As soon as 3.3.3 hit, all the wowhead.com spec links died. I’m really not happy with that. As I’m sure my readers aren’t. I usually use those links to go back and revise my specs. I couldn’t even do that this time around. So, for the future, we’ll be using Mmo-Champ talent calculator links.

Of the three trees, Blood saw the least changes, from a dps view. The biggest change that comes to mind is that the Abomination’s Might raid buff is now passive instead of being triggered by strikes. What this means to you is that the order of Heart Strike and Death Strikes in your rotation will in no way affect your Abom’s Might uptime. Those of you who like to group the six Heart Strikes together can do so without affecting your buffs (I’m talking to you Cappadocian).

The other large change to Blood was an alteration to Will of the Necropolis, which is a tanking-only talent. The change got rid of the internal cooldown placed on the ability back in the Naxx days.

The bread and butter of this spec is still alternating Heart and Death Strikes and still centers around proc timing to pull off the best possible Dancing Rune Weapon. Make sure to continue to keep your speed pots around to improve your damage.

My advice to the Blood devotees out there is to live it up while you can. If you’re unhappy with these changes, feel free to let Blizzard know about that in a constructive non-QQ way.

Blood Single-Target DPS [51/0/20]

Glyphs: Dark Death, Dancing Rune Weapon, Death Strike

Rotation 1:       

Rotation 2:      Dump(   )

Yesterday, we had a big announcement from Blizzard about Death Knight tanking in Cataclysm; and it was a big one. Blizzard is reversing their long-held “every roll in any tree” policy to make Blood the only tanking tree for Death Knights. Blood will be like the Protection tree for Death Knights. Here’s what Ghostcrawler had to say about it:

We're doing our Cataclysm preview on the death knight changes later this week, but we knew one change risked overshadowing all the others, so we figured we'd go ahead and drop the proverbial Blood bomb today.

In Cataclysm, death knights will have a dedicated tanking tree, much like the other three tank classes. That tree will be Blood.

We’ll go into more detail in the upcoming preview, but we wanted to take the opportunity to explain the reasoning for such a big change.

Why the about face? We actually thought the “tri tank” experiment worked out okay. We suspected there would always be a “best” tanking tree, because that’s the way these things shake out, but we hoped it would be close enough that many players could tank with their favorite tree. When we tried out this design for Wrath of the Lich King, we were using it as a test case to see if we wanted to do similar things with the warrior and paladin talent trees.

A lot has happened since that time. We introduced the dual-spec feature, allowing players to have a tanking spec and dps spec that they could switch between. We introduced Dungeon Finder, which makes it easier to find players who want to tank, and even let players level up using a dedicated tank spec. In Cataclysm, we are introducing the concept of passive talent tree bonuses and we think that feature is a lot stronger when the talent tree has a particular focus (such as damage, tanking or healing). For example, it’s safer to give more passive damage to a tanking tree than we can a dps tree. Above all, we were just spending a lot of effort trying to balance three trees (though it was really six trees, since each tree was trying to do two things).

It started to feel unfair to the other tank classes that we had to spend so much effort tweaking three types of DK tanks, and it even started to feel unfair to the DK that we couldn’t focus their tanking experience. One bit of feedback that really struck home was the DK players who said, essentially, “I look at the Protection tree and I’m jealous of all of the cool tools they have to help their tanking. As a DK, I have to pick and choose tanking talents from within a sea of dps talents.” Rather than have a strong focus, the trees felt a little watered down because they were trying to do so much. With Frost as a dual-wield, spell and runic power focused tree, Unholy as a disease and minion focused tree, and Blood as a self-healing, defensive cooldown, tanking tree, we think the focus of each tree is a lot clearer and cooler.

In Cataclysm, Blood will be the death knight version of a Protection tree. It will have passive talent tree bonuses that reflect tanking. It will have tools, such as a Demo Shout equivalent, necessary for tanking. Several of the more fun tanking talents from Frost and Unholy will be moved into Blood. We will be able to revise (or even remove) clunky mechanics like Rune Strike and focus on letting DKs generate threat with their normal Blood tanking rotation.

This is major change, and we understand it will be met with some disappointment from players who really liked the flexibility, those who appreciated the unorthodox talent tree design, or those few of you who really liked Blood dps. Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is the right change for the game.

More exciting death knight news coming up soon in the preview.

  -  Ghostcrawler ( Source )

I wanted to wait until this morning to post to let this announcement sink in. My feelings on it are mixed. I saw this coming because, as I pointed out in my post titled Have You Attained Death Knight Mastery?, it would be EXTREMELY problematic for Blizzard to continue with the same Death Knight class design and make it fit into the new Mastery system in Cataclysm. A change was necessary.

Death Knights are set apart because their class design attempts to support every role in any tree. The direct result is that tanking talents are watered down and disbursed throughout the three trees, leading to what really are three different tanks. I like the current approach, but it’s not a good design decision. By focusing Death Knight tanking into one tree, tanking talents can be more focused, and lead into a single class role design.

What this all fails to take into account is that Death Knight players feel a lot of loyalty to their play style. Those who have devoted their characters to Blood dps will not be as happy as the tanks to have this change forced upon them.

As we all leave Northrend behind, and journey back to Azeroth for the first time in five years, its best to keep in mind that Death Knights, the iconic class of Icecrown are just one of ten classes. This change, while maybe good from a gameplay view, chips away just a little more from the uniqueness of the Death Knight. If I wanted to play a warrior, Grendaran wouldn’t be sitting at 70 right now. Someone had to say it.

Another interesting question is the presence situation. Frost presence is supposed to be for tanking, but the Frost tree is a dps tree, while Blood presence is used mostly for dps. Blood however is going to become the new tanking tree. The presences seem a little backwards. I’m certain that originally Frost was designed as the tanking tree and presence, however this was changed somewhere closer to release (in fact, I think that I remember this from some of the older expansion infos; not sure I really have any evidence to cite on it).

This is a big change, Ghostcrawler has promised more information on the Death Knight changes in Cataclysm; all of this could change. What’s your opinion on this, do you support it? Let me know.

Now that the 3.3 DPS Specs are all but done, let’s talk a little about tanking. I was surprised that I pretty much like my tanking specs from 3.2, with the exception of Unholy. There’ve been some changes to Scourge Strike and some other abilities in Unholy, so it warrants a second look at the spec I picked out.

Blood
53/8/10

Blood hasn’t changed at all since I looked at it in 3.2. This spec provides strong regeneration and mitigation as well as nice utility talents in the top of the other two trees. I think Blood is a superior raid-boss tanking spec.

Perks
Health Regeneration via Imp Death Strike, Imp Blood Pres, and Vampiric Blood
Enhanced mitigation via added Stamina, Armor, and Parry
Hysteria and Might of Mograine raid buffs
Improved Runic Power generation

Frost
10/51/10

From my experience, Frost is the superior Aggro spec. Along with other abilities; you get stronger initial threat thanks to Howling Blast. I use Frost the most for Heroic tanking and on raid trash, due to its snap-aggro on the pull.

Perks
Improved Avoidance and Mitigation via Frigid Dreadplate and Unbreakable Armor
Improved AoE threat via Howling Blast and Morbidity

Unholy
13/8/50

This unholy spec focuses more on raid tanking. It drops talents for magic immunity because they’re pretty much useless in a raid situation. Unholy focuses more on AoE threat and avoidance. I’d imagine it would be great for trash tanking, but I think it falls short on aggro generation for raid bosses.

Perks
Superior AoE Threat via improved diseases and wandering\ebon plague
Improved Avoidance via Bone Shield

Yesterday, we looked at an Unholy AoE DPS build. Today, we’re going to delve into Blood DPS. Blood is awesome because it’s old-school melee dps. This spec offers the highest theoretical Single-Target damage.

Strengths
At the moment, Unholy Single-Target specs appear to have a slight dps lead, but that is subject to change.
High Single-Target DPS – Highest possible theoretical single-target dps of all Death Knight builds.
Scales well with two or three targets
Raid Utility – Raid utility in the form of Abomination’s Might and Hysteria.
Improved Survivability – You gain improved survivability thanks to Improved Blood Presence, enhanced Death Strike, and Blood Worms.

Weaknesses
Raid buffs are duplicable; they aren’t specific to the Death Knight.
Works best with excellent connectivity, lag results in missed GCD’s and diseases can fall off
Weak AoE performance, Blood, at least this build, focuses more on Single-Target DPS.

A Note On DRW

Dancing Rune Weapon is your premium Runic Power Dump for Blood spec. Remember that DRW gains damage based on the buffs that you have at the time. You want to maximize your temporary buffs when using DRW. First, make sure that your diseases are up and at their peak duration. Secondly, make sure that Hysteria is up, and that you are ready to use your Trinkets. Most importantly, make sure that you are at maximum RP. Sometimes, you can’t coordinate all of these while keeping with your current rotation, or Hysteria may not be up because it has a longer cooldown, but try to meet as many of these conditions as you can to maximize your damage.

51/0/20 Rotation

Rotation 1
     Dump(   )

Rotation 2
     Dump(   )

Glyphs

Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon
Glyph of Death Strike
Glyph of Dark Death

Stat Weights

For information on what these stat weights mean, please see my BiS post

Weapon DPS 9.89
Strength 2.89
Armor Penetration 2.75
Hit Rating (to cap) 2.51
Haste Rating 1.5
Expertise Rating 2.47
Crit Rating 1.56
Agility 1.37
Attack Power 1

Stat Weights via ElitistJerks

I like to comment on original thinking. When I see a Death Knight that has a non-standard spec, I’m interested. Usually random Death Knights are using a spec that they’ve found on my site, or on the Elitist Jerks forums. When I see something totally different, I like to take the time to consider it.

This latest tidbit comes from Faine of Aerie Peak. In PvE, there aren’t many hybrid specs, but his spec is about as hybrid as you can get. He’s running with 24/8/39. It takes Blood down to VotTW and Unholy down to CF.

I’m trying to figure out this build’s rotation, and the relative benefits of splitting your points up to heavily between the two outer trees. I guess this gives you some versatility between magic and melee damage, and some regeneration via rune tap; and of course the ghoul; Bone Shield is nice too.

This build lacks either Death Rune Mastery or Reaping, so it’s not going to generate Death Runes. This limits the rotation possibilities. Seeing as it doesn’t have Scourge Strike, it’s going to be either Obliterate or Death Strike-based. He’s taken Glyph of Death Strike, so I’m guessing he tries to use Death Strike.

This build doesn’t take any of the raid buff or improvement talents in the lower end of the Blood tree, so it’s almost a waste to use Death Strike. He’s also forgone points in Necrosis and BCB, which will lower overall melee dps.

As advantages, I could maybe see this build as a decent OT \AoE build. It seems to balance between melee and spell-based dps. It has some avoidance; in the form of Bone Shield. It also benefits from perma-ghoul.

However, I think that this build is going to suffer in both dps and threat by not having Death Runes and because it doesn’t delve deeply enough into the bottom of any of the trees. I’d compare this to an Unholy DPS no-DR build, but even that uses SS for DPS and threat. It also lacks much if any raid utility.

This appears to be a versatile build; it has its benefits, and also its problems. Every build has its strengths and weaknesses. It may not be something that I’d consider using in a bleeding-edge raid, but I like to reward individual thinking, and choosing not to just pick the token build from your favorite Death Knight blog.

What do you all think about this spec? Do you think that independence is important in the Death Knight community? As always, send me comments via email or post a comment right here on the site using our new comment feature.

First order of business, been having some server issues. It’s makes things a bit difficult to get more people to the site when things don’t work. It’s Vmware’s fault, and I’m trying to get it settled. If you’ve had issues getting on; I’m sorry about that. If you haven’t, forget this first paragraph. I’m a one man show here, I designed the site, I host the site, and I write content; sometimes the gnomes tinker with my hardware.

First bit of news is a big “I told you so”. According to Blizz, rogues are getting nerfed. They expect a 7% damage decrease to Assassination and a 2% decrease to Combat. Taking into account the meters from ICC, I’m not surprised at all. Take away 7% of our rogue’s damage and she’s still ahead, but not by quite so much compared to everyone else. We have good people with about equivalent gear and skill, if someone’s THAT far ahead, something is wrong with the class. This is the same argument other people used against Death Knights back in Naxx. The buff nerf game is part of the class-mechanics merrygoround that the devs use to keep everyone interested; deal with it. As expected some wonderful people of the WoW community have taken the news waaaay too far. Check out this read from Ghostcrawler on the forums:

It's amazing how the raiding guilds of the world went from stacking rogues to sitting rogues in one night.

Most of the estimates I've seen on the forums is around a 7% nerf to Assassination and a 2% nerf to Combat. That sounds about right. If you're arguing your raid can't handle that or offset it in other ways, I'm a tiny bit skeptical.

I know it's not fun to get nerfed. Believe me. I hear about it. But the whole moral of the "sky is falling" deal is that when you exaggerate the impact of every change we make, then it makes for it hard for us and everyone else to distinguish between things that are really a big deal versus you just venting a little bit. If the sky is falling let us know that, but save it up for those episodes when it really is.

In your eagerness to find a gotcha I think you misinterpreted me. You guys (the community) theorycrafted the nerf to be about 7% for Mutilate. For you guys (the community) to then complain that it's a massive nerf that will cost you a raid spot seems disingenuous. Either you don't believe those estimates, in which case I advise you to address those players who made them, or you're just being melodramatic.

We know how much we wanted to lower rogue damage, but we typically don't share our numbers. What happens is if we said "Rogue target damage is 7.5K dps" then every time players did less than that or saw other classes do more, they'd try and argue that we need to make changes instead of them trying to do better.

- Ghostcrawler (Source)

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to say that Rogues DESERVE to be nerfed, or that they shouldn’t be a little bit higher on the meters than a DK. What I am trying to say is that an equally geared and equally skilled rogue should not be topping the meters by as high of a margin as they are (or maybe were) currently. That turns into a class balance issue, and guilds start stacking rogues as they have stacked other classes in the past, and an overpowered class becomes a crutch.

As promised, I did a little comparison between blood and frost. These meters were taken on the same raid with the same raid members. I used my normal frost DW spec (0/53/18) and the top 2-hand blood dps spec (51/0/20). I think that the damage ended up being relatively the same. Blood scored a little less, but I chalk this up to less familiarity with the rotation. I was able to come up top on one of our attempts against Saurfang.

Blood	Frost	Frost

We killed Saurfang again, but we had to slightly modify our strategy. We had a hunter and a balance druid for ranged dps. We had the ranged, and one of our DK’s on permanent flesh duty, while myself, Kaali, and the rest of the melee dps focused totally on the boss. We were able to get to Frenzy just as Saurfang was using the first MoB. The strain on the healers was a lot less. Even though we had less overall dps, we still rolled the encounter. If we hadn’t made that change, we would have failed. So, if you’re raid is low dps-wise, you may want to consider a similar strategy.

That was it for the night unfortunately, we had some people bail before we could try the new wing, and then Yuriken and Kilios’ dad was rushed to the hospital, killing our raid night this week.

Got something you want me to talk about, feel free to drop me a line. Also, if you have a screen shot of someone being a Deathnoob, feel free to email it to me for our mutual amusement and their humiliation.