Ghost Crawler explains 4.2 changes

We have a nice post up explaining the tweaking that has been going on with the Death Knight class in Wow 4.2.

We added the cast time to Hungering Cold for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.

Unfortunately this is a direct nerf for PvP which annoys in PvE, even though it wasn't needed in PvE. Still, I guess we can get used to a small cast time, right?

The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed -- you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.

The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.

They nerfed the self-healing from Death Strike, but sadly this again stops it doing self-healing in PvE too. Given the heroics these days involve the DPS not taking any damage, this change is a pain because at the moment I can get some health back using Death Strike, using it instead of Obliterate.

The Might of the Frozen Wastes change was a small tweak to help keep one-handed Frost relatively competitive with two-handed style.

This is intriguing, DW was better in 4.1, however in 4.2 it will be interesting to see if 2 Handed Frost is better or not, given equal weapon item levels. I'll keep my eye on the Elitist Jerks thread.

The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does theoretical higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

Well, if you continue to design the game to be unforgiving of mistakes, the answer would be 0%. Otherwise more DPS is always better, given that Frost and Unholy both have their play style issues, I'm fine playing either. Plus I get to dual wield in Frost, and that is cool.