The Catch Up is Complete

Hey Guys and Gals

Ravon back once again after a short break I took revisiting my favorite place in the whole world. Yes Azeroth.  Had a lot to catch up with once I got my hands on Cataclysm earlier this month and  thankfully due to lots of snow and ice in Ireland I had a lot of time on my hands to run through a lot of the content. Not all but a lot.

So what’s this article going to be about. Yep you guessed it a full on Cataclysm review session. So we’re going to break it up into a few sections here for you guys. First is Questing. First off the bat in the new Stormwind or Ogrimmar is the choice you get to pick between the lost city of Vashj’ir or Mount Hijal. Personally I picked Vashj’ir as I wanted to see just how good this zone was after it was finally completed from beta. Now hold your horses I was not disappointed and that’s for later. The questing flow in all areas is amazing. There is a true and defined fluidity to it that is so well done it is no time and you have completed half the quests in the area just because they are so fun. With the questing comes the phasing and we finally feel like we are in a progressive MMO when the very landscape around up is changing as we read the quest text and please guess for your own sake read the quest text.  Now there are parts where you could maybe miss a quest or two and miss out on a chain quest and have to fly all over the map to find it but this only happens a couple of times. All in all questing is epic.

Secondly I wanna talk about zones. We got the 5 new zones with the lost city of Vashj’ir, Mount Hijal, Ulduam, Deepholm and Twilight Highlands. Are these zones spectacular? Yes. Does the phasing work good in these zones. My god yes. What would you change about these zones? Well i would not change much apart from a few more NPC’s and a bit less of a respawn time on the existing ones as most people will have seen that once you kill one it is like he cloned himself in a split second and just started to pound on you where he left off. Of course this will all get sorted once the number of people running the areas diminishes but it was a little annoying. Vashj’ir is amazing. The swimming and walking underwater is great and fun but I did hear a lot of people complaining about it but personally I had no problem with it. Hijal uses phasing to its uttermost best ( yes it can be a sentence). As you progress through the zone it is great to see the life returning to the mountain and you helping change the zone forever by your actions. Ulduam is just so much fun and gorgeous. Hell it’s just chock full of Indiana Jones which I love. Deepholm is menacing and broody which works great for the zone where Deathwing called home for so long and finally Twilight Highlands is cool and taking the fight to the Twilight cult and helping the red dragons is definitely a favorite.

Next up is dungeons. So I have run every one of the new dungeons except heroic Deadmines and they all start exactly where the quests that lead you there end which is brilliant.  I have only completed dungeons on normal at the moment as I am waiting on guild to gear up before taking on heroics. Throne of the tides is beautiful and simple to be honest. It’s not much of a challenge but looks cool. Vortex Pinnacle will cause you some problems if you do not CC the adds but other than that the bosses are pretty straight forward. Stonecore is fun and again not much of a challenge on normal mode.  The lost city of Tol’vir is again a CC checker. You need your group working together here or else it is a very big wipefest. Halls of Origination is fun and it’s great to be with Mr Bronzebeard again. The bosses are simple and no real problems with them at all. Grim Batol = OMG. Now of all the new dungeons this one was hard. The trash is hard. The bosses are hard and if you do not clear a good bit of the trash with the drakes at the start then prepare for a long night head of you guys cos it is not easy. All in all I like the new dungeons. They are all fun and great to run through and experience. Heroics will not be easy :).

Lets tackle the Goblins and Worgan last. WTH was Blizzard thinking about putting these guys in this expansion? Are they nuts? Do we not already have way too many cool things in here? I guess they thought not and gave us the fun and completely over the top Goblins and vicious down right bad ass Worgan. So Goblins have been in the game since the start and they are just as fun and conniving as they always have been. I started with a Goblin rogue as they are evil stealing gremlins so that was the perfect combo ( did you get the joke? lol) and I must say that not only was the questing fun and interesting in the starter zones but also the phasing actually helped me care about my little Gizmo.  The use of vehicles in the 3rd quest you get is ingenious and gives you so much fun to play and do your quests that it feels like no time before you’re stranded on the Lost Isles and fighting the Alliance so that you can survive. Lucky for you that the Horde hate the Alliance again and that you get a chance to scratch their backs and they help scratch your’s. Now that good business, The Worgan on the other hand face an impossible fight from the word go against the enemy they will eventually become. The questing is fun and gives you the basics of exactly what your class can and can’t do and also lets you have fun as a human before your life is ripped away by the curse that befalls the Gilneas people.  As you fight to basically stay alive as the Undead arrive to take Gilneas you are helped by the Night Elves who feel a duty to assist your race as they are partially to blame for the curse. The Worgan are exactly what the Alliance need. They needed a vicious menacing brutal race to off set the nice and friendliness that has been in the Alliance since the start. We are going to see a lot of Worgan around and hopefully my Worgan druid will be at the thick of the action soon.

So is World of Warcraft: Cataclysm worth all the hype? Well yes and no. It is an amazing piece of work and one which as a player I am so glad to see happening. Is this the best that Blizzard can do? No. There is much more to come from this expansion and I think we have only got a small bit of a bigger and much more interesting storyline. I think this will be the start of something great and not the best that we have seen. What’s Blizzards next expansion? Come on people why the hell would you bother asking this already. Get over it and play the game they have given you.

When the world is shattered….

Hey guys and girls

A late post this week due to the fact I have run out of game time which means my lovely access to World of Warcraft is none existent until the end of this week. So all information brought to you this week will be from various other websites.

So obviously the big news this week is that shattering of Azeroth as we knew it and reborn in the fires of Deathwing. As I have not seen or experienced this apart from on the beta I have to say I really wanna see it. With all the Dalaran and Shattrath portals being removed I hear a lot of people crying about the fact of not being able to run through a portal to where they want to go. Get over it people. You knew it was coming and it’s not a big deal now we will be able to fly in Azeroth anyway. From playing on the beta I have seen how much the world has changed and I love it. Come on the Redridge bridge is finally complete.

Blizzard has cut the prices of WoW and all its expansions also for a limited time. You can pick Vanilla World of Warcraft and The Burning Crusade up for €5 each and also Wrath of the Lich King for €10. So come on guys buy this limited offer for your loved ones and get them hooked also.

Blizzard announced the Darkmoon Faire website. Similar to the 5th anniversary website there are unlockable features the more that you send in your applications for the 2 competitions that they now have running. One a video competition and the other and image competition.  Prizes include laptops and headsets and the stuff which has been unlocked so far is pretty darn cool. Look below at the images and videos unlocked so far. Must say Garosh looks badass.

The official World of Warcraft forums closed down and reopened in a new location this week on the new community site. They look just as neat and tidy as before and I don’t really see a down side to this one. Sure we will have gotten used to the old system but come on its new and pretty and for all those barred Trolls you have been unbarred to rant and rave as much as you like (until you get banned again) in the new glossy forum pages.

No pet for the anniversary this year and I for one am pissed off at this. Blizzard stated it was because they wanted these little guys to only be part of a milestone event like the 5th anniversary. So what was with the 4th anniversary pet then guys? What was the milestone there guys? I know the guys at Blizzard have been busy this year and all but this was their chance to give us Ghostcrawlers moose. Hell they could have even set it on fire and told us for all our whining they would be giving us a flamin moose and we would have been happy. Well we’ll just have to wait for our camels then.

Sorry here but sometimes you come across a piece of fan art that blows you away and I have to give a big congrats to Zhongjie Lan (Windforcelan) for this masterpiece below which I have printed on glossy paper and is sitting up in my office as a truly amazing piece of work. It has to be one of the most sexy and amazing pieces of Warcraft art I have seen in ages and deserves the praise of being on the Blizzard fan art site.  Check below for the picture.

Finally for this week in review we got Patch 4.0.3 which saw those elementals attacking the major cities and although I only saw a fraction of this due to the above issue of running out of game time and money. It did look damn cool with epic raid’s amount of people battling to protect their cities for the onslaught of the elements. This of course died down after a few days and most people just stood there and let others do the work for them. Way to go guys on showing your true allegiance.

Well that’s it from me for another week. I shall be back with you on Sunday this week as I need to actually play the game for a while to get acquainted with what I am telling you guys. Have fun

Epic Noobs Everyone.

Hey guys and welcome to another week in the World of Warcraft.

So this Monday we got the 2nd part of the world event. I must ask was anyone else pretty disappointed in this new set of quests. Yes sure it was kinda cool nuking tiny stone dudes in Ironforge but there wasn’t an epic or huge deal really about it unlike the 1st stage where the elementals were appearing world wide. I kinda hoped that the second stage would see an even greater amount of these world invasions or maybe cut the timer down on them from 1 hr to maybe 30 minutes.  But alas neither of the above seemed to happen and instead we got a quest to save some artifacts and kill some little dudes. Lets hope for something a bit more substantial in the coming weeks as Cataclysm rules up to the door and knocks it off it’s hinges.

Then on Friday night we got the 3rd part of this event giving us a few more quests including disrupting some cultists and their plans for Stormwind and visiting Thrall in Nagrand as we find out that he has stepped down as Warchief and handed the title to an obviously happy Garosh. This 3rd installment definitely was as good as the first and shows the effects that the cultists are having on the cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar with visitors having to be checked before entering the gates in case that they are cultists trying to expand their plans. This doesn’t seem to be working too well though as there are plenty of them walking around in plain sight. Don’t you just want to punch them.

This week thanks to our friends at MMO-Champion we got our first looks at the new store pets coming our way later this month. The Lil’Ragnaros and Moonkin Hatchling will be winging our way to us soon and you can expect both these pets to cost the same as the previous Lil XT and Pandaran Monk pets. Just like the Monk last year half off all money raised from the sale of the Moonkin Hatchling shall go to a charity which is as yet to be nominated by Blizzard. My take on this is simple. Buy the Moonkin to support the charity as it is a good cause and will more than likely be a deserving one and buy Rag if you feel like it. It is nothing major to buy one or both of them and it is nice to do your charitable deed for the year guys lol.

Blizzard announced this week the introduction of the Dial in authenticator. So what this service is is a free opt in service for when the game believes that it may not be you who is trying to access your account. If this is the case it shall as you to phone a toll free number from a specific number which you will set upon opting in and follow the directions from there. This is a great idea and one I know has been talked about before other places I.E The Instance and add that extra layer of security against account hackers. For those of you who’s phones are not compatible with the mobile authenticator or just not will to pay for the extremely cheap authenticator itself ( which I don’t see why you should not) then this is a viable option for you and it’s free.

Blizzard also announced that you shall be able to race change immediately as of December 7th to either Worgan or Goblin.Does this make me want to do it with my main. No not at all. Some people will want to do this yes but they are going to miss out on exciting new content if they do which I for one shall be rolling 3 new characters. A Worgan, Goblin and either a Human Paladin or Orc Druid. For the people who want their characters as these new races it’s great but I do not foresee many people doing this until at least their characters hit 85 but I have been wrong in the past.

Yes it has arrived a lot quicker than last year… We got our Deathy’s. Wow what a little spit fire he is too. Deathy’s animations come less than those of the other pets but this still makes him a constant companion for all those people who attended or bought the Direct TV package this year. I know he shall have pride of place beside me as I adventure through a reforged Azeroth and he shall be there beside me as I take down his daddy Deathwing.

The Delay.

Hey guys.

First off I would like to apologize for the delay in the last couple of weeks but with Blizzcon and the RL job commitments it has been a nightmare to get 20 minutes to write-up anything substantial enough to call a post but here we are another Friday and another post is for your viewing pleasure.

News today of the beta testing of the new World of Warcraft community site and I must say I am impressed. No longer will there be a mass of menu’s down the left hand side of the screen but all neatly categorized along a top menu plane for ease of access. I must say I like this design a hell a lot. The background is in fitting with the Cataclysm expansion and the overall flow of the site is great. Well done to the designers. Must say I really like.

I have fallen in love by the way with a new World of Warcraft wallpaper. Yes we have the new official Cataclysm wallpaper finally this week and it looks as dark and as menacing as anything I have seen come for the artists before. It has replaced my anniversary 5 and 20 year Warcraft wallpaper of all the faction leaders and I think it will be around for a long time yet.  Unfortunately though my daughter doesn’t seem to like Deathwing so every time she sees him she does a little scream and runs away which is cute and is exactly what I wanna do in-game but I am not such a girl. Yet.

The Cataclysm world event started this week with a number of quests involving elementals and the Twillight Hammer cult. I have played through this series of quests on my main and main alt now and my say they are very well done and not at all majorly time-consuming. There is an achievement also for killing each of the 4 types of elementals in different regions and a friend of mine came up with an excellent idea for making this easier. All you have to do is create a new global chat channel called rifts or whatever you wish and tell people about it. Then people can update each other in your realm on when rift times are or if rifts are currently available and where in certain areas. TOP TIP.

I have to address Red Shirt Guy. This guy had the guts to call Blizzard out on a mistake in lore in beta compared to the new novel The Shattering. Well done this guy and must say to all the idiots who are annoying him give him a break. Someone else would have done this at some stage and it is not fair to make fun of a person just because they have noticed a mistake in-game and I am sure that if this was something to do with your class or role you would have been more than happy for him to stand up there and tell the main guys at Blizzard about it. So well done sir and hope you’re not taking idiots opinions to personally. Also well done on the new in-game character based on Red Shirt Guy in Ironforge Wildhammer Fact Checker who is nicely dressed in customary red shirt.

Cataclysm has also gone on pre sale download from Blizzard store. Now I know a lot of people will get the digital download but for once guys I have to disagree with a game / expansion of this magnitude. I have pre ordered the Cataclysm Collectors Edition with official game strategy guide (which ain’t worth that much really) because god damn it I want it. Yeah I know it’s a lot of money for not that much else extra and yes I know it just for show and yes I know it really nothing but junk to go along with the books and Murlocs and figures and other stuff that I already have spent way way way too much money on but come the hell on. This is the biggest change to the biggest MMO ever. Can you not say that you too are tempted by the silver and red lava box and all it contents.  Sure you are.

Well that’s me for another week guys. Have fun and hope to get the second part of the world event this week so enjoy killing elementals in Stormwind and others.

Outta here.

What patches means to you.

hey guys and welcome back.

So lots to talk about this week including some Blizzcon related stuff which has everyone in a buzz so lets just drive straight into those murky waters of the well of eternity and see what stuff we can pull up.

So as everyone knows by now patch 4.0 dropped this week with a wealth of changes to talk about. First off we have the new water mechanics which personally i think have been long long overdue. The reflection system is inch perfect and for such a minor aesthetic change it does add that sweet little kiss back into the game especially in Northrend or the harbour in Stormwind.

We also had some class changes. Well i say some there was a major upheaval in classes in patch 4.0. not to go into too much detail as all the information can be found at mmo champion anyways but to pick out a couple that i have noticed so far being the warrior and warlock changes. Firstly warlock now don’t need to use bag spaces to carry soul shards. Yahoo we all say and again it’s a change that took too long coming. There is also no cost now for summoning voidwalkers or demons of the like as you now have a talent called Master Summoner which if maxed out costs no mana to summon them. Blizz FTW on the warlocks so far. Of course my undead warlock is only level 25 at the moment so will have to wait a long time to see what they like at max level and hoping they are just as cool.

Warriors also have some changes in the way of rage normalization and so far i have not played much around with my max level warrior tank as my internet has decided to give me extremely high latency in instances which i am looking into but when i get the change to i will write-up a nice post on how this has effected warriors for all you guys.

We have seen parts of cataclysm starting to appear in the UI as well this patch with new look interfaces for not just professions but also talents and your spell book. Must say i really like these changes as it makes it much easier for you to find what you want and also gives you more options in the professions section along with a button to link to a specific chat section E.G if you wanted to link your blacksmithing Eternal Belt Buckle.

We also all knew that the stats changes were coming this patch along with the new mastery system and so we can say a big good-bye to MP5, defense, spell ranks (auto updated per level now) and weapon skill. Again this is another welcome change to a system that was desperately to complicated and didn’t explain clearly enough why you needed these stats.

See we just half way now. told ya there was lots to talk about 🙂

The new patch has also introduced the new flexible raid lock out system. A more concise post on this can be found here by Blizzard on the forums but in essence starting with ICC and Ruby Sanctum you can not complete for example Lord marrowgar on 25 man normal and then go and do up to as far as you want on 10 man content. For sake of argument we will say to Sindragosa and then hit the Lich King on 25 if you so wish. Any explanation i will give on this will not explain this perfectly but in essence it is a cool change and one many many players will find extremely helpful in see all the content in the game that they would have otherwise missed out on due to being in a bad pug or just not having the time to raid or missing a scheduled raid night.

Introduced into the game for the first time also in the reforging vendors. Which these do is they allow you to swap 40% of any of the secondary stats of an item (mostly ratings) for another secondary stat. Reforging is done by NPCs in Capital Cities, ask a guard if you want to know where they are! This is a nice feature and one i can see Blizzard opening up possibly even further for item customization. How about changing the colors on items or even changing the item itself to look like previous tier gear if you had a favorite. The possibilities for this are amazing and something we all hope Blizzard expands on in game soon.

We also have the emblems going the way of the doo doo this patch and the intro of justice points. basically your Justice Points total will be equal to (Emblems of Triumph + Emblems of Frost ) * 2.75.  There was a great post on the forums explaining this new system and how it works for raids and dungeons going forward and I for one am so happy that they have gotten rid of the emblem system and gone just a much more simple and easy to understand points system. It is not a huge revamp but is one that will definitely be of benefit to the game moving forward in the years to come. Read the post on justice points here.

and finally on patch 4.0 we have got glyphs. Glyphs will now be separated into three different tiers: minor, major, and prime.  This system rocks rocks. Now glyphs are permanent spells and once you buy them from the auction house or scribe then they are available to you to mix and match when ever you so desire. Again another great post on this new system in the forums here. Being a warrior tank i know how much it could cost me on buying glyphs for situational encounters. especially in ICC but this new system has made that task so much easier and one i know tanks are going to love .

Now that all the patch 4.0 news is covered lets look at some more news. Blizzcon baby is a week away and this week we found out the headline act. Yes none other than the writers of the greatest song in the world and it’s tribute song as they forgot the greatest song in the worlds lyrics. The one and only Tenacious D. Yes you heard Jack Black (Year One, Kung Foo Panda etc ) and Kyle Gass (the other guy from Tenacious D and the pick of Destiny) are coming to rock Blizzcon like Ozzy did before them. What a perfect choice for a band for such a great event. Seriously who else could top these guys except maybe a 2 hour (TBFKA level 80 Tauren Cheiftans). With the Direct TV package this is going to be an awesome event and thank god i still have holidays to take in work as they are now booked for this amazing event.

This sunday the first cataclysm TV spot shall be going live in America during the Dallas Cowboys versus Minnesota Vikings NFL game on Fox. Game starts at 4:15 PM EDT, 1:15 PM PDT . I am sure within a few minutes of the TV spot going live it will be all over Youtube so all you EU and Ozzie gamers keep and eye out and lets see what a peak at the cataclysm cinematic is going to look like. We know it will be epic but i want it now as Veruca Salt would say.

Well that’s it from me for this week. Hope you enjoyed this especially long post today. Chat next week.

Death Knight Cataclysm Changes

Well we waited a long time today but here for your pleasure are the Death Knight changes just in time for our new columnist to review them:

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. In this preview, you’ll get a glimpse at some of the new abilities, spells, and talents in store for the death knight class, along with an early look at some improvements we plan to make to the rune resource system.

New Death Knight Abilities

Outbreak (level 81): Outbreak infects the target with both Frost Fever and Blood Plague at no rune cost. This ability allows death knights to apply diseases quickly when they are switching targets or when their diseases have been dispelled.

Necrotic Strike (level 83): Necrotic Strike is a new attack that deals weapon damage and applies a debuff that absorbs an amount of healing based on the damage done. For context, imagine that the death knight can choose between doing 8,000 damage outright with a certain ability, or dealing 6,000 damage and absorbing 4,000 points in incoming heals with Necrotic Strike — the burst is smaller, but a larger overall amount of healing would be required to bring the target back to full health.

This ability is meant to bring back some of the old flavor from when death knights could dispel heal-over-time (HoT) effects. It also gives the class a bit more PvP utility without simply replicating a Mortal Strike-style effect.

Dark Simulacrum (level 85): The death knight strikes a target, applying a debuff that allows the death knight to copy the opponent’s next spell cast and unleash it. Unlike Spell Reflection, Dark Simulacrum does not cancel the incoming spell. In general, if you can’t reflect an ability, you won’t be able to copy it either.

Rune System Changes

While we’re satisfied with the way the rune system works overall, we’re making a few major changes to the mechanics that will ultimately help death knight players feel less constrained. Here’s the rationale behind the changes, followed by an explanation of how the new system will work.

• In the current rune system, any time a rune is sitting idle, death knights are losing out on potential damage output. By comparison, rogues spend most of their time at low energy levels, and if they’re unable to use their skills for a few seconds, that energy builds up and can be spent later, minimizing the net loss from the interruption.
• A death knight’s runes, on the other hand, cannot be used until they are fully active. If a death knight ever goes more than a few seconds without spending an available rune, that resource is essentially wasted. Because the death knight is pushing buttons constantly, it can be difficult to add new mechanics to the class because the player doesn’t have any free global cooldowns to use them. We can’t grant extra resources or reduced cost, because there is no time to spend them. Missing an attack is devastating, and it’s impossible to save resources for when they’re most useful.
• Additionally, each individual death knight ability has a fairly low impact on its own, making it feel like most of the death knight’s attacks are weak. The death knight’s rotations are also more easily affected by latency or a player’s timing being just a little off. At times, it feels like death knights aren’t able to take advantage of their unique resource mechanic, which can diminish the fun.
• The new rune system will change how runes regenerate, from filling simultaneously to filling sequentially. For example, if you use two Blood runes, then the first rune will fill up before the second one starts to fill up. Essentially, you have three sets of runes filling every 10 seconds instead of six individual runes filling every 10 seconds. (Haste will cause runes to fill faster.) Another way to think of this is having three runes that go up to 200% each (allowing extra “storage”), rather than six runes that go up to 100% each.
• As this is a major change to the death knight’s mechanics, it will of course require us to retune many of the class’s current abilities. For example, each ability needs to hit harder or otherwise be more meaningful since the death knight is getting fewer resources per unit of time. Some abilities will need to have their costs reduced as a result.

Talent Changes

Next we’ll outline some of the death knight talent-tree changes we’re planning in Cataclysm. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a sense of how we’re intending each death knight spec to perform.

• One of the biggest changes we’re making is converting Blood into a dedicated tanking tree. While we feel that having three tanking trees was successful overall, it’s less necessary in a world with dual-specialization. In addition, the current breakdown isn’t as compatible with the Mastery-based passive talent-tree bonuses we want to add (see below). We’d rather spend time tweaking and balancing one good tanking tree rather than having a tank always wondering if they picked the “correct” tree out of three possibilities.
• Blood seemed like the best fit for tanking. Unholy has always had a strong niche with diseases, magic, and command over pets. Frost now feels like a solid dual-wield tree with Frost magic damage and decent crowd control. Blood’s niche was self-healing — fitting for a tank — as well as strong weapon swings, which could easily be migrated to Frost and Unholy.
• Our plan is to move the most interesting and fun tanking talents and abilities to Blood. For example, you will likely see Vampiric Blood and Will of the Necropolis remain, while Bone Shield will move over from Unholy.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Blood
Damage reduction
Vengeance
Healing Absorption

Frost
Melee damage
Melee Haste
Runic Power Generation

Unholy
Melee damage
Melee and spell critical damage
Disease Damage

Healing Absorption: When you heal yourself, you’ll receive an additional effect that absorbs incoming damage.

Runic Power Generation: This will function as the name implies, and the new rune system will make generating Runic Power more appealing.

Disease Damage: Unholy death knights will be able to get more out of their diseases, which are integral to the tree’s play style.

Vengeance: This new mechanic is designed to ensure that tank damage output (and therefore threat) doesn’t fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will grant a stacking Attack Power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character’s unbuffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have an Attack Power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Blood tree; these values will be smaller at lower levels.

You only get the Vengeance bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Blood tree, so you won’t see Frost or Unholy death knights running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to design tank gear more or less the way we do today; there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but the goal is that all four tanks will do about the same damage when tanking.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues

Death Knight Dedicated Tanking Tree a Reality

Yes Guys it is true.

Ghostcrawler has just posted that DK’s will now have a dedicated tanking tree. With Blood going to be the tanking choice for Death Knights in Cataclysm this will surely help players who wish to tank on their DK’s but were not sure which of the 3 trees was best to do so in. He doesn’t go into much detail but wanted to explain the motivation behind such a major change to the class:

“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.”