New layout now, new era later

So after taking a break and seeing how Death Goddess changed her layout, it prompted me to redesign my own layout and try something new. It's not as dark as it was but I think it still represents the coldness of a Death Knight. I'm going to be working on getting a new banner image as well as the current one doesn't really fit anymore.

Best estimates are putting Cataclysm on the horizon, hopefully before Christmas like WOTLK was. Lots and lots of changes have been put out there since the Beta started. Some have been met with praise, others...not so much. Overall, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. This represents a new era to Warcraft overall. It will be interesting to see how the story plays out throughout this expansion. But more so right now, the focus is on the mechanics changes.

******SPOILERS AHEAD******

The biggest change is the talent trees. Talent trees are now 31-point trees and you will be locked into your chosen tree until you have spent 31 points in that tree, after which you can spend your remaining 10 in another tree for a total of 41. Needless to say, this severely limits your options for specs.
Taking a look at the newest version of the DK talents (which can be found here), the trees are vastly different already.

I had a post going for the new talent changes but as I just noticed, Wowhead has updated to the newest talent trees which is missing some of the talents I had outlined in this post. So I'll start over. You'll never notice anything different as I hadn't posted the original yet.

One thing I do like about the redesigned talent trees for all classes is how you receive 3 abilities that define that spec as soon as you make that your chosen talen tree. I'll detail each of the DK given abilities at the start of each section.

==Blood==
Blood receives Heart Strike, Vengeance, Veteran of the Third War and Death Rune Mastery right from the start. On a side note, Vengeance will be an ability given to all tanks, be it Druid, Warrior, Paladin or Death Knight.
I'm still having problems coming up with a spec on this one. There are so many great talents in the Blood tree that it limits options from the others. I'm still on the fence about Blood Parasite. I'm just still not convinced this is a useful talent for tanks. I like the change to the talen but just not convinced of it's utility.
I'm very happy that we now have Bone Shield though I wish/hope for Anti-Magic Zone though I can understand why they wouldn't give it to us. It would benefit the tank more than it would a group taking damage. With a DK in melee range, it would be useful for a DK to be able to fall back into a group of ranged and shield them or throw it down for the melee, keeping the tank from needing to move around.
A lot of other talents are mostly unchanged, though where they appear in the tree has changed. Blood Tap is now in Tier 5, for example.
Blood Presence is now the tanking presence, just thought I'd mention quickly for clarity sake.

==Frost==
Frost will receive Frost Strike, Icy Talons, and Blood of the North.
There's a load of great changes to this tree. I'll admit it now, I'm very biased towards Frost pretty heavily. I highly enjoy dual wielding and the Frost based damage. One of the biggest changes I noticed with this round was the removal of the Runic Empowerment talent. I'm somewhat pleased that this was removed as it was a source of confusion for me. It wasn't very clear how useful it was going to be and if other specs were going to want it as well. As I'm not currently in the beta, I'm not sure if it was useful at all or not. In it's place, they have moved Nerves of Cold Steel into the first tier. While this change technically will allow for other specs to allow a degree of dual wielding, it's probably not recommended without Threat of Thassarian.
Improved Icy Talons no longer has additional talent requirements, it now resides in the 4th Tier.
Speaking of the 4th tier, there are two new talents of Pillar of Frost and Brittle Bones. Pillar of Frost seems to have replaced Unbreakable Armor completely but retains the instant +20% Strength while Brittle Bones provides a permanent increase of 4% to Strength as well as increasing damage taken by your victims of Frost Fever by 4%.
Interestingly, there is a talent called Might of the Frozen Wastes now that allows upto a 45% chance to generate 100 RP when wielding a two-handed weapon. How useful this is remains to be seen. In the current spec I have generated for Frost, there's already going to be an abundance of RP being generated. If it continues with the trend from Wrath, generating this much RP is almost wasteful as it can't be dumped fast enough without missing rotation on other abilities.
Lastly, Frost Presence has taken up the main DPS presence for DKs unless haste proves to finally be very useful to Death Knights, in which Unholy Presence may be the winner.

==Unholy==
Unholy receives Scourge Strike, Master of Ghouls, Reaping and Impurity.
I'll admit it, I don't know a lot about Unholy DPS. I leveled in it only briefly and was not impressed. I just can't get a hang of the pet mechanic. To me, if I wanted to play a hunter or a warlock, I would.
Anyway, one of the new talents is Resilient Infection (which is not yet implemented. This seems to be a more PVP based ability as there isn't much in PVE that actually dispels debuffs from a PVE target.
Unholy Frenzy is a new talent to Unholy but looks to be the replacement for Hysteria.
Corrupting Strikes is also new, increasing damage from Plague Strike and Scourge
Strike by 30%, which is a pretty significant amount.
Sudden Doom has also been moved over from Blood.
Overall, Unholy doesn't seem to have changed a lot other than these changes detailed here. As always, if I've left something out, please do tell me about it in the comments.

All in all, I'm pleased with the changes over the past couple weeks to the DK trees. I feel like the Blood tree could be cleaned up a bit more really but would figure out something to do if not. I am very pleased with the way they have went with the Frost tree and looking forward to being able to have a tank spec and a DPS spec again instead of two tank specs. I hope that the changes continue to improve over the coming months and look forward to Day 1 of Cataclysm.