Zaroua:

Deathchill is unchanged. You can check wowhead's talent calculator for as long as it is unchanged to confirm.

Omg new abilities:
Path of Frost: Gives Water Walking, works on mount
Rune Strike: lvl 67, 10RP, Instant melee attack, 5secs CD, Instantly Strikes the target for weapon damage. Only Usable after the DK performs a melee or spell critical hit.

Don't see the new Command spell though.

Edit about XP: Needed 2millions before patch I think, now need 1.8million, for 77>78.

Edit2: Ghouls are now permanent. Can only have one at a time.

Edit: nevermind

Editing this for better wording, and less loling(sorry Kaubel ^^)

So frost is in a much better shape, but they changed Howling Blast to 1U1F, same as Oblit. It's quite good for leveling, but you heal way less than blood, or even unholy for that matter, since you can't deathstrike with full diseases on normal mobs pretty much. It does quite a lot of damage though, Frost Strike is really nice now, and with Chill of the Grave RP generation, you can frost strike easily. In fact I often sit at 100RP between mobs, with Butcher. I haven't found a use for Rune Strike however, but I guess that's because of Frost Strike being a much better RP investment. In another spec, you could choose between a deathcoil and this, and while a deathcoil is a better use of GCD for a rotation, Rune Strike is a better use of RP... Hard to figure when that would be useful.

So my thoughts is, it'll be viable for leveling, but blood is probably better(heart strike is broken I heard however), but for endgame, I wonder, all 3 trees are shaping up quite nicely now.

Has Death & Decay changed at all? Is it still a high threat tool? If so then would it seem like the new Reaping talent is only useful for tanks?

Also what kind of rotation is the new frost looking like?

Did some testing just now for BCB and Necrosis.

Used a 58 Orc Death Knight with 15 points in Unholy for Necrosis, nothing else. Highest Necrosis proc (excluding crits) over about 100 hits was 75. Used Blood Fury (234 AP) and the damage immediately went up to to 80+.

Put points into Black Ice and the damage went over 80 consistently (84 max excluding crits). Black Ice and Blood Fury bumped it up to nearly 100.


Blood Caked Blade procs for 1 without diseases. Does 100% weapon damage with diseases up. I didn't test the proc chance to see if it was changed.

Well from 70->75 it was around 2.330.000 for every level, so if its 1.800.000 they roughly decreased it to 75%.

The Ghouls are a bug (See GC Bluepost) - they arent intended to be permanent, only if you have the Talent "Night of the Dead" you'll be able to keep a Ghoul forever.

Overall it looks like Blood got hit by the nerftrain (atleast obliterate is kinde worthless now, better get deathrunes and HS and healing got reduced greatly).
Frost buffs seem huge, have to try out frostspecs today.

Bone Armor got pretty much nerfed to.

A Question to Bone Armor:

Does it only reduce damage taken from the attack that consumes a bone or is it 40% for all attacks until bone shild runs out (so after min. 14 sec due to the 3.5 sec internal CD)?

For those with Beta access. I have some concerns with Unholy Blight now. It seems the 60 RP cost means it can never be used from a 'zero rune power' start.

6 runes will not generate the needed RP to fire it off in one rotation, and thus, it cannot be used for secondary threat or an AoE pull. Do you find this true, false, true but not a big deal, or other?

I always envisioned that if I did a full Unholy 51pt tank, UB would be used every pull .... certainly on any AoE or boss pull. Now it seems that on any fresh fight (post wipe), it is not going to be an option. Seems kind of poor for so deep in the tree.

EDIT (addition): Also .... could someone please get ol' GC to consider changing our anticipation talent from dodge to parry. Parry seems to be the core style of defense for the DK. 5% more parry is the same avoidance, but we get another weapon smack to the target (boss). Let rogues and shamma dodge via talents. DK seems all about deflecting blows away (parrying).

To continue the PvP discussion after the latest round of changes - is Blood still viable with the nerfed burst and self-healing? Right now it looks to me that going full Frost, with enough in Unholy to get On a Pale Horse (reduced stun and fear duration) is optimal. Frost offers control as well as addresses the death knight's PvP weaknesses, such as being kited and vulnerability to CC. Furthermore it also appears to offer some good burst via stacking damage of Icy Touch and Howling Blast.

Even with all the nerfs, having someone on your team lockdown an enemy player long enough to DRW > Oblit Oblit HS HS > Empower Rune Weapon > Oblit Oblit HS HS is just plain wrong, especially with Hysteria up. Even without crits, you're looking at over 12-15k dmg in under 8 seconds.

And I certainly don't think Frost will stay as it is right now, too strong. It'll be nerfed back to acceptable levels pretty soon.

I tested it this morning before heading to work, it's currently definitely scaling with attack power. I do have some talent improving it, but those wouldn't account for it doing ~400 damage versus the tooltip's mentioned 105 to 129 damage.