Everywhere where I've seen the rumor reported mentioned that it was based on a "Now deleted forum post on the official World of Warcraft forums", which doesn't really mean much either way.

It'd certainly be interesting if Blizzard decided to do so, but I'm not inclined to believe it until I see it announced.

Deathknight.info



http://eu.blizzard.com/wwi08/streams.xml has a schedule up.

It would be nice to have time to level up a deathknight and not be behind by the time raiding starts like it did for draenei shamans/blood elf paladins.

The TBC launch was generally more stable because all the kinks had been worked out weeks ago with the Before the Storm patch. Remember? The one that released 41 point talents and enabled Paladin/Shaman tier drops for Horde/Alliance raids that didn't have any yet?

It wouldn't surprise me at all if they did a similar "Before the Lich King" patch to pass the release headaches weeks before WOTLK actually goes live, but pre-releasing DKs sounds like an even awesomer idea.

Maybe I'm missing something, but pre-releasing death knights doesn't sound awesome to me. Let's say Blizz releases death knights in 2.5. Every single person will roll a death knight on that day (probably all on Mal'Ganis too). So everyone will be in EPL and that pretty much guarantees problems. Then, when WotLK actually comes around, all those Death Knights will be 70 and head off to Northrend, increasing the load in the two initial zones.

Death Knights coming with WotLK means the WoW population will be spread out among three zones at the start. Pre-releasing them puts the population in 1 or 2 zones only.

I don't see how the EPL situation would be any worse or different than hellfire at launch stability wise. The relative size of the zones could pose issues however. Either way the benefits in this case far outweigh the potential issues.

I don't think it would happen this way.

Look at Shamans and Pallys. At TBC launch everyone tried to make one, but how many people actually stuck with it? Especially with as class as complicated as Death Knights I would expect the turnover will be pretty large, which only a small section of the playerbase (either those who want to reroll or those who do nothing but play WoW) will have a level 70 DK by the time Wrath actually ships.

So yes, you would be looking at pretty massive EPL lag for the first day or two while everyone tries out the new class. After that I would assume everything will even out and it will be just like any other old day when Wrath hits.

If their servers can stand the added stress (I know my server was pretty bad on the BC launch day), then it makes perfect commercial sense for Blizzard to make this "DK patch" go live a before the expansion.

An unpleasant side effect to this: just like the "PvP patch" killed raiding back at Vanilla, this "DK patch" would indeed kill it again for those guilds that aren't done with all content.

How does that have anything to do with servers being able to handle load?

I thought the DeathKnights started in a instanced zone. Then they leave that and enter EPL. If thats the case they can always go to felwood, winterspring, silithus ect to level.

If rolling a DK requires pre-ordering WLK, that will limit the numbers a bit. Laziness will take its toll. If you're required to pre-order the collector's edition that should thin out the numbers significantly.

The fact that it's smaller is really the bigger technical issue. You have more player collision. The amount of information the servers have to send out and the players have to recieve is a relatively constant term for the local mobs and environment, plus something that varies as the square of the player density as each player has to be updated for each other player in their visual radius. Comparing it to HFP also assumes that the legacy terrain still enables sufficient quest design for the DK starting quests that the level designers can take advantage of their experience in dispersing players, which they didn't have when originally designing EPL.

Plenty of guilds kept progressing after that "pvp patch". Maybe the raiders who only care about gear quit raiding but with badge gear and arena gear I think that boat left a long time ago.

Some guilds continued raiding after the PvP gear patch. Most didn't.

Most raiders do mostly care about loot, or at the least they care about it enough that they do not feel like spending the effort to acquire gear that is going to be obsolete in a month or two. (So desire for loot + desire for content/social aspects > apathy > desire for content/social aspects.) You may interpret that as a sad truth, but it is most assuredly a truth. (Witness, for example, the importance of raid gear being notably better than dungeon blues (a situation which was messed up in early TBC) - if it was just about the content or social aspects, that shouldn't matter much.)

You are missing something. Only people who pre-order WOTLK would be able to roll DKs. So unless everyone pre-ordered so they could roll early, you'd have a current situation of the population being spread across Outland and DK Country and a projected future situation of the new DKs being in the starter zone and then Outland while the pre-ordered DKs are in Northrend with everyone who didn't roll a DK.

However, I don't think DKs will be pre-released unless WOTLK is delayed.

Well, the Blizzard WWI just started but the stream is crapping out on me.

To relief the agony, here are some liveblogs:
Liveblogging the Worldwide Invitational opening ceremony - WOW Insider
Thierry's 1UP Blog: LIVEBLOG ACTIVATE
IGN Advertisement

E: stream works! WOOT
Curse this slow connection of mine, can't watch HD


DIABLO ****ING THREE

And now it kicked me out in the middle of the announcement AGHHHH

Back again and out again

DISCLAIMER: LIVE TYPING FROM FEED

Is that Kaplan talking about DKs? Anyway, the sound's back now. DK's will use warrior gear, runes were decided as the resource system early on.

hunter:
No steady shot clipping? What does that mean? - oh autoshot will fire through steady shot casting
Different pet families... pet TALENTS?

priest:

can cast a buff to friendlies which sleeps enemies striking them
spriest talent that gets a -90% damage buff, pacified but regens 6% hp/mana every second for 10 seconds
guardian spirit: travels around healing party members, if party member would die, the guardian spirit dies instead
(apparently all three are talents)

mage:

frostfire, not as good as frostbolt or fireball, but with an elemental build it'll beat both
mage armor: shortens durations of magical effects on you

druid:
roots usable indoors
flourish, short cast time heal, 1,5s depends on how many hots you have on your target

shaman:
totem upgrades, suffering from totem spam -> SoE and GoA combined! totems in physical school
something about stacking shamans which I didn't catch
earthliving weapon->healing bonus, flametongue->+spell dmg, windfury stays, the frostw/e weapon gets boosted
hex: limited CC, turns enemy into a frog, can move but can't attack, pve behaves like poly

rogue:
fan of knives, aoe damage, situational, rogues not aoe class
sap gets expanded to other mob types, beast, giant, dragon, anything with a skull and a brain inside (personal note: what about UD :p)

paladin:
ret paladins are difficult to itemize since they are unique in their item needs, will move to DK like itemization
"waaah, ret pala stole my sword, now they'll steal your armour too"
hand of purity, some reactive healing
BoP and BoF won't overwrite other blessings anymore

warrior:
shockwave and some other to make warrior feel more like warcraft 3 and feel that warriors are strong
shockwave upgrades prot warriors damage
titan's grip for fury, was fake last expansion but blizz took it and made it real in wotlk

warlock:
demonic circle, teleport back, around 50 yrds, faster summon
51pt demonology talent - demon form, shadowbolt is aoe in demon form, no pets

Since feral druids now get the benefit of WF, I wonder if it'll affect hunter pets too.

It should, given that totems are raidwide now.

Felguards with WF and hunter pets with WF... this will be fairly interesting.

Maybe I'm missing some new piece of information, but the early DK rumor seems easily debunked by one simple fact:

You unlock Death Knights by completing a quest at 80.

This isn't the same situation as BE Pallies and Draenai Shaman. It's a hero class which you need to unlock. So, a month before release Blizzard will put out a Before the Storm type patch with the new talents and spells and data in it, but DK's still won't be available until a month or so after the release of the expansion.

You're missing some new info. From the Blizzard DK site.

Even that's old now. Most recent statement was that if you have a 55 character on any realm then you would be able to make a DK on any realm you wish to. But you can only have one DK per server and normal PvP restrictions apply also.

To expand on some of the new goodies announced at Tom Chilton's talk:

-- Pet Talents: These will entirely take the place of the current pet training system. From what he said, there will be 3 different trees, and each pet race will be placed in one specific tree; beyond that, each pet race will have it's own unique ability, it sounded like it was to be unlocked within the talent tree or perhaps even without "talenting", that wasn't quite clear. They want to make the various pet races feel different and interesting, compared to how they are now.

-- Mage Armor: Cuts the duration of all magical debuffs on the Mage, including DoTs, in half. They wanted Mage Armor to be utilized more than it is right now.

-- Shaman Totems: There is a lot of "totem spam" that Shaman go through; he mentioned specifically that Shaman probably more than any other class often use extra addons just to manage all the extra hotbar buttons, so they have access to them all. The mentioned combination of GoA and Strength of Earth is just one of many; he said there were a "whole slew" of totems to be combined. It sounds like they're going through all the totems to see which can/should be combined.

-- Raid-Wide Buffs: Totems will affect the entire raid nearby. He mentioned how raids often feel the need to stack Shaman, to have one in each group for totems and Bloodlust. (This leaves open the question of whether Bloodlust/Heroism will be changed as well to cover the entire raid... he didn't mention that at all, but the underlying logic is there, if they decide to go in that direction.) The later panel mentioned the totems, Unleashed Rage, and Battle Shout as "some" of the buffs that they're looking to put raid-wide.

-- Druids & Windfury/Weapon Enchants: This was announced during the Q&A; someone asked if druids would be changed to where Windfury and weapon enchants like Executioner would work for them -- the answer given is that Windfury would be changed, to be a buff and not a temporary weapon "enchant", so that it would work both in cat/bear form, along with Rogue poisons, etc. The other part of the question wasn't answered... at this time, it sounds like "on hit" weapon enchants and other such buffs still aren't going to work for druid cat/bear forms.