The second one is the one that interests us all since we have to team up out of our guilds almost everyday and that our guildmates are intelligent guys to which we can explain the ABC of the DK (well most of them anyway ).

Let aside the bad image provided by the Knoobs (oh man I’d like to slap some of them sometime) I think those are the points we most suffer from:

1) DKs are (really) often described as “AOE Tanks”, but what does it really mean? That means we can control many mobs at the same time, not that you can start AOEing a pack of mobs before we start building aggro and we will get the aggro back from you.

If everything goes well, if all the mobs are in the radius of the death&decay, if we apply and spread our diseases to all the mobs without misses… yes, we can hold an early and steady AOE. But when something gets in the way of our nice setup rotation (somebody pulling aggro, mob not recieving a disease etc.) and forces us to taunt, use death grip or so while you happily AOE all you can… that can end up bad.

I can remember a setup on “early Emalon” where the Warrior tank laughed at me when I suggested I take Emalon and he takes the adds. I explained him that my “Anti-Magic Shell” allows me to avoid the damage of the nova which eases the work of the healers which were having a hard time on that evening. But no, he was MT and in his mind DK == AOE, the adds were mine to handle.

2) The rune system is easy to understand… once you look at it. But I think there is a deep misunderstanding, even among DK players, of how rune/RP work. Runes take 10 seconds to come back online, that means that beside the global cooldown and the ability cooldown that are already common knowledge we have an additional cooldown to count with and that is new for most.

I often had the question in heroic 5-man dongeons as to why I don’t always drop D&D to begin with. All those persons had in mind that runes function the way Rage or Mana work and they did not understand that a spell that I did not use for the last 30 seconds could not be “up” for use on the next pack. If I can impose my tempo, you will see D&D all the time, if not, don’t wonder…

3) The last point is deeply linked with the way Wow is evolving and the public it is reaching. Remember the time when we had to wait for 3-4-5 “Breaking Armor” of our warrior tank before dropping a single DOT? In my opinion, unless you play the high content and try to beatup heroic raids there is no need for 100% concentration and organisation anymore. The tank threat is so high that even when you repeat to “wait that the tank has his back on the wall befor you start doing damage on Onyxia”, you endup with 20-ish dots and 5-10 guys hopping along the dragon doing half-blank damage…

I don’t want to point the finger at anyone, but some of the stupid behaviour Protadins and Wardefs can handle with – for example -  non-space dependant multitarget aggro, we cannot… and the same way healers are loathed after a wipe, the DK tanks are hated because the cannot even handle stupid behaviour…