Maahk

EDIT: Deleted original: posts created while writing made this post redundant.

As for the reduced stats talent, that was assuming it would be effective on a boss mob. If not, of course those points would be better spent elsewhere.

At any rate, I don't see the frost tree being a tanking tree at this point, given that Blizzard envisioned the DK as an anti-casting tank and that what appear to be several key anti-casting talents are deep in unholy. It's hard to tell with the amount of information out there what will be required of DKs as a level 80 raiding tank, but whatever tree or mechanic it ends up being, I'm still excited for new mechanics and styles of play.

 

Malleus

Here's a thought. We know the Inscription profession creates something tradeable that you can have up to (IIRC) six of your spellbook. What if it creates items similar to the Darkmoon Cards, and further has an ability to enhance existing decks by adding silver foil to the cards of the deck?

Regarding your later post on Runes: those aren't likely to be Inscription items. Runes already exist in Blacksmithing, so it's probably more of the same.

 

Ja7us

Remember that "Runes" also figure prominently in Death Knights' mythology. I would bet money that Death Knights equip Runes in their ranged slot, for example.

 

Darksaber

To me, at least, it seems most likely that they'd simply be more rare than the normal cards. That's at least the norm for most collectible card games that feature 'Foil' cards. Although it is just as possible that Inscribers will be able to modify the cards. It would certainly be interesting, but unless they drastically increase the amount of cards/decks, I don't know how much of a demand for the ability there'd be. Might be too narrow of a niche.

 

Zapf

Is there a concise list of all the frost abilities the DK has? I couldn't find anything on icy touch, icebound fortitude, and hungering cold on the deathknight.info site / google.

After tooling around on that talent calculator, I got 10/50/11 - got high enough in blood and unholy to get parry and the lich spell, went deep in holy to get frost strike, the shadow/frost and resist proc talents, the dread plate armor talent, and some of the runic power and spell crit related stuff. I'll link the actual build when get on an actual computer instead of this wii.

 

Sideshow

This is what I know so far:

Blood Presence: Strengthens the Death Knight with the presence of blood, increasing damage by 15% and healing the Death Knight by 4% of damage dealt. Only one Presence may be active at a time.
Frost Presence: The Death Knight takes on the presence of frost, increasing armor by 45% and threat generated by 25%. Only one Presence may be active at a time.
Unholy Presence: Infuses the Death Knight with unholy fury, increasing attack speed by 15% and reducing the global cooldown on all Death Knight abilities by X sec. Only one Presence may be active at a time.

Plague Strike: A vicious strike that deals weapon damage plus 72 and plagues the target, dealing X Shadow damage over X.
Blood Strike: Instantly strike the enemy, causing 60% weapon damage plus X for each disease effect on the target.

Death Grip: Draws your target before you with a beam of unholy power. This will also taunt the target, forcing enemies to attack you for X.
Death Coil: Unleashes all available Runic Power, causing up to X Shadow damage to a non-Undead enemy target or healing up to X damage from a friendly Undead target.
Blood Boil: Causes all disease effects on targets within X yards to painfully erupt, consuming the diseases, dealing X damage, and forcing the target to attack the Death Knight for 3 sec.
Degenration: Instantly attack the target, dealing 60% weapon damage and inflicting a disease dealing X over X. This disease will corrupt an existing heal over time spell, removing it and dramatically increasing the damage dealt. While afflicted by this disease, other heal over time effects on the target will have no effect.
Anti-Magic Shell: Surrounds the Death Knight in an Anti-Magic Shell, absorbing X% of the damage dealt by the next harmful spell. Damage absorbed by Anti-Magic Shell energizes the Death Knight with additional Runic Power. X.
Icy Touch: Deals X Frost damage and reduces the target's ranged, melee attack, and casting speed by -15% for X.
Mind Freeze: Strike the target's mind with cold, dealing X Frost Damage and interrupting spellcasting while also preventing any spell in that school from being cast for X.
Chains of Ice: Forms icy chains around the enemy, locking the target in place for X.
Icebound Fortitude: Consumes all available Runic Power, causing the Death Knight to become immune to Stun effects and increasing armor by 50% for up to X. Does not remove existing Stun effects.

Raise Dead: Raises a Ghoul from a corpse to fight by your side. If the target corpse is not humanoid, Corpse Dust must be supplied to complete the spell.
Army of the Dead: Summons an entire legion of your best Ghouls to fight by your side.
Summon Deathcharger: Summons a Deathcharger, which serves as a mount. Speed is increased by 100%.

Ghoul abilities were posted earlier.. talents are across the web

 

Zzbzq

off the top of my head, you missed Strangulate and Death Strike?

 

Yourexwife

Do we know how diseases are going to work? My uninformed guess tells me that abilities will have different types of diseases tied to them (one Strike having a disease doing shadow damage over time, a different Strike with a disease that maybe decreases cast speed by 10%, something like that), but past that, I haven't the slightest idea. I'm assuming that they won't work like rogue poisons or anything quite like that, at least.

I'm still trying to figure for myself exactly how tanking will work. It seems they are really going for each tree to be viable for damn near anything, which makes me excited and a bit timid at the same time. I do dig how the class certainly at least feels considerably more synergistic with its talents as opposed to having basically three distinct classes in one. Frost being known as the "control" tree only pushes that forward, at least for me.

 

Zzbzq

Hypothesiscraft: DKs do more damage while tanking than other tanks.

 

Feorthas

True but they must output 116%, on average, of the other tanks' base TPS output to match the 1.45 threat multiplier from their current 1.25. I'm not saying that's impossible--heck, it might even be easy for all we know--just want to make sure that's taken into account.

 

Lamaros

I expect the talents for the DK will get moved around a lot.

Blood seems to be the Leveling/Melee DPS tree. Some talents here seem out of place though (Will of the Necropolis?)
Frost seems to be the Tanking/Frost Spell (CC heavy) Tree. But there are more 'odd' talents included here that don't fit as clearly as in the Blood tree.
Unholy seems to be the Disease Spell (DoT heavy)/Summons tree. But there is some stuff that looks to be PvP only in there too.

I think at this point the talents are associated more by concept than by synergy, and this will change over the course of the beta.

(It still baffles me as to why they keep coming up with talents like Rune Tap. Unless it happens to have ranks it's just another of those things that will be ignored.)

 

Loeff

Heh heh. I'm not declaring the sky is falling. In fact, I believe the first post of this thread forbids whining

No, I'm merely pointing out Blizzard's history with this class. It was the last class added to beta, just 3 weeks prior to launch, we all didn't have a lot of time to playtest them, and we've all seen Blizzard poke and prod them ever since. You would think that with all the uproar hunters bring, Blizzard would want to get it right and thoroughly test out any and all changes. Which would take time, so start early. Right? It just doesn't bode well that minor things are being tweaked, when there is much work to do with the class, as far as pet abilities being finished and an entire spec that is sorely lacking.

Now, I don't mean this to say other classes don't need some tweaks/buffs as well. Paladins being a prime example there. But I feel like those classes have pieces in place to be great, Blizzard just needs to fine tune. Or, majorly give them a tune up maybe

Anyway, it might be too early to worry about any of this. But, when I see druid changes, which are a wish list of druid changes, being tested out, I wonder why we don't see that for hunters. Or paladins for that matter.

But, some classes are easy to fix/balance and others aren't.

This space for rent.

 

• Playered

Because the Paladin and Hunter changes/talents/abilities are not implemented yet so its rather silly to compare something which does not currently exist to something which does.

You could think of it that Shamans, Paladins, and Hunters to a degree all needed somewhat more extensive implementations to fix the issues with the classes as a whole (hence their delay), in comparison to some of the ones which have been hashed out now which really were mostly fine and just needed some slight talent and ability additions to work optimally (Druids for eg).

Where Rogues fit in this I dont really know though, but this "wahh x classes get all they wanted and we got nothing" type posts are stupid because right now there is *nothing* to even base this off as it's unknown rather than ignored.


How we will get the leaks for the remaining classes will be somewhat more iffy than what we have currently though I think, I highly doubt they will accidently let the public download all their Alpha Client/Patches like what has happened in the last few days.

Jabbing at some of the Paladins in my guild with the DK changes is fun though, cynicism when given fuel is enjoyable to watch pan out - I do hope they end up looking as good as the Druid changes right now, im actually pretty excited to stay on my Druid in WoTLK instead of going back to my Rogue - time will tell if that changes though :P

 

Addled

QFT. Frost is supposed to be the tanking tree, yet we find great tanking talents in Blood (Blade Barrier, Veteran of the Third War, Will of the Necropolis, Spell Deflection, Blood Barrier) and Unholy (Lichborne, Magic Suppression, Bone Armor). Are these going to be moved to Frost or placed lower in Blood/Unholy so a deep Frost build can still get them?

Am I wrong, or does Frost seem like a fun PvP tree? Knockbacks, slows, freezes... feels a lot like the mage Frost tree: tons of control, a bit less DPS than the other trees. Frozen Runeblade seems out of whack too. Frost is supposed to be a tanking tree, yet the Frost "weapon imbue" deals extra Frost damage? Shouldn't it be increased aggro generation, or a debuff to lower enemy damage?


Um, what? If there's a risk of a 200% crit, that means there's also a chance for a string of 200% crits. That is UNHEALABLE, whether reactively or proactively. Imagine [Boss Special Ability] critting for almost the tank's entire health, then a normal melee strike critting and killing the tank. Sorry, but your plan would mean that the tank would die, at random, and there would be NOTHING you could do about that. Nobody likes wiping and paying repair bills even when execution was perfect and the RNG just decided to crap all over them.

To be fair, shamans only have chain heal as an AoE heal, at least priests still have Prayer of Healing (unless I missed a patch note, which is entirely possible, so correct me if I'm wrong).

I would be surprised if Blizzard doesn't give other healing classes more aoe options, especially since paladins haven't received new healing spells since vanilla WoW.


I can't believe this would go live. You could stack an entire 25man raid on top of each other, and CoH would do an incredible amount of healing. Even in fights where you have to spread out, a single CoH could heal the tank, all the melee (6-7, perhaps more) and the random person running into melee range (paladins reapplying Judgements, shamans dropping totems for their group).

Have the current entangling roots (outdoors-only, breaks easily on its own damage) still available as a base ability, make "Improved Entangling Roots" available at a 31+ talent ability that makes Entangling Roots available indoors and decreases the chance for Entangling Roots to break. Perhaps even merge it with Force of Nature; I have always felt that talent is a bit weak.

 

Lamaros

As the talents currently stand the PvP spec would have to be Frost/Unholy, while for tanking I think you might go something like 44/16/11:

You get Deflection, Spell Deflection, Scent of Blood, Veteran of the Third War, Blood Rune Mastrey, Will of the Necropolis, Frost Aura, Toughness, Nerves of Cold Steel, Unholy Command, and Lichborne.

You miss Bone armor and Magic Suppression, but what can you do.

I assume you'd use blood strike as your basic attack, with all the talents that apply to it to improve damage (+15% damage, +8% crit, bonus damage on crits, blood rune mastery) and thus threat, as well as the contribution from frozen runeblade, the odd plague strike, and the random free deathcoil. Probably go with something like 5/4 out of 6 blood runes on your blade.

War Tools :: Talent tree Death Knight Talents

This will all be irrelevant when this all changes soon, though!

 

panny

This points to chance to resist CC effects being changed to reducing duration instead. Very welcome for PvP. I know I hate fighting Orc Warriors as a Mutilate Rogue, this will make combat much less reliant on a stun resist completely screwing me while at the same time reducing the amount of time I can keep someone locked down.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Prinsesa

I would love it if anti-CC effects/talents were homogenized in this way.

For Paladins, off the top of my head:

Stoicism could use a similar change in reducing Stun duration.
Unyielding Faith could use a similar change in reducing Fear and Disorient duration
Pure of Heart could use a similar change in reducing Curse and Disease duration

I really have to sound off on how ridiculous Pure of Heart is right now. The only Disease effect that can ever be applied in PvP is Devouring Plague from an Undead Priest - one race of one class. Cleanse is going to nail it every single time.

And then you have Curses, of which only one class can cast - chance to resist is barely worth anything because of how curses don't even have cooldowns. The Warlock is simply forced to expend one extra GCD 15% of the time. Changing it to a duration reduction would be perfect since it would be an absolute increase in how many more Curses a Warlock has to cast on you over the length of a given fight.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

SanSul

Reducing the duration of Curse of Tongues would be a godsend. Hopefully the Devs also address weak talents like Imp Devotion Aura, Imp Ret Aura, and one handed weapon specialization. (5 points in an extremely bloated tree for 5% threat? come on!). I see they are bloating the trees of many classes, so I have fears that Prot Paladins are going to have to many essential talents and not enough points.

 

Cranberry

Do remember that DKs are heavily disease-based, and other classes are getting some in Wrath.

 

flyingtoastr

If they move Deflection from Ret to Prot (or put it into the first tier) you're looking a few free points.

I do agree though that while they seem to be bloating trees they need to streamline the ones that are already terrible before making them worse.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Draele

Any thoughts on the Affliction talents? I was discussing them on the lock forum and we had a great discussions going but then all of a sudden the threads went boom and several bans were given out (a permaban for your's truly...)

I'm very disappointed with them as a whole. Given, it is still alpha so there's no point in getting our panties in too big of a bunch. I'd say the only talent I like in its entirety would be the one that gives Corruption a chance to burn mana/rage/energy/runic power. The 51-pointer is pretty trashy...regardless of its synergy with Haunt...Thoughts?

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Lamaros

There is discussion going on in here:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t26024-w...ew_discussion/

 

Draele

Thanks much. I missed that.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

PSGarak

Diseases and Curses are not crowd-control abilities, they're damage abilities and a few not-strictly-CC utility effects. Don't expect duration decreases on any of them. And yeah, DKs are going to be a big-time disease class. Paladins having anti-warlock/DK talents is at least thematically consistent, and also fits their role as the anti-debuffer support class.

The affliction changes seem mostly geared towards making it synergize better with destruction as the other tree. I realize that shadowbolt is still the primary filler and a non-trivial source of damage, but it still seems odd. The other warlock trees are shaping up nicely for a rough draft, I think. The cross-element talents in destruction seem determined to break the stranglehold of Sacrifice on destro builds, which I consider a good thing because I disliked the main raid spec on a pet class being the petless spec. The destro tree as a whole may be a bit bloated right now, especially around the top with the new cataclysm, but that also means you get even more effect for forgoing Sacrifice. The demo tree is also more interesting, although I'm not sold on the higher amount of pet-specific talents.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Prinsesa

I acknowledge that DKs are disease-based, but that only ups the potential to a 2nd class. I do anticipate that there might be a Lifebloom/Unstable Affliction-esque penalty for dispelling it somewhere in there though.

Also, where did you get Disease effects from other classes? I must have missed that.

Regarding Affliction:

For some reason, I really like Atrocity's concept. I heard someone complain a few pages back that Locks didn't really need another AOE, but I disagree, because Atrocity works on a different mechanic.

Look at how Druids have a back-loaded HOT in the form of Lifebloom, but then are getting a front-loaded HOT in the form of flourish.

Because of Atrocity's DOT-based nature, it looks like it could be useful on more aggro-sensitive fights, such that your tank isn't so stressed trying to keep up with the massive front-loaded threat of Seed spam (since they blow almost instantaneously on any target that's under attack).

I don't really play a Lock, so YMMV, but that's certainly the impression I got from it.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler