WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities. - Page 147

Eishara · 09/30/08, 10:36 PM

Originally Posted by Thorakk

I kind of suspect that's the case too but until either the US servers come back up or our EU buddies try it out we won't know for sure.

Well I just tried it out and there was some weirdness.

1) Blood of the North creates Death Runes as normal, if you Blood Strike on the Death Runes from the Blood Runes they come back as Death Runes again, if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery they respawn as Unholy/Frost again. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 6 x BS -> DDUUFF

2) Death Rune Mastery makes Death Runes as it should, if you use the Death Runes from Blood of the North to Obliterate they return as Blood Runes as expected. HOWEVER if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery on Obliterates then for some reason one of each pair of Death Runes is made a Death Rune when they refresh. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 3x Obliterate -> BBDUDF

I'm bug reporting it now, I don't think that's what's supposed to happen.

Zaroua · 09/30/08, 10:43 PM

Originally Posted by Eishara

Well I just tried it out and there was some weirdness.

1) Blood of the North creates Death Runes as normal, if you Blood Strike on the Death Runes from the Blood Runes they come back as Death Runes again, if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery they respawn as Unholy/Frost again. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 6 x BS -> DDUUFF

2) Death Rune Mastery makes Death Runes as it should, if you use the Death Runes from Blood of the North to Obliterate they return as Blood Runes as expected. HOWEVER if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery on Obliterates then for some reason one of each pair of Death Runes is made a Death Rune when they refresh. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 3x Obliterate -> BBDUDF

I'm bug reporting it now, I don't think that's what's supposed to happen.

It should end with BBDDDD.

Also the main purpose of Obliterate as Blood was to save GCDs if you were 51/13/7 or to proc DRM for more HS.

Xanarios · 09/30/08, 10:43 PM

Originally Posted by Eishara

Well I just tried it out and there was some weirdness.

1) Blood of the North creates Death Runes as normal, if you Blood Strike on the Death Runes from the Blood Runes they come back as Death Runes again, if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery they respawn as Unholy/Frost again. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 6 x BS -> DDUUFF

2) Death Rune Mastery makes Death Runes as it should, if you use the Death Runes from Blood of the North to Obliterate they return as Blood Runes as expected. HOWEVER if you use the Death Runes from Death Rune Mastery on Obliterates then for some reason one of each pair of Death Runes is made a Death Rune when they refresh. f.ex.

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 3x Obliterate -> BBDUDF

I'm bug reporting it now, I don't think that's what's supposed to happen.

Aye, there's something funny about that. Explains why I couldn't work out a rotation that had DRM and BotN in it though. Thanks!

jaxdahl · 09/30/08, 11:29 PM

Blade Barrier activates upon both blood runes being used, even though the wording didn't change in this build.

Same spec, different gem (-14 defense rating (541->538 skill) for +24 stamina), lost a little under 1% due to bladed armor change, gained 2.61% dodge (Thought it'd be 2.5 or less). I have 10.03% dodge naked with 5% from talents.

New:
Dodge: 22.98
Parry: 19.57

Old:
Dodge: 20.37%
Parry: 20.57%

Mild Confusion · 10/01/08, 12:16 AM

I think IT was over buffed. I'm not gonna get used to it hitting that hard.

I'm more interested in HB. I always felt that it should be superior to Oblit if fully specced into frost, but only if you get all the frost enchancing talents. Right now, Oblit still has the advantage of higher crit rate though.

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After some quick testing, my Oblits are hitting for about 3100 to 3500 on a crit and my HB's are critting between 3800 and 4100.

FS was critting for up to 3700+

IT was critting for about 4k on average.

This is my spec.

Lanlaorn · 10/01/08, 12:46 AM

I know Howling Blast is a 31 point talent while Obliterate is a base skill, but I don't see how it's good design sense to make a single target and an AoE attack that both consume the same resources to use where the AoE is superior even against one target. Obliterate even comes built in with a drawback you have to invest talent points into to remove.

Looking at the talents I assumed they were going for Oblit to be Frost's FU dump with Howling Blast being for AoE situations, outside melee range attacks and a free bonus from Rime procs. These recent changes have seemingly made Oblit completely obsolete though, and so just like the IT change, I don't think this will last.

Edit: Also, the new Rune Strike makes Killing Machine appear to be a pretty poor investment for tanking since constant RS use will reduce the quantity of your white crits considerably. Considering lower crit levels in tanking gear anyway this change makes the talent completely unattractive, by my math anyway.

Buanna · 10/01/08, 2:03 AM

Originally Posted by jaxdahl

Blade Barrier activates upon both blood runes being used, even though the wording didn't change in this build.

So they indeed did put this bug in knowingly? What if you're not using Blood Runes, but using Death Runes?

Kaejin · 10/01/08, 2:27 AM

Sounds like the only bug is in the tooltip. Frost Strike's tooltip didn't change either from what I can see on the talent builders.

SpaceDrake · 10/01/08, 3:51 AM

Blade Barrier isn't "bugged", it's intended. It's the tooltip that has not yet been updated.

Ditto Rune Strike, which now works like Revenge - you dodge/parry and you can queue up a Rune Strike to take the place of your next autoattack and it'll hit for double damage and cause extra threat Great power now.

Also yes IT is a bit out of control at the moment. I imagine it'll get turned down a little bit and the damage shifted to the other Frost abilities.

I actually like the Reaping change, as it means that Unholy isn't punished for using Blood Strike any longer; previously there was literally no reason to hotbar Blood Strike as Unholy. Now you can pull a boss, BS twice to get BB and start the Death runes going, then conduct the rest of your rotation.

Mild Confusion · 10/01/08, 5:56 AM

I didn't run a meter for it, but I was doing all that damage on a raid boss target dummy, so armor was affecting Oblit a lot more so than HB. This was also in level 80 premade gear.

Someone will need to do a longer and more thorough test to see the overall dps differance between Oblit and HB. It's true that HB was critting higher, but Oblit crits a hell of a lot more often. If the dps differerance between the crit max and amount of crits is higher than HB's, then Oblit will be preferred for overall dps while HB will be preferred for burst damage.

methods · 10/01/08, 9:53 AM

Originally Posted by Lujaar

I can't decide whether to call this "pretend enh shaman spec" or "deathrune spec." (When I tried this spec I took death rune mastery to see if it was possible to sustain 4 death runes permanently. Turns out it's not.)

The blood/froststrike spec looks competitive, especially given that you can also take abom's might over bloody vengeance if you don't have an enh shaman or marks hunter. Wouldn't you hit harder by using more blood strikes and fewer oblits though? 2 baseline blood strikes hit slightly harder than one baseline oblit because of higher bonus damage. With this spec, you're gaining 15% crit on oblit, vs two different multipliers on blood strike - 15% from Blood of the North, 18% from Bloody Strikes (plus 60% bonus damage). Obviously if you take death rune mastery and try to BSx4 you're going to run out of GCDs for frost strikes, but oblitting twice doesn't make sense. The only time I'd want to oblit twice would be to free up a GCD for a Rime proc.

Everything about doing BS over OB is very true in a high stat/gear setting. I do not know the exact threshold but from what i can tell if you are sitting around 21 crit from gear and 2200ap (6% hit and talented Expertise) the 15% crit on OB combined with the extra crit damage from Guile adds up slightly higher. That and the lack of GcDs for the BS model can really hold you back in the long run. I would assume once you have a crit buffed near the 40% mark it would be better to use BS anyway.

After all being said.... this build took a pretty bad hit with the latest beta build and I assume it wont be a contender much longer.

Saxe1978 · 10/01/08, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by Eishara

BBUUFF -> 2x Obliterate 2x Blood Strike -> DDDDDD -> 6 x BS -> DDUUFF

Sorry, about my stuipid Question, but what is "u" means?
Can anyone translate this for me?

Bloodstrike, Bloodstrike, ?, ?, Frostrike, Froststrike
2 * Obli, 2 * Blood,

D = ?

• Chicken · 10/01/08, 11:44 AM

Originally Posted by Saxe1978

Sorry, about my stuipid Question, but what is "u" means?
Can anyone translate this for me?

Bloodstrike, Bloodstrike, ?, ?, Frostrike, Froststrike
2 * Obli, 2 * Blood,

D = ?

D = Death Rune
B = Blood Rune
U = Unholy Rune
F = Frost Rune

Eishara was listing how the runes looked in between each rotation for clarity.

Eishara · 10/01/08, 11:48 AM

Yes, sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear but Chicken has it right. All I was pointing out is the interaction between the Death Rune Talents, Blood of the North will only ever make Blood Runes into Death Runes, Death Rune Mastery will only ever make Unholy/Frost Runes into Death Runes but Death Rune Mastery is currently bugged and only makes one pair of Unholy/Frost Runes into Death Runes when using Obliterate with Death Runes.

methods · 10/01/08, 12:25 PM

Wow... So IT Spam is officially the highest DPS bar none for the DK class. No question really.

20/51/0 DRM + BotN Spec

IT expected hit after stats (including crit modifiers) and talents: 2662.077

IT Spam on second rotation like so (while keeping ps because it feels wrong not to)

IT->PS->OB->BS->BS->FS->*wait*->IT->PS->IT->IT->IT->IT->FS *repeat* with FS in the place of *wait* from now on.

Note: Having the IT glyph actually hurts dps due to GcD lockout.

In Naxx T7(including gems)
Stats after talents (no raid buffs or horn):
AP: 2752
Crt: 26.8%
Hit: 5.37%
Exp: 2.5%
Haste: 4.54% (before Icy Talons)
Armor: 13100
Weapon: 180 dps 2H
Mob armor mitigation: 40%
Presence: Blood
Total DPS showing max theoretical: 2356.92

Incoming nerf to IT or buffs to other specs.

Edit: I havn't adjusted for the recent nerf to disease damage (if someone could find those numbers i'd be in your debt).