Wishful thinking Combat tank spec?

[shadowboy]

I doubt they'd remove combat as a dps spec. If anything they'd fork it off into two specs like they did with feral druids. Blood dks are the ONLY example of a dps spec that lost the ability to dps (similarly, frost and unholy dks were the only tank specs that lost the ability to tank).

[Tarazet]

Oh really? You've clearly got no freaking idea how that works. I'll give you a hint: part of tanking is getting agro and holding it.

It needs to be coordinated, but it can still be used effectively to reset a tank's stacks so that you can solo tank certain encounters that otherwise need 2 tanks. In the end, though, the Druid's own HotW is better for this purpose.

[Verain]

I doubt they'd remove combat as a dps spec. If anything they'd fork it off into two specs like they did with feral druids. Blood dks are the ONLY example of a dps spec that lost the ability to dps (similarly, frost and unholy dks were the only tank specs that lost the ability to tank).

And note that it was under special conditions- they basically admitted that they failed hard with the DK specs.

[shadowboy]

I don't think they failed. Blood and frost were both viable tanks in wrath (I had tanked with both specs on my dk back then). The reason the changed it is because it was a balancing nightmare. They were basically balancing 6 specs and trying to cram 6 specs into the design space of 3 (which is incidentally exactly why they split feral combat into feral and guardian). It was a neat idea and neat experiment, but honestly, the payoff per work ratio wasn't cutting it. By making blood a tank-only spec made the design more compelling. It took away the notion of "ok, which damage ability do I take in tier 3 of the talents so I can unlock that sweet mitigation one in tier 4." They needed to make that change to dks for dks to work with the minor talent tree overhaul of cataclysm (and there's no way hybrid tank/dps for all 3 specs would work under the MoP design).