Does the DK unholy talent to become a ghoul permanently break focus?

When I first started tanking with my DK I noticed that when I died and came back as a ghoul, none of my shamans could fire at my targets anymore. I use the focus target system and they lost focus. I went ahead and respecced out of it but now that I'm thinking about it I never actually tried to hit my focus button again.

Can anyone tell me if you use a focustarget system (your alts focus your main and cast on their focustarget) if your main is a DK and becomes a ghoul can you refocus him once he does and keep shooting? If so I may respec back into it to get the permanent pet.

lol that sucks! ive not tried it personally so i cant help sorry :P but thats quite a shock that focus drops to me :O

I will strip my DK nekkid tonight and see if I can get the alts to focus on the ghoul you turn into. However, I'd spec back into it either way - the permanance of the ghoul pet is nice but the stun on a short timer is epic. Either way, you still can advance the focus manually to your next toon. Or maybe you're using a hardcoded focus list in your macros? Mine use /cast [target=focustarget,exists][] SPELL and I set the focus using F1,F2,F3, etc. If you're using a cascaded character list to cast and there's no "name" you can use to identify yourself as a ghoul, did you know that you can just commit ghoul suicide by right-clicking on the buff to die instantly?

Hm thats true - might spec back into that - let me know if you can find out about refocusing when the ghoul spawns also since I would be curious about that as well :)

When you turn into a ghoul upon your death, focus is wiped. You can however refocus on your toon in ghoul form. It is very frustrating though.

I have a keybind for each toon in the mbox group (same bind that switches to that toon's pip in keyclone) that sets focus to them absolutely. When I am ghouled, I hit this key, hit my follow focus bound key, and resume the fight.

However, because the ghoul abilities are now slotted where my other synchronized abilities are on my non-ghoul toons, everything gets fubar'd pretty quickly, and gets worse if another of my DKs gets ghouled. Now what I do when my head DK dies and gets ghouled, I hot-seat switch to another DK on the team, refocus everyone to him, and resume the battle, just letting the one that got ghouled do whatever he may do on his new ghoul ability keybinds as I work through my attack rotations. I still need tons of practice to get ghoul form coordinated, but alas that requires dying, which I try to avoid at all costs. :-)

Silvermoon/US
Quad DK team : Dèèkaye (tank), Dèekaye (dps), Deekayè (dps), Deèkaye (dps)
Shaman 5-box: Kynix (also doubles as boxed healer with the quad-DKs), Kyñix, Kýnix, Kýñix, Kÿnix
Paladin Tank: Kythor

From experience.. if one of your shaman's dies and the deathknight has lost their ghoul...

If the DK summons another ghoul, the player becomes her pet but is still controlled by the player.
During this time, your shaman cannot be rez'd until she kills herself as the ghoul.
If the DK has the points to make their pet permanent, this is even worse.

So as a DK, after a wipe or partial wipe, do not summon a pet, or the player will have to run off and find a hostile mob to attack..
Which lets them use their corpse explosion ability, ie the fastest way to kill themselves off, so they can be rez'd.
Of course, this then makes the hostile mob pissed off at the DK back with the group/raid recovering.

A positive thing though, that a dual-DK'ing friend of mine has discovered, is that turning into a ghoul upon death seems to make you take no durability loss.
That is, having that talent makes your repair costs for that character be solely what you lose during combat, and take no extra durability loss from dying.
This should also make it less painful to test ghoul abilities ad such for those who wanted to do that.

@Ualaa: As mentioned in a post earlier, instead of finding a mob so you can explode, you can right click the buff to suicide.