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PvE Gear in PvP
Ideally, PvE gear should be what you use until you have PvP gear. The same should be true of using PvP gear to do a raid. Weapons are a little bit of an exception, since traditionally their damage has been high and resilience low. That may be worth changing though.
Gear Upgrade - Slightly different stats on different tiers
Unless the piece's name is orange, gear should almost always be a choice. Even if you are jumping up a tier you may be dropping some stats in order to increase others.
Gearing up is one of the most interesting parts of the game. Deciding whether you want X or Y is supposed to be a tough decision. We make no guarantee that everything that drops is an upgrade for you, even set pieces.
Building the most optimal set of gear for your particular spec is also one of the things that lets more expert players demonstrate mastery of the game. If the set pieces were always better, that wouldn't happen. In fact one of the reasons we made sets smaller (not 8 pieces or whatever) is so players could still undertake the challenge of completing them without also getting in a position where they were very reluctant to upgrade again.
Death Knight
Dual Wield vs. Two-Hand
The goal is to let death knights make a choice between DW or 2H DPS. We realize there is a risk that DW will overtake 2H at some point, but that is not the goal. For most existing classes that promote DW, we allow DW to dominate.
It's hard to tell if that is happening yet on death knights. Patchwerk is a short fight where blowing cooldowns reaps big benefits, and I tend to agree with the opinions that this guy won the lottery.
We haven't decided if we are going to take steps yet to back off DW damage. If DW death knights are only going for the fastest possible weapons in order to maximize procs per unit time, then that is something we might address.
Anti-Magic Shield/Zone
We buffed AMS because we dropped the mitigation of Icebound Fortitude and Bone Shield by a pretty hefty margin.
One idea that has been circulating is to have AMS and AMZ share a cooldown so that the death knight can't just pop both in rapid succession. It's possible this might make AMZ pretty unattractive in PvE though, which is why we haven't pulled the trigger on that one yet.
Summon Gargoyle
My suspicion is the Gargoyle is OP at the moment. It may only be in situations where the death knight needs a lot of burst on demand, but it definitely seems more popular than we suspected it would be.
Heart Strike
Heart Strike should be your go to ability in most cases. When you are at risk for breaking CC, you can use Blood Strike instead. But the intent is that Heart Strike will do more damage. It competes with Frost Strike and Scourge Strike in the other trees.
Blood Spec
For PvE, we've seen some pretty decent numbers come out of Blood. I think players just need more time to try out all the build combinations. For PvP the big hits of Scourge Strike, the mitigation of Bone Shield and AMZ and the extra damage from the Gargoyle and ghoul probably make Unholy overshadow the other trees. This should be better next patch.
