Well, on the subject of class annoyances, I'd find it somewhat crippling if a druid will basically be permanently dazed when it matters i.e. in high mobility fights, while paladins and warriors won't have those problems, as I don´t think daze was intented to make tanking more difficult. Any playstyle adjustments -like strafing to avoid the effect- I feel are rather unintuitive. I suppose it's a minor complaint only, but I personally don't see the harm in Survival of the Fittest (for example) being changed so it'd remove the chance to be dazed in feral forms.

A minor stab at an idea for warlocks' destruction tree too(so I won't be blamed for leading us off-topic with druid problems ), I always thought Demonic Sacrifice would be a necessary talent for a Demonology spec as it allows you to get some use out of your pet in encounters that are too pet-unfriendly. Destruction taking it is clearly broken though, but the weaknesses of DS, namely school specific damage and losing one's pet I think could give a strategy to fix it. Like Death Knights seem to get tanking abilities in every tree such a classdefining feature as pets should find their way in every talenttree of a warlock. Demonology is obvious, Affliction has at least Dark Pact yet a talent for Destruction is missing. I can't really think of anything in specific/creative though - perhaps something like +3/6/9% damage to spells with a pet active as high tier Destruction talent? Coupled with a slight bloating of the destruction tree to let them compensate for saving up points by not picking DS.

Edit: I forgot about Demonic Power I suppose, but considering it's not very good in most builds I don't think it invalidates my idea.

Destro does (or did) get pet talents. Imp firebal/ Imp lash of pain. Still solves nothing. Either you're a Sta buff for the MT, or the boss does some AE 10 seconds into the fight and eats your pet. Unless you're willing to go a full 41 to get the guard, or you don't mind losing ALL party DPS synergy and just be STA-on-a-stick, Pets are worthless on 9 out of 10 bosses.

A "beta opt-in" link was just added to account management. The link is currently broken, but I think we can take this as a sign that it's probably coming soon.

Seems to be not up yet in Europe, or I just can't find it. Still, that's promising

I know it's unpropable but pleaaaase be true: Rumor: Death Knights coming early - WOW Insider

Paraphrased: preorder WotLK from selected retailers and you'll get your DK playable before others.

Oh good, so there will be even MORE of an overpopulation of DKs at 80.

E: By way of explanation - some of the DK overpopulation will be eased, at least at first, by people levelling their current mains to 80. If this is the case we'll have DKs going from 70 too.

It would help on the "launch day reroll" though. I remember trying to start a Shaman when TBC first came out and I couldn't even attempt most of the starting zone quests because over 9000 other people had the same plan.

By spacing out when people can start the toon it would, at least moderately, streamline this so the DK creation zone isn't crawling with every person on the server on launch day.

Borean and Howling Fjord are quite gigantic zones, comparable to any of the largest zones currently in-game, with perhaps a half-dozen apparent settlements in each. I'm pretty confident they can handle it - imagine if HFP, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar, and Nagrand were all open to you on TBC launch day.

Seems to me that it would just move the DK starting zone overcrowding to whenever the patch is released that enables them. Even more so, maybe, since the DK population won't be split between people questing in new WotLK zones. And if something like this happened, who wouldn't preorder Wrath? That's one heck of an incentive to do so.

Not that I don't want it to happen, mind you. I would love to get my hands on a DK and still be able to hit Northrend with the rest of my guild when the expansion drops.

And this is why if I don't get a beta key I'm buying my way in. It lets you take your time and enjoy the content, and then race to 80 when the time comes.

People who aren't immediate planning to at least try deathknights? I honestly wasn't going to bother, but if it gives me something to do until the xpac...

While the DK rumor certainly is interesting, I'd think getting the starting content out in time might be too much of a hurdle. From all the alpha leak videos, it seemed like DK's were just being dropped in EPL w/o any starting quests. While I'm sure most of us probably would overlook that in trade for getting a DK started out & geared early, I'd be pretty surprised blizzard would be willing to let it go like that.

Not the mention stepping up the schedule of adding DK's to the T4, T5, and T6 gear sets. I could see them not bothering with DK's and T4-T6 (much less T1-T3) with the release of WotLK, but if they were to come out early, that seems a pretty big gap.

Does it matter with the gear reset? I am sure warrior tanking plate will suffice. And in all honesty, DKs were probably designed to get to 80 wearing nothing but greens and blues anyways... I'd even wager that DKs might be a little overpoweres in the 55-60 range to compensate, and then gradually power down till a more balanced state at 80.

Being dropped in EPL is a placeholder, though it seems from various leak sites that the starting DK area is a new, post-plague township east of Tyr's Hand and the Noxious Glade. There's also some information to suggest that DK may start out initially in an instanced, pre-plague version and be involved in the destruction of the town.

If just that addition to EPL was to go live, I guess it could happen. I would also pretty much instantly pre-order wrath.

Releasing early the Death Knights has the potential to be a huge marketing hit, in the same time giving the development team more time to polish/test the real "new stuff"... seems like a win-win situation to me.

There is a lot of non-set DPS gear, and DK will be able to use Leather and Mail too. Tanking stuff may be an issue, but dps gear is not.

This "preview" of DKs is likely to happen a month a weeks before release, so it doesn't matter all that much anyway.


Pre-orders are a great way for a company to get your dollars ahead of the product release (time value of money if you don't understand why).

This was one of the neatest features of LotRO. It gave you a fairly "epic" sense of how the game would play out, and would be a great way to reward players in WoW for unlocking the DK.

I'm concerned about server stability, though. I'm not sure if the servers can handle all new instances that will need to be spawned when it's released. A new location in EPL might be better just to handle the population.

I remember BWL pre-TBC, when Alliance and Horde on our server would have to coordinate Razorgore attempts, because having more than 2 attempts going at once would lag the server to death.

Why is everybody so concerned with server stability?

I think with the flawless day 1 TBC had, with thousands in Hellfire at the same time, and hundreds of ramparts instances going on, they've proven that the server upgrades they did in 2006 worked.

I think pre-releasing DK's would be a great idea. I wish they had done the same with horde pallies & alliance shaman when patch 2.0 came out before TBC.

Obviously it differs per realm, but on the European Azjol-Nerub server at least the first day of TBC was far from flawless in it's performance. The performance was better than what I expected, but during prime time the world server for Outland was very unstable and went down two or three times an hour.

The instance server did hold up well considering most people I know decided to "hide from the rain" within Ramparts and Blood Furnace, but not all servers were stable on the first day of TBC.

Hardware has been upgraded several times since the old days of BWL aswell as the fact that this isnt a 40 man raid instance.
Now i'm no expert on it but i do think running several dozen small instances isnt to much of a strain when you considering all the instances being run at the same time in tbc.

Where exactly did this pre-release DK rumour first crop up? It makes too much sense and seems to have so many win-win benefits for Blizzard, it almost seems silly if they didnt actually do it.

Imagine if WAR comes out similar time to WOTLK. Wouldnt it be convenient for Blizzard if many people had already grown attached to their Deathknight for several months due to its pre-release ahead of WOTLK/WAR - opted directly to jump headfirst into WOTLK when both games are released, numbing the urge to sample the competiton? Surely not everyone will act like that, but many fans will be and it most definetely is an edge Blizzard would have over the competitor.

It certainly wasn't perfect on Burning Blade, but it was "pretty good", especially after a couple of days, and I think that's probably okay. We can't really expect them to build up their systems so that they can effectively handle 20x the standard single-zone load, when it'll never get that high until the next expansion release.