Switch in Frigid Dreadplate for 5-man tanking if that's your focus.
I can't decide between Blade Barrier or (Improved Icy Talons or Ebon Plaguebringer), Unholy Rune Mastery, and other secondary benefits of not having to be rune empty once every 8s. My instincts tell me the second option, but I'll be damned if I don't want to try to make 10% avoidance work.
DPS, I would still go a heavy Blood spec, with probably up the frost tree to runic power for the rest.
That's actually the old version of Vampiric Blood. This is the new one. Vampiric Blood - 1 rank, 1B, increases healing through spells and effects by 50%, 20s duration, 2m cooldown
Also Imp Icy Touch is 3 points, 10/20/30% and 1/2/3%
I only copy pasted mmochamp stuff, and yeah some things are wrong, but ghostcrawler said they were in the process of upgrading talents, so there might have been weird stuff up.
As for builds, to be honest we still have to see some real values on all this stuff. Like how much scourge and heart strike hit for respectively and other stuff like that. At least they're trimming unholy bloat by reducing some side stuff to 3pointers.
Now I have my fingers crossed for a friday patch, I actually want to test this stuff ingame, looking at talent trees getting changed and changed again is pretty dull, especially when they're so far from current gameplay.
Sure. Except Shamans still have a 100% uptime on Unleashed Rage, bring Stormstrike and Strength of Earth/Air. And not to mention a better haste buff.
While windfury beats Icy Talons, isn't IT better than Wrath of air? Wowhead lists WoA as 10% spell haste and shows no improved version anyway.
Edit: Unholy blight is blood plauge now? Ghostcrawler has posted several times recently about how UB is one of Unholy's extra diseases over the other two specs, seem odd they'd change that.
I liked Pyros' idea about auras, it does seem odd that you can only use Frost's while tanking.
Seems an Icy Talons/Ebon plague utility DPS build if you have a caster heavy raid would be good. With abom's strength change(affects raid instead of just group), a blood/icytalon build for a more melee heavy raid would also be good. There's also ways to take one of these in a tank build of the corresponding tree, but for ebon plague I think it's a bit tough to take it without sacrificing tanking goodies.
As for blight, Ghostcrawler said after the talents were changed that it still had its own debuff. I guess just a tooltip mistake. It's too deep for any of my builds anyway, unless you actually need to AE tank, at which point it'd just be easier to get a holydin to respec prot.
Frost aura, I don't really care since frost always looked like a weak tanking tree deeper in it after I started playing my DK, I like unholy tanking better, so it was mostly a pvp tree for me. The aura talents are way too deep to get them without full specing in that tree too. I also don't like how each tree buffs only one presence, meaning if you tank with blood or unholy spec, you're not buffing the presence you're using, and if you train the others you're forced into that presence too. It somewhat goes against their concept of every tree can tank thing. Maybe they should make the bonuses unrelated to presences, so when you have the unholy 10%speed thing, it works in any presence, frost blood or unholy, and same for everything.
This makes sense because it frees up usefulness of the Frost Aura points, where otherwise they are restricted to a tanking build. As it currently stands you only want something useful for tanking in Frost Aura because you wont be using Frost Presence for anything else. This is annoying because the Frost tree is no longer just a tanking tree but it gives no bonus to DPS.
Alternativly they could just give Frost Aura a double bonus, with the second bonus being so useful that it might allow people to DPS in Frost Presence. This would be much more awkward though.
I like the spirit behind the Icy touch and Ebon plague changes, making them a viable alternative to other classes talents etc ((e.g. A malediction lock))
I mentioned the only 4 diseases that the death knight gets. All those others have gone away. (Sad face.)
The class was too chaotic, we were using too many debuff slots, and Blood Strike was either going to be terrible with few diseases or insane with tons of diseases. A refinement was in order.
So 4.
Improved Corpse Explosion was cut in favor of more interesting talents. The Frostfever rune was replaced with something like the old Frozen Rune Weapon, now called Razorice. Death and Decay has no disease, which actually lets its damage come up higher (and it has a nice threat multiplier too). Don't worry -- Icy Touch and a single Pestilence can disease almost everyone. The whole thing just clicks better now. You only have to worry about keeping up 2 diseases most of the time, since Crypt Fever / Ebon Plague applies automatically. That just leaves Unholy Blight (see below).
The web team that puts up the talent calculators has done awesome in the face of very rapidly changing trees, but some stuff gets caught mid-change. Improved Icy Talons for example is 20% haste -- same as talented Windfury. Abomination's Might is 10% attack power, same as Unleashed Rage.
Unholy Blight counts as a disease while it lasts. It also causes Blood Plague. So in essence it causes two diseases for purposes of things like Blood Strike, Death Strike, Obliterate and Blood Boil that scale off diseases. If you have Crypt Fever or Ebon Plague, that disease appears automatically so you end up with 3 diseases from Unholy Blight.
That's nice, Icy Talons is now equal to imp WF and better than WoA. I don't suppose Abom str will stack with unleashed now it's the same effect though. Also, I hope D&D's bonus threat only apllies in Frost presence, so it can be used while DPSing too.
They've really embraced this direction of duplicating group utility all of a sudden. I wonder if this was always their plan, or if a sort of revelation has occured in the last couple of weeks to send them down this path.
In any event, I'm pleased that I can lean more towards an Elemental Shaman for situational offhealing in my group compositon without trading away so much utility. In a casual outfit like mine, expect I'm going to have a rash of Death Knight re-rolls to find spots for.
That's nice, Icy Talons is now equal to imp WF and better than WoA. I don't suppose Abom str will stack with unleashed now it's the same effect though. Also, I hope D&D's bonus threat only apllies in Frost presence, so it can be used while DPSing too.
Frost runes are pretty useless in an AoE situation as it stands since you'll wanna maximize your dps from Blood Plague/Wandering Plague/Pestilence, but then you've got no room for D&D (which might be okay if they make it tanking-oriented), plus will Unholy Blight be at all viable? Or is the runic power drain and cooldown just too much to even consider for raids? (I realize we have no idea what role AoE dps will have in WotLK, but I'm assuming it's going to be at least pretty important, at least important enough to spec like this to get the extra utility. Plus: imagine an AoE curse of elements.)
I kinda like this build 'cause it's got decent single-target viability and rotation options. I'm just wondering how/if an AoE rotation is gonna work with a DK.
Just a question, but do people feel the heal from Ferocious Dead is good enough to go 3/3 in it? With just 1 point into it the length of the ghoul will be equal to the cooldown of the spell.
Just a question, but do people feel the heal from Ferocious Dead is good enough to go 3/3 in it? With just 1 point into it the length of the ghoul will be equal to the cooldown of the spell.
You are certainly refering to the old talents.
Now:
- With 3/3 in Ravenous Dead, the Raise Dead cooldown is lowered from 5min to 3min30.
- With 3/3 in Ferocious Dead, the ghoul's uptime is increased from 2min to 3min30
The problem I see coming is with things like Ebon Plaguebringer being equal to a Malediction lock, but no stacking we are going to wind up back in a situation they are trying to avoid.
Raids will theorycraft out "is it better to have a lock apply that debuff or a death knight?" Then they will choose the optimum and not bother with the other class - unless they can bring more DPS than any other alternative. The non-stacking thing probably works ok for 10 man raids, but will be not so good for 25 mans. Pick the optimum class for the debuff and then fill out the rest of the raid with "pure" DPS classes that don't sacrafice DPS for utility (mages, rogues, etc).
What is really needed is for Blizz to code diminishing returns into multiples of the same category of buffs. So you can have a Malediction lock and an Unholy DK and have them give the raid more than +13% spell damage but less than +26%
Other than that, the debuff limit will become a real issue again, with a new class added and more classes getting new debuffs, when there's already issues in certain raid makeups currently. I hope they use the upgrade to increase it again.
Now this is purely speculative on my part, and it's certainly not intended to be a casual vs hardcore although in some ways it will be, sorry about that in advance.
The way I see things developping with the buff/debuff stacking is that they are doing this for the 10 man raiding.
In a 25 man raid setup, they can easily asume that all buffs/debuffs will be available and design with that in mind.
In a 10 man raid setup, they cannot assume the same. Hell, it's actually very probable that some buffs/debuffs will not be available. How do you design your encounter without a good idea of what buffs/debuffs will be present.
Simple, you give more class the same buffs/debuffs and then assume they always be available.
What will be the impact of this on 25 man raid..I don't know. I am not sure if blizzard does, or actually care to the level people here do. They've said time and time again that Karazhan has been one of the most popular instance.
Sure the rewards(badges) makes it very attractive to run...but they've been trying for years to make more people raid without much success...except for Karazhan so they know people are willing to do the 10 man stuff. And I think the raiding focus for them has changed to 10 man...
I think the DK is the perfect example of this design. A class, that can perform well when not doing what it's specced for...spec for tanking and when not tanking do decent DPS. Spec for DPS and be an ok offtank, or MT for some encounters. It brings a few key buffs/debuffs that can replace buff/debuff that other classes can also bring.
25 man raids are about specialist, 10 man raids while still being mostly specialist will require a few spot to be able to fullfill a few roles.
That's what the dk does, that's what a lot of the changes done to a few classes does, and that's what the new buff/debuff system seem to encourage too.
As a deathknigth, you can choose to not spec ebon plague (or Icy talon). If the alternative without any utility is good dps then there's no problem even for 25.
Now this is purely speculative on my part, and it's certainly not intended to be a casual vs hardcore although in some ways it will be, sorry about that in advance.
The way I see things developping with the buff/debuff stacking is that they are doing this for the 10 man raiding.
In a 25 man raid setup, they can easily asume that all buffs/debuffs will be available and design with that in mind.
In a 10 man raid setup, they cannot assume the same. Hell, it's actually very probable that some buffs/debuffs will not be available. How do you design your encounter without a good idea of what buffs/debuffs will be present.
Simple, you give more class the same buffs/debuffs and then assume they always be available.
What will be the impact of this on 25 man raid..I don't know. I am not sure if blizzard does, or actually care to the level people here do. They've said time and time again that Karazhan has been one of the most popular instance.
Sure the rewards(badges) makes it very attractive to run...but they've been trying for years to make more people raid without much success...except for Karazhan so they know people are willing to do the 10 man stuff. And I think the raiding focus for them has changed to 10 man...
I think the DK is the perfect example of this design. A class, that can perform well when not doing what it's specced for...spec for tanking and when not tanking do decent DPS. Spec for DPS and be an ok offtank, or MT for some encounters. It brings a few key buffs/debuffs that can replace buff/debuff that other classes can also bring.
25 man raids are about specialist, 10 man raids while still being mostly specialist will require a few spot to be able to fullfill a few roles.
That's what the dk does, that's what a lot of the changes done to a few classes does, and that's what the new buff/debuff system seem to encourage too.
I think you are right. What Blizzard is trying to do is give us more options when it comes to debuffing. Making it so you don't HAVE to have "one Affliction lock with imp CoE" or "one Enhancement Shaman". For hard core guilds there will definitely be speccing into very specific talents to min/max the benefits from one class to the next as you typically know who is going to be there. But always expect the unexpected. If you Affliction lock dies early in the fight due to lag and his CoE runs out, having another class with similar debuffing is a huge boon. Or what if she/he just can not make it that night?
Options are a good thing. Yes I think more classes with non-stacking debuffs will be a bigger boon to smaller/casual guilds with a bigger benefit to 5/10 man but it can still be advantageous to the hard core as well. So let's not cry over being given more options in raid composition.
This just means Blizzard is going to have to work extra hard to balance the personal dps of each spec.
Affliction locks in BC can get by because of malediction and shadow embrace. Now they lose one of those buffs(though they do gain a small spirit buff). Their scaling will have to be addressed.
As long as Blizzard is aware of this issue, and I'm sure they are, then I'm not that worried. And what it does mean for all of us that don't want to raid 25 mans, we get so much more group flexibility to work with.
I just don't see a combination where you bring the Blood DK, or maybe even the Malediction Warlock. Perhaps I'm looking into this a bit much. I know in most cases, you'll just choose the better players. It's rare to find a guild full of 25 outstanding, 100%-attendance players who are also cold-hearted number crunchers.
It seems that the inherent side effect from buff/debuff redundancy is that certain specs, and by relation the players that like to play them, aren't needed anymore. The only absolute solution to that is retarded amounts of redundancy such that every spec covers 2 buffs/debuffs of another class.
Why stop at DPS buffs? Blood pact, MoTW, Fort, Commanding Shout, Blessing of Kings, etc etc...if they really wanted to achieve true redundancy, there would be a truly sickening amount cross-class buffs.
I just don't see a combination where you bring the Blood DK, or maybe even the Malediction Warlock. Perhaps I'm looking into this a bit much. I know in most cases, you'll just choose the better players. It's rare to find a guild full of 25 outstanding, 100%-attendance players who are also cold-hearted number crunchers.
It seems that the inherent side effect from buff/debuff redundancy is that certain specs, and by relation the players that like to play them, aren't needed anymore. The only absolute solution to that is retarded amounts of redundancy such that every spec covers 2 buffs/debuffs of another class.
Why stop at DPS buffs? Blood pact, MoTW, Fort, Commanding Shout, Blessing of Kings, etc etc...if they really wanted to achieve true redundancy, there would be a truly sickening amount cross-class buffs.
Tell the Imp Icy Talons DK he can spec for more personal damage because the Shaman's going to cover Windfury and the Lock has Malediction. Or get the lock to respec. Etc.
08/07/08, 11:55 PM
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