2fps

What’s the one thing that would prompt me to post again in spite of the fact that I’m swamped busy with schoolwork and other real life obligations at the moment? OH YEAH THE CATACLYSM BETA IS OPEN. All that crying and moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth over new abilities, talents and configurations?

Let it all out and don’t stop throwing tantrums until Cataclysm goes live!

I’ve been looking over some of the new information on Mmochamp and I’m both annoyed and satisfied with quite a lot of the talent restructuring for Death Knights so far. The Blood tree, and it also looks like Blood presence, is shouldering all the tanking responsibility as previously announced. One thing I wanted to make particular note of is the way they’re really pushing hard to make you choose between good talents. Naturally, after that I’ll post the disjointed word vomit that constitutes the rest of my initial reactions to the changes.

Choices choices choices!

Blizz has been saying they want to make us choose between good talents for a while now and from the looks of the beta talent trees they’re off to a good start.

Suppose you’re a Death Knight tank and you’ve spent most your talent points in Blood and are now looking for things in Frost and Unholy to pick up. We’ll assume you’ve spent 57 points in Blood and that your build now looks something like this.

So what next?

Personally, I really have a hard time living in a world where I know I can’t drop DnD every 20 seconds or so. Do I ever actually do that? Of course not but its nice to know that if I need to drop DnD for whatever reason I’m not going to be limited by its innately long cooldown. Ok, so I want Morbidity. Uh oh, its pretty deep in Unholy now. Well, I suck it up and spec for it anyway because I value it just that much and now my talents look like this.

Huh, only one talent point left! But I wanted to make my Icy Touch hit harder and I wanted to pick up Runic Empowerment! Tough.

Now the theorycrafting may end up saying that Runic Empowerment is as much a staple as Sanguine Fortitude but that isn’t the point right now. I want Runic Empowerment. I want Morbidity. I can only have one. This feels like an interesting decision to have to make.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these talent trees evolve in the coming months.

Word vomit

• Hysteria is called Unholy Frenzy and is on the third tier of Unholy now. Still able to be picked up by tanks, still handy to have around.
• Sudden Doom lost to deeeeeeeeep Unholy. Also reverted back to just making your next Death Coil free, not automatically launching one for you. Another button to push when your runes are down likely.
• No cost to activate Icebound Fortitude again, yay!
• Vendetta, now called Exsanguinate, moved to tier one of Blood. Has anyone ever taken this ever? Surprised its still kicking around.
• Dancing Rune Weapon gives 20% extra Parry chance now. On the fence about this one. Perhaps I’m still locked into the historical mindset of Parry being mostly garbage but I was hoping for a little bit more from the reworked 51 point talent.
• Magic Suppression/Anti-magic Zone still in Unholy. I’m being entirely greedy with this but uh… can Blood get those instead? We’ll trade you uh… Blood Parasites and um… Exsanguination!
• On a Pale Horse retains its mounted movement speed increase thus ensuring its place as my leveling tree for the second expansion in a row.
• Pillar of Frost sits on the fifth tier of Frost and prevents you from being knocked back and boosts your Strength by 20%. No knockbacks for 20 seconds, nice!
• Lichborne unchanged, still stupid.
• You can still kinda make a really super ghetto Frost or Unholy tank spec but only kinda… kinda. Not that I recommend those sorts of shenanigans of course.