Customer Services

Wanna find more in WotLK Beta? Here are some tips, they all come from Blizzard, so you can trust it.

DK's Role in 5 and 25 players dungeons (src)
A DK of any spec should be able to tank a 5-player non-heroic instance. The same is true for a warrior, and perhaps even a paladin or druid, though those are a little tricky since the gear overlaps different roles even less. A warrior pretty much cannot tank a raid (unless he massively overgears it) without a heavy investment in the Protection tree. The difference is the DK can go into the Blood, Frost or Unholy tree and still tank. But she probably needs as many tanking talents as she can get (which does not have to mean the same number of talents that other classes spend), and definitely needs the tanking gear and player skill that go along with raiding.

Death Coil usage frequency (src)
We found that a lot of DKs were able to spam Death Coils at a pretty steady pace. Part of this was bugs, but part of it was also the Runic Power Mastery talent along with the talents that gave your runic power -- Butchery and talents like Dirge. We made a big pass on all of these numbers to get Death Coil down closer to the frequency we intended -- something more like once a cycle (if you imagine a cycle being something like Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Blood Strike, Blood Strike, Death Strike). We feel like all of the talents are more interesting choices now without some of them being no-brainers and others being lackluster. For example, Sudden Doom feels meh when you are already tossing Death Coils as fast as you can.

Death Knight
Plague Strike and Degeneration (src)
We removed the hot dispel effect from Scourge Strike and put it on the base Plague Strike. Scourge Strike will be given something to replace the loss. Even if all it does is Plague Strike but as Shadow damage, that may be sufficient.

A Brief History of Degeneration

I believe the initial version of Degeneration described at the World Wide Invitational was that it removed all hots on the target and did extra damage per hot, and the dot effect of Degen also prevented any additional hots. Wow. While this might sound fun (for the death knight) it was probably ridiculously overpowered, and very punitive towards one type of healer in particular. If you think druids are OP in Arenas, this was probably not the best way to fix that.

The version of Degeneration that existed through most (possibly all) of the alpha and beta was a spell that removed one hot and did bonus damage on its dot effect (it was originally 7x damage then lowered to 3x damage). A potentially confusing tooltip on Degeneration probably didn't help at all.

When we made the recent pass at death knight talents, we gave the Degeneration effect (dispels one hot) to Scourge Strike. Some players were concerned that meant they had to go deep Unholy in order to be effective at PvP. This was not our intent and it's probably debatable whether or not that single ability made Unholy the PvP tree.

Nevertheless, after hearing many concerns, we are giving the ability back to core Plague Strike. It currently does not scale damage if it finds a hot -- it just removes the hot. If we think the damage bonus is necessary we'll add it back, possibly with a talent.

The current Plague Strike's tooltip says something like:

A vicious strike that deals X weapon damage and infects the target with Blood Plague, a disease dealing Shadow damage over time. Will dispel one heal over time effect from the target.

Frigid Dreadplate and Tanking talent changes (src)
Frigid Dreadplate will probably not affect most bosses. It will however stack with things like Thunder Clap. It's not an expensive talent, so it may still be worth it for trash and PvP. If not, we might change it to something else, but we don't want to over stack Frost with too many tanking abilities. It's a little tricky to compare Bone Armor directly to the other two abilities since it is dependent on hits. If you take 4 quick strikes (though there is an internal cooldown) it may not be up as long as Unbreakable Armor. This is entirely dependent on the duration and internal cooldown, which fortunately are easy numbers for us to adjust to try and achieve some approximation of parity.

Unholy tree being worked on (src)
With the changes we made, the two diseases last the same amount of time, which is one of the things that makes the DK feel smoother in general. We're still working on Unholy. It has some really interesting talents but it needs to gel a little better. Since AE isn't universally useful and the Ghoul is something of an acquired taste, we'd like you to be able to build a solid Unholy tree even without those talents. Some of the talents also didn't fare well with the conversion. Blood-Caked Blade was a great talent before that didn't survive the transition well. We're still working on it