The autonomy of tanks was never in question. It is the total independence from group dynamics I have a problem with.
But besides that, nothing really.
Most abilities would remain as is.
Firstly, I would still leave their self-healing on the higher end.
I would change their runes - 3 runes would be frost or unholy runes (can be used for either - let’s call them death) and 3 would be blood runes. Abilities that will use death runes would have a reduced cost compared to now.
The blood runes are used for heals and absorption. The bloodrunes are not restored when hitting enemies or particularly quickly automatically, but rather when being hit. Cooldowns can restore these bloodrunes as well, but they are fairly long.
Damage and threat is dealt through a combination of the non-blood runes and Runic Power. Other defensive capabilities can be found all over the map. Unholy runes generally works against magic damage and is used for cooldowns while unholy power is used for damage or physical mitigation.
The blood runes power healing spells. Some suck health from enemies as AoE while others are focused on single target.
Blood Death Knights have several unique features besides this, including their excellent mitigation of magical damage, plate armor, and Death Grip. By bringing back their original resource system, or at least something close, we give them something else that no other class in the game has or has ever had. They will also still have Anti-Magic Zone, Resurrection, and things like that of course.
The purpose here is to tie the healing done to the damage taken and generally good reactive gameplay. This results in a situation where Blood DK’s do heal, potentially quite a lot, but they pretty much by definition can only very temporarily heal more than the damage they take. The generation is normalized and tuned accordingly.
Their mitigation remains very high and they are still focused on heals, grips, and other DK shenanigans, but they can never sustain a situation where they outheal enemies for minutes on end.
How does that sound? Did I ruin Blood DK’s?