Preemptive Note:

No, I am not currently participating in the beta. So I am just working with the previous 20 pages of data, while studying the talents and the abilities.



From what I have read, heavy Blood appears to be the bread and butter build thus far. Knowing this, I would still like to discuss the utility of an Unholy dpser. If tanking turns out to be better as unholy, then there would be no need for this particular spec, being that they would be able to stack Ebon Plauge.

Assuming that one specs 3/17/51 while dual wielding, is the haste and dw specialization worth loosing an extra 7 points in unholy? How much of your damage is pure white damage? This would also affect the disease from Blood Cloaked Blade if the duration isn’t very long.


To do more theorizing, there is some information that I’m going to need.

Concerning the disease from Blood Cloaked Blade:

How does this debuff work?
1. Will a new application renew the duration?
2. Is the debuff affected by attack power?
3. Will lesser applications overwrite the current debuff?
4. How long does it last?

On Corpse Explosion and Raise Dead:

Currently the Undead Racial, Cannibalize, will work on skeletons left by alliance characters. Being valid “corpses” for cannibalize, does the same hold true for Corpse Explosion and Raise Dead. Otherwise down the road putting talents into said abilities may have negative repercussions in fights without a decent supply of corpses.


How many diseases are there currently available?
So far I see the debuffs from the following abilities:

Death and Decay
Degeneration
Plague Strike
Unholy Blight
Ebon Plague
Blood Cloaked Blade
and Corpse Explosion

how many differnt plagues can the ghous have? I can no longer find my link that held that information.

edit*

Does the haste from Unholy Presence, Icy Talons, and windfury totem stack? If not, what stacks with what?

I'm not 100% sure how well these will work, but the first would be more along the lines of running with the garg. Though feedback on whether or not using it is worth the talent point would also be nice.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

the second forgoes the extra duration on the diseases, and puts it twords extra death coil damage. Considering this will be equivalent to the "finishing move" much like rogues and will not make up a huge bulk of your damage, it will be used to clear out the runic power. If the garg is not worth the point then maxing out the damage done by abilities to diseased targets. Though i'm gonna point out that two points in epidemic are very important to lengthen the durations of D&D and the plague strike. Whether or not this talent also extends the damage done by the diseases, it allows for mor hits by Blood Strike on highy diseased targets.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

We will also need some feedback on how much runic power plague strike and degeneration produce. If 50%/75% is a fair amount, it will also be a superior talent to improved death coil, because more of them will yield more damage in the long run than flat increasing the damage. This will need numbers to calcuate.

For those of us not au-fait enough with the DK talents to know what is the "generic" unholy 51, could you link your intended build please?

I have no idea if this is the proper forum for this question, but here goes: How are they handling professions for death knights? The character starts at 55, do the professions start at one or do you start farther along? With an additional 15 levels to reach 80, it would seem prudent to stockpile mats before the expansion and if I do not have to grind out hundreds of linen cloth for first aid I would rather find that out prior to grinding them out.

Edit: Everyone will be leveling from 70-80. I meant that death knights have 15 additional levels on top of what everyone else is doing.

First Aid starts with "270/300". [Runecloth Bandages]
Your professions will start with 0, like for everybody else.

That's the current "WotLK beta" status for this.

P.s.: 55+15= 70.

For those in the Beta, do the token vendors for tier gear in Shatt/Hyjal have a tier 4/5/6 set for Deathknights? I know instances like Karazhan through Sunwell will be outdated after WOLK release, but I'm sure many will still go back to run them. It wouldn't make much sense for Deathknight being the only class without a token drop, even if they just exact copied the warrior set or something and added Deathknight to that token.

Well from the way I see it and mind you this is just pure speculation from my observations, I doubt they would add level 70 content for Death Knights in the form of tier gear. I base this on the fact that they never really went back and fixed certain classes Tier gear after modifications were made to the class (Hunter for example with their AQ gear), it seems to me that Blizzard has a tendency to not go back to old content and add/change things (patch 2.3 notwithstanding). Granted I would love to see a T4-6 for Death Knights as I intend on still running old content but I'm not sure if Blizzard is up to doing that.

Seems like Blizzard like the current 2/2/2 run config, and won´t be allowing you to swap from it anymore (or at all i guess since it hasn´t been implemented).

WoW Forums -> Rune Configuration Swapping: What's the plan?

I must admit to being somewhat jaded about this, given they haven´t even tried to balance something that i think everyone would have found interesting and enjoyable, but oh wells.

Seems like frost has some fairly significant problems with this, doesn´t seem to synergise well with other runes, and requires too many frost runes to be effective.

Oh, and Runeforging and enchanting don´t stack currently, nor do they have plans to allow them to, it´s lower down in the same link.

Is Frost Strike damage affected by the following buffs/debuffs:

Misery - 5%
Black Ice - 10%

Are the percentage buffs additive or multiplicative?

Assuming Frost Strike is affected by:
Blood Presence - 15%
Glacier Rot - 15%
Frozen Rune Weapon - 10%
Curse of the Elements - 10%
Ebon Plague - 9%
Merciless Combat - 60% on target less than 20% hp
Guile of Gorefiend - 60% bonus to crit damage
Deathchill - garauntee frost spell and ability crit for next 6 secs

On targets more than 20% hp

If the percentages are additive, Frost Strike damage bonus:
1.590 on a hit
4.134 on a crit

If the percentages are multiplicative, Frost Strike damage bonus:
1.755 on a hit
4.535 on a crit

On targets less than 20% hp:

If the percentages are additive, Frost Strike damage bonus:
2.190 on a hit
5.694 on a crit

If the percentages are multiplicative, Frost Strike damage bonus:
2.808 on a hit
7.301 on a crit

Assuming 5000 AP and 150 dps 3.6 speed 2 handed weapon the average normal melee hit will be 1825. Frost Strike's bonus damage makes it total 2121 Frost Damage. After multipliers:

On targets more than 20% hp

If the percentages are additive, Frost Strike damage:
3372 on a hit
8768 on a crit

If the percentages are multiplicative, Frost Strike damage bonus:
3722 on a hit
9618 on a crit

On targets less than 20% hp:

If the percentages are additive, Frost Strike damage bonus:
4644 on a hit
12076 on a crit

If the percentages are multiplicative, Frost Strike damage bonus:
5955 on a hit
15485 on a crit

Compared to say the same weapon with Blood Presence, Bloody Vengeance, Blood Gorged, Blood Frenzy, and Hysteria:

2993 on a hit
5986 on a crit

Assuming melee crit rate is 30%,

Expected damage for melee hit is 3891.

Expected damage for Frost Strike over 20% with additive percentage bonus is 4991. Frost Strike adds 1100 damage on average.

Expected damage for Frost Strike under 20% with additive percentage bonus is 6873. Frost Strike adds 2982 damage on average.

Since Frost Strike is a on next melee ability like Heroic Strike, it can act as a Frost rune dump? Leaving more GCDs free for use without resorting to Unholy Presence?

Imp. Blood Strike & Sudden doom & Dancing Rune Weapon are wasted talents then.

thanks for the link - although this saddens me quite a bit (from customizable runes to DK-only "enchants" - I just don't see (yet) how that makes the game more fun as the Blizzard poster claims)

In a way, it is better that they took out rune customization, it would be hell to balance. The difference between a fixed number of runes and just one more is huge, especially when you consider mechanics like frost builds which are based on burst damage. Now that they have a fixed number of runes, they should be able to balance various builds better, without forcing everyone to go full frost or blood with 4runes, unholy being the red headed stepchild since there's no real good unholy rune dump.

Also it got taken out in alpha, you can hardly consider that stuff in alpha, or even beta, will make it live in any way or form. Most people won't even know you could customize runes.


Someone asked earlier in the thread about T4-6 for DKs. Answer is currently no, there's no available gear from the T4-T5 vendors in shat, too lazy to go to CoT to check if they have T6 since it's probably be the same.

I disagree, considering customizing the 6 runes was a big part of how Blizzard has been advertising Deathknight playstyle until now (or very recently at least) anyone who followed WotLK/Deathknights since the original announcement is likely to have heard about it and the idea that rune-type customization might be cut didn't even pop up until one of the WWI panels

of course it's useless to discuss this now as Blizzard seems pretty much convinced that no customization is better for players and for the game so I'll leave it at that

I think we covered earlier in this thread quite exhaustivly how annoying rune cutomisation could be just from a players point of view. From a devs point of view it would be much, much worse. It would be absolutly horrible (read: near impossible) to balance the class in any reasonable way if runes were customisable and I think that anyone who cannot see that and understand that fixed runes is better, because it will result in a more balanced and intuitive class, is hanging on to a pointless dream.

It would be nice if the forsaken were treated as undead for many reasons, but it is also a big problem, so the forsaken are not undead. The same view has to apply here.

For the runes we do have, however, I hope they make them clearly stronger than the Enchants avaliable. It would be a great loss to the class if there was nothing at all customisably unique about them. If that means slightly nerfing baseline abilities to keep the DKs power in line with expectations then sobeit, I think the flavour is important. (It would perhaps be better to allow DKs to have a rune on a weapon and and enchant, but I expect codingwise they'd use the same system and it might not be possible.)

I am pretty sure that they took out the rune customization since otherwise raid dps deathknights would have to stack runes to be viable which would dull down their gameplay a lot from versatile to just 1 unholy and 5 blood to spam plaguestrike and then bloodstrikes with a slow 2 hander for maximum dps.

The rotation would be just to spam bloodstrikes, get a lot of free coil crits, a plague strike now and then to get blood mastery to spam even more blood strikes and Rune weapon whenever its up. Its like how sword rogues raid.

I think the limitation comes from having either enchant or poison/(windfury) but since windfury and other totems will be simple buffs I don't really see a restriction for them not to stack. That said, I'd rather have them be less powerful and stack with enchants and totems.
One other reason could be visuals, if the runes glow and would override any enchant glows but it's been done before, many weapon glows in game already override enchant glows.

They should make in the runeforge profession a way to change 1 rune type into another rune type. That way you allow some flexibility at the cost of not having a runeforge enchant on your weapon.

It's basicly the same suggestion Rhea made but with a penalty to make it more balanced.

Having acquired a beta key and played a DK for a few minutes, I can definitely say that A) The DK starting quest line and zone are really fucking cool and B) Allowing a different number of runes would be hell to balance. Most people will never know that it was ever any different.

Both that suggestion and Rhea's entirely miss the point. Changing any runes, be it a once off, whenever, only one rune, only one type, or anything, significantly impacts on the balance of skills and abilities.

If there are even three different rune compositions you can have (you suggestion would have 6, by the way) then the number of variables that need to be balanced increases by a factor of 3.

Instead of thinking "is frost strike balanced in a frost/blood spec" and "is frost strike balanced in a frost/unholy spec" the devs have to consider, "is frost strike balanced in a frost/blood spec when you have 4F/2B, or 2F/2U/2B, or 4F/2U, or 2F/4B, or..." get the point?

My suggestion only has the options
3/2/1, 3/1/2;
1/3/2, 2/3/1;
1/2/3, 2/1/3;
2/2/2

It would be quite "simple" to balance (never is) because you can assume a maximum 3 of one rune type and the trade off is one less of another type. Not That off-balancing in my opinion.

When balancing an ability that uses 2 Blood, you have 3 options:
3 blood runes, the player might use it with 1 another blood ability and either 1 unholy or 1 frost ability.
2 of all runes, the player might use it with what ever frost and unholy ability but not another blood.
1 blood rune, not usable.

There's already mechanics to support this, Blood Tap will change a blood rune to a death rune, empower rune weapon will generate 1 additional rune of each type, and death rune mastery talent makes it so you have a chance to get a death rune out of any other rune when it refreshes.

But those are heavily balanced with cooldowns(1min bloodtap, 3mins empower, 12%chance on death rune mastery) and or cost(15%health cost for blood tap, nothing for empower, 3talent points in the blood tree for death rune mastery).

The issue really is, you can't design different runetype usage if you can change the base quantities of runes you have. Frost Strike is balanced because it's slow as hell, and you can only use it twice before you have to wait for runes to cooldown, or use something else. It's atm not very good, but with a high end weapon, it'd hit like a truck, and if you could put just one more frost rune in your rotation, that's a 50%increase in usage. That's a big change.

Either way, it's what they chose to go, I haven't tested customizable rune system, so I don't care. I only know the 2 of each, and it works just fine. Whatever spec I'm using, I'm not spamming just one key, which would probably what would happen with a customizable rune system. Even with just 1more I'd be spamming the same key more often.

Also as I said before(or maybe I didn't since my last message got deleted and I retyped it), they're probably going to rework rune masteries. They'll provide the kind of customization you want, while being random and as such more balanced. I can see them making frost rune 100% on freeze, and unholy rune give a side bonus like refreshing all diseases. Blood is fine, and currently if you have a blood build, you do get more blood runes than other runes, by quite far.

Yes, but it's not worth the effort to Blizzard, as can be read from the Bluepost.

Setting a baseline of 2/2/2 for runes means Blizzard can start to balance how the DK will perform with other classes. They already have to balance DKs around 27 classes (3 builds per class), so limiting a variable is good design.