Annihilation, Frost talent 3/3, Tier 6

Increases the critical strike chance of all your melee special abilities by 3%, in addition there is a 90% chance that your Obliterate will do its damage without consuming a disease.

Still uncertain if you'd need a very fast weapon to assure diesease hit, or a very slow 2h weapon. All depends on the implementation - if it's a set % - like windfury - then the faster the better. If it's a PPM mechanic - then the slower the weapon, the greater chance for it to proc. Also PPM procs are unaffected by haste - a relatively bad decision.

Places to level at 55.. Where will you be doing it ? I was thinking Burning Steppes at first, but then got to thinking, WPL quests give alot of exp. EPL is a mess of quests all over the place..

I do know one item id like to go after, is todo Black rock depths and try to get that Trinket
Hand of Justice . Probably getting some guildies ( if their not busy leveling themselves ) to power run you through BRD, BRS lower and upper, scholo, and strath.. doing all the quests.. by then should be 58 or higher to start Hellfire TBC content.

guess another good part is you wont have to deal with new zones with other people, if your busy leveling a death knight.. that is if everyone and their mother is playing a DK

I'm pretty sure that the DK starting zone and quests will get you close enough to 58 that you can go from them to Outlands without having to do much in the way of questing or grinding. The two starting zones we've seen (before and after, so to speak) are reasonably large.

Leveling specs are not always DPS specs. They're often much more concerned with efficiency and the reduction of incoming damage. I think there's enough damage-reduction talents across the trees that frost's tanking talents may not edge out. I would anticipate either Unholy spec for the mount- and run-speed increase on Unholy presence, or a Blood life-return spec for downtime reduction. While grinding, Unholy is also much more able to take advantage of corpses for both Ghouls and explosions.

Personally I am not considering any spec without Corpse Explosion, because Corpse Explosion is the best spell in the game in any game that has a spell named Corpse Explosion. I could see myself going for a dumbassed 33/0/27 spec for blood worms and iCE, but this is unlikely in favor of 50 Unholy first, then to Forceful Deflection some frost speed reductions.

Hmmm, after playing around a bit more on the talent calculator, I'm not sure I understand why they homogenized the trees each into a tank/dps hybrid with a different twist but left tank talents singular.

What I mean is, if you look at feral druids, almost every talent affects both dps and tanking somehow. DK builds will by necessity simply be either pure dps or tank/dps hybrid for tanking. Putting tank talents in every tree is fine, but dps builds will simply spec around them and not take them, disallowing 'innate hybrid ability'.

It doesn't need to be overbearing like the feral tree, but it would be nice to see more tanking things come with dps talents instead of having to waste talent points if you want to tank outside of raids.

Thoughts?

I think that's a very pertinent point Azurai and is the kind of thing Blizzard would overlook (because they often assume players will choose "reasonable" and "balanced" specs/consumables/whatever and continue in this benign assumption until people min-max over and over and over again and Blizz finally cottons on). We may end up with three flavours of DK tank but be back to the situation of a paucity of players who are specced to tank an instance (or specced such that they can tank an instance relatively painlessly).

Why shouldn't DKs be ahead of paladins and druids? They're 3 and 4 role hybrids respectively, with the druid getting double talent points in one tree because they whined too much about having to respec like every other class in game to fulfill two roles. While the rough ability of each tank spec will be somewhat equivalent if they are specced properly, the only thing DKs would have going for them is the same flexibility of a feral but with more utility/higher dps. The DK is easily the worst physical tank, the second best caster tank and the second best ranged tank currently. How do DKs shine at being mediocre at two things while having to respec between them while hybrid classes offer much better with additional flexibility? The druids will always have in combat flexibility over the DK, because they gain avoidance from agility and threat from damage in addition to requiring less defense, whereas plate tank gear necessitates defense, parry, dodge, block, block value, etc. This means they can dps fairly well in tank gear whereas the DK will be handicapped without a gear and possibly rune swap.

The raw mitigation and avoidance a warrior has means they will never be replaced as the premier raid tank. The removal of CBs is a moot point too, as most heavy-hitting bosses can't crush in TBC anyway. The problem is DKs inherently can't be pure tanks because none of the trees allow this. They have nothing to make up the obscene armor values of ferals or the block skill of paladins or warriors. Avoidance just simply isn't reliable like mitigation, especially when the avoidance is proc based. Thus, they have to be more flexible in role or else they are simply a bad warrior clone. Judging by the presences, the difference is supposed to be in flexibility much like a feral druid's.

Also, as I mentioned above, I'm kind of curious how DKs are meant to fulfill their role as THE 'caster tank'. AMS has a 20 second cooldown and is 75% reduction only increased to immunity deep in the caster-dps tree. Meanwhile, spell reflect is on a 10 second cooldown. It seems like besides gimmick abilities that are absorbed by AMS but not reflectable, warriors are still the best anti-caster tank. Look at warlocks vs. DKs for ranged tanking, too. Fel Armor's 20% more healing > difference hps, especially with DKs only having 4% hp to their frost presence if talented deep in frost. Warlock threat will be higher too, unless they remove the add'l threat component of searing pain in order to artificially create a niche for DKs as the only thing you can do at range is icy touch spam.

Don't get me wrong, I love the DK class so far and I think the DPS aspects are already well on their way to finished. I just don't see the same in the tanking department, which is kinda odd because the first thing Blizzard said about DKs is that they would be a tank since that role is the most needed one on most servers.

@Azurai - all the things you are mentioning about druids have no place in Wotlk. They are based on TBC, and what little we do know about WotLK, a lot of tanking stuff about druids are changing.

#1 - Druids will get no defence on gear - all their crit needs are via talents in WotLK.
#2 - Druids will no longer get obsene armor - all the green text high armor leather has been removed. Obsene armor for druids was meant to cover crushing blows that druids couldn't avoid. As you've said - crushing mobs go bye bye, and so does high armor for druids.
#3 - Druids will no longer get very high dodge % too - their super good agi -> dodge modifier is getting nerfed to correspond to what rogues have.


Also unlike druids - DK's can parry with a weapon... they just can't block - but block on a 8000 hit is still just 200-300 max.
Based from what I see DK's will be #1 at melee elemental (most of their talents point to that), and decent at aoe tanking - that's it. Remember you can't block elemental melee bosses. You can still dodge or parry their attacks. Ranged tanking is hard when the class is supposed to hit something with a sword.... and hopefully will compete on dps charts with fury warriors (cross fingers).

Those changes are good, didn't know they were changing druids that much. But your block value amounts are kinda skewed. Our MT has 670 block in miti gear and 850 in threat gear right now. That's a huge amount of damage mitigation.

The elemental boss thing is true, but that seems to be such a small niche it doesn't even really matter, because you'll still have to wear full resist gear to tank it. DK's need to take less damage from magic passively than warriors and be able to go immune to spells more often without talents. Frankly if AMZ were no longer talented as well, it would make it a little more reasonable to call DKs the anti-caster tank. I just don't see the advantage when warriors have 16% reduced spell damage and can reflect every 10 sec, while DKs have 0% spell damage reduction and can go immune (only with talents) every 20 sec.

This is based on procs. While this is currently what allows DKs TO tank physical damage, its still the worst way to do it. DKs are still dead last in terms of mitigation. Which is fine as long as they get other benefits.

This talent is really good... but again, proc based mitigation isn't very reliable.

As I said earlier, this is a gimmick mechanic. They could easily make stuff reflectable. An entire class built on the niche of a single raid boss that does an attack which isn't reflectable isn't DKs being good at something, its blizzard hard coding a boss to be anti-warrior.

It's talented AND strictly worse than warriors by 11%

PvP talent. In no way will you ever tank an elemental boss without capped resist and expect to live as long as its new content. I just don't see this skill amounting to anything until it's changed to flat % damage reduction.

AMZ, though, is exactly the sort of skill which would make DKs truly anti-caster. The ability to use a skill like AMZ and apply it to any boss with an AoE and trivialize it for a group of people who are taking damage from another source on the fly is the type of thing DKs should be for. Gimmicked fights where you have to use a DK because they basically coded a boss that way is a completely artificial niche. Yes, shear, I'm looking at you and your bastard cousins sure to poke their heads up in WotLK.