Bug fix and update to DK's tanking

I found this which may explain why during a couple of Heroic instances last night I was having so much trouble with damage mitigation. Poor Forian was almost pulling his hair out!

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The ever-helpful Ghostcrawler hit the forums late yesterday with a slew of changes to Death Knight tanking in the form of both bug fixes and buffs. The single biggest "buff" is actually a fairly significant bug fix; Death Knights had half the untalented, ungeared dodge of a Warrior or Paladin, and that was definitely never intended. Between that and a change to Blade Barrier (it's currently activated with all runes on cooldown; it's being changed to activate with only Blood runes on cooldown), Death Knights should see a significant improvement to their avoidance. Threat generation is also getting a nice boost, as Blizzard recognized that Death Knights suffered badly whenever key moves failed to land. Rune Strike is becoming a reactive ability like the Warrior's Revenge, and Frost Strike can no longer be dodged, blocked, or parried. Death and Decay has also been changed to be more competitive with Consecration and Thunder Clap, which is consistent with the overall trend toward AoE tanking effectiveness.

I've healed a number of Death Knight tanks in 5-mans now (you'll be hearing from my grumpy self about this soon) and recognized a few early versions of these issues, certainly in the form of Blade Barrier's often-spotty uptime. While I'm glad that DK's are getting more consistent threat generation, I have to admit that my real concern is the amount of burst they seem to take (something others have noticed as well), so I'm keeping an eye on the tweaks being made.
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This may mean that until the bug fix is applied I can't tank HC's.. half the dodge of an untalented naked warrior is a huge problem in an HC instance!

So guys, the good news from last night is that we were fighting a quite major disadvantage, undoubtedly with better gear this wouldn't be a problem but going in with such a handicap and borderline gear we did incredibly well. I must say finding this info has cheered me up by a huge amount, I was ready to hang up my sword this morning...

Surviving despite a mechanical flaw, well done! It will be nice to see the balancing of things. Maybe DKs are also next in line for a nerf? They seem to be able to do anything really well.

I think things are balancing out.. Certainly I don't come top of the DPS while tanking anymore, though like a prot palie I do more damage than a prot warrior, this is just the mechanics of the class.

I suspect most of the cases which show DK's as overpowered come down to luck, gear and player. I've been grouped with quite a few other DK's and seen both extremes of dps from them.

Last night in the heroics I was far from OP - we pretty much wiped on every boss and the other DK that was with us was bottom of the DPS, even below me while I was tanking.

Yes a well geared well played DK is formidable, but I think that can be said about all of the classes. My greatest fear is that whether the class needs tweaking or not that if there are too many cries of OP then Blizzard will be heavy handed in their 'fix' resulting in another broken class with the joy taken out of it.

Having started WoW as a feral druid more than 4 years ago (at that time this was a joke class), then a Marksman hunter 3 years ago (again a joke class of the time) then a retribution Pali before they got fixed, you can see that I have played most of the classes from when they were simply not even wanted in a group. It would be a shame to move the other way from good to joke.

Let's hope for the best. Most classes seem to be overpowered at the moment, so maybe the DK will not descend all the way to joke.