. Are the encounters designed assuming 20% vulnerability? Or 20% haste? Both? Neither?

You can’t have a unique buff from all 30 specs in the raid. You probably don’t want to swap specs in and out for each boss. Some guilds probably will, though I doubt you want all the bosses to be balanced with that assumption.

I suppose we could make 5 of the specs just suck for raiding and expect that you bring the other 25, but that feels kind of lame too. There was certainly deflation following the moment when DKs thought Ebon Plague or some other buff would *insure* a spot in the raid. Is there a class and spec who is happy not to have a raid-mandatory buff or role?

All of this ignores the debuff limit, since that is more of a technical issue and not a design one. Though still, do you want to try and understand what’s happeneing when you’re looking at a boss with 60 or 100 debuff icons on it?

It’s not a trivial problem.

Pestilence is an almost required button push any time you face more than one opponent. It went from niche to core.

We are looking at Anti-Magic Shell as possibly being runic power or even free. We need to get the remaining bugs knocked out of it to see how it feels.

Increasing the duration is an easy change.

This doesn’t really change the role of the ability at all. It just makes it more consistent to apply. Unfortunately the timing of the change turned out not to be ideal.

This talent required new technology, which we either got too late for this build or ended up causing bugs somewhere. We’ll get it fixed.

A friend of mine once said that game design was like working in a sausage factory. The end result might be tasty, but you don’t always want to see what goes on to make the sausage

Pull with Icy Touch, follow with Plague Strike, Pestilience the disease to everything around you and top it off with Death and Decay.

For those Unholy DK’s out there you can top that off with Unholy Blight and follow up with a Obliterate on your target (or open if you want) to activate Desecrate for the AE snare and +10% damage.

This wasn’t intended as a nerf to DK health. If their health ends up too low, we can boost it through talents or the core stamina of the class.

We don’t want to have Frost Aura affect threat because we pulled all of the +threat talents from all classes. We didn’t want to have to design encounters assuming every tank had those talents.