What are you thinking would be best stat to work on for dps as a death knight ? Their Strenght for AP for harder hits, their spell damage, or find a happy median of both ?
I assume Ret pallies have a balance of both ? This would pertain to Death knights as well ?

Retri Paladins generally forego Spelldamage for Warriorlike stats because it costs too much physical damage for the small amount of spelldamage gained.

Death Knights in fact will scale their spells with AP, so I doubt they're interested in spelldamage.

They're moving ret pally itemization towards dps warrior itemization. This means that dps warriors, dps DKs and dps ret pallies will all share the same gear. I think most likely we won't see spell dmg dps plate.

Unless it's for prot pally - remember even now, they are only ones that need +spell damage to tank. It is possibile they will somehow be freed from it as well, or their gear somehow be useful to tanking DK's as well.

Paladins will always require spelldamage to tank (although, not to DPS, as was mentioned), but whether we will actually need tank drops with spelldamage in the expansion is debatable. A high-spelldamage tanking weapon has always provided a very large chunk (sometimes all) of a prot paladin's spelldamage, and that probably won't change. I wouldn't be surprised to see a talent that increases our base spelldamage somehow, ameliorating the need for any tanking drops with spelldamage on them (not counting tier pieces, assuming the token system remains in effect).

Well iirc they're moving spell dmg and healing into one stat, spell power, so holy pallies and prot pallies will most likely end up sharing loot. But they also said they wanted all loot to be usable by around 3 classes, so unless some significant rebalancing and reworking of paladin mechanics happens, only paladins will be able to use spell power plate. Thus blizzard will either rework paladins or keep spell power plate in game. The other option I can see is that DK tanking abilities will require spell power to do decent while regular dps abilities will be melee based

This is getting a bit off-track for this thread but, to be honest, if Protection Paladins continue to be able to tank rather well with one to three good +Damage items (primarily Weapon + Shield) in WotLK--at least as well as they are able to now--they could 'share' those items with Holy Pallies simply because they probably wont need EVERY slot for pure tanking gear.

Not to mention that Shield block will allow a double value block every 20 seconds (talented) and 3 point in Critical block will give 30% to block for double. If the effects can stack your MT could have a 30% chance to block for 3400 every 20 seconds.

There's a blue quote on MMO-champion from the WWI saying:
So you should be able to have both FRW and WF active at once.

The current state of mage tallents implies an exceptional bias towards stacking frost mages (or elemental mages deep enough in frost). We're pretty much all expecting that to get nerfed though.

WF, being weapon enchant, or a buff, will likely still not apply to Frost 2H-tanking DKs, if its mechanics are not changed.
Right now WF Totem only procs off white damage. With the speed of a weapon, said DK will have zero to none white damage output while tanking. Hence WF will be useless.

Now, if they merge WF weapon and WF totem into single both-hand identical buff, that procs off all damage, it might benefit this type of DK

The Windfury change was discovered a good week after my post and, yes, that does make the whole issue kind of a moot point. So, swap from 4% Death Rune chance to 2% + Frozen Rune Weapon and we're back on track...

Okay, Hex is updated to v0.2.0! All character details and spells have been updated to level 80 and the combat log idea has been replaced with a statistical calculation since it was becoming overly complex. The latest version features every DPS talent so you should be able to get a pretty good idea of how different talent builds and different rune configurations compare.

Screenshot: http://www.ellipsoid.org/hex/hex_0.2.0.png
Download: http://www.elliipsoid.org/hex/setup.exe

Any feedback on bugs or issues with calculations can be directed to the thread here

There doesn't seem to be an anti DK class in 1v1 scenarios besides mages. They're going to be feral druids on crack. I don't know the limitations on their presences but if they're able to switch those freely then they'll either shutdown melee/hunters that attack them with Frost presence, outlast some with Blood, and chase casters and have more breathing room with GCD for interrupts while in Unholy. With degeneration and deathgrip, resto druids are going to have a tough time against them. Priests and Locks won't get any breathing room against them assuming they spec into Lichborne in unholy.
At the moment, DK's seem pretty weak against a class that can outsnare them and with Deathgrip, it looks like Mages are the only ones capable of this.
Most classes are getting really nice pvp buffs in multiple trees so I wouldn't say DK's will be overpowered but I don't think you'll easily counter them at all.

On a silly note, I need to roll a char to 55 named Scorpion just for the sake of Death Grip and a macro saying "Get Over Hereeeee".

How many DKs with which spec do you see in 10/25 Raids?
I think 1/10 (every spec okay, perhaps blood for personal dps since there are few synergies) and 2/25 (1 unholy for the debuff, the other frost for tanking)

And which weapon choice do you see with which spec?
I believe blood-2h, frost-DW, unholy-both possible

Your opinions?

It seems to me like having one unholy is the way to go as long as raid bosses aren't immune to the more evil diseases, the debuffs are nice, and tehre are some nice utility abilities mixed in there.

Now that you have a boss diseased like crazy, either a frost based (pending runes can be easily swapped between fights) OR blood based DK could deal out some good damage spamming blood strike completely independent of his gear.

A heavy blood/light 16ish frost looks like not a bad way to go for a tank/dps utility, you you get the AC/haste bonus from frost, and the rest in blood for damage.

What is going to make the specs for DK's fuzzy is the whole AP -> spelldamage thing, are the huge "get more spelldamage from what you have" bonuses in unholy/frost better than the "get more overall ap which transfers to spelldamage" in blood? What is the most effective dps combination of them? Do the stacking diseases in unholy count as one per stack or one total? what is immune to disease? ect. ect.

For me, I'm going deep unholy first, I want to explode corpses =)

In addition to that, putting any kind of limitation on the ability to re-rune would seriously annoy anyone who ever makes any sort of mistake while setting up runes. Whether you're just a newb trying to find your way with all the possible rune combinations, or whether you're a Raid Tank who happened to just misclick something... if you're gonna be stuck with that for, say, 15 Minutes due to some cooldown or whatever comes to mind, it's gonna be a massive annoyance for you and anyone in your raid should you happen to MT.

Far as I can see, Death Knight can really only adapt to changes in environment (different mob groups, etc) by altering his rune setup while other classes simply use different abilities. That being said, I believe DK should and will actually be able to switch rune setups between fights. And as far as "omnipotence through rune-swapping" goes, I don't think that's gonna happen given that you're still living within the confines of your spec.

As far as I know we also don't know how runes are actually obtained, do we? If getting these runes is anything like souldshard farming for a warlock, then I guess you're not going to see that many Deathknights fond of swapping around runes all the time. Instead they'll come around with more generic setups and really only swap around for specific fights (Bosses). Of course this blatant assumptions, though.

Rune work like energy, they just regen themselves every 10secs.

I think you'll be able to change runes out of combat whenever you wish, since changing runes is somewhat like switching gear on a warrior. Depending on the fight, you'll go for stam heavy, or block heavy and so on. The DK will most likely not have as much flexibility in his gear choices, but by switching runes around, he'll be able to choose between a more threat based build(runes balanced to fuel some of the blood or unholy dmg abilities) or a tank build(with more frost runes to chain the good frost tanking abilities more often). If it requires a trip to town, it's going to be quite annoying, but I guess it's ok too, since changing runes does affect your character performance quite greatly because of the system.

At this point, it's pretty inconceivable that Blood Strike will remain with its extra damage per any disease on the target. Otherwise, we'd be in a situation where 10 Unholy DKs would easily have 40 diseases on their target making Blood Strike do 60% of weapon damage + 12k.

I don't know what kind of level 80 damage to expect out of raids, but I'm guessing that blows everything else out of the water.

This is the same situation as with 10 mellee shamans or dps pallies all putting debuffs on the same boss, I remember a video of a guy taking something like 100k damage from a chain lightning crit after a raid of shammies all stormstriked him.

The -stats and such diseases wont stack if multiple players put them in like sunder and demo shout do now, obviously the damage ones will have to.

If it turns out to be too much blizzard will integrate a diminishing returns component to blood strikes after whatever they deem as "too many" diseases, thats what they usually do when things get too silly.

They'll just add a cap to how many diseases Blood Strike benefits from. Hardly a hard fix.

That was actually pre-BC, and the setup was 9 stormstrikes on a warrior in Zerker, both he and another shaman grab Bezerking, he blows Death Wish, then Elemental Mastery -> Chain Lightning for 36k, I think. Blizz proceeded to promptly fix the bug that let stormstrikes stack.

What they will probably do is, if it becomes a problem, they'll make Blood Strike only use debuffs that you yourself put up, much like the Blood Elf Priest spell (can't remember what it's called).