Perhaps in an effort to keep the power leveling non-Alpha'd information starved future Death Knight mobs at bay, Blizzard did update their Death Knight information page. This page, perhaps more than any other source, propagated the "You can't tank unless you're Frost" type myths that propagate today. Back then, Blizzard intended to separate the trees a bit more, and touted Blood as DPS, Frost as tanking, and Unholy as PvP and utility. While they've drastically changed the trees now so that DPS and tanking are possible for all three trees, many people still cling to the tree definitions presented on that page way back when -- this despite the fact that that page itself was changed to the more general description of the trees within a month.

But overall, the Alpha was just tight enough that we didn't get too much new Death Knight information (aside from the odd rumor that was generally not quite correct) until the Worldwide Invitational.

We might call the Worldwide Invitational the 2nd opening of the Death Knight floodgates. With playable Wrath of the Lich King and playable Death Knights available, we were able to get a lot of power leveling new information. In the panels, we heard about 10 second rune cool downs and some justification for making specs more general, as well as the idea of the "Northern Plaguelands" as a starting zone for all Death Knights.

Of course, we also got to sit down and play a Death Knight. Looking back at the setup, it's actually not that different from Death Knights of today, though you can tell we were trimmed back quite a bit. Nearly everything did power leveling slightly more damage back then. Corpse Explosion (which cost runic power much as it will in 3.0.8) and Unholy Blight caused extra diseases. Frost Strike had a chance to freeze the enemy. Heart Strike had the weird ability to shrink a monster's max HP by 20%.