In the latest beta patch, Blizzard was so kind as to bump the level cap up to 85, in addition to opening Uldum and Twilight Highlands, the last two major leveling zones in the expansion. Unfortunately, neither zone is itemized, but more on that later. In my testing this past week, I've delved in the long-dead, dormant spec of two-handed frost. The spec was officially killed off (at least in the sense of having competitive DPS) in the latter part of Wrath, when Blizzard decided to make frost the official spec of dual wielding. However, with the advent of Cataclysm, that is changing. With blood becoming a dedicated tanking tree, it left unholy as the only two-handed weapon tree. Recognizing that some players might dislike the pet-tending aspect of unholy, Blizzard decided to support two-handed weaponry in the frost tree once again.

That said, deciding to support it and succeeding at it are two different things, and in addition, there seems to be a lot of people who are still confused as to whether or not Blizzard plans to support it. You can put your mind at ease now though. Very recently, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) confirmed that, yes, Blizzard is supporting the two-handed weapon playstyle for the frost tree.

Frost Rises two-handed Spec again

I started out with this spec. The nice thing about a two-handed frost spec is that you it only takes three talent points (for Might of the Frozen Wastes) to lock in the weapon, as opposed to six for dual wielding, leaving you slightly more freedom to choose your talents. Unfortunately, this is somewhat tempered by the fact that you have to take a relatively useless (for PvE) talent, Icy Reach, to even break into the tree, but I'm hopeful they'll switch that up before release.

As far as the playstyle goes, your basic priority system is going to be about the same as dual wield, with special attention paid to your Rime and Killing Machine procs to make sure you're getting the most use out of them. Of course, with all the runic power output, you'll be hard-pressed to keep up with churning out the Frost Strikes, especially if you have Glyph of Frost Strike (and it remains unchanged on live, which isn't a given). Overall, I found that in Deepholm quest gear, I was churning out damage in more than respectable amounts and regularly seeing massive critical strike damage on my Frost Strikes. I can report that two-handed frost is certainly at least as adequate as dual-wield frost, as far as leveling goes.

The big question as to whether it will keep viability at the endgame remains tied to the big issue that plagues death knights all over beta: GCD. If the lack of free global cooldowns constrains dual wield frost already, how much more will it constrain two-handed frost? If all the extra runic power granted by Might of the Frozen Wastes can't be converted to actual Frost Strikes, then two-handed frost has a strong possibility of languishing behind dual wield frost as they both hit the GCD ceiling.

In the immediate present, it suffers the same problem that unholy and frost dual wielding do: the health factor. The fact is, blood's amazing self-healing potential is too hard to ignore, and while two-handed frost (like dual-wield frost and unholy before) can hold up relatively well in one-on-one fights, it's blood that's going to make sure you survive and allow you to take on the hairier quests in which you can't help but pull some pretty big groups of mobs.