WoW: Patch 3.3.3 PTR: Death knight changes

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The Patch 3.3.3 PTR notes are out, and with them a nice handful of death knight changes. Oddly enough, most of them are buffs. The focus this time seems to be mostly on slightly buff death knight tanking, giving frost DPS some arguably much needed buffs, and applying some general changes to specific talents in the death knight class. While we'll need to see some PTR testing to be sure, it looks like frost DPS may be out of the pit and sitting pretty indeed. Without further ado, let's take a look at the changes.

General Changes

Icy Touch This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence - In a perfect world, the DPS would hold off for a bit while you grabbed aggro. In reality, they're generally going full blast while you're still trying to position the boss so it doesn't cleave the healers. Any change that allows for a chance to overcome that little issue, especially with PuGs becoming more and more common even for raid content, is more than welcome.

Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100% -- This gives frost DPSers a chance to get to their full damage potential a bit faster on fights where they need to move or switch targets a lot. It's a minor but certainly far from unwelcome change.

Talents Blood

Abomination might:This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged -- I can't say I have ever heard of a blood death knight being kicked for a marksman hunter because his AP buff is more dependable, but this is still certainly not an unwelcome change. If nothing else it should help keep the buff going on fights with lots of movement or if the blood death knight messes up his rotation for some reason.

There is no longer a cool down on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health - One of Blood's main weaknesses as a tank tree is the lack of truly preventative cool downs or abilities. Even requires incoming healing to be truly effective. Will of the Necropolis is one of the few ways blood tanks have to outright absorb or deflect damage that other trees don't have. Given that it only absorbs 15% of a single hit's damage at a specific level of health, I don't think its too overpowered to remove a few other restrictions.

Glyphs
When this glyph causes Frost Fever to be refreshed, it will now also trigger a refresh -- This will be a nice change that may make the glyph viable for Frost DPSers who use Icy Talons. Of course, testing will probably be needed to see if this makes it better than other glyphs, and it what situations. Either way though, it feels like a pretty solid no-brainer fix. If there is one question here though, one would sort of wonder why normal Icy Talons wasn't just passive alongside Improved Icy Talons. It seems unnecessarily punitive toward the death knight.