Finally had a chance to have a good deep look at these talents. Massive thanks to MythicTrap for making the trees on their site. It made it significantly easier for me to visualize and learn from what will be available.
I think it’s best if I go spec by spec to give my thoughts on them. I’ll touch on a few very cool talents, address any concerns I have, and voice some questions that are probably just needing clarification.
Before we get into the talents, are there any planned changes to the Runeforging System?
General Tree
Every class has their general tree, and I am very glad to see Abomination Limb making it’s return in Dragonflight. This ability has become a core part of DK and I am excited to see it back.
I think the coolest “new” talent in the general tree is Death’s Echo. This is going to be a very welcomed change to have access to additional movement, an additional death grip (formerly only available as Blood PvP if I recall correctly) and additional death and decay (Unholy will be most pleased)
I do wish Wraith walk wasn’t so far out of the way, as it’s very nice to have for movement speed, but that’s a very minor thing I thought of.
One question and concern I have is regarding Horn Of Winter. Currently, HoW is never picked as a talent and it feels very clunky to use. If this is implemented (and hiding Rune Mastery which looks strong depending on proc rate) could it be removed from the GCD?
I’m also curious about Blood Draw. This talent looks cool, but how much does it heal from nearby enemies?
Overall I think the general tree looks solid. I think most of the “Major” stuff is put in a good spot, and I like the way it’s set up. I do wish there was another “route” to get to the end talents, but I understand that we probably shouldn’t be able to pick all 3 of the bottom line, with one exception as Frost (see below).
FROST
Ok first off. Thank you for giving us PvE chill streak.
Second, I want to echo my thoughts from my Feedback on Frost DK post on this ability:
I’m also happy to see Frostwhelp’s Indignation (renamed to Frostwhelp’s Aid) make a comeback. This was one of the best Azerite Talents in BFA and it helped make a couple other Frost Builds viable, so I am excited to see if they can make a comeback as well!
More specific to the general tree, but I am VERY happy to see frost have access to soul reaper now. Yes there is a choice to be made, but with the Empower Rune Weapon Talent in the Frost tree, you can technically get all 3 bottom talents from the general tree. Brilliant.
I’m very happy to see some talents/conduits/legendary effects from Shadowlands carry forward as well, and I’m looking forward to see what combinations are the best in given scenarios.
UNHOLY
Of the three spec trees, the unholy one felt the most one-dimensional to me. In both the frost and Blood trees I debated a few routes but the unholy one felt like there was just a strictly better option most of the time. I did like in this tree that there were more ways to reach army of the damned as a bottom row talent, in that you could take any of the three main routes to get there.
I have questions about the Morbidity talent. The way it reads is “Diseased enemies take 3/6% increased damage per disease they are affected by.” Does this apply to all diseases? Or just ones applied by the Death Knight? Does this apply to all targets attacking? The wording seems vague and like you could overload on Unholy Death Knights to just add infinite damage. I think this needs to be clarified.
One talent I was surprised to see is Reaping. It looks like we’re really leaning into the execute dream of Unholy DK. Depending on what other execute classes get as talents, this build will be the best Execute build we’ve ever seen.
I was hoping to see a return of the tier set bonuses as a talent, though maybe those are off the table, but I like the way the tier set interacts with the current rotation and playstyle of unholy DK.
BLOOD
I like how we’re leaning into the fantasy of Blood DK. The 10/20/30% stamina increase and 3/6/10% damage taken reduction talent is going to be a mainstay.
The one I am really looking forward to messing around with is Unquenchable Thirst. I think it’s a really cool talent idea. What I don’t like about this talent is that there is bound to be some gameplay around cancelling vamp blood early for extra damage. I don’t like the thought, as a tank, of cancelling defensives. I don’t think that fits the playstyle or the ideas of a tank. What I would rather see is the talent absorb Death Strike healing to a point, then burst for damage but Vamp blood doesn’t get cancelled. Then you can plan death strikes for when to “burst the thirst”, allowing for high level planning and gameplay, but you aren’t sacrificing survivability to do it. With it’s “infinite scaling” I can already see Rextroy making a video about one-shotting players with this ability.
Outside of that, the blood tree does feel very basic, but well composed. I like the added effect to Tightening Grasp, which will just make Blood DK do even more damage, but if that’s where we’re going with Tank damage I’m here for it.
CONCLUSION
Overall, I’m impressed. There are some questions and potential issues, but the routing and the identity shaping of these talent trees seems fantastic. I have not been a fan of our current talent systems since their inception in MoP, so I am glad to see them leaving and I have been advocating for talent trees to return, so I am thrilled to see this effort by Blizzard, Thank you all very much from the bottom of my heart.
I think these talent trees will really help with spec identity. There are going to be hundreds if not thousands of possible combinations for every spec in the game and I am looking forward to shaping my talents to the content I am doing. I hope Tomes and Codex’s stick around to facilitate that in a raid environment.