New Cataclysm Talent Trees

So much for the iconic abilities being at the bottom of the tree... Seriously, having to take Hungering Cold to pick up Howling Blast???
 
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Looks to me like Hungering Cold is a good way to apply your Frost Fever to multiple targets, and combos well with Howling Blast for some good aoe damage.

I do have to say that it looks like a lot of the trees still need work. The Shaman trees seem pretty restrictive - really only 1 or 2 viable builds, not the "and put the last 10 points wherever" kind of builds that Blizzard was hoping for.
 
But Hungering Cold is a one-minute cooldown and a glyphed Howling Blast (which has a 10-second cooldown) applies Frost Fever to all hit targets. Hungering Cold is arguably okay for a tank who's Frost, but only Blood Death Knights are going to be tanks...

Hungering Cold, on Live, is simply a one-talent-point investment and is a filler if someone doesn't take IT/IIT to get the current 51-point talent, Howling Blast. The fact that Blizzard stated that we'd have to place 31 points into one talent tree because we'd be given iconic abilities at the bottom of the tree is at complete odds with the gutted talents on that list with all the current iconic abilities right where they've been all along: at the top of the tree with no justification for locking us into a single tree for 31 talent points.

Honestly, I hope you're right that they plan on making sweeping changes to this, because this is completely underwhelming.
 
Hungering Cold to me almost seems like it should be in the Blood tree now since it's the tanking tree. It seems like more of a tanking ability than dps to me.
 
I am pretty sure that the DK talents that you see now are live talents; that is, at this point Blizzard has probably just deleted the "bad talents" and hasn't changed up the existing talents much at all since the last 61-point setup.
 
From the beta patch notes

"While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations"

So its a pretty rough draft for those classes/specs still
 
Neirai the Forgiven said:
I am pretty sure that the DK talents that you see now are live talents; that is, at this point Blizzard has probably just deleted the "bad talents" and hasn't changed up the existing talents much at all since the last 61-point setup.
Click to expand...

The DK talents, in general, are not at all like they are on live. Howling Blast, for instance, does not have any prerequisite on live whatsoever. There's also a talent in the Frost Tree which doesn't exist on live at all, namely, a three-point talent to help out a 2H speciality. Please note that while it may have been somewhat ripped from Blood (and it hasn't been; the blood version works with abilities, whereas the Frost version only works with auto-attacks) it jumped in talent point requirements from two points to three.

And since the entire focus of the trees are very different in Cata than they are on live, there's wholesale movement of talents, new talents, and old talents that work in different ways on live.

viglundr said:
From the beta patch notes

"While this is a first pass on all of the talent trees, death knight, druid, paladin, warlock, Arcane mage, and Assassination rogue trees are not as far along as other specializations"

So its a pretty rough draft for those classes/specs still
Click to expand...

Considering that Death Knights, in general, are being given a complete overhaul, I don't believe this for one minute. Blizzard cannot have claimed to have completely shifted the focus of Death Knights and not have something more for talents by now.
 
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I'm sure that they have something more already on their internal dev/test environments, and they're just not ready to push it out to beta yet.
 
I would have to back up Dan in that I believe these are just all thrown in as place markers. The hunter tree is completely off form anything usable, and many of the other trees go against what Blizz says they want for the final design. I am sure we will see some real changes over the next few weeks.
 
I did some searching in regard to these. It appears that Hungering Cold, in Alpha, set up a 50% increase in damage for Howling Blast, something that was very synergistic and makes sense for its prerequisite status. In Beta, they removed the damage bonus and the fact that Hungering Cold is still linked to Howling Blast is an apparent mistake. Rime is supposedly going to be swapped with Hungering Cold, making the talent tree much more synergistic than it currently appears.

In any case, the only thing that currently makes sense is to pass apparent issues along to Blizzard so that they're aware of any concerns we have as players. :)
 
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