#0 - March 24, 2009, 8:14 p.m.
Let's start by the initial band-aid: the class itself.
Death Knights were a class that was, primarily, put in the game to be a neat new class that got everyone interested in it... that could tank. At the time, people were complaining about a lack of tanks - which more stemmed from the way the levelling system discouraged you to ever learn how to tank until you hit max level (which still takes place today) and then, once you hit max level, you had to deal with people that did not want to "wait" for you to learn how to play a role, so you went with what you all ready knew from levelling, and while you probably weren't as good at it as a fresh 70 as you became later down the road, the role of DPSing was not nearly as important as tanking (or healing) and groups wouldn't necessary care much about your overall performance.
To put it simply, the mindset then, as it was now, if you have a good tank and a good healer in a 5 man, the rest of the group is relatively moot. But if you have three good DPS'ers and a bad healer and tank, then your group is doomed to fail. That's not to say that better DPS might not make the group's time easier, or quicker, but a DPS class's performance does not have nearly the same impact on a groups sucess as do a tank or healer. There are going to be obvious exceptions to this statement, but the fact of the matter is that it is overall true, especially if you are doing content which you do not ridiculously outgear, and even moreso if it is content that you are not experienced with, and do not outgear.
So, with Death Knights, they created a nice new hero class. I won't get into the concept of hero class and how it got skewed from beta - and to be perfectly honest, I think Blizzard probably made a mistake in calling Death Knights a "hero class" and should have just called them a "new class", to avoid the misconception that Death Knights would, could, or should be "better than" other classes.
We were laid out three basic distinctions: Frost Death Knights tanked, Blood Death Knights DPS'd, and Unholy PvP'd. There were some other distinctions in there, too, (like Frost was about "Control", Unholy was about Ghouls and Diseases, Blood was about HP or something like that), but these were overall minor and really don't do much to help or hurty anyone's argument as we're talking more about actual, honest-to-goodness in game "roles".
Somewhere a long the lines this changed, and the trees were supposed to be a "dintinction of play style, not role." and the idea of each tree having its own role was thrown out and replaced with the idea that every tree should be able to do every role just as well as every other tree. The biggest flaw that was pointed out in this thinking is that there is no precedence for it. That Blizzard essentially trying to fit the square peg, DK's, into the round hole, every other class. The only think even -close- to this precedence is the Feral tree for Druids, where they can DPS, Tank, and PvP with the same tree. It is the only precedence for containing three roles in a single tree - and, furthermore, Feral Druids have the distinction of having two separate "forms" that distinguish role in the way that they have entirely different abilities, and so talents can be easily made to have duality in affecting all roles while having a significantly lower chance at being overpowered for any. Warriors have something similar to this in stances.
Presences, you may say, are the same thing - but they aren't, because they do not allow or disallow you to use abilities, and therefore where as with a Protection Warrior, you can assume does not use Overpower while tanking, simply because it cannot be cast in defensive stance, you can never assume that any spec of DK does not use any ability regardless of role - making it overwhelmingly tedious to change one ability because there are potentially nine different applications of that same ability and how you could overpower/underpower that ability's application for one spec/role while balancing it for another.
