When one takes a two-week vacation, one generally looks forward to things having changed, even slightly, when one returns. This is especially sure when speaking of the Mists of Pandaria beta test. Strangely, that hasn't been exactly the case for death knights. There have been changes, certainly, but not as drastic as we might have hoped -- and not as well-explained, either.

Today, we'll take a look at a few of the more important changes and what they imply for our class. In addition, we'll see what Ghostcrawler did and didn't say about death knights in a recent post.

Plague Leech and disease issues

There've been a few changes to death knights, but the most interesting one comes with Plague Leech. This first-tier talent, which replaces Vile Spew, will allow you to generate a death rune by canceling the diseases from your target.

The nice thing about this skill is that it gives us another much-needed Blood Tap replacement now that Blood Tap itself has been turned into a somewhat more restricted talent. The bad thing about this skill is that it's probably going to become mandatory for min-maxing DPS death knights. If your diseases are about to expire anyway and you can eat them for an extra death rune, it's hard to see how that won't become a DPS increase. Once we all reach level 90 and the math has been sufficiently mathed, it seems relatively obvious that Plague Leech will be considered mandatory by the hardcore PvE community, for better or for worse.

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Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Mists of Pandaria

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone! As you probably know, Diablo III's release date is today. With over 1 million Annual Pass subscribers set to receive free digital copies of the game, chances you or a guildmate is going to playing this game. As someone who's been a huge fan of the Diablo series for over a decade, I can vouch for the series. If you need something else to keep your attention while we wait for Mists of Pandaria to go live, you could easily do worse, that's for sure.

If you're interested in checking out Diablo III, I'd suggest you look at the following articles we've published to get you up to speed.

• Here are six blue posts that you must read.
• We offer some tips on fixing common Diablo III installation issues.
• We have a quick guide to the basics of Diablo gameplay.
• Rossi gets you up to speed on the lore of the Diablo franchise.
• My basic introduction to Diablo is a few months old, but it's a good read.
• Alex explains why we're covering Diablo III on a WoW site.

If you're not into Diablo, don't worry. We still have plenty of the WoW coverage you expect. With new beta patches coming all the time, there's a lot of it, too. Downtime today is just a series of rolling restarts at 5 a.m. PDT, so that's at least enough time to read a quick article or two.

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Filed under: Realm Status, News items

So the other day, I jumped into a Raid Finder group on my hunter. Early in the instance, a lockbox dropped. Most of us, of course, rolled greed. One rogue rolled need and won the box. I don't know why he rolled need. Maybe his finger slipped. Maybe he assumed that since he could lockpick the box, he had a right to roll need. Maybe he was just a jerk. Whatever the reason, he rolled, and he won. Immediately, a couple of other players made a pretty huge outcry. Ninja looter, they said. Kick him, they said. He eventually apologized, but they would have none of it. Finally, they got a kick vote started and kicked him out of the group.

You know what I was thinking the whole time this was happening? I was wishing the other players would shut up so we could finish the instance. Honestly, all that chat was getting on my nerves. I just wanted my valor points -- who cared about a lockbox? In all honesty, it would have probably had around 50 to 100 gold total, assuming he got a good price on the AH for the green item inside. I can make that much in a half-hour of dailies, no problem. Besides, the ninja was in the top 10 DPS for the raid, much higher than the two people shouting the loudest for his removal. I would have rather kept the ninja than risk getting someone else with much lower damage potential.

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

The strange thing about talking about the unholy tree since Cataclysm is that nothing ever seems to change. Don't get me wrong, unholy's been on a roller coaster of nerfs and balances, it's true, but the basic gameplay stays the same -- and more importantly, the basic problems never really get fixed.

So as we come into Mists of Pandaria, where are we with unholy? It still has a relatively unique playstyle, with a pet and less difficulty keeping diseases up (but more difficulty applying them because of the rune spending issue), but this same playstyle gives it a lot of trouble, as weapon damage scales horribly and strength becomes more important -- some would say too important. This is how it continues to go with unholy.

Today, we'll take a look at the upsides and downsides of unholy as it currently exists in the Mists of Pandaria beta and maybe make some suggestions for things Blizzard could focus on fixing once the death knights' turn for class balancing comes around.

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Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. With a new wave of 400,000 Mists of Pandaria beta invites having gone out this past week, everyone with an Annual Pass should now have their invites. If you have yours, you may want to read up on our guides to being a better beta tester.

I have to admit, when I am not testing my death knight, one of the things I have been doing is creating monks of various races to get a feel for whose combat animations look the coolest. Of course, none of them quite face up to pandaren just because they all have the whole issue of being old models, but you get some cool moves. I'm finding I really like Forsaken monks. They almost hearken back to the old ghouls of WCIII that they came from.

Whether you're in the beta or not, you'll want to keep reading. We have all the latest beta news you'll want to know about, as well as class news, opinions, and the rest. Downtime today is from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you should have time to get caught up. Keep reading for more.

Hot news and features

• Patch 4.3.3 is live, and with it, some changes to the customer support UI. We'll show you the ropes.
• Check out the latest patch 4.3 hotfixes for April 17.
• World bosses are coming back with a vengeance in Mists of Pandaria, and Matt has a quick guide to etiquette and expectations for taking them down.
• Chase takes a look at three monk abilities that call back to classic fighting games.
• Rossi offers a beginner's guide to WoW lore.
• Anne offers some advice for dealing with in-game harassment.
• Brian takes a look at what WoW players search for on Google.
• We offer more transmogrification looks based off old Nintendo favorites.
• Rossi wonders if flying mounts caused more harm than good.

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Filed under: Realm Status, News items

Since the last time we talked, we have seen a couple of new updates to the Mists of Pandaria beta. There haven't been many earth-shattering changes for death knights, but some of the changes have been significant enough that it's worth talking about both what they mean for the class and what they may imply about future updates.

It's difficult to say where Blizzard is going with our class in Mists, if only because they haven't said much. They've started talking on the beta forums, but they haven't directed anything at the death knight class yet. This isn't completely surprising. Our class is not in a horrible place right now, and the beta's young. Chances are we'll get our turn eventually.

That said, having developer feedback is useful for figuring out how to mold your own feedback. Knowing what a developer intends with a certain change can help us test that change with a better understanding of how it fits in to a larger vision. In absence of that, however, we can still look at the implications of these changes to see what we come up with.

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Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. We seem to have settled into a nice, mid-beta groove with Mists of Pandaria. There's nothing earth-shattering going on, maybe, but we're still getting a steady diet of awesome news coming our way and the promise of even more as the beta continues. Overall, it's a pretty exciting time to be a fan of WoW.

Scheduled realm maintenance this morning is from 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT, so you should have plenty of time to get caught up the week's news. Keep reading for our usual roundup.

Mists of Pandaria news and features

• Check out these awesome new jewelcrafting mount models. And if that's not enough, there's even a super-expensive version.
• There are also new emote animations for female pandaren.
• Here's a video of some more awesome new mounts coming with Mists of Pandaria.
• Josh takes a look at five super-exciting new monk abilities.
• When's Mists of Pandaria's release date? We took a look at past patch and beta development cycles for clues.

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Filed under: Realm Status, News items

In Cataclysm, there were many hot-button death knight balance issues, but one of the biggest was Unholy Presence vs. Frost Presence. Frost Presence fell out of vogue very quickly in Cataclysm, since all DPSers found themselves running into a global cooldown wall pretty quickly. We were producing resources so fast, we needed the 1-second GCD provided by Unholy Presence to have any hope of spending them all.

This issue has come to the forefront even more in Mists of Pandaria beta testing. This is because a loss of runic power generating talents have put the dual wielding frost style at a disadvantage, enough that it needs the extra runic power regeneration from Frost Presence. Unfortunately, when it loses the 1-second GCD of Unholy Presence, it starts to stutter, with many testers using the dread descriptor "clunky" to describe the resulting rotation. Part of this could be trying to adjust going from Unholy Presence to Frost Presence, admittedly, but it feels like a problem.

If you want to see a comparison, switching to two-handed frost provides it. Thanks to the improved runic power generation on Might of the Frozen Wastes, two-handed frost can use Unholy Presence with ease, and its rotation plays nice and smoothly, very close to what it is on live.

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Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Happy Tuesday Morning, everyone. As the week gets in full gear, we here at WoW insider are mostly still basking in the post-PAX afterglow. Alas, I was not among the attendees, but my coworkers who did make the trip to Boston had a blast, and the panel went well. If you missed it, why not use this week's downtime as an excuse to listen to the panel? We even have footage of the first 10 minutes.

If you can't make time to listen right now, don't worry. We still have plenty of news for you to catch up on. In addition to all the juicy stuff from the Mists of Pandaria beta, we have some pretty big site news. Yes, that is a new comment system you're seeing. Luckily, the world hasn't ended, as some were predicting, so you should still be able to use it. Downtime today is limited to a series of rolling restarts at 5 a.m. PDT, but with all this good stuff to read or listen to, you may want to stick around anyway. Read on for more.

Mists of Pandaria news and features

• We have a spoiler-free overview of the Mists of Pandaria beta.
• We take a first look at monk leveling in the beta.
• Raid Rx has a basic guide to the mistweaver healing monk.

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Having finally had a chance to play the Mists of Pandaria beta, I'll be looking this week at the basics of the experience for a level 85 death knight coming into Jade Forest, the first zone in the leveling experience.

The setup

Upon logging in to Mists of Pandaria for the first time, you will, of course, have to choose new talents. With the talent system being so radically changed, there's really no around it. Luckily, it's a relatively painless process. Having played around a bit with most of the choices, I'm not sure if many of the choices are that dynamic, but your mileage may vary.

On tier 1, you may see some blood death knights going for Unholy Blight to have a nice bit of runic power AoE, but other than that, the three choices are pretty clearly split between the three specs. That said, it's not a horrible tree, either. You can pick some cool stuff that'll help with your desired role and keep on playing, and I like that. It's just not going to be a free choice, per se. At the moment, it just appears that there's almost always a clear winner for most situations on any given tier based on your preferred spec, role, and playstyle.

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Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Mists of Pandaria