DK MoP Beta Class Changes

[Nodata]

I know this isn't really the place, but since I've been talking so much about how I'd fix Death Knights etc, I actually had a go at coming up with some changes to the talent tree. Mostly just for one certain talent that I'd love to see Death Knights get, straight from the big man himself.

http://mop-talent-grid-maker.appspot...&gridId=137001

Feedback on your talents:
- really exciting stuff overall
- Nec plague is a beast, I like where it comes from, and all together it's a really exciting talent
- Might of Mograine seems OP. Counting that Nec Plague is a potential candidate for tanking already, MoM feels like a lvl90 mitigation talent, which none of the other tanks have. I like the wink to SM, but maybe Fragmented Souls could give you a big strength bonus for a while.
- Unholy blight would put a debuff on target, which means it would be more logical that the miss % affects all attacks and not just those aimed at you.

[Kiru]

Feedback on your talents:
- really exciting stuff overall
- Nec plague is a beast, I like where it comes from, and all together it's a really exciting talent
- Might of Mograine seems OP. Counting that Nec Plague is a potential candidate for tanking already, MoM feels like a lvl90 mitigation talent, which none of the other tanks have. I like the wink to SM, but maybe Fragmented Souls could give you a big strength bonus for a while.
- Unholy blight would put a debuff on target, which means it would be more logical that the miss % affects all attacks and not just those aimed at you.

I tried to mix tank and dps into the talents, would probably be best just to drop the tank side of things, none of the other tanks have level 90 Cooldowns, just damage. The reason for the wording on UB and MoM, was so that a DPS Death Knight couldn't provide a tanking cooldown for the tank. Also, Fragmented Soul reduced damage they dealt to you, and increased damage you dealt to them. I the reason I went for %damage instead of a strength bonus, was that it seems to be...'treading' on Pillar of Frost's ground.

Glad you liked Nec Plague though, keep in mind that would be a 3rd Disease for 30 seconds. Not sure if that would be overpowered, the other talents would have to be real strong.

[hasslehoof]

They could either tweak Blood Tap a bit and put into a new Tier with Plague Leech and another similar ability (Probably Tier 1, that's another rubbish tier, 2/3 are crap, Unholy Blight is good but it could be so much better if perhaps it was one of the new damage talents.), or just give us back our old Blood Tap.

I know this isn't really the place, but since I've been talking so much about how I'd fix Death Knights etc, I actually had a go at coming up with some changes to the talent tree. Mostly just for one certain talent that I'd love to see Death Knights get, straight from the big man himself.

http://mop-talent-grid-maker.appspot...&gridId=137001

Can't post on the US forums, but there's a lot of ideas I like in that talent tree. GJ . Although, I do feel Blood Tap seems quite powerful compared to the other level 15 talents on a 45s cd, I think it would have to be 60s, or the one that makes your next ability cost no resources lowered to 1min. Just my 2c, Plague Leech already is quite powerful for Frost while spamming HB on aoe.

[SSHA778]

Implemented holding off using DS until 'x' stacks. I wasn't originally going to post the data up, but, well, if I'm going to make this claim I might as well.

Scent of Blood should not affect when you use DS. At best, you are no better off than just blindly using DS without paying attention to your stacks. At worse, if you wait until a certain amount of stacks, you take significantly more damage and do significantly less healing. Respectively, you could be taking up to ~7-10% more damage and healing for ~20% less.

Why is this the case? Because Scent of Blood stacks are not that powerful. Scent of Blood is good because of the RP return. The healing addition is a bonus--not the focus. You must remember that Scent of Blood is a % of a %. DS heals for 20% of the damage you take. 1 Scent stack increases that to 24% of the damage you take.

First objection: Holding off until a certain amount of stacks to use DS is completely unrealistic because you're not going to wait until 'x' stacks every time.
Response: Agreed.

So, to counter that, I took it to the next level. I coded in logic to hold off on using DS if an auto-attack was coming within 0.75s. Since auto-attacks are evaluated first in my sim, this would grant the sim another stack before using DS.

Still no difference.

You can look at the data yourself here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...2R5NUhWTm96THc

As a note, I caught an error with Heroism. I had it giving 45% haste for 45s, when it should be giving 30% haste for 40s. This has been fixed, so you may see the DS/min drop some. However, I double checked it with 5 of the 10 or so setups I posted previously, and the increase in damage taken and decrease in healing done is completely negligible. Heroism is only active about ~7% of the time. As such, I did not bother to update that data.

---------- Post added 2012-05-04 at 07:01 PM ----------

Oh, right, I forgot to mention a few quirks when the sim starts waiting for higher stacks (affects > 3 stacks most).

For RE:
The sim hardly ever uses RS because the DS interval is so long that there are almost never any F/U depleted runes. This is why the RP generated and overflow look weird.

For BT:
The sim hardly ever uses RT because BT turns that blood rune into a death rune. Since the DS interval is so long, this blood(death) rune is hardly ever used. The sim will not use that blood(death) rune on HS/RT, so it just sits there.

[Mionelol]

there's no point waiting SoB stacks to use DS, simply because the stacks used on that specific DS are stacks lost for the next one, and reversely, stacks that you could have gained for that very specific DS didn't go to waste since they'll be used by the next one anyway

considering they're multiplicative and not exponential, you're not gaining anything and just holding off for no reason :O

there would be a point doing it if:
1) stacks increased the effect of DS exponentially instead of a simple multiplication
2) you could decide when to time SoB stacks for specific attacks in particular to boost DS that would heal for a lot of hp compared to minimum heal ones. that being said, outside of specific attacks from bosses (and said specific attacks can't do more damage than your own hp, heh?) , melee damage is random and unpredictable.

tbh i'd redo your latest sim, adding a "Super Big Bad Breath" to your dragon once in a while, every minute or so (on top of his regular breath ability you already use for him), and asking the DK to hold off his DS if SuperBigBadBreath is coming 5~ secs later - this is probably the only way to gain a benefit from stacking SoB.

[SSHA778]

Not really all that inclined to do that. The main point of that test was to confirm my speculation from a really long time ago. If it's only going to gain from a massive attack every minute, then overall that's not going to be a big deal.

I've seen a few people on the official forums starting to claim that holding off on DS due to SoB is going to be optimal. I don't know where they're pulling their information from because it's obviously not from facts.

I mean, sure, yeah, the sim isn't saying you should never hold off to wait on SoB. The fight mechanics will dictate that. A small gain here and there without much extensive effort is more than fine, and a small increase in damage taken overall to significantly reduce something threatening right then is more than acceptable. All that the sim says is that if you deliberately hold off for SoB, you're either breaking even or getting worse on the overall scale, which is going to govern the "general case" behavior.

[paraalso]

Like now holding off on DS for damage spikes will be optimal, but SoB won't really matter since any stacks you gain will just be less stacks for the next DS. If Blood Tap or RC ends up being the best choice for blood, then it'll also make it easier to hold a DS in store for a damage spike. If no damage spike comes, then you can just use DS just before your next runes for it come off cooldown, and so you always have a possibility of death striking when the big spike hits.

With RE you need to empty out your unholy and frost runes before using Rune Strike, and thus remove the possibility of using DS for at least a few global cooldowns.

[Wih]

The only reason I can see to hold off on DS due to SoB is if the benefit to using those runes is higher on something else. If the "something else" is another DS at a later time it should follow the same rules from Cata - that delaying your DS doesn't give any overall benefit (boss mechanics aside). If the "something else" is a different ability entirely, it would only be the case if that ability had a better effect (per rune or GCD, whichever you were after at the time) for the number of SoB stacks you had at the time (until you had enough SoB stacks to make DS more potent than the alternative). Until Death Siphon appeared in Mists, there was no other contenders for mitigation, no reason to consider this...but it honestly looks like situations where you choose Death Siphon over DS for pure mitigation will not happen during a standard raid.

[SSHA778]

For those that are interested to see exactly what my sim does or to check its legitimacy, I uploaded the source code. As a note, if you don't have MATLAB, you won't be able to run it, and I have no plans at this time to convert it to another, more portable language.

Quoting myself from the official forums:
"Source code:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...9qUTi-8tA/edit

As a note, that document is huge (26 pages). Up until page 7, most of it is just declarations.

Some really important notes in case you miss them in the comments (green):
-CurrentBlood/Frost/Unholy is the current active respective slots.
-CurrentDeath is how many active death runes there are.
-A time of 75 (sim) corresponds to 0.75s (real-time).
-I left all of my debugging lines in out of laziness. None of them are used because they don't happen, but I leave them in there to see if they do start happening again after I make a change.
-For those who code in C, in MATLAB, switch cases automatically break at the end of the case.
-The priority is simply the order of evaluations in "function Priority()"
-Speaking of the priority, the first 5 seconds don't use the exact priority, but this impact is minimal."

[Leviatharan]

...That's interesting...
What happened to On a Pale Horse? Last I checked the website said it was baseline level 61, but now that I'm looking at WoWhead, it's uncategorized. Is it gone? When'd we lose it?

[AncientNecro]

What happened to On a Pale Horse? Last I checked the website said it was baseline level 61, but now that I'm looking at WoWhead, it's uncategorized. Is it gone? When'd we lose it?

I was also curious about this, hopefully it's just an error... or at the very least, all classes lose 20% mount speed passives.

[Dalavita]

OaPH being removed would be one of the few rage inducing things to deal with on my DK come MoP... I hope it's just an error. Since pallies retain their 20% mount speed as a passive I don't think ours is gone.

[Ryleylol]

OaPH being removed would be one of the few rage inducing things to deal with on my DK come MoP... I hope it's just an error. Since pallies retain their 20% mount speed as a passive I don't think ours is gone.

It's still there on beta at the moment, so no need to get angry about it

[McFrotton]

It appears they have removed Death Knights blue eyes in beta now.

If you arent trolling, its probably just a lightning bug.

[Xinia]

If you arent trolling, its probably just a lightning bug.

Why would it be trolling when calling out a change noticed on beta?? You have any base to call me a troll?

[SSHA778]

Copy/pasting from my post on the official forums:

"
New data is up:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...HNMOVdTN2hfemc

As of right now, I haven't pulled the old data down. I might, or I might not.

Notes:
-This is a spreadsheet, not a document; feel free to download it
-Fixed the Heroism tooltip error that slightly raised the value of Heroism
-RS triggers a 1.00s GCD
-Unholy Blight (UB) is supported
-Tabs have the setups on them
-Each page has 6 different sets of data: RE/RC/BT with and without hit/expertise
---The top row is with hit/expertise capped
---The bottom row is without

If something looks weird, let me know and I'll check into it.

Since this will probably come up, Glyph of Outbreak's uptime is the way it is because the sim does not deliberately pool RP in anticipation of diseases falling off. Thus, it starts the pool once the diseases have actually fallen off. Since it generates around ~7.5 RP/sec, it can take up to 5s for Outbreak to be cast again.

For the setups that use PS, all it checks is for the rune and if BP is down, so it will fire that off much sooner, leading to a slightly higher disease uptime.

As always, if there are questions, feel free to ask.

The testing parameters were the same as previously, which can be found here:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...938?page=7#124
"

[Leviatharan]

Why would it be trolling when calling out a change noticed on beta?? You have any base to call me a troll?

I think he's just calling you that out of disbelief that Blizz would remove one of the appearance changes they added specifically gave to the class, especially as it doesn't affect balance...

[Kiru]

I think he's just calling you that out of disbelief that Blizz would remove one of the appearance changes they added specifically gave to the class, especially as it doesn't affect balance...

Settle down. The Death Knight appearance options did disappear for a few short days between patches (My DK had normal eyes, skin and a different colour of hair since mine was a DK Only colour), it was a bug, they are back again.

Anyway, another build, still no changes to Frost (Did you know Frost hasn't been changed at all from Day 1 of Beta?). I know Beta is Beta and all, but I'm starting to worry.

[drivertz]

...That's interesting...
What happened to On a Pale Horse? Last I checked the website said it was baseline level 61, but now that I'm looking at WoWhead, it's uncategorized. Is it gone? When'd we lose it?

I saw that aswell and got intrigated.

[paraalso]

On a Pale Horse is in uncategorized on the live version of wowhead too, not just the MoP beta version. It's still in the beta itself, so I doubt it's anything to worry about.

I'm starting to get flashbacks to Cata beta from this one, though. Remember when everyone kept saying that "we'll get out turn, don't you worry"?