Lapp

You don't get an extra Frost Fever seeing as that's a spell, not a melee strike. You do get a second Blood Plague, and if you have a ghoul you may be lucky enough to get the disease he places.

I am not exactly sure, but I think that currently abilities are inconsistent with how they work with diseases. Obliterate's tooltip does say that it only works with the DK's diseases; Heart Strike's however, does not. I know for certain that HS works on other people's diseases, seeing as I'd do _massive_ damage when hitting something with multiple DKs' diseases on it. I don't believe Obliterate uses any but your own, however (I _think_ it uses your DRW's and possibly your ghoul's, though), because I've Obliterate'd in similar situations where there were many diseases on a target and I got no abnormal damage. I could probably do some controlled testing to clear up the issue, but we'll see.

As far as personal damage with Obliterate, I believe the highest I've gotten so far was in a UK group -- 7k. I had Hysteria, but I do not think I had my DRW's diseases or the ghoul's disease at the time. So definitely not the highest I could've possibly gotten. Soloing at 71, though, my Heart Strike crits are regularly over 2k and my OB's over 4k, with them ramping up to well over 3k and 5k, respectively, with CDs and minion diseases.

It's honestly too early to tell if the damage is too high or not, seeing as other classes are performing similar stuff. The only problem to this reasoning is that DKs have horrid gear, compared to other classes, at least. I have something like 1310 AP, 26% crit, 400-some ArP, 5% worth of expertise, and nearly 5% hit at 71 in mostly greens and some blues. Your average geared melee at 70 will have something more like 1600-1800 AP and 28-32 crit (covering the middle ground here--as you'll have T6/SW-geared folks with much better stats). Imagine if you outfitted a DK in offspec plate from T6 content... I would honestly be interested to know how hard abilities would hit for _then_. However, this isn't exactly a feasible feat, heh.

 

Eradorn

In reference to the leveling ability of DK, there is another factor beyond gear. I brought over a 60 lock and Pali that my brother had just to see what it was like with the new coefficients and talents, and I found they level far better than they did at 60 in BC. My paladin would often struggle and now tears through mobs with ease.

You can't compare the difficulty of OL the same as when BC came out anymore than you can compare the difficulty of EPL from Vanilla to BC. Totally different setup.

 

Stoical

That's what I thought glancing at the talents as well, but after thinking about it / testing it more, I'm really not impressed with Unholy in PvP. It has better AoE, but that's not usually relevant to PvP. It has some talents early in the tree that are great for PvP (30% cleanse resist on diseases, 20% shorter stuns, 6s longer diseases), but those will be accessible by a deep blood/unholy or deep frost/unholy spec, and don't give any reason to go deep Unholy.

Desecration sounds great on paper, but it's a tiny area, and it stays on the ground, not the target - so it's basically a tiny 50% frost trap. If people are quick, I would wager it won't be that difficult for them to get out of the area before it even slows them.

As the trees are now, I'd much rather be either Blood or Frost for PvP, with a few points in Unholy for those easily accessible talents - Frost brings more control and survivability (maybe for 3s or 5s where you have another big damage-dealer so you play more support, or 2s with an outlast healer), Blood brings more damage and self-healing (double dps 2s, triple dps 3s). I just don't see deep Unholy bringing anything to the table that is better than those strengths in Blood and Frost. If Desecration were seriously improved, either by a much larger area (say, the size of an actual hunter frost trap), or by an effect that stays on the target instead of the ground (meaning an extra 50% snare on that target and a little mobile frost trap moving along with them), I might feel differently.

 

Pyros

I agree with that analysis, unholy is very good for the early tiers, but not that great later on. AMZ or Bone Shield are ok for sure, but they're very defensive talents, and you lose a lot from going deep unholy. Deep frost has a tons of nice PvP goodies, acclimatation, chill blains/aneurysm, hungering cold even if you go that low, and depending on your team, imp icy talon can be quite powerful, a perma 20%melee haste is awesome in a double melee dps 3vs3 team. Blood should be good for 2s, Hysteria on your mate and feeding him hps through bloodworms/runetap/deathstrikes with blood aura(assuming they fix deathstrike/blood aura), and the insane burst dps it has.

 

Weigraf

Isn't Master of Ghouls pretty good? An extra "ranged" interrupt and a stun should be quite useful.

 

Pyros

Depends on the bracket and your team, ghouls are like water elementals, but they're melee(run into AEs more) and can't use skills right as you summon them(out of the ground animation). They have very low hp/armor, so they can be killed really easily. That's why I'm not too sure about master of ghoul. Other than that, yes it's an excelent talent. It's not TOO deep though, halfway, meaning you can spec rather deep in frost or blood, just not down to the last 2 tiers.

 

Gort

Back to Obliterate... Acknowledging it may not be working right/intended to hit quite as hard as it does, I'm wondering if there may be a problem with it and Annihilation. Would that not make 13ish Frost mandatory for any spec using Obliterate? (And further, make Oblit mandatory for use as any spec bar, perhaps, deep Blood, if Heart Strike outdoes Oblit?)

The ability seems to be designed to hit really hard, at the cost of stripping your dots, which is great, but I can't see how, if there's a talent to remove the downside, that talent doesn't instantly become mandatory for every DK, period?


Am I wrong somehow? I don't want to see any spec, regardless of tree, automatically pick up 13 in Frost. Unholy/Blood or Blood/Unholy shouldn't be automatically nonviable due to a limited Oblit.

 

Pyros

Well arguably in a tanking spec, you could replace oblit with death strike, if you assume a decent bit of the heal actually heals, the threat would probably be somewhat close(once they fix the insane disease stacking oblit stuff), and so you could skip frost. But yeah as a DPS, you're always taking annihilation, simply because for unholy/frost runes, there's nothing worth using over oblit, and reapplying diseases is probably a net loss. Just like you'll probably always get epidemic in any DPS build, so you don't have to reapply diseases as often and can oblit more. And just like you'll always take Subversion since it's the only threat tool DKs have. Now the issue is talent placement, subversion is only tier1, epidemic tier2 but annihilation is tier3, forcing quite a few points in it. It's also 3points, so you need the 10 to go there and 3more. Epidemic is only 7, subversion is perfect as it is.

I think they need to add a new strike that uses different runes to offer options for certain builds(blood runes as unholy are worthless for example unless you dump 8points in blood, on top of 13points in frost for annihilation), a strike that could do as much damage as oblit, but with a different effect instead of disease wiping. Or rework oblit.

 

Gort

If Death Strike's heal threat does work out well, then yeah, there's a possible substitute there. 100% + 494 + (50% * disease_count) may not be better than 60% + 220 + (100% * disease_count_healing), threatwise. Tight, though, but possible.

Epidemic is good where it is, the 3 points in Imp. DC aren't a waste for DPS at all, and the 6%crit/30%critbonus to plague/death/scourge strikes isn't horrible. It's no worse, I'd say, than the +fire/frost hit talent being tier 2 in mage frost. Subversion is fine, as you say.

But that's a lot of "if's". For DPS, Frost is currently the only real minor tree, and for tanking, unless the heal threat from DS equals/beats Oblit, then you're stuck there as well. Not to cry wolf or anything, but this might be worth raising as feedback. I can't see them intending to force a minor spec like that.

 

Pyros

Well it's the kind of things I've already reported using ingame tool, this and the total lack of a good blood rune dump as deep unholy, and frost lower damage output, and the lack of RP generation in frost, and the lack of a good frost rune dump in frost, etc. Hell all I do lately is log in, go through the list of my northrend quests giving feedback from what I remember of the quests, mining low level stuff cause I don't have a mining alt on my beta account to transfer and figure I'll probably want some crafted gear for decent raid testing, and suggesting tons of stuff about general balance with multiple builds.

Since they like tripled xp needed per level, I can't afford to do the quests I haven't done before they raise level cap, and there's so little tanking loot in instances I don't feel like running them at all. And for some unknown reason, even though we only have a pve server on the euro beta, the bgs on it are NOT enabled, so can't even pvp. You'd figure with all the pvp action on this side of the atlantic we'd be entitled to at least being able to test the new BG.

Anyway think I've made a suggestion about pretty much every issues I've seen with the DK, big or not. Like their terrible UI, or the icons for frost fever/blood plague being too similar. And the terrible runeforge level reqs they added for no reason.

 

Thorakk

I have been doing some 5 man tanking recently and have extrapolated this build (still 71) for 80 tanking that I think will be quite effective

The rotation would go like this

The basic idea here being that using blood of the north you can blood strike once each rotation creating a death rune for a howling blast, allowing you to use it on cooldown with the new proposed 10s recharge and still get both an IT and an oblit or 2 oblits.

 

Deathwing

Howling Blast without Frost Fever spread to most of the targets seems like such a waste. I'd still say unholy is much better just because of bone shield.

 

Prepared

Tossing in a (working) Pestilence in the first part of this rotation would alleviate that problem, if I understand the ability correctly.

I would, personally, ditch the 1/2 Abom. Might and 1/3 Scent of Blood and put the other points into either Glacier Rot (more threat) or Icy Reach (larger groups).

"were death knights lol whats the worst that could happen"
"You get nerfed."

 

Thorakk

I was thinking about that, I could also drop the entire imp icy touch line / icy talons line in favor of killing machine etc. Really it would only matter in a raid setting (which I forgot to mention I was primarily thinking this up for) depending on your shaman situation. In the end though I decided that 1 point in abom strength brought some really nice group utility (assuming it stacks). With all of the oblits you would be throwing it should almost always be up.

I'm not sure if it was scent of blood or just sudden doom but whenever I tank deep (but not FRW) blood I can never spend all of my RP, 1 point seemed a decent compromise.

As far as howling blast you could indeed add a pestilence on the first rotation (but only on the first) and keep the rest the same, you could also opt for a mark of blood if you thought it would be useful. Speaking of mark of blood I'd much perfer if it got "lichborned" (shorter cooldown shorter duration) as it is a 5 minute cooldown with a 30 second duration seems out of place next to all the 1 or 2 minute tanking cooldowns.

 

Prepared

If you were to drop Mark of Blood (as you said), as well as Scent of Blood and Abom. Might (as I suggested), you could pick up DRM and perhaps perform a few additional threat moves during your 4 seconds of dead time in the rotation.

Hmm, now that I think about it, I think a chart like Lapp had on the last page would be best to illustrate this, because without it I'm having trouble figuring in when runes refresh.

"were death knights lol whats the worst that could happen"
"You get nerfed."

 

Cloudgatherer

Two quick comments. Frost Aura is pretty useless the vast majority of the time, it isn't a talent I foresee being at all popular in a deep frost build in its current form. Additionally, for 5 man tanking I've found that Black Ice + Morbidity + DnD does a good job of holding agro on multiple mobs. Try tanking against an unholy DK, even if you're in Frost Presence and the Unholy DK is not, he'll rip multi-mob agro off of you.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Is the tanking build for 5 mans I've been playing with. DnD + Icy Touch + [Deathchill] Howling Blast (Blood Tap or BotN covers 3 frost runes) does a pretty solid job of establishing agro, even if the Howling Blast does half damage against the non-primary targets. I've found groups are really bad at strictly following single targeting, so when I do apply Hungering Cold, it is nearly immediately broken by someone else. However, if I take some time and stress to not do that on certain pulls, it is a very powerful tool as you can kill 1 or 2 of the mobs before the freeze effect even wears off (then apply Howling and/or DnD when it is fading).

 

essex1028

I'm curious to know if anyone's played with the numbers for the current build with necrosis, black ice and icy talons. It seems like these 3 synergize really well together.

This is my current planned build: DPS Build

I've taken blood up to bloodworms simply while I level to decrease downtime, but am very curious to know if the combination of icy talons and necrosis beats out going up to heart strike and MoM.

Edited: Changed to the correct build

 

Zurai

Taking a point in Shadow of Death rather than Blood-caked Blade is criminal, especially if you're making a build to take advantage of big hasted autoattack procs.

To answer your question, though, right now Necrosis isn't all that hot, because it doesn't account for increased attack power, it just uses your weapon's raw damage range. Assuming that's a bug, Necrosis will be great, because Black Ice, Cinderglacier, and Ebon Plague all improve its damage, not to mention all the other raid buffs that might apply. Without the AP scaling it's a little weak, though.

 

Zaroua

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft with dual Fallen Crusader. Makes use of all the DPS stats and scales extremely well with Strength. The real problem though is how well a DPS DK scales with percentage based skills that multiply with each other: Blood Aura (115%) + Bloody Vengeance (126%) + Blood Gorged (145%) then you add in Hysteria for 175% dmg, put in a clicky trinket and time it with a passive proc trinket along with whatever the new Haste Potion is going to be and you have some truly sick damage potential.

Edit: Of course that build may not scale as well as going with a 2h weapon because of all the strikes. Depends on how raiding goes.

And also, my Necrosis definitely hits harder when I have more AP (Crusader + AP trinket). I'll probably install recount tomorrow and post some more accurate numbers.

Dogma also claims that God has a sense of humor and at times presents Him as a joker of sorts, thus again lowering Him to human level. While I am certain God has a "sense of humor" since He gave it to us, I find it most difficult to believe He finds humor in sin since He will cast the unforgiven sinner into the lake of fire for eternity. Not very funny at all.

 

Zurai

I just tested it again. Necrosis does the same damage regardless of my AP - about 180 average with the Axe of Frozen Death plus Black Ice. It did the same amount of damage with my weapon as my only equipped item and with my full gear set.

 

Prepared

I can confirm that. I'm not so sure why they can't easily fix this. It's basically the same mechanics as Flametongue and SoR, except with AP instead of Spellpower. :\

"were death knights lol whats the worst that could happen"
"You get nerfed."

 

nevinera

It's a beta, and that's very obviously not the intended effect of the talent.

yeah, very similar to my current build of choice: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The three points coming out of black ice hurt a little, but only affect about a third of your total damage..
still 3% dps decrease is nothing to laugh about.

But i want you to picture a deathknight fighting a mob with a SWARM of bloodworms out.
With two daggers, he should average around 14 at a time.

 

Zurai

I say, "assuming it's a bug" because it's been like that since shortly after beta began, and was noticed the day of the patch that changed it. You can't go by tooltip because there are a LOT of incorrect tooltips in the game right now. For example, Black Ice says it only increases the damage of spells, but it actually increases all shadow and frost damage you deal, even if they aren't from spells. That's intended functionality according to Ghostcrawler; the tooltip is wrong and will be changed. We've received no word on Necrosis, so it's safer to assume it's a bug, but you can't dismiss the possibility that the bug lies in the tooltip rather than the ability.

 

Deathwing

Won't daggers severely hamper the damage a death knight does from specials?

 

PSGarak

We can assume that Necrosis is either a bug or due for a redesign because it's non-scaling
Daggers suffer a normalization penalty from being daggers, entirely aside from their fast speed. There are swords in the 1.3-1.6 range you could pick up instead that would be much better, although they may be offhand-only.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png