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  1. #1
    Dreadlord the0o's Avatar
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    Question How do we "Fix" Death Knights?

    Death Knights are awesome.

    We weave Spells into our Melee attacks, we can summon ghouls, we can blight the land and spread Decay.
    We have the single greatest starting zone EVER.

    We can into WOW as a broken class that has been nerfed to hell and back so we can be balanced, However we are not balanced, we are underpowered (frost PVP), clunky (Unholy) and weak (Cant take a hit to save your unlife).

    How do we fix this? and a better question : what is truely wrong with our specs / class?


    ---------------

    In my opinion, Death Knights are great tanks (my favorite), we do amazing DPS in PVE, but we are lacking in PVP. One of the problems is most of our defensive cooldowns have a cost, unlike many other classes. Another issue is our self healing (Frost/Unholy) is underwelming compaired to others. Now i dont believe we need a instant cast free 30% heal on a 2 min cooldown. I like the healing talents we have, and in 5.2 they are getting buffed, however dont think that is enough.

    Example :

    Death Siphon
    1 Death
    Instant
    Deal X Shadowfrost damage to an enemy, healing the Death Knight for 100% of damage dealt.


    You use a Death rune to heal your self for a pitiful amount. Death siphon should adjust to your spec, like soul reaver, you give up a frost/blood/unholy rune to get access to a quick heal. IMO Death siphon should look like this :

    Death Siphon
    1 Blood/Frost/Unholy
    Instant
    Deal X Shadowfrost damage to an enemy, healing the Death Knight for 300% of damage dealt.

    or

    Death Siphon
    1 Blood/Frost/Unholy
    Instant
    Mark the Target with the sign of Death, Your next 3 attacks will heal you for 150% of the damage dealt over 5 seconds.


    -

    Conversion is another weak ability blizzard is toying with :

    Conversion
    Level 60 death knight talent
    10 Runic Power, plus 10 per sec (reduced to 5)
    Instant
    Continuously converts Runic Power to health, restoring 3% of maximum health every 1 sec. Only base Runic Power generation from spending runes may occur while Conversion is active. This effect lasts until canceled, or Runic Power is exhausted.

    For any spec, losing Runic power is a huge loss to threat / damage. If you are giving up so much you need to get something worthwhile back. The HOT from conversion should be increased to 4% and the tick should be every .7 secs.

    My other issue is with Asphyxiate, Death's Advance and Chilblains, two amazing talents that are stuck together in the same tier. I dont want them moved or replace because the new talent system should be based around picking 1 out of 3 great abilities. I want them buffed the player doesnt feel like he is losing something by picking 1/3.

    A easy Buff could be : Asphyxiate no long replaces stranugate, Death's Advance can be used on a targeted unit, frees them from all roots and snares and makes them immune to them for 7 secs, Chillblains causes icy touch to removed a magic effect and chains of ice will snare all enemies in a 5 yard radius around the target.

    Another issue is how to remove the "fat" from unholy death knights, should one ability be baked into another? should something be removed? or should unholy be retooled from the ground up? should they get prem death runes like frost?

    What about Frost? what issues do they have? can they fix the strike damage against high armored targets? is there any fixes that can be made?


    -----

    TLDR : What can be done to balance the once great Death Knight?

    "Humility defeats pride, Master Yang has preached. Pride defeats man"


  2. #2
    Bone shield is now baseline.

    Death pact is now baseline.

    Death siphon and conversion removed.

    New tier 75 talents(a line about summons would be fine).

    EDIT:I was talking about tier 60 :P.
    Last edited by Nezia; 2013-01-17 at 01:44 AM.

  3. #3
    Dreadlord the0o's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nezia View Post
    Bone shield is now baseline.

    Death pact is now baseline.

    Death siphon and conversion removed.

    New tier 75 talents(a line about summons would be fine).
    Great ideas, What do you replace Death and conversion them with?

    "Humility defeats pride, Master Yang has preached. Pride defeats man"


  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by the0o View Post
    Great ideas, What do you replace Death and conversion them with?
    Something about minions and/or summons, like blood worms, some new kind of dancing rune weapon, or anything like that.

  5. #5
    Deleted
    Reposting this here, posted it on the DK forums (on a whim) months ago - don't really think DKs are massively broken, would just be what I did if I were in charge of them... (thank God I'm not, right!) Deleted changes to gargoyle and conversion because they're happening anyway in 5.2:

    UNHOLY PRESENCE
    You are infused with unholy fury, increasing attack speed and rune regeneration by 10%, and movement speed by 15%. While in unholy presence your Death Coil ability costs 10 less runic power.

    DEATH COIL
    Fire a blast of unholy energy, causing 1133 + 0.514 * AP * 1 Shadow damage to an enemy target or healing (1133 + 0.514 * AP * 3.5) damage on a friendly Undead target. Costs 35 runic power (down from 40)

    STRANGULATE
    Shadowy tendrils constrict an enemy's throat, silencing them for 5 sec. Non-player victim spellcasting is also interrupted for 3 sec. Ability now has no resource cost. This ability is not replaced by Asphyxiate.

    ASPHYXIATE
    Lifts an enemy target off the ground and crushes their throat with dark energy, stunning them for 5 sec. No longer functions as a silence. No longer replaces Strangulate, cooldown increased from 1min to 1.5min.

    ICEBOUND FORTITUDE
    The Death Knight freezes his blood to become immune to Stun effects and reduce all damage taken by 35% (up from 20%) for 8 sec (down from 12sec). Cooldown reduced from 3mins to 2mins. Ability no longer costs resources.

    CHILLBLAINS
    Victims of your Frost Fever disease are Chilled, reducing movement speed by 40% (down from 50%) for 8 sec (down from 10 sec), and your Chains of Ice immobilizes targets with the Chilblains debuff for 3 sec.

    HOSTILE TAKEOVER
    NEW TALENT - Replaces Death's Advance as a level 58 talent. The Death Knight disarms his opponent for 5 seconds and reduces attack/casting speed of the opponent by 25% for 10seconds. Instant, 1 min cooldown.

    DEATH'S ADVANCE
    Death's Advance is now a baseline ability for Death Knights but no longer causes a passive movement speed increase. Movement-impairing effects may not reduce you below 75% of normal movement speed. (up from 70%) Upon activation the death knight breaks all movement impairing effects, may not be slowed below 100% movement speed and gains immunity to roots and snares for 6 seconds. 30 second cooldown.

    SOUL REAPER
    Soul Reaper ability can no longer be dispelled.

    HOWLING BLAST
    The Primary Target damage of Howling Blast has been reduced to 80% of what it was. Howling blast's damage on primary and secondary targets is now the same.

    ICY TOUCH
    The Icy Touch ability has now been buffed to do 25% more single target damage than Howling Blast.

    GLYPH OF ICY TOUCH
    Glyph of Icy Touch has been removed and replaced with a re-worked glyph of Chains of Ice.

    GLYPH OF CHAINS OF ICE
    Now causes 150damage to the target (modified by attack power) and has a 50% chance to dispell one helpful magic effect from the target.

    TIER 14 SET BONUS CHANGES
    DPS 2SET - Your Obliterate, Frost Strike, Death Coil and Scourge Strike deal 10% increased damage.
    DPS 4SET - Your Pillar of Frost ability grants 5% additional Strength, and your Unholy Frenzy ability grants 15% additional haste. (up from 10%)

    UNHOLY CHANGES

    NEW ABILITY - Dominate Undead :

    Replaces Master of Ghouls and Control Undead while in Unholy specialization. Dominates the target undead creature, forcing it to do your bidding. The Dominated undead minion is considered a permanent pet and will last until released. The Unholy Death Knight can keep a maximum of 3 different undead minions. Your raise dead ability now contains 3 slots where you can choose between your dominated undead. (2min cooldown)

    Different types of Undead minions have different abilities, the 4 main types being:

    Casters (e.g Banshees - ranged spells, silence or HoTs)
    Light DPS (e.g. Gheists - quick melee abilities, stuns or Bleeds)
    Heavy DPS (e.g. Skeletal Swordsman - slow melee abilities, roots or bleeds)
    Tanks (e.g. Abominations - Slow Melee abilities, absorbs or hook grips)

    Dominated Undead will be scaled to do appropriate damage and can not be used on other players or pets controlled by other players.

    GHOUL

    Your ghoul, or dominated undead minion now benefits from your pvp power and resilience
    Last edited by mmoc0cdb03e806; 2013-01-22 at 07:20 AM.

  6. #6
    I wouldn't mind a cooldown tier considering that a lot of other classes seem to have one.

    But this is outside the scope of what we can realistically hope for before the next expansion.

  7. #7
    Our damage is fine, we just need a smoother gameplay as well as some more surviability.

    -Put Necrotic Strike back into a UH rune
    -Make Soul Reaper cost a UH rune for all specs
    -Make Chillblains baseline
    -Put Hungering Cold back
    -Put Dark Succor back to 15% heal for Frost and UH
    -Make IBF something more than a stun breaker in PvP and have actual defensive merit

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by wooootles View Post
    Our damage is fine, we just need a smoother gameplay as well as some more surviability.

    -Put Necrotic Strike back into a UH rune
    -Make Soul Reaper cost a UH rune for all specs
    -Make Chillblains baseline
    -Put Hungering Cold back
    -Put Dark Succor back to 15% heal for Frost and UH
    -Make IBF something more than a stun breaker in PvP and have actual defensive merit
    Like the poster a few posts up I think Deaths advance would be a better baseline talent than chillblains. It's more spec neutral where cb is something a frost dk might want to grab that an unholy dk would pass on for something else

  9. #9
    Stood in the Fire
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    Unholy dks are already too close to melee BM hunters as it is, let's please not completely make a joke out of the class. If anything redesign the class as a plate caster one like people have been begging for.

    -My 2 cents.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Samsarathedk View Post
    Unholy dks are already too close to melee BM hunters without all the cool pet choices and utility as it is, let's please not completely make a joke out of the class. If anything redesign the class as a plate caster one like people have been begging for.

    -My 2 cents.
    Fixt it for you

  11. #11
    Would be an interesting dynamic to turn the DSi/conversion tier into a minion tier. Have bloodworms (would need to be modified so DPS get more bang for their point), the gargoyle (UH could get some better weapon scaling in return), and I would love to see another ranged, perhaps a frost lich that frostbolts(less base damage than garg but scales with frost mastery). This means UH/Blood/Frost all have their obvious choice, but in certain situations the others might be better (lich for ranged/control. worm for healing, garg for high output/UH mastery).

    death's advance if made baseline would need a longer CD, or keep the CD but make the passive not work when on CD. In the same line make Asphyxiate baseline and move remorseless winter and the old desecration to this line to be the anti-movement line.

    T90 deals with control/positioning so perhaps a mind control (will of the lich king/scourge) or a PBAoE root (Nerubian binding)

    Death strike healing should just be affected by PvP power. This would put it back to its pre-battle fatigue numbers which was enough to keep me alive for a bit longer during burst, but not horribly OP live forever type healing.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by matthias9742 View Post
    T90 deals with control/positioning so perhaps a mind control (will of the lich king/scourge) or a PBAoE root (Nerubian binding)
    Hahah, this reminds me of an old idea of mine to replace remortless winter:

    Bloddy sight: The death knight inspires his own hatred to the nearby enemies, causing them to not be able to discern his comrades from his enemies. This effect will make up to 5 nearby enemies to become hostille among themselves, lasts for 8 secs, a target cannot be affected by this effect again for 40 secs. 1 min cd.

  13. #13
    Stood in the Fire
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    Quote Originally Posted by Imbalanced View Post
    Fixt it for you
    No, my post was meant to be taken exactly as I posted it. A melee hunter class i.e. unholy dk is a silly design imo. So either leave it and let dks have some dignity or redesign the class.

  14. #14
    Dreadlord the0o's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nezia View Post
    Hahah, this reminds me of an old idea of mine to replace remortless winter:

    Bloddy sight: The death knight inspires his own hatred to the nearby enemies, causing them to not be able to discern his comrades from his enemies. This effect will make up to 5 nearby enemies to become hostille among themselves, lasts for 8 secs, a target cannot be affected by this effect again for 40 secs. 1 min cd.
    You know, i had that idea as well, but it sounds like too "rogue/Shadow Priest-ish" to be a DK ability.

    Mines :

    Deadzone
    2 min CD
    Poison/discombobulated the mind of your opponent, causing the target to see all nearby units as enemy targets. Last 30 secs / 10 on players.


    In a nutshell if a rogue uses this on a player, all npcs/other players will become enemy targets and will look like the rogue (kinda like that drink in dalaran that turns everyone into mages).

    "Humility defeats pride, Master Yang has preached. Pride defeats man"


  15. #15
    Deleted
    To be honest. I think that dk will be fine in 5.2. But I find myself missing something. So I was thinking... How about let's give all dk's spec's pet appropriate to curren spec and controlable.(frost one could have root in place of strun, blood some dmg reduction) and make unholy more based on dot's and make Gargoyle giving it some cd that dk can control my idea is fear (two pets but one is activating cd for some amount of time). It would give more versatility to all spec's and make unhloty more intresting. (Well I also may be an idiot that can't find unholy's potential)
    And as cherry on top quote form Vmagik.: Your ghoul, or dominated undead minion now benefits from your pvp power and resilience.

    And as last sorry for errors im kind of bad in writing in english.

  16. #16
    HOWLING BLAST
    The Primary Target damage of Howling Blast has been reduced by 10%.

    The AOE portion of the Howling Blast ability has been reduced to 35% of the primary target's damage (down from 50%)
    That would hurt DW frost soo much in pvp since HB is the main rune-skill for DW in pvp.

    Do this:
    • Remove the Obliterate damage bonus from Might of the Frozen Wastes and the Frost Strike damage bonus from Threat of Thassarian.
    • Increase Frost Strike-damage by 30% and Obliterate-damage by 10% for Frost passively. Let Obliterate ignore 15% armor per diseases on the target.

    Make 2h and DW play the same way again (like we always use to). Make it only a cosmetic option once again (like it always was)
    Only broken part about frost DK's atm is the new Threat of Thassarian and might of the Frozen Wastes
    Last edited by Wrien; 2013-01-16 at 11:03 PM.

  17. #17
    I got an idea, remove tier 75, put the rune regen passives back into their specs, make blood tap back to the old version and baseline and do this:

    Empowered strikes- Your specialization strikes are permanently enhanced
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Blood- Impaling strike (heart strike) now deals 125% weapon damage plus 765 on the primary target and to 5 additional nearby enemies, additional enemies are struck 125% of the damage done to the main target, damage is increased by 15% per disease. In addition targets are slowed by 50%.

    Frost- Gloomy strike (frost strike) now deals 125% weapon damage as shadow frost damage, every time you Gloomy strike you gain frosty pillars buff stacking 5 times, once reaching 5 stacks you unleash a path of spiky frost 30 yards in front of you causing enemies in the way to be knocked away from the path 5 yards dealing 23460 frost damage (this effect has a 1 min cooldown).

    Unholy- Defiling strike (scourge strike) now deals 100% weapon damage plus 864 as shadow damage, damage is increased by 25% per disease on your target. This strike has a critical strike chance increase by 30%.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Runic mind- Your mind is empowered with runes, your maximum runic power is increased by 30 and runic power regen is increased by 10%

    Blood caked blade- Your auto attacks have a 25% to cause a blood-caked strike which hits for 100% weapon damage plus 15% for each of your diseases on your target.
    Last edited by Beefkow; 2013-01-16 at 11:03 PM.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Samsarathedk View Post
    Unholy dks are already too close to melee BM hunters as it is, let's please not completely make a joke out of the class. If anything redesign the class as a plate caster one like people have been begging for.

    -My 2 cents.
    Can we please fix that to "redesign the SPEC as a plate caster" I have a LOT of fun doing evil things up close with weapons as frost thanks
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  19. #19
    @ vmagik

    I can appreciate your proposed changes to Unholy Presence and Death Coil. DC is one of our coolest spells IMO. The idea of using it more sits just fine with me; Especially since Unholy needs a buff somewhere anyway.

    I think most would agree that Strangulate needs to cost zero resources at this point. Defensive CDs that cost resources are incredibly less useful; And considering the fact that we have access to so few defensive CDs, this fact hits that much harder.

    Asphyxiate no longer replacing Strangulate seems like a no-brainer to me. But, a bigger problem is the actual tier it's located. A stun just cannot compete with our gap closers. Asphyxiate should be on the same tier with Remorseless Winter as they share the same DR.

    100% agree with the Icebound Fortitude changes. Better damage reduction and no cost!

    Not sure what you're going for with your Chilblains changes. 50% slow is standard across the board for all classes.

    Personally, I would like to see the Chilblains "slow" made into a glyph; And then the Chilblains "root" as well as the actual Chains of Ice ability removed from the game. In CoI's place in our grid, we could have a new talent that replaces the old function. Think Grasp of the Dead: This would be a 1 Unholy Rune ability that rooted a target for 5 seconds. Imagine a few skeletal arms reaching from the ground to hold your target in place. This wouldn't change much for Frost, but it would function much better within Unholy's rune system. Plus, it would just look cool.

    I'm not so sure about the Hostile Takeover idea. I keep hearing more DKs talk about wanting a disarm ability. But before that, it was a stun. I just don't think that's the way to go IMO. I would like to see what the IBF changes did before we further addressed our physical mitigation problems.

    I don't really have a big problem with Soul Reaper being dispellable. I do think that it needs to take more skill to do so. Therefore, I think that our Soul Reaper needs to do it's job in 3 seconds instead of 5. If it can be dispelled within 3 seconds, then so be it.

    On the general theme of Icy Touch and Howling Blast: I agree. Icy Touch should be the go to Frost Rune ability for single targets when playing Frost. And then, we have Howling Blast for anything over one target. That's just good gameplay right there. This should have been done 3 years ago. But just for the record, Howling Blast hits it's secondary targets for 80% of our primary targets damage, and not 50% as the tooltip states. The general idea is that IT should hit harder on a single target than HB. I don't want to lose any AOE potential here.

    On the topic of your Dominate Undead idea: I like the idea of having a Skeletal Warrior as my pet. That's the dream really. I don't think we need to take the Hunter route where we have a "stable" of undead pets though. Abominations don't even make sense to me as something our Raise Dead spell would even summon. I definitely think we can easily free up a whole tier in our grid for a new set of themed abilities. Having it revolve around minions is one idea. But, I'm not even sure that is the right path to take. Honestly, I would just be happy to have a glyph that changed my ghoul into a Skeletal Warrior the same as Glyph of the Geist.
    Last edited by Clash the DK; 2013-01-17 at 02:01 AM.

  20. #20
    The Unstoppable Force Belize's Avatar
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    Scissors, and anyways they're technically dead-ish I don't think they have those urges anymo- OHHHHHH not that kind of "fix". My bad.


    Your second death siphon might actually be worse than the original. You're spending 3 runs for a HoT which in the middle of combat would technically be worse off than a direct heal. Death runes are stupid easy to have usually (Idk about Unholy I don't play it) and you can chain it back to back, faster than the HoT would heal you.

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