Daily Blue - DK Changes, Exotic pets, Thunder Clap

Seeing how active the blue posters are on WotLK beta forums, we reinstated the Daily Blue feature, it's separated from other news items (meaning they have their own news) to make it easier on news sorting/comments. More news to come today, stay tuned.

Death Knight - About the new Frost Strike (src)
The new Frost Strike still hits for Frost damage (no armor). The normalization will just allow you to use any speed weapon without worrying about what that means. We are trying Frost Strike as runic power right now. It works really well with talents like Merciless Combat, Deathchill and Killing Machine. You can still throw Death Coil at ranged enemies, but Frost Strike will always hit harder (and crit bigger since it's not a spell). Since Frost's 51 is not a damage spell, you don't feel like you are wasting runic power on the Frost Strike. We haven't yet added any secondary effect to Frost Strike (chill, freeze, disease, shatter) mostly because we have tried lots of those already and don't want to saddle the shiny new Frost Strike with any excess baggage at this point.

Death Knight - Dual Wield and 2H (src)
Death Knights will be able to dual-wield. The design is that DW and 2H are about equal. Because DW tends to dominate for specs that have it as an option, you probably won't see it propped up much more than it is now. Ideally we would like to see 2H and DW DKs. I suspect 2H will be slightly more popular since that fits most people's notions of a proper DK.

Death Knight - The new Death Strike (src)
Death Strike is 1U, 1F. It isn't a hard hitter (i.e. Oblit is always a better choice when you want big numbers), but you are healed by a percentage of the damage per disease. With two diseases, you can be healed for 100% or more of the strike's damage. It has no mechanic tied to killing an enemy or hitting them when wounded any longer.

Death Knight - Heart Strike has trainable ranks (src)
It has trainable ranks at higher level, much like Frost Strike and Scourge Strike.

Death Knight - Frost fever runeforge to be replaced (src)
Since Frost Fever became a disease that you can keep up relatively easy (and at range even), the Frost Fever runeforge isn't very useful so we plan on replacing it with the something like Frozen Rune Weapon. Windfury Totem, however, is a passive haste buff so it will stack with any enchantment. The DK runeforge enchants will not stack with enchants like Executioner, though they will stack with temporary buffs like sharpening stones.

Death Knight - The new talent trees contain a few bugs (src)
There are a few bugs in those tech trees. Off the top of my head,

• Killing Machine and Deathchill benefit Frost Strike. Killing Machine only procs from white attacks.
• There are no stacking diseases. Icy Touch causes Frost Fever and Plague Strike causes Blood Plague. You can talent to get a few more spells that cause those diseases, and Unholy can add two more diseases (Ebon Plague and Unholy Blight). This makes Unholy Blight quite useful because it's the only way to get 4 diseases up for Blood Strike or Obliterate.
• Sudden Doom does benefit from Heart Strike. Heart Strike hits very hard and has a nice debuff with PvP and PvE uses (think Icy Veins, Windfury, Frenzy, Flurry and a host of boss abilities). It's less confusing than the previous debuff and isn't dependent on a next strike.
• Chilblains lasts twice as long.
• Abom Strength benefits the raid.
• Imp Rune Tap lowers cooldown as well as +health.
• Crypt Fever doesn't affect attributes, but it boosts the damage of other diseases on the target.
• Corpse Explosion costs 1 Unholy (remember Raise Dead is free).
• Blood-Caked Blade doesn't cause a disease. It adds melee damage to existing ones.
• Morbidity lowers cooldown on DnD and cost of Death Coil.

I'm sure there are others. We'll get them fixed up.

Hunter - Trap talents to be enhanced (src)
We're still going to do a consolidation on the "trap talents" in the Survival tree, and we'll also add some synergy with Bear Trap in there too.

Hunter - Silencing Shot to get changed (src)
Some changes to Silencing Shot will be made before... the end...

Hunter- Devilsaur and more exotic pets (src)
In the current build, you can tame Devilsaur without the 51 talent, it's a bug. Next build there will be a few more Exotic pets, also there is currently a single chimera that is tamable and he might even be a rare spawn (Numaroc).

Hunter - Auto rezzing the pet (src)
We might try something where the talent still auto-rezzes the pet, but takes a few seconds longer so that hopefully whatever gibbed Fluffy in the first place isn't going to just do it again. It's a tricky balance because if the delay is too long, hunters will just use their own rez and the talent is a lot less attractive. An alternative is a shaman-like self-rez, though it would have to be on the pet bar, not the hunter's. Even then it is yet one more button you have to find room for, so I think the current implementation still might be cooler with some polish.

Hunter - Auto leveling mechanic not applied to pets retrieved from the stables (src)
I suspect that it won't be. We can do some investigation and see how hard it would be to get that fixed. Unless you have a personal attachment to that pet or it's one of the few that is no longer available, you could just go out and get a new one though.

Hunter - Devilsaur pet size (src)
It think it's pretty evident that having pets that are too large might make the game less fun to play in some situations. We're just going to have to see how the beta goes, but ideally it would be cool if devilsaurs could remain at their current size. We'll try.

Warrior - AE Tanking and Thunder Clap changes (src)
AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We'll see how that feels.

Unobtainable Achievements (src)
Well its worth points to be a "Key master" and I can't reacquire those keys that I did away with. As a rogue I tossed the shadowforge key to make room once they made the lock pickable.
We're making all of the old keys obtainable if you deleted them. Same goes for pets and tabards. For keys, talk to a Locksmith. For Pets, talk to a stable master. For tabards, go to the tabard vendor. It's important to note that this ONLY works for pets/tabards/keys that cannot be obtained again by the player. This means that if a pet was a rare drop and you deleted it, you'll need to farm for it again.

WotLK Arena (src)
You will be able to continue rated arena matches at level 70, but there will be no new gear rewards in this bracket. Only skirmishes will be available from levels 71-79 but then at level 80 the rated matches will be available again.

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