Not to long ago I embarked on a journey to swap my dps spec from Blood to Frost and it’s been a fun ride. It has also taken me pretty deep down the rabbit hole into the mechanics of how to dish out the damage properly and learn many of the small intricacies that when added up can make a substantial difference in performance. I still have a great deal to learn but I’d like to share what I have already learned.
If you are interested in turning in your Heart …

I think there is a good amount of anticipation for this patch which will be releasing the new boss Halion into the Ruby Sanctum. It will also be the end of AVR in it’s current form as well as the addition of Battle.net Real ID. There will not be any major changes to the classes however, which I’m sure some were wishing upon a star for. Let’s take a look at what we are getting.

Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha
The Cataclysm Friends & Family Alpha just started.
Important: The Friends & Family Alpha is restricted to employee’s friends and family, the only way to enter this phase of the alpha is to have a Blizzard employee request a key for you personally. Any mail you receive about a potential Cataclysm beta is a scam.

Love him or hate him, GC took the time to get pretty involved in a discussion about DK’s success and failures throughout WotLK. The discussion was in the tanking forums and titled “3.3.3 Worked (sorta) for DKs” and can be found over at the official forums here.
Among the topics discussed was the population fluctuation of DK’s. First, they were “OP” according to GC, then they were fixed to be more inline with the other classes. This caused a lot of DK’s early on in the expansion, and tapering off later …

Not the greatest illustration, I’m not the best at Gimp/Photoshop but this should give a rough idea.
Instead of the 200% example that GC was giving, it’s better to think of the strikes as taking 50% of our rune pool. It’s going to be hard to differentiate between Runic Power used for Frost Strike/Death Coil and the “Rune Power” or “Rune Energy” in the new rune system. Maybe a name will catch on somewhere…
Basically, we will have 3 runes now in theory. We will still actually have 6 runes, but to …