You would have to rely on AV as much as you have to rely on your runes being up all the time and connecting a DS. DS comes first, but when that fails all you have left is your AV and cooldowns. Again, your CDs can't always be up all the time so in the end you are relying a bit on AV.

As far as this whole hit/exp issue is concerned, I don't really see why it should matter that much because there are a lot of upgrades in FL from T11 that has a lot of hit/exp. I mean I'm not even trying to get any hit/exp and I have 2%/19exp, further upgrades will get me more hit while keeping exp the same.

Avoiding hits might mean you get less of your Mastery, but in the end it leads to a higher overall survivability. I mean you can get pummeled with 10% avoidance (arbitrary #) and while you're getting full use of your mastery, you will die because A) You'll run out of cooldowns and/or B) your healers will oom.

As a side note I completely agree with the "more EH = DS better" line and there's quite a few ways to make it happen but I'm not exactly sure that's Blizzard's train of thought with DKs as was said so many times in blue posts.

I'll chime in and say that I did infact just swap back to DPS after swapping to being our MT last tier. There is absolutely zero point in a world where bosses are being underhealed to meet DPS checks to burden your guild with a Blood DK tank. Our EH and the vision that Blizzard has for us has utterly failed in the Firelands heroics. I would literally get globalled occassionally by Ragnaros (on the pull a few times, mind you) because my Death Strike would get parried and he would hit me for ~100k back to back with Bone Shield up because I had no Blood Shield. This is is simply unacceptable. I've given up giving constructive suggestions on how to fix our class, the ball's in Blizzzard's court now. If they don't fix anything about Blood DKs in 4.2 then no guild in the world that is going for high rankings will even consider using a Blood DK.

I know this is going to come across as whine but it's just simply put the truth. If Blizzard doesn't realise this by now then they're just not paying attention to high end guilds filtering out their Blood DKs over Block Tanks. This is not unfounded whine either, I've tanked everything in WotLK as did I tank everything in t11 (including Nefarian's bone constructs, which is a whole different problem with Blood DKs lacking a Block mechanic) and I tanked everything up to Majordomo. I swapped to my Prot Paladin alt for Domo and then even attempted to tank Ragnaros, but I will hold my guild back no more - I'll just let the block tanks tank him and then maybe even reroll to Prot Paladin after this tier is done.

The problems with DKs that have been discussed are so minor that the real issues at hand just get missed out on. Our passive mitigation is too low after they nerfed our armor on the beta. Bone Shield is an outdated mechanic that is supposed to serve as a Holy Shield/Shield Block but it doesn't even come close. Death Strike being avoided brings us from a suboptimal tank to a horrible one - when your DS gets avoided 2-3 times in a row you're solely relying on your healers to keeping you up which is just pure bad design - I thought Blizzzard's vision was to keep DK's the "active" tank?

I feel Blizzard needs to adress the following: our armor, our Bone Shield mechanic and definitely our Blood Shield mastery. The way that our mastery interacts with Avoidance is pure stupidity. Not to mention how it interacts with itself and other absorb effects. Bone Shield needs to turn into our Mastery and it needs to become our "Block". For Paladins it is already literally a 20-30% damage reduction as it stands. Why would us having that make us overpowered?

Grim times are ahead, that's for sure.

After tanking 11/13 (10-man) heroics last tier I've also switched to Frost. I wasn't feeling overwhelmed per se, but when I went frost and our feral druid went tank, it just solved so many problems:

- More passive tank durability. The active tanking element is sold as the primary means by which a DK tank can stand apart from the rest. I appreciate that, and in a lot of instances enjoyed it. However, the truth is, if you fail to make full use of that active tanking element, it becomes a burden not to you, the tank, but to your healers. It's already enough work for healers to try to 2-heal every other 10-man fight. Guaranteeing that the game is handling our tank's mitigation, not a fallible human player who can be distracted, who can lag, or who can simply get tired after a long night of progression, makes everyone's lives far easier.
- No competition for off-set plate tank drops.
- No problems with hatchling DPS (this was before the death strike change, so I have no idea if the fix actually resolved that issue).

Evidently this tier has been unkind to us - not only the gimmicks of Alysrazor and Majordomo, but also when a tier like this has forced a lot of guilds to drop several healers in favor of meeting DPS requirements. It becomes quite obvious what currently needs to be changed regarding our own surviability.

The complexity of our way of mitigating damage is something that Blizzard seems happy about and determined to stick to, despite the many balancing issues it creates. There is a plethora of factors that need to be taken into consideration from an encounter design POV regarding Death Knight tanks, and in the end a lot of these factors are simply overlooked.

What the block tanks get in favor of their rather simple defensive mechanics is a guarantee that they will always be able to do what's needed. With a Death Knight there's always going to be encounters where we excel or fall far behind simply because of the rather limited length of balancing each tanking spec gets in terms of being "viable" for any given encounter. It's more than evident that what Blizzard considers viable is far from the community's opinion.

A simple example:
Previous tier, healers leaving a tank at 70% before the next swing was a reasonable scenario. In addition, Death Strike was fully utilized this way. Damage intake allowed reactive healing.
This tier, when a tank is at far greater risk of dying in 2-3 hits, reactive healing is less possible. This goes for Death Strike as well, and this is where our system of survivability falters. Active, or reactive mitigation won't fully work under these conditions.

When re-applying your diseases, using Bone Shield or back-to-back Death Strike misses puts you at such a great risk that it currently does, something needs to change. I believe that as long as such a great portion of our survivability comes from a single ability - an ability which a chance of missing, being parried and dodged, and shares resources with other important abilities - we will just see the issues escalate in the coming tiers.