Death Knight players in the beta shaking in boots.

Many Death Knight players are worried over an interesting post on the beta forums. It basically is the herald to the nerf bat slapping Death Knights right in the face. What will come of it? With the volatile way the beta is running, who knows.

If that sounds like too much of a euphamism, you could also go with nerf bat.

We have started our big numbers pass on all classes, and as many of you suspected, the death knight's damage was much too high in some situations. For comparison, their sustained dps could be 30% higher than a rogue of similar gear and skill. That's a lot. Remember, a death knight can pack 5 or 6 abilities into a 10-second window. They hit often, like a rogue, but for much bigger numbers.*

I don't want to freak anyone out, which is probably inevitable with a post of this nature, but I also didn't anyone to be unduly shocked if a new build goes out soon.

We need to get more feedback on the death knight talent trees, rotations and abilities, and to some extent that wasn't happening because opponents were dying too fast, or perhaps just because five digit crits are too distracting. We also need to get the game closer to a shippable state, which means making sure the dps of various classes at various levels of gear is more in line. I'm sorry, but from all our tests and number-crunching, DK dps was not in line. I also suspect they aren't the only class in that situation.

If we nerfed DK dps too much, then rest assured, we'll improve it. By many accounts, the class is a pretty fun one to play, and we're not about to let our first new class get largely ignored just because its dps (or tanking for that matter) aren't competitve. As always, feedback on the changes are useful, but try not to fret too much. :)

Yes, I expect many of you can cite examples where you saw another class one shot an entire group of elites. Those classes are getting adjusted too.

* - there is an expectation that a guy with a giant runeblade should be hitting for really big numbers. An alternative is to keep the Mortal Strike-like crits, but slow down the frequency that they can use those hits. I'm not sure slower rune coolups or expensive abilities would be as fun as the current implementation but it is something we could consider. Another alternative is to nerf DK white damage in order to keep the big numbers, but changing white damage can do very strange things to classes, so we'd prefer to try other routes first.

You can read the post here over on the official forums.