Lurker

These look like mob abilities. I don't see the logic in giving Warriors 4 more spell reflects and making them school specific. Paladin? Maybe, but making 4 copies of one spell just for schools only seems counter-intuitive and wasting space on Hotbars/spellbooks. Headless Horseman's Mount is a holiday event reward though.

Stay of Execution does look like a Player ability, but I'm really weirded out by the "treated as if you are at full health" bit at the end. Does that mean healing spells/potions/similar will not heal you because "you're at full health"?

I think Rogues will get that ability that Ming or someone posted a while back where the rogue darts around and kills shit. It's named Murder Spree on the leak site.

 

PSGarak

I think they mean that you're not treated as if you are at low health for Execute, Molten Fury, Dirty Deeds, and the new warlock one.

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

 

Lamaros

Shows how much I pay attention to the holiday stuff.

Agreeing about the others possibly/likely being mob abilities. Will adjust my post accordingly.

e: I have officaily gone crazy. Don't know where I was getting all my strange thoughts about Spell Deflection and what it used to be from, unless it changed in the second patch.

 

Azurai

But the problem is it never will be a 'choice', because Blizzard just doesn't do it that way. As much as they preach about weapon/spec viaiblity raiders have one choice: the best. Hunters have to use retarded looking ranged weapons because of speed, fury warriors have to dual wield, rogues have to use swords, etc.

I have no problem if they fine tune all the trees to allow both DW and 2h to be very comparable, but its pretty delusional to think there will be a choice for raiders who want to excell in the long run. Certainly it would be an unprecedented move by Blizzard if they actually did it.

 

Alvira

Would be relatively easy for them to align two hander weapons of death knights if they really wanted to. Just make it similar to what a mortal strike warrior would want. Just because I am a tank doesn't necessarily mean that my weapon has to be a weak one filled with tanking stats. There are 17 other gear slots for that.

It looks like death knights will hold aggro mainly through DPS and frost presence given the very few high threat abilities they have currently. So, they would want a DPS based weapon. Looking at the starter sword that deathknights are given reinforces this view. So, its not necessarily creating a whole new class of tanking weapons for deathknights. Its just adding one more class that will want what mortal strike warriors want. Given the very small number of arms warriors raiding right now, I think its a good thing.

Remember the excitment people used to have over obsidian edged blades and Askandis? (Before fury became scuh accepted mainstrem for DPS warrior raiding). Now you get such types of two handers going to hunters, or prot/healing pallys (because the raid didn't bring any ret pally), or becoming a pvp toy to the fury warrior who respects arms to arena for weekends. Having deathknight, a class that would use such two hander weapons all the time is a good thing and would in no way increase the loot complexity at all. It would be less wasted loot in fact.

I want deathknights to tank with a two hander DPS weapon. not a two hander "tanking" weapon. And from what I see right now, that is also exactly what we will bee doing. (Unless blizzard starts creating lots of weapons specifically with a lot of +parry rating).

I just remember the ooos and ahhhs when obsidian bladed and Askandi was first data mined, and how it was every warrior's dream. Even I, who was a mage and totally didn't care for such weapons, knew about its desirability. Does Cataclysm's edge even get that kind of attention nowadays?

Imagine when you kill the Lich King in WOTLK, and frostmorne drops, and it goes to a hunter because all the warriors are fury, all the pallys are healing spec ...

 

Lamaros

Talent changes, see them all at Yarr! Tools:

Yarr! Tools :: Deathknight 8472

Lots of good changes, expected nerfs, some buffs, some clarification (tool-tip wise, anyway). Lots of new stuff too.

DW: 15% damage boost for offhand. Still not enough. Maybe the numbers work better for Unholy/Frost spell DPS though. Necrosis and Blood Caked Blade look like they could all be DW advantaged (with Icy Talons, Nerves of Cold Steel, Killing Machine). Maybe tanking isn't the DW direction?

Frost rune mastrey gets a buff 25% to 50%, but Frost Strike get a nerf from 30% to 10%. Icy Touch talent stays at 15%. Proc goes from 7.5% for Frost Strike to 5%, and from 3.75% to 7.5% for Icy Touch. Only a slight buff. The weakest of all the mastreys.
Blood rune mastrey stays the same. But it was the strongest by far if white damage counts.
Unholy mastrey gets a buff with Plague and Degen, the more spammable unholy abilities, at 10% proc.

FMastrey with IC/FS/FS/IC: 7.5%/5%/5%/7.5%
BMastrey with PS/BS/D/BS: 10(0 on first hit)/10/10/10
UMastrey with PS/D/D/D: 10/10/10/10

Trying to work out how Frost is expected to make it up if ~35% is what they want the chance to be (Frost is 23%). Even with 4 FS and 2 IC you only have ~30% by my quick calculation. Maybe I should be counting Death Rune Mastrey (which has ~32% chance to proc from 6 runes), though that's low enough that other trees might also use it.

Oh I see, Mind Freeze gets 15% and is runic power free now. Does it still cost a rune I wonder.

Where's the Frost/Blood Synergy? Tanking?

 

Lurker

Yarr! Tools :: Deathknight 8472
Raid Utility / Survivability

Nerves of Cold Steel offhand damage is a nice addition, and really proves to me they intend on supporting Dual wielding for the class. I can't recall accurately, but I think bosses are immune to attribute drains (Ret's Vindication?), but Ebon Plaguebringer is the real trick pony here anyway, plus the occasional Icy Touch if you don't have another DK. A consistent 9% is still nothing to sneeze at, and I don't think this build will be gutter DPS either. That floating point in Imp. Death Coil could easily buy you Frozen Rune Blade, if you don't have Windfury or want to help the Frost Mages out (Still no word on the vulnerability). Shouldn't be particularly bad in BGs either.


Yarr! Tools :: Deathknight 8472
Blood Builds will remain mostly the same. Thank god the Rune Tap change. Can drop points for the expertise if it becomes necessary, but Lichborne and capping out unholy DPS talents speaks louder than 6 expertise.

On Blood Aura, this was knocked down from +50% additional healing (Logically giving us 6% health returned per damage), but it's now 10% (20% tooltip error?). 0.4% (0.8%) additional healing is nothing if it's multiplicative like we thought when it was 50%, so they may have changed this so it's additive, resulting in 14% damage dealt to health. Also noticed Heart Strike has no cap, but I'm going to guess it's hidden now, or the tooltip isn't accurate on the builder.

Edit: After reading the tooltip, Necrosis will probably only affect white attacks. 15% Haste and offhand damage will probably easily out do it, not to mention the extra damage from using Icy Touch.

 

Feorthas

Eh... considering that bosses can't exactly be frozen at the moment, I'd at least like to hope that the frost tree is perfectly capable of doing its job(s) without relying on its free rune proc talent; however, if we suddenly be able to CONSIDER bosses frozen, as mages can--thus making the ability proc--I'll gladly take that along with the low procrate as getting the additional synergy out of other abilities in the tree, as well as the added benefit to frost mages, will be well worth it.

With regard to Frost/Blood (that's major in frost, minor in blood), it seems like something around a 15/56/0 spec could be a pretty solid tank. Here's what I came up with in a quick run-through of the new trees: click me

You get the additional AP, Parry, and Crit from blood--which should all assist in tanking, although getting additional strength from somewhere elsewould make the parry talent even better--along with most of the bread & butter frost talents. One topic that should be discussed however, is whether Toughness is really worth it. With a 45% armor boost in Frost Presence along with a functioning parry mechanic, would 10% armor or 10% frost/shadow spell damage be more worth 5 points at the 2nd-tier level? At the low end, survivability might be aided enough to make Toughness a no-brainer, but where is the cutoff?

Aside from that, I'm leaning away from frost being a DW-Tanking tree unless you go Frost/Unholy to pick up the additional 5% Shadow damage from Necrosis. Even after considering that though, I think you'd still want to put at least 15 points in blood for the parry and crit rather than drop 15 in unholy for 5% Str, +6 sec duration on diseases, +3% crit on specific abilities, and 5% additional shadow damage; the scaling parry talent in Blood just makes those points almost mandatory if there's any way at all to get high-strength tanking plate.

Addendum: Oh holy crap, Hungering Cold considers targets frozen even when they aren't.... I think. Only time will tell, but I think we just got our 'hi boss, you're frozen' button! Consider the threat possible from opening with this combo:

0.0 - Deathchill
1.5 - Icy Touch (CRIT)
1.75 - Frost Strike (CRIT)
3.0 - Hungering Cold (CRIT)
4.5 - Howling Blast (CRIT)
4.75 - Frost Strike (CRIT, assuming 3.5 spd weapon hasted by 15%)

Even better, it only requires 4 frost runes! Admittedly, you blow your hungering cold at probably the 10 runic power level just to 'freeze' the target, but a critical howling blast (3.0x damage before any other multipliers are considered!) at 4.5 seconds would be well worth it. Unfortunately, the wording on Hungering Cold could mean that the target is no longer considered frozen after any damage taken, so this would be an opener-only setup but that's still a TON of front-loaded threat.

Preliminary updated build if Hungering Cold does, in fact, proc 'Frozen' effects: 14/57/0

 

Lamaros

Hard to compare Icy Talons to Necrosis. Important things are the other talents you get and the fact that Necrosis does'nt require you spend a point on Icy Touch in your rotation.

I'm looking at the Trees at the moment and I can see how:

Blood/Unholy goes.
Unholy/Frost goes.
Frost/Blood goes.
Heavy Blood/Frost/Unholy go.

But I'm more confused as to:

Unholy/Blood
Blood/Frost
Frost/Unholy

These last three don't seem to offer as many possibilities. Any ideas on this?

Edit:

I think there might be some room for an Unholy/Blood tank build, with more focus on magic damage tanking, something like:

http://wrath.druzya.org/yarr/?c=deat...5003100105105h

 

Lamaros

delete me.

 

Baern

Blade Barrier is still to good if you can keep it up constantly, and I still see no reason why you can't (hidden cooldowns aside). Very difficult talent to balance, it'll probably be one that'll rebalanced, nerfed and buffed for the next forever. It'd probably be okay if it was deeper in Blood.

It also seems that if you only have one DK on your (25-man) raid, you'll want it to be Unholy. Even if Unholy is the weakest dps tree I fail to see how any of the talents in deep Blood will make up for 9% more spell damage. As has been mentioned Unholy doesn't look like it'd have terrible dps either.

Acclimation is a little better, 30% chance (from 15) and 18 second duration (from 15) means it will have a fair chance of staying up in a lot of situations.

Deep Frost/Blood still looks like the best tanking spec, but I can't help but wonder if passing up as many DPS talents as the spec requires will make holding agro impossible. Remains to be seen.

For a magic tank/raid utlity build I thought about something like
http://wrath.druzya.org/yarr/?c=deat...1050051155003d

 

Alvira

I think Ebon plaguebringer and crypt fever will be rebalanced again and again before the actual expansion. Somehow, I just don't see them wanting to make unholy deathknights essential to a raid just for the magic vulnerability debuff that it brings to the raid.

DKs by concept are DPSers and tanks. Support was never featured strongly as one of DK's strengths. It should never be the overiding reason to have one in raid.

I noticed that heart strike is now just 1 blood rune. That's a very nice change. It won't be used on raid bosses, but in every other situation (farming, pvping, etc), it would be nice.

 

Lamaros

Breakdown of Talents/Changes (not mentioning those that have had minor/no changes):

Blood:

Bladed Armor: Up 25% from 20 to 25 I think.
Imp. Blood Strike: Up from 10% per rank to 30%. I would guess that this bonus just applies to the disease bonus and not the blade strike as a whole because of this.
Subversion: The only -threat talent DKs have, I wonder if this will have any impact on Frost/Unholy builds? Can be gained simply from 8 talent points, with 5 being in the useful bladed armor if not a blood strike user, though.
Forceful Deflection: I have no real idea what 20% of ones strength will be at 80, nor what the parry rating conversion will be, so it's hard to know what this will work out to. However the % aspect will ensure it continues to scale a little bit with gear beyond level 80.
Rune Tap: Good to see it has been converted to a %.
Blade Barrier: I don't think 15% is that strong (down from 30) all things considered, looks good right now.
Blood/Frost/Unholy Aura: Down to 2 talent points instead of 5.

Frost:

Imp. Icy Touch: Reduces the CD from 6 to 1 now, and gives it 25% more crit damage. Used to be a flat 15% increase, so it'll be a lower boost now unless all the icy touches are Killing Machined.
Frostbite: Now applies to mind freeze? Or did I just miss this before.
Annihilation: New. Interesting placement for this talent. The wording makes me unsure if it's 90% chance for each disease on the target to not be consumed, or 90% for all but one. The former is quite powerful, but it's an odd place considering obliterate is a 2B ability (to my knowledge, this may have changed also?).
Aneurysm: New. Makes Mind Freeze another spell to work into a frost rotation with regularity, like a heavy blood DC, where before it was much more situational. Given the mind freeze synergy with freezing, killing machine, mastrey it might be quite decent now.
Merciless Combat: Now a pre-req for Frost Strike.
Acclimation: Much better now in chance of being active, but the resistance amount is unknown.
Guile of Gorefiend: More support for Obliterate and Mind Freeze.

A -threat talent mid-high in frost would be useful.

Unholy:

Vicious Strikes: New. Tooltip looks wrong for this.
Necrosis: New. 5% to white damage it seems. Not that powerful really, but combines for some DW boost with other stuff. Maybe a little bit of a boost would be nice, or unlink it from damage a bit and make it per strike (Eg: Your normal melee swings have a 100% chance to make your normal melee hits inflict 5% additional shadow damage. This buff lasts for 5 seconds and stacks up to 3 times).
Shadow of Death: 1% ability boost. Seems a bit for the sake of it, but at least gives some use generaly.
Summon Garg: Tooltip change, but not sure how it is different to what it was before.

Other stuff changed, but has been covered in this thread already.

 

Baern

With regards to dps, Unholy/Blood works okay. Even before you consider other characters and ghouls, a single Unholy DK can have up to 5 diseases on a target, 4 of which will probably be up most of the time (Unholy Blight being the 5th. Potentially a 6th in Imp Corpse Explosion, but well...). That makes the Imp Blood Strike talent far better for an Unholy DK than a Blood one.
Bladed Armor will also give extra benefit to Impurity, and Subversion might well end up being a required talent.
Then there is Dark Conviction, 5% melee crit will be a decent dps boost even if a lot of your damage is spell based.

Blood/Frost doesn't work quite so well. Increasing your melee haste by 15% at the cost of needing a Frost Rune and losing out of better talents from Unholy.

Frost/Unholy works from a dps view I think, possibly better than Frost/Blood, and certainly looks for PvP.

Saying all that, not all tree combinations have to work. Certainly don't with other classes.


On the case of Subversion. I think both deep Unholy and deep Frost should get a threat reduction talent. That, or just make the threat reduction innate in Blood and Unholy presense (like stances).
As it stands both Frost and Unholy dps builds will probably be forced into Blood for at least 8 points.


Edit: Summon Gargolye went from 1 Unholy 1 Frost rune to Runic Power. It was originally RP but was changed, now its RP again. Interesting that it mentions it scales with AP now too.

 

Tulavan

did I miss something, and the talent calculator is taken down completely? Cant open it, says Forbidden

 

TheWicked22

Yeah, BlackDew's server host kicked him due to excessive bandwidth use.

Not sure if it's kosher to link to the wikidot forums, but here goes nothing...
General: [Updated] Yarr!-Tools
posted June 13'th at 10:11 am (PST)

 

Nymph'

Some things I'd like to point out here.

- About proc mitigation : I think this is underestimated too. The use of proc is simply a different way to play, more interesting in my opinion, as it demands more reactivity and skill to master it. Where's the fun, and the game, if it's just spamming abilities with fixed stats ? Being forced to react quickly to variations of proc, using cooldowns (like trinkets or special abilities) is a lot more exciting imho. And makes more differences between a good and a bad tank. (Note that Luck mitigates itself as you increase the number of cooldown possible. With my avoidance rogue, there's nearly no chance I could die, because I have so much cooldowns that the chances of all of them being used and me being hit at the same time is ridiculously low - maybe not even once per week. That's not 0%, that's 0.01%. Not more than having your FAI disconnect you. :] )

- About 10 sec cycle : I really don't understand sentences like "2 in a 10 seconds cycle". It seems totally absurd to me to talk about a 10 seconds cycle (or simply cycle) for a DK ; when runes are not reactivated at the same time. I think you need to reconsider your way of thinking from the idea of a "cycle" to something more adapted. An ability with 4 second cooldown could perfectly be spammed every 4 seconds => 2.5 times per 10 seconds, and not fit with a 10 seconds cycle at all. Plus, there are talents that reset runes ; others than transform them ; etc. And there's no need to use all your runes at the same speed everytime ; keeping some (especially death runes) for later could be a good idea too. Trying to pick into that a good old caster/warrior/rogue "cycle" idea seems pretty hard to me.

- About numbers of runes : here too, I disagree with the idea that it's necessarily 4 FR/1 BR/1 UR for frost tanking. As it was said before, the blood rune is not that necessary. Plus, I think that it won't be that difficult to change runes (very probably when not in battle, as I do not see how it could work in battle - but runes seems to be on the weapon, so change weapon would change runes... ?), so blood rune, sometimes even unholy runes wouldn't be usefull, and going with 6 FR, very possible. Do not forget the "death runes" talent, too. It procs often (approx. two per minute ?), so it give you a Blood or Unholy capacity every 30 seconds. The thing is, you have to use it quickly, so you can refresh your parry proc. If you could keep it for later, it would be perfect ; but even like that, it's interesting. (so you can cast Blood or Unholy capacities even if you don't have the rune for these, and taking 5 FR if not 6 on your weapon)

 

PSGarak

I think in general you are going to want to spam your runes, because they're a resource structure that's entirely time-limited and not longevity-limited. The only exception is, eg, leaving a frost rune open for spell interrupts, but even that's dubious if you have five of them staggered. A 10-second window isn't a bad way of looking at things, just so long as you do allow for fractional representations and make sure clipping isn't an issue, which a zero-cooldown filler should be able to take care of.

As I've stated before, I'm with you on the other two points. Blood and Unholy runes are basically a waste if you aren't making use of them on cooldown with abilities superior to frost capabilities; Death Rune procs or cooldowns (I think there are both available for a frost DK?) should take care of unexpected edge cases, and re-rune your weapon when you expect to need them. And since avoidance is already spikey, and you don't need to become uncrushable, avoidance should really be looked at as an average, with attentive healers.

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

 

Lamaros

First point:

When you onlyhave two procs and they have a low chance it's an entirely different situation. When you have abilities that can be used alongside procs it's a different situation. This DK conversation is not a conversation about Procs generally, it's certainly not a conversation about Rogue procs or DPS procs. It's about aviodance procs on the DK.

Second point:

Runes have a 10sec cd. It makes sense to talk about a 10 sec rotation, or a rotation that is broken down into 10second sections. Barring procs runes ARE reactivated at the same time if you are planning to get the most out of them (ie: using them when they become avaliable). The Mastrey procs do change this and make it more complicated, but they're pretty small chances to proc and are much harder to calculate at this point in time. The DK is a damage class. It gets threat through damage and does DPS through damage. Most of the damage comes from using abilities, via runes or runic power. Runic power comes from using runes. Hence more rune use is at the heart of more DPS. Saving runes for use later only makes sense when you're using another rune, if you have one rune ot use and you are not using it then chances are you are not maximising DPS. Generally speaking you would only save runes if you wanted to do something not related to damage.

The DK rune system is going to have a bit of variety due to certain things, but it is not amazingly unique. The basic principles of maximising damage will be the same as all other DPS classes in the game.

Third point:

Indications currently point to being able to change runes at a "rune forge". Probably not an item you can carry about with you.

Take a loook at the DK abilities more closely and consider how many of them someone might want to be able to use. Then consider that the only reliable way of getting a death rune requires a blood rune. People will have 1 blood rune on their weapon unless the way to change runes is 'any time out of combat' or unless they are going to a very specifc encounter and know precisely what they will need.

Look then at the other abilities and talents. Will any DK not be puting a disease on a target? Not using anti-magic shell? Not using death strike when grinding? Etc? No. You will pretty much have at least one Unholy rune on your blade. What about frost? This is probably the only tree that people might skip and even then it wont be very often.

Death runes will proc upwards of 2 times a miniute on average. But it doesn't work out to "once every 30 seconds" it's a proc. It could be twice in a row, 4 times in 30 seconds, or not at all in 1min. You would never count on it to give you runes in a tree you want but dont have on the blade. It's a free rune and will be handy, but it's a DPS boost basicly, nothing more. Who's going to blow all their frost runes hopeing to get a death rune so they can cast Anti-Magic Shell and not get destroyed? No one. They'll just put an unholy rune on the blade and the blow the death rune on more frost strikes for more threat.

 

Alvira

Yup, agree with Lamaros.

This is exactly why runes with like 6 of one type just isn't very practical. You CAN spam an ability every chance you get. But if you have no rune in which to activate it, even if that ability is on cooldown, you can't use it.

THis is why frost strike is going to be just as usable by a two hander frost knight as a dual wield. Because you simply won't have so many frost runes to be able to "spam" it even if you are getting in 8 hits in 10 seconds.

You can't just look at cooldown alone. Take Icy Touch. WIth talents, you can go down to 1 second cooldown. But can you literally cast 10 icy touches in 10 seconds? You can't, because you only have 6 runes max on your runeblade. And few are going to put 6 frost runes and nothing else on their blade.

Even if someone is crazy enough to put 6 frost runes on his blade, what happens after the 6th icy touch? Non of you runes are cooled down yet. So, now you have icy touch ready to cast, but zero runes to power it.

Same goes for runic power based spells. Why not spam deathcoil? Because a deathcoil powered by 10 runic power is going to hit for a laughable amount. You might as well wait until its more fully powered up, before you use up all your runic power on a big deathcoil rather than trying to spam it often resulting in several small deathcoils.

I suspect deathknight will be fairly balanced precisely because Blizzard has structured most of their damage around the rune system. Sure, a deathknight can have tons of really cool abilities and powers. But he can only use some of them at any one time, depending on his runes. And he can't spam. In fact, unlike warrior, where you can have situations where more rage = more abilities spammed all the time. DK is not like that. No matter what the situation, runes have a fixed cooldown.

Short of the rune mastery talents procing. But they have intentioanally made the proc low so that you can't rely on it happening often enough to do anything fancy in your routine.

 

Celebrimor

The only reason a tank would not take 6 frost runes is anti magic shield so far imo. If a boss does some heavy nuke spell of some sort the DK can handle it easy then.

 

Aeryn

Death Grip (single target taunt) would be another. Requires 1 unholy.

Personally, I'd rather be able to make due with 6 frost runes though, but tanking without taunt? I don't think so. Maybe some bosses... Also, would it really be wise to spam all your runes if it meant that you'll have your taunt on a 10 sec. cooldown?

 

Lamaros

Yeah, umm. Did you miss the bit where it looks like you can only change runes in a runeforge?

You expect someone to tank a whole raid, trash, OT, maybe DPS, different bosses, etc all with a very specific rune structure?

Please think things through in the future.

 

Tulavan

The Blood Tap trainable ability (at least it was there, not sure what happened to it if anything) is a button to refresh your Blood rune instantly, and convert it into a Death rune. Dont remember the CD, but its usable.

The Empower Runeblade trainable ability instantly refreshes one of each rune types, if its on the runeblade. That means for 6F runes setup it will only refresh one frost rune. For 4F/1B/1U it will refresh 1F/1B/1U - 3 times the effectiveness. It is very unlikely that the CD will be longer then a couple of minutes, so these abilities will be your "Oh s&%t" buttons, and their effectivenes is almost exclusively available to varied runes setup, not all of one type.

 

PSGarak

Can I see a source on this whole Runeforge concept? I am a bit incredulous, and that would change things quite a bit. The logistical overhead for randomly grouping in the field and wanting to switch roles could be aggravating.

As far as taunt, I can live without. I use it way the hell less than every ten seconds on my (non-prot) warrior when tanking. Blood Tap should probably be enough, especially with Root abilities available in frost. The unholy rune, if I have it, will see far more use for anti-magic shield.

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