Updated Death Knight Class Development Notes for The War Within Alpha - Core Class & Unholy Tree Changes
Blizzard has shared additional developer commentary explaining some of the new Death Knight changes in this week's Alpha build for The War Within, focused on the core class and Unholy trees!
For Unholy our goal was to address some of the flood of resources, reduce the number of things that need to be tracked to play optimally, increase pathing as well as choice, and reduce the number of nodes you need to pick up to play the spec fluidly. We will go into a little more detail below for both the core and Unholy changes.
Core
The core tree has undergone a decent reshuffling of talent placement, node pathing, ability’s becoming baseline and talent rank reduction.Due to the unique leveling experience Death Knights have and not starting from level 1, they had a reduced amount of abilities baseline and had to “buy back” several abilities that other classes and specs would have normally earned as they levelled.Heading into The War Within we are reassessing the stance on this for Death Knight not only for abilities they had to talent into in the core tree but also their spec trees. The hope here is by freeing up some of these talent points you had to spend to make a functional leveling experience you gain a few points that allow you to flex into more optional talents without locking you into one build.We have also updated several pathing nodes and moved around a few nodes to better fit the new tree philosophy.
Structurally the bottom of the tree no longer holds 9 throughput talents and they have been shifted to earlier in the tree and many of them have been reduced to 1 point. Again, allowing for more build variety and the ability to pick up situational talents when you might.
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