I've noticed the rune system has been bugged or changed since the new patch.
When I used to get a miss or parry with ability the rune would not be wasted and I could reuse it with next global. Now it's changed. When I get a miss/parry/etc I can't use the ability again but get an error message instead. It was something along the lines 'no runes available' even though I'm seeing that I have the rune ready under my char portrait. I even got this error once I popped Blood Tap. The latter suggests that this new 'feature' is a bug not intended change.
Yeah lots of UI issues in this build, same with RP not decaying out of combat and stuff. Guess it'll be fixed next build. It's really annoying with runes though. I've also had runes locked out for no particular reason and unlock them in weird ways. For example, had 2unholy runes locked, couldn't use plague strike or degen or death strike, until one blood refreshed at which point I could plaguestrike to unlock the unholy runes. Was weird, and annoying.
As for the talents and tanking in particular, I agree with the lack of good tanking talents deep in the trees. There's some decent stuff, but it means giving up on too much usually. They should definitely move the good stuff higher in the trees(bone armor, frigid, unbreakable) and make them better in comparison, to force deeper specs. Then balance frost presence around it, by adding a passive dmg% reduction, or a proc like ability or whatever else. So you'd need to go 40+ into one tree for a good tanking talent, and end up actually able to take other stuff than tanking oriented talents. Currently with the tri specs, you have to take only tanking talents because you don't have spare points pretty much. With a deeper specs, since you wouldn't be able to reach other tanking talents after you're speced down your favorite tree, you'd be able to take utility or threat tools.
could be useful to move the tanking tier2 talents down to tier1 too. It's hard to consider a tanking build without deflection and toughness when they're such good passive mitigation talents. Which makes deep unholy tanking a bit hard to pull.
However, it's definitely fine for 5mans. I tank nicely with crappy cobalt crafted set, even with not so well geared healers and/or bad healers, and I haven't had much trouble holding 2-3mobs on me. The class is very fun, and having shield wall on 1min cooldown is like a whole lot of internetz. Death Grip for running mobs too is so nice. Instead of yelling at your healer because he's running away from you like a freaking idiot, you just pull the mob back to you. There's really a lot of nice stuff. One thing DKs could use however is a way to generate some RP out of combat/health based, to pull with deathcoil. Icy chill range is a bit short, and that's it for your pulling tools, so being able to shoot one deathcoil for pulls would be nice.
The reason Heart Strike is on next swing is you want to be able to get it off before you or your allies do too much damage to an enemy. The earlier you get it off, the better. It can be renewed if it falls off too. I've seen enough people play with it to know that it can feel underwhelming, and a big part of that is because the enemy's hp bar barely moves. You have reduced what "100%" means for the enemy, not knocked it from 100% to 90%. But it is still a lot of damage.
This is going to be a pretty scary ability in PvP and it's very useful in PvE once you start fighting challenging enemies, like bosses. If you're blasting through things quickly, then there are probably a lot of abilities that seem of questionable use.
A few posters -- Beta testers who were in Alpha not developers -- go on to explain while it is intended to work against bosses there is some 'hidden cap' that it won't go past to balance it's power. Still... from the anecdote of an above poster it would seem that currently it is working on bosses for the full 20%.
I think the optimal design for the tanking talents with what they are trying to do...would be something like this.
Model 1:
3 talents per tree..at 21, 31, 41 points.
Options for tank builds would be:
1 - 41 deep into one tree, and 21 into another plus 9 point anywhere. That would give 4 tanking talents. 6 Builds...41F+21B, 41F+21U, 41B+21F, 41B+21U, 41U+21F, 41U+21F.
2- 31 deep into 2 trees plus 9 points anywhere...giving you again 4 tanking talents. 3 builds...31F+31B, 31F+31U, 31B+31U.
3- 21 into 3 tree+9 point anywhere. That would give 3 tanking talents. 1 Build 21F+21B+21U.
That gives a potential 10 builds for tanking. I'm not saying it would be easy, or even possible to balance it out...but it would go far into acheiving what they want to do.
Model 2:
2 Talents per tree...at 21 and 41.
1- 41 deep into a tree, and 21 into another for 3 tanking talent. 6 builds possible again.
2- 21 into 3 tree giving you another build of 3 tanking talent.
This model gives only 7 build, probably much easier to do since they need only to have a total of 6 tanking talent.
Model 3:
2 Talent per tree...at 31 and 41.
1- 41 deep into a tree for 2 talents. 3 build possible.
2- 31 deep into 2 tree for 2 talents. 3 build possible.
This model is similar to model 2, giving only 6 builds for 6 talents.
It's probably something similar that they are aiming for, wether it works or not remains to be seen...but I think they should definitly give it a shot. As people mentioned, they still have lots of time.
A few posters -- Beta testers who were in Alpha not developers -- go on to explain while it is intended to work against bosses there is some 'hidden cap' that it won't go past to balance it's power. Still... from the anecdote of an above poster it would seem that currently it is working on bosses for the full 20%.
I always considered Heart Strike PvP talent, sort of equivalent of similar ret paladin ability.
Having ability that removes 1/5th of the boss HP pool right would be pretty insane (and make Heart Strike DK pretty much required for any cutting edge single, or even dual boss encounter) - nowadays top DPSers claim 10-15% of the raid damage, while in case of DK it would be, effectively, 20% + his own (non-trivial) damage output.
I wonder what is the reasonable cap for such ability in boss fight? 5% maybe?
One thing that really should be applied to the DK trees in respect to tanking is to take a leaf from the druid book and have dual purpose talents. That way you are able to keep toughly to one spec. Apply a few other suggestions like lower placed Pure tanking talents and i think that would make the situation a lot easier.
It takes 20% of the boss' health off or merely reduces the max health of the boss by 20%?
If a raid were to DPS down the aforementioned boss and at the 20% generic enrage, would a heart strike proceed to kill the boss of just put the max health down by 20% and waste that 20% of your DPS's time?
Originally Posted by Ulthwithian
Paladins do have an ability to heal multiple people at once. It's called Divine Storm. ><
I think by heart striking late only in the fight you actually do your raid harm.
Imagine a boss had merely 100k hp. You dps the boss down to 20% and then someone applies heart strike when it hasnt been applied before.
20k/100k = 20% and so people can begin using execute and other talents that give damage bonus sub 20% hp.
Heart Strike -20% max hp
20k/80k = 25% and execute/talents become unusable again.
edit: This also means that depending on how boss hp reacts when the heart strike debuff fades, it may be possible to gain the most benefit from heart strike by deliberatley allowing it to fade around the 25% marker, extending the use of execute and execute like talents. This assumes however that the hp does not scale back and the boss would not go from 20k/80k to 25k/100k when heart strike fades. And also that they are not immune.
Someone tested heart strike and posted results last page, it affects % hps current and total. So like if the boss is at 20% with 20k/100k, he'll drop down to 16k/80k. If you let it fade, he'll go back to 20k/100k.
Overpowered but well I guess it'll see capping/nerfing. It's also too bad it's so low in blood tree, makes it not very useful for PvP, since blood is so weak in pvp in its current state. They've done an ok job at making all 3 trees pve dps/tanking trees(can use a lot of polishing but well all trees have both types of talents), but blood is terrible for pvp, unholy is average and frost is good.
Interesting thread, though a little less cordial than we'd ideally like to see in a beta thread.
There are 4 tanking classes in the game. All 4 should be able to tank any encounter in the game, up to and including the cutting-edge 25 player content. They will need really good gear of course, and it will require players who really know their class and work together. You won't be able to completely ignore talents either. Not every death knight will be a great tank, but not every great death knight tank will be 51+ points in Frost either.
Raiding is changing in Lich King, just as it changed in Burning Crusade. Threat will be easier to manage (not irrelevant, just easier to manage). Crushing blows are gone. Shield Block no longer offers the near constant protection it used to. All tanks can generate better dps. There are more raid-wide buffs, but fewer stackable buffs. Druids actually have to help rez after a wipe.
You can also approach it another way: 30 specs, 25 raid slots. You just can't take everyone. The worst case situation is some classes or specs bring so little to the group that they just get ignored. We're trying hard to prevent that. You have viable alternatives to say stacking shammies or shadow priests now. The best case situation is that groups have some flexibility with who they bring.
And to be honest, not every Sunwell guild brings the same 25 specs even today.
My apologies if I don't specifically address someone's concerns, because you all raise some really intelligent points.
Q u o t e:
One of my biggest concerns, and I think many people will agree with me, is that our baseline abilities just don't seem up to par at the moment.
Almost any warrior should be able to tank a 5 player instance. It's hard for us or anyone to evaluate what will be required to tank a heroic or a raid because the content just isn't finished yet. If your baseline abilities aren't up to par, then we'll buff them.
Q u o t e:
Essentially, I'm worried that DKs will steal the jobs of some of the other tanking classes who have to sacrifice more to be tanks.
It's that word "sacrifice" that kind of sucks. I never felt like I was sacrificing to get Shield Slam. It's fun to use, and sometimes it can even do decent damage. What I sacrifice in going down Prot is my speed at doing dailies and my ability to PvP. That is unfortunate, and something we're trying to change. We're changing the existing classes slowly, because frankly we have all become familiar and learned to love aspects of them. But the DK is a chance to start fresh.
There were tanking paladins and druids throughout Burning Crusade. Maybe there were still more warriors as MTs, but I think it's easy to imagine some tweaks that would have altered that -- losing crushing blows for example. (And honestly I think a lot of the warrior as MT stuff is tradition, though their dominance in classic WoW certainly didn't help.)
Q u o t e:
Ghost, your post says "Maybe death knight off-tanks can still contribute decent dps and utility when not tanking" So, it is blizzards design to make death knight tanks just an off tank/dps? Will we not MT anything? In my opinion it goes against the idea of a tanking class.
One of the problems with the warrior class is that a prot warrior in good gear can't contribute dps or utility. I meant wouldn't it be nice if DKs could avoid that problem? Ferals can avoid it to some extent (but more on that below).
Q u o t e:
Early BC feral druids were nerfed for this reason.
Q u o t e:
Other tanking classes have to devote a majority of their talent points to tanking talents in order to compete for MT positions. If the DK ends up being competitive baseline, and has the luxury of spending talent points on "fun stuff" like DPS-boosting talents or utility talents, then that doesn't really seem fair to players of the other tank classes, who have to give up that stuff in order to take tanking talents instead.
I realize your druid argument was really about PvP but I am going to talk about PvE here. The problem with ferals in BC was that with a single spec they could do nearly as much dps as a rogue and also tank as well as a warrior. The warriors and rogues understandably cried foul. If you look at the feral tree for Lich King, you'll see that it does have more bear-centric and cat-centric talents. If you pick the cat-centric talents, you'll still be able to tank to some extent, but you probably aren't your guild's main tank. Likewise, there are definitely talents that will help a DK be a good MT. Blade Barrier is a great example. But there are other talents too. You need some of them. You don't need all of them. We don't want either the druid or the death knight to be jack of all trades, master of none. If you want to tank, it's going to come at the expense of some dps talents. But you'll have more options about which tanking talents and which dps talents you do take. The trees are designed so that you can't have them all.
Q u o t e:
+5% STA
+13% STR
+15% Armor
+20 Parry rating, +rating = to 20% of STR (this needs to be retuned...will explain later)
Compare to a warrior spec 5/0/66:
+5% STA
+10% STR
+10% Armor
+5% Dodge
+5% Parry
+5% Block
If we give the death knight +10% dodge, doesn't that solve the whole problem? My point is that if there are issues, we have plenty of knobs to tweak.
Q u o t e:
5pts in Forceful Deflection gives you 20 parry RATING, and RATING = to 20% of your STR. Even using the level 70 coefficient for parry rating, 20pts is equal to 0.84% Parry chance.
By our estimates, Forceful Deflection will grant a level 80 death knight tank around 6% parry, probably higher if fully raid buffed. (Don't tell the warriors.) If you let your strength get too low, your parry will suffer, but it's sort of the point to make you not mind all that strength that's going to be showing up on your tanking plate.
Q u o t e:
Blizzard wants people to go down their trees and take a couple of tanking talents along with their DPS talents. I just don't think that's going to happen. Players who are not specifically aiming to make a tanking character will just pass up those talents so they can get pure DPS talents. Meanwhile people who want to min/max tanking will cherry-pick the trees to get the best tanking talents they can get while ignoring really valuable DPS talents along the way.
I would reword that a little bit. What we want is for a death knight tank to be able to go down the Frost tree or the Blood tree and get the tanking talents from there. It's fine to have dps death knights and tanking death knights. What we want is for the tanking death knights to have fun so they don't all decide to respec dps. That said, there are some talents that benefit both play styles.
When you talk to death knights, some of them like the Blood tree and some like the Frost tree (when it's working). Some like to mix and match, and that's okay too. If one of them gets bored with the Blood tree, they even have the option of going into Unholy and still be able to tank.
Because our fans are smart and because there are so very many of you, it's entirely likely that a particular spec will eventually be proven to be the best for tanking. These things happen. But maybe the difference between it and the second best spec won't be as dramatic as the difference between Protection and Fury. Even Fury has talents every tank takes (Cruelty) and Protection talents most tanks avoid (I'll let you fill in the blank there). Maybe there are more interesting ways to build talent trees than to say "I only care about X aspect of the game, so I'm not even going to look at 2 of my talent trees."
TLDR version: The concern I am trying to aleviate is that just because there is not a traditional protection tree doesn't mean that death knights are doomed to being crappy tanks.
It seems like they really want DKs to be good tanks, even raid MTs. If they aren't good enough in their current state they'll be buffed untill they are. Sounds good. Oh, and also they are unnerfing D&D a bit.
One very annoying thing I noticed when tanking Draktharon earlier is out of combat rune usage. Fights end, you refresh bone armor for next fight, then you have to wait a bit for the rune to refresh. Every 2pulls, you have to resummon your ghoul, and then you absolutely have to wait 10secs(you can skip on some with bone armor cause one unholy and another on the way is usually enough). It was really really annoying. Made a suggestion to speed up rune regen out of combat in frost presence.
Other than that, went relatively fine. My gear is way terrible now, and ratings changes don't help, went from 4.5%crit reduction to 2.5% in like 2levels. Hp and armor haven't moved, I'll have to get going on the questlines that give tanking gear for halls of stone I guess. Surprisingly, the boss fights were easier than trash mitigation wise, bosses don't go through your full bone armor in 1second like 3mobs do, and you can pop lichborne for a solid 75% of the fight. There's a T Rex that was fearing I think, but never got feared since I was on lichborne the whole fight ^^. Threat is very good though as a DK, I could hold aggro easily, even on multimob pulls. 2-3mobs you plaguestrike then pestilence right away and that pretty much secures aggro on all the mobs, with maybe an icy chill or a deathcoil on the offtanked mobs when you can. 4-5mobs, Death&Decay for AE disease, bloodboil for initial aggro and getting everything back into D&D if they moved, then you just obliterate main mob, deathcoil an add, icy chill another mob, bloodstrike first one, and when unholy runes come back, plague+degen+pestilence will lock everything again. You can also easily mitigate the early burst by popping Icebound fortitude early.
Mixed feelings still, it's hard to compare tanking with the crappy gear DKs have. But I love some of the tools. Strangulate, Death Grip, all very fun. There's some usual net then range trolls in the dungeon, it was awesome griping them back into melee range when I was rooted, and still hitting them with icy chill/deathcoil when they weren't. Also Death Coil is really awesome to generate aggro on a caster that's not being resheeped or whatever and is shooting your healer. Ranged threat is nice.
One very annoying thing I noticed when tanking Draktharon earlier is out of combat rune usage. Fights end, you refresh bone armor for next fight, then you have to wait a bit for the rune to refresh. Every 2pulls, you have to resummon your ghoul, and then you absolutely have to wait 10secs(you can skip on some with bone armor cause one unholy and another on the way is usually enough). It was really really annoying. Made a suggestion to speed up rune regen out of combat in frost presence.
Good comment/suggestion... I don't really think it would be overpowered to just cut rune refresh time in half when out of combat in all presences, though I guess Blizzard doesn't want DKs to have even less downtime. That said, this is similar to what Tankadins have to deal with, unless they're undergeared or sit down a couple of times per pull to take some crits on purpose... sitting down to drink up for your "blue rage" isn't particularly fun... Remember, even if Blizzard doesn't fix this, a tank should be comfortably ahead on threat by the last 15%, so maybe you can stop your rotation at that point in order to lower downtime.
That said, this does raise an excellent point of discussion, that DKs are the one type of tank in the game that do not rely on getting hit to generate threat. One big reason that Paladins and Warriors don't stack avoidance more (until Sunwell) is simply the fact that if they don't get hit, it inhibits rage or mana generation... DKs don't have this problem. DKs will probably be the "tank that does instances which he is significantly overgeared for". Another related comment, is that threat gen will thus not increase as damage taken increases, so the DK relies solely on increasing AP to increase TPS. Hopefully this won't mean poor scaling compared to other tanks.
Good comment/suggestion... I don't really think it would be overpowered to just cut rune refresh time in half when out of combat in all presences, though I guess Blizzard doesn't want DKs to have even less downtime. That said, this is similar to what Tankadins have to deal with, unless they're undergeared or sit down a couple of times per pull to take some crits on purpose... sitting down to drink up for your "blue rage" isn't particularly fun... Remember, even if Blizzard doesn't fix this, a tank should be comfortably ahead on threat by the last 15%, so maybe you can stop your rotation at that point in order to lower downtime.
The issue isn't really using runes right before the combat ends and having to wait a bit, that's fine. Paladins, if they have infinite drinks(understand mage, or don't care about money) will just drink a few ticks and be ready for next pull. This also happen only every now and then, you can do a lot of 5man pulls with minimal mana usage(or could). The issue here is once the fight is over, you wait for your combat runes to refresh which takes only like 4-6secs while you're moving up to next pull, marking, waiting for mage/shaman mana and what not. But then, you have to use an ability that eats runes before the pull. Your ghoul is obviously not necessary for stuff, but it does add a disease, adds DPS, and is a general unholy design founding stone. Even with full duration ghouls(which is somewhat of a waste), you're still looking into a decent number of resummon through an instance, and you definitely can't pull with both unholy runes down. Means you might just end up skipping ghouls for anything but bosses, which is a bit stupid imo.
It doesn't affect solo downtime at all, since you rarely have to wait for runes while soloing. It's not like engaing a non elite without your runes up is a huge deal, they'll just refresh and you'll use them as they refresh. I don't really remember a time where I'd think, damn I have to wait for my runes to come back when questing. It does happen all the time when instancing though.
Maybe have Master Ghoul or another ghoul related talent makes it so you can summon ghoul for no rune cost while OOC(can also add no corpse dust while we're at it but whatever). It would hardly be gamebreaking, would be unholy/ghoul related spec only, and would make ghouls much more fun to use when tanking. They're really useful for tanking especially on 5man trash, since they can stun, interupt casts even if you're not in range yourself, do some good AE damage, disease and can be death pacted for heals.
As for threat scaling and stuff, I don't see it being an issue, they're moving away from reactive threat with reduced shield block usage and higher AP for wars and paladins, so it'll probably scale the same way. If they feel it's needed they can always add a way to get RP from getting hit in frost presence. But I believe DKs already scale twice with AP, once with direct AP attacks, and 2nd with higher RP generation with bigger hits. Somewhat like rage.
At least currently, with my shitty gear, never had an issue with threat(besides retadin prepatch with bugged art of war). And that's against some people in T6/sunwell gear, which is much much better than quest gear.
A few things I'm curious about with death knights, mainly involving corpses.
The ghouls that are spawned from Army of the dead, when they die can their corpses be exploded? How do Army of the Dead ghouls currently compare to Raise Dead ghouls?
What happens to corpses exploded with corpse explosion, do they disappear? Does this prevent enemy players from being able to be ressed? What about raising a ghoul from an enemy player's body?
If corpse exploding doesn't make a corpse disappear, does this let a single body be exploded multiple times?
A few things I'm curious about with death knights, mainly involving corpses.
The ghouls that are spawned from Army of the dead, when they die can their corpses be exploded? How do Army of the Dead ghouls currently compare to Raise Dead ghouls?
What happens to corpses exploded with corpse explosion, do they disappear? Does this prevent enemy players from being able to be ressed? What about raising a ghoul from an enemy player's body?
If corpse exploding doesn't make a corpse disappear, does this let a single body be exploded multiple times?
Army of the Dead is a level 80 skill. The current cap is 77.
The point is to take deflection(which sadly isn't scaling for shit these past levels, so might be dropping it), frigid dreadplate and bone armor. They nerfed necrosis a lot so I'm actually taking plague strike stuff, but yeah I'm not sure it's actually any better would need to parse. I like the build however, it gives a decent mix of passive mitigation and bone armor, which is really nice. Also perma ghoul which is again very nice for 5mans.
As for the corpses questions, most of those that could be answered have been already. Everything in relation to Army of the Dead is unknown since cap is still not 80, so no one has seen the ability yet.
It does base weapon damage now it seems, not affected by ap/spellpower/most other stuff. It was way overpowered before though, it was hitting to close to 50% of normal attacks instead of 25%. Now however, it's more like 15%. I speced necrosis for leveling in my usual tri spec, and actually dropped it now to get more blood talents, because it wasn't good enough imo.
Other than that, went relatively fine. My gear is way terrible now, and ratings changes don't help, went from 4.5%crit reduction to 2.5% in like 2levels. Hp and armor haven't moved, I'll have to get going on the questlines that give tanking gear for halls of stone I guess. Surprisingly, the boss fights were easier than trash mitigation wise, bosses don't go through your full bone armor in 1second like 3mobs do, and you can pop lichborne for a solid 75% of the fight. There's a T Rex that was fearing I think, but never got feared since I was on lichborne the whole fight ^^. Threat is very good though as a DK, I could hold aggro easily, even on multimob pulls. 2-3mobs you plaguestrike then pestilence right away and that pretty much secures aggro on all the mobs, with maybe an icy chill or a deathcoil on the offtanked mobs when you can. 4-5mobs, Death&Decay for AE disease, bloodboil for initial aggro and getting everything back into D&D if they moved, then you just obliterate main mob, deathcoil an add, icy chill another mob, bloodstrike first one, and when unholy runes come back, plague+degen+pestilence will lock everything again. You can also easily mitigate the early burst by popping Icebound fortitude early.
Still using the Cobalt craftables? What spec were you tanking with?
Also, did they lower the CD for lichborne w/o saying anything? If not how were u able to keep it up for so long on a 5 min cd? Just curious because I was looking into a BB+BA build for tanking but wasn't sure how effective it would be.
Still using the Cobalt craftables? What spec were you tanking with?
Also, did they lower the CD for lichborne w/o saying anything? If not how were u able to keep it up for so long on a 5 min cd? Just curious because I was looking into a BB+BA build for tanking but wasn't sure how effective it would be.
I'm not him, but while Lichborne has a 5min CD, it lasts 30sec. There are plenty of pre-heroic 5man bosses that only take 30sec to kill.
If a DK takes the talent to boost Anti-Magic shell's absorption to 100%, then for the 3 seconds that it's up, is the DK treated as immune like a Divine Shielded Pally and does a boss turn to someone else?
If a DK takes the talent to boost Anti-Magic shell's absorption to 100%, then for the 3 seconds that it's up, is the DK treated as immune like a Divine Shielded Pally and does a boss turn to someone else?
Even if it does it shouldn't be much of an issue. Mobs do not change targets once they've begun casting a spell, and with it's duration you'll only use Anti-Magic Shell in reaction to a cast starting. It's worth trying out however, there could be a situation like Kael'thas where a mob chaincasts a number of deadly spells in succession, in which case you might not want one to get targeted at a random raid member.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
If a DK takes the talent to boost Anti-Magic shell's absorption to 100%, then for the 3 seconds that it's up, is the DK treated as immune like a Divine Shielded Pally and does a boss turn to someone else?
Absorption is not the same thing as immunity, so the mob will happily continue to cast spells at you.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
07/30/08, 8:20 PM
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