WoD Death Knight Changes

[Sinzaram]

Do the devs even play DKs? Holy shit these suggest changes like plaugebeaer are so stupid. Can we remove outbreak, plague strike, icy touch, unholy blight now?

Plaguebear as you spell it, is a talent which is currently on the same row as Unholy Blight, and its only 1 day old!
At least give it a tiny benefit of the doubt that they haven't come up with the perfect talent yet.

Imo Plaguebearer sounds a fine design, option of a passive disease talent vs a cooldown talent.
This sort of choice is similar of many other classes talents, Passive vs Active vs Cooldown

Festering strike without necrotic plague might as well go too.... Garbage.

Whats so terrible about Festering Strike now?
Its a strike that converts death runes, does ok damage and extends diseases.
Talented with Necrotic is even better since it extends the 15 stack of Necroticy goodness.

How hard is it to understand the 56 tier is awful all together and needs to be redone?

Thats exactly what they are doing right now with making Roiling Blood baseline and replacing it with the Plaguebearer concept!
I doubt that 1 day old concept is the final change to that tier.

When do the quality of life changes like no rune cost on strangulated and pillar of frost coming?

You clearly missed the memo about the Empowered Pillar of Frost Perk:

Empowered Pillar of Frost
Pillar of Frost provides an additional 10% Strength and no longer costs any runes.

When will the real issues be even acknowledged like orphaned frost runes for unholy aoe?

This "real" issue was solved in 5.2 when they made Blood Boil keep Frost converted Death Runes as Death Runes and made it so Icy Touch converts Frost to Death Runes if you're too lazy to Festering Strike twice at the start of a aoe phase.

They're even making it better for PvP with the new Glyph of Ice Reaper, which lets Chains of Ice convert Death Runes.

Baked into blood boil now (or I think I read that... perhaps I'm mistaken?)

Hmm let me post the exact Tweet:

We're actually changing that row a bit. Merging Blood Boil into Pestilence. Replacing Roiling Blood with a new talent.
@Celestalon Source

From the sound of that quote seems the damage of Blood Boil will get moved into Pestilence.
Although like the comment above about plaguebears: the Roiling Blood removal, Blood Boil>Pestilence change might be very early days, they might even decide its easier to implement in another way.

One final tweet this morning to go with the Blood Deathcoil news:

Death Coil is going to 30 RP cost baseline.
@Celestalon Source

This is great, since Death Coil currently costs 40 RP baseline and is reduced by 20% as Unholy to 32 RP.
Hurray for fixing the weird 32 RP cost that Unholy currently has!

[Keile]

To be clear, Celestalon just tweeted that Blood will use only Death Coil and that Rune Strike will be removed.

Hmmm...I can get behind this so long as they buff it's damage to compensate.
As it stands DC hits like a wet noodle for Blood.

[Dnusha]

It would be great if we somehow could add stacks into necrotic plague.
1 stack for festering strike sounds like a fair trade (2 runes) or maybe 1 stack for necrotic (1 D rune).
It would be pretty great.

[Khiyone]

I personally think that Blood needed all this attention, as it has consistently been the worst tanking spec throughout the expansion and still utilized its old mechanic from Cataclysm, while all the other tanks scaled with Vengeance. It's great to see them finally getting some love! Celestalon has stated that they won't change the reactive feeling of Blood, they'll just have it scale with Resolve.


On another note, with the return of Death Coil for Blood does that mean that it will now be possible to get Death Coil self-healing and X% Leech?

[valliant13]

I personally think that Blood needed all this attention, as it has consistently been the worst tanking spec throughout the expansion and still utilized its old mechanic from Cataclysm, while all the other tanks scaled with Vengeance. It's great to see them finally getting some love! Celestalon has stated that they won't change the reactive feeling of Blood, they'll just have it scale with Resolve.


On another note, with the return of Death Coil for Blood does that mean that it will now be possible to get Death Coil self-healing and X% Leech?

On the contrary, both Frost and Unholy need just as much attention as Blood. Until the buffs we got in a hotfix in January we were the worst DPS class as a whole. Unholy sits in the middle now while frost is in the lower mid portion and I am okay with that, however we NEEDED those buffs to get there, and unholy might was buffed A LOT to get unholy into the middle. I would rather have proper "Scaling" so to speak than have these abilities have tuning knobs based on them. A perfect example of fixing the issue is fixing Killing Machine, however Celestalon has said they are happy with how Killing Machine works currently. So yes, I fully understand that blood needed these changes, but DPS DKs need some serious tweaks too. I don't want to be fotxp like warlocks have been in MoP however I would love each spec to be competitive without tuning stupid stuff like they did to increase our damage.

[Shiira]

If blizzard don't intend to change killing machine frost is always going to have issues.

[Wrien]

On the contrary, both Frost and Unholy need just as much attention as Blood. Until the buffs we got in a hotfix in January we were the worst DPS class as a whole. Unholy sits in the middle now while frost is in the lower mid portion and I am okay with that, however we NEEDED those buffs to get there, and unholy might was buffed A LOT to get unholy into the middle. I would rather have proper "Scaling" so to speak than have these abilities have tuning knobs based on them. A perfect example of fixing the issue is fixing Killing Machine, however Celestalon has said they are happy with how Killing Machine works currently. So yes, I fully understand that blood needed these changes, but DPS DKs need some serious tweaks too. I don't want to be fotxp like warlocks have been in MoP however I would love each spec to be competitive without tuning stupid stuff like they did to increase our damage.

And he said in a tweet that they thinkl DW frost should use Obliterate, but he didn't seem to get the point that we don't... And i don't want to use Obliterate because it will steal Killing Machine procs from Frost Strike, and Howling Blast is much stronger than Obliterate. With 2h you got the opposite problem (Frost Strike stealing Obliterate killiong machine procs). I don't get what blizzard are trying to achieve here. he also said that they want to make Frost more imteresting to play, but they only thing they could mention so far was the changes to runeforges.

[Taninsam]

And he said in a tweet that they thinkl DW frost should use Obliterate, but he didn't seem to get the point that we don't... And i don't want to use Obliterate because it will steal Killing Machine procs from Frost Strike, and Howling Blast is much stronger than Obliterate. With 2h you got the opposite problem (Frost Strike stealing Obliterate killiong machine procs). I don't get what blizzard are trying to achieve here. he also said that they want to make Frost more imteresting to play, but they only thing they could mention so far was the changes to runeforges.

You surely have missed this.
So now we clearly need to get Obli back into DW.

[Schizoide]

I'm happy that Death Coil is replacing Rune Strike for Blood. Makes sense.

I just wish Frost would get Death Coil back too. I use Death Coil on my frost DK all the time. Not every rune cycle. It is situational-- but that situation come up whenever I'm out of melee range, and that happens really frequently. It should not be a candidate for button bloat pruning. If the devs decide to remove it, they need to realize the change is actually a nerf and not something that can be hand-waved away as a button pruning non-issue. If they make an informed decision that the nerf is warranted, so be it.

Still no responses about Killing Machine. It seems that Celestalon still does not understand that correctly played DKs completely ignore Killing Machine in its current incarnation, even though many of us have tried our best to convey that info.

[Futhark]

Just putting this out there: I'm sad to see Runic Strike go. You guys may see AotD and RD as thematic, but I really enjoyed how Blood was developing this Runic theme: Rune Strike, Rune Shield, Rune Tap, Dancing Rune Weapon, etc. Rune Strike was the go-to melee runic-power ability and I just liked the theme. Not a great reason to argue for keeping it, I just like runes. :P

[Traveler Voltin]

but i liked rune strike

[Sinzaram]

but i liked rune strike

Would you rather have a melee only hit that is only for hitting in melee or a 40 yard ranged nuke that you can also use to heal control undead pets?

The cost is identical, and i'm sure the damage is going to be balanced to be the same as Rune Strike would have been.

[Ampere]

On another note, with the return of Death Coil for Blood does that mean that it will now be possible to get Death Coil self-healing and X% Leech?

Good question. I would assume not, as it would make the talent a lot weaker for Frost since they lose Death Coil.

[Maxweii]

I think plaguebearer would be a nice talent in concept, as when you are closing in (for Unholy/Blood) you can get your dots up before you even make it there. Frost can do this with HB so that fixes that. Only problem would obviously be with it's interaction with Necrotic, as it would totally kill Festerblight play for Unholy if it replaces the dot instead of adds a stack or such.
Maybe a good way to compensate for that would be say, if Death Coil or Frost Strike is used on a target that has Necrotic Plague on it, it triggers x amounts of ticks of the disease as instant damage.

That would be a really nice talent, but then again would make it so that the combo would probably be too strong. Would put it in line for how Plague Leech technically is a dps CD, then Plaguebringer would be a passive dps, and Unholy Blight would need some love then.

[Schizoide]

All abilities that apply diseases add a stack to necrotic, so that wouldn't be a problem.

[Maxweii]

I figured as much, but since it's a talent things interact weird. Since normally they don't apply dots, it's not out of the realm of possibility that it could interact weird.

Though if it just interacts very simply, well then danm Festerblight with Necrotic would start a lot sooner then before in the rotation due to our normal use of DC making the stacks skyrocket faster then without it.

[Shiira]

Maybe a good way to compensate for that would be say, if Death Coil or Frost Strike is used on a target that has Necrotic Plague on it, it triggers x amounts of ticks of the disease as instant damage.

Unholy really doesn't need more factors that make weapon damage matter less.

[Nangz]

The AMZ nerf is a nerf compared to live, but every cooldown has been nerfed. Their explanation of raid cooldowns being too strong is the reasoning for the changes to all these cooldowns and it still is upheld by these changes.

With Tranquility and Devotion Aura becoming a healer spec only raid cooldown, AMZ only has to stand up against Smoke Bomb, Rallying Cry, and Amplify Magic. I'd include damage-to-healing cooldowns like Ancestral Guidance and Vampiric Embrace, but those are fairly difficult to gauge without knowing damage values. AMZ seems to stand up well to those 3 other cooldowns listed once the duration, cooldown and actual effect are factored in.

[Shiira]

It's about time.

Now they just need to do something about amz and purgatory sharing a tier.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Mildly disappointed Runestrike is going away. I'll miss it.