If people are trying for 100% shield uptime, youll always feel like you’re lacking. In the end, healers are expected to heal something. If they think you need to be at 100% all the time, then they force you into overhealing. If a healer lets you dip down 25%, they would see you’re doing a good deal of healing yourself.

That’s a good point. I think what we were really hoping to address is the perception that a death knight tank must use every single Unholy and Frost rune on Death Strike, and game Runic Empowerment procs to generate even more Death Strikes. If you had to do all that to be successful at all, then that would be a problem. The spec isn’t designed with that necessity in mind, though. Blood is expected to use (as an estimate, and assuming effective usage) around 6-7 Death Strikes a minute; any additional Death Strikes are helpful of course, but they shouldn’t be mandatory. Blood is balanced against the other tanking specs with this assumption in mind. To be fair, one of the drawbacks of the active mitigation that Blood has, contrasted with the passive mitigation of other specs, is that it does require more work – but the trade-off is that death knights have an enviable array of tools to manage incoming damage and promote survivability. That’s not to say that those tools must be used flawlessly – the spec is designed around using those tools at an adequate level. We don’t generally balance specs around a theoretical maximum; in many cases, those levels aren’t achievable by most human players in an actual encounter and only show up in simulations. Instead, we design around what players can reasonably accomplish.

We also recognize that some of you have concerns about Death Strike overhealing, and that it represents a wasted mastery. We didn’t go the route of Death Strike over heals creating a ‘bubble’, because it seemed that it would create even more pressure to use Death Strike at every conceivable opportunity. Nonetheless, it’s not off the table completely, and it’s something we might consider for the future.

On that note, Death Runes are tied to Death Strike to promote flexibility. It’s too easy to allow the discussion to center around a hypothetical Patchwerk style fight without external support debuffs, where threat doesn’t matter, and the only relevant issue is absorbing every single point of damage possible. Tanking is dynamic though, most fights are more complex than that and the situation can change suddenly and require immediate reaction. Adds run in, things get loose, you may need to move out of fire and then silence a ranged caster that didn’t move with you, and so forth. Death Strike is a core ability, as noted, but keeping the runes it generates as Death Runes helps make it more likely that when a complication arises that the tank has the right runes for the job. (Source)

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