Doesn't that defeat the whole point of this buff redundancy system? To let people play whatever(relatively) and just go have fun?

At this point, I think a big part of the problem is relative buff/debuff power. If things like windfury, malediction CoE, and battle shout are that crucial to encounter design, they need to change. That way classes can keep their uniqueness.

But then we are respeccing raids to optimize each night depending on who shows up and I thought Blizz wanted to move away from that sort of thing...

OK the Unholy DK showed up tonight so all warlocks respec Destruction. Next night...We need the Unholy DK to respec Frost as the Enh Shaman isn't avaialble, so a warlock will have to respec to Affliction for Malediction.

Just doesn't seem an appealing model to me. Of course with two talent specs you can keep two PvE builds to mitigate this, but then we are back to raiders having to respec to PvP which I thought wasn't desirable.

If you're trying to decide who to bring to a raid for the night, than you're min/maxing. I was under the impression that the first person was trying to maximize with what he had. Keep in mind we're supposedly going to have 2 specs to switch between, and DKs don't need separate gear for each spec. Also, a DK can pick up both Imp Icy Talons and Ebon Plaguebringer, so that warlock wouldn't have to respec. :P

A DK can also pick up a host of group survivability talents in his DPS spec, so I don't see why everyone is comparing the raid-wide buffs while ignoring the other buffs DKs have while attempting to theorycraft their future raid spot.

I'm scratching my head over the change to the Frost Aura talent. I suppose maybe it was a bit too much of a "hey, I'm the tanking tree so get me for more HP" talent before, but the current version I highly doubt I would spend any points on. Warriors were skipping Improved D-Stance with fair frequency, and this seems like a similar case here (even if it does affect the entire party, 4% is still pretty small).

I do like the move away from the "frozen" concept for the frost tree. I do wonder about making frost fever a disease though. Obliterate+Annihilate still leaves a 10% chance of wiping off frost fever, and in a raid, maybe there are 2 DKs and the other one does not have Annihilate (or maybe both don't have it). If Obliterate is being used, then frost fever might be getting removed. If it isn't, what else does one spend Frost Runes on?

Unbreakable Armor... this talent/skill needs something. This is effectively IBF junior, but inferior in nearly every aspect and costs a talent point. Longer CD, less mitigation (none vs spells), a slight avoidance boost due to +Strength component. I think it should be on a 1min CD in its current form, or perhaps it should do something else to justify a 2min CD.

Overall, a deep Frost DK looks to be shaping up to be a pretty decent AoE tank. Maybe not to the caliber of the Prot Pally, but quite passable. I am interested in seeing how a build such as the following holds up in Wrath 5 mans:
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Death Knight -> Talent Calculator

Raid MT tanking is likely a different build, but I think for 5 mans the above would be pretty decent.

Don't get the problem, you just recast icy touch if it drops. You should have someone with imp TC if you're in a 25man, since it's 2%better than imp icy touch. In a 10man, the chances of having another DK obliterating without annihilation are slim at best, and he can still reapply a non improved(or improved) icy touch after obliterating anyway. And you can too. Icy touch does decent damage, so decent threat also, reapplying it even if it doesn't drop isn't a waste of a rune.

I guess obliterating your icy touch is one of the bad result of the change, but the good one is you can apply a 20y range instant disease on anything you want, to bloodboil it. The other is you can pestilence it to get an AE speed debuff, much like thunderclap.

I think the point of all the changes is that, after covering all the "necessities," you will have more like 10 or 15 slots open instead of 4. What I see happening is that the power an average collection of peoples, and a min-maxed group, is converging, which makes balancing earlier. The whole paradigm of building a raid group to maximize the buffs and whatnot is basically done. By WLK I expect that you'll be getting the people who are best at their role, regardless of class, and you will be very very surprised if you didn't happen to pick up all the necessary raid buffs along the way. And if you didn't, most of those can be covered by a respec and/or scrolls.

So according to http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deathknight, obliterate has a 100% chance to not remove diseases with 3/3 annihilation now. Also, the unholy tree just looks unbelievably awesome now.

Yeah, I must say unholy is looking pretty damn cool. I'm gonna try some deep frost though tonight if server can get back up. Frost has always been the tree that interested me, but always played kinda bad. They have made a lot of changes to it, and it sounds like it will play a lot smoother.

Well I'll probably respec like 10 times this weekend anyways to try everything. Good thing that's just 1 copper in beta.

Are some of the talents up on the new MMO trees not discussed yet?

I really like the new blood caked blade, for doing straight damage and not dealing with buffing a disease, and night of the dead seems like a very good compact talent for getting your ghoul back up. Desecration seems like an awesome damage buff, which will presumably work on all enemies since it affects the ground, and if it creates some sort of pulsing debuff on a target, will be a very useful snare for pvp.

I definitely don't see how I could fit in AMZ though, since I've got to spend the points for annihilation, and even without AMZ I'm short on unholy points.

Yeah, unholy looks like the tree I could sink the most points into. Whether that's just cause it offers more good stuff or because it's in need of some talent consolidation, I dunno. Also, Night of the Dead just looks... weird. I'm assuming it's a self buff, but does it have a duration? And if there's no restrictions beyond what it says on the talent, it seems like you could spawn a whole pile of ghouls if you just spammed scourge strike with your unholy runes. And lastly, Blood-Caked Blade looks like it's going to get nerfed hard, if I'm reading it right. A 15% chance to deal 240% weapon damage with four diseases up?

Will have to see how Night of the Dead actually works, the wording is a bit weird. For BCB, you only have 3 common diseases(assuming you get ebonplague, which is a hefty point investment), and you can pop blight for an additional 4th with a continous RP cost and a 1min cooldown(and pretty damn deep in the tree). So it's "only" 120-180%. It does sound pretty fucking awesome though. New unholy looks better than ever, and while I'm obviously going to give frost a try(blood is pretty much the same), I feel like unholy is insane currently. Aniihilation and that new talent on obliterate that slows down stuff and increase damage, sounds awesome for PvP too. Creates mini frost traps areas everytime you obliterate, I wonder how long they last, but it'd be pretty damn fun. Also give a snare to unholy, making it a bit more viable for PvP compared to frost. With Chains of Ice undispellable(the snare component at least) and unholy aura, and some interesting burst ability, Unholy looks pretty solid for all types of play.

New talents are certainly good. I'd go with 2 deathknights in a raid, one specced like this:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...00000000000000

For Abomination's Might, Mark of Blood, Heart Strike, Hysteria & Blood Aura

And one like this:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...11100023103100

For Ebony Plague, More Ghoul 'Combat' resses (lol), Imp Icy Talons & Crypt Fever for the other DK.

I think it's pretty obvious Frost subspec is the way to go now that Obliterate is a 100% chance to not remove diseases. Finally!

Well those specs are nice, but might not be needed depending on your group setup. The most likely configuration would be to replace the plague/icy bot with an unholy tank DK, and have enh shamans handle the windfury stuff. Seems much more efficient than having a debuff bot who will probably quite suck at DPSing because of not too much synergy in its DPS choices, and stuff like that.

Also I'd argue on points placement for your blood/frost dps build, mostly maxing blood aura with 1point of sudden death, which still looks pretty shitty, especially if you use obliterates often, which you will since you speced for annihilation. I'd try to free some points for Death Rune Mastery to be able to convert those pesky unholy runes into blood runes, you only need one unholy rune every 12secs for plague strike, the second one is almost wasted.

But yeah, with the current state, there'd be 2 valid different specs for DKs that'd fit in a min/maxing environnement. Imp Icy Talon though is mostly a PvP/10man talent, I doubt any guild will run without an enhance shaman, if anything because of bloodlust in a melee group. Ebonplague however is way less redondant, affliction locks unless they fix DPS issues aren't that common, at least in current raiding environement.

Just out of curiosity, but if you can still use Corpse Explosion on a ghoul right after it dies, with Night of the Dead it seems like about every minute or so, you'd be able to Explode your ghoul if you have the Master talent, then Corpse Explode it for a bit more, than insta summon a new ghoul since it supposedly doesn't have a rune cost anymore.

Unholy definitely looks good...real good. Blood still has some perks, but it might have achieved parity, at least in dps. I'm still at odds over URM and Blade Barrier. They're both so damn good. With Morbidity reducing the cooldown of DnD to just 5s beyond duration, we're almost to consecrate levels! Seriously, you could probably work DnD into a single target rotation. Since it does damage every second, it's almost guarunteed to proc URM in combination with your other damage. And even though you can't plague/scourge strike right away, DnD was said to have a threat multiplier this patch, probably makes up for the lost threat.

Can you explain why Obliterate removing diseases was a terrible thing anyway(excepting a raid environment where it would eat other DK's diseases)? You use it at the end of your 10s rune cycle, you're just going to put the disease right back up.

There's still downtime with no Icy Touch up assuming you're tanking, and it forces set rotations, which aren't very flexible. I never liked it, but matter of taste. I guess in a perfect raiding environement as a DPS tool, it doesn't matter. Not everyone will play the DPS DK in 25man raids though ^^.


Anyway tested Unholy rather fast. There's a lot of bugged stuff, as expected with new talent.

BloodCaked Blade does 1dmg per disease.

Night of the Dead does nothing. It only procs on plaguestrike(not scourge), there's 2ranks that do exactly the same thing, it only stacks up to 3times, for 10mins each, potentially reducing cd by 30mins, but it doesn't do anything on Raise Dead. Since they haven't raise lvl cap, no Army of the Dead yet so can't tell if it'd work on that.

Master of Ghouls now gives the usual pet commands(attack follow stay and offensive/defensive/passive) but none of the special abilities at all.

Corpse explosion without imp corpse explosion lost a lot of its efficiency, but since it's now a rune cost, I guess it's a decent AE.

Blight does more damage as far as I can tell, it's pretty decent now ticking 200ish dmg alone. Does NOT apply Blood Plague.

Desecration only procs if your obliterate doesn't kill the mob, and it's like world of awesomeness. The graphics is like Nightbane corrupted ground thingie, with undead arms trying to grasp stuff at the same time. It lasts about 12secs, increases your dmg by 10% in the area and slow downs everything.

Pestilence is broken in this build.

New Death&Decay does much better damage, but consumes 1rune of each(instead of 2unholy). With the 15secs cooldown talent though, and Blight, you can AE tank like a pro.

Dirge was nerfed from 75% to 50%(well like, there's only 2ranks now, and contrary to what was shown on talent calculator, it is 25% per rank).

Necrosis seems to do better damage. Probably fixed the AP thingie in it or whatever, while it doesn't do a clear 25% of your autoattacks, it's pretty close, around 20%.

Morbidity doesn't reduce cost on DeathCoil anymore either, as was shown on one of the talent calculator. Meaning, there's actually no way to spam more deathcoils besides Sudden Death in blood. Will make them less common, and the caster buffing talents less powerful.

Empower Rune Weapon 5min cooldown(up from 3), refreshes all your runes and gives 25RP.

Deathstrike: Fucking insane. Probably will end up getting nerfed like they nerfed original blood healing, it just heals too much currently. You hit stuff for 400-500with it, heals you for 1500 and the only cooldown are runes.

New rune graphics, bugged UI showing runes blinking for no specific reason.

Various UI changes, like scrolling combat texts tells you stuff like Attacking You! when threat switches, or Silenced. when you silence something. Threat counter has a "state" color system, red is you have aggro, orange is when you're gonna lose aggro.

Ghoul only seems to have Claw and Leap now. Haven't seen it disease stuff, rest is not accessible so not sure. Ghoul name is RandomPetName. Also, not sure if it's Master of ghoul related or not, but the ghoul doesn't die anymore even after its time is over.

Blood is doing rather sick DPS right now. I did some tests and with my awful gear, I was doing 4k Heart Strikes and 5.9k+ Obliterates.

Can someone in beta test to see if a rotation like this is enough for AE and single target agro:

2x(Icy Touch, DnD, Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Death Coil) 1x(Icy Touch, Plague Strike, 2x Blood Strike, Death Coil, Obliterate)

That whole thing is over 30s. But, I guess if that held AE and main agro, what would be the point of pestilence? Just to spread diseases quickly?

Pestilence point is to spread Icy Touch for AE tanking(like thunderclap) mostly, and depending on your build(epidemic, wandering plague) to do additional damage. Also D&D doesn't apply a disease anymore, so you'd need pestilence to have a backup plan(blood boil) in case stuff goes wrong.

It's broken currently anyway, meaning they were probably tweaking it, meaning it'll probably change.

As for if it's enough for aggro, it all depends on what hits, what your group is eating and doing and stuff like that. Old D&D was enough to hold mobs from the healer, and new one does like twice the damage, and you can cast it twice in the same pull. If you mean if it's enough for Seeding destro locks, probably not, but wandering plague/blight/D&D/pestilence might be enough for that.

By the way, Death Knights have now gotten their own original hair colours and skin toning, example below:

http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/2...8035105ll2.jpg

Just to give you an idea of some of the numbers Blood Spec is putting out now:

http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/4...8040410zh1.jpg
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/7...8040323ap4.jpg