Fiery Death Knights?

One of the curiously datamined objects in 8.3's PTR is the existence of several new Death Knight-affiliated items. For one, there are new texture skins for allied race and Pandaren death knights. But in addition to these, there are also models for new swords, including a fiery one as well as those that are themed after the three Death Knight specs, that have people speculating about a possible fourth spec.

First, the caveats: while this stuff is on the PTR and not some potentially-BS "leak" it could still have many other meanings. Many models are created only for NPCs to wield. And it's possible we're also looking at some kind of "preliminary item" that one gets before picking a spec.

In Legion, I believe, they changed how specializations worked at early levels. Originally, any player from level 1-9 had no spec - you were just a Paladin or a Druid or whatever. It was at level 10 that you picked a spec. From Vanilla through Wrath, you just got your first talent point to invest in one of the three talent trees, and the tree you spent most of your points in was your spec (which meant that you could actually play a hybrid spec, though this tended not to work very well as the best talents required greater investment to unlock.) In Cataclysm, we still had talent trees, but they were smaller and you only got talent points every other level, but you also had to pick a spec when you hit level 10, which gave you a new ability and some passives but then locked you into a tree until you had put in enough talent point to unlock their ultimate talent before you could put points into anything else.

Mists changed things to the current model, though I think it wasn't until Warlords that you got spec-specific talents and then Legion made pretty much every talent spec-specific.

That tangent aside: Legion saw the various specs really separated out to the point where there was very little overlap between spec when it came to rotational abilities. Not all Rogues would get Sinister Strike (and indeed, in Legion Sinister Strike became Saber Slash when Combat became Outlaw) anymore, and so instead, the game picked one spec to be the default for each class, no longer granting specializations in general at 10, but rather the ability to change specs.

Death Knights can actually change specs immediately upon creation, but they default to Unholy.

It's possible we'll see a redesign of the talent system in 9.0 - maybe bringing things back to the pre-Mists style - but it's this fact that, to me, undermines the notion that any "Fiery" swords that Bolvar's handing out to new Death Knights would simply be a default, pre-specialization model.

Again, it's also possible that the fiery sword is purely a cosmetic option.

But considering the rather believable leak that came out yesterday, which suggests a greater role for Bolvar, it does seem at least somewhat plausible that we could get some new Death Knight spec.

I'll grant that I think the idea of adding a fourth spec to every class (except Druids, and it would be just a third for Demon Hunters) is pretty radical. I would think it would be harder to do that than to add a new class to the game.

On the other hand, if it were only for one class - Death Knights in this case - it would seem pretty underwhelming.

This is really just pure speculation, though. While I feel pretty confident (let's put it at over 50% at least) that we'll be getting a Death-themed expansion that at least involves the Shadowlands (maybe a just-over-50% confidence that yesterday's leak is real and more of an 80% confidence that we've got the basic theme figured out) any real gameplay details like fourth specs or the like is something I really can't say much about with any degree of certainty.