Death Knight WoD - Why do some of our talents still exist?

[OzUnOo]

I'm not trolling guys. Im asking, out of sheer curiosity and confusion, for the reason as to why the talents specified below were left untouched up until now in WoD beta, because i simply dont get it! Yes, i did not play the beta and i haven't been following all tweets and builds so theres a chance im just missing something? If the devs have talked about this please link the tweets!

1st Talent Tier: Unholy Blight

This talent used to be staple for 2H Frost and Festerblight Unholy cuz of the disease-strike sinergy.. but not only is that gone, we now have Roiling Blood baseline in the form of Pestilence (the talent that most players picked anyway). Couple that with Plaguebearer+Necrotic Plague and Outbreak and its clear to me that the one thing DKs wont lack in WoD is DoT application methods, so why is UB still in the game? Is this talent still attractive for Frost? It surely wont be for Unholy..

2nd Talent Tier: Anti-Magic Zone

Yes, i get it, Dks were stacking AMZ in PvE which made heavy-magic encounters too easy and it had to be nerfed, I GET IT. But that was supposed to be a bandaid fix until they have time to sit down and actually rework it, WHY IS THIS ATROCITY GOING INTO WOD?? Do the Devs actually think its in a "good place"? Why am I not seeing players being upset about keeping AMZ in such a crappy state? I can barely even call this an actual talent!

3rd Talent Tier

This tier is fine, the best we have really. Wouldnt hurt to see Death's Advance buffed a bit as it would still be a nice trade-off.

4th Talent Tier

This tier is fine. Boring as hell, but fine. Im afraid that if they try to change it into something cooler it would bring more bad than good.

5th Talent Tier: Death Siphon

With Necrotic Strike gone and Battle Fatigue (almost) extinct, it seems like Death Siphon will finally have a chance in competitive PvP/PvE, and that pisses me off to no end. We all know whats gonna happen: DKs will start climbling ladders really fast and then Blizz will realize DS is an INSTANT SPAMMABLE SELF-HEAL that does RANGED MASTERY-SCALING DAMAGE and nerf it into oblivion, forsaking it to the same "leveling tool" usefulness it had in MoP. This is the kind of hability that will always either be insanely strong or laughably weak, theres no middle ground here! Its not a matter of numbers, its the concept thats just wrong.. why keep this in game when you know it cant be balanced in a satisfaying way?

6th Talent Tier: Desecrated Ground

With most instant CCs gone and the remaining CCs packed together into fewer DR groups, i dont think DG has a place in WoD PvP. We already have 4 "trinkets" (all tied to our survivability, so its best not to touch those), which seems plenty w/o the need of a plain second trinket.. is there a reason as to why we still need all this immunity? Our uptime already looks good with the cast changes, id much rather see another utility talent replacing this one.

7th Talent Tier

Only time will tell how the new talents will perform, but from the start i can see Necrotic Plague being a real pain to balance.. how can NP be good for Blood and Frost w/o being OP for Unholy?? But again, i never used it so i cant really tell..

Thanks in advance! All constructive comments are welcome!

[tru]

Topic I get quite aggravated at myself personally. We have some of the lamest talents. Rune mechanics were stripped from specs and made talents same for other spells that were tweaked and reworded as in hungering cold/remorseless winter desc. ground(pulled from unholy) Unbreakable armor/ minus the +armor gain a knockback immunity = pillars of frost.
The original Unholy blight and raise ally were still 2 of my favorite spells in the game.
DK dps in MoP and really ever since the big unholy nerfs in early cata has suffered
INC. MoP with the ONLY level 90 talents for ALL classes that is not a DIRECT benefit to dps. Very situational at best for any sort of +damage gained from them.
Blizz said some crap like "we don't want to have to balance DKs around those talents if they did damage" aka "were fking lazy" If we had a damage component tied to our end talents now then we would be better off in PvE... problem in PVP? disable it inside instanced pvp zones derpfix.

There is very little differentiation between the specs. AMS is a given for all. AMZ should be unholy only
Rune regen tier should be baked back into their respectable specs RE frost/blood RC unholy give us a NEW tier We have seen very little NEW since Lich King. We are becoming more and more like a ground up food paste you feed someone in a hospital.

We are one of the couple classes that talents dont change depending on spec. I think they probably had the right idea for Warriors with talents per spec change (even tho some are quite lame).
I hate killing machine so much I wish they would pull it out and make it an optional talent for frost.
They could do so much to make us cool to play again but they keep taking away slowly. Waiting an entire xpac to move the rune regen talents to be more accessible to players trying to level is a major insult IMO.

I would design each spec accordingly keeping a theme for each spec
They redone warlocks and look how good they did in MoP and they didnt get nerfed because "we would have to retune content because of guild rosters" aka "we are lazy"
Same for mages

Warriors get glad stance "because they already had all the tools there"
Blood DPS will never be thought of again how is that fair? if anything they had to build a talent and spells and add restrictions to glad
Blood DPS could be done with one talent

Sorry I rant/get mad when thinking about what they have done (and not done) to us.

[GhostShaman]

Topic I get quite aggravated at myself personally. We have some of the lamest talents. Rune mechanics were stripped from specs and made talents same for other spells that were tweaked and reworded as in hungering cold/remorseless winter desc. ground(pulled from unholy) Unbreakable armor/ minus the +armor gain a knockback immunity = pillars of frost.
The original Unholy blight and raise ally were still 2 of my favorite spells in the game.
DK dps in MoP and really ever since the big unholy nerfs in early cata has suffered
INC. MoP with the ONLY level 90 talents for ALL classes that is not a DIRECT benefit to dps. Very situational at best for any sort of +damage gained from them.
Blizz said some crap like "we don't want to have to balance DKs around those talents if they did damage" aka "were fking lazy" If we had a damage component tied to our end talents now then we would be better off in PvE... problem in PVP? disable it inside instanced pvp zones derpfix.

There is very little differentiation between the specs. AMS is a given for all. AMZ should be unholy only
Rune regen tier should be baked back into their respectable specs RE frost/blood RC unholy give us a NEW tier We have seen very little NEW since Lich King. We are becoming more and more like a ground up food paste you feed someone in a hospital.

We are one of the couple classes that talents dont change depending on spec. I think they probably had the right idea for Warriors with talents per spec change (even tho some are quite lame).
I hate killing machine so much I wish they would pull it out and make it an optional talent for frost.
They could do so much to make us cool to play again but they keep taking away slowly. Waiting an entire xpac to move the rune regen talents to be more accessible to players trying to level is a major insult IMO.

I would design each spec accordingly keeping a theme for each spec
They redone warlocks and look how good they did in MoP and they didnt get nerfed because "we would have to retune content because of guild rosters" aka "we are lazy"
Same for mages

Warriors get glad stance "because they already had all the tools there"
Blood DPS will never be thought of again how is that fair? if anything they had to build a talent and spells and add restrictions to glad
Blood DPS could be done with one talent

Sorry I rant/get mad when thinking about what they have done (and not done) to us.

I just want to chime in and say that I totally agree with you and the OP. Ive played DK since wrath, and through all the ups and downs, I dont think we will ever see it remotely enjoyable again. The class needs an overhaul to fix it, not just a massive consolidation.

[OzUnOo]

I just want to chime in and say that I totally agree with you and the OP. Ive played DK since wrath, and through all the ups and downs, I dont think we will ever see it remotely enjoyable again. The class needs an overhaul to fix it, not just a massive consolidation.

I had a feeling this would happen.. I appreciate your posts guys, but even though i showed a bit of disappointment in some of my topics, the point of this thread is to try to understand the reason behind keeping these talents in WoD, my goal was not to simply rant and complain about them.. maybe i wasnt clear enough and for that i'm sorry.

[Baphomette]

Unholy Blight is all right, certainly still has its uses. Plague Leech is the one that's always bothered me in that row. Spreading disease, spreading disease, removing disease? I'm sure it will work fine with NP since you just leech every time NP is about to fall off anyway, but the talent shouldn't exist in that row (if anywhere) so I'm inclined to continue boycotting it.

Third row sucks. We never should have had to choose between DA and Chilblains. DA should be with two other mobility increasing choices, and some kind of CC should be with Chilblains and Asphyxiate.

Death Siphon still costs a Death rune, so I don't know how you call that spammable.

Assuming no further changes, Necrotic Plague is going to go live as a damage increase for Unholy and a QoL change (not even necessarily an increase) for Frost. I actually don't mind this row. Our talents aren't very exciting and some make no sense, but they are not one of our big issues as far as I'm concerned. We still have outstanding issues from the last beta and they don't seem to be any more interested in addressing them this time around.

[Beet]

I just want to chime in and say that I totally agree with you and the OP. Ive played DK since wrath, and through all the ups and downs, I dont think we will ever see it remotely enjoyable again. The class needs an overhaul to fix it, not just a massive consolidation.

Man I hear you. The other day I was looking back at the WotLK launch DK talents and I was so sad remembering how unique we were back then. So many cool things we had going for us were gutted left and right. I had almost forgot about us being able to come back as a ghoul after we die. I remember arena matches being changed by that mechanic. I remember back when we had crazy things like Marks to put on the enemy. And when we had Hungering Cold!

I also miss Blood being a DPS spec, and being able to tank as Unholy. But mainly DPSing as blood. It was hella fun with heart strike cleaving up a storm. And DRW providing sick burst. That was the first time I found out about the power of Armor Pen. I also miss relics. We had some fun ones like that one in Ulduar that I think Hodir dropped? I remember it changed the way we played Frost DPS entirely.

Oh well I'm getting off topic. But yeah there's a lot of the DK talents I was hoping they'd remove or change. I really hate our level 90 talents. Especially when I compare them to my warriors.

[OzUnOo]

Unholy Blight is all right, certainly still has its uses. Plague Leech is the one that's always bothered me in that row. Spreading disease, spreading disease, removing disease? I'm sure it will work fine with NP since you just leech every time NP is about to fall off anyway, but the talent shouldn't exist in that row (if anywhere) so I'm inclined to continue boycotting it.

Third row sucks. We never should have had to choose between DA and Chilblains. DA should be with two other mobility increasing choices, and some kind of CC should be with Chilblains and Asphyxiate.

Death Siphon still costs a Death rune, so I don't know how you call that spammable.

Assuming no further changes, Necrotic Plague is going to go live as a damage increase for Unholy and a QoL change (not even necessarily an increase) for Frost. I actually don't mind this row. Our talents aren't very exciting and some make no sense, but they are not one of our big issues as far as I'm concerned. We still have outstanding issues from the last beta and they don't seem to be any more interested in addressing them this time around.

What uses does Unholy Blight have that cant be fullfilled by blood boil/plaguebearer/necrotic plague? in what situations does a 1,5 min CD dot application fairs better than constant dot applications that are incorporated in our normal rotations? Please elaborate, i really dont see a reason for this to exist since the disease-strike sinergy is gone.. Plague Leech gives death runes, which will always be useful.

About DA, i think the problem is that it not worth picking over the other choices most of the time, it needs to be buffed to make it a more worthwhile trade-off..

Plague Leech and Blood Tap can make Death Siphon very spammable in kitting situations, not to mention unholy's reaping. You dont see it happen cuz DS is garbage at live, thats all.

[Maxweii]

Unholy Blight actually has a pretty good purpose of being the fastest way to apply a 15 stack NP. If you are going to do Festerblight Unholy then this will be amazing for you. For Frost/Blood it could be good for rapid NP stacking on adds far away from the boss.

AMZ is still in a weird spot because of what it competes against on the talent line, but raid CD's are more potent in WoD then they are now, 20% reduction in WoD is prob close to what it is now at 40% reduction.

[Schizoide]

Going through the OP's list quickly.

Unholy Blight: Everybody will be using Plague Leech, because it's a substantial performance improvement. It also consumes a bunch of GCDs, making frost less tedious-- assuming you don't hate Plague Leech, like me. UBlight (and Plaguebearer for that matter) would be interesting if Necrotic Plague was worth using but well, it's not.

AMZ: Yes, everybody hates that we're forced to choose between personal survivability and a raid cooldown, because that's no choice at all-- most DPS and even some tanks will be forced to take AMZ.

Movement tier: This tier is fine if you PvP. If you PvE, you take Death's Advance, period. No choice at all.

Rune Regen tier: This tier is fine if... you pick one at random, I guess? These talents all perform identically and are all best used passively. No choice at all.

Healing tier: Obviously you're coming from a PvP standpoint, which makes sense. In PvE, conversion was nerfed to heck and back for Blood, who will likely never use it the entire expansion. Just like MoP, most players will stick with Death Pact.

L90 tier: Funny that you don't think DG has a place in PvP, since god knows it has never had and will never have a place in PvE either. Luckily there's still role-playing. "Forsooth, the ground is vaguely grey and dusty!"

L100 tier: Necrotic Plague isn't balanced at all, it's so undertuned that nobody will use it.

[OzUnOo]

Unholy Blight actually has a pretty good purpose of being the fastest way to apply a 15 stack NP. If you are going to do Festerblight Unholy then this will be amazing for you. For Frost/Blood it could be good for rapid NP stacking on adds far away from the boss.

AMZ is still in a weird spot because of what it competes against on the talent line, but raid CD's are more potent in WoD then they are now, 20% reduction in WoD is prob close to what it is now at 40% reduction.

You`re right, i forgot the UB sinergy with Necrotic Plague, but that only helps me prove my point! I was hoping the devs would retune NP back to a DPS gain in the last patch, but with UB easily giving us 15 stacks of NP, i dunno if they can! NP is even more of a pain to balance than i thought..

AMZ is not just weird cuz of its spot, its weird all by itself. This is the only active talent skill i`ve seen that is completely useless unless other players use it at the same time, the DK cant make it useful by itself! That tier trade-off wouldnt hurt nearly as much if AMZ was useful by itself as a defensive CD, but it simply isnt.

[Khorm]

AMZ is not just weird cuz of its spot, its weird all by itself. This is the only active talent skill i`ve seen that is completely useless unless other players use it at the same time, the DK cant make it useful by itself! That tier trade-off wouldnt hurt nearly as much if AMZ was useful by itself as a defensive CD, but it simply isnt.

Why do others have to use it at the same time?

[OzUnOo]

Why do others have to use it at the same time?

Cuz its a 20% magic reduction on a 3 second window with 2 min CD, which on its own is completely irrelevant. The reason Blizz made the talent this way was exactly to allow DKs to stack AMZ in PvE without making encounters too easy, which is the epitome of stupidity imo. They were too lazy to disencourage its abuse by giving the talent an overhaul, and instead balanced the talent in a way that makes it only ever useful in that single moment alone, while punishing everyone else who didnt abuse it at all. This talent represents everything that is wrong in Blizz balancing criteria, EVERYTHING about it is wrong.

[Nayami]

I'd be happy if they put Anti-Magic Zone in the Level 90 Tier and change Desecrated Ground to something else to fit AMZ's tier, but nothing will change at this stage maybe next expac :/