[02.06.09] Initial Changes List
[02.08.09] Blood Boil Range Reduction
[02.11.09] Devs Working on Fixing "Diseaseless" Specs
[02.15.09] Blood Plague HoT removal to be "looked at"
[02.17.09] Blizzard working on "equalizing" DK Talent Trees

BIG UPDATE
(clicky)



Blood

• Blood Gorged now grants armor penetration instead of expertise.
• Sudden Doom – this talent now procs a Death Coil rather than requiring an additional button click. It works similarly to shamans’ Lightning Overload.
• Pestilence – this spell no longer causes damage but just spreads diseases. Blood Boil is intended to be the general area attack, and has been changed to be castable on targets with no diseases on them, but does extra damage if diseases are present.
• Blood Boil range reduced.

Frost

• Unbreakable Armor now absorbs a flat amount of damage that increases as your armor increases. It no longer boosts armor.
• The Frost tree has been shuffled. Among other things, PvP talents such as Endless Winter are closer to the top of the tree where Blood and Unholy death knights can access them.
• Magic Suppression and Blood of the North have been reduced to 3 ranks for the same benefit.

Unholy

• Gargoyle and Unholy Blight have swapped talent positions. Gargoyle’s damage has increased and runic power cost per time has decreased.

Unknowns

• What do they mean when they say the Frost tree will be shuffled?
• Will the Blood Boil changes prompt a change in the glyph as well? (Probably)
• By how much has the range of Blood Boil been reduced?
• How much Armor Penetration will Blood Gorged grant?
• What will be done to encourage the usage of diseases for all Death Knight specs?

Points of Discussion

• Will the change to Sudden Doom make Blood rotations easier to manage?
• How much of a nerf to specs like 0/32/39 was the repositioning of the Gargoyle? How much DPS will be gained by picking up Unholy Blight? Will Unholy dps see a noticeable increase from the changes to the Garg?

Changes listed in italics are the most recent additions.

and KM will be further down the tree. Pretty uninteresting, until we can see the new tree.

Gargoyle/UB swap... will be interesting to see how this affects the cookie-cutter builds that rely on Gargoyle.

yea, once I read "frost tree's getting some swappage" I knew specs like 21/50 are bound to die.

Anyways, I am interested in the Sudden Doom change. Free Death Coil which saves more RP for regular old deathcoils during RP dump.

Armor Penetration on Blood Gorged kinda stinks. Well, that depends on how much ArP it is, but 5 expertise was quite nice. If its like 10% or so, I guess it'll be a good tradeoff.
The Sudden Doom change however is just awesome. That's going to be quite some damage. Suppose it's a good move towards the GCD problem for Blood.

Indeed, the Sudden Doom change saves a lot of GCDs and make it so that there should almost be no reason for questioning Blood Presence with a Blood spec.

The Pestilence / Blood Boil change makes sense, though it's going to make grabbing the initial aggro on spawns a little more annoying for non-Unholy.

On the other hand, if they buff BB damage enough then maybe it will make Blood into a viable AOE tank tree.

I wonder if they're going to switch HB and Frost Strike. If not, you could make a HB / UB build for ridiculous AOE threat / damage.

I suspect we'll see a lot more players going 50/0/21. Adding UB to blood builds makes them effective AE tanks. Combined with corpse explosion, they wouldn't do bad AE DPS either.

For tanking, maybe. For DPS no way. DRW will still destroy everything else when it comes to raw damage output.

Uh, just thought I'd let you know there really is no "GCD problem" for Blood. The only time you should be riding full runic is when you're hanging on to hope for another proc before using DRW or you keep getting back to back Sudden Doom procs preventing your DCs from eating your runic.

I have a question for everyone, with the swap of ub and garg, how do you see DW builds being viable? also with the shuffle of frost talents im interested to see if DW damage will still be consistant after the patch to what were seeing now.

I ask because I joined a 25 man raiding guild and am going to respec from 54 unholy to 32/39 and pick up a couple decent beginner weapons but dont want to waste my time if DW is just going to die out.

I wonder if this Frost shuffling is going to move HB deeper. They talked about making "PvP talents" more accessible; that could be taken to mean that HB and HC may switch positions. While I realize they want DW builds to be a viable option, I don't think they have any love for a spec like 0/32/39.

There is really no telling what the future of DW holds. With the Shuffle of the Frost tree being vauge, there is no telling what its going to look like at this point.

As far as DW dying out, there will always be some people who hold on to it, and Blizz doesn't want DW to be completely not viable for DK's. Also there will almost always be one spec that eeks out a few hundred dps more than the rest if not more.

At this point its just wait and see, 3.1 is still quite a ways off.

During beta many of us were barking up this tree due to the power of Gargoyle vs Unholy Blight, but I do welcome this change.
As for the other changes, I'm interested to see how frost will play out with 2 extra points.

Anyways I do have a feeling Unholy will become the spec for Death Knights once again.

Wonder how much damage Blood Boil will do? Might make getting Outbreak worthwhile.

I hadn't thought of the possibility of getting Unholy Blight as a Blood tank. Even if you have to make some sacrifices, it might still be worth it for an AoE tanking perspective. I am pretty sure your single target threat will suffer, however.

Something like this for example 45/5/21

You lose:

- 10% damage when above 75% HP
- However much ArP BG will be
- 30% crit bonus on Blood Boil, Blood Strike, Obliterate, Death Strike and Heart Strike
- The possibility to get Annihilation so you can use Obliterate rather than Death Strike

You gain:

- Morbidity (depending how you spec at the moment)
- Epidemic (depending how you spec at the moment)
- Either 5/5 Necrosis, 3/3 Outbreak & 2/5 Necrosis or any combination of points in that tier.
- 2% Str & Parry from Shadow of Death
- 20% stun/fear reduction (optional, flavor perhaps)
- Unholy Blight


Maybe it will be worth it. Maybe not. Also first time I hear that Blood isn't GCD starved, but I haven't been Blood DPS for a long time I guess.

Was wondering that too.

If they put HB as 51 talent point ability and remove its cooldown things might get...interesting though.


What I am kinda missing from the preview is any info about "fixing" the DK threat mechanics vs caster/slowly attacking bosses. Since rune strike is pretty useless there.

There is no way they will move Hunger Cold higher up into the tree. A 10s, 1min CD AoE CC with no diminishing returns will ALWAYS be a 51pt talent. It's just way too good otherwise.

It's hard to say what they are going to do, we will just have to wait and see. If they destroy the current DW specs they could easily buff it in another way. Even doing something as crazy as making it so certain strikes hit with both weapons. Like they did with WF and WW. Only time will tell whats in store for us. I'm surprised they released so many changes all of a sudden, and of course it all has to survive the PTR.

I dunno if it will be moved but something has to be done with it. With the Gar change currently all 51 point talents in all trees have no tanking viability.

Is it just me, or the new UA is a cloned BA in the style of Shield Slam vs Shield of Righteousness?
And last time i checked, no DK is getting to the armor cap anytime soon, with the glyphed UA, armor pots and inspiration procs.

I think your right, but I can see it happening if they nerf it. I don't think it sees very much use at all currently, and PvP is definitely one of, if not the most useful place for something like Hungering Cold. If making some of the deeper frost talents more available for PvP specs is a goal for the new frost tree, its certainly within the realm of possibility, in my mind.

Its hard to say. Really. Its weird how a simple statement like "The frost tree has been shuffled" can completely turn your feelings about a class upside down. Maybe its just because frost has always been my favorite tree ever since beta, but its like we got a list of planned changes to the class, and yet we still haven't the slightest clue whats in store.