Current issues with Death Knights overall.

[Mitra]

I feel like, on top of all scaling issues, the rune system itself is obsolete and should be completely reworked in 6.0.
I think it should work like shadow orbs or soul shards and leave Runic Power to be the actual ressource.
For example, let's say a DK has one set of 3 runes: he could use them however he wants to increase his damage, his defense or use a special ability.

Then comes the Runic power:
Since hunters and rogues have a full bar of ressource available, Runic Power should stay the way it is and go the way of the warrior to be like Rage:
-Runic power generating abilities (auto attacks or cooldown-based small attacks)
-Runic power consuming abilities (heavy attacks)
This would help the devs to smooth out the skills, the rotation and the CDs of both DPS and tank DKs.

It would also prevent ressource overcapping for both RP and runes, for which we are currently the only class with that kind of issues. (warriors can dump rage easily, same for rogues, same for hunters)

i like the way i need to manage my runes, i'm not saying the current system, but overall, it's a dk unique thing, they really need to do something about our actual rune system but not like you mentioned, if they do that we would look much like warriors, i really wouldn't like that.

[Deleted]

From the front page;

-Q: Now that we're approaching the end of MoP. What class/classes do you think need a big overhaul in 6.0?

-A: None. We will likely work to make the 3 hunter and rogue specs play a little more differently from each other.

Sooo, yeah.

[devilminion]

From the front page;

-Q: Now that we're approaching the end of MoP. What class/classes do you think need a big overhaul in 6.0?

-A: None. We will likely work to make the 3 hunter and rogue specs play a little more differently from each other.
Sooo, yeah.

and whoever expected a number pass or overhaul must be dreaming seeing how much attention Dks got last two expac betas.

[Riven]

and whoever expected a number pass or overhaul must be dreaming seeing how much attention Dks got last two expac betas.

Kinda this.
Didn't make the thread hoping for an overhaul for 5.4, but more towards the next expansion. The issues need to be made public NOW, so the devs have time to actually structure the class properly in terms of the talent tree, not make stupid talents (eg. Plague leech) and to remember to make decent animations for any new spells :P

[Deleted]

I dont think its problem that Blood dont get defence benefit from vengance, the problem is that othere tanks are geting it, you should avoid as much damag as you can as tank imo. I like all other limitations and problems, its fun to overcome them, and still we have best active mitigation and personal cooldowns of all tanking specs in game. But i have to say i would love some new animations, the one we have now are just bland.

[valliant13]

If we aren't as good next tier I won't really mind, we were the absolute best melee this tier by far, and were very strong in T14 with our utility. Will I enjoy being thousands of DPS below someone who is garbage but his class carries him? Not really, but there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about it, and blizzard sure isn't wanting to fix things.

We were the best melee on niche fights and we needed a rogue to become the best melee of this tier. So no...We werent the strongest. Rogues have been mostly ahead of unholy since 5.2 Tier 14 we were average. Im ok with being in the middle of the pack if its 5% or less difference between classes/specs. Im not ok with being lower mid to last in the tier and 25-30% behind.

[CausalXXLinkXx]

We were the best melee on niche fights and we needed a rogue to become the best melee of this tier. So no...We werent the strongest. Rogues have been mostly ahead of unholy since 5.2 Tier 14 we were average. Im ok with being in the middle of the pack if its 5% or less difference between classes/specs. Im not ok with being lower mid to last in the tier and 25-30% behind.

We were absolutely the best melee this tier, and on fights where we were really strong utility wise just made it even better. I'm still one of the top end damage on fights without Tricks.

[Olrox]

I think you're more or less spot-on with your entire post - I've not yet seen it written so well; props to you for being a voice for what I'd assume is many of us who still love the idea of the DK or are attached to them for any given reason.

My biggest issues with the class are as follows in order of importance:

1. Specs and rotations feel extremely bland compared to how variable and fun other classes feel (The difference in play between Arms and Fury for example, is quite apparent. Arms doesn't really feel like Fury at all) and I wish they'd really try to re-tune some of it. I like the principle of 2H frost being the BIG NUMBERS Obliterate spec and DW Frost being the RAPID FIRE! spec but I don't understand why Unholy is the "HEY CHECK OUT HOW MUCH POWER I CAN DUMP INTO MY MINDLESS GHOUL MINION!" Dark Transformation should transform ME, not my ghoul.

2. Flavor. You're 1000000% right about this and I feel all of your pain. The only thing that distinguishes one strike from another is the color of the pencil-thin crescent particle that appears in front of us when we do this or that strike. Paladins have the Templar's Verdict animation and many unique spell effects and particles for their abilities and warriors have quite a few unique animations for their attacks (rogues as well) but we are effectively shafted and we don't even get cool particles to go with most of our stuff. I'm happy we're seeing glyph of the skeleton next patch - that's something but we should have several of those already on top of others - the HoW glyph is lame; geist is neat and foul menagerie is cool too but where's the unholy auras one from beta? Warriors and Paladins both have so many more amusing graphical glyphs than we do.

3. Talents. I think our talents are whack; not only are some of our tiers just fucked, some of our choices are just not even worthwhile or are so dull that you can't really FEEL their effect. The upcoming buff to plague leech is cool...but a lot of players already use it anyway.

4. Masteries - that's the only part of stats that I'm worried about; I don't care if we're simming low or whatever; I can outdps people I raid with and more importantly, I can do strong enough numbers to kill bosses on whatever mode we're doing and I'm not holding my raid back. Masteries are bad though; I think Blood's is awesome but Unholy and Frost are fucked in this area; I know for balance it's probably in a good place but it's kind of like most trinkets that give X flat stat and chance for Y on hit; it's just boring and doesn't give you many choices for gearing.

5. Runeforging - While I am upset that they've never overhauled this feature and made it more dynamic (it's one of the core features of our class...) I'm ok with it since it's at least viable and powerful in its current form; even if you only use 3-4 of the available choices ever.

[valliant13]

We were absolutely the best melee this tier, and on fights where we were really strong utility wise just made it even better. I'm still one of the top end damage on fights without Tricks.

Just because you are on the top end of damage with your guild doesnt mean that the facts arent facts. Go look at raidbots and look at dps(notspec score). Outside of one fight(tortos/cheesing it) we arent close to top melee. We are the fifth best melee. And still miles behind mages, warlocks, spriests, boomkins. I forget which fight but there was a frost dk that parsed #1 in the world for Frost and he was last on dps in his guild by a good amount and the people that outdps'd him didn't even rank. So again just because you top your guilds damage doesnt mean our class is the top of the damage chain.

Also what utility did we bring outside of a BR. We have none. Most guilds dont require AMZ because it's a waste. So what utility were you talking about again?

[Deleted]

Kinda this.
Didn't make the thread hoping for an overhaul for 5.4, but more towards the next expansion. The issues need to be made public NOW, so the devs have time to actually structure the class properly in terms of the talent tree, not make stupid talents (eg. Plague leech) and to remember to make decent animations for any new spells :P

But the question in the quoted part was in regards to the next expansion, not 5.4, so that doesn't bode very well for us.

[Nangz]

They don't need to overhaul us, just changes. Those are still on the table.

The last two expansions warlocks and paladins got overhauls which included completely new resources, cutting down on abilities, redesigning rotations. At most, I think we could/should expect talent changes/reworks and rotation changes. No new resources, unlikely to cut down on abilities. etc

[Deleted]

I forget which fight but there was a frost dk that parsed #1 in the world for Frost and he was last on dps in his guild by a good amount and the people that outdps'd him didn't even rank. So again just because you top your guilds damage doesnt mean our class is the top of the damage chain.

Also what utility did we bring outside of a BR. We have none. Most guilds dont require AMZ because it's a waste. So what utility were you talking about again?

Aoe grip... /sarcasm
It was council btw and the dk is Nedaa.

As far as i could test SoO looks BS for every melee so far and if dks stay like that am gonna reroll no way am gonna gimp hc progression because i play a half shit class that only "badies" enjoy toping dmg in normal/lfr progression.

[Deleted]

Dks are boring

Dks suck at dps

Dks suck at tanking

Keep posts on topic, leaving a stink bomb void of content is not okay. ~Nyanmaru

[JesseGoesHam]

I can agree with most of this, things like the rune regen tier is just retarded if you ask me. But really dks dont lack mobility and ranged damage. They have just as much ranged viability as any other melee, dont pity the death knights, pity the warriors.

And please back up your info with some data when you say that prot do more dps than frost (im not saying that you are wrong)

PS: Blizz has stated that the rune regen tier is here to stay (WTF?)

[valliant13]

I can agree with most of this, things like the rune regen tier is just retarded if you ask me. But really dks dont lack mobility and ranged damage. They have just as much ranged viability as any other melee, dont pity the death knights, pity the warriors.

And please back up your info with some data when you say that prot do more dps than frost (im not saying that you are wrong)

PS: Blizz has stated that the rune regen tier is here to stay (WTF?)

I agree that the rune regen tier should be a choice but I personally think they need to move it up to the level 58 or 60 talent. There is no reason it should be level 75 with this rune system. I haven't leveled a dk since wotlk and with these talents it will most likely stay that way as well.

[Tyranitar]

THis question might be slightly off topic and maybe you can't really answer it, but anyways: Is the DK community just asking fewer/less "worthy" questions, or why are dev posts just very rarely raleted to DKs?

To me it feels like the devs wouldn't bother about us DKs, nut maybe the issues haven't been brought up to them.

[klieren]

This thread has now been consolidated and reposted on the PTR feedback forum! Please add your support and further feedback to this thread!
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/9499490725

Warning this is a fair read, I decided to write this as I'm currently losing interest in playing my DK, my main since late Wrath, and potentially main changing.
A large deal of it is subjective, so feel free to post your thoughts as well.
I apologize in advance for terrible formatting as I originally wrote this up on my iPhone, and I'll fix it later.

This is going to be from a pure DPS perspective to start with.

NOTE: This thread isn't going to be lobbying for changes now, it's more of a discussion thread about the overall issues with the class and what we can look to fix/give feedback on for the next expansion/major patch after 5.4


1. Rotation.
All three DK specs are currently simming at the bottom of the meters, with DW frost even being behind Prot Paladins with no vengeance.

I know sims are to be taken with a grain of salt but is this because of bad scaling/tuning, or is it because the playstyles are quite simplistic and leave little room for tuning at the high end?
There doesn't seem to be a "combustion" about DK's. What I mean is, a mechanic that requires some skill and experience on the part of the DK to really push the class to its limits.

I would like to see something like this, as currently the class feels quite dull to play, and our damage is really bad outside of abusing Feather/Diseases as Unholy to pad meters, and you might as well bring any other melee on any fight where Gorefiends isn't mandatory.

Also I have the feeling our DPS without Feather is going to go down even further than it already is unless some big changes are made to the damage of our spells.

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Overall_D...14/60/default/ take a look dude you clearly dont know how to play death knights if your on the buttom of the dps meters.. really all calculations shows us being top 10 with all 3 viables, and then all real tests and proves shows us being 13 as UH and Frost being 19 out of 22 we aint buttom but we aint top or top 10. but it all matters of fight and playstyle really.

2. Stats.
Currently our Mastery seems very dull in comparison to other Masteries (Except for Blood), flat frost/shadow damage has always been boring and not a valuable stat unless you're playing DW frost. I would love to see something done where Crit, Haste and Mastery stacking is all viable for all specs, as they'v done with Warlocks.

Reworking mastery to interact with certain spells in an interesting way, and making crit increase damage of our main strikes are such ideas (although overused)

Currently all of the stats are infact bad Str is ofc surpreme and with all 3 being bad it makes 1 of them better than the rest ofc and that is haste^^ because of faster useage of abilities that are provided damage from our str^^ and as you state they aint viable well mate start playing them because they are you will loose abit of damage on some fights and gain on others etc UH on aoe fights (tortos) you gains dps for going Mastery > Haste but its small margins.

3. Flavor
(Note: this point is very subjective)

In my opinion the DK class is lacking a great deal of flavor.
We basically use the exact same animations for every single main ability except Howling Blast and Death Coil, both of which use the general Spell Cast animation.

A big point is out fancy Mists of Pandaria ability, Soul Reaper. This ability was actually a big letdown personally when I got it, compared to when I first heard about it.

I expected the animation for it to be your character thrusting their weapon through the chest of the enemy the way the Lich King attacks in ICC, or something like the Templar's Verdict animation at the least!
But nope, we got the same old attack animation with a reused spell effect and nothing when it actually procs.
So much for the incredibly exciting level 87 spell.

Even warriors have their Slam/Revenge animations, which are more interesting than swinging your weapon the exact same way 300 times a fight casting Scourge/Frost strike/Obit/Festering. Not to mention the Dual Wield animations are superior.

Blood boil still uses the old Hammer of the Righteousness animation, that spell has such potential to look cool but just doesn't.

Pillar of Frost could actually be a pillar or a frozen suit of armor etc instead of just a light blue cloud. That said, over the years it has grown on me.

Glyphs are okay now with the new ones being added in 5.4, but could be better in terms of flavor.

I was a strong advocate of this idea I saw in MoP beta:
Glyph of Unholy Auras: Outside of combat you gain an unholy aura that lingers about your character relating to your currently active Presence.
Think of the green aura hanging about the piles of bones in Acherus in the Unholy trainer quarter, something like that.


Runeforging is another hot topic. I don't believe this system needs a rework but it could have delivered a lot better on being ACTUAL runeforging and the animations of the enchants.

When I first rolled a DK and heard about runeforging, I immediately got the idea of actually seeing the runes forged into your weapons as a visual effect, perhaps with some customization interface where you choose a combination of runes that spell out an enchant, and then they're visible on your blade. An example of this is the Greatsword of the Ebon Blade's visuals.

Otherwise I feel some of the older enchants could use a buff/rework to make them actually useful, especially with Death Gate now returning you to where you left from, I wouldn't mind having to change my runeforge to suit a different fight as it changes my playstyle somewhat.

Matters the spell animations mate then in the coming time all previous races are getting revamped in looks and designs and that includes the things such as fighting animation^^ pls dont complain about it now and not all our spells are the same mate^^

Matters runeforging how would you like it to be? well i dont really see anything that aint cool about the current system i do have better solutions for changes to it tho^^ would love it to affect your actual runes^^ and have different stats etc like gems so you as DK could extra gem your weapon with 6 custom runes which you choose in reforging you could make it 6 of same rune = 6 red runes etc and each rune should be special stat / bonus or benefit matters of spec

etc:
Blood, red: Death Strike Heals, blue: Survival cooldown buffs, green: Cooldown on abilities,
Frost: Red: bonus Damage, blue: More Frost Damage, green: Lower Cooldowns.

Or maybe direct stats and make the unholy go yellow XD so blizzard could use the direct Gemming design^^

4. Talents
Honestly I like the DK talents for the most part, there are a few exceptions though.

Plague Leech is just a horrible clunky way to play, this talent does not need buffs, it needs to be removed and replaced with something better. How it even made it through beta with the dozens of threads complaining about how terrible it was I honestly have no idea.

The level 75 tier should be shifted to level 55, having no rune regen talents on a fresh DK until level 75 is literally the worst experience of any low level class, and I've played them all.

I think the 75 tier talents should be also somewhat changed to avoid the ridiculous bad luck streaks you can get with them, eg. runic corruption always gives at least 1s of 100% regen per coil/FS. The amount of times I've had emptied full runic power bars into Empowerment/Corruption and not had a single proc is just the most depressing thing.

Death's Advance should be baseline, or if not, sprint increased to 50% and breaks Roots/Slow effects, but doesn't make you slowable less than 100%. The passive 70% should still be there.
DK's are currently the least mobile melee outside of Death's Advance and the argument that they have ranged attacks is quite outdated.

Desecrated Ground should be reworked or replaced, it's stupid in PvP and useless in PvE outside of very very situational circumstances, usually soloing mobs that do some ridiculous CC chain on you.

Remorseless Winter is too easy to avoid in PvP as an alternative, nearly everything has a dozen ways out of it. It's basically the Cataclysm spell warlocks almost got, except even easier to stop by simply dispelling the stacks. Meanwhile leg sweep..

I believe Remorseless should have been a baseline dps cooldown for frost, Defile as the equivalent for Unholy, and have Gorefiends as baseline and all 3 level 90 talents redone, probably as interesting passives to avoid button bloat.

Also, Death and Decay slow glyph should be reworked to just be Desecration back on Necrotic/Scourge Strikes/Obliterate. I miss Desecration.

Cheers for reading if you made it this far!

I do see a few of those things i do see why lvl 75 talents should be changed to earlier so you starts with it. but i dont really see why you wanted to buff it even more? and some of the talents your mentioning like Plague Leech i totally agree replace it, it is just stupid the way it works. also several of the talents are somewhat useless for PvE which other classes also have a few of i see no need to change them but it would be g8 to atleast make them useable in raiding^^

[valliant13]

THis question might be slightly off topic and maybe you can't really answer it, but anyways: Is the DK community just asking fewer/less "worthy" questions, or why are dev posts just very rarely raleted to DKs?

To me it feels like the devs wouldn't bother about us DKs, nut maybe the issues haven't been brought up to them.

Their excuse in the past has been because they listened to the DK community too much going into wotlk because during beta there was no reason to bring a death knight. People brought that up to them including guilds and they buffed dks considerably. They overcompensated by A TON. They still use that excuse from time to time as well. It's quite pathetic really.

[Basso]

gain on others etc UH on aoe fights (tortos) you gains dps for going Mastery > Haste but its small margins.

i tried to read your post but after this one i could only laugh about you sorry.........
if you bomb the bats, they die to quickly for our diseases to tick for more then one or two time, other ae classes are far better,
if you dont kill the bat the dmg dont matter at all of course you could push but it doesnt matter.

if you look through all the logs most of them are pushed with dmg on sources that don't matter.

none of the rating site tells the real truth, raidbots is way to high because of pushed logs, simcraft is a bit low and so on


but if you are playing a dk you will notice that we are the bottom of the charts if we talk about dmg that matters in the fight,
there a some we can get higher places but in general we are way to low and that will not get better in the next content because
all the reason in the posts before....

[Vereesa]

I don't unfortunately have a lot to add to this thread at 0100 hours, but reading it thread has certainly made me realize how broken this class is in some aspects and does indeed need some work in the upcoming expansion.

Subbed.