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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Tanking Death Knight Tree Changes in World of Warcraft Cataclysm

It was announced on the official World of Warcraft forums that developers are planning to implement some changes that will make the Blood tree the primary choice for the tanking tree for all Death Knight in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. As the game is now, Death Knights have 2 viable trees for tanking - Frost and Blood. Both trees have some cool talents and abilities which provide the Death Knights with increased survivability, health regeneration and damage mitigation talents for both melee and spell damage.

The plan is to make only 1 tree with all tanking talents for the Death Knights when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm comes. Developers explain that it will be nice to avoid the confusion when choosing tanking spec and to be able to access all the abilities and skills at the same time. This is why they have decided to give DKs a dedicated tanking tree, similar to the other three tank classes - Paladin, Druid and Warrior.

Recently one of the Blizzard employees, named Ghostcrawler explained in an official blue post about all the reasons and intention Blizzard staff members have when it comes to Death Knight tanking. It seems that the development team wanted to see how it can work out to have an actual choice of tanking tree and to allow players to choose between two viable options when it comes to tanking. This was meant to be a test, and it turned to work out just fine.

However, a lot has happened in the game after WOTLK was released - the new dual specialization was introduced, the new Dungeon Finder feature was introduced and much more. There are even more changes coming with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and one of them will make a really large impact on the talent choices - the new Mastery concept. This is why the developers have decided that even though tanking as both Frost and Blood works just fine for the Death Knight class, tweaking the Masteries so they benefit 2 trees will be a bit more complicated. As a result, they decided to have just 1 tanking tree for the Death Knights, and focus the proper Mastery bonuses for that tree.

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 necessary for tanking and the Death Knights will have it easier when choosing both talent tree and talent points as they will gain access to abilities and skills which will help them perform their tanking role.

Even though this is a major change, I'm sure that it will work really well in the long run, because so far all changes made by Blizzard have proven to be for better. I'm curious to see how the Death Knight Blood tree will look in Cataclysm, but I will have to wait a bit more just like everyone else for the detailed trees to be announced.

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