I was/am assuming it will work like Seal of Righteousness, although obviously if it works like Flametongue it's use is drastically reduced. I didn't really think about it, but the name suggests it will probably work like Flametongue, which would be disappointing.

I think 5% hit is a pretty big deal even with 2h, with Imp. FF on a target you'd only need 1% hit to cap (0 for Draenei?), meaning you can drop almost all the +hit on your gear and concentrate on other things. It could be that you can't avoid +hit on your gear, though, in which case you may be better spending points elsewhere and avoiding Frost entirely, for a DPS build anyway.

Also, Scent of Blood looks to be a PvP talent, and I'm completely unsold on Heart Strike in a raiding build. I would drop Scent of Blood for Blade Barrier (assuming it's not too difficult to get rid of all Runes once every 15 seconds), and then put the deflection talents back into Bladed Armor, along with the point from Heart Strike. Although unless Blade Barrier has some hidden cooldown, or it is much more difficult to use up all 6 runes than I am imagining, then it looks too powerful for a 3 point talent.

Good point; I'd definitely reposition those points into Bladed Armor and then ponder keeping points in parry or maxing armor.

As far as the higher-tier defensive talents go (Blade Barrier, Spell Deflection, etc.) I'd probably avoid them unless I knew that I'd need to offtank something on a regular basis and, even then, probably avoid Spell Deflection in favor of maxing blade barrier and keeping as many points in DPS talents as possible.

Looking more individually at talents, and having way too much time on my hands in my post exam period, Midnight Sun looks very weak when compared to the deep spell damage reducing talents in Prot/Prot/Feral. Improved Defensive stance, for example, is 6% to all magic damage for 3 talent points, Spell Warding is 4%/2 points and the new (admitedly higher tier) druid talent is 3 points for 10% armor/10% spell reduction.

While I understand that there will be some differences, I don't see why it can't be made all schools. It could be that the DK is deemed adept enough at combating spell damage and it is simply filler, I don't know, but I would guess at significant amounts of the spell damage in WotlK being Frost and Shadow, and if that is the case why not just make it all schools? Or perhaps it is due to pvp considerations.

Other than that, the problems I have are more with the tree layouts than the talents, going deep frost seemingly forcing you not to take some of the better tanking talents, for example, but I expect them to change before release so it's perhaps not worth considering in too much detail right now.

Frozen Runeblade did get me thinking though, and I even had a look at it.
Couple of things I have noted.
Currently, it appears as though it should be ranked. In fact, the only rank of Frozen Runeblade (rank 1) available in the spell data calls upon (not sure if that is the correct terminology to be using) the proc spell of rank 1 flametongue weapon. Again, I'm not sure if I've explained this as well as I could, but in effect Frozen Runeblade rank 1 is Flametongue rank 1.
Frozen Runeblade rank 1 - http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/views...?spellid=49142
Flametongue rank 1 - http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/views...p?spellid=8024
And the 8026 spell in question - http://urlshort.com/wotlk/site/views...p?spellid=8026

From this I would say it is safe to assume Frozen Runeblade is unfinished in it's current alpha form. It either will become ranked and be Flametongue for DKs, as in an identicle spell, or something else. Until the spell is finished then speculation on it's use is somewhat limited. I would question the logic of having it scale with spell damage though, I would honestly like to see all DK abilities scale with AP, and the Impurity talent done away with.

But anyway! The reason I decided to look into it was simple, I wanted to see if there was any chance of it being an alternative to Windfury. Obviously Flametongue isn't competitive with Shaman windfury weapon, but the totem only works on white attacks, so it might not be quite so clear, especially if (as I believe is correct?) regular melee attacks don't generate Runic Power.
A few things aren't known at the moment, how much extra damage Frost Strike will cause with Frozen Runeblade for example, although if you were fitting it into a DPS build you probably won't have that anyway. It's worth noting anyway.

Reason I wanted to look at was thinking about an extra melee and the problem of needing an Enhancement shaman. Not that Unleashed Rage and SoE totem aren't huge anyway, but it was simply to consider if a DK would suffer as badly as, for example, a ret pally or a dps warrior without a shaman.

Anyway. Using Cat's Edge and stealing the rotation from above, and the forumlae too for that matter, basically, because I'm only looking for a "rough" idea, as I really don't expect it to be better than WF, or even competitive, I just want to see if it could close the gap somewhat.

Using 70 seconds, so 7 cycles and 20 (well, 21) unhasted auto attacks, we would expect to see 4 Windfury procs. Maths is not my strongest point, but with 445 extra AP (31ish extra dps?) you'd hit for 1162 on average non-crit, x1.3 for crits and the average WF attack is 1510. Now, I assume mulitply this (and this seems to be missing on your calculations Lurker, I am unsure if it is or I am overlooking something? If I've missed it my maths is even more broken than it probably already is!) 1.45 for Blood Pressence, Blood Gorged and Bloody Vengence.
So, 1510x1.45 = 2190
2190x4 = 8760 extra damage over 70 seconds, or 125 dps.

A note here, I'm assuming it would just be a 1.45 multiplier, but could it be 1.15x1.15x1.15? It doesn't make a huge amount of difference, with the latter method resulting in 131 dps rather than 125.

My maths could be screwy, and the other glaring problem is that WF scales, so in a melee group with Battle Shout, Unleashed Rage, SoE totem and elixers/food/flasks/scrolls and so on, WF will obviously do much more damage. Even with any damage reduction through armor 125 dps is clearly an under estimate, but still.

Frozen Runeblade would, assuming no misses/dodges (which seems fair as I have done the same for WF), hit 20 times from regular melee attacks in the 70 seconds. Each 10 second cycle contains 5 melee strikes, adding a further 35 attacks.
So, in ideal circumstances with the above rotation, you would hit 55 times with Frozen runeblade effect. As this is ideal, I will forget about 16% full resists, and various partial resists, but they would have to be considered.
Anyway, in order to reach the (unrealistically low) WF damage of 8760, each proc would need to do 160 damage on average.

The current max rank of Flametongue would do 122 damage per attack with 0 spell damage, and if Frozen Runeblade were to do the same then it would contribute 96ish dps. This would seemingly get a 1.15 multiplier from Blood Pressence, meaning 140 damage per attack.
Couple of things I haven't added here, is that Frozen Runeblade would be affected by CoElements, Misery and possibly Winter's Chill (frost mages might not be popular at the bleeding edge, but they're still fairly common even in PvE), as well as a number of Frost talents depending on build. I only feel comfortable including Black Ice, however, as if we're stripping away all external buffs from WF it is only fair we do the same for Frozen Runeblade.
So, 147 per attack then, still 13 less than (the low estimate of) WF.

At this point it looks as though the two are close, but obviously that isn't actually true. WF not only scales much faster from external sources (AP buffs) but also with the DKs own abilities. This scaling changes if you spec deep frost, however, with Frozen Runeblade gaining from Tundra Stalker and Frost Strike, and WF will actually scale less quickly through talents than Frozen runeblade. If it scales with Spell damage, then deep Unholy will cause it to scale even faster, due to Impurity and Rage of Rivendare. Theoretically, Frozen Runeblade could scale 15% through Blood Pressence + 10% through Tundra/Rivendare, 5% through Misery, 13% through Malediction CoElements and 5% through Black Ice, along with some extra damage through frost strike.

I will take another look, and probably not bore everyone with pointless speculation that time, when the Frozen Runeblade ability is updated.
At low-mid range gear levels or low levels of buffs (10 men perhaps), though, I would not be entirely suprised to see Frozen Runeblade out perform Windfury. Maybe even at higher gear levels for Frost or Unholy spec. A lot will, of course, depend on it's scaling.

Upon a little reflection, I see no reason why it shouldn't be competitive, or better even. There is a large enough thread on it already, but I see no reason why a melee group should require a enhancement shaman any more than a ret pally, or any other number of individual melee specs.

Perhaps if blizzard wants to keep with the Dual Wielding they will make the strikes function like storm strike for dual wielding. However, this raises all kinds of other questions about how the different modifiers would change when hitting with both weapons.
I have to say these trees are the least straight forward trees I've seen. It seems like they want to keep options open.

I did Presence/Gorged/Vengeance as 1.52, which is 1.15*1.15*1.15

I also assumed Improved Blood Strike would be +30% total damage (Excellent), instead of +30% weapon damage (Not bad) or +30% of its bonus damage (328 for 2 diseases, or 426 after the talent. Pretty paltry for three talent points).

As an aside, I think the Strength Scrolls will be pretty nifty for DKs. I need to find out what overrides it, if anything besides standard strength potions. Anyone know offhand?

A few sources have mentioned a DK talent called Improved Icebound Fortitude, as shown below:

Improved Icebound Fortitude - "Increases the duration of your Icebound Fortitude. In addition your Icebound Fortitude will dispel any damage over time effects and replace them with heal over time effects."

Its odd, because I can't seem to find this ability on any of the death knight talent calculators. Is this 'talent' actually a skill, or is there an error of some sort somewhere?

It's trainable, Rank 1 being at level 72 (and being the only rank).

I know that most people here are trying to figure out a reason why a Deathknight would be useful as a tank, as other tanks in this game have a specific role (druid is high damage mobs, paladin is AoE mobs for instance)

One thing that I haven't seen anyone consider, wouldn't a deathknight be viable as a avoidance tank?

here's my reasoning - I'm going to copy my warriors unbuffed stats in stamina gear to get us started. I am also going to consider this at a level 70 range, so I can draw better comparisons to what we have now, all stats are listed as unbuffed percentages.

32% dodge
22% parry (without talents)

so this is my unbuffed stats as a deathknight, I also have reached the defense cap as well of 490.

the 490 defense cap also increases my chance to be missed by 5.6% (140 extra defense over your max, each defense point giving .04% to be missed)

The only thing we have to add from here is a boss' innate miss chance of 5%, so here is the attack table now:

32.00% dodge
22.00% parry
10.60% miss
15.00% crushing
20.40% hit


Here's my specc: Avoidance Spec

I've specced the innate 5% to parry, so we now have to add that to our current parry chance. This leaves us with 15% chance to crush and 15.40% to hit. This final bit is made up with Blade Barrier.

When my DK has no runes available he gains an extra 30% parry for 15 seconds. Now we are going to assume runes take 10 seconds to regenerate themselves, and that each rune has a separate cooldown.

For the easiest discussion, I am going to enchant 3 blood runes and 3 unholy runes into my blade and I am going to spam plague strike (if my information is correct plague strike has no CD on it and takes 1 blood and 1 unholy rune per cast) With that in mind it will take me 4.5 seconds to expend all 6 runes (1.5 second cooldown on each cast) as soon as those runes have been used up I will recieve Blade Barrier, pushing my parry up another 30%. Now my attack table looks like this:

32.00% dodge
57.00% parry
10.60% miss
00.40% crushing

There is now .40% left on the mobs attack table, and a full 1.6% more avoidance I need to obtain from the boss being 3 levels ahead of me. There are quite a few ways to obtain this last amount. The easiest way would be raid buffs, so lets give myself; an agility elixir (35) an agility food (20) a Mark of the wild (20) and a blessing of kings (10% of total agility.) My unbuffed agility on my warrior was 200 IIRC so for the sake of argument lets say my DK has 150. adding totals from the buffs together I will obtain another 97.5 ( [35 + 20 + 20] X 10% ) + ( 150 * 10%) Every 30 agility gives my character 1% to dodge (30 agility is the highest amount you need at the moment for a tanking character to receive 1% dodge, so I think it is a good basis to assume the DK will have) so that gives me just over 3% more dodge, now my attack table looks like this:

35.00% dodge
57.00% parry
09.60% miss


I know have 100% avoidance, I cannot be hit by anything but magic, I also have specced Spell Deflection giving myself an extra 15% reduction to magic attacks.

The benefit to this type of a specc is the way DK's use abilities, our runes refresh like Rogues energy, we don't need to be hit / do damage to gain rage like Warriors or have to worry about mana efficiency like Paladins, so our threat can remain very high.



I think deathknights will now be the new avoidance tanks.


EDIT: Things not considered, Hunter Viper Sting and Balance Druid's Insect Swarm, for a total extra of 7% to miss
EDIT2: Rogues don't gain rage...

Gift of Arthas is a free disease assuming the DK is tanking.

It seems everyone is in some agreement (at least for those who havn't actually played the class!) over what the better DPS and tanking talents are for the DK. At the moment the Blood tree looks to be the clear winner on both account, with the Unholy tree being useful also.

Either we are missing something or this will surely change.

One thing that interests me about the DK is the spellcasting aspect of it. At the moment however the spells of the DK are somewhat limited. They are creature summons, snare/interrupts with a little DPS, or non-damage utility. All well and good in their own right, and things that look to fit with the class well, but insofar as the flat out DPS spells go there are only a few, most of which are only obtainable through talents, and are pretty much restricted to AOE damage.

They are:

Blood Boil
Death & Decay
Corpse Explosion
Deathchill
Unholy Blight

That's a fair amount of AOE damage spells. Deathchill and Unholy Blight are mutualy exclusive but otherwise it is possible for the DK to have up to 4 AOE abilities.

Is there some intention for the DK to AOE tank? Or AOE DPS? In most other respects the DK looks to be a single target class so how are these abilities expected to be used:

Blood Boil is obviously not just an AOE spell, it is also a taunt. It has obvious uses for single and multi-tarket tanking, the onyl question is just how well it does in AOE threat generation. Even if DKs don't AOE tank or AOE DPS this spell still has a place, though.

Death & Decay seems to be a flat out AOE DPS spell. It would also be useful in AOE tanking given how it is placed.

Corpse Explosion is a talented ability, (currently) found 21 points into the Unholy tree. It does damage based on runic power and when combined with the Improved telent will give all targets a disease. There is an obvious application here in combination with Blood Boil that points to Corpse Explosion being a useful AOE tanking spell, but it looks useful as AOE DPS too.

Deathchill is a talented ability, (currently) found 21 points into the Frost tree. It does more damage than Improved Corpse Explosion (40 damage per Runic power as opposed to 18) and also causes increased threat. This seems to indicate it is exclusivly an AOE tanking ability. It also has a useful combination with Imp. Corpse Explosion, in that the talent Glacier Rot will result in this spell doing 15% more damage to all diseased targets.

Unholy Blight is another Unholy disease AOE. This one cas stack up to three times and has obvious combinations with Blood Boil. It seems to indicate to me that Blood Boil may do extra damage depending on how many diseases are on each target, giving BB the ability to be used by an Unholy DK on targets with 4 diseases for improved damage and threat.

At first glance it appears that unless a DK specs for some of these added AOEs then their ability to tank groups, or damage groups, will be somewhat restricted. Blood Boil has obvious problems for anyone not tanking and is dependant on diseases being on the targets, while D&D is on a thirty second cooldown and is not hugely damaging. Were one to spec for Deathchill then the obvious intention is tanking, and in combination with Imp Corpse Explosion and Blood Boil, as well as D&D the potential looks reasonable. Unholy Blight also looks to have potential, depending how Blood Boil works, so the possibilty of properly speced DKs being good AOE tanks looks high.

On pure DPS the options are less good. Only D&D and Corpse Explosion offer the DK ranged damage and while Unholy Blight does not seem exclusive to tanking in the same manner that Deathchill and BB do, it shares runic power with Corpse Explosion.

The intention looks to me to primarily be for DKs to have AOE 'usefulness' instead of any great damage--to do some AOE while bashing on a single target--unless the DK is to be tanking the whole group. This seems in line with the rest of the class, where damage is primarily melee based and spells are grounded more in utility for PvP or types of tanking rather than outright DPS.

A potential Tanking AOE build:

War Pirate :: Talent tree Deathknight

Deathchill, Corpse Explosion, 7(13)% (Frost and Shadow) magic damage reduction, Bone Armor, etc.

Potential DPS +AOE build:

War Pirate :: Talent tree Deathknight

When it comes to DPS, I think it might be very useful to look at Ret Paladins to see what the Death Knight will be like. Looking at the talent trees I can see several immediate similarities between the DK and a Paladin:

- Dark Conviction -> Bloody Vengeance is a straight take from Conviction -> Vengeance with similar effects and the same position in the tree
- Deflection is the same talent in the same position
- Subversion and Fanaticism both increase crit chance on the main dps abilities, while reducing threat
- Nerves of Cold Steel and Precision are both +hit talents early in the tanking tree
- Ravenous Dead and Divine Strength both add a % of str and are early in the unholy/holy tree
- The DK's disease/strike system seems to be rather similar to the Paladins seal/strike system

So it seems likely that the DK dps spec used the ret paladin as a base, so we can probably expect them to fill a similar role in raids (one for the speciality skills, no others unless they're horribly imba, which is always a posability with a new class).
The next question then, is what does a DK bring to a group and why should they deserve a spot in it over another class?

- +5% str to group members
- Mark of Blood: Speciality skill that heals the group is unique situations (will have to see raid encounters to determine usefulness)
- Hysteria: Single target dps buff, short cooldown, huge effect. Will likely be a big reason to bring a Blood DPS, but it doesn't matter what group they're in.
- Unholy Aura: +10% movement speed for the group. If it stacks with other bonuses it could be quite useful for some encounters, if not then it's significantly less useful. Judging from other movement bonuses, it likely won't (though WotLK is changing quite a few things).

Judging from that, there isn't a whole lot that will be useful for a DPS group but, with the group heal and bonus strength, it could be quite useful to have a Blood DK in your tank group.


Also, there were some basic things I was hoping someone here could shed some light on:

- What kind of stat conversions does the DK have? (for example, str:AP) I'm guessing that it would be the same as warriors/paladins, but it wouldn't hurt to confirm it.
- What's the rune cooldown? I see a lot of people working with 10s, but has that been confirmed?