Death Knights to have Dedicated Tanking Tree in Cataclysm

[JakobBloch]

Have you tried DW dps'ing as Frost? It's a lot of fun, much faster paced (hence more challenging).

I can see the cool things that you can do with dual-wielding but I reject it on philosophic grounds. DKs shouldn't be able to DW and I intend to stick to that. =)

[Illidra]

The thing that most people seem to be concerned about is not that it's just one tank tree, but that they picked blood instead of frost.

there may seem an illusion that most dk tanks are frost, but that's because alot use it for the snap aggro for easy hc farming at low levels, not because it is the superior spec.

the extended cooldowns do mean that it is viable inside icc, especially if you're supplying the haste buff ( although now every dk and their mothers are fighting over who gets to go frost and who gets stuck as the lolplague supplier). But blood is the dominant spec for the endgame raider, with the superior cooldown, WoTN, higher stamina and more stable single target threat, also the abundance of death runes provides incredible utility when adapting to situations.

will i miss having multi tanking? yes
does this outweigh the fact that i'll finalyl be balanced? hellllll naaaaa

so far we've been promised somethign that functions like demo shout, boneshield as blood has been stated as an idea. ( possibly something that will be changed to work as a temporary block mechanic for 10 seconds or so, maybe a watered down shield block or something) the point is, who knows.

Blood tree's playstyle could change incredibly, or it could stay almost exactly the same, frankly it's gna be a hell of a ride from now till open beta. ( if i get a beta key i will probably pee myself with delight )

[Edgewalker]

I'm confused why the about face from frost to blood, though from a mechanics perspective the self healing abilities do seem to scream "Ima tank!". Though it's not the iconic DK tree, well as some of my friends say at least. Most say Frost is.

Frost has never really been the defacto tank spec. Blood has been for virtually the entire real expansion (discounting Naxxramas, which likely could have been defeated by our characters at level 70).

[Darksend]

I think edge it is more about people relating presence to spec: frost is the tanking presence so frost spec should be the tanking spec

[Edgewalker]

I think edge it is more about people relating presence to spec: frost is the tanking presence so frost spec should be the tanking spec

I would imagine the entire presence system would be getting a workaround, especially considering the overall uselessness of unholy presence. Maybe presence only based abilities, increased effects through masteries, etc.

[Darksend]

I would imagine the entire presence system would be getting a workaround, especially considering the overall uselessness of unholy presence. Maybe presence only based abilities, increased effects through masteries, etc.

As soon as I heard "causes serious issues for death knights" (paraphrase) I went to make a sammich. =P J/K, I'm sure the change to runes will make the rotation more fluid, and thus allow for better tuning.

I wonder, though, what they will be doing with the presences? It would feel pretty strange if they kept frost as the "tanking" presence when the frost tree will have become DPS centric, and the "DPS" presence linked to the tanking tree. With the changes to runes, I wonder what that will do for unholy? I suspect majors changes for all three presences.

To which I completely agree

[mistersix]

If Unholy remains as a "haste" style buff than given the change from haste to attack speed but resource gen... would that be interesting at all?

[Illidra]

If Unholy remains as a "haste" style buff than given the change from haste to attack speed but resource gen... would that be interesting at all?

on the assumption that blood and frost would swap and unhoyl would stay as a similar haste increased presence, it would likely have faster rune fillups to compensate the faster gcd, but until we can see the rune system live in action and exactly what presences do we won't be able to predict an accurate outcome for if hasting with presence and gemming str would outweigh the possibility of gemming haste/str and using the dps presence to compensate the lower str, or if the changes will even make haste appealing to gem or wether it will be one of those stats that you like having but couldnt care if you lost in exchange for crit or more str.

we'd probably need some hard data on how haste affects gcd in relation to rune top up.

it could be that haste is best up to a point where more haste means the gcd is too fast for runes, (lets call this a-b) , during the stage b-c excess haste will lead to downtime and idling while waiting for rune refresh, at the point c-d we hit the point where the gcd is capped, but haste is speeding rune top up to the point where we can effectively never run out of runes.

of course this is all conjecture that has no evidence.

we also need to know if rune top ups being effected by haste will be subject to dr or if it will scale on a linear basis but have a capped point.

[bling581]

The first assumption would be that they will simply swap the effects of Frost Presence to the new Blood Presence. I don't think they will keep the current haste effect of Unholy Presence because of haste now affecting the CD time on rune. It's possible they might leave it and could do something like "increases the benefit of haste on reducing rune cool downs by an additional X%" along with the movement speed increase. So the same amount of haste for Unholy would yield a higher benefit than it would in Frost presence. It's all speculation until we get more information in the coming months. I'd like to see the new presence system interact more with their respective trees and not have a superior default presence like Blood was for all 3 dps specs. They've been trying to get away from passive buffs so I'd rather have something with more flavor than a simple % damage modifier. If they in fact remove the old Blood Presence I expect it will be incorporated into the dps specs somehow.