New Death Strike in Legion and soloing content as a DK

[Malacrass]

Old:

Death Strike

1 Unholy, 1 Frost
Focuses dark power into a strike that deals 135% Physical damage and heals you for 1. (Healing based on 400% of your Attack Power, according to WoWhead)

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New:

Death Strike

40 Runic Power, Melee Range, Instant
Focuses dark power into a strike that deals strong Physical damage and heals you for 50% of all damage taken in the last 6 sec (minimum 7% of maximum health).
If you are below 35% health when this is cast, all Runic Power is consumed, increasing the potency of the healing effect.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the bolded part a heavy nerf to the soloing capabilities of DKs? Of course they don't balance classes around soloing, but I think it's still worth mentioning/discussing since A LOT of people hold on to a DK for the sole purpose of clearing instances.

[Saiyendra]

Why do you think so?

All similar types of mitigation are being changed to something like this, so our ability to solo old content won't change in relation to other classes. In any case this Death Strike is more powerful than what we had in MoP/Cata, and we did fine back then.

[Nnyco]

its the same death strike we had before wod, except the rune cost and the super heal when youre low

[runkel]

dosent this realy depends on how much runic power we are able to gain in Legion and how much health we end up having? And we dont know enough about the other changes to realy say anything yet..

personally i think this will be great , i realy dident like stamina this expansion, maybe next one it will have some value again .(mostly talking about trinkets, and no, i dont raid, so mostly soloing/dungeons)

[bahumut5]

Still heals for a Minimum of 7% of your maximum health.

I don't think my DK will solo any less content
Also, seems like we can survive Enrage Timers of less old content this way as well!

[Saiyendra]

That was how it was before WoD you know right? If anything the occurrence of Death Strikes will increase as well. Plus the heal over time from Blood Plague and Bonestorm (if it doesn't get nerfed/removed) would make you literally unkillable for MoP content and below, possibly WoD as well.

There won't be any legacy buffs in MoP or WoD content.

[Edlarel]

There won't be any legacy buffs in MoP or WoD content yet.

Fixed. When they squish stats again, they will likely revisit that content in the same way they did the older stuff.

In any case, I see this not as a nerf but a return to something we know already (with some minor modifications). It won't damage soloing at all.

[dementedlogic]

There won't be any legacy buffs in MoP or WoD content.

Yes, there will. The buffs on old content aren't flags to the actual old content, they are applied by level and that level will scale up with the new 110 level cap.

"It's not a flag, it's based on level difference. When the level cap goes up in Legion this will become effective for Mists content." Source: Nitemoogle. It was said in private, so no public link. That said if you ask on Twitter they should clarify for you.

[chibichibiko]

Why do you think so?

All similar types of mitigation are being changed to something like this, so our ability to solo old content won't change in relation to other classes. In any case this Death Strike is more powerful than what we had in MoP/Cata, and we did fine back then.

However, the blood shield part of death strike is proportionately less than MoP/Cata, which if I recall correctly started at 50% naked and could easily be 100% with incidental mastery on gear. That said, a 50% of recent damage +40% of that as shield (=70% of recent damage) is still pretty significant.

[Sting]

Yes, there will. The buffs on old content aren't flags to the actual old content, they are applied by level and that level will scale up with the new 110 level cap.

"It's not a flag, it's based on level difference. When the level cap goes up in Legion this will become effective for Mists content." Source: Nitemoogle. It was said in private, so no public link. That said if you ask on Twitter they should clarify for you.

Wrong, according to this source:

Q: Legacy buff for MoP content, When? – Vert
A: Never. (Or at least not until next time we do a stat squish, technically.) The “legacy buff” that applies to enemies below level 90 once you exceed that level was designed specifically and solely to offset the 6.0 “stat squish,” which compressed the exponential scaling in the items available from level 61 to 90, into linear scaling. Pre-squish, a level 90 player with Pandaria raid gear was literally a dozen times more powerful than they had been at level 80 with Wrath gear. Post-squish that is no longer the case, so we have a special combat modifier in place to preserve the expected gameplay, so that soloing old content does not become harder. Gear higher than item level 463 wasn’t squished, so endgame Mists content designed to be tackled by players of that power level wasn’t affected and no combat scalar is needed. Mists content will increasingly become doable with fewer players than intended, as player power continues to rise, as has always been the case. People already are soloing large chunks of Mists content, and that goal will only become more and more attainable as time goes on and gear continues to improve.

No plans until the next stat squish, this is from june this year. When was that private conversation?

[dementedlogic]

September 18th, 2015.

[Saiyendra]

Yes, there will. The buffs on old content aren't flags to the actual old content, they are applied by level and that level will scale up with the new 110 level cap.

"It's not a flag, it's based on level difference. When the level cap goes up in Legion this will become effective for Mists content." Source: Nitemoogle. It was said in private, so no public link. That said if you ask on Twitter they should clarify for you.

No, this explicitly contradicts Watcher's post (us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/17905730394?page=116#2307) and doesn't make sense. Gear scaling between MoP and WoD is exponential, so there's no need for a legacy buff until the next stat squish is implemented.

Edit: I didn't see Sting's post above.

[dementedlogic]

He could be wrong, of course. It's not the first time developers/designers/community members mixed up the message. I can only report what he told me, which was more recent than Ion's post.

[Tojara]

Who cares? Death strike still has a minimal heal, goes to RP and heals for more at low health.

What does change is blood plague heals us a flat 1% every 3 seconds, and bone storm heals us what, 3% every second as long as you keep it up. It's at the cost of death striking, but you can keep it up forever.

I'd wait to see, considering they have cited they are pretty much changing a shit load of talents for everybody and making most of the specialization specific. Lots more throughput talents, instead of PvP talent rows that only sometimes work in PvE content.

[Alroxas]

Of course they don't balance classes around soloing, but I think it's still worth mentioning/discussing since A LOT of people hold on to a DK for the sole purpose of clearing instances.

I think you also need to take a look at the other spells/abilities in the DK toolkit. For instance, Blood Plague (applied by Blood Strike) heals 1% of max HP every 3 seconds for 30s. Add in that Blood Strike done within a DnD applies Blood Plague to all enemies present (also Blood Boil still exists for Blood DKs via twitter), and you'll have healing from lots of sources. Moreover the talent: Bonestorm does use RP (taking away from Death Strike) but also hits 3 times per second and heals 1% of max HP per hit. So that's 3% per sec per target healing. Talk about a nice heal in a group AoE situation.

[Nahela]

Probably be even easier to solo, honestly. Especially as you start to outgear content just based on the new sources of healing.

[Raugnaut]

To be exact, its been more or less reverted to the MoP level Death Strike, which did the exact same thing. The only difference is that it uses RP rather then runes, and to be accurate, looking at just the baseline, we will be able to use Death Strike 30% as often compared to previously, for one main reason - Blood Strike.

In Legion, Blood Strike generates 20 RP for 1 rune, or 2 runes for 1 Death strike. Since we have a total of 6 runes all-together, we will be able to use all 6 runes to use 3 death strikes, whereas before we could only use 2 runes per rune rotation, unless you somehow managed to get 6 death runes, generally with Rune Tap.

The only real concern is, of course, Mastery. In MoP, you could easily get 200% strength shields, so a single Death Strike would either heal for 21% hp, or for 150% of the last 5 seconds of damage taken - And, since you had 20% haste back in MoP baseline, and each melee attack AND dodge/parry generated 10 RP, well, you could easily get 1 DS every 5 seconds, which more or less meant that you would never die when soloing older content (And indeed, if you looked at the healing numbers for DK tanks, on flex/normal, heroic geared DK tanks did not need a single iota of external heals. Only reason DKs even needed a group was generally because they would hit enrage without a group, and enrage bosses tend to deal quite a bit more then 300% of your health per 5 seconds. At the end of MoP, pre-6.0, there was a few DKs soloing a number of the earlier bosses on flex/normal)

Of course, Mastery in Legion is significantly nerfed compared to Mastery in MoP, as it was reduced to 40% from the previous baseline of 120%. So a Death Strike will only heal for around 70% of the last 6 seconds of damage taken. Not all that bad though - We now have more sources of healing in comparision to WoD, AND Legion - Blood Plague heals for 1%/3, or .3% hp a second. Bonestorm isn't too good for single-target healing - It heals for 9% HP/45 RP, a bit below DS's 10% HP/40 RP, and scales with number of mobs rather then with damage taken, so its really good for AoE, poor for single-target soloing. But theres bound to be at least 3 talent rows that increase Blood DKs survivability, which will help with soloing.

Anyway, for Blood DKs, the problem has never, EVER been a lack of survivability, and this trend seems to continue into Legion. It tends to always be either a lack of damage (unable to beat the Enrage), or inability to deal with a mechanic (Current examples of old boss's that prevent easy soloing are Dark Animus non-LFR, Sha of Pride, Galakras, ect.