Thoughts on Blood DKs in the MoP Beta (including Patch 15589)
Posted 04/15/12 at 1:14 PM by Tyvi
Updated 04/17/12 at 9:23 PM by Tyvi (Now with 50% less typos! (Probably.) Also, apparently Chilblains only has one l in it. Pfft.)
Updated 04/17/12 at 9:23 PM by Tyvi (Now with 50% less typos! (Probably.) Also, apparently Chilblains only has one l in it. Pfft.)
Beta time is always a good time to crash to desktop due to #132 errors post some feedback on where our class is headed. This will be a long post because I want to include every single bit I can think of that applies from everything I have seen in Cata and the current patch (which is 15589). I might do follow up posts once new patches are released and only comment on the changes so this post should work as a good baseline.
Imagine Mists of Pandaria released tomorrow and you just logged on. What did you gain and what did you lose? Here is the list (I'll comment on some of these abilities later in detail but I want to keep it as concise as possible here):
Baseline abilities:
- Death Strike is back to it's pre 4.3 incarnation where it does not heal or trigger Blood Shield unless it connects. Fortunately, it now cannot be parried. It also deals less damage than one Heart Strike now.*
- Heart Strike is pretty much unchanged. The only thing of note is that it deals more damage than Death Strike even on a 1:1 basis.
- Rune Strike now works in all Presences at any time. Damagewise it still is our lowest hitting ability but it's not much less than Death Strike.
- Veteran of the Third War does not grant any bonus Expertise anymore.
- Bone Shield does not cost any Runes anymore. Unfortunately it is still on the GCD.
- Blood Tap has been removed. There is a new talent with that name but it only resembles our old BT remotely. More on that later.
- Death Pact has been removed and is now available as a talent.
- Obliterate and Festering Strike are now Frost and Unholy only respectively. Blood Rites has been adjusted accordingly and now only works with Death Strike.
- Blood Presence now reduces all damage by 10% (crit immunity and +20% Rune speed have been baked in even if the tooltip doesn't show it). (Do not fixate too much on the numbers since I expect they will change, just do note that we got a small compensation because Blade Barrier is gone.)
- Death Coil scaling has been improved, making Lichborne self-healing more effective and powerful.
- Control Undead is new. It works on anything you would expect it to work on (i.e. mobs that are generally flagged to be CCable) and gives you a pet bar with mob specific abilities. Using this ability prevents you from using Raise Dead. Death Pact does not work with this undead mob, either. Vile Spew, however, does work.
- Necrotic Strike now costs a Death Rune instead of an Unholy Rune. Not a huge change for Blood.
- Horn of Winter now increases AP by 10% and lasts for 5 minutes. Abomination's Might has been removed.
- Raise Ally got it's RP cost reduced to 30 and now resurrects the target with more health and mana which is welcome change considering we cannot glyph it to provide 100% health as Druids can.
- Soul Reaper is our new execute ability. It costs 1 Death Rune, has a 6 second CD and hits pretty hard.
- On a Pale Horse is now available to all DKs baseline. Pretty nifty (and who wouldn't want to be on a horse? Yeah, I thought so.)
- Mind Freeze now has a 15 second CD but in return does not cost any RP anymore.
- Symbiosis : Blood gains another tanking cooldown. Currently, it is another Vampiric Blood. Again, don't worry much about the specifics, just note that all tanks gain a tank CD from Symbiosis at (usually) half strength. But more on this later.
- Frost Presence now has Runic Power Mastery baked in (every other Presence is now stuck at 100 RP) and now doubles your RP generation. You can resurrect people out of combat with a DnD+HoW combo now if you use this presence so that is nice.
- Scent of Blood has been reworked. It now gives you 10 RP per white attack that successfully connects and increases your next Death Strike heal by 15%, stacking up to 5 times. Note that you have to use a 2h weapon for this to proc with a 100% chance; anything faster and the proc chance goes down because it uses a PPM system. So no, Dual Wielding is still not any more viable than it is now. Note that SoB is not affected by either Frost Presence nor Conversion and keeps giving you 10 RP per white hit either way.
- Frost Fever and Blood Plague last 30 seconds baseline. FF is not a tanking debuff anymore since the 20% increased attack speed debuff has been removed for all tanks. Scarlet Fever, however, is still around and works with Blood Plague as before.
- Dancing Rune Weapon now copies your abilities without damage penalty - which is awesome. It cannot cast any of new the MoP spells or talents and it's AI is still stupid as hell. The former is likely to get changed as MoP progresses, the latter probably not - which is not awesome. And yes, it is still on the GCD. :/
- Runic Empowerment is now a talent and not baseline anymore. More details below.
- Anti-Magic Shell now generates RP if it absorbs any damage (physical and magical alike).
*When I mention things like "this ability does more/less damage" it's important to note that I do not look at the weapon damage values too closely because they are still changing. What does matter is how much damage our various abilities do relative to each other because that might chance our rotation/priorities.
I'll go into more detail here since the talents are (mostly) new. Review this if you aren't clear on what the abilities do. I will mention things that are not clear from just reading the talents, as well.
Thematically, this is Disease Application Tier, or in short: DAT TIER. As Blood, we once again have a 30 sec CD Outbreak so we have no problem keeping debuffs up in single target scenarios (such as bosses). So what we want from this tier is the AoE application benefit (especially for streaming adds) and/or another alternative to apply diseases if Outbreak is on CD without spending Runes (relevant once we can pull sufficiently fast). If we want to kite mobs, this is also going to influence our choices here (but more on this in Tier 3).
While all of the talents fulfill the AoE criteria, Vile Spew is nigh unusable for anyone but Unholy due to the pet requirement and the horribly steep RP cost (the damage the ability does is also really, really low but that is more of a bonus anyway; if they wanted DKs to have an RP based AoE it would not come through a talent). If Bloodworms could trigger VS or if you are in a dungeon with undead mobs that you can enslave through Control Undead and the RP cost goes down, it might become a viable option for speed runs. But as of right now, I do not recommending speccing this.
Unholy Blight has a nice animation (hey, that stuff is important) and a reasonable CD at 90 seconds. It is great for applying diseases, especially on streaming adds because it costs no RP nor Runes. Additionally, if you spec Chilblains it will snare mobs so that even if they run past you to munch on your healer because you had no resources available to get threat on them, or maybe because the sun was in your eyes while your cat was dancing on keyboard (while it was eating your homework) and you were busy extinguishing the fire in your house, they will not get very far and you will be able to get them back pretty easily. For speed runs, if you time it right, you can use this just as you move to the next pack while your DPS finishes off the now snared pack and you pull another pack that is now freshly diseased. Epic stories will be written about you and your mighty ingenuity and healers will worship the ground you walk on. Or so I heard.
Overall, this is a very good talent and the one I would recommend you to spec 100% of the time if it wasn't for the fact that
Roiling Blood is also very good (See what I did there? Totally awesome lead-in). This talent pretty much frees up the Pestilence keybind but RB is more than just a Pestilence copy that deals damage. Remember, glyphed Blood Boil has a 15 yard range which is very, very convenient to apply diseases with even on stragglers and, more importantly, for kiting purposes in conjunction with Chilblains. RB also allows you to IT one mob and PS another mob instead of having to put both diseases on the same mob so you can Pestilence effectively. Unfortunately you will need to BB twice for both diseases to apply to the whole group because each BB picks a single target to spread diseases from. Additionally the BB damage is applied before the diseases are spread which is a shame; I can live with it of course, but this talent would be even better if damage calculations were done post-Pestilence portion for the bonus damage.
Do note that if you spec this, I advise you to move a tiny bit after a BB because one of the mobs never gets it's diseases refreshed otherwise (if you played a Warrior back when Thunder Clap had a target limit this will sound familiar because you had to move as well to make sure TC would hit different mobs).
Now with the drawbacks out of the way, let's focus on the real strength of this talent: Sustained kiting. Unlike UB, you can kite with RB pretty much indefinitely if you do it right and at the reasonably safe distance of 15 yards if you glyph BB. It should look something like this.
In summary, this tier has two great choices with RB and UB. Unfortunately, VS just isn't there yet to be useful for Blood. Except maybe if you want to humiliate people in duels by having your ghoul vomit in their faces and win. Not that I would ever condone talents to be used in such frivolous manner (if you want to do it, teabag their corpse with the ghoul first, then vomit on them; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with ~style~). Also, someone should really campaign to get the name changed to Ghoul Vomit.
Meet my good friends: Lichborne, AMZ... and Icy Grip.
Thematically, this is the Cooldown... and Icy Grip Tier.
Lichborne has remained unchanged from the Cata version but the fact RP generation (see: Scent of Blood and AMS, above) and Death Coil healing (see: Math, in class) has gone up made this talent go up in power relatively regardless. I probably don't need to say more since everyone who tanked in (early) Cata knows how useful this talent is. This is a great pick if you require another tank CD, moreso because healer mana is supposed to matter again.
Anti-Magic Zone received a small buff due to the fact that it does not cost a Rune to cast anymore and a bigger buff because you can now place AMZ anywhere within 30 yards. Apart from that, you still want to use it for magical damage that comes in big bursts (think Hour of Twilight or Elementium Bolt impact) instead of staggered damage that comes with multiple hits that do relatively small damage. The reason is that the absorb cap on AMZ is still pretty low but you can still reduce any form of damage by 75% regardless of the damage cap if it comes in a single big burst.
Don't forget that nothing is stopping you from using it just on yourself, either. (Preferably on a cleaving boss just so melee is tempted to run in and get themselves killed because HEY SHINY.)
Icy Grip is... well, simply not good. Not only does it not fit the theme of the tier but it doesn't even do the thing it does well (which is snare and mob movement). The most it does is save you one Frost Rune because there is absolutely nothing stopping from just comboing Death Grip with Chains of Ice yourself since DG is off the GCD. Even ignoring this, here is the problem: For IG to be a viable choice the encounter will have to fulfill 3 criteria:
1) You will not want another self-healing CD because the boss is apparently too shy to hit (on) you hard enough for you to be in any kind of danger.
2) There will be very little to no raid damage so AMZ is useless as well because the boss is apparently already hard-pressed enough to gently admonish the tank with fluffy pillows that it just cannot spare any nerve to hit anyone else. Fair enough, not every boss has the confidence of a Kael'thas WHO JUST DID NOT STOP TALKING.
(2b) You don't want to look at the AMZ bubble even though it looks absolutely awesome. You monster.)
3) There is one add which spawns every 25-34 seconds that needs to be snared and gripped back. You will also somehow have no way to save a Frost Rune for it because a guildie dared you to "spam Path of Frost as much as you can, you wuss" (guild dare are serious business, in case you were wondering).
Frankly, there was literally only one encounter in recent memory where Icy Grip could have been useful: Sappers on Warmaster. But since saving a Frost Rune is not hard and the fact that both AMZ and LB are of more use there, it wouldn't get specced there either.
Icy Grip needs to do something we cannot already do anyway (or be ridiculously good at what it does) or it will not be specced. The reason LB is so awesome is because it heals for a ton now and can be combo'd with AMS to be even more powerful. The reason AMZ is so awesome is because we do not have any other raid CD available so being able to actually get one is kind of a big deal. Right now IG is the closest thing to a talent that let's you do something you can already do, except slightly better; just like those "Ability X does +5% more damage" ones that got removed for exactly this reason, if you get my point.
I have no idea what to do with Icy Grip either. I figured maybe it could let you sprint so it would be useful for things like resetting your bleed stacks on Riplimb without the use of a trap/Body and Soul. But really that's for Blizzard to decide.
Either way, I am not terribly heartbroken about it because as Blood I already have 2 great abilities I can pick from which is good enough for me. I just like picking on it so much.
This is one of my favorite tiers. Thematically, this is the CC/Snare Tier. But to me it is the OH-MY-GOD-ARE-THEY-REALLY-GIVING-ME-CHILBLAINS-QUESTIONMARK-EXCLAMATIONMARK tier.
Death's Advance is not a bad talent by itself. I have a feeling this is more of a PvP talent because PvE encounters where you get snared enough for this to be of any use are rare. But I am not willing to discount this just yet because all 3 talents are very situational so if they give us encounters with stunnable and/or snareable adds, who is to say they won't make one where DA would be good? Maybe Blizz should hand out more of those talents that give you a passive benefit when off cooldown and a bigger benefit when used since they look like fun. So in this case, you could add a Sprint mechanic to DA or something.
And to be honest, if I specced this in the current tier I would probably just stand in Hagara's Water Bubble to make use out of it. And if a guildie asked, I'd just say "Because Death's Advance, duh!". Well, atleast until one of the Priest healers snaps and grips me into an Ice Wave just to make a point. Or atleast that would happen if they were able to think of it themselves. Their loss. :V
I addressed this a bit in the Tier 1 commentary but Chilblains just works so well with our other abilities. Having a renewable AoE snare is really good for anything with adds - be it dungeons or raid adds. Is it situational? Yes, it is. But so is every other talent in this tier and all these talents only compete with each other after all. Do not mistake this just for a snare either since the root is very powerful as well. A rooted melee mob cannot hit you after all and this allows us to use CoI as a ghetto stun. If you remember Heroic LK with the (temporarily) enraging Shambler mobs that could dish out the pain then you will probably realize how good this can be. And if you don't remember, you will just have to take my word for it. What could possibly go wrong by doing that, right?
(Just be careful not to root a mob out of range of yourself if someone else is in melee range or they will get whacked instead. Can also be used to troll melee you dislike.)
Asphyxiate is another good talent. It gives us a real stun on 1 min CD and, easy to overlook, removes the Rune cost on Asphyxiate/Strangulate so it's useful even if mobs are not stunnable but interruptable. The only way to improve this talent is to take it off the GCD (*wink wink nudge nudge*). Oh, and maybe make it easier to type. <_<
In summary, another tier with 2 strong choices with Chilblains and Asphyxiate and the 3rd one being a maaaaaaaaaaaybe. It's too early to discount it because all 3 are niche enough to work at some point or another. And there are probably PvP dudes who really like DA, anyway.
Another good tier.
Thematically a Self Healing Tier* which is very much iconic for Blood DKs. Or in short: The "Suck it, DPS specs!" tier.
*yes, I realize you can read that in a very specific, nonflattering way; go away. :V
Death Pact has been significantly improved and made worth a talent point, IMO. At 50% max health every 2 mins this is really good. It doesn't kill your ghoul either and with the reduced Raise Ally CD it can now be up every time you need it. There is just one tiny problem: It is still on the GCD. If this were off the GCD, it would pretty much be perfect. Is being on the GCD going to stop it from being viable? Of course not, but as a defensive CD it really ought to be off the GCD and a new expansion is a good time to do so.
Ah, Death Siphon, I actually like this spell as well. I especially like the bit where it costs Death Runes because it a) allows the spell to be more powerful than if it used a regular Rune and b) as Blood we can plan for it and fit it into our rotation.
I have read many posts where people say that a Blood DK will never use this because the heal would have to outheal half Death Strike and Blood Shield. This is not true and makes the mistake of assuming we use all our Death Runes for survival all the time (the same people usually want to get rid of Blood Rites as well for the same reason). There are scenarios where we can afford to and want to add damage to the boss because not having the boss enrage is more important than not dying. Naturally, if the boss hits very hard then you won't use DSi and spec Death Pact instead. But not every boss is Warmaster or Zon'ozz at his highest stacks. Even they have ramping up damage and windows that allow you to use DSi. (Scent of Blood helps a little with using Death Runes on non-Death Strike abilities, too, but more on this later.)
Anyway, this skill hits pretty hard now (to put this in perspective: it currently hits harder than Heart Strike, our hardest hitting ability) and has a 40 yard range. You really have to play with it to appreciate what a 40 yard range ability can do in terms of pulling speed and ease of picking up mobs. Apart from some raid fights that can make use of the range (Oozes on Yor for example) and allow you to weave DSi's into your rotation, this spell is going to be quite phenomal in speed runs for challenge modes because of the damage/range combo. If there are mobs that take increased damage, even better.
According to MMO's database the healing portion cannot crit (the damage you do on mobs can crit though) and is not flagged for not doing any threat (like Death Strike for example) so this should be great for directing new mobs your way if you still needed convincing.
(It also says it can be cast while dead but the only thing that happened is that it made me feel stupider for even trying this. Just look at that smug treant face.)
This leaves us with Death Conversion. This was a good talent before they butchered the RP generation rate you could have with Conversion up (the problem being here that Frost Presence increases all RP gain by 100% and 2h Frost gaining 30 RP per swing in FP which allowed them to sustain Conversion 24/7 so Blizzard ended up nerfing Conversion instead of adjusting FP and/or 2h Frost). Before that, Conversion already had a huge drawback because the RP you lose through Conversion cannot be converted into Runes through Rune Strike --> RC/BT/RE. So this is a pretty hefty DPS loss and survivability loss (less Death Strikes) for a skill I was primarily using for soloing packs of mobs so I could Heart Strike instead of Death Strike for the added damage/cleave. But right now there is no point in doing so; the other two talents are simply better in every way. Maybe (and this a big maybe) if you skipped on Lichborne and have no use for AMS so you could use it for the RP gain it would be OK - but still, huge DPS loss and requires you to use AMS on top.
Yet another tier with 2 good choices (it's like there is a pattern or something <_<) with Death Pact and Death Siphon. The former is great for hard hitting bosses because of the massive amount of burst healing it can do while the latter is good for added damage while not sacrificing survivability by as much as only using Heart Strike would do.
Conversion unfortunately got overnerfed so I don't think it's worth speccing anymore.
Our Rune Regen Tier. Unlike DPS specs, we will care less about which version gives 2% more Runes/min so I feel we are getting the best deal out of it since we can actually pick the talent we are more comfortable with/enjoy the most (in theory anyway). Obviously there are limits to it, but the proc rates are close enough for it that the deciding factor is actually something else entirely. Anyway, moving on:
Runic Corruption is the same talent Unholy currently has. It is the simplest of the 3 talents and easiest to use properly: All you need is one pair of FU/DD Runes on a 6+ CD before you Rune Strike to get full use out of a proc. On top of things, RC procs stack and increase the +100% Rune regen buff instead of overwriting each other and you can put your Blood Runes on CD with no ill effect: On the contrary, this talent actually looks like the tier that can give us the highest DPS because it speeds up Blood Runes as well.
Runic Empowerment is, if forums are to believed, the devil itself. I don't think I have seen people hate something more since the ending of Mass Effect 3 (if I reopened some wounds, this will cheer you up; ME2/3 spoilers!)
Personally, I am loving this talent on live. It rewards gaming your Runes with more Death Runes but even if you don't game it you can get Death Runes out of it - just less. That is pretty good design. So what is the problem? It doesn't work as well without the Cataclysm version of Blood Tap. RE gives you Runes back one by one which desyncs them very often. While RE is roughly providing you with slightly more Death Strikes as RC does if you care to game it, you have to get 2 procs first to get a single DS out of it. RC simply does not have this problem because the 2 Runes needed for DS come off CD together. Even if over a given time RE and RC pull even (or RE is even slightly better), RC gets to DS more consistently. To give you an example: Even a single RC proc let's you Death Strike 3 seconds earlier than if you had gotten no proc (over a 3 second window, your Runes regen as if 6 seconds passed). A single RE proc will do nothing for you until you get the second proc.
This really should not be the status quo here because RE should be better than RC for the simple reason that it is harder to use. You need to set up your Runes before you can Rune Strike and you already sacrifice some DPS because of the lower Blood Rune regen. There is also a risk of overpooling RP or proccing a Blood Rune by accident so there should be an appropriate reward to go with it. Right now this is not the case.
My suggestion is to either bring back old Blood Tap or have RE turn one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune if you talent it. This way you would still have to game your D/B Runes appropriately so the Death Rune is preferably always off CD when you proc a corresponding Rune with RE. This also helps with the desynced Runes since you got an uneven number of D/F/U Runes so a proc every 8.33 seconds is still salvagable but more frequent procs becomes less useful (because you have to wait for the pair to recharge) so RE doesn't pull miles ahead.
Blood Tap (now the actual MoP talent) has a similar problem that RE does. For the sake of argument, I will differentiate between 2 versions of utilizing BT: First the normal way and second the way to "game" it since this will inevitably happen:
Normal way:
You cannot use it for a Death Strike unless you get all 10 charges. Currently it takes 5 Rune Strikes to do so. While you could technically proc a Death Rune every 5 charges there is no point in doing this because the desynced Rune is not usable for Death Strike and would just sit there unused.
When I imagined this talent, I was quite excited of the possibilities because I had hoped you could save charges during lulls in damage and unload when the damage ramps up. Once again Zon'ozz is a good example here: You can store charges when he doesn't have the damage/haste buff and use them when he does. But here is the problem: it only works once per phase. You will not be able to get in another 5 Rune Strikes and get another BT'd Death Strike because this would take too long.
While in the long term you have a 40% proc chance (which is really not far off of RE for example), in the short term you are highly suspectible to burst once you used your charges on a single Death Strike. This is not good.
The gaming way:
1) Get 6 charges, convert B --> D. You would have to make sure that both your B Runes are on CD but one full FU pair is not (this is the trickiest part to pull off because it requires you to not Death Strike for atleast 8 seconds). Right now this Death Rune stays as long as you do not use it. (3 Rune Strikes used, 1 charge remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
2) Rune Strike four more times to get 9 charges, wait for the burst. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 9 charges remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
3) Wait for all FU pairs to be on CD, use BT once (consume 5 charges). You can now Death Strike with the D Rune from step 1) that you sat on for god know's how long and whichever D Rune proc'd from the FU pairs. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 4 charges remaining, 2 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
4) Rune Strike three more times, get 10 charges, use them. (3+4+3 Rune Strikes used, 0 charges remaining, 4 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
5) You are now at 0 charges and you need to a full 5 Rune Strikes to get another DS or another 3+4+3 RSes to pull this off again. During this step you are the most suspectible to burst.
So both methods of BT have the same problem in the end: Once all charges are used, you need to wait another 5 Rune Strikes to get them back up again. If you game BT, you reduce the amount of RSes needed to 3 for the first time only before you need to set up the whole shebang again. Either way, this only delays the inevitable drought where you wait for 5 Rune Strikes to land and hope nothing happens to you because you are very suspectible to getting bursted down during that phase.
Also, go take a look at the steps again required to game it. Does the effort required look reasonable for the payoff? The answer is no. Too much effort and difficulty to set it up for too little gain. Here is what I meant by comparing it with RE earlier; it shares the completely skewed effort:reward ratio RE has compared to RC while having the same drawback of desynced Runes not doing anything, having a lower overall proc rate than RC to boot AND a a more stringent requirement to use your RP without wasting it (Want to use RS between step 3 and 4? Tough luck, charges are capped!)
If you agree with rewarding difficulty, then I hope you would also agree in this order of effectiveness for the talents: BT (gamed)> RE (gamed) > RC. I would even go as far as putting BT without gaming in front of RC as well because it requires manual input even if not gamed and is still harder to play than RC but I'd like to hear some opinions on this. Do keep in mind that RC also still offers the best DPS potential for Blood.
So, now that this is out of the way, how do we fix BT? One easy way is to make one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune again to cut down the worst case scenario of going without procs to 3 Rune Strikes (5 charges + the D Rune you kept off CD). This would work for both versions of BT (gaming it and normal way).
It would also allow you to skip 1) of the setup to game BT. (Though you are still free to turn in the second B Rune into a temporary D Rune and gain 6 Death Runes. This may look impressive but is nothing we cannot already do with the old Blood Tap and our 2 set tier bonus.)
The other method is to up the amount of stored charges from 10 to 14. Would cut the amount of RSes need to get another DS to 3 as well (14 --> 4 --> 10 charges).
Unless the RE and BT changes happen, RC is most likely going to be my recommended choice for every single possible encounter. It is simply that good. Sustained but even damage? RC. Ramping up damage? RC and plan to use CDs (a single guaranteed DS from BT would not change this). Need more DPS? RC. Standing in Stormwind, looking all Death Knighty? RC.
(It would also help to know who BT was intended for; people who want consistency at the cost of throughput? For people who want a more challenging rotation which in turn is more rewarding? Because right now, it's not doing either very well.)
Anyway, enough about this tier already. :P
An astute follower of the Beta news may have noticed that noone could playtest these changes yet. But never fear, having good imagination is one of my strengths so I'll tell you all you need to know about our
HAPPY FUN OP TIER.
(I will happily ignore the damage values because they are not the reasons we will pick what we pick anyway as tanks and/or fellow griefers.)
Gorefiend's Grasp has a pretty short CD and functions as AoE pull. The fact that it's usable on both hostile and friendly target gives it great versatility. The most obvious use would be to make a mouseover macro and cast it on yourself whenever mobs get away from you. But you can also use it for fun things such as: moving the mobs over to help your co-tank, gripping the mobs to your healer and scaring the shit out of him (if it's a Priest, make sure you refer to this GRAFF I made; not that I am bitter for all the Life Grips I had to endure or anything <_<), interrupting spell casts by moving the mobs mid-casts (i.e. GG the closest mob so the casters in the back get forced into melee), delay mobs reaching you by pulling them back to the furthest mob if applicable so you can perform a tactical retreat. And so on. Combine this with a glyphed DnD that snares and you can put quite some distance between the mobs and yourself.
Remorseless Winter is another Lich King themed spell that can be used as both snare and stun. There really isn't much else to say here because this talent is pretty straightforward but nonetheless very good. A 6 second AoE stun is great, especially since you can avoid getting hit if you really want to while it ticks down through Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight + Chilblains kiting. For that reason alone I expect this to be a good choice for encounters that require kiting.
Desecrated Ground is the obligatory PvP talent... is what I would have said if I wasn't aware of how useful my human racial is even in PvE. Aside from dungeons and raid trash where it is more likely to get stunned, disoriented etc it has been consistently useful in every raiding tier in Cataclysm so far (some examples: Halfus knockdown/stun, snare dispels from MC on Cho'gall/Nefarian, Conclave frost snare, Majordomo's cyclone, Bethilac's snare, Hagara's snare (works as dispel if your healer is asleep/dead/running away from GGed mobs - and yes, that has got to be the best acronym ever)).
Now I do realize that DGr does not include the "Removes all movement impairing effects" bit that PvP trinkets and human racial have which somewhat limits it's usefulness but I do hope this will get added later.
In either case, this looks like the first tier with 3 actual, viable choices. DGr is admittedly niche but I hope that once the snare removal is added in, it will be slightly less niche. And that is only from a PvE PoV anyway. I am sure the PvPers are very happy as it is. :P
As noted previously, there is some nice kiting synergies in the talents right now with Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight in Tier 1, Chilblains in Tier 3, Gorefiend's Grap and Remorseless Winter in Tier 6 and possibly even Conversion (See how Conversion does not get bolded? That's totally deliberate because Conversion is bad and should feel bad.) to heal up while you kite since you can't use RP on anything but Death Coil at range (however, Conversion is still the weakest link here).
I also considered adding Conversion and non-LB specs as having a form of synergy because they didn't pick the only other talent that can convert RP into health with Lichborne. However, LB still has a vastly superior conversion rate than, well, Conversion and it doesn't cut into your RP generation. The fact that the other choices in Tier 5 are so much better than Conversion is making a build that doesn't have LB but does have Conversion very unlikely anyway.
Overall, I'd say DK talents are in a pretty good place. Most talents are useful and will see play in PvE. It is probably easier just to list the ones I am not too happy with: Vile Spew in Tier 1, Icy Grip in Tier 2, Conversion in Tier 4, Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment in Tier 5. Of these talents only Icy Grip has pretty much no chance of getting better just by improving on what it does. That said, except for Tier 5 all tiers have atleast 2 viable choices for Blood so overall I am quite happy with how things worked out.
Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.
I'll just focus on the ones that are useful or have a chance to be useful for Blood if tweaked a little (some glyphs like VB and BS also remain unchanged so there is no need to comment on them either):
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon has the right idea but it's not there yet. Trading damage (or even Parry as it was last patch) for another bonus is good - unless said bonus happens to completely useless, such as increased threat. There are a few ways to make it work (here is just a sample but the intent should be obvious):
1a) -x% parry, +y seconds DRW uptime?
1b) +x% parry, -y seconds DRW uptime?
2) -x% parry, +y damage dealt while DRW is up?
3) -20% parry, +y magic damage reduction?
4) -% parry chance, +increase rune regen (maybe even instantly refreshing some Runes when cast, say 2 Death Runes?)?
5) removing the RP cost, adding a rune cost of 2-3 and reducing the CD to 45 secs (the trade off here would be a Death Strike vs DRW)?
Glyph of Death Coil is interesting but I feel it is currently too costly for the effect. 40 RP is not cheap for something that shields for so little. The glyph currently uses the offensive DC values to calculate for how much it shields; to put things in perspective, a DC heal is roughly 3.5 times the amount of that (~21k damage/shielding at 42k AP, 75k if used on self with Lichborne).
But just to stress the fact: The idea is great, especially since Blood DKs do not bring much of defensive raid utility except potentially AMZ (which, admittedly, is good) so anything that allows us to actually contribute just a bit helps but the DC shield already cannot be used on ourselves or stack so I feel upping the value wouldn't be amiss.
Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell is situational so I'd say this is good. On some fights you want to absorb a single big hit, one some others you want it to last the full 5 seconds to immune debuffs and soak as much RP for as long as possible. Needs to be decided on a case by case basis which is an ideal all glyphs should strive for.
Glyph of Blood Boil, Glyph of Death and Decay and Glyph of Pestilence are pretty much the glyphs you want for kiting duty. It should be obvious as to why.
Glyph of Dark Succor: Not exactly a tanking glyph but I still felt like commenting on the change. It doesn't cost Runes to use anymore and I would suggest making this baseline since it's nothing more than a Victory Rush copy by now. (I imagine it would already be baseline if DKs didn't have so few useful glyphs as it is.)
Also, it doesn't proc if you are in Blood Presence anyway so it's not like it would affect tank balance one way or another.
Glyph of Icy Touch gives us an offensive dispel. This is pretty good since (AFAIK) all dispels are getting a CD in MoP so being able to help out your dispellers is a good option.
Glyph of Presences would indicate a need to swap Presences, presumably to Frost Presence to stack up on RP and back to Blood/Unholy but I don't see this being used in practice (for PvE anyway). Since the RP you retain is not absolute but % based, quick swaps are just not worth it and neither should we encourage it to be.
I would rather see this glyph being redone and adding various Presence benefits, mainly the Runic Power Mastery part that we lost in MoP. Blood is already generating RP faster than on live where you can spec for 130 max RP so it is somewhat backwards to remove it when you need it more, not less. (Just to clarify: the RP carry over from changing Presences would be removed as well if they give us RPM back.)
I also wouldn't mind seeing a Glyph of Necrotic Strike that removes the absorb/damage at the cost of increasing the duration of Slowed Casting in PvE in case you run without a Rogue or Warlock in the raid.
And finally, how about a Glyph of Raise Ally that resurrects the target at full health like the Druid glyph does?
Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.
Most of these glyphs are cosmetic in nature but that's part of their charm.
Glyph of Path of Frost is still my favorite glyph and I'm glad it is still around because I tend to fall from cliffs a lot for no reason at all. Seriously, who would even need this? *cough*
One glyph I'd really like to see again Glyph of Crimson Blood Boil that reverts the Blood Boil animation to the Cata Beta one. It looked really good then and I still don't know why it was taken out. Since it's a personal taste thing, it makes a lot sense to make it a minor glyph. (I wanted to show a screenshot but apparently I don't have one with the old BB animation (because normally people don't just stop to make a screenshot mid-BB unless, I guess <_<) so this video will have to suffice to show the the animation I was referring to.)
I also like Glyph of Geist quite a bit and I hope we either get more choices for Undead minions or a glyph that randomizes your ghoul's model every time you raise him (why yes, I do want my Buckethead Ghoul).
The following part of the post will look like there is a lot to improve with Blood because it tends to focus only on the things that don't quite work yet, so I'll take a moment to review what works really well (and there is quite a few things Blood does extremely well):
Many things work just the same as they do in Cataclysm and to be frank, I was quite scared Blizz would revamp DK tanking again and change everything I fell in love with. But luckily, this did not happen.
Death Strike still works the same, Blood Shield is still improved through Mastery and one big absorb shield so timing it remains crucial (because Death Strike is not just active, but reactive and proactive at the same time; it's a great combo provided bosses don't start 2 shotting us again :P).
We kept our multitude of CDs which is, as GC put it in a recent post, part of the charm of being a Blood DK. Hell, we even got the Rune cost on Bone Shield and who knows, maybe next expansion it will actually be off the GCD.
Either way, assume I am quite happy with whatever I am not mentioning and let's move on:
One of the biggest draws Blood had for me was that it was easy to learn but hard to master. I realize people like to think that of every class they play, even Hunters in full cloth gear like to think they are just misunderstood and we just need to give them "another chance, man!", but for me this was key. Sure, you could randomly Death Strike but that would generally open you up to burst damage while you were tapped out of Runes if you did it on anything that hit hard. And sure, you could let Blade Barrier fall off but you would take more damage. And so on.
Generally, when I die, the first thing I do is at how I timed my CDs and Death Strikes and if there is a way to improve on that (and there usually is always a way to do better); only after that was done would I commence casually mentioning how the solar lights happened to coincide with my point of vision.
I am actually quite happy for the other tanks that also got redesigned with Active Mitigation in mind because it widens the gap between good and bad tanks which gives the good tanks a nice way to differentiate themselves from other tanks of their own class.
That said, is it true that DKs still have a high skill cap in MoP? Yes, they do because CD and DS timing is still there, but unfortunately that is very much it.
This is a picture from 4.2:
I had a tracker for Blade Barrier, Blood Tap and Blood Shield and obviously having to keep the Runes in a specific state to game RE.
But going into MoP we lost Blade Barrier (we lost that one in 4.3 actually but you get my point) which is was another thing to track and help us be better than someone who could not track it. We are also losing Rune gaming as well, what with Runic Corruption looking like the best choice and the Cata version of Blood Tap being removed. I really hope something changes here (like making RE/BT good again) to help with raising the skill cap again.
The introduction of Scent of Blood has made me mildly optimistic because it seems that Blizzard is aware we lack something right now (well, that and SoB is an excellent way to make accuracy stats matter; more on that below). While SoB is on the right track, it is not quite there yet because it does not change how we play one bit.
The only thing that dictates when we Death Strike is the amount of damage we have taken in the last 5 seconds. Generally, DSing after 3 consecutive hits is best (there are some caveats but this is the gist). SoB does not change this because the healing it adds does not interact with the amount of damage we take - which, as mentioned above, is the only thing affecting Death Strike usage (it gives you a slightly higher DS, yes, but the damage we took has a bigger impact on the DS size than the SoB bonus). SoB right now only rewards us for gearing for hit/exp and for being lucky with avoidance RNG: If you avoid enough hits you don't have to DS so your SoB keeps stacking up. But again, this is nothing we can actually influence ourselves.
What SoB needs to make it worth tracking is if you could actually influence the amount of stacks yourself through a mechanic to help it stack or even prevent it from falling off. One way to do this is to make the healing portion of SoB* stack from Heart Strike and/or Rune Strikes but cap it low enough that you want to hold off from HS/RSing too much until you can clear your stacks with a DS. Doing something like this would be engaging and active and would fit right into theme of "easy to learn, hard to master".
(SoB is also a mitigating factor between the two spectrums of high and low DS/min usage since people who achieve less DS/min will be compensated with slightly higher SoB stacks for when they do DS.)
*and only the healing portion; please keep the 10 RP gain to white attacks since that works well as it is.
I just want to stress again that this isn't just me being against making the class easier to pick up for new people. On the contrary, this is a good thing. My problem is that the difficulty at the higher end seems to have gone down instead of remaining where it was in Cata or even going up (hence the whole "hard to master" cliche line :P). I also realize that people may have a different opinion but they can write their own post (preferably with some of this and that.)
First off, read this in case you missed the Exp/Hit rating changes in MoP. If you still want to read stuff that isn't this post (I'M NOT JUDGING), go read this as well. I'll wait. Figuratively speaking, I mean. I am not actually going to wait because this post is already here. Anyway, moving on. <_<
In MoP, all tanks will supposedly require accuracy stats to improve their survivability. Warriors and Druids will need to hit the mob to generate rage (I read that they still get rage on dodge/parry which I assume is a bug) which directly influences how often they can use their active mitigation abilities. Monks and Paladins do not generate Chi and Holy Power respectively if they fail to connect their respective resource generating abilities either so they, too, can hit their active mitigation buttons less often.
As DKs we have Scent of Blood which increases RP gain and average DS size proportionally to how much accuracy stats we have; the more we have, the more RP we gain which directly improves how often we can Death Strike through our RP --> Rune conversion methods (BT, RE or RC). In addition, SoB also affects DS size and while it's not a deciding factor for when we DS it still adds up on average over the course of the fight. Lastly, we also have Outbreak which is on the spell hit table and an Outbreak miss means we lose atleast half a Death Strike (unless you have someone else available to keep up your debuffs).
But most importantly, Death Strike can still miss or be dodged. While the change to make it unparryable was necessary and very much welcome, we still don't want DS to miss if we want to time it with any form of consistency.
With all this in mind, I am expecting most DKs to gear for atleast the hit and exp dodge cap. Personally, I am quite happy to do so because I never liked seeing a quarter of my attacks not land due to inflated boss avoidance values (and to be fair, I would have vastly prefered bosses to lose their bonus parry chance instead but you know what they say about these kind of things).
Currently all tanks but Paladins have two rotations:
1) The offensive rotation that includes spending resources on abilities that do not increase survivability but do damage instead (i.e. Heart Strike with Death Runes, Maul/Heroic Strike with Rage, ThathingwheretheMonkhitsthemobhardbutwhosenameIforgot with Chi)
2) The more traditional defensive rotation that uses resources on survival only (i.e. Death Strike with Death Runes).
I think this is a good thing for the game as well if balanced correctly. The danger here is that you need to balance every tanks' rotation properly or you might end up with something where Tank 1 using his defensive rotation is doing the same (or even more) damage than Tank 2 who is doing his offensive rotation. And Tank 1 is doing this while being more survivable, to boot. Now imagine if Tank 1 decided to shift to his offensive rotation and he would totally blow Tank 2 out of the water.
On live, the difference between a DK using 1 DS vs 2 HS is technically there but the damage gap between both is not big enough so I can understand why HS damage went up while DS damage went down on Beta. However I think this went a little too far; 1 HS outdamaging 1 DS feels wrong. It also widens the gap between the offensive rotation and defensive rotation too much (and remember, both rotations need to be balanced for all tanks, see above). And to be frank, I do miss having a 2 Rune strike that sacrificed long term damage for short term burst capabilities (I could break Rageface's stun in emergencies with Death Strike for example).
And since I haven't mentioned Scent of Blood for atleast 4 paragraphs now: SoB does help us shift into a more offensive rotation because if you cut out a Death Strike or two for more Heart Strikes the subsequent Death Strike will heal for more.
All this said, I am quite excited to dish out some extra damage with our new spells Death Siphon (if specced) and Soul Reaper. To give you some damage numbers:
- Death Strike hits for 21k with 42k AP.
- Heart Strike hits for 24k, also with 42k AP.
- Death Siphon is hitting for 33k damage with 42k AP
- Soul Reaper hits for 6k damage on it's physical portion and 94k shadow damage with the execute portion at 44k AP
(all this was done with a 2000 DPS weapon)
With these numbers, our highest DPS rotation would look like this:
Soul Reaper sub 35% > Heart Strike (2+ targets) > Death Siphon > Heart Strike (single target) > Death Strike
Again, I realize some numbers might change so we shouldn't fixate on them too much but it's not like Death Strike is going to ever outdamage Soul Reaper for example. Or even Death Siphon because of it's unique Death Rune cost.
(That's BFU on top and BFU on bottom)
Since this is related to dealing damage, I might as well mention it here: The order in which the game uses your Runes for single rune abilities is atrocious. While a human player would try to get one pair of Runes on CD so they all cool down together the game consumes them all in a fixed and non-optimal order. Look at the picture above and imagine all Death Runes and Blood Runes have cooled down. If you were to do 6xHeart Strike the game would use both Blood Runes first (which is ok) then both Frost Runes and then finally both Unholy Runes which wastes potential regen time on the bottom FU pair. A human would have picked the 2 Blood Runes, then 1 Frost and 1 Unholy Rune, then another Frost and the final Unholy Rune.
It's time this gets fixed since we have been plagued with this issue since Cata Alpha when our whole runes system got revamped.
I am very happy that we will be able to spec into AMZ and possibly even utilize Glyph of Death Coil to provide the raid with some defensive utility. I think these things combined with Raise Ally put us in a very good position.
My only gripe is with the raid buffs/debuffs we bring. Right now Blood only brings the 10% AP buff with Horn of Winter. Wouldn't it be possible to bring something else like the physical vulnerability debuff? It would fit thematically and would also allow you to give DPS DKs the magical vulnerability debuff on top of things. Would make sense for something that is closest to being a "Magic Knight".
Check out the currently known Symbiosis spells here
All tanks receive an additional tanking CD through Symbiosis (it doesn't even matter who gets what; just that it is a tanking CD). Now you are probably wondering how giving tanks more of the stuff that makes them more... tanky-ish-stuff is a bad thing, right? There are two reasons why the current implementation is not a good thing:
1) You should not rely on Symbiosis to give you another tanking CD and directly influence how well you do for any given encounter. Remember Dark Intent? And how it got removed for MoP because of this exact problem? Symbiosis should not encourage class stacking.
2) This is a boring cop-out. There, I said it. Giving me stuff I already have is not interesting and we already have Icy Grip in case I feel like I want something like that. Symbiosis should give everyone something that is situational enough so it's not always a no-brainer to give it a specific class. There is a reason Symbiosis does not give DPS or healers additional throughput abilities so why are tanks special snowflakes? There are so many abilities you could give tanks without breaking the whole balance that I am rather confused as to why this hasn't happened yet. Dash for a tank? Sure, why not? Intervene/Charge for non-Warriors? Also sure, why not? Death Grip for Bears? Again, yes.
(Hell, I'd take Faerie Fire as well because that way it would actually get applied faster. <_<)
Or my favorite non-tank Symbiosis skill: Growl for Rogues. It allows them to off tank and then go back to DPSing (this is not meant as emergency tanking in this case but as pre-planned role so you can cut out the OT for a given boss encounter where they only tank something for a few seconds like Halfus' adds). Basically the job Cats can do now, Rogues can do in MoP. If you have the choice of a Cat or Resto/Balance Druid giving the Rogue Symbiosis, make sure you make the Cat do it just to rub it in.
Not pictured: The Rogue licking off the Cat's tears for being able to do something Blizz deliberately broke in MoP. Irony is fuuuuuuuuuuun.
Just various stuff I could think of:
Dancing Rune Weapon
Dancing Rune Weapon still has a stupid AI. Most of the time DRW does not stick to the mob I cast it on and decides to walk back to me and "assist" me when that is the last thing I want from it. I would very much prefer if it actually stayed on the mob I cast it on because it allows you to do fun things like Strangulate/Mind Freeze two different mobs or even build ranged threat on a caster.
And the one thing that baffles me the most is that this was actually how things worked in early Cata Beta. DRW would place a debuff on the mob it was casted on and stick on it until the mob died. So why was this changed?
Global crit immunity
Why is this still tied to our Presence when every other tank gets it innately? This talent has bugged out so ridiculously often that this should be reason alone to change it. I would also like the option of swapping to Unholy Presence for the speed buff without risking a crit (you already give up a whole bunch of defenses for swapping) so why can't we get a global -6% crit reduction for speccing Blood?
Strangulate, Bone Shield, Death Pact/Raise Dead and DRW are still on the GCD.
Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Traditionally, all interrupts, survival (and DPS) CDs are off the GCD. And most of ours already are, so why are some excluded at random?
Why are Diseases not ticking the moment they get applied like Rend?
Simple question. Why not? The only drawback is that you can't charge some RP pre-pull on critters by spamming CoI but I'd rather give this up and get instantly ticking diseases in return for some snap AoE threat/damage. I can honestly not think of any reason against this. Can someone else?
Increase Disease durations to 33 seconds
So we do not have to Outbreak exactly every 30 seconds. Sometimes you need to the GCD for something else so having that 3 sec window to reapply diseases is pretty nice.
We were promised new Runeforges in the first Q&A in Cata and I am still hoping this happens. The ones we currently have are mostly bland and boring. Out of all the Runeforges, I'd say Fallen Crusader is best because it is a proc, heals you and increases your Strength. For all intents and purposes the enchant could be a flat +15% Str buff if Blizz wanted to go the boring route - but they didn't. Which is why the existence of Stoneskin Gargoyle, Swordshattering etc. are even more baffling (and that's not counting outliers like this which have no place in the game).
In my opinion, Runeforges should be more than just simple passive stats. Our rune weapons were meant to be something special after all.
So here some sample suggestions:
Spellshattering now increases your duration and absorb cap of your AMS instead of giving you 4% more magical DR. The silence reduction can remain in place.
Swordshattering reduces the CD and increases the duration of your DRW. Disarm reduction stays in place.
Stoneskin Gargoyle increases all healing done and taken by x%. Reduces the CD on IBF or something.
Even if you don't like the examples, the point remains: stuff like +4% parry is boring.
This is actually something I keep reading on the Beta forums quite a bit and frankly this intrigues me. As Blood we are resource constrained so a 1 sec GCD would be pretty fun to play around with. Would also make timing DS slightly easier with the lowered GCD and there is the also the fact that DKs are the only ones who got their mitigation tool on the GCD at all (ShotR for example is actually off the GCD).
I don't feel too strongly either way but I would love to test this in the Beta for sure.
No WoW related post is truly complete without various buzzwords that are there to give the reader the impression that the author knows his stuff. Here they are: Clunky, Bad Design, Archaic, Creepy Sunflower.
Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm just saying what everyone else was thinking it.
Johnson “Tyvi” McJohnson is absolutely not related to the World of Warcraft developers. He wishes he could design UIs for them though, because he is really good at making them.
[top] The new stuff!
[top] Ability changes
Imagine Mists of Pandaria released tomorrow and you just logged on. What did you gain and what did you lose? Here is the list (I'll comment on some of these abilities later in detail but I want to keep it as concise as possible here):
Baseline abilities:
- Death Strike is back to it's pre 4.3 incarnation where it does not heal or trigger Blood Shield unless it connects. Fortunately, it now cannot be parried. It also deals less damage than one Heart Strike now.*
- Heart Strike is pretty much unchanged. The only thing of note is that it deals more damage than Death Strike even on a 1:1 basis.
- Rune Strike now works in all Presences at any time. Damagewise it still is our lowest hitting ability but it's not much less than Death Strike.
- Veteran of the Third War does not grant any bonus Expertise anymore.
- Bone Shield does not cost any Runes anymore. Unfortunately it is still on the GCD.
- Blood Tap has been removed. There is a new talent with that name but it only resembles our old BT remotely. More on that later.
- Death Pact has been removed and is now available as a talent.
- Obliterate and Festering Strike are now Frost and Unholy only respectively. Blood Rites has been adjusted accordingly and now only works with Death Strike.
- Blood Presence now reduces all damage by 10% (crit immunity and +20% Rune speed have been baked in even if the tooltip doesn't show it). (Do not fixate too much on the numbers since I expect they will change, just do note that we got a small compensation because Blade Barrier is gone.)
- Death Coil scaling has been improved, making Lichborne self-healing more effective and powerful.
- Control Undead is new. It works on anything you would expect it to work on (i.e. mobs that are generally flagged to be CCable) and gives you a pet bar with mob specific abilities. Using this ability prevents you from using Raise Dead. Death Pact does not work with this undead mob, either. Vile Spew, however, does work.
- Necrotic Strike now costs a Death Rune instead of an Unholy Rune. Not a huge change for Blood.
- Horn of Winter now increases AP by 10% and lasts for 5 minutes. Abomination's Might has been removed.
- Raise Ally got it's RP cost reduced to 30 and now resurrects the target with more health and mana which is welcome change considering we cannot glyph it to provide 100% health as Druids can.
- Soul Reaper is our new execute ability. It costs 1 Death Rune, has a 6 second CD and hits pretty hard.
- On a Pale Horse is now available to all DKs baseline. Pretty nifty (and who wouldn't want to be on a horse? Yeah, I thought so.)
- Mind Freeze now has a 15 second CD but in return does not cost any RP anymore.
- Symbiosis : Blood gains another tanking cooldown. Currently, it is another Vampiric Blood. Again, don't worry much about the specifics, just note that all tanks gain a tank CD from Symbiosis at (usually) half strength. But more on this later.
- Frost Presence now has Runic Power Mastery baked in (every other Presence is now stuck at 100 RP) and now doubles your RP generation. You can resurrect people out of combat with a DnD+HoW combo now if you use this presence so that is nice.
- Scent of Blood has been reworked. It now gives you 10 RP per white attack that successfully connects and increases your next Death Strike heal by 15%, stacking up to 5 times. Note that you have to use a 2h weapon for this to proc with a 100% chance; anything faster and the proc chance goes down because it uses a PPM system. So no, Dual Wielding is still not any more viable than it is now. Note that SoB is not affected by either Frost Presence nor Conversion and keeps giving you 10 RP per white hit either way.
- Frost Fever and Blood Plague last 30 seconds baseline. FF is not a tanking debuff anymore since the 20% increased attack speed debuff has been removed for all tanks. Scarlet Fever, however, is still around and works with Blood Plague as before.
- Dancing Rune Weapon now copies your abilities without damage penalty - which is awesome. It cannot cast any of new the MoP spells or talents and it's AI is still stupid as hell. The former is likely to get changed as MoP progresses, the latter probably not - which is not awesome. And yes, it is still on the GCD. :/
- Runic Empowerment is now a talent and not baseline anymore. More details below.
- Anti-Magic Shell now generates RP if it absorbs any damage (physical and magical alike).
*When I mention things like "this ability does more/less damage" it's important to note that I do not look at the weapon damage values too closely because they are still changing. What does matter is how much damage our various abilities do relative to each other because that might chance our rotation/priorities.
[top] Talents
I'll go into more detail here since the talents are (mostly) new. Review this if you aren't clear on what the abilities do. I will mention things that are not clear from just reading the talents, as well.
[top] Tier 1 - Roiling Blood, Vile Spew, Unholy Blight
Thematically, this is Disease Application Tier, or in short: DAT TIER. As Blood, we once again have a 30 sec CD Outbreak so we have no problem keeping debuffs up in single target scenarios (such as bosses). So what we want from this tier is the AoE application benefit (especially for streaming adds) and/or another alternative to apply diseases if Outbreak is on CD without spending Runes (relevant once we can pull sufficiently fast). If we want to kite mobs, this is also going to influence our choices here (but more on this in Tier 3).
While all of the talents fulfill the AoE criteria, Vile Spew is nigh unusable for anyone but Unholy due to the pet requirement and the horribly steep RP cost (the damage the ability does is also really, really low but that is more of a bonus anyway; if they wanted DKs to have an RP based AoE it would not come through a talent). If Bloodworms could trigger VS or if you are in a dungeon with undead mobs that you can enslave through Control Undead and the RP cost goes down, it might become a viable option for speed runs. But as of right now, I do not recommending speccing this.
Unholy Blight has a nice animation (hey, that stuff is important) and a reasonable CD at 90 seconds. It is great for applying diseases, especially on streaming adds because it costs no RP nor Runes. Additionally, if you spec Chilblains it will snare mobs so that even if they run past you to munch on your healer because you had no resources available to get threat on them, or maybe because the sun was in your eyes while your cat was dancing on keyboard (while it was eating your homework) and you were busy extinguishing the fire in your house, they will not get very far and you will be able to get them back pretty easily. For speed runs, if you time it right, you can use this just as you move to the next pack while your DPS finishes off the now snared pack and you pull another pack that is now freshly diseased. Epic stories will be written about you and your mighty ingenuity and healers will worship the ground you walk on. Or so I heard.
Overall, this is a very good talent and the one I would recommend you to spec 100% of the time if it wasn't for the fact that
Roiling Blood is also very good (See what I did there? Totally awesome lead-in). This talent pretty much frees up the Pestilence keybind but RB is more than just a Pestilence copy that deals damage. Remember, glyphed Blood Boil has a 15 yard range which is very, very convenient to apply diseases with even on stragglers and, more importantly, for kiting purposes in conjunction with Chilblains. RB also allows you to IT one mob and PS another mob instead of having to put both diseases on the same mob so you can Pestilence effectively. Unfortunately you will need to BB twice for both diseases to apply to the whole group because each BB picks a single target to spread diseases from. Additionally the BB damage is applied before the diseases are spread which is a shame; I can live with it of course, but this talent would be even better if damage calculations were done post-Pestilence portion for the bonus damage.
Do note that if you spec this, I advise you to move a tiny bit after a BB because one of the mobs never gets it's diseases refreshed otherwise (if you played a Warrior back when Thunder Clap had a target limit this will sound familiar because you had to move as well to make sure TC would hit different mobs).
Now with the drawbacks out of the way, let's focus on the real strength of this talent: Sustained kiting. Unlike UB, you can kite with RB pretty much indefinitely if you do it right and at the reasonably safe distance of 15 yards if you glyph BB. It should look something like this.
In summary, this tier has two great choices with RB and UB. Unfortunately, VS just isn't there yet to be useful for Blood. Except maybe if you want to humiliate people in duels by having your ghoul vomit in their faces and win. Not that I would ever condone talents to be used in such frivolous manner (if you want to do it, teabag their corpse with the ghoul first, then vomit on them; if it's worth doing, it's worth doing with ~style~). Also, someone should really campaign to get the name changed to Ghoul Vomit.
[top] Tier 2 - Lichborne, Anti-Magic Zone, Icy Grip
Meet my good friends: Lichborne, AMZ... and Icy Grip.
Thematically, this is the Cooldown... and Icy Grip Tier.
Lichborne has remained unchanged from the Cata version but the fact RP generation (see: Scent of Blood and AMS, above) and Death Coil healing (see: Math, in class) has gone up made this talent go up in power relatively regardless. I probably don't need to say more since everyone who tanked in (early) Cata knows how useful this talent is. This is a great pick if you require another tank CD, moreso because healer mana is supposed to matter again.
Anti-Magic Zone received a small buff due to the fact that it does not cost a Rune to cast anymore and a bigger buff because you can now place AMZ anywhere within 30 yards. Apart from that, you still want to use it for magical damage that comes in big bursts (think Hour of Twilight or Elementium Bolt impact) instead of staggered damage that comes with multiple hits that do relatively small damage. The reason is that the absorb cap on AMZ is still pretty low but you can still reduce any form of damage by 75% regardless of the damage cap if it comes in a single big burst.
Don't forget that nothing is stopping you from using it just on yourself, either. (Preferably on a cleaving boss just so melee is tempted to run in and get themselves killed because HEY SHINY.)
Icy Grip is... well, simply not good. Not only does it not fit the theme of the tier but it doesn't even do the thing it does well (which is snare and mob movement). The most it does is save you one Frost Rune because there is absolutely nothing stopping from just comboing Death Grip with Chains of Ice yourself since DG is off the GCD. Even ignoring this, here is the problem: For IG to be a viable choice the encounter will have to fulfill 3 criteria:
1) You will not want another self-healing CD because the boss is apparently too shy to hit (on) you hard enough for you to be in any kind of danger.
2) There will be very little to no raid damage so AMZ is useless as well because the boss is apparently already hard-pressed enough to gently admonish the tank with fluffy pillows that it just cannot spare any nerve to hit anyone else. Fair enough, not every boss has the confidence of a Kael'thas WHO JUST DID NOT STOP TALKING.
(2b) You don't want to look at the AMZ bubble even though it looks absolutely awesome. You monster.)
3) There is one add which spawns every 25-34 seconds that needs to be snared and gripped back. You will also somehow have no way to save a Frost Rune for it because a guildie dared you to "spam Path of Frost as much as you can, you wuss" (guild dare are serious business, in case you were wondering).
Frankly, there was literally only one encounter in recent memory where Icy Grip could have been useful: Sappers on Warmaster. But since saving a Frost Rune is not hard and the fact that both AMZ and LB are of more use there, it wouldn't get specced there either.
Icy Grip needs to do something we cannot already do anyway (or be ridiculously good at what it does) or it will not be specced. The reason LB is so awesome is because it heals for a ton now and can be combo'd with AMS to be even more powerful. The reason AMZ is so awesome is because we do not have any other raid CD available so being able to actually get one is kind of a big deal. Right now IG is the closest thing to a talent that let's you do something you can already do, except slightly better; just like those "Ability X does +5% more damage" ones that got removed for exactly this reason, if you get my point.
I have no idea what to do with Icy Grip either. I figured maybe it could let you sprint so it would be useful for things like resetting your bleed stacks on Riplimb without the use of a trap/Body and Soul. But really that's for Blizzard to decide.
Either way, I am not terribly heartbroken about it because as Blood I already have 2 great abilities I can pick from which is good enough for me. I just like picking on it so much.
[top] Tier 3 - Death's Advance, Chilblains, Asphyxiate
This is one of my favorite tiers. Thematically, this is the CC/Snare Tier. But to me it is the OH-MY-GOD-ARE-THEY-REALLY-GIVING-ME-CHILBLAINS-QUESTIONMARK-EXCLAMATIONMARK tier.
Death's Advance is not a bad talent by itself. I have a feeling this is more of a PvP talent because PvE encounters where you get snared enough for this to be of any use are rare. But I am not willing to discount this just yet because all 3 talents are very situational so if they give us encounters with stunnable and/or snareable adds, who is to say they won't make one where DA would be good? Maybe Blizz should hand out more of those talents that give you a passive benefit when off cooldown and a bigger benefit when used since they look like fun. So in this case, you could add a Sprint mechanic to DA or something.
And to be honest, if I specced this in the current tier I would probably just stand in Hagara's Water Bubble to make use out of it. And if a guildie asked, I'd just say "Because Death's Advance, duh!". Well, atleast until one of the Priest healers snaps and grips me into an Ice Wave just to make a point. Or atleast that would happen if they were able to think of it themselves. Their loss. :V
I addressed this a bit in the Tier 1 commentary but Chilblains just works so well with our other abilities. Having a renewable AoE snare is really good for anything with adds - be it dungeons or raid adds. Is it situational? Yes, it is. But so is every other talent in this tier and all these talents only compete with each other after all. Do not mistake this just for a snare either since the root is very powerful as well. A rooted melee mob cannot hit you after all and this allows us to use CoI as a ghetto stun. If you remember Heroic LK with the (temporarily) enraging Shambler mobs that could dish out the pain then you will probably realize how good this can be. And if you don't remember, you will just have to take my word for it. What could possibly go wrong by doing that, right?
(Just be careful not to root a mob out of range of yourself if someone else is in melee range or they will get whacked instead. Can also be used to troll melee you dislike.)
Asphyxiate is another good talent. It gives us a real stun on 1 min CD and, easy to overlook, removes the Rune cost on Asphyxiate/Strangulate so it's useful even if mobs are not stunnable but interruptable. The only way to improve this talent is to take it off the GCD (*wink wink nudge nudge*). Oh, and maybe make it easier to type. <_<
In summary, another tier with 2 strong choices with Chilblains and Asphyxiate and the 3rd one being a maaaaaaaaaaaybe. It's too early to discount it because all 3 are niche enough to work at some point or another. And there are probably PvP dudes who really like DA, anyway.
[top] Tier 4 - Death Pact, Death Siphon, Conversion
Another good tier.
Thematically a Self Healing Tier* which is very much iconic for Blood DKs. Or in short: The "Suck it, DPS specs!" tier.
*yes, I realize you can read that in a very specific, nonflattering way; go away. :V
Death Pact has been significantly improved and made worth a talent point, IMO. At 50% max health every 2 mins this is really good. It doesn't kill your ghoul either and with the reduced Raise Ally CD it can now be up every time you need it. There is just one tiny problem: It is still on the GCD. If this were off the GCD, it would pretty much be perfect. Is being on the GCD going to stop it from being viable? Of course not, but as a defensive CD it really ought to be off the GCD and a new expansion is a good time to do so.
Ah, Death Siphon, I actually like this spell as well. I especially like the bit where it costs Death Runes because it a) allows the spell to be more powerful than if it used a regular Rune and b) as Blood we can plan for it and fit it into our rotation.
I have read many posts where people say that a Blood DK will never use this because the heal would have to outheal half Death Strike and Blood Shield. This is not true and makes the mistake of assuming we use all our Death Runes for survival all the time (the same people usually want to get rid of Blood Rites as well for the same reason). There are scenarios where we can afford to and want to add damage to the boss because not having the boss enrage is more important than not dying. Naturally, if the boss hits very hard then you won't use DSi and spec Death Pact instead. But not every boss is Warmaster or Zon'ozz at his highest stacks. Even they have ramping up damage and windows that allow you to use DSi. (Scent of Blood helps a little with using Death Runes on non-Death Strike abilities, too, but more on this later.)
Anyway, this skill hits pretty hard now (to put this in perspective: it currently hits harder than Heart Strike, our hardest hitting ability) and has a 40 yard range. You really have to play with it to appreciate what a 40 yard range ability can do in terms of pulling speed and ease of picking up mobs. Apart from some raid fights that can make use of the range (Oozes on Yor for example) and allow you to weave DSi's into your rotation, this spell is going to be quite phenomal in speed runs for challenge modes because of the damage/range combo. If there are mobs that take increased damage, even better.
According to MMO's database the healing portion cannot crit (the damage you do on mobs can crit though) and is not flagged for not doing any threat (like Death Strike for example) so this should be great for directing new mobs your way if you still needed convincing.
(It also says it can be cast while dead but the only thing that happened is that it made me feel stupider for even trying this. Just look at that smug treant face.
)This leaves us with Death Conversion. This was a good talent before they butchered the RP generation rate you could have with Conversion up (the problem being here that Frost Presence increases all RP gain by 100% and 2h Frost gaining 30 RP per swing in FP which allowed them to sustain Conversion 24/7 so Blizzard ended up nerfing Conversion instead of adjusting FP and/or 2h Frost). Before that, Conversion already had a huge drawback because the RP you lose through Conversion cannot be converted into Runes through Rune Strike --> RC/BT/RE. So this is a pretty hefty DPS loss and survivability loss (less Death Strikes) for a skill I was primarily using for soloing packs of mobs so I could Heart Strike instead of Death Strike for the added damage/cleave. But right now there is no point in doing so; the other two talents are simply better in every way. Maybe (and this a big maybe) if you skipped on Lichborne and have no use for AMS so you could use it for the RP gain it would be OK - but still, huge DPS loss and requires you to use AMS on top.
Yet another tier with 2 good choices (it's like there is a pattern or something <_<) with Death Pact and Death Siphon. The former is great for hard hitting bosses because of the massive amount of burst healing it can do while the latter is good for added damage while not sacrificing survivability by as much as only using Heart Strike would do.
Conversion unfortunately got overnerfed so I don't think it's worth speccing anymore.
[top] Tier 5 - Blood Tap, Runic Empowerment, Runic Corruption
Our Rune Regen Tier. Unlike DPS specs, we will care less about which version gives 2% more Runes/min so I feel we are getting the best deal out of it since we can actually pick the talent we are more comfortable with/enjoy the most (in theory anyway). Obviously there are limits to it, but the proc rates are close enough for it that the deciding factor is actually something else entirely. Anyway, moving on:
Runic Corruption is the same talent Unholy currently has. It is the simplest of the 3 talents and easiest to use properly: All you need is one pair of FU/DD Runes on a 6+ CD before you Rune Strike to get full use out of a proc. On top of things, RC procs stack and increase the +100% Rune regen buff instead of overwriting each other and you can put your Blood Runes on CD with no ill effect: On the contrary, this talent actually looks like the tier that can give us the highest DPS because it speeds up Blood Runes as well.
Runic Empowerment is, if forums are to believed, the devil itself. I don't think I have seen people hate something more since the ending of Mass Effect 3 (if I reopened some wounds, this will cheer you up; ME2/3 spoilers!)
Personally, I am loving this talent on live. It rewards gaming your Runes with more Death Runes but even if you don't game it you can get Death Runes out of it - just less. That is pretty good design. So what is the problem? It doesn't work as well without the Cataclysm version of Blood Tap. RE gives you Runes back one by one which desyncs them very often. While RE is roughly providing you with slightly more Death Strikes as RC does if you care to game it, you have to get 2 procs first to get a single DS out of it. RC simply does not have this problem because the 2 Runes needed for DS come off CD together. Even if over a given time RE and RC pull even (or RE is even slightly better), RC gets to DS more consistently. To give you an example: Even a single RC proc let's you Death Strike 3 seconds earlier than if you had gotten no proc (over a 3 second window, your Runes regen as if 6 seconds passed). A single RE proc will do nothing for you until you get the second proc.
This really should not be the status quo here because RE should be better than RC for the simple reason that it is harder to use. You need to set up your Runes before you can Rune Strike and you already sacrifice some DPS because of the lower Blood Rune regen. There is also a risk of overpooling RP or proccing a Blood Rune by accident so there should be an appropriate reward to go with it. Right now this is not the case.
My suggestion is to either bring back old Blood Tap or have RE turn one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune if you talent it. This way you would still have to game your D/B Runes appropriately so the Death Rune is preferably always off CD when you proc a corresponding Rune with RE. This also helps with the desynced Runes since you got an uneven number of D/F/U Runes so a proc every 8.33 seconds is still salvagable but more frequent procs becomes less useful (because you have to wait for the pair to recharge) so RE doesn't pull miles ahead.
Blood Tap (now the actual MoP talent) has a similar problem that RE does. For the sake of argument, I will differentiate between 2 versions of utilizing BT: First the normal way and second the way to "game" it since this will inevitably happen:
Normal way:
You cannot use it for a Death Strike unless you get all 10 charges. Currently it takes 5 Rune Strikes to do so. While you could technically proc a Death Rune every 5 charges there is no point in doing this because the desynced Rune is not usable for Death Strike and would just sit there unused.
When I imagined this talent, I was quite excited of the possibilities because I had hoped you could save charges during lulls in damage and unload when the damage ramps up. Once again Zon'ozz is a good example here: You can store charges when he doesn't have the damage/haste buff and use them when he does. But here is the problem: it only works once per phase. You will not be able to get in another 5 Rune Strikes and get another BT'd Death Strike because this would take too long.
While in the long term you have a 40% proc chance (which is really not far off of RE for example), in the short term you are highly suspectible to burst once you used your charges on a single Death Strike. This is not good.
The gaming way:
1) Get 6 charges, convert B --> D. You would have to make sure that both your B Runes are on CD but one full FU pair is not (this is the trickiest part to pull off because it requires you to not Death Strike for atleast 8 seconds). Right now this Death Rune stays as long as you do not use it. (3 Rune Strikes used, 1 charge remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
2) Rune Strike four more times to get 9 charges, wait for the burst. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 9 charges remaining, 1 Death Rune gained.)
3) Wait for all FU pairs to be on CD, use BT once (consume 5 charges). You can now Death Strike with the D Rune from step 1) that you sat on for god know's how long and whichever D Rune proc'd from the FU pairs. (3+4 Rune Strikes used, 4 charges remaining, 2 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
4) Rune Strike three more times, get 10 charges, use them. (3+4+3 Rune Strikes used, 0 charges remaining, 4 Death Runes gained and consumed.)
5) You are now at 0 charges and you need to a full 5 Rune Strikes to get another DS or another 3+4+3 RSes to pull this off again. During this step you are the most suspectible to burst.
So both methods of BT have the same problem in the end: Once all charges are used, you need to wait another 5 Rune Strikes to get them back up again. If you game BT, you reduce the amount of RSes needed to 3 for the first time only before you need to set up the whole shebang again. Either way, this only delays the inevitable drought where you wait for 5 Rune Strikes to land and hope nothing happens to you because you are very suspectible to getting bursted down during that phase.
Also, go take a look at the steps again required to game it. Does the effort required look reasonable for the payoff? The answer is no. Too much effort and difficulty to set it up for too little gain. Here is what I meant by comparing it with RE earlier; it shares the completely skewed effort:reward ratio RE has compared to RC while having the same drawback of desynced Runes not doing anything, having a lower overall proc rate than RC to boot AND a a more stringent requirement to use your RP without wasting it (Want to use RS between step 3 and 4? Tough luck, charges are capped!)
If you agree with rewarding difficulty, then I hope you would also agree in this order of effectiveness for the talents: BT (gamed)> RE (gamed) > RC. I would even go as far as putting BT without gaming in front of RC as well because it requires manual input even if not gamed and is still harder to play than RC but I'd like to hear some opinions on this. Do keep in mind that RC also still offers the best DPS potential for Blood.
So, now that this is out of the way, how do we fix BT? One easy way is to make one of the Blood Runes into a permanent Death Rune again to cut down the worst case scenario of going without procs to 3 Rune Strikes (5 charges + the D Rune you kept off CD). This would work for both versions of BT (gaming it and normal way).
It would also allow you to skip 1) of the setup to game BT. (Though you are still free to turn in the second B Rune into a temporary D Rune and gain 6 Death Runes. This may look impressive but is nothing we cannot already do with the old Blood Tap and our 2 set tier bonus.)
The other method is to up the amount of stored charges from 10 to 14. Would cut the amount of RSes need to get another DS to 3 as well (14 --> 4 --> 10 charges).
Unless the RE and BT changes happen, RC is most likely going to be my recommended choice for every single possible encounter. It is simply that good. Sustained but even damage? RC. Ramping up damage? RC and plan to use CDs (a single guaranteed DS from BT would not change this). Need more DPS? RC. Standing in Stormwind, looking all Death Knighty? RC.
(It would also help to know who BT was intended for; people who want consistency at the cost of throughput? For people who want a more challenging rotation which in turn is more rewarding? Because right now, it's not doing either very well.)
Anyway, enough about this tier already. :P
[top] Tier 6 - Gorefiend's Grasp, Remorseless Winter, Desecrated Ground
An astute follower of the Beta news may have noticed that noone could playtest these changes yet. But never fear, having good imagination is one of my strengths so I'll tell you all you need to know about our
HAPPY FUN OP TIER.
(I will happily ignore the damage values because they are not the reasons we will pick what we pick anyway as tanks and/or fellow griefers.)
Gorefiend's Grasp has a pretty short CD and functions as AoE pull. The fact that it's usable on both hostile and friendly target gives it great versatility. The most obvious use would be to make a mouseover macro and cast it on yourself whenever mobs get away from you. But you can also use it for fun things such as: moving the mobs over to help your co-tank, gripping the mobs to your healer and scaring the shit out of him (if it's a Priest, make sure you refer to this GRAFF I made; not that I am bitter for all the Life Grips I had to endure or anything <_<), interrupting spell casts by moving the mobs mid-casts (i.e. GG the closest mob so the casters in the back get forced into melee), delay mobs reaching you by pulling them back to the furthest mob if applicable so you can perform a tactical retreat. And so on. Combine this with a glyphed DnD that snares and you can put quite some distance between the mobs and yourself.
Remorseless Winter is another Lich King themed spell that can be used as both snare and stun. There really isn't much else to say here because this talent is pretty straightforward but nonetheless very good. A 6 second AoE stun is great, especially since you can avoid getting hit if you really want to while it ticks down through Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight + Chilblains kiting. For that reason alone I expect this to be a good choice for encounters that require kiting.
Desecrated Ground is the obligatory PvP talent... is what I would have said if I wasn't aware of how useful my human racial is even in PvE. Aside from dungeons and raid trash where it is more likely to get stunned, disoriented etc it has been consistently useful in every raiding tier in Cataclysm so far (some examples: Halfus knockdown/stun, snare dispels from MC on Cho'gall/Nefarian, Conclave frost snare, Majordomo's cyclone, Bethilac's snare, Hagara's snare (works as dispel if your healer is asleep/dead/running away from GGed mobs - and yes, that has got to be the best acronym ever)).
Now I do realize that DGr does not include the "Removes all movement impairing effects" bit that PvP trinkets and human racial have which somewhat limits it's usefulness but I do hope this will get added later.
In either case, this looks like the first tier with 3 actual, viable choices. DGr is admittedly niche but I hope that once the snare removal is added in, it will be slightly less niche. And that is only from a PvE PoV anyway. I am sure the PvPers are very happy as it is. :P
[top] Talent Synergies
As noted previously, there is some nice kiting synergies in the talents right now with Roiling Blood/Unholy Blight in Tier 1, Chilblains in Tier 3, Gorefiend's Grap and Remorseless Winter in Tier 6 and possibly even Conversion (See how Conversion does not get bolded? That's totally deliberate because Conversion is bad and should feel bad.) to heal up while you kite since you can't use RP on anything but Death Coil at range (however, Conversion is still the weakest link here).
I also considered adding Conversion and non-LB specs as having a form of synergy because they didn't pick the only other talent that can convert RP into health with Lichborne. However, LB still has a vastly superior conversion rate than, well, Conversion and it doesn't cut into your RP generation. The fact that the other choices in Tier 5 are so much better than Conversion is making a build that doesn't have LB but does have Conversion very unlikely anyway.
[top] Summary
Overall, I'd say DK talents are in a pretty good place. Most talents are useful and will see play in PvE. It is probably easier just to list the ones I am not too happy with: Vile Spew in Tier 1, Icy Grip in Tier 2, Conversion in Tier 4, Blood Tap and Runic Empowerment in Tier 5. Of these talents only Icy Grip has pretty much no chance of getting better just by improving on what it does. That said, except for Tier 5 all tiers have atleast 2 viable choices for Blood so overall I am quite happy with how things worked out.
[top] Glyphs
[top] Majors
Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.
I'll just focus on the ones that are useful or have a chance to be useful for Blood if tweaked a little (some glyphs like VB and BS also remain unchanged so there is no need to comment on them either):
Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon has the right idea but it's not there yet. Trading damage (or even Parry as it was last patch) for another bonus is good - unless said bonus happens to completely useless, such as increased threat. There are a few ways to make it work (here is just a sample but the intent should be obvious):
1a) -x% parry, +y seconds DRW uptime?
1b) +x% parry, -y seconds DRW uptime?
2) -x% parry, +y damage dealt while DRW is up?
3) -20% parry, +y magic damage reduction?
4) -% parry chance, +increase rune regen (maybe even instantly refreshing some Runes when cast, say 2 Death Runes?)?
5) removing the RP cost, adding a rune cost of 2-3 and reducing the CD to 45 secs (the trade off here would be a Death Strike vs DRW)?
Glyph of Death Coil is interesting but I feel it is currently too costly for the effect. 40 RP is not cheap for something that shields for so little. The glyph currently uses the offensive DC values to calculate for how much it shields; to put things in perspective, a DC heal is roughly 3.5 times the amount of that (~21k damage/shielding at 42k AP, 75k if used on self with Lichborne).
But just to stress the fact: The idea is great, especially since Blood DKs do not bring much of defensive raid utility except potentially AMZ (which, admittedly, is good) so anything that allows us to actually contribute just a bit helps but the DC shield already cannot be used on ourselves or stack so I feel upping the value wouldn't be amiss.
Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell is situational so I'd say this is good. On some fights you want to absorb a single big hit, one some others you want it to last the full 5 seconds to immune debuffs and soak as much RP for as long as possible. Needs to be decided on a case by case basis which is an ideal all glyphs should strive for.
Glyph of Blood Boil, Glyph of Death and Decay and Glyph of Pestilence are pretty much the glyphs you want for kiting duty. It should be obvious as to why.
Glyph of Dark Succor: Not exactly a tanking glyph but I still felt like commenting on the change. It doesn't cost Runes to use anymore and I would suggest making this baseline since it's nothing more than a Victory Rush copy by now. (I imagine it would already be baseline if DKs didn't have so few useful glyphs as it is.)
Also, it doesn't proc if you are in Blood Presence anyway so it's not like it would affect tank balance one way or another.
Glyph of Icy Touch gives us an offensive dispel. This is pretty good since (AFAIK) all dispels are getting a CD in MoP so being able to help out your dispellers is a good option.
Glyph of Presences would indicate a need to swap Presences, presumably to Frost Presence to stack up on RP and back to Blood/Unholy but I don't see this being used in practice (for PvE anyway). Since the RP you retain is not absolute but % based, quick swaps are just not worth it and neither should we encourage it to be.
I would rather see this glyph being redone and adding various Presence benefits, mainly the Runic Power Mastery part that we lost in MoP. Blood is already generating RP faster than on live where you can spec for 130 max RP so it is somewhat backwards to remove it when you need it more, not less. (Just to clarify: the RP carry over from changing Presences would be removed as well if they give us RPM back.)
I also wouldn't mind seeing a Glyph of Necrotic Strike that removes the absorb/damage at the cost of increasing the duration of Slowed Casting in PvE in case you run without a Rogue or Warlock in the raid.
And finally, how about a Glyph of Raise Ally that resurrects the target at full health like the Druid glyph does?
[top] Minors
Here is a list of available Major Glyphs right now.
Most of these glyphs are cosmetic in nature but that's part of their charm.
Glyph of Path of Frost is still my favorite glyph and I'm glad it is still around because I tend to fall from cliffs a lot for no reason at all. Seriously, who would even need this? *cough*
One glyph I'd really like to see again Glyph of Crimson Blood Boil that reverts the Blood Boil animation to the Cata Beta one. It looked really good then and I still don't know why it was taken out. Since it's a personal taste thing, it makes a lot sense to make it a minor glyph. (I wanted to show a screenshot but apparently I don't have one with the old BB animation (because normally people don't just stop to make a screenshot mid-BB unless, I guess <_<) so this video will have to suffice to show the the animation I was referring to.)
I also like Glyph of Geist quite a bit and I hope we either get more choices for Undead minions or a glyph that randomizes your ghoul's model every time you raise him (why yes, I do want my Buckethead Ghoul).
[top] Blood gameplay in MoP
[top] The Good Stuff (tm)
The following part of the post will look like there is a lot to improve with Blood because it tends to focus only on the things that don't quite work yet, so I'll take a moment to review what works really well (and there is quite a few things Blood does extremely well):
Many things work just the same as they do in Cataclysm and to be frank, I was quite scared Blizz would revamp DK tanking again and change everything I fell in love with. But luckily, this did not happen.
Death Strike still works the same, Blood Shield is still improved through Mastery and one big absorb shield so timing it remains crucial (because Death Strike is not just active, but reactive and proactive at the same time; it's a great combo provided bosses don't start 2 shotting us again :P).
We kept our multitude of CDs which is, as GC put it in a recent post, part of the charm of being a Blood DK. Hell, we even got the Rune cost on Bone Shield and who knows, maybe next expansion it will actually be off the GCD.
Either way, assume I am quite happy with whatever I am not mentioning and let's move on:
[top] Easy to learn, hard to master?
One of the biggest draws Blood had for me was that it was easy to learn but hard to master. I realize people like to think that of every class they play, even Hunters in full cloth gear like to think they are just misunderstood and we just need to give them "another chance, man!", but for me this was key. Sure, you could randomly Death Strike but that would generally open you up to burst damage while you were tapped out of Runes if you did it on anything that hit hard. And sure, you could let Blade Barrier fall off but you would take more damage. And so on.
Generally, when I die, the first thing I do is at how I timed my CDs and Death Strikes and if there is a way to improve on that (and there usually is always a way to do better); only after that was done would I commence casually mentioning how the solar lights happened to coincide with my point of vision.
I am actually quite happy for the other tanks that also got redesigned with Active Mitigation in mind because it widens the gap between good and bad tanks which gives the good tanks a nice way to differentiate themselves from other tanks of their own class.
That said, is it true that DKs still have a high skill cap in MoP? Yes, they do because CD and DS timing is still there, but unfortunately that is very much it.
This is a picture from 4.2:
I had a tracker for Blade Barrier, Blood Tap and Blood Shield and obviously having to keep the Runes in a specific state to game RE.
But going into MoP we lost Blade Barrier (we lost that one in 4.3 actually but you get my point) which is was another thing to track and help us be better than someone who could not track it. We are also losing Rune gaming as well, what with Runic Corruption looking like the best choice and the Cata version of Blood Tap being removed. I really hope something changes here (like making RE/BT good again) to help with raising the skill cap again.
The introduction of Scent of Blood has made me mildly optimistic because it seems that Blizzard is aware we lack something right now (well, that and SoB is an excellent way to make accuracy stats matter; more on that below). While SoB is on the right track, it is not quite there yet because it does not change how we play one bit.
The only thing that dictates when we Death Strike is the amount of damage we have taken in the last 5 seconds. Generally, DSing after 3 consecutive hits is best (there are some caveats but this is the gist). SoB does not change this because the healing it adds does not interact with the amount of damage we take - which, as mentioned above, is the only thing affecting Death Strike usage (it gives you a slightly higher DS, yes, but the damage we took has a bigger impact on the DS size than the SoB bonus). SoB right now only rewards us for gearing for hit/exp and for being lucky with avoidance RNG: If you avoid enough hits you don't have to DS so your SoB keeps stacking up. But again, this is nothing we can actually influence ourselves.
What SoB needs to make it worth tracking is if you could actually influence the amount of stacks yourself through a mechanic to help it stack or even prevent it from falling off. One way to do this is to make the healing portion of SoB* stack from Heart Strike and/or Rune Strikes but cap it low enough that you want to hold off from HS/RSing too much until you can clear your stacks with a DS. Doing something like this would be engaging and active and would fit right into theme of "easy to learn, hard to master".
(SoB is also a mitigating factor between the two spectrums of high and low DS/min usage since people who achieve less DS/min will be compensated with slightly higher SoB stacks for when they do DS.)
*and only the healing portion; please keep the 10 RP gain to white attacks since that works well as it is.
I just want to stress again that this isn't just me being against making the class easier to pick up for new people. On the contrary, this is a good thing. My problem is that the difficulty at the higher end seems to have gone down instead of remaining where it was in Cata or even going up (hence the whole "hard to master" cliche line :P). I also realize that people may have a different opinion but they can write their own post (preferably with some of this and that.
)[top] Tanks and Hit/Exp requirements
First off, read this in case you missed the Exp/Hit rating changes in MoP. If you still want to read stuff that isn't this post (I'M NOT JUDGING), go read this as well. I'll wait. Figuratively speaking, I mean. I am not actually going to wait because this post is already here. Anyway, moving on. <_<
In MoP, all tanks will supposedly require accuracy stats to improve their survivability. Warriors and Druids will need to hit the mob to generate rage (I read that they still get rage on dodge/parry which I assume is a bug) which directly influences how often they can use their active mitigation abilities. Monks and Paladins do not generate Chi and Holy Power respectively if they fail to connect their respective resource generating abilities either so they, too, can hit their active mitigation buttons less often.
As DKs we have Scent of Blood which increases RP gain and average DS size proportionally to how much accuracy stats we have; the more we have, the more RP we gain which directly improves how often we can Death Strike through our RP --> Rune conversion methods (BT, RE or RC). In addition, SoB also affects DS size and while it's not a deciding factor for when we DS it still adds up on average over the course of the fight. Lastly, we also have Outbreak which is on the spell hit table and an Outbreak miss means we lose atleast half a Death Strike (unless you have someone else available to keep up your debuffs).
But most importantly, Death Strike can still miss or be dodged. While the change to make it unparryable was necessary and very much welcome, we still don't want DS to miss if we want to time it with any form of consistency.
With all this in mind, I am expecting most DKs to gear for atleast the hit and exp dodge cap. Personally, I am quite happy to do so because I never liked seeing a quarter of my attacks not land due to inflated boss avoidance values (and to be fair, I would have vastly prefered bosses to lose their bonus parry chance instead but you know what they say about these kind of things).
[top] Damage balance: Death Strike vs Heart Strike vs Death Siphon vs Soul Reaper vs Super Long Title
Currently all tanks but Paladins have two rotations:
1) The offensive rotation that includes spending resources on abilities that do not increase survivability but do damage instead (i.e. Heart Strike with Death Runes, Maul/Heroic Strike with Rage, ThathingwheretheMonkhitsthemobhardbutwhosenameIforgot with Chi)
2) The more traditional defensive rotation that uses resources on survival only (i.e. Death Strike with Death Runes).
I think this is a good thing for the game as well if balanced correctly. The danger here is that you need to balance every tanks' rotation properly or you might end up with something where Tank 1 using his defensive rotation is doing the same (or even more) damage than Tank 2 who is doing his offensive rotation. And Tank 1 is doing this while being more survivable, to boot. Now imagine if Tank 1 decided to shift to his offensive rotation and he would totally blow Tank 2 out of the water.
On live, the difference between a DK using 1 DS vs 2 HS is technically there but the damage gap between both is not big enough so I can understand why HS damage went up while DS damage went down on Beta. However I think this went a little too far; 1 HS outdamaging 1 DS feels wrong. It also widens the gap between the offensive rotation and defensive rotation too much (and remember, both rotations need to be balanced for all tanks, see above). And to be frank, I do miss having a 2 Rune strike that sacrificed long term damage for short term burst capabilities (I could break Rageface's stun in emergencies with Death Strike for example).
And since I haven't mentioned Scent of Blood for atleast 4 paragraphs now: SoB does help us shift into a more offensive rotation because if you cut out a Death Strike or two for more Heart Strikes the subsequent Death Strike will heal for more.
All this said, I am quite excited to dish out some extra damage with our new spells Death Siphon (if specced) and Soul Reaper. To give you some damage numbers:
- Death Strike hits for 21k with 42k AP.
- Heart Strike hits for 24k, also with 42k AP.
- Death Siphon is hitting for 33k damage with 42k AP
- Soul Reaper hits for 6k damage on it's physical portion and 94k shadow damage with the execute portion at 44k AP
(all this was done with a 2000 DPS weapon)
With these numbers, our highest DPS rotation would look like this:
Soul Reaper sub 35% > Heart Strike (2+ targets) > Death Siphon > Heart Strike (single target) > Death Strike
Again, I realize some numbers might change so we shouldn't fixate on them too much but it's not like Death Strike is going to ever outdamage Soul Reaper for example. Or even Death Siphon because of it's unique Death Rune cost.
[top] Rune Order consumption
(That's BFU on top and BFU on bottom)
Since this is related to dealing damage, I might as well mention it here: The order in which the game uses your Runes for single rune abilities is atrocious. While a human player would try to get one pair of Runes on CD so they all cool down together the game consumes them all in a fixed and non-optimal order. Look at the picture above and imagine all Death Runes and Blood Runes have cooled down. If you were to do 6xHeart Strike the game would use both Blood Runes first (which is ok) then both Frost Runes and then finally both Unholy Runes which wastes potential regen time on the bottom FU pair. A human would have picked the 2 Blood Runes, then 1 Frost and 1 Unholy Rune, then another Frost and the final Unholy Rune.
It's time this gets fixed since we have been plagued with this issue since Cata Alpha when our whole runes system got revamped.
[top] Raid utility
I am very happy that we will be able to spec into AMZ and possibly even utilize Glyph of Death Coil to provide the raid with some defensive utility. I think these things combined with Raise Ally put us in a very good position.
My only gripe is with the raid buffs/debuffs we bring. Right now Blood only brings the 10% AP buff with Horn of Winter. Wouldn't it be possible to bring something else like the physical vulnerability debuff? It would fit thematically and would also allow you to give DPS DKs the magical vulnerability debuff on top of things. Would make sense for something that is closest to being a "Magic Knight".
[top] Symbiosis
Check out the currently known Symbiosis spells here
All tanks receive an additional tanking CD through Symbiosis (it doesn't even matter who gets what; just that it is a tanking CD). Now you are probably wondering how giving tanks more of the stuff that makes them more... tanky-ish-stuff is a bad thing, right? There are two reasons why the current implementation is not a good thing:
1) You should not rely on Symbiosis to give you another tanking CD and directly influence how well you do for any given encounter. Remember Dark Intent? And how it got removed for MoP because of this exact problem? Symbiosis should not encourage class stacking.
2) This is a boring cop-out. There, I said it. Giving me stuff I already have is not interesting and we already have Icy Grip in case I feel like I want something like that. Symbiosis should give everyone something that is situational enough so it's not always a no-brainer to give it a specific class. There is a reason Symbiosis does not give DPS or healers additional throughput abilities so why are tanks special snowflakes? There are so many abilities you could give tanks without breaking the whole balance that I am rather confused as to why this hasn't happened yet. Dash for a tank? Sure, why not? Intervene/Charge for non-Warriors? Also sure, why not? Death Grip for Bears? Again, yes.
(Hell, I'd take Faerie Fire as well because that way it would actually get applied faster. <_<)
Or my favorite non-tank Symbiosis skill: Growl for Rogues. It allows them to off tank and then go back to DPSing (this is not meant as emergency tanking in this case but as pre-planned role so you can cut out the OT for a given boss encounter where they only tank something for a few seconds like Halfus' adds). Basically the job Cats can do now, Rogues can do in MoP. If you have the choice of a Cat or Resto/Balance Druid giving the Rogue Symbiosis, make sure you make the Cat do it just to rub it in.
Not pictured: The Rogue licking off the Cat's tears for being able to do something Blizz deliberately broke in MoP. Irony is fuuuuuuuuuuun.
[top] Misc
Just various stuff I could think of:
Dancing Rune Weapon
Dancing Rune Weapon still has a stupid AI. Most of the time DRW does not stick to the mob I cast it on and decides to walk back to me and "assist" me when that is the last thing I want from it. I would very much prefer if it actually stayed on the mob I cast it on because it allows you to do fun things like Strangulate/Mind Freeze two different mobs or even build ranged threat on a caster.
And the one thing that baffles me the most is that this was actually how things worked in early Cata Beta. DRW would place a debuff on the mob it was casted on and stick on it until the mob died. So why was this changed?
Global crit immunity
Why is this still tied to our Presence when every other tank gets it innately? This talent has bugged out so ridiculously often that this should be reason alone to change it. I would also like the option of swapping to Unholy Presence for the speed buff without risking a crit (you already give up a whole bunch of defenses for swapping) so why can't we get a global -6% crit reduction for speccing Blood?
Strangulate, Bone Shield, Death Pact/Raise Dead and DRW are still on the GCD.
Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Traditionally, all interrupts, survival (and DPS) CDs are off the GCD. And most of ours already are, so why are some excluded at random?
Why are Diseases not ticking the moment they get applied like Rend?
Simple question. Why not? The only drawback is that you can't charge some RP pre-pull on critters by spamming CoI but I'd rather give this up and get instantly ticking diseases in return for some snap AoE threat/damage. I can honestly not think of any reason against this. Can someone else?
Increase Disease durations to 33 seconds
So we do not have to Outbreak exactly every 30 seconds. Sometimes you need to the GCD for something else so having that 3 sec window to reapply diseases is pretty nice.
[top] Runeforges
We were promised new Runeforges in the first Q&A in Cata and I am still hoping this happens. The ones we currently have are mostly bland and boring. Out of all the Runeforges, I'd say Fallen Crusader is best because it is a proc, heals you and increases your Strength. For all intents and purposes the enchant could be a flat +15% Str buff if Blizz wanted to go the boring route - but they didn't. Which is why the existence of Stoneskin Gargoyle, Swordshattering etc. are even more baffling (and that's not counting outliers like this which have no place in the game).
In my opinion, Runeforges should be more than just simple passive stats. Our rune weapons were meant to be something special after all.
So here some sample suggestions:
Spellshattering now increases your duration and absorb cap of your AMS instead of giving you 4% more magical DR. The silence reduction can remain in place.
Swordshattering reduces the CD and increases the duration of your DRW. Disarm reduction stays in place.
Stoneskin Gargoyle increases all healing done and taken by x%. Reduces the CD on IBF or something.
Even if you don't like the examples, the point remains: stuff like +4% parry is boring.
[top] 1 second GCD baseline
This is actually something I keep reading on the Beta forums quite a bit and frankly this intrigues me. As Blood we are resource constrained so a 1 sec GCD would be pretty fun to play around with. Would also make timing DS slightly easier with the lowered GCD and there is the also the fact that DKs are the only ones who got their mitigation tool on the GCD at all (ShotR for example is actually off the GCD).
I don't feel too strongly either way but I would love to test this in the Beta for sure.
[top] Final Words
No WoW related post is truly complete without various buzzwords that are there to give the reader the impression that the author knows his stuff. Here they are: Clunky, Bad Design, Archaic, Creepy Sunflower.
[top].1.2.3.5.7.2.1.5.2.5.2.2.1.3.6 WHY DOES HE KEEP MAKING SO MANY SUBINDECES?!
Oh, don't look at me like that. I'm just saying what everyone else was thinking it.
Johnson “Tyvi” McJohnson is absolutely not related to the World of Warcraft developers. He wishes he could design UIs for them though, because he is really good at making them.
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