Current issues with Death Knights overall.

[Beefkow]

Update!

Sense you don't have any updates for unholy... (that is my favorite spec )

Keep in mind, i don't exactly want the S5 unholy dks back, nono i am not intending for this to happen:

- Adjust scourge strike to make it cost two runes (like it did back in wotlk), frost and unholy rune, and SS is now purely shadow, and % wep dmg adjusted to balance.

-Festering strike becomes 1 blood rune and works exactly like (wotlk) blood strike except more wep %.

-Necrotic strike has been removed from the game entirely, to compensate blood plague will have a 20% chance of dispelling a HOT effect while it ticks (idk how frost and blood and dark guardian will compensate, but i am focusing on unholy right now).

-Frost has their chillblains and blood with their slow (if they have one), unholy will get desecration, now procs off of SS specifically (with SS costing so much, desecration won't proc as much).

-Icy touch has been scaled to deal the damage is used to deal back in wotlk (2k hits on 35k targets? something like that).

-New passive (slight dps boost) Necrosis: Your auto attacks deal 20% as shadow damage.

-Dark transformation will continue to stack to 5, but once stacks hit 5, the dark transformation effect will happen automatically.

-Bone shield should be baseline for all dks, but reduce charges to maybe 3?

That is all of my thoughts, feedback is appreciated!

[Vereesa]

I feel very strongly that Rolling Blood should be made baseline and Pestilence removed from the game along with the rest of our first tier of talents. We only have 6 tiers and those talents are taking up precious space.

No. Roiling Blood needs to be a choice, if it were rolled straight into Blood Boil Unholy would lose all its AoE disease gaming or be unable to AoE with Blood Boil at all.

[Clash the DK]

No. Roiling Blood needs to be a choice, if it were rolled straight into Blood Boil Unholy would lose all its AoE disease gaming or be unable to AoE with Blood Boil at all.

Wasting a full tier of talents just so that we preserve the Festerblight playstyle would be a huge disservice to the class.

[Raikh]

Wasting a full tier of talents just so that we preserve the Festerblight playstyle would be a huge disservice to the class.

Breaking a playstyle to keep an QoL talent is even more unreasonable, for blood fine, for unholy scrap it.
Pestilence is way better at control, you only get the dmg of weakened blood boil and you don't have to stay in meele range, wohoo, essential. It not only kills festerblight, it kills aoe as you want to have high dmg dots to bomb, canceling them immediately does more bad than good.

[Deleted]

Breaking a playstyle to keep an QoL talent is even more unreasonable, for blood fine, for unholy scrap it.

Why is that fine for blood? I'm not sure I understand.

[Vereesa]

Wasting a full tier of talents just so that we preserve the Festerblight playstyle would be a huge disservice to the class.

I'm not even talking about Festerblight. If Roiling Blood was baseline, diseases would become entirely meaningless for Unholy AoE and that would kill what little playstyle it has for AoE. And I'm not sure it's a 'waste' of a talent tier either.

Edit: That aside, they could alternatively introduce a completely new type of AoE for Unholy, one that didn't rely on Roiling Blood Boil.

[Wrien]

Updated again!

New talent grid (NEW!):

http://mop-talent-grid-maker.appspot...&gridId=663001

Blue = New


Class Changes:

Talent Changes:

- Roling Blood and Unholy Blight has been removed. Pestilence is the way to spread diseases. MoP made it too easy to spread diseases.

- Chillblains has been removed from talents and is now a frost passive. Old Desecration has taken it's place. Chillblains now adds a slow effect to Howling Blast main target, Icy Touch, Frost Feaver (spread through Pestilence) and a root effect to Chains

- Replaced Tier 5 with DPS CD's.

- Plague leech is now a new skill for all specs.

- New Presences:
Death presence: New tank presence. Mostly like what blood is now.
Blood presence: Increases auto-attack damage and critical chance.

- Icy Touch now dispells by default.



The new tank spec. Blood (current) has been split into 2 talent trees. Blood is now dps while Dark Guardian is the tank spec.

Design Idea: A dark guardian who manipulates and corrupts life energy to sustain himself in the face of an enemy onslaught. (current description of blood. Fit's it's new name). The spec is a combination of the current blood spec and a more warlock-like DK.

Key skills:
- Death Strike (unholy and frost rune) same as now. Converts runes into detah runes.
- Dark Strike (death rune) deals shadow damage.
- Life Siphon (runic Power): Deals 1850 to 2150 Shadow damage to an enemy target, healing the caster for 100% of the damage dealt.
- Dark Powers (Mastery): Increases self-healing by x%, and armor by x%
- Bone Shield: same as now
- Death and Decay: same as now
- Crimson Scourge is a blood and Dark Guardian passive skill.
- Soul Shriek: Deals x Shadow damage to all enemies in a 15 yard cone in front of the caster, silencing them for 3 sec.



The "new" dps spec. Blood (current) has been split into 2 talent trees. Blood is now dps while Dark Guardian is the tank spec.

Mostly the same as in Wotlk. healing has been greatly reduced.

design idea: Much like what 2h frost is now, a hard hitting death king dealing physical damage primary. Some new skills has been added. Some (from Wotlk has not been brought back) . Deals heavy damage on auto-attack as well. Doesn't docus much on diseases. physical damage, heavy auto-attacks and dancing rune-weapon defines the blood dps spec.

Key-skills:
- Heart Strike is now the Death Strike of it's time (double-rune damage skill. No longer heals). Hard hitting skill. Around 300% weapon damage.
- Blood Strike is now the aoe-strike (cleave), aoe-part of it is now granted through a passive skill, learned at level x. Same as Heart Strike is now (live)
- Rune Strike: now has a 8 sec CD, damage increased. Making Death Coil the most used Runic Power skill, but making Blood different than Unholy as well. deals 350% weapon damage.
- New passive skill, Armor Piercing: When you use Heart Strike you have a chance to grant armor piercing effect, causing you to ignore 50% armor for 5 sec.
- Crimson Scourge is a blood and Dark Guardian passive skill.
- Death Coil: same as now, + a passive skill to increase it's damage (a little more ranged capabilities).
- Dancing Rune Weapon: same as now
- *MASTERY* Empowered Rune-weapon: Increases auto-attack damage by x%, and the coldown of Dancing Rune Weapon is reduced by x%.




MOP changed frost in a bad way. It made 2h and DW play differently, resulting in 2h becomming a 1-skill spec while DW becomming a Howling Blast spammer. Neither of these are good and there has to be a balance between. Howling Blast shouldn't be the main rune-skill, but should be a viable option to Obliterate, dealing great ranged damage. OIbliterate should be the rune-skill to use at melee-range, but shouldn't be as dominant as it is for 2h frost right now. Frost should be more about dealing frost damage, more than 2h is now, and less than DW is now. Less Obliterate and more frost damage for 2h, more Obliterate and less frost damage for DW. A balance between what 2h and DW is like now. Frost should be based around Frost damage, with Obliterate as a strong secondary skill, primary used to build runic power for Frost Strike, and granting the Rime Proc. Frost relies too much on procs as well at the moment, so i'm trying to find a solution to this as well.

- Might of the Frozen Wastes has been Removed
- Obliterate damage has been increased from 230% (current) to 250% weapon damage. (to make it better than Howling Blast without Rime proc, and better in melee range)
- Frost Strike damage bonus from Threat of Thassarian has been removed
- All melee-skills now hits with off-hand while dual wielding (DW viability)
- Frost Strike damage has been increased from 105% to 160% weapon damage (more frost damage)
- New passive skill: Razorice. Same as glyph, but now works with 2h as well. (more Frost Damage)
- Rime now increases Frost damage by 30% for your next Howling Blast or Icy Touch (more frost-damage based, Cinderglacier)
- Killing Machine now increases critical strike chance of your 2 next Obliterate and Frost Strike by 50% (less random)
- New Skill, Deathchill (1min CD): Empowers your next skill: Howling Blast deals main target damage to all enemies around and applies chillblains slow to all, Icy Touch Dispells 3 magic effects, Chains of Ice roots 3 targets, Frost Strike Stuns the target for 2 sec.




- Unholy Frenzy has been removed (due to new dps-tier).
- Dark Transformation now transforms your pet automaticly at 5 stacks.
- Scourge Strike should be better in a way
- Wandering Plague has been brought back. Dots defines unholy nowdays.

More to come for unholy


More to come...
Please, give me feedback, all constructive criticism is welcome. Tell me what you think of it and what you'd like to change. Some of these changes are probably dumb or OP.

[Raikh]

@asheriah
blood is currently a tank, which means that teh dot dmg is mainly based on vengeance which is pretty much constant, making rolling blood a pure gain for blood and gives better aoe tanking flexibility. While for unholy it can do more damage to your damage than good.

@Wrien
Without saying anything in detail, going back to a more wrath style of the dk isn't helping us in anyway, its merely a change in playstyle which is subjective if thats good or bad, not really getting our gearscaling to a competitive point. Our secondary stats need to boost each other or to diminish very slowly so that their % gain stays consistent for a long time.
I can make a little version of this myself if it is wished for to further explain my point.

[Ikrekot]

Mastery for dark guardian is a bit too strong because none tank mastery work on magic fight. Increased healing from ds work on magic fight too.

[Deleted]

I'd make the new blood dps mastery increase the % of your dmg done by DRW instead of reducing the CD.

[Deleted]

@asheriah
blood is currently a tank, which means that teh dot dmg is mainly based on vengeance which is pretty much constant, making rolling blood a pure gain for blood and gives better aoe tanking flexibility. While for unholy it can do more damage to your damage than good..

Thing is, without Roiling Blood, it's extremely hard to get some snap aggro since outbreak/pestilence don't deal damage.

I agree that it should be a choice, and not made baseline. I can't see that being removed either unless we get something else as a compensation.

[Raikh]

Thing is, without Roiling Blood, it's extremely hard to get some snap aggro since outbreak/pestilence don't deal damage.

I agree that it should be a choice, and not made baseline. I can't see that being removed either unless we get something else as a compensation.

I think we misunterstood each other in that concern, my point was that it should be removed for unholy and being made baseline for blood, not removed completely.

Making it a choice would also be okay, if made in form of a major glyph, talents are strong, they impact your playstyle, give you utility or new spells which are powerful on special situations etc. The whole tier 1 of the dk is just QoL with semi visible benefit aside from plague leeche which sounds cool but is actually weird and can result in a loss for a minor and situational gain which even gets lost on higher ilvls.
Also some classes have felt stronger glyphs than rolling blood/ unholy blight would be.

[Clash the DK]

Breaking a playstyle to keep an QoL talent is even more unreasonable, for blood fine, for unholy scrap it.
Pestilence is way better at control, you only get the dmg of weakened blood boil and you don't have to stay in meele range, wohoo, essential. It not only kills festerblight, it kills aoe as you want to have high dmg dots to bomb, canceling them immediately does more bad than good.

I would argue that DOT damage within the game is too high. This includes Unholy and specifically the Festerblight playstyle. We don't want Unholy to be this niche spec where it only does well when DOTs can be rolled. Being balanced around a baseline Rolling Blood would actually be a good thing for the spec. Now that Festerblight has been brought to light, it will be factored into any balancing of the numbers in the future. So, take that into consideration.

[Deleted]

I think we misunterstood each other in that concern, my point was that it should be removed for unholy and being made baseline for blood, not removed completely.

That's entirely possible, my english isn't very good.

I agree with what you said. If one thing is sure though, is that our talent tree needs to be reworked.

[Dellis0991]

The problem with dks is that I cut thru them like god damn butter in battlegrounds! thats why I don't play dks anymore....

[Raikh]

I would argue that DOT damage within the game is too high. This includes Unholy and specifically the Festerblight playstyle. We don't want Unholy to be this niche spec where it only does well when DOTs can be rolled. Being balanced around a baseline Rolling Blood would actually be a good thing for the spec. Now that Festerblight has been brought to light, it will be factored into any balancing of the numbers in the future. So, take that into consideration.

In what consense is it too high? DoT classes provide variation in playstyle from the classic caster/melee conception and therefore DoTs should provide a good amount of the overall dmg of the respective class and it is a simple but rewarding mechanic to manage DoTs.
Also we don't perfrom siginificantly higher on festerblight bosses than on non festerblight bosses, with excpetion of dmb buffs like Ji-kun or Jin'rokh.
It is a important mechanic to manage dots, giving them much uptime while they're strong, this is for me an important part of the fun i have with unholy.
While that is, there is absolutely no need to roll the dots to infinity, you also can reapply them with the next feather procc to get out more ss instead of fs, the difference is as long as you don't overwrite with less than 80% performance not significant, also it is possible to get stronger dots midfight than in the beginning as theres no guarantee for everything to procc. (that might change though)

I don't have a problem when we are balanced around being able to game our dots accordingly, but id do have a problem with skill being replaced by shere QoL, not even a real dmg gain or a cool utility.
Also it hurts AoE and again i like it more do be able to do high aoe dmg with well placed dots than random hammering blood boil because it has been buffed to compensate for irrelevant dots.
I want to be rewarded for playing well and rolling blood is the exact opposite as it negates everything skillfull you could possibly do with dots in aoe scenarios.

Also we are currently only competitive because of a bug, i slowly lose faith in blizzards tuning as they don't get it anyway, they've proven that more than once, atleast for the dk. So they don't always measure everything into it, i wouldn't wonder if they just say eat that not really our problem mayn people have fun with it. (which would be kind of true, again it is mostly a term of heroic raiding which makes up only a little part of the community)

[Deleted]

The problem with dks is that I cut thru them like god damn butter in battlegrounds! thats why I don't play dks anymore....

I totally agree with this statement.

Even stacking defensive CDs we go down so quick the only "death" in Death knight is our own.

[Kronik85]

If we are going to discuss ideas for a fourth spec then I'd really like to see a ranged DPS spec that used DRW as a sort of satellite that you could use to cast your weapon strikes at range. I've mused on it for a while but I'm not sure how well it could work with our current resource system and if you didn't add a cast time to Death Coil or a channel to DRW then the whole thing might feel really weird and floaty as a ranged and be ridiculously OP in PvP.

Thinking out loud here but maybe add a new version of the Death Coil spell that costs runes and make all Runes into Death Runes as standard, give it a cast too but let us move whilst casting it. You then spend RP on DRW which slowly depletes your RP pool at X a second but during this channel you can use various weapon strikes with your Runes that are high damage so that they feel rewarding to use. This way your punished for moving in PvP and PvE like casters are meant to be.

[Skarssen]

I know this has been discussed Ad nauseam, and Blizzard will never do it, but I would be happy with them removed 2-hand frost and have frost specialize on with 1-hand weapons and frost damage, then bring in a 2nd DPS specialization for blood. 2h frost is already more of a physical damage spec anyway, and I think the mechanism is in place to make blood a physical damage/vampire spec without too much difficulty (buff heart strike single target, remove the up-front self heal from death strike and turn it into a health-leeching DoT, etc). The two frost subspecs just don't seem to be working in the way that TG/SMF work for fury. They are pretty different, and currently 2h frost is just boring. Blood of the North made rune management largely trivial, and killing machine just doesn't matter anymore and you are left with a pretty brain dead spec.

Anyway, I know the blood DPS spec will never happen, I just wish we had a more physical based 2h DPS spec that required some thought and a chance for skilled players to differentiate themselves.

[Jce]

I find it odd that no one has mentioned that Control Undead only works in Icecrown and VERY FEW other places, rendering the spell virtually useless at level cap