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  1. #1

    Patch 7.3 Frost Death Knight Changes, Blizzard App Update, Tweets, StarCrafts

    DreamHack Valencia 2017 Results, Decks, and VODs

    Upcoming Patch 7.3 Frost Death Knight Changes
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    The next PTR build should have a round of changes aimed at addressing various concerns with Frost. The major issues we're focused on are:

    • The spec is too dominated by Breath of Sindragosa (which has knock-on effects on talent choice throughout the tree).
    • Breath of Sindragosa, when you do use it, can be maintained for far too long. In addition to causing the talent/legendary lock-in around it, it means the demand for continuous time on target is very strict for extended periods of time.
    • The spec has many talents/legendaries that (individually or taken together) flood it with resources. Breath contributes to this by encouraging you to take all of them, but it's also a problem on its own.
    • Talent balance generally has to be reviewed, especially after addressing all of the time.
    • We're trying to limit the scope of the changes in the patch, to address the above without opening up the core rotation for changes.


    We want to preserve the identity of Breath of Sindragosa, including the steady resource drain being the main limiting factor, and the expression of skill in optimizing around that. So in trying to avoid less natural solutions like capping the duration or redesigning how it works, we're trying to limit the talent/legendary synergies that cause huge variance in how long Breath can be maintained. And breaking the Breath of Sindragosa/Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, on its own, goes a very long way toward making Breath's duration more reasonable again. DPS adjustment for the change is being put mostly into the baseline spec rather than into the power of Breath, because it's currently so far ahead of other setups.

    • Murderous Efficiency (L56->L57), Frozen Pulse (L57->L90), and Runic Attenuation (L90->L56) swapped positions
    • Hungering Rune Weapon duration 12s (from 15s) and additionally grants 20% haste
    • Bugfix: Hungering Rune Weapon correctly generates a Rune every 1.5s instead of every 1s
    • Murderous Efficiency chance 50% (from 65%)
    • Horn of Winter cooldown 45s (from 30s)
    • Koltira’s Newfound Will generates 1 Rune (from 2) and now causes Obliterate to deal 10% extra damage

    Using even a small subset of all of the above effects causes the rotation to be quite flooded. They are all being either weakened in power (with compensation to the baseline spec), or given non-resource-granting effects for part of their value. In addition, the two most egregious offenders (Murderous Efficiency and Horn of Winter) can no longer be taken together.

    Overall, there should now be a much broader set of talent combinations that produce a good-feeling rotation in which there are resources to do something on most GCDs, but you're still able to spend them down. Including, for example, during Hungering Rune Weapon, which is overly hectic or frustrating right now when you can't spend all of its resources.

    In addition, the talent rearrangement puts Frozen Pulse on a row with two predominantly AoE talents, which is a better home for it. The Frozen Pulse/Icy Talons ("machinegun") synergy is preserved, but can no longer be taken alongside Runic Attenuation as well.

    NB: The Hungering Rune Weapon bug may be fixed on live shortly as well, after we test the fix and analyze the impact.


    Minor talent rebalancing to match the above rearrangements and talent changes; numbers are likely to be updated as the rest of the changes settle into place.

    EDIT: Added Frozen Pulse change which was missed when I copied changes into the post earlier. As with the other changes, this is meant to make Frozen Pulse balanced within its new row, and meant to be accounted for in the overall DPS increase above.

    Breath can retain its role as a talent that encourages building around it to some degree (and its synergies with things like Runic Attenuation, Koltira's Newfound Will, and Seal of Necrofantasia are preserved). But without the overpowering Hungering Rune Weapon interaction, there is a lot more room for other builds to compete, and we've buffed the spec's baseline damage a great deal to shift the landscape towards all talents being closer together in DPS. As always, we'll continue to examine all of these changes based after people can start to test them on PTR.

    Blizzard App Beta Update
    The Blizzard App has been updated to add a collapsible sidebar with smaller game icons.



    Blue Tweets
    Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
    ToS mechanic scaling for 10 man groups still doesnt feel right. Been a problem in ToV and NH too. Please re-evaluate this.
    Hello! We do analyze results and watch for things like this. Can you point to any specific encounters or situations where it feels notable? (WarcraftDevs)

    Ghostcrawler Tweets
    Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
    Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
    Can you explain what the anti-combo anti-pattern is?
    It’s when something the game is asking you to do interferes with another thing the game is asking you to do in a way that is really frustrating. Games are always asking you to make trade-offs (do you want more offense or more defense?), and those can be hard decisions, but that’s not really what the anti-combo issue is.

    Zileas called it “anti-combo” because it feels like you are being asked to take steps which actively move you away from your desired result. Imagine a fighting game combo, ABC, where A adds 10% damage, and C adds 20% damage, but B removes 10% damage. Sad trombone sound.

    An example we talk about all the time is the vanilla WoW rage model for tanks. You need to take damage to earn rage to do stuff. One of your core rotational buttons was Revenge, which stuns the target. A stunned target isn’t attacking and so isn’t giving you rage. Likewise, warrior tanks stacked dodge and parry, which meant you weren’t taking hits and generating rage. The better you got as a tank by improving your avoidance, the worse you became as a tank by decreasing your rage. (Source)



    StarCrafts - Season 5 Ep22: The Duel
    Another episode of StarCrafts has been released!


  2. #2
    Stay away from my spec bitch!

  3. #3
    5 years and they still post GC tweets

  4. #4
    Very happy with the Frost DK change. Hated the Breath playstyle. Just didnt feel right for me. And very hard to manage in Raid situations.
    Hopefuly I can go back to Machine Gun Frost playstyle. Felt like that was the right fit for a dual-wielding DK

  5. #5
    So how do you even get into the Battle.Net App Beta? its not listed as a beta you can sign up for under your beta preferences in account management.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Decisive The Hallowed View Post
    Very happy with the Frost DK change. Hated the Breath playstyle. Just didnt feel right for me. And very hard to manage in Raid situations.
    Hopefuly I can go back to Machine Gun Frost playstyle. Felt like that was the right fit for a dual-wielding DK
    I'm sorry to tell you just coz we can't use HRW with breath doesent mean it still wont be the better build.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Orisai View Post
    5 years and they still post GC tweets
    Probably because people enjoy reading what he has to say in his posts.
    "May the way of the Hero lead to the Triforce"

    "May the Goddess smile upon you."

    "Hero", is what they've all been saying. This world, it isn't worth the saving."

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Orisai View Post
    5 years and they still post GC tweets
    Maybe if you people would actually read what he says, instead of just bitching that it's there, you'd realize that what he has to say is great insight into the how developers work. It can actually be interesting.

    And if you still don't like it, that is ok, but just scroll past. No reason to complain.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Decisive The Hallowed View Post
    Very happy with the Frost DK change. Hated the Breath playstyle. Just didnt feel right for me. And very hard to manage in Raid situations.
    Hopefuly I can go back to Machine Gun Frost playstyle. Felt like that was the right fit for a dual-wielding DK
    I mean hopefully the make it more viable for you so you can enjoy it. I, personally, would still rather use Breath. I wish that they would consider capping it... as it stands now it will always be a cool down that is dictated by RNG more than skill and that's really unfortunate. It also makes it so that you can't move off of the boss. If it had like a 20 second duration maximum then it would be a lot better. I think the design of a short but powerful Breath is much better than a long Breath and weaker Breath.

  10. #10

    Horde

    Quote Originally Posted by addlemanc View Post
    Maybe if you people would actually read what he says, instead of just bitching that it's there, you'd realize that what he has to say is great insight into the how developers work. It can actually be interesting.

    And if you still don't like it, that is ok, but just scroll past. No reason to complain.
    There is a reason even if you don't like it. Because in this case we can even summon ConcernedApe to tell us about developing a game. He is absolutely a fantastic guy anyway. I get it GC has insights, but he doesn't work with Blizz anymore, and because with your reasoning, we could show any mmo developer tweets and answers. He is working with a moba now, doesn't know anything about Blizz stuff or the future in any projects regarding this matter.

    And for the disclosure I like GC, but I also get the "haters" or simply say, critics' viewpoint.

  11. #11
    terrible changes for frost =/

    putting hrw and bos on the same talent line just nulls both of those choices. It is in fact taking choices away from us.

    I don't understand their reasoning for reducing the time we can keep breath up, seems to me balancing cooldowns / knowing the boss fights and when to use bos was a pretty okay "skill" check and the reward was semi-ok burst dps. It felt rewarding and fun.

    The buffs they have laid out above don't even get close to covering completely destroying breath. They are axing our potential in half to raise up the lower end slightly.

    Not amused.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Kazlehoff View Post
    So how do you even get into the Battle.Net App Beta? its not listed as a beta you can sign up for under your beta preferences in account management.
    You can just enable it in the settings of the app.

  13. #13
    Deleted
    My battlenet actually looks different than both of those images, lol.

  14. #14
    Blizz sucks so bad, they shoudnt change how FRost works to please casuals, instead they should only buff the spec by 30% at least do it can be competitive with other dps specs. This nerf to BoS will only make the class simple to casuals to play.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Quincey View Post
    terrible changes for frost =/

    putting hrw and bos on the same talent line just nulls both of those choices. It is in fact taking choices away from us.

    I don't understand their reasoning for reducing the time we can keep breath up, seems to me balancing cooldowns / knowing the boss fights and when to use bos was a pretty okay "skill" check and the reward was semi-ok burst dps. It felt rewarding and fun.

    The buffs they have laid out above don't even get close to covering completely destroying breath. They are axing our potential in half to raise up the lower end slightly.

    Not amused.
    I mean I'd be fine if Breath was shorter but significantly stronger... but I don't think they'll go that route. It's a little silly that they feel this way. Like... they're putting all of this extra work in to make Breath last a much shorter time but they could have just said "yeah it has a 20 second cap now" and left everything else exactly where it was... >.> This is just making a mess of things because of their hesitance to make Breath have a maximum duration.

    My biggest complaint with Breath is that it doesn't actually feel good to get a longer duration and it only feels bad to get a shorter one. Say like... 1 minute and 20 is your average opening Breath with ring. It doesn't feel good to get that you just feel like you did what is expected of you.. but if bad RNG dictates that you only get a 50 second Breath then you feel like you fucked up regardless of whether or not it was your fault. You feel bad just because the game mechanics dictated you didn't get the right procs at the right time. They really should just fucking cap the damn thing at a reasonable time so we can just hit that time and know we did good.

  16. #16
    Merely a Setback Kaleredar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fabled View Post
    Probably because people enjoy reading what he has to say in his posts.
    I always feel like people are trying to bait some sort of "gotcha" answer out of him to validate their own opinions as to why they think the game sucks now.
    “Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
    Quote Originally Posted by Wells View Post
    Kaleredar is right...
    Words to live by.

  17. #17
    How can I download beta launcher? I want that new look!

  18. #18
    Damn, I have to say I am very happy with them doing some changes to frost spec since it became very boring, but I hope that won't place us even lower in the DPS sims than we are now...

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by emilpor View Post
    Damn, I have to say I am very happy with them doing some changes to frost spec since it became very boring, but I hope that won't place us even lower in the DPS sims than we are now...
    because sims are important right? You do a sim, import it into WoW and just watch the boss die.
    Quote Originally Posted by Nizah View Post
    why so mad bro

  20. #20
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Orisai View Post
    5 years and they still post GC tweets
    Because in the past mmo asked if they should post GC stuff here, and the majority said yes, so...

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