Pyros

The up to 20% is a limit for raid bosses mostly. Before they actually displayed the max(which was 3k). Maybe it has changed, but I guess it's just the same thing roughly. Popping 20% out of a boss would be slightly overpowered. Or they could just make it not work on bosses I guess.

And yeah, in my original analysis, DK were to be compared to enhance shaman, which is pretty bad since you pretty much compare one whole class to a single spec of a class(not that shaman in general is a very strong arena class, but there was/is more than one viable spec depending on bracket).

Still a lot of time to go anyway. I'll probably box a paladin or a warrior with my DK anyway, so I guess I'll end up getting at least one viable arena char and one viable raid tank. I do hope both will be though.

 

Feorthas

I currently see Death Grip as a way to pull someone hanging outside of melee range into an AoE you were already going to do on, say, the other team's assist train or healer group (if they make the mistake of hanging out near eachother). Anything to disorient/confuse a player, even for just a second, is worthwhile in PvP.

 

mrboh

Due to all the pure weapon damage abilities you use, Blood is most definitely a big meaty 2H tree and the DPS numbers support this. Talents like Nerves of Cold Steel and, in particular, Killing Machine, mean that you can get potentially more DPS out of a dual-wield build than a 2H build as Frost, Unholy or a tri-spec.

For tanking, I guess you'll see a smoother threat generation curve while dual-wielding, but you have to take into account the fact that you'll potentially have your attacks parried much more often.

 

Lunkhedd

I'm not sure about that. Frost looks like it's supposed to be the mitigation tanking tree (with Blood as the avoidance tree and Unholy as utility), but the Frost mitigation abilities seem weaker than what paladins and warriors get, unless the armor makes up for lack of blocking more than I think it will.

To me, it looks like if you're specializing your DK tank as an anti-caster tank, which is supposed to be their strength, your primary targets will be Magic Suppression and Bone Armor in Unholy and Spell Deflection in Blood. That still leaves a lot of points for customization (e.g. deeper in Blood for better avoidance, some Frost for better mitigation, or deeper in Unholy for better AoE threat).

 

Mithar

Looking at one of the tanks in my guild, he gets about 31% of his armor from his shield. According to wowhead, Frost Presence increases armor contribution from items by 45% (Link below is for the page). If you replace all the +block gear with +parry gear and add the 20+20% of strength to parry rating from the Forceful Defelction in the second tier of the Blood tree, the death knight may come out on top. After all, isn't each parry 100% damage avoidance while each block only reduces the damage by a set amount?

Please forgive me if I have misunderstood some point about tanking; everything I know about it I picked up listening to my friends who tank.


Frost Presence - Spell - World of Warcraft

Edited to correct a few minor things.

 

Siddown

You have it right, you are just doing the math wrong.

31% of your tanks armor comes from his shield, meaning he'd have 69% without it. Therefore, his shield actually buffs his armor by 44.9% over just his plate pieces alone (31/69 * 100). So Frost Presence does the exact same thing.

 

Celebrimor

This thing makes frost the best:
Icebound Fortitude - Spell - World of Warcraft
With guile of gorfiend you are looking at a 30% uptime of that spell and its a perfect anti rage mechanic together with lichbourne.
Also acclimation should give all the help you need with spell mitigation thats not burst, and burst can still be mitigated with anti magic shell.

And by the way, anyone doubting that deathknights will be good in pvp should not worry, icebound fortitude is 12 seconds every minute for non frost specs, its a physical buff so it can't be dispelled so you have an awsome anti focus ability with it and put on frost presence to gain high resistance and armor. And you are not totally worthless at range either since you can still root, aoe dmg/fear, counterspell and deathcoil people, not to mention that just by having death grip you are almost at warrior level of anti kiting.

 

auron0

Could someone provide some insight into the Draenei Racial for Death Knights?
Is it a 1% hit to spell or melee or will they be combining the racial trait to a 1% hit to both spell and melee in the expansion?

 

Lunkhedd

Wow, I managed to completely overlook the cooldown on that thing. I guess I assumed somehow that it'd have to be longer for something that's essentially 2/3 of Shield Wall. I suppose over time it averages out to a 10-15% damage reduction (depending on talents), making it an active alternative to something Defensive Stance-like.

It looks like we'll have a pretty wide range in how regular incoming damage is by tank class, with druids being very predictable and DKs on the other extreme being very bursty. DKs will have a lot of control over their defenses, though, which might help make up for the variation in damage taken.

 

Lamaros

The thing about tanking at the moment is that there are few really strong tanking talents deep into trees, which looks to be on purpose. Apart from Will of the Necropolis at 43 points and Frost Arua at 37, neither of which are overwhelmingly good, nothing is truly deep. Blade Barrier and Unbreakable Armor (which looks much weaker of the two) require 33 points.

Other useful tanking talents look to be:

Blood: Forceful Deflection, Spell Defelction, Veteran of the Third War, Blade Barrier. 23 points required.
Frost: Toughness, Frigid Deathplate. 23 points.
Unholy: Lichborne, Shadow of Death, Bone Armor, Magic Suppression. 31 points.

Unbreakable armor needs a boost it seems to me. Of course there are threat considerations I'm not really sure about, given the rune system, but at the moment it looks like Frost is the weaker tree. The only real reasons people will probably want to go deep into a tree at the moment is because of the damage boosts they might give.

For example, a quick spec like: http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...12510100000000

Looks to have more advantages than a commitment to anything in frost. The biggest loss is armor, for I expect that Frigid deathplate will not stack with other like effects that a few other classes can apply, and Unbreakable armor is weak, and Frost Aura near compensated by 5% more stamina.

 

Foxx2405

They only chance Ratings to work for both melee and caster as far as i know.

So no, draenei racials wont change (would be too overpowered as well in my opinion).

Since Deathknight is mainly a melee class, expect the draenei DKs to get 1% melee hit.

 

Randyll

After reading the thread, it came to my mind to wonder about the viability of the Death Knight in PvP situations, as there wasn't much discussion going on about this. First of all, I think the DK talent trees seem to be pretty well thought out: Blood seems to be the primary DPS tree, Frost has tanking stuff via casts (caster mob tanks, wasn't this stated by Blizzard?) and Unholy is just general utility. But it's not all that clear though, feels as if Blizzard intends DK tanks to tank with two-handers as Blood/Frost specced.

Without participating in the beta it's hard to tell apart from reading posts by DK testers what would be the dominant spec for PvP on a Death Knight. I thought it would be Blood at first, but seeing as most of the Blood talents are focused on pure DPS with some tanking abilities, my focus was put on the Unholy tree. It looks like a mixed bag: since the Death Knight is a melee fighter, this would mean that the DK's main damage comes from spells while he does some DPS with his weapon. Although there's a lot of variety to it, such as ghoul pets and to turn undead (pun intended), feels as if a Unholy DK will have a playstyle completely different to that of other classes.

But how does a DK, an unholy one, actually fight other players? Does he wield a two-hander and use his spells and abilities much like enhance shamans and ret paladins, or does he use even more spells, with melee DPS just as an extra? Or will he be dual-wielding?

After which comes synergy. With whom will DK's be best teamed up? Warlocks? They share the spell school. Warriors and rogues? They are melees, no doubt they'll compensate each other. Paladins? Unlikely... although DK's have abilities that Paladins don't, so I guess they'll work together pretty well.. somewhat.

What would be nice to hear is the experiences of DK testers. Have they been fighting others during their quest for XP, and how has it gone? Pulling players with Death Grip and then plaguing it with diseases and sending undead pets to it sounds something I'd definitely want to experience above anything else. It will certainly be an interesting thing to try out.

 

Pyros

Issue is, currently at DK's lvl, there's only DKs. That and, at least on euro, there's only a PvE server. The class pretty much works like a warrior or rogue, as in, you need to be in melee for most of your dps. You can disease people, but it's nowhere close to warlock dot damage, it's more like if you play rogue and use deadly poisons. You also need a decent number of melee attacks before being able to use ranged attacks(death coil mostly), about 3 if you have a talent increasing the runic power generation on them, or reducing death coil cost(frost). That means you won't stand at range spamming spells.

There are some rune based range attacks though. Icy chill does pretty low damage, 20yard range, and reduce casting/melee/ranged speed by 15%. Always good to slap on everyone if you have nothing better to do. You also have Strangulate, which is a 30yard 5secs silence, with a 30secs cooldown, which also does a bit of dmg at the end. You can Death and Decay, 30yards, 10y AE, powerful ticking dot in the zone for 10secs, can proc fears on everyone who walks in it. Chains of Ice is your basic CC, 20y range, roots for 3secs, then targets is snared for 10secs, regaining 10% of speed per second(so 90 80 70% etc).

So when you're standing there while being kited, you're not totally powerless, and those abilities generate runic power, so you can Death Coil a bit too. But frost will probably end being the PvP tree, because it has more CC and ranged attacks. Howling Blast can be used from range, Hungering cold is a very powerfull CC tool on a 1min cooldown, you have better snares to keep in range of people, and there's some interesting little stuff(acclimatation raises your group's resists when you get hit by spells).

I wonder if there's a PvP server on the US beta servers? I'd probably have to reroll there if they make one on euro, since I do want to test the DK in PvP.


As a side note, I checked Draenei aura, and it says Increases hit chance by 1%. Nothing about melee specifically. Looking at thottbot to confirm, it seems they rolled both draenei auras into one since they removed spell and melee hit. So yeah, it adds 1% to spells too.

 

Randyll

Ah, that's too bad about the PvE server bit. I thought as much of the spell dps part, it's evident that any class will be pigeonholed into one specific role. The question is, will the DK's role be melee dps or just general utility? What I mean is, would their role be more like that of a warlock, that brings damage and a lot of utility (think CoT, drains, DoTs), or warrior-like with direct damage and utility.

Frost seems interesting. It's sad though, I would've preferred all this disease, pet and... death... stuff over some frost-based attacks. But it all looks very appealing, I'd go as far as saying each tree could have its own purpose in PvP. In the end, the ability of countering snares with snares sounds cool.

I guess we'll have to wait when the level cap is raised to 80 or a few months into WoTLK before making serious assertions about PvP viability. Before that, it's just speculation, but interesting nonetheless. To digress, I had it in my mind to roll a death knight specifically for PvP purposes. All I hope is they won't end like enhancement shamans, although they're no means a bad class, they're not as much "in high regard" as let's say, the rogue, warrior or druid. What I mean is that, when engaging in a fight with an enemy, I'd like them to think "uh, a death knight, holy crap" instead of a "oh, class x, what a breeze.". Would Blizzard face endless balance problems I don't know, too early to say.

But Pyros, what's your experience of the DK's ability to support other melee classes? Can it fulfill the role of a primary damage dealer in a team, or will it tag along with a warrior or rogue and support them and the team while doing damage themselves? Or is the beta population too small to make any assessment in this area?

 

Lamaros

A couple of questions for you Pyros:

There are a couple of ways to read this and I wonder if you could clear up how it actually works. Plague Strike doesn't stack does it? So is it damage per plague strike up on any targets, or the ones spreading the disease, recieving the disease, or what?

Can you confirm my earlier questions about Bone Armor. Will its charges get used up by Dots (original cast and/or ticks), AoE damage, and nondamaging abilities and effects like hamstring?

Is does Mind Freeze use runic power of a frost rune, there is some confusion with some places saying it uses a rune, but with the talents like Aneurysm saying it uses runic power.


Other comments:

Both Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude seem to have been buffed in the recent beta push. Now Fort reduces all damage by 50%, while AMS reduces all spelldamage by 75% (talentable to 100%) for 3 seconds, instead of just counting one spell, and is down to a 15sec CD. Both these changes look to greatly improve the DKs tanking abilities, though they do not especially improve the spelldamage tanking abilities.

Spelldamage tanking at the moment seems to come from a couple of things:

Spell Deflection, which is 10% of your parry chance and, which as I have discussed before, looks to require you to pick up Blade Barrier for best use. (It is also going to be rather proc related)
The 5% reduction rune to 2Her.
The 5% reduction from Magic Suppression.
AMS 3 second magic resistance/immunity.

All the other tools a DK has, which includes Lichborne, Bone Armor, and Icebound Fort, are just as good, or better, for other tanking.

Moreover, all the abilities I have mentioned are base abilities or require the Blood or Unholy trees. The build I linked above, which picks up all of the abilities I have mentioned, cannot afford to put points into Frost even to pickup Toughness.

Unless AMS gets a big boost, or we see more DK abilities, I don't understand how the DK tanking talents are going to work as they are now. General tanking will probably work ok anywhere, but the specific strengths of the DK are not focused; they seem scattered across all three trees with no way to get enough of them to make a difference unless you pick one specific highly restrictive build.

Or maybe Blizzard is just throwing out abilities for fun at the moment, with no real encounter expectations, and is going to change the trees around a lot more as the beta progresses.

 

Pyros

So first, Pestilence is a way to spread Plague strike disease to two additional targets pretty much. But it can work in more complicated ways. Say you have 3enemies, A B C. You use Death and Decay, cause it's awesome and stuff. It does a disease AE effect too. Then you hit A with plaguestrike(assuming you somehow get your unholy rune for it, but that's for sake of argument). When you use Pestilence on A, it'll do 1x the damage on every mob, and spread Plaguestrike or D&D dot on the other 2. Now let's go with another situation. A B C still, you plaguestrike A, then plaguestrike B, then you get a filthy weapon proc on B(from Blood-caked bake talent). You use Pestilence on B. It will spread either plaguestrike on A and C, or filty weapon on A and C. It'll also do 2x damage, because 2 targets out of A B C are afflicted by plaguestrike. If it moves plaguestrike, it'll reset the duration of the dot. In first case, if it spreads D&D disease, nothing happens(since all mobs already have same duration D&D disease).

What I haven't verified is, if it works off other DK's plaguestrike. It could potentially be a killer for AE with 2 DKs popping plaguestrike on 3targets then using Pestilence twice on them. However Pestilence damage is actually rather low, at least at my level, so not sure it's worth bothering. I believe the main point of the ability, is to disease more targets while tanking for a minimal cost, so when you need to taunt you can Blood Boil all of them at once. The damage is icing on the cake if you want. And if you want numbers, with one plaguestrike, it does 80-90 to everything. In comparison, D&D ticks for about 150, on every target under the effect.


Mind Freeze uses 20runic power, it used to be a frost rune, was changed. It's easier to have 20runic power when you do need to pummel, than having a frost rune, and it's not build dependant(frost build would suck for mind freeze using a rune since you use runes for damage). Aneurysm makes it free, and Runic Power Mastery makes it almost free if you don't want Aneurysm.


As for Bone armor, my small tests(hard to test anything since there's not many people online and willing to run tests) seem to show that bone armor charges do not expand either on dots(tried shadow word pain from some orcs in hellfire) or AE(hurricane from the arrakoas). However, it does reduce incoming damage from these sources by 40%. Meaning, it's pretty awesome for like, DPSing raid bosses, since it'd give a huge mitigation for everything but randomly targetted single spells.



About your tanking concerns, I think you could do without Blade Barrier for a spelltanking build. Spell Deflection is 30% less spell damage equal to your parry chance, Anti Magic shell will offer you a breather when you need it, antimagic zone can reduce incoming damage for 2-3spells in a row, Bone Armor and Icebound Fortitude do work on spells too so you can't really exclude them. Then do not forget you have +80 to all resists when in Frost Presence. There's quite a few antimagic tools, I think it'll probably be fine for those specific fights. Anyway they're definitely not done with tweaking, they're mostly adding abilities and getting stuff working correctly before they'll start tweaking numbers precisely based upon content difficulty.

 

Lamaros

Thanks a whole heap for these detailed replies, it is much appreciated.

Bone Armor sounds huge at the moment, I don't think that can last, but hopefully it does.

I wasn't aware that Frost Presence gave +80 to all resists, is that new? I assume it stacks with Pally Auras and the like?

Also, do you have an idea on what kind of Strength DKs are looking at in tanking gear? Its seems most of the starting zone stuff was for DPS, understandably, but do you find any need to pick up outlands tanking gear to tank, or is DPS stuff better suited?

From my basic guesses it seems you'd get around 5% Parry from Forceful Deflection in DPS gear, and with the str to shield block changes also it looks like we should expect similar str numbers on tanking gear. Anything less and the DK talent is a touch weak.

 

Celebrimor

By the way, aren't the trees kinda limited now that you can't change the runes around? Like, even if you spec 51 down in frost you still only got 2 runes per 10 seconds and 2 filler runes on top of that.

Imo they should change the rune mastery talents to add another rune of that type and move them down to the 35 pt tier so that you can only have one of them. Or atleast change the frost to that, since currently frost requires much more frost runes for its synergies than the other specs require of their runes.

 

Pyros

Yes Frost seems the weakest because of the 2runes limitation, 3 would help greatly, instead of an unholy(can still use D&D with Blood Tap). I think they're not done with rune masteries yet anyway, or with the whole system, so we'll see.

As for str on tanking gear, no idea, but it should be high enough since the 2 other tanks are getting their full block from it, and AP will be more important for their tanking stuff. That should give a pretty high parry rating which in my opinion should do ok against new block mechanics. Now that's only one part of tanking, and hard to tell anything in detail about the exact situation of DKs without knowing gear, and with having a rather early draft of talents. Theorycrafting with numbers at this point is probably worthless, can only do soft comparisons to see general trends.

And the resist on frost aura might be new, no idea, but currently it adds 45%more armor from items, 45%threat and 1point of resist per level. I assume this resist is stackable with everything, but haven't tested, since again euro servers don't have char copies, so we only have DKs around atm. And only alpha players. Euro is pretty slow ^^. I'll test when I get the chance but it'd be weird if it didn't stack since it's part of the class design, and isn't actually an aura but a self buff. That means in resist fights and stuff, where tanks would usually have to switch a few pieces for resist gear, or couldn't at all due to heavy melee dmg(sharaz), a DK would have a naturally higher base resist. Would probably still get trashed by sharaz melee attacks, but well at least you wouldn't die to a close teleport or something like that ^^.

 

Pyros

I'll make a small modification, after further testing(or less head in ass leveling), Pestilence actually spread ALL diseases on the 2 other targets, not a random one. Which is actually pretty nice since it means the first time it'll spread plaguestrike/degen and the 2nd time do 3x dmg due to plaguestrike being on everyone.

 

Kerbi

I have been wondering does Necrosis and Blood-Caked Blades count as shadow spell damage? If so would Black Ice actually buff them both by 10%.

If it works like that I can see some good DW Frost/Unholy specs with those 3 talents being the focus.

 

cladnin

Plaguestrike + Degen + Ghoul's puke disease -> Pestilence = pretty strong ae killing. Blood is ridiculous for grinding, especially if you proc blood worms. I've seen scenarios where taking on 9 even con or higher mobs, where when all 9 are dead, the DK is at 100% - gg blood worm / vendetta / blood pres. The class is real strong for grinding / leveling, and Pestilence makes it even better. Like Pyro says, it works on any disease, so the more, the better.

 

Pyros

Well when AEing, I like Death Coil then Blood Boil then Obliterate twice on a mob with deathcoils, and then work from there with the rest of the mob around 20-30% hps. But yeah, Blood is pretty sick, even though for AE grinding, Unholy is quite nice too, with Corpse Explosion. Especially if you pull stuff to a prekilled corpse, so you can pop CE right away instead of having to kill one of the mob.

As for Black Ice stuff, Blood caked definitely counts as a shadow damage, because it procs a disease doing shadow damage. It SEEMS to work on Necrosis, but I'd need a way bigger sample than I'm ready to do currently, because Necrosis damage isn't actually a fix value. It might be because it's 25% of your weapon range, thus giving various results. It also always gives more than 25%, so I guess it's affected by spellpower, which means it should be affected by Black Ice too.


While I was at it, I tested Icy Talons on a frost immune mob like someone asked yesterday. Went to EP on water elems, you don't get the haste bonus from Icy Talons if the mob doesn't get hit by Icy Chill.

 

Darkrenown

It's new for us anyway, what wotlkwiki says is:

* Blood Presence: Increases damage done by 15% and returns back 4% of the damage done as health.
* Frost Presence: Increases armor by 45% and threat generated by 25%.
* Unholy Presence: Increases attack speed by 15% and lowers the global cooldown by 0.5 seconds.

It's nice that frost is up to 45% more threat as well as getting the resists, and I assume that means ferals will have +45% in Direbear to put them on the same level as DKs and warriors. Are any of the other auras different ingame from the above?

Have you played much unholy yet? If so, can you tell us about the Gargoyle; which sound fun, Unholy Blight; which sounds really weak unless it's only for stacking up diseases for Obliterate/BloodStrike, and Army of the Dead; which also sounds fun.

 

Pyros

Only frost presence is different, the threat is just so every tank is the same, warriors and paladins got changed too, no idea about druids but guess they did also.

Gargoyle drains a lot of runic power, but seems to do good damage while it's up. It throws wrath like stuff, like the ones in Hyjal, and those were hitting for 650 a pop at lvl 60, which is quite a good number. Unholy Blight seemed rather weak, and having 2 full runic power drainers at the end of unholy also made it hard to use, especially with also corpse explosion in there. I'd need to run better tests for both, but I was a bit underwhelmed when I tested it, and you pretty much want DW to stack the -15%stats thing before, so I just dropped unholy until I can get enough hit% plate from outlands.

As for Army of the Dead, it's the lvl 80 spell, so no one knows what it actually does.