Enchant weapon - titanguard removed

Had this enchant gone live it would have become THE enchant for nearly all tanks. It would not have been an interesting choice. We would have had to keep introducing higher tiers of the same enchant, or else players would just keep using this version for perpetuity. We put Stamina already on many items. We don't think your weapon needs one as well. I received messages from several tanks for very prominent guilds asking us to please not go forward with this enchant. They understood why it was bad for the game.

Death knights have access to superior enchants in part because they do not have a shield or ranged weapon slot and the stats provided by those items.

The PTR is for testing. If you find yourself frustrated that things change between the PTR and live, I would suggest you stop paying attention to the PTR notes. Even if a change like this had already gone live, we probably would have changed it anyway. We did not like what this enchant would have done for the game.

P.S. I had to ban about 6 people in this thread. While we accept criticism, this is not the place for rants about how you hate Blizzard or our development staff. Obscene language is not permitted on the forums. Please be adults.

Q u o t e:
I can't understand why GC recently acknowledged that the lack of tanking sigils was an issue, and that they would be added.

We added that sigil and enchant because death knights had difficulty reaching the defense "cap" in part because they don't have shields, ranged weapons or often tanking weapons. A DK who gears solely for survivability in this way is probably also going to have threat problems. Part of the reason we make tanks have to manage threat is so their gear choices aren't always as simple as "whatever gives me the best survivability."

There are already stamina enchants on many pieces of gear. Casters can go that route of stacking spellpower on as much gear as possible, but if they ignore int and mana regen, that spellpower will be for naught. With tanks, we have found that given the choice between stamina and anything else (assuming you are comparing things of equivalent level) stamina will always win. One of the few enchants where you actually have a decison would be replaced by yet another stamina enchant. I am pretty confident the same thing would happen with a stamina to cloak enchant.

Here is the player's point of view: Ah, an enchant for my weapon. That will help me survive and help out my healers, therefore making me a slightly better tank. Maybe I'll be slightly better prepared for KT or Sarth + 3 or Ulduar. Awesome.

Except... here is the developer's point of view: Okay, we just buffed every tank in the game by 750 health. That means we now have to make every mob hit slightly harder to compensate. Otherwise we are just buffing tank survivability for no reason. The net effect to you would be pretty negligible in the long run, while any tank who chose not to put stamina on his or her weapon would suddenly be at a disadvantage.

Q u o t e:
Is there however a plan to have a different tanking enchant that isn't stam oriented, maybe a proc to take 400 damage less on next hit etc, or is Lifeward, BC Potency etc supposed to be the ones?

I mean, it's obvious the stam enchant was an attempt to add something that would have covered a gap in available enchants. Is this just going to be a retry for something new, or is it more "Let's just buff /change the current ones like Lifeward and Black Magic to be better and fill this".

We'd like to add more interesting tanking weapon enchants, but have to be very careful not to make them fall into the same problem as Titanguard. Ideally we would like to be able to design encounters without the assumption that every tank has X on their blade. It would be nice if even putting something on your weapon to increase damage (and therefore threat) felt like a viable alternative.