One thing to keep in mind that isn't posted on MMO-Champion builds is that Hungering Cold is a prerequisite to get howling blast.

Personally, from my beta experience I think I will rock out old school 2H Frost, and as such see below:

Expected 2H Frost build: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...m-DH6VN,,12479

Optional Talents up for debate:

2/2 Endless Winter vs 2/2 Icy Reach?
1/1 Lichborne vs 1/3 Virulence vs 1/2 Icy Reach

Conclusions:

1. Frost 2H seems to have more 'available points' but unfortunately the points seem to get "wasted".

Example:
DW = Nerves of Cold Steel (3) + Threat of Thassarian (3) = 6
2H = MotFW (3) + (2/2 Endless winter or 2/2 Icy Reach) = 5

2. Blood Subspec only viable option for both Frost 2H/DW and Unholy (although slight potential for some old DW UH builds with NoCS so low).

3. Hungering Cold is a LAME talent to force us to take. Still applies frost fever, and therefore its not capable of aiding effective CC, and seems 100% counter intuitive to being a prerequisite for Howling Blast.

Looking at the new 31 pt trees Scarlet fever is in the 2nd tier of blood talents. Does anyone know whether it is a disease and is refreshable by glyph of disease?

If that is the case would a 2h frost build like http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?deat...-stA1n2,,12479 using a blood boil at the beginning of a fight to get a 3rd disease be viable?

It wasn't the case on Beta until now so i doubt that will be the case now. It's just a DK version of Demoshout.

The 1U Scourge strike does only a little bit more damage than Plague strike. On its face it doesn't seem to be anywhere close to obliterate. What is the intended rotation?

I can't figure it out. As it stands it seems that you are supposed to use IT-PS-BS-BS-Oblit-then SS in place of PS. It is really wonky. Since addons are disabled in beta, I can't tell you what the damage differentials are.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[quote=Mchammer;1700829 using a blood boil at the beginning of a fight to get a 3rd disease be viable?[/QUOTE]

Scarlet Fever does not count as a third disease.

As far as I know only SS is using the 1 rune mechanic and DS/Oblit were still 2 runes. I think for frost runes you are supposed to burn IT, which would mean at least partially sub speccing into frost for IIT.

GoD might be written off for Frost and Unholy at this point, with ITT and viscious strikes.

Looking at the talent trees, it also seems like they are artificially lowering our strength by putting %str increase talents out of our reach. I'm not sure about blood (I'd guess they dip into unholy for the Necrosis/Ravenous Dead), but for frost and unholy dps currently they all dip into other trees and either pick up ravenous dead or endless winter for the %str gain. So both specs are losing between 2-3% strength, which is a massive loss especially considering cata gear.

The difference between 2H and DW is now just the 3 points for Nerves of Cold Steel that you need for DW. You end up with 1 point that you have to use to move down the tree (I'd pick Lichborne, or maybe Icy Reach) and that leaves you with 2 points you can put in in virulence or epidemic and the other 8 in Blood. Which works better than the way it is now.

And the problem with Hungering Cold in raids is that it doesn't affect very many kinds of mobs. Basically just a small number of the pack type mobs which you'd just AoE anyways. Sure, it may cause a problem for a mage since you've now put a DoT on their sheep target, but it's no better or worse than using pestilence.

While I haven't had a chance to check it out since the new talent trees due to realm stability issues, Rime and howling blast are a must for 2H frost single target dps. A lot of us have a bad taste in our mouth since howling blast was turned into summer breeze, but trust me, that's not the case on beta.

Howling blast is hitting truck, 18-21k crits per mob with no diseases, if game play continues that way it is now, I can almost guarantee that putting the points from rime and howling blast would be wasted anywhere else.

With that said, I definitely anticipate DKs to be tweaked down a bit, at least 2H frost. Even with MotFW bugged to grant 1 instead of 10 RP, the numbers are quite ridiculous.

I wouldn't expect 1 disease 30k oblits to go live either. I'm prone to believe them when they say everything is up in the air.

There is an issue with the DK UH Tree at the moment, in which you cannot put points into Morbidity, or it resets the whole tree bar the 1st level.

I am currently testing WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie as unholy, and it seems pretty strong in terms of damage output, although I doubt it is optimal seeing as the biggest hits I have so far are 10k death coils!

Scourge Strike on a fully diseased target makes around 9k at the moment.

My main comment would be that we have moved from GCD locked in UH to more rune locked, although I dont have masses of haste yet (19.79%), so this could change a lot as the talents and my haste improve.

So far, no real disappointment, but until I get to hit something with more than 24k health, I wont be able to see any consistency in the numbers.

Another observation from beta - Outbreak applies frost fever and blood plague but NOT Ebon plague!

Icy touch now also apllies ebon plague, and pestilence does spread it even though the tooltip doesn't state that, it states spreads frost fever and blood plague.

Under the new rune system, I think those oblit numbers sound only slightly high. You have to keep in mind that we can only use them 1/2 as often as in live. However, I really would be shocked to see HB survive the way it is working in beta.

Tweaking numbers is the thing they do last. So I wouldn't worry about that too much.

Then again, 30k obliterates might not be that far fetched. If you realize that a raid buffed obliterate currently is 25k damage and you can do 2 of those where you can do 1 in cata, that makes for 50k damage. Now a lot of that gets reduced by the fact you have no raid buffs and the fact that haste now affect rune refresh. But still 30k isn't that far fetched.

I wouldn't hold too much hope in Howling Blast staying as a good single target damage source. Alongside Whirlwind and Divine Storm, it is likely to be tuned to be a button you want to hit when you want to AoE and not simply give bonus damage when there are more targets available.

I thought this was also the reason why Icy Touch was added to Rime, to keep it's functionality as a free damage source for single target damage.

So for those playing on the beta, how would you describe the difference in our globals now that our runes work totally different? Although we were global capped in the past, I always enjoyed having something to do, and really hated sitting there waiting for a rune to refresh or RP to build. With the new system, are we left with tons of empty globals, with nothing to do?

Just my 2c but I do not think this question can be answered yet. As a generalization they said we want to free up gcd's to let you do more <cool stuff>...the <cool stuff> has not yet been added in beta. At the moment it feels very much like we were just cut from 6 to 3 runes. I would say wait until they finish implementing the as of yet unknown <cool stuff> and then we can get a good answer to the question.

So far I'm liking the new talent trees, and how much more focused they've become. However, I do wish they would add a top tier talent for 2h Frost that could be used in lieu of Nerves of Cold Steel. As of right now, you have to sort of dump a point in Lichborne or Icy Reach, which is a bit suboptimal. Maybe they could tag something onto Nerves of Cold Steel that would benefit 2her's, so both playstyles could make use of the talent.

Which, after looking through the talents, if I'm not mistaken Two-Handed Weapon Spec has been removed. So adding that to Nerves of Cold Steel would be a perfect dual use talent for both DW and 2h.

I think we shouldn't focus too much on the new trees in total yet. I mean; take frost for example. Besides Runic Empowerment becoming baseline I really don't see improved Icy Touch sticking around in its current incarnation.

Frost uses icy touch once per 1.5 minute with epidemic or once per minute at best without.
Unholy will get a new ability to use with frost runes (also mentioned in the recent twitter discussion).
The tank benefit from Icy Touch (extra threat) and from imp. IT (6% bonus to the swing speed slow) are both gone.

And there are more talents like that that I can't see sticking around.

Another thing to note (not sure if i mentioned that earlier or somewhere else); is that Howling Blast and Hungering Cold used to have a pretty great synergy in alpha. I haven't checked beta yet, because i've been busy. But using Howling Blast on targets frozen by Hungering Cold used to make your HB do 2x or 3x more damage. That synergy might be removed now in beta (as said havent checked yet), but the "link" might be a remnant from that synergy.

EDIT: In haste posting this from work, I definitely made a few silly mistakes...

@Nyth_
At present, hungering cold sits at something ridiculous like a 1min CD (for suboptimal 10second CC that breaks all other CCs), and does not give any added synergy (Read: no +dam modifiers) apart from the "oh damn, I just KM/HB'd and ripped threat of all mobs off the tank, better CC them to survive" scenario. There have been rumors of them switching up rime/hungering cold in the talent tree to further the synergy between Rime and HB while removing HC a prerequisite for our 31 pt talent.

Outbreak is quite a bit weaker then it seems due to the limited sources of pre-fight RP generation, and isn't used as an opener, but rather a quick refresh 30secs into the fight when RP is flowing in abundance (frost also doesn't use epidemic, and in fact, in its current incantation, -none- of the specs should apart from filler points to get further in the tree if required)

Unholy, feels clunky and broken without the frost rune use, but there are a number of things they can do to fix that, and I'm actually quite excited to see how they go about it.

@Sakuratei - Howling blast has been toned down alot indirectly by the removal of alot of the + str talents, but is still a single target DPS boost easily if combined with a KM Rime. another thing to note, is that it seems to be avoiding the AoE cap presently, as I can easily thrown a 15-21k HB crit on a single target, as well as on 8 targets, it reminds me of the early days of the DK, seeing eight to twelve 15k+ numbers flash on your screen brings a smile to my face every time, despite the fact I know it wont be there forever.

As for Outbreak, it won't be used as an opener, other than possibly pvp situations, but think of like adds on PP or LK encounter. Just a quick way to throw up diseases and then unload all of your runes on more powerful strike attacks.

If you read the dev twit chat the other day, they are putting in a new attack for unholy that will use the extra frost runes.

Actually. no they didn't. What the dev chat -did- say is below:

--
Q. What is the intent and thoughts on changing the rune cost of Scourge Strike?
A. In Wrath of the Lich King, it is closer to being a clone of Obliterate with a slightly different feel than we'd like. We want to change that. We're also very aware of the rotational problems inherent in decoupling the Unholy and Frost runes. Rest assured, our solution will not be expecting you to Icy Touch alongside each Scourge Strike.
--

This is a far cry from a 'new strike' and tbh, think about it for a second, giving Unholy a strike that uses a frost rune? That's quite counter-intuitive to the build and even if they go that route, all the work they have done to free a GCD filled rotation will be thrown out the window. As is, UH has quite a full arsenal of abilities and I don't honestly see adding an additional strike to be that beneficial. I am willing to bet, that their intentions for that frost rune will be more based around building a synergy with the current model (READ: like frost: Oblit = rime = HB = RP = FS), as opposed to a focus around completely segmented AMS/AMZ + Ghoul + SS.

At least, that is what I am expecting to see....

EDIT: New beta build tonight, hopefully we'll know soon enough.

Interesting Change. If you keep in mind that haste now also increase the ghouls energy regen. This talent becomes interresting. 50% haste is significant and if the energy regen increase is linear to haste it could be a 50% ghoul dps increase.

Currently the ghoul is about 10-15% of our dps, so assuming that stays roughly the same, that a 5-7.5% dps increase. Worth using the unholy rune for I'd say.

@7alisman
I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make.

Frost's model works the other way around more or less. Basically frost lacks runes to use howling blast in their regular rotation; Rime is the solution that makes that possible through a proc.

Unholy is in a different situation, we have a rune in excess and we can basically spend it on nothing other than icy touch. Now for PvP this is great, it means you can chain snare without giving up any dps. This is why i think Unholy will remain the pvp tree. But for PvE this is a bad mechanic design.

From the Blizzard quote I make up that they intend to have other plans with that frost rune. I'm not sure what you were expecting to see; but having Icy Touch proc something just like obliterate does for frost (if that was what you were hinting at) it still doesn't take away we'll be spamming a disease applicator; which is something I'm always strongly against.

My point was that the unholy has a lot of everything, but nothing that really works together in any synergy. I 100% agree that spamming a disease applicator is counter-intuitive, but I also don't believe giving them another frost centric rune strike is going to fix it (in fact, i think that would break it further, forcing more of a GCD capped rotation, much like bloods on live). My point was that they should use that rune to build something that mesh's all (or some) of the individual talent specialties in a design like they have done with frost, not that the model should to be the same as frost.

As I noted, frosts abilities have great synergy:
Hit OB to proc rime to get a free HB that generates RP to frost strike.

What does unholy have that works together like that....AMS now gives -only- unholy RP for DCs.
AMZ functions on its own
Ghoul is an auto attack bot
SS as a single rune does less damage then DCs at present

A number of things can be done, but adding another strike, that functions off a frost rune, just seems like a band-aid, and forces you into a GCD capped rotation anyways. How do you balance an off spec strike to make it worth while for unholy, but not overpowered for DW frost?

They still are going to do something with that frost rune. I read that as adding in a new attack but they will add something whether it be an attack, spell, or casted buff that will use that rune.

What it will be is all speculation at this point, its just beta as well so they could remove the single rune functionality of SS all together and go back to dual rune.

I really hope they do something interesting to unholy's playstyle, after playing frost I don't think I could go back to unholy. During Ulduar it was a lot of fun to play, making sure to have enough runic power to keep UB refreshed, SS being pure shadow damage.