We haven’t heard much from any blue or developer in regards to Death Knights or anything for that matter since WotLK release. I’m sure with the next patch looming we’ll start to hear more blue feedback. Yesterday GC hit on a few tank topics and also chimed in on a gear itemization thread.

Tank scaling is terrible.

Ghostcrawler
It would be elegant if a 5-player run took 1 tank, 3 dps, 1 healer and a 25-player run took 5 tanks, 15 dps and 5 healers.

It just doesn’t work out that way. We don’t think we can offer enough interesting encounters if they all have to require 5 tanks and we would have to severely punish stacking healers if the encounters were designed for 5, otherwise you’d probably be able to trivialize the encounter. (Usually we do that in the form of berzerk timers.)

It’s just two competing design goals and we’re pretty okay with how it has landed. We did try and make it so that non-tank specs can tank 5-player dungeons, and dual spec will help as well.

Our goal with dual-spec though is more that you can tank heroics on weekends and raid as dps during the week, not that you tank the trash then switch to dps for the boss. Doubtless players will still do the latter, but we aren’t designing raid encounters knowing that players have access to dual spec. Don’t expect to see 12 tank fights or that sort of nonsense.

Tanking, too easy?

Ghostcrawler
We definitely wanted to make tanking, especially 5-player dungeons and the introductory raids, a little easier.

We also wanted to improve the AE-tanking capabilities of all tanks.

We don’t think the threat game is what is fun about tanking. It’s a largely invisible and confusing number that traditionally required a mod in order to be tracked. We do want tanks to care about threat (or else they just stack mitigation and blame threat on the rogue) and we want them to care about dps too.

Remember that the old Naxx was the pinnacle of 40-player raiding. The new Naxx was designed to be more like Karazhan, or even a litle easier, considering that some of the Kara fights (the dragons, Prince and Aran in particular) required a lot of coordination.

Ulduar and subsequent raids will be a step up in difficulty, and I would also expect to see a lot more of the “hard mode” challenges, like “3 drakes up.” We want to give players a chance to really test their mettle and have “server first” mean something and all that. We just want to do it without shutting 90% of players out of the instances — arguably one of the coolest aspects of the game considering all of the customized art and sound — and especially not the first couple of raids.

If we’re having this conversation about Icecrown, then I would admit we have a problem.

Could we get a statement on itemization?

Ghostcrawler
It is not our goal to make sure that every piece you can get is perfect for your class or spec. A lot of the game’s depth comes from those tough decisions when you’re not sure if a piece is really an upgrade or not, or if that wasted stat is worth the other enormous stat on the piece, or if you are better off passing a minor upgrade to someone else for which it is a huge upgrade.

Upgrades are also boring if every piece = your previous piece but with 2 on all of the stats.

If someone just can’t do their job because they lack critical gear, that’s a slightly different issue. There have been cases where a critical item (say a tanking shield) was too rare, or upgrades were too hard to come by (say druid or paladin tanks in Sunwell). We think there is a little bit of that going on at the moment, but not too much, and of course we like to add more drops, vendor items, craftables and enchants and gems over time (and need room to do so).