WotLK Discussion - Talents and abilities. - Page 50

Gort · 08/11/08, 8:59 PM

Originally Posted by Zurai

They're actually talking about buffing Bone Shield by increasing the internal cooldown to match the 3.5 seconds used by shaman shields. Currently it's 2 seconds. Since removing a bone isn't tied to decreasing the damage dealt by the attack, that's a major buff.

I believe this has already been done; I recall seeing mention of it perhaps last week, or earlier.

Hearteater · 08/11/08, 10:51 PM

I don't see how Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor can really stand up to Bone Shield.

1) Both VB and UA have less uptime than BS (20 seconds out of 120 versus at least 10.5 out of 30 not counting waiting on cooldown pre-pull)
2) BS adds damage which is nice and that plus its charge-based design makes it not only a tank specs tool, but a DPS spec tool too
3) 40% less damage > 25% more armor and 5% more parry
4) VB looks to be only healing generated by the DK himself, in which case I can't see that amount of healing matching BS, especially given VB can lose mitagation due to overhealing. No matter what, healers on the DK will overheal when VB is activated, either because they are suddenly (and unexpectedly) healing for more or because the DKs self-healing is much greater.

A better design for UA might be something like Ice Barrier, with absorption based on a % of armor value (maybe around 10%) combined with a short duration and cooldown (lasts 10 seconds, cooldown 30 seconds). VB might work better with a Last Stand-like mechanic, increasing maximum health by maybe 50% (but not change current health) for 20 seconds with a 1 minute cooldown. This would let a Blood DK make better use of all the healing available and also provides nice pre-pull functionality.

nevinera · 08/11/08, 11:08 PM

Originally Posted by Hearteater

I don't see how Vampiric Blood and Unbreakable Armor can really stand up to Bone Shield.

1) Both VB and UA have less uptime than BS (20 seconds out of 120 versus at least 10.5 out of 30 not counting waiting on cooldown pre-pull)
2) BS adds damage which is nice and that plus its charge-based design makes it not only a tank specs tool, but a DPS spec tool too
3) 40% less damage > 25% more armor and 5% more parry
4) VB looks to be only healing generated by the DK himself, in which case I can't see that amount of healing matching BS, especially given VB can lose mitagation due to overhealing. No matter what, healers on the DK will overheal when VB is activated, either because they are suddenly (and unexpectedly) healing for more or because the DKs self-healing is much greater.

A better design for UA might be something like Ice Barrier, with absorption based on a % of armor value (maybe around 10%) combined with a short duration and cooldown (lasts 10 seconds, cooldown 30 seconds). VB might work better with a Last Stand-like mechanic, increasing maximum health by maybe 50% (but not change current health) for 20 seconds with a 1 minute cooldown. This would let a Blood DK make better use of all the healing available and also provides nice pre-pull functionality.

VB does increase all healing done to you, not just by you.
But yes, neither of those tools stands a chance compared to bone shield.

even if the durations were comparable, the tools just aren't as good.
I fully expect them to change these talents more. Just a few iterations ago, they were effectively useless remember.

nevinera · 08/11/08, 11:54 PM

The technical definition of a spell is anything that can’t be dodged or parried. Since that isn’t always easy to determine, for a death knight the attacks that use weapon damage are not spells. Frost Strike and Scourge Strike are not spells (the tooltips usually call them abilities). Pestilence and Mind Freeze are.Note that DK spells are not affected by spellpower and are affected by attack power. We might also allow them to use melee crit instead of spell crit if that gets to be an issue. It may not be an issue since items now always increase both melee and spell crit. Ditto for hit.

So I gues FRM isn't even as decent as I thought. :-\

In the light of this blue post, are we certain that impurity affects strikes? (says 'spells' in the talent)

Darkrenown · 08/12/08, 12:38 AM

I've thought of a few more questions:

If you have shadow of death and you die while fighting a mob, does the mob reset because you "died"? If not, does it keep beating you up as you go through the rising as a ghoul animation?

Once you're ressed as a ghoul, either by your own shadow of death or by a ghoul-res from another DK can you still loot/get kill credit? What if you kill something as a ghoul, then die and res as yourself again?

I assume ghouls/gargs are like other pets: if they kill something without you hitting it at all, it doesn't count as your kill. Is that correct?

Can other DKs get the damage bonus from your Unholy ground effect?

Pyros · 08/12/08, 12:51 AM

Originally Posted by Darkrenown

I've thought of a few more questions:

If you have shadow of death and you die while fighting a mob, does the mob reset because you "died"? If not, does it keep beating you up as you go through the rising as a ghoul animation?

Once you're ressed as a ghoul, either by your own shadow of death or by a ghoul-res from another DK can you still loot/get kill credit? What if you kill something as a ghoul, then die and res as yourself again?

I assume ghouls/gargs are like other pets: if they kill something without you hitting it at all, it doesn't count as your kill. Is that correct?

Can other DKs get the damage bonus from your Unholy ground effect?

The mob stays on you, but you have an invuln like mechanic during the animation. The mob will tear you apart though most of the time, because when you die it's like to 3-4mobs and ghouls have crap for armor/avoidance/hp.

You can't loot as a ghoul, but you get kill credits. You can loot once you run back after you cancel ghoul.

Didn't test, but probably that's a basic mechanic to prevent easy macroing I believe.

No idea about the Desecration effect, but from the wording it seems it's be a personnal aura thing. If they made it shared, it'd be too powerful I think, it's a whole 10%, and it's easy to proc it.

Darkrenown · 08/12/08, 12:53 AM

Thanks.
Also, I've just read on mmo-champion that Pestilence and D&D no longer scale with attack power. With Pestilence I don't suppose it matters too much, but I find it odd they've taken a DK tank ability, removed it's damage scaling and added a fixed amount of bonus threat. I thought Blizz were moving away from that idea.

D&D not scaling makes me sad.

Zurai · 08/12/08, 12:54 AM

Originally Posted by Darkrenown

I've thought of a few more questions:

If you have shadow of death and you die while fighting a mob, does the mob reset because you "died"? If not, does it keep beating you up as you go through the rising as a ghoul animation?

Once you're ressed as a ghoul, either by your own shadow of death or by a ghoul-res from another DK can you still loot/get kill credit? What if you kill something as a ghoul, then die and res as yourself again?

I assume ghouls/gargs are like other pets: if they kill something without you hitting it at all, it doesn't count as your kill. Is that correct?

Can other DKs get the damage bonus from your Unholy ground effect?

Your aggro resets, but it resets to <minimum aggro value> rather than resetting the mob completely. The mob will continue to beat on you, and ghouls only have 4.5k health at the moment, so it's quite possible to die during the ~4 second "clawing out of the earth" animation during which all of your abilities are locked.

You're still tagged to the mob, but you cannot loot or interact with anything in the environment (including turning in quests, looting corpses, clicking clickies, etc). You'll still have sparklies, but you'll have to run back to your corpse or be rezzed to pick them up. You do get kill credit, and it's actually possible to get the kill credit on a quest like Ring of Blood and still fail because you die after the mob did because you can't turn in the quest as a ghoul.

Yeah, they act as standard pets as far as tagging is concerned.

I havn't tested Desecrate, but the talent indicates it's only +10% for you.

EDIT: Death and Decay still scales with AP. Not sure about Pestilence.

Pyros · 08/12/08, 12:57 AM

"We decided to untie them presences. If you get Blood Aura, it's just always on now and doesn't matter what presence you're in. Ditto for Frost and Unholy."

An expected change, and a good one.

WoW Forums -> Suggestion: Scrap or Rework Aura Talents.

Darkrenown · 08/12/08, 1:23 AM

That's nice. Maybe they could make Frost aura someone non-tanky now and add the -spell damage into Frost presence?

Buanna · 08/12/08, 1:51 AM

Or put threat reduction on Blood and Unholy. 8 required talents was a bad design. 3 is less than 8, but it's still a bad design.

Darkrenown · 08/12/08, 3:20 AM

I'm not sure how that's related.

Darkrenown · 08/12/08, 5:02 AM

Originally Posted by Zurai

EDIT: Death and Decay still scales with AP. Not sure about Pestilence.

Yeah, looks like mmo-champ read too much into the tooltip changing:

I couldn't find the post that asked this question, but death knight abilities such as Pestilence still scale with attack power. Some of the tooltips were getting cluttered with the whole "depending on AP" spam. We don't put "scaled with spell power" on caster spells, so we figured maybe by this point players would know or quickly learn not to put a caster belt on your DK.

One of our longer term plans is to have smarter tooltips that could update dynamically based on things like improving your AP or even talents.

Prepared · 08/12/08, 10:43 AM

Thank goodness for that! I thought for a second it'd be a huge slap to the face of DK tank threat. Fixed-damage abilities are so pre-TBC. :P

Nice that they are (only now) considering tooltips displaying useful information. Only took them how long to implement MobHealth... now DrDamage?

Isla · 08/12/08, 11:13 AM

Is Haste Rating looking good for Deathknight DPS or threat?
I'm trying to compare things like the +80AP or +40HR you'd get from enchanting rings.

At the moment, a Blood Elf Paladin gets great benefits from stacking Haste, whereas a Warrior would get better results from AP/Crit.

Pyros · 08/12/08, 11:23 AM

The only thing haste seems good for is procing more unholy/blood masteries, but that sounds like a very small increase. White damage is also currently pretty high on DKs, but I think it's mostly because gear is still leveling blues and stuff, once you start getting an epic weap I'd suspect white dmg will be a lower part of your DPS relatively. If they made haste work on rune cooldowns then it'd become an excelent stat, but currently having more haste is probably worse than having any mix of any other stats for the same budget(besides hit when you're hit capped, obviously).

Muarf · 08/12/08, 11:27 AM

Haste would only affect "white" damage, not the special attacks. The only other benefit I see would be a little more [whatever rune you put] procs and a few more Icy Touch crits.

Feorthas · 08/12/08, 11:38 AM

So, while we're talking about scaling, what Death Knight spells (non-strikes basically) still scale with AP and which do not?

Even better, if someone has an up-to-date list of coefficients, that would be awesome.

Zurai · 08/12/08, 11:59 AM

Originally Posted by Feorthas

So, while we're talking about scaling, what Death Knight spells (non-strikes basically) still scale with AP and which do not?

All of them. Even disease damage seems to scale with AP, although not much.

Hearteater · 08/12/08, 12:47 PM

Per Ghostcrawler (here):

The damage should be a lot higher. As others have pointed out, Crypt Fever wasn't working at all and Frost Fever was doing 1 damage. Depending on the delivery mechanism of the disease, the damage could also be different, which feels odd.

Assume Blood Plague should tick for around 150 to 200 depending on gear and level, and Frost Fever should be about 70% of that. At L80 with blue or better gear, it is liable to be much higher.

◊ Eej · 08/12/08, 1:43 PM

Originally Posted by Zurai

Your aggro resets, but it resets to <minimum aggro value> rather than resetting the mob completely. The mob will continue to beat on you, and ghouls only have 4.5k health at the moment, so it's quite possible to die during the ~4 second "clawing out of the earth" animation during which all of your abilities are locked.

The last time I was clawing out of the earth, I almost fully absorbed a Hammer of Wrath, melee swing and a Judgement of Command (guess what I was killed by). They seemingly added some massive absorb shield to the ghoul crawling animation but I haven't tried it out some more yet.

Zurai · 08/12/08, 2:06 PM

Yeah, a couple builds back (when ghoul form only had like 1.5k health) I would get Immune messages during the animations, but I don't any more. I havn't seen any absorb messages, but I wasn't looking for them either. Could be a big damage absorb going on.

nevinera · 08/12/08, 2:25 PM

Originally Posted by Muarf

Haste would only affect "white" damage, not the special attacks. The only other benefit I see would be a little more [whatever rune you put] procs and a few more Icy Touch crits.

Well.. not exactly. It does improve the gcd on spells, which would be.. IT, dc, and a lot of the unholy stuff. depending on if it works before or after unholy's haste, it might not do anything (spell gcd is forced to stay above 1.0 last i heard).

Either way, it's not a big deal, unless they start considering our strikes like spells.

Quasar · 08/12/08, 2:36 PM

Originally Posted by Pyros

The only thing haste seems good for is procing more unholy/blood masteries, but that sounds like a very small increase. White damage is also currently pretty high on DKs, but I think it's mostly because gear is still leveling blues and stuff, once you start getting an epic weap I'd suspect white dmg will be a lower part of your DPS relatively. If they made haste work on rune cooldowns then it'd become an excelent stat, but currently having more haste is probably worse than having any mix of any other stats for the same budget(besides hit when you're hit capped, obviously).

Hmm. I'm 72, in a decent set of quest greens with the blue axe from the Borean quest. Blood spec, doing about 800 solo and 900-1000 in groups. But white damage is fairly constant at only about 24-26% of my damage done. This is making stuff like Haste and Necrosis pretty underwhelming. I've focused instead on hit-capping, getting my crit to around 27-30%, then AP and expertise. Maybe ArPen, but I can't find any ArPen on gear along with Crit. It's lots of either-or for everything but hit.

Should I expect to see my white damage take up more of my overall damage as I level assuming I don't get a better weapon? I can't say I see that it will.

nevinera · 08/12/08, 3:21 PM

Originally Posted by Quasar

Hmm. I'm 72, in a decent set of quest greens with the blue axe from the Borean quest. Blood spec, doing about 800 solo and 900-1000 in groups. But white damage is fairly constant at only about 24-26% of my damage done. This is making stuff like Haste and Necrosis pretty underwhelming. I've focused instead on hit-capping, getting my crit to around 27-30%, then AP and expertise. Maybe ArPen, but I can't find any ArPen on gear along with Crit. It's lots of either-or for everything but hit.

Should I expect to see my white damage take up more of my overall damage as I level assuming I don't get a better weapon? I can't say I see that it will.

Well.. necrosis still works out to +5-6% total damage with those numbers. Not crazy, but not exactly worthless.
(I expect it's much higher for DW)

Haste is a terrible stat, yes. We need hit, crit, expertise, and ap/str.
ArPen may be terrible, depending on your build (blood is probably happy with it)