World of Warcraft Class Q&A Series: The Death Knight

[GameBanshee News]

Blizzard continues their World of Warcraft class Q&A series by having "Ghostcrawler" from the class design team address community questions about the Death Knight.

How do we feel about the current viability of dual-wielding? Are there plans to improve it or have it fit a specific role for the class?

Ghostcrawler: This is a controversial topic because we realize some players just aren’t interested in dual-wielding (or seeing any death knights even do it), while others love the faster strikes that come with it. Our design has always been that dual-wielding should be an option, but that also means that it can’t take over, as it often does for classes in which we provide the option.

Part of our goal with the death knight was not to have a tanking or PvP tree, and we feel we’ve been pretty successful with that. However, adding dual-wield to that matrix just gives us an impossible task, because then you need to have the Blood dual-wield tank spec and the Frost two-hander PvP spec and so on.

What we are going to do with dual-wield in 3.2 is just provide the Frost tree with the talents necessary to prop-up dual wielding, including a new talent that lets Frost Strike, Death Strike, Obliterate etc. hit with both weapons. This will likely mean that Blood and Unholy dual-wield specs just won’t work anymore. It also carries the risk that all Frost death knights feel like they have to go dual-wield. This latter part isn’t necessarily a goal, but could be the outcome. We think in this case our only option is to remove some player choice in order to provide a real choice in other areas.