Upcoming Death Knight Changes

[Boubouille]

Upcoming Death Knight Changes
The layout of the original post has been slightly changed to make it more readable

We have talked about making some of these changes and wanted to provide more details. You should be able to try these out yourselves on the PTR before they go live.

Our reason for most of these changes should be obvious, but some common themes are:

• Making tanking still rely on cooldowns, but rely on them a little less.
• Make Blood a more attractive spec, and particularly for tanking.
• Chill out some of the defensive capabilities all DKs have in PvP.
• Avoid having to use Death and Decay as an out-of-combat runic power generator.
  

General

• All multi-rune abilities generate 15 runic power.
• New runeforge rune -- Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (two-handed only) now grants 25 Defense and 2% Stamina.
• Many death knight glyphs have been changed. In many cases the negative consequences were removed.
• New death knight sigils are now available, primarily from vendors, including a tanking-oriented sigil.

Blood

• Rune Strike -- damage decreased from 200% to 150% but threat increased to 150% from 100%.
• The healing of Blood Aura, Blood Presence and Death Pact has been doubled.
• Heart Strike – we overhauled this ability. It no longer has a haste debuff but will now be able to strike two targets like a cleave. It still hits for more than Blood Strike, but you can still use Blood Strike if e.g. you don’t want to break CC.
• Bloody Strikes – the bonus damage from Pestilence has been moved here to help Blood AE slightly.
• Vampiric Blood -- in addition to its current effects, also adds 20% health temporarily.
• Will of the Necropolis -- now reduces the damage of any attack that takes the DK below 35% health by 5 /10/15% instead of boosting armor when wounded,
• Dancing Rune Weapon – cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power.

Frost

• Icebound Fortitude – now reduces damage by 20% instead of 50%. The amount of damage reduced increases with bonus Defense (to about 35% for 540 Defense, but it can go higher). The stun immunity is intended to be its primary role in PvP.
• Frost Presence -- bonus armor increased from 60 to 80% and magic damage reduction increased from 5 to 15%. We wanted to reduce the effectiveness of cooldowns but bring up base mitigation to reduce damage spikiness.
• Horn of Winter -- now has no cost and grants 10 runic power in addition to its stat buff, but has a 30 sec cooldown.
• Hungering Cold – cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power.

Unholy

• Anti-Magic Shell -- cooldown lowered to 45 sec from 60 sec.
• Bone Shield -- mitigation reduced from 40% to 20%.
• Corpse Explosion -- damage increased substantially, added 5 sec cooldown, and changed cost to 40 runic power.
• Night of the Dead -- now grants 40/70% passive area spell avoidance to your pet in addition to its current effects.
• Outbreak – this talent no longer receive bonus damage from Pestilence. The bonus from Plague Strike and Blood Boil has been increased slightly.
• Pestilence -- no longer has a 10 sec cooldown.
• Raise Dead -- now split into two spells: Raise Dead now raises a ghoul or pet ghoul (if talented). Raise Ally now raises a fallen party member (at no reagent cost).
• Shadow of Death -- duration reduced from 45 seconds to 25 seconds.
• Unholy Blight – cost reduced from 60 to 40 runic power.

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[Refreshment]

These changes makes me a happy dk.

[LavaDuck]

I like most of the PvE changes. That new runeforge should help DKs reach their defense cap a little quicker. Can probably drop a +defense enchant now. (When it goes live of course)

[Squirralfire]

My favorite has to be the corpse explosion buff!

[Refreshment]

And new sigils! I thought we had enough of those *cough* *cough*

No, but seriously, what were they thinking?

[theomegapoint]

Sexiness.... thats all i have to say.
Now i have a reason to go blood... i missed those little wurms (especially Larry and Jim-Bob) from the old OMG NERF DK!!!!!! beta days.
Also... huzzah Corpse Explosion!

Only one little minor tiny little minor minor tiff. First enchant(ish thing) that scales with gear? And no, I don't include the old armor pen system and executioner. QQ gimme back my 5% tauren racial lulz. On the plus side i can finally use a different rune ~~

[Clefty]

Look like some good changes overall. One thing I still hate is the taunt effect of Army of Dead. That spell is so fun, and would be useful if only we could have the option to turn the taunt effect on or off.

[theomegapoint]

I like most of the PvE changes. That new runeforge should help DKs reach their defense cap a little quicker. Can probably drop a +defense enchant now. (When it goes live of course)

Gasp! Why would you drop a D enchant that will increase your mitigation now for a minor bit of hp?

[Shamb]

mmmh ... CORPSE EXPLOSION BABY !!!

Seriously aside from that IBF nerf which bugs me for pvp the rest seems awesome.
More Incentive to go Blood can only be good as everyone and their mother is Unholy atm. And of course Bone Shield nerfs sucks hairy balls...

Though is it me or they totally forgot that frost existed too ? It only got nerfed more then others as IBF is 18 second duration for Frost DK's ... That's kinda lame since no one is frost, frost dps sucks, frost tanking is less and less popular too. I guess the only ''reason'' to go frost tanking now is because Bone Shield got nerf'ed, but that doesn't give anything to Frost. Weird imo.

[Uuker]

I am an Unholy Tank and I quite like the changes. Thought I would have to respec I guess since some talents received some heavy changes. Also Blood now looks more attractive for me :P
I would love to see new changes in detail (with stats and numbers)

[theomegapoint]

Will Raise Ally be a normal healer-class ress or will it ress a party member for 45 sec as a ghoul?

What's the point of this new change?

It raises them as a ghoul. The point is that some specs (*cough* unholy) felt it more advantageous to rez their own pet, assuming it will stay alive for longer than 45 seconds than to rez another player who will have limited use over a short period of time.
This change removes that little problema.

[Shamb]

Will Raise Ally be a normal healer-class ress or will it ress a party member for 45 sec as a ghoul?

What's the point of this new change?

Raise 45 seconds as a ghoul. The point ? well... now it's gonna be usefull for something instead of being a pathetic feature.

Before that you had the choice between you had to sacrifice your ghoul to raise a player that way which was beyond pointless... Now you can have both, thus it works as a short-timed dps oriented battle res.

[Haskel]

Gasp! Why would you drop a D enchant that will increase your mitigation now for a minor bit of hp?

If 540 defense gives you a ~35% damage reduction (up from 20%), then you're getting about 15% mitigation for 140 defense. This boils down to about 0.1% mitigation per defense. Defense enchants run in the 20ish rating range, meaning dropping a defense enchant means you lose around 0.3% damage reduction on a CD with ~15% uptime. That means a hit that would normally do 6500 damage w/ IBF up will now do 30 less damage. I really doubt IBF will be good reason to stack defense past 540.

[Deleynard]

the shadow of death nerf sucks. its nice to have enough time to kill my gankers after i die then run away so i can rez were they wont find me. and wth would they nerf bone shield?

[Uuker]

Will Raise Ally be a normal healer-class ress or will it ress a party member for 45 sec as a ghoul?

What's the point of this new change?

there were many times when I wanted to raise a ghoul after a wipe but I "rezzed" my party member instead who died very close to the boss. After that we wiped again >.< It chooses automatically the closiest humanoid or an ally corpse. So that's a necessary change.

[miekkagoon]

IBF change sucks
Bone shield lost it usefullness (even tho i dont use it much in lvling XD) they least should have increased the damage bonus
not too big changes on my beloved unholy which i see as good thing

And thank lord for changin corpse E to runicpower eater now my little suicide marrowslicer and all others shall make heaven tremble whit out costing UH rune ^^

Will Raise Ally be a normal healer-class ress or will it ress a party member for 45 sec as a ghoul?

i give penny for anserw to this

[theomegapoint]

IBF change sucks


i give penny for anserw to this

1) IBF was necessary.... melee classes might as well have just turned around and bent over when facing an Unholy DK with BS and IBF up. Trust me, i play both sides of the coin. Being OP is fun, but playing a T7 MS war who can barely dent a green/blue DK is rather sad.

2) Already given, in two different flavours.

[bloodwine77]

it doesn't really look like Frost got any buffs.

I'm going to trust Blizzard that the IBF nerf tradeoff with the Frost Presence buff will result in not much change in my tanking abilities.

At least they didn't touch our Unbreakable Armor.

I'd like to see the changes they have in mind for the glyphs. Hopefully they remove the damage nerf aspect of the Icy Touch glyph.

Unholy and Blood do better DPS, but I've surprisingly find myself liking Frost.

[frozenpatato]

I'm so happy with most of these change ;D

[theomegapoint]

As far as frost not getting many buffs, I think they are not so much buffs to the player tanking as frost, but the player healing the frost tank. Healers hate hate hate hate damage spikes. For those of you that were around when Karazhan was new and exciting (and difficult), remember Prince's phase two crazy ass frenzy? Remember how healers hated that? The changes smooth out Frost's mitigation, making it fit a straight line more than a sine curve (of frustration and death).