http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/deathknight/talents2.html#none

Degeneration being moved into deep unholy as Scourge strike......seriously? Also its really sad to see the 51 points for unholy being utterly useless for PvP.

There are a few bugs in those tech trees. Off the top of my head,

-- Killing Machine and Deathchill benefit Frost Strike. Killing Machine only procs from white attacks.
-- There are no stacking diseases. Icy Touch causes Frost Fever and Plague Strike causes Blood Plague. You can talent to get a few more spells that cause those diseases, and Unholy can add two more diseases (Ebon Plague and Unholy Blight). This makes Unholy Blight quite useful because it's the only way to get 4 diseases up for Blood Strike or Obliterate.
-- Sudden Doom does benefit from Heart Strike. Heart Strike hits very hard and has a nice debuff with PvP and PvE uses (think Icy Veins, Windfury, Frenzy, Flurry and a host of boss abilities). It's less confusing than the previous debuff and isn't dependent on a next strike.
-- Chilblains lasts twice as long.
-- Abom Strength benefits the raid.
-- Imp Rune Tap lowers cooldown as well as +health.
-- Crypt Fever doesn't affect attributes, but it boosts the damage of other diseases on the target.
-- Corpse Explosion costs 1 Unholy (remember Raise Dead is free).
-- Blood-Caked Blade doesn't cause a disease. It adds melee damage to existing ones.
-- Morbidity lowers cooldown on DnD and cost of Death Coil.

I'm sure there are others. We'll get them fixed up.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

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Q u o t e:
Ghost, what do you have to say about the (apparent) contradiction in the Frost and Unholy trees: in order to pvp, you need Scourge strike (anti hot utility), but in order to pvp, you need Chilblains (otherwise catching up to use said utility is going to be far too difficult)? And, of course, it's not possible to get both.

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You shouldn't need either to PvP. The anti-hot utility, while useful, is not a one-stop druid crusher. It won't cleanse a stack of Lifeblooms. Chilblains is a nice bonus if you are the kind of player who really loves Hamstring. But the DK also has two really nice "catching up" abilities: Chains of Ice and Death Grip.

Talents shouldn't be the crutch that allow you to do something you can't otherwise do. If the DK has trouble tanking or with PvP, we need to solve that at the core level. If Degeneration has to go back to being a core ability, that's something we can do. If the DK needs one more ability to slow people down, that's something we'll consider.

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Q u o t e:
Are we going to just do:

Icy Touch
Plague Strike
Blood Strike
Blood Strike
Obliterate
Frost Strike

Plague Strike
Blood Strike
Obliterate
Obliterate
Frost Strike

Forever? You need Icy Touch in every other rotation to keep Icy Talons up. Is the two-phase rotation really better than the first? If you just rotated the first part forever you wouldn't need Blood of the North or Endless Winter, and that would save you 8 talent points.

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The first is a perfectly fine rotation. The second will do much more damage, assuming you also have Annihilation, Icy Talons and Frost Fever from Frost Strike. You'll have to decide the talent to dps trade-off.

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Q u o t e:
I'm still taking a Pally or Warrior over a DK tank, though. Why use a class who doesn't have access to all of their "gold medal" tanking talents (because they're found in different trees), than a tank who can use all of their best mitigation, threat generation, and armor bonus talents in a single, stream-lined tree?

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Ideally you should be able to. With 4 tanks in the game, and 25-player raids usually needing 3 or fewer, we can't assume you will have a given class to tank. However I wouldn't assume a warrior has better mitigation, threat or armor just because that player spends a lot of talents in Protection. In fact, most Prot warriors tend to spend 5 points in Fury and a least 5 points in Arms.

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Q u o t e:
Is the 11pt Frost Talent weapon imbue gone forever? or is it a baseline ability now? I've just lost 10% frost damage :(

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Ten percent damage for one talent was always a little hard to balance. :) Since Frost Fever became a disease that you can keep up relatively easy (and at range even), the Frost Fever runeforge isn't very useful so we plan on replacing it with the something like Frozen Rune Weapon. Windfury Totem, however, is a passive haste buff so it will stack with any enchantment. The DK runeforge enchants will not stack with enchants like Executioner, though they will stack with temporary buffs like sharpening stones.

Like Heart Strike, Scourge Strike hits for about twice as hard and in this case it does the damage as Shadow damage. It's a valuable talent even without the degeneration effect. Don't think of degen as an extra disease in the new model; for most DKs there are only 2 diseases. If we do bundle the degen debuff with the core Plague Strike, or leave it as a separate ability, it will only dispel 1 hot and do extra damage to targets with hots on them.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

Icy Talons procs off of Icy Touch. Improved Icy Touch is only 3 talents now. You will probably use Icy Touch every 10-12 sec to keep Frost Fever up.

Sudden Doom gives you a free Death Coil that always crits. There are some modified talents that now proc off of Death Strike - Infested Coprse [Bloodworms] and Death Rune Mastery.

"Bloated" is one of those terms like "slap in the face" that sometimes makes me smile. Often a talent tree is considered "bloated" if it has more talent points than a player is able to get at max level. The DK talent trees have very similar number of talents and number of talent points to the mage and other trees. Yes you are going to have to make some hard choices, even within a tree. If all the choices were easy, the talent trees probably aren't very good.

On the DW issue....

Death Knights will be able to dual-wield. The design is that DW and 2H are about equal. Because DW tends to dominate for specs that have it as an option, you probably won't see it propped up much more than it is now. Ideally we would like to see 2H and DW DKs. I suspect 2H will be slightly more popular since that fits most people's notions of a proper DK.

On the raiding issue... it's soapbox time. :)

There is no way a Frost, Blood and Unholy DK is getting into every raid. Likewise, there is no way an Affliction, Demo and Destro warlock is getting into every raid. As I am fond of pointing out, we have 25 raid slots and 30 specs. Over the next few weeks, we are going to take a really hard look at raid buffs and debuffs. We are going to combine some when we can and give different specs alternate ways of providing the same debuff. As an example, shadow priests, ret paladins or survival hunters should all be valid mana batteries. As another example, Ebon Plague may offer the same effect as Curse of Elements (and neither will stack). You'll want someone to bring the debuff, but you may not need both debuffers in one raid.

The classes that are the hardest to solve are the paladin, shaman and druid (and possibly priest) because the three specs bring such different abilities to the group. But we still would like to solve this problem. It's not fair that every raid have 3 druids and 1-2 rogues (or 1 druid and 0 rogues if you're talking 10-player raids). (I love druids -- I'm not picking on you.)

I know there is a tradition in BC of a prot warrior MT with perhaps another prot warrior or a paladin as OT. If we do our jobs right, there will be some gouprs that run feral MTs with unholy DK OTs in Lich King raids. Crazy, I know, but in the BWL days it was 5 prot warriors tanking, so we've already come a long way. :)

Short answer: all 3 DK specs need to bring something to a raid. But don't expect that any single spec (of any class) is going to have an ability that is so mandatory to raiding that they always get a spot.

Wall of text crits Ghostcrawler. Ghostcrawler dies.

You can't really plug in old damage numbers with new talents to get meaningful information. I think some of you are assuming the class has changed less than it has.

Here are some examples...

Blood and Frost knights have 2 diseases. Blood Strike hits harder per disease. Increasing bonus damage per disease when you only have 2 is an upgrade over the older version. Think about it this way -- it will be much easier for you to hit Blood Strike when it's always at max-damage potential.

Obliterate does something like 50% extra damage per disease. With both diseases up, it should hit for about double.

Heart Strike and Plague Strike are at least a 50% damage improvement over their core abilities. Even if you don't need the secondary effect, that's a lot for one talent point. These are your rewards for going deep into those trees.

Crypt Fever is an extra disease. So is Unholy Blight. With those two talents, an Unholy knight can make Obliterate hit for ~200% damage. Frost Fever is a disease that ticks for Frost damage, though it does less damage than Blood Plague because of the haste debuff. Since Crypt Fever and Blood-Caked Blade improve disease damage, they are pretty useful when you can keep both Blood Plague and Frost Fever up.

Without Blood of the North, you are typically going to get one Howling Blast per cycle (your other Frost goes to Icy Touch to keep Frost Fever up).

Vampiric Blood works like Demon Armor -- any healing on you is increased for a short period. This is quite useful when tanking, and decent for any Blood Knight. Our calculations suggested the numbers we used were appropriate, but if they are too low in actual testing, we'll bump them. In fact Blood has so much healing now (Death Strike is amazing - something like 50% of weapon damage returned as healing per disease) that we pruned some of the healing from talents like Scent of Blood. They just weren't all necessary.

If the DK needs a core perma-snare to be competitive in PvP, we'd rather give that as a core ability (or at the very least an upper tier talent) rather than force every Arena DK to go down the same tree. I'm not convinced the Degen debuff (removes one hot and does bonus disease damage when it hits hots) is essential for PvP, but if it is, we'll find a way to give it to you as a core ability.

I know it's not easy to evaluate all the changes given only a talent tree that has some errors in it, but believe me, these are good changes. The players who have tried them really dig the way the DK plays now. Hopefully the beta data will get updated soon and you can try them out.

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Q u o t e:
So the selling point for the ultimate Unholy talent is that if you spend an extra 5 points on it you get double damage on one Obliterate (or two, if you throw a further 13 talent points into Frost)?

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Death knights benefit a lot from more diseases. Blood Strike, Death Strike and Blood Boil, as well as a few talented abilities, are happier with more diseases. By all means if this doesn't appeal to you, don't pick up the talent. It's intended to be a choice. Unholy Blight is still nice damage and unlike Death and Decay, you can chase down the enemies that run out of the area.

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Q u o t e:
I just wanted to hit this point again. Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable armor considered as tanking talents conflict directly with Blade Barrier. Blade Barrier, if you have a good rotation which this update makes much easier, can be up a large proportion of the time. Practically 10% parry for 5 talents points is a great bonus. However, to activate it, you have to activate your long-ish cooldown deep tree talent. If we consider them an added bonus every 90 seconds, fine. For three points, having a short buff every 90 seconds isn't bad, I guess. If the idea is to be able to save those for a timely moment, then that doesn't work with Blade Barrier, which seems presented as a core mitigation talent for any tanking DK.

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The idea was that Blade Barrier would be going off a lot, even unplanned. But when you need a little bit of extra survivability from Unbreakable, you can use a rune at the right time to get it, and ideally you might even be able to get Blade Barrier to go off at the same time. This is a new mechanic for us, though, and it will need some testing to see how it feels.

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Q u o t e:
Like make Unbreakable Armor -5% to ALL damage for 10s when you have 0 frost, giving us a weaker Def stance/Righteous Fury, and something similar done to vampiric blood so it could be up all the time.

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I won't argue that 5% damage reduction up all the time isn't useful, but is it fun? We just changed Shield Block for the warrior because it was a spammable ability that wasn't particularly interesting to use but felt mandatory to push. It was never a choice. If death knights end up needing more passive damage reduction, we'd rather just bake it into Frost Presence or something. Getting Unbreakable Armor up at the right time will take some planning and timing, but the payoff is a bigger benefit. It's a decision and you're rewarded for making a good one. (If it just ends up frustrating, then we'll change it.)

That one extra sec in Aneyursm (it's actually 2 sec now IIRC and Chilblains last 6 sec), is there solely because you don't start with Mind Freeze. Without that extra bonus you could talent into an ability that affects an ability you don't have yet.

This is something we have tried to do with all classes, but on most classes it's a lot easier since you gain talent points so slowly. DKs tend to get talents faster than they get core abilities.

In some cases we decided it was close enough that we cheated a little anyway -- you don't start at L55 with Death Strike for example. But you get it pretty quickly.

We're still working on the Chilblains duration and placement in the tree. Don't sweat it for now, IMO. :)

See the other post for discussion of Unbreakable Armor et al.