#0 - March 13, 2009, 7:56 a.m.
The three biggest overpowering factors about Death Knights right now are:
1) The "Shadowfrost" allows for the Death Knight to kill players at a range. It does not rely on bigger opportunities of burst
2) A Death Knight can stick on a target more easily than a Warrior or Paladin because of their three gap closers: Glyph of Blood Boil, Chains of Ice, and Death Grip.
3) Every Death Knight tree has powerful defensive cooldowns on very short cooldowns such as:
-Vampiric Blood and Rune Tap
-Unbreakable Armor
-Bone Shield
(1) is more or less fixed with the nerf of the current most popular Death Knight arena spec, 0/20/51. (3) has been fixed with the increase of cooldowns on Bone Shield, Unbreakable Armor, and Vampiric Blood to two minutes.
We don't need another ranged snare that does 50%. But some form of snare for non-blood related builds is almost necessary to keep most other classes in range when our only gap closers are a dispellable snare using some of our most important runes and a backwards intercept on a 35-second (25 if talented) cooldown.
My suggestions? I have two of them.
A) Change the Bloodboil snare to 30%.
B) Remove the Bloodboil glyph and change the Blood Strike Glyph to 40%.
This keeps the Heart Strike snare in check as our most powerful snare, but it also keeps our much needed secondary snare for other trees.
Even if the duration is 5 seconds (Which is currently the BB one), it's a tool we need to use. Even with Hamstring, a warrior can't stay on a kill target 100% of the time, and even with these suggestions, a Death Knight would still play a more balanced role as a melee class.
TL:DR - We aren't Retribution paladins. We have no ways to defensively remove snares, so we need to keep some form secondary non-dispellable snare to remain competent as a melee class.
