Whats news lately?

Well it has been a slow few weeks in blogging, until Blizzard started drip feeding information about the expansion to the community at which time everything exploded. Overall meh! I’m waiting to see what the cohesive picture is. Random information with no real detail has limited value.

In other news my alt-ism has taken off in a very solid way. As I thought, the prospect of playing one toon when getting into regular runs is difficult is a game-breaker, so much so that Ive pondered pugging those ICC runs. If I can get a group without having the LK-Dead achievement. Grr.

Mortigen my main is now just doing the daily when I play, the weekly sometimes, and otherwise odd runs. Basically this means I doubt I’ll see much more of the end-game content now, and kind of resigned to enjoying runs when they happen.

Keeping a light and fluffy attitude will help me not go insane and like the process of playing a well geared toon in 5 man runs. And so onto the alts update after the break.

Happy gaming.

Tanking as Blood mandatory in expansion

There will be blood.

Looks like the writing is on the wall for Death Knights who are not using a Blood spec to tank. Blood will be the Tank tree in Cataclysm expansion.

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

This is something that I did not think they’d do, but is easy to understand why. The differences between the tank classes were enough that giving them a semblance of parity was hard; and having DKs witk 3 talent trees just makes that harder still.

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.

Which is why I can accept that something had to be done – but sheesh, it is a big call. Huge call, I expect to see some Death Knights who step away from the class due to this. Could be worth getting as much value from your non-blood tanking now. 🙂

So DKs will probably have a tank, pve, and pvp tree. I can see Unholy being the PvE and Frost as the PvP talent trees.

This is a tad too much of a change from the cool almost-any-tree which they have now; but then it would not be the first time a class has been totally re-worked during an expansion.

Does make me think that with Frost talents having dual wield, will we also see dual-wield as only viable in one spec, or will it be retained as a concept for both Tank and DPS, or even pvp and pve?

We’re just not sure yet on DW Blood tanking or 2H Frost dps. Certainly our main focus will be to make sure 2H Blood tanking and DW Frost dps work, but we’re not likely to crack down on alternate uses of those specs. We’re not sure that a Blood DW style could work without talents that allow for strikes with both weapons, but we’ll see. It should be a fun beta. 🙂

Like most posts this raises more questions for me than answers; and I can’t wait to see more. Can I get a beta key maybe? probably not, but one can wish.

• Where will two weapon be used? I have 2x one hander ilevel 232 tank weapons that I’d like to take for a spin.
• What happens to Frost presence as the Tanking presence?
• Couldn’t the mastery bonus be based upon the presence that the DK uses, rather than the talent tree if they wished to keep 3 viable Tank trees?

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