There have been a couple of post on the forums that GC has responded to in regards to Death Knights. First was Errogants plea to have DW made -at least- viable. GC responds with three words that give a glimmer of hope with little detail:

Ghostcrawler
Next major patch.

Jargamain made the arguement that it isn’t really that DK’s are overpowered, it is simply that Blizzard designs boss raids (in Ulduar) around having a DK tank. GC responds:

Ghostcrawler
You know, those encounter designers are right across the hall here. I am waving at them right now. We all work pretty closely together to match the boss abilities to class abilities. We work even closer together on the numbers. When someone is tuning Frozen Blows or Imbalancing Strike, they do that knowing what the stam pools, mitigation, avoidance and cooldowns are of appropriately geared tanks.

That’s not to say boss design is irrelevant. Say for example we made a raid with one boss, like Eye of Eternity. Now say Feral druids were slightly better at that fight. Does that mean druids are overpowered for that encounter?

There are 14 Ulduar bosses. If DKs are better at tanking 5 of those does that mean DKs are overpowered? If the next tier of content has bosses that druids are better at tanking, does that make things equal?

We want them to all be close ideally. Since we don’t want to give every tank the exact same stats and gear they are never going to be 100% equal. The trick is discovering how much of a delta is too much (and it’s an answer that’s hard to generate with math alone).

Jabi was a warrior that must have got owned by a DK.

Is it balanced that DKs regularly do 2-3x my damage in 2v2 Even though they have a multitude of damage reduction abilities(let’s not even talk about frost presence), armor ignoring stirkes that regularly crit for 7-8k on 800 resil, and a ranged spammable snare?

I think the highest I’ve ever MS crit a DK for was somewhere in the 1700 ballpark.
I get scourgestrike crit regularly for ~7200.

Please answer why it’s fair not only for DKs to have massive utility BUT double my damage. I’d really like to know.

Ghostcrawler
MS hits for physical damage. DKs wear plate. SS hits for shadow damage. Warriors wear plate.

MS requires rage. SS requires two runes and two diseases to already be active on the target.

SS hits. MS hits and causes a healing debuff.

You can’t just compare two abilities out of context like this. Shred likely does more damage than MS or SS. Many rogue attacks hit for far less. I’m not sure what conclusions you can draw from such facts.

Now, if you have evidence that over the course of a match the DK is consistently doing much more damage than you, that might be something worth digging into.

On a side note, you can now log into the site and comment using your Facebook account. At the moment, you can see the option to log in above the comment box for each post, more integration will be coming soon.