Spooncraft

When you see the new talent trees, there will be several significant tanking changes that I wanted to explain. Don’t worry — they’re all good.

1) Forceful Deflection is gone. Why? It is now a core ability all death knights get!
2) The top of each tree has a really desirable tanking talent. We figure it’s not painful to spend points in tier 1 of any tree. You can, and probably should, get all of these.
3) Near the bottom of each tree is another really desirable tanking talent. You will still be able to grab this talent and sub-spec into other trees, but you won’t be able to get the gold medal in more than one tree.
4) These talents are more predictable and more under your control. For example, we changed Unbreakable Armor to have a 30 / 60 / 100% chance of boosting your armor by 25% whenever both Frost runes are inactive. To balance this, there is a 90 sec internal cooldown (which we will show in a debuff aura). So you can choose when you want the armor buff. Hold that second Frost Rune until just before the enrage or whenever. Stack it with Icebound Fortitude or Anti-Magic Shell (or both) for truly amazing mitigation.
5) I am not trying to imply there are only 2 tanking talents per tree. The point is that there are some talents we can assume all DK tanks will have, and some others that will be more variable (but ideally equal in utility).
6) No, Blade Barrier is not the ultimate tanking talent in Blood.
7) With the disease changes, getting diseases on multiple enemies is much easier than before. We’re also positioning Pestilence to be better at multi-target tanking. A much improved Death and Decay will be nice for pulling, but it’s not Consecrate.
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Forceful Deflection is bonus Parry Rating equal to 25% of your Strength. There is one “rank” and you start with it at level 55.

The concern about saving your Runes for the bonus mitigation is totally valid and we’re just going to have to try it out. We didn’t want the bonus to be up for a very short period of time, and we didn’t want the bonus to be trivial but up nearly all the time. We think it’s okay to have to surrender a little bit of dps (in the form of saving a rune you might have used for Obliterate) in order to boost your survivability periodically — to some extent that is what tanking is all about. You also have core abilities like IBF that you can use if you get caught with the ability on cooldown.

Part of the DK tanking style is that you have high enough dps to generate sufficient threat. Still we recognize that you can get into a situation where say the ret paladin is catching up to your threat level too fast and you need to do [something] to really pour on the threat. If we find that a few DK abilities need to generate extra threat, we can go that route. (src)