The Death Knight Q&A

Now, like many of you, I was eagerly waiting to see what Ghostcrawler was going to write about the Death Knight class. Having been subjected to many changes since the class was released, it was going to be an interesting view as to what the Devs were thinking on doing with our class.

Safe to say, a lot of people will be sorely disappointed.

The biggest thing I mean by this is that if you expected your answer to be given to you, you probably may not of gotten it. Dual wielding was addressed as well as the changes to the cooldowns, however it is interesting that they released the Q&A after 3.2 and the interview is set before 3.2, which means we knew of the changes. Does the Q&A really do much in this case? Not really, we knew what we had and this was most likely a failed timing issue for the Q&A release.

Now, onward to something that I read which kinda puzzled me. At one point, this question was asked to Ghostcrawler, and I will ask you all to read the reply he gave:

Q: Are there plans to change or improve the Frigid Deadplate talent?

Ghostcrawler: We don’t necessarily consider the deepest talents in a tree to be the best ones. Generally when we push talents deep, it’s because they are of limited interest to other specs or else so powerful that we want to keep them away from other specs. Frigid Dreadplate is a great tanking talent since it adds avoidance. I can’t imagine a death knight tank actually skipping out on Anticipation, so it doesn’t bother us that the Anticipation talent is considered better. That said, we think avoidance is likely too high on all tanking classes, so we aren’t likely to buff Frigid Dreadplate.

Now, Frigid Dreadplate right? Nothing that a DK dpser like myself should worry about right? No, something here seems wrong. It's the first line I would like you guys to reread for a moment:

"We don’t necessarily consider the deepest talents in a tree to be the best ones. Generally when we push talents deep, it’s because they are of limited interest to other specs or else so powerful that we want to keep them away from other specs." -Ghostcrawler

This is something that bothers me. When I'm going down a talent tree, as early as Diablo 2, I was going down a tree and getting talents that seemed to be better and better and allow my character to become more powerful. Think of it as an investment: the more time you spend in the investment, the more you expect to get something good out of it. What bothers me is that it sounds to me that they're more pushing the talents down so other trees cannot get those skills more than simply giving the class advancement. And maybe this is something that the Devs may want to look at.

I know that I've read from time to time that people feel like their classes are stale. Many times, we feel as if some of our higher end point talents are just not worth it. If this is the way that the Devs are thinking instead of giving utility and damage increase to the character, than this would explain why that we feel the way we do.

I would sorely suggest that the Devs and Ghostcrawler would look at this and perhaps consider changing their philosophies. Perhaps not right away and maybe not even in this expansion. However it could be time for them to go a different road come 4.0. Allow some sort of feeling that when you go down the tree, you feel as if your character is evolving better, instead of going with the idea of placing talents so other trees cannot get to it. Worse comes to worse, bloat the better talents at the bottom and make the top not as inviting for classes to hybrid themselves into.

It's weird how as well, they wish to work hybrids in and yet hybrids are being pretty much discouraged with the philosophy in which the class trees are built.

Just some food for thought for you all.