Baern

Death Strike nerf makes sense, now all instant one rune strikes deal 60% weapon damage, with different perks.
Frost Strike is still next melee though, it just had it's cooldown removed (I believe?).

 

Talgog

Mount.jpg - ImageHost.org

Now that's what I'm talking about.

 

Feorthas

Couple of things:
-Obliterate appears to be a spell/ability and not a talent!
-Really hoping that Death Knights (and Mages) can put the 'Freeze' status effect on bosses now, even if it does nothing, just to get the additional bonuses to threat (and damage, for Mages)
-Frost is now definitely the tanking tree, no question about that.
-Lichborne is useful! More of a pvp than pve talent in my book but still...
-AE Tanking is more up in the air than it was previously (I think) but still remains feasible although it now relies more on CDs now than Runic Power generation.
-Heart Strike sounds like an attack that inflicts "Deep Wound" from Guild Wars, except it has an upper limit of 3000 hp rather than GW's unlimited 20% (admittedly, 3000 is 20% of 15000 so that shouldn't be a huge issue). Now we just need to find out if the -20% HP effect disappears after X seconds (as the GW effect does).

Wish we had a new talent tree to play with to see where these changes have done in a more tangible manner...

 

Baern

Heart Strike lasts 30 seconds currently.

 

uber

Where are you seeing this? Every bit of information I can find indicates that it is a replacement for Heart Strike, which is now trainable.

What did they change other than the 15 min -> 5 min cooldown?

This isn't that big of a deal, as it has been stated that DK's are being designed to tank magic bosses, leaving the AoE tanking strictly up to the Pallys.

 

Baern

In the WotLK thread it was posted that Chill of the Grave affects Obliterate. I can't find that info anywhere else though.
I'm entirely unsure what is happening with Heart Strike/Obliterate at the moment.

 

Lurker

Hmm. Don't know if Empowered Blood Presence has been confirmed yet.

 

Baern

Doesn't make sense for it to be, aside from being too powerful, Blood Aura is still in the game. Also, all other presences have a 45 yard range. I think it's probably just a left over alternative to Blood Aura they were running with.

 

Feorthas

Heart Strike is still in there and there are abilities in Frost that modify Obliterate's damage. I just put 2 & 2 together and got 4 *shrug*. The new Heart Strike looks like a great PvP Talent though; Deep Wounds effects in Guild Wars were a great mechanic as they'd temporarily reduce someone's max HP to 80% of what it normally was. It didn't make them unhealable but it made it so that spikes would take them down much more easily.


That's it, pretty much. Lets you use it more often in PvP, which is what it's geared towards (in my opinion). A 15 minute CD is perfectly fine for PvE as you'll be running a boss maybe once every 10-15 minutes if you're learning them (not counting early bosses) but it's a bit long for PvP, outside of arena (and isn't the Arena CD limit 12 minutes or was it 15?).


Eh, right now I see DK Tanks as a mix between paladin tanking and druid tanking, just magic focused rather than physical focused. Besides, every tank needs SOME sort of reliable AoE abilities .

---

New observation:
-With the +Hit talent in frost changed to 1H weapons only, could frost tanking heavily encourage Dual Wielding? This would allow you to imbue your offhand with Frost-damage (and now freeze or slow proc--can't remember which) and keep your main hand free for Windfury. Sure, it would require much more hit than a 2H tank but does anyone else think that this might not be too outrageously far-fetched?

 

Shadowalker

I feel that it may just take away too much from your tanking stats, which will already be suffering without block.

 

gorsameth

Well the real answer i guess will come once we discover whether or not there will be tanking 2h'ers. Tanking 1h'ers are already one-hand so you can duel wield 2 but unless there are 2 handers with good tanking stats dw might win it.

 

Feorthas

Or, for that matter, why bother with TANKING 1Hs, at least for your MH, if you can get excellent Hit and Expertise values on some DPS weapons? Even if it's only truly viable to get about 5% Hit in solid tanking gear, with the talent included, what do Death Knights really need to hit with white attacks for? A DK might be perfectly happy dual-wield-tanking with a good amount of expertise and kinda crappy hit simply because there's no rage mechanic to worry about here. As long as you can land your assortment of tanking strikes and, more importantly, spells you could theoretically be whiffing away with minimal penalties depending on the threat values for those abilities.

Admittedly, the debuff from Frozen Rune Weapon will be highly desirable, but there's a good possibility that equipping a relatively fast tanking weapon in your OH will lead to somewhat decent uptime but it's probably way to early to debate detailed mechanics like that at this point.

 

Incision

I thought about the Hit talent in Frost, but still landed in Unholy. I consider DK itemization to be similar to Arms Warriors, so I'm not so sure how useful stacking hit will be. For one, you're using a 2H weapon, which means a lot of your main damage will be from yellow swings, and capping that is not very difficult. Like I said, I'm open for discussion though. Would love to get more into DPS specs in this thread, but it seems tanking specs are all the rage at the moment.

 

Baern

Tanking with a 2 hander has parry haste benefits, though. Both offensively and defensively, given the number of +parry abilities a DK has.

There are a lot of interesting synergies between Frost DK and Frost mage now too.
Mages give Winter's Chill (up to 10% extra crit for Frost spells against target) and Winter's Grasp (target is considered frozen for 2/4 seconds) as the two which stand out from a raiding perspective.
From the DK, there is the new Frozen Runeblade effect (whatever it may be) and the ability to freeze targets. Hopefully bosses will recieve the freeze debuff even if they are immune to the effects, but if not it's still useful when grouping and in PvE.
Obviously if the Frozen effects differ between the two classes the synergy is reduced somewhat.

DKs gain benefit from CoElements, Shadows and Recklessness too, can't think of another class you can say that about.

 

Nymph'

I thought DK tanking was meant to be dual wielding tanking. That was the original idea of the devs, isn't it ? Or have I misheard the thing ? :o

 

uber

Up until recent alpha leaks, it has always been assumed that DK's would tank with 2-handers and DPS dual wielding.

Personally, I think dual wielding ought to be removed from the DK's as they have little to no mechanics in place to truly take advantage of it and all their skills seemed to be designed with large slow weapons in mind, dealing a percentage of weapon damage.

And as it has been mentioned before, the extreme reliance of DK's on parry's would seem to indicate that 2-handers would be better for tanking, as it will greatly increase your white damage and overall threat generation.

 

uber

I've been thinking about this, and a raid with multiple DK's in it would benefit TREMENDOUSLY by having all their mages spec fire/shatter. If the frozen debuff can be applied to bosses, the mages in the raid would essentialyl be critting non-stop, a tremendous boost in overall raid dps. The only thing to worry about is the extra threat that they would generate, but well timed invis's would help mitigate that and/or taking time off Fireballing to Ice Lance for a few seconds of the most mana efficient DPS you could ever hope for.

 

Baern

Frost has a little now, with Frozen Runeblade (both the vulnerability and potentially placing it on both hands, if that's possible) and the melee crit causing your next spell to crit talent. A lot of Frost damage will be spell based too.

Unholy could end up with enough spell damage to allow for either, Blood clearly favours a 2 hander.

I don't disagree that removing dual wield altogether seems more sensible though.

 

uber

It is interesting to note, that unlike every other class that can dual wield (Warrior/Rogue/Shaman) the Death Knight has no talent to increase the damage done by his off-hand weapon. Also, they have no skills that truly shine from dual wielding a la Stormstrike, Whirlwind or Mutilate. Either there are plans to rectify this in the near future or the Devs are fully commited to the idea of DK's having two weapons.

 

Baern

Link here to a thread with a further link to a zip file with screen shots of all the changes in.
Chill of the Grave does affect Obliterate, so it must be trainable, and the old Heart Strike was replaced with the new one (20% health one).

 

PSGarak

Shaman DW Spec talent increases hit chance, it doesn't increase offhand weapon damage.

DKs don't have any double-weapon strikes yet, but that doesn't mean they won't in the future. Additionally, they don't really need to add that much DW-dependence, so much as just remove 2H-dependence from the frost tree to make it a DW tree. It already has a higher emphasis on spells than weapon strikes. So far, it actually does have DW-synergy by guaranteeing a spell crit after each melee crit, which will happen much more frequently with a pair of 1.8-speed tank weapons than a 3.6-speed 2Her, plus a spec-specific weapon enchant which you could have two of (or one of and windfury). As far as parry-haste goes, you generally don't worry too much about the damage your tank does.
There's also the possibility that they'll let you tank with either DW or a 2Her, based on personal preference or need for mitigation vs threat or some other auxilliary consideration like secondary tree. I wouldn't be surprised if deep blood specs still tank with 2Hers even if frost is optimized for DWing.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

uber

Looking back over the talents, it does look like Blizz is trying to DK tanking down the dual wield path (Nerves of Cold Steel, Killing Machine etc.) Also, the Frost Strike talent is unique in that it increases melee damage by a fixed amount (currently 200 at level 50?) instead of a percentage scaler, also indicating it will work with 1-handers. It will be interesting to see where all this ends up.

 

Baern

Frost Strike converts the entire attack to Frost damage though, so Rune for Rune you still get a better return with a two hander.

 

uber

This is true, but you're going to see a better return on one-handers than you would if the attack was a percentage based modifier like every other DK strike.

 

Apaine