It looks like you might not be able to customize your runes now, instead you always have 2B/2F/2U although you can engrave a semi-permament rune onto you blade for a selection of buffs: Profession - Runeforging
I've not seen any mention on if your weapon can have multiple runes at once, but I would guess not. You can change you runes in Ebon hold.
Have been playing a DK since yesterday, got to 60 earlier today, gotta say, it's a pretty fun class. It is quite dynamic since some abilities using multiple runes so you have to plan ahead, and some talents will speed up rune regen or give you various procs and stuff, so even while grinding you're still pressing quite a few buttons. I leveled as blood until 60, now trying other specs.
I'm currently frost, it's decent, but wish howling fjord did a bit less dmg with half the cooldown, currently can only use it every now and then so it makes frost a bit dull. It does burst nicely though when you use it on a frozen target, around 1.6-2k dmg hit on hellfire orcs, and it's AE so you can setup a big combo with hungering cold first, very nice AEing. There's some runic power management talents too in the tree, but I can't test any of it cause I have infinite runic power currently, gotta find out which talent is bugged, spamming deathcoil the whole fight makes stuff easier for leveling though ^^. Frost strike is pretty weird, since it does frost damage instead of melee, if you use it on an equal/green mob, it does better damage than any other melee attack, but if you use it on orange/red mobs, it does less damage than normal melee attacks. On next hit stuff is also pretty annoying with the rune system, works weird sometimes.
What I like is pretty much every skill I use often. I have to rotate almost all my direct attacks to use all my runes efficiently, I use the grip to pull faster, I use the other taunt on multi mob pulls to blow up my diseases after spreading them, and I use the 2 anticaster tools when fighting casters. Slap death and decay on multimob and ghoul when it's up, and I don't really have unused stuff. Some are situational, like the silence and pummel, but it's nice getting new stuff/ranks and not thinking: "meh, another rank of something I don't use". Happens often with other classes since trees are focused on a specific part of the char, while DK still has to use all 3 trees even when full speced in one.
Does anyone, from reviewing DK talents and skills, have a good bead on what DK tanking is likely to look and feel like? From the perspective of a prot paladin, I'd love someone to summarize what the fell of DK tanking would be.
Aside from how effective they are at multi-mob tanking or AoE tanking, which I'm hoping they'll have some ability to do, how different or similar to warrior or tankadin tanking is it likely to be?
Does anyone, from reviewing DK talents and skills, have a good bead on what DK tanking is likely to look and feel like? From the perspective of a prot paladin, I'd love someone to summarize what the fell of DK tanking would be.
Aside from how effective they are at multi-mob tanking or AoE tanking, which I'm hoping they'll have some ability to do, how different or similar to warrior or tankadin tanking is it likely to be?
What remains to be seen at high level is mitigation, but in terms of tools, there's some very interesting concepts. For example you can taunt everything that's diseased in a 30m radius every ~10secs. Combined with Death and Decay which instantly disease a large zone, and the plague strike/pestilence combo(diseases one mob then spreads it to 2 other mobs in range), you can actually keep AE taunting a few mobs every 10secs. You also have more ranged threat tool than any other tank I believe, with Grip to pull a mob to you, Chain of Ice+Howling Fjord(if speced cold) for a big single target burst and basic deathcoils.
But I'm unsure about how well they'll mitigate melee damage, with proc based mitigation buffs and no blocks. Every tree has some very good tanking talent, but they're all spread out enough that you can't take most of them at once, which makes it hard to evaluate correctly. That and there's no DK doing dungeons yet in beta(DKs were wiped from alpha, so will take a week for the first DKs to reach northrend stuff). Even then, 5mans only go so far, I doubt you'll see first hand insight for DK raid tanking(which is the only thing that really matters in the end) before a few weeks before wotlk going live, when they'll probably have a naxx focus test.
Originally Posted by Darkrenown
How are ghouls anyway? Do they feel useful or is it just "meh, ghoul is up, might as well pop it"?
Unspecced ghouls are a bit random, they pop as "guardians" so they run around and attack stuff by themselves, and use their abilities randomly. They last like 1:30 and are on 5mins CD, and require a 50silver component to summon, or a humanoid body. So, they're not really that great if you're not unholy speced. If you are though, you can keep a rather good uptime on them(2:30less on the CD, longer duration but not sure how much) and you can also make them into pets instead of guardians, so you can control what they do. They do respectable damage and have nice utility(taunt and stun). They also use diseases which increases your own abilities. Finally, they also act as some kind of living healthstone, since you can sacrifice them to regain hp.
I'm gonna test unholy now so will see stuff in detail, specifically gargoyles and stuff.
The rune system as I currently understand it is interesting. I think it is better than a changable rune system for a number of reasons, mostly balance and being more player friendly, but not being able to further customise the character is still an unfortunate result.
If we are stuck with two of each rune however it makes me wonder about some of the talents still, notable the rune mastrey ones.
Does Frozen Rune Weapons debuff effect count as a frost hit? I cannot see how you will be freezing targets anywhere near as often as Blood unless that is the case. The same applies to the Unholy tree.
If we have fixed two of each then you could use one degen and one plague strike in 10 seconds. That's two hits with a 10% chance. You could use two icy touches, two hits with 7.5% chance. Or you could be blood and get 10% for every weapon hit; which I assume would include any blood strikes, plague strikes, degens, obliterates, white hits, and the like.
Not being in the beta I don't know how these things work, but either I am misunderstanding something, blood rune mastrey is meant to be much more powerful than the others, or the balance is just wrong.
It is also interesting to note that the unholy mastrey is a tier lower, enabling it to be used in more varied builds. How this stacks with blood would be interesting. Would you get a double chance (one chance to lower blood, one unholy) with plague strike and degen if you had both?
On the other talents I can notice:
Necrosis is better now than before. 5 points is still a lot for what might be a small damage increase (not a whole lot of the DK DPS being from white damage as I currently understand it) but it is useful considering some of the other talents in the area might not be great for a PvE spec.
Shadow of Death is well buffed at 2% to both STR and STA.
Bone Armor now has a DPS use which is nice. I wonder if bones are consumed by AoE abilities or only ones that directly target the DK. I asume the former, otherwise it is really really good.
The tooltip for AMZ still doesn't imply if it scales with AP or SP, or at all.
Unbreakable Armor now, with the assumption that we cannot stack Forst runes in our blade, looks weak and to have too much varience to be a really useful tanking talent.
Acclimation looks rather dull and gimmicky.
Death Rune mastrey looks to be in a decent place now. A Blood/Unholy build with all three mastreys avaliable to it looks to have a decent chance at getting some notable rune boots.
Veteran of the third war also looks to be in a better place now.
Mark of blood looks changed, or maybe it's just me. Now looks to be more of the 'reasons to havea blood DK in a raid' ability. Looks good.
Abominations strength is interesting. Party bonuses are an odd one (applies to acclimation too) given the WotLK raidwise push, and I wonder how much action obliterate is going to see this far into blood. As a finishing move the bonus isn't so great, because you're less likely to use the 10sec fighting, but 50% from Blood Strike is still good.
Blood Aura is great when you consider it's ANY of your skills or abilities. That means Rune Tap, Scent of Blood (if tanking or OTing), Blood Presence, and so on. I assume it doesn't also apply to Mark of Blood if you're tanking.
Blood Gorged tooltip is clearer now.
Dancing Rune Blade has double the length now.
I'm still a bit curious about the DK tanking abilities, but time and players in the Beta will tell a better story about that.
Possibly a dumb question, but does anyone know whether Icy Talons works on targets that are immune* to the attack slowing debuff of Icy Touch? The talent description seems to imply they wouldn't be, but also sounds like flavor text, so I might be reading too much into it. Assuming you can get the 15% haste against bosses, a hybrid build with bloody vengeance, icy talons, and necrosis seems like it would be able to put out some nasty white damage. And as long as I'm pestering the beta testers - does the disease from Blood-Caked Blade stack or just reset the duration? And is Frozen Rune Weapon PPM or flat % based?
*Maybe nothing's immune, but I'm not sure for instance what the interaction between imp. tclap and icy touch is, since tclap provides a better melee slow but not a cast slow. Do both debuffs go up with attack speed at -20% and casting at -15%?
Other random thoughts:
Tiers 2 and 4 of the blood tree really need some more work. There's too many linked talents there, and a significant number of wasted points for a pure DPS build.
As Lamaros mentioned, either there's something not evident from the mastery descriptions, or blood mastery is just far and away better than the other two.
If the goal is for all three trees to be able to tank effectively, I'm thinking deep unholy needs some more tanking love. Bone Armor looks crazy good, but 4 charges every 30 seconds means nasty spikes in between casts. Lichborne looks like a respectable panic button vs. melee bosses, but isn't up for most of the fight. Beyond that, what does it have?
The rune system as I currently understand it is interesting. I think it is better than a changable rune system for a number of reasons, mostly balance and being more player friendly, but not being able to further customise the character is still an unfortunate result.
I really hope this isn't the case, having two runes of every type for every single spec will give so much less variety
Does Frozen Rune Weapons debuff effect count as a frost hit? I cannot see how you will be freezing targets anywhere near as often as Blood unless that is the case. The same applies to the Unholy tree.
Since it's not a damaging effect presumably it's applied purely based on whether you hit the target or not
If we have fixed two of each then you could use one degen and one plague strike in 10 seconds. That's two hits with a 10% chance. You could use two icy touches, two hits with 7.5% chance. Or you could be blood and get 10% for every weapon hit; which I assume would include any blood strikes, plague strikes, degens, obliterates, white hits, and the like.
Are you talking about Frozen Rune Weapon? It applies to all melee hits.
Not being in the beta I don't know how these things work, but either I am misunderstanding something, blood rune mastrey is meant to be much more powerful than the others, or the balance is just wrong.
It's only one point, think of it as a 10% chance per Blood Strike hit to get another Blood Strike hit 5 seconds later
It is also interesting to note that the unholy mastrey is a tier lower, enabling it to be used in more varied builds. How this stacks with blood would be interesting. Would you get a double chance (one chance to lower blood, one unholy) with plague strike and degen if you had both?
Same deal, basically a 10% chance per Plague Strike/Degeneration to get another Degeneration 5 seconds later
Bone Armor now has a DPS use which is nice. I wonder if bones are consumed by AoE abilities or only ones that directly target the DK. I asume the former, otherwise it is really really good.
From the testing I've done, the damage component of Bone Armor is only useful for generating threat while tanking. To keep Bone Armor up, you have to use one Unholy and one Frost rune per 30 seconds, which represents 6.7% of your yellow damage potential for that time period. Since Bone Armor is only a 2% damage buff, your overall damage actually goes down by keeping Bone Armor up.
Acclimation looks rather dull and gimmicky.
If you get 100 resistance for 3 stacks of Acclimation then that's about 15% magical damage mitigation for your entire party. Against a boss that's chain casting spells at you I think that's a pretty reasonable investment.
I'm still a bit curious about the DK tanking abilities, but time and players in the Beta will tell a better story about that.
I don't have access to the beta, but my take on tanking is basically this. In terms of skills, firstly you have two taunt abilities, Death Grip (single target, 35 second CD, 25 seconds talented) and Blood Boil (AoE, 30 yard range, 15 second CD, 11 seconds talented, requires disease(s) on the target). Icy Touch applies a debuff that reduces melee, ranged and casting speed by 15% for 20 seconds and is something you would presumably want to have up 100% of the time, regardless of your spec.
For AoE tanking there are two useful baseline spells, Pestilence (spreads a disease from the target to two additional nearby targets, doing damage) and Death and Decay (30 sec CD instant case AoE doing damage for 10 seconds). In addition, if you are an Unholy tank then you have Unholy Blight (AoE causing damage and diseases which can be maintained by generating runic power) and Wandering Plague (15% chance to damage nearby targets every time one of your diseases ticks).
Finally, there are the emergency abilties. Icebound Fortitude reduces all damage by 50% for 12 seconds (18 seconds talented) and Lichborne, the 11-point Unholy talent, gives you an additional 25% chance to be missed for 30 seconds on a 5 minute CD.
In terms of tanking style, it really depends on what spec you choose. Blood tanking is based on increasing parry chance to mitigate both physical and magical damage. Frost tanking is probably the weakest right now with the "core" tanking talent being a 15% chance to proc a 30% armour buff per frost rune. That being said, Acclimation is a useful party-wide ability for tanking casters. Finally, Unholy tanking is based on using Bone Armor to mitigate 40% of damage for 4 hits, which is not very many but it should be up a reasonable percentage of the time with high enough avoidance. As previously mentioned, Unholy also has some decent AoE tanking abilities but I don't think it will quite approach Paladin ability in this regard.
I probably sounds like a broken record but if you're interested in how DPS or tanking specs are panning out, have a play with [BETA] Hex: A Death Knight Analysis Tool
mrboh please don't post split. It's against the rules and will get you an infraction.
My Frozen Rune Weapon comment contained a typo, I meant would it freeze the target when it is applied. IE: Will it impact Mastrey. For the 7.5% effect from Icy Touch I am talking about Frost Rune Mastrey. I think you are misunderstanding my comments about the Mastrey talents, or confusing it with something else. Your simplfication if you are in the beta is inadequate, and if you're not you're just being condescending and not helpful.
Bone armor, according to the talent, last 5 miniutes. This is not needing to be recast every 30 seconds. As I said, if incidental damage uses up the bones then it will not last that 5miniutes on many occasions, but if it is only targeted effects then it may last a decent length.
As for acclimation: A talent that is only useful in specific situations (ie, a boss that does aoe spelldamage and is not aviodable or requires +resistance gear) is the definition of gimmicky. Spending 3 talent points for something you rarely use is not really a fun investment.
The point of this thread, now especially with beta in effect, is for informed comments or questions. Speculation isn't useful anymore unless it is tied in with questions to those who have beta access and will just confuse the topic.
In terms of tanking style, it really depends on what spec you choose. Blood tanking is based on increasing parry chance to mitigate both physical and magical damage. Frost tanking is probably the weakest right now with the "core" tanking talent being a 15% chance to proc a 30% armour buff per frost rune. That being said, Acclimation is a useful party-wide ability for tanking casters. Finally, Unholy tanking is based on using Bone Armor to mitigate 40% of damage for 4 hits, which is not very many but it should be up a reasonable percentage of the time with high enough avoidance. As previously mentioned, Unholy also has some decent AoE tanking abilities but I don't think it will quite approach Paladin ability in this regard.
To me it seems like with toughness, frigid dreadplate, acclimation and unbreakable armor frost is by far the best tanking tree.
And even if you go 51 frost you can still get lichbourne, unholy command, and 4/5 forcefull deflection which are almost all of the other trees tanking talents, while the frost tanking talents are pretty deep down.
Also, to me it seems like the deathknight can heal himself with deathcoil once he uses lichbourne, since then he is considered an undead.
Also hungering cold is way too strong to be wasted on burst damage in most group cases, 20 seconds of aoe cc is just awsome in so many many situations and I think that it will prevent many whipes and win many arena fights when used correctly.
Acclimatation is more of a 5man PvE talent(where you'll rarely run around in resist gear anyway) or a PvP skill(where increasing your group shadow resistance again say, a spriest/ua lock team would help quite a lot). Unbreakable Armor is currently quite weak. It seems to proc off random stuff though, I've had it proc on Death and Decay, I'd need to run more tests to find out what exactly it can proc off(and if it's not a bug).
Frost rune mastery is weaker, in a way. However remember you can force a freeze with Chains of Ice and Hungering Cold. Meaning you can actually control when you'll get the mastery to proc, while blood and unholy are both random. Also not sure where your numbers are from, but Icy Chill and Mind Freeze have a 15%chance to proc freeze when talented, and Frost Strike is a base 10%, so overall using frost attacks, minus Obliterate, gives you a higher chance to proc it than unholy.
Also Frozen Weapon is pretty much terrible, the only point to it as far as I can tell is raid, if you're using DW, to keep the debuff for your frost mages(and maybe yourself but I don't see frost as that good for raid dps, it's bursty but long cooldowns on everything). It doesn't proc freeze, and does no additional damage, and with a 2h it'll often fall off before you refresh it. It only seems to fall by increment though, so like, maybe you could maintain it at 8-10 with a 2H, if you had enough ramping up time and used a lot of melee attacks.
Not sure about Icy Talons working or not on mobs immune to the 15%, I'll check later if I can get my character ingame, euro beta servers are being tweaked with, can't access alliance chars atm, and I made my DK alliance. Was horde turn yesterday
Frost rune mastery is weaker, in a way. However remember you can force a freeze with Chains of Ice and Hungering Cold. Meaning you can actually control when you'll get the mastery to proc, while blood and unholy are both random. Also not sure where your numbers are from, but Icy Chill and Mind Freeze have a 15%chance to proc freeze when talented, and Frost Strike is a base 10%, so overall using frost attacks, minus Obliterate, gives you a higher chance to proc it than unholy.
According to the talent tree I saw Frost Rune Mastrey is a 50% chance when freezing something, so it's 50% of 15% for Icy Touch and 50% of 10% for Frost strike. Correct me if this is wrong and it's 100% in game.
According to the talent tree I saw Frost Rune Mastrey is a 50% chance when freezing something, so it's 50% of 15% for Icy Touch and 50% of 10% for Frost strike. Correct me if this is wrong and it's 100% in game.
Oh right forgot about that, my bad. Yeah so I guess you can't force a rune mastery with hungering cold/chains of ice actually, guess I was just lucky to proc it almost everytime on those(hungering cold since it AE freezes has a decent total chance though).
Overall Frost seems to be the worst tree in terms of general feeling. It seems designed with PvP in mind(when it should have originally be a tanking tree), since most stuff make sense from a PvP point of view, but not so much in PvE. Without rune customization(and thus having 3-4frost runes at a time), the tree seems rather weak, since you always need one free frost rune to fjord the freezes. With its cooldown, you can't even use it once per fight either, so in the end you rely a lot on the non frost related stuff.
A usual fight would look like this, Ice Chill, if it freezes, fjord, else plague strike, degenerate, bloodstrike, obliterate, and weave in some deathcoils in the middle. Out of these, only obliterate uses some of the frost tree(for increased crit chance, and procing stuff like unbreakable). A lot of the tree is "wasted" if chill doesn't proc freeze, and even when it does, it's not that awesome because of the cooldown. Frost Strike is soso, being next hit and using a frost rune, since you pretty much want to chill to start, and obliterate to consume the diseases you have to use to use unholy/blood runes.
Out of all 3 trees when I tested them, Frost was the one that looked the most "meh" to me. For PvP however I can see the uses of all the cooldowns to stack some insane burst all at once. Build some runic power, wait for frost runes back, then hungering cold to freeze, pop the 100%crit cooldown, run into melee range and fjord, you get fjord triple dmg autocrit+frost strike autocrit at the same time, then blood tap to convert a blood to frost, chains of ice, death and decay on the guy, and hope he dies cause you're now out of everything. But with unholy presence GCD reduction, this could happen very very fast, and frontload a lot of damage. A part of that combo would end up being AE too, forcing people to run away from whatever you're targetting.
The other "meh" thing about talents was the top of unholy, specifically the fact you have 2 talents that use all the runic power there, while the tree itself is already quite power consuming with corpse explosion and the death coil boosting. I think they should change one of the 2 to something else, or combine them or something like that. That, or give a better way to generate runic power in unholy, currently if you plan on using Unholy stuff, you pretty much have to get 18points in frost for Rune Mastery, again because you can't have more than 2 unholy runes for degenerate spamming with Dirge.
Oh and if people wanted a "proof" that blood health regen is probably a bit out of hand, people are doing 5man BC dungeons at intended level with 5DKs. Just healing each other with blood aura and the other tools(mark and stuff). It's definitely funny though, since usually you'd only expect healing hybrids to be able to 5class dungeons.
Still quite a few months to go, so not too worried about the result for now. And the gameplay still is very fun. Now they just need to fix the euro servers so I can actually play, and everything will be fine ^^.
Frozen Rune Weapon is not that bad, dual weilding on normal mobs...I will easily get it to a stack of 5. If I fight elites, or some of the harder regular mob I will get it to 10 without much problem. While soloing it's nice bonus, I think the synergy in group/raids with frost mage or other DK will be pretty good as it will be quite easy to maintain at 10.
As of now, you cannot change the rune setup. I am not certain if we ever will be able to. It was mentioned that they wanted the core abilities balanced before even considering to allow it. The rune cooldown is the only cooldown for a lot of the abilities, allowing you to have more then 2 of one type could lead to interesting balance issues.
While I originally thought of the new, fixed rune system very much in the same way, I now prefer to think of every Death Knight being provided two runes of each type--making every DK able to use every skill that the class gets and getting rid of a "oh, I can't do that because I dont have an XYZ rune" type of DK (while also making it relatively impossible to specialize as well :-/)--with the Rune Mastery talents being almost critical to adding flexibility, but more on that shortly.
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Lets take a closer look at the Blood/Frost/Unholy Mastery talents:
Blood Rune Mastery: 10% chance of proccing when you hit a diseased target. -Pros:
--You hit things a lot and can expect this to have a better than 75% chance of proccing within 14 hits (1.0-0.9^14)
--Blood Runes can be Rune Tapped into Death Runes at any time at the cost of 1 GCD; this makes Blood Rune Mastery even better. -Cons:
--Nothing really; just attack things and it'll eventually happen as long as you perform a standard disease/blood strike rotation. Could be kinda bad for PvP though if disease removal happens often *shrug*.
Frost Rune Mastery: 50% proc chance when a target is frozen. -Pros:
--If Hungering Cold ever hits more than one target, you have an expected 75% chance of proccing FRM so it should go off all the time while grinding.
--Frost Strike can also proc a freeze effect (10% chance) and certain specs (?) can freeze targets with other skills
--FRM probably has the best PvP Procrate with the high percentage chance for the proc combined with an AoE ability capable of proccing it.
--Will probably yield the best burst as you WILL be cycling frost runes fastish on a Hungering Cold AoE cycle -Cons:
--Extremely unreliable when tanking a 'Boss' which is immune to standard freezing effects (only Hungering Cold can proc it and it has a 1 minute CD)
Unholy Rune Mastery: 10% proc chance when you hit with Degeneration or Plague Strike. -Pros:
--1 Tier lower than the other two Mastery talents
--??? (there has got to be something nice about it, I'm just not extremely familiar with Unholy in general :-/) -Cons:
--BRM is a 10% chance when you hit a diseased target, URM is a 10% chance when you use one of two strikes; it just seems a LOT weaker.
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I agree that necrosis is very much improved over what it was previously. In addition I'd argue that, if the extra damage somehow scales with Spellpower (which DKs get through AP anyway, thus allowing that additional 25% damage to do some minor 'double dipping' into our AP scaling) this could be very welcome for some specs .
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Unbreakable Armor did get buffed to add 15% strength as well, which will probably buff a Frost DK's parry as well via Forceful Deflection. I don't think we can pass final judgment on this for at least a little longer but, yes, I would like a higher procrate as well.
Acclimation could be decent if it 'boosts' your resistance by a large amount but it does feel very PvP focused, rather than PvE focused, to me *shrug*.
--Blood Runes can be Rune Tapped into Death Runes at any time at the cost of 1 GCD; this makes Blood Rune Mastery even better.
Can you elaborate on this? Possibly I'm just looking at old information, but on Wowhead I see Rune Tap as a blood rune->HP conversion, with a 1 min cooldown. The only blood->death rune conversion I see is Death Rune Mastery, which is a 12% chance, not an active skill.
Can you elaborate on this? Possibly I'm just looking at old information, but on Wowhead I see Rune Tap as a blood rune->HP conversion, with a 1 min cooldown. The only blood->death rune conversion I see is Death Rune Mastery, which is a 12% chance, not an active skill.
He used the wrong word.
Blood Tap: Immediately activates a Blood Rune and temporarily converts it into a Death Rune. This rune counts as a Blood, Unholy, or Frost Rune. Lasts 20 sec
Whoops, guess I should have thought to check skills in addition to talents. It's on a 1 min CD, but still, not bad.
So has anyone in beta been able to do much comparison between DW and 2h? I understand that currently the DK quest rewards don't really support DW, but I'm hoping someone who's outleveled that gear can take a crack at both styles. Just from reading the numbers, it seems like 2h has an enormous advantage because of all the instant strikes, and only a handful of talents with fixed % procs (blood rune mastery, blood-caked blade if the disease can stack, and uh... that's it?) seem to give any advantage to DW. I would be curious to know if Blizz intends for weapon choice to split down tanking/DPS lines, or if both styles are intended to be able to fulfill both roles.
Well about acclimatation PvP focused talents are fine too, and it can have uses in PvE, even though it probably won't have any for raiding. You'd be hard pressed to see me crying about being able to only put 51-54ish points in frost for all good tanking stuff compared to other classes bloated talent trees though ^^.
Your analysis on rune mastery is pretty good, only that as Lamaros pointed, the FRM actually only procs 50% of the freezes, and freezes don't happen that often. Hungering Cold is nice but it has a long cooldown, so you can only proc it once a minute. Icy Chill and Mind Freeze can proc it, but due to rune cooldown you can't really spam them that much, and if you want to bank on howling BLAST(for some reason I thought it was howling fjord, which is why I use that word in previous posts ^^) you need to keep a rune up if it procs. Overall, makes for some sporadic procs.
BRM is definitely the best, since unless you use Obliterate, it's really easy to keep any kind of disease up. I guess you have a point about PvP and diseases dispels though. Also Blood runes have more uses by being converted to death rune via the spell, or via death rune mastery talent. I could see some interesting potential for PvE using Dual Wield Blood, to proc it as often as possible, Unholy stance for the GCD to fit those attacks in, and just getting a stack of diseases running then spamming Blood Strike.
URM procs are quite limited, but then again you don't really need unholy runes that much. I guess if you proc it however, it means you can pop Death and Decay on that pull without gimping your normal rotation.
I think I'd like to see a talent or a spell that converts runic power back into runes, to have more flexibility, Empower Rune Weapon is a pretty long cooldown. Something like 80runic power for a Death Rune, or 40 for a random rune.
As another subject, there's a lot to discuss about DK viability in arenas. While they'll probably do fine in BGs with the burst and stuff, I wonder what they can offer in arenas that's actually really good. Their "charge" is on a 25secs cooldown, and can't be used defensively like intercept/shadowstep on someone away to get out, they don't have a MS mechanic(degenerate isn't that powerful), they have pretty bad CC(30%snare on icy chill with frost talent, and a 15secs cooldown root/snare that is dispellable, even though I guess the strong point is they're ranged) and no anti snare/root. They have good tools against Fear and somewhat good against Stuns, but it seems they'll be kited even worse than Warriors are currently. I can see some decent synergy with frost mages, assuming frost mages will still be the dominant arena spec, but they only act as a random chance to proc freezes for shatter, they can't actually use the frostmage freezes much(howling blast in on 30secs cooldown and is the only thing using freeze status).
I'd like to see an additional CC that isn't tied to a powerful PvE effect(like death grip, they can't really make it 15secs, it's a taunt, and DKs already have a 16secs "AE" taunt that can be talented to 12), or a way to get out of snare/roots, something like that. There's some inventive way to go about it, like an ability that gives your current root to your target, maybe even make it friendly only, so you could for example trade your root to your druid, who could then break it. Cooldown/rune/runicpower usage to balance it and stuff.
Obviously, this is all theorycraft since no one has played a max lvl DK in arena, but if it looks not so good on paper, I doubt it'll look better ingame. It goes the other way, but rarely this way.
Well about acclimatation PvP focused talents are fine too, and it can have uses in PvE, even though it probably won't have any for raiding. You'd be hard pressed to see me crying about being able to only put 51-54ish points in frost for all good tanking stuff compared to other classes bloated talent trees though ^^.
Your analysis on rune mastery is pretty good, only that as Lamaros pointed, the FRM actually only procs 50% of the freezes, and freezes don't happen that often. Hungering Cold is nice but it has a long cooldown, so you can only proc it once a minute. Icy Chill and Mind Freeze can proc it, but due to rune cooldown you can't really spam them that much, and if you want to bank on howling BLAST(for some reason I thought it was howling fjord, which is why I use that word in previous posts ^^) you need to keep a rune up if it procs. Overall, makes for some sporadic procs.
. . .
As another subject, there's a lot to discuss about DK viability in arenas. While they'll probably do fine in BGs with the burst and stuff, I wonder what they can offer in arenas that's actually really good. Their "charge" is on a 25secs cooldown, and can't be used defensively like intercept/shadowstep on someone away to get out, they don't have a MS mechanic(degenerate isn't that powerful), they have pretty bad CC(30%snare on icy chill with frost talent, and a 15secs cooldown root/snare that is dispellable, even though I guess the strong point is they're ranged) and no anti snare/root. They have good tools against Fear and somewhat good against Stuns, but it seems they'll be kited even worse than Warriors are currently. I can see some decent synergy with frost mages, assuming frost mages will still be the dominant arena spec, but they only act as a random chance to proc freezes for shatter, they can't actually use the frostmage freezes much(howling blast in on 30secs cooldown and is the only thing using freeze status).
I'd like to see an additional CC that isn't tied to a powerful PvE effect(like death grip, they can't really make it 15secs, it's a taunt, and DKs already have a 16secs "AE" taunt that can be talented to 12), or a way to get out of snare/roots, something like that. There's some inventive way to go about it, like an ability that gives your current root to your target, maybe even make it friendly only, so you could for example trade your root to your druid, who could then break it. Cooldown/rune/runicpower usage to balance it and stuff.
Obviously, this is all theorycraft since no one has played a max lvl DK in arena, but if it looks not so good on paper, I doubt it'll look better ingame. It goes the other way, but rarely this way.
I mentioned FRM being sub-par on bosses in its 'cons' section .
And, yes, being able to have a 51-point frost build and put the 20 remaining points elsewhere is extremely nice; I'm favoring Blood rather heavily right now in my theorycrafted spec(s) but it may turn out that I need some Unholy for Spellhit more than anything additional in blood. *shrug*
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As far as arenas go, I have no idea what I'm going to end up doing until some Level 80 damage numbers are out for the three different trees (specifically, what a Deathchilled Howling Blast on frozen targets would hit for). If Frost ends up being viable for arenas, I'm definitely going to try that but I'm not sure what exactly I'll be doing.
One big advantage that I see death grip having in arenas is the ability to pull someone 30 yards away from his support, into the middle of your whole team. I can see a lot of nasty combos revolving around that.
Other abilities that (on paper) look pretty solid for PvP - AMZ looks like a nice support ability, although you have to use it pretty intelligently given the cooldown. Ghouls (as pets) can probably harass someone pretty effectively, with the intercept and stun abilities (not sure on the CD of either). DKs look like the anti-druid, thanks to degeneration, and heart strike might also be useful for burning someone down (but "up to 20%"? Based on what?). However, non-frost DKs definitely look vulnerable to kiting, although as an enhancement shaman, I ought to be used to that by now.
07/18/08, 12:38 PM
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